PopTech

Fast Company has a spread on a cool “zero-energy” house.

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.

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.

In the next 40 years, we have to produce as much food as we have in the past 8,000.

— …and six other startling human-footprint facts from the World Wildlife Fund. Yikes.

If you are wandering around Greenland’s ice sheet and you run into this crazy thing, it is NASA’s GROVER (government acronym for something). It is solar powered and it crawls around Greenland on its own and uses ground-penetrating radar to look at ice. And it’s cool.

National Geographic has a piece on how to design a fish trap to reduce bycatch by 80 percent. (Bycatch is all the fish you don’t want to catch and end up throwing out. HUGE WASTE.)

Plants dumped 11 billion gallons of raw sewage because of Hurricane Sandy. That’s billions with a “B.”