Grist List
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IKEA will ship disposable furniture on disposable pallets
IKEA knows from disposable. So when the company realized it could save money and shipping space by using cardboard shipping pallets, it tossed out its traditional wooden pallets like last year's BILLY bookshelf. The new pallets can support loads as heavy as the wooden pallets could, but they’re only a third as high and weigh […]
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Critical List: $4 billion for energy efficiency; SUVs rise again
President Obama and former President Clinton are announcing $4 billion to make buildings more energy efficient over the next two years. A fierce wind storm hit the West yesterday, taking down trees and fanning fires. Coke ditched those white, pro-polar bear holiday cans preeetttty fast. Apparently they confused Coke drinkers, some of whom thought the […]
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The most heartbreaking polar bear picture, ever
I don't know if this guy is actually trying to push this icebreaker ship away from his home. Maybe he just thinks there's a free buffet if he can climb aboard. But in the context of the polar bears' plight, with their numbers dwindling due to climate change and habitat loss, this looks like a […]
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Energy-producing toilets kill two birds with one … well, you know
Leave it to MIT geeks to figure out how to solve one problem (the need for a sustainable energy source) by solving another (insufficient sanitation). Sanergy, a company founded by a group of MIT grads and newly funded by USAID, provides low-cost toilets to sanitation-challenged communities in Kenya, then harvests the waste to convert into […]
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Cool map shows density at a glance
The pixels on Fathom Information Design's Dencity map get smaller the more people they represent — meaning that sparsely-populated areas are low-resolution, and densely-populated ones are sharp and bright. It illustrates both the positive and negative aspects of density: Each pixel gets less space the more pixels there are, but that means that denser areas […]
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Eating horses is legal now, and PETA loves it
Hey, you can finally defrost that horse steak you've had in the freezer! The spending bill that Obama just signed included a provision lifting the ban on federal inspection of horses that are raised for food, a ban that has made it effectively illegal to slaughter horses for the last five years. And weirdly, PETA […]
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Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown more terrifying than we thought
In a new report, Tokyo Electric Power company has revealed that the Fukushima meltdown probably did more damage and was more dangerous than anyone realized at the time. The report's based on a simulation, but that simulation indicated that the entire ration of fuel inside one reactor could have turned into a pile of molten […]
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Adorable video defends public transportation
Here's a sweet 30-second plea for the improvement of the public transportation used by 35 million Americans every day. Because there should be many tens or hundreds of millions more of them, but at the rate we’re going now, that’s not looking likely. Eighty-four percent of transit systems have raised rates or cut service. Is […]
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Airport to increase safety by gassing birds
Last year, a Royal Air Maroc plane made an emergency landing at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after it was hit by a flock of geese. They've been trying everything to get rid of the birds, they say, including "luring them away" (presumably with irresistible offers from Groupon). Incidents like these have been increasing at the airport, […]
