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Submission + - Home Depot's "Bee-Friendly Plants" are Actually Toxic

Submitted by Taffykay
Taffykay writes: Home Depot and other big box stores market "bee-friendly" flowers and vegetable plants that are actually toxic to the pollinators. Friends of the Earth teamed up with the Pesticide Research Institute to survey stores throughout Washington D.C., Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay area and discovered that not only are these plants laced with neonicotinoids — pesticides known to be harmful to bees — but they contained concentrations up to 200 times higher than agricultural crops.

Submission + - Elon Musk Unveils Long Awaited Hyperloop Design

Submitted by Taffykay
Taffykay writes: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk finally unveiled design plans for the $6 billion Hyperloop, which will transport passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in half an hour for $20. Comprised of two steel tubes side by side that allow capsules or pods to travel both ways, the system would be built on pylons above ground. The system includes solar panels mounted on the tube that provide all of the necessary energy, as well as an electric motor similar to the one used in the Tesla Model S except that it is rolled flat.

Submission + - Terrafugia's Flying Car Completes First Public Flight (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Childhood dreams of flying cars are a reality at last, thanks to Terrafugia, who designed and demonstrated a new car that can actually fly. The company revealed its prototype at the EAA AirVenture airshow in Wisconsin last Wednesday, and just as planned, the car went from land to air and back again without any trouble.

Submission + - Over 100 Dolphins Wash Up on East Coast Beaches, Reason Unknown (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent spike in the number of bottlenose dolphins washing up on East Coast beaches has left scientists baffled. “There’s a number of things that cause animals to strand,” Maggie Mooney-Seus, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told CBS News. “It could be biotoxins. It could be disease. It could be human interactions with fishing gear.” The only clue they have moving forward is an eerily similar case that occurred back in the summers of 1987 and 1988. At that time, the cause was determined to be morbillivirus, a measles-like, airborne virus that’s often fatal in dolphins.

Submission + - Plants Talk to Each Other Through Messengers in the Soil (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Taffykay
Taffykay writes: Chinese researchers discovered in 2010 that a tomato plant infected with leaf blight alerts other plants, which then activate genes to ward off the disease. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen expanded that original study with broad bean plants, and discovered that the plants communicate with one other through a fungus messenger in the soil.

Submission + - Aerovelo's Human-Powered Helicopter Wins Elusive $250,000 Sikorsky Prize

Submitted by oritonic1
oritonic1 writes: Since 1980, several teams have tried (and failed) to build a human-powered helicopter that could win the elusive $250,000 Sikorsky prize. But a Canadian start-up, Aerovelo, has finally taken the crown with Atlas, a human-powered craft that managed to stay at least 10 feet in the air, for 60 seconds, within a 30'x30' area.

Submission + - China Says Serious Polluters Will Get the Death Penalty (inhabitat.com) 1

Submitted by formaggio
formaggio writes: According to the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government is now allowing courts to punish those who commit environment crimes with the death penalty. The new judicial interpretation comes in the wake of several serious environmental problems that have hit the country over the last few months, including dangerous levels of air pollution, a river full of dead pigs, and other development projects that have imperiled public health.

Submission + - 400-Year-Old Arctic Plants Frozen by Glaciers Come Back from the Dead (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A crop of 400-year-old plants that were wiped out by glaciers have come back to life. While on a recent expedition, University of Alberta researchers discovered something that had a “greenish tint.” It turned out to be ancient bryophytes sprouting new growth after 400 years of dormancy.
Science

Submission + - Parasitic Flies are Turning Bees Into Zombies (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Taffykay
Taffykay writes: "The latest in a string of explanations for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a finding that parasitic flies are attacking bees and turning them into zombies. Published in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE , the study by scientists from San Francisco State University and others reveals that after the flies attack the bees and lay eggs in their abdomens, the bees then abandon their hives and congregate around light en masse, Walking Dead-style. When they finally do die, their bodies then become cocoons from which up to 13 fly larvae emerge about a week later."

Submission + - artist Ap Verheggen has hatched a plan in cooperat (stumbleupon.com)

Submitted by
Taffykay
Taffykay writes: "Artist Ap Verheggen has hatched a plan to develop a solar-powered leaf-shaped structure that uses ordinary condensation principles to create ice in the Sahara desert. If this sounds like a wild plan hatched by some deranged person, read on. It turns out that Cofely Refrigeration and Verheggen, who is also the Cultural Ambassador for UNESCO-IHE, the water training institute of the UN, have simulated desert conditions in a shipping container to test the product's theory, and have already produced 10 cm of ice."
Security

Submission + - Massive DNS Cache Poisoning Hits Brazil (net-security.org) 1

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: A massive DNS cache poisoning attack attempting to infect users trying to access popular websites is currently under way in Brazil, according to Kaspersky Lab expert Fabio Assolini. Brazil has some big ISPs. Official statistics suggest the country has 73 million computers connected to the Internet, and the major ISPs average 3 or 4 million customers each. If a cybercriminal can change the DNS cache in just one server, the number of potential victims is huge. And that is exactly what has been happening during last week. Users trying to reach Google, YouTube, Facebook and other popular global and local sites were being faced with pop-up windows telling them to install "Google Defence" and similar thematic software or Java applet in order to be able to access the wanted site.

Submission + - One Tenth of China's Farmland Polluted with Heavy (china.org.cn)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A report form China's Environmental Ministry reveals that one tenth of China's 1.22 million square kilometers of farmland are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins. The AFP lists 'lead, mercury and cancer-causing cadmium' and points to the rapid pace of China's industrialization as well as factories and their operators flouting regulations and laws. Cheap batteries and lead refineries are slowly turning China into a land where whole villages are poisoned (11 incidents so far this year). According to Human Rights Watch the government's response to this scourge is laughable. The poisoned are denied treatment and China's Environmental Ministry offers no possible help: 'The report documents how local authorities in contaminated areas have imposed arbitrary limits on access to blood lead testing, for example by permitting only people living within a small radius of a factory to be tested. When tests are conducted, results have often been contradictory or have been withheld from victims and their families. And children with elevated blood lead levels who require treatment according to national guidelines have been denied care or told simply to eat certain foods, including apples, garlic, milk, and eggs.'
News

Submission + - MIT Creates New Battery for Ultra-Fast EV Charging (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by formaggio
formaggio writes: A team of researchers at MIT set out to “reinvent the rechargeable battery” and succeeded by creating a liquid-flow battery, suitable for electric vehicles that can be recharged as quickly as simply pumping gas and could halve the cost of current EV batteries.

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