Globe and Mail – Octopuses are smart in ways humans are only beginning to understand – just as companies are about to farm them for food on a much larger scale… The octopus has already challenged our theories on evolution, intelligence and consciousness. It has proven itself smarter, more playful, more feeling than we ever… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Climate Change
Webb Space Telescope First Image Gallery
“About the Telescope – The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier infrared space observatory of the next decade. Orbiting far beyond Earth’s moon, Webb’s sensitive instruments will detect infrared radiation from Solar System planets, exoplanets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies. These observations will help us to better understand the early universe, how galaxies and… Continue Reading
National Parks Log Plastic Litter
Gizmodo“: You’re hiking through glorious nature when you see it—a dirty, squished plastic water bottle along the trail. Instead of picking it up and impotently cursing the litterer, you can now take another small helpful step—you can report the trash to a new data project that aims to inspire policy change. Environmental nonprofit 5 Gyres… Continue Reading
How are cities planning for heat? Analysis of United States municipal plans
V Kelly Turner and Emma M French and John Dialesandro and Ariane Middel and David M Hondula and George Ban Weiss and Hana Abdellati, How are cities planning for heat? Analysis of United States municipal plans, Vol 17, No 6 Environmental Research Letters,2022. UCLA Newsroom: “…To assess heat planning, the researchers — from UCLA, Arizona… Continue Reading
US water likely contains more ‘forever chemicals’ than EPA tests show
UK Guardian: “A Guardian analysis of water samples from around the United States shows that the type of water testing relied on by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is so limited in scope that it is probably missing significant levels of PFAS pollutants. The undercount leaves regulators with an incomplete picture of the extent… Continue Reading
Waste from thousands of old industrial sites may be released by floods
Ars Technica: “As sea levels rise, coastal areas face a growing risk of flooding. But humans and environments near urban centers and the ocean may face issues beyond rising water. These areas have also been home to a large number of manufacturing facilities. Over the years, many of them may have left toxic chemicals in… Continue Reading
A Crisis Historian Has Some Bad News for Us
The Atlantic: “America and the world are living through what Adam Tooze, the internet’s foremost historian of money and disaster, describes as a “polycrisis.” As he sips a beer at a bar near Columbia University, where he is the director of the European Institute, Tooze talks through a long list of challenges: War, raising the… Continue Reading
California takes bold step to reduce truck pollution
California Air Resources Board: [June 25, 2022], “the California Air Resources Board adopted a first-in-the-world rule requiring truck manufacturers to transition from diesel trucks and vans to electric zero-emission trucks beginning in 2024. This bold and timely move sets a clean-truck standard for the nation and the world, and marks the Newsom administration’s most important air… Continue Reading
Free App Identifies Bird Species by Sound
Sci-News: “The BirdNET app is a free bird sound identification app for Android and iOS that includes over 3,000 bird species. Ornithologists hope this app will reduce barriers to citizen science and generate tens of millions of bird observations globally…” The ubiquity of smartphones combined with the power of new machine learning algorithms presents an… Continue Reading
The Norwegian library with unreadable books
BBC Future – “One recent Sunday morning, in a forest north of Oslo in Norway, more than 200 people gathered to watch a ceremony. They had walked in a procession – some with their dogs, others their children – along gravel trails, directed by arrows on the ground made from sprinkled wood shavings. The air… Continue Reading
US weather, climate forecasting is about to get way better
ZDNET: “US weather and climate forecasting is about to get a major upgrade. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this week turned on two new supercomputers that are three times faster than the agency’s former supercomputing system. By this fall, the new HPE Cray supercomputers should deliver an improvement to the US Global Forecast… Continue Reading
US only has 6,000 fast charging stations for EVs
MIT Technology Review – Here’s where they all are. “The United States has around 150,000 fuel stations to refill its fleet of fossil-fuel-burning vehicles. Despite the rapid growth of all-electric vehicles in America—400,000 of them were sold in 2021, up from barely 10,000 in 2012—the country has only 6,000 DC fast electric charging stations, the… Continue Reading
