Grist List
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Oil execs get monster raises after a ‘very strong’ 2011
How big was your raise last year? John Watson, the CEO of Chevron, got a 52 percent bump in his compensation. That’s a nice chunk of change for anyone, and in Watson’s case, it brought his total yearly take up to about $25 million. Which is nothing to complain about, unless Watson is comparing his […]
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Scientists build energy-efficient computer out of crabs
Here is an amazing example of humans piggybacking on a natural phenomenon to create an incredibly clever system: crab-based computing. A crab-based computer starts with swarms of crabs. These swarms include hundreds of thousands of crabs that, individually, run every which way but that, as a group, progress in one direction. Even more incredible — […]
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The neuroscience of why the GOP is like that
Here's Chris Mooney, who has made it his mission to chronicle and then explain why the GOP is resolutely anti-science, summing up his life's work rather succinctly.
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Millennials love cities because they provide the one thing their boomer parents couldn’t give them
Why is Gen Y migrating to the cities? Because millennials are craving the things they didn’t get in their suburban upbringings, like connectedness and adventure.
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Critical List: Emperor penguin population double previous estimates; a new fracking working group
A team using very high resolution satellite pictures counted twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than any previous study had. President Obama formed a new working group in Washington to coordinate federal oversight of fracking. Those earthquakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas could be caused not just by fracking wastewater disposal but by fracking itself.
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Farm-in-a-truck teaches kids about sustainability
Compass Green is a mobile greenhouse built into a truck, which runs on vegetable oil (natch). Handsome hipsters Nick Runkle and Justin Cutter retooled the truck, which was already fitted with Plexiglas display panels, to turn it into a biofuel-powered educational farm on wheels.
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Texas got a CRAZY amount of hail
I know this looks like a firefighter standing in a crack in some rocks, but no, my friend: those are four-foot hail drifts in Amarillo, Texas. The reason they look so dirty is that this is basically the only precipitation the drought-stricken state has been getting lately — Texas was covered in mostly dust, so […]
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Depressing videos show the human toll of fracking
Because your Friday could use a little bleakness, here’s the trailer for Water Defense’s “Natural Gas Exxposed” video series, showing the toll that fracking takes on communities.
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Government spends $40 million mowing lawns of empty homes
The U.S. government owns 200,000 foreclosed homes. And to keep those empty homes looking spiffy for would-be buyers, the government has to keep up appearances — including the appearance of the lawn. As a result, we taxpayers are forking over $40 million for lawn-mowing at these uninhabited houses.
