Like a nice wool blanket can help a human baby stay warm and healthy, so too does a baby white spruce get protection from a blanket of snow. At the same time,…
Category: Science
This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain required to…
The US Buried Nuclear Waste Abroad. Climate Change Could Unearth It
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaii in 2017 when she saw the photo online:…
Good Climate Solutions Need Good Policy—and AI Can Help With That
To achieve real climate solutions, changing behavior and developing technology is not enough, says Michal Nachmany, founder and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Climate Policy Radar. “A lot of this is policy,”…
US Cities Could Be Capturing Billions of Gallons of Rain a Day
In this map, blue signifies higher amounts of annual stormwater runoff from urban areas, while red is lower. States with relatively large amounts of precipitation and large urban areas, like Texas and…
Emergency Planners Are Having a Moment
Also, in a disaster, there are no good decisions, there are only least-worse decisions. Every decision will come with a set of consequences. What the government really struggled to do was mitigate…