by Jess Zimmerman. One company's trash can be another's treasure — for instance, a server farm produces excess heat, making heat a waste product, but a greenhouse runs on heat and considers it a necessity. The U.K.'s National Industrial Symbiosis Program (NISP) helps match up companies... 

by Jess Zimmerman. This infographic by Camden Asay (click to embiggen) shows that we're fast running out of the stuff that powers our vehicles and our weaponry. But we've got even less time left with our gadgets. Yttrium and indium, two of the rare-earth elements that enable us to have TVs,... 

by Jess Zimmerman. The Indian city of Bangalore is not the cleanest, apparently. So a group of young Bangaloreans is cleaning up the city , a block at a time. And they're doing it anonymously.  Read More →

by Christopher Mims. Matt Novak of the always worthwhile blog  Read More →

by Sarah Laskow. Cleveland is one of those ailing American cities constantly held up as an example of the country's decline. But The New York Times has taken a look at a revitalization plan the city's been working on and found that, in one uptown area at least, the city is actually growing.... 

by Christopher Mims. When they're not making massively leveraged bets on the collapsing value of your savings account, the world's largest banks are doing their best to destroy the ability of this planet to support human life, says a new report . Watchdog group BankTrack investigated which banks... 

by Sarah Laskow. How often does a car need an oil change? Ask Jiffy Lube, and it's a flat 3,000 miles. According to car manufacturers, however, their products can go anywhere from a low of 5,000 miles to a high of 10,000 before an oil change is necessary. The Stranger crunched the numbers and found... 

by Sarah Laskow. Who needs government loan guarantees? SolarCity is going to put solar panels on 120,000 military houses with financing from Bank of America-owned Merrill Lynch. (Er, down with the banks?) Environmental regulations have ” benefits and costs .” They do kill jobs, but they... 

Thorium is a naturally-occurring, radioactive, and amazingly abundant metal that was discovered in 1828 by Swedish chemist, Jons Jakob Berzelius. The mineral, named after the Norse god of thunder, has languished in relative obscurity for many years as opposed to its much more recognized cousin, uranium.... 

An ambitious US carbon capture and storage (CCS) project has begun a three-year trial to pump one million tonnes of CO2 underground. The Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium (MGSC) has begun injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) for the first million-tonne demonstration of carbon sequestration in the... 

Every year, one million skiers take to the slopes from the UK alone, while a staggering five million Brits consider themselves to be skiers even if they don’t actually make it to the mountains. Europe is home to thousands of ski resorts, with Austria, France, Switzerland and Italy among the most... 

by Jess Zimmerman. It seems to be a pretty time-honored advertising strategy that when you want your message to really hit, you need to connect it to things men want/don't want to happen to their penises. In this example, found on Tumblr , wasting energy is … blue balls, or maybe priapism?... 

by Jess Zimmerman. This interactive map from NPR, which shows hybrid and electric car sales figures across the U.S., is a handy way of calculating the hippie concentration of your area at a single glance. But it also might help predict which areas will get EV infrastructure soonest, because of high... 

by Jess Zimmerman. Lest you get too caught up in Keystone XL and forget that tar-sands oil is super-destructive in general, NRDC has a new report about how a completely different pipeline will also lead to ecological disaster. The Northern Gateway pipeline, which would run from Alberta to British Columbia,... 

by Christopher Mims. The new documentary The Crisis of Civilization is the most user-friendly exploration of imminent doom you’ll ever see. Through interviews, found footage, and animation, the film actually manages to make the unwinding of our conventional, fossil-fueled, more-is-more industrial... 

by Christopher Mims. Now that condos and a Trump Tower line the banks of the Chicago River, the Windy City is finally thinking about making it less gross. It's one of America's most exploited waterways — in 1900, the city literally reversed the river’s flow to keep all the sewage... 

by Christopher Mims. Homes and strip malls in America's outer-ring suburbs, which contained most of the country's most expensive homes in the 1990s, are now worth less than what it cost to build them. And the land beneath them is worth effectively zero, says Brookings Institution senior fellow... 

by Jess Zimmerman. I have complicated feelings about animal testing, at least when it comes to science. But I have very uncomplicated feelings about dogs, and this video of nine beagles being set free made me blubber unattractively. These dogs have lived in cages their entire lives, testing medicines,... 

by Sarah Laskow. In Australia, a virus called Hendra, which has had a 60 percent mortality rate in humans, is on the rise. There were 18 outbreaks of the disease this year, more than in the 16 previous years combined, and scientists suspect that climate change had a hand in this year's surge. An... 

by Sarah Laskow. As oil and gas companies wander ever further offshore in search of fossil fuels, the government's putting some money into technology that safeguards against oil spills. The amount they’re spending — $9.6 million — is a paltry sum as federal investments go. But...