Grist List

Terrifying recycled playground will eat your children

Let's say you want to build a playground for refugee children from Myanmar. And let's say you also want to recycle some rubber tires. You could tie the tires to ropes and make swings out of them, like kids have done pretty much since the tire was invented, or maybe you could put them on the ground to make an obstacle course. Or, hey, you could fashion them into a sort of Gigeresque nightmare squid! That one sounds good, let's do that.

Beauty and the Beastly BPA-Soaked Soup

Disney princess-mania can strike 3 to 5-year-old children at any time. That’s bad enough for kids (and mostly their parents), but now these bedazzled damsels are harming all children in a whole new way -- by enticing them to ingest high levels of BPA.

Campbell's has been using Disney princesses and other Disney characters to sell kid-targeted food. Cartoon labels and "cool shapes" -- i.e. noodles that are supposedly, though unidentifiably, made to look like kids’ favorite characters -- help entice "healthy kids" into eating chicken in salty chicken broth. And of all the soups tested for BPA in a recent study, the Disney Princess Cool Shapes soup scored the worst.

Would you believe Mark Zuckerberg killed a bison?

Does this look like the face of a man who could kill a bison? Does this look like the DOG of a man who could kill a bison? WELL IT IS. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is continuing his yearlong challenge of eating healthier and more sustainably by only eating meat he kills himself, rather than meat from environmentally unfriendly factory farms. And now he's going after the deadliest game. Or wait, no. But pretty big game nonetheless.

Local dressing is the new local eating

The wool and cotton for all of the clothes in Rebecca Burgess' closet was grown within 150 miles of her home in the Bay Area. The wool was spun there, too; the dyes were grown there; the sweaters were knitted there. In fact, the clothes were entirely locally sourced from what Burgess calls her local "fibershed" — the network of farmers, millers, weavers, designers, dyers, knitters, and seamstresses that it takes to make clothes.  

Walk Score's new apartment finder lets you build your perfect commute

Sure, there's a tool for finding the apartment with, say, the most bars in walking range. But eventually you're going to need to go to work, and if your commute is miserable, even having a bar for every day of the month won't save you. (Though it'll help.) Luckily, the Walk Score guys have put together a new tool that lets you search for an apartment based on how long it'll take you to get there from work.

Critical List: Nebraskans ‘debate’ Keystone XL; Yellowstone temps could rise 10 degrees

Are Nebraskans really “split” over the Keystone XL pipeline, as Canada’s ambassador says? Sounds like a whole lot them know what they want, which is not tar-sands oil running through their state.

Homeowners who want solar panels but don’t want to pay a $30,000 installation cost could start paying utility bills to Google instead.

The EPA’s pushing back the deadline for releasing fuel efficiency rules.

The U.K. could have commercial tidal power within the next four years.

Check out this high-tech prosthetic for amputee cyclists

The Cadence leg prosthetic looks like something Chell from Portal might wear, but it's actually specially designed for riding a bike. Design student Seth Astle just won the James Dyson award for Cadence, which helps give below-the-knee amputees the fluid leg movement necessary to pedal a bike efficiently. 

Oil drilling wastes 100 million cubic feet of natural gas a day

Every day, oil companies burn 100 million cubic feet of natural gas -- not to power anything, but just because it's not oil and they don't need it. According to The New York Times, the North Dakota landscape is full of will-o-the-wisp plumes of fire where natural gas is burning off. 

More than 100 tar-sands activists politely arrested in polite Canadian protest

On Monday, at least 400 protestors stormed -- or, more accurately, walked gently up to and tapped on the shoulder -- the Canadian parliament building in Ottawa to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Over 100 people were arrested, charged with trespassing, and barred from coming near the parliament building for a year. But everybody was REALLY, REALLY POLITE about it.