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Solar panels are great—if you own a home. For those still tied to the rental racket, though, the dream of going solar seems like just that: a distant dream. It’s virtually impossible to imagine most modern landlords springing for expensive setups when they won’t even fix a leak in a bathtub!

Some of us here at Modernize are apartment dwellers ourselves, and we solar-minded renters were getting tired of gazing at sweet panel setups like that kid who can never have a puppy because his brother is allergic. Luckily, urban solar is no longer a mere pipe dream: in fact, a new study shows that city-based solar has the potential to generate much more power than the area’s needs. And the solar field has not been deaf to the calls of a growing urban consumer market. A battery of devices now exist that are poised to change how renters power and heat their apartments—from kitchens all the way to the phones in their pockets.

As the Arctic warms, Greenland’s fringe of glaciers is thinning and melting—but the future of the Greenland ice sheet remains a giant question mark. Until recently, that was also true of the ice sheet’s past: Scientists have long debated whether it might have shrunk away to nothing during Earth’s warmest periods. Now, a new study suggests that Greenland was entirely ice free at some point in the last 1.25 million years.

“We should be worried about the Greenland Ice Sheet,” says Joerg Schaefer, a geochemist from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and lead author of the findings, presented yesterday at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting here.

Do not underestimate the babbling brook. When it comes to greenhouse gases, these bucolic water bodies have the potential to create a lot of hot air. According to a new analysis in the journal Ecological Monographs, by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues, the world’s rivers and streams pump about 10 times more methane into our atmosphere than scientists estimated in previous studies.

African countries have agreed to cooperate in setting limits for use of lead in paints with a view to phasing it out by 2020. This is because of its dangers to human beings, especially to children, and the environment.

Drivers are seeing more hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) on the road, but refueling stations for those vehicles are still few and far between. This is about to change, and one reason is a new testing device being validated at California refueling stations that will greatly accelerate station commissioning.

Developed by U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Hydrogen Station Equipment Performance device, or HyStEP, could reduce the time to commission new stations from months to just one week. HyStEP is funded by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Fuel Cell Technologies Office as part of the Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructure Research and Station Technology (H2FIRST) project.