Climate Culture
All Stories
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The coolest tiny home we’ve seen recently has a giant hole in the roof
The key to small-space living is not feeling cramped, which makes this Barcelona apartment the pinnacle of the genre. The home uses sliding doors to open the 430-square-foot apartment up for a sense of space, or close it for privacy. But the centerpiece of the house is the hole in the ceiling — a plant-filled […]
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Are our 15 seconds of fame up, geologically speaking?
Paleontologist Jonathan Payne says we’re not seeing the sixth mass extinction yet. But give us time …
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Ask Umbra: How can I get my neighbors to stop spraying pesticides?
A reader's garden has been poisoned by her spray-happy neighbors. Umbra offers ways to help them catch the drift.
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How to use a broken cell phone to survive in the wilderness
If your nature hike goes seriously awry, your cell phone will probably be your best chance of survival — if you can get signal, you can let people know where you are. If you can’t get signal, well, it is basically a hunk of metal. But, it’s a hunk of metal that can (if absolutely […]
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Dress shirt uses spacesuit technology to keep you dry on your bike commute
You know how you don’t bike to work because you get hot and sweaty and gross? A group of MIT graduates has stolen that excuse. They copied technology from spacesuits and used it to make what BikeBlogNYC has rightly dubbed “the TANG of dress shirts” — a sharp-looking top that regulates your body heat. No […]
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Umbra’s second helpings: How to recycle beer bottles with limes
Can you recycle beer bottles with lime wedges? Umbra tosses back an answer.
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Canadian high-schooler makes her own graduation dress out of old homework
Kara Koskowich is going to take the world by storm. Girlfriend just graduated from high school in Canada, and instead of shelling out for a fancy graduation dress, she decided to reuse old homework and post-it notes to make one herself: The dress took almost 75 pieces of paper to make, Koskowich said. She started […]
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Tile your home with recycled money
Pennies are so useless as legal tender that there's genuine debate about whether we should even keep them around. You could dump them in the Coinstar machine ... or you could use them to make an awesome, cost-effective copper flooring.
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Giant LEGO wildlife is cooler than anything you made as a kid
The theme of the new installation at the Reiman Gardens, a massive public garden at Iowa State University, is “Nature Connects.” That usually means something about the complex interdependency of the ecological network and blah blah hippie stuff, but in this case it means nature literally snaps together out of LEGO bricks. And also blah […]
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12-year-old whose awesome speech floored 1992 Rio Summit returns to Rio+20 as a mom
At the original Rio summit,12-year-old Severn Suzuki became "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes" by giving a kick-ass speech to the assembled delegates.Twenty years later, her perspective has changed but her message hasn't.
