Tag Archives: environment

La Puna, a high-altitude plateau straddling Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, is not for the faint of heart. Visitors must endure a 10-hour drive from the closest city, battle altitude sickness at heights of 3,200 meters or more, withstand harsh ultraviolet radiation and wildly fluctuating temperatures, and manage without—gasp—Wi-Fi or cell …

It’s a perennial question at WIRED: Tech got us into this mess, can it get us out? That’s particularly true when it comes to climate change. As the weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, there are hopes that artificial intelligence—that other existential threat—might be part of the solution. DeepMind, the …

Salmon are legendary for their commitment to procreation. You know the drill: They wander the ocean before returning to rivers where they hatched, fire themselves upstream to spawn, and then drop dead. It’s not such a rigid life cycle, though. In fact, it’s a system that’s allowed a species like …

There’s much, much more to the rainforest than meets the eye. Even a highly trained observer can struggle to pick out individual animals in the tangle of plant life—animals that are often specifically adapted to hide from their enemies. Listen to the music of the forest, though, and you can …

Whether you love lagers or extra-bitter IPAs, you love alpha acids and just don’t know it. These are the compounds in hops that impart that bitter taste, which can be subtle or intense, depending on the cultivar. For centuries, farmers who produce hops for traditional European beer making—particularly in Germany, …

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Gergana Daskalova was nine months old when she was taken in by her grandparents in their small village in Bulgaria. It was soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and her parents had …

Brunch tomorrow in Texas will take place under the eye of Sauron. From about 10:20 am local time in San Antonio, the sky will begin to darken with an annular solar eclipse, in which the moon crosses directly in front of the sun at a time the satellite is especially …

It’s been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers—colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn’t the …

Unless you’re running around barefoot, you experience heat waves through air temperature. For the most part, that’s how scientists track them too. “Heat extremes have been always studied based on air temperature, in part because we have a lot of observations of air temperatures,” such as from meteorological stations, says …

With little fanfare, the European Union has launched a huge climate experiment. On October 1, the EU kicked off the initial phase of a Europe-wide tax on carbon in imported goods. This marks the first time a carbon border tax has been tried at this scale anywhere in the world. …