Latest Articles

Watch a lizard play video games with uncanny precision

The theme of today is animals learning to coexist with human culture. Once this bearded dragon and the baby seal join forces to sit on a couch AND play video games, they will be an unstoppable force of lethargy at near-human scales! Who says you need a big cerebral cortex to be a couch potato?

E. coli can now make three kinds of fuel out of grass

Switchgrass, Dubya’s favorite biofuel feedstock, is back in the news. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute have engineered E. coli — the same bug that is spoiling the lives of raw cookie dough eaters everywhere — to transform switchgrass into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The secret sauce of their solution […]

Shale gas ‘profits’ are based on accounting trickery

When you add up all the costs — monetary costs, not even environmental — of fracking for shale gas, it turns out the entire business is horribly unprofitable, reports energy analyst Chris Nelder at SmartPlanet. So why are companies engaged in an unprofitable business if it's also a fairly unneighborly way to pollute the local […]

Baby seal breaks into house to sleep on sofa

This baby fur seal snuck through a cat flap into a New Zealand home and snuggled up on the sofa. Awwww who's a good little home invader? Who? Who? Look, he's even got a pillow!  Okay, so the killjoy New Zealand Department of Conservation, which took the above photo, wants you to know that fur […]

How bikes can solve America’s most pressing problems

(click to embiggen) Air quality, obesity, commute times, strained family budgets, unnecessary deaths, runaway health care expenses — is there anything that a mass shift to bicycles transportation wouldn't solve? And it's not like this is a fantasy — Europe has demonstrated that not only is this possible, it's the future.

Ingenious origami cup eliminates plastic lids

Yes, yes, we should all bring our own mugs when we go to Starbucks. But failing that, wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate plastic waste from the equation by leaving off the lid? Designer Peter Herman's Compleat cups have a clever folded design that provides cup and lid in one, giving you one […]

The doctor and the life coach: A question for Andy Revkin

I’m working on one last follow-up to my brutal-logic posts, but lemme just take a time-out to ask a question of my friend, NYT journo-blogger Andy Revkin, who seems to have thrown his lot in with Bjorn Lomborg and decided that talking about greenhouse-gas emissions is a drag. First, to frame things, a thought experiment: […]

Whippersnappers unite: Young farmers work to change 2012 Farm Bill

A group of young farmers visiting Sen. Olympia Snowe’s office in Maine.Across the U.S., young people are heeding the call for a more just, sustainable, and healthy food system, and are heading to the fields to build it themselves. They are working on farms and starting their own small-scale farm businesses from scratch. But, as […]

Oil companies have invested 50 times more in tar sands than in renewables

The oil industry talks a big game about looking toward the future and investing in renewable fuels. But a bit of number crunching from NRDC shows that oil's commitment to renewables isn't much more than talk. According to the enviro group's analysis, the oil industry has spent about 50 times more on tar-sands development alone […]

Chevron admits that it hasn’t been able to stop the Brazil oil leak

Remember how last month Chevron spilled more than 100,000 gallons of oil off the coast of Brazil? The oil industry likes us to think that spills like this are no big deal: They'll clean that right up! But this spill's not following that script. The company tried to plug the offending well with cement, but […]