This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Within five miles of Kim Gaddy’s home in the South Ward of Newark, New Jersey, lies the nation’s third-busiest shipping port, 13th-busiest airport, and roughly a half-dozen major roadways. All told, transportation experts say, …
Read More »How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away
Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting, building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations. Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to …
Read More »Green Roofs Are Great. Blue-Green Roofs Are Even Better
You might visit Amsterdam for its famous canals, and who could blame you, really. But the truly interesting waterways aren’t under your feet—they’re above your head. Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures specially designed to manage the extra weight of …
Read More »Here’s a Clever Way to Uncover America’s Voting Deserts
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In Georgia’s 2020 gubernatorial election, some voters in Atlanta waited over 10 hours to cast a ballot. One reason for the long lines was that almost 10 percent of Georgia’s polling sites had closed over the preceding seven years, despite …
Read More »How One Corporation Is Cashing In on America’s Drought
This story originally appeared in the The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the West’s smallest rural enclaves. Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community …
Read More »Environmental Damage Could Cost You a Fifth of Your Income Over the Next 25 Years
Almost from the start, arguments about mitigating climate change have included an element of cost-benefit analysis: Would it cost more to move the world off fossil fuels than it would to simply try to adapt to a changing world? A strong consensus has built that the answer to the question …
Read More »Unruly Gut Fungi Can Make Your Covid Worse
Fungi are an indispensable part of your microbiome, keeping the body’s host of microorganisms healthy as part of a system of checks and balances. But when you’re hit by an infection, fungi can be thrown out of equilibrium with other organisms inside you, leading to a more severe infection and …
Read More »NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From
NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station. This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and attorneys are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to …
Read More »We Finally Know Where Neuralink’s Brain Implant Trial Is Happening
Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink has chosen the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, as the initial study site to test its Telepathy device. The first participant in Neuralink’s study, Noah Arbaugh, underwent a successful procedure at the institute in January to get the device implanted. Known as a brain-computer …
Read More »The Rise of the Carbon Farmer
Patrick Holden strolls across the field, pausing from time to time to bend and point out a bumblebee, or a white butterfly, or a dung beetle. A wide expanse of blue sky stretches above. Beneath, undulating green hills, sprawling hedgerows, a horizon broken only by the jagged tips of Wales’ …
Read More »