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On last night's Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert talked about helium and its surprising disappearance from the Earth. Despite being the second most abundant element in the universe, helium is quickly being depleted on Earth, and will soon be lost forever. More »
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Concept artist Diego Gonzalez created tons of art based on Paolo Bacigalupi's dystopian young adult novel Ship Breaker, and now he's edited it together into a harrowing, intense trailer. It will make the novel's environmental collapse feel all too real. More »
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The Republican party needs to wake up to the reality that we're causing global climate change before it's too late, warned two former GOP congressmen. More »
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Scientists at MIT mimic plant processes to build solar cells that renew themselves like living beings. More »
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This is the Aral Sea, which was once one of the four largest lakes in the world, until the Soviet Union diverted the rivers that fed it. Now full of stranded ships, it's just one of the world's dying lakes. More »
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The Transcendent City is a gorgeous short film by Bartlett School of Architecture graduate Richard Hardy about an artificial intelligence network that coexists with its ecosystem. It's a welcome break from the presupposition that AI overlords would scorch the Earth. More »
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This has been a hot, wretched week in the Northeastern US. But as heat waves go, this one was pretty mild — especially compared to these seven examples. More »
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Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa have created a simulation of the potential spread of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill over 360 days. Their hypothetical scenario? All sorts of bad. More »
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The future is a beautiful place - and you can help make it that way, while picking up a paycheck at the same time. Here are 20 jobs that will help the human race avoid dystopia! More »
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Boneshaker author Cherie Priest writes a heartbreaking, unsettling essay about the Gulf of Mexico disaster, and the responsibility we all share. More »
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We've done so much damage to the planet, we can't call it "Earth" any more, says environmentalist Bill McKibben. We'll have to start calling our planet "Eaarth" instead. And we have to pronounce it in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. More »
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Here's your first look at a ground-based cloud-seeding system. With drought hitting the Western United States hard, governments are pushing the federal government to spend $25 million on cloud-seeding technology. Meanwhile, China is already spending $100 million to make rain. More »
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Photographer James Balog is best known for his death-defying trips to Iceland, Greenland and Alaska, where he's documented the melting icecaps using photos and time-lapse images. But he's also made stunning images of cyborgs and "techno sapiens." More »
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The sands of a renewed desert claim the remains of Las Vegas in 2050. It's not a still from Resident Evil 3, it's one of the terrifying future visions from The Age Of Stupid, a new environmental docudrama. Gallery below. More »
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Lumber companies are calling for offshore clear-cutting, logging forests that have been underwater for decades. And environmentalists have discovered the only loggers they could love. More »
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The area where Bulgaria hugs the Black Sea is a mass of cheap, crappy resorts punctuated by a few luxury hotels. Still, areas with untouched forest remain — at least, they will until next year, when an eco-community will turn nature into "nature" by creating a carbon-neutral city in a place where there are currently no humans at all. Apparently replacing real forest with a development that "may contain nature" isn't a popular idea. More »
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Click to viewYou may have thought Pixar's trashbot epic Wall-E was an environmentalist screed about humans ruining the planet through over-consumption. But you'd be wrong, say a rising chorus of conservative commentators. Rather, Wall-E is a right-wing dream come true, a saga about the need to escape big government and return to small-town family values. Not only that, but some progressives are starting to attack the poor little guy for not being hardcore enough. More »
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A nightclub opening early next month in England is going to save the future — but only if you boogie as hard as you can on their energy-absorbing dance floor. The floor is made from a flexible material that bends as people pound it with their dancing feet. As you can see in this image, the dancing squashes special blocks under the floor that convert motion into into energy that powers the club's lighting and sound system. So maybe Emma Goldman was right about how revolutions should always include dancing? More »
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It's another installment of Ask a Biogeek, a column where UC Berkeley biology researcher Terry Johnson answers all your questions — especially the weird ones. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=394481&view=rss&microfeed=true An infamous list from the Heartland Institute of 500 scientists with doubts about global warming — often waved around among policy-makers as "proof" that there are still doubters within the scientific community — turns out to be at least 10 percent fake. When the DeSmog Blog posted the actual list yesterday, 45 scientists whose names appeared on it stepped up to protest. All are requesting that their names be removed from the list. We can only assume more will step forward as time goes on and the public list circulates further. [DeSmogBlog] More »
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What if, instead of using energy once we could recycle it? A new way of generating electricity from truck traffic at the Port of Oakland in California is doing just that, a promising step toward the coming electricity cycle. Nature is defined by cycles — the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and so on. Humans have messed both of those up severely of course, but water still evaporates, turns to rain, and then empties into the ocean or gets sucked up in plants, where it repeats the process. The Port of Oakland experiment might help save civilization by creating an electricity cycle, harvesting electricity from cars, trucks even people (like the AI in The Matrix, except without the human enslavement). More »
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Today is Earth Day, a celebration that's supposed to focus on attention on ecological balance — keeping our planet green and healthy. But as futurist Jamais Cascio points out in an essay published today, the point of environmentalism isn't to protect the planet — Earth has survived much worse than a little carbon emissions, thank you very much. Remember that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? Way worse than aerosols in the atmosphere, and yet the planet survived. Cascio argues that the unspoken point of environmentalism is to save human civilization. More »
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In five years, you'll be eating a hamburger that no animal died for. Instead, that burger will have been grown from a tiny sample of cells in a plant-and-mushroom bath. The cow who donated the cells will be frolicking in a meadow somewhere, having long forgotten the annoying poke from a tissue engineer with a syringe. At a meeting in Norway of the In Vitro Meat Consortium late last week, scientists and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss the future of "cultured meat," or meat that's essentially grown like cultures in a lab (pictured here). This meeting, the first of its kind, signaled the beginning of a viable industry around the production of vat-grown meat. More »
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To-do lists are a great way to plan your week, and it turns out they're also not a bad tool for futurists either. We've put together 20 to-do list items that anyone can use to stop environmental disaster, speed the invention of artificial intelligence, jumpstart a moon colony, and help everyone become posthuman. Usually it seems like ordinary people can't contribute to massive projects that require scientific minds as well as philosophers and other specialists. But there are actually a lot of things you can do. Over the past week we've posted four separate to-do lists for futurists, and now we bring them all together so you can print them out, tuck them in your pocket, and start checking items off to change the world. More »
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Ecocity Builders is a group that does eco-friendly urban projects. They've just posted some cool images of what a typical urban downtown looks like now, and what it would look like if the city were redesigned to be a pedestrian space made with recycled materials. Above, you can see the "before" picture. Click through to see the "after." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=356860&view=rss&microfeed=true The Earth faces seven "tipping points" within the next 100 years. These are changes in the environment that can't be undone, and which will lead to a disastrous downward spiral and amplify global warming and environmental damage on a historic scale. The first of these, the collapse of the Indian summer monsoon, will happen within just one year, predict scientists. The next one, the melting of the Arctic sea-ice, will happen within 10 years. [UniverseToday, via PosthumanBlues] More »
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A forklift driver tries to block a monster coming out of the ground in this early concept art from The Host 2, which starts filming this summer. The sequel to the best monster movie in ages will feature multiple monsters, says writer Kang Full. And it sounds as though it'll be even more political than the original. Click through for full image and more details. More »
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The latest craze among environmentalists is killing children by not having them. These people are appalled by the huge carbon footprint kids leave behind. Think of all the consumer electronics devices they'll use up and throw away, not to mention all those gallons of gas parents use to ferry their little carbon emitters to toxic malls. There's a hilarious writeup of this fake "trend" in an issue of the Daily Mail from last week, full of horrified prose about how shocking it is that women might want to forgo squirting out an infant, and then blaming the whole thing on extreme environmentalism. More »
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Heroes continues to one-up Lost as often as possible; as the cast of ABC's castaway drama get continually arrested for DUIs, actors from NBC's superhero soap are now in danger of finding themselves arrested for saving the world. More »
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