THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Milton Orr looked across the rolling hills in northeast Tennessee. “I remember when we had over 1,000 dairy farms in this county. Now we have less than 40,” Orr, an agriculture adviser for Greene County, Tennessee, told me …
Read More »South Sudan May See the First Permanent Mass Displacement Due to Climate Change
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Enormous floods have once again engulfed much of South Sudan, as record water levels in Lake Victoria flow downstream through the Nile. More than 700,000 people have been affected. Hundreds of thousands of people there were already forced …
Read More »Alien Spaceships Could Be Detected Using Gravitational Waves
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. How much do we really know about what else is out there in the universe? Let’s take an outlandish example. If there were aliens flying around our galaxy with the sort of warp drive technology we often see …
Read More »Why Polio Has Reemerged in Gaza
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. A 10-month-old boy in the Gaza Strip was recently paralyzed by poliovirus—the first such case in the region this century. Israel and Hamas have agreed to a limited ceasefire to allow 640,000 children in the enclave to be …
Read More »A Rare Coincidence of La Niña Events Will Weaken Hurricane Season
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The North Atlantic Ocean has been running a fever for months, with surface temperatures at or near record highs. But cooling along the equator in both the Atlantic and eastern Pacific may finally be starting to bring some …
Read More »Will the ‘Car-Free’ Los Angeles Olympics Work?
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. With the Olympic torch extinguished in Paris, all eyes are turning to Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics. The host city has promised that the next Summer Games will be “car-free.” For people who know Los Angeles, this …
Read More »The Run of Record-Breaking Heat Has Ended, for Now
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. A 13-month streak of record-breaking global warmth has ended. From June 2023 until June 2024, air and ocean surface water temperatures averaged a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than records set only a few years previously. Air …
Read More »How Do You Get Drugs to the Brain? Maybe Try a Parasite
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Parasites take an enormous toll on human and veterinary health. But researchers may have found a way for patients with brain disorders and a common brain parasite to become frenemies. A new study published in Nature Microbiology has …
Read More »How to Stop Wildfire Smoke Damaging Your Health
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. When wildfires rage, the immediate threat is obvious—but smoke from the fires actually kills far more people than the flames. As fires become more frequent, that smoke is leading to a public health crisis. In a new study …
Read More »Last Monday Was the Hottest Day on Record
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. In the past week, Earth’s record for the hottest day was broken twice. Sunday, July 21, was declared Earth’s hottest day since records began, when average surface temperature reached 17.09 degrees Celsius. On Monday the record was broken …
Read More »