Latest Articles

Putting the wilderness back in our cities

Neil Chambers’ new book, Urban Green: Architecture for the Future, is a study in imprecision. Ankle deep and a mile wide, the book reads like a half-baked primer in green design and conservation science. It could have used another year or two in the oven. It’s too bad. At the heart of this book — […]

What can trick-or-treaters tell you about the health of your neighborhood?

When my brother and I were little, around this time of year we loved to watch The Halloween Tree, an animated feature based on a Ray Bradbury book of the same name. The movie opens with Bradbury himself narrating: It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small […]

Live chat on population 7 billion — ask your questions and have your say-so

Sandeep Bathala and Carmen BarrosoJoin a Grist live chat on population issues on Monday, Oct. 31, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern / 10:00 a.m. Pacific, marking the occasion of the world population hitting 7 billion. We’ll have two experts on hand to answer your questions: Sandeep Bathala of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, formerly […]

Developing countries take the climate change bullet for the rest of us

Here's the 2012 Climate Change Vulnerability Index, produced by risk analysis firm Maplecroft, which shows the areas of the world that are most at risk from the impacts of climate change. Does it remind you of anything? Maybe a reverse map of the biggest climate change offenders? (This isn't the first time people have put […]

Great, we have three-eyed fish now

Fishermen trawling a nuclear-plant-fed reservoir in Córdoba, Argentina have caught a three-eyed wolf fish. Like everyone else who's writing about this story, I'm illustrating this post with a picture of Blinky, the nuclear fish from The Simpsons, because the real fish is super ugly.  They don't know for sure yet whether the fish's mutation is […]

Mitt Romney, political windsock, flips to climate change denial

If there's one thing Mitt Romney's good at, it's turning directly into whatever political winds are blowing through the Republican base. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that in a speech at Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., he just said this: My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this […]

Why does ABC News hate electric cars?

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Skype, wants to revolutionize the landscape of American cars with his Tesla Motors Model S sedan. He's already got a contract with Toyota, and he's been lauded by every outlet that knows what the hell it's talking about. So why does ABC News want to smear Tesla as the next […]

The Northern lights as you’ve never seen them before

As the International Space Station orbits Earth, it snaps images from a still camera affixed to its underside. String them together, and you get views of terrestrial phenomena as you've never seen them before. In this case, it’s the Aurora Borealis. The sun is in an active phase right now, leading to displays of "Northern" […]

This Daily Show investigation of science will make you lolsob

I learned a lot from this Daily Show video where Aasif Mandvi tries to figure out what science is really up to. I learned that Republican strategist Noelle Nikpour is some kind of reverse zombie who can't stand to be around brains. I learned that Stephen Colbert's on-air persona is not as much of a […]

Oh man alive you will not believe what’s in the McRib

McDonald's McRib sandwich has kind of a cult following, like Phish if they were only around for like a month every year instead of seemingly forever. And like Phish, it is jam-packed with synthetic ingredients. (I kid, I kid. I'm sure all of Phish's enhancement is purely herbal.) For instance, one of the bun ingredients […]