PENSA These solar-powered flowers are now  sprouting up in New York, offering precious joules to cell phones drained by searching for 3G on the subway.  Design firm Pensa and solar company GoalZero will be testing the Street Charge... 

What’s worse — a transit system that shuts down all the time because of malfunctions, or one that just powers through? St. Petersburg, Russia, chose the latter approach. This video shows what happens when a subway car’s... 

We strongly recommend that you do not use this method to get in touch, as it were, with the Earth. But as this video shows, it is technically possible to run over eight or 10 feet of red-hot lava and emerge with your limbs intact.... 

squirrel83 An incomplete section of the destroyed Rockaway Beach boardwalk in late May. Nearly eight months after Hurricane Sandy destroyed almost three miles of historic boardwalk along the Rockaway peninsula at the southern end... 

Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust Click to embiggen. Unlace your bodice, put down your bastard sword, and stop trying to genetically engineer that goat into a unicorn — it turns out all you need to experience the thrill of living... 

Eric Constantineau As a journalist, it takes a lot to really piss me off: I’ve found that most scandals aren’t really scandals if you dig past the screaming headlines and into the wonky details. And, though I grew up... 

When dozens of police officers in riot gear raided the occupied Hayes Valley Farm in San Francisco early last Thursday morning, it seemed like the end of the road for this garden space. Activists from around the Bay Area had moved... 

Keijo Knutas Is this old-fashioned idea ready for a comeback? When Stan Cox’s Losing Our Cool questioned America’s fetish for air-conditioning in 2010, some very nasty comments reached his inbox. But Cox, an agricultural researcher... 

Shutterstock No shortage in sight. Every few months we see a spate of “news” stories warning that population growth rates are declining in the U.S. and/or the world, potentially leading to a shortage of babies and outright... 

Foie gras is a controversial topic . It’s one of the most delicious foods on the planet, but conventional foie gras comes at the price of force-feeding ducks and geese.  Pateria de Sousa  is doing things differently. By following... 

DVIDSHUB An aircraft releases fire-retardant over Black Forest, Colo. Last year, Colorado suffered from a  record-breaking wildfire season : More than 4,000 fires resulted in six deaths, the destruction of 648 buildings, and a half... 

Patrick Cashin New York is finally building another subway line on the East Side, and if these photos by Metropolitan Transit Authority staff photographer Patrick Cashin are to be believed, it will be a magical cave of wonders. Well,... 

Shutterstock Yum, genetically engineered corn and cotton. That isn’t what most people would think. (Especially the cotton bit. And  especially  the GMO bit.) But a growing number of pests appear to share this sentiment. They’ve... 

Revkin and Roberts, last seen together in 2011. Andrew Revkin has been on the front lines of environmental journalism for decades. He picked up the climate story before many of us had heard of it. He’s best known for his Dot... 

Who says solar and wind can’t provide enough energy for a modern lifestyle? This giant, terrifying robot with a geodesic dome shell and 12 crustaceanesque legs derives its power from a wind turbine and a roof-mounted solar panel.... 

Just wait til that new unitard isn’t cool anymore. Last week, Jezebel’s Doug Barry was all , “AAA! Throwing away clothes is shockingly bad for the environment! And 45 percent of your donated clothes are shipped overseas... 

R. R. Smith / USDA Cover crops like red clover could be the factor allowing organic farms to sequester carbon dioxide. We’ve known for a while now that organic agriculture is good for the climate: It does a better job at grabbing... 

On average, it costs $2.51 more to fill a conventional car with a gallon of gas than to charge an electric car to go the same distance, according to the Department of Energy’s new eGallon tool. It may be an even bigger difference... 

Giken Seisakusho Bikes are great and all, but as more people start cycling instead of driving, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to create new slabs of empty asphalt on which to park bikes. A better solution is Japan’s... 

Shutterstock As if climate disruption , air pollution , health problems , and landscape destruction weren’t bad enough, here’s another reason to hate the coal industry: Coal companies are shortchanging U.S. taxpayers out of...