Tag Archives: environment

This story originally appeared on Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There was a time when we human beings used to put animals on trial for their alleged crimes against us. The earliest of these prosecutions in the Western tradition of law appears to be a case …

The global temperature numbers for September are in, and they are not good. “This month was, in my professional opinion as a climate scientist—absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather posted Tuesday on X (formerly known as Twitter).  Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, read that post …

In 1919, an entrepreneur named Nils Halvorsen Norheim set up an automated factory for making flatbreads near Barkåker in Norway, the first of its kind in the country. A century on, his great-great-granddaughter found herself peering into an oven in a tiny kitchen in Trondheim, doing some baking of her …

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Under the relentless sun in Africa, the birthplace of humanity, every living thing had to find a way to beat the heat. Lions rested in the shade, termites built giant ventilation mounds, and elephants evolved giant …

Lego has built an empire out of plastic. It was always thus. The bricks weren’t originally made from wood, or metal, or some other material. Ever since the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, bought Denmark’s first plastic-injection molding machine in 1946, Lego pieces have been derived from oil, a fossil …

New York and the surrounding areas are under a flash flood warning, and the city and state have issued emergency declarations. Parts of Brooklyn received more than 5 inches of rain this morning; Central Park and Midtown Manhattan had around 4 inches, according to the National Weather Service. Trains were …

Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It's like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols …

Two years after the remnants of Hurricane Ian dumped up to 10 inches of rain on New York City in just two hours, the metropolis is once again inundated today by extreme rainfall. It is one of the many cities worldwide grappling with a counterintuitive effect of climate change: Sometimes, …

Think back to any dinosaur illustration you saw as a kid. The background was almost certainly one of two things: an asteroid streaking across the sky or a volcano blowing its top. (If the illustrator was feeling extra dramatic, maybe both.)  A 6-mile-wide asteroid, which hit the coast of the …

In the center of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A black-and-white layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and …