In the current climate of rising gas and food prices, it should stand to reason that people would find ways to change their most wasteful habits. According to new research from the UK, we need look no further than our own refrigerators. Fully 18 percent of all food purchased for household use in England and Wales is thrown away. The number is even higher for families with children at 27 percent. A now four year-old study of similar measure in the U.S. puts the American number around 14 percent, with nearly half of all food readied for harvest never making it to a dinner table.

Plating at Home

Cost: $30
Easy | | | | | Hard

You may not want to rechrome a '57 Chevy, but you can coat small objects using kits designed for plating jewelry. This $30 plating pen (pmcsupply.com) uses electricity the same as the bumper factory does, just with a couple AA batteries instead of a car-size transformer.

It's a slow-motion horror movie: Nuclear waste leaks from underground storage shafts and seeps toward a river, where it contaminates drinking water used by millions of people. That's exactly the scenario unfolding at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in rural Washington State.

The solution, too, sounds like a page ripped from a Hollywood screenplay: Insert two industrial-strength electrodes deep into the ground, and melt the soil—along with everything around it—into solid glass, trapping the toxic waste for thousands of years.

The U.S.