Apr 11
Of the many problems on Earth, here are two: there are too many jellyfish in the seas
Apr 02
Just how many large mysterious objects can there be floating at sea? That’s what many of us have wondered after the search for debris from Malaysia Airlines 370 turned up piece after piece of ocean trash. The search for flight 370 has focused our attention on empty patches of ocean and, in the process, shed light on the surreal world of lost shipping containers.
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Mar 03
The average New Yorker generates about three pounds of trash every day, and a huge amount of that is food waste—which could be composted, if only we had the space. Enter "Green Loop," a proposal to build massive composting islands off the coastline of NYC.
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Mar 03
Mount Everest might be the be-all, end-all of mountaineering, but it’s also a dumping ground for the climbers striving upon its face—which is littered, as National Geographic puts it, "with garbage leaking out of the glaciers and pyramids of human excrement befouling the high camps." This week, Nepal announced a new rule aimed at cleaning it up.
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Feb 24
Let this be your cautionary tale against building a pretty waterfront park on a landfill. At Cesar Chavez Park on the Berkeley Marina, squirrels and gophers are burrowing through old trash, turning the ground into toxin-leaching swiss cheese. Poison from the estimated 1.9 million tons of residential, commercial, and industrial waste is now leaching into the San Francisco Bay.
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Feb 12
It’s hard to be a bee these days, what with the sinister—and still mysterious—Colony Collapse Disorder decimating millions of hives over the past decade. But a few highly resourceful Canadian species have started adapting new nesting techniques, using plain old everyday plastic garbage to build their homes.
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Jan 01
Sure, we all know pollution destroys ecosystems, but, for better or for worse, pollution can create ecosystems, too. The billions of tiny pieces of plastic that are now floating in our oceans are exactly that: a novel ecosystem humans have unwittingly made by throwing away too much plastic. Microbes and insects that might have no business thriving in the middle of the ocean suddenly have found a new home amidst all that drifting plastic.
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Nov 15
Pooping birds, overflowing trash cans, radioactive poisoning, too much driving, and those goddamn hipsters again. Welcome to another edition of What’s Ruining Our Cities.
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Oct 18
We’ve all felt it: The unique kind of envy that results from encountering something you want, but can’t afford. For some of us, it’s the new iPhone. For others, it’s an eight-foot-long hot tub boat. For artist Jason Ruff in his younger years, it was sneakers and cigarettes—which serve as materials for his latest project.
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Sep 25
Have you ever had a roommate who saves plastic grocery bags just in case they ever have the need to reuse the dang things? Like, hundreds of plastic grocery bags? Well, thanks to some Australian engineers, those extra bags can not only have a purpose, they can become technology of the future.
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