Latest Articles
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Treatment of circus elephants worse than you ever imagined
Mother Jones has a long investigation into the treatment of elephants at Ringling Brothers. In short, the conditions they live in are beyond horrible. According to records and testimony turned up in court, trainers: beat elephants with hooks and other tools, while maintaining the animals are trained using only verbal cues and tenderly cared for […]
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Don’t bag your leaves — they just go in landfills
Awesome, an excuse to be lazy in the fall! Melissa Hopkins, a spokesperson for the National Audobon Society, is encouraging people not to bag up their leaves, because 8 million tons of them end up in landfills every year. (The leaves are biodegradable, of course, but the bags are not.) Instead, you can compost them, […]
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How to feed 7 billion of us without ruining the planet
Now that we’re surrounded by 7 billion of our closest friends, it’s probably a good time to talk about how we’re going to feed them. The government, along with corporations like Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, and others who are part of our current industrial agriculture system, will tell you that feeding the world is all about […]
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World’s only white kiwi pulls through surgery
Manukura, the world's only known white kiwi (not an albino!), had endoscopic surgery Friday to break up a large stone she'd swallowed. Kiwis normally eat small stones to help with digestion, but Manukura's eyes were bigger than her stomach, and the stone got stuck in her gizzard. Doctors operated using a laser that's usually used […]
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Watch a climate satellite get launched
NASA's new weather satellite — which in typical NASA acronym-happy fashion, is called the NPP, standing for NPOESS Preparatory Project, standing for National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System — is a state-of-the-art way to measure climate impacts. The satellite will monitor ozone levels, temperatures, vegetation cover, ice cover, air pollution, and other effects of climate change, […]
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Snowstorm took it to the trees
Up and down the East Coast, millions of people are without power after the weekend's snowstorm. But the most severe damage the storm wreaked was on trees. Snow is particularly harsh on trees that still have green leaves on them: It's as if a person were caught out in a snow storm wearing a light […]
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Critical List: 7 billionth baby born; OWS to use green generators
The world's 7 billionth baby has been born in the Philippines. (How do U.N. arbiters know she's the seven billionth? They don't: it’s just symbolic.) It snowed on the East Coast, and "virtually every site north of Maryland to Maine … recorded their greatest October snowfall on record." An energy storage company that received a […]
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Ask Umbra: Can toxic pollutants escape from my body fat?
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, If I ever manage to lose these rolls and handles, will the toxic stuff I’m storing in my fat be released? Will I get sick in the process? Theodora S.Angel Fire, N.M. A. Dearest Theodora, Yours was the closest I could find to a Halloween question this […]
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Don’t let Solyndra fool you: Solar PV is on fire
This post was written by J. Matthew Roney, research associate for the Earth Policy Institute. Additional resources at www.earth-policy.org. Solar photovoltaic (PV) companies manufactured a record 24,000 megawatts (MW) of PV cells worldwide in 2010, more than doubling their 2009 output. Annual PV production has grown nearly 100-fold since 2000, when just 277 MW of […]
