doing good
The Withering Indignity of Being a Peep
As if mastication and digestion wasn’t enough, Peeps are degraded and mocked while they are alive, often the subjects of violent Peep bashing smut on Youtube. Humans commonly find it amusing to smash Peeps with hammers, light them on fire, flush them...
How to Stop Our Food From Killing the Climate From Killing Our Food
Climate change is so unfair to us. It already contributes massively to global food insecurity with "killer droughts":http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/08/01/the-role-of-drought-in-the-horn-of-africa-famine/, "awful floods":http://www.washingtonpost.com...
Bacteria that Eat Carbon and Poop Fuel Might Just Save the Planet
The biggest physical advantages of fossil fuels are that they're energy-dense and portable, which means they store a lot of power. That storage issue is one of the biggest barriers to developing a power grid reliant solely on renewable technologies...
Alain de Botton’s Bizarre Atheism Isn't What Atheists Want
If Alain de Botton's "Atheism 2.0" is where “atheism” is going, I’ll gladly retract the label for myself and settle on “rational materialist.”
One Man is Solving Texas' Drought Woes by Capturing Cloud Juice
It's easy to forget when you cruising through the sprawling metropolises of the Southwest -- Dallas, Phoenix, even Los Angeles -- that the region is largely desert, and arid at the least. Securing water's long been a contentious issue in those parts...
Why Plants Are Blooming Early This Year
It's been an unseasonably warm spring this year. People walking down my street in cutoffs and sitting out on patios, soaking up some rays, has happened more often in the past week than I ever remember happening in the month of March. The flower box...
China's Irrigation System is Ridiculously Dirty
China has an incredible number of mouths to feed, and even with food imports from the U.S. booming, those hungry mouths require a whole lot of farmland. That farmland, meanwhile, requires the second-largest irrigation network in the world. Now, it...
William Shatner Spent the 80s Proselytizing for Vegetarianism
In this 1982 love letter to vegetarianism, William Shatner walks us through the history, benefits, and misconceptions of adhering to a vegetarian diet. Hokey? Oh yes. But it's also rather informative, including some early indications that shooting cows...
Is Google Stereotyping the World?
which is the most popular site on the web and the portal to all of our published information. In terms of defining who humans are to outside parties, Google's search algorithm is one of the most powerful things in history. More importantly, that...
The Key to Solving African Food Crises is Better Farmer Networking
The most ubiquitous images of Africa usually include a scorched, barren landscape and some insanely thin babies. People starving. No food. And one usually gets the impression that we -- the West -- must swoop in and save the day. "Let us feed those...
Sorry Insomniacs, Your Sleeping Pills are Killing You
Risky sleeping- the dangers of medicating insomnia. http://www.vanishinsomnianow.com/articles/adolescent-insomnia.jpg Sleeping pills might actually be worse for you than not sleeping. A recent study published in the online journal BMJ Open suggests...
How the Lorax Got Polluted
There may be all kinds of reasons to defend the Lorax -- Dr. Seuss's wondrous children's fable that's also a seminal book about conservation -- from the wrath of Lou Dobbs and Fox News and others to whom the children's book-turned-Disney film is...