For years, we’ve been told to plan our daily diet by thinking food groups and calories. Now we’re told to choose by color. ”Orange and green, definitely, we should have something from these groups every day,” Lilan Cheung, director of health promotion and communication with the Harvard School of Public Health, told an AP reporter. “Purple or blue, dark green and orange. Reds don’t need to be part of the daily diet mix but they should be eaten frequently.” Turns out the disease-fighting phytochemicals and antioxidants we hear so much about are often natural plant pigments — the carotenoids that make carrots orange, for example, or the anthocyanins that give beets their lipstick hues.

If you’re looking for an alternative to obtrusive rain barrels and expensive cisterns, check out Rainwater HOG, a system of 47-gallon plastic tanks with a sleek, 71″ x 19.5″ x 8.5″ profile that can fit along narrow passages, under decks, or in other underused spaces. The modular design enables you to add on capacity and even put the tanks in multiple locations. Only drawback, as far as I can tell — they’re made of virgin plastic, with no recycled content.

Get an online sneak peak of the new California Academy of Sciences, which will open this week. Unlike typical natural history museums, which architect Renzo Piano dubbed “kingdoms of darkness,” the stunning new facility is suffused with light. The combined natural history museum, aquarium, indoor rainforest, planetarium, and world-class research and education facility is on track for LEED Platinum certification. Its 2.5-acre living roof, which mimics the San Francisco Bay area’s rolling topography, is designed in part as replacement habitat for the imperiled Bay Checkerspot butterfly. A transparent four-story dome in the Academy’s east wing houses the “Rainforests of the World” exhibit, complete with birds, butterflies, and frogs living amongst the jungle vegetation. As executive director Greg Farrington notes, the new Academy looks forward and embraces life rather than cataloging the dark halls of distant history. The museum seeks to explore, in his words, “how we got here, and how are we going to find a way to stay.”

The University of British Columbia Botanical Garden has a new forest canopy walkway that enables visitors to explore the treetop biodiversity of the lush Pacific Coastal Rainforest. Continuing a trend at other public gardens, it’s reportedly the first canopy walkway in Canada. 

Here’s a statistic that will come in handy next time you’re at a one of those cocktail parties where somebody pooh-poohs biological diversity by asking “Who needs insects anyway?” According to a paper in the journal Ecological Economics, the economic value of pollinators, especially bees, is about $217 billion a year. As reported in Science Daily, the study suggests that if it continues, the current decline of pollinators worldwide will have the biggest effect on fruits and vegetables, followed by oilseed crops. Crops that generally don’t depend on pollinators, such as cereals, sugar cane, and spices, would suffer fewer adverse affects.

So far in this year’s presidential campaign we’ve heard about sexism, ageism, racism, and other social ills. Well, what about phytoism?  How come it’s socially acceptable to put down plants? Why is it elitist to eat arugula (or frequent “fern bars,” or drink beverages made from coffee beans), but not elitist to dine on a trophy animal? As one of my favorite bloggers pointed out today, arugula is available at any local McDonalds, but there isn’t even a website that sells moose meat, which all of a sudden is considered as American as Thanksgiving turkey.

If you’re headed to the Venice Biennale in the next couple of months, check out the latest figment of MAD Architects‘ imagination — Superstar, a mobile, self-sustaining city capable of housing, growing food, producing energy, and recycling the waste of 15,000 people. The Beijing-based firm conceived Superstar as an alternative to the “sloppy patchwork of poor construction and nostalgia” (if not the astonishing diversity of the vegetable markets and array of restaurants) of the typical Chinatown in cities around the world. The sparkling, three-dimensional star-shaped superstructure, which has been described as looking a little like a Cylon Base Star from Battlestar Galactica by Inhabitat, will be able to travel around the globe, providing a taste of Chinese cuisine and culture wherever it docks. 

The Lifepod, Kyu Che’s sustainable, portable, off-the-grid mini-capsule for getting away from it all. Just be back when it’s time to vote.

Urban Farming, a nonprofit group that plants crops for the needy on rooftops and other unused spaces in cities, has launched a vertical agriculture project at four locations in and around downtown L.A. The four new urban farms employ the green wall system developed by Green Living Technologies, a series of modular, 2 foot by 2 foot by 4 inch, stainless steel panels divided into growing cells that are mounted to a building facade. The four L.A. edible walls are between 24 and 30 feet across and 6 feet high and have been planted with bell peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, tomatillos, strawberries, spinach, leeks, and a variety of herbs. Members of the community will maintain the gardens and harvest the food.

Last week the Olympic Village in Beijing officially earned the LEED Gold award from the U.S. Green Building Council under its pilot LEED for Neighborhood Development program. Among the sustainable design features of the complex, as reported in Inhabitat: rainwater, graywater, and storm water collection systems, lots of green roofs and open space, drought-resistant and native plantings, and a network of bicycle and pedestrian paths.