Our Planet

Are Weddings Causing Environmental Damage?

Weddings are meant to be beautiful and memorable. Whether you have a barn wedding or an elaborate event at a country club, or you keep it simple in a church, it should be a reflection of who you are as a couple.

Unfortunately, certain wedding styles, decorations, and even some long-standing traditions may be doing more harm than good when it comes to the environment. Most people are so wrapped up in the splendor of the event itself that they don’t often think about how their choices might be impacting the health of the planet.

20 Amazing Elephant Facts

Elephants! Even though these largest existing land animals are loved, revered, and respected by people and cultures worldwide, they are actually close to the edge of extinction. The escalation of poaching, habitat loss, human-elephant conflict, and mistreatment in captivity are just some of the threats to both African and Asian elephants. So, we urgently need to take action to protect these amazing (and cute!) animals. Here are 20 amazing elephant facts.

This “Salmon Cannon” helps native fish pass over dams

Hydroelectric dams act as obstacles for wildlife, especially migrating salmon. The Whooshh Fish Transport System, also known as the “salmon cannon,” gives fish a much-needed boost over dams so they can swim upstream to spawn.

Super Saturn: J1407b

The exoplanet J1407b is simply “Super Saturn”. If you read Isaac Asimov‘s 1986 novel “Foundation and Earth”, you’ll remember how the main characters of the book (Councilman Golan Trevize, historian Janov Pelorat, and Gaian Bliss) were amazed by Saturn’s rings. They were thinking the gas giant with preeminent rings in old stories was just a myth. But after seeing Saturn, they made sure that they found the solar system which contains the Earth, the original home of humanity.

A Year Along the Geostationary Orbit [Short Film]

Our beautiful yet fragile Earth from the Geostationary orbit. “A Year Along the Geostationary Orbit” is a 16-minute short film by the German engineer Felix Dierich. He used the Japanese weather satellite Himawari 8 data made publicly available by the Japanese and Australian governments to craft a timelapse while producing this amazing time-lapse of Earth from space.

Strategies Businesses Are Taking to Reduce Their Single-Use Plastic Use

Single-use plastics can be convenient, but more often than not, they have a lasting negative impact on our planet. They end up in our landfills, oceans, and ecosystems creating problems for animals and plants alike. In fact, half of all plastic in the world was created in just the last 13 years, and according to National Geographic, only 9% of that plastic is actually recycled. That is 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste with nowhere to go. These plastics are then unable to biodegrade, so they just continue to break down into smaller and smaller microplastics which causes more systemic problems.

Terrascope: Turning Earth into a giant telescope

We can turn Earth into a giant telescope. According to a recent study titled “The ‘Terrascope’: On the Possibility of Using the Earth as an Atmospheric Lens”, published by David Kipping of Columbia University, our planet offers an opportunity for pronounced lensing.