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UPDATE: Typhoon Ma-On has been downgraded to a tropical storm. It is expected to move over central Japan today, hitting south of Tokyo before moving out to sea, according to the U.S. Navy. At least one person was reported missing and dozens injured after the storm landed in Japan on Tuesday. The smiling faces of [...]
An interesting debate showed up in my Twitter feed today. A few followers of China’s green energy policies have taken climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post to task for using some information that undersells what China has accomplished. I hadn’t read Lomborg’s article, which ran on April 21, but it [...]
Want to save the Earth? Easy, just buy a couple of ice trays. To the long list of human inventions that are wrecking global climate—the internal combustion engine, the industrial era factory—add the automatic ice maker. Climate modelers have long known that households are far bigger contributors to global warming than most laypeople realize. For [...]
On Sunday, over 17,000 people took to the streets of Tokyo to let their government know they’ve had it with nuclear power. It was an unusual display of mass disgruntlement in the Japanese capital, but these are unusual times. Residents walked through the neighborhood of Koenji – reportedly the birthplace of Japanese punk – with [...]
Sure, Japanese vending machines got a bad wrap awhile back for selling schoolgirls’ underwear, but that was then. If you’ve been to Tokyo recently, you know and love the machines’ for their convenience and ingenuity. For example, unlike their un-evolved counterparts in most of the world, Japanese vending machines have a couple of rows dedicated [...]
A government-run institute in Malaysia announced this week that it had released 6000 genetically modified mosquitoes into an uninhabited patch of forest in December to combat dengue fever. The experiment, which is now over, was aimed at controlling the local mosquito population by having altered male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes mate with wild female mosquitoes, which [...]
I’m back from Cancún, and I miss the weather there, if not the all-night hours of the assignment. You can read a longer version of my analysis of the conference over here, which includes some details on the last-minute drama as Bolivia tried to block adoption of the Cancún Agreements, only to be deftly overruled [...]
The more I write about environmental issues, the more I like writing about technology. Maybe that’s because while reporting on the decline of the environment can be, frankly, depressing (the naturalist Lois Crisler once remarked of the inextricable link between “love [of the earth] and despair”), while technology is undeniably optimistic, one new and better [...]
Another blueprint for the Green Green Revolution was announced today at the 3rd International Rice Congress, and this time it’s all about — you guessed it — rice. Well, according to rice types anyway (the corn guys might have a different theory). But the scientists that unveiled the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), a plan [...]
