Latest Articles

The News Smashup: 4 examples of a news app sub-genre

After attending one of Twitter’s developer teatimes here in Seattle and having various other Twitter API related experiences recently (more on that soon), it’s becoming a bit obvious that there’s a rapidly-emerging subspecies of news app coming into being.  This sort of app can trace its origins pretty directly to pre-Twitter sites like Techmeme and […]

Sow seeds, not greed: Farmers gather on Wall Street

Photo: Eddie CrimminsIt’s been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan — around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don’t cross paths much these days. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the […]

Huntsman bows to right wing, reverses position on climate science

Photo: Gage SkidmoreCross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. At an oil-sponsored event at the Heritage Foundation, presidential candidate Jon Huntsman reversed his prior defense of climate science. Huntsman, who famously mocked his fellow candidates for questioning global warming in August, was asked by NewsBusters blogger Lachlan Markey if humans contribute to climate change. Huntsman said that the […]

Green giants: Seattle gets even greener, starting with its biggest buildings

Brian Geller, executive director of the Seattle 2030 DistrictPhoto: Greg HanscomSeattle, a.k.a. the Emerald City, looms Oz-like in the imaginations of eco-minded architects and designers. Its reputation for being uber green drew architect Brian Geller to the city from New York a few years ago. Now, he looks at the skyline rising above Elliott Bay […]

Hungary destroys 1,000 acres of Monsanto maize

Genetically modified seeds are banned in Hungary. So when government regulators found that 1,000 acres of maize had been planted with genetically modified seeds, they just plowed the suckers under. You stick it to the Monsanto, Hungary! Leaving aside the fact that this sort of sweep-the-checkers-off-the-board move is always kind of badass, this is also […]

Durban dispatch: Practical progress and water woes

Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green. “The Nepalese government has exhausted funds to drain the Tsho Rolpa (Nepal’s biggest glacial lake), which poses an immediate threat to at least 10,000 people,” said Samjwal Bajracharya, the lead author of a new report on the status of glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, also known as the Third […]

Bad guys bicker over Gulf oil spill

Apparently today is the day we talk about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? The White House released its year-in-the-making report about what needs to be done for cleanup ("more better things"), and now it looks like BP is still trying to palm off blame. They're claiming that Halliburton, which produced the cement used to […]

Prius is the only survivor of $3 million car crash

A car crash in Japan that's being hailed as the most expensive ever, even though it totally wasn't, totaled eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini, and three Mercedes…es. (Ugh, I just looked it up and Mercedes looks like a fifth-declension noun with the nominative plural "Mercedes," so I can't even make up a cutesy Latinate plural, WHATEVER […]

White House goals for cleaning the Gulf: Fix stuff

After the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, the Obama administration decided to dig deep into the environmental problems that faced the Gulf Coast and, in the way of governments everywhere, set up a task force to study the issues. This week, that task force released its report. According to the report’s introduction, the president's directive to […]

Solar-powered tanning salon. Really.

This is real. Comedian Kyle Kinane spotted it while driving through the wasteland of unconquerable vacuity known as Southern California. The place is called Sunlounge, and it has a website and a Yelp page full of catty reviews from people who love to tan. Sunlounge says it gets 15 to 30 percent of the power […]