| Welcome to MNN's daily newsletter for Saturday, July 21. For breaking news throughout the day, visit us online at the Mother Nature Network. |
EDITORS' PICKS:
The buzz from Copenhagen is all about its new 'superhighway' for bikes. The real secret to its pioneering urban design, though, is that it puts people first on all its streets. Read the story... |
Catch up on Alec Baldwin's wind turbine catch-22 and San Francisco's controversial solution to panhandlers in our weekly roundup of offbeat environmental news. Read the story...
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Thelma Taormina isn't exactly keen on smart meters. So when a utility worker arrived at her Houston home to install one of the devices, she did what any totally rational homeowner would do: She grabbed her gun. Read the story...
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Our garden reporter (yes, we have a garden reporter) has some tricks to get a second crop of tomatoes -- at no extra cost. Read the story... |
Since traveling can bring you into contact with many things that your body isn't used to, it's easier to get sick. Our blogger, who returned from a recent trip to Guatemala, offers some advice. Read the story... |
THIS DAY IN HISTORY:
 July 21, 365 A.D.: An earthquake believed to be magnitude 8.0 or higher causes widespread destruction on the Greek island of Crete. A tsunami from the quake also devastates Alexandria, Egypt. July 21, 1970: The Aswan High Dam (at right, in 2008) is completed across the Nile River. A pet project of Egyptian President Gamel Abdul Nasser, the dam's construction, partly financed by the Soviet Union, raises Cold War tensions. The dam controls the nearly-annual floods along the Nile, but its construction has a negative side effect: Those floods deposited fertile soil along the banks of the Nile, and the end of the flooding begins hard times for Egyptian farmers. July 21, 1980: Wilson Pinheiro, head of the Brazilian Rubber Tappers' Union and a fierce opponent of deforestation of the Amazon, is murdered. His colleague, Chico Mendes, meets the same fate eight years later. |
