I often joke that New York City residents seem to regard any place beyond the Hudson River as some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where dark-eyed cannibals rule a savage environment until you reach San Francisco.

It's why they don't mind dumping all their sewage there.  It makes a nice barrier.

But the latest bout of sewage was not intentional.  And it impacted the first annual IronMan Triathlon in the city.  The experience of those in the Aquadraat Sports IRONMAN U.S. Championship was not great this weekend - even for the exorbitant cost of doing anything in New York City.

The Olympics can never be green, given that countries spend $14 billion tearing down and building stuff and then people fly and drive in from all over the place to watch.  But they can at least be relatively green.

 As Melissa C. Lott at Scientific American Blogs notes, the Brits did it right; the event was built with sustainability as part of the planning.  From recycling to energy efficiency, plenty of their materials and buildings are being repurposed, so in the Green Olympics of Olympics, London is #1

"The formation of a new science of biotic controls,” predicted Rachel Carson in "Silent Spring" 50 years ago next month, was going to save us from pesticides.

She was wrong that DDT would give you cancer if you sprayed it but she was right in believing that the future of agriculture rested solidly on genetic solutions to problems that chemicals were then solving.

Why, then, are her intellectual descendants so against science?  Mostly, it's because they never read her book, they have simply read activists discussing what her book was about; being anti-agriculture and gravitating to what she perceived as the problem (DDT and pesticides) rather than one factor (misuse).

Current policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are inadequate for dealing with the threat that they pose - for every emission that America alone reduced (and we have reduced a lot, we are back at 1992 levels) China added that and more, and India would also like to have air conditioning.

Yet anyone who contends there has to be a hard stop on fossil fuels has basically eliminated themselves from a rational policy discussion - the energy density of gasoline is unmatched and we would need to create a nuclear power plant worth of clean energy every day for the next 50 years to meet our energy needs right now.  

There is a subsection of the science community that loves Rachel Maddow; she is literate and she has the right politics.  But most of science is doing a facepalm because her slippery slope reasoning about 'fracking', if applied to any field of science, would call a halt to research all over the country.

Global warming and more water would be good for surfers, right? 

Nope.  Did you see any surfing in "Waterworld" or"The Day After Tomorrow"?  Nope, because higher sea levels mean terrible breaks.  As Sam Kornell at Pacific Standard puts it, "the contour of a wave is as important as its size, and the way a wave builds and breaks is determined chiefly by the shape of the ocean floor as it meets the shoreline."

Even a foot change in the tide line can mean the difference between great and mediocre waves and researchers believe sea levels could rise six inches by 2030, and a foot by 2050, or more.

Usain Bolt runs faster than you.  He makes it look easy but he certainly works hard at it.  He also has an advantage you don't - the right genes.

Is that random?  Maybe.  Mutation and genetic drift and random walks are all aspects of how we got to where we are but we may be on the road to creating better athletes too. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans writing in Nature News note that almost every male Olympic sprinter and power athlete ever tested carries the 577R allele, a variant of the gene ACTN3.

About half of Eurasians and 85% of Africans carry at least one copy of this 'power gene'(Berman, Y.&North, K. N. Physiology 25, 250–259, 2010).

Traces of 2,500-year-old chocolate on a plate in the Yucatan peninsula may mean chocolate was a condiment or sauce with solid food in pre-Hispanic cultures rather than as a beverage reserved for the elite.

Or it could have spilled. 

The discovery announced by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History also suggests that there may be ancient roots for traditional dishes eaten in today's Mexico, such as mole, the chocolate-based sauce often served with meats. The traces of chemical substances considered "markers" for chocolate were found on fragments of plates uncovered at the Paso del Macho archaeological site in Yucatan in 2001 and recently analyzed.

"Total Recall" may be getting creamed by critics but fans of VR headsets are firmly behind the Oculus Rift.

The Oculus Rift is a head-mounted display with a few features that make it ideal for gamers;  impressive head-tracking capabilities; stereoscopic 3D rendering; a wide field of view - 110 degrees, compared to around 40 degrees for most headsets —so you don’t see the screen. And multiple inputs (DVI/HDMI and USB). When wearing the Oculus, each eye gets close and personal with a 640x800 LCD screen for a total resolution of 1,280x800 in 720p.