Grist List

Moving documentary on ferry drivers who rescued 9/11 refugees

Could ammonia be the zero-carbon fuel we've been waiting for?

Ammonia would make a pretty handy, potentially carbon-free liquid transportation fuel, say engineers, and it could be produced right at gas stations using electricity from the grid, water, and air. 

Meter-long king crabs invade Antarctic waters, eat everything

On the seafloors of Antarctic basins, the water has warmed by just 0.27 degrees C — but that’s enough to allow giant king crabs to take over the ecosystem and eat everything they find. These suckers are more than three feet across, and they're gobbling up sea urchins, sea lilies, sea cucumbers, and starfish. They're also messing with the make-up of the sea floor. Check out the (terrifyinggggg) video above: The crab looks like an invasive vehicle in a Star Wars movie that's launching a sneak attack on an unsuspecting, peaceful civilization.

Critical List: Obama admin backs more solar projects; Kiribati president wants a new island

The Obama administration provided a loan guarantee to a SolarCity project that would put solar panels on 160,000 military homes — "the larger domestic residential rooftop solar project in history," Energy Secretary Chu said.

Rick Perry thinks he's a smart as Galileo. Or at least that some climate-denying scientists are.

So he’d be pretty irked to see yet more evidence that global warming is real, if he actually read newspapers.

The Dalai Lama and other Peace Prize winners ask Obama to reject Keystone XL

If Obama won't listen to the Tar Sands Action protesters, will he listen to nine of his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates? Because they've all but told him -- in their very kind and Peace-Prizey way -- that they'll be embarrassed to share the medal with him if he doesn't.

Nine laureates, including the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have written Obama a letter urging him to nix the pipeline.

ConAgra pulls a dirty frozen-meal trick on food bloggers

Hey, remember those ads where they used to secretly replace people's actual made-from-beans coffee with freeze-dried Flavor Crystals? Those were a laugh riot, right? So obviously the most genius possible marketing plan for frozen dinners -- basically the food equivalent of instant coffee -- would be to make people think they're eating real made-from-food food, and then alert them that they've been baited and switched. It can't fail! You know, unless the people involved are food bloggers who care about eating organic, fresh, and healthy ingredients rather than mass-fabricated sodium-enhanced spun and capped protein strands. Then they might get pissed.

But ConAgra, makers of such food-adjacent items as Chef Boyardee and Reddi-Wip, didn't see that one coming when they set up a supposed luxury dinner with a group of food bloggers and their guests. The host, chef George Duran, served -- and implied he had cooked -- a main course of lasagna and a dessert of, um, "razzleberry pie." Once the bloggers had gotten it down their necks, Duran told them the food was actually frozen Marie Callender dinners. Smile, you're on ConAgra Camera!

Toilet-sharing app CLOO' turns your home into a public bathroom

Hey, we all love sharing, right? It lets you live comfortably while limiting consumption and waste. And you have that bathroom, and you're not using it all the time, right? What are you, selfish? Put your money where your mouth is, toilet-hog, and offer up your bathroom to strangers with a deuce to donate. Otherwise the terrorists win.

If you're seriously willing to hang an "Open to Strange Butts" placard outside your lavatory (what are you, nuts? We were joking), a new app called CLOO' will let you take shit from just about anyone.

The Onion nails core dilemma of tackling climate change

As individuals, how can we face the existential threat of climate change when we are continually reminded that everything we do -- the very act of living -- inexorably contributes to our own undoing? It’s sort of the world’s most angst-inducing question, which is why the Onion’s take on it is so genius.

Oil rig escape pods turned into real-life Survivaballs

You remember Survivaballs, don't you? They're the ultimate solution to a planet gone crazy with excess thermal energy, marketed directly to the executives most directly responsible for all this climate change.

Well, now someone has turned oil rig escape pods into the ultimate climate-immune hotel.