Fireflies make light without electricity, and by copying them, scientists have figured out how to do the same thing. Only instead of the yellowish light of fireflies in the night, a team at Syracuse University has figured out how to make green and orange and red light -- all out of firefly juice.

If you need to flesh out your bucket list, here are 10 natural wonders that usually get left off lists of old faithfuls like the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef and, uh, Old Faithful. Some of these are less well-known because they're remote and hard to get to, but others are right here in the U.S. -- like the giant hot spring ringed with rainbow-colored algae.

Twenty years ago, a 12-year-old rocked the Earth Summit in Rio with a plea to world leaders to get serious about saving the planet. Her name was Severn Suzuki, and today, she hands the torch to another young'un, Brittany Trilford, 17, who will address the leaders of 140 nations as the Rio+20 Earth Summit finally gets off to its official start.

Trilford hails from Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Last winter, she entered the Date with History contest that invited young people to record themselves giving a speech to the leaders of the world about the future they wanted. She won the grand prize, a trip to Rio for the Earth Summit. She didn’t learn until later that she would actually have a chance to speak to at the summit in person.

Trilford’s date with history is at 9 a.m. Eastern time (that’s 6 a.m. on the West Coast). It should be webcast live here. Watch Grist for highlights later in the day, and a link to the video when it’s up. (See update at bottom of post.) Meantime, I caught up with Trilford yesterday with some questions about her speech, her prognosis for the planet, and how she got to be so freaking opinionated.

Denise Morrison grew more than 100 types of plants in her yard in Tulsa, Okla. She had garlic chives and strawberry, apple mint and spear mint, an apple tree and a pecan tree.

But someone complained about it, and city inspectors stopped by. Her plants, they said, were too tall. The entire lawn would have to go.

Morrison knew she was in the right; she had read the city code, which allowed plants over 12 inches if they were meant for human consumption. Hers were, so she got the police involved. They issued a citation, and she and the city went before a judge in August. The judge told them to come back in October.

The next day, the city came to Morrison's yard and bulldozed her plants.

Alex Schibli, 72, owns an island, right smack off the coast of Manhattan. (Delightfully, it’s called “Rat Island.” Great name for a NYC island, or BEST name?) When you hear “owns an island” you figure “Romney rich,” but Schibli only paid $176,000 for the 2.6 acres. That might seem like a lot, but when a studio apartment in the East Village is going for $400,000, really, it's a steal. Schibli told the New York Post why he chose to buy a little piece of nature:

I’d always dreamed of having my own place for peace and quiet in the middle of the ocean. When Rat Island came on the market, I had to buy it ...

I love swimming, canoeing and collecting mussels -- and we’re going to have lots of fun with my family. There’ll be picnics, barbecues and the occasional party, but, more than anything, we’re just going to relax.

The key to small-space living is not feeling cramped, which makes this Barcelona apartment the pinnacle of the genre. The home uses sliding doors to open the 430-square-foot apartment up for a sense of space, or close it for privacy. But the centerpiece of the house is the hole in the ceiling -- a plant-filled half-outdoor shower that's built like a chimney, open to the sky. (Don't worry -- there are camouflaging plants on top, so the drones will have to work VERY hard to see you naked.)

Photo by Krissy Venosdale.

Four and a half billion years is a hard number to digest. That’s the age of the Earth, and a lot has happened in that time. The geologic record contains dramatic climate swings, the formation of entire continents, the proliferation of new species -- as well as mass extinctions. But no matter what has happened in the past, life goes on. Well, in the case of mass extinctions, at least some life does ...

To help people get their heads around our role in all this, geologists use the analogy of a clock: If you compress all of the Earth's history into a single day, humans do not show up on the scene until a minute before midnight.

Q. Dear Umbra,

I live in a pretty nice trailer park with lots of room to grow beautiful organic food. My neighbors spray pesticides at the fence line, and the pesticide drift has poisoned some of my vegetables and the soil. I stopped talking to them the second time it happened. The park manager has told them not to do it. But they continue. How can I stop them from trying to poison me? I talked with the mayor and she didn’t know what I should do, as there are no city laws addressing the problem. And what do I do with the soil and the plants that have been poisoned?

Patricia
Lafayette, Colo.

A. Dearest Patricia,

I am going to let you in on a little secret. There are times when I dole out advice from up here on the Advice Doling Console and I think to myself, “Hmm, easier said than done.” I know this is going to be one of those times, because it is hard to find a confident-yet-not-overly-confrontational way to talk to people about their habits, especially people with whom you share a fence line. But let’s take a look at how you can protect yourself and your veggies.

If your nature hike goes seriously awry, your cell phone will probably be your best chance of survival -- if you can get signal, you can let people know where you are. If you can't get signal, well, it is basically a hunk of metal. But, it's a hunk of metal that can (if absolutely necessary) be busted up and used to make a signal mirror, a compass, a spear, a fire-starter, and a fishing lure. Saved by the cell!

The Art of Manliness has instructions on how to make all these survival necessities out of cell phone bits (plus a snare for small game, if you happened to have headphones with you when you get lost).

You know how you don't bike to work because you get hot and sweaty and gross? A group of MIT graduates has stolen that excuse. They copied technology from spacesuits and used it to make what BikeBlogNYC has rightly dubbed "the TANG of dress shirts" -- a sharp-looking top that regulates your body heat. No sweaty pit spots! No overheating before your meeting! Now helmet up.

The shirt's called the Apollo shirt, because it's space technology and presumably also makes you look like a Greek god. The creators, whose company is called the Ministry of Supply, say that it pulls heat away from your body and stores it "like a battery" -- when you get into your badly climate controlled office, you get that heat back to battle the A/C. (Although you, Grist reader, of course work in an office that properly manages its temperature in a sustainable way.) Also there are vents for airflow, and we're going to give the Ministry of Supply bonus points for creating a wrinkle-free shirt without formaldehyde.