I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of us are glad that the year 2010 of the common era is over, done with, and a candidate for erasure from the Time Vortex if it starts getting uppity again. Sure, it had its ups and downs for all of us - they always do - but last year was a particularly bad one on a large scale. There was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that's destroyed a entire ecosystem, perhaps permanantly. Last January was the earthquake that devastated the island of Haiti, resulting in the …

If you've been watching the news these past few days, you've probably come across the bruhaha over a fuel tanker crashing into the San Francisco Bay Bridge, dumping tens of thousands of gallons of petrochemical fuel into the water and forcing a number of beaches to close, to say nothing of the impact upon the environment. San Francisco, long a haven for the unconventional, unusual, and inventive, has birthed an unusual and effective method for cleaning up and disposing of the spilled fuel: Pads made of human hair and oyster mushroom mycelia. The principle underlying the effort is a simple …