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South Africa, despite its sociopolitical, racial, criminal, and economic despairs, remains an extraordinary adventure capital. Off the country’s coast, an intrepid traveler can descend into the Indian Ocean in a steel cage and go nose to snout with very large, very hungry great white sharks

South Africa, despite its sociopolitical, racial, criminal, and economic despairs, remains an extraordinary adventure capital. Off the country’s coast, an intrepid traveler can descend into the Indian Ocean in a steel cage and go nose to snout with very large, very hungry great white sharks. The flat top of Table ...

It's possible to subsist almost entirely on items found in Walmart (you can even buy tents if you don't have a home), but there's one product found in a quarter of all American households that most Walmarts don't stock: guns. Until now. Walmart is returning the gun counter to a big chunk of its stores.

Sometimes conservation plans work so well that once-endangered species no longer need protection. That's the case in Central America, where the Morelet's crocodile ( Crocodylus moreletii ) has recovered enough that many of the protections put in place decades ago to help it are now on the verge of being lifted. Once heavily hunted for their skin, which was heavily valued as a source of high-quality leather, the Morelet's crocodile began its slow climb toward survival back in 1970, when Mexico (where most of the animals live) banned hunting of all crocodiles and caimans.

Following the recent disaster in Japan, the Tokyo Hackerspace --an open community space where hackers get together to play with hardware (among other things)--channeled its hive mind not into its usual playing with lasers and forgetting to shower, but rather into helping the country recover from earthquake and nuclear-related woes. The Tokyo Hackerspace's most high-profile project is its NETRAD geiger shield, an open-source geiger counter shield that detects local radiation levels. Eventually, the hackerspace hopes to expand its sensor network to the Fukushima region

Once in space, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to the moon... and Mars.

Ethonomic Indicator of the Day: 26% -- the amount of global CO2 emissions that come from the production of traded goods and services.

Costa Rica was once regarded as the poorest of all the colonies of the Spanish Empire, sadly deficient in the silver and gold so coveted by conquistadors. As it turns out, all of the glittering gold and silver those explorers could have ever wanted was there all along, in the country's tropical rainforests—but in the form of two gloriously lustrous species of beetle.

Illustration by Dan Winters When supersecretive agriculture giant Cargill decided to attack the no-calorie-sweetener market dominated by Sweet'N Low, Splenda, and Equal, it sent its best marketers and scientists to basement war rooms and covert labs. Only now can the inside story of Truvia -- and its unlikely success -- be told. SAYS ZANNA MCFERSON , plucking a stevia leaf from a plant on her desk and biting into it, "I knew there had to be something we could do with it." Through the expansive windows of her corner office at Cargill's headquarters, an Aspen-like mega-lodge on the outskirts of suburban Minneapolis, she stares out at the snowy pines and at the horizon beyond

Dear EarthTalk: Is air quality in the United States improving or getting worse? Is it cleaner in some parts of the country than in others?

San Francisco, with a large population crammed into a very small footprint, can be notoriously hard to park in. But, as it's also one of the tech-savviest cities in the country, they've come up with a solution to make it easier to find a place to leave your car and to better value parking places

George Doriot, the father of venture capitalism, liked to quip "Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete." Doriot died in 1987, but his ideas about venture funding can be seen to this day; Intel, Apple, and Cisco (to name a few) are some of the first companies to be funded by venture capitalists. The VCs that followed in his footsteps—including Tom Perkins, Arthur Rock, and Don Valentine—have, through their work, trailblazed a path of American innovation.

Gold-hungry Peruvian miners are eroding the country's portion of the Amazon rainforest at an alarming rate, according to a new study. Small-scale gold panners in the Andean nation have responded to soaring gold prices by revving up the pace of gold mining, stripping the region of its forests.

After a decade of dealing with environmental and regulatory red tape, the first offshore wind farm in the U.S.

The U.S doesn't have much over China at this point. Sure, we have breathable air, but they have more clean energy funding , the world's fastest-growing economy, and at least for now, a head start on the vehicle electrification race.