Going Solar
[caption id="attachment_76035" align="alignleft" width="550" caption="My son, Jack, eager for the installation to
[caption id="attachment_76035" align="alignleft" width="550" caption="My son, Jack, eager for the installation to
Every once in a while, an environmental disaster makes big news, but the effects remain years after the headlines have faded. Here are six stories of what human activity did to mess up Mother Nature. 1. Mossville,
The possibility of life on Mars and other planets and moons has been debated for as long as we have known about those planets. Now that water has been found on the Mars, that possibility is more believable than ever. Sure, conditions are fierce on Mars, b
Update: the entire documentary is now available online for free! A new PBS* documentary, The Botany of Desire, premieres Wednesday night (tonight!) at 8pm on PBS stations throughout the US. It's based on the popular Michael Pollan book of the same name
Playgrounds have come a long way since the early days of hot, steel slides and open-backed infant swings. Here's some that are more than just seesaws and monkey bars
Today, Scientific American brings us some answers to the question what happened to the honeybees? Since the "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) appeared in 2006, millions of beehives have been abandoned by the bees, putting bee-pollinated crops at risk -- a
BY BRIAN
Frontline is a PBS documentary series that has consistently offered the best reporting on a huge range of topics for over 25 years. Since 1983, Frontline has produced more than 480 documentaries on everything from politics to religion to personal finance
The balance of nature took about four billion years to settle into the pattern the earth now holds. When humans change one thing, large or small, it begins a chain reaction that we often can't foresee. We don't know everything there is to know about Mothe
Some of you who've been with us from the beginning might recall Mangesh's post a couple years back about Tesla's high-end electric sports car, made in Silicon Valley. In the post, Mango wrote mental_floss' favorite inventor Nikola Tesla, who famously drea
700 years ago, in the area that we today know as Arizona and New Mexico, the Anasazi people came en masse from the north to build large stone settlements. Their predecessors (the Hohokam) had built with sticks and mud, and as a result the older settlemen
Back in September, fellow blogger Ransom asked how to stop unwanted phone books. I have long wondered this myself, as I use the internet for all my phone number lookups. Now, I don't think the phone book is a bad thing -- it's just something that I don'
If you're up on your environmental news, you already know water is a big issue. We're not only running out of clean tap water, we're spending billions of dollars and polluting the environment as we haul bottled water all over the country (much of which co
Portland, Oregon has long had a Weather Ball -- a series of lights that tell you, in rough terms, a weather forecast. It's located downtown, on top of a building. From many locations in Portland you can spot the ball and get a general sense of upcoming
Greenpeace has been at the forefront of political and environmental activism since its inception in 1971. While opposing nuclear testing and supporting environmental causes, Greenpeace has routinely been in the media spotlight, and often seeks out media
When you throw something in the trash, it's easy to think that it stops being your problem -- your friendly neighborhood sanitation workers take it away, and that's that. Well, until the Garbage Apocalypse of 2062, when GarbageNet becomes self-aware and
When Al Gore and the U.N. climate panel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Gore's push to solve the climate crisis received even more media attention. I'm familiar with An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore in general, but I hadn't seen his Nobel Prize accep
As is usually the case with bills in Congress, I had a lot of trouble believing that the 2007 Farm Bill was applicable to me. After all, the last time I even remember going to a farm was on a kindergarten field trip, when I got goat's milk squirted direct
We've all heard about the dangers of global warming and climate change. It's going to make the oceans rise, drown our cities, kill plants, cause hurricanes and ruin the Earth for our grandkids. But that's all secondary to the real effects of global warmin
Although the first day of fall was on September 23 this year, I didn't notice it was fall until last night. Why? Well, it didn't smell like fall. Here in Portland, there's a particular smell I associate with the onset of fall -- the smell of people's f
Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan is showing a new series of images called Running the Numbers starting Saturday in LA. Running the Numbers features images based on specific quantities -- generally large numbers of consumer products we typically do
According to this story, the red tide currently floating off the coast of Sarasota "has not killed fish or caused respiratory problems on Siesta Public Beach, Sarasota County's biggest tourist beach." Um, wrong. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands
A reader named Stephen wrote to us yesterday, pointing out that environmentalists extol the benefits of using cork on one hand and worry about endangered cork forests (at left) on the other. Odd, that. Fortunately, Treehugger resolved the quandary for us
According an article in today's New York Times, the Smart car, which we've all marvelled at on our trips across the pond, may be coming to a dealership near you as soon as 2008! According to the article: DaimlerChrysler, which shelved an earlier plan to b