Ferris Jabr, writing for Scientific American:

In an episode of Matt Groening’s animated science fiction sitcom Futurama, Leela offers her friend Fry an unusual housewarming gift: a bonsai tree sprouting tiny bananas, melons and plums. “It’s a miniature fruit salad tree,” she explains.

Here’s the thing: fruit salad trees are real.

Grafting isn’t just for making fruit salad, either. We do it all the time with bonsai, adding branches where there were none to achieve a certain aesthetic. Here’s another fun bonsai trick: air layering.

Adam Rogers dives deeper into the histories and possibilities embedded in the Congress for the New Urbanism’s “Freeways Without Futures” report.

Christopher Joyce, reporting for NPR:

Anthropologists believe early humans evolved in Africa and then moved out from there in successive waves. However, what drove their migrations has been a matter of conjecture.

One new explanation is climate change.

Wisconsin. And not in a good way.

Ingvar Kamprad of Ikea fame seems to have caught a case of the Walt Disneys. Like the wealthy animator, the Swedish furniture magnate is dipping his company’s toes into urban development. But don’t expect slavish reproductions of the big box stores, as Doug Sanders reports at the Globe and Mail:

As the Ikea people repeatedly tell anyone who will listen, this place will not be an Ikea. There will not be Poäng armchairs adorning the living rooms and Billy bookcases covering the walls. The houses will not require Allen keys to assemble. Meatballs in lingonberry sauce will not be served at the restaurants. And there will not, the company insists, be an Ikea store anywhere in or near the neighbourhood.

And like Disney, Ikea plans to keep a close eye on what happens in the development:

“We would have a fairly firm line on undesirable activity, whatever that may be. But we also feel we can say, okay, because we’ve kept control of the management of the commercial facilities, we have a fairly strong hand in what is said in terms of the activities that are held on site.”

Despite Ikea’s protestations, this sounds exactly like a Disney development.

(Via Design Decoded.)

Matt Novak:

While researching a column I wrote recently for BBC Future about fighting the skyscraper fires of tomorrow I came across a fascinating anti-skyscraper law from 1912 that would have a lasting impact on Australia’s largest city. Fearing that fighting fires was nearly impossible in tall buildings, Sydney passed the Height of Buildings Act of 1912, limiting new buildings to just 150 feet tall. As a result Sydney spent almost half a century growing predominantly outward rather than skyward.

It’s easy to bag on big box stores—I’m often guilty of that myself. But you’ve got to admit, their scale and reach can be beneficial at times.

Mark Hertsgaard, with an op-ed for the New York Times:

Indeed, instead of helping farmers take common-sense measures to limit their land’s vulnerability to extreme weather, the legislation would simply spend billions more on crop insurance — sticking taxpayers with the bill. “It’s like giving a homeowner cut-rate fire insurance but not requiring fire extinguishers,” Jim Kleinschmit of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy told me in an interview.

Stephanie M. Dloniak, reporting for the New York Times:

As difficult and exciting as capturing the lions was, a more imposing question now loomed: What do you do with them?

We nearly always frame the problem as lions moving into cities and suburbs. But the reality is, we’ve moved into their territory.

Michael M. Grynbaum, reporting for the New York Times:

Barry F. Hersh, a professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University, said online maps were only the latest tool in a long line of technology influencing geography. “The telephone company once decided which neighborhood you were in,” he said.

Tim Landis, writing for The State Journal-Register:

The first test runs of 110-mph passenger trains in Illinois are scheduled to begin by the end of this month. But speed is only one piece of the test. Transportation regulators and Amtrak also will monitor an automated system of crossing gates and lights intended to accommodate trains, motorists and pedestrians. If the system works as expected on the Amtrak line between Dwight and Pontiac, plans are to extend the upgrades to the remainder of the route downstate. The target is to begin faster service between Chicago and St. Louis in 2015.

That’s a lot of hermit crabs.

(Via Shawn King.)

Matt O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News et al. interviewed yours truly for a nice A1 feature on trees and wealth.

Veronique Greenwood, reporting for Discover Magazine:

The clouds in the Amazon, just like everywhere else, consist of water vapor clinging to tiny clumps of carbon compounds. In forested areas, the carbon compounds are byproducts of plants’ metabolism; in populated areas, they are often from human pollution. Most of the time, atmospheric chemists can see the carbon clumping taking place; when the microscopic bits reach a certain size, they are able to attract and hold water. In the Amazon, the clumps seem to appear out of nowhere, nearly fully formed. No one has ever been able to catch them in the act of coming together.

Until now.

This is a perfect example of why we should keep hammering away at seemingly impossible questions. It would be easy to throw our hands in the air. But these scientists didn’t, and now we know something new.

David Biello, writing for Scientific American:

Can the world’s existing farmlands provide enough crops to satisfy the hunger of the nine billion people—up from seven billion currently—that demographers predict will be living on the planet by the mid-21st century? Or will more and more forests and other ecosystems have to be cleared to feed all the extra mouths? A new study, published in Nature on August 30, suggests that increasing deforestation could be avoided provided farmers made better use of water and nutrients on land currently under cultivation around the globe.

Wise fertilizer use and targeted intensification. Sounds about right.

Jack Healy, reporting for the New York Times:

With their natural food sources ruined by drought, animals are descending from mountains and mesas, desperate to eat whatever they can find before the winter freeze comes.

There isn’t much to go around.

If you’re talking about polymath Eric Fischer, maker of various awesome maps, it’s all of the above. Eric Jaffe interviews him for the Atlantic Cities.

Will Ferguson, writing for New Scientist:

[Nanocrystalline cellulose] will replace metal and plastic car parts and could make nonorganic plastics obsolete in the not-too-distant future, says Phil Jones, director of new ventures and disruptive technologies at the French mineral processing company IMERYS. “Anyone who makes a car or a plastic bag will want to get in on this,” he says.

Scientists have known about nanocrystalline cellulose, or NCC, for a while now. The news here is that the U.S. Forest Service’s has built a factory to produce the stuff. It’s cheap, strong, and renewable. The article says tech, auto, and defense companies are curious about NCC, but think of what architects are going to do once they get their hands on the stuff. 

(Aside: NCC is transparent. Yes, my fellow Star Wars nerds, transparisteel is real. It just happens to be made from wood.)

Remember that ghost town that was to built in the New Mexico desert? The one that was to be a test bed for all sorts of wiz bang technologies that could revolutionize real, populated cities? Turns out the developer has put off construction “due to some very complicated and unforeseen issues with acquiring the land.” Mmm hmm. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the price tag ballooned from the $200 million it was to cost when I first wrote about it?