Don't expect giant machines that can purify the atmosphere or nanotech that can reverse global warming just yet. The U.S. government has yet to approve the fledgling agency which would unify several independent researchers and university labs with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Basically, it would be an Earth-monitoring super-group whose goals are to research and solve humanity's crimes against the biosphere.

USGS director Charles Grote, who is helping to put the group together, isn't quite as grandiose when explaining the ESSA's mission:

The USGS, in bringing not only its geologic, biologic, hydrologic and geospatial expertise to the understanding of natural systems, but also its research capabilities in energy, mineral, water, and biologic resources, gives the new organization a comprehensive perspective on both environmental and resource systems. If we effectively link these capabilities with those of NOAA, we will have a powerful research institution

But David Rejeski, former member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is thinking bigger:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has demonstrated the value of funding high-risk, high-reward research and development. ESSA should foster similar ventures in the environmental arena.

Given the kinds of projects that have come out of DARPA, including the internet and swarm robots, Rejeski is clearly hoping for giant robots who can cool down the oceans or clean up chemical spills. That's what we're hoping for too.

Earth Systems Science Agency, we have a planetary emergency! Help us before it's too late!

Image from Earth Sons.

Organizing an Earth Systems Science Agency [Nature via Eurekalert]

Making a list of marine species might not seem like a big deal, but taxonomists face some daunting problems. For one thing, some species have dozens of names, nicknames and even "official" Latin names dating back centuries. The Census of Marine Life is sorting through all of them and figuring out which species are which, assigning them scientific names, and noting all of their aliases. To make matters worse, researchers are constantly finding new species, sometimes hundreds at a time. It can take years for a new find to be published because of the taxonomic chaos.

The Census is working with the World Register of Marine Species to clear all this up. They currently have over 120,000 validated names, and expect to top 200,000 by the end of this year. What's truly astonishing is their estimate for the total marine species on Earth, discovered and undiscovered: over 1 million. At the current rate of progress, it would take over 500 years to catalog all of them. As more and more species are threatened by pollution and climate change, it becomes even more important to identify them.

Ultimately, the Census of Marine Life catalog will be used to build the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS). This information portal will have photographs, distribution info and a ton of other data on each species, all easily accessible and updatable. Census data will also be contributed to the Encyclopedia of Life and the Species2000 project, which will create a similar catalog for every single species on our planet - animal, plant, fungi...everything. Image by: NOAA.

Census Of Marine Life Lists 122,500 Known Species, Over Halfway To Complete Inventory By Oct. 2010. [Science Daily]

When the ozone hole is finally closed in about 60 years, thanks to environmental protection laws forbidding emissions that thin the ozone layer, the weather will change dramatically at the pole. According to ScienceNOW:

The appearance of the ozone hole actually created a unique wind pattern called the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), which prevents warmer air from reaching Antarctica. The pattern results from two competing conditions: a cooling of the stratosphere, 12 to 50 kilometers above Earth's surface, due to the depletion of its heat-absorbing ozone layer; and a warming troposphere, which lies below the stratosphere and which has seen its temperature rise thanks to greenhouse-gas accumulation.

As the ozone hole recovers, the stratosphere will once again warm up over the Southern Hemisphere, with unpredictable effects on SAM. In the new study, an international team of researchers compared standard climate change computer models with newer versions that take atmospheric chemistry into account. The comparison showed that ozone-induced stratospheric warming could reduce the role of SAM in blocking tropical air from migrating to the pole. That's worrisome, the team says, because the wind pattern affects, among other things, the Southern Hemisphere's climate, the extent of its sea ice, the variability of its storm tracks, and its patterns of rainfall and drought.

An article about the researchers' work appears in today's edition of Science. This isn't exactly as ironic as you might think. The only reason the SAM exists is because global warming shifted cold winds from the upper atmosphere down to the lower. Basically, the weather just keeps getting more and more screwed up. Photo by Julian Dowdeswell.

Computer Models Show Major Climate Shift [via ScienceNOW]

According to Scidev.net:

Farmers in all three countries said they have suffered from an increasing shortage of surface water. Wild swings in the weather, between persistent drought and torrential floods, have also been reported . . . Everhart Nangoma, one of the case study researchers at the European Union offices in Blantyre, says farmers in Malawi now spend more on expensive, fast-growing varieties. They also plant a minimum of two crops in their gardens to ensure at least some harvest.

Others are banding together to create DiY rainwater harvesting tanks, while still others are "switching from wheat and potatoes to quick-maturing crops such as beans and maize." Many have begun planting inside forests.

African Farmers Adjusting to Climate Change [Scidev]

Irony aside, the new compounds — dubbed HBT and G2ZT — reportedly only produce ammonia as their byproduct when they go boom. This is a good thing because many long-term health problems related to air pollution come from the formation of nitrogen oxides.

Of course if you make lots of super-powerful bombs out of HBT or G2ZT, many people probably won't be around to enjoy the cleaner air. But the researchers say another application would be cleaner rocket fuels, which we're going to need as flights into space become more and more common.

Source: American Chemical Society via EurekAlert

The Associated Press reports:

Grease is transformed into fuel through a chemical process called transesterification, which removes glycerine and adds methanol to the oil, leaving a thinner product that can power a diesel engine. Biodiesel can also be blended with petroleum diesel, and blends of the alternative fuel are now sold at 1,400 gas stations across the country. But as the price of diesel shoots up, so, too, does the value of grease.

Biodiesel Pirates Steal Used Cooking Oil [MSNBC]

How would this work? Otegu explains:

The outer skin of the structure absorbs sunlight through an organic photovoltaic skin and transfers it to the nano-fibers inside the nano-wires which then is sent to storage units at the end of each panel. Each turbine on the panel generates energy by chemical reactions on each end where it makes contact with the structure. Polarized organisms are responsible for this process on every turbine's turn.

The inner skin of each turbine works as a filter absorbing CO2 from the environment as wind passes through it.

The fact of using nano-bioengineering and nano-manufacturing as means of production is to achieve an efficient zero emission material which uses the right kind and amount of material where needed.

These micro organisms have not been genetically altered; they work as a trained colony where each member has a specific task in this symbiotic process. For example, an ant or a bee colony, where the queen knows what has to be done and distributes the tasks between the members.

Nano-Vent Skin [via Dezeen]

Explaining these satellite photos, NASA reps say:

Flood water can be difficult to see in photo-like satellite images, particularly when the water is muddy. This pair of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite use a combination of visible and infrared light to make floodwaters obvious. Water is blue or nearly black, vegetation is bright green, bare ground is tan, and clouds are white or light blue.

On April 15, rivers and lakes are sharply defined against a backdrop of vegetation and fallow agricultural land.... The wetlands near the shore are a deep blue green. Cyclone Nargis came ashore across the mouths of the Irrawaddy and followed the coastline northeast. The entire coastal plain is flooded in the May 5 image. The fallow agricultural areas appear to have been especially hard hit. For example, Yangôn (population over 4 million) is almost completely surrounded by floods. Several large cities (population 100,000-500,000) are in the affected area. Muddy runoff colors the Gulf of Martaban turquoise.

Myanmar's Delta Waterworld [DotEarth]

Yeah, it's something like this. Here you can see the Boxberg Power Plant, torching massive amounts of coal, chewing up the landscape, and shooting smoke into the atmosphere. Apparently these kinds of plants have been spun as a positive alternative to nuke power. I'd rather get electricity from nukes any day than power my computer with coal.

Images by Carsten Koall/Getty.

Abengoa Solar's PS10 power plant generates 11 megawatts of clean power, supplying more than 5,000 households. The heliostats automatically swivel to follow the sun and focus maximum sunlight on the receiver at the top of the tower. The company claims the potential to generate temperatures in the neighborhood of 1,800 degrees F with an efficiency 25 percent greater than current photovoltaic technology. Prototype towers were tested in the U.S., but PS10 is the first commercial plant. More Spanish towers are planned with greater power generating capacity.

How hard would it be to put a mirror array like this into orbit? With GPS, it would have pinpoint accuracy, cause incredible damage and leave no unpleasant radioactivity behind. Company reps swear they have absolutely no plans to demand a $500 million ransom from the world's governments to keep them from incinerating cities. Top photo by: afloresm. Schematic by: Abengoa.

11 Megawatt Solar Power Tower [EcoGeek]

Cory developed the balloons with aerospace engineer Pini Gurfil. The two say that these balloons would be good for off-the-grid applications, like setting up a camp after a disaster or pumping energy into a house far from electricity generators. Because the balloons are so lightweight and energy-efficient, they can be quickly deployed and moved around.

According to Inhabitat:

Cory and Gurfil have constructed several prototypes and have conducted research to show that a 10 ft balloon could provide around a kilowatt of energy (equivalent to 25 square meters of solar panels). Their target cost is $4,000 per balloon, compared to the $10,000 it would cost for a solar field producing the same amount of energy. The balloons will last about a year without needing maintenance.

Solar Balloons [Inhabitat]

When reading the map, it's helpful to know that units are logarithmic, millions of metric tons/year. It may not sound like much, but knowing when and where Americans are pumping CO2 emissions into the atmosphere might help open some eyes to how major the global warming problem is, and what they can do to help.

As a country, the U.S. has responded to the global warming problem with a mixture of apathy and denial (for details on this policy, please direct all correspondence to the White House). But Vulcan's taking the issue to the people. Now you can say, "well, I live in Chicago, how much CO2 am I responsible for?" A look at the national map will give you a good idea (Chicago's red, that's bad), but you can also look at which power plants, factories, or roadways are particularly bad in that area.

It wouldn't be the worst thing if Vulcan compelled you to carpool a little more often, but it's designed to be more than just a guilt trip. Data like this is power. People in the U.S. can go to their town hall/city hall/county officials and say 'look, we're emitting XX tons of CO2 per year, and we need to get this thing under control."

To those who say, "but China's the world's biggest emitter now!" fair enough. For their next trick, Gurney and the Vulcan crew are planning Hestia, which will map the entire globe's emissions in similar detail.

Source: Purdue University via EurekAlert

The SkySails propulsion system can attach to pretty much any large ship, is computer controlled and deploys and retracts automatically. The company recently completed a major test, criss-crossing the Atlantic in a cargo ship called the MS Beluga using one of their "towing kites." The result: a 20 percent fuel savings. The system is shown in a computer rendering above, and can be seen in actual operation on their test vessel, the MS Beaufort:

An optional computerized system would allow ships to travel along a route optimized for wind power, and the SkySail is safer and more efficient than traditional masted sails, the company claims. Ships equipped with SkySails could put a big dent in the oil consumption and pollution created by the ever-growing container cargo industry. Photos by: SkySails.

MV "Beluga SkySails" successfully completes maiden voyage. [SkySails]

States like California, Montana, Idaho and Colorado are already seeing their crops and livestock die off in record numbers. And the climate report predicts that the situation will only get more dire, even if the government responds immediately by cutting emissions. Droughts will become longer and more intense. Rivers and water reserves will dry up, partly because they are usually replenished with melting snow each year. But if the heat continues to rise, there will be no snow — and therefore no runoff into water reserve areas.

Hotter and Drier — The West's Changed Climate [NRDC via TreeHugger]

To-List for Futurists: Building Ecotopia

1. Today: recycle all the waste materials you can.

2. Today: get educated by reading Jared "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Diamond's quietly disturbing book Collapse, which is about how societies destroy themselves by misusing natural resources. Getting a global, historical picture can help you understand what's at stake. Also, it's useful to realize that a lot of the environmental mistakes we're making now were already made in the past on a smaller scale.

3. This month: refurbish an old machine that you were going to throw away and start using it again. You don't have to use the machine for the same things it was built to do! Instructables and MAKE magazine have have a lot of great ideas for how to repurpose old machines.

4. This month: Spend one day volunteering with an organization or getting together with friends to help your community produce less environment-damaging waste. Think broadly about what it means to produce less waste. It could mean everything from cleaning up garbage in natural areas, to helping someone else refurbish their old computers. The point of this item on the to-do list is to work with other people (even if it's online) to reduce polluting waste, because you can't change the future all by yourself.

5. This year: Be sure that you vote for political candidates who support national and international cooperation to scale back on carbon emissions and toxic mining practices. Since this is a global problem, candidates need to be thinking outside city boundaries, state boundaries, and national boundaries. This could mean signing onto the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali plan, or it could mean cooperating with the city next door to treat acid mine drainage in a local area.

TOMORROW: How to Create Artificial Intelligence

Image by Mitch Epstein, via Ecotopia Exhibit.

Here is the Yaghi lab's custom robotic sampling device, which fills hundreds of cells with crystal samples. Those samples are scanned via a rapid X-ray technique using this awesome X-ray machine, which quickly determines their crystalline structure. Only the crystals that can absorb carbon dioxide (or another desired compound) will be sorted out for more study. And finally, here's the device that purifies samples of crystal so you can get a vial of pure carbon dioxide-absorbers, sprinkle them in your carbon capture filter, and use a combustion engine without all the goo.

Top image via Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA. Bottom image via Dave Bullock/Wired.com.

CO2-Absorbing Crystals [Wired]

So here's what we did: we went around the AAAS exhibit hall and took pictures of any sign that made us think of something sexual or made us want to yell the word "dude!" really loudly. When we took the picture of the PNAS sign, the guy in the booth looked all suspicious and said, "Are you making fun of our sign?" We admitted that we were, but he was really nice about it. Nobody else even noticed that their signs were dirty. Even the chick whose poster said "talking dirty" on it.

OK, fine. So what we did wasn't really that mean and just shows that we are a bunch of immature dorks. But in our defense, we did do a public service. We took a stack of "pocket guides" on WMDs from the FBI's booth and handed them out at the airport. You know, for science education.

* Actually, we didn't really steal the skulls. That guy in the picture did.

Unlike today's light water reactors, gen IV nuclear power plants like this futuristic one, in Japan, will be fast reactors that won't have any highly-radioactive Plutonium or Uranium waste to bury deep underground. Instead, these elements will be stripped out of the nuclear waste in a process called "partitioning," and reused. There will be some waste, of course, but it won't have a half-life of several hundred thousand years. Probably more like 1000. AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Here's a schematic for a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor. Also, fast reactors don't produce products that can be weaponized. So countries using gen IV fast reactors, like this one (below) being built in Kalpakkam, India, won't have to worry that somebody might steal a byproduct and stick it in a bomb. Fun fact: experimental facilities like the Idaho National Laboratory in the US have been experimenting with fast reactor technology for over fifty years. Fast reactors were among the first designs tested for nuclear power, but were scrapped because they were too expensive. AP Photo M.Lakshman

Here's a traffic jam created by checkpoints outside the city of Baghdad. And here is a great vision of future parking in a climate-changed British city.

Baghdad traffic at checkpoint by Jamesdale10.

Cars underwater in England by dubaddict.

Hyderabad traffic by Alex Graves.

How does the carbon-collecting strategy work? A release from Georgia Tech says:

Georgia Tech's near-future strategy involves capturing carbon emissions from conventional (fossil) liquid hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles with an onboard fuel processor designed to separate the hydrogen in the fuel from the carbon. Hydrogen is then used to power the vehicle, while the carbon is stored on board the vehicle in a liquid form until it is disposed at a refueling station. It is then transported to a centralized site to be sequestered in a permanent location currently under investigation by scientists, such as geological formations, under the oceans or in solid carbonate form. In the long-term strategy, the carbon dioxide will be recycled forming a closed-loop system, involving synthesis of high energy density liquid fuel suitable for the transportation sector.

Carbon-capture strategy could lead to emission-free cars [Georgia Tech]

University of Arizona researcher Bruce Tabashnik said:

What we're seeing is evolution in action. This is the first documented case of field-evolved resistance to a Bt crop.

The researchers write in their report that Bt cotton and Bt corn have been grown on more than 162 million hectares (400 million acres) worldwide since 1996, "generating one of the largest selections for insect resistance ever known."

Another example of natural selection working this fast can be seen among elephants, who were hunted for their ivory tusks in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries. Over the course of a century, a "tuskless" mutation in a few elephants spread across the population like wildfire. While only 1% of elephants were born without tusks in 1930, in 1998 15% of female and 9% of male elephants were. Image via USDA-Agricultural Research Service.

First documented case of pest resistence to biotech cotton [Eurekalert]

No list of pollution mutants could begin without first paying homage to Hedorah, AKA The Smog Monster (1971). He lands on top of Tokyo's smokestacks and sucks the smoke out to grow bigger, and meaner, and more red-eyed. He literally shits all over the city, big slimy rivers of diarrhea. But he also does nice things, like use his grody powers to prevent us from having to hear one more folk song from a bunch of psychedelically-dressed hippies playing guitar in the middle of a field. Eventually Gojira kills him by grabbing a couple of weird glowing white balls from inside his stinky body. There are also a lot of messages "from the children" in this movie, which was allegedly inspired by letters from Japanese children saying the scariest thing they could imagine was pollution.

One of the greatest filmmakers at work in the U.S. today, John Sayles (director of Lone Star), got his start writing cheesily great pollution monster flick Alligator (1980). The fact that this movie is both funny and politically-minded is entirely due to the accident of Sayles needing some money to fund his indie movies. A pet alligator flushed and released into the sewers of Chicago starts slurping up growth hormones that people are pissing and pooping out into his home. Then he grows into a ginormous, mutant alligator who eats pets . . . and people!

A terrific and fairly obscure entry in the pollution mutant genre is Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), directed and written by outlaw filmmaker Fredric Hobbs. "Gaseous vapors from an ancient mine" have turned a gentle sheep into a guy dressed in a fucked-up sheep suit, but that hardly matters in this strange sendup of life in a small Western town. As the town's racist mayor tries to prevent a nice black guy from buying real estate in his town of apple-cheeked whiteys, the mutant sheep rampages and tries to make it with a hippie chick. Eventually, there is some serious racist violence that takes the film from happy mutant romp into more sinister territory. Like Alligator, this is good political satire masquerading as a cheesy monster movie, and it will please you by succeeding at being both smart and gooftastic.

The best kind of pollution mutant is a rampaging, pissed-off animal, and that's why Prophecy (1979) is such a terrific flick. Bears who have been eating mercury-saturated fish in the rivers near an industrial factory have turned into massive, yucky bears who basically look like they have been turned inside-out. Rampaging and eating of humans follows, and some of the special effects are actually pretty cool. Directed by John Frankenheimer, who helmed the original (and great) Manchurian Candidate (1962), as well as a whole bunch of pretty good horror/actioners, this flick never spawned the billion cheesy sequels. Instead a supernatural movie with Christopher Walken called THE Prophecy got a bunch of awful sequels instead. That's what you get if you keep dumping mercury in the water, kids: bad sequels from a movie with the same name. It's Mother Earth's way of punishing you.

And no list of this sort would be complete without our generation's return to the pollution beastie: The Host (2007), a terrific scifi-horror-comedy about a giant thing (carp? whale? eel? combo platter?) that comes out of the waters near Seoul after a lameass military dude from the U.S. orders his underling to dump a zillion tons of old formaldehyde in the water. Bad move. Now a very angry combo platter is eating people and looking very much like the coolest special effect ever. When the mutant kidnaps the youngest girl in a family of quirky outcasts, they go on the offensive, tracking down the beastie in its lair to get their little girl back. This is the best mutant monster movie to come out in years, and like many entries in the genre it's well-written and has a social message that anybody who hates pollution can get down with.

"It's only a matter of time before the world's militaries learn to use the Earth itself as a weapon," Cascio writes. He speculates about how climate change and global warming could also be weaponized:

The offensive use of geoengineering could take a variety of forms. Overproductive algae blooms can actually sterilize large stretches of ocean over time, effectively destroying fisheries and local ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health risks when it cycles out of the stratosphere. One proposal would pull cooler water from the deep oceans to the surface in an explicit attempt to shift the trajectories of hurricanes. Some actors might even deploy counter-geoengineering projects to slow or alter the effects of other efforts.

Battlefield Earth [Foreign Policy]

Anyone who has visited the Berkeley area in California has probably wondered at one of Tsui's creations. He builds eco-friendly houses in an organic style that look like aliens with curving shell bodies and bulging eye windows. And now he's trying to make his green, alien dreams reduce our urban footprints by taking the population up into his Ultima Tower.

He suggests that the Tower will be completely non-mechanical, with air and light fed into the living areas via a central shaft. All living spaces will be 100 feet square, with at least fifty percent of that given over to ground vegetation. Floors will be full of lakes, ravines, and trees. The one-mile base of the tower will sit in a giant lake that will act as a cooling system, and later turn into precipitation on each floor. It's not so much a building, Tsui says, it's a living environment. A vertical train will take people from the ground floor to the top in about 10 minutes.

Here are the details:

Location: Any densely populated urban environment
Cost: $150,000,000,000.00
Population: 1,000,000 people
Exterior surface area of building: 150,000,000 square feet
Enclosed volume: 53,000,000,000 cubic feet
Square footage: 1,500,000,000
Total enclosed acreage: 39,000 acres
Elevator speed: 20 feet per second (13 miles per hour) 9 minutes and 40 seconds to reach the top floor from the ground floor.
Dimensions: Height—10,560 feet; Diameter at the base—6000 feet; Number of stories—500;
Total Square Feet: Approximately 5,000,000 square feet

Tsui also designs fashions that look like something out of a 1970s science fiction movie. I hope when I'm living in his Ultima Tower I can just keep wearing jeans and my DefCon t-shirts, though.

Plan for the 2-Mile High "Ultima" Tower [Tsui Design + Research Inc]

Since the air quality around the world is only likely to get worse before it gets better, maps like the ones produced by the Pollen Robots and CitySense may become life-savers for people living in the ultra-toxic twenty-first century. So how do they work?

According to Pink Tentacle:

The so-called "Pollen Robots," which weigh 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) and measure 30 centimeters (1 ft) across, consist of a monitoring unit housed in a spherical styrofoam shell. A pair of eyes glow 5 different colors — white, blue, green, red and purple — to indicate the level of Japanese cedar and cypress pollen in the air. Two hundred hay fever sufferers around the country have volunteered to hang the Pollen Robots outside their homes, where they will monitor the air and send minute-by-minute reports over the Internet to Weathernews headquarters in Tokyo.

CitySense will consist of 100 wireless sensors deployed across a city, such as on light poles and private or public buildings; our current target is to deploy the network in Cambridge, MA. Each node will consist of an embedded PC, 802.11a/b/g interface, and various sensors for monitoring weather conditions and air pollutants. Most importantly, CitySense is intended to be an open testbed that researchers from all over the world can use to evaluate wireless networking and sensor network applications in a large-scale urban setting.

Pollen Robots [Pink Tentacle]
CitySense [official Web site]

The Tara isn't gigantic or imposing, it's just made to keep its small science crew alive in subzero weather for a very long time. Here's another view, where you can see the climate experts setting off : BBC News says:

Last year, Tara measurements revealed the dramatic springtime collapse of surface ozone in the Arctic for the first time. Over the last 15 months, the boat has covered 5,200km (3,200 miles), including crossing the Noth Pole, drifting at an average speed of 10km per day (6 miles per day).

Boat Sails free from Icy Shackles [BBC News]

Write the researchers:

Overall, our results suggest that the ability to exhibit striking changes in colour evolved as a strategy to facilitate social signalling and not, as popularly believed, camouflage.

For evo-geeks, that means the chameleon's special power of color-changing is primarily the result of sexual selection, not natural selection. And it's further proof that animal communication is far more ubiquitous than we ever realized. Not only are chameleons communicating, but their need to exchange information with each other is driving their evolution. Image by Jerome Delay/AP.

Selection for Social Signalling Drives the Evolution of Chameleon Colour Change [PLoS Biology]

Still in the proposal stage from Columbia University environmentalists, these buildings could become urban farmhouses, many stories high, that would yield organic crops year-round. Sheltered by massive walls, these farms will be protected from most weather, pests, and communicable plant diseases that plague their outdoor counterparts. They will, however, be more vulnerable to attacks by pod people, terrorists, and Godzilla. Images by Atelier Soa Architectes

Vertical Farm main page

The toilet sounds great and I like the idea, but calling it the "dignity toilet" just underscores one of the basic problems with this design: nobody really wants to carry their poop around on their back like a Timbuktu bag. But if you ignore this issue, there's something truly ingenious about the bottom part of the toilet, which lets you mulch your waste into the soil without ever getting your hands dirty:

Sanitary Facilities for Africa [via TreeHugger]

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• Massive quantities of helium were discovered leaking out of the ground in Nevada. This mysterious gas emission is even stranger because usually geologists only see this kind of thing near volcanoes. Is Nevada about to become a volcanic hellhole? [Discovery News]
• 10,000-year-old trees were discovered during a construction project on a farm in Michigan. They are among the best-preserved fossilized trees ever found, and scientsts speculate that they were crushed under the last glacier to stretch across North America. [Science Daily]
  

• A Japanese court ruled today that a grieving widow would receive compensation from Toyota because the company killed her husband with overwork. The 30-year-old man died after working 60 hours/week for a month, and then 70 hours/week for an additional month. In Japanese, there is a word for death from overwork: karōshi. [Autoblog]
  
• Scientists have just announced a "map of genetic aging" in mice. The map shows a series of genes whose behavior changes as the mice age. Since human and mouse genomes are fairly similar, researchers hope to use this map to find similar "aging genes" in humans, and perhaps tinker with those genes to reverse the aging process. [PLoS Genetics]
  
• If you're thinking of getting a genetic test, think again. Most experts say the tests are a total waste of money and tell us next to nothing. Even though there are more and more genetic tests every day, they aren't getting any more accurate or reliable. [Reuters]