Smithsonian.com

In case you haven’t noticed, there has been SO MUCH FRETTING AND PANICKING about the mysterious end of bees–known as “colony collapse disorder” (although “colony collapse” sounds cooler on its own, methinks).
The point is, the bees are dying. So you know what would be a really great idea? Training the few remaining bees to hunt for landmines.

Let this be a warning to wasps and hornets. Bees ruined one too many human picnics. Lesson learned.

In fields where farmers plow away crop stubble before turning over the ground, erosion occurs relatively quickly. When the stubble is left and turned over with a disk, that rate dramatically drops, according to a new study in this week’s online edition of PNAS.

You might say, who cares about losing a little dirt?

A lot of civilizations probably should have. David Montgomery, an author of the study who also penned Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, has linked the demise of civilizations to how long it took them to deplete their soil.  (More…)

To offset carbon emissions put out by the Holy See, the Pope has established the Vatican Climate Forest, in Hungary’s Bukk National Park. God’s humble liaison will partner with Planktos Corporation and its Hungarian subsidiary, KlimaFa, according to messenger angels in the form of online corporate press releases. This makes the Vatican the world’s first carbon neutral sovereign state.

There’s something off about the whole plan, though. What would Jesus do? Are we to believe that he would go ahead and sin/pollute so long as he could set up some operation abroad that would atone for his transgressions?  (More…)

While there are polar bears and seals and whales around the North Pole, there’s also oil. The oil is the reason Russian submarines recently planted their flag on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, 14,000 feet below the North Pole, thus (disputably) securing the rights to any oil or natural gas resources.

Not so, says Canada, who had previously claimed the North Pole as part of its nation. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory,’ ” Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told a Canadian television station. “This isn’t the 15^th century.”  (More…)

A multi-story high geyser from a steam pipe near New York’s Grand Central Station and now the collapse of Minneapolis’s I-35W bridge…what’s next?

Luckily, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with help form the University of California at San Diego, are trying to be a bit more proactive when it comes to aging infrastructure in the United States. They have designed electronic sensors, about the size of a business card and costing only $1 each, that, when attached to bridges, could collect data on stressed materials and provide the warning needed to avoid disasters.  (More…)