As The Hollies once sang, “The road is long with many a swine-ing turd”. That will be the hopes of engineers at North Carolina University for their new bioadhesive made from pig manure.

Through pigs we generate 43 billion gallons of manure worldwide each year. It’s spilling everywhere like a warming bowl of soup carried by Michael J Fox and we’re treading in pig slop just to keep our heads above the surface. We simply don’t know what to do with it all, but thankfully civil engineer Ellie Fini had a shitty idea. Pig waste is plentiful in oils very similar to that of petroleum which is the sticky binding usually used in asphalt for road laying. Although it’s too low grade to manufacture gasoline out of, crushing my dreams of pig-poop-powered cars, Fini and her team of engineers have used it to create a binding solution like that of petroleum. At just 56 cents a gallon it is a cheaper, more sustainable and simply hilarious alternative. Just mix the bioadhesive with rocks and it’s good to go.

Paul Walker will never get to drive on pig poo roads and that gives me a sad.

“How bad can this pig manure problem be? I’ve never seen it so I don’t give a shit! ” I hear you shout, and I applaud you for the pun despite how unimaginative it is. Yet there is a very real human reason to care though – superbugs. Not the Ant-Man, Marvel Studios kind. The MRSA, antibiotic resistant and humanity-wiping-out kind.

China raises and consumes roughly half of the planet’s pigs which produces an estimated 618 billion kilograms of manure each year (Side note – to my surprise, this fact is not the pick up line I thought it’d be. Do I need to work on my game??? No…no it’s the women who are wrong. My mum says I’m a catch). That’s a lot of waste which invariably slips and slides its way into China’s watercourses meaning some people are drinking pig waste. This isn’t great in of itself, but factor in the massive amounts of antibiotics in the pig’s feed to encourage growth and try and keep them alive and what you actually end up with is pig waste filled with antibiotic-resistant super bacteria invariably slipping and sliding into the China’s watercourses, meeting up and palling around with other antibiotic-resistant super bacteria and breeding into a sort of Megatron type super bug. And some people then drink it. In fairness I’ve seen people drink worse during Freshers’ week at Uni, however if someone chooses to down a pint of Wray&Nephew, absynth, pickle juice and urine then they CHOSE to do so of their own volition. There’s a reason they don’t exclusively serve pig poop superbug water at Revolution.

You equestrian wankers that let your horses shit on the road – it’s not the same thing and it’s not cool. You’re wankers.

To be able to take the manure away and use it for something useful and profitable could be a really cool thing – they also filter out all the smelly stuff during the process so the roads won’t stink and the leftovers can be used by farmers to fertilise with. It just goes to show that no matter how much crap life gives you, you can always find a way to drive your Fiesta over it. Or something inspirational like that. Poop lol.

I am a proponent of the idea that the biggest problems facing the world right now; climate change, the economy, immigration and terrorism, are better solved in an international forum and on a bigger scale which is why I was so disappointed with the result of the Brexit referendum. However it appears the issue of climate change has been downgraded as a priority even further.

Two days into her new post as a Prime Minister that nobody elected, Theresa May abolished the Department for Energy and Climate Change and moved the responsibility to a new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Given the government’s commitments to addressing climate change it seems a bit odd to shunt them into a department where it isn’t even mentioned in the name, although not surprising from a woman who wants to blast your human rights into the top corner like a Cristiano Ronaldo free kick.

I see no difference here.

May then proceeds to appoint former Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom to the position of Environment Secretary. To say Andrea Leadsom’s agenda is “not entirely environmentally friendly” would be an understatement on par with Steven Irwin insisting “this particular sting ray is harmless”. This is a woman who, when appointed Energy Minister in 2015, asked officials:

“When I first came to this job one of my two questions was: ‘Is climate change real?’ and the other was ‘Is hydraulic fracturing safe?’ And on both of those questions I am now completely persuaded,”.

She is now an advocate of fracking and an avid climate change ignorer.

Andrea, climate change is real. Even ignoring the mountains of data that explains just how real it is, maybe you could try using your demonic powers to open up some sort of portal from whichever fiery circle of hell you reside and peer into the mortal realm – the floods last year made Cumbria look like a live-action Little Mermaid reboot.

And then there’s the fracking. If you’re unsure what fracking is, it basically involves drilling down into rock, injecting water, sand and chemicals into it at high pressure until the gas and it flows out so we can use it for our barbeques during our two days of summer or whatever. It’s kind of like waterboarding a suspected terrorist until they say or do anything to make it stop.

If that explanation makes fracking still sound innocent to you, it isn’t. Many parts of America and even France and Germany have gone so far as to ban it outright. France – a country that considers eating cow udders a delicacy – thought it was too much for fuck’s sake. The thing most critics point to are the potential health and environmental impacts of waterboarding a landmass with chemicals, including the contamination of our water supplies,  increased seismic activity and flares of flaming methane. Let’s break that down – she thinks turning Britain into greenless, quaking, barren wasteland where flames shoot out from the fucking ground is a super idea because she is the Antichrist and wants to turn Britain into Hell2.0. She’s also now in charge of the fox hunting ban and is committed to repealing it.

“Oh that? That’s completely fine. Yeah, this is fine. Fire is supposed to come out of those pipes. This will make gas prices marginally cheaper, maybe. You can use the money you’ve saved to buy bottled water instead. The fumes are going to be good for you. Renewable energy? I’m Environment Secretary, not a fucking dirty hippy.”

This is just a brief insight into what we have to look forward to then. When the world is completely submerged in acidic water and you are balanced on flotsam floating through Cumbria, battling Andrea Leadsom to the death over the last bottle of Evian, using improvised weapons made from the shin bones of your perished loved ones, the ground will shake under the waves like Michael J Fox on a tumble dryer due to the constant fracking. Theresa May will soar overhead having revealed her true form, her giant leathery wings and horns blocking out the dying sun as you remember that you read it here first.

Plastic surrounds us. I’m typing this on a plastic keyboard, later I’ll fill up my plastic bottle to take with me to the gym – the debit card I pay for the gym with is plastic. Even after I’ve been dead for a hundred years, my plastic water bottle will probably still be here for a thousand years more. I desperately don’t want the most lasting mark I leave on this world to be a bottle of water I got in a Boots meal deal.

The fact is plastic could literally surround us. Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times and we create enough plastic film to wrap Texas up like a sandwich in a packed lunch. These kinds of figures are mind bending, so try mentally picturing this: our planet is tied up in plastic bondage ropes, Texas is in a plastic gimp suit and neither of them have safe words. Plastics production amounted to 311million tonnes in 2014, only half of this was recycled and even less was reused. Production is predicted to double again in the next 20 years. I understand why plastic is so prevalent as I use it enough myself; it’s strong, functional and cheap to produce, however it simply doesn’t biodegrade or go anywhere, piling up faster than sexual assault cases against an 80’s TV presenter. When 8 million tonnes of it end up the ocean every year we can agree something needs to be done.

Rule 34 of the internet – if you spend your morning searching for “earth bondage porn” you will eventually find it.

Producing plastics that will degrade from renewable resources is the next step to take, however this doesn’t address the problem of the existing plastic sitting around like an unwelcome house guest overstaying their welcome. This is why a new species of bacteria able to eat one of the most common plastics could be a really exciting prospect.

PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) is the plastic commonly found in water bottles, and some Japanese scientists have isolated bacteria from outside a bottle recycling facility that can break it down and turn it into food for itself. Think of the bacteria as a bunch of lads in chinos having great banter in town when Jay (who’s an absolute LEDGE by the way) suggests a cheeky Nando’s. That bottle recycling facility is Nando’s, the plastic bottles are peri-peri chicken.

What a time to be alive! Lad culture is the best thing to ever happen in the history of ever!!!!! I love browsing UNILAD articles!!!!!!!!! They’re hilarious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And so well written!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The process itself takes quite a long time, roughly 6 weeks to eat a thumbnail sized piece, so the aim is to speed this up so as to make a meaningful reduction on plastics already in the environment. Maybe some sort of shitey loyalty scheme like Ed Sheeran’s Nando’s black card or a free side of macho peas could encourage the bacteria to eat more plastic quicker. To be honest the plastic sounds a more appealing meal to me than Nando’s but I guess I just don’t have the banter to smash it with the lads. I hate Nando’s.

Top lad. Great banter.

Have you ever looked at a two tonne rhino and thought “I’d like to fight that rhino with my bare fists and try to defeat it fairly in hand to horn combat”? Of course you haven’t because you know that rhinos are essentially weaponised cows on steroids and that you would be shanked and trampled like a snitch in a prison riot within seconds. Unfortunately, rhino horns were recently declared more valuable than gold, diamonds and cocaine at £40k a pound and is used as an aphrodisiac. Apparently ingesting ground up horn gets you quite literally horny. Haha. Sorry.

That’s why brave poachers have to firstly use their brave helicopters to stay at a brave distance, using their brave high calibre weapons to incapacitate the rhino before bravely setting down and using a brave chainsaw to bravely hack off the horn. Then they bravely leave the animal to suffer and die in great pain if it wasn’t already dead before getting back in their brave helicopter and bravely running away before the authorities can catch them. Sheer bravery.

This kind of shithousery means that the black rhino is critically endangered, that they could be extinct within the next ten years and that depressing graphs like this one are being made.

Here we see the rhino population dropping faster than your mum’s knickers after a glass of wine. I touch myself to the image of both.

So what can be done to stop these rhinos being poached out of existence? Well my first thought was to set up decoy rhinos by reusing the animatronics from the original Jurassic Park films. When the poachers land to take the horn a heavily armed task force leaps from the bushes and holds them at gunpoint. Jim Carrey then emerges from the fake rhino’s anus, like that scene from Ace Ventura, holding a rhino’s horn. He then proceeds to sodomise each and every one of the poachers with said rhino horn to truly test its effectiveness as an aphrodisiac.

The rhino’s saviour emerges from his colon cocoon

Fortunately smarter and less unhinged minds have created an effective and more practical solution (I think Jim Carrey’s schedule is taken up with Dumberererer and Dumbererererererer 3 anyway). The Rhino Rescue Project is devaluing rhino horns by infusing them with a dye to render the interior of the horn valueless as an ornament. The dye also contains ectoparasiticides, making it poisonous to humans yet completely harmless to the rhino itself. For want of a better phrase it will seriously fuck up any poacher or sexually inadequate weirdo that handles it with, best case scenario, “diarrhoea, nausea, vomiting, severe headaches, all the way up to nervous symptoms, which could be permanent”. At worst, some ectoparasiticides precipitate the development of cancers later on in life. For any musicians reading, Cancer Horn would make a great name for your metal band.

While calling a rhino worthless might give it low self esteem, it’s better than being shot. Trust me, I know – I have low self esteem and I’ve done laserquest.

Hopefully this means the Vietnamese man looking to spice things up in the bedroom will have to do what we all do instead of snorting horn dust – picture Mary Berry of the Great British Bakeoff shaking her head at you disapprovingly and patting her riding crop against her palm as she tells you that the victoria sponge cake you baked for her had a “soggy bottom” and that you need to be punished. That’s what we all do isn’t it? Isn’t it???

I didn’t know Cecil the lion personally, in fact I don’t know any lions personally. One thing I do know about Cecil though, apart from him having a ridiculously underwhelming name for such a mighty predator, is that in June 2015 American dentist Walter Palmer paid a reported $50,000 to go to Zimbabwe, shoot Cecil with a bow and arrow, later shoot him with a rifle and then cut off the lion’s head and skin. This caused some minor international outrage.

I’m not ashamed to say I googled “funny cecil the lion”

Fast forward to 5^th October as David Cameron and his cronies introduce a five pence charge on single use carrier bags across England, those scumbags. Despite seeing middle aged women posting their disgust on Facebook at this denial of what they see as a basic human right, like water or touching themselves to Fifty Shades of Grey, I for one felt like 5p was nowhere near enough. Why? You’ve got to consider the real cost of a plastic carrier bag.

In the body of water between Japan and the USA sits the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is caused by ocean currents whisking the rubbish we’ve discarded into the water and bringing it all together into swirling poisonous soup. It’s kind of like that bit in Finding Nemo where the fish ride the East Australian Current to Sydney except the fish are used condoms and Sydney is a swirling poisonous soup. It’s hard to guess how big this patch is as a lot of the debris sits just underneath the water, but the best estimates at the moment think it’s about twice the size of Texas. It’s only getting bigger too as much of it is not biodegradable, and these patches occur all over our oceans and coastlines.

So now I ask you to consider the whale. Whereas Cecil the Lion probably weighed around a measly 190kg, the average Blue Whale has a mass of 190,000kg. Whales can have tongues as heavy as an elephant and hearts as big as a car, and yet their throats are only as wide as a beach ball which limits what and how they eat. They’re like the Roomba vacuum cleaners of the sea, hoovering up teeny-tiny shrimp called krill. Unfortunately, as they hoover up the krill they can also hoover up a whole bunch of plastic such as from these floating garbage swirls, blocking a whale’s digestion system and leading to starvation and death.

I don’t need an excuse to use a gif of a cat in a shark costume on a Roomba chasing a duckling, but it’s nice to have one. This is exactly how whales feed.

Many whales die slowly and painfully this way every year, clogged up by plastic bags with a Finding Nemo dvd case protruding through their stomach wall. It’s estimated over 1 million birds and 100,000 marine animals die each year from plastic debris. Imagine if Crush hadn’t been there to guide Marlin and Dory to Sydney and had instead suffocated with a Tesco carrier bag stuck around his head. They never would have found Nemo and Squirt would have been left an orphan.

I don’t need an excuse to use this picture of a brilliant Darla Hallowen costume, so I’m not going to give one.

Fortunately there are many groups trying to find ingenious ways to combat the pollution of the oceans, my personal favourite being two cool surfer dudes from Perth who have invented this neat Seabin which automatically collects waste from marinas.

Some practical ways you can help are re-using bags for life or maybe even learning how to balance a week’s worth of shopping on your head as you walk back to your car – I don’t know how committed to this you are and I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. Ironically, you can get a free plastic bag with the purchase of live or raw fish as well as a variety of bladed goods such as axes and knives. So if Walter Palmer had been a lumberjack rather than a Dentist he could have bought an axe and received a free bag for it, using that bag to choke a whale to death and saved himself $50,000. Whales are an infinitely bigger and more impressive trophy and he could have used the money he saved to build a giant wall to mount the whale’s head on. If anything he was thinking too small with Cecil. If anything we should be charging $50,000 for plastic bags, not 5p.

Have you ever noticed how when you become aware of your own breathing you start having to control it manually? Perhaps this has just happened to you now as you’ve read this. That once autonomous process now seems really annoying. Haha. One of the reasons you’re able to breathe, and also why the planet isn’t a big stinky pit of ammonia and methane anymore, is photosynthesis. If you somehow managed to sleep/bunk your way through GCSE biology, photosynthesis is a complicated process which basically involves light, carbon dioxide and water being converted into sugar and oxygen by some living thing. If that was too much for you, imagine a Jehovah’s Witness knocking at your house but instead of them converting you to Christianity they convert your sister’s bedroom into a super cool man cave with an arcade machine and a massage chair. Now replace Jehovah’s Witness with light and massage chair with oxygen and you’ve got it. If that confused you further then there’s simply no explaining this to you and I give up.

Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and saviour Pacman?

Almost all life on earth is reliant on this process and frankly now that I read that back I wonder why Jehovah’s Witnesses are given such a hard time. A problem arises though when we as a species continue to pack ourselves into cramped cities like sardines in a tin, and that tin is the source of a huge amount of carbon emissions which causes the tin to heat up and get polluted and makes it a generally unpleasant area to live. What the hell are those sardines doing in there?

In steps London-based artsy brainbox Julian Melchiorri with his Silk Leaf. This artificial leaf is made by extracting the chloroplasts (the cells in the plants that do the photosynthesising) from plants and binding them with silk fibres. Hard to beleaf right? I’m not even sorry for that. These imposter leaves can then engage in photosynthesis like ordinary leaves but without having to be plugged into the ground like those annoying trees have to be. They can theoretically be placed anywhere and the creator hopes for them to be used to help clean city air. If you’ve ever seen Get Him To The Greek you’ll know the bit where Puff Daddy is stroking the furry wall and he says “Imma cover the whole outside of my house in this material”. It’s that general idea but with high-rise buildings covered in fake leaves, like a really big prop tree in a school theatre production, hoovering up all the nasty carbon dioxide from the air.

He also says something about “this is what pussy in the 80’s felt like”. Ladies, if you feel like an artificial leaf down there please go see a doctor.

By far the most exciting potential use for these leaves though is the possibility of using them during SPACE EXPLORATION. Long duration space travel is hindered by the ability to provide a sustainable source of stuff for astronauts to breath. These artificial leaves could be the answer and you can be damn sure I’m excited at the prospect of interplanetary space travel and colonisation. I want to go to Mars and visit an exact replica of the space bar with the three-breasted prostitute from Total Recall and if this leaf can bring that reality a step closer whilst happening to clean up our air then that is fine by me.

Bring it on.

When I was fourteen I watched an episode of Top Gear (R.I.P). I could just stop there and we’d just write this off as the worst blog post of all time ever – and it’s only my first one so that would be impressive. However, despite not knowing its importance at the time, I still think about this episode of Top Gear nearly nine years on.

In this particular episode, sex-symbol James May introduces us to the Honda FCX Clarity, a four door family car and what he dubbed as “the most important car since the car was invented”. As he drove around Los Angeles, looking like a spaniel in lightwash jeans, I was struggling to see the importance. I like episodes of Top Gear where they blow stuff up or travel to the Gaza strip in third hand minis or something. The ones where they act like huge man children and I can laugh at innuendos.

If you didn’t understand the spaniel in lightwash jeans reference, here he is looking like a spaniel in lightwash jeans.

The thing that makes this car important, and why it has stuck with me, is that it is a zero-emission fuel cell vehicle. It has its own on board generator that powers the electric motors that make the car move. If you’re not familiar with the limitations of ordinary electric cars like the G Whiz I’ll put it into terms you might understand. Say you’re on your iPhone, shaking your head at your Auntie sharing a racist post on Facebook and liking attractive girl’s pictures on Instagram. You get a snapchat from bae (please forgive that) and she asks if you’re still awake and if she can send some nudes. You are excited beyond belief, technology is great, how did your grandparents ever survive without this stuff? But just before you can reply with those heart-eye emojis your iPhone dies – you’re out of battery. You scramble for the charger and plug it in but by the time you’re back online she’s already gone to bed thinking you weren’t up. She ends up marrying a doctor and having two children, you die alone.

If my mum is reading this, I have no experience of this happening whatsoever.

The storage of energy, particularly in electric cars, is inherently flawed. They take many hours to fully charge for a very limited run time. 4 hours charging for 30 minutes of driving just doesn’t add up and it isn’t practical not to mention the environmental implications of producing the large number of batteries to run them. They had the same problem powering your mum’s sex toys.

Again, if my mum is reading this I am sorry.

The Clarity uses a hydrogen fuel cell, combining compressed hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate electricity through chemical reaction. Fuel cells are explained here in more depth and with nice colourful pictures which I always appreciate. Importantly the only thing that is emitted from the car is water which is what you get when you mix hydrogen and oxygen – H2o. This means that rather than having to plug it in every 30 minutes (like a damn iPhone, what is up with that battery life? Am I right???? Like and share this post if you agree!!!!) you simply fill this car up just like its fossil fuelled cousin only with compressed hydrogen rather than dead dinosaurs. The result is a practical car fuelled by the most  abundant element in the universe that can never run out and a vehicle with range and performance similar of the petrol alternative.

It would take a considerable amount of hydrogen to power your mum’s dildo.

So why the hell aren’t we all driving round in these things? Why when I look out of my window aren’t there flying hydrogen cars whizzing past like an episode of The Jetsons?

Firstly, when I previously stated to “simply” fill a car up with compressed hydrogen, it is not actually that simple. Despite being so plentiful, hydrogen doesn’t occur naturally on earth in large quantities, much like a Galaxy Truffle in a box of celebrations. Has anyone actually ever seen one of those? I mean they’re pictured on the box but I don’t think I’ve ever had one. Anyway, naturally occurring hydrogen is usually attached to some other element and isolating it on an industrial scale take a significant amount of energy and effort and actually creates more carbon dioxide. There’s also the problem of storing the hydrogen. In liquid form there is inevitable energy loss from its refrigeration and there are obvious anxieties about high pressure storage being accessible to the public – I wouldn’t shake a can of coke and then give it to my Grandma. Not after last time.

She’s never been the same since.

Possibly the biggest problem is the sheer scale of uprooting the current dead dinosaur juice infrastructure and replacing it with a large-scale system to move this gypsy water stuff around the country. To do that would take a lot of money, and money is something we don’t have a lot of at the moment. There are currently only 11 hydrogen fuelling stations in the UK and only 4 of those are open to the public which could prove to be a bit of a ball ache if you happen to live in the Shetland Islands.

Nonetheless I think this technology is super exciting. It isn’t the finished article, even nine years after I first heard of it, but improvements are being made all the time. Who knows, maybe in a few years we could all be living the dream – driving cars powered by the tears of our secondary school maths teachers to dogging sites all over Britain.

Again mum, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Maybe your internet has slowed down and that episode of Orange is the New Black isn’t buffering. There are only so many Pepe the Frog memes on Instagram to like I guess. It’s more likely that you’re just someone I’ve click baited here Buzzfeed style and you’re just politely yet confusedly reading this. If you’re here for ’10 Times Adolf Hitler was TOTALLY relatable (and adorable)’ then you’re in for a disappointment. An article for another time perhaps.

Basically, I like science – science is interesting and cool. Maybe not in the conventional sense like clubbing, having sex and smoking, but I think it is. I also like the planet and the things that inhabit it and think ideas and innovations that look to keep the fuel wars/apocalypse at bay are cool too. Sometimes though, despite my best intentions, I find a lot stuff I read about that should excite me does the exact opposite. Science can also be really boring, dense and confusing.

You can see where this is going. Me, a man with no formal scientific qualifications and armed only with sheer nerd will-power, intends to simplify the science behind the things that should allow our children to use this planet in the future without fighting over its resources with makeshift spears or having drinking their own piss Bear Grylls style.

The environment. Science. Ben Kenobi not recognising R2-D2 in A New Hope. I’m aiming to be able to combine and explain at least two of these things in a way that we can both understand. Let’s learn about cool new innovations in green technology together. Let’s get behind innovations that can change our lives on this planet for the better. Let’s annoy our friends and loved ones with our incessant hippy science shit.

I’m also really good at photoshop.