Today is World Water Day, and this year's theme is devoting to the scarcity of clean, drinkable H20 on our planet.

But innovative ideas, like PlayPumps in South Africa, are solving the problem -- in a surprisingly fun way.

Taking a few minutes to turn off electrical devices won't just help you save the planet, it can also help you save a few bucks off your electric bill each month.

Colorado's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) based in Golden, is the home of the nation's only large-scale pilot plant for the production of ethanol from biomass. Engineers and scientists at NREL lead the way in research on renewable energy technologies, from photovoltaics (solar cells) to wind to renewable fuels. NREL received a surge of media attention early this year when 32 staff positions were eliminated and then hastily reinstated just in time for President Bush's visit to NREL in February. All of this followed the president's State of the Union address in which he announced that "America is addicted to oil" and pledged a 22 percent increase in investments into clean energy. NREL's Andy Aden told LIME about the promises and limitations of cellulosic ethanol.

Back in March, we wrote about how to talk to Michael Crichton and his ilk. It seems almost impossible that there could be anyone left who denies that the Earth's climate is changing as a result of human activity. But amazingly enough, they do exist and they are extremely vocal: evidence the Competitive Enterprise Institute ads that we wrote about earlier this week.

Now WorldChanging, a blog we read regularly, has issued a call for help in dealing with these poor fools whose heads are in the sand (or somewhere less polite). Having noticed a rise in posted comments from "climate denialists," the folks at WorldChanging are calling for some groupthink. Here's what they're after:

Are you sitting down? Because here's some shocking news: A Bush administration-commissioned study found that the atmosphere is indeed growing warmer, and that human fingerprints are everywhere. But according to the New York Times, "White House officials noted that it was just the first of 21 planned assessments."

The Bush administration has long maintained that there is a lack of scientific consensus on global warming and its causes, and that this uncertainty must be resolved before action can be taken. The new study, undertaken by the Climate Change Science Program - a department the administration created four years ago to study the uncertainties - found that previous discrepancies in records of temperature increase are no longer apparent, and that "our understanding of observed climate changes and their causes have increased," according to the press release.

Climate scientists are shaking their heads in disbelief over a press release from the UK's University of Leicester about a "new theory to explain global warming." According to a Russian researcher, rising global temperatures are the result not - as is now nearly universally accepted among climate experts - of increased carbon dioxide levels but of a meteor that crashed in Siberia at the turn of the century.

Here’s an interesting little bit of news about potential future impacts of climate change: According to an astronomer in the U.K., 40 years from now it might be nearly impossible to use telescopes on the ground to see into space, thanks in part to increasing cloud cover caused by a changing climate.

Can an enzyme save the planet? It’s highly unlikely, but kind of fun to think about. Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine discovered a “mutant enzyme” that, at least in theory, has interesting implications for global warming.

We all know plants take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis. Some experiments have shown that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more a plant will grow. But many people think there’s a limit, that plants won’t simply continue to take in more CO2 the more we send it into the atmosphere thorugh fossil fuel emissions and burning down rainforests.

Ever wonder what climate change experts talk about when they get together? The blog Daily Kos gives you a chance to find out – well, at least to “listen” in on a virtual roundtable discussion with three renowned climate scientists. Daily Kos sat down for an online chat with Dr. Michael E. Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center; Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York; and Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

They're in the news almost as much as Brad and Angelina, and you know they have something to do with global warming. But what exactly is a greenhouse gas? In a nutshell, they're gases in the atmosphere—both naturally occurring and caused by humans—that absorb and emit radiation.