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 ask me how many times I’ve forgotten mine). Luckily, sustainable seafood watchdogs have kept pace with technology and now, like with almost everything else in our lives, there’s an app for that.
Read the rest at Green Guide

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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 could get a worm bin or a bokashi system, but the truth is: for city dwellers, composting is more often an ideal than a reality.

Enter Compost Cab, a soon-to-launch concept for city-dwellers in Washington, D.C. For $8 a week, Compost Cab provides you with a trash bin which you fill with organic waste. Then the company picks it up each week and trucks it to a nearby urban farm, which turns your banana peels and coffee grounds into soil.
Read the rest at National Geographic Green Guide

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RoboCup 2010 marks the 14th year that hundreds of roboticists pit their mechanized creations against each other in five different soccer leagues. Some are reserved for two-legged, two-armed humanoids, whereas others are for small, wheeled robots that look like polka-dotted coffee cans. There’s even a league just for virtual robots, where computer programs go head-to-head to test the limits of cooperative artificial intelligence.

The goal at RoboCup is not just to win but to push robotics in ways that apply in the real world—and to eventually build a team of robots that can beat the human World Cup champions. Humanoid robots have made great strides since their debut in the 2002 RoboCup, where they competed in four events: a penalty kick competition, a race, freestyle demonstrations, and the aptly titled “Standing Still on One Leg.”

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I’ll be honest with y’all, when they miked me up(!) I was a little nervous, but I think I did pretty well.

The moderator, Vocus’ Bill Wagner, asked a couple questions that got me thinking, though.

Bill wanted to know more about the mediabistro cocktail party I went to last year where an all-too-aggressive PR person wanted to engage in some mutual back-scratching. Essentially, for those who don’t remember (it was a year ago, after all), the flack offered me work writing press releases in exchange for favorable coverage of one of her clients.

I still get the shivers thinking about it.

Anyway, that was on my mind last week when I attended another mediabistro mixer (and I was honestly somewhat dreading that I’d run into this woman again, but I can’t even remember what she looked like at this point).

(Side note: Last year, I’m pretty sure there were a few comped appies. This year, not so much. And they say the media are bouncing back! Pah!)

I was chatting with a freelance friend of mine, saying something like, “Wow, the turnout is so much higher quality than last year–last year I just met sharks.” and explained the issue with the aggressive flack.

He said that that sort of thing happens all the time in the music freelance industry.

I’ve hardly covered music. It’s just not my thing (though I did write about Ted Leo’s new album once), so I had no idea. But his claim is that it’s totally common for a music freelancer to get good coverage for some album and then be offered work writing press releases for that label. The thing about music, I guess, is that much of it is assigned rather than pitched, because a magazine says “Oh, we have to do something about the new Vampire Weekend album” rather than waiting for a writer to say “Hey, I’ve got a feature on a great band nobody’s ever heard of.” Which means, I suppose, that you’re less likely to benefit from having done PR work for a label…other than by getting paid way more than you do for writing a music review. Which is why it’s so tempting.

An informal poll of my journalism and music friends garnered reactions ranging from “Ugh” to “That makes me feel weird but I completely understand it.”

So the issue of ethics and freelance is more thorny than I had initially thought. Sure, there are folks I know who cover both sides (journalism and marketing/PR), and do it well. But the rules are different, it appears, depending on what you’re actually writing about. Surely other beats—like energy policy or something that Actually Matters—frown on freelancers moonlighting for the American Clean Coal Institute.

I’ve done almost no marketing work, though once I wrote a fawning article for an internal company newsletter that paid very well (and gave me a bit of a suntan, as a bonus). I’m not sure how editors feel about writers who work both sides, but I would certainly want to disclose any connections I had before pitching an article to a newspaper or magazine.

I hope that, at least, is standard.

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A decade ago, as Shanghai’s population approached 18 million and housing prices skyrocketed, the city decided to act. City planners developed an initiative called “One City, Nine Towns”—satellite suburbs would be built on farmland outside Shanghai to house one million people by 2020.

Each town would create an identity through its internationally inspired architecture and attractions. Outside the themed areas, which make up perhaps 5 percent of the new developments, construction proceeds at a breakneck pace.

Developers thought European themes would be attractive to Shanghai’s new rich, but ten years after launching the project, some themed towns remain empty. Others have barely broken ground; yet others have stalled, half-finished, victims of poor planning or political graft. (Another planned city, Dongtan, which is frequently included with the Nine Towns as the unofficial tenth town, has been delayed indefinitely after Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu, who was supporting the effort, was arrested on corruption charges.) All of the towns, says French architect Rémi Ferrand, who studied them as part of a book about the region’s development fit into Shanghai’s landscape in different ways; the city, with its period of British and French occupation has always been regarded as a somewhat foreign place. Building these international “New Towns” is, in a way, “like the continuation of a story.”

Read the rest at Smithsonianmag.com

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They’re not the most aww-inspiring baby pictures, but new infrared images prove the youngest known planet outside our solar system does in fact exist—and that planets can grow up fast—a new study says.

Probably only a few million years young, Beta Pictoris b is already fully formed, despite standard models that say such a planet should take ten million years to reach “adulthood,” researchers say. The planet breaks the record once held by the planet BD 20 1790b, which clocked in at 35 million years old.

The new planet is also nearer to its parent star than any other known planet outside our solar system—about as close as Saturn is to our sun.

Located about 63.4 light-years from Earth, that star, named simply Beta Pictoris, is similar to our own star. And like Beta Pictoris b, Beta Pictoris is relatively young—about 12 million years old, compared with the sun’s 4.5 billion years.

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Saltwater crocodiles in the South Pacific travel between islands by body surfing, according to new research designed in part by late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin.

The world’s largest living reptile, the saltwater crocodile is found in brackish and freshwater habitats extending east-west from East India to Fiji and north-south from southern China to northern Australia (see a map of the region).

Despite being found on several islands across this range, different crocodile groups haven’t evolved into completely unique species—the way Darwin’s finches evolved on the Galápagos Islands.

That suggests the crocodiles are somehow island hopping, keeping the overall gene pool well mixed. But until now, no one was sure just how the crocs were traveling, as they’re excellent swimmers for short distances but aren’t great at long, endurance swims.

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All eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, an imaginary disk that extends from the sun’s equator.

But new data show that two of the three Jupiter-like planets known to circle the sunlike star Upsilon Andromedae have orbits that are tilted 30 degrees from each other.

The orbit of the third, innermost planet is still unknown. (Find out about a batch of planets recently found outside our solar system that have tilted, “wrong way” orbits.)

The unusual discovery suggests that astronomers can’t assume all star systems with multiple worlds will always be able to keep planetary siblings in line. (See “Our Solar System May Have Millions of ‘Twins.’”)

The Upsilon Andromedae system probably formed the same way as other planetary systems, including our own, said study leader Barbara McArthur of the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin.

When a cloud of material condenses and collapses to form a star, some leftover material can circle the star’s middle in what’s called a protoplanetary disk. This disk, in turn, can coalesce to form planets.

In Upsilon Andromedae’s case, something knocked two of the outer planets into strange, crisscrossing orbits after the star system had been born.

The star has a binary companion, a dim red dwarf star that orbits Upsilon Andromedae at a distance of about 70 billion miles (112 billion kilometers). If that red dwarf has a very elongated orbit, it might have swooped in close to Upsilon Andromedae sometime in the past, disturbing the planets’ orbits with its gravity.

There’s also evidence that a “missing” planet might have been involved in a gravitational tug-of-war with its peers. The planets could have pushed each other around so much that the loser got thrown out of the system, while the remaining worlds were left askew.

(Related: “Mystery Space Object May Be Ejected Black Hole.”)

“Planet-planet scattering is a very likely cause for what we see,” McArthur said.

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In the past 20 years we’ve traded pagers for smart phones and library cards for Kindles. But the joint federal-industry task force charged with responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is still using cleanup methods that haven’t changed much since the days of the Exxon Valdez.

Nearly four million gallons of oil have already spewed into the Gulf since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig sank last month.

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.

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At this week’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival, a panel of scientists and advertising executives dissected the latest research on “neuromarketing”: measuring consumers’ brain activity to help develop ads and products.

The tactic is making headlines for big business. 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.

But Campbell’s and Frito-Lay have huge budgets; this technology isn’t cheap. What about smaller companies?

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