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POPSThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Also Know As The Trash Vortex 
Sad Picture: No one to blame for this but ourselves. Four fifths of the plastic detritus floating over 2.5 million square miles of ocean surface arrives there from land-based run off: from stormwater, in other words: litter. Sadly - many people take the "out of sight, out of mind" approach. Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up. We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic. All succeeding generations will only see an ocean filled with trash. Net a piece of plastic, and you’ll find barnacles and small crabs clinging to it. Not a good thing for fish, birds, and mammals that mistake it for its natural food, such as eggs, jellyfish, or other sea creatures. Most of the plastic will eventually photo-degrade into small, dust-like particles to the point that it will be non-detectable to the human eye, but ingestible by sea mammals, birds, and fish—many of which we then consume ourselves.
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POPSConcrete that literally eats pollution. If it works, then this could be a big breakthrough indeed. However, it's not like cities are going to start re-paving roads that don't need it, or demoing & rebuilding building, (or even just repainting them with this solution)... The cost would be prohibitive. So that 50% savings (just off of 15% of concrete surfaces) is a LONG way away. Plus, this definitely doesn't curb the need for changing the way we pollute...
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POPSGIANT gabage patch floating in Pacific This is absolutely unbelievable. If you're never drive across To put this in perspective, Texas, the second larges state in the union, includes roughly 267,339 sq. mi, or 7.4% of the nation's total area. And our mommies can't clean up after us this time.
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POPSWe have a 'right to starlight,' astronomers say One Brazilian astronomer, Augusto Daminelli, told the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper that in Rio, "it should be possible to see up to 5,000 stars with the naked eye -- but because of light pollution we can only see 150." He noted that nearly a third of electric lighting is directed to the heavens, and thus wasted. Possible solutions include putting aluminum covers on street lighting to direct the illumination downwards, and using weaker, more energy-efficient lamps, he said. "More than two billion people in the world are unable to see the Milky Way. For us, the sky is a heritage site for mankind," he said. <<
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POPSCan we harness energy from outer space? While nuclear fusion has already been tested with the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, those reactions give off the majority of their energy as radioactive neutrons, raising both safety and production concerns. Helium-3, on the other hand, is perfectly safe. It doesn't give off any pollution or radioactive waste and poses no danger to surrounding areas. helium-3 has two protons but only one neutron. When it's heated to very high temperatures and combined with deuterium, the reaction releases incredible amounts of energy. Just 2.2 pounds (one kilogram) of helium-3 combined with 1.5 pounds (0.67 kilograms) of deuterium produces 19 megawatt-years of energy Roughly 25 tons of the stuff could power the United States for an entire year.
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POPSSmoke a Pack a Day... or move to Cairo This comes as no surprise to me. The entire time I was in Cairo I coughed, hacked and eye watered my way through each day. I asked my chain smoking friend why he bothered to smoke when he could just breathe the air. Worst pollution I personally have ever had to live through. Luckily enough I was able to escape by heading home, unlike most everyone else stuck there.
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POPSIs a zero-carbon city on the horizon? As part of their Masdar Initiative (masdar meaning "the source" in Arabic), an effort to further the research and implementation of sustainable construction, the Abu Dhabi government will build this city on a nearby 2.3 square-mile site (six square kilometers), adjacent to its international airport at an estimated cost of $22 billion. It projected the city will eventually be able to sustain 50,000 residents and more than 1,000 businesses. It broke ground in construction of the city and hopes to complete the project by 2016.
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POPSBlue skies, scorched Earth? What is Global Dimming? If we were to eliminate global dimming all together without addressing global warming the increase in temperature and extreme weather might be more significant than previously predicted. This has been recorded with one full degree temperature change in just a few days of decreased pollution in the days following the 9/11 attacks . This reverse effect of dimming has been has been blamed along with global warming for increasing temperatures, appropriately called global brightening . No one wants smoggy skies but it could be smog and particulates that may be shielding us from the full consequences of the greenhouse gases we pump into our air daily. Clear blue skies are something many folks thinks of when they think of “going green” but those clear blue skies may hold more heat than we can handle.
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POPSBurma, Chevron, slave labor, Rice and more The pipeline was built with slave labor, forced into servitude by the Burmese military. The original pipeline partner, Unocal, was sued by EarthRights International for the use of slave labor. As soon as the suit was settled out of court, Chevron bought Unocal. Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.
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POPSEarth is upside down • “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970. • “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...” Life magazine, January 1970. • “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970. • “...air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970. • Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years. • “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.
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POPSPollution in China 
"It was only when pollution literally started to bloom across the lakes of China earlier this summer that the country's leaders finally sounded full alarm on the environment. Blue-green algae blooms choked Lake Taihu - China's third biggest source of freshwater - in May, forcing 5 million people to use bottled water for drinking and bathing. "Soon after, local media were reporting outbreaks across the country. Rancid blooms contaminated Dianchi Lake in southwestern China, then Xinlicheng reservoir, the main source of water for Changchun - a northern city of almost 3 million people. In every case, pollution - either from factories, fertilizer or untreated sewage - was to blame. "Algae blooms are nature's response to discharges of nitrogen and phosphorus. Grown to excess, they choke waterways of oxygen, killing fish and fouling the air with a putrid smell. When prime minister Wen Jiabao visited Lake Taihu, he reportedly described it as an environmental wake-up call to the nation."
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POPS'Suicidal' cows throw themselves off cliff cont: There has been speculation in the past that when this does happen it is because a tightly-grouped number of cows have followed each other as they search for more grass. Most scientists generally believe that animals are incapable of committing suicide. Even lemmings, which by popular myth throw themselves off cliffs during mating season, do not take their own lives intentionally. Instead, evolutionary pressures cause them to feel the urge to change habitat at which point they migrate in huge droves.
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POPSWhales may die from heartbreak too For Yves Paccalet, a French naturalist and philosopher who helped push through the 1986 moratorium, the intelligent and highly-social creatures may be so exhausted from their centuries-long combat with humankind that they have simply have given up the fight. "The psychological consequences of our aggression have compromised their will to live," said Paccalet, who worked extensively with French marine explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
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