Featured Stories

In Sacramento, they pick figs, kumquats, and plums from public trees. In New York, they harvest purslane–an edible flower–from the cracks in the sidewalk. Down south, it’s fiddlehead ferns, and just about everywhere, people are picking black walnuts, wild mushrooms, and dandelion greens.

Urban foraging–gathering fruit, vegetables, and other useful things from parks, lawns, and sidewalks–isn’t a new thing. But as more urbanites become aware of the free bounty surrounding them, new issues are–pardon the pun–cropping up. When a public park’s berry patch is raided, whose responsibility is it to make sure there are some left for everyone to enjoy? What about pesticides?

Not too long ago, if you wanted to know what type of seafood was best for the environment, your tools didn’t get any more high-tech than a wallet card or a fridge magnet. But the fridge magnet doesn’t help much when you’re at the grocery store, and wallet cards are easy to leave behind (just [...]

from National Geographic’s Green Guide If you live in a city, you might have a window box or a pot of tomatoes on your balcony. You might even be lucky enough to have a small backyard garden. But do you compost? Probably not: composting in a small space is tough, not to mention smelly. You [...]

Amid efforts to cap the seafloor leak, cleanup workers have been using boat-based skimmers to pick up the oil, booms to gather the slick for burning, and chemical dispersants to break the crude into smaller droplets—all parts of the oil-fighting toolkit for decades. Soon, though, tech of the future could be cleaning up spills like this one.

Frito-Lay studied women’s brains to help develop an ad campaign, and Campbell Soup (CPB, Fortune 500) just unveiled a packaging redesign based on consumers’ “neurological and bodily responses” to different mockups. By hooking customers up to EEG or MRI machines, a company can learn about what’s really going on inside a buyer’s brain — possibly even before the buyer knows it.

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2010-02-03 Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition [...]

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2009-11-20 If Dr. Horrible really did have a “freeze ray,” he might stop the world by zapping it with ultraviolet light, new research suggests. After feeding a light-sensitive chemical to transparent, microscopic worms called nematodes, scientists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia were able to paralyze the tiny [...]

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2009-08-17 Contrary to a recent TV cell phone ad, Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t likely to set up shop in space any time soon. But if it did, the donut chain might like to build next to WASP-17b, a newfound planet that’s puffed up to be roughly as dense as a [...]

“Bacon cereal.” “Bacon lollipop.” “Bacon spaghetti.” “Bacon bread.” “Bacon coffee.” “Bacon beer.”

In a sane world, none of these exact phrases would return any hits when plugged into Google. This is not a sane world.

BRANDON GREEN RESOLVED to try his hand at real estate after watching a late-night infomercial in 2000. Bored with his job in sales as an IT recruiter in Silver Spring, Green paid $19.95 for Carlton Sheets’s “No Down Payment” video, and applied himself. “My first project was a complete overhaul of a house, 727 11th Street, NE,” he recalls.