Tag Archives: science

Extreme heat kills roughly half a million people worldwide each year, but at the current rate of global warming it could be close to five times as deadly by 2050. Then there are the indirect health risks of climate change: Chaotic weather and higher temperatures generate deadly natural disasters, bring …

If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, doubling its biomass as quickly as every two days to conquer small bodies …

After a year of eyebrow-raising headlines about government whistleblowers alleging that the military was running secret programs focused on alien spaceships and a months-long study and dogged investigative work through the shadows of classified Pentagon programs, the United States Defense Department announced Friday that it found no evidence that the …

There’s a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIs help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs. In recent years, the devices have even gone wireless. If mind-reading computers become part …

Everyone's talking about heat pumps these days as a better way to warm your home. They even pull double duty, replacing your air conditioner in summer. The great thing is that they're generally more energy-efficient than old-school heaters, and they don't burn any fuel, so replacing that old gas furnace …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, …

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free …

The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. Or much of it, at least. On February 28, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research announced that 2,940 fires had burned in the Brazilian Amazon over the course of that month—a record-breaking number for a February. Many of them are still blazing. Real-time satellite …

In many areas of health, women receive worse care, and suffer worse outcomes, than men. Women experience higher rates of adverse drug reactions. Across hundreds of diseases, they are diagnosed later than men. Women are more likely to suffer from common mental health conditions. In moments of acute pain, women …

Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical …