Articles by Sarah Laskow

Take a video tour of UMD’s prize-winning Solar Decathlon house

The Chesapeake Bay's sad state has yielded on positive result: the bay ecosystem inspired the  University of Maryland's "WaterShed" house, which won the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon over the weekend.

You can take a tour of the house above. WaterShed features solar panels, a green roof, a rain harvesting system, solar thermal water heating, sink and shower water filtration, "constructed wetlands" instead of gardens, and an indoor waterfall (!) that helps control humidity.

Critical List: Green jobs program flounders; India calls Monsanto out on biopiracy

Oof. Only 10 percent of people the Labor Department trained for green jobs have found work.

Using solar energy to extract oil must be the ultimate example of greenwashing.

In Afghanistan, networking generators together can relieve 7,900 fuel trucks of their duties and keep soldiers from risking their lives to bring oil into the country.

These hairy crazy ants are invading America and they do not screw around

Start playing the video above, and after you're suitably grossed out by the close-ups, skip to about 0:45. These are insects called hairy crazy ants -- that is what they’re really called -- and they are terrifying. How do they move that fast? 

These guys are invading the American South. They are called hairy, because their bellies are hairy. They are called crazy, because they move crazy fast, and also they are crazy with nothing to lose. And they're hard to kill.

Now we have two giant holes in the ozone layer

I hear New Zealand is beautiful, but I'm never going there, because the ozone is thin and I'll die of skin cancer. I hear Norway is beautiful, too, but it looks like I can't go there either, because now there's an unprecedentedly big ozone hole over the Arctic.

Winter often thins the ozone layer over the Arctic, but this year, for the first time, scientists are saying the hole is comparable to the one of over Antarctica. It's twice as bad as the two biggest holes scientists had previously observed over the Arctic, and in some sections, 80 percent of the ozone is gone.