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Earth & the Environment
Robotics
Health & Medicine
Extreme Machines
Research
Worst-Case Scenarios
Science
Featured Story
Methane Maps Step One for Energy Prospectors
A team of geologists recently found hundreds of plumes of methane gas—a potent greenhouse gas and potential energy source—in the Arctic Ocean, indicating there may be more methane being released from deep in the ocean than expected.
Previous Earth & the Environment Stories
| How California's New Water Laws Inform the Coming National Crisis California is also in the midst of one of the biggest water crises this nation has ever seen. Here are six of the most prescient fixes proposed by a water task force—problems and solutions that may be coming to a local assembly (or a courthouse) near you.
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| Wave Power Desalination Plant Coming Soon to Texas This month, the state of Texas granted its first-ever offshore lease for a wave-powered energy system to Renew Blue's Seadog Pump. PM sat down with Mark Thomas, founder and CEO of Renew Blue, to talk about how this technology works.
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| 5 Technologies Missing From the Clean Energy Bill Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer recently unveiled the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, a bill that aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. The following weren't mentioned in the new bill, but they deserve attention.
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| Earthquake Research Digs Deep to Find Timely Warning System With no promising methods for short-term earthquake prediction, researchers are studying fault zones in several ways to develop a clearer picture of tectonic plate behavior.
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| GE Dredges Hudson River PCBs, Ships Them to Texas Before PCBs were phased out in the '70s, companies like General Electric dumped tons into New York’s Hudson River. In 2009, GE marshaled 12 excavators, 18 tugboats and 37 barges to begin digging up the toxic sludge and then ship it to West Texas. (Published in the October 2009 issue)
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| 5 Realistic Lessons in Radical Consumption From No Impact Man In the film No Impact Man, Colin Beavan and his family abandon their city lives, devising radical ways to reduce consumption and waste. They follow a premise: If it's easy, it must be wasteful. Here's how to balance the radical with the realistic.
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| Weird Stories of Objects Falling From the Sky—Explained The annals of history are full of tales of strange objects falling from the sky. In honor of the release of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs we present a list of the 10 craziest things to rain down on humanity from the heavens.
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| The New Homesteaders: Off-the-Grid and Self-Reliant You may have heard about them: Off-the-gridders living in radical opposition to modern amenities by cutting themselves off from the rest of society. Not so. The new homesteaders are simply DIYers who revel in self-reliance. This is their story. (Published in the October 2009 issue)
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| A History of Self-Reliance Though rooftop solar power, 500-mile diets and home-brewed biodiesel may seem like a new trend, humans have been going back to the land for centuries. Here is an timeline of the high points in self-reliance, from Thoreau to the Energy Policy Act of 05. (Published in the October 2009 issue)
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| Top 10 Most Dangerous Plants in the World Following the recent discovery of Nepenthes attenboroughii, a giant pitcher plant large enough to digest rodents, PM tracked down poison-plant aficionado Amy Stewart to discuss some of the world's deadliest plants.
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| View Full Science: Earth & the Environment Archive | ||
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