As Tropical Storm Barry gathers strength on its way to a violent clash with the Louisiana coast, officials are rightly evacuating some residents, while advising others to shelter in place and have emergency plans in case the worst should happen. Barry is indeed a major threat — but the way we measure hurricanes may not be adequately driving home this storm’s dangers, renewing calls …
Read moreTesla Inc. handed over the first of its electric Semi trucks, a milestone for the automaker more than five years after it unveiled the vehicle.
“If you want the most badass rig on the road, this is it,” Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said Thursday at Tesla’s battery factory near Reno, Nevada. He capped off the delivery event with a handover of key cards to two PepsiCo…
Read moreIn October 2019, the Rotary Club of Bugolobi asked me to talk on the environment and climate change. I looked forward to the opportunity. It would be the first time as an activist that I’d be addressing Ugandan professionals, many of whom were my parents’ age (I’m 24). The audience would be civic-minded middle-class men and women who could raise awareness about the climate cri…
Read moreAbout 14% of U.S. adults said they used marijuana edibles as of 2022, and research suggests many of them do so in search of better sleep. One small 2021 study of cannabis users found that more than three-quarters of them thought they slept better thanks to the drug.
But despite the popularity of using edibles for sleep, the data on how well they help people drift off are surprisingly mixe…
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Nothing has captured the march of wealth and progress like any society’s ability to light up the night—first with campfires and torches, then with gas lamps, finally with incandescent lights. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 Rural Electrification Act was an effort both to bring modernity to the 90% of American farms that lacked electricity and to help jolt the American economy, which…
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The human relationship with the land we live on has evolved over the hundreds of thousands of years humans have roamed the planet, but no period has seen as dramatic change as the last century when humans used land in new ways to extract wealth and build a modern economy.
Now, a landmark new U.N. report warns, humans face a moment of reckoning on how we use the planet’s land: human …
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At least 75,000 Americans in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have already died from COVID-19—and the devastation is far from over. After a decrease earlier this summer, the death toll is now rising once again, and as the country heads into the fall and then flu season, millions of Americans who require institutional long-term care remain at the greatest risk.
But, …
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Hydropower is the world’s biggest source of renewable energy, generating about 16% of the global electricity supply. And it will continue to play a key role as the world looks to meet net-zero targets, not least of all because, like a battery, it can store massive amounts of energy for later and quickly release it in moments of peak demand.
But despite being better for the climate, …
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More than 116,000 Americans are waiting to receive an organ transplant, and about 20 die each day during the wait. Scientists are eager to find solutions to the organ shortage.
That’s why a recent landmark report in the journal Science, which detailed the creation of piglets that could potentially provide organs for human transplants in the future, is being heralded as a &l…
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In one of the first large studies exploring immunity from natural infection with COVID-19, researchers in Denmark found some surprising trends—including evidence that even those who previously contracted the disease should still get vaccinated.
In the study, published March 17 in medical journal The Lancet, researchers took advantage of repeated coronavirus test results fro…
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