PETRI DISH PORK: Scientists say the texture and flavor isn't quite like the real thing ... not yet anyway. (Photo: SixyBeast /Flickr) In an effort to make meat production more humane, alleviate hunger and help curb global warming , Dutch researchers have developed a way to grow edible...
From the house where he was born, Henry Clark can stand in his back yard and see plumes pouring out of one of the biggest oil refineries in the United States. As a child, he was fascinated by the factory on the hill, all lit up at night. In the morning, he'd go out to play and find th...
If you had just a few minutes to address world leaders — to give the ultimate “My Fellow Earthlings” speech — what would you say? That was essentially the question behind A Date With History , a challenge sponsored by the climate campaign Tcktcktck , the Natural Resources Defense Coun...
Google is backing it. So is Warren Buffett, America's most-watched investor. GE, one of the world's biggest manufacturers, is too. Each of these corporate icons is placing big bets and hundreds of millions of dollars on a future powered by wind and solar power. Apple just joined them,...
As the climate gets warmer, so do the rivers and lakes that power plants draw their cooling water from. And that is going to make it harder to generate electricity in decades to come, researchers report. Shawn Poynter for The New York Times A cooling tower at the Big Sandy coal-fired ...
West Virginia coal activist Maria Gunnoe is used to intimidation, as writer/blogger Aaron Bady points out. It’s one thing to oppose coal companies from the office of the mayor of New York City. It’s another to do it, as Gunnoe does, from the West Virginia valley floors where the coal ...
My name is Sonia and I live in an animal shelter in Portugal. I have been here for a long time, and nobody really knows when I actually came here. I dont know it myself either because I am very old. I cannot hear well and these days I sleep a lot. Whilst I sleep I have trouble with m...
There is a legitimate debate among cyclists about the efficacy of separated bike lanes compared to full recognition and respect of bicycles as vehicles entitled to use the same roadways as motor vehicles. I’ll confess to a bit of personal ambivalence about it all, especially outside o...
Researchers recreate bee collapse with pesticide-laced corn syrup (04/05/2012) Scientists with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have re-created the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder in several honeybee hives simply by giving them small doses of a popular pesticide, imidacl...
New York City’s Empire State Building has been an icon of engineering achievement for generations. Now it has reinvented itself as the standard-bearer for a new generation of green technologies and strategies. Last week, the Empire State Building Company reported that its energy effic...
What's Happening from Environmental Building News LEED 2012 Postponed to 2013, Renamed LEED v4 In response to growing concerns from the market, USGBC is postponing plans to ballot the next version of LEED until 2013. By Nadav Malin The KPF-designed BASF headquarters recently achieved ...
The cap and trade system known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative announced on Monday that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the nine participating states on the East Coast fell by an average of 23 percent during the first three years of the program. The pioneering ...
Three years ago it became obvious that the fraudulent, irresponsible lending practices of America’s biggest commercial banks were responsible for the country’s rapid economic decline, and once again, taxpayers picked up the slack. The federal government doled out billions of our hard-...
Shifting to a greener economy could generate up to 60 million additional jobs over the next two decades and lift millions of people out of poverty, UN agencies and trade unions said recently, urging governments to use the Rio+20 summit to turn this potential into reality. A new report...
Almost every school in Washington, D.C., is now serving [at least one] local food for breakfast or lunch every day, partly because of the extra five-cent financial incentive that schools receive for doing so from the Healthy Schools Act. Schools are also meeting higher nutrition stand...
Engineer Jim Styner with the Hydrovolts test turbine. Canals are ecologically barren channels built for the utilitarian purpose of draining rainwater and snowmelt away from rivers and delivering it to farmers, factories, and homes. But something unusual has been lurking in an irrigati...
"Following these events, I decided to participate in the tribute for Sadako Sasaki. Sadako lived the horror of the Hiroshima bomb and its tragic consequences. A few years later she was suffering from leukemia caused by the atomic events of 1945. She told the Japanese legend of 1000 cr...
Le Brésil lance la campagne "Passeport vert" du sommet de la montagne du Corcovado Le gouvernement du Brésil et le PNUE ont lancé l'initiative "Passeport vert" visant à modifier le comportement des voyageurs et des touristes à l’intérieur et à l'extérieur du pays. LIRE LA SUITE Emprun...
In 2011, the sales value of greentech manufacturing, from manufacturing inputs like silicon through intermediate products like solar cells to end products like wind turbines and biofuels, came to 198 billion euros ($245.3 billion) -- twice what it was in 2008. It grew 31 percent per y...
I’ve seen a recent surge of stories about conservatives and climate change. None of them, oddly, tell voters what they most need to know on the subject. In fact, one of them does the opposite. (Grrrr …) I respond in accordance with internet tradition: a listicle! 5. Conservatives have...
By Rosie Kunneke, Nikki Botha and Dinielle Stöckigt (Sea Shepherds from South Africa and Operation Desert Seal team members) Sea Shepherd representatives with Namibian Ombudsman, John Walters (L) Every year it is the same heart-breaking story. Come June/July, the powers that be in Nam...
The analysis makes a bunch of assumptions, the worst and most ridiculous of which is that anyone would purchase an iPad primarily to read eBooks. This article should also really be titled: "Carbon Footprint of iPads Higher Than Printed Books", because that's all the author can really ...
To keep up with rising data storage demands, tech companies accustomed to thinking about their resources in terabytes are now racing to build data centers by the hundred-thousand square feet. As these companies start owning assets, they face new challenges and opportunities inherent i...
As dysfunctional as the American political system appears to be right now, it at least provides some checks and balances to unlimited power. In a parliamentary system like Canada's, if a government is in power long enough to pack the Senate and the Supreme Court and gets a majority go...
The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) does a great job of summarizing wind power growth and cumulative installed wind power capacity in countries around the world year after year. And we wrote a summary piece on GWEC’s most recent annual report when it came out in February. However, G...
Religious fundamentalism of any form falls prey to the same errors and horrors of any form of extremism. Once a group believes it is right beyond any possibility of question, the results are likely to be terrifying and generally have been. Eric Hoffer wrote eloquently on the subject s...
These vintage photos of Pittsburgh, from before it passed a smoke-control ordinance in 1941, are so hazy that some of them look like they’ve been hit with some kind of artsy-grunge Instagram filter. But this is just what an industrial city looked like in those days — clogged with a lo...
There are people who like public transportation, and then there are people who want to rub public transportation all over their body parts — or at least get it permanently inked on them. Here are some of our favorite transit-map tattoos from the internet. Here’s a nice-looking Chicago...
The stuff fortunes were made of. Tallying the predictions of energy industry executives is an interesting exercise. Like any dominant business sector, the energy industry’s predictive powers are limited by one key damper: a blindness to change that might undermine their dominance. But...
A University of Winnipeg graduate who received a three year B.A. with a combined major in Economics and Rhetoric, Writing & Communications. I am currently working as a financial and commodities journalist in Winnipeg. My eventual goal is to be a clean tech policy analyst down the road...
