Articles by Jess Zimmerman

New site shows how far public transportation will take you

Mapnificent lets you see how far you can get on public transportation in a set amont of time, in more than 60 metro areas worldwide. (Above: 15 minutes on bus and rail in Chicago.) It's a new way of visualizing how easy it is to navigate a city without a car. You can use it to check out places where you might want to live or visit, to get an idea of how far transportation will get you and how much of your day it might take up to get where you need to go.

Here's what 15 minutes looks like in a few more cities:

Your next plastic cup could be made out of fish

Plastic is actually a pretty revolutionary material — we wouldn't want to go back to a time before it existed (just a time before people started throwing it in the ocean). But it's made from petroleum, and we haven't really got any to spare. So viable plastic alternatives — corn plastic, algae plastic, chicken feather […]

Bill Nye explains science, the moon, and climate change to Fox News, using very small words

Bill Nye's years of experience teaching science to children seem to have prepared him well for talking to Fox News hosts. Here, he attempts to help Happening Now host Jon Scott grasp difficult concepts like "volcanoes are not connected to the burning of fossil fuels" and "the science that happens on the moon ... is the same science that happens on Earth." Favorite line: "When you say to yourself, well, I'm going to ignore all the evidence of climate change, you're saying, I'm going to ignore the best ideas anybody's ever had."

Good lord, American homes are huge

This infographic from the BBC shows how much newly built North American, and especially U.S., homes dwarf those currently being built in Europe. The average new U.S. home is more than twice as big as the average new home in the U.K.