Climate Culture
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Transit workers stop train to save toy bunny
Casey Carey-Brown, a Boston woman who blogs about her daughter “Roozle,” has chronicled a harrowing story about childhood trauma narrowly averted by big-hearted transit workers. It concerns Roozle’s toy bunny Nummy, pictured above. (Roozle is the human child, Nummy is the bunny. I just don’t want you getting confused and thinking this was almost way […]
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New York kids need a doctor’s note to use sunscreen in school or at camp
Once upon an innocent American summer, sun-kissed cheeks were all the rage for lithe, beautiful children freckling in the clean air. But now we know that evil sun rays will kill you — not now, but later, with skin cancer — and that kids should wear sunscreen pretty much any time they go outside for […]
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The coolest photos of Earth from space we’ve ever seen, hands down
NASA astronaut Don Pettit takes pictures from the International Space Station, and they are mind-boggling. In the long-exposure photos, cities appear as streaks of light as the ISS orbits Earth at Ludicrous Speed. And those blotches? Those are lightning. Holy shit.
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Umbra’s second helpings: Untangling the garden hose problem
A reader wonders how to find a hose that's not made of PVC plastics. Umbra's not going to water down this answer.
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Off our chests: What breasts tell us about the state of our world
Breasts are amazing things, says Florence Williams, author of the new book "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History" -- but maybe not for the reasons you think they are.
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First-graders protest Starbucks to save local coffee shop
Back in 2011, a tragedy of epic proportions struck the East Village: Starbucks moved in. And not only did it move in, it kicked a beloved local coffee shop, The Bean, out of its flagship location. Even non-coffee drinking elementary school students were outraged, as Majorie Ingall discovered: Here we have a piece of paper […]
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GZA and Neil deGrasse Tyson team up on a hip-hop record about science
I do not know much about writing rap lyrics, but I’m guessing that most rappers do not meet with physicists and cosmologists from MIT and Cornell before sitting down to write. But that’s exactly what Wu-Tang Clan founding member GZA did during the creation of his new album, Dark Matter — a project the rapper […]
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The coolest images and video of the transit of Venus
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured terrific footage of Venus' path across the sun.
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16-square-foot apartment is a vision of tiny housing taken too far
We love tiny housing — it’s less wasteful, and so adorable! But there’s a limit to how small a space you can live in and still not go insane. We butted up against it with the 78-square-foot apartment, but this video about a (fictional, but plausible) Hong Kong apartment called King’s Cube plunges past the […]
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Today in astronomical weirdness: This is your last chance to see the transit of Venus
Manhattanhenge is cool, but it happens twice a year. Ditto Supermoons. Solar eclipses are less common, but nothing like today’s astronomical weirdness. This afternoon and evening, Venus will pass in front of the sun, for the last time in your lifetime unless you are a robot or a Time Lord. Here’s why you should try […]
