Time to Eat the Dog? Weird Green Living Advice

Imagine carefully feeding your beloved and faithful dog a healthy diet that will help him grow fat and juicy, eyeing him one day and declaring, “Yep, it’s time to eat the dog.” That’s what two professors at Victoria University in New Zealand are proposing we consider – sort of – after finding that our choice in pets causes our carbon footprints to balloon out of control.

From the Dominion Post:

The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created bypopular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.

“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”

In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.

They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.

Despite the title of their new book – Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living – Brenda and Robert Vale don’t really want you to serve Fido burgers at your next cookout. They are urging people to consider taking herbivorous food animals like goats as pets instead of dogs and cats.

The carbon footprint of our pets is probably something that most people haven’t really thought about, but while dogs and cats may not provide food or eat the most earth-friendly diets, they provide comfort and companionship that most people aren’t willing to give up. And, it’s highly unlikely that cities are going to begin allowing people to keep cows in suburban backyards or geese in their apartments.

Though some people can get away with having goats, chickens and rabbits as pets, not all of us can or want to – and an important way to offset the impact of dog and cat ownership is to adopt unwanted animals at shelters instead of buying from breeders. (And be sure to spay and neuter!)

Link [The Dominion Post]
Photo credit: HahaStop.com

Eco Surgical Masks & More Bizarre Greenovations

The never-ending parade of amazingly strange “green” inventions continues even through the recession with bizarre inventions that will make you ask, “why?” Some are awesome – like reusable tote bags that turn into Mexican wrestling masks (WIN!) while others will have you scratching your head in confusion, like male floral fascinators.

Trendhunter has a great gallery of 30 weird eco innovations, some more earth-friendly than others. Here are some of our favorites:

We’ve all seen floral fascinators and hair accessories for women, but Nissa Quanstrom’s ‘Green Streets’ shoot turns the tables and lets men wear flowers on their faces as well.

By adding an image of a Mexican wrestler on the bag, the sack looks super-radical when filled. Now what happens when it is empty? The Eco Warrior Bag is the best reason to have a costume party! Put that bad boy on your head and you have a night of hilarity ahead of you.

Designed by Australian industrial designers Ben Landau and Brittany Veitch, each Bio-Accessory includes a living organism that is supposed to create a ‘mobile natural environment.’ The idea behind the Bio-Accessories is to have nature within an urban setting.

Japanese wood design company Sasaki Kogei has created stunning, eco-friendly wooden guns. The gun is a replica of a Smith and Wesson model 2 Army gun. The company also offers another eco-friendly wooden guns including the 357 Korutopaison.

Check out the other 26 weird inventions over at TrendHunter.

Link [TrendHunter]

Bad Bunnies Burned as Biofuel in Sweden

When you look at adorable, fuzzy bunnies, do you think, “Gee, these suckers would make the perfect biofuel to keep me warm this winter!”? If so, you might want to go in for a psychiatric evaluation – or move to Sweden, where they’re actually doing just that.

Apparently, bunnies are such a huge nuisance in Stockholm parks, officials not only kill them by the thousands every year, but ship their bodies off to a biofuel facility so they can keep Swedes warm and cozy all winter long.

From Scientific American:

Converting the rabbits to fuel is the company Konvex, a subsidiary of the Danish company Daka Biodiesel, which makes automotive and heating fuels from vegetable and animal oils and fats. The Swedes have a variety of similar efforts, including turning slaughterhouse trimmings into biogas, a methane fuel that runs taxicabs in Linkoping in southern Sweden.

Bunnies, despite a felicity for breeding, are not quite abundant enough to be a reliable fuel so Stockholm also ships dead cats, cows, deer and horses to the plant for processing, Tuvunger told Der Spiegel. No word on whether the remains of man’s best friend are also keeping Swedes warm this winter.

Hey, don’t get us wrong. Using a waste material for fuel = WIN. However, there’s something messed up about killing cute, innocent little creatures by the thousands and then burning their bodies for warmth. It’s not like these are the killer rabbits of Monty Python.

And, perhaps these bunnies should not be a waste material in the first place – because there are better ways of dealing with an overpopulation problem than mass murder.

Link [Scientific American]

When Trees Attack: Woman Impaled by Falling Limb

Trees are not always our friends. Just ask Sonny Bono… oh, wait, you can’t. Because A TREE KILLED HIM. Well, you can ask Michelle Childers, the woman who miraculously survived being impaled in the neck by a wayward tree limb that was hell-bent on destruction.

Childers was enjoying a leisurely drive on a rural road in Idaho on September 5th with her husband when a spruce tree crashed through the passenger side window of the vehicle. All she felt was a “strange pressure” as her husband told her she’d been impaled.

They drove to a nearby lodge for help, and a helicopter transported her to the hospital where the tree limb was safely removed after 6 hours of surgery.

The photos and video are a gruesome reminder that just about anything, no matter how innocent it may seem, can be deadly. Watch out for that tree!

Link [The Huffington Post]

Belgian Farmers go on Milk-Dumping Binge to Protest Low Prices

In Europe, you can get a liter of milk for 20 (Euro) cents. That doesn’t even begin to cover dairy farmers’ expenses – and to make a point, they’ve dumped millions of liters of the cow secretions into a field. The mass dumping was just the latest move in a protest that has also included blocking deliveries and holding back supplies.

From Reuters:

They blame both the European Commission and local governments and about 7,000 liters of milk was dumped in front of German agriculture ministry buildings in Bonn on Saturday.

Leaders of the protests say they want the European Union to freeze planned increases in production quotas and on Wednesday they demanded the creation of a pan-European institution to regulate the demand and supply of milk.

“It is really sad that we have to throw away the milk,” Romuald Schaber, president of the European Milk Board, said at a demonstration in Belgium where protesting farmers watched hundreds of tractors spew milk over fields.

“Our demands were not heard by the politicians.”

That field is seriously going to stink like hell for a while – and imagine all the hormones seeping into the soil. What a waste. Ironically, over in Britain, there’s a milk shortage, with British farmers saying they simply can’t meet the demand for milk. Dairies and supermarkets in Britain have to import millions of liters a day from abroad, but apparently that’s not enough to help out the angry European dairy farmers.

Link [Reuters] + [Times Online]
Photo credit: BBC

Mysterious Glow in the Sky was Astronaut Urine

A trail of light sparkled through the sky on Wednesday night, observed by some skygazers who marveled at its beauty. Was it a shooting star, or some other romantic celestial occurrence? No. It was astronaut piss.

Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery were merely dumping water and urine out into space in preparation for a landing attempt on Thursday. Poor weather forced them to postpone, but the Discovery safely landed in California on Friday.

From Space.com:

The light show Wednesday was aided by an unusually large amount of water being dumped all at once – about 150 pounds (68 kg), said NASA spokeswoman Kylie Clem. Discovery had just undocked from the International Space Station the day before, and had not been able to unload waste water during the 10-day visit.

“It would have been a large quantity because we don’t do water dumps while docked to the station now,” Clem told SPACE.com in an e-mail. “That is a fairly new restriction over the last couple of flights in order to prevent potential contamination of the Kibo module.”

The Kibo module is a new Japanese-built research lab on the space station that includes an external platform to expose science experiments to the space environment. Water dumps from a docked shuttle could potentially pollute the experiments.

So, why would dumping water cause a shimmering light trail in the sky? When astronauts dump waste water, it usually freezes into a cloud of tiny ice droplets. When the sun hits them, the ice turns into water vapor and disperses in space.

It’s probably safe to say that piss has never been so pretty.

Link [Space.com]
Photo credit: Painting by Scott Listfield via BOOOOOOOM; Inset: Space.com

Crazy Tongue-Eating Parasite Found Off Jersey Coast

It sounds like something out of a bad horror flick: “Bizarre Tongue-Eating Parasite Discovered Off Jersey Coast!” But that’s an actual headline from Treehugger and they’ve got pictures to prove it. This ghastly little critter attacks a fish, burrows into it, eats its tongue and then proceeds to live in its mouth.

From Treehugger:

While the isopod, a kind of louse, has been known to exist for a while now, discoveries of live specimens is rare. The BBC reports that “Fishermen near the Minquiers – islands under the jurisdiction of Jersey – found the isopod, a type of louse, inside a weaver fish.” So no, the tongue-eater wasn’t found in that Jersey. The Jersey Shore is still tongue replacing creature-free, if you stateside Northeasterners were worried about the thing ruining your late summer vacationing.

Not that you’d have to be too concerned anyways–the isopod isn’t a threat to humans in the slightest, though it’s reportedly vicious, and can deliver quite a little bite. One of the fishermen who found the creature described it thus: “Really quite large, really quite hideous – if you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp, nasty claws underneath and I thought ‘that’s a bit of a nasty beast’.”

A bit of a nasty beast, indeed. This thing is pretty sick, but it’s also yet another amazing example of the vast variety of creatures that exist on this planet.

Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Clever Cherry

Mother Nature? Eerie Crying Face Seen in Melting Glacier

It’s like the treehugger equivalent to Christians seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in everything from concrete walls to grilled cheese sandwiches: an eerie feminine face in a melting glacier that appears to be crying a river of tears.

The image was captured on the Austfonna ice cap in Norway by marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan while on an annual trip to observe the glacier and the wildlife that live in the area.

From The Daily Mail:

A glacier expert has confirmed the ice cap carrying an image of Mother Nature ‘crying’ has been continually shrinking by as much as 160 feet every year for several decades.

Jon Ove Hagen, a member of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and professor in geosciences at Oslo University, Norway, has been studying the Austfonna ice-shelf since 1988.

Mr Hagen, 59, said: ‘Austfonna, at over 3,000 square miles, is by far the largest ice cap in Svalbard and one of the largest in the Arctic.

‘Retreat of glacier fronts at Austfonna over a 12-year period average a frontal retreat of about 160 feet-per-year.

‘The geometry of the ice cap is changing. The fronts are retreating, the lower parts are getting thinner, with a thinning rate of about three feet-per-year while the interior of the ice cap is thickening with about 1.6 feet-per-year.

‘The ice cap is losing about 1.6 cubic miles of ice every year.’

It’s rather eerie, no doubt about it, and it probably will end up on global warming protest posters within days. But let’s not turn this into a quasi-religious thing, eh? The general public thinks we’re quacky enough as it is.

Link [The Daily Mail]

Chemical Cocktails Cause Penis Deformities in Baby Rats

You know how the EPA and the chemical industry are always claiming that all kinds of chemicals are safe, based on minimal exposure to a single chemical at a time? And you always think, “who’s only exposed to one chemical at a time?” Well, your instinct to distrust these claims is right on the mark, according to a new study that finally evaluated the effect of exposure to multiple chemicals.

Researchers found that harmful effects – including penis deformities – where found in baby rats after a pregnant mother was exposed to a mixture of chemicals, even when each individual chemical in the cocktail causes no harm on its own.

The pregnant rats were given either a phthalate called DEHP, fungicides vinclozolin or prochloraz, the drug finasteride or a mixture of the four chemicals.

From Environmental News Network:

Some groups were exposed to levels of the chemicals that previous research has suggested causes no harm (the “no observed adverse effect level,” or NOAEL). Others were exposed to the chemicals at the NOAEL level.

Once born, the baby rats were weighed, inspected for nipple retention and genital deformities, and measured for the distance between their anus and the base of their penis (anogenital distance). All males were scored for their degree of feminization. In some male animals, researchers also weighed reproductive organs and the kidney and liver. What did they find?

The mixture of DEHP, vinclozolin, prochloraz and finasteride, given at doses known to harm reproductive development, caused decreases in anogenital distance, increased prostate weights and retained nipples. The effects seen in relation to these conditions was additive and could be predicted given the responses observed when looking at the chemicals individually.

However, incidence of penis deformities were much stronger with the mixes than what would be predicted from the potency of the individual chemicals. For a significant number of rats, the penis opening was not at the tip, but was often located toward the base of the genitals.

Eek! A deformed rat penis!

When you think about how many supposedly ‘safe’ chemicals we are exposed to on a daily basis, it seems like there is all manner of opportunity for harm. And just because your mom worked in a chemical factory/drank antifreeze/did other dumb shit when she was pregnant with you and you’re “fine” doesn’t mean anything (fine is relative).

Seriously, who wants to risk having a baby with penis deformities and other problems because we are all so apathetic about the chemicals that are absorbed by our bodies? Time to get serious about cutting chemicals out of your home, especially if you’re a woman of childbearing age.

(If you’re wondering how many times we can possibly make a South Park screen cap relevant to environmental news, the answer is: AN INFINITE NUMBER OF TIMES.)

Link [ENN]
Photo credit: South Park

Amazing Buddha Sculpture Made from Dead Bugs

Inhabitat has quite an eye for fascinating and beautiful green design, and this find has a bit of the bizarre in it as well: a Buddha statue that appears to be made from jewels, but is actually comprised of 20,000 dead bugs.

The statue, located in a community hall in the Gumma prefecture of Japan, took over 6 years to create. Check out this video:

From Inhabitat:

Inamura Yoneiji, a 89-year-old local of the area, created the statue in tribute to the souls of the insects, most of which are beetles. Talking about the statue, Yoneiji says “For children in the years immediately after World War II, Japan was poor and there was little entertainment available, aside from catching bugs. However, every bug would eventually die after being caught. By making a statue of a Buddha from their dead bodies, perhaps their souls can rest in peace.” And how much more peaceful could a statue of Buddha get, with the bodies of bugs extended into a new life to pay homage to Buddha.

It really is surprisingly beautiful, with so many bugs in various sizes and colors shimmering in the light, held together with small pins. Pretty amazing stuff.

Link [Inhabitat]

11 Bizarre Sources of Clean Energy, from Dead Turkeys to Urine

Why stick with boring old oil when you could be powering your home, car and gadgets with slaughterhouse waste, garbage and onions? As strange as transforming these substances into renewable fuels might seem, many of them are viable energy sources and some are already in use around the world.

And if you think these ideas are weird, check out MSNBC’s Crazy green energy ideas that just might work, which covers another 7 including solar panels in space and “snakes in a wave”.

Watermelons

Image via: Flickr user flattop341

The newest wild n’ crazy renewable energy on the scene is watermelon juice, which can be a valuable source of biofuel. Researchers say juice from ‘cull’ watermelons – imperfect ones that can’t be sold for consumption – can be efficiently fermented into ethanol. These ‘cull’ watermelons are currently just being plowed back into the field, so they’re technically a waste material.

Slaughterhouse Waste

Image via: Discover Magazine

As insanely disgusting as it sounds, turkey guts can be used to produce oil. No, really. It works in the same way that any fossil fuel is created, through pressure and heat, only at a faster pace.

A company called Changing World Technologies is transforming slaughterhouse waste – including a sickening blend of rotting heads, feet and intestines – into oil at a thermal conversion plant in Carthage, Missouri.  Other surprising items that go into the mix include old tires, mixed plastics and municipal sewage. But, the process still needs a lot of refinement to be commercially applicable.

The process of turning your Thanksgiving leftovers into oil is complicated, but not impossible. Mental Floss has an overview, which starts with chopping and churning those giblets into a fine, grainy mess. Mmm. Who’s hungry?

Poo (and Pee) Power

Image via: Statemaster

It may be distasteful, but waste – from both humans and animals – has proven to be a surprisingly efficient form of renewable energy. In Norway, city buses run on biomethane, which is a by-product of treated sewage. Not only is it a free source of energy, using biomethane in this way prevents it from being emitted into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Cows are also a major source of methane, emitting it in all sorts of unsavory ways, from both ends of their bodies. An Ohio company has developed a way to refine that methane gas in a way that could potentially power homes.

Then there are urine-powered batteries. That’s right, pee is a promising source of renewable energy as well thanks to its particular composition of its main component, urea, which is made up of hydrogen and nitrogen. Using a nickel-based electrode, scientists can create large amounts of cheap hydrogen from urine that can then be burned or used in fuel cells.

Garbage

Image via Idiocracy/20th Century Fox

There’s quite a bit of controversy as to whether trash is really a source of renewable energy – it’s certainly not ‘clean’. In fact, groups like Greenpeace warn that classifying garbage as a source of renewable energy risks ‘enshrining it’ rather than trying to produce less in the first place. Then, there’s the fact that trash incinerators are the leading source of extremely toxic chemicals called dioxins.

Modern incinerators use heat from the incineration to boil water, causing steam, which then generates electricity. These incinerators are cleaner than their predecessors, but they still pollute the air. Some argue that, with the looming threat of catastrophic climate change, using this energy is worth breathing in dirty air.

An Ottawa company called Plasco Energy Group is working on a method that transforms garbage into a synthetic gas without emitting greenhouse gases, but it’s got quite a few technological and financial hurdles to cross before it can be applied on a wide scale.

Onions

Image via: Flickr user Darwin Bell

One onion farmer is now crying all the way to the bank after finding a way to turn onion juice into fuel. This process has big up-front costs – about $9.5 million in this case – but they’ll make it back fairly quickly. Gills Onions saved a whopping $700,000 off their facility’s annual electric bill by using the juice to run his refrigerators and lighting, and another $400,000 on disposal costs. They also received $2.7 million from SoCal Gas, which offers financial incentives to customers that reduce natural gas consumption through on-site generation.

An anaerobic digester converts treated onion waste into biogas, which is then conditioned and turned into methane. The methane is pumped into a 600-kilowatt fuel cell to make electricity.
The same concept can be used for other waste products.

Viruses

Image via: MIT

Common viruses that are harmless to humans can be harnessed to create both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery. Researchers at MIT genetically engineered viruses that build cathodes and anodes, producing batteries that have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries. The process of creating the batteries is environmentally friendly in and of itself, using non-toxic materials and requiring no harmful solvents.

Currently, the MIT prototype is about the size of a coin and can only be used 100 times, but researchers intend to pursue even better batteries using materials with higher voltage. Once that next generation of virus batteries is ready, they’ll be ready for commercial production.

Burning Bodies

Image via: Hubpages

There’s nothing like staying warm in the dead of winter thanks to the heat given off by burning corpses. The Swedish town of Halmstead figures that heat generated by crematoriums shouldn’t be wasted, so they decided to divert it into local buildings instead of just letting it escape into the sky.

Of course, they can’t just pump hot crematorium air directly into people’s houses. That air is chock full of nasty stuff like mercury from dental fillings, so the off-gases must be filtered before the heat is usable. But, this ‘byproduct energy’ saves costs, uses less water, and uses an available resource in an incredibly efficient and creative way.

Booze

Image via: Flickr user scottfeldstein

Sweden customs officials confiscate a million bottles of booze every year from purveyors of smuggled alcohol trying to evade local taxes. That’s a lot of alcohol – and until recently, it was all being poured down the drain. What a waste. Luckily, someone came up with a brilliant idea: shipping it to a waste-to-fuels plant where it’s added to bioreactors along with other waste, creating methane that is used to fuel biogas-powered vehicles.

Then there’s the Scottish distilleries that run their own plants on byproducts of the distilling process, along with sustainably harvested wood chips. Combination of Rothes Distillers Limited (CoRD) teamed up with Helius Energy to build a combined heat and power (CHP) plant along with a fertilizer factory fueled by all that booze waste. Makers Mark Distillery in Kentucky has been using a similar technique for a number of years.

Bugs that Poop Oil

Image via: Times Online

Bug excrement may seem like a most unlikely source of fuel, but scientists have actually found a way to genetically engineer bacteria that produce ‘renewable petroleum’. Silicon Valley company LS9 claims that this “Oil 2.0” will be carbon negative, as well. LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms about a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant, which have been modified to produce crude oil when fed agricultural waste.

It’s essentially the same process as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, it just sounds way crazier. The main challenge being faced by LS9 right now is that, although it can produce its bug fuel in lab beakers, meeting America’s weekly oil needs would require a facility roughly the size of Chicago.

Chocolate

Image via: FacilityBlog

Before you freak out at the idea of perfectly good, delicious chocolate being used as fuel instead of going into your mouth, relax: this source of renewable energy is made with cocoa bean shells, not the chocolate itself. Cocoa bean shells are a waste product that can be mixed with coal at power stations to produce sort-of-greener-ish fuel.

Cocoa bean shells will be donated to Public Service of New Hampshire when chocolate maker Lindt USA begins producing its own chocolate from raw cocoa beans by the end of 2009.

Unfortunately, though this sounds cool, adding cocoa shells to the coal doesn’t make a huge difference because of the tiny ratio of shells to coal.

Man-Made Tornadoes

Image via: Technovelgy

The average tornado contains as much energy as a typical power plant – but how in the world can you safely harvest that energy? Well, as it turns out, that requires creating man-made tornadoes in a controlled environment.

Canadian engineer Louis Michaud calls his tornado the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, and he says he could extract as much as 200 megawatts of electricity from it – enough to power a small city. Michaud heats an elevated layer of air so that the temperature is much higher than that of the air below, which creates a vortex, and then places wind turbines at the base of the vortex, which are able to suck up the energy contained within.

Michaud has built many small prototypes with nary a bump in the road, and producing a 200-megawatt facility would cost roughly $60 million, lower than the cost of any existing power source. He’s currently looking for investors.

Best of EarthFirst’s Bizarre Green News

When it comes to green news, there’s certainly no shortage of bizarre stories to go around. But it’s not all about the latest weird green gadget or the strangest sources of renewable energy. Sometimes, the stories are just crazy in and of themselves, from the president of PETA requesting that her dead body be barbecued and eaten to honeybees getting addicted to cocaine.

We dug through the EarthFirst.com archives to find some of the most mind-boggling bizarro stories of the past year, and we’ve got some doozies to revisit. Check it out:

WTF, Broccoli?! Check Out This Cascadian Farms Package

Someone at Cascadian Farms has a great sense of humor. Bloggers Alicia Carrier and Summer Allen-Gibson of Bread & Honey noticed something funny recently on a bag of broccoli, and took to the web to share it with all of us. Read More

Student Group Eats a Cat in the Name of Animal Welfare

A group of students in Denmark have had their Facebook profiles suspended after uploading a video of them eating a cat. The students planned the cat-eating performance as a way to call attention to the plight of food animals such as pigs and cows. Read More

Dumped Corpses Give Sharks a Taste for Human Flesh

Experts believe that a pack of bull sharks in Mexico is intentionally targeting humans, after recent attacks have killed two surfers and injured another. A fourth swimmer is missing. The deadly 10-ft long sharks may have developed a taste for human flesh after feasting on corpses dumped by the mob. Read More

UK Wind Turbine Destroyed, Locals Claim UFO Did It

A 290-foot turbine was mysteriously mangled overnight on Sunday near Louth in Linconshire, United Kingdom with local residents claiming to have seen an octopus-like UFO. Experts have ruled out most of the more believable explanations, like a meteor or lightning strike. Read More

PETA President Wills Her Body to Become BBQ & Leather Goods

PETA did it again. Stomach-turning publicity stunts are nothing new to the animal rights organization, but the latest one will make you lose your lunch (fair warning). PETA President Ingrid Newkirk has willed her body to the group along with a gross list of instructions on what they should do with each body part after she’s dead. Read More

Shrimp on a Treadmill Helps Scientists Study Climate Change Effects

By now you may have seen the strange YouTube video that shows a shrimp inexplicably running on an underwater treadmill to the tune of ‘The Final Countdown’, the Benny Hill theme, the Rocky theme and several other humorous and inspirational anthems. Funny as it may be to see this little guy running with all its might, the shrimp on a treadmill is actually part of a serious science experiment. Read More

Honeybees Susceptible to Cocaine Addiction

Despite the fact that cocaine repels most insects, researchers have found that honeybees can become addicted to the substance and even suffer withdrawal symptoms. Bees on cocaine behave the same way humans do, throwing themselves into highly energetic dance routines and talking incessantly to their nest mates. Read More

Camouflaged Mobile Home for Nature Observation or Spying on People

Whether you’re the ultra-paranoid type that wants a camouflaged living space or are just a fan of cool green design, it’s hard not to love this bizarre mobile home. It’s a fake hedge on wheels… that just happens to have a semi-hidden room inside it.

The ‘Porta Hedge’ is covered in recycled plastic Christmas tree branches to blend in with natural greenery, and can be powered with solar panels. Inside are a couple rope swings and chalkboards (why, you ask? Well, why not?). It even plays prerecorded bird songs from its hidden exterior speakers.

The makers of Porta Hedge just returned from a summer tour of America, conducting a study on whether the combination of artificial branches and birdsong will encourage wildlife to use the Porta Hedge as a home.

And, hey, good news – it’s now commercially available! That’s right, get your very own Porta Hedge and use it to observe wildlife, spy on people, prevent complaints by neighbors about an ugly motor home sitting in your driveway, or as the perfect space to lounge around in your tin foil hat.

Link [Porta Hedge] via [Dornob]

Catfish Used to Clean Pools on Foreclosed Properties

Faced with dozens of smelly, swamp-like swimming pools on foreclosed properties, Florida officials are getting extremely desperate. With nearly 9 percent of upscale Wellington’s homes in foreclosure, they needed to find a fast and cheap way to deal with the problem. Their solution? Amazonian catfish, the very same fish used to keep aquariums naturally free of algae.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

Most bottom-feeders don’t make it past the guard gate. But Amazonian catfish, fashionably leopard-spotted and wearing fins as flamboyant as pool party caftans, are living the good life in several upscale Wellington neighborhoods hard-hit by foreclosures, including Olympia and Versailles.

“The water looks lighter around the edges,” said Debra Mitchell, the village’s lead code compliance officer, peering into a pool in Versailles, whose water is a putrid olive green.

The village has started a pilot program using the algae-eating fish, called pterygoplichthys and commonly known as “plecos” or “sailfin catfish,” in slime-choked swimming pools. Mitchell said she hopes the slime-eaters will be an inexpensive and eco-friendly way to clean up abandoned pools, an all-you-can-eat banquet of scum.

Unlike mosquito fish, which were dumped into swimming pools on foreclosed properties by California officials last summer, Amazonian catfish are already a part of the local ecosystem. They’re not native, of course – like many other species in Florida, they were dumped by irresponsible pet owners and subsequently flourished. They’re present in canals and lakes all over the state.

Using these fish – which were provided by a local fish farm that caught them in a nearby lake – will cost Wellington officials $700 for a year, versus the $7,000 that it would have taken to maintain the pools using chemicals and other traditional methods.

While it’s nice that officials consulted (and received encouragement from) the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Science before they did this, it’s hard not to be concerned about using live animals in such a way – particularly when, as the Sun Sentinel article states, the fish will be ‘destroyed’ when the houses are sold.

Link [Sun-Sentinel]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Snuggles, a Modular Hotel Inspired by Hamster Tunnels

If you’ve ever looked at a hamster tunnel and thought, “Gee, I wish they made these human-sized”, you’re in luck. A German urban design firm has created a modular hotel concept that can be used for camping in the woods, fun on the beach or as an urban residence. And it’s so cozy, they named it ‘SNUGGLES’.

From Inhabitat:

The modular system was intended for use as comfortable, safe housing for travelers to festivals, workshops, or other artistic events. Each unit features a three-sided pod with a window and tunnel access to a central pod with sanitary facilities.

We love that their hotel design uses the barest of resources, and is totally mobile and reconfigurable. The pods can built on stilted platforms, which gives the eco advantage of adapting to their environment without disturbing it. This vertical living configuration could be even more sustainable than camping, with the ability to fit more travelers per square foot of land used.

So now there are human hamster balls, hamster wheels and hamster tunnels. To complete the experience, we just need some clumsy giants to pick us up and squeeze us until our eyeballs bulge, then forget to feed us until we die in a pile of our own feces. Awesome. Sign me up.

Link [Inhabitat]

The World’s Weirdest Plants

Mother Nature has produced some mind-boggling oddities, and though most of them may be members of the animal kingdom, the world’s flora has its share of weirdos as well.  From a gigantic, fleshy, parasitic flower that smells like rotting flesh to water lilies that can hold the weight of two people, the strangest plants on Earth are a sight to behold.

ABC Action News has rounded up 7 of them:

Rafflesia arnoldii

Found in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo, the Rafflesia arnoldii produces the largest individual flower on earth.
The flower can grow up to three feet across and weigh up to 24 pounds.
It’s a parasitic plant that attaches itself to a host plant and feeds off of it for nutrients and water.
And boy, does it smell.  Rafflesia arnoldii emits an odor similar to rotting meat to attract insects for pollination purposes.
This plant is rare and hard to find.  The flower takes months to develop and only last a few days.

Titan Arum

Here’s another real stinker.
Also found in Indonesia, the titan arum is known as the “corpse flower” for its awful smell of rotting meat.
The titan arum can grow up to 10 feet in circumference, reach heights of 7 to 12 feet and weigh up to 170 pounds.
Unlike the equally bad-smelling rafflesia arnoldii, the titan arum is not a single flower, technically speaking.  It is formed by a cluster of much smaller flowers, called an inflorescence.

Check out five more, along with slideshows of each natural oddity, at ABC Action News.

Sheep Poo Canoe Headed for France… If it Doesn’t Sink First

A pair of intrepid Welsh entrepreneurs will be paddling across the English Channel in a canoe they made from a mixture of recycled paper and sheep poo. Lez Paylor and Lawrence Toms covered a canoe frame in the sheep poo paper and a paste made from flour and water, and waterproofed it using beeswax and soya bean extract resin.

Though the two Welshmen, whose paper company Creative Paper Wales makes the sheep poo paper, tested the canoe recently, Toms isn’t confident that it’ll make it to France.

From BBC News:

“I’m not even confident it will operate in a bath!” he said.

“It was my business partner [Lez Paylor] who built it. I’ve been training in a swimming pool so I can swim 15 miles in cold water!”

The Bala maiden voyage supported some of Mr Toms’ concerns. Despite managing about five miles (8km), a small leak had caused a soggy patch about the size and shape of a sheep, he said.

The pair will attempt to cross anyway in the hopes of raising money for the Wales Air Ambulance.

“Rural Wales really depends on the air ambulance and if we can do something entirely preposterous and raise them a few quid, it would be a nice way to give something back,” he said.

Link [BBC News]
Photo credit: BBC News

Pablo Escobar’s Fugitive Hippo Killed in Colombia

It’s the sort of headline that you’d expect to see in one of those trashy black-and-white tabloid magazines claiming to have found the secret island home of Elvis, Tupac and Marilyn Monroe – but believe it or not, it’s true.

Famed cocaine baron Pablo Escobar had an exotic collection of animals on his ranch in Colombia, and three hippos escaped almost three years ago. One was just shot and killed.

From The Telegraph:

Authorities ordered that the hippos, two adults and a calf, be hunted down and killed amid concerns they were damaging crops and endangering humans, the Guardian reports.

“It was only a question of time before those animals hurt someone,” the environment minister, Carlos Costa, said. “After more than two years of trying to capture them, the decision [to kill them] was a sound one.”

Escobar was cornered and shot dead in 1993.

Hippos weren’t the only exotic creatures kept on Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles ranch – there were also kangaroos, elephants and rhinos. After Escobar’s death, the state took over the ranch and most of the animals went to zoos. Strangely, about two dozen hippos were left to themselves on the ranch and in 2006, a male and a female escaped and produced a calf.

We’ll spare you the photo of the dead hippo, because it’ll only give you a major case of the sads. Why do narcissistic rich people insist on using exotic animals as a status symbol? It’s sickening.

Link [The Telegraph]
Photo credit: elespectador.com

From Wind Turbines to Dolphins with Bongs: 10 Green-Themed Tattoos

People get all kinds of mind-numbingly stupid things permanently etched onto their skin, from creepy portraits of Zack Morris to very NSFW gay mermen. So, we can’t help but appreciate the tattoos that actually mean something, even if they’re not spectacularly well executed.

Tattoos with eco themes are getting more popular, and as with any type of tattoo design, there are the good, the bad and the WTF. And, while tattoos are never really green, if you do drunkenly stumble into a parlor called Instantly Regrettable Tattoos and wake up the next morning with Al Gore on your ass, there is in fact an eco-friendly method of tattoo removal.

Here are 10 greenish tattoos, from the cute and understated to the “Oh my god, is that a dolphin with a bong?”

By far the best green-themed tattoo we’ve seen is this group of simple wind turbines on the arm of a lovely young lady who is clearly a big fan of renewable energy.

This trio of bicycling enthusiasts have made their love for free, green transportation visible to the world on their backs, forearms and ankles.

There’s hardly a more potent emblem of green than the recycling symbol, so it’s a popular option among environmentalists with a passion for ink.

Sea turtles are at once a beautiful example of the rich array of wildlife that call the world’s oceans home and an icon of the conservation movement. They also apparently make for pretty, tasteful tattoo subject matter – at least in this case.

Maureen, the proud owner of this swamp tattoo, writes “I am a PhD student in Ecology. I have toiled away the years of my dissertation working in wetlands across Ohio. The extended exposureto methane gases and gallons of blood donated to mosquitoes, ticks and leeches inspired my tattoo. In addition to the clear inspiration from my habitat of choice, each item in the tattoo symbolizes a very personal analogy in my own life – past, present and future. I’m pretty sure only nerds among wetland nerds can figure it out. Anyway, as you can see it’s still a work in progress. I have 18 hours in so far and have been working on it for two years. Only a wetland ecologist with a penchant for entomology would sit for such a tedious process, right?”

Vegetarians will appreciate this animal rights-themed tattoo, in which a cow, pig and chicken hold up signs that read “If I barked… or purred… would you still eat me?” Unsurprisingly, PETA is a big fan.

On a similar note, fellow animal lover “Jinxi” has inked herself not only with a bold black “VEGAN” tattoo but also sports a downright amazing portrait of a cow. Seriously, who knew bovine body ink could be so pretty?

The author of a book called “No Regrets: The Best, Worst and Most #$%*ing Ridiculous Tattoos Ever”, Aviva Yael, deemed this her favorite tattoo of all time. Yes, it’s a dolphin with a douchey tribal armband tattoo of its own sitting in a recliner enjoying a nice relaxing bong hit. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Next Page »