PopTech

Mr. Obama has a firm grasp of the climate issue, and no one doubts that he cares about it. But as is often the case with this president, the question is whether he will exhibit a sense of urgency to match his intellectual understanding.

— New York Times editorial board.

This crazy-looking thing is a new kind of wind turbine —which happens to produce 600 percent more power than a conventional windmill.

That is mycelium under a microscope. Mushrooms. And it is the new insulation that can grow inside your walls. It’s airtight. It’s strong. It’s fireproof. And it ain’t plastic.

In the most comprehensive survey of its kind to date, a team of two dozen volunteers from the climate science website Skeptical Science has found a 97 per cent consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that humans are causing global warming.

— An Australian Broadcasting Corporation piece on how the science is, in fact, “settled” on whether humans are causing climate change.

Yikes. This from the New York Times on the impact of mass incarceration of African American men on voter turnout.

Moran Cerf was a hacker. Then he was a bank robber. Now he is a neuroscientist, and through implanted electrodes his patients can manipulate digital images using their brains. It’s all in his just-released 2012 PopTech talk.

Welcome back to What’s Hot and New with the Kidz, a recurring feature brought to you by the New York Times, a Montessori-school newsletter devoted to understanding the hot and new mindset of contemporary Kidz.

— Gawker’s Leah Beckmann exquisitely skewering the Times’ smells-like-my-grandma’s-house coverage of driving trends among young people.

treehugger:

“This building puts 4,450 households on two acres and it is actually designed with energy conservation in mind. By going huge they are getting tremendous manufacturing efficiencies; by going vertical they get the kind of repetition that makes it affordable. By going half a mile high and 220 stories they are going to get noticed.”

That is Lloyd Alter describing the sustainable case for what will be the world’s tallest building. See more pictures and a video here: One Building, One City: World’s tallest prefab, Sky City, is breaking ground in June

Don’t throw away that styrofoam cup. Look what this guy can do to one.