Latest Articles

Hybrid power plant turns wind directly into automotive fuel

Enertrag is a new hybrid power plant whose parent company invites you to "drive to [your] local petrol station and fill up with 50 litres of wind … !!!" Three exclamation points! Renewable energy has made Germans so adorable. Their website even has a picture of German chancellor Angela Merkel showing off a tank of […]

Mexico City’s ‘earthscraper’ would be a 1,000-foot underground building

BNKR Arquitectura wants to build a pyramid that penetrates nearly 1000 feet into the earth below Mexico City's largest and most historic public square. Its upper floors will be illuminated through a glass ceiling that will replace the paving stones of the current square, and its deepest reaches will receive daylight piped in from fiber-optic […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]