Predictions that global climate change will lead to more extreme weather patterns have not been lost on the arid, landlocked nation of Mongolia, and beginning this month, this sparsely populated country of 3.1 million is embarking on a unique experiment address the effects of a warming climate.

With its legendary harsh dry winters and short, hot summers, Mongolia is already a land of temperature extremes.

Some recycled goods or projects are just plain weird! While others are simply wonderful. As They say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

All recycling is good, don’t get me wrong! Whatever we can do to promote keeping junk and garbage out of our overloaded landfills is worth it.

You have “geo,” meaning earth, and “thermal” meaning heat. Together, you have “geothermal,” another word for super hot earth. Where and how does earth get so darn hot?

Birds are great to have around. They eat harmful bugs and are fun to listen to and watch. If you want to attract more birds to your home, garden or school, try building them a nestbox. Birds can have a hard time finding a good place to build a home, especially in cities. With a nestbox, they can move in without much fuss or muss.

Siberian cranes are critically endangered. Whooping cranes and red-crowned cranes are endangered. Sandhill cranes are making a comeback, but many are relocating to Pennsylvania.

Florida cranes nonchalantly wander neighborhoods and golf courses, while Demoiselles are dying out in Turkey — but number in the hundreds of thousands elsewhere.

From Germany to Japan, India to Uganda, and Florida to Bhutan, cranes and their traditional, threatened habitats are making news.

Instruments at Japan’s stricken Fukushima power plant on Wednesday detected radioactive xenon in the plant’s #2 reactor, suggesting that a recent burst of nuclear activity had occurred inside the reactor’s mangled core. Although the chance that a small burst would become a self-sustaining nuclear reaction was remote, workers nevertheless scrambled to “extinguish” the activity with boric acid in order to prevent further damage to the fuel rods or what remains of the reactor vessel — and to prevent any additional release of radioactivity into the environment.

Around the world, consumers, retailers, environmentalists, and politicians are all discussing various facets of the ubiquitous plastic bag.

Plastic has clearly won the “Paper or Plastic” debate. Plastic bags quickly became so economical, plentiful, and convenient that they had captured at least 80 percent of the grocery and convenience store market within 10 years of their introduction, according to the American Plastics Council.