Ray LaHood at Bike Summit, photo credit Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland This writer didn't expect much from Ray Lahood, calling him the "Congressman from Caterpillar" and suspecting that he would tend to favor the car and the big roads that they ride on over alternate forms of transport. I was wrong; I learn from Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo credit Yakkay via Facebook. This is not a story of why you should wear your helmet. We're not going to get into that hornet's nest...if we can help it. The debate may never be over. Instead, we're going to show off the ways helmet manufacturers are trying to make you WANT to wear your helmet...if you want to wear a helmet. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Paul Steiger at the Samara / Massey Journalism Seminar; Photo credit Salim Bamakhrama Much of the Canadian media elite gathered at the Samara / Massey Journalism Seminar to hear Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and now editor-in-chief of ProPublica, a non-profit investigative newsroom in New York. Propublica was founded to fill the void left as newspapers cut investigative journalism as an expensive luxury in the face of the online onslaught. It has a te...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Here's a Haitian model of the "Lucia" stove that turns biomass into biochar, and cooks dinner, too. Photo credit WorldStoves via tweetphoto. Biochar, the "co product" of burning wood or agricultural waste in a pyrolitic (oxygen free) environment, has garnered both praise and criticism for its possibilities as a CO2 sequestration tool....Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo credit NASA via Discovery News The quantitiy of debris in space has been causing concern to agencies involved with exploring space and companies depending on satellites installed there. But now space agencies have demonstrated the capability of a new system which tracks debris and is intended to prevent collisions. The system detected a near-collision situation in which 3.8 tons of rocket booster waste left over from a Chinese launch threatened the 8 ton European Space Agency (ESA) Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger