Articles by Sarah Laskow

Critical List: Huge wind farm to rise in Wyoming; doomsday clock ticks forward

The Obama administration is speeding towards approval for a huge wind project, 1,000 turbines strong, in Wyoming.

GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon cribbed text for her op-ed on Keystone XL from the website of pipeline builder Transcanada.

There's a second tar-sands pipeline, Northern Gateway, and that one faces strong opposition, as well.

A traffic light that knows the difference between bikes and cars

No matter how strong a cyclist's legs are, a bike cannot go as fast as a car. Duh, right? But traffic lights are not as smart as humans, and they do not instinctively understand that. So they’re programmed to assume leg-powered vehicles can make it safely through lights in the time allotted to things with engines. Luckily, some human was smart enough to invent the Intersector --  a traffic light that respects the difference between bikes and cars.

This electrical socket spits out your power-sucking plugs

The PumPing Tap does not like wasted power. It's an electrical socket with a spring-loaded ejector seat, which pops plugs right out if they're slowly sucking energy when not in active use.

The idea is to combat vampire power, the massive amount of energy slowly sapped by idling gizmos, like microwaves that aren’t cooking or chargers that aren’t charging anything. The PumPing Tap (which is still in the design stage, sadly) monitors the flow of energy, and if you don't use a device for 10 minutes -- ptooie! -- it's unplugged.

Critical List: Canadian minister hates tar-sands opposition; airlines charge for free carbon permits

Canada's natural resources minister is not happy that all of you with your "radical ideological agenda" think Canada's turning into a creepy petrostate.

Japan is releasing those three whaling activists who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel.

Carbon emissions are delaying the next ice age.