Archive for the 'Environment' Category

Leave it to Japan to come up with yet ANOTHER crazy toilet idea.

Though this seems much more practical than the toilet motorcycle.

Low flow toilets save so much water per flush but they often leave behind… waste.

Yuck.

So Japanese toilet maker TOTO came up with a Double Cyclone flushing system.

According to satellite data, the earth produces 53.6 petagrams of plants a year. No, a petagram isn't a letter from Josh Hutcherson, it's about 2.2 trillion lbs.

Of that, humans use about 40%, or about 24 billion tons!

That seems like a lot of salad, but it might not be enough!

DOOM!

We feel like every few weeks we write another story about the Arctic sea ice reaching some new historic low.

But most researchers didn't expect it to keep getting worse.

It's literally almost fall and the ice is still receding.

In the video, the black represents what the ice levels usually are, and the white ice you can see represents what actually happened this summer.

New data says the ice crushed the record it just set of only 1.58M square miles. It's now down to the new record of 1.32M square miles of ice.

Check out the video (above) to see how much less that is than average.

Wouldn't it be great if the Earth just naturally gave us everything we needed to run all our electronics and helped us to stop polluting so much?

Well two new studies have found that the Earth does actually have enough wind to power the whole world!

We told you recently that the number of human cases of West Nile this year has exploded, reaching 1,590 in the U.S.

Now, even worse, the number of people who have died because of it is on the rise — 66 so far.

That's the highest case count through the last week of August since the virus was first detected in the United States in 1999.

Texas seems like a great place to avoid right now, as 45% of the cases have come from there. 31 of the 66 deaths are from there.

Those numbers are expected to rise, too!

More than 70% of all West Nile virus cases in the United States are found in six states: Texas, South Dakota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Michigan.

Which is weird, because those seem pretty random!

Here's how you can cut your risk:

Scary!

Not only has the arctic sea ice reached an all time record low (1.58 million square miles, dropping below the previous low, 1.61 square miles), but a sea storm that's bringing in MORE warm weather has the whole area churning in what's being described as a "giant slushie!"

Greeeat!

Arctic sea ice has just reached the lowest it's ever been recorded — and it still has about two weeks to keep melting before it starts refreezing.

It shrunk to 4.1m sq km (1.6m sq miles) on Sunday.

Here's what scientists said: