Alex Pasternack

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  To Fight Oil Spills, An Open-Source Swarm of Robotic Sailboats (Video)

  Ask anyone who lives in the Gulf or the Niger Delta: oil spills are very nasty, and they don't clean themselves up. Chemical dispersants can make spills worse. And deploying hundreds of people in boats to run the clean-up presents a host of health

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  Genetic Architecture: When Buildings Think With Their Surroundings

  Karl Chu knows he is a man way ahead of his time. It’s a time when, he posits, humans have transcended their bodies to exist on multiple planes, contribute to a global brain, and write apps with their genomes.

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  In NYC Tonight: Cities As Green Engines

  Cities may account for two-thirds of global energy usage and over 70% of global carbon emissions, but we know they don't have to be enemies of the environment.

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  To Determined Young Social Innovators, the Highest Tech Is Low

  Mention social good to generation Y -- or other generations for that matter -- and the focus easily turns to high tech innovation. It's an angle emphasized by big events like TED, which emit a steady feed of technology-heavy ideas.

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  How to Plant 60 Million Mangrove Trees in 3 Months (Slideshow)

  The mangrove tree is essential to tropical zones around the world, helping to nourish local ecosystems with fish and plants, protect shorelines and soak up carbon. And now it's vanishing at an alarming rate. Since 1980, the

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  How to Plant 60 Million Mangrove Trees in 3 Months in Remote Africa

  The mangrove tree is essential to tropical zones around the world, helping to nourish local ecosystems with fish and plants, protect shorelines and soak up carbon. And now it's vanishing at an alarming rate. Since 1980, the planet has lost up to a third

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  Traffic Can Be Good, Public Transit Can Be Bad: David Owen's Unconventional Urban Wisdom (Video)

  Writer David Owen makes the now uncontroversial argument that cities are the greenest places we can live, given their scalability, mobility, and density. He's got a lot more unintuitive wisdom about cities, and how much better they can be: Traffic can

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  Fighting Against Time, Thousands Are Rebuilding Senegal's Mangrove Forests

  BIGNONA, Senegal -- I was eager to post this earlier, but when you're in Casamance, in southern Senegal, you've a catalog of good excuses.

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  Treehugger in Senegal: This Is the World's Biggest Tree Planting Project: 60 Million Mangroves

  The mangrove tree is quite simply an ecological superhero. It not only makes up highly productive ecosystems in tropical and sub-tropical tidal zones, but it serves as a vital renewable natural

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  Great Short Film About the U.S.'s Only Residential Vacuum Garbage Collection

  Could vacuum tubes be the best way to collect garbage? I asked the curator of a recent exhibit about Roosevelt Island's pneumatic garbage system if she thought this was a good idea or the product of Jetsons-era whimsy.

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  Should We Replace Garbage Trucks With Vacuum Tubes?

  Trash is one of those few things in our world no one wants to see, smell, touch or even think about. Think about it.

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  The Future of the City: A Review of the RPA's 20th Annual Conference

  George Orwell was wrong. Although he said advanced technology would create authoritarianism, it actually leads to decentralization and democratization. That was the message of Julia Vitullo-Martin, the

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  SharedEarth.com: A Landshare Grapevine Linking Gardeners With Gardens

  It's an obvious problem in urban and suburban jungles around the country: many people are eager to garden but have nowhere to indulge their green thumbs. And plenty of homeowners have gardens in need of tending.

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  The Best Film About a Plastic Bag You'll Ever See

  Plastics. In The Graduate, it's the big secret Benjamin gets from a well-meaning family friend. These days, it's one of our dirtiest, creepiest secrets too.

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  Shanghai's First PETA Benefit Gets Wild

  Who showed up to Shanghai's first anti-fur benefit show on a recent Thursday night? Local indie pop band Candy Shop and opening emo band Forget and Forgive rocked, rapped,

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  Interview and Video: Director of VBS.tv's "Heimo's Arctic Refuge" On the Most Far Out Americans

  Survivalism may be going mainstream, what will all the new cave men and off-gridders. But for Heimo and Edna Korth, survival in the wild has been a way of life for three decades. The last humans to be living in the 19.5-million-acre Arctic National

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  New York's Health and Design Chiefs Talk Design That Makes Us Healthier (Video)

  New York City's health kick isn't just limited to cigarettes, calorie labels and a possible sugar tax. Mayor Bloomberg and his forward-thinking administration are thinking carefully about how good "active design" -- of sidewalks, streets and buildings

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  Digging Into Urban Outfitters' Perfectly Good Trash

  The other night around 9.30 pm, I was walking up 14th st. and 6th Ave. when I passed a bunch of boxes next to the trash outside Urban Outfitters. The boxes were all marked "Broken" or "Broken Glass." With my suspicion that their definition of "broken"