By Melissa C. Lott and Scott McNally According to Dr. James Hansen, developing Canada’s tar sands would mean “game over for the climate.” And, the current Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies is disappointed with President Obama for not taking action to stop Canada from causing a climate change-induced apocalypse. But, what Dr. [...]

Business Insider reporter Robert Johnson tried to get a tour of the Alberta tar, err, oil sands operations, but was denied. So instead, he rented a Cessna and took photos from 1,000 feet in the air. The entire slideshow is a fascinating look at the process of surface mining in Alberta and shows the ugly, [...]

My home town of Austin, Tex. is, like many cities, experiencing rapid growth and all of the challenges that go along with adding hundreds of thousands of people to a region in the span of several years. Traffic, congestion, gentrification, etc. A lot of this growth and expansion is happening in the downtown core, which [...]

The University of California, Riverside is now using a bank of lithium ion batteries to help reduce its peak electrical load, while creating a powerful engineering research lab. Housed in the Winston Chung Hall, this 1.1 Megawatt-hour battery bank is one of the largest battery storage systems currently installed in a university setting. According to [...]

Paper towels are on my short list of aggravating and wasteful habits that can be improved without a whole lot of work. In this 4 minute TEDx talk, Joe Smith lays out a super simple two step way to use a single paper towel to dry hands in the bathroom.   Everybody with me? Shake [...]

Honda’s new mobility gadget has me worried. Yesterday Honda announced a new invention called the Uni-Cub. It’s a cute, “Wall-E” inspired “personal mobility device” engineered to get people from here to there – all without walking. Great! Convenience! It’s a smaller Segway that one pops a squat on (not in that sense, at least not [...]

Each day, the average American household throws away a pound and a half of food. And, while this might not seem like much, but, over the course of a year, these pounds amount to the energy equivalent of throwing 350 million barrels of oil into the trashcan. To put it in perspective, this is about [...]

Large-scale energy storage technologies are often hailed as a key to enabling increased use of intermittent renewable energy resources – like solar and wind – to supply the nation’s electricity demand. If one can balance out the generation dips (for example, when the wind dies down on a summer afternoon) using an energy storage technology, [...]

Last week the news broke that Adam Yauch, aka MCA, of the Beastie Boys passed away from cancer. Having grown up in the 80s and 90s, I listened to my share of Beastie Boys. MCA was my favorite in the group; I dug his raspy delivery, prematurely graying hair, and also what he did outside [...]

This weekend brings with it many reasons to celebrate. As people raise a glass for Cinco de Mayo and a potential Triple Crown winner, they will do so under the bright glow of a Supermoon. Due to the relatively close proximity to the earth, this weekend’s full moon will appear 12% larger that typically seen. [...]