I’M driving 550 miles in three days, all by myself, mainly for the fun of it—and I’m not an environmental villain. Behind the wheel of a borrowed bright-red electric Tesla Model S, I click off the miles as I head south from the San Francisco Bay Area on Interstate 5 through California’s San Joaquin Valley, feeling virtuous because my tailpipe spews no pollution.
Cities are often seen as the flipside of nature: synthetic, sleek and sometimes impersonal. For places that pine after being greener, the Solitair tree nursery provides a blueprint.
The Pentagon is working on technology that will allow it to engineer a new organism within a day of it being found in the wild.
“Even using conservative estimates, the researchers found that the rate of extinction in the last 115 years is as high as 50 times what it would be under normal circumstances.” Read more
“The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history. Our analysis emphasizes that our global society has started to destroy species of other organisms at an accelerating rate, initiating a mass extinction episode unparalleled for 65 million years. If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue, humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits.”
“Instead of treating Amsterdam as complete and starting again elsewhere, the IJburg plan has managed to find more space in a city that thought it had no more left.”
NASA said that if all goes to plan with these studies, it sees the first business-jet-sized supersonic planes going into production by 2025, and commercial planes by 2030.
“Researchers are considering how CRISPR could or should be deployed on organisms in the wild. Much of the attention has focused on a method called gene drive, which can quickly sweep an edited gene through a population. The work is at an early stage, but such a technique could be used to wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes or ticks, eliminate invasive plants or eradicate herbicide resistance in pigweed, which plagues some US farmers.” Read more
“If he was paid by the oil and gas industry lobby he couldn’t have written a more favorable article for them.”—Elon Musk
