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The race to electrify the world’s vehicles and store energy will require batteries — so many of them, in fact, that meeting the demand we will see by 2040 will require 30 times the amount of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel that those industries currently use.

That presents an enormous challenge, one exacerbated by the mining industry’s alarming allegations of labor crimes, environmental destruction, and encroachments on Indigenous land. There are ways to mitigate electrification’s extractive impacts, one of which may seem obvious: Recycle every battery we make. 

Doing so would reduce the world’s need to mine these minerals by 10 percent within 16 years, because the critical materials in batteries are infinitely reusable. Eventually, a robust circular battery economy could all but eliminate the need to extract them at all.

Of course, that would require recovering every EV pack at the end of its life, a sizable undertaking as the United States prepares for hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles to retire by the end of the decade. A nascent ecosystem of startups is working toward that goal, and the Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits to incentivize the practice. But some electrification advocates say those steps do not go far enough. While the European Union recently passed a regulation mandating EV battery recycling, there is no such law in the U.S. Proponents of a federal recycling standard say that without one, batteries that could be recycled might get left behind, increasing the need for mining and undermining electrification’s environmental benefits. 

“We need a coordinated federal response to truly have a large-scale impact on meeting our demand,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a policy advocate at Earthjustice, which favors a federal recycling requirement. “If you compare us to the EU, we are woefully behind and need to move much more quickly.”

That movement would have to come from Congress, according to Miller-McFeeley. Historically, however, regulating recycling has been left up to the states and local jurisdictions. The Biden administration has instead been supporting the country’s budding EV battery recycling industry, mainly by making it good business to recover critical materials. 

The Department of Energy wants to establish a “battery ecosystem” that can recover 90 percent of spent lithium batteries by 2030. It has granted billions in loans to battery recyclers to build new facilities. Automakers are incentivized to buy those recyclers’ products, because part of the federal EV tax credit applies only to cars with batteries that include a minimum amount of critical minerals that were mined, processed or recycled in the U.S. or by a free-trade partner. Manufacturers also get a tax credit for producing critical materials (including recycled ones) in the U.S.

Daniel Zotos, who handles public advocacy at the battery recycling startup Redwood Materials, said in an email that a healthy market for recycled materials is emerging. “Not only is there tremendous value today in recycling these metals, but the global demand for metals means that automakers need to source both more mined and recycled critical minerals.”

Zotos said Redwood Materials agrees with the approach the federal government has taken. “The U.S. has in fact chosen to help incentivize, rather than mandate, recycling through provisions established in the Inflation Reduction Act, which we’re deeply supportive of.”

During a pilot project in California last year, the company recovered 95 percent of the critical materials in 1,300 lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride EV and hybrid batteries. The cost of retrieving packs from throughout the state was the biggest barrier to profitability, but Zotos said that expense will subside as the industry grows.

A tiny but growing secondary market for EV batteries is also driving their reuse. Most batteries will be retired once their capacity dwindles to about 70 to 80 percent, due to the impact on the car’s range. But they’re still viable enough at that point to sustain a second life as storage for renewable energy like wind and solar power. 

B2U Storage Solutions used 1,300 retired batteries from Nissan and Honda to create 27 megawatts hours of storage at its solar farm just north of Los Angeles in Lancaster, California. Photovoltaic panels charge the packs all day, and B2U sells the stored power to the local utility during peak demand in the evening. “There is more value in reuse,” said company president Freeman Hall, “and we’re not doing anything more than deferring recycling another four or five years.” 

Homeowners and hobbyists are embracing second-life batteries, too. Henry Newman, co-owner of the auto dismantler EV Parts Solutions in Phoenix, said customers buy his Tesla and Nissan Leaf batteries to convert classic cars or create DIY power storage at home. Any batteries that Newman can’t sell are picked up by Li-Cycle, a lithium-ion battery recycler with a plant in Gilbert, Arizona. 

Newman said dismantlers and customers seem to want to do the right thing. “I know there will be people who don’t follow regulation, but my experience in the last six to seven years is that the industry is pretty conscious of it and tries to mitigate throwing these things in the trash,” he said. A law could help prevent mishandling, but Newman worries about any overreach or added costs that would come with more regulation. 

But relying on the market to ensure proper stewardship is risky, said Jessica Dunn, a senior analyst in the clean transportation program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The recycling of cars has traditionally been a market-based environment,” she said. “But we’re dealing with a completely different system now. EV batteries are big and have a lot of critical materials in them that we need to get out of them no matter if it’s economical or not.” 

Transporting EV batteries, which can weigh more than 1,500 pounds, is expensive (as much as one-third of the cost of recycling them), dangerous, and logistically challenging. Packs can catch fire if improperly handled, and they are classified as hazardous material, which requires special shipping permits. If the battery is in a remote location or is damaged, a recycler could deem it too much trouble to retrieve without a mandate to do so.

Dunn also said that not all batteries contain enough valuable materials for it to make financial sense to go through the trouble of recovering them. While most EV batteries currently contain high-value cobalt and nickel, a new generation of cheaper lithium-ion-phosphate, or LFP, batteries don’t use those metals. Tesla, Ford, and Rivian all recently announced they will use LFPs in some models.

“Just because there aren’t nickel and cobalt in them doesn’t mean that the lithium isn’t something that we should be recovering,” said Dunn. Redwood Materials said it collects lithium-ion phosphate batteries and uses the lithium within them to assemble new battery components, and that they collect all battery packs no matter their condition.

Finally, without guidelines in place, viable batteries may not be repurposed before being recycled, which Dunn said undermines their sustainability. “You’ve already put all that literal energy — and the environmental impacts that go along with that — into manufacturing these batteries,” she said. “So if you can squeak an extra five to 10 years out of them, that’s a really good option.” 

With the U.S. poised to see about 165,000 electric vehicle batteries retire in 2030, Dunn said the time to ensure no batteries are stranded is now. “We’re not seeing a big wave now, but that’s coming, and so we need to be prepared for that.”

There has been some federal movement toward a recycling requirement. The 2021 bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directed the Department of Energy to establish a task force to develop an “extended battery producer responsibility framework” to address battery design, transport, and recycling.

Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, is the approach that the EU took in its battery regulation that passed last December. EPR puts the onus on the manufacturer to ensure that what they produce is properly repurposed and then recycled, either by compelling them to pay for the recycling or to handle it themselves. 

Thirty-three states have such laws, covering 16 products ranging from mattresses to packaging. “It is a paradigm shift for how waste is managed in the United States,” said Scott Cassel of the Product Stewardship Institute. But Congress has never passed such a law. 

EV battery recycling might be the issue that could garner bipartisan support for one. Access to critical materials is a foreign policy and national security issue: China processes more than half the world’s lithium and cobalt, which means a steady domestic supply from recycling would help alleviate dependency on a geopolitical rival. 

Building out the infrastructure to dismantle, recover, and process battery materials could also create thousands of jobs, an accomplishment most lawmakers are happy to align themselves with.  

Republican senators alluded to both benefits when supporting the bipartisan Strategic EV Management Act of 2022, which passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act last year. It requires multiple agencies to work on guidelines for “reusing and recycling” batteries from vehicles retired from the federal fleet. 

Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said in a statement that the bill would ensure agencies could “reap the full economic benefits of EV investments … and do so in a manner that lessens our dependence on communist China.” 

These laws set in motion efforts to design recycling frameworks, but the timelines to develop them span years. In the meantime, a few states are weighing their own mandates. “The states don’t want to wait for any of these bills to move,” Cassel said. “They’re ready to act right now.”

In California, a Senate bill would require battery suppliers to ensure that all “vehicle traction batteries” be recovered, reused, repurposed, or recycled. The bill passed unanimously this week and is headed to the Assembly. Senator Ben Allen, who introduced the bill, said there is bipartisan political and industry support for creating a framework. “You need a system in place,” he said. “That’s like saying, ‘Oh, the people will drive just fine to and from work. We don’t need traffic laws.’” 

As it has been with other clean-vehicle targets, California could be a bellwether for a standard that would eventually take hold nationally.

“We’d love to create a system that could help to inform national policy,” said Allen. “And in this case, with this industry support and bipartisan backing, there actually may be a blueprint here.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/technology/the-u-s-doesnt-have-a-law-mandating-ev-battery-recycling-should-it/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Cold weather is prime time for humans to stay inside and snuggle up with loved ones. For our primate cousins, cuddling may even keep them healthy, as frosty temps and social bonds seem to go together like hot chocolate and marshmallows. Chilly temperature behavior, as it turns out, may also alter the course of evolution.

A study published June 1 in the journal Science found that a species’ long-term adaptation to life in extremely cold climates led to the evolution of successful social behaviors. Asian colobines living in colder regions saw genetic changes and adaptations to their social behaviors including extended care by mothers, which increased infant survival and the primates’ ability to live in the large complex multilevel societies we see today.

[Related: These primate ancestors were totally chill with a colder climate.]

An international team of researchers from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Australia studied how langurs and odd-nosed monkeys adapted over time. These members of the colobine family are leaf-eating monkeys that have been on Earth for about 10 million years. Their ancient ancestors dispersed across the planet’s continents and learned to live in tropical, temperate, and colder climates. 

“Virtually all primates are social and live in social groups,” study co-author and  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropologist Paul A. Garber said in a statement. “But the groups differ in size and cohesiveness. There are those that live in units of two or three individuals and others living in communities of up to 1,000 individuals.”

According to Garber, genomic studies suggest that the harem unit of organization—one male with two or more females and their offspring—was the ancestral norm for Asian colobines. Males are intolerant of other rival males and will fight to protect their turf. In some species, the females will stay with their natal group, while in others, both sexes leave to join or form new harems.

More complex societies formed over time. Some odd-nosed monkeys still form harems, but aren’t territorial. “This means their group territories can overlap and there are times they may come together to forage, rest and travel,” said Garber. 

Snub-nosed monkeys form a multilevel or modular society where multiple harems remain together throughout the year and create a large, cohesive breeding band. The team on this study recorded a society of about 400 individuals and breeding between individuals from different harems was common in golden snub-nosed monkeys. This inter-harem breeding happened roughly 50 percent of the time.

The study used ecological, geological, fossil, behavioral, and genomic analyses, and found that the colobine primates that lived in colder places tended to live in larger and more complex social groups. The glacial periods over the past six million years likely promoted the selection of genes that are involved in cold-related energy metabolism and hormonal regulation in the nervous system.

[Related: Baboons can recover from childhood trauma with a little help from their friends.]

Black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in some parts of China live in low-oxygen elevations up to about 13,500 feet where night time temperatures can drop below zero on the coldest evenings. The Odd-nosed monkeys living in extremely cold locations developed more efficient pathways for dopamine and oxytocin. Oxytocin particularly is an important neurohormone for social bonding and this hormonal efficiency may lengthen the time a mother monkey takes care of her baby. This led to longer periods of breast-feeding and increase in infant survival.  

These adaptive changes appear to have further strengthened the relationships between individual monkeys, increased tolerance between males, and encouraged the evolution of more complex and larger multi level societies that go a long way. Strong social bonds can even help gut bacteria health in some monkeys.

In future studies, the team is interested in studying how changes in mating and social behavior may be the result of genetic changes from past environments and other social factors from the past. 

“With climate change becoming an hugely important environmental pressure on animals, it is hoped that this study will raise awareness for the need to investigate what course social evolution will take as the prevailing climate changes,” study co-author and University fo Western Australia biological anthropologist Cyril Grueter said in a statement. “Our finding that complex multilevel societies have roots stretching back to climatic events in the distant evolutionary past also has implications for a reconstruction of the human social system which is decidedly multilevel.”

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If you’ve bought shoes, torn into beef jerky, or taken certain medication recently, you have likely handled at least one tiny silica gel packet. After briefly wondering why your new backpack contained a squishy little warning-labeled pillow, you probably chucked it into the garbage with the rest of the packaging.

Yet those little packets are as useful as they are ubiquitous, and you can find plenty of uses for silica gel around your home. It’s better to give them a second, third, or fourth life instead of sending them directly to the landfill. 

Although silica beads are not gems, the porous mineral does come from the ground. Silica is harvested through a “straightforward” mining process using open pits or dredging, according to Robert Goodin, a mineral commodity specialist with the US Geological Survey’s National Minerals Information Center. He says this usually removes vegetation and disturbs the ground’s top layer, and adds that explosive charges will occasionally be used to break apart the rock.

[Related: Which expiration dates actually matter?]

“These little silica gel packets, they’re in everything, but [use in desiccation is] actually a very small percentage of what this industrial sand is used for,” Goodin explains. “It’s less than 1 percent of the eventual end use.” He estimates that over 60 percent of silica sand—similar to regular sand but with much more silica—goes to the oil and gas industry for fracking and other needs. Glass production uses up another roughly 10 percent.

“Recently, [the US has] been the top producer, a major exporter and self-sustaining in a lot of these end-uses for silica, so we have a strong silica—or industrial sand—mining industry” in this country,” Goodin says.

What happens if you eat silica gel?

Despite their ominous, all-caps warnings about consumption, silica gel packets are generally considered non-toxic. The real concern is the size of the beads—it’s pretty easy for a child to choke on the packet or the beads within it, although some beads are large enough for adults to choke on, too. Swallowing silica gel can also lead to dehydration, which could irritate your throat and nose, and cause stomach pains, vomiting, constipation, or nausea.

Even so, spending a lot of time up close with silica can lead to health problems. According to Goodin, industrial workers exposed to silica dust may develop respiratory illnesses if inhaled.

And Britta Baechler, senior manager of ocean plastics research at Ocean Conservancy, notes that some silica gel packets feature a color-changing moisture indication. These aren’t supposed to be used near food and contain a compound known as cobalt chloride, which several chemical manufacturers list as an irritant and a carcinogen.

“Overall it seems that when they do not contain cobalt chloride, silica gel packets are relatively safe to use,” Baechler says. Nevertheless, you should avoid reusing these packets for any food-adjacent uses, just in case.

How to use silica gel around your home

Even if you shouldn’t use silica gel packets around food, there are still plenty of ways to safely reuse the desiccant, but you’ll have to reactivate the packets first.

Paper-based heirlooms—think old books, Gramma’s wedding photo album or your children’s handmade holiday decorations—are also frequently threatened by insidious moisture, leaks, or humidity. Tuck some silica packets into your memory box and breathe a little easier.

Protect—or revive—electronics

You’ll need quite a few to be effective, but keeping silica gel packets packed away with cameras, film, smartphones, video tapes, laptops, and other water-sensitive electronics and accessories can keep them safe until subsequent use. Dropped your phone or tablet in the bath? Try using a slew of silica gel packets to adsorb the water and bring the device back from its watery doom.

Keep moisture-prone areas dry

Your bathroom, basement and attic, are all places that can accumulate moisture easily. Adding silica gel packets near areas that might fog up, like windows and mirrors, can help prevent that slightly-annoying or even damaging condensation and slow down the growth of mold.

[Related: The right way to wash your waterproof clothes]

Preserve unique, special-purpose, or expensive materials

Leather and sports gear might be fine in a bit of rain, but prolonged exposure to moisture can ruin, stain or mildew different specialty fabrics. And any boxes of seasonal clothing or items you only use once a year (think: holiday sweaters and decor) might get wet long before you open them up and realize it. Silica gel packets tucked into pockets and between layers of fabrics can adsorb water before anything is ruined. Other water-sensitive materials such as seed packets can benefit from nearby silica gel packs, and you can even speed up drying flowers with silica. 

What happens to silica beads in the environment?

For most silica gel packets, a single use is all they’re likely going to get. Still, the packets that encase the silica gel beads are a relatively understudied source of single-use plastic pollution, Baechler explains.

“By function, [silica gel packets are] a desiccant,” Baechler says. “So if these packets are being dumped into waterways, or even onto land, it can dry out whatever environment ends up in, which can be problematic.”

[Related: How to go zero-waste at the grocery store]

Additionally, silica works as an insecticide for indoor and outdoor uses in powdered form on “stored grain, other food, feed and ornamentals; in food handling areas; and on pets and their living/sleeping quarters,” according to a US Environmental Protection Agency fact sheet.

“That means it’s being applied in an environmental setting,” Baechler adds. “I would surmise that if silica is used in this way and released into the environment, especially in large quantities that could have some impacts in terms of water retention in ecosystems and, perhaps, impacts on [animal and plant life] as well.” 

For now, at least, the environmental effects of silica gel are uncertain, but we think it’s better to be safe than sorry.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on July 27, 2022.

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Last month, engineers at Georgia Institute of Technology unveiled a creepy, crawly centipede-inspired robot sporting a plethora of tiny legs. The multitude of extra limbs wasn’t simply meant to pay homage to the arthropods, but rather to improve the robot’s maneuverability across difficult terrains while simultaneously reducing the number of complicated sensor systems. Not to be outdone, a separate team of researchers at Japan just showed off their own biomimetic “myriapod” robot which leverages natural environmental instabilities to move in curved motions, thus reducing its computational and energy requirements.

[Related: To build a better crawly robot, add legs—lots of legs.]

As detailed in an article published in Soft Robotics, a team at Osaka University’s Mechanical Science and Bioengineering department recently created a 53-inch-long robot composed of six segments, each sporting two legs alongside agile joints. In a statement released earlier this week, study co-author Shinya Aoi explained their team was inspired by certain “extremely agile” insects able to utilize their own dynamic instability to quickly change movement and direction. To mimic its natural counterparts, the robot included tiny motors that controlled an adjustable screw to increase or decrease each segment’s flexibility while in motion. This leads to what’s known as “pitchfork bifurcation.” Basically, the forward-moving centipede robot becomes unstable.

But instead of tipping over or stopping, the robot can employ that bifurcation to begin moving in curved patterns to the left or right, depending on the circumstances. Taking advantage of this momentum allowed the team to control their robot extremely efficiently, and with much less computational complexity than other walking bots.

As impressive as many bipedal robots now are, their two legs can often prove extremely fragile and susceptible to failure. What’s more, losing control of one of those limbs can easily render the machine inoperable. Increasing the number of limbs a lá a centipede robot, creates system redundancies that also expand the terrains it can handle. “We can foresee applications in a wide variety of scenarios, such as search and rescue, working in hazardous environments or exploration on other planets,” explained Mau Adachi, one of the paper’s other co-authors.

[Related: NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.]

Such serpentine robots are attracting the attention of numerous researchers across the world. Last month, NASA announced the latest advancements on its Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), a snake-bot intended to potentially one day search Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus for signs of extraterrestrial life. Although EELS utilizes a slithering movement via “rotating propulsion units,” it’s not hard to envision it doing so alongside a “myriapod” partner—an image that’s as cute as it is exciting.

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Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1—and a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico is already brewing. Tropical wave Invest 91-L only now has a 70 percent chance of becoming the first named system of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season—Arlene—but it will likely bring downpours and gusty thunderstorms to parts of Florida by the end of the work week whether or not it becomes a named storm.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

For the 2023 season, NOAA forecasts a pretty average amount of hurricane activity. In their annual outlook, NOAA predicts a 40 percent chance of a “near-normal season”, a 30 percent chance of an “above-normal season”, and a 30 percent chance of a “below-normal season”. 

The forecast calls for 12 to 17 total named storms—those with winds of 39 MPH or higher. NOAA anticipates that five to nine of these storms could become hurricanes (winds of 74 MPH or higher), including one to four major hurricanes. Major hurricanes are category 3, 4, or 5 storms with 111 MPH winds or higher.

Some of the names for this year’s storms include Cindy, Harold, and Sean among others.

The 2023 season is anticipated to be less active than recent years, partially due to a tug-of-war between some factors that suppress storm development and some that fuel it. This is the first year in three years without a La Niña pattern present, and the latest forecasts say there is a 90 percent likelihood that El Niño will develop by August and then remain strong in the fall. 

El Niño’s influence on storm development may be offset by favorable conditions in the tropical Atlantic Basin. Those conditions include a potentially above-normal West African monsoon that helps create some of the Atlantic’s stronger and longer-lived storms, all while creating  warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and tropical Atlantic Ocean. 

These warm waters are pure hurricane fuel, and those temperatures have been incredibly high this spring. But the temperatures in the North Atlantic basin, where the storms are born and intensify, and the eastern-central tropical Pacific Ocean, where El Niño forms, are the places to watch.

“This year, the two are in conflict—and likely to exert counteracting influences on the crucial conditions that can make or break an Atlantic hurricane season,” Iowa State University atmospheric scientist Christina Patricola writes in The Conversation. “The result could be good news for the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts: a near-average hurricane season. But forecasters are warning that that hurricane forecast hinges on El Niño panning out.”

[Related: El Niño is probably back—here’s what that means.]

Ocean temperatures in the Atlantic’s tropical regions were unusually warm during the most recent active hurricane seasons. In 2020, the Atlantic produced a record 30 named storms and the 2005 season produced 15 hurricanes including Hurricane Katrina.

The tropical Pacific Ocean influences the Atlantic hurricanes by forming teleconnections—a chain of processes that change the ocean or atmosphere in one region which then leads to larger scale changes that can influence the weather in other places.

“During El Niño events, the warm upper-ocean temperatures change the vertical and east-west atmospheric circulation in the tropics,” Patricola writes. “That initiates a teleconnection by affecting the east-west winds in the upper atmosphere throughout the tropics, ultimately resulting in stronger vertical wind shear in the Atlantic basin. That wind shear can tamp down hurricanes.”

Atlantic hurricane season ends on November 30. In the meantime, NOAA encourages those who could be affected by tropical systems to understand watches and warnings for their area and prepare emergency supplies ahead of time. 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 100 kilometers off the northwest coast of Africa, lies an archipelago known as the Canary Islands, created millions of years ago by intense volcanic activity. The biggest and most populated island, Tenerife, rises from the deep-ocean floor to a series of peaks, one of which is the third-largest volcano in the world. Tenerife’s interior highlands are a moonscape, while its coastline of lava rock and sheer cliffs is pounded by surf. In contrast to most of the island’s stark geology, north of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz, is a long crescent-shaped beach of soft yellow sand, with groves of palm trees and a calm bay created by a long breakwater. This is Playa de las Teresitas, a magnet for northern European tourists craving winter sun.

But most of the people sunbathing on Teresitas are likely unaware of what lurks in the shallow waters lapping the shoreline. The bay—engineered and less than 10 kilometers from the Canaries’ second-largest city—is a surprising haven for pups of one of the world’s most critically endangered fish: the angelshark.

When the Spanish took control of the Canaries in the 1400s, they began cultivating cash crops: cochineal and sugar cane in the beginning, and later adding bananas, tomatoes, and other valuable commodities. For centuries, the islands’ economy thrived, but it was a fragile wealth. Over the years, livelihoods were threatened by cycles of crop disease, competition from cheaper markets, and lava flows that wiped out harvests and turned good agricultural land into barren terrain. In the 1950s, the boom in package tourism showed promise as a new cash crop. But while the islands had the sunshine, warm climate, and ease of access from Europe needed for this new industry, they were missing a vital element: picture-postcard sandy beaches.

Cue planners on Tenerife, who concocted an audacious plan to make over one of the island’s exposed lava-rock beaches. They chose a stretch of coastline close to Santa Cruz and expropriated the avocado farms and other smallholdings. Earthmovers leveled the foreshore and intertidal zone, and they constructed a breakwater over a kilometer long. And then, from the Western Sahara on Africa’s northwest coast, they shipped in the pièce de résistance: 240,000 tonnes of sand.

By 1973, this gargantuan project, environmentally questionable from today’s viewpoint, was complete. As anticipated, tourists arrived. Unanticipated was what their presence gave to one of the world’s most endangered fish species—visibility. Maybe angelsharks always gathered here, but until recently, no one really knew.

Along Playa de las Teresitas, rows and rows of tourists lounge on beach chairs under umbrellas or pad across soft sand to cool down in the water. The breeze creates tiny sapphire-tipped waves on the water’s surface, a magical cover for what lies beneath—an angelshark nursery.

Female angelsharks regularly migrate to these ideally sheltered waters to give birth to anywhere between eight and 25 live pups, who remain in the shallows for about a year. Feeding on cuttlefish and other small prey, they grow to around 50 centimeters, about the same length as a newborn baby. Then they disappear for years until they are mature. Where they go is a mystery.For centuries, angelsharks had been common along the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Europe, as well as the Mediterranean. The ancient Greeks fished them; Pliny the Elder described the use of their skin to polish wood and ivory. On the British Isles, they were called monkfish for their resemblance to a monk’s hooded robes. With the advent of industrial bottom trawling in the late 1800s, they were easily caught and became a common food fish. By the 1960s, aggressive fishing of angelsharks, coupled with their extremely low reproductive rate, led to a dramatic decline in their populations. Targeting them eventually became commercially unviable and the name monkfish was relegated to another species, the anglerfish.

But angelsharks were still by-catch in other fisheries, and by the early 1970s, as developers barged Saharan sand to Tenerife, the fish were pushed close to extinction in most parts of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

In the European Union and the United Kingdom, it has become illegal to fish or retain angelsharks. If one is accidentally caught, fishers must return it alive to the sea. But the main threat to angelsharks remains the powerful bottom-trawling industry, which accounts for over 30 percent of fish landed in the European Union.

The story in the Canary Islands is slightly different. Michael Sealey, a marine biologist with the Angel Shark Project (ASP) in Tenerife, says that bottom trawling has never been as viable in the Canaries as in most of Europe and the Mediterranean. The seabed is mostly too deep, he explains, the underwater topography laced with jagged seamounts and reefs where fishing gear can get hung up. On top of that, the European Commission has halted all trawling in the Canaries since 2005.

But biologists only became aware about a decade ago that the Canaries host an angelshark population. Subsequently, in 2014, the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Museum Koenig Bonn, and Zoological Society of London collaborated to establish ASP. The project’s goal: to gather data on critical habitats, movement patterns, and reproductive biology of angelsharks, and work with local communities and officials to protect the fish. Life history information is crucial for developing effective conservation strategies and protecting valuable, if improbable, habitat—like Playa de las Teresitas.

But angelsharks are not the easiest of research subjects. They are masters of disguise, so spotting them is a challenge. They have a peculiar flattened shape and spend most of their time lying on the ocean bottom partially covered by sand. Their coloring—reddish- or greenish-brown scattered with small white spots—helps them blend into the seabed.

Gathering data on such elusive animals, with low population densities spread over a huge area, is labor intensive. Help has come in the form of citizen science: everywhere in the Canary Islands, recreational divers and fishers are invited to make online reports of any sightings or accidental catches of angelsharks. Through an ASP initiative, dive operators conduct friendly competitions to see which company can record the most sightings, thereby increasing data collection, particularly from citizen scientists.

Rubén Martinez, a dive instructor in Lanzarote, the easternmost island of the Canaries, is a keen advocate of angelsharks and regularly volunteers for ASP surveys. He helps with procedures such as tagging the fish with either spaghetti tags—an easily attached plastic loop—or acoustic tags. Both are done on the spot without having to catch the fish or lift it out of the water. “We work in a team and practice beforehand,” Martinez says. After an angelshark has been spotted in the sand, the team places a mesh attached to a sturdy frame over the animal. They take a small sample of fin for DNA analysis and attach a tag to the base of the dorsal fin. The whole procedure, when done properly, takes less than a minute.

Surveys have shown that other beaches in the Canary Islands are also potential nursery sites. Interestingly, most of them have been altered, like Teresitas, to make them more attractive to people. On Lanzarote, Playa Chica boasts another long sweep of imported sand. It’s a magnet for divers—as well as a spectacular and easily accessible site—so the number of sightings of mature angelsharks off this shoreline is one of highest in the whole archipelago. How do the sharks react to these shoals of wetsuited humans? Alba Esteban Pacheco, a biologist and former dive instructor with Euro Divers Lanzarote, admits that while there have been instances of divers getting too close to the sharks, most dive companies are sensitive in this regard and brief their clients well. They have little choice: in 2019, Spain introduced legislation in the Canaries that made disturbing the sharks or harming their habitat and breeding grounds a criminal act subject to large fines.

Pacheco is very clear that she keeps her dive clients at least the recommended one meter distance from any angelsharks they find hiding in the sand. “Also,” she says, “these days, with everyone videoing everything and posting it on social media, it’s hard for divers to step out of line.”

But is this enough? Eva Meyers, a cofounder of ASP, acknowledges that the diving community plays a crucial role in conservation of the species. But she adds that much more needs to be done to ensure the long-term survival of angelsharks in areas like Playa Chica.

A recovery plan ASP developed with local authorities is in the final stages. It will include measures such as signage along sensitive coastlines and establishing a code of conduct for divers throughout the Canaries.

Among international dive communities, the word is out about the chance to see mature angelsharks in the Canaries, and this is a growing part of the tourism sector. Indeed, shark diving all over the world is a boon to economies. It generates over US $24-million yearly in the Canaries. Globally, shark-diving tourism generates over $300-million yearly, and local communities benefit much more from shark diving than from shark fishing. In some cases, this has led to the creation of marine reserves, such as in Fiji, which help other marine species as well.

Many divers may now be cognizant of the fragility of the angelshark population, but what about all those people splashing about and swimming in the all-important nursery areas just off the beaches? Sealey thinks that human activity in the shallow nursery areas influences angelshark behavior. On busy beaches like Teresitas, juveniles normally retreat to deeper water during the day when lots of people are around. During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions kept people off the beach. After almost two years of peace, angelsharks seemed unprepared for the people wading back into the water, as swimmers reported an unusual number of bites soon after restrictions lifted. The fish rely on their camouflage for protection, but when stepped on, they might lunge up from their hiding place and bite, though they usually swim away. Known locally as “gummings,” the bites are not serious and rarely draw blood. But the increase in gummings was an indication that the juveniles had adapted to remaining hidden in the shallows 24/7 to conserve energy. Post-pandemic, angelsharks have adapted again, by heading into deeper water earlier in the day and avoiding interactions with humans, as do many other urban wildlife species.

Back in the 1970s, did angelsharks also adapt to the Canaries’ headlong efforts to redesign itself for tourists? It’s intriguing to think that the massive, environmentally disruptive projects to remake beaches could have accidentally enhanced the habitat for one of the world’s rare fish species. But what’s clear is that after the breakwater was built and the sand arrived, people followed, and in the calm, shallow waters they began to see baby angelsharks. And unlike how many an association between humans and wildlife ends—in conflict and dead animals—this time it led to conservation.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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One of the world’s busiest airports will soon showcase an innovative, undeniably cute way to speed up travelers’ entrances and exits. First announced earlier this month, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) is partnering with EV Safe Charge to demonstrate how the company’s mobile electric vehicle charging station, ZiGGY, could be deployed in public spaces to economically and conveniently power up consumers’ parked cars.

[Related: Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source.]

Electric vehicles are an integral component of the societal shift towards clean, renewable energy. Unfortunately, battery shortages stemming from supply chain issues alongside a need for evermore charging stations is hampering a wider adoption of green transportation. ZiGGY obviously isn’t a catch-all fix, but it’s still a novel tool that both its makers and DFW hope to highlight over the summer as part of the airport’s series of EV charging solution demos.

“We know that electric vehicles will be a big part of the future of transportation,” Paul Puopolo, DFW’s Executive VP of Innovation, said in a statement, adding their air hub is “leaning into emerging technology now so that we are prepared to meet the needs of the airport community well into the future.”

ZiGGY itself resembles a large vending machine on wheels, which makes a certain amount of sense given it dispenses electric fuel on demand. Using geofencing technology, app-based controls, and on-board cameras, ZiGGY can be deployed directly to the location of your parked EV, where a user can then connect the charging bot to their ride. To court additional revenue streams, each ZiGGY also features large video screens capable of displaying advertisements. Don’t worry about getting stuck behind it if someone is using a ZiGGY, either—its dimensions and mobility ensures each station can park itself behind an EV without the need for additional space.

Speaking with Ars Technica on Tuesday, EV Safe Charge’s founder and CEO Caradoc Ehrenhalt explained that the idea is to deploy ZiGGY fleets to commercial hubs around the world, such as additional airports, hotels, and shopping centers. “What we’re hearing from people… is the common thread of the infrastructure being very challenging or not possible to put in or not cost effective or takes too much time. And so there really is the need for a mobile charging solution,” said Ehrenhalt.

[Related: Why you barely see electric vehicles at car dealerships.]

Of course, such an autonomous vehicle could find itself prone to defacement and vandalism, but Ehrenhalt apparently opts to look on the sunnier side of things. “Ziggy is fairly heavy because of the battery,” they cautioned to Ars Technica. “It has cameras all around and sensors, including GPS, and so there potentially could be [vandalism], but I’m always hoping for the best of humanity.”

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But if you’re an animal lover determined to feed your local park’s residents, there are several healthy alternatives. Before you go stock up on snacks, though, always make sure you’re allowed to feed the critters in question—some areas’ rules are more lenient than others.

What to feed ducks (and other waterfowl)

The best advice we can give about feeding ducks (or other types of park fowl like swans and geese) is to imitate the types of food they naturally eat in the ponds and fields they call home. This means vegetables and nutritious grains work well, while processed “human” foods do not. Even though bread is typically made from grains, the breadmaking process renders it very filling with a relatively low amount of nutrients, two factors that can lead to malnourished ducks. Instead, try to stick with snacks that haven’t been highly processed.

For vegetables, the most important consideration is making sure that the bits and pieces you offer are small enough for waterfowl to handle. Ducks and their relatives aren’t great at chewing—while their bills help break down food, they don’t have teeth, at least in the traditional sense. Cut salad greens, vegetable peels, nuts, grapes, and other produce into small pieces before you toss them to these birds.

[Related: Why do ducks have orange feet?]

A bag of frozen mixed peas, corn niblets, and carrot pieces is one of the best options for waterfowl: these veggies are nutritious, affordable, and small enough for ducks to eat whole. Grains like oats, rice, and seeds make good waterfowl chow for the same reason. Even better, many of these little morsels will float on your local pond, keeping them easily accessible to ducks. Big chunks of food that sink to the bottom aren’t as useful.

If you’re looking to get fancy, you can also drop a couple more dollars on a bag of specially formulated waterfowl food. These pellets, available online or at your local pet store, are typically fed to pet birds and farm animals. These bite-size bits may not float on water, though, so test a few handfuls near the water’s edge before you start a feeding frenzy. This designer food may be best served up on the banks.

Other tips for feeding ducks

No matter how eager they are for a human-provided snack, your local park’s resident fowl are almost certainly not going to go hungry without you. Most ducks are perfectly capable of foraging for insects, plant life, and other nutrition sources on their own. That means you don’t need to feel bad if some of them miss out on the feast. In fact, overfeeding waterfowl can cause a host of problems, from teaching them to rely on human handouts to throwing off their natural nutritional balance. When in doubt, it’s better to stop feeding the birds sooner than you’d like than it is to feed them too much.

If you suspect a particular duck, goose, or swan may be unable to feed itself after you leave, it’s time to call in professional help. Waterfowl that live in parks are susceptible to a host of dangers from the human world, ranging from vehicle strikes to lead poisoning. Feeding them may be a temporary kindness, but it’s not a sustainable solution. If you see a bird having difficulty moving around or visibly in distress, contact your local wildlife specialists right away.

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Over three million years ago, a 500-plus pound marsupial roamed Australia, winning the prize of the continent’s first long-distance walking champion. In a study published May 31 in the Journal of Royal Society Open Science, a team of scientists described the discovery of this new genus using advanced 3D scans and the partial remains of a 3.5 million year old specimen. 

Most earlier studies on this group have focused on its skull since other skeletal remains are rare in Australia’s fossil record. The skeleton described in this new study, found at Kalamurina Station in southern Australia in 2017, is special since it is the first that was found with associated soft tissue structures. The authors used 3D-scanning to compare the partial skeleton with other diprotodontid material housed in collections all over the world. A hard concretion that formed shortly after the animal died encased its foot, and CT scans revealed the soft tissue impressions on the outline of its footpad.

[Related: Giant wombats the size of small cars once roamed Australia.]

The new genus Ambulator, meaning “walker” or “wanderer,” had four giant legs which would have helped it roam long distances in search of food and water compared to its earlier relatives. It belongs to the Diprotodontidae family, an extinct family of big, four-legged, herbivorous marsupials that lived in New Guinea and Australia. The largest species was Diprotodon optatum, which was about the size of a car and weighed almost 6,000 pounds. Diprotodontids were an integral part of the region’s ecosystem before going extinct about 40,000 years ago. 

“Diprotodontids are distantly related to wombats – the same distance as kangaroos are to possums – so unfortunately there is nothing quite like them today. As a result, paleontologists have had a hard time reconstructing their biology,” study author and Flinders University PhD student Jacob van Zoelen said in a statement. 

Ambulator keanei lived during the Pliocene era when Australia saw an increase in grasslands and open habitats become more dry. To have enough to eat and drink, diprotodontids likely had to travel great distances. 

“We don’t often think of walking as a special skill but when you’re big any movement can be energetically costly so efficiency is key,” said van Zoelen. “Most large herbivores today such as elephants and rhinoceroses are digitigrade, meaning they walk on the tips of their toes with their heel not touching the ground.  “

Diprotodontids are plantigrade animals, which means that their heel-bone makes contact with the ground as they walk. This is similar to the way humans walk and helps distribute the weight while walking, but does use more energy when running. According to van Zoelen, diprotodontids also have extreme plantigrady in their hands. The bone of the wrist is modified into a secondary heel and this “heeled hand” may have made early reconstructions of the animal look a little bit bizarre.

“Development of the wrist and ankle for weight-bearing meant that the digits became essentially functionless and likely did not make contact with the ground while walking.” said van Zoelen. “This may be why no finger or toe impressions are observed in the trackways of diprotodontids.”

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This article was originally published on Undark.

George Washington’s palm tree. Thomas Jefferson’s sloth. Edward Harris’s hawk. Quite a few species come with a person’s name attached to them. Sometimes these names — formally known as eponyms — memorialize the original collector. Sometimes it’s a scientist’s family member, a benefactor or government leader, a colleague, or even a celebrity. According to one official estimate, eponyms make up around 20 percent of all animal names in use.

Many species got their eponyms during the early days of scientific collecting, which was partially fueled by the broader colonization programs of European powers throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Over the past few years, however, that history has come under increased scrutiny. In 2020, for instance, amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the push to remove Confederate monuments, some ornithologists began questioning whether birds named for Confederates and slaveholders should be retitled.

Now, an international group of researchers argues that it’s time to move away from eponyms entirely. “In short, we believe that naming species in honour of real people is unnecessary and objectively difficult to justify,” the authors wrote in a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. “The Earth’s biodiversity is part of a global heritage that should not be trivialized by association with any single human individual, whatever their perceived worth.”

The authors of the paper are wading into an ongoing and contentious debate — and the scientific institutions responsible for approving new species names aren’t budging.

The goal of naming species — or nomenclature — is to make sure scientific names are uniform across different fields and research labs, said Luis Ceríaco, a commissioner with the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which controls the naming of animal species. “It’s a space to promote stability and promote universality on the use of names,” Ceríaco added. “What we want is to have a set of rules that allow people to really know what they are talking about when referring to species.”

For this reason, the ICZN and its partner organization, The International Association of Plant Taxonomy, follow established codes that prioritize older names, and only alter them for reasons of science and stability.

Proposals to rename species due to social or political concerns have attracted both criticism and support. In February 2023, a group of ICZN commissioners — including Ceríaco — put out a paper against renaming species on ethical grounds. Deciding which eponyms should be replaced due to “perceived offensiveness” isn’t in the code’s remit, they wrote. “Owing to the inherently subjective nature of making such assessments, it would be inappropriate for the Commission to assert judgments on such matters of morality, because there are no specific parameters to determine thresholds for offensiveness of a scientific name to a given community or individual, either in the present day or in the future.”

Other scientists, however, have been happy to step into the gap.

The push to reassess problematic species names isn’t new. Consider the case of Anophthalmus hitleri, a cave beetle named after Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, the eponym of which — in addition to honoring a historical genocidaire — has made the insect a target for some collectors. Yet despite calls to drop the eponym, the species has not been renamed by the ICZN. “The logic to date in preserving ‘hitleri’ is that the name per se is not offensive,” entomologist May Berenbaum noted in a 2010 issue of American Entomologist. “Frankly, though, a scientific name that sentences a species to extinction at the hands of fanatical Fascist memorabilia collectors causes considerable offense, at least to me.”

More recently, in 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement — a reference to Cecil Rhodes, the former prime minister of British colonial South Africa — launched discussions in the botanical sciences about replacing “culturally offensive and inappropriate names,” which grew alongside similar debates in ornithology around the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

For some people, the stakes of such decisions can feel high. “Naming and language have power. The way that you use language tells people whether they belong or not,” Earyn McGee, a conservation biologist and organizer of Black Birders Week, told Undark in 2020. The refusal to change species names, she said, “tells Black people and other people of color that they don’t matter, that they’re not important.”

Such movements have, in turn, led some taxonomists to argue that renaming species injects political considerations into taxonomy, opening up thorny questions. After all, where should scientists draw lines between good actors and bad ones? (Should species named after Queen Victoria be replaced? What about plant names commemorating American slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?)

“We have a code of ethics,” Ceríaco said, “and the ethics part says that no one should erect a new name knowingly that’s going to cause offense.” However, he added, the ICZN emphasizes the freedom of authors to name species as they see fit, so they also don’t revise names that break their ethics code. “It’s always on the responsibility of the author. We strongly suggest for people to be sure that what they’re going to erect is not going to cause offense to anyone.”

The alternative, Ceríaco said, would be for the ICZN to have to adjudicate which names are acceptable, opening “a pandora’s box.” Allowing such revisions at all would affect the work of global researchers, conservationists, and others who depend on a stable taxonomic framework. “We’re not being dismissive toward the arguments that the names are offensive,” he said. But, he added, the consequences of changing the names would be trickier than keeping them.

Not all researchers were convinced by the ICZN’s argument. Some of them, like Patrícia Guedes — a biologist with the CIBIO Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources — banded together to in March 2023, pointing out that eponyms were effectively more trouble than they were worth. Part of the issue with eponyms, they noted, was that the practice is inextricably bound up with science’s colonial history: Many past researchers came from colonizing European nations, and as a result many species ended up named after White, male, upper-class Europeans. In Africa alone, the researchers found, 1,565 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals — a quarter of the continent’s native vertebrates — are eponyms, the majority of which honored “colonizers or people of colonial descent.”

“A name that is considered innocuous by some may be perceived as offensive by others, and names that were once considered inoffensive are not necessarily viewed in the same way in a post-colonial world,” the authors wrote. Overturning all prior eponyms would be ethically sound but practically unfeasible, they conceded. Still, the authors argued that the ICZN could put taxonomists of the species’ native region in charge of renaming proposals.

Guedes told Undark that it would be neater — and easier — to tighten the ICZN code’s rules to restrict eponyms going forward. As long as organisms are named after people, she said, such arguments about which names are appropriate will continue: “I’m sure there are other ways of honoring people who’ve contributed to science that’s not attaching their name to another living being.”

Guedes and her colleagues face an uphill battle: Many taxonomists like eponyms. “I think it’s positive in many, many cases,” Ceríaco said. He himself has described around 40 species, some of them eponyms, including a species of viper named after James Hetfield from Metallica. (This is a bit of tradition in taxonomy: Consider Taylor Swift’s millipede, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s snake.) Such names are a chance to get communities that generally don’t pay attention to such discoveries involved, he said. Eponyms also give researchers the chance to name species after scientists from the countries in which they were found, he added, such as an Angolan gecko that honors local scientist Francisco M. P. Gonçalves.

“There are certainly unfortunate eponyms out there,” Stephen Heard, an ecologist and author of “Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider,” a book about eponyms, wrote to Undark in a Twitter message. “There are also wonderful ones that bring attention to underrecognized figures in science, including Indigenous people, women, and more.”

It’s an honor for a researcher to have a species named after them, said Brian Sidlauskas, an ichthyologist at Oregon State University. (He would know: There’s an Amazonian fish with his name on it.) But while he’s not interested in barring their use, he does think the ICZN could create a process for ditching problematic names — perhaps through a panel of experts tasked with weighing in on proposed name changes. “There really are some names in history that genuinely are really offensive, so having some mechanism for changing those is a good idea,” he said — a position other researchers have staked out as well.

In addition, the ICZN’s stance against making changes for ethical reasons is a “classic slippery slope argument,” Sidlauskas said. “It’s clear that they don’t want to the responsibility for doing so. But if not them, then who has the responsibility and ability?”

Others argue that naming practices should change on a community level, regardless of what the ICZN does. “Going forward I think that White Europeans should not be naming species from countries that are not their own after other White Europeans,” said Laura Jennings, a botanist at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. While she doesn’t feel it’s for her to tell colleagues how to name species in their own country, she’d decline her own eponym. “My preference is to name species after a characteristic of the plant, a place name, or a name in a local language,” she added. “Something that links the plant to its native habitat.”

The broader community discussion isn’t going anywhere. The ICZN is currently working on the 5th edition of its formal code, Ceríaco said, which will be delivered for comment and debate by the community before it’s ratified in the next year or two. That’s part of the reason he and his colleagues made their position clear earlier this year, he said — to foster debate.

It’s a goal that Guedes’ team shares. “I don’t think the real change is going to happen anytime soon. But what we wanted to do was create a space for discussion,” she said.

“And I think we’re achieving that,” she added.

Asher Elbein is a writer based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in The Oxford American, the Texas Observer, and The Bitter Southerner.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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It feels like nearly every week or so, someone’s quadrupedal robot gains yet another impressive (occasionally terrifying) ability or trick. But as cool as a Boston Dynamics Spot bot’s new capability may be, it’s hard to reliably compare newly developed talents to others when there still aren’t any industry standard metrics. 

Knowing this, a team of research scientists at Google are aiming to streamline evaluations through their new system that’s as ingenious as it is obvious: robot obstacle courses akin to dog agility competitions. It’s time to stretch those robotic limbs and ready the next generation of four-legged machines for Barkour.

[Related: This robot dog learned a new trick—balancing like a cat.]

“[W]hile researchers have enabled robots to hike or jump over some obstacles, there is still no generally accepted benchmark that comprehensively measures robot agility or mobility,” the team explained in a blog post published last week. “In contrast, benchmarks are driving forces behind the development of machine learning, such as ImageNet for computer vision, and OpenAI Gym for reinforcement learning (RL).” As such, “Barkour: Benchmarking Animal-level Agility with Quadruped Robots” aims to rectify that missing piece of research.

In simple terms, the Barkour agility course is nearly identical to many dog courses, albeit much more compact at 5-by-5 meters to allow for easy setup in labs. The current standard version includes four unique obstacles—a line of poles to weave between, an A-frame structure to climb up and down, a 0.5m broad jump, and finally, a step up onto an end table.

To make sure the Barkour setup was fair to robots mimicking dogs, the team first offered up the space to actual canines—in this case, a small group of “dooglers,” aka Google employees’ own four-legged friends. According to the team, small dogs managed to complete the course in around 10 seconds, while robots usually take about double that time.

[Related: Dogs can understand more complex words than we thought.]

Scoring occurs between 0 and 1 for each obstacle, and is based on target times set for small dogs in novice agility competitions (around 1.7m/s). In all, each quadrupedal robot must complete all five challenges, but is given penalties for failing, skipping stations, or maneuvering too slowly through the course.

“We believe that developing a benchmark for legged robotics is an important first step in quantifying progress toward animal-level agility,” explained the team, adding that, moving forward, the Barkour system potentially offers industry researchers an “easily customizable” benchmark.

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On May 27, an Australian man snorkeling off of the coast of North Queensland survived an attack from a saltwater crocodile—by prying the reptile’s jaws off of its head. Australia’s reptilian saltwater giants have the highest bite force of any animal on Earth at 3,700 pounds.

McGowan was snorkeling with his wife and some friends near the Charles Hardy Islands, about 25 miles off the coast of Cape York on the day of the attack.

[Related: Saltwater crocodiles are eating a lot of feral hogs in Australia.]

“I was attacked from behind by a saltwater crocodile which got its jaws around my head. I thought it was a shark but when I reached up I realized it was a crocodile. I was able to lever its jaws open just far enough to get my head out,” McGowan said in a statement released by the Queensland Government’s hospital service.

According to McGowan, the crocodile attempted to attack a second time, but he managed to push it away with his right hand that had already been bitten by the reptile. McGowan was transported to Haggerstone Island about 45 minutes away, before going to Cairns Hospital. He suffered cuts and puncture wounds to his head and hands and is currently recovering from his injuries.

The area surrounding Haggerstone Island is known as “croc country,” according to the Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science. The department urges visitors to practice “crocwise behavior,” such as staying away from the water’s edge, properly disposing food, and keeping pets on a leash. The department warned that crocodiles could be in all of the waterways in the region and that people  in smaller vessels like kayaks, standing close to the water’s edge, or  wading while fishing are at a greater risk of a croc attack. Queensland’s science department is investigating this most recent incident, stressing the importance of reporting crocodile sightings and incidents in a timely manner.

There have been at least 44 occasions of crocodile attacks on humans in the area since 1985. In February, a non-fatal attack occurred off the Cape York Peninsula, where another man was able to free himself from the jaws of a crocodile. 

[Related: This small crocodile’s giant ancestors likely preyed on early humans.]

Billy Collett, the operations manager at Australia Reptile Park told The Guardian that those who escape crocodile attacks usually frighten the reptiles away. “Crocodiles are the hardest-biting animal on the planet. But when people do fight back, they seem to let go,” he said. “[McGowan] probably scared the croc which realized it grabbed something too big to handle.”

According to the Australia Zoo, the home of famed crocodile advocate Steve Irwin, saltwater crocodiles can grow up to 19 feet long and weigh up to 2,000 pounds. They can swim up over 500 miles per day, which can make them difficult to track. Locals affectionately call the reptiles “salties” and they are more commonly found in Australia’s warmer northern regions. Australia’s federal government estimates that there are about 100,000 saltwater crocodiles in the northern parts of the country.

“I live on the Gold Coast and am a keen surfer and diver, and understand that when you enter the marine environment, you are entering territory that belongs to potentially dangerous animals, such as sharks and crocodiles,” McGowan said in his statement.“I was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” 

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Even after all that quarantine hobby honing, gardening can still be an uphill battle for those lacking a green thumb—but a little help from robotic friends apparently goes a long way. Recently, UC Berkeley unveiled AlphaGarden, a high-tech, AI-assisted plant ecosystem reportedly capable of cultivating a polycultural garden at least as well as its human counterparts. And in one particular, consequential metric, AlphaGarden actually excelled.

As detailed by IEEE Spectrum over the weekend, UC Berkeley’s gardening plot combined a commercial robotic gantry farming setup with AlphaGardenSim, an AI program developed in-house by utilizing a high-resolution camera alongside soil moisture sensors. Additionally, the developers included automated drip irrigation, pruning, and even seed planting. AlphaGarden (unfortunately) doesn’t feature a fleet of cute, tiny farm bots scuttling around its produce; instead, the system resembles a small crane installation capable of moving above and tending to the garden bed.

[Related: How to keep your houseplants from dying this summer.]

As an added challenge, AlphaGarden was a polyculture creation, meaning it contained a variety of crops like turnips, arugula, lettuce, cilantro, kale, and other plants. Polyculture gardens reflect nature much more accurately, and benefit from better soil health, pest resilience, and fewer fertilization requirements. At the same time, they are often much more labor-intensive given the myriad plant needs, growth rates, and other such issues when compared to a monoculture yield.

To test out AlphaGarden’s capabilities compared with humans, researchers simply built two plots and planted the same seeds in both of them. Over the next 60 days, AlphaGarden was largely left to its own literal and figurative devices, while professional horticulturalists did the same. Afterwards, UC Berkeley repeated the same growth cycle, but this time allowed AlphaGarden to give its slower-growing plants an earlier start.

According to researchers, the results from the two cycles  “suggest that the automated AlphaGarden performs comparably to professional horticulturalists in terms of coverage and diversity.” While that might not be too surprising given all the recent, impressive AI advancements, there was one aspect that AlphaGarden unequivocally outperformed its human farmer controls—over the two test periods, the robotic system reduced water consumption by as much as a whopping 44 percent. As IEEE Spectrum explained, that translates to several hundred liters less after the two month period.

[Related: Quick and dirty tips to make sure your plants love the soil they’re in.]

Although researchers claim “AlphaGarden has thus passed the Turing Test for gardening,” referencing the much-debated marker for robotic intelligence and sentience, there are a few caveats here. For one, these commercial gantry systems remain cost prohibitive for most people (the cheapest one looks to be about $3,000), and more research is needed to further optimize its artificial light sources and water usage. There’s also the question of scalability and customization, as different gardens have different shapes, sizes, and needs.

Still, in an era of increasingly dire water worries, it’s nice to see developers creating novel ways to reduce water consumption for one of the planet’s thirstiest industries.

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Play is crucial for the social, physical, and cognitive development of many species, and even though cats are largely solitary creatures, they still need plenty of it. But people who are new to felines might not know what playtime actually looks like for these furry fellows.

Learning how to keep your cat properly stimulated is an essential part of sharing your home with them, and science can provide a couple of clues on where to start. Everyone in your household will benefit from it.

Use toys like a string wand with a fake mouse three to four times a day in brief intervals, Siracusa says, and make sure to end every play session by letting your cat put something in their mouth. It will be a satisfying outcome for all their efforts. 

You can achieve a similar puzzle-solving effect by cutting out holes in an old plastic container, or a shoe or cardboard box, and filling it with toys. Cats can then reach in and figure out how to get their treats out through the openings. 

If you have a tablet, there are apps specially designed for cats that you can download in lieu of a physical toy. For example, Cat Fishing 2 (available for Android and iOS) will turn the screen on your device into a pond with one, two or three fish that will disappear as your cat taps them with their paws. There are many apps out there that do the same with mice and birds if the fish aren’t alluring enough.

Trying and failing to catch intangible prey, like fish in a digital pond or a bright red dot on the wall, can be furr-straiting for your kitten, so be sure to reward them with a few treats or some wet food on a spoon.

“Cats tend to go high because they are prey, and observing the world from a vantage point makes them feel safer,” Siracusa explains. The floor of a busy household also brings with it the possibility of being stepped on, so allowing cats some height can be comforting. A cat tree, a cheap bookshelf, or a similarly safe place to perch will do the job. 

And if even after getting them their own observation deck your chronic climber keeps breaking your expensive porcelain collectibles, don’t punish them. It sure must be annoying to say goodbye to every fragile belonging you own, but Siracusa warns against disciplining your cat for something that’s natural to them—it can lead to aggressive behavior toward you.

For a cat, an ideal environment is one where there’s always the option to engage socially and playfully, but where they can also abstain if they want to. Attempting to force a cat to play or preventing this type of activity when needed, may lead to adverse behavior, such as seclusion and aggression.

Contrary to popular belief, loose strings and yarn can also be dangerous to cats, especially kittens: they can get caught in it or potentially ingest it and asphyxiate. Keep yarn wrapped up tightly when using it as a cat toy, and if your furry buddy is on the younger side, always keep an eye on them during playtime.

But your cat is not the only one you should be careful with. Don’t use your body as a toy when playing with cats. It goes without saying that their sharp claws and teeth can scratch your skin, and those cuts mixed with cat saliva can lead to infection. 

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For more than a hundred years, California, Arizona, and Nevada never accounted for evaporation on the lower basin of the Colorado River as they divided its water between themselves and later with Mexico. Their logic held that as long as there was more water than people used, they could ignore small losses from natural processes. More importantly, it was politically fraught—for decades, the lower basin states have been unable to reach an agreement about how evaporation should be taken into account when sharing the river’s waters. Even as a 23-year-long megadrought sucked moisture out of the already arid region, evaporation stayed off the books with decision making.

But now, as water managers scramble to find a solution to a river that’s been overused, mostly for irrigation-heavy crops like livestock feed, they’re forced into a harsh reality: every drop counts, including those that disappear into the air. 

In August 2022, the Biden administration ordered California, Arizona, and Nevada to cut their annual allotments from the river by significant amounts. Last month, the White House released a plan outlining two options, which would reduce the states’ use of the river by as much as one quarter: evenly split reductions on the lower basin, which divides the river’s flow from the tip of Arizona down to northern Mexico, between the three states, or make reductions based on senior water rights, which means fewer cuts for California. On May 22, after much politicking, the states proposed an alternative deal that pledges to use 13 percent less water from the river overall. But it’s still unclear if and how the proposed plan accounts for evaporation. 

How much water is evaporating from the lower basin of the Colorado River?

One way to measure how much water dries up in the system each year is by looking at the evaporation losses on Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, located in Nevada and Arizona and Utah and Arizona, respectively. About 1.9 million acre-feet or 13 percent of the water from the reservoirs across the entire river is lost to evaporation each year, says Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University. 

In particular, the lower basin (which includes Lakes Mead, Mohave, Havasu, and a few smaller mainstream reservoirs) lost an average of 906,000 acre-feet of water per year to evaporation from 2016 to 2020, according to Schmidt, who cites data from the Bureau of Reclamation. To put that number into context, Nevada can legally use about 300,000 acre-feet per year with the existing deal. “The evaporation of water in the lower basin is equal to three Nevadas. Some people would say that’s a big number,” Schmidt says. Other estimates put the amount of water lost to evaporation even higher at about 1.5 million acre-feet per year, or about five Nevadas.

But the overall amount of water that evaporates hasn’t actually changed that much in the past decade. That’s because there’s just less water in the reservoirs, which means there’s less water to lose,” according to Katherine Earp, a hydrologist for the Nevada Water Science Center. At the same time, she adds, as the reservoirs become shallower, the water becomes warmer, and evaporation increases slightly.

[Related: See inside Glen Canyon Dam as Lake Powell levels drop]

Evaporation occurs when energy, usually in the form of heat, turns a liquid into gas. In this case, sunlight heats up water from the reservoirs and transforms it into water vapor. While the process seems straightforward, many factors affect how much evaporation occurs on the reservoirs. “It’s the sun; it’s dry winds sweeping across the reservoirs; it’s whether or not it’s cloudy,” Schmidt says. “It’s all about the heat and the relative humidity of the air over the reservoir.” A warming climate can accelerate those drivers as well, he says.

Earp cautions that scientists don’t know how much climate change and evaporation will cut into water held in the lower basin. She says there are two factors that could see direct impacts: the reservoirs’ temperature and depth. “Those are changing as the [lakes along the Colorado River] are changing,” she says. “Most of the evaporation is being done right at the surface with the wind. So that’s not changing. We’ve always had a big hot desert—we will continue to have a big hot desert.”

What can states in the Colorado River deal do to fight evaporation?

Even if the states took immediate action to prevent evaporation on the Colorado River, it wouldn’t be simple. The reservoirs are too big for quick fixes. “People put covers on their swimming pools and hot tubs,” Schmidt says. “You’re not going to do any of that on Lake Powell and Lake Mead—these are reservoirs are more than 100 miles long.” Instead, he outlines two potential solutions: consolidating water from the two major reservoirs into one or pumping some of the water underground. 

Schmidt did the math behind the first option. In a white paper published in 2016, he examined how much water might be saved if the lower basin states fill Lake Mead and put any remaining water into Lake Powell. “Right now we manage the system to equalize the storage contents in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and so we sort of maximize the surface area exposed to the sun,” he says. But he found the savings would be minimal, about 50,000 acre-feet of water across the two reservoirs, and says it should be used as a second-tier strategy.

[Related: Solar panels and water canals could form a real power couple in California]

In the second option, water from the reservoirs would slowly be cached underground. Arizona and California already store some water underground in recharge basins with the intention to put water back into local aquifers. But there’s a risk of not being able to track and recover all of the water that seeps back into the ground. Still, Schmidt says recharge basins might be a good option if evaporation gets worse. “It’s a technique trusted by water managers,” Schmidt says. “Yes, it’s uncertain. But those uncertainties do not concern people enough that they don’t do it.”

Earp says the subterranean-storage strategy might be difficult in southern Nevada, where the geology can’t store such large volumes of water. “When users can’t use all the water, they do store excess in smaller orders in Arizona and Las Vegas. But doing the whole lake is a much bigger scale thing,” she says. “I don’t know if it would work.”

Both Earp and Schmidt agree that evaporation will keep playing a role in negotiations over the lower basin. “The most fundamental attribute of the river is it’s fully tapped out,” Schmidt says. “When the natural flow of the river system declines, and you begin to account for everything (because you must), then evaporation is a significant process. And somebody’s got to account for it.”

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When you look up at the clouds, what do you see? A blob, a wisp, perhaps an elephant-shaped clump. It’s fun to get creative with the descriptions, but scientists have a formal classification system that can be useful to the everyday cloud watcher, too. We’ve made a field guide to types of clouds, so next time you’re enjoying a day outside, you can put your newfound knowledge of the skies to work.

What’s in clouds and their names?

Clouds are made up of droplets of water or tiny ice crystals floating in the planet’s atmosphere. They hold clues about the weather—like if it’s going to rain, snow, or worse—and the interesting physical and chemical cycles churning through the air.

“They are such an amazing feature of Earth that are simply fun to look at and study,” says Vanessa Maciel, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Clouds are shaped by the many changing characteristics of the atmosphere: temperature, moisture, winds, and more. 

[Related: Make your own weather station with recycled materials]

Just like animal species, climate scientists have a system for naming clouds with genera, plus smaller subdivisions of species and varieties. These designations are based on their shape, appearance, and how high they are in the atmosphere. Each genus of clouds can be described as one of four main shapes, first categorized in 1803: cirro-form, cumulo-form, strato-form, and nimbo-form. Cirro-type clouds are the thin wisps; cumulo-type clouds are huge and fluffy; strato-type clouds are wide and flat layers; and nimbo-type clouds are the quintessential gray rain clouds. 

The astonishing diversity of clouds might seem overwhelming to a beginning cloud-gazer, but Maciel has advice on where to start. “A great way to narrow down the type of cloud you are seeing is to first try to estimate whether it is in the lower, middle, or high atmosphere,” she says.

High clouds

The highest clouds are the wispiest: cirrus, cirrocumulus, and cirrostratus. They generally form above 20,000 feet, and typically indicate a coming change in the winds or weather. In certain regions of the tropics, they can even indicate that hurricanes are on the way. Generally, the air gets colder higher up in Earth’s atmosphere, so cirrus and friends are made up of ice crystals that are stretched and spread by the winds, giving them their thin, strand-like shapes.

Cirrus are the thinnest wisps, whereas cirrocumulus appear more like a thin, rippled white sheet. Cirrostratus are a more homogenous sheer veil. If you see a bright halo forming around the sun, that might be the cirrostratus. When cirrus clouds stack together like ridges, almost like a rack of ribs, the variety is called vertebratus.

Maciel’s favorite cloud looks a bit like a cirrus cloud, but is actually something quite different. Nacreous clouds, also known as mother-of-pearl or ice polar stratospheric clouds, are made of very cold ice. When the sun goes down they catch the light and reflect brilliant colors. “These colors occur only during sunrise and sunset, and are created by the interaction between sunlight and the cloud’s ice crystals, which are smaller than that of a standard ice cloud,” says Maciel. “They are also pretty rare as they only occur at high atmospheric altitudes and high latitudes.” Your best bet of seeing them is near the planet’s poles.

Mid-level clouds

In the middle of the atmosphere, we start to see more clumps: altostratus and altocumulus. They can be found 6,500 to 20,000 feet up, and tell very different tales when it comes to weather—altocumulus often mean you’ve got a pleasant day ahead, but altostratus indicate a long bout of rain or snow. 

Altostratus appear as large, flat sheets that aren’t quite thick enough to block out the sun entirely. Altocumulus, on the other hand, look like a horde of little cotton balls scattered in the sky. You’ve likely seen a few different species and varieties of altostratus and altocumulus before, particularly cavum. This variety is a continuous sheet of cloud with a big chunk missing. Stratiformis is another common species of altocumulus, where high clouds appear like a patchy, ridged sheet. Similarly, if there are layers of cloud that cover the sun entirely, they may be a variety known as opacus.

Low clouds

Many kinds of clouds start close to the ground—6,500 feet or below—and extend high into the atmosphere. These clouds are called nimbostratus, stratus, stratocumulus, cumulus, and cumulonimbus. These clouds are made up of water droplets from the surrounding warm air, creating their quintessential fluffy look.

Nimbostratus are the gray gloomy clouds that indicate rain. Stratus clouds also create gloomy days as they cover the sky in a low sheet of dingy white. Stratocumulus are somewhat similar to altocumulus, but they have a darker shadow and don’t appear quite as bright white as their higher altitude counterparts. 

Cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds are the behemoths of the bunch. Cumulus are huge white clouds reaching high up into the sky—the classic cotton balls. Cumulonimbus, on the other hand, are imposing and a bit foreboding, with a high, flat top and a promise of rain storms.

[Related on PopSci+: Cloudy with a chance of cooling the planet]

Low clouds come with some of the oddest and most interesting varieties and features. This is where tubes or vortexes appear from clouds, called tuba. They can also show—for a brief moment, anyway—a feature that looks like a set of perfect crashing waves, known as fluctus. Although the fluctus pattern looks almost too good to be true, it’s a somewhat common consequence of the physics of fluid motions. Stratocumulus clouds can also put on a cow costume: That is, they can grow little nubs on their undersides that almost look like udders, known as mamma. Cumulus clouds can even put on a hat, an accessory cloud called pileus that pops up at the top of one of these huge cloud formations.

What clouds to look for now

This summer, you can expect all the fair weather clouds, plus some of the weirder ones that pop up with summer storms like pileus. “Summer usually has clear skies, unlike the overcasts typical of winter,” adds Maciel. “But as summer also has a lot of convection due to the warm surface temperature, you can expect to see cumulus clouds, which are your iconic fluffy and bright white clouds.”

Clouds are just as complex as their classifications, and they’re changing not just with the seasons, but also with the climate. As Earth’s temperature warms, the varieties we see might change, too. “In spite of their ubiquity, there is still a lot about clouds that we don’t know,” says Maciel. For now, though, see how many you can spot—and enjoy the beautiful views provided by our planet’s magnificent atmosphere.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

One in five people could live in dangerously hot conditions by the end of the century if global warming continues at its current pace, even if nations uphold their pledges under the Paris Agreement, scientists warned in a new peer-reviewed study. It’s the latest research published in recent days that points to the stark human and societal costs of the accelerating climate crisis as global carbon emissions continue to rise to unprecedented levels.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Sustainability, estimates that some 2 billion people would see a mean annual temperature of 84 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, starting in as early as 2070, when Earth’s population is expected to reach at least 9.5 billion. Most people live in a “human climate niche” that ranges between a mean annual temperature of 55 degrees and 80 degrees, the researchers said, so that many people experiencing a major uptick in regional heat would be unprecedented.

Such a temperature threshold, where 84 degrees or higher becomes the middle ground for the year, can also be very dangerous for anyone without air conditioning or other means to cool off, the study’s authors also noted. According to their estimate, some of the nations that will be hardest hit by the heat are also home to some of the world’s poorest communities, where air conditioning typically isn’t an option.

Of the estimated 2 billion people that could be forced out of their climate niche and into dangerous extreme heat, the study found, 600 million will be in India, 300 million in Nigeria and 100 million in Indonesia.

“Those people who are affected are the poorer people on the planet,” Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at Exeter and the study’s lead author, told Forbes. “At higher temperatures, life becomes unbearable, affecting water, agriculture and food. You can’t barricade yourself from climate change. There is an undeniable interconnection amongst nations.”

Among the study’s most pertinent findings is the drastic difference it would make for the world to limit average warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—the most ambitious target of the Paris Agreement. Scientists estimate that under the global climate treaty’s current pledges, the world is still on track to warm by roughly 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. But if emissions were significantly slashed to limit average warming to 1.5 degrees, Monday’s study said, just 400 million people would be pushed outside their climate niche instead of 2 billion.

Monday’s study also comes on the heels of a major report released last week by the United Nations’ weather agency, which warned that heat will likely soar to record levels in many parts of the world over the next five years. Global warming, combined with a climate pattern known as El Niño, will largely drive that heat, the report’s authors said, with the next five years almost certainly set to be the warmest five-year period ever recorded.

“This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment,” Petteri Taalas, the World Meteorological Organization’s secretary general, told the New York Times. “We need to be prepared.”

It’s not just extreme heat that climate scientists have warned about in recent days.

On Monday, the World Meteorological Organization released another report, which found that the economic damage of natural disasters continues to rise, even as improvements in early warning systems have helped reduce the loss of life. In that report, the U.N. body tallied nearly 12,000 extreme weather, climate and water-related events globally between 1970 and 2021 that have killed more than 2 million people and caused $4.3 trillion worth of economic damage.

And climate change is already affecting all parts of the world, not just the poorer regions. About $1.7 trillion of that financial damage took place in the United States alone.

The new studies and reports, in many ways, are pointing to a reality with which many people are already familiar. This week, swathes of India are baking under extreme heat, with some places reaching temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday. Over the weekend, raging wildfires in Canada continued to send smoke south into the U.S., prompting officials in Colorado and Montana to issue air quality alerts. And last week, heavy rainfall inundated 43 towns in Italy, causing landslides and flash floods that killed 14 people and destroyed hundreds of roads.

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Termites are often thought to be structural pests, but two researchers have taken a slightly contrarian viewpoint. As detailed in a new paper recently published in Frontiers in Materials, David Andréen of Lund University and Rupert Soar of Nottingham Trent University studied termites’ tens of millions of years of architectural experience exhibited within their massive mounds. According to the duo’s findings, the insects’ abilities could inspire a new generation of green, energy efficient architecture.

Termites are responsible for building the tallest biological structures in the world, with the biggest mound ever recorded measuring an astounding 42-feet-high. These insects aren’t randomly building out their homes, however—in fact, the structures are meticulously designed to make the most of the environment around them. Termite mounds in Namibia, for example, rely on intricate, interconnected tunnels known as an “egress complex.” As explained in Frontiers’ announcement, these mounds’ complexes grow northward during the November-to-April rainy season in order to be directly exposed to the midday sun. Throughout the rest of the year, however, termites block these egress tunnels, thus regulating ventilation and moisture levels depending on the season.

To better study the architectural intricacies, Andréen and Soar created a 3D-printed copy of an egress complex fragment. They then used a speaker to simulate winds by sending oscillating amounts of CO2-air mixture through the model while tracking mass transference rates. Turbulence within the mound depended on the frequency of oscillation, which subsequently moved excess moisture and respiratory gasses away from the inner mound.

[Related: Termites work through wood faster when it’s hotter out.]

From there, the team created a series of 2D models of the egress complex. After driving an oscillating amount of water through these lattice-like tunnels via an electromotor, Andréen and Soar found that the machine only needed to move air a few millimeters back-and-forth to force the water throughout the entire model. The researchers discovered termites only need small amounts of wind power to ventilate their mounds’ egress complex.

The researchers believe integrating the egress complex design into future buildings’ walls could create promising green architecture threaded with tiny air passageways. This could hypothetically be accomplished via technology such as powder bed printers alongside low-energy sensors and actuators to move air throughout the structures.

“When ventilating a building, you want to preserve the delicate balance of temperature and humidity created inside, without impeding the movement of stale air outwards and fresh air inwards,” explained Soar, adding the egress complex is “an example of a complicated structure that could solve multiple problems simultaneously: keeping comfort inside our homes, while regulating the flow of respiratory gasses and moisture through the building envelope,” with minimal to no A/C necessary. Once realized, the team believes society may soon see the introduction of “true living, breathing” buildings.

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As they creep through tropical environments appearing not to have a care in the world, sloths give off some of the chillest vibes in the animal kingdom. This relaxed and elusive nature does make studying sloths a bit difficult, but a study published May 29 in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment is shedding some new light on activity patterns and behaviors adaptations of two sloth species.

[Related: Sloths aren’t the picky eaters we thought they were.]

The team looked at Bradypus variegatus and Choloepus hoffmanni, two sloth species that live in the lowland rainforests of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Costa Rica is home to six species of sloths, who have the slowest digestive system of any animal on Earth. It can take the mammals two weeks to digest an entire meal, and they sleep about 20 hours a day to conserve energy. 

Using micro data loggers, the team continuously monitored the behavior of both three-toed sloths (Bradypus) and two-toed sloths (Choloepus) for periods ranging from days to weeks. These recordings enabled the team to explore how fluctuating environmental influences sloth activity and how that correlates with their uniquely chill and low-energy lifestyle. 

Choloepus sloths are cathemeral, meaning that they have irregular variable periods of activity throughout a 24-hour cycle. Cathemeral behavior allows them to take advantage of better environmental conditions while minimizing the risk of predation. 

The study also observed a large amount of variability in activity levels between the animals and also within individual sloths. This flexibility suggests that the animals have developed diverse strategies to adapt to their surroundings, which enhances their chances of survival when the environment fluctuates. 

The team initially expected that daily temperatures, which can hit the mid-90s, would influence sloth activity, but their observations did not support that initial hypothesis. However, Bradypus sloths did increase their night time activity on colder nights and the nights that followed colder days. The authors believe that this indicates a potential correlation between sloth behavior and temperature variations.

[Related: Our bravest ancestors may have hunted giant sloths.]

While this study adds more understanding to sloth ecology, it also highlights the importance of preserving and protecting tropical rainforests and their unique inhabitants. According to Global Forest Watch, Costa Rica lost about 2.4 percent of its forest cover between 2000 and 2020, but the country has gained international recognition for its efforts to mitigate climate change and promote animal welfare.

“Understanding the drivers of sloth activity and their ability to withstand environmental fluctuations is of growing importance for the development of effective conservation measures, particularly when we consider the vulnerability of tropical ecosystems to climate change and the escalating impacts of anthropogenic activities in South and Central America,” the team wrote in the paper.

As these tropical ecosystems become more vulnerable due to human-made climate change, understanding wildlife patterns are crucial for conservation methods. While long-term observational research is a challenge, this study could pave the way for more studies on this cryptic and elusive species. 

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Over the past decade, public awareness about climate change has grown, albeit gradually. As more people became eco-conscious, it isn’t surprising that the demand for environmentally friendly products has increased as well. According to the 2022 Sustainable Market Share Index, sustainability-marketed products now hold about a 17.3 percent share of the consumer packaged goods market, a significant increase from 13.7 percent back in 2015. Products marketed as sustainable also grew about twice as fast as conventionally marketed products from 2017 to 2022.

With more green products entering the market, it’s important to ensure that manufacturers do not mislead consumers when it comes to environmental claims. The Federal Trade Commission made the Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims (or “Green Guides”) exactly for this purpose. First issued in 1992, the guide has been updated several times since then to keep marketers from making unsubstantiated claims.

[Related: How to actually recycle.]

Last month, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) submitted a comment about the Green Guides. According to the agency, the use of the resin identification code (RIC) with the recycling symbol—the familiar three chasing arrows—constitutes a misrepresentation of claims. Even though the RIC is meant to identify a product’s unique plastic resin type, consumers generally understand it to represent a universal recycling symbol. A 2019 report from the Consumer Brands Association found that 68 percent of Americans assume any product with the resin code and recycling symbol is recyclable.

“When the plastic industry co-opted the recycling symbol to label their plastic resins, they began a decades-long misinformation campaign to convince Americans that all plastic packaging is recyclable,” says Martin Bourque, executive director of the Ecology Center and co-founder of the Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers (AMBR). “Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

The RIC refers to the type of plastic of which there are seven in total. However, “very little plastic packaging is even marginally recyclable,” says Bourque. According to Greenpeace, only polyethylene terephthalate (PET) #1 and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) #2 can be claimed as recyclable materials. They are the only types of plastic resin widely accepted by more than 350 material recovery facilities (MRF) across the country. Even if MRFs were to accept other types of plastic, that doesn’t ensure that they will be recycled—they might simply dispose of them.

Recycling contamination occurs when recyclable items are placed in the wrong bins or non-recyclable items end up in the recycling system. Local governments and MRFs face contamination issues in their daily operations, which is associated with consumer confusion about what is recyclable or not. The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit organization committed to building a circular economy, estimates that contamination costs the US recycling system at least $300 million annually. 

Bourque says the use of the chasing arrows with the RIC has undermined efforts at reducing plastic use, enabled even more single-use and disposable plastic packaging, and cost recyclers millions in collection, sorting, and disposal expenses. The EPA comment says that updating the recyclable claims section on the Green Guides may reduce consumer confusion and the financial burden of facilities receiving and incarcerating plastic materials they cannot recycle.

ASTM International, which administers the RIC system, revised the standard in 2013 and replaced the chasing arrows symbol with a solid equilateral triangle to bring the focus back to the purpose of resin identification and quality control before recycling. The state of California also passed SB 343 in 2021, which prohibits the use of the chasing arrows symbol on products that are not considered recyclable in accordance with statewide recyclability criteria. 

Having an equilateral triangle around the resin identification code is moderately better than the recycling symbol, says Bourque, but he recommends that California’s new labeling law be adopted on a national level since it requires any claims of recyclability (including the use of the chasing arrows symbol) to be backed up with proof.

The RIC system was not intended for consumers in the first place, but rather, for those who work in materials recovery and recycling facilities. In terms of getting more people on board with recycling, it may be helpful to establish consumer communication tools like new labels to indicate specifically whether a plastic material is recyclable or not, says Kate O’Neill, global environmental politics and governance expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It may also restore trust in the system and create more effective recycling practices from consumers, she adds.

[Related: Recycling plants spew a staggering amount of microplastics.]

To increase plastic recycling rates, it’s necessary to invest in recycling infrastructure, says O’Neill. The country’s recycling infrastructure hasn’t been keeping up with today’s waste steam. Last year, the EPA announced $375 million in funding for new recycling, reuse, and waste prevention programs and initiatives—the largest investment in recycling by the EPA in 30 years.

O’Neill says creating markets for recycled plastics could also help. In 2020, California passed AB 793 which requires plastic beverage containers to contain a minimum amount of recycled content. Starting in 2022, the amount of post-consumer recycled resin in plastic beverage containers should at least be 15 percent. The requirement increases to 25 percent by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030, thereby increasing the demand for recycled resin.

Although recycling is part of the solution when addressing plastic waste, O’Neill says it can’t be the panacea. The focus should still be on reducing plastic packaging, not recycling more, says Bourque. Targeting virgin plastic production and use can reduce further waste generation. “We cannot recycle our way out of the plastic packaging crisis,” he adds. “Remember, it goes ‘Reduce, Reuse, then Recycle!’”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Kelp is common along temperate shorelines around the world. For millennia, this large brown algae has been vital to coastal Indigenous peoples. In Washington State and British Columbia, kelp is a traditional food source, a focus for commercial cultivation, and habitat for critically endangered and threatened species like rockfish and young salmon. It’s hard to overstate kelp’s value. For the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, says shellfish biologist Annie Raymond, “you can’t quantify how important this biodiversity is, culturally.”

But over the past four decades, warming water and other factors have been killing kelps across the Salish Sea. So this summer, Raymond and her team will be hunting for kelp spores—colloquially called seeds—in the Juan de Fuca Strait, part of an ongoing effort to build an emergency fund for kelps, says Raymond, and ensure their future in the tribe’s traditional territory.

To face the pressing need to preserve kelp biodiversity, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is partnering with the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF) and other tribes, universities, and organizations to expand a seed bank for Washington kelps as part of the Puget Sound Kelp Conservation and Recovery Plan.

Begun in 2010 by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the existing seed bank houses a collection of bull kelp spores from the Washington coast. Currently, the spores are housed in Wisconsin, but in the coming months, the collection will be moved to a US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries research station in Manchester, Washington.

The expanding seed bank, says Raymond, is designed to preserve vulnerable kelp species for future restoration. While the tribe will only collect spores along the Juan de Fuca Strait, “the seed bank allows the tribe to contribute to habitat protection,” she says. “We want to help build resilience across the region.” The PSRF will also contribute to the seed bank, sampling sites along the Washington coast.

Jodie Toft, PSRF’s deputy director, says it’s taken years to build the infrastructure necessary to house such a precious resource at the Manchester Research Station for the long haul. Although the seed bank will house thousands of samples in a refrigerator no bigger than one in a typical kitchen, “we needed to make sure that our kelp lab was going to be able to keep the seed bank alive,” says Toft.

Unlike with many terrestrial plant seeds, which can be dried and stored for decades and remain viable, storing kelp for extended periods is more complex. To reproduce, explains Raymond, kelps release zoospores that develop into male and female gametophytes. To keep them viable, scientists store kelp gametophytes under red light, in low iron environments, or in a freezer, which puts it in a kind of arrested development. This means that the new bank needed to keep conditions tightly controlled, with emergency measures in case the power goes out.

The PSRF seed bank is just one of several kelp seed banks in California, Oregon, Alaska, and British Columbia. Simon Fraser University plant biologist Liam Coleman, who is working to start another kelp seed bank in British Columbia, says there’s an urgent need to make and maintain these kinds of biobanks. “The number one priority is just to make sure that biodiversity is backed up,” says Coleman. By preserving genetic diversity, scientists hope to give species the best chance they can to cope with future environmental challenges.

Seed banks will also give people in the future a chance to reforest kelps with the same genes that existed in the region in the first place, maximizing the chances that kelps will thrive.

“The gold standard for restoration is to replicate what was lost in the place where it was lost,” says Toft. Raymond hopes restoration in the future won’t be necessary. But if it is, and all goes as planned, “even 50 or 100 years in the future” the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe will be able to access the seed bank.

It’s not just the Jamestown S’Klallam who will benefit. Todd Woodard, the infrastructure and resources executive director of the Samish Indian Nation, says that in Samish territory, kelp populations have declined by 36 percent from 2006 to 2016. Woodward expects his community will use the seed bank to reseed some of their restoration sites.

Yet as NOAA’s Manchester seed bank nears completion, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe will have to make crucial decisions about which kelp species to preserve. “We know bull kelp will be one,” says Raymond, “but there are also a number of understory kelps that we want to study.”

Time, however, is already running short for Salish Sea kelps. Biodiversity is still high in the Juan de Fuca Strait, but other parts of Puget Sound have already lost nearly all of their bull kelp, and for some remaining populations, genetic diversity is exceedingly low. That’s why Raymond knows they need to work fast.

“The tribe has countless cultural resources that are intertwined with kelp,” she says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This story was originally published by Grist.

Given America’s penchant for gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs, you might be surprised to learn that the country’s gasoline usage is going down, maybe for good. Even though only about 1 percent of cars on the road today are electric, some say the United States has already passed “peak gasoline” — the pivotal moment when the fuel’s use finally begins a permanent decline after a century of growth. 

Gasoline consumption has not fully bounced back to levels seen before local governments began lockdowns in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people stopped driving to work every day. Back in the pre-pandemic year of 2018, Americans burned an average of 392 million gallons of gasoline, more than one gallon every day for every person in the country. Since that annual peak, a combination of remote work, high gas prices, and fuel economy standards that require that new cars get better gas mileage have diminished demand. To stay profitable, oil refiners have cut back on production.

Demand for gasoline this year could end up at around 366 million gallons per day, down 7 percent from 2018, according to analysis provided to Grist by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research and advocacy nonprofit. With recent policies like the Inflation Reduction Act offering a tax credit of up to $7,500 for an electric vehicle and the Biden administration’s new emissions rules — which require two-thirds of new passenger vehicles be electric by 2031 — gasoline demand could decrease almost a quarter by 2030, according to the research group, compared to current levels.

That’s still not fast enough to hit important targets to slash greenhouse gases, says Janelle London, the co-executive director of Coltura, an organization advocating for the end of gasoline. “Scientists are saying that we have to cut emissions from all sources in half by 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and gasoline use just is not on track,” she said. The majority of the country’s transportation-related carbon emissions come from burning gasoline in cars, trucks, and SUVs. And transportation is currently the country’s largest source of pollution. London says that the fastest way to cut consumption is to target electric vehicle incentives toward “gasoline superusers”: the 10 percent of population that drives the most and guzzles nearly a third of the country’s gas. 

That’s not who’s buying electric vehicles right now. The typical EV driver is likely to be among those who drive the least, London said. “The only way we’re going to solve this near-term problem is to get the biggest gasoline users to switch to EVs, like, now, as soon as possible.” California, for instance, is on track for a 10 percent cut in gasoline use by 2030, far from its goal of halving gasoline use by the end of the decade. If superusers in California bought electric vehicles before everyone else, it would result in a steep, 43 percent drop that would move the state much closer to its climate goals.

London says that federal tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act “could be much better designed,” and she’s not the only one who thinks so. Ashley Nunes, director of federal climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research center, says the credits aren’t necessarily prompting people to give up their gas-powered cars. They’re just adding another vehicle. An estimated 44 percent of households with an electric vehicle have at least two other cars, if not three — nearly all of which run on gas. “First and foremost, I think that electric vehicle incentives should not be given to people who are not turning in their gasoline-powered car,” Nunes said. “We’re not paying for you to add another car in your garage.” 

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society, Nunes and other researchers found that offering blanket subsidies for electric vehicles isn’t an economically effective way of reducing carbon emissions. Targeting subsidies at households with only one vehicle and toward taxi or Uber drivers produces more bang for the federal buck. “You want to target people who drive their cars a lot, because that’s where you see the real emission benefits associated with EVs,” Nunes said.

In some states, there’s new interest in getting frequent drivers to switch to EVs. A bill in Vermont, for instance, would allow the Burlington Electric Department to use funds to help gasoline superusers buy electric vehicles. It passed through the state legislature this month and is headed to Republican Governor Phil Scott’s desk. If signed, it’ll be the first legislation in the country to offer EV incentives specifically to “superusers,” a term coined by Coltura two years ago.

Coltura makes the case that converting the biggest gasoline users into EV owners means less money for gas stations and more for power providers. “Utilities have a huge interest in getting these superusers to switch to EVs,” London said. “Suddenly, they’d be using a lot of electricity, right?” Someone who uses 1,000 gallons of gasoline a year, if switched to an EV, would use about 9,000 kilowatts of extra electricity each year, according to Coltura. Using the average cost of gasoline and electricity in February 2023, that means they’d spend about $1,150 on electricity instead of $3,390 on gas, saving roughly $2,000 a year.

There’s another effort underway in California that would allow superusers to receive more funding, in addition to federal tax credits, to switch. Assembly Bill 1267 would have directed the California Air Resources Board to institute a program that maximizes the reduction in gasoline — and thus the climate impact — for each dollar spent on incentives for superusers. After passing unanimously through two committee hearings this spring with bipartisan support, the bill died last week. (London said that it will likely be reintroduced next year.) The state already has a hodgepodge of programs that help lower-income residents buy electric cars — including one that offers grants of up to $9,500 to replace a gas guzzler with a cleaner vehicle — though they have suffered from a lack of funding.

The superusers who make less than the state’s median income wind up spending 10 percent of their income just on putting gas in their car. “People say you can’t afford an EV,” London said. “If you’re a superuser, you can’t afford to keep paying for gasoline.” 

The average price of an electric car is about $59,000, higher than the $48,000 average for all cars. But London says that average EV cost is “irrelevant” since there are cheaper options on the market. “The question is, is there an EV at the price point that I can afford one?” she asks. While the cheapest EV model, the Chevy Bolt, is being discontinued, a new Nissan Leaf starts at just under $30,000, and tax credits can knock the price down further.

Clayton Stranger, a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, said that there was a “compelling” economic case to target superusers with EV incentives, though the savings alone might not be enough to make people switch: The infrastructure needs to be built in rural places to make people feel comfortable driving an electric car, giving them confidence there’s a place to charge if they need it.

And then there’s the other aspect of ending the gasoline era: getting Americans out of their cars and into buses and trains, and onto bike lanes and sidewalks. “We also need to significantly reduce the amount of driving that is done,” Stranger said. “EVs alone don’t get us all the way there.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/peak-gasoline-superusers-electric-vehicle-incentives/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

Sweat was dripping down Luis Cassiano’s face. It was 2012, and Rio de Janeiro’s hottest day to date: At nearly 110 degrees Fahrenheit, the seaside city had just barely beaten its previous record set in 1984.

Cassiano and his mother, then 82, had lived in the same narrow four-story house since they moved to Parque Arará, a favela in northern Rio, some 20 years earlier. Like many other homes in the working-class community — one of more than 1,000 favelas in the Brazilian city of over 6.77 million — its roof is made of asbestos tiles. But homes in his community are now often roofed with corrugated steel sheets, a material frequently used for its low cost. It’s also a conductor of extreme heat.

While the temperatures outside made his roof hot enough to cook an egg — Cassiano said he once tried and succeeded — inside felt worse. “I only came home to sleep,” said Cassiano. “I had to escape.”

Parque Arará mirrors many other low-income urban communities, which tend to lack greenery and are more likely to face extreme heat than their wealthier or more rural counterparts. Such areas are often termed “heat islands” since they present pockets of high temperatures — sometimes as much as 20 degrees hotter than surrounding areas.

That weather takes a toll on human health. Heat waves are associated with increased rates of dehydration, heat stroke, and death; they can exacerbate chronic health conditions, including respiratory disorders; and they impact brain function. Such health problems will likely increase as heat waves become more frequent and severe with climate change. According to a 2021 study published in Nature Climate Change, more than a third of the world’s heat-related deaths between 1991 and 2018 could be attributed to a warming planet.

The extreme heat worried Cassiano. And as a long-time favela resident, he knew he couldn’t depend on Brazil’s government to create better living conditions for his neighbors, the majority of whom are Black. So, he decided to do it himself.

While speaking with a friend working in sustainable development in Germany, Cassiano learned about green roofs: an architectural design feature in which rooftops are covered in vegetation to reduce temperatures both inside and outdoors. The European country started to seriously explore the technology in the 1960s, and by 2019, had expanded its green roofs to an estimated 30,000 acres, more than doubling in a decade.

“Why can’t favelas do that too?” he recalled thinking.

Scientific research suggests green infrastructure can offer urban residents a wide range of benefits: In addition to cooling ambient temperatures, they can reduce stormwater runoff, curb noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, and ease anxiety.

More than 10 years since that hot day in 2012 — and several heat records later — Cassiano heads Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit he started to educate residents about how they can build their own green roofs. Favela construction comes with its own set of technical peculiarities and public policy problems, and Cassiano enlisted the help of local scientists to research best practices and materials. But covering the roofs of an entire neighborhood requires time and — even with cost-reducing measures — a big budget.

His work has been steady, but slow. He is still far from converting every roof in his community of some 20,000 people. And with the effects of climate change arriving quickly, time may not be on their side. Still, Cassiano sees Teto Verde Favela as a template for others in similar situations around the world.

“I started to imagine the whole favela with green roofs,” he said. “And not just this favela, but others, too.”

Green roofs have been around for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that the modern-day version really took off, thanks to new irrigation technology and protection against leaks developed in Germany.

The technology cools local temperatures in two ways. First, vegetation absorbs less heat than other roofing materials. Second, plant roots absorb water that is then released as vapor through the leaves — a process known as evapotranspiration that offers similar cooling effects to how sweat cools human skin.

Green roofs can also help prevent flooding by reducing runoff. A conventional roof might let 100 percent of rain run off, allowing water to pour into streets, but a green roof, depending on its structure and slope, “can reduce this runoff generation rate to anywhere from 25 to 60 percent,” Lucas Camargo da Silva Tassinari, a civil engineer who researches the effectiveness of green roofs, wrote in an email to Undark.

Such interventions could be helpful in Brazil, where flooding is an ongoing issue, and temperatures are rising. A 2015 study showed that land surface temperatures in the city’s heat islands had increased 3 degrees over the previous decade. But greenery appears to help: Researchers from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, or UFRJ, found a 36 degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city’s warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas.

In Parque Arará, Cassiano said the temperature regularly rises well above what is registered as the city’s official temperature, often measured in less dense areas closer to the ocean. He decided his community’s first green roof prototype would be built on his own home. As he researched the best way to get started, Cassiano came across Bruno Rezende, a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis at UFRJ. When he told him about his idea, Rezende came to Parque Arará right away.

There isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to green roofs. A designer must take into account each location’s specific climate and building type in order for the project to not only be effective, but also structurally sound.

The problem is that green roofs can be quite heavy. They require a number of layers, each serving its own unique purpose, such as providing insulation or allowing for drainage. But Parque Arará, like all of Rio’s favelas, wasn’t built to code. Homes went up out of necessity, without engineers or architects, and are made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks, cinder blocks, asbestos tiles, and sheet metal. And that informal construction couldn’t necessarily hold the weight of all the layers a green roof would require.

After looking at Cassiano’s roof, Rezende’s first suggestion was to cover it with rolls of bidim, a lightweight nonwoven geotextile made of polyester from recycled drink bottles. Inside those rolls of bidim, leftover from a recent construction project, they placed several types of plants: basket plants, inchplants, creeping inchplants, and spiderworts. They set the rolls in the grooves of the asbestos roof, and then created an irrigation system that dripped water down.

With a cheap way to install lightweight green roofs, Rezende brought Cassiano to meet his advisers and present what they had found. The university agreed that the project showed such promise that it would provide materials for the next step, Cassiano said.

Once the plants on Cassiano’s roof had time to grow, Rezende and André Mantovani, a biologist and ecologist at Rio’s Botanical Gardens, returned to see what effect it had on Cassiano’s home. With several sensors placed under the roofs, the researchers compared the temperature inside his house to that of a neighbor’s for several days. (The researchers intended the study to last longer, but the favela’s unreliable energy system kept cutting power to their sensors.)

Despite the study’s limitations, the results were encouraging. During the period that researchers recorded temperatures, Cassiano’s roof was roughly 86 degrees. His neighbor’s, on the other hand, fluctuated between 86 and 122 degrees. At one point, the roofs of the two homes differed by nearly 40 degrees.

For Cassiano, the numbers confirmed what he suspected: If he wanted to make a difference, he needed to put green roofs on as many homes as possible.

“When we talk about green roofs, we think about one house. But that’s not enough,” said Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. “When you start to imagine a street, a block, a neighborhood, and a city or a community as a whole with several green roofs, then you have something. Because it’s about the collective. It benefits everyone.”

But thinking on a larger scale comes with a host of new challenges. In order for a green roof to be safe, a structure has to be able to support it, and studying the capacity of individual buildings takes time. And even with low-cost materials such as bidim, installing green roofs on hundreds or thousands of homes requires significant funds.

“The biggest obstacle is the cost,” said Bia Rafaelli, an architect based in São Paulo who has worked with communities like Cassiano’s to teach them about sustainable building options. “To make this all viable on a large scale,” installing green roofs on all the favelas, she said, “there would need to be sponsorship from companies or help from the government.”

While some municipalities in Brazil have legislation requiring green roofs on new construction when possible, Rio de Janeiro does not. A bill that would create a similar law to those in other cities has been at a standstill in Rio’s city council since May 2021.

Rio does, however, incentivize builders to install green roofs and other sustainable options — like solar panels and permeable paving. But such efforts don’t typically benefit residents of the favelas, where most building is done informally, without construction companies looking to legislation for guidelines and benefits.

In addition to red tape and other bureaucratic hurdles, any project related to the favelas also faces longstanding racism. According to a 2021 study conducted by Instituto Locomotiva, Data Favela, and Central Única das Favelas, 67 percent of the population in favelas across Brazil is Black. That’s disproportionately higher than the country’s general population, which is 55 percent Black.

“Public policy doesn’t reach” favelas, said Diosmar Filho, a geographer and senior researcher at the research association Iyaleta, where he heads studies on inequality and climate change. The working-class communities, he said, are heat islands because of environmental racism — the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color — which has left much of Brazil’s Black population with inadequate housing and health care, both of which are aggravated by the effects of climate change.

Such trends aren’t isolated to Brazil. A 2020 study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning found that White neighborhoods in South African cities had disproportionately higher access to urban green infrastructure, including parks and green roofs — which the authors dubbed a “green Apartheid.” In a 2019 study, researchers at the University of Michigan used a spatial analysis to determine that green roofs were predominantly located in the city’s downtown, which they noted was more White and affluent than the rest of the city. (The study had limited data, however, and only analyzed 10 green roofs.)

Without support from the government or other authorities, Filho said, Black people often turn to each other for help. “It’s always the Black population that’s producing quality of life for the Black population,” he said, referring to people like Cassiano and projects like Teto Verde Favela.

“The actions of Teto Verde would be a great point of reference for urban housing policy for the reduction of impacts of climate change,” said Filho. But when municipalities deny people of color the right to safe housing and ways to push back against climate change, he added, “that’s when it becomes a case of environmental racism.”

Back in Rio, Cassiano continues to collaborate with research scientists and students at UFRJ. Together, they test new materials and methods to improve on the initial green roof prototype first installed on his home more than 10 years ago. To adapt for favela construction, his primary focus has been to reduce cost and reduce weight.

Instead of using an asphalt blanket as a layer of waterproof screening, Cassiano uses a vinyl sheet sandwiched between two layers of bidim. This means the cost of roofs installed by Teto Verde Favela is roughly 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot; conventional green roofs, though difficult to estimate in cost, can run as much as 53 Brazilian reais ($11) for the same amount of space. His roofs also started out hydroponic, meaning no soil was used, in order to decrease their weight.

Cassiano’s mother, now 93, loves caring for the plants on their roof. It not only helps lower the temperature in their home on hot days and retains rainwater to help prevent flooding in a downpour, but Cassiano said it also gives their mental health a much-needed boost.

“Now I couldn’t live here in this house without this green roof,” said Cassiano. “It makes me so happy when I see birds, when I see butterflies, when I see a flower or a fruit,” he added.

“It’s so much more than I ever imagined.”

Jill Langlois is an independent journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and TIME, among others.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Apart from being naturally cliquey, gorillas are born foragers. In the wild, the great apes are regularly on the move in search of fruits, vegetables, and bamboo shoots; a habit that can become difficult to recreate when living within a zoo setting. At Zoo Atlanta, for example, human workers generally provided gorillas with their meals at certain scheduled times and locations.  But an affordable new device could provide a much more naturalistic feeding regime for the apes—once they get used to it.

[Related: Gorillas can be cliquey, too. Here’s what that says about our own social lives.]

Recently, a team of mechanical engineering students and alumni at Georgia Tech began developing and testing ForageFeeder, a $400 machine partly inspired by deer feeders that can disperse gorillas’ their meals at random intervals and locations throughout the day. Suspended about 15 feet above the ground, ForageFeeder drops food such as carrots, sweet potatoes, and turnips from a bucket into a tray, after which time a rotor shoots the snacks in a circular motion as far as 30 feet away from the machine.

Recreating animals’ natural habitats and environments are crucial to ensuring zoo residents’ psychological and physical wellbeing, while also encouraging exercise and mental stimulation. Much like modern humans, zoo animals frequently deal with obesity due to a lack of activity. Tools and techniques such as the ForageFeeder not only promote Zoo Atlanta gorillas’ movement, but better simulate their natural foraging world.

Zookeepers at Zoo Atlanta have utilized the ForageFeeder on-and-off in their gorilla enclosure since last August. Although the primates are now largely used to its appearance, it wasn’t always the case. A video showcasing the gorillas’ first encounter with ForageFeeder depicts pretty much what one might expect—that is to say, some extremely befuddled apes. Over time, however, Zoo Atlanta’s residents have grown more used to the device.

“I’m confident we’re going to see statistical data that confirms what we’re already seeing: more foraging behavior,” Josh Meyerchick, senior keeper of primates at Zoo Atlanta and one of the research paper’s co-authors, said earlier this month.

[Related: Zoo animals are getting COVID vaccines made specially for them.]

That said, the team behind ForageFeeder aren’t waiting for gorillas to get with the program. Plans for the machine are currently open source online, and easily modifiable to adapt for countless other animal species’ diets, feeding times, and other particularities. ForageFeeder’s makers have already even modified their creation to serve Zoo Atlanta’s Angolan colobus monkey population.

“I find the zoo projects very interesting because your intended audience can’t provide any feedback,” says Magie Zhang, a project collaborator and recent mechanical engineering graduate. “If the device stops working, the animal doesn’t tell you. If they rip it apart, you can’t tell them to stop. It’s good to anticipate the problems of a design and figure out its solutions before it’s sent into the real world.”

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When it comes to the critical process of pollination, butterflies and especially bees are typically the most lauded participants. These pollinators fly from flower to flower to feed and fertilize plants by spreading pollen around. But, these fluttery creatures are far from the only species that help flowers reproduce and bloom. It turns out that some of nature’s most unsung and diverse pollinators are a type of long-snouted beetles called weevils.

[Related: Build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Peer Community in Ecology wiggles into the world of weevils, including some who spend their entire lifecycle in tandem with a specific plant they help pollinate. 

“Even people who work on pollination don’t usually consider weevils as one of the main pollinators, and people who work on weevils don’t usually consider pollination as something relevant to the group,” study co-author and assistant curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago said in a statement. “There are lots of important things that people are missing because of preconceptions.”

The quarter-of-an-inch long  weevils can be considered pests, especially when found munching on pasta and flour in pantries. Weevils used to find their way into the biscuits on Nineteenth Century ships that even highly ranked officers ate, as depicted in the 2003 seafaring film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. They can be so destructive that from 1829 to 1920, boll weevils completely disrupted the cotton economy in the South as they fed on cotton buds. 

Despite this less than stellar reputation, the insects are still beneficial to many of the world’s plant species. 

Scientists have identified roughly 400,000 species of beetles, making them one of the largest groups of animals in the world. Among this already big bunch of bugs, weevils are the largest group. “There are 60,000 species of weevils that we know about, which is about the same as the number of all vertebrate animals put together,” said de Medeiros.

The authors looked at 600 species of weevil, reviewing hundreds of previously published data on how weevils and plants interact to get a better sense of their role as prime pollinators. It focused on brood-site pollinators—insects that use the same plants that they pollinate as the breeding sites for their larvae. It is similar to the relationship between Monarch butterflies and milkweed, which is the only plant that Monarch caterpillars can eat. 

“It is a special kind of pollination interaction because it is usually associated with high specialization: because the insects spend their whole life cycle in the plant, they often only pollinate that plant,” said de Medeiros.  And because the plants have very reliable pollinators, they mostly use those pollinators.” 

[Related: This lawn-mowing robot can save part of your yard for pollinators.]

Unlike Monarchs, brood-site pollinators take the relationship with the plant a step further. They rely on only one plant partner as a source for both food and egg laying, unlike adult Monarchs who will eat the nectar of many different types of flowers. 

“This kind of pollination interaction is generally thought to be rare or unusual,” said de Medeiros. “In this study, we show that there are hundreds of weevil species and plants for which this has been documented already, and many, many more yet to be discovered.”

The relationship like the one between weevils and their plants means that they both need each other to flourish. Some industries, like palm oil,  have already hurt forests, therefore disturbing the animal species that rely on them. 

“Oil palm, which is used to make peanut butter and Nutella, was not a viable industry until someone figured out that the weevils found with them were their pollinators. And because people had an incorrect preconception that weevils were not pollinators, it took much, much longer than it could have taken,” said de Medeiros.

Misconceptions about weevils were one of this team’s motivations for the study. The team hopes that by summarizing what is known about the pollinators, more scientists and the general public appreciate the role of weevils as pollinators, particularly in the tropics. 

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These days, it seems like every carmaker—from those focused on luxury options to those with an eye more toward the economical—is getting into electric vehicles. And with new US policies around purchasing incentives and infrastructure improvements, consumers might be more on board as well. But many people are still concerned about whether electric vehicles are truly better for the environment overall, considering certain questions surrounding their production process. 

Despite concerns about the pollution generated from mining materials for batteries and the manufacturing process for the EVs themselves, the environmental and energy experts PopSci spoke to say that across the board, electric vehicles are still better for the environment than similar gasoline or diesel-powered models. 

When comparing a typical commercial electric vehicle to a gasoline vehicle of the same size, there are benefits across many different dimensions. 

“We do know, for instance, if we’re looking at carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, that electric vehicles operating on the typical electric grid can end up with fewer greenhouse gas emissions over the life of their vehicle,” says Dave Gohlke, an energy and environmental analyst at Argonne National Lab. “The fuel consumption (using electricity to generate the fuel as opposed to burning petroleum) ends up releasing fewer emissions per mile and over the course of the vehicle’s expected lifetime.”

[Related: An electrified car isn’t the same thing as an electric one. Here’s the difference.]

EVs also produce no tailpipe emissions, which means reductions in particulate matter or in smog precursors that contribute to local air pollution.

“The latest best evidence right now indicates that in almost everywhere in the US, electric vehicles are better for the environment than conventional vehicles,” says Kenneth Gillingham, professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale School of the Environment. “How much better for the environment depends on where you charge and what time you charge.”

Electric motors tend to be more efficient compared to the spark ignition engine used in gasoline cars or the compression ignition engine used in diesel cars, where there’s usually a lot of waste heat and wasted energy.

Creating an EV produces pollution during the manufacturing process. “Greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing an electric vehicle are almost twice that of an internal combustion vehicle…that is due primarily to the battery. You’re actually increasing greenhouse gas emissions to produce the vehicle, but there’s a net overall lifecycle benefit or reduction because of the significant savings in the use of the vehicle,” says Gregory Keoleian, the director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. “We found in terms of the overall lifecycle, on average, across the United States, taking into account temperature effects, grid effects, there was 57 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for a new electric vehicle compared to a new combustion engine vehicle.” 

In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with operating the vehicles, fully battery-powered electric vehicles were the best, followed by plug-in hybrids, and then hybrids, with internal combustion engine vehicles faring the worst, Keoleian notes. Range anxiety might still be top of mind for some drivers, but he adds that households with more than one vehicle can consider diversifying their fleet to add an EV for everyday use, when appropriate, and save the gas vehicle (or the gas feature on their hybrids) for longer trips.

The breakeven point at which the cost of producing and operating an electric vehicle starts to gain an edge over a gasoline vehicle of similar make and model occurs at around two years in, or around 20,000 to 50,000 miles. But when that happens can vary slightly on a case-by-case basis. “If you have almost no carbon electricity, and you’re charging off solar panels on your own roof almost exclusively, that breakeven point will be sooner,” says Gohlke. “If you’re somewhere with a very carbon intensive grid, that breakeven point will be a little bit later. It depends on the style of your vehicle as well because of the materials that go into it.” 

[Related: Why solid-state batteries are the next frontier for EV makers]

For context, Gohlke notes that the average EV age right now is around 12 years old based on registration data. And these vehicles are expected to drive approximately 200,000 miles over their lifetime. 

“Obviously if you drive off your dealer’s lot and you drive right into a light pole and that car never takes more than a single mile, that single vehicle will have had more embedded emissions than if you had wrecked a gasoline car on your first drive,” says Gohlke. “But if you look at the entire fleet of vehicles, all 200-plus-million vehicles that are out there and how long we expect them to survive, over the life of the vehicle, each of those electric vehicles is expected to consume less energy and emit lower emissions than the corresponding gas vehicle would’ve been.”

To put things in perspective, Gillingham says that extracting and transporting fossil fuels like oil is energy intensive as well. When you weigh those factors, electric vehicle production doesn’t appear that much worse than the production of gasoline vehicles, he says. “Increasingly, they’re actually looking better depending on the battery chemistry and where the batteries are made.” 

And while it’s true that there are issues with mines, the petrol economy has damaged a lot of the environment and continues to do so. That’s why improving individual vehicle efficiency needs to be paired with reducing overall consumption.

EV batteries are getting better

Mined materials like rare metals can have harmful social and environmental effects, but that’s an economy-wide problem. There are many metals that are being used in batteries, but the use of metals is nothing new, says Trancik. Metals can be found in a range of household products and appliances that many people use in their daily lives. 

Plus, there have been dramatic improvements in battery technology and the engineering of the vehicle itself in the past decade. The batteries have become cheaper, safer, more durable, faster charging, and longer lasting. 

“There’s still a lot of room to improve further. There’s room for improved chemistry of the batteries and improved packaging and improved coolant systems and software that manages the batteries,” says Gillingham.

The two primary batteries used in electric vehicles today are NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) and LFP (lithium-ferrous-phosphate). NMC batteries tend to use more precious metals like cobalt from the Congo, but they are also more energy dense. LFP uses more abundant metals. And although the technology is improving fast, it’s still in an early stage, sensitive to cold weather, and not quite as energy dense. LFP tends to be good for utility scale cases, like for storing electricity on the grid. 

[Related: Could swappable EV batteries replace charging stations?]

Electric vehicles also offer an advantage when it comes to fewer trips to the mechanic; conventional vehicles have more moving parts that can break down. “You’re more likely to be doing maintenance on a conventional vehicle,” says Gillingham. He says that there have been Teslas in his studies that are around eight years old, with 300,000 miles on them, which means that even though the battery does tend to degrade a little every year, that degradation is fairly modest.

Eventually, if the electric vehicle markets grow substantially, and there’s many of these vehicles in circulation, reusing the metals in the cars can increase their benefits. “This is something that you can’t really do with the fossil fuels that have already been combusted in an internal combustion engine,” says Trancik. “There is a potential to set up that circularity in the supply chain of those metals that’s not readily done with fossil fuels.”

Since batteries are fairly environmentally costly, the best case is for consumers who are interested in EVs to get a car with a small battery, or a plug-in hybrid electric car that runs on battery power most of the time. “A Toyota Corolla-sized car, maybe with some hybridization, could in many cases, be better for the environment than a gigantic Hummer-sized electric vehicle,” says Gillingham. (The charts in this New York Times article help visualize that distinction.) 

Where policies could help

Electric vehicles are already better for the environment and becoming increasingly better for the environment. 

The biggest factor that could make EVs even better is if the electrical grid goes fully carbon free. Policies that provide subsidies for carbon-free power, or carbon taxes to incentivize cleaner power, could help in this respect. 

The other aspect that would make a difference is to encourage more efficient electric vehicles and to discourage the production of enormous electric vehicles. “Some people may need a pickup truck for work. But if you don’t need a large car for an actual activity, it’s certainly better to have a more reasonably sized car,” Gillingham says.  

Plus, electrifying public transportation, buses, and vehicles like the fleet of trucks run by the USPS can have a big impact because of how often they’re used. Making these vehicles electric can reduce air pollution from idling, and routes can be designed so that they don’t need as large of a battery.  

“The rollout of EVs in general has been slower than demand would support…There’s potentially a larger market for EVs,” Gillingham says. The holdup is due mainly to supply chain problems. 

Switching over completely to EVs is, of course, not the end-all solution for the world’s environmental woes. Currently, car culture is very deeply embedded in American culture and consumerism in general, Gillingham says, and that’s not easy to change. When it comes to climate policy around transportation, it needs to address all the different modes of transportation that people use and the industrial energy services to bring down greenhouse gas emissions across the board. 

The greenest form of transportation is walking, followed by biking, followed by using public transit. Electrifying the vehicles that can be electrified is great, but policies should also consider the ways cities are designed—are they walkable, livable, and have a reliable public transit system connecting communities to where they need to go? 

“There’s definitely a number of different modes of transport that need to be addressed and green modes of transport that need to be supported,” says Trancik. “We really need to be thinking holistically about all these ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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On May 25, the Supreme Court of the United States cut back the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate wetlands in another setback for the landmark Clean Water Act. In the 5 to 4 ruling, the court said that the law does not allow the EPA to regulate the discharges into the wetlands that are near a body of water, unless the wetland has a unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. 

[Related: The EPA’s roll back of the Clean Water Act could impact drinking water for millions of Americans.]

The issue before the court was the reach of the 51-year-old Clean Water Act and how courts should determine what counts as “waters of the United States” for the purposes of legal protection. In 2006, the court ruled in two consolidated cases that wetlands are protected by the Clean Water Act if they have a “significant nexus” to regulated waters. Business interests and property rights groups sought to narrow the regulations in wetlands and areas that are directly connected to “navigable waters,” like lakes and rivers.

This case–Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency–concerned Michael and Chantell Sackett, a couple who wanted to build a home on what an appeals court called “a soggy residential lot” near Priest Lake in Idaho’s panhandle. The Sacketts began construction in 2007 by filling in the land, and the EPA ordered them to stop. The agency threatened the couple with fines, saying  they must return their property to its original condition. Backed by successful conservative property rights group Pacific Legal Foundation, the Sacketts sued the EPA. A dispute regarding if the lawsuit was premature reached the Supreme Court in an earlier appeal and the justices ruled that the suit could proceed in 2012. Justice Alito said that the Clean Water Act gave the EPA too much power in a concurring opinion that same year.

Thursday’s 5 to 4 majority opinion is the latest decision in a trend where the conservative-leaning court has narrowed the reach of environmental regulations. In 2022, the court restricted the EPA’s authority to curb emissions from power plants in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the EPA’s interpretation of its power went too far. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett concurred that the Clean Water Act extends only to those “wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own rights.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented, with Kagan writing a concurring opinion. They agreed that the Sacketts should prevail, but wrote that they would have ruled for them on more narrow grounds without changing what defines “waters in the United States.”

[Related: What would America be like without the EPA?]

In his own dissent, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “By narrowing the [Clean Water] Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”

Wetlands are some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on the planet and the US has roughly 75.5 million acres of wetlands. They are an important tool against slowing the pace of human-made climate change, particularly in urban areas, while protecting communities from flooding and storms. 

Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has dramatically cut pollution in America’s waterways, leading to major rebounds of fish species. Since the wetlands like those at the center of the Sackett case have a close relationship with the larger water system of streams and rivers, the court’s ruling has major potential to impact the health and quality of all waterways in the United States. 

“This decision will cause incalculable harm. Communities across the country will pay the price,” Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) President & CEO Manish Bapna said in a statement following the ruling. “What’s important now is to repair the damage. The government must enforce the remaining provisions of law that protect the clean water we all rely on for drinking, swimming, fishing, irrigation and more. States should quickly strengthen their own laws. Congress needs to act to restore protections for all our waters.”

Correction (May 30, 2023): Kagan wrote a concurring opinion, not the dissenting opinion as this originally stated. We regret the error.

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In 2020, about 34 million households in the United States experienced some degree of energy insecurity. Energy insecurity is defined as the inability to meet basic household energy needs, like reducing or foregoing basic necessities to pay energy bills. Others may maintain unsafe temperatures at home due to cost concerns, both of which are “chronic” forms of energy insecurity. Individuals may also experience “acute” energy insecurity, or a short-term disruption to energy sources due to infrastructural or environmental reasons, much like power outages.

People who need electronic medical devices and live in poor housing conditions tend to experience higher rates of energy insecurity. A recent Nature Communications study characterized power outages across the country from 2018 to 2020 and found that there were almost 17,500 power outages lasting more than eight hours. Outages of this duration are considered medically relevant because of potential health hazards for vulnerable groups, especially those who require electricity-dependent durable medical equipment (DME) such as oxygen concentrators and infusion pumps. Although some DME can have backup battery power, they only last a few hours.

“Understanding to what extent power outages affect health motivated us to create the county-level power outages dataset,” says Joan Casey, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, who was involved in the study. “As our grid ages and climate change worsens, we need to understand who power outages affect.”

[Related: Fossil fuels are causing a buildup of human health problems.]

The authors used local indicators of spatial association (LISA) to identify countries with high levels of social and medical vulnerability alongside frequent power outages. In particular, counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Michigan experience frequent medically-relevant power outages and have a high prevalence of electricity-dependent DME use. They “face a high burden and may have more trouble responding effectively, which could result in more adverse health outcomes,” says Casey.

The authors also determined the overlap between climate events occurring on the same day as medically-relevant power outages. They reported that about 62 percent of such outages co-occurred with extreme weather events, like heavy precipitation, anomalous heat, and tropical cyclones. Furthermore, medically-relevant outages are 3.4 times more common on days with a single event and 10 times more common on days with multiple events. Weather and climate events may drive large-scale outages, but increased energy demand from an aging electrical grid may play a role in county-level outages.

Upgrading the grid and relying further on distributed generation like generating and storing renewable energy are necessary to prevent power outages and ensure that huge areas won’t go offline, says Casey. The Department of Energy intends to modernize the grid to increase resiliency, add capacity for clean energy, and optimize power delivery. The department is also investing in energy infrastructure like microgrids, which can disconnect from national infrastructure and continue to run even when the main grid is down, and grid-scale energy storage devices, which store clean electricity to help provide power during peak loads.

“Certain communities and individuals may experience more and more severe power outages or have less ability to respond,” says Casey. “These groups may be persistently marginalized and lack access to generators, charging centers, or health care.”

Communities of color have unequal access to energy generation and battery storage, even though they tend to be the hardest hit when it comes to power outages following extreme climate events. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, rural and Black communities in Puerto Rico appeared to have the longest restoration times. Higher percentages of Hispanic/Latino populations were also associated with longer outages in Florida after Hurricane Irma in 2017. Meanwhile, counties with a higher proportion of Hispanic/Latino residents faced more severe power outages during the 2021 Texas winter storm. Black residents reported more day-long outages as well.

“We need to work to understand who is most at risk during an outage and provide support to these populations,” says Casey. “This could involve preparing health systems to receive patients, community charging stations for those that rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment, or weatherproofing homes to keep indoor temperature at more optimal levels.”

[Related: Heart disease-related deaths rise in extreme heat and extreme cold.]

Developing a registry for individuals medically dependent on electricity would establish a national estimate for this vulnerable population and document their geographic location. This can help state, territorial, and local health departments prioritize efforts and anticipate the resources that first responders should deploy during emergencies. At present, the Department of Health and Human Services only keeps the record of over 2.9 million Medicare beneficiaries who need electricity-dependent DME. The number of DME users covered by other insurance programs is not known. 

Jurisdictions with a high prevalence of prolonged outages could also help vulnerable populations by establishing temporary emergency power stations. Such a solution could make electricity more accessible and reduce avoidable emergency department visits, which may prevent crowding. Together, upgrading the grid, mitigating climate change, and providing alternative electricity sources can all minimize the impacts on power supply faced by vulnerable populations and communities of color.

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Industrial mining of the deep ends of the ocean for valuable minerals is becoming more of a possibility as companies search for new sources of needed minerals, such as cobalt and lithium. The devastating impacts that this noisy and extractive process could have on the ocean’s numerous species is front of mind for scientists around the world, particularly in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. Now, experts are attaching some numbers to the concerns.

[Related: Deep-sea mining has murky aftereffects.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Current Biology found 5,578 different species in the CCZ, and roughly 88 to 92 percent of these species are entirely new to science. The authors compiled a CCZ checklist of all the species and records to better understand what may be at risk when mining begins. 

“We share this planet with all this amazing biodiversity, and we have a responsibility to understand it and protect it,” co-author and Natural History Museum London deep-sea ecologist Muriel Rabone said in a statement. 

Spanning six million square kilometers from Hawaii to Mexico, the CCZ is one of the most pristine wilderness regions in the world. According to NOAA, it is also home to polymetallic nodules that are a potential source of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements. These materials are becoming increasingly important for modern life, since they are used in making a range of electronics. Polymetallic nodules are also found in deeper regions of the Indian Ocean.

To study the CCZ, researchers travel throughout the Pacific Ocean using techniques such as using remote-controlled vehicles to travel the ocean. They also use simple box core sampling, where a study box is placed on the bottom of the ocean floor to collect samples.  

“It’s a big boat, but it feels tiny in the middle of the ocean. You could see storms rolling in; it’s very dramatic,” said Rabone. “And it was amazing—in every single box core sample, we would see new species.”

In the study, the team sifted through over 100,000 records of the creatures found in the CCZ taken during these expeditions. They found that only six of the new species found in the CCZ—including a carnivorous sponge, a nematode, and a sea cucumber—have been seen in other regions of the world. The most common type of animals in the CCZ are arthropods, worms, sponges, and echinoderms like sea urchins.

[Related: Even mining in shallow waters is bad news for the environment.]

“There’s some just remarkable species down there. Some of the sponges look like classic bath sponges, and some look like vases. They’re just beautiful,” said Rabone. “One of my favorites is the glass sponges. They have these little spines, and under the microscope, they look like tiny chandeliers or little sculptures.”

In the future, the team emphasizes the importance of increasing research efforts in the CCZ that are collaborative, cohesive, and multidisciplinary so that scientists and business alike can gain a deeper grasp of the region’s vast biodiversity. They also stress the importance of learning more about these new species, how they are connected to the greater environment around them, and the biogeography of the area to understand why some species cluster in specific regions more than others.   

“There are so many wonderful species in the CCZ,” said Rabone, “and with the possibility of mining looming, it’s doubly important that we know more about these really understudied habitats.”

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Typhoon Mawar pelted Guam with heavy rain and the strength of a Category 4 hurricane over about two days. The storm was upgraded to a ‘Super Typhoon’ when it reached maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour as it moved north of the island. President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for the  US territory of about 150,000 people on Tuesday May 23.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

According to the National Weather Service Guam, the storm had Category 4-level winds of about 140 miles per hour just before midnight local time on Wednesday May 24 as it passed over Guam. Guam International Airport recorded sustained winds of 71 mph and a gust of 105 mph. The storm’s eye passed just north of the island, but the powerful eyewall hit the whole island.

Initial estimates say that close to a foot of rain fell and approached two feet in some parts of the territory. Guam is about the size of the city of Chicago and sits about 1,500 miles east of the Philippines.

Typhoons are the same type of warm-core tropical storm as hurricanes, except that they form west of the Northwest Pacific Ocean. Mawar was one of the strongest typhoons to hit Guam in decades. In 2002, Super Typhoon Pongsona struck the island with the force of a Category 4 hurricane and caused over $700 million in damage. 

In an address on Facebook, Guam Governor Lou Leon Guerrero urged residents to stay home for their safety, as the island was still seeing 40 to 50 mph winds on Thursday morning. The governor reported that the strongest winds from the storm were felt throughout the island, but particularly in the north.

The Guam Power Authority reported that the island’s energy grid was providing power to only about 1,000 of its roughly 52,000 customers. As of Thursday morning, the government had not reported any deaths due to the storm. 

According to The New York Times, strong building codes minimized damages and deaths from major storms in Guam. In most cases, “we just barbecue, chill, adapt” when a tropical cyclone blows through, says Wayne Chargualaf, who works at the local government’s housing authorities. However, since it has been over 20 years since Super Typhoon Pongsona, he told The Times that “we have an entire generation that has never experienced this. So a little bit of doubt started to creep into my mind. Are we really ready for this?”

[Related: Typhoon Merbok breaks records as it lashes the Alaskan coast.]

Human-caused climate change is contributing to an increasing number of intense tropical storm systems like Mawar. Tropical systems are generating more rainfall and bigger storm surges and are also more likely to intensify faster. Mawar rapidly intensified from Monday into Tuesday, with the storm’s top wind speeds increasing by 50 mph in only 18 hours.

Mawar will continue to track west-northwest away from Guam and towards the northern Philippines and Taiwan. It strengthened to the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 165 mph and gusts up to 200 mph, but slow weakening is likely and it is not expected to threaten land in the next several days.  

The Atlantic Hurricane Season begins on June 1 and runs until November 30. The National Hurricane Center is already watching a system off the coast of Florida. An early forecast from Colorado State University released in April calls for slightly below-average hurricane activity, partially due to the current neutral conditions before El Niño likely begins in the Pacific Ocean.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In 2020, on a rocky hillside overlooking the vast swell of the Pacific Ocean near the Chilean port city of Antofagasta, a local man out walking his dog stumbled upon the sun-bleached skull of a small mammal. Curious, he pocketed it and brought it to the attention of researchers Alejandro Peñaloza and Jaime Jiménez. The scientists were shocked. The skull belonged to a long-tailed chinchilla, a species typically found deep within the Chilean Andes Mountains. As far as scientists knew, chinchillas had never inhabited the coast.

“I couldn’t believe it at first,” says Jiménez, a researcher at the University of North Texas who has studied chinchilla ecology for over 30 years. “There were no past records of chinchillas in the area, and never on the coast, so it just didn’t make any sense.”

The excited researchers dug into the mystery. They quickly discovered a plethora of pint-sized paw prints in the sand and rodent scat strewn among the boulders, but what they really wanted was photographic evidence. The researchers baited camera traps with apple slices and, to their delight, captured dozens of images of the rodents. It was only when the scientists checked the cameras that they realized just how close they’d come to seeing the chinchillas—one image was snapped just 11 minutes after they’d left.

The footage shows that the coastal chinchillas are strikingly different from their Andean counterparts. As the scientists detail in a recent report, while the mountain chinchillas are larger with thick fur and rounded ears, the coastal chinchillas have smaller bodies, sleeker fur, and unusually elongated rabbit-like ears. Aside from their peculiar looks, the coastal chinchillas were also captured moving about in the daytime—a behavior never before seen in wild chinchillas.

“These animals are usually completely nocturnal, so it may be a sign of fewer predators or an adaptation to their environment,” says Jiménez.

The revelation that long-tailed chinchillas are inhabiting the coast is challenging scientists’ long-held assumptions about how these animals live. For one thing, says Fabian Jaksik, a member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences who was not directly involved in the research, the find “is significant because it’s the northernmost record of the long-tailed chinchilla in Chile ever, even historically speaking.”

The environment where the coastal chinchillas reside is also a world apart from the harsh and frigid deserts of the Andes. Sandwiched between the Atacama Desert and the Pacific Ocean, life flourishes along the coastal margin thanks to the proximity of the sea and its moderating effect on daily temperatures. A thick fog known as the camanchaca frequently rolls in on morning easterly winds and nourishes the region’s plants.

For researchers striving to learn more about these novel animals, however, even their palate is puzzling.

While the Andean chinchillas mainly eat grass, scientists aren’t quite sure what the coastal chinchillas eat. The hillsides they inhabit are absent of grasses but rich in flora that is either highly toxic or studded with spines and thorns. “It could be that they are eating something completely new or nibbling on a bit of everything and somehow digesting and surviving the toxins,” says Jiménez. “But this is just a hypothesis.”

With so many differences in appearance, behavior, and ecology, scientists aren’t quite sure what to make of these chinchillas. “The coastal chinchillas might be a subspecies or maybe even a new species,” says Jiménez. “We’ll only be able to answer these questions after we’ve understood these animals and their lives better.”

Beyond their enigmatic ecology, the coastal chinchillas are raising wider questions about the species’ future.

While Andean long-tailed chinchillas are still recovering from centuries of overhunting and face ongoing threats from habitat destruction for mining, the coastal chinchillas seem to be thriving. If they are the same species, the new population suggests long-tailed chinchillas are more abundant than previously thought, offering hope for their survival in the wild.

“This is probably a population that escaped overhunting due to its isolation,” says Peñaloza. “So there may be lots more out there waiting to be found.”

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Researchers recently constructed a material capable of generating near constant electricity from just the ambient air around it—thus possibly laying the groundwork for a new, virtually unlimited source of sustainable, renewable energy. In doing so, and building upon their past innovations, they now claim almost any surface could potentially be turned into a generator via replicating the electrical properties of storm clouds… but trypophobes beware.

According to a new study published today with Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated a novel “air generator” (Air-gen) film that relies on microscopic holes smaller than 100 nanometers across—less than a thousandth the width of a single human hair. The holes’ incredibly small diameters rely on what’s known as a “mean free path,” which is the distance a single molecule can travel before colliding with another molecule of the same substance.

[Related: The US could reliably run on clean energy by 2050.]

Water molecules are floating all around in the air, and their mean free path is around 100 nm. As humid air passes through Air-gen material’s miniscule holes, the water molecules come into direct contact with first an upper, then lower chamber in the film. This creates a charge imbalance, i.e. electricity.

It’s the same physics at play in storm clouds’ lightning discharges. Although the UMass Amherst team’s product generates a miniscule fraction of a lightning bolt’s estimated 300 million volts, its several hundred millivolts of sustained energy is incredibly promising for scalability and everyday usage. This is particularly evident when considering that air humidity can diffuse in three-dimensional space. In theory, thousands of Air-gen layers can be stacked atop one another, thus scaling up the device without increasing its overall footprint. According to the researchers, such a product could offer kilowatts of power for general usage.

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid.]

The team believes their Air-gen devices could one day be far more space efficient than other renewable energy options like solar and wind power. What’s more, the material can be engineered into a variety of form factors to blend into an environment, as contrasted with something as visually noticeable as a solar farm or wind turbine.

“Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go,”Jun Yao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the paper’s senior author, said in a statement. “The generic Air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.”

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The armadillo is beloved for its ability to scrunch itself up in a ball with their protective flexible shells. They’ve long been considered the only living mammals with these reptilian and fish-like suits of bony or scaly armor instead of hairy mammalian skin. However, a study published May 24 in the journal iScience, shows that African spiny mice actually produce the same spiny structures beneath the skin of their tails, which has gone largely undetected by scientists.

[Related: How science came to rely on the humble lab rat.]

African spiny mice are small to medium sized rodents with spiny hairs on their upper body, large eyes and ears, and scaly tails. Some species are found in Egypt, other parts of eastern Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan and while others are native to South Africa.  

A team of scientists made this spiny discovery while conducting routine CT scanning of museum specimens for the openVertebrate program. 

“I was scanning a mouse specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum, and the tails looked abnormally dark,” co-author and director of Florida Museum of Natural History’s digital imaging laboratory Edward Stanley said in a statement. 

Stanley initially assumed the discoloration was caused by an imperfection that was introduced when the specimen was preserved, but analysis of the X-Rays revealed an unmistakable feature that he was intimately familiar with.

“My entire PhD was focused on osteoderm development in lizards,” he said. “Once the specimen scans had been processed, the tail was very clearly covered in osteoderms.”

Osteoderms are the bony deposits that form scales or plates on the skin. They are also distinct from the scales of pangolins or the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines. These parts are composed of keratin, the same tissue that makes up hair, skin, and nails.

Osteoderms on spiny mice have been observed since the mid-1970s. A 2012 study demonstrated spiny mice can regenerate injured tissue without scarring. This ability is very common among reptiles and invertebrates, but was previously unknown in mammals. While mammalian skin is particularly fragile, spiny mice can heal twice as fast as their rodent relatives.

Spiny mice belong to four genera in the subfamily Deomyinae, but other than similarities in their DNA and possibly the shape of their teeth, scientists have been unable to find a single shared feature among the species of this group that distinguishes them from other rodents.

[Related: This newly discovered gecko can literally squirm right out of its skin.]

The team scanned additional museum specimens from all four genera and found that the spiny mice tails were covered in the same sheather of bone. Gerbils are the closest relatives of Deomyinae and they do not have osteoderms, which means that this trait likely evolved only once in the ancestor of spiny mice. 

“Spiny mice can regenerate skin, muscle, nerves, spinal cord and perhaps even cardiac tissue, so we maintain a colony of these rare creatures for research,” co-author and University of Florida biologist Malcolm Maden said in a statement. 

Maden and his team are mapping the genetic pathways that give spiny mice these healing powers to hopefully find a model for human tissue regeneration. The team further analyzed the development of spiny mice osteoderms and confirmed that they were similar to those of armadillos, but likely evolved independently. 

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Update May 25, 2023: This post has been updated with a comment from Chevron.

The already questionable $2 billion a year voluntary emissions offset market is facing even more scrutiny. An investigation by transnational corporate watchdog Corporate Accountability first reported in The Guardian found that carbon offsets from fossil fuel giant Chevron are mostly worthless—could also cause harm. The investigation found that the company relies on “junk” carbon offsets and “unviable” technologies. These actions do little to offset the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

The new research from Corporate Accountability found that between 2020 and 2022, 93 percent of the offsets that Chevron bought and counted towards their climate targets from voluntary carbon markets were actually too environmentally problematic to be considered as anything other than worthless or junk.

[Related: Many popular carbon offsets don’t actually counteract emissions, study says.]

Carbon offsets are tradable “rights” or certificates that allow the buyer to compensate for 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gasses. These offsets are usually in the form of an investment in emissions-reducing environmental projects in other parts of the world. 

An investigation by The Guardian and Germany’s Die Zeit, and the nonprofit journalism outfit, SourceMaterial earlier this year found that the world’s leading provider of these offsets, Verra, may be making the climate worse. Verra is often used by major corporations like Shell and Disney, but over 90 percent of Verra’s most popular rainforest offset credits were discovered to be  “phantom credits” that do not result in “genuine carbon reductions.”

Carbon offsets are considered worthless or having low environmental integrity if the project is linked to a plantation, forest, or green energy project. This includes hydroelectric dams that don’t lead to any additional reductions in greenhouse gasses, or exaggerates the benefits and minimizes risks of emitting emissions, among some other factors.

Chevron often purchased offsets that focused on large dams, plantations, or forests, according to the report. It found that many of these “worthless” offsets are also linked to some alleged social and environmental harms. These harms are primarily in communities in the global south, which happen to face the most harm by the climate crisis that Big Oil helped create. 

“Chevron’s junk climate action agenda is destructive and reckless, especially in light of climate science underscoring the only viable way forward is an equitable and urgent fossil fuel phase-out,” Rachel Rose Jackson from Corporate Accountability told The Guardian.

Chevron is the second-largest fossil fuel company in the United States and its vast operations stretch north to Canada and the United Kingdom and south towards Brazil, Nigeria, and Australia. It reported over $35 billion in profits in 2022 and its projected emissions between 2022 and 2025 are equal to those from 364 coal-fired power plants per year. This is more than the total emissions of 10 European countries combined for a similar three-year period, according to the report.

[Related: BP made $28 billion last year, and now it’s backtracking on its climate goals.]

Chevron “aspires” to achieve net zero upstream emissions by 2050, largely relying on carbon offset schemes and carbon capture and storage to do this. Carbon offsets rely on environmental projects to cancel out a company’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new report further argues that the widespread use of these worthless offsets undermines the company’s net zero aspiration. Their net-zero aspirations only apply to less than 10 percent of the company’s carbon footprint–the upstream emissions that are produced from the production and transport of gas and oil. It excludes the downstream or end use emissions that are due to burning fossil fuels.

“Any climate plan that is premised on offsets, CCS, and excludes scope 3 [downstream] emissions is bound to fail,” Steven Feit, fossil economy legal and research manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, told The Guardian. “It’s clear from this report and other research that net zero as a framework opens the door for claims of climate action while continuing with business as usual, and not moving towards a low-carbon Paris [agreement]-aligned 1.5-degree [2.7 degree] future.”

Bill Turenne, an external affairs coordinator from Chevron, added via email that Chevron believes the report is “biased against our industry and paints an incomplete picture of Chevron’s efforts to advance a lower carbon future.” The offsets reviewed in the Corporate Accountability report are “compliance-grade offsets accepted by governments in the regions where we operate,” Turenne said.

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This article originally published on The Conversation.

Intestinal infections take a heavy toll on impoverished Black communities that have out-of-date sewage systems. These infections often spread through contaminated soil and water and are among the most common diseases worldwide.

Approximately one-quarter of the global population is infected with soil-transmitted helminths, intestinal parasitic worms that can cause serious health problems.

Additionally, up to 50% of people around the world are infected with Helicobacter pylori, bacteria that live in the stomach and can cause ulcers and cancer.

I am a biological anthropologist, and it is clear to me that these two types of infections contribute to systemic health inequities, especially among communities of color in which limited access to medical care and inadequate sanitation systems may both increase exposure to pathogens and lead to worse outcomes.

Historically, intestinal infections have been prevalent in parts of the U.S. where high poverty rates and environmental factors – such as flooding and warm, humid summers – favor infection spread.

Although many Americans believe these diseases now exist only in lower-income countries, research that my colleague and I have conducted challenges this assumption.

Renewed interest in US intestinal infections

Launched in 2019, the Rural Embodiment and Community Health Study started with the goal of measuring current infection rates and determining which living conditions contribute to infection risk.

Though national infection rates remain unclear because of the absence of large-scale studies, our preliminary work in 2019 found that 38% of children sampled in a predominantly Black Mississippi Delta community had intestinal parasitic infections.

Moreover, 80% of those children exhibited high levels of intestinal inflammation. Those levels are much higher than those observed in other populations and may lead to several poor health outcomes, including impaired intestinal ability to absorb nutrients and stunted growth.

Our more recent analyses from 2022 focused on adults living in the Mississippi Delta and Southwestern Illinois, two areas that experience regular flooding.

Among those adults, 73% displayed elevated intestinal inflammation, while 45% were infected with H. pylori, the bacteria that can cause ulcers and cancer.

Taken together, those results demonstrate widespread intestinal infections and inflammation at all ages in these low-income, mostly Black communities.

Long-lasting intestinal infections and associated inflammation can lead to nutritional deficiencies, restricted growth, reduced educational attainment, decreased work productivity and increased risk for serious diseases later in life, including certain cancers).

A legal challenge in Alabama

The Rural Embodiment and Community Health Study is not alone in recognizing the impact of intestinal infections on Black communities. One of the most widely publicized recent research studies investigating intestinal infections focused on the health effects of poverty and crumbling sanitation infrastructure in Lowndes County, Alabama, a region characterized by a history of racial segregation and inequity.

Researchers found that more than 1 in 3 people tested in Lowndes County were infected with hookworm, an intestinal worm spread through sewage exposure that lives in soil and infects people by burrowing into bare feet.

This 2017 study has since led to legal action.

In a landmark May 2023 court ruling, the Biden administration found that Alabama’s public health department had discriminated against Black residents by denying access to adequate sanitation systems and imposed fines for resulting sewage issues.

This decision is being hailed by environmental justice advocates as a transformative environmental justice agreement that may increase public awareness of the ongoing health crisis that results from infrastructure neglect and associated pathogen exposure.

Community activists – such as Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice – said they hope the federal government continues to intervene, leading to similar results in other affected communities.

“This country’s neglect of wastewater infrastructure in majority Black communities, both urban and rural, is resulting in a hygienic hell for far too many people, a hell that climate change is only making worse,” Flowers said in a March 2023 interview.

Why are there still parasites in the US?

The story of parasite infection in the U.S. is two-sided.

On one hand, the U.S. has successfully controlled many parasite infections. Malaria is one of them.

In addition, advancements in sanitation infrastructure and household construction mean that many Americans do not generally have to worry about parasite infections.

But this national success is not complete, as demonstrated by the recent findings in low-income Black communities across the country.

Limited awareness of the continued threat posed by neglected intestinal infections has made it more difficult to identify and treat these diseases in the U.S. than in lower-income nations.

For instance, in many countries the drugs needed to treat hookworm infections cost mere cents, but in the U.S., where drug prices are unregulated by the federal government, these same medications can cost hundreds of dollars.

The recent court decision in Alabama represents an important step toward increased national recognition of the role intestinal infections play in perpetuating racial health inequities.

Increased awareness will ideally result in improved access to testing and treatment in affected communities. But more work is needed to assess the full extent of these infections across the U.S.

Even if medical treatment is accessible and affordable, vulnerable individuals are often reinfected, as these pathogens continue to spread through the environment. Structural changes are needed to break the cycle of infection and poor health.

Current federal investment in community infrastructure – including water quality – is encouraging but does not go far enough. Ultimately, a concentrated nationwide effort to update and maintain sanitation systems is the best way to finally halt infection transmission and support health equity across the U.S.

Theresa E. Gildner, Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Neglected sewage systems are a public health risk for low-income communities appeared first on Popular Science.

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The concept of a sailboat might conjure up thoughts of swanky sailing holidays or fearsome pirates—and some companies are hoping to bring them back into the mainstream, albeit in a modern, emissions-focused way. According to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), there are seven types of Wind Propulsion Technologies, or sails, which could potentially help the organization bring down the shipping industry’s currently massive carbon footprint. 

[Related: Colombia is deploying a new solar-powered electric boat.]

Wired reports that a Swedish company called Oceanbird is building a sail that can fit onto existing vessels. The Wingsail 560 looks kind of like an airplane wing placed vertically like a mast on a boat, and this summer the company plans to test out a prototype on land. If all goes well, next year it could be making its oceanic debut on a 14-year-old car carrier, also known as a roll-on/roll-off or RoRo shipping container, called the Wallenius Tirranna.

This is how the sail, coming in at 40-meters high and weighing 200 metric tons, works—the sail has two parts, one of which is a flap that brings air into a more rigid, steel-cored component that allows for peak, yacht-racing inspired aerodynamics, according to Wired. Additionally, the wing is able to fold down or tilt in order to pass underneath bridges and reduce wind power in case of an approaching storm. One Oceanbird sail placed on an existing vessel is estimated to reduce fuel consumption from the main engine by up to 10 percent, saving around 675,000 liters of diesel each year, according to trade publication Offshore Energy.

But, the real excitement is the idea of a redesigned vessel built especially for the gigantic sails. According to Wired, the Oceanbird-designed, 200-meter-long car carrier Orcelle Wind could cut emissions by at least 60 percent compared to a sailless RoRo vessel. The company themselves even estimates that it could reduce emissions by “up to 90 percent if all emissions-influencing factors are aligned.” However, it will still be a few years before one of these hits the high seas. 

[Related: Care about the planet? Skip the cruise, for now.]

Oceanbird isn’t the only company setting sail—according to Gavin Allwright, secretary general of the International Windship Association, by the end of the year there could be 48 or 49 wind-powered vessels on the seas. One such ship already took a voyage from Rotterdam to French Guiana in late 2022 using a hybrid propulsion of traditional engines and sails. However Allwright tells Wired “we’re still in pretty early days.”

The IMO has already set a climate goal of halving emissions between 2008 and 2050, but experts have called this goal “important, but inadequate” to keep emissions low enough for a liveable future. Currently, these goals are still not being reached, with a Climate Action Tracker assessment showing that emissions are set to grow until 2050 unless further action is taken.

The post These massive, wing-like ‘sails’ could add wind power to cargo ships appeared first on Popular Science.

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The decades-old international treaty that banned ozone-depleting substances has successfully averted huge amounts of sea ice loss—delaying the first ice-free Arctic summer by as much as 15 years, according to a new study. The study published May 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that regulating these harmful substances helped delay further globalc heating.

[Related: Fixing the ozone hole was a bigger deal than anyone realized.]

In 1985, scientists first discovered a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica on the Earth’s south pole. Representatives from countries around the world gathered to craft a treaty to protect the ozone layer, which shields the planet from harmful levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. The resulting Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 and went into effect in 1989 with the purpose of reducing atmospheric concentrations of ozone-depleting substances (OSDs) that were commonly used in refrigerators, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, and aerosols. It remains the only United Nations treaty ratified by every country in the world. 

This new study demonstrates that the treaty’s impact depends on future emissions and the impact goes as far north as the Arctic. 

“The first ice-free Arctic summer–with the Arctic Ocean practically free of sea ice–will be a major milestone in the process of climate change, and our findings were a surprise to us,” study co-author and Columbia University geophysicist Lorenzo Polvani said in a statement. “Our results show that the climate benefits from the Montreal Protocol are not in some faraway future: the Protocol is delaying the melting of Arctic sea ice at this very moment. That’s what a successful climate treaty does: it yields measurable results within a few decades of its implementation.”

According to Polvani and other climate scientists, the rapid melting of sea ice in the Arctic is the largest and most clear sign of human-made climate change. The first completely ice-free Arctic summer will likely occur by 2050, largely due to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Other powerful greenhouse gasses like ODS’ also contributed to this warming, but their concentrations in the atmosphere began to decline in the mid-1990s. 

In this new study, the two authors analyzed new climate model simulations and found that the changes implemented by the Montreal Protocol is delaying the first appearance of an ice-free Arctic summer by up to 15 years, depending on future carbon dioxide emissions. They compared the estimated warming from ODS’ with and without the Montreal Protocol under two scenarios of future carbon dioxide emissions from 1985 to 2050. If the Montreal Protocol had not been enacted, the estimated global mean surface temperature would be about 0.9°F warmer and the Arctic polar cap would be almost 1.8°F warmer in 2050, according to their results.

[Related: Fixing the ozone hole was a bigger deal than anyone realized.]

“This important climate mitigation stems entirely from the reduced greenhouse gas warming from the regulated ODSs, with the avoided stratospheric ozone losses playing no role,” co-author and University of Exeter applied mathematician and atmospheric scientist Mark England said in a statement. “While ODSs aren’t as abundant as other greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, they can have a real impact on global warming. ODSs have particularly powerful effects in the Arctic, and they were an important driver of Arctic climate change in the second half of the 20th Century. While stopping these effects was not the primary goal of the Montreal Protocol, it has been a fantastic by-product.” 

Both authors stressed the importance of remaining vigilant to atmospheric concentrations as the ozone layer is healing, especially due to a slight rise in ODS concentrations from 2010 to 2020.  In 2016, an amendment to the Montreal Protocol (called the Kigali Amendment) that required the phase out of the production and consumption of some hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) was added. While HFCs do not directly deplete ozone, they are powerful climate change-inducing gasses which can accelerate warming. An uptick in CFC use was detected in 2018 and tracked to China, but that was quickly fixed. Scientists say that the Kigali Amendment is estimated to avoid 0.5–0.9°F of warming by 2100, not including contributions from HFC-23 emissions.

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One large part of managing egg-laying hens is a process called sexing, or determining the sex of a baby chick after it hatches. A study published May 22 in the journal PLOS ONE finds that fertilized chicken eggs can be sexed by “sniffing” the volatile chemicals that are emitted through the chicken’s shell.

About a day after hatching, chicks are sorted by sex. Male chicks are killed almost  immediately, a process that kills an estimated 6.5 billion male chicks per year. Sexing is largely used due to both economics and biology—male chickens are of little use to the egg and meat industry since they do not lay eggs and do not fatten up quickly enough to be sold as meat. The practice costs egg producers about $500 million annually, but some European countries including Germany and France have already banned culling of male chicks or plan to phase it out. 

[Release: 6 things to know before deciding to raise backyard chickens.]

If hatcheries could identify the sex of an egg earlier in incubation, billions of male eggs could be humanely killed before the chick can feel pain, as well as reducing waste and environmental impact. The technology that is already on the market for this process called in-ovo sexing depends on either imaging through the shell or sampling the shell through a tiny hole. 

In this new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis and a startup company at the university called Sensit Ventures Inc., it is possible to sniff out the egg’s volatile organic chemicals and determine the egg’s sex. 

The team first had to find out if the chemicals released by male and female embryos give off reliably detectable differences. At study co-author Cristina Davis’s lab at the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the team developed sensing chip technology that can collect and analyze organic chemicals in the air.  

They adapted suction cups that are already used for industrial handling of eggs to “sniff” air from the eggs without actually opening them up. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analyzed the air samples and the sex of the eggs was confirmed by DNA analysis at the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. 

[Related: Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Egg?]

“We found that there are volatile chemicals from the egg, a scent that you can capture and sort statistically,” study co-author and CEO of Sensit Ventures Tom Turpen said in a statement. 

According to the study, this air-sniffing technique was able to identify male and female embryos at eight days of incubation with 80 percent accuracy, based on two minutes of air sampling. Using this rapid suction-cup sampling method could also be carried out in rows that test multiple eggs at the same time 

“We think that the hardware platform invented at UC Davis could be integrated into hatcheries,” Turpen said.

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On May 22, the Biden Administration and the states along the Colorado River announced that they had reached an agreement to conserve an unprecedented amount of the river’s water supply. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada have agreed to save an additional 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River Water in the Lower Basin by the end of 2026, or about 13 percent of these states’ total allocation of water from the river.

In return, the federal government will compensate the three states for three-quarters of the water savings, or about $1.2 billion. The money will come from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Actf and is intended to pay Native American tribes, farmers, cities, and others who will voluntarily forgo their supplies.

[Related: What California’s weird winter means for its water problems.]

The Colorado River is a critical water supply in the Western United States and 20 years of severe drought, population growth, and climate change have strained its supply. The three states in the river’s Lower Basin all agreed to take less water from the river for now, in an effort to keep the water levels from falling so low that it jeopardizes the water supply to major cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, as well as some of the most productive farmland in the country.

The agreement follows almost a year of negotiations and numerous missed deadlines. The plan intended to protect both Lake Powell and Lake Mead—two of the largest reservoirs in the US. Recent  droughts have reduced the Colorado River’s natural water flow by roughly 20 percent. In summer 2022, the water levels in both reservoirs fell so low that officials worried that the hydroelectric turbines they powered might stop working. 

In June 2022, the federal government told the seven states that rely on the river—including Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—that they must find a way to reduce their water use by two to four million acre-feet of water per year. An agreement was not reached among the states, and the federal government considered unilaterally imposing water cuts on those states last summer. 

The states had until May 30 to take a position on future unilateral reductions, but a deal was being negotiated behind closed doors to reach a deal and avoid imposing cuts that would likely  face legal challenges and delaying any serious action, according to The New York Times.

“There are 40 million people, seven states, and 30 Tribal Nations who rely on the Colorado River Basin for basic services such as drinking water and electricity. Today’s announcement is a testament to the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to working with states, Tribes and communities throughout the West to find consensus solutions in the face of climate change and sustained drought,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in a statement. “In particular I want to thank Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau and Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, who have led the discussions with Basin state commissioners, Tribes, irrigators, local communities, and valued stakeholders to reach this critical moment.”

[Related: What the Colorado River’s record lows mean for western US.]

The agreement runs through the end of 2026 and still needs to be formally adopted by the federal government. By 2026, all seven states that rely on the Colorado River may face a deeper water reckoning and the river’s decline is likely to continue. 

According to The Washington Post, Arizona’s commissioner to the Colorado River Tom Buschatzke emphasized that the deal is not the final outcome, and the parties have also agreed to a new proposal that will be analyzed by the Interior Department. 

“It is important to note that this is not an agreement — this is an agreement to submit a proposal and an agreement to the terms of that proposal to be analyzed by the federal government,” Buschatzke told reporters. “That is a really critical point for everyone to understand.”

The heavy snow and rain that fell in the West during the winter helped ease the crisis and gave the negotiators some breathing room, but this winter was “extraordinary” and was not a solution. 
“This wet winter definitely is great news for the Colorado River because of the snowpack. That snow runoff from the mountains will drain into the Colorado River and increase the stream flow,” Utah State University climate scientist Wei Zhang told PopSci in March. “But that cannot solve the water problem in the Colorado River—that demand is still much larger than the supply.”

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Best Overall		Temtop M2000 2nd		SEE IT	The ability to test many things in one device, with consistent results and audible alerts, makes this monitor our top pick.
Best Smart		Atmotube Pro Portable		SEE IT	Impressive accuracy, and handy app alerts, help this keychain-sized monitor work well across a wide variety of temperatures and humidity.
Best Indoor Outdoor		Davis Instruments AirLink		SEE IT	This multienvironment-friendly unit offers easy-to-read graphs and charts, Weatherlink.com integration, and compatibility with Davis weather stations.

Nothing beats a breath of fresh air. Unless, of course, that “fresh” quality air is contaminated by chemicals, soot and other forest fire byproducts, or “Volatile Organic Compounds” (VOCs). Even those with the best noses can have difficulty telling how good their local air is, especially with the presence of odorless gasses, so what are you to do? You could call in an air quality professional … or you can begin to do your own tracking with one of our picks for best air quality monitors.

• Best overall: Temtop M2000 2nd
• Best smart: Atmotube Pro Portable
• Best indoor outdoor: Davis Instruments AirLink
• Best portable: Sensirion SPS30
• Best budget: Temtop P20

How we selected the best air quality monitors

Largely, selecting the best air quality monitors was more a matter of hitting the research shelves than the shopping cart button. With such a product, the customer sentiment and manufacturer-supplied specs really mean a lot less than in-depth product analysis from researchers and experts that were able to compare consumer-facing products with laboratory-grade equipment. This results in a thin product selection, but I was able to identify five air quality monitors that I can confidently recommend.

The best air quality monitors: Reviews & Recommendations

What is the best air quality monitor? The best air quality monitors come tested from official sources and come in a variety of shapes, styles, and working methods. While the Temtop M2000 2nd Generation is the top pick for air quality monitor, due to its ease of use and robust testing ability, our four other monitors might be right for you depending on your circumstances. In any event, these are the five air quality monitors that have both proper testing and current availability in the market.

Best overall: Temtop M2000 2nd Generation

Temtop

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Temtop M2000 2nd Generation tests for a wide variety of pollutants, has built-in calibration, and includes an audible alarm.

Specs

• Measures: CO2, HCHO (formaldehyde), PM2.5/PM10, Temp., Humidity
• AQ-SPEC report: High consistency
• Type: Handheld 

Pros

• Tests many things all in one device
• High consistency across many devices
• Has an audible alarm for when levels rise too high
• Tried and tested by several school systems

Cons

• Doesn’t work in temperatures below freezing

The Temtop M2000 2nd Generation is a relatively easily operated handheld air quality monitor that has been widely used. It has been used by the New York State Education Department and the United Federation of Teachers has used it to measure Carbon Dioxide levels in schools in efforts to fight Covid-19.

The 2nd Generation product improves upon the original Temtop M2000 by adding a data export feature. This is really useful because, as mentioned by the AQ-SPEC report, where the Temtop M2000 2nd Generation suffers losses in accuracy it makes up for it with high levels of consistency. Even across multiple Temtops, the reading levels should be consistently similar in the same situation. This means that you can pinpoint exactly when contaminant levels have started rising, even if you have to have a replacement device.

I’m also particularly pleased that it makes an attempt at a calibration system. While the accuracy, consistency, and difficulty for average users feel a bit daunting, the system’s overall capabilities are more than enough to begin with. Part of the calibration process being leaving the device outside for lengthy periods of time is also annoying, but manageable.

In reality, the main concern is the limited capabilities the device has during the colder months. Without being able to function below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the supposed “indoor-outdoor” nature of the device is cut off for many months of the year for those of us too far North or South of the equator. Luckily, in-home monitoring will still work year-round.

Finally, if you like the look of the M2000 2nd Generation, but are looking for something quite a bit cheaper, our budget choice also comes from Temtop. The Temtop P20 has reduced features, but also a reduced price tag.

Best smart: Atmotube Pro Portable 

Atmotube

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Atmotube Pro attaches directly to your backpack or belt clip and alerts your phone directly when there’s a problem.

Specs

• Measures: PM1/PM2.5/PM10, VOCs, Temp., Humidity, Barometric Pressure
• AQ-SPEC report: High accuracy, high precision
• Type: Wearable

Pros

• Impressive accuracy counts
• Handy app alerts
• Works well across a wide variety of temperatures and humidities
• Keychain size

Cons

• Shorter battery life than hoped for

The Atmotube Pro Portable is a keychain-size air quality monitor that won’t take up much space and can be put just about anywhere or come with you. All of the data collected will be at your fingertips via the Atmo app, available free for Android and iOS devices.

The app will give you your personal stats, access to personal and global maps, and a personalized series of articles to help you understand air quality. You can also export your device’s data as a CSV file for further analysis.

According to the Atmotube’s AQ-SPEC results, the device is quite accurate, ranging from 86% to 98% across a variety of conditions. The AQ-SPEC report also notes that the device is highly consistent across a variety of environmental conditions, saying that heat and humidity had “minimal effect” on the device’s precision. Despite its small size, the Atmotube Pro delivers at a high level.

One of the bigger disappointments with the Atmotube Pro is the battery life. As expected of such a small device, the battery is also quite tiny. When the device is set to take measurements only once every 30 minutes, you can squeeze about a week out of the little battery. However, when you crank that up just a notch, the battery dies much more quickly. This is very unfortunate when using a device that, by its very nature, you want to set up and forget about. Fortunately, if the device isn’t meant to be mobile, you can keep it plugged into the charger while it is running.

Best indoor outdoor: Davis Instruments AirLink

Davis Instruments

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The AirLink is made for both indoor and outdoor usage, provides beautiful charts, and works well with other Davis Instruments systems.

Specs

• Measures: AQI, Temp., Humidity, Dew Point, Heat Index
• AQ-SPEC report: Highly accurate for PM1.0/PM2.5, but not for PM10, consistent
• Type: Indoor or outdoor

Pros

• Weatherlink.com integration
• Easy to read graphs and charts
• Installs easily both indoors and out
• Integrates into your Davis weather station

Cons

• Poor PM10 reading

The Davis Instruments AirLink comes with a heavy-duty body that can be conveniently placed in indoor or outdoor environments. If you want it in your house, just place the machine on a desk or table. It has four safety feet to reduce the chances of it sliding off smooth surfaces. Alternatively, mount it outside (near an outlet) and attach the provided weather-resistant cover.

If you’re into more than just air quality monitoring, you’ll really appreciate the extra things the AirLink tracks, such as dew point and heat index. You’ll also be happy to note that it will connect with weatherlink.com and can integrate with your other Davis weather station products. These services are also available on your phone via the WeatherLink app.

I really appreciate that the output looks professional but still feels closer to what you might expect from a cable weather station than what your average lab coat wearer would be reading. The only thing I was disappointed with is that, as per the AirLink’s AQ-SPEC report, the PM10 readings weren’t too accurate. Really, though, this is just a small trade-off for a good home system and typical consumers will be more than happy with this machine.

Best portable: Sensirion SPS30

SENSIRION

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Sensirion SPS30 is a no-frills machine dedicated to particulate matter testing.

Specs

• Measures: PM1.0/PM2.5/PM4.0/PM10
• AQ-SPEC report: High precision
• Type: Portable

Pros

• Small size
• 8-year lifetime
• Long-term stability and contamination-resistance
• Moddable

Cons

• Drab UI makes interpreting data difficult

If you’re wanting to feel like you’re really in the lab, the Sensirion SPS30 might be right up your alley. Right from the moment I opened the company’s product introduction video, I felt instantly reintroduced to the lab environment I once came from.

Where this really shines is the Sensirion SPS30’s great moddability. For example, some users are soldering them on bikes for CanAirIO, a citizen science project dedicated to building a citizen network for monitoring air quality throughout the world. The simple USB port connection and loads of data quickly generated by the device lend it to lots of projects. Other possibilities include pairing it with air conditioners, smart home devices, HVAC equipment, and more.

Where this “lab environment feel” really doesn’t shine is the UI. If you’ve ever worked with in-company software or any niche data-collection devices you probably already know what I mean. You sure get a lot of data, but it isn’t going to look beautiful or come easy to read. Check out the company’s demonstration video for an up-close look at the graphs provided by the machine before deciding on whether or not to make a purchase.

As for the Sensirion SPS30’s AQ-SPEC report, the key thing to know is that the device is highly precise across temperatures and humidity levels. While PM1.0 and PM2.5 levels were highly accurately measured in field and laboratory testing, PM10 levels were shown to be highly inaccurate in the field trials.

Best budget: Temtop P20

Temtop

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This budget solution will take care of all of your basic air quality monitoring needs.

Specs

• Measures: PM2.5, Temp., Humidity
• AQ-SPEC report: Higher precision at low temperatures
• Type: Desktop or mountable

Pros

• Highly accessible interface
• Everything needed for wall mounting included
• Can double as a nice desk or wall clock
• Exportable data

Cons

• Limited pollutants measured, but still great for price
• Low battery life

Considering that a laboratory-grade air quality tester can cost thousands of dollars, it would seem impossible to make a competitive one in the two-digit range. However, with Temtop’s P20, that isn’t true.

The Temtop P20 is able to measure PM2.5 pollutants. While it’d be nice to measure other pollutants or even other sizes of particulate matter, doing one thing well is quite impressive for the budget tier. The P20’s AQ-SPEC report tells us that the machine’s precision is most accurate when the local temperature is lower. That being said, the measurements indicate an accuracy of over 90% for most conditions at 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

You’ll probably enjoy having the Temtop P20 around, as it is also a rather nice LCD screen clock. To take a bit of the mystery out of the reading counts, a cute smiley face interprets the PM2.5 levels as good, fair, or poor. Another smiley face interprets your local humidity levels in a similar manner.

While the device can be mounted on the wall, and includes the screws needed to do so, I recommend using the back stand and using it as a desk monitor. On the wall, the numbers, time, and smiley faces will probably prove somewhat tricky to see clearly. This will also help you keep it plugged into a charger because the battery only lasts for about 6-8 hours on a single charge.

Finally, those of you interested in data will rejoice. Much like the Temtop M2000 2nd Generation, our top choice of air quality monitor, the Temtop P20 has USB connectivity to export the collected data in CSV format. 

Things to consider before buying the best air quality monitors

One thing to note from the current research is that air quality monitors for public usage are still an emerging market. As such, there are a lot of claims about accuracy that are either demonstrably false or haven’t been thoroughly checked by scientists or any actual regulatory board. With all of this in mind, here are the key things to remember when buying an air quality monitor:

Target pollutant

In a fantasy world, an air quality monitor would be able to sniff out any potential harm in the air and let you know. Unfortunately, air quality monitors in the real world need to be designed to target specific contaminants. While it is never a mystery as to what pollutants an air quality monitor tracks—as they are nearly always prominently displayed in the specs and ads—you may find yourself overwhelmed with a few new terms. Here’s a quick mini-guide to get you up to speed on air pollution vocab:

PM: PM stands for “particulate matter” and measurements of it are able to tell you how many liquid or solid particles of varying sizes are in your air. The particles are measured in microns, given after the “PM.” For example, PM2.5 tests for the amount of particles that are approximately 2.5 microns in your air. The makers of the Atmotube report that PM1 particles are typically emissions from factories and vehicles, PM2.5 particles usually come from fires and combustion, and PM10 particles are from pollen, mold, and fine bits of old plants and insects. You’ll find that PM2.5 is a common measurement taken by portable air purifiers, such as the conveniently compact Wynd Plus personal air purifier with air quality sensor.

AQI: This stands for Air Quality Index and is a popular, but somewhat outdated, method for measuring air quality. Essentially, the AQI measures pollutant levels for a wide variety of substances, gives them each a score from 0-500, and reports the highest one. It doesn’t matter if only one pollutant is high or if several are, only the top one is getting reported. Still, the data is historically known and the conversions for each pollutant can still be useful. If you want to play around with the system, a handy AQI calculator is available for you.

VOCs: These are “Volatile Organic Compounds” and largely come from human sources. The EPA warns that sources of these contaminants include household cleaners, building materials, and standard office equipment. They also have found that these pollutants are consistently found in much higher concentrations in indoor settings. VOCs are a big part of the reason why our recommended floor cleaners focused so heavily on ingredients. Certain high-end air purifiers, such as the Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde, are specifically equipped with sensors attuned to these byproducts we bring into our homes as we upgrade furnishings and electronics, etc.

Scientific usage

Before making any purchase of something as important as an air quality monitor, be sure to check out how the product is perceived by experts. That can be as simple as running a Google search with “site:.edu” or “site:.gov” followed by the product name or trawling through the depths of the “Air Quality Sensor Performance Evaluation Center” (AQ-SPEC) website.

AQ-SPEC provides comprehensive data on air sensors after real-world field trials. While AQ-SPEC reports explicitly state that they are not an endorsement of a particular monitor, the evaluations are free for the manufacturer if the sensors are “low-cost” and meet basic selection criteria. As a result, simply bothering to submit a sensor for an AQ-SPEC report is a sign of a manufacturer’s good faith in their product.

All of the air quality monitors on our list have a detailed AQ-SPEC report. Unfortunately, these reports can be a bit dense and read more like a Ph.D.’s journal submission than a consumer-facing report. I’ve attempted to condense these reports down into the relevant bits but, if you’ve got any interest, you’re highly encouraged to parse through them yourself as well.

Accuracy & consistency

Accuracy and consistency feel very similar at a glance but affect our perceptions of an air quality monitor in big ways. As you might be able to gather from a recent analysis by the Berkeley Lab, accuracy is going to be difficult to maintain but high consistency will make these machines still quite valuable sources of information for your home.

Part of the reason for this comes down to calibration, which laboratory equipment undergoes frequently. Take the humble pH machine, for example. Back in my lab days, I remember calibrating this machine nearly every day I would use it, using specialized liquid solutions. Now imagine calibrating something that measures air … at home. It appears that cheap calibration is on the way, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy or reliably done by the average person.

The result is that we have to expect some loss of accuracy when high-quality calibration isn’t feasible. Depending on what is being measured, this might not necessarily be too much of a problem. For example, your home thermometer is likely about 1 degree off but it is still enough to tell you that you have a fever. The key is getting something that is accurate enough for your purposes.

Perhaps more important is consistency. While several consumer-grade air quality monitors have a bias, especially after being run for multiple days, if that bias is consistent we can still get extremely useful information. For example, if your reading for Carbon Dioxide suddenly skyrockets above what you are used to getting, you know you have a problem.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best air quality monitors

Getting a high-quality air quality monitor doesn’t have to be for laboratory professionals alone. While the world of personal air quality monitoring is still an emerging one, there are still some great products out there. Combining the most stringent testing circumstances with ready commercial availability produced a list of exactly these five air quality monitors, so we’re sure customers will find satisfaction from something on this list.

The post The best air quality monitors in 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, Peggy Eby crawled on her hands and knees under a fig tree, searching for bat droppings and fruit with telltale fang marks.

Another horse in Australia had died from the dreaded Hendra virus that winter in 2011. For years, the brain-inflaming infectious disease had bedeviled the country, leaping from bats to horses and sometimes from horses to humans. Hendra was as fatal as it was mysterious, striking in a seemingly random fashion. Experts fear that if the virus mutates, it could jump from person to person and wreak havoc.

So while government veterinarians screened other horses, Eby, a wildlife ecologist with a Ph.D., got to work, grubbing around the scene like a detective. Nobody knew flying foxes, the bats that spread Hendra, better. For nearly a quarter century, she’d studied the furry, fox-faced mammals with wingspans up to 3 feet. Eby deduced that the horse paddock wasn’t where the bats had transmitted Hendra. But the horse’s owners had picked mandarin oranges off the trees across the street. The peels ended up in the compost bin, where their horse liked to rummage. “Bingo,” Eby thought. Flying foxes liked mandarins. The bats’ saliva must have contaminated the peels, turning them into a deadly snack.

Eby, however, longed to unlock a bigger mystery: Could she, with the help of fellow scientists, predict when the conditions were prime for Hendra to spill over from bats, before it took any more lives? What if they could warn the public to be on guard — maybe even prevent the virus from making the leap? It would be painstaking work, but it wasn’t a pipe dream; Eby was already spotting patterns as she crawled around infection sites.

But when she pitched her research to a government funder the following year, she got a flat no. She proposed starting small, gathering basic data on flying foxes that could be used to figure out when and why they spread the virus. Her work, she was told, wasn’t considered a “sufficiently important contribution.”

Global health organizations and governments have long focused on responding to outbreaks rather than predicting and preventing them. Billions of dollars pour into developing treatments and vaccines for infectious diseases, but only a small fraction goes to understanding why contagions spread from animals to humans in the first place. Some experts reject even that, viewing spillover as too random, mysterious and rare to be observed and studied.

The work Eby does is the opposite of the major research projects on deadly diseases that typically get scientific grants. Government and nonprofit funders are often drawn to studies involving cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence, and they want results in a few years’ time. Eby had spent decades trekking into the Australian bush, often on her own dime, observing flying foxes for hours on end with only a notebook and a pair of binoculars. To support her research, she took on consulting jobs, such as advising towns whose residents viewed bats as pests. She knew, though, that side hustles would never be enough to support the multidisciplinary team of scientists needed to crack the Hendra virus.

In the years that followed, Eby found like-minded scientists, and the team, led by women, persisted. They cobbled together grant after grant, battled burnout and kept impatient funders at bay. A decade after Eby’s government grant proposal was shot down, they published a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature that demonstrated it was not only possible to predict Hendra virus spillover, but it might be preventable. Only then did it become obvious just how important Eby’s quiet fieldwork truly was.

Dr. Neil Vora, a tuberculosis physician and former officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he was thrilled when he saw the paper. “It gave clear evidence that we can take actions to prevent spillovers of viruses,” said Vora, who now works for environmental nonprofit Conservation International. “I hope it helps to convince funders and policymakers that spillover prevention merits implementation now.”

In a world still scarred by the COVID-19 pandemic, Eby’s dogged success exposes a global scientific blind spot. It’s not that trendy science involving the latest AI wonders isn’t worthy of research dollars. It’s that it should not be funded at the expense of the sort of long-term, shoe-leather work that allowed Eby and her colleagues to solve the mystery of a deadly contagion, Vora and other public health experts say. “All of these actions are important if we want to save as many lives as possible from infectious diseases,” Vora added.

Novel infectious diseases will keep coming at us, Eby warns. Investing in scientific work like hers “seems like a poor approach now,” she said, “but 20 years from now, we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t do it.”

Fresh out of college in the 1970s, Eby explored the wilds of Australia on a research fellowship, following the path a German naturalist had chronicled before he disappeared in 1848. Some parts were so remote that she had to hitch a ride on the tiny plane that delivered mail to park rangers. Eby, who grew up in Kansas, was awed by the diversity of the landscape and charmed by the openness of the people. When her fellowship ended, she decided Australia was home.

Eby was in her 30s when she came to love flying foxes. Her boss at the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service asked her to figure out how bats spread fruit seeds in rainforests. She followed signals transmitted by radio collars on flying foxes and knocked on landowners’ doors to ask if she might, please, observe the bats feeding in their trees and collect droppings. She even tracked them from a single-engine Cessna, battling nausea as she discovered that the bats could migrate hundreds of miles, a fact that nobody knew at the time.

When she watches flying foxes hanging in repose, Eby’s breathing slows. It feels like meditation. “It changes my perspective so I feel less significant,” she explained. “I think that’s important for all of us to feel less significant in the world.”

She was working on her dissertation about the bats in 1994 when a novel virus struck a Brisbane suburb called Hendra. The trouble started when a pregnant racehorse named Drama Series became congested and feverish. A veterinarian gave her painkillers and antibiotics, but she died the next day. As horse after horse got sick, some thrashed in their stalls, unable to breathe. “It’s a horrible thing to see when they’re mutilating themselves,” the veterinarian, Dr. Peter Reid, recalled.

Then the horses’ trainer died. The outbreak had spread to humans.

For more than a decade, Hendra popped up sporadically. It killed another horse trainer and two veterinarians. A veterinary nurse became so ill that she had to learn to walk and talk again and never regained some of her hearing.

Scientists figured out that Hendra came from flying foxes, and it had to pass through horses before it could infect humans. Eby was aware of those discoveries but didn’t get pulled in until an unprecedented number of horses died in 2011. Nobody knew why so many were getting sick when Hendra had been rare in the past. Media helicopters rumbled over sites where horses died, and people who lived and worked near them panicked. A group of ecologists lobbied the government to add a bat expert to the team deployed to infection sites, a practice that wasn’t common then and still isn’t. The ecologists picked Eby.

Shortly after her 60th birthday, Eby began suiting up in PPE and heading to the scene every time a horse tested positive for Hendra. She soon noticed the bat roosts near these sites were new and small. Something strange was going on.

Around the same time, Dr. Raina Plowright, a professor of disease ecology at Cornell University, proposed working together. Plowright was an Australian who had emigrated in the opposite direction of Eby but had never lost interest in her homeland’s infectious diseases.

They agreed to tackle the mystery together. They applied for multiple grants and were shot down because their ambitions didn’t match the funding silos: Agencies that support human health don’t typically care about animal health, and those that back studies on the environment often aren’t interested in how it affects public health. In saying “no,” one animal foundation explained that its mandate didn’t extend to diseases that leaped to humans.

In 2012, Plowright received a small grant from the Australian government, but that was only for mathematical modeling and didn’t support fieldwork like Eby’s. By 2017, a National Science Foundation grant came through, but it wasn’t enough to cover all of the costs of catching and testing bats. The team spread itself thin. “It was headed to a burnout situation,” Plowright recalled.

Eby, meanwhile, tapped unusual sources to get data. She befriended beekeepers, who could tell her when and where key species of trees were flowering. This helped them track shortages of the bats’ favorite food: nectar from eucalyptus blossoms. She also asked workers at wildlife rehabilitation centers to keep logs about sick and injured bats that they cared for.

The team studied weather patterns and how the forest cover had changed. Eby contributed field records on the location, number and health of bat roosts. Altogether, their data spanned 25 years.

The team’s resourcefulness paid off. By 2017, the researchers figured out how and why Hendra was spilling over from bats:

In early 2017, the researchers determined that conditions were ripe for Hendra to leap from bats to horses and potentially to people. A drought, followed by too much rain, had led to a dire shortage of eucalyptus blossoms, and malnourished bats were turning up at wildlife rescue organizations. By then, there was a Hendra vaccine for horses, but few owners had opted for it. It was only a matter of time before a horse nibbled something tainted with the bats’ saliva or droppings.

Eby pushed past the fear that their prediction might be wrong. She and her colleagues published a bulletin that winter, warning veterinarians of an impending Hendra outbreak and their need to wear full protective gear near horses.

The team was right. Four horses on separate properties caught Hendra that season.

No humans got sick.

When the same pattern of weather and food shortages repeated in 2020, Eby and her colleagues were confident that it’d be a calamitous year. They sounded another warning that May, at the start of the Australian winter season: “Conditions predict heightened Hendra virus spillover risk in horses this winter: actions now can change outcomes.”

Later that month, one horse was infected and euthanized. The team braced itself for a wave of horse deaths. But then — nothing. No other Hendra cases were identified, and the outbreak that was supposed to happen just didn’t.

Somehow, they had gotten it wrong.

“We still felt confident in our understanding,” Eby recalled, “but we didn’t have the full story yet.” She ran through everything she knew about bats and Hendra, scouring for what they might have missed. There had, indeed, been a food shortage. So where were all the bats?

Eby was in COVID-19 lockdown in mid-July that year when she got stunning news. Gympie, a former gold-mining town near the east coast, had been less affected by the severe weather than expected, and a few patches of a type of eucalyptus known as the forest red gum were flowering en masse. Their slender branches teemed with fluffy white blooms. Eucalyptus trees don’t flower every winter; their blooms appear erratically. Some 240,000 flying foxes had flown in for the rare feast.

“I immediately knew,” Eby said. “This is what was different.”

Her collaborators, a field team from Griffith University, rushed to check roosts in areas where Hendra cases had previously struck. Many roosts were empty, the bats drawn away by the Gympie banquet.

Eby and Plowright had worked on this for a decade now, patching together four or five grants at a time to continue their research. Funders wanted results.

But they needed more data. They had to understand how this unexpected winter flowering in Gympie was affecting bats across eastern Australia. With the lockdown preventing Eby from examining the roost herself, she began to compile information on historic mass winter flowerings like this one.

One reason why it wasn’t initially obvious that the Gympie congregation was important was that the bats that had flocked to town were grey-headed flying foxes, not the black flying foxes that spread Hendra. Eby came to believe that a hierarchy of bat species governs which can claim the best food, and the behavior of one affects the other.

The greys get dibs on the best food. When eucalyptus nectar is scarce, the greys eat what’s available, pushing the black flying foxes to scavenge for fruits in horse paddocks, their equivalent of junk food. But when the nectar is abundant, like it was in Gympie, the greys will depart for that fine dining opportunity, allowing the blacks to ditch the horse paddocks for better food that the greys leave behind. This draws the bats that carry Hendra away from horses and people.

In the end, what she concluded was astonishing: There had never been a spillover at the same time as a rich winter flowering.

“We said, this can’t be real, it’s too good,” Plowright said. “Those remnant patches of flowering were protecting the whole landscape.”

Patches of eucalyptus around a single town could protect all of eastern Australia. Imagine a few clusters of trees in New Jersey protecting the entire Eastern Seaboard.

The researchers could see how, between 1994 and 2006, consistent winter flowering was still taking place around the country. But as people cut down more and more trees, reducing the available habitat, winter flowering became unreliable and occasional, leading bats to search in horse paddocks for other sources of food.

Habitat destruction and deforestation has been linked to outbreaks of many notorious viruses, including Ebola, monkey malaria and the brain-invading Nipah virus. The discoveries of Eby and her colleagues show that we can learn all of the elements that lead to spillover — environmental, animal and human — in enough detail to design ways to predict and prevent the next outbreak.

Their discovery comes as the threat of Hendra increases. Deforestation has decimated the bats’ winter foraging habitats and shows no signs of stopping. Climate change likely will cause more extreme weather conditions, which will further disrupt the winter budding of eucalyptus, making food shortages more common.

Eby and her colleagues see a new way forward: If the remaining patches of winter-flowering trees were preserved and more were planted, they could once again reliably draw the bats away from people and protect the entire country from Hendra virus for years to come.

Yet few government agencies and global health authorities are ready to invest in action that comes out of this hard-won discovery.

The Hendra team, in 2018, had managed to score a grant from a program under the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that was unique in its scope and vision. Called Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT, it sought to understand the mechanisms of spillover with the goal of developing technologies to protect U.S. military forces deployed to disease-prone locations. But the program was a one-off and is ending after five years. DARPA says it is not its role to fund the solution Eby and her colleagues discovered.

“We are ready for the next hard problem,” said Kristen Jordan, the deputy director for the DARPA Biological Technologies Office. “There are many we need to address.”

Department of Defense officials asked Plowright whether the model that predicted Hendra could also predict the next coronavirus spillover in Southeast Asia.

Plowright recalls responding: “Well, you need data. And we have no data.” It’d be impossible to calculate that risk without replicating the years of wildlife tracking, environmental data gathering and number-crunching that the Hendra team conducted. “People just don’t get that.”

On a crisp afternoon last September in the city of Tamworth in New South Wales, Eby pulled into the parking lot of a Hungry Jack’s burger restaurant. She had heard reports of an enormous roost of flying foxes in town and hurried to get there. Eby couldn’t see any bats from where she had parked, but she didn’t need to. Her clear blue eyes lit up and she beamed. “Can you smell them?”

Alongside the aroma of cooking grease was a musky, sweet scent that announced the presence of bats. As Eby walked to the river, she could also hear their shrill chattering. Then, there they were, hanging upside down from every branch on every tree that lined the river, grooming themselves and resting before the evening’s forage. With their wings folded around them, the bats looked like tear-drop-shaped fruit. A week earlier, another researcher had flown a heat-seeking drone over the roost and estimated that the river in Tamworth was hosting about 300,000 bats — more than half of the grey-headed flying fox population in all of Australia.

Eby moved slowly so as not to startle the roosting animals. She raised her binoculars, tallying males and females, noting any that were pregnant and scanning for babies born out of season. The roost looked healthy. She was elated. The Tamworth bats confirmed that a single unusually abundant flowering of eucalyptus could provide a protective effect for the whole system. And sure enough, there were no Hendra virus cases in the winter of 2022.

A few years ago, Eby had thought it might be time to retire. She was nearing 70 and ready to take a break from the physical grind of fieldwork. But then came an unconventional funding opportunity she couldn’t pass up.

After thousands of bushfires burned an estimated 59 million acres in a single season that came to be known as the Black Summer, money poured in to help restore habitat for Australia’s iconic koala. Eby instantly recognized the chance to explore how planting eucalyptus affects flying foxes, which conveniently feed on nectar from many of the same trees preferred by koalas. “The bats are hanging onto the coattails of the koalas,” she said with a wry grin.

There wasn’t a universal data set tracking reforestation projects, so she set out to create one. Today, supported by money from various koala-focused projects, she drives across eastern Australia training koala conservationists to upload records of their tree-planting projects into a common database. She hopes that reforestation efforts will make winter flowering commonplace again and prove the case for preventing spillovers with habitat restoration.

Eby says that she believes preventing outbreaks is possible, and that the methods she and her colleagues have developed can be applied to other disease systems. “There was nothing remarkable about my work. It can be done again in other circumstances, it just takes the will,” she said. “It also takes an understanding that this is a long term quest.”

Even while she embarks on her new mission to prove the power of reforestation, she pauses to cheer the remnant patches of forest when they bloom.

As the sun set over Tamworth, she stood above the riverbank, her hair glowing silver under the light of a streetlamp. She watched as the bats set out into the darkening sky, their long wings beating the air as they soared from the trees and headed out to feed. Eby couldn’t see where they were headed but knew that nearby, eucalyptus trees were blooming, producing sweet nectar that would keep the country safe from a Hendra virus spillover. Smiling to herself, she murmured, “Isn’t it wonderful?”

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An estimated 30 tons of highly volatile ammonium nitrate disappeared from a railcar traveling last month between Wyoming and the Mojave Desert in California. Frequently used as a fertilizer, the compound is also infamous for its role in the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as well as a massive 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed over 200 people. In this instance, however, multiple reports indicate Union Pacific railway officials believe the cargo accidentally leaked out of “the bottom gate on the railcar” during its two-week journey across the western US.

According to The New York Times, a Union Pacific spokesperson explained that the fertilizer—transported in pellet form within a covered hopper car akin to coal shipments—is designed for ground application and quick soil absorption, and “should pose no risk to public health or the environment.” The shipment belonged to an explosives manufacturer, Dyno Nobel, whose representatives also told the Times they do not currently suspect “criminal or malicious activity” behind the disappearance. Union Pacific is reportedly in the “early stages” of its investigation, while the Federal Railroad Administration and the California Public Utilities Commission are also conducting their own reviews of the incident.

[Related: Toxic train derailment in East Palestine, OH highlights issues facing America’s railways.]

“The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit,” a Dyno Nobel spokesperson said in a statement.

Although ammonium nitrate is relatively harmless on its own, its addition to a fuel source combined with heat and pressure make for an extremely powerful explosion. This can often prove useful—as is the case with a compound called ANFO (ammonium nitrate/fuel oil), which miners use to clear large rock formations. However, ammonium nitrate is also a go-to chemical for illegal homemade explosives and bombs. As California radio outlet KQED explains, Congress passed a law in 2007 on the regulation and transfer of ammonium nitrate to prevent its misuse by bad actors. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security proposed additional regulations, but never formally adopted them.

News of the rail incident comes only a few months after a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, resulting in a temporary, mandatory evacuation order for thousands of residents. The release of toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride gas and a carcinogen called ethylhexyl acrylate resulted in numerous reports of physical and respiratory issues such as headaches, coughing, and acute bronchitis.

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The catastrophic flooding from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy inundated parts of the New York City subway system with corrosive salt water and brought with it a warning for the future. Now, scientists have learned that the city is sinking, and it’s not just the underground trains that are in trouble.

[Related: New York City’s subway system isn’t ready for a storm-filled future.]

A study published earlier this month in the Earth’s Future journal found that New York City is sinking at a rate of roughly one to two millimeters per year, but certain parts of northern Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and lower Manhattan are actually sinking faster at 2.75mm per year. 

There is not one cause for this sinking, but the weight from giant skyscrapers is magnifying the problem. In the study, the team calculated that all of the city’s structures weigh 842 million tons (1.68 trillion pounds), about the weight of 140 million elephants.   

Many of the city’s largest buildings sit upon solid bedrock called Manhattan schist, but there is a mixture of sand and other clays holding up some of the other structures. For example, the Manhattan stanchion of the famed Brooklyn Bridge is built on a hard layer of sand, since it was too dangerous for the workers building it to keep drilling down to bedrock. 

“The softer the soil, the more compression there is from the buildings. It wasn’t a mistake to build such large buildings in New York but we’ve just got to keep in mind every time you build something there you push down the ground a little bit more,” study co-author and a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey Tom Parsons told The Guardian. 

The clay and sand is adding to the sinking effect that might be due to the way that the Earth below continues to shift following the Earth’s most recent ice age–about 10,000 years ago. Giant ice sheets covered Earth during the coldest parts of the planet’s last ice age, which caused the ground right underneath them to sink. The landmasses tilted up and after the ice sheets melted, the areas that were propped up like New York and other cities in eastern North America are now sinking back down. Earlier studies suggest the East Coast could see as much as 19 to 59 inches of sinking by 2100. 

Climate change is compounding the issue, as the sea level rise continues to accelerate. The waters surrounding New York City are rising at about twice the global average due the glaciers melting from the effects of climate change and seawater expanding. Since 1950, the sea level around New York City has increased about nine inches. According to the NYC Panel on Climate Change, the sea level could rise between eight inches and 30 inches by the 2050s and as much as 15 inches to 75 inches by the end of this century.

“A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of hazard from inundation in New York City,” the team wrote in the study.

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier.]

New York is not the only city that will be facing this crisis. A report from the C40 Group, a network of mayors from some of the world’s biggest cities dedicated to confronting the effects of climate change, found that 800 million people are expected to live in coastal cities where sea levels are expected to rise by over a foot by 2050.

The study’s authors also stress the need to adapt to these threats of increased flooding. “Every additional high-rise building constructed at coastal, river, or lakefront settings could contribute to future flood risk,” the authors wrote. 

In the fall of 2020, New York City began construction on the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project which is aimed at reducing the flood risk and sea level rise along Manhattan’s east side. According to the city government, the boundaries of this project correspond with the natural “pinch-points” in the 100-year floodplain. These are areas where the land is higher along the coastline, making it easier to close the system off from water entering from the north and south. The project is expected to be complete in 2026 and will eventually span 2.4 miles and include 18 movable floodgates. 

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Last week, The New York Times went backstage at the Oregon Zoo for an intimate look at the fake eggs the zoo was developing as a part of its endangered Condor nursery program. 

The idea is that caretakers can swap out the real eggs the birds lay for smart egg spies that look and feel the same. These specially designed, 3D-printed eggs have been equipped with sensors that can monitor the general environment of the nest and the natural behaviors of the California condor parents (like how long they sat on the egg for, and when they switched off between parents). 

In addition to recording data related to surrounding temperature and movement, there’s also a tiny audio recorder that can capture ambient sounds. So what’s the use of the whole charade? 

The Oregon Zoo’s aim is to use all the data gathered by the egg to better recreate natural conditions within their artificial incubators, whether that has to do with adjusting the temperatures they set these machines to, integrating periodic movements, or play back the sounds from the nest, which will ideally improve the outcomes from its breeding efforts. And it’s not the only group tinkering with tech like this.

A ‘spy hippo’

This setup at the Oregon Zoo may sound vaguely familiar to you, if you’ve been a fan of the PBS show “Spy in the Wild.” The central gag of the series is that engineers craft hyper-realistic robots masquerading as animals, eggs, boulders, and more to get up close and personal with a medley of wildlife from all reaches of the planet. 

[Related: Need to fight invasive fish? Just introduce a scary robot]

If peeking at the inner lives of zoo animals is a task in need of an innovative tech solution, imagine the challenges of studying animals in their natural habitats, in regions that are typically precarious or even treacherous for humans to visit. Add on cameras and other heavy equipment, and it becomes an even more demanding trip. Instead of having humans do the Jane Goodall method of community immersion with animals, these spies in disguise can provide invaluable insights into group or individual behavior and habits without being intrusive or overly invasive to their ordinary way of life.  

A penguin rover

Testing unconventional methods like these is key for researchers to understand as much as they can about endangered animals, since scientists have to gather important information in a relatively short time frame to help with their conservation. 

[Related: Open data is a blessing for science—but it comes with its own curses] 

To prove that these inventions are not all gimmick and have some practical utility, a 2014 study in Nature showed that a penguin-shaped rover can get more useful data on penguin colonies than human researchers, whose presence elevated stress levels in the animals. 

The point of all this animal espionage?

Minimizing the effects created by human scientists has always been a struggle in behavioral research for the natural sciences. Along with the advancement of other technologies like better cameras and more instantaneous data transfer, ingenious new sensor devices like the spy eggs are changing the field itself. The other benefit is that every once in a while, non-scientist humans can also be privy to the exclusive access provided into the secret lives of these critters, like through “Spy in the Wild,” and use these as portals for engaging with the world around them.

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The most irrigated crop in the US isn’t a particularly tasty one. Nationwide, lawn grass takes up a total area bigger than the size of Georgia, and requires more than 300 gallons of watering per household a day. “These turf grasses have really short roots, so they require nearly a constant input of water,” says Becky Barak, a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden and leader of the Rethinking Lawns Project.

The traditional American lawn, which often holds non-native species from Africa, Asia, and Europe, can be great for kids and dogs to run around on. But there are tons of native plantings that decrease water and pesticide use, reduce time and energy spent on mowing, absorb stormwater, and provide real habitat for wildlife. Not to mention, they make an incredible backdrop in the process. “Some native grasses can be mowed to look more like traditional turf grasses,” Barak says. “But then there are others that are beautiful and can add so much visual appeal and a totally different look.”

[Related: What to consider before ripping out your lawn]

When it comes to choosing types of grass, there are thousands of choices. “They can be all different colors of the rainbow,” Barak says. That might sound overwhelming, but don’t worry—you can narrow down the list by browsing local native nurseries and regional university guides. (Remember to check the soil type in your yard and find plants that match.) Once you have some options that work for your space, no matter how tiny, you’ll be well on your way to creating the native landscape of your dreams. Here are nine beloved varieties to get you started.

Short grasses

Buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides)

• Native range: Central US
• Height: 3 to 10 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

If you’re looking for a native grass that still keeps the lawn feel, look no further than buffalo grass. Named after the American bison that once grazed all over the Great Plains, this drought-tolerant turf grass is a popular choice for lawns for its sod-forming abilities. You can mow it infrequently or never if you prefer the slightly taller look. Although buffalo grass can survive without irrigation, it may lose some of its color in periods of drought and dormancy. Mix the seeds with other low-growing options for sustained greenery, or consider using a buffalo grass cultivar that’s bred for more consistent color.

Curly mesquite grass (Hilaria belangeri)

• Native range: Southwestern US
• Height: 4 to 12 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low

Another popular turf grass for drought tolerance, this species is the perfect choice for desert and desert-like environments. It’s considered to be one of the best lawn options out of native grasses in the US, though its range is limited to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Curly mesquite grass can grow in a variety of well-drained soils but works best in clay loam.

Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica)

• Native range: Eastern and Midwestern US
• Height: 6 to 12 inches
• Light: part to full shade
• Water use: low to medium

Although Pennsylvania sedge isn’t technically a grass, its grass-like appearance makes it a great choice for homeowners looking to make their yard more native without losing the lush carpeted look. The plant offers good ground cover, spreads well, and deters deer from grazing. In the fall, this delicate, windswept-looking sedge turns from vibrant green to tan.

Medium grasses

Purple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis)

• Native range: along the East Coast from Maine to Florida, west to Arizona
• Height: 8 to 18 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low

Purple lovegrass, one of Barak’s favorites, adds the perfect pop of color to your lawn. The heat-tolerant plant really starts to shine in August, when it forms an inflorescence of purple-red flowers that seemingly float on the grass like a cloud of color. Though it can be damaged by heavy foot traffic, the grass stays relatively short, only needs to be mowed a few times throughout the year, and is deer-resistant.

[Related: This lawn-mowing robot can save part of your yard for pollinators]

“Hatchita” blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis)

• Native range: Western and Central US
• Height: 8 to 20 inches
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Along with buffalo grass and curly mesquite grass, this type of grass completes the trifecta of popular native turf choices in the US, but is even more drought tolerant than the other two members of the big three. It’s also both cold and heat tolerant, can grow in most soils except overly wet ones, and hosts different kinds of skipper butterflies during their breeding season. In the summer, the plant displays an inflorescence of purple flowers; in fall, it turns beautiful hues like orange and red. For fuller coverage, consider combining blue grama with buffalo grass and various native wildflowers in your yard.

Muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris)

• Native range: Southeastern US and the East Coast
• Height: 2 to 3 feet
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Planting muhly grass is like setting off living fireworks on your lawn. Each fall, it blooms with feathery pink inflorescences In winter, the grass fades into a rich tan. Beyond that, it retains a gorgeous dark-green color. The plant is easy to grow and germinate and is highly deer resistant.

Prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)

• Native range: Great Plains
• Height: 2 to 3 feet
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Another one of Barak’s favorites, prairie dropseed’s flowing green clumps make it the perfect accent or border grass—but that’s not the only fun part. When it begins to pop around June, the grass produces small pink and brown flowers that smell like coriander, licorice, or popcorn. It maintains its shape outside of the warmer seasons, even when blanketed by snow. This slow-growing type of grass is also a great choice if you’re looking to make your yard more pollinator-friendly, as they provide nesting materials for native bees.

Tall grasses

Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)

• Native range: everywhere in the US except the West Coast
• Height: 2 to 7 feet
• Light: full sun
• Water use: low to medium

Despite its name, this drought-resistant grass is rather tall, making it a great choice to add dimension to a yard or garden. Little bluestem also boasts, you guessed it, a beautiful blue hue in summer before turning copper in the fall. Loved by homeowners (including Barak) and animals alike, this grass attracts birds and butterflies and provides nesting materials for native bees. On the flip side, you might catch a few deer visiting your new bluestem buffet.

[Related: How to build a butterfly watering area]

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)

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A new report finds that methane regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency  could spur job growth in Texas as oil and gas operators measure, monitor and mitigate the harmful greenhouse gas.

While Texas officials argue the methane regulations would kill jobs, the report, published today by the Texas Climate Jobs Project and the Ray Marshall Center at the University of Texas, Austin, found that new federal methane regulations could create between 19,000 and 35,000 jobs in the state. 

Oil and gas producing regions, including the Permian Basin, would need a significant workforce to detect methane leaks, replace components known to leak the gas and plug abandoned wells. Previous research shows the methane mitigation industry is already growing.

In the absence of state methane rules, the EPA’s draft methane rule, first issued in November 2021 and strengthened in a supplemental filing last November, along with a new methane fee under the Inflation Reduction Act, will have a major impact on oil and gas operations in the Lone Star state. 

“We want to show that environmental policies are not job killers,” said Christopher Agbo, research and policy coordinator for the Texas Climate Jobs Project, an affiliate of the Texas AFL-CIO. “You can create tens of thousands of good-paying, family-sustaining union jobs while also cutting back on emissions.”

Changing the Methane Narrative 

The EPA’s methane regulations, to be finalized later this year, would reduce methane emissions 87 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act’s first-ever methane fee for large emitters will also start in 2024 at $900 per ton of methane and increase to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

Reducing methane emissions is one of the most effective short-term measures to slow the pace of climate change because methane traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide.

But Texas has been a stubborn opponent of federal methane regulations. In January 2021, shortly after Biden ordered the EPA to develop new methane rules, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order directing state agencies to use every legal avenue to oppose federal action challenging the “strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”

After the EPA released its draft methane rule in 2021, Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian issued a statement that “anti -oil and -gas policies will kill jobs, stifle economic growth, and make America more reliant o[n] foreign nations to provide reliable energy.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission submitted joint public comments to the EPA, referring to provisions of the proposed methane rules as “burdensome,” “economically unreasonable” and “onerous.”

The new report, Mitigating Methane in Texas, seeks to change the narrative on methane regulations in Texas, concluding that the methane mitigation sector could grow rapidly as new regulations go into effect. 

Slashing methane emissions in Texas would be a mammoth undertaking. The effort would require the creation of thousands of new jobs, from deploying drones to measure emissions to decommissioning orphaned wells to installing flare systems on storage tanks.

The report authors found that to comply with methane regulations, Texas would need at least 19,000 workers and up to as many as 35,000, which would add between six and nine percent to the number employed in the oil and gas industry in 2022.

“We are the largest emitter of methane in the country,” Agbo said. “So all this funding and regulations toward methane mitigation are going to play a huge role in Texas.”

He and co-author Greg Cumpton, of the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at UT Austin, found that methane mitigation would create long-term maintenance jobs in the oil and gas sector, including leak inspection and detection, leak repair and storage tank maintenance. Short-term replacement and abatement jobs would include replacing methane-emitting components like pneumatic controllers. 

The biggest labor demand would be in the Permian Basin, where the authors estimate addressing methane emissions would require an additional 7,556 jobs. The report authors urge new jobs in methane mitigation be unionized and protected under prevailing wage laws and other high road employment practices. 

“Part of ensuring that the jobs created in areas like the Permian Basin are good-paying jobs would be implementing Department of Labor-registered apprenticeship programs,” Agbo said. “There needs to be collaboration between labor unions, local, state and local governments, and also workforce development boards in the area.”

“A Big Growth Field”

Oil and gas operators around the world are already working to reduce methane emissions. Some turn to Austin-based SeekOps, a company that pairs sensor technology with autonomous drones to measure emissions. While many of the firm’s clients are in Europe—where methane regulations have been in effect for years—SeekOps expects its U.S. clientele to grow.

“It’s a big growth field,” said Paul Khuri, SeekOps vice president of business development. “Next year is going to be a huge year, because the IRA taxes start on Jan. 1.”

SeekOps currently has 30 employees, including data analysts, atmospheric scientists, software and hardware engineers and drone pilots. The company was founded in California but relocated to Austin to be closer to potential customers in the energy industry. 

Khuri said SeekOps clients include oil and gas companies that have voluntarily committed to emissions reductions, regardless of the local regulatory framework. He said he will be watching how the federal government enforces the new methane fees to gauge how much the methane mitigation industry could grow.

“That will be a really good indicator of where the market is going to head and see whether this will be a massive growth area,” Khuri said.

A 2021 Environmental Defense Fund report found that the methane mitigation sector was already growing rapidly. The report identified 215 firms manufacturing technology or providing services to manage methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The number of manufacturing firms had increased by 33 percent from 2014 to 2021 and the number of service firms had increased by 90 percent between 2017 and 2021.

The EDF report found that more companies mitigating methane had employees located in Texas than any other state. Companies headquartered in Texas include Solar Injection Systems in Odessa, which manufactures solar-powered chemical injection pumps; Cimarron Energy, an emissions control company in Houston, and CI Systems in Carrollton, which commercializes infrared remote sensing technology. 

Arvind Ravikumar, an engineering professor and co-director of the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab at UT Austin, said that oil and gas companies are facing pressure on multiple fronts to reign in methane emissions. More buyers of U.S. natural gas in Europe and Asia are tracking supply chain methane emissions and some utilities are seeking “certified natural gas” with lower associated methane emissions.

“Even if the EPA methane regulations were not in place, the majority of these emissions detection and reduction efforts would go on,” Ravikumar said.

Because methane emissions occur through venting and leaking, not combustion, direct on-site measurements are necessary, Ravikumar said. This bodes well for job creation.

“Methane mitigation or methane emissions detection is not something you can do remotely. You have to be on the ground,” he said. “What that means is you’re going to put a lot more people in some of the most remote, rural corners of the country.”

Ravikumar said many facets of methane measurement and accounting must still be ironed out. But he agreed the economic benefits to oil and gas producing regions of Texas cannot be overlooked.

“Having a policy that’s going to create jobs exclusively in remote parts of the country is really hard to do,” Ravikumar said. “And methane is one place where you can do that successfully.”

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On a clear morning in April, after milking his seven cows, Tim Sauder looked over the pasture where he had just turned the animals out to graze. Like many dairy farms, Sauder’s fields swayed with a variety of greenery: chicory, alfalfa and clover. But they were also full of something typically missing on an agricultural landscape — trees. Thousands of them.

Between 2019 and 2021, Sauder planted 3,500 trees at Fiddle Creek Dairy, a 55-acre family farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he and his wife raise cows to produce yogurt, cheese and beef. Today, young willow, hickory, poplar, pecan and persimmon trees stud the pastures, and on a crisp spring morning, rows of honey and black locusts, bur and cow oaks, were beginning to leaf out, casting shadows on the long grass below.

Sauder said planting trees has always been a priority; before he filled his pastures with them, the farm was home to a small fruit orchard as well as riparian buffers — trees planted along the creek to prevent erosion and safeguard water quality. But the trees that his cattle now graze beneath represent a fundamental shift in his operation.

The Sauders are betting the farm, as it were, on silvopasture, the ancient practice of raising animals and growing trees and pasture on the same piece of land (silva is forest in Latin). In a silvopasture setup, farmers carefully manage each element to benefit the other—relying on manure to fertilize trees, for example, or fallen fruit to feed the livestock—resulting in a system that’s greater than the sum of its parts. 

It’s an old idea that’s gaining modern traction. Last year, the USDA awarded the Nature Conservancy and multiple partner organizations a $64 million grant to advance agroforestry — the umbrella term for agricultural practices that incorporate trees — by providing technical and financial assistance to farmers looking to make the switch. This year’s Farm Bill could mean another infusion of funding as well as the expansion of existing agroforestry programs to more explicitly include silvopasture. 

“The USDA is doing a lot, but a lot more could be done,” said Jabob Grace, communications project manager with the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit that promotes agroforestry practices. His organization is advocating that the 2023 Farm Bill increase appropriations for the National Agroforestry Center, the only government agency dedicated to the practice, from $5 million to $25 million (Grace said the Center has been chronically underfunded, never receiving more than $2 million annually). They’re also pushing for the establishment of regional agroforestry centers, the development of a USDA technical assistance program in agroforestry, and more grant money dedicated to helping farmers like Sauder establish a silvopasture system. 

In Sauder’s pastures, “each tree has multiple benefits,” he explained. Mulberry leaves have more protein than alfalfa, and the seed pods that fall off the honey locust every autumn are packed with sugar; those trees were chosen to supplement the animals’ diet. Sauder chose other tree species with leafy canopies to protect his herd’s health. “Come August, there will be shade here when the cows need it.”

Providing shade may seem like a matter of comfort, but it can actually be one of life and death. Last summer, thousands of cattle died in Kansas, after the area was racked by historic heat and humidity. As the climate heats up, researchers think mortality events like the one in Kansas will become more common. But even when cattle survive brutally hot summers, the impact of heat stress can wreak havoc on a farm’s bottom line.

Grace said the farmers he works with are worried about what hotter temperatures mean for their livelihoods. 

“When we talk to our producers about silvopasture, the first thing they’re interested in is shade,” Grace said. “They’re noticing the hotter temperatures. Their cattle are uncomfortable, they’re not putting on weight. Cash is almost directly flowing out of that farmer’s pocket when they have overheated cattle.”

A lot of cash, in fact. A 2022 study from Cornell University predicted that losses of cattle herds due to heat stress will total $15 to $40 billion a year by the end of the century. To avoid these losses, the authors note that “tree–livestock systems can be highly effective in reducing heat stress.” And Farm Bill funding could help more farmers get started.

Shade is one way silvopasture cuts down on costs, but there are others. Some poultry farmers use the method to shield their flocks from birds of prey. Vineyards and Christmas tree farms are increasingly turning to grazing animals to mow and control weeds.

But a silvopasture system can do more than simply save farmers money; it can help them diversify what they grow. Perhaps one of the oldest — and most profitable — examples of silvopasture is the dehesa system of southern Spain, where Ibérico pigs wander among towering oak trees, feasting on acorns and fertilizing the soil, resulting in some of the world’s most expensive ham and a cash crop of cork.

While livestock health and revenue are compelling reasons for farmers to practice silvopasture, perhaps the method’s most convincing advantage is its potential as a climate solution. 

Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that analyzes climate solutions, ranks silvopasture as the 11th most effective strategy for combating climate change — well ahead of solar panels, recycling and electric cars — finding that pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as similarly sized but treeless pastures.

The perennial roots of a silvopasture system can also help stabilize the soil, preventing erosion as well as the flooding that’s becoming more common with heavier rains. Additionally, a well-managed silvopasture operation can reduce wildfire loads — thanks to carefully spaced and pruned trees as well as grazing animals that control the shrubby understory — and increase biodiversity.

What’s more, when livestock get to eat the forage that’s right in front of them, the gas-guzzling farming equipment and trucks typically used to get food to feedlots can stay in park. “Cutting back on harvesting and transporting means a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses,” Grace explained.

According to Grace, large swaths of the American Midwest used to be covered by a natural silvopasture of sorts, an oak savanna ecosystem where grazing animals like bison dined on prairie beneath fruit and nut trees. Many Indigenous cultures embraced and benefited from this form of land management, until European settlers got to work deforesting the region, eventually building farms that worked more like factories. 

This emphasis on efficiency led to widespread monoculture and annual cropping systems where, Grace said, “for a good chunk of the year, not much is happening.” 

Today, only about 1.5% of farmers in the U.S. (approximately 31,000) practice any form of agroforestry, including silvopasture, a 2017 USDA survey revealed. But as summers get hotter and climate predictions more dire, interest in the practice is booming. Matthew Smith, research program lead at the USDA’s National Agroforestry Center, said “the demand for silvopasture knowledge and information is higher than anyone can provide.” 

That’s because silvopasture is more complicated than turning livestock loose in the woods; it requires choosing the right trees and forage for the local climate and constantly moving livestock from one place to another. 

“If folks are interested in silvopasture, they really should have expertise in rotational grazing beforehand…which is hard to learn,” Smith said. “Things can go wrong quickly when all your crops are in the same place.” Livestock left in one spot too long can damage trees, for example, and plants grown too close together can outcompete each other for light and nutrients. 

There are other challenges. For one thing, silvopasture systems require a large area of land and more hours of labor — at least at first — to maintain. Additionally, it takes trees many years to grow and begin to provide meaningful benefits. But, by far, the greatest obstacle for most farmers who want to practice silvopasture is the high price of purchasing, planting and maintaining trees. 

The vast majority of silvopasture operations rely on grants and cost-sharing programs from organizations like the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the USDA, programs  that advocates like Grace say badly need the boost in funding and staff that this year’s Farm Bill could provide. Grace said that the handful of existing agroforestry programs, such as the Conservation Reserve Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, are vague in their wording and need to be tweaked to more explicitly fund silvopasture projects and provide additional cost-sharing opportunities to farmers. 

Savanna Institute ally and climate NGO Carbon 180 is recommending that the 2023 Farm Bill increase federal cost share to 75% for agroforestry practices to help defray upfront costs and ensure farmers can access high-quality, regionally appropriate trees and shrubs. 

In the meantime, funding remains a “major barrier to farmers hoping to pursue silvopasture,” said Austin Unruh, owner of Trees for Graziers, who helped Tim Sauder secure money from the Pennsylvania office of the NRCS. Unruh, whose business has helped about 25 farms implement silvopasture in the last three years, said helping farmers pay for them “has been frustrating. It’s a different source of funding each time, different hoops to jump through.”

For Sauder, the financial assistance from the state was paramount. He said that without it, the trees in his pasture simply wouldn’t be there, “at least not for the next 20 years or so.” 

He admits that the new system has been a lot of work upfront, but that he expects it to pay off in the form of healthier pasture, soil and cows — and hopefully his land’s ability to support more of them. 

And yet, it’s working in tandem with nature that inspires Sauder the most. Running his farm with the health of the ecosystem top of mind, he said, is like making up for the mistakes of his ancestors, Mennonite immigrants who displaced Indigenous people and bent the land to their will. 

“I’m reimagining what would have happened if they had arrived here and said instead, ‘What’s the best way to live in this place?’”

This article is copublished with Ambrook Research as part of a series that looks at ways the 2023 Farm Bill can help address the climate crisis. Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us @NexusMediaNews.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In 1985, the British Antarctic Survey alerted the world that in the atmosphere high above the South Pole a giant hole was forming in the Earth’s protective ozone layer. World leaders swiftly assembled to work out a solution. Two years later, the United Nations agreed to ban the chemicals responsible for eroding the layer of the stratosphere that shields Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Known as the Montreal Protocol agreement, it is still one of the UN’s most widely ratified treaties.

The Montreal Protocol was a win for diplomacy and the stratosphere. But unbeknown to its signatories at the time, the agreement was also an unexpected ward against climate catastrophe. As new research shows, the aptly named ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) that created the hole over Antarctica are also responsible for causing 30 percent of the temperature increase we saw globally from 1955 to 2005.

Michael Sigmond, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada is the lead author of a new study calculating the greenhouse-trapping potency of ODSs. The substances’ contribution to global warming are, he says, “larger than most people have realized.”

The Montreal Protocol regulates nearly 100 ozone-eating chemicals. Many fall under the umbrella of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), chemicals popularized in the 1930s for use in spray cans, plastic foams, and refrigeration. Compared with the array of toxic, flammable alternatives they replaced, CFCs were seen as wonder chemicals, and by the early 1970s, the world was producing nearly one million tonnes of them each year.

CFCs are inert, so they don’t react with other gases. Instead, they tend to accumulate in the atmosphere and drift wherever the wind takes them, hanging around in the air for 85 years or more. Once they reach the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth’s multilayered atmosphere, CFCs begin to break down. They’re “destroyed by being blasted apart by photons,” explains Dennis Hartmann, a climate scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. That reactive ruckus is what causes the hole in the ozone layer.

In the troposphere—the lowest level of the atmosphere, which fewer photons reach—ODSs act as long-lasting greenhouse gases. Back in 1987, scientists knew ODSs trapped some solar radiation, but they didn’t know how much. Only recently have scientists been putting together the evidence that ODSs are actually one of the most damaging warming agents of the past half century.

The effects of this warming are amplified at the poles. Sigmond and his colleagues’ work shows that if ODSs had never been mass produced—if the concentration in the atmosphere had stayed at 1955 levels—the Arctic today would be at least 55 percent cooler, and there’d be 45 percent more sea ice each September.

ODS production leveled off in the 1990s. But because they’re so long-lived, these gases are still kicking around, and the warming they cause is still increasing. Yet it could have been much worse. By banning ODSs, the Montreal Protocol unintentionally prevented 1 °C of warming by 2050.

With the Montreal Protocol, world leaders rallied around an urgent cause. In the process, we inadvertently phased out the second-largest forcer of global warming. The unanticipated benefits for the global climate, says Susann Tegtmeier, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Saskatchewan who was not involved in the study, “can be considered a very welcome and very positive side effect.”

While it’s taken a lot more negotiation and innovation to begin dislodging the main driver of climate change—carbon dioxide—the Montreal Protocol proves the power of collective action and shows how tackling environmental woes can help us in ways we didn’t expect.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This year is going to be pretty unforgettable, and not in a good way. Climate scientists have predicted the arrival of El Niño, a climate pattern that temporarily warms up waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean and will change precipitation and temperature patterns around the world.. The last El Niño event took place from 2018 to 2019.

Each El Niño is unique in terms of how intense the warming effect gets, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. This makes it harder for individual areas along the Pacific, like California and countries in Southeast Asia, to know how to properly prepare for upcoming storms or flooding. 

Past El Niño events can help areas get a broad sense of how strong the next one will be, but as time goes on, Swain says it is likely we will see an increase in extreme El Niño events because of climate change. This upcoming one is expected to make 2023 the hottest year in human history.

What is the forecast for El Niño 2023?

Climate scientists use a variety of tools to predict when and how hard El Niño will hit. Some examples include satellites to track wind and tropical rainfall patterns, ocean buoys to monitor sea surface temperatures, and mini radios strapped to weather balloons that measure air temperature, humidity, and pressure. 

David DeWitt, director of the Climate Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasts an 82 percent chance of El Niño arriving between May and July. A weak El Niño is not out of the question, but the likelihood of a strong El Niño is about 55 percent. There’s also a 90 percent chance of El Niño persisting in the first few months of 2024.

How does El Niño warm the ocean?

During El Niño, weak winds coming from the east cause heat to build up along the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean. As the waters warm up, they transfer heat to the atmosphere and create moisture-rich air that fuels rainstorms and floods.

One sign of an upcoming El Niño event to look out for is Kelvin waves in the Pacific. These aren’t your normal beach waves: They resemble the slow sloshing ones in your bathtub. The long movements pull expanding warm water to the ocean’s surface, which in turn, raises sea levels. They also strengthen El Niño by further reducing how much cold water is on the ocean’s surface. 

[Related: The jet stream is moving north. Here’s what that means for you.]

Recently, satellites orbiting Earth detected two- to four-inch-high Kelvin waves moving west to east along the equator. They also measured higher than average sea levels—another strong clue for El Niño. “If it’s a big one, the globe will see record warming,” NASA scientist Josh Willis said in a statement.

How will El Niño affect global weather patterns?

Brad Rippey, a meteorologist for the US Department of Agriculture, says El Niño is expected to cause flooding in some regions and droughts in others. During the Northern Hemisphere summer (June to August), El Niño will likely suppress Atlantic hurricanes and bring drought in regions such as Central America, the Caribbean Basin, and southern and southeastern Asia. During the Southern Hemisphere summer (December to February), areas like southern Africa, Australia, and the western Pacific Basin will experience more heat, droughts, and fires. 

Some regions of the world, however, will face wetter conditions. Rippey says that parts of South America, such as Argentina, have been reeling from drought because of the long-running La Niña that began in 2020. With El Niño, these areas would finally get doused with precipitation.

Is climate change making El Niño worse?

El Niño and its cooler counterpart La Niña are part of a natural cycle between warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean that was first detected by South American fisherman in the 17th century. That said, climate change is interacting with this cycle and shaping a future with stronger El Niño episodes. “The Earth’s natural climate cycle and climate caused by humans are not independent of each other,” Swain explains. He adds that before global warming, the world’s temperature would reset after El Niño, but now it remains elevated.

The combination of human-caused global warming and short-term warming from El Niño could mean that the second half of 2023 or early 2024 will break global temperature records, Swain says.

Is the world prepared for the switch from La Niña to El Niño?

Yes and no. While most communities have experienced the upturns and downturns of El Niño before, each cycle is different. This upcoming one is no exception.

The level of preparation depends on the country and whether El Niño will trigger more heatwaves or flooding. Another factor is a country’s economy and whether they can afford to invest in protective measures.

[Related: This summer could push US energy grids to their limits]

“It’s usually the places that are most vulnerable that often have the least ability to shift things around to prepare,” says Swain. The 2015-2016 El Niño event, for example, caused heat stress, malnutrition, and disease outbreaks for more than 60 million people living in developing countries. But that doesn’t mean richer countries come out unscathed. For instance, El Niño events in the past 15 years cost the US economy $25 billion. A study published on May 18 in the journal Science estimates the average El Niño cost the global economy $3.4 trillion.

Being a few months away, Swain says it’s unlikely that a resource-poor region can change things around in a short time. “Now the question becomes, how much resilience do these places have to these kinds of natural hazards?”

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On May 9, a baby California condor hatched at Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation, education, and conservation organization in Phoenix, Arizona. The hatching is a ray of hope and welcome good news for the struggling species that was only recently brought back from the brink of extinction. 

Only 22 condors were believed to be alive during the 1980s after a maelstrom of habitat loss, poaching, lead poisoning accidents with power lines, and the insecticide DDT. Currently, about 275 wild birds are cruising the skies about California, Utah, Arizona, and Baja California, Mexico, more than 160 are in captivity, and more than 400 live worldwide. 

[Related: Inside the Yurok Tribe’s mission to make critically endangered condors thrive.]

The largest bird species in North America and a crucial part of the ecosystem, California condors are considered sacred to many indigenous peoples. The Yurok Tribe of the Pacific Northwest call California condors “prey-go-neesh,” and say the birds have been tied to the Yurok Hlkelonah, or the cultural and ecological landscape, since the beginning of time. The tribe has officially been a driving force on condor reintroduction since 2008. 

Now, these sacred and important birds face a grave threat in the form of a tiny pathogen. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), also called bird flu, is threatening condors at an alarming rate. It was first detected in the California condor in late March, and more than 20 are known to have died since. 

“It is scary particularly for endangered species like the California condors. It has the ability to wipe out an entire species,” Liberty Wildlife’s Animal Care Coordinator Jan Miller tells PopSci. 

One of the birds that succumbed to the disease was the new hatchling’s mother, part of a breeding pair of wild California condors. The mother was found acting suspicious in a cave near the Grand Canyon and was brought to Liberty Wildlife due to suspected bird flu. She died eight days later.  

“Using telemetry, it was assumed that she had laid an egg, probably between March 13 and March 17, and it was predicted to hatch between May 9 and May 17,” Liberty Wildlife’s Executive Director Megan Mosby tells PopSci. “The limited movement of the male led to the assumption that he was trying to incubate an egg.  The biologists at the Arizona Vermilion Cliff site decided that it wasn’t safe for the male, a known breeder, to attempt to raise a chick solo and feed himself, especially in a dank, cool cave … a perfect place for flu contamination.”

[Related: Spy tech and rigged eggs help scientists study the secret lives of animals.]

Biologists brought the egg back to Liberty Wildlife, where it was monitored in a structure called a brooder.  When the egg began to “pip,” the Los Angeles Zoo’s propagation team advised Liberty Wildlife on best practices for monitoring the hatchling’s progress. The team noticed that the chick was in the wrong position in the egg due to where it had pipped, or poked through its membrane, and that it would need assistance in order for the hatch to be successful. 

“Veterinarian Dr. Stephanie Lamb assisted in the freeing of the baby from the egg and the operation was successful.  After a health check, a swab to test for Avian Flu was obtained, and the chick was placed in an incubator with a surrogate (stuffed animal) ‘mother’ condor,” Miller says. 

The hatchling was negative for bird flu and continued to eat solid food and bond with her surrogate plush parent. According to Mosby, the team was excited to find out she was female because 11 of the 21 condors that have died due to bird flu were breeding age females.

On May 17, she was flown to The Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho. There she will be raised by foster parents so that she can one day be released back into Arizona’s skies.  

“At this age it is very easy for the chick to imprint on humans so getting her with her own species is critical to her releasability,” says Miller. “The Peregrine Fund has a very advanced propagation department with proven foster parents to help raise chicks for release into the wild. It is a very large operation with proven results.”

According to the team, vultures like the California condor are not only intelligent, but are incredibly necessary to help clean up the environment since they handle dead and decaying animals that can spread disease. 

“Vultures are part of the natural cleanup crew in nature. They deserve every fair chance they can get to continue to survive and be a part of this world,” says Miller. 

In addition to this welcome hatchling’s continued success this week, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service approved the emergency use of bird flu vaccine on May 16. The Yurok Tribe called this move, “a huge step in the effort to combat this virulent threat, but still a long road ahead.”

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American families need over one trillion diapers every year for the 4 million babies born across the country annually. Diaper use can extend far past the first year of infants’ lives—and they generally don’t finish potty training until somewhere between 1.5 to 3 years old. Extrapolate those needs to the entire world, and it’s easy to see how disposable diapers are the third-most prevalent consumer product found in landfills. Because most diapers contain plastics such as polyester, polyethylene, and polypropylene, they are expected to linger in those same landfills for about 500 years before breaking down.

But what if disposable diapers’ lifespans expanded far beyond their one-and-done use? Environmental engineers recently pondered that very question, and have reportedly found a surprising solution: diaper domiciles.

As detailed in a paper published on Thursday with Scientific Reports, a trio of researchers at Japan’s University of Kitakyushu combined six different amounts of washed, dried, and shredded diaper waste with gravel, sand, cement, and water, then cured their samples for 28 days. Afterwards, they tested their composite materials’ resiliencies, and recorded some extremely promising results.

[Related: Steel built the Rust Belt. Green steel could help rebuild it.]

For a three-story, 36-square-meter floor plan, the team found that the cured diaper waste could replace as much as 10 percent of sand within a structure’s traditional concrete support beams and columns. In a single-story home, that percentage nearly tripled. Meanwhile, diapers could swap out 40 percent of the sand needed in partition wall mortar, alongside 9 percent of the sand in flooring and garden paving. All told, disposable diaper waste could replace as much as 8 percent of all sand in a single-story, 36-square-meter floor plan.

The team’s results are extremely promising for low- and middle-income nations facing intense housing crises. For the purposes of their study, researchers adhered to Indonesian building codes to mirror a real world application. “Like other developing countries, low-cost housing provision in Indonesia has been a serious concern in the last three decades,” writes the team in their article. Indonesia’s urban population is growing at around 4 percent per year, resulting in an annual housing deficit of as much as 300,000 homes per year, the authors also noted.

Moving forward, researchers note that collaboration would be needed with government and waste facility officials to develop a means for large-scale collection, sanitization, and shredding of diaper waste. At the same time, nations’ building regulations must be amended to allow for diaper-imbued concrete. Still, the findings are a creative potential solution to the literal and figurative mountain of a sustainability issue—one that may soon finally be toppled. Just make sure it’s all sanitized first.

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A worrying new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) estimates over two-thirds of North America will see elevated risks of energy grid shortfalls and blackouts over the summer if faced with extreme temperature spikes and dire weather. While resources remain “adequate” for normal seasonal peak demand, the major non-profit international regulatory authority’s 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment warns most of the US—including the West, Midwest, Texas, Southeast, and New England regions—may not possess enough energy reserves to handle heatwaves, severe storms, and hurricanes.

NERC’s report is particularly troubling given this year’s El Niño forecast. El Niño historically produces wetter-than-average conditions along the Gulf Coast alongside drier climates for areas such as the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains. While a naturally occurring event, both El Niño and La Niña weather patterns are expected to rapidly strengthen by the end of the decade due to the exacerbations from climate change. On top of this, industry watchdogs say the US power grid still requires critical maintenance, repairs, and modernization. “The system is close to its edge,” warned NERC’s Director of Reliability Assessment and Performance Analysis John Moura in a call with reporters.

In Texas, for example, the NERC explains that “dispatchable generation may not be sufficient to meet reserves during an extreme heat wave that is accompanied by low winds.” Wildfire risks in the West and Northwest, on the other hand, could jeopardize the ability to transfer electricity as needed, resulting in “localized load shedding.”

[Related: How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid.]

“This report is an especially dire warning that America’s ability to keep the lights on has been jeopardized. That’s unacceptable,” Jim Matheson, the CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said in a statement.“Federal policies must recognize the compromised reliability reality facing the nation before it’s too late.”

In addition to reliability concerns during peak performance times, the NERC report notes that continued supply chain issues concerning labor, material, and equipment have affected preseason maintenance for generation and transmission facilities across North America.

Still, NERC’s assessment isn’t entirely bad news—much of northern Canada and the US East Coast face a low risk of exceeding their operating reserves. Meanwhile, no region in North America is currently staring down a “high” risk of not meeting their needs during normal peak conditions. “Increased, rapid deployment of wind, solar and batteries have made a positive impact,” said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of Reliability Assessments. “However, generator retirements continue to increase the risks associated with extreme summer temperatures, which factors into potential supply shortages in the western two-thirds of North America if summer temperatures spike.”

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The word “bomb” is not usually associated with positive things. Except in this case, where making seed bombs could help the ecological restoration of your neighborhood. 

Instructions

1. Mix the clay and potting mix. In the bowl, pour the clay and potting mix in a 2:1 ratio. 

The powdered clay acts as a binder and protects the seeds from direct sunlight, insects, and birds. We used green calcium bentonite clay (which doubles as a face mask), but you can use any kind you find at your local store or have at home. If you want seed bombs that look more natural and blend into the soil, you can use red clay powder.

3. Add the seeds. Pour in your seeds in a ratio of 3:1 in relation to the clay mix and combine with your hands or a mixing spoon. You may change this proportion depending on how dense you want plants to grow, but 3:1 is ideal to work in enough seeds.

• Pro tip: You can put multiple types of seeds into your bombs, but be careful how you mix and match: sun-loving plants will thrive in a spot where a shade-loving one will die, while fast-growing greenery might out-perform and suffocate another. Only combine seeds with similar qualities or habitat preferences, or plants that are known to grow well together.

4. Knead and roll the mix into small balls. Use the palms of your hands to shape your bombs. Keep them around half an inch (approximately one centimeter) in diameter. As you finish each one, place them on a tray with enough room between them so they’re not touching—once they dry, it’ll be difficult to break them apart. 

• Pro tip: As you shape your bombs, your clay mix might start drying, making it hard to work with. Keep a bowl of water at hand and add it to the mix in small amounts to bring the desired texture back.

5. Let the seed bombs dry and harden. Leave your tray of seed bombs to rest for a couple of days until they’re fully dry and hard. If you want to speed up the process, place them in direct sunlight, and if you’re leaving them outside, make sure they’re covered in case it rains.

6. Start bombing. Once all of your seed bombs are dry, you can plant them in indoor or outdoor pots, your yard, or in neglected patches of soil you’re allowed to access. You can push them slightly into the soil, leaving the tops uncovered in a sunny spot, but if you prefer to toss them like true bombs, soak them in water for 5 to 10 minutes before bombardment. 

Finding seeds native to your area is easy. You can follow our guide and collect seeds from the plants around you, or you can get them at your local hardware store or nursery. To know what to get, check out the National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder, which will show you a list of plants and shrubs local to your specific zip code.  

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If Spiderman and Antman took their DNA and mixed it together in a petri dish, the result might be something like the spider species Siler collingwoodi (S. collingwoodi). This tiny, colorful, jumping spider found in China and Japan uses a combination of camouflage and some award-worthy mimicry to deter some hungry predators. In a stressful scenario, these spiders will imitate the way an ant walks to avoid being eaten.

[Related: Black widows battle their even deadlier cousins in a brutal spider war.]

A study published May 17 in the journal iScience found that the combo of camouflage and ant mimicry works to evade spiders that eat other spiders, but not hungry praying mantises. It’s advantageous to mimic an ant because they are typically not very tasty, and can have spiny defenses, chemical repellents, or venom. Not to mention, species of “exploding” ants like Colobopsis saundersi that are not afraid to fight and bite back. While scientists already knew that S. collingwoodi walked like an ant, the team on this study were curious how accurate the mimicry is, whether it imitates multiple species of ants, and how effective it is at discouraging predators. 

“Unlike typical ant-mimicking spiders that mimic the brown or black body color of ants, S. collingwoodi has brilliant body coloration,” co-author and Peking University in China ecologist Hua Zeng said in a statement. “From a human’s perspective, it seems to blend well with plants in its environment, but we wanted to test whether their body coloration served as camouflage to protect against predators.”

To better understand how these ant-inspired theatrics help the spiders avoid becoming dinner, the team collected wild ant-mimicking spiders from four spots in southern Hainan, China, and brought them back to the lab. They also collected another type of jumping spider that does not mimic ants as a comparison and five co-occurring ant species as potential models.  

The team then compared and characterized how the insects and arachnids moved in terms of how they used their individual limbs, their speed, acceleration, and whether they followed a straight path or took a more roundabout way. 

Inside of jumping like most jumping spiders, S. collingwoodi scuttle around like ants. They raise their front legs to mimic an ant’s antennae, bob their abdomens, and lift their legs to walk more ant-like. Out of the five ant species studied, the spider’s style of walking more closely resembled three of the smaller ant species that are closer in size.

“S. collingwoodi is not necessarily a perfect mimic, because its gait and trajectory showed high similarity with multiple ant species,” said Zeng. “Being a general mimic rather than perfectly mimicking one ant species could benefit the spiders by allowing them to expand their range if the ant models occupy different habitats.”

Then it was time to test these defenses against two likely predators. Portia labiata and the praying mantis. Portia labiata is a similarly sized jumping spider with color vision who specializes in preying upon other spiders. The praying mantis is a more generalist predator that has a monochromatic visual system–meaning it has trouble telling multiple colors apart. 

[Related: Jumping spiders might be able to sleep—perchance to dream.]

To see how the color camouflaging was working, they modeled how the two predators would perceive S. collingwoodi relative to the other prey species. They used a background of two plants that the spiders live on—the red-flowering West Indian jasmine and the Fukien tea tree The ant-mimicking spiders were better camouflaged from both predators on the jasmine plant than on the tea tree plant.

The predators were more likely to attack the non-mimicking spider than the ones that imitate ants. Out of 17 trials, the spider launched five attacks—all of them were launched towards a non-mimicking spider. However, praying mantises attacked both prey species with equal readiness.

“We initially thought that both predators would behave similarly in the anti predation experiments, but in fact the simulated ant locomotion of Siler collingwoodi only worked for the jumping spider predator, while the praying mantis showed indiscriminate attacks on both ants and mimics,” co-author and Peking University evolutionary ecologist Wei Zhang said in a statement. 

It is possible that this difference might be driven by each predator’s likelihood of being injured if they eat an ant. The praying mantises are much larger than their prey, and they have a better chance of eating spiny ants without risking catastrophic injury. Predatory spiders do not have this margin for error. 

“For the spider predator, a random attack on an ant could result in injury,” says Zhang, “so they are very careful predators and will only attack if they can distinguish S. collingwoodi from ants with a high degree of certainty.”

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

In the Mon Valley of western Pennsylvania, steel was once a way of life, one synonymous with the image of rural, working-class Rust Belt communities. At its height in 1910, Pittsburgh alone produced 25 million tons of it, or 60 percent of the nation’s total. Bustling mills linger along the Monongahela River and around Pittsburgh, but employment has been steadily winding down for decades.  

Though President Trump promised a return to the idealized vision of American steelmaking that Bruce Springsteen might sing about, the industry has changed since its initial slump four decades ago. Jobs declined 49 percent between 1990 and 2021, when increased efficiency saw the sector operating at its highest capacity in 14 years. Despite ongoing supply chain hiccups and inflation, demand continues growing globally, particularly in Asia. But even as demand for this essential material climbs, so too does the pressure to decarbonize its production.

Earlier this month, the progressive Ohio River Valley Institute released a study that found a carefully planned transition to “green” steel — manufactured using hydrogen generated with renewable energy — could be a climatic and economic boon. It argues that as countries work toward achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, a green steel boom in western Pennsylvania could help the U.S. meet that goal, make its steel industry competitive again, and employ a well-paid industrial workforce.

“A transition to fossil fuel-free steelmaking could grow total jobs supported by steelmaking in the region by 27 percent to 43 percent by 2031, forestalling projected job losses,” the study noted. “Regional jobs supported by traditional steelmaking are expected to fall by 30 percent in the same period.”

In a world struggling to keep global climate change below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the traditional coke-based process of making steel, which uses coal to power the furnaces that melt iron ore, remains a big problem. The industry generates 7.2 percent of all carbon emissions worldwide, making it more polluting than the entire European Union. Old-school steel manufacturing relies on metallurgical coal — that is, high-quality, low-moisture coal, which still releases carbon, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants. About 70 percent of today’s steel is made that way, much of it produced cheaply in countries with lax environmental regulations. However, only 30 percent of U.S. production uses this method.

Technological improvements and pressure to reduce emissions have led to increased use of leftover, or “scrap,” steel during production. When products made of traditional, coke-based steel have reached the end of their useful life, they can be returned to the furnace and recycled almost infinitely. This reduces the labor needed to produce the same amount and quality of steel as traditional production methods, and it accounts for about 70 percent of the nation’s output.

The scrap is melted in an electric arc furnace and uses hydrogen, rather than coke, to process iron ore. It requires less energy than traditional methods, particularly if renewable energy powers the furnace and generates the hydrogen. Nick Messenger, an economist who worked on the Institute’s study, believes this approach could revitalize the Rust Belt by placing the region at the forefront of an innovation the industry must inevitably embrace.

“What we actually show is that by doing that three-step process and doing it all close to home in Pennsylvania,” he said, “each step of that process has the potential to create jobs and support jobs in the community” — from building and operating solar panels and turbines, to operating electrolyzers to produce electricity, to making the steel itself.

The study claims a business-as-usual approach would follow current production and employment trends, leading to a 30 percent reduction in jobs by 2031. A transition to hydrogen-based electric arc manufacturing could increase jobs in both the steel and energy industries by as much as 43 percent. The study calls western Pennsylvania an ideal location for this transition, given its proximity to clean water, an experienced workforce, and 22,200 watts of wind and solar energy potential.

To make it work for the Mon Valley, the study notes, manufacturers must get started as soon as possible. The quest for green steel isn’t just an ideological matter, but a question of global economic power. “There’s a huge new race, in a sense, to get in on the ground floor,” Messenger said. “When you’re the first one, you attract the types of capital, you attract the types of businesses and entrepreneurs and industries that cause that kind of flourishing boom to happen around this particular sector.” 

The Ohio Valley’s fabled steel mills may be looking, if cautiously, toward a decarbonized future. Two years ago, U.S. Steel canceled a $1.3 billion investment in the Mon Valley Works complex, citing, in part, its net-zero goals and the need to switch to electric arc steel production. Of course, the biggest challenge is that while the Mon Valley has massive wind energy potential, very little of it has been tapped. But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, federal subsidies and tax breaks could give clean energy developers a boost.

The Biden administration has shown faith in green steel through a series of grant programs, subsidies and tax credits, including $6 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act to decarbonize heavy industry. But Europe has the advantage. Nascent projects in Sweden, Germany, and Spain dot the European Union, with the United Kingdom close behind. Some are using hydrogen, but others are experimenting with biochar, electrolysis, or other ways to power the electric arc process. 

In the United States, a company called Boston Metal is experimenting with an oxide electrolysis model, hoping to make the U.S. a leader in green steel technology. This model eliminates the need for coal by creating a chemical reaction that emulates the reaction that turns iron ore into steel. The company is in the process of commercializing its technology and plans to license it to steel manufacturers. Adam Rauwerdink, the company’s senior vice president of business development, hopes to see its first adopter by 2026.

Rauwerdink believes the world is moving away from traditional steel manufacturing and  that U.S. companies will be playing catch up if they don’t adapt. He has seen more and more companies and investors get on board in the past five years, including ArcelorMittal, the world’s second biggest steel producer. It invested $36 million in Boston Metal this year. He considers that investment a clear sign that the race for green steel is on, and it’s time for manufacturers to embrace the technology — or get left behind.

“Historically, you would have built a steel plant near a coal mine,” he said. “Now you’re going to be building it where you have clean power.”

This story has been updated to clarify that Boston Metal is still commercializing its technology.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/steel-built-the-rust-belt-green-steel-could-help-rebuild-it/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Months of painstaking work analyzing over 16 terabytes of imaging and 4K video data has resulted in the first full-sized 3D scan of the RMS Titanic’s stunning, sunken remains.

Per the BBC, specialists working for the deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd. began remotely piloting two deep sea submersibles during the summer of 2022. The pair of subs, Romeo and Juliet, collected over 700,000 images over the 3-mile wreckage site during their more than 200 hours of diving time. The results are renderings in such detail that they showcase one of the cruise liner propeller’s serial numbers alongside passengers’ shoes and bottles of unopened champagne.

[Related: How scientists keep ancient shipwrecks from crumbling into dust.]

Over 1,500 people died after the cruise liner struck an iceberg and sank into the frigid Atlantic Ocean waters during its 1912 maiden voyage from Southampton, UK, to New York. Numerous expeditions have surveyed the Titanic’s remains since its rediscovery in 1985, but until now the ocean’s pitch-black environment at 3,800m (12,500ft) coupled with the ship’s sheer size have only allowed murky glimpses and snapshots of wreckage.

Now, however, experts can begin studying the Titanic’s remnants with an entirely new level of detail and precision. In a statement, Parks Stephenson, a longtime Titanic researcher, explained, “What we are seeing for the first time is an accurate and true depiction of the entire wreck and debris site. I’m seeing details that none of us have ever seen before and this allows me to build upon everything that we have learned to date and see the wreck in a new light.”

According to Stephenson, despite knowing the disaster’s cause, we still aren’t sure what really happened when the ship hit the iceberg. “We don’t even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies—she might have grounded on the iceberg,” Stephenson told the BBC. Additionally, examining portions such as the ship’s stern could uncover the physics behind how the ship actually landed upon the sea floor.

[Related: Watch never-before-seen footage of the Titanic shipwreck from the 1980s.]

Time is of the essence for future visits to the Titanic’s remains, as microbial life continues to eat away at portions of the ship while other pieces disintegrate within the deep ocean’s hostile environment. But even so, the newest imagery will be an invaluable historical asset for researchers as they continue to learn from one of the 20th century’s most famous tragedies.

The 2022 expedition was detailed by a film crew working alongside Magellan Ltd. for Atlantic Productions, with plans to release a documentary on the project in the near future. 

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Forging strong social relationships can help mitigate the effects of traumatic childhood events in human adults, but also in baboons. A study published May 17 in the journal Science Advances drew on 36 years of data from almost 200 baboons in southern Kenya and found that even though early adversity can take years of their lifespans, stronger social bonds in adulthood can help get these years back. 

[Related: Baboon poop shows how chronic stress shortens lives.]

“It’s like the saying from the King James Apocrypha, ‘a faithful friend is the medicine of life,’” co-author and Duke University biologist and evolutionary anthropologist Susan Alberts said in a statement.

Studies have consistently found that people who go through more bad experiences growing up, such as neglect or abuse,  are more likely to die early. However, the mechanisms behind how early adversity leads to a premature death has been harder for researchers to pin down, according to Alberts. Some of the limitations to earlier research is the reliance on self-reported memories which can be imprecise and subjective. 

Enter our primate cousins. Baboons share more than 90 percent of their DNA with humans and researchers have followed individual baboons near Amboseli National Park in Kenya since 1971. 

In this new study, the researchers analyzed how early life experiences and adult social connections affected long-term survival in 199 female baboons between 1983 and 2019.

Baboon childhood is certainly different from human childhood, but young baboons still face hardships. The team in the study tallied up each female’s exposure to six potential sources of early adversity, including whether she had a low-ranking or socially isolated mother or if her mother died before she reached maturity. It was also noted if she was born in a drought year or into a large group, and if she had a sibling close in age, which could contribute to more competition for both maternal attention and resources.

The team found that stressful experiences are very common for the baboons growing up in the semi-arid and unpredictable landscape of Amboseli. Of the 199 baboons in the study, 75 percent suffered through at least one stressor, and 33 percent had two or more.

Their results confirm previous findings that the more hardship a female baboon faces, the shorter her lifespan. Monkeys who experienced more upheaval at a young age were also more socially isolated as adults.

[Related: Monkeys with close friends have friendlier gut bacteria.]

However, the researchers showed that 90 percent of the dip in survival was due to the direct effects of early adversity, not to the weakened social bonds that continued into adulthood.

No matter how strong their bonds were with other baboons, each additional hardship translated to 1.4 years of life lost. Those who went through four bad experiences growing up died close to 5.6 years earlier than those who didn’t face any. Since the average female baboon lives to age 18, this is a large drop in lost years.

But an unfortunate start in life does not mean that a baboon will absolutely live a short life. 

“Females who have bad early lives are not doomed,” co-author and biologist at SUNY Oswego Elizabeth Lange said in a statement. “We found that both early life adversity and adult social interactions affect survival independently. That means that interventions that occur throughout the lifespan could improve survival.”

In baboons, strong social bonds are measured by how often they groom with their closest friends. Those with strong social bonds added 2.2 years to their lives, no matter what adversity they had faced in their earlier years. The baboons whose mothers died before they reached maturity and then forged strong friendships in adulthood showed the best ability to bounce back. 

However, the flip side is also true. Weak social bonds can magnify early life adversity, according to the study. 

It is not clear yet if these results can be translated to adult humans, but it suggests that early intervention is not the only way to overcome childhood trauma and its lingering effects. 

“If you did have early life adversity, whatever you do, try to make friends,” Alberts said.

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Within the next five years, the planet is 66 percent likely to reach 2.7°F (1.5°C ) of warming according to a jarring new update from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 2.7°F is the internationally accepted global temperature threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change.

[Related: For marine life to survive, we must cut carbon emissions.]

The WMO forecasts that global temperatures are expected to surge to record levels fueled by heat trapping gasses and a naturally occurring El Niño event. The organization also predicts that the annual average near-surface temperature will be over the threshold for at least one year between 2023 and 2027.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set 2.7°F as a guardrail against increasingly dangerous atmospheric warming, and over 100 countries including the United States, Argentina, China, and Egypt, pledged to prevent long-term warming if possible. A special United Nations report from 2018 said going past this point would be dangerous and lead to significantly more death, destruction, and damage to global ecosystems.

According to the WMO, these new findings do not mean that Earth will permanently exceed the 2.7°F level that was specified in the Paris Agreement. The organization believes that the jump would be a temporary, and is not as worrisome as the agreed-upon climate danger point.

“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory. This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Scientists believe that there is a 62 percent chance that an El Niño will develop by the end of this year. El Niño is a natural part of an oscillating weather system that develops in the Pacific Ocean. Earth has been in a rare “triple dip” of the opposing phase called La Niña for the past three years. La Niña typically has had a dampening effect on temperature increases around the world. With the new El Niño developing, there is a 98 percent chance that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, according to the WMO.

Warming in the arctic is also disproportionately high. This region heats much faster than the rest of the world, largely because as sea ice melts, solar radiation can no longer be reflected back and the heat is absorbed. This rapid warming is affecting global weather patterns and the jet stream. 

[Related: The past 8 years have been the hottest on human record, according to new report.]

Reaching this point, even just for a single year, would represent an acceleration of human impacts on the global climate system and send the world into “uncharted territory,” since average surface temperatures have never breached the threshold in recorded history. The highest average in previous years was 2.5 °F (1.28°C) above pre-industrial levels.

Scientists do not believe that the anomaly will occur this year, but the chance of temporarily exceeding this threshold has risen steadily since 2015, when it was close to zero. Between 2017 and 2021, there was only a 10 percent chance of exceeding this target.

“Global mean temperatures are predicted to continue increasing, moving us away further and further away from the climate we are used to,” Leon Hermanson, a Met Office expert scientist who led the report, said in a statement. 

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Excerpted from The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature’s Hidden Rules by Tim Blackburn. Copyright © 2023. Published by Island Press.

The composition and structure of ecological communities doesn’t only depend on what happens in their immediate vicinity. Events in the wider environment are important, too. All of nature is connected. This is why migration matters.

Indeed, migrants have never mattered so much. Humanity has destroyed a substantial proportion of natural habitat worldwide, and much of what is left is now heavily fragmented—small islands in a sea of inhospitable cropland, pasture, or concrete. The populations they house will be small, too, and susceptible to the vagaries of bad
luck. Luckily, as we’ve seen, fragmented populations can still persist if they are connected by migrants. Migrants can bolster birth rates and counteract death rates, preventing population extinction and recolonizing sites when local extinction does take populations out. Humanity’s fragmentation of nature has only increased the relevance of these dynamics.

Migration can ameliorate some of the damage caused by fragmentation, but only some. Metapopulations are most secure when there is a large “mainland” population acting as a plentiful source of immigrants. Unfortunately, habitat destruction tends to reduce the extent and productivity of such mainlands, to the detriment of surrounding patches dependent on their largesse. Remaining fragments are often viewed as unimportant from a biodiversity perspective, but destroying them can increase the distance between surviving patches, and so lower the likelihood of colonization. When colonization rates are lower than extinction rates, populations will eventually disappear. More isolated habitat fragments have fewer species, moths and others.

On top of that, not all species are well adapted for a peripatetic lifestyle. Female vaporer moths, for example, lack wings, essentially being furry sacks for laying eggs. They are ill equipped for moving between habitat fragments. Likewise, winter moth, mottled umber, and early moth—all widespread species I’ve trapped in Devon but not in London, where the patchy nature of suitable habitat does them no favors. Even apparently mobile species often will not move far, like the cinnabar moth. Many skulking bird species of the Amazon rainforest understory evidently will not cross open spaces to the extent that major rivers in this basin become boundaries to their geographic distributions.

Specialists on certain habitats or food plants will fare especially badly when fragmentation increases. Species like the scarce pug, which in Britain feeds only on sea wormwood on a few east coast salt marshes. Extensive coastal development means that salt marshes are rarer and more-fragmented habitats than of old, and these are the only habitat of sea wormwood in Britain. Greater distances between suitable patches reduces the chances that dispersing individuals will find them, to colonize or rescue.

Migrants can also allow species to respond to changes in conditions— to take advantage of new opportunities as they develop, or escape from sinking ships. This is especially important in the face of the ongoing climate crisis. When environmental conditions change beyond the physiological tolerances of individuals, the species has only three options: adapt, move, or go extinct. The current speed of environmental change makes adaptation difficult, especially for those with slower life histories, leaving movement as the best option for survival.

Unfortunately, the ability of species to track changes in the climate is significantly hampered by habitat destruction and fragmentation. It’s easy for populations to move through continuous tracts of habitat. But remember the effects of area and isolation on the species richness of islands: small, remote pockets of habitat are harder targets for dispersing individuals to hit. Humanity has increased the need for species to move while simultaneously making it harder for them to do so.

We can help, though—right? If species need to move, we can step in and do the leg work. It’s called assisted colonization—the translocation of individuals beyond the current limits of their distribution in order to conserve species that would otherwise go extinct thanks to their inability to reach new areas in the face of a changing environment. Humans have been moving species around for all sorts of reasons for millennia now. Why not for conservation?

Well, precisely because of those species we’ve moved—the impacts of pesky aliens like the box-tree moth. In truth, that species is second division when it comes to damage. Other aliens have been much worse. I’ve already mentioned cats and rats, but take the rosy wolfsnail. It was moved to several islands across the Pacific to control populations of another alien, the giant African land snail, but instead ate its way through the entire world populations of more than 130 other snail species. Alien diseases can wipe out naïve host populations, like the fungal pathogens Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and B. salamadrovirans that, between them, have been responsible for the extinction of almost 100 amphibian species worldwide, and population declines in hundreds more. Alien plants can modify ecosystems to their own advantage, and suppress native plant species. Native birds tend to do worse in habitats dominated by alien plants, because their insect prey often cannot make a living on those plants. Aliens in general have been associated with the global extinction of more species in the last 500 years than any other human intervention, including habitat destruction. They remain one of the main drivers of global population declines.

It’s trebly ironic that not only has humanity caused problems for species by increasing the need for them to move while simultaneously making it harder for them to do so, but also has caused problems for some species by moving others. The pressure for assisted colonization is growing, but we are rightly wary of taking species to places where they have no prior history.

Buy The Jewel Box by Tim Blackburn here.

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This story was first published on June 3, 2013. It covered the most up-to-date technology in bomb detection at the time, with a focus on research based off canine olfaction. Today, dogs still hold an edge to chemical sensors with their noses: They’ve even been trained to sniff out bed bugs, the coronavirus, and homemade explosives like HMTDs.

IT’S CHRISTMAS SEASON at the Quintard Mall in Oxford, Alabama, and were it not a weekday morning, the tiled halls would be thronged with shoppers, and I’d probably feel much weirder walking past Victoria’s Secret with TNT in my pants. The explosive is harmless in its current form—powdered and sealed inside a pair of four-ounce nylon pouches tucked into the back pockets of my jeans—but it’s volatile enough to do its job, which is to attract the interest of a homeland defender in training by the name of Suge.

Suge is an adolescent black Labrador retriever in an orange DO NOT PET vest. He is currently a pupil at Auburn University’s Canine Detection Research Institute and comes to the mall once a week to practice for his future job: protecting America from terrorists by sniffing the air with extreme prejudice.

Olfaction is a canine’s primary sense. It is to him what vision is to a human, the chief input for data. For more than a year, the trainers at Auburn have honed that sense in Suge to detect something very explicit and menacing: molecules that indicate the presence of an explosive, such as the one I’m carrying.

The TNT powder has no discernible scent to me, but to Suge it has a very distinct chemical signature. He can detect that signature almost instantly, even in an environment crowded with thousands of other scents. Auburn has been turning out the world’s most highly tuned detection dogs for nearly 15 years, but Suge is part of the school’s newest and most elite program. He is a Vapor Wake dog, trained to operate in crowded public spaces, continuously assessing the invisible vapor trails human bodies leave in their wake.

Unlike traditional bomb-sniffing dogs, which are brought to a specific target—say, a car trunk or a suspicious package—the Vapor Wake dog is meant to foil a particularly nasty kind of bomb, one carried into a high traffic area by a human, perhaps even a suicidal one. In busy locations, searching individuals is logistically impossible, and fixating on specific suspects would be a waste of time. Instead, a Vapor Wake dog targets the ambient air.

As the bombing at the Boston marathon made clear, we need dogs—and their noses. As I approach the mall’s central courtyard, where its two wings of chain stores intersect, Suge is pacing back and forth at the end of a lead, nose in the air. At first, I walk toward him and then swing wide to feign interest in a table covered with crystal curios. When Suge isn’t looking, I walk past him at a distance of about 10 feet, making sure to hug the entrance of Bath & Body Works, conveniently the most odoriferous store in the entire mall. Within seconds, I hear the clattering of the dog’s toenails on the hard tile floor behind me.

As Suge struggles at the end of his lead (once he’s better trained, he’ll alert his handler to threats in a less obvious manner), I reach into my jacket and pull out a well-chewed ball on a rope—his reward for a job well done—and toss it over my shoulder. Christmas shoppers giggle at the sight of a black Lab chasing a ball around a mall courtyard, oblivious that had I been an actual terrorist, he would have just saved their lives.

That Suge can detect a small amount of TNT at a distance of 10 feet in a crowded mall in front of a shop filled with scented soaps, lotions, and perfumes is an extraordinary demonstration of the canine’s olfactory ability. But what if, as a terrorist, I’d spotted Suge from a distance and changed my path to avoid him? And what if I’d chosen to visit one of the thousands of malls, train stations, and subway platforms that don’t have Vapor Wake dogs on patrol?

Dogs may be the most refined scent-detection devices humans have, a technology in development for 10,000 years or more, but they’re hardly perfect. Graduates of Auburn’s program can cost upwards of $30,000. They require hundreds of hours of training starting at birth. There are only so many trainers and a limited supply of purebred dogs with the right qualities for detection work. Auburn trains no more than a couple of hundred a year, meaning there will always be many fewer dogs than there are malls or military units. Also, dogs are sentient creatures. Like us, they get sleepy; they get scared; they die. Sometimes they make mistakes.

As the tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon made all too clear, explosives remain an ever-present danger, and law enforcement and military personnel need dogs—and their noses—to combat them. But it also made clear that security forces need something in addition to canines, something reliable, mass-producible, and easily positioned in a multitude of locations. In other words, they need an artificial nose.

IN 1997, DARPA created a program to develop just such a device, targeted specifically to land mines. No group was more aware than the Pentagon of the pervasive and existential threat that explosives represent to troops in the field, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the need for bomb detection extended beyond the battlefield. In 1988, a group of terrorists brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil drove a Ryder truck full of explosives into the underground garage at the World Trade Center in New York, nearly bringing down one tower. And in 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated another Ryder truck full of explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The “Dog’s Nose Program,” as it was called, was deemed a national security priority.

Over the course of three years, scientists in the program made the first genuine headway in developing a device that could “sniff” explosives in ambient air rather than test for them directly. In particular, an MIT chemist named Timothy Swager honed in on the idea of using fluorescent polymers that, when bound to molecules given off by TNT, would turn off, signaling the presence of the chemical. The idea eventually developed into a handheld device called Fido, which is still widely used today in the hunt for IEDs (many of which contain TNT). But that’s where progress stalled.

Olfaction, in the most reductive sense, is chemical detection. In animals, molecules bind to receptors that trigger a signal that’s sent to the brain for interpretation. In machines, scientists typically use mass spectrometry in lieu of receptors and neurons. Most scents, explosives included, are created from a specific combination of molecules. To reproduce a dog’s nose, scientists need to detect minute quantities of those molecules and identify the threatening combinations. TNT was relatively easy. It has a high vapor pressure, meaning it releases abundant molecules into the air. That’s why Fido works. Most other common explosives, notably RDX (the primary component of C-4) and PETN (in plastic explosives such as Semtex), have very low vapor pressures—parts per trillion at equilibrium and once they’re loose in the air perhaps even parts per quadrillion.

The machine “sniffed” just as a dog would and identified the explosive molecules. “That was just beyond the capabilities of any instrumentation until very recently,” says David Atkinson, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. A gregarious, slightly bearish man with a thick goatee, Atkinson is the co-founder and “perpetual co-chair” of the annual Workshop on Trace Explosives Detection. In 1988, he was a PhD candidate at Washington State University when Pan Am Flight 103 went down. “That was the turning point,” he says. “I’ve spent the last 20 years helping to keep explosives off airplanes.” He might at last be on the verge of a solution.

When I visit him in mid-January, Atkinson beckons me into a cluttered lab with a view of the Columbia River. At certain times of the year, he says he can see eagles swooping in to poach salmon as they spawn. “We’re going to show you the device we think can get rid of dogs,” he says jokingly and points to an ungainly, photocopier–size machine with a long copper snout in a corner of the lab; wires run haphazardly from various parts.

Last fall, Atkinson and two colleagues did something tremendous: They proved, for the first time, that a machine could perform direct vapor detection of two common explosives—RDX and PETN—under ambient conditions. In other words, the machine “sniffed” the vapor as a dog would, from the air, and identified the explosive molecules without first heating or concentrating the sample, as currently deployed chemical-detection machines (for instance, the various trace-detection machines at airport security checkpoints) must. In one shot, Atkinson opened a door to the direct detection of the world’s most nefarious explosives.

As Atkinson explains the details of his machine, senior scientist Robert Ewing, a trim man in black jeans and a speckled gray shirt that exactly matches his salt-and-pepper hair, prepares a demonstration. Ewing grabs a glass slide soiled with RDX, an explosive that even in equilibrium has a vapor pressure of just five parts per trillion. This particular sample, he says, is more than a year old and just sits out on the counter exposed; the point being that it’s weak. Ewing raises this sample to the snout end of a copper pipe about an inch in diameter. That pipe delivers the air to an ionization source, which selectively pairs explosive compounds with charged particles, and then on to a commercial mass spectrometer about the size of a small copy machine. No piece of the machine is especially complicated; for the most part, Atkinson and Ewing built it with off-the-shelf parts.

Ewing allows the machine to sniff the RDX sample and then points to a computer monitor where a line graph that looks like an EKG shows what is being smelled. Within seconds, the graph spikes. Ewing repeats the experiment with C-4 and then again with Semtex. Each time, the machine senses the explosive.

A commercial version of Atkinson’s machine could have enormous implications for public safety, but to get the technology from the lab to the field will require overcoming a few hurdles. As it stands, the machine recognizes only a handful of explosives (at least nine as of April), although both Ewing and Atkinson are confident that they can work out the chemistry to detect others if they get the funding. Also, Atkinson will need to shrink it to a practical size. The current smallest version of a high-performance mass spectrometer is about the size of a laser printer—too big for police or soldiers to carry in the field. Scientists have not yet found a way to shrink the device’s vacuum pump. DARPA, Atkinson says, has funded a project to dramatically reduce the size of vacuum pumps, but it’s unclear if the work can be applied to mass spectrometry.

If Atkinson can reduce the footprint of his machine, even marginally, and refine his design, he imagines plenty of very useful applications. For instance, a version affixed to the millimeter wave booths now common at American airports (the ones that require passengers to stand with their hands in the air—also invented at PNNL, by the way) could use a tube to sniff air and deliver it to a mass spectrometer. Soldiers could also mount one to a Humvee or an autonomous vehicle that could drive up and sniff suspicious piles of rubble in situations too perilous for a human or dog. If Atkinson could reach backpack size or smaller, he may even be able to get portable versions into the hands of those who need them most: the marines on patrol in Afghanistan, the Amtrak cops guarding America’s rail stations, or the officers watching over a parade or road race.

Atkinson is not alone in his quest for a better nose. A research group at MIT is studying the use of carbon nanotubes lined with peptides extracted from bee venom that bind to certain explosive molecules. And at the French-German Research Institute in France, researcher Denis Spitzer is experimenting with a chemical detector made from micro-electromechanical machines (MEMs) and modeled on the antennae of a male silkworm moth, which are sensitive enough to detect a single molecule of female pheromone in the air.

Atkinson may have been first to demonstrate extremely sensitive chemical detection—and that research is all but guaranteed to strengthen terror defense—but he and other scientists still have a long way to go before they approach the sophistication of a dog nose. One challenge is to develop a sniffing mechanism. “With any electronic nose, you have to get the odorant into the detector,” says Mark Fisher, a senior scientist at Flir Systems, the company that holds the patent for Fido, the IED detector. Every sniff a dog takes, it processes about half a liter of air, and a dog sniffs up to 10 times per second. Fido processes fewer than 100 milliliters per minute, and Atkinson’s machine sniffs a maximum of 20 liters per minute.

Another much greater challenge, perhaps even insurmountable, is to master the mechanisms of smell itself.

OLFACTION IS THE OLDEST of the sensory systems and also the least understood. It is complicated and ancient, sometimes called the primal sense because it dates back to the origin of life itself. The single-celled organisms that first floated in the primordial soup would have had a chemical detection system in order to locate food and avoid danger. In humans, it’s the only sense with its own dedicated processing station in the brain—the olfactory bulb—and also the only one that doesn’t transmit its data directly to the higher brain. Instead, the electrical impulses triggered when odorant molecules bind with olfactory receptors route first through the limbic system, home of emotion and memory. This is why smell is so likely to trigger nostalgia or, in the case of those suffering from PTSD, paralyzing fear.

All mammals share the same basic system, although there is great variance in sensitivity between species. Those that use smell as the primary survival sense, in particular rodents and dogs, are orders of magnitude better than humans at identifying scents. Architecture has a lot to do with that. Dogs are lower to the ground, where molecules tend to land and linger. They also sniff much more frequently and in a completely different way (by first exhaling to clear distracting scents from around a target and then inhaling), drawing more molecules to their much larger array of olfactory receptors. Good scent dogs have 10 times as many receptors as humans, and 35 percent of the canine brain is devoted to smell, compared with just 5 percent in humans.

Unlike hearing and vision, both of which have been fairly well understood since the 19th century, scientists first explained smell only 50 years ago. “In terms of the physiological mechanisms of how the system works, that really started only a few decades ago,” says Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the more people learn, the more complicated it gets.”

Whereas Atkinson’s vapor detector identifies a few specific chemicals using mass spectrometry, animal systems can identify thousands of scents that are, for whatever reason, important to their survival. When molecules find their way into a nose, they bind with olfactory receptors that dangle like upside-down flowers from a sheet of brain tissue known as the olfactory epithelium. Once a set of molecules links to particular receptors, an electrical signal is sent through axons into the olfactory bulb and then through the limbic system and into the cortex, where the brain assimilates that information and says, “Yum, delicious coffee is nearby.”

While dogs are fluent in the mysterious language of smell, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.As is the case with explosives, most smells are compounds of chemicals (only a very few are pure; for instance, vanilla is only vanillin), meaning that the system must pick up all those molecules together and recognize the particular combination as gasoline, say, and not diesel or kerosene. Doty explains the system as a kind of code, and he says, “The code for a particular odor is some combination of the proteins that get activated.” To create a machine that parses odors as well as dogs, science has to unlock the chemical codes and program artificial receptors to alert for multiple odors as well as combinations.

In some ways, Atkinson’s machine is the first step in this process. He’s unlocked the codes for a few critical explosives and has built a device sensitive enough to detect them, simply by sniffing the air. But he has not had the benefit of many thousands of years of bioengineering. Canine olfaction, Doty says, is sophisticated in ways that humans can barely imagine. For instance, humans don’t dream in smells, he says, but dogs might. “They may have the ability to conceptualize smells,” he says, meaning that instead of visualizing an idea in their mind’s eye, they might smell it.

Animals can also convey metadata with scent. When a dog smells a telephone pole, he’s reading a bulletin board of information: which dogs have passed by, which ones are in heat, etc. Dogs can also sense pheromones in other species. The old adage is that they can smell fear, but scientists have proved that they can smell other things, like cancer or diabetes. Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says that a “mouse sniffing another mouse can obtain much more information about that mouse than you or I could by looking at someone.”

If breaking chemical codes is simple spelling, deciphering this sort of metadata is grammar and syntax. And while dogs are fluent in this mysterious language, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.

THERE ARE FEW people who better appreciate the complexities of smell than Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist and the associate director of Auburn’s Canine Research Detection Institute. He has been hacking the dog’s nose for more than 20 years.

“By the time you leave, you won’t look at a dog the same way again,” he says, walking me down a hall where military intelligence trainees were once taught to administer polygraphs and out a door and past some pens where new puppies spend their days. The CRDI occupies part of a former Army base in the Appalachian foothills and breeds and trains between 100 and 200 dogs—mostly Labrador retrievers, but also Belgian Malinois, German shepherds, and German shorthaired pointers—a year for Amtrak, the Department of Homeland Security, police departments across the US, and the military. Training begins in the first weeks of life, and Waggoner points out that the floor of the puppy corrals is made from a shiny tile meant to mimic the slick surfaces they will encounter at malls, airports, and sporting arenas. Once weaned, the puppies go to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they get socialized among prisoners in a loud, busy, and unpredictable environment. And then they come home to Waggoner.

What Waggoner has done over tens of thousands of hours of careful study is begin to quantify a dog’s olfactory abilities. For instance, how small a sample dogs can detect (parts per trillion, at least); how many different types of scents they can detect (within a certain subset, explosives for instance, there seems to be no limit, and a new odor can be learned in hours); whether training a dog on multiple odors degrades its overall detection accuracy (typically, no); and how certain factors like temperature and fatigue affect performance.

The idea that the dog is a static technology just waiting to be obviated really bothers Waggoner, because he feels like he’s innovating every bit as much as Atkinson and the other lab scientists. “We’re still learning how to select, breed, and get a better dog to start with—then how to better train it and, perhaps most importantly, how to train the people who operate those dogs.”

Waggoner even taught his dogs to climb into an MRI machine and endure the noise and tedium of a scan. If he can identify exactly which neurons are firing in the presence of specific chemicals and develop a system to convey that information to trainers, he says it could go a long way toward eliminating false alarms. And if he could get even more specific—whether, say, RDX fires different cells than PETN—that information might inform more targeted responses from bomb squads.

After a full day of watching trainers demonstrate the multitudinous abilities of CRDI’s dogs, Waggoner leads me back to his sparsely furnished office and clicks a video file on his computer. It was from a lecture he’d given at an explosives conference, and it featured Major, a yellow lab wearing what looked like a shrunken version of the Google Street View car array on its back. Waggoner calls this experiment Autonomous Canine Navigation. Working with preloaded maps, a computer delivered specific directions to the dog. By transmitting beeps that indicated left, right, and back, it helped Major navigate an abandoned “town” used for urban warfare training. From a laptop, Waggoner could monitor the dog’s position using both cameras and a GPS dot, while tracking its sniff rate. When the dog signaled the presence of explosives, the laptop flashed an alert, and a pin was dropped on the map.

It’s not hard to imagine this being very useful in urban battlefield situations or in the case of a large area and a fast-ticking clock—say, an anonymous threat of a bomb inside an office building set to detonate in 30 minutes. Take away the human and the leash, and a dog can sweep entire floors at a near sprint. “To be as versatile as a dog, to have all capabilities in one device, might not be possible,” Waggoner says.

Both the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. It’s important to recognize that both sides—the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose—have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. And the most effective result of this technology race, Waggoner thinks, is a complementary relationship between dog and machine. It’s impractical, for instance, to expect even a team of Vapor Wake dogs to protect Grand Central Terminal, but railroad police could perhaps one day install a version of Atkinson’s sniffer at that station’s different entrances. If one alerts, they could call in the dogs.

There’s a reason Flir Systems, the maker of Fido, has a dog research group, and it’s not just for comparative study, says the man who runs it, Kip Schultz. “I think where the industry is headed, if it has forethought, is a combination,” he told me. “There are some things a dog does very well. And some things a machine does very well. You can use one’s strengths against the other’s weaknesses and come out with a far better solution.”

Despite working for a company that is focused mostly on sensor innovation, Schultz agrees with Waggoner that we should be simultaneously pushing the dog as a technology. “No one makes the research investment to try to get an Apple approach to the dog,” he says. “What could he do for us 10 or 15 years from now that we haven’t thought of yet?”

On the other hand, dogs aren’t always the right choice; they’re probably a bad solution for screening airline cargo, for example. It’s a critical task, but it’s tedious work sniffing thousands of bags per day as they roll by on a conveyor belt. There, a sniffer mounted over the belt makes far more sense. It never gets bored.

“The perception that sensors will put dogs out of business—I’m telling you that’s not going to happen,” Schultz told me, at the end of a long conference call. Mark Fisher, who was also on the line, laughed. “Dogs aren’t going to put sensors out of business either.”

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Up until 100 million years ago, butterflies were night creatures. Only nocturnal moths were living on Earth until some rogue moths began to fly during the day. These enterprising members of the order Lepidoptera took advantage of the nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees by flying during the day. From there, close to 19,000 butterfly species were born.

[Related: Save caterpillars by turning off your outdoor lights.]

In 2019, a large-scale analysis of DNA helped solve the question of when they evolved. Now,  the mystery of where in the world colorful winged insects evolved plagues lepidopterists and museum curators. A study published May 15 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found that butterflies likely evolved in North and Central America, and they forged strong botanical bonds with host plants as they settled around the world.

Getting to this conclusion took a four-dimensional puzzle that makes 3D chess look like a game of Candyland. Scientists from multiple countries had to assemble a massive “butterfly tree of life” using 100 million years of natural history on their distribution and favorite plants, as well as the DNA of more than 2,000 species representing 90 percent of butterfly genera and all butterfly families. 

Within the data were 11 rare butterfly fossils that proved to be crucial pieces to the story.  Butterflies are not common in the fossil record due to their thin wings and very threadlike hair. The 11 in this study were used as calibration and comparison points on the genetic trees, so the team could record timing of key evolutionary events.

They found that butterflies first appeared somewhere in central and western North America. 100 million years ago, North America was bisected by an expansive seaway called the Western Interior Seaway. Present day Mexico was joined in an arc with the United States, Canada, and Russia. North and South America were also separated by a strait of water that butterflies had little difficulty crossing.

The study believes that butterflies took a long way around to Africa, first moving into Asia along the Bering Land Bridge. They then radiated into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and eventually the Horn of Africa. They were even able to reach India, which was an isolated island separated by miles of open sea at this time. 

[Related: The monarch butterfly is scientifically endangered. So why isn’t it legally protected yet?]

Australia was still connected to Antarctica, one of the last remnants of the supercontinent Pangaea. Butterflies possibly lived in Antarctica when global temperatures were warmer, and made their way north towards Australia before the landmasses broke up. 

Butterflies likely lingered along the western edge of Asia for up to 45 million years before making the journey into Europe. The effects of this pause are still apparent today, according to the authors. 

“Europe doesn’t have many butterfly species compared to other parts of the world, and the ones it does have can often be found elsewhere. Many butterflies in Europe are also found in Siberia and Asia, for example,” study co-author and curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History Akito Kawahara said in a statement. 

Once butterflies were established all over the world, they rapidly diversified alongside their plant hosts. Nearly all modern butterfly families were on Earth by the time dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. Each butterfly family appears to have had a special affinity for a specific group of plants.

“We looked at this association over an evolutionary timescale, and in pretty much every family of butterflies, bean plants came out to be the ancestral hosts,” Kawahara said. “This was true in the ancestor of all butterflies as well.”

Over time, bean plants have increased their roster of pollinators to include multiple types of bees, flies, hummingbirds, and mammals, while butterflies have similarly expanded their palate. These botanical partnerships helped make butterflies blossom from a minor offshoot of moths to one of the world’s largest groups of insects, according to the study.

“The evolution of butterflies and flowering plants has been inexorably intertwined since the origin of the former, and the close relationship between them has resulted in remarkable diversification events in both lineages,” study co-author and Florida Museum curator Pamela Soltis said in a statement. 

The post A ‘butterfly tree of life’ reveals the origins of these beautiful insects appeared first on Popular Science.

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This month marks the fifth anniversary of “No Mow May,” an annual environmental project dedicated to promoting sustainable, eco-friendly lawns via a 31-day landscaping moratorium. In doing so, the brief respite gives bees and other pollinators a chance to do what they do best: contribute to a vibrant, healthy, and biodiverse ecosystem. To keep the No Mow May momentum going, Swedish tech company Husqvarna has announced a new, simple feature for its line of robotic lawnmowers: a “rewilding” mode that ensures 10 percent of owners’ lawns remain untouched for pollinators and other local wildlife.

While meticulously manicured lawns are part of the traditional suburban American mindset, they come at steep ecological costs such as biodiversity loss and massive amounts of water waste. The Natural Resource Defense Council, for instance, estimates that grass lawns consume almost 3 trillion gallons of water each year alongside 200 million gallons of gas for traditional mowers, as well as another 70 million pounds of harmful pesticides. In contrast, rewilding is a straightforward, self-explanatory concept long pushed by environmentalists and sustainability experts that encourages a return to regionally native flora for all-around healthier ecosystems.

[Related: Build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’.]

While convincing everyone to adopt rewilding practices may seem like a near-term impossibility, companies like Husqvarna are hoping to set the literal and figurative lawnmower rolling with its new autopilot feature. According to Husqvarna’s announcement, if Europeans set aside just a tenth of their lawns, the cumulative area would amount to four times the size of the continent’s largest nature preserve.

Enabling the Rewilding Mode only takes a few taps within the product line’s Automower Connect app, and can be customized to change the overall shape, size, and placement of the rewilding zones. Once established, the robotic mower’s onboard GPS systems ensure which areas of an owner’s lawn are off-limits and reserved for bees, butterflies, and whatever else wants to set up shop.

Of course, turning on Rewilding Mode means owning a Husqvarna robotic mower that supports the setting—and at a minimum of around $700 for such a tool, they might be out of many lawn care enthusiasts’ budgets. Even so, that doesn’t mean you should abandon giving rewilding a try for your own lawns. It’s easy to get started on the project, and as its name suggests, doesn’t take much maintenance once it’s thriving. If nothing else, there’s still two weeks left in No Mow May, so maybe consider postponing your weekend outdoor chore for a few more days.

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A dark side effect of the electricity that helps society run around the clock is the pollution caused by our increasing numbers of lights at night. Light pollution can obscure stargazing, confusing sea turtles when they hatch, and also could be harming coral reefs.   

[Related: The switch to LEDs in Europe is visible from space.]

The light pollution from cities along the coast can trick the reefs into spawning outside of their optimal reproductive times, according to a study published May 15 in the journal Nature Communications.

“Corals are critical for the health of the global ocean, but are being increasingly damaged by human activity. This study shows it is not just changes in the ocean that are impacting them, but the continued development of coastal cities as we try and accommodate the growing global population,” Thomas Davies, a study co-author and conservation ecologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom,  said in a statement. 

The moon’s cycles trigger coral to spawn. During these spawning events, hundreds of eggs are released on certain nights of the year. These nights are critical to maintain and recover coral reefs after mass bleaching or other adverse events.

By using a combination of spawning observations and data on light pollution, an international team of researchers showed that the corals exposed to artificial light at night (ALAN) are spawning about one to three days closer to the full moon compared to reefs that are not.

If coral spawn on different nights, coral eggs are less likely to be fertilized and survive to produce adult corals. Population growth is needed now more than ever to help the population recover after disturbing events like bleaching.

The study builds on research from 2021 that mapped out the areas of the ocean that are most affected by light pollution. It found that at 3.2 feet deep, over 7 million square miles of coastal ocean are exposed to biologically important ALAN.  

“This study further emphasizes the importance of artificial light pollution as a stressor of coastal and marine ecosystems, with the impacts on various aspects of biodiversity only now being discovered and quantified,” Tim Smyth, a co-author and biogeochemist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, said in a statement. 

The team paired their new data with a global dataset representing 2,135 coral spawning observations taken over the last 23 years. They saw that ALAN is possibly advancing the triggers for spawning by creating a fake illuminance between sunset and sunrise on the nights after the full moon. 

[Related: The best ways to reduce light pollution and improve your quality of life.]

The study looked at coastal regions around the world, but the coral reefs of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in the Middle East are particularly affected by light pollution. These coastlines have been heavily developed in recent years, putting the reefs near the shore at risk. 

“Despite the challenges posed by ALAN, corals in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba are known for their thermal tolerance and ability to withstand high temperatures. However, a disturbance in the timing of coral spawning with the moon phases can result in a decline in new coral recruits and a reduction in the coral population,” Oren Levy, co-author and marine ecologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said in a statement. 

Some individual methods to reduce light pollution, especially for those along the coast, include removing nighttime lighting that is not necessarily needed for public safety, removing all unnecessary light even if it is just one in a backyard, and switching away from white lights to more muted red lights that are less intense.

“By implementing measures to limit light pollution, we can protect these vital habitats and safeguard the future of the world’s oceans. It’s our responsibility to ensure that we preserve the biodiversity of our planet and maintain a healthy and sustainable environment for generations to come,” said Levy.

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In an environment without light, or where sight is otherwise useless, some creatures have learned to thrive by sound. They rely on calls, clicks, and twitters to create a kind of map of their surroundings or pinpoint prey. That ability is called echolocation, and a simple way to understand how it works is to crack open the word itself. 

What is echolocation?

Imagine an echo that locates things. The sound hits an object and bounces back, relaying information about a target’s whereabouts or cues for navigation. When Harvard University zoologist Donald Griffin coined the word “echolocation” in the journal Science in 1944, he was describing how bats rely on sounds to “fly through the total darkness of caves without striking the walls or the jutting stalactites.”

In the decades since, scientists have identified many other animals that use echolocation, aka biosonar. For example, at least 16 species of birds echolocate, including swiftlets and nocturnal oilbirds, which roost deep in South America’s caves. Laura Kloepper, an expert in animal acoustics at the University of New Hampshire, calls this shared ability an example of convergent evolution, in which “you have two unrelated species evolve the same adaptive strategy.” 

How does echolocation work?

To find fish in deep waters, or avoid crashing in the inky night, whales and bats produce loud ultrasonic sounds at frequencies all the way up to 200 kilohertz. That is way beyond human hearing (most adults can’t perceive pitches above 17 kilohertz). 

[Related on PopSci+: 5 sounds not meant for the human ear]

Why do specialized echolocators use ultrasonic sound? “High-frequency sounds give really fine spatial resolution,” Kloepper explains. Hertz is a measure of the distance between each acoustic wave: The higher the hertz, the tighter the wave, and the smaller the detail captured by the vibration of energy in the air. If you were to echolocate in a room, a big, low-frequency wave might simply reflect off a wall, Kloepper says, while an echo from a higher-frequency sound could tell you where the doorway or even the knob was.

Echoes, if you know how to interpret them, are rich in information. As Kloepper explains it, when an animal with the ability hears a reflection, it examines that sound against an “internalized template” of the call it sent out. That comparison of echo versus signal can yield the distance to a target, the direction it might be traveling in, and even its material make-up.

Ultrasonic calls give another bats boost, too—they rely on next-level frequencies to find mates. Many species of moths hunted by bats have evolved ears attuned to these frequencies as a means of survival.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight?]

To make ultrasound, a bat vibrates a specialized organ in its throat called a larynx. It’s not too different from how the human voice box works, except the bat produces a much higher frequency sound. Certain bat species then release the sound from their mouths, while others screech from the snout, using an elaborate nasal structure nicknamed a nose-leaf. 

Whales

Dolphins, orcas, and other toothed whales echolocate for the same reasons as bats do: to chase down tasty prey and navigate through darkness. But these aquatic mammals emit ultrasound in a completely different way. Inside whale heads, often close to their blowholes, sit lip-like flaps. When the animals push air across the flaps, the appendages vibrate, producing clicks. “It’s just like if you inflate a balloon and let all the air out of that balloon. It makes a pbbft noise,” Kloepper says. 

The curves of dolphin skulls propel that noise into fatty structures at the front of their heads, called melons. These, in turn, efficiently transmit vibrations in seawater. The waves bounce off prey or other objects, but the whales don’t rely on external ears to hear the echo (their ear canals are plugged up with wax). Instead, the vibrations are channeled via their jawbones, where sound is received by fat-filled cavities so thin that light can pass through them. The cavities are near the whales’ inner ears, which sense the echoing clicks. The process can reveal all sorts of details: where a fish is, where it’s going, and how fast it’s swimming.

Shrews

Shrews have sensitive whiskers but poor eyesight. To supplement their senses as they explore their forest and grassy meadow habitats, they might use a coarse form of echolocation, which Sophie von Merten, a mammalogist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, calls “echo-orientation” or “echo-navigation.” This ability could “give them a hint that there is an obstacle coming,” she says, such as a fallen branch detected by the shrews’ twitters. Their bird-like sounds are faint, but audible to humans. 

The extent of shrew echo-navigation isn’t entirely clear. In a 2020 “experiment, von Merten and a colleague found that, when shrews are introduced to new environments, the wee mammals twitter more frequently. Von Merten says it’s likely they are sensing the unfamiliar location by these vocalizations, but another interpretation could be that the captive animals are stressed. That’s a hypothesis she doesn’t find very convincing, though her ongoing research will measure shrew stress, too.

Could there be other undiscovered creatures out there that echolocate? “I think it’s very likely,” Kloepper says. She adds that it’s hard to tell which animals beyond mammals and birds display the behavior, given “just how little we know about vocalizations of many cryptic species.”

Humans

Unlike bats, people aren’t born with the innate power of echolocation—but we can still make it work. In his original 1944 paper, Griffin discussed a, such as captains listening for echoes of ship horns against cliff faces, or those who are blind following the taps of their canes. 

The post How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound appeared first on Popular Science.

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Every nerve in your body is now on high alert, and you turn on the light just in time to see a flash of fur dart into the crack under your closet door. You scream an undignified “YEEAAARRGGEETTTOUTTTTT,” which, roughly translated from panicked shrieking, means: “Hello, you are a mouse. Please leave.”

Signs you have a mouse in your house

“Something I’ve noted over the years is that you know someone has a mouse when you hear the very distinct scream the person makes when they’ve seen a mouse,” jokes Michelle Niedermeier of Pennsylvania State University. “Male, female, old, young—it’s the same screech.”

Niedermeier works with the Pennsylvania Integrated Pest Management Program, helping communities deal with pest problems. She says that often, for her, the first sign of a mouse is seeing the critter itself scurry across the floor.

But because mice are nocturnal and you’re unlikely to see them (or you may catch only catch a bleary-eyed glimpse in the middle of the night), there are other signs of an infestation you should be aware of. They may also be inhabiting areas you only visit infrequently, such as an attic or crawlspace.

One of the most obvious signs of a mouse infestation is feces. The poop of a typical house mouse is only a few millimeters long, black, and pellet-like. Mice poop a lot, and they poop just about everywhere, so seeing their droppings is usually a good sign that the rodents have taken up residence.

If an infestation goes on for long enough, you might start to notice a distinct and unpleasant smell, or even some strange markings on your walls.

“Where mice go, they leave scent, and they leave a grease trail too,” says Jeff Schalau, an extension agent with The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension. Near baseboards and along walls, this grease trail resembles the smudges from handprints on a painted surface. It appears when a mouse rubs against the wall, leaving behind dirt and oils from its fur. Mice tend to avoid open spaces, and will usually travel as close to the wall as possible, which makes their trails easy to predict.

The best way to get rid of mice

Unlike some other pests, a mouse infestation is one you can take care of yourself. There’s no need to call an exterminator—just screw your courage to the sticking place and get to work.

“It all boils down to food, water, and shelter,” Niedermeier says. Cut off those three things, and you’ll make your home a lot less attractive to mice.

The problem is that mice are resourceful. For water, they can take advantage of leaks that you might not even know exist, and for shelter, they can make use of just about any kind of clutter or hole. That makes food the most important factor to tackle. “Eliminating food is paramount to getting rid of a mouse problem,” Niedermeier says.

Mice will eat pretty much anything, too, so you’ll have to be thorough. Start by cleaning up any crumbs or food debris on surfaces and floors. When you cook, promptly clean dirty dishes instead of letting them sit out. Store food in places mice can’t reach, like the refrigerator, or inside containers they cannot nibble through, such as glass or sturdy plastic. And don’t forget about your pets’ supply. Only put out the amount of food a pet will eat in one sitting. While Fifi might like grazing on kibble throughout the day, so do mice.

Then it’s time to block up all the unconventional entrance and exit points. If you happen to see a mouse, pay attention to where it runs, and stay on the lookout for any holes or cracks.

“If you can stick a regular old pencil in a hole, a mouse can get through,” Niedermeier says. She explains that the largest part of a mouse is its tiny skull, which is usually only the width of a pencil. “If their head can get through, the rest of their body can get through as well,” she adds.

Close up any holes you see, and even the holes you’ve helped put in. Holes around pipes or wiring are often overlooked, but can act as a mouse superhighway system through your home. Don’t forget to look up high—mice can climb walls as long as their claws can grab hold.

When you fill in holes, use high-quality materials that will last for years. In the end, it will save you a lot of work. Niedermeier recommends using silicone caulk or stainless steel or copper mesh—think a pot scrubber—to block any openings. Silicone lasts for a longer time than latex caulk, and unlike steel wool, copper and stainless steel don’t rust.

“You really only want to do this job once,” Niedermeier says. And if you do it well enough, your hard work will keep mice away as long as your home remains sealed-up.

3. Trap any remaining mice

So you’ve cleaned up, boxed up, and sealed up your home—but there are still some mice inside. Now, it’s time to get rid of the stalwarts that remain. It’s time to address the big question: Do you know how to catch a mouse?

For starters, as much as you might want to, you can’t just snatch them up and take them outside. Mice have excellent senses of direction, and even moving them some distance from your house isn’t enough to get rid of them. In experiments, they find their way home quickly, even heading through obstacles to get back to their residences. The best way to get rid of mice from your home, unfortunately, is to kill them.

[Related: How to fight an ant infestation]

The most effective method is a trap, baited with tasty morsels like peanut butter, oats, or dried fruit. Place them along baseboards and walls, where mice prefer to travel, with the bait directly in their path. Simple wood and wire snap traps are a classic for a reason. They work fast, they’re effective, they’re cheap, and they’re reusable. When in doubt, this is a good first option for any home with a mouse problem.

More modern plastic snap traps, which look something like a binder clip, are also effective. Like the wooden snap traps, the plastic ones are easy to set up and use. Between the two, it’s mostly a matter of personal preference.

If you have a pet, be sure to place the traps where your pet can’t reach. If this isn’t possible, Schalau recommends placing a sturdy box with a mouse-sized hole in it along the wall and over the trap. This will allow the mouse to reach the bait, while keeping your pet safe.

Another effective and humane option is an electric box trap, which can be baited just like a snap trap. The battery-powered machine has an opening that mice can run into to try and catch the bait. When a mouse enters the box, it steps on a plate that carries a current and is instantly electrocuted. Then, a small light begins flashing to indicate that the trap has caught a mouse and should be re-set. Electric box traps are good for getting rid of mice in homes with pets, because they are completely enclosed—no dog or cat can get to the charged plate. In addition, they leave very little mess, which makes them easy to clean. The downside is that you do need to make sure the batteries are regularly charged, and they cost considerably more than a snap trap.

“Mice are a health concern,” Niedermeier says. “They spread disease, they trigger asthma, and so having a mouse in your house is a real health issue.”

They also tend to carry foodborne diseases like salmonella. And since mice enjoy noshing on the same foods that people and pets do, they have the potential to spread diseases onto our food and meal preparation surfaces.

And that’s not the only illness these fuzzy creatures can spread. “Hantavirus is a serious issue out here in the west,” Schalau says. Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, carried by rodents including mice, can be fatal.

So if you find a mouse, don’t try cohabiting. “As soon as you identify a problem, take action,” Schalau says. Otherwise, the infestation will only grow—and you’ll soon have to contend with multiple generations of rodents. “Their reproductive potential is off the charts,” Schalau says. “At the first sign of any mice inside your house, you need to get on it.”

What not to do when you’re getting rid of mice

It’s not enough to know how to kill mice—you need to do it properly. Poison might sound good, but pest control experts do not recommend this option. While it will kill mice, poison can also kill any animals that might feed on mouse carcasses. It can also inadvertently poison pets.

And there’s another downside. Most poisons don’t work instantly, for good reason: Manufacturers don’t want mice to become gun-shy of poisoned bait. So what often happens is that a mouse eats a poison pellet, walks back to its nest, and only then dies. Unfortunately, mice like tiny holes and often take up residence in hard-to-reach places like walls.

Trust. You do not want to smell a dead mouse for months as it slowly decays inside your walls. Don’t do it.

Another popular option on the market is glue traps, which stick to the bodies of any mice that walk over the trap. Theoretically, this should immobilize the mouse. But starving to death while stuck to a piece of cardboard is not a great or humane way to go. And few people are willing to kill the mouse by hand. That is, if the trap actually works.

“The glue, though it’s sticky, is not sticky enough,” Niedermeier says. Older, stronger mice—which are more likely to be breeding and creating a mouse problem—can often pull themselves out of the glue traps, sometimes with a very gruesome effect. “They are ready, willing, and able to gnaw off their own arm to get out of it,” she explains. “It’s more humane to use a snap trap.”

Cleaning up after a mouse infestation

Once you’ve closed off access to your food, water, and shelter, sealed entrances and exits, and killed any interlopers unfortunate enough to remain in your domain, it’s time to clean up.

If you used traps, you should keep your hands covered while you dispose of mouse carcasses in the trash. Use disposable gloves, a plastic bag, or even sturdy leather work gloves to keep a safe distance between you and the mouse. Remember, mice can harbor diseases, so you’ll want to be cautious as you handle their bodies.

You can also take the bodies outside if you live in a rural area, but be sure to put the remains in an area far away from your house, where pets won’t be likely to bring them back in, and they won’t attract additional unwanted scavengers.

Also, take the opportunity to clean up any mouse urine or droppings, wearing a face mask if you are allergic or have asthma. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the safest way to clean up after mice is to wear gloves and spray the droppings with diluted bleach before wiping up the waste. Needless to say, washing any clothing or bedding that mice have pooped on is always a good idea. And don’t forget to wash your hands afterward.

Whew. You’re all set. Sleep the sleep of the content knowing that you have a mouse-free house.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on February 24, 2017.

The post How to get rid of mice and keep them away appeared first on Popular Science.

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On a small patch of land in the northeast Bronx in New York City sits a tidy but potent battery storage system. Located across the street from a beige middle school building, and not too far from a Planet Fitness and a Dollar Tree, the battery system is designed to send power into the grid at peak moments of demand on hot summer afternoons and evenings. 

New York state has a goal of getting a whopping six gigawatts of battery storage systems online in the next seven years, and this system, at about three megawatts, is a very small but hopefully helpful part of that. It’s intended to be able to send out those three megawatts of power over a four-hour period, typically between 4 pm and 8 pm on the toastiest days of the year, with the goal of making a burdened power grid a bit less stressed and ideally a tad cleaner. 

The local power utility, Con Edison, recently connected the battery system to the grid. Here’s how it works, and why systems like this are important.

From power lines to batteries, and back again

The source of the electricity for these batteries is the existing power distribution lines that run along the top of nearby poles. Those wires carry power at 13,200 volts, but the battery system itself needs to work with a much lower voltage. That’s why before the power even gets to the batteries themselves, it needs to go through transformers. 

During a January tour of the site for Popular Science, Adam Cohen, the CTO of NineDot Energy, the company behind this project, opens a gray metal door. Behind it are transformers. “They look really neato,” he says. Indeed, they do look neat—three yellowish units that take that voltage and transform it into 480 volts. This battery complex is actually two systems that mirror each other, so other transformers are in additional equipment nearby. 

After those transformers do their job and convert the voltage to a lower number, the electricity flows to giant white Tesla Megapack battery units. Those batteries are large white boxes with padlocked cabinets, and above them is fire-suppression equipment. Not only do these battery units store the power, but they also have inverters to change the AC power to DC before the juice can be stored. When the power does flow out of the batteries, it’s converted back to AC power again. 

The battery storage system is designed to follow a specific rhythm. It will charge gradually between 10 pm and 8 am, Cohen says. That’s a time “when the grid has extra availability, the power is cheaper and cleaner, [and] the grid is not overstressed,” he says. When the day begins and the grid starts experiencing more demand, the batteries stop charging. 

In the summer heat, when there’s a “grid event,” that’s when the magic happens, Cohen says. Starting around 4 pm, the batteries will be able to send their power back out into the grid to help destress the system. They’ll be able to produce enough juice to power about 1,000 homes over that four-hour period, according to an estimate by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA.

[Related: How the massive ‘flow battery’ coming to an Army facility in Colorado will work]

The power will flow back up into the same wires that charged them before, and then onto customers. The goal is to try to make the grid a little bit cleaner, or less dirty, than it would have been if the batteries didn’t exist. “It’s offsetting the dirty energy that would have been running otherwise,” Cohen says. 

Of course, the best case scenario would be for batteries to get their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind, and the site does have a small solar canopy that could send a teeny tiny bit of clean energy into the grid. But New York City and the other downstate zones near it currently rely very heavily on fossil fuels. For New York City in 2022 for example, utility-scale energy production was 100 percent from fossil fuels, according to a recent report from the New York Independent System Operator. (One of several solutions in the works to that problem involves a new transmission line.) What that means is that the batteries will be drawing power from a fossil-fuel dominant grid, but doing so at nighttime when that grid is hopefully less polluting. 

How systems like these can help

Electricity is very much an on-demand product. What we consume “has to be made right now,” Cohen notes from behind the wheel of his Nissan Leaf, as we drive towards the battery storage site in the Bronx on a Friday in January. Batteries, of course, can change that dynamic, storing the juice for when it’s needed. 

This project in the Bronx is something of an electronic drop in a bucket: At three megawatts, the batteries represent a tiny step towards New York State’s goal to have six gigawatts, or 6,000 megawatts, of battery storage on the grid by 2030. Even though this one facility in the Bronx represents less than one percent of that goal, it can still be useful, says Schuyler Matteson, a senior advisor focusing on energy storage and policy at NYSERDA. “Small devices play a really important role,” he says. 

One of the ways that small devices like these can help is they can be placed near the people who are using it in their homes or businesses, so that electricity isn’t lost as it is transmitted in from further away. “They’re very close to customers on the distribution network, and so when they’re providing power at peak times, they’re avoiding a lot of the transmission losses, which can be anywhere from five to eight percent of energy,” Matteson says. 

And being close to a community provides interesting opportunities. A campus of the Bronx Charter Schools for Better Learning sits on the third floor of the middle school across the street. There, two dozen students have been working in collaboration with a local artist, Tijay Mohammed, to create a mural that will eventually hang on the green fence in front of the batteries. “They are so proud to be associated with the project,” says Karlene Buckle, the manager of the enrichment program at the schools.

Grid events

The main benefit a facility like this can have is the way it helps the grid out on a hot summer day. That’s because when New York City experiences peak temperatures, energy demand peaks too, as everyone cranks up their air conditioners. 

To meet that electricity demand, the city relies on its more than one dozen peaker plants, which are dirtier and less efficient than an everyday baseline fossil fuel plant. Peaker plants disproportionately impact communities located near them. “The public health risks of living near peaker plants range from asthma to cancer to death, and this is on top of other public health crises and economic hardships already faced in environmental justice communities,” notes Jennifer Rushlow, the dean of the School for the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School via email. The South Bronx, for example, has peaker plants, and the borough as a whole has an estimated 22,855 cases of pediatric asthma, according to the American Lung Association. Retiring them or diminishing their use isn’t just for energy security—it’s an environmental justice issue.

So when power demand peaks, “what typically happens is we have to ramp up additional natural gas facilities, or even in some instances, oil facilities, in the downstate region to provide that peak power,” Matteson says. “And so every unit of storage we can put down there to provide power during peak times offsets some of those dirty, marginal units that we would have to ramp up otherwise.” 

By charging at night, instead of during the day, and then sending the juice out at peak moments, “you’re actually offsetting local carbon, you’re offsetting local particulate matter, and that’s having a really big benefit of the air quality and health impacts for New York City,” he says.  

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier]

Imagine, says Matteson, that a peaker plant is producing 45 megawatts of electricity. A 3-megawatt battery system coming online could mean that operators could dial down the dirty plant to 42 megawatts instead. But in an ideal world, it doesn’t come online at all. “We want 15 of [these 3 megawatt] projects to add up to 45 megawatts, and so if they can consistently show up at peak times, maybe that marginal dirty generator doesn’t even get called,” he says. “If that happens enough, maybe they retire.” 

Nationally, most of the United States experiences a peak need for electricity on hot summer days, just like New York City does, with a few geographic exceptions, says Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow focusing on energy storage at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “Pretty much most of the country peaks during the summertime, in those late afternoons,” he says. “And so we traditionally build gas turbines—we’ve got hundreds of gigawatts of gas turbines that have been installed for the past several decades.” 

While the three-megawatt project in the Bronx is not going to replace a peaker plant by any means, Denholm says that in general, the trend is moving towards batteries taking over what peaker plants do. “As those power plants get old and retire, you need to build something new,” he says. “Within the last five years, we’ve reached this tipping point, where storage can now outcompete new traditional gas-fired turbines on a life-cycle cost basis.” 

Right now, New York state has 279 megawatts of battery storage already online, which is around 5 percent of the total goal of 6 gigawatts. Denholm estimates that nationally, nearly nine gigawatts of battery storage are online already. 

“There’s significant quantifiable benefits to using [battery] storage as peaker,” Denholm says. One of those benefits is a fewer local emissions, which is important because “a lot of these peaker plants are in places that have historically been [environmental-justice] impacted regions.” 

“Even when they’re charging off of fossil plants, they’re typically charging off of more efficient units,” he adds. 

If all goes according to plan, the batteries will start discharging their juice this summer, on the most sweltering days. 

The post How an innovative battery system in the Bronx will help charge up NYC’s grid appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Bleaching occurs when a stressed marine creature, most commonly a coral, expels its symbiotic algae and turns a ghostly white, often in response to a warming sea. But bleaching affects more than just corals. Giant clams—massive mollusks that can grow more than 1.2 meters in diameter and weigh as much as 225 kilograms—can bleach, too. And in recent research, scientists have learned more about how bleaching disrupts these sessile giants, affecting everything from their nutrition to their reproduction.

Giant clams live on coral reefs and are the largest bivalves on Earth. Like corals, giant clams bleach when they’re stressed, often as a response to excessively warm water. As with a coral, a bleached giant clam expels the algae, called zooxanthellae, that live inside it. These algae dwell in the soft tissue of the clam’s mantle and provide energy for the animal through photosynthesis, leaving a bleached clam with less energy and nutrients. At worst, bleaching can kill giant clams through food deficiency.

Scientists have been studying bleaching in giant clams for decades. In 1997 and 1998, during a brief period that saw extensive coral bleaching worldwide with corals succumbing in at least 32 disparate countries, bleached giant clams were observed from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to French Polynesia after water temperatures in the South Pacific rose significantly. In 2010, similar temperatures in the water off Thailand’s Ko Man Nai Island also led to scores of deaths.

Of the 12 species of giant clams, some are more resistant to heat stress than others. But as scientists are finding, even when a giant clam survives bleaching, other physiological functions can still be severely impaired.

A recent study in the Philippines of wild clams, for example, found that bleaching can hamper their reproduction. Bleaching reduces the number of eggs giant clams produce, and the more severe the bleaching, the fewer eggs they make. Reproducing “takes a lot of energy. So instead of using that energy for reproduction, they just use it for their survival,” says Sherry Lyn Sayco, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan.

Mei Lin Neo, a marine ecologist and giant clam expert at the National University of Singapore who was not involved in the study, says the work contributes to the story of how climate change can have “repercussions on the longevity of species.”

In general, she says, we know much more about how climate change affects corals than marine species with similar physiologies. “By understanding how other symbiotic species respond to climate change, each species becomes a unique indicator on how the overall reef ecosystem is doing.”

Bleached giant clams, it turns out, are often better than corals at coping with bleaching. Near Ko Man Nai Island, 40 percent of the bleached clams re-colored after a few months as the zooxanthellae repopulated in their tissues when temperatures cooled again. After the 1997–1998 bleaching event, over 95 percent of the 6,300 bleached clams near Australia’s Orpheus Island recovered.

Giant clams seem amenable to restocking, too. In the Philippines, where the largest species, Tridacna gigas, went locally extinct in the 1980s, restocking has brought it back.

“Clams are not just any organism,” Sayco says. “It’s not that we are just conserving them for them to be there,” she adds, “they have lots of benefits and ecosystem services, such as [boosting] fisheries [and] tourism.”

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On Sunday, phone lines across the world will be their busiest—if we all remember to call our mothers. But we’re hardly the only creatures with good reason to celebrate our moms. We’ve searched the Popular Science archives to give you a roundup of stories featuring heroic mothers from across the animal world.

The moms who really give parenting their all

For the wriggling offspring of the Taita Hills caecilian, there’s no better taste than mom’s peeling skin. These land-dwelling, legless amphibians—found in the forests of southern Kenya—rip off the thick, protein-packed layer with gusto. By the time her kids are done feasting, mama caecilian will lose more than a tenth of her body weight.

Then there’s the mother desert spider, whose sacrifice for her brood goes more than skin-deep. Once the hatchlings emerge, she spits up her own meals to feed her children. Pretty tame, until the digestive enzymes that come up with her puke eat away at her insides. She’ll continue to feed and protect her young for the next two weeks while the enzymes from her stomach kill her from the inside out. But the baby spiders won’t let the corpse go to waste—they’ll gobble up what remains of mom before setting out on their own.

A whole lot of milk

Mammals might only feed their newborns breast milk, but that doesn’t mean they are any less impressive. Elusive orangutan mothers will breastfeed their children at night and under tree cover for up to eight years, well past the time their young is small enough to carry around. That’s the longest any wild animal nurses their young.

For the burrowing, venomous, shrew-looking mammal called a solenodon, children don’t get milk near mom’s chest. The offspring climb next to her butt, where her nipples are found, to breastfeed for several months.

Love to spare

Some mothers don’t raise their own biological children, or even members of their own species. At the end of the year, biologists on an American island in the North Pacific got really excited when a Short-tailed albatross couple had an egg in their nest. It would have been the fourth time that a chick of the endangered species was born on U.S. soil. But once the egg hatched and scientists peered into the nest, they didn’t find a little Short-tailed albatross. Instead, the couple had adopted an egg from a smaller, more common bird, the Black-footed albatross. The researchers weren’t too disappointed—fostering a foundling could be great practice for the first-time parents.

Sharks with virgin births

For certain species of fish, fathers are optional. At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, female zebra sharks reproduced by fertilizing their eggs with their own genetic material. That process, known as parthenogenesis, is typically a last-ditch move when males aren’t available. But the female sharks shared their enclosure with potential mates. “This changes what we think we know about parthenogenesis and why it occurs,” said Lise Watson, Shedd Aquarium’s assistant director of animal operations and habitats, to Popular Science.

Mouse moms teach parenting life skills

Young mice get pointers on how to parent from older mother mice. A study published in the journal Nature in 2021 reported a behavior called “shepherding,” in which mother mice pushed virgin female mice into a nest of crying mouse pups. It’s as though the mothers were urging the other mice to learn a lesson in babysitting: “It wasn’t violent or forceful or aggressive, but definitely like an experienced mom grabbing the older child by the hand and dragging them into the nursery,” study author and NYU professor Robert Froemke told Popular Science. 

Straight from the womb

Humans have a few weird quirks thanks to their moms, beyond the traits they might have inherited. If a mother eats strong flavors like garlic, vanilla, or mint while pregnant, their infant may be more gung-ho to try those foods later on. The microbes found in our guts are also from our moms. A lot of those bugs come straight from her birth canal. That’s just one more thing to thank your folks for when you give them a call this weekend.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on May 12, 2018.

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A road capable of charging electric vehicles en route to their destinations could power up as soon as 2025 in one of the world’s most eco-friendly nations. As the Amsterdam-based tech site The Next Web explains, Sweden is well on track to electrifying a roughly 13-mile portion of its E20 highway spanning between Hallsberg to Örebro, both of which are located between Sweden’s two largest cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg.

The electric road system (ERS) project is overseen by the nation’s transport administration, Trafikverket, who are still determining which of three specific technologies could be best suited for the task: overhead conductive, ground-based conductive, and ground-based inductive charging. The first format utilizes an overhead pantograph design similar to those seen atop traditional trolleys and streetcars, but would be limited to large vehicles capable of reaching the tall power lines, i.e. public commuter vehicles.

[Related: Car owners: here’s when experts say you should switch to an EV.]

The other two options, however, could hypothetically also support smaller vehicles and private EVs. In a ground-based conductive format, power would transfer from specialized tracks installed either on top or below the pavement via a mechanical arm. Inductive charging would require conductive coils installed in both the roads and vehicles.

As futuristic as these ideas may sound, Sweden has already successfully tested all three ERS methods in various areas around the nation, including the towns of Gotland, Lund, and Sandviken. While much of that work has pertained to mass transit options, designers also tinkered with systems capable of supporting smaller and private vehicles as far back as 2018.

There are immense benefits to expanding ERS capabilities, beyond just the immediate convenience. According to one recent study from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, increased reliance on ERS installations alongside at-home EV charging could lower electrical grid demands during peak usage times, as well as potentially reduce vehicle battery size by as much as 70 percent. Those smaller batteries would mean less rare earth materials are harvested, leading to potentially cheaper, more accessible EV options for consumers.

[Related: Why you barely see electric vehicles at car dealerships.]

“After all, many people charge their cars after work and during the night, which puts a lot of strain on the power grid,” author Sten Karlsson, an energy efficiency researcher and professor at Chalmers, said in a release in March. “By instead charging more evenly throughout the day, peak load would be significantly reduced.”

Sweden isn’t alone in its aim to electrify portions of its roadways. As the electric transportation industry site Electrive notes, similar projects are also underway in the UK, Germain, Italy, and Israel. Here in the US, the Norwegian company ENRX recently announced plans to install a one-mile ERS prototype section within a stretch of four-lane highway near Orlando, Florida.

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After an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs struck the Earth, the prehistoric giants lost their dominion over the planet. The mammals that rose up about 66 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch had some big shoes to fill—and they certainly grew into the challenge over time.

[Related: We’re one step closer to identifying the first-ever mammals.]

In a study published May 11 in the journal Science, found that a family of extinct rhinoceros-like herbivores called brontotheres began their time on Earth about the size of a dog, but evolved to reach elephant size over a relatively short amount of time. Brontotheres also may have not reached its full size potential before it went extinct roughly 34 million years ago due to changes in their environment.

With the dinosaurs gone at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), the mammals of the world had significantly less competition for resources, and scientists believe this led to their success as a family. Brontotheres was one of the biggest winners among mammals, and grew from about coyote-sized, 40 pound creatures into 2,000 pound goliaths. According to the study, they did this over a period of only 16 million years, which is very quick in evolutionary terms.

Brontothere means “thunder beasts,” and their powerful name was inspired by Lakota oral histories of violent thunderstorms accompanied by giants, according to the National Park Service.The animals lived in Asia, Europe, and North America. Most species weighed over a ton, but the biggest roamed what is now the South Dakota Badlands. These giants clocked in at about 8 feet tall and 16 feet long. They are the relatives of modern tapirs, horses, and rhinos, and were equipped with Y-shaped horns on their noses. 

The team of researchers on this brontothere size evolution study peered back at the evidence from the family’s fossil record and a family tree of 276 known brontothere individuals. They were fortunate that the fossil record shows most of their evolutionary record, and the team generated computer models to track how the genetic traits of different brontothere species changed. 

They also conducted phylogenetic analysis, or an evaluation of the evolutionary avenues that causes a new species to take shape. This helped them determine how such evolutionary changes may be linked or connected to their increase in body size. 

The data showed that body size actually evolved in both directions across brontothere species. Some would evolve bigger, while other times a species would evolve smaller. They found that the smaller species were more prone to extinction compared to their bigger cousins, and a trend of bulkier brontotheres persisted longer than the smaller species emerged.  

[Related from PopSci+: An ancient era of global warming could hint at our scorching future.]

Towards the end of the Eocene, the remaining brontotheres were true thunder beasts. Their status as megaherbivores likely benefited the beasts, with the smaller animals being more vulnerable to become a carnivore’s dinner. Competition from other big and small herbivores could hardly stand up to the beasts, according to the study.

Unfortunately, at this same time, the climate drastically changed from a more humid herbivore’s paradise to something much more dry. The brontotheres thus lost their evolutionary advantages when the previously lush and green ecosystem dried up. They eventually went extinct about 34 million years ago.

Further research into this family could model the ecological factors like ancient climate shifts that affected how much edible vegetation covered the planet and how it led to the demise of these megaherbivores.

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

To get plastics ready for use in consumer and industrial products, companies add thousands of chemical additives that give them properties like elasticity and fire resistance. Many of these chemicals, however, are hazardous to human health and the environment, and environmental advocacy groups have long pushed for their elimination.

Those advocates scored a victory last week when parties to the Stockholm Convention — an international treaty regulating hazardous pollutants — agreed to add three new chemicals to a list of globally banned substances, including the plastic additives UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus. The move is expected to safeguard people and the natural world, although a handful of exemptions mean the chemicals will not completely disappear as a threat.

World governments “took an important step today toward protecting human health and the environment,” Sara Brosché, a science adviser for the International Pollutant Elimination Network, or IPEN, said in a statement. “But we are disappointed that financial interests caused unnecessary and dangerous exemptions that will lead to ongoing toxic exposures.”

The decision came out of a two-week-long conference in Switzerland on the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions, a series of United Nations agreements to regulate waste and hazardous chemicals. The Stockholm Convention, which will control the three new chemicals, was first passed in 2001 to phase out or restrict the global production of “persistent organic pollutants,” hazardous pesticides and industrial chemicals that don’t break down naturally. There were 12 chemicals on the original list, but it’s since expanded to cover more than 30. More than 150 countries have ratified the Stockholm Convention and are subject to its restrictions; the U.S. is not among them.

The most recently banned chemicals include a pesticide called methoxychlor, as well as two plastic additives: UV-328, which absorbs UV light and is widely used in transparent plastics products, and Dechlorane Plus, a flame retardant that’s added to plastic coatings and electrical wires. All three chemicals have been shown to persist in the natural environment and bioaccumulate up the food chain, and have been linked to health concerns ranging from neurodevelopmental damage to endocrine disruption. These concerns are particularly acute for people who work in recycling workshops, where plastics are exposed to high heat and other processes that encourage chemical leaching.   

By placing the chemicals in a category known as “Annex A,” parties to the Stockholm Convention have agreed to take steps to eliminate them from global use and production — with a handful of exemptions, in the case of the two plastic additives. Until 2044, both UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus will still be allowed in spare parts for motor vehicles and agricultural equipment, among other uses. Strangely, Dechlorane Plus will also be allowed indefinitely for use in medical imaging devices and aerospace products — even though the chemical’s production is projected to end globally by 2026 due to a national-level bans that are already on the books.

“We are quite disappointed” with the exemptions, said Jitka Straková, a project manager for the Czech nonprofit Arnika. Although there are fewer exemptions than there have been for previous chemicals, she said any ongoing use or production of UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus will harm recyclers in the developing world — especially because countries could not agree on rules for labeling contaminated products. This means that, even though the Stockholm Convention now bans the recycling of products containing UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus, recycling workers could unwittingly accept plastics containing these chemicals into their workshops.

“Exempted uses mean that the products will still be contaminating waste streams when they reach their end of life,” Straková said. A recent study she helped conduct with IPEN found alarming Dechlorane Plus contamination in and around e-waste recycling sites in Thailand, where much of the world’s plastic waste is exported. The study showed that a group of 40 Thai recycling workers had blood serum concentrations of Dechlorane Plus that were more than 39 times higher than those of a control group.

“Everyone has a right to know when toxic chemicals threaten their bodies, their food, and their health,” Thitikorn Boontongmai, toxic waste and industrial program manager for the watchdog Ecological Alert and Recovery – Thailand, said in a statement.

UV-328 contamination is also widespread, thanks to the chemical’s ubiquity in consumer products. An IPEN analysis of 28 hair accessories and toys from Russia, China, and Indonesia found UV-328 in every item. A separate study from IPEN found UV-328 in recycled plastic pellets from nearly two dozen different countries, suggesting that UV-328 travels into recycled products even if they were never meant to contain the additive.

“We are essentially losing track” of where UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus are going or what type of products they’re reaching, Strakova said. She said companies should immediately switch to safer alternatives despite the Stockholm Convention exemptions, and that countries should set strict limits for those chemicals in waste, banning them from being recycled into new products.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/regulation/more-than-150-countries-agree-to-ban-3-toxic-chemicals/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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It’s been just about 20 years since Finding Nemo was released in theaters and the lost “little clownfish from the reef” swam his way into our hearts. However, there is way more to coral reef fish than their beautiful scales and fictional tales. 

[Related: This rainbow reef fish is just as magical as it looks.]

A study published May 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology found that some of the fish that live in anemones and reefs go through intense physiological changes when they switch from speedy swimming in the open ocean as larvae to settling down to life on the reef.  

Nemo and his young sea turtle pal named Squirt may have had a bit more in common than their age. Like sea turtles, many coral reef fish spawn away from where the animals will eventually settle and live. Adult coral reef fish spawn their larvae in the open ocean and the larvae swim against strong currents to get back to the reef where they will live as adults. Other bottom dwelling marine organisms like sea stars, corals, and urchins also follow this pattern. 

“These first weeks of life can be the most vulnerable for coral reef fishes, and if they don’t make it, that means they cannot grow up to be healthy adults and contribute to coral reef ecosystems,” co-author and James Cook University marine biologist Jodie L. Rummer told PopSci.

All of this swimming demands a lot of energy from the tiny fish, but then once they are settled on the reef floor, they must drastically switch gears and survive in a low-oxygen, or hypoxic, environment at night. 

To learn more about how this adjustment  works, the team collected daily measurements of the cinnamon anemonefish (Amphiprion melanopus) larvae’s swimming speed, oxygen update, and hypoxia tolerance. They observed them in a laboratory setting from the time that they hatched until when they settled down, usually around day nine of life.

“Coral reef fishes, including anemonefishes, as larvae are swimming among the fastest relative to their body size,” study co-author Adam Downie told PopSci. Downie is currently an animal physiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and conducted the research as part of his PhD at James Cook University. “In our study, maximum speeds were over 12 centimeters [4.7 inches] per second, but for a fish that is the size of your pinky finger nail, that is 10-12 body lengths per second. Comparatively, relative to their size, larval coral reef fishes, including clownfish, outcompete most other marine life in a swimming test and all humans!”

Additionally, they saw that their hypoxia tolerance in the fish increased around day five while their oxygen intake decreased. To investigate how their bodies cope with these lack of oxygen, they sequenced mRNA from larvae of different ages to look for changes in gene activity that occurs during development. These physiological changes were correlated to areas of the gene where hemoglobin are produced and the activity of 2,470 genes changed during development.

[Related: Invasive rats are making some reef fish more peaceful, and that’s bad, actually.]

“These baby fish can change the expression patterns of certain genes that code for oxygen transporting and storage proteins just in time to cope with such low oxygen conditions on the reef,” said Rummer. “These proteins, like hemoglobin and myoglobin, are found in our bodies too and are important in getting oxygen from the environment and delivering it to the muscles, heart, and other organs. Indeed, timing is everything!”

The study found that relative to their body size, cinnamon anemonefish (also called cinnamon clownfish) larvae have the highest oxygen uptake rate of any bony fish currently measured. The genetic changes they can make to take in more oxygen underpin how reef fish can swim at speeds that would make even the most decorated Olympians envious. According to Downie, some studies have clocked clownfish at up to 50 body lengths per second, compared with Michael Phelps’ just under two body lengths per second. 

Since the effects of climate change threatens all marine life, the team believes that warmer ocean temperatures could impair clownfish swimming since the energy demands are so high. The warming waters put reef ecosystems at even more risk, in addition to coral bleaching, ocean acidification, disease, and more. 

“Next steps would be to see how different climate change stressors, such as temperature and pollutants may impact swimming performance of larval clownfishes and their ability to successfully transition from the open ocean to coral reefs,” said Downie. 

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On May 11, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will propose new limits on the greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants. Second only to the nation’s transportation sector, the electricity sector generates about 25 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution in the US. 

[Related: Renewable energy is climbing in the US, but so are our emissions—here’s why.]

According to the EPA, the proposal for coal and new natural gas power plants would keep up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide from spilling into the air through 2042. This is the equivalent to reducing the annual emissions of about half the cars in the United States. The EPA estimates that the net climate and health benefits of these new standards on new gas and existing coal-fired power plants are up to $85 billion through 2042.

“By proposing new standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, EPA is delivering on its mission to reduce harmful pollution that threatens people’s health and wellbeing,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a statement. “EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future. Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people—cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”

The new rules will likely not mandate the use of technologies that capture carbon emissions before they leave a smokestack, such as direct air capture. It will instead set caps on pollution rates that planet operators will have to meet by either using a different technology or switching to a fuel source like green hydrogen. 

The new limits represent the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort to date to roll back the pollution from the US’ second-largest contributor to climate change. It also follows the current administration’s plans to cut car tailpipe emissions by speeding up the transition to mostly elective vehicles and curb methane leaks from gas and oil wells.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is adding over $370 billion into clean energy programs and the administration hopes that these new actions push the US further in the fight to constrain further human-made global warming.  

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier.]

These investments and regulations could put the US on track to meet President Biden’s pledge that the US will cut greenhouse gasses in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. While more policies are needed to reach the 2050 target, scientists say these goals must be met by all major industrialized nations to keep average global temperatures from increasing by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre industrial levels. Beyond that temperature tipping point, catastrophic flooding, drought, heat waves, flooding, species extinction, and crop failure will become significantly harder for humanity to handle. Earth has already warmed by two degrees Fahrenheit.

If these regulations are finalized, they would mark the first time that the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. It extends to all current and future electric plants as well. 

The plan will face steep opposition from the fossil fuel industry and Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

Despite these proposed new regulations, Biden has also faced criticism from many environmentalists for the decision to approve the Willow oil project in Alaska this March. Environmental groups call this massive oil drilling plan by ConocoPhillips a “carbon bomb” that could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day. 

Many younger voters and young climate activists say Biden broke a major 2020 campaign promise by approving Willow. With this in mind, EPA officials will announce these new regulations at the University of Maryland.

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WHEN A NUCLEAR-POWERED satellite crashes to Earth, whom do the authorities call? What about when a derailed train spills toxic chemicals? Or when a wildfire burns within the fenceline of a nuclear-weapons laboratory? When an earthquake damages a nuclear power plant, or when it melts down? 

Though its name isn’t catchy, the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center (NARAC) is on speed dial for these situations. If hazardous material—whether of the nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical, or natural variety—gets spewed into the atmosphere, NARAC’s job is to trace its potentially deadly dispersion. The center’s scientists use modeling, simulation, and real-world data to pinpoint where those hazards are in space and time, where the harmful elements will soon travel, and what can be done.

The landscape of emergency response

NARAC is part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which is run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which itself is part of the Department of Energy—the organization in charge of, among other things, developing and maintaining nuclear weapons. 

Plus, NARAC is part of a group called NEST, or the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. That team’s goal is to both prevent and respond to nuclear and radiological emergencies—whether they occur by accident or on purpose. Should a dirty bomb be ticking in Tempe, they’re the ones who would search for it. Should they not find it in time, they would also help deal with the fallout. In addition, NEST takes preventative measures, like flying radiation-detecting helicopters over the Super Bowl to make sure no one has poisonous plans. “That’s a very compelling national mission,” says Lee Glascoe, the program leader for LLNL’s contribution to NEST, which includes NARAC. “And NARAC is a part of that.”

And if a suspicious substance does get released into the atmosphere, NARAC’s job is to provide information that NEST personnel can use in the field and authorities can use to manage catastrophe. Within 15 minutes of a notification about toxic materials in the air, NARAC can produce a 3D simulation of the general situation: what particles are expected where, where the airflow will waft them, and what the human and environmental consequences could be. 

In 30 to 60 minutes, they can push ground-level data gathered by NEST personnel (who are out in the field while the NARAC scientists are running simulations) into their supercomputers and integrate it into their models. That will give more precise and accurate information about where plumes of material are in the air, where the ground will be contaminated, where affected populations are, how many people might die or be hurt, where evacuation should occur, and how far blast damage extends. 

Modeling the atmosphere

These capabilities drifted into Lawrence Livermore decades ago. “Livermore has a long history of atmospheric modeling, from the development of the first climate model,” says John Nasstrom, NARAC’s chief scientist.

That model was built by physicist Cecil “Chuck” Leith. Leith, back in the early Cold War, got permission from lab director Edward Teller (who co-founded the lab and was a proponent of the hydrogen bomb) to use early supercomputers to develop and run the first global atmospheric circulation model. Glascoe calls this effort “the predecessor for weather modeling and climate modeling.” The continuation of Leith’s work split into two groups at Livermore: one focused on climate and one focused on public health—the common denominator between the two being how the atmosphere works. 

In the 1970s, the Department of Energy came to the group focused on public health and asked, says Nasstrom, whether the models could show in near real time where hazardous material would travel once released. Livermore researchers took that project on in 1973, working on a prototype that during a real event could tell emergency managers at DOE sites (home to radioactive material) and nuclear power plants who would get how much of a dose and where.

The group was plugging along on that project when the real world whirled against its door. In 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania partially melted down. “They jumped into it,” Nasstrom says of his predecessors. The prototype system wasn’t yet fully set up, but the team immediately started to build in 3D information about the terrain around Three Mile Island to get specific predictions about the radionuclides’ whereabouts and effects.

After that near catastrophe, the group began preemptively building that terrain data in for other DOE and nuclear sites before moving on to the whole rest of the US and incorporating real-time meteorological data. “Millions of weather observations today are streaming into our center right now,” says Nasstrom, “as well as global and regional forecast model output from NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], the National Weather Service, and other agencies.” 

NARAC also evolved with the 1986 Chernobyl accident. “People anticipated that safety systems would be in place and catastrophic releases wouldn’t necessarily happen,” says Nasstrom. “Then Chernobyl went wrong, and we quickly developed a much larger-scale modeling system that could transport material around the globe.” Previously, they had focused on the consequences at a more regional level, but Chernobyl lofted its toxins around the globe, necessitating an understanding of that planetary profusion.

“It’s been in a continuous state of evolution,” says Nasstrom, of NARAC’s modeling and simulation capabilities. 

‘All the world’s terrain mapped out’

Today, NARAC uses high-resolution weather models from NOAA as well as forecast models it helped develop. Every day, the center brings in more than a terabyte of weather forecast model data. And those 3D topography maps they previously had to scramble to make are all taken care of. “We already have all the world’s terrain mapped out,” says Glascoe. 

NARAC also keeps up-to-date population information, including how the distribution of people in a city differs between day and night, and data on the buildings in cities, whose architecture changes airflow. That’s on top of land-use information, since whether an area is made up of plains or forest changes the analysis. All of that together helps scientists figure out what a given hazardous release will mean to actual people in actual locations around actual buildings.

Helping bring all those inputs together, NARAC scientists have also created ready-to-go models specific to different kinds of emergencies, such as nuclear power plant failures, dirty bomb detonations, plumes of biological badness, and actual nuclear weapons explosions. “So that as soon as something happens, we can say, ‘Oh, it’s something like this,’ that we got something to start with.” 

Katie Lundquist, a scientist specializing in scientific computing and computational fluid dynamics, is NARAC’s modeling team lead. Her team helps develop the models that underlie NARAC’s analysis, and right now it is working to improve understanding of how debris would be distributed in the mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation and how radioactive material would mix with the debris. She’s also working on general weather modeling and making sure the software is all up to snuff for next-generation exascale supercomputers. 

“The atmosphere is really complex,” Lundquist says. “It covers a lot of scales, from a global scale down to just tiny little eddies that might be between buildings in an area. And so it takes a lot of computing power.”

NARAC has also striven to improve its communications game. “The authorities make the decision, but in a crisis, you can’t just give them all the information you’ve generated technically,” Glascoe says. “You can’t give them all sorts of pretty images of a plume.” They want one or two pages telling them only what the potential impact is. “And what sort of guidelines might help their decision making of whether people should shelter, evacuate, that sort of thing,” says Glascoe. 

To that end, NARAC has made publicly available examples of its briefing products, outlining what an emergency manager could expect to see in its one to two pages about dirty bombs, nuclear detonations, nuclear power plant accidents, hazardous chemicals, and biological agents.

The sim of all fears

Recently, the team has been assisting with radioactive worries in Ukraine, where Russia has interfered with the running of nuclear power plants. It also previously kept an analytical eye on the 2020 fires in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone and the same year’s launch of the Mars Perseverance rover. The rover had a plutonium power source, and NARAC was on hand to simulate what would happen in the event of an explosive accident. Going farther back, the team mobilized for weeks on end during the partial meltdown of the Fukushima reactors in Japan in 2011. 

But one of the events Glascoe is most proud of happened in late 2017, when sensors in Europe started picking up rogue radioactive activity. Across the continent, instruments designed to detect elemental decay saw spikes indicating ruthenium-106, with more than 300 total detections. “We were activated to try and figure out, ‘Well, what’s going on? Where did this come from?’” says Glascoe. 

As NARAC started its analysis, Glascoe remembered an internal research project involving the use of measurement data, atmospheric transport models, statistical methods, and machine learning that he thought might be helpful in tracing the radioactivity backward, rather than making the more standard forward prediction. “As the data comes in, the modeling gets adjusted to try and identify where likely sources are,” says Glascoe. 

Like the prototype that DOE had called up for use with Three Mile Island, this one wasn’t quite ready, but Glascoe called headquarters for permission anyway. “I said, ‘Hey, I know we haven’t really kicked the tires too much on this thing, except they did conclude this project and it looks like it works.’” They agreed to let him try it. 

Four days and many supercomputer cycles later, the team produced a map of probable release regions. The bull’s-eye was on a region with an industrial center. “And sure enough, a release from that location would do the trick,” says Glascoe. 

The suspect spot was in Russia, and many now believe the radioactivity came from the Mayak nuclear facility, which processes spent nuclear fuel. Mayak is located in a “closed city,” one that tightly controls who goes in and out. 

Ultimately, no one can stop the atmosphere’s churn, or its tendency to push particles around. The winds don’t care about borders or permits. And NARAC is there to scrutinize, even if it can’t stop, that movement.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Onboard the Song of the Whale, spotting a cetacean comes with perks. “There is always a competition,” says Niall MacAllister, the boat’s skipper. Whoever sees the first whale, or the most whales, might be treated to a pint the next time the sailboat docks. Not that the people on this specially designed research vessel need extra motivation to watch for whales.

Since being built in 2004, the extra-quiet Song of the Whale and its crew have studied whales in western Europe, the Mediterranean, Greenland, and elsewhere. Right now, they’re off the coast of Massachusetts, where they’ve been trying to ensure a future for the North Atlantic right whale, a species in dire danger of extinction. That effort recently had them searching the water for a chemical clue they think might help predict the whales’ movements—and hopefully protect them from danger.

North Atlantic right whales have been called the “urban whale” because they live mostly along the bustling east coast of North America. Once nearly eradicated by whalers, the species bounced back to around 500 by the year 2010. But ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear continued to plague the whales, and they encountered further trouble in the past decade when the warming ocean pushed their prey northward. Following their food, the whales suddenly showed up in large numbers in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“There weren’t any protections, and there wasn’t an expectation that they were going to be there. And it resulted in some pretty tragic deaths,” says Kathleen Collins, the marine campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

As the whales had even more run-ins with ships, ropes, and other human hazards, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared an unusual mortality event starting in 2017. Today, there are thought to be fewer than 340 of the animals alive, with under 70 breeding females.

With the clock ticking, IFAW sent the Song of the Whale on a mission to follow the North Atlantic right whales up North America’s east coast. It’s a bid to learn what they can about the whales’ movements—including how to anticipate where they’ll be ahead of time.

In some ways, we know these whales intimately. Researchers can identify every living North Atlantic right whale by sight, and they maintain a catalog of the whales’ biographies. In other ways, though, the whales’ affairs are a mystery.

“One of the leading questions that we have in the larger scientific community is, Where are these right whales right now, and where are they going?” Collins says. “They’re notoriously hard to track.”

To protect them, it would be helpful to understand not just where the whales are now, but where they’re headed next. Scientists at NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary have put their hopes in the chemical dimethyl sulfide (DMS).

The molecule is made by phytoplankton, microscopic ocean algae. Its importance in understanding ocean food chains became apparent in the 1990s when Gabrielle Nevitt, a sensory ecologist at the University of California, Davis, was studying how certain Antarctic seabirds find krill to eat. The birds don’t seek out the fishy smell of the krill themselves, she found. Instead, the seabirds follow DMS. “They would track it like a little bloodhound,” Nevitt says.

Why follow DMS? The chemical tells seabirds that their prey are nearby having a meal of their own. DMS comes out of the tiny algae when krill or any other of the ocean’s miniature animals, called zooplankton, are eating them. “So as zooplankton crunch on phytoplankton, this DMS gas is just released into the water,” says David Wiley, a marine ecologist and research coordinator at Stellwagen.

Some fish also follow the smell of DMS to find food in coral reefs. Given the importance of DMS for various predators, Wiley and others wondered if right whales might be using the same cue.

Right whales are baleen whales, which means they fuel their massive bodies with minute crustaceans that they filter from gulps of seawater. We know what they eat, says Wiley, but “we don’t really know how whales find their food.”

Using a device that repeatedly tests the concentration of DMS in the water, Wiley and his colleagues have shown that higher concentrations of DMS correspond to denser patches of zooplankton. It’s not proof that whales, like birds and fish, follow the trail of DMS to find food. However, it shows that following that trail would work.

That’s why, this spring, Wiley joined the crew of the Song of the Whale to continue studying whether North Atlantic right whales are following the scent of DMS. As in his previous research, Wiley sampled the water for DMS. The team also recorded the locations of whales and, if they could, embarked on a smaller inflatable boat to sample the water closer to the animals.

Wiley says his preliminary data from this and other recent experiments shows that right whales—as well as another species called sei whales—are more likely to turn up in areas with higher DMS, suggesting they sniff the chemical out. “So far, all the data point to yes,” he says.

The crucial step will be to put this hypothesis into action. Now that Wiley and his colleagues have a strong suspicion that North Atlantic right whales are following DMS to find food, they hope their studies will reveal a specific threshold of DMS that predicts where the whales might soon come to feed.

If they can determine that, scientists could use sensing buoys or even satellite observations to gauge DMS concentrations in the ocean and warn local authorities, which could call for vessels to slow down or take other measures to limit the hazards to whales.

Such a system could someday join other ways scientists are trying to predict where whales will be, such as a project that tracks blue whales by modeling their movements based on environmental conditions, or one that finds humpbacks by looking for congregations of seabirds.

Nevitt, who discovered DMS sensing in seabirds, says working with DMS and getting timely, ecologically relevant measurements can be tricky. When it comes to following whales’ food, she says, “there might be less subtle indicators that are easier to measure.”

Whether it’s by following DMS or something else, efforts to predict North Atlantic right whales’ movements could help keep the teetering species alive so that future generations can spot them, too—perks or no.

“I’m optimistic that right whales, if left alone, can do fine,” Wiley says. “We just have to find ways to leave them alone.”

The post These whales might follow their noses to their next snack in the surf appeared first on Popular Science.

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After embracing artificial intelligence, Microsoft is taking another gamble on a promise from OpenAI’s CEO for one more moonshot goal—nuclear fusion. As CNET reports, Microsoft announced it has entered into a power purchase agreement with a startup company called Helion Energy that is slated to go into effect in 2028. Unlike AI’s very immediate realities, however, experts suspectbelieve the project’s extremely short timeframe and technological constraints make this timeline unrealisticcould easily prove disastrous.

Nuclear fusion is considered by many to be the end-all be-all of clean, virtually limitless energy production. Compared to fission reactions within traditional nuclear power plants that split atoms apart, fusion occurs when atoms are forced together within extremely high temperatures to produce a new, smaller mass atom, thus generating comparatively massive amounts of energy in the process. Researchers accomplished important fusion advancements in recent years, but a sustainable, affordable reactor has yet to be designed. What’s more, many experts estimate achieving this milestone won’t happen without “a few decades of research,” if ever.

Helion was founded in 2013, and received a $375 million investment from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2021, shortly after it became the first private company to build a reactor component capable of reaching 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit). The optimum temperature for fusion, however, is roughly double that temperature. Meanwhile, Altman’s OpenAI itself garnered a massive partnership with Microsoft earlier this year, and has since integrated its high-profile generative artificial intelligence programming into its products, albeit not without its own controversy.

[Related: Physicists want to create energy like stars do. These two ways are their best shot.]

Helion aims to have its first fusion generator online in 2028. This generator would theoretically provide at least 50 megawatts following a one-year ramp up period—enough energy to power roughly 40,000 homes near a yet-to-be-determined facility location in Washington state. From there, Microsoft plans to pay Helion for its electricity generation as part of its roadmap to match its entire energy consumption with zero-carbon energy purchases by the end of the decade. As CNBC notes, because it’s a power purchase agreement, Helion could face financial penalties for not delivering on its aggressive goal.

In 2015, Helion’s CEO David Kirtley estimated their company would achieve “scientific net energy gain” in nuclear fusion within three years. Within nuclear fusion research, this energy gain refers to the ability to viably emit more power than it takes to produce. When asked this week by MIT Technology Review if Helion met those goals, a representative declined to comment, citing competitiveness concerns, but said its “initial timeline projections” had assumed the company would raise funds faster than it ultimately managed.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” Helion CEO David Kirtley also admitted in a statement released Wednesday,  but we are confident in our ability to deliver the world’s first fusion power facility.”

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Sadly, vitamins and supplements will not really keep the mosquitoes from biting you this summer, but scientists are still trying to figure out why the insects seem to love sucking some blood more than others.

[Related: How can we control mosquitos? Deactivate their sperm.]

In a small study published May 10 in the journal iScience, a team of researchers looked at the possible effects that soap has on mosquitoes. While some soaps did appear to repel the bugs and others attracted them, the effects varied greatly based on how the soap interacts with an individual’s unique odor profile.

“It’s remarkable that the same individual that is extremely attractive to mosquitoes when they are unwashed can be turned even more attractive to mosquitoes with one soap, and then become repellent or repulsive to mosquitoes with another soap,” co-author and Virginia Tech neuroethologist Clément Vinauger said in a statement.

Soaps and other stink-reducing products have been used for millennia, and while we know that they change our perception of another person’s natural body odor, it is less clear if soap also acts this way for mosquitoes. Since mosquitoes mainly feed on plant nectar and not animal blood alone, using plant-mimicking or plant-derived scents may confuse their decision making on what to feast on next.  

In the study, the team began by characterizing the chemical odors emitted by four human volunteers when unwashed and then after they had washed with four common brands of soap (Dial, Dove, Native, and Simple Truth). The odor profiles of the soaps themselves were also characterized. 

They found that each of the volunteers emitted their own unique odor profile and some of those odor profiles were more attractive to mosquitoes than others. The soap significantly changed the odor profiles, not just by adding some floral fragrances. 

“Everybody smells different, even after the application of soap; your physiological status, the way you live, what you eat, and the places you go all affect the way you smell,” co author and Virginia Tech biologist Chloé Lahondère said in a statement. “And soaps drastically change the way we smell, not only by adding chemicals, but also by causing variations in the emission of compounds that we are already naturally producing.”

The researchers then compared the relative attractiveness of each human volunteer–unwashed and an hour after using the four soaps–to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. These mosquitoes are known to spread yellow fever, malaria, and Zika among other diseases. After mating, male mosquitoes feed mostly on nectar and females feed exclusively on blood, so the team exclusively tested the attractiveness using adult female mosquitoes who had recently mated. They also took out the effects of exhaled carbon dioxide by using fabrics that had absorbed the human’s odors instead of on the breathing humans themselves.   

[Related from PopSci+: Can a bold new plan to stop mosquitoes catch on?]

They found that soap-washing did impact the mosquitoes’ preferences, but the size and direction of this impact varied between the types of soap and humans. Washing with Dove and Simple Truth increased the attractiveness of some, but not all of the volunteers, and washing with Native soap tended to repel mosquitoes.

“What really matters to the mosquito is not the most abundant chemical, but rather the specific associations and combinations of chemicals, not only from the soap, but also from our personal body odors,” said Vinauger. “All of the soaps contained a chemical called limonene which is a known mosquito repellent, but in spite of that being the main chemical in all four soaps, three out of the four soaps we tested increased mosquitoes’ attraction.”

To look closer at the specific soap ingredients that could be attracting or repelling the insects, they analyzed the chemical compositions of the soaps. They identified four chemicals associated with mosquito attraction and three chemicals associated with repulsion. Two of the mosquito-repellers are a coconut-scented chemical that is a key component in American Bourbon and a floral compound that is used to treat scabies and lice. They combined these chemicals to test attractive and repellent odor blends and this concoction had strong impacts on mosquito preference.

“With these mixtures, we eliminated all the noise in the signal by only including those chemicals that the statistics were telling us are important for attraction or repulsion,” said Vinauger. “I would choose a coconut-scented soap if I wanted to reduce mosquito attraction.”

The team hopes to test these results using more varieties of soap and more people and explore how soap impacts mosquito preference over a longer period of time. 

The post Can scented soap make you less of a mosquito buffet? appeared first on Popular Science.

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Satellite data reveals that methane leaks from two main fossil fuel fields in Turkmenistan caused more global heating last year than all of the carbon emissions in the United Kingdom. The satellite data was produced by French energy and environmental geo-analytics company Kayrros for the Guardian.

[Related: Methane is the greenhouse gas we can no longer afford to ignore.]

The data, as reported by the Guardian, shows that the western western fossil fuel field on the coast of the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan leaked over 2.9 million tons (2.6 million metric tonnes) of methane in 2022. The eastern field emitted almost 2 million tons (1.8 million metric tonnes) during that timeline. Because methane is so much more potent than carbon dioxide, the two fields emit the equivalent of more than 403 million tons (366 million metric tonnes) of carbon dioxide, or more than the annual emissions by the United Kingdom. China and the United States are the largest emitters of CO₂ in the world and the UK ranks at 17.

Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that is emitted during the production and transport of oil, natural gas, and coal. Emissions can also result from agriculture and livestock practices, land use, and the decay of organic waste in landfills, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 2021, methane accounted for 12 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the US, which is especially concerning since  it is 25 percent more effective at trapping heat than CO_2.

Methane was officially added to the list of climate change priorities to address this decade by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021. The amount of methane emitted by human activity has been underestimated in the past and emissions have surged in the past 15 years. A 2020 study by the University of Rochester found that levels of “naturally released” methane reported in the atmosphere were 10 times too high, and fossil fuel-based methane is actually about 25 to 40 percent higher than scientists previously predicted. 

“The big take-home nugget for me is they said if you look at all the warming activity done by humans over the last century … carbon dioxide has contributed 0.75 degrees Celsius, while methane has contributed to 0.5 degrees Celsius,” Bob Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, told PopSci in 2021. 

Previous reporting from the Guardian found that Turkmenistan is a top country for methane “super emitting” leaks and it is possible that switching from a process called flaring to venting methane might be behind the explosion in emissions. Flaring burns unwanted gas and adds CO₂ into the atmosphere, but it is an easy process to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon. Venting releases the invisible methane into the air completely unburned and has been harder to track until more recent developments in satellite technology. Since methane traps 80 times more heat than CO₂  over two decades, venting is far worse for the climate.

[Related: Everything you should know about methane as regulations loosen.]

“Methane is responsible for almost half of short-term [climate] warming and has absolutely not been managed up to now – it was completely out of control,” Kayrros president Antoine Rostand, told the Guardian.  “We know where the super emitters are and who is doing it,” he said. “We just need the policymakers and investors to do their job, which is to crack down on methane emissions. There is no comparable action in terms of [reducing] short-term climate impacts.”

Turkmenistan is currently China’s second biggest supplier of gas and the country is planning to double its exports to China. Until 2018, Turkmen citizens received free gas and electricity, but the country is also incredibly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. The likelihood of severe drought is projected to increase “very significantly” over the course of this century, and crop yields are expected to fail.

The upcoming 2023 COP28 climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates is seen by some to be an opportunity for change in the region. One source told the Guardian that diplomatic efforts are being made to urge Turkmenistan to cut its methane emissions. “We are really hoping Cop28 is a forcing mechanism,” the source said.

The post Satellites traced super methane plumes to Turkmenistan’s gas fields appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally appeared in Grist.

A Gallup survey released in late April found that 55 percent of U.S. adults support the use of nuclear power. That’s up four percentage points from last year and reflects the highest level of public support for nuclear energy use in electricity since 2012. 

The survey found that Republicans are more likely to favor nuclear energy than Democrats, consistent with previous Gallup polls. Experts say that partisan divide is particularly visible at the state level, with more pro-nuclear policies adopted in Republican-controlled states than left-leaning ones. But Democratic support for nuclear energy is on the rise, and advances in nuclear technologies and new federal climate laws could be behind the broader shift in public opinion toward nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy has historically been a source of immense controversy. A series of high-profile nuclear accidents and disasters, from Three Mile Island in 1979 to Chernobyl in 1986 to Fukushima in 2011, have raised safety concerns — even though the death toll from fossil fuel power generation far outstrips that of nuclear power generation. Several government nuclear programs have also left behind toxic waste that place disproportionate burdens on Indigenous communities.

But nuclear power doesn’t produce carbon emissions, and it’s more consistent and reliable than wind and solar energy, which vary depending on the weather. For these reasons, the Biden administration has identified nuclear energy as a key climate solution to achieve grid stability in a net-zero future. The administration is pushing for the deployment of a new generation of reactors called “advanced nuclear”: a catch-all term for new nuclear reactor models that improve on the safety and efficiency of traditional reactor designs. 

In a recent report, the Department of Energy found that regardless of how many renewables are deployed, the U.S. will need an additional 200 gigawatts of advanced nuclear power — enough to power about 160 million homes — to reach President Joe Biden’s goal of hitting net-zero emissions by 2050. 

Gallup has tracked several swings in public opinion since first asking about nuclear in 1994. From 2004 to 2015, a majority of Americans favored nuclear power use, with a high of 62 percent in support in 2010. But in 2016, the survey found a majority opposition to nuclear power for the first time. Gallup speculated that lower gasoline prices that year may have “lessened Americans’ perceptions that energy sources such as nuclear power are needed.” In recent years, views on nuclear power had been evenly divided until the latest poll, conducted between March 1 and 23.

The new poll found that 62 percent of Republicans support the use of nuclear power, compared to 46 percent of Democrats. The support from Republicans is likely driven by “a focus on energy independence, supporting innovation, supporting American leadership globally, and supporting American competition with folks like China and Russia specifically in terms of the nuclear space,” said Ryan Norman, senior policy advisor at the center-left think tank Third Way.

Matt Bowen, a senior research scholar on nuclear energy at Columbia University, points out that those political differences in public opinion have played out at the state level. As he puts it, conservative states tend to have “a much more supportive environment” for nuclear energy policies. 

In Tennessee, for example, Republican Governor Bill Lee announced a plan in February to allocate $50 million in the state budget to support nuclear power-related businesses. In 2021, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon welcomed the arrival of a planned advanced nuclear reactor site in his state, set to be one of the first advanced reactors to operate in the country. And last February, West Virginia repealed the state’s ban on construction of nuclear power plants. 

Many of the states passing laws to enable nuclear infrastructure have experienced major job losses as a result of a declining coal sector, Norman observes.

Meanwhile, states that have placed restrictions on the construction of new nuclear power facilities are largely Democratically controlled. Those 12 states include Democratic strongholds like California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. 

On a national level, Norman from Third Way emphasized that the recent Gallup poll reflects growing support from people of all political backgrounds. 

Democratic support for nuclear power jumped up 7 percent this year, up from 39 percent in 2022. Recent studies on decarbonization pathways and the Biden administration’s climate goals have spotlighted nuclear power as a potential clean energy solution — a possible reason for the uptick.

In addition to the Department of Energy’s modeling, the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario found that in order to fully decarbonize the global economy, worldwide nuclear power capacity would need to double between 2022 and 2050. 

In Congress, nuclear power has enjoyed some rare moments of bipartisan support. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have joined forces to pass a few successful pro-nuclear laws. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law injected $6 billion toward maintaining existing nuclear power plants. And while the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was an entirely Democratic effort, it included a technology-neutral tax credit for low-carbon energy that can be used for nuclear power plants. The climate spending law also allocates millions in investments for advanced nuclear research and demonstration.

Bowen credits Democratic lawmakers’ newfound openness to nuclear power to the increasing urgency of addressing climate change. As he put it, nuclear could be one answer to a question policymakers are increasingly asking themselves: “How do you achieve these deep decarbonization scenarios, especially since we have less and less time?”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/us-support-for-nuclear-power-soars-to-highest-level-in-a-decade/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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Best overall		MidWest Homes for Pets Eillo Folding Outdoor Wood Dog House		SEE IT	Available in multiple sizes, the sturdy construction keeps your pet safe from the elements.
Best double		PawHut Wood Cabin-Style Elevated Pet Shelter		SEE IT	This pick can house two dogs and is easy to maintain.
Best budget		Pet Republic Dog House		SEE IT	This affordable option offers an elevated floor and is ideal for small-to-medium dogs.

Setting up your four-legged friends with a cozy place to rest, like a dog house, is one of the easiest ways to help them feel secure. Dogs crave companionship, true, but they are also denning animals that need a space where they can go to get away if they are stressed or seek a break from typical household traffic. Granting your dog a dedicated sanctuary—whether it’s a dog crate or a full-fledged dog house—is a surefire way to bring them peace of mind in a communal space and provide a predictable place for them to park for naps, to shelter from inclement weather, and to use as a home base. While choosing the best dog house for your pet can seem tricky due to the many variations and styles available on the market, we’ve kept a few simple factors in mind so you can pick from a list that guarantees a perfect fit for your pooch.

• Best overall: MidWest Homes for Pets Eillo Folding Outdoor Wood Dog House
• Best all-weather: Petsfit Wooden Dog House
• Best for small breeds: WARE Premium Plus A-Frame Dog House
• Best extra-large: Confidence Pet XL Waterproof Plastic Dog Kennel
• Best double: PawHut Wood Cabin-Style Elevated Pet Shelter
• Best indoor: Casual Home Wooden Large Pet Crate
• Best for travel: Enventur Inflatable Dog House
• Best budget: Pet Republic Dog House

How we chose the best dog houses

We’re big dog lovers at Popular Science. There’s no shortage of gear to buy for your canine, but we look for items that can genuinely help improve your pet’s life. Our dog house selections provide valuable shelter from both the cold and the heat. We examined the quality of build materials, size, appropriateness for different breeds, insulation, ventilation, and price. We also considered user reviews in compiling our list of recommendations.

The best dog houses: Reviews & Recommendations

Whether you’ve got a terrier who loves to bask in the sun or an older dog that can use some insulation during the winter months, these dog houses can help keep your pet stay safe and cozy through the seasons.

Best overall: MidWest Homes for Pets Eillo Folding Outdoor Wood Dog House

Midwest Homes for Pets

SEE IT

Specs

• Sizes: Small, medium, large
• Dimensions: Medium (25.24 inches D x 40.6 inches W x 29.1 inches H)
• Materials: Wood, asphalt, metal
• Weight: 35.7 pounds

Pros

• Easy to assemble
• Made of wood
• Comes in three sizes

Cons

• Insulation kit has to be ordered separately

The Eilio Folding Outdoor Wood Dog House checks all the major requirements for shelter for your canine. Made of water-resistant wood, this dog house comes in a beige stain that’s attractive while easily able to blend in with the surroundings. The roof is made of asphalt to protect against the elements, and the elevated floor keeps dogs off the wet ground. This model is available in small, medium, and large sizes to fit a range of breeds. If you’re looking for an insulated dog house, you can purchase a tailored kit for each size. Setup is easy and doesn’t require any tools. And the dog house comes with a one-year warranty. Add another layer of comfort with a dog bed.

Best all-weather: Petsfit Wooden Dog House

Petsfit

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Specs

• Sizes: Small, medium, and large
• Dimensions: 19 inches D x 41 inches W x 27.5 inches H (medium)
• Materials: Finnish spruce, stainless steel, asphalt
• Weight: 46.3 pounds

Pros

• Attractive design
• Waterproof
• Easy to assemble and clean
• Comes in three sizes

Cons

• Some users say the wood is lightweight and flimsy
• Not insulated

Available in three sizes (small, medium, and large) and multiple colors (grey, light grey, red, and yellow and white), this dog house from Petsfit offers ample protection for your pup, regardless of size. It uses stainless steel hardware and asphalt shingles to offer a durable shelter. The roof can be opened up for easy cleaning. A raised floor keeps your pet from dealing with the soggy ground.

Best for small breeds: WARE Premium Plus A-Frame Dog House

Ware

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Specs

• Sizes: Small, medium, large, and extra large
• Dimensions: Small (20 inches L x 28 inches W x 30 inches H)
• Materials: Wood
• Weight: 32.6 pounds

Pros

• Attractive design
• Waterproof
• Easy to assemble

Cons

• A few users said the product arrived with broken parts
• Some extra parts (including door) sold separately

Just because you may not be able to afford a rustic cabin in the woods doesn’t mean you can’t help your Chihuahua lead its best life. WARE’s Premium Plus A-Frame Dog House is a top-of-the-line house for small dogs. This modern dog house will likely inspire some envy with its architectural look, but it’s also designed with waterproof shingles to protect from the elements. Unfortunately, a door, porch, and insulation kit are considered add-ons and are sold separately, but this house does come with adjustable feet that keep your pooch away from the ground. And this modern dog house is available in sizes from small to extra large to accommodate a range of breeds.

Best extra-large: Confidence Pet XL Waterproof Plastic Dog Kennel

Confidence

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Specs

• Sizes: One
• Dimensions: 41 inches D x 38 inches W x 39 inches H
• Materials: Plastic
• Weight: 29.5 pounds

Pros

• Insulated
• Waterproof
• Durable

Cons

• Some users report plastic panels aren’t easy to assemble
• May be affected by strong winds

Looking for a big dog house for your Newfie or a Great Dane? This kennel from Confidence Pet is sized for large dogs, with an exterior that’s 41 inches long, 38 inches wide, and 39 inches tall. It has a wide entrance for easy access and is constructed out of waterproof plastic for easy assembly and enduring protection in the rain and snow. Two air vents allow your pet to stay cool in hot weather—an essential feature for any extra-large dog house.

Best double: PawHut Wood Cabin-Style Elevated Pet Shelter

PawHut

SEE IT

Specs

• Size: One (comes in grey and natural wood)
• Dimensions: 59 inches L x 63.5 inches W x 39.25 inches H
• Materials: Fir wood
• Weight: 85 pounds

Pros

• Rustic look
• Designed for two dogs
• Raised construction protects pets from moisture

Cons

• Some users say it’s cheaply made
• Expensive
• Not large enough for big dogs

This durable pet shelter from PawHut is made of solid fir wood and has a total weight capacity of 286 pounds, making it one of the sturdiest and best double dog houses available. This large doghouse has a raised design and a big basking porch leading to its two living rooms with vinyl-curtained doorways. A hinged asphalt-finished roof offers plenty of protection for various weather conditions while still allowing easy cleanup, and its large side windows promote a healthy degree of airflow.

Best indoor: Casual Home Wooden Large Pet Crate and End Table

Casual Home

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Specs

• Sizes: Five 
• Dimensions: 27.5 inches L x 20 inches W x 24 inches H
• Materials: Wood 
• Weight: 28.25 pounds

Pros

• Attractive design
• Doubles as an end table
• Comes with lockable gate

Cons

• Will show chew marks
• Some users said the materials weren’t high quality

This dog crate from Casual Home doubles as a stylish end table, making it one of the best indoor “dog houses” for any space. It sports functional mission-style side slats for good ventilation, and the locking gate keeps your pet cozy and secure overnight or while you’re out. Its top offers ample space for lamps, beverages, and more. For another portable crate option, consider the Diggs Revol Dog Crate.

Best for travel: Enventur Inflatable Dog House

Diggs

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Specs

• Sizes: Small, medium, large
• Dimensions: Small (27 inches L x 18 inches W x 20 inches H)
• Materials: PVC, nylon mesh, metal 
• Weight: 13 pounds

Pros

• Easy to transport
• Lightweight
• Comfortable

Cons

• Not immediately available

Even traveling, having a few familiar comforts from home is nice for you. Your dog is no different, so Enventur’s Inflatable Dog House is super cool. Developed as part of a Kickstarter campaign, this dog house combines the durable PVC used in inflatable kayaks, bite-resistant mesh, and rust-resistant metal that can withstand the elements. Using the included adapter, you can inflate it with a standard manual or electric air pump in minutes. It’s designed with D-rings that attach inside your car to keep your pet secure as you travel to your destination. The floor and walls are cushioned to ensure a relaxing experience for your pooch, and mesh windows provide plenty of ventilation. And when you’re ready to pack up, the Enventur folds down flat and comes with handles for easy carry. It comes in small, medium, and large and is currently available for preorder.

Best budget: Pet Republic Dog House

Pet Republic

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Specs

• Sizes: Two (medium and large)
• Dimensions: 27.17 inches W x 25.6 inches D x 27.16 inches H
• Materials: Plastic
• Weight: Not available

Pros

• Provides ventilation
• Weather resistant
• Easy to clean

Cons

• Some users found it hard to assemble

If you’re in the market for cheap dog houses, consider this shelter from Pet Republic. This model is set apart from other budget dog houses by its thoughtful use of an elevated floor for better isolation during rain and a system of buckles and screws for assembly. It has an entrance of 17.7 inches tall and 10 inches wide, making it perfect for small to medium dogs of every kind, and it’s fairly lightweight, allowing users to move it about space as needed.

Things to consider when shopping for the best dog house

Your pet’s safety and comfort are paramount when picking the best dog house. Here are the factors you should take into consideration before making a purchase.

Materials

Dog house materials and insulation are another key design variant that determines whether an outside dog house suits your specific needs. Dogs living in temperate locations or spending equal time indoors and outdoors may do well with a standard wooden dog house for ample protection from mild rain or sunny days. Pets living in snowy or wet locales that reach lower temperatures, meanwhile, will gain much more from having a properly insulated dog house to provide their shelter (of course, pets should never be left unattended outdoors in freezing temperatures, so these dog products are meant as a short-term shelter for outdoor stays in bad weather).

Weather

While many designs of outdoor dog houses are available, only certain models offer a level of flexibility suitable for long-term use in various weather conditions. Wooden dog houses are fantastic for a temperate climate and dogs that primarily reside indoors. Still, if you’re looking to be prepared for any possible scenario, an insulated model finished with durable plastic will deliver in spades.

Insulated plastic designs are some of the best outdoor dog houses available due to their ability to withstand normal wear and tear from extreme environmental factors, including ultraviolet light, rain, and frost. This toughness allows them to provide consistent protection for your dog at a level superior to regular wood and to last much longer than less durable constructions, making them more effective in a wider range of situations. The plastic also provides a stable shell for foam insulation to reside within, which can add to the consistency of your pet’s comfort in cold and hot weather. Adjustable window vents and elevated flooring are other key aspects found in the best outdoor dog house designs, which provide a customizable level of comfort in any season and add resistance to flooding and excess cold.

Size of dog

It’s easy to see larger dogs as more resilient and more tolerant of the discomfort brought on by the elements, but they need shelter and comfort just as much as smaller pets. Of course, protecting your large dog from harsh sunlight and cold winds can pose a, well, bigger challenge if you’re dealing with a limited amount of outdoor space, so it’s crucial to select a properly sized design that provides ample shelter without introducing a cumbersome or restrictive obstacle to your yard.

The best extra-large dog houses on the market are constructed from durable plastics that are both lightweight and waterproof, allowing them to perform leaps and bounds above alternative wooden designs when it comes to flexibility. Besides, wooden constructions in this size class tend to be heavy and difficult to move around when needed. And, unlike most wooden dog houses, plastic designs also won’t require any extra finishing on the user’s part if they want true waterproof performance.

Number of dogs

Pet owners with more than one dog may prefer a double dog house over a traditional offering due to their fun apartment-style designs and space-saving efficiency. Double dog houses provide the perfect alternative to buying multiple outdoor shelters at once and also offer your pets the option of sticking together rather than having separate dwellings, which is an important consideration for these companionship-driven pack animals.

When shopping for the best double dog house for your yard, you may want to maximize your space by selecting a design that offers a dedicated exterior common area, like a porch or basking area. Models that integrate thoughtful features like this allow your dogs to enjoy extra comfort and convenience not normally afforded by resting on the ground. As is the case with single outdoor dog houses, the best double dog house should also be elevated somewhat to achieve better insulation and isolation from snow, ice, and water.

Size of house

Proper sizing is one of the most significant and misunderstood factors that come into play when shopping for the best dog houses for family pets. While traditional human-centric logic may suggest that a dog house with extra interior space to spare is more desirable, the opposite is actually true when it comes to dogs. 

Sure, an extra-large dog needs an extra-large dog house, but there’s actually no benefit, and there may be a detriment, to an extra-extra-large design. A model that’s too big for your pet won’t retain their body heat like a snug design, which is especially crucial to consider when shopping for an outdoor dog house that can be used in cold weather. In addition, dogs in the toilet training process are prone to soiling a designated area in their dog house if given the space to comfortably do so without messing in their resting area. For these reasons, it’s generally recommended that dog houses offer no more space than required for your pet to enter, turn around, and comfortably lie down.

Decor

The best indoor “dog houses” combine the elegance and simplicity of fine home furnishings with the security and comfort that only a dedicated shelter can provide. To avoid ending up with an indoor den that’s intrusive or cumbersome, it’s a good idea to choose a piece that can blend in with your existing furniture collection and provide some measure of versatility by doubling as an end table or other useful piece of furniture. Doing so will ensure that you not only save valuable indoor space, but also you end up with a resting place for your dog that’s much more durable and lasting than a traditional plush indoor dog house.

Many indoor options include swiveling containment doors and function more as dog crates, which is useful for providing an extra level of security and comfort for your dog, as well as a measure of discipline and regularity. An indoor sanctuary with a closing door can keep your pet safely contained in short-term situations where you don’t want them roaming around (say, when you’re running errands or seeing a movie) and help them grow accustomed to a bedtime and wake-up routine.

Price

A sturdy dog house that provides reliable comfort and protection isn’t exactly easy to find on the cheap, but if you’re willing to make a few compromises and forgo some of the flexibility found in more pricey offerings, you can find a suitable model for low-impact use on a budget. The best inexpensive choices are more sheds than houses and are made of durable plastics that offer natural resistance to the weather, allowing your pet to stay dry and the structure to last. Due to the fact that wood is both more absorbent and more expensive than plastics, this is actually one of the more desirable features of less expensive plastic dog houses.

Insulated dog house models are also difficult to acquire on a budget, and it’s important to note that waterproof plastic isn’t really meant for prolonged shelter in inclement weather. Adjustable ventilation is also not typically found at a lower price point, but choosing a house with static vents is a great way to ensure your pet stays cool and comfortable in hot weather.

FAQs

The final word on the best dog houses

• Best overall: MidWest Homes for Pets Eillo Folding Outdoor Wood Dog House
• Best all-weather: Petsfit Wooden Dog House
• Best for small breeds: WARE Premium Plus A-Frame Dog House
• Best extra-large: Confidence Pet XL Waterproof Plastic Dog Kennel
• Best double: PawHut Wood Cabin-Style Elevated Pet Shelter
• Best indoor: Casual Home Wooden Large Pet Crate
• Best for travel: Enventur Inflatable Dog House
• Best budget: Pet Republic Dog House

Finding the best dog house for your canine companion comes down to ensuring that the size is appropriate for their breed and that the material is appropriate for the environment where it will be used. While wood is a great material for outdoor dog houses in temperate locations, insulated plastic is the preferred construction for wetter and colder climes. The best designs should have an elevated floor to isolate your pet from the elements. Allowing your dog access to its own comfy space is important for maintaining its sense of comfort and security while protecting its long-term physical and emotional well-being.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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In the news, it seems like electric vehicles are everywhere—from new tech developments to changing policies to increasingly interesting designs. And while the road to electric vehicles may be bumpy, reports show that it’s absolutely crucial to electrify our transportation sector in order to reach critical climate change goals. But unfortunately, the feeling of EV omnipresence doesn’t currently extend to the dealership.

According to a new study released this week by the Sierra Club, 66 percent of car dealerships nationwide did not have a single electric vehicle for sale. And out of those dealerships, only 44 percent reported that they would offer an EV for sale if they could get their hands on one. While this is a step up from previous reporting done by the Sierra Club in 2019, it’s still low considering the massive EV goals set in place by businesses and certain state legislation.

[Related: EV companies call out their own weaknesses in new clean energy report.]

“To help avoid the worst impacts of climate disruption and protect our communities, it’s important that we accelerate the transition to all-electric vehicles,” Sierra Club Clean Transportation for All Director Katherine Garcia said in a release. “Enough empty promises: The auto industry must step on the accelerator and get electric vehicles on dealership lots now.”

One of the major problems getting EVs to the dealership lots is supply chain problems involving semiconductors and batteries, but some major manufacturers are also part of the problem themselves. Major manufacturers often don’t have many EV options in the US—for example, Honda’s first EV to sell in the US won’t be available until 2024, with Toyota only starting to sell the BZ4X stateside last year. 

For dealers, selling EVs just isn’t the same money making machine as selling combustion cars. A decent chunk of a dealership’s income is from parts and service, something that just isn’t as necessary for electric vehicles, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.

“All else equal, an electric car has fewer mechanical parts than a gasoline or diesel car, which directly means that the revenue a car dealer makes from an electric car is much lower than what the dealer will make from a gas or diesel counterpart,” Vivek Astvansh, an assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University, told Vox.

Plus, investing in infrastructure can represent a huge cost, from purchasing chargers and infrastructure to retraining staff on the ins and outs of EVs. Some manufacturers, such as Chevrolet, are enacting EV standards for their dealerships, according to reporting by Vox. 

[Related: Here’s when experts say you should switch to an EV.]

It’s not all bad news, however—the ability to buy directly from EV makers such as Rivian and Lucid can put the pressure on dealerships to get the electrification started. States where policy allows for direct sales account for 615,724 EVs sold in 2022, representing 65 percent of all EVs sold nationwide, according to the report. 

And if you’re looking to find a dealership that has an EV in stock, your best bet is to try locations in the Southeast (which have a 41 percent rate of dealers with EVs) or look around for Mercedes-Benz dealerships which above 75 percent of offer EVs. 

But for dealerships, the time to act is now. There are already 1.9 million reservations or pre-orders for recently released EVs, and the percentage of EVs in new vehicle sales has tripled since 2020.

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The piercing and malevolent gaze of Sauron, the powerful villain The Lord of the Rings, is being honored in a way that may even make Gandalf’s heroic eagles envious. A new genus of butterflies has been named Saurona in honor of one of fiction’s greatest villains.

[Related: Scientists Calculate Calories Needed To Walk To Mordor.]

With their fiery orange hindwings and piercingly dark eyespots, Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera are the first two species described in this new genus, described in a study published April 10 in the journal Systematic Entomology. Scientists believe that there are more species within this genus waiting to be described.  

“Giving these butterflies an unusual name helps to draw attention to this underappreciated group,” study co-author and Senior Curator of Butterflies at London’s Natural History Museum Blanca Huertas said in a statement. “It shows that, even among a group of very similar-looking species, you can find beauty among the dullness. Naming a genus is not something that happens very often, and it’s even more rare to be able to name two at once. It was a great privilege to do so, and now means that we can start describing new species that we have uncovered as a result of this research.”

Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera are the first butterflies to be named after the epic villain, but they are not the only animals named after Sauron and other characters from JRR Tolkien’s epic trilogy. A dinosaur (Sauroniops pachytholus) and an insect (Macropsis sauroni), and has also been named after the antagonist and his eye that constantly surveys the lands of Middle Earth. Sauron’s foil and heroic wizard Gandalf also has some animals named for him, including a species of crab, moth, and beetle and a group of fossil mammals. The tragic and troubled creature Gollum has fish, wasps, and fish named after him. 

Naming animals after fictional characters can help draw attention to them in the real world. A recent example comes from the devastating 2019-202 wildfires that struck Australia. The fires burned over 42 million acres and harmed 3 billion animals. Three Australian beetles that were devastated by the fires were named after Pokémon in an effort to attract conservation funding.

The Saurona butterflies are found in the southwestern Amazon rainforest and belong to a butterfly group Euptychiina. This group is difficult to tell apart by their physical characteristics alone, and the scientists on this study used genetic sequencing to help differentiate the new species.

“These butterflies are widely distributed in the tropical lowlands of the Americas, but despite their abundance they weren’t well-studied,” Blanca said. “Historically, the Euptychiina have been overlooked because they tend to be small, brown, and share a similar appearance. This has made them one of the most complex groups of butterflies in the tropics of the Americas.”

[Related: How are dinosaurs named?]

Even with major advances in DNA sequencing like target enrichment and Sanger sequencing that can produce vast amounts of DNA from samples, it took the team over 10 years to assess more than 400 different butterfly species. 

They deciphered the relations between groups and described nine new genera including one called Argenteria. In English, Argenteria translates to “silver mine,” and was named by Blanca and her team due to the silver scales on their wings. Argenteria currently has six species within the genus, but there are likely more out there waiting to be discovered.

The researchers on this study estimate they uncovered up to 20 percent more uncovered species than there were before the project began, and they hope to describe even more. More description will help scientists to better understand the relationships between the different species and the issues they face. 

“It’s important to study groups like the Euptychiina because it reveals that there are many species we didn’t know about, including rare and endemic ones,” said Blanca. “Some of these species are threatened with extinction, and so there’s a lot to do now we can put a name to them. There are also many other butterfly and insect groups that need attention so that they can be better understood and protected.”

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Scientists in Australia have just begun vaccinating wild koalas against chlamydia. This field trial in the state of New South Wales is an effort to protect one of Australia’s most beloved animals against the disease that can cause blindness, infertility, and death. The chlamydia epidemic in koalas has been ravaging populations of the marsupial since the 1990s. 

[Related: A new vaccine may curb the koala chlamydia epidemic.]

Koalas along the east and southeast Australian coasts have been particularly affected, with some populations having infection rates of up to 100 percent. In 2021, Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital veterinarian and research coordinator Amber Gillett called chlamydia one of the most significant threats to koalas and treatment after infection is not enough to save them. “Although many koalas with chlamydia can be treated using traditional antibiotics, some animals cannot be saved due to the severity of their infection. Having a vaccine that can help prevent both infection and the severity of the disease is a critical element in the species’ conservation management.”

While origins of the disease is koalas aren’t fully confirmed, but scientists believe that marsupials possibly caught the disease from exposure to the feces from infected cattle and sheep. Chlamydia then spread via sexual contact or was passed from mother to offspring.  

This single-shot vaccine has been designed just for koalas and was tested in a few hundred fluffy specimens in wildlife rescue centers. For this new field trial, the team hopes to catch, vaccinate, and subsequently monitor about half of the koala population living in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales–about 50 koalas. 

“It’s killing koalas because they become so sick they can’t climb trees to get food, or escape predators, and females can become infertile,” Samuel Phillips, a microbiologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast who helped to develop the new vaccine, told the Associated Press.

The first koalas were caught and vaccinated in March, and the effort is expected to last for three months. To find them, the team spots koalas in eucalyptus trees to then build circular enclosures around the base of the trees with doors that lead into cages. Eventually, the koalas climb down from one tree to get more eucalyptus leaves from another tree and wander into the traps.

They are then given a check-up to assess their health and given anesthesia before getting the vaccine. They are kept under observation for 24 hours after waking up to check for unexpected side effects, according to Jodie Wakeman, the veterinary care and clinical director at Friends of the Koala. The nonprofit organization runs a wildlife hospital where the koalas are getting vaccinated.

[Related: How to handle a koala-chlamydia epidemic.]

The koalas are marked with a pink dye on their backs so that the same animals are not caught twice before being released back into the wild. 

Australia’s federal government declared that the koalas in the eastern regions of New South Wales, Queensland, and the Australian Capital Territory were endangered. A 2020 report from the New South Wales government found that the unique creatures could become extinct by 2050 due to disease, road collisions, and habitat loss. Climate change is only exacerbating the problem.

The trial was approved by multiple Australian governing bodies balancing the risk of disturbing the marsupials against the danger of allowing chlamydia to continue to spread unchecked. It is one of only a few worldwide examples of scientists attempting to inoculate endangered wildlife for the purposes of conservation. In 2016, a team began to vaccinate Hawaiian monk seals morbillivirus and in 2020, biologists in Brazil started vaccinating golden lion tamarins against yellow fever.

“Vaccination for wildlife is certainly not routine yet,” Jacob Negrey, a biologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine told the AP. “But whether it should be used more often is a fundamental question that conservation biologists are really wrangling with right now.”

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The humble sea star is an ancient marine creature that possibly goes back about 480 million years. They are beloved in touch tanks in aquariums for their celestial shape, spongy skin, and arm suckers. These beautiful five-limbed echinoderms are also helping scientists figure out a crucial life process called tubulogenesis. 

[Related: What’s killing sea stars?]

A study published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications, examined this process of hollow tube formation in sea stars that provides a blueprint for how the organs of other creatures develop.

Tubulogenesis is the formation of various kinds of hollow, tube-like structures. in the body. These tubes eventually form blood vessels, digestive tracts, and even complex organs like the heart, kidneys and mammary glands. It is a basic and crucial process that occurs in the embryo stage, and abnormalities during these processes can cause dysfunctional, displaced, or non-symmetrical organs and even regeneration defects in structures like blood vessel. 

Little is known about the general mechanisms of the hollow tube formation during embryogenesis since animals all use very different strategies to form these tubular structures.

That’s where the sea star comes in. Their process of tubulogenesis is relatively easy to observe since their embryos are very transparent and can be observed without disturbing them. Not to mention, they breed in large numbers year round. This new study reveals the initiation and early stages of tube formation in the sea star Patiria miniata or bat star.

“Most of our organs are tubular, because they need to transport fluids or gasses or food or blood. And more complex organs like the heart start as a tube and then develop different structures. So, tubulogenesis is a very basic step to form all our organs,” study co-author and cell biologist Margherita Perillo of the University of Chicago-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory said in a statement. 

Not only is the sea star an ideal because of its translucence, the researchers needed an animal that was along the base of the tree of life and evolved before the phylum Chordata– vertebrates including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, Perillo adds.

Perillo and her colleagues used CRISPR gene editing and other techniques to analyze the gene functions in the sea stars and long time-lapse videos of developing larvae. The team worked out how the sea star generates the tubes that branch out from its gut. From these observations, they could define the basic tools needed for more advanced chordate tubular organs that may have developed. Now, they are getting closer to answering how organisms developed up from one cell into the more complex 3D tubular structures that make up various organisms. 

According to Perillo, in some organisms such as flies, “there is a big round of cell proliferation before all the cells start to make very complex migration patterns to elongate, change their shapes, and become a tube.”

[Related: These urchin-eating sea stars might be helping us reduce carbon levels.]

In other animals, including mammals, cell proliferation and migration occur together. The team found that in sea stars, cells can also proliferate and migrate at the same time in order for the tubes to form the way they do in vertebrate formation. The mechanism behind making organs must have already been established at the base or root of chordate evolution, according to the team. 

Beyond providing evolutionary insights into organ formation, sea stars can also aid in biomedical research. Perillo found that a gene called Six1/2 is a key regulator of the branching process in tube formation. If Six1/2 is taken out of mice, their kidneys form abnormally, but the mice that lack the gene also resist tumor formation, even if they are injected with tumor cells. Understanding this gene, that is overexpressed in cancer cells, may lead to new ways to study disease progression.  

“I can now use this gene to understand not only how our organs develop, but what happens to organs when we have a disease, especially cancer,” said Perillo. “My hope is that, in five to 10 years maximum, we will be able to use this gene to test how organs develop cancer and how cancer becomes metastatic.”

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This story from the March 2012 issue of Popular Science covered the nuclear fusion experiments of Taylor Wilson, who was then 16. Wilson is currently 28 and a nuclear physicist who’s collaborated with multiple US agencies on developing reactors and defense technology. The author of this profile, Tom Clynes, went on to write a book about Wilson titled The Boy Who Played With Fusion.

“PROPULSION,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up.

And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

WHEN I MEET Taylor Wilson, he is 16 and busy—far too busy, he says, to pursue a driver’s license. And so he rides shotgun as his father zigzags the family’s Land Rover up a steep trail in the Virginia Mountains north of Reno, Nevada, where they’ve come to prospect for uranium.

From the backseat, I can see Taylor’s gull-like profile, his forehead plunging from under his sandy blond bangs and continuing, in an almost unwavering line, along his prominent nose. His thinness gives him a wraithlike appearance, but when he’s lit up about something (as he is most waking moments), he does not seem frail. He has spent the past hour—the past few days, really—talking, analyzing, and breathlessly evangelizing about nuclear energy. We’ve gone back to the big bang and forward to mutually assured destruction and nuclear winter. In between are fission and fusion, Einstein and Oppenheimer, Chernobyl and Fukushima, matter and antimatter.

“Where does it come from?” Kenneth and his wife, Tiffany, have asked themselves many times. Kenneth is a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. Tiffany is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” Kenneth says.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground. It started with his first, and most pedestrian, interest: construction. As a toddler in Texarkana, the family’s hometown, Taylor wanted nothing to do with toys. He played with real traffic cones, real barricades. At age four, he donned a fluorescent orange vest and hard hat and stood in front of the house, directing traffic. For his fifth birthday, he said, he wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.”

This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive.

To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”

At 10, Taylor hung a periodic table of the elements in his room. Within a week he memorized all the atomic numbers, masses and melting points. At the family’s Thanksgiving gathering, the boy appeared wearing a monogrammed lab coat and armed with a handful of medical lancets. He announced that he’d be drawing blood from everyone, for “comparative genetic experiments” in the laboratory he had set up in his maternal grandmother’s garage. Each member of the extended family duly offered a finger to be pricked.

The next summer, Taylor invited everyone out to the backyard, where he dramatically held up a pill bottle packed with a mixture of sugar and stump remover (potassium nitrate) that he’d discovered in the garage. He set the bottle down and, with a showman’s flourish, ignited the fuse that poked out of the top. What happened next was not the firecracker’s bang everyone expected, but a thunderous blast that brought panicked neighbors running from their houses. Looking up, they watched as a small mushroom cloud rose, unsettlingly, over the Wilsons’ yard.

For his 11th birthday, Taylor’s grandmother took him to Books-A-Million, where he picked out The Radioactive Boy Scout, by Ken Silverstein. The book told the disquieting tale of David Hahn, a Michigan teenager who, in the mid-1990s, attempted to build a breeder reactor in a backyard shed. Taylor was so excited by the book that he read much of it aloud: the boy raiding smoke detectors for radioactive americium . . . the cobbled-together reactor . . . the Superfund team in hazmat suits hauling away the family’s contaminated belongings. Kenneth and Tiffany heard Hahn’s story as a cautionary tale. But Taylor, who had recently taken a particular interest in the bottom two rows of the periodic table—the highly radioactive elements—read it as a challenge. “Know what?” he said. “The things that kid was trying to do, I’m pretty sure I can actually do them.”

A rational society would know what to do with a kid like Taylor Wilson, especially now that America’s technical leadership is slipping and scientific talent increasingly has to be imported. But by the time Taylor was 12, both he and his brother, Joey, who is three years younger and gifted in mathematics, had moved far beyond their school’s (and parents’) ability to meaningfully teach them. Both boys were spending most of their school days on autopilot, their minds wandering away from course work they’d long outgrown.

David Hahn had been bored too—and, like Taylor, smart enough to be dangerous. But here is where the two stories begin to diverge. When Hahn’s parents forbade his atomic endeavors, the angry teenager pressed on in secret. But Kenneth and Tiffany resisted their impulse to steer Taylor toward more benign pursuits. That can’t be easy when a child with a demonstrated talent and fondness for blowing things up proposes to dabble in nukes.

Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from a friend at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency. Over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled Taylor around to nearby antique stores, where he pointed the clicking detector at old
radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles and uranium-glazed Fiesta plates. Taylor spent his allowance money on a radioactive dining set.

Drawn in by what he calls “the surprise properties” of radioactive materials, he wanted to know more. How can a speck of metal the size of a grain of salt put out such tremendous amounts of energy? Why do certain rocks expose film? Why does one isotope decay away in a millionth of a second while another has a half-life of two million years?

As Taylor began to wrap his head around the mind-blowing mysteries at the base of all matter, he could see that atoms, so small but potentially so powerful, offered a lifetime’s worth of secrets to unlock. Whereas Hahn’s resources had been limited, Taylor found that there was almost no end to the information he could find on the Internet, or to the oddities that he could purchase and store in the garage.

On top of tables crowded with chemicals and microscopes and germicidal black lights, an expanding array of nuclear fuel pellets, chunks of uranium and “pigs” (lead-lined containers) began to appear. When his parents pressed him about safety, Taylor responded in the convoluted jargon of inverse-square laws and distance intensities, time doses and roentgen submultiples. With his newfound command of these concepts, he assured them, he could master the furtive energy sneaking away from those rocks and metals and liquids—a strange and ever-multiplying cache that literally cast a glow into the corners of the garage.

Kenneth asked a nuclear-pharmacist friend to come over to check on Taylor’s safety practices. As far as he could tell, the friend said, the boy was getting it right. But he warned that radiation works in quick and complex ways. By the time Taylor learned from a mistake, it might be too late.

Lead pigs and glazed plates were only the beginning. Soon Taylor was getting into more esoteric “naughties”—radium quack cures, depleted uranium, radio-luminescent materials—and collecting mysterious machines, such as the mass spectrometer given to him by a former astronaut in Houston. As visions of Chernobyl haunted his parents, Taylor tried to reassure them. “I’m the responsible radioactive boy scout,” he told them. “I know what I’m doing.”

One afternoon, Tiffany ducked her head out of the door to the garage and spotted Taylor, in his canary yellow nuclear-technician’s coveralls, watching a pool of liquid spreading across the concrete floor. “Tay, it’s time for supper.”
“I think I’m going to have to clean this up first.”
“That’s not the stuff you said would kill us if it broke open, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not instantly.”

THAT SUMMER, Kenneth’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ashlee, then a college student, came to live with the Wilsons. “The explosions in the backyard were getting to be a bit much,” she told me, shortly before my own visit to the family’s home. “I could see everyone getting frustrated. They’d say something and Taylor would argue back, and his argument would be legitimate. He knows how to out-think you. I was saying, ‘You guys need to be parents. He’s ruling the roost.’ “

“What she didn’t understand,” Kenneth says, “is that we didn’t have a choice. Taylor doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘can’t.’ “

“And when he does,” Tiffany adds, “he doesn’t listen.”

“Looking back, I can see that,” Ashlee concedes. “I mean, you can tell Taylor that the world doesn’t revolve around him. But he doesn’t really get that. He’s not being selfish, it’s just that there’s so much going on in his head.”

Tiffany, for her part, could have done with less drama. She had just lost her sister, her only sibling. And her mother’s cancer had recently come out of remission. “Those were some tough times,” Taylor tells me one day, as he uses his mom’s gardening trowel to mix up a batch of yellowcake (the partially processed uranium that’s the stuff of WMD infamy) in a five-gallon bucket. “But as bad as it was with Grandma dying and all, that urine sure was something.”

Taylor looks sheepish. He knows this is weird. “After her PET scan she let me have a sample. It was so hot I had to keep it in a lead pig.

“The other thing is . . .” He pauses, unsure whether to continue but, being Taylor, unable to stop himself. “She had lung cancer, and she’d cough up little bits of tumor for me to dissect. Some people might think that’s gross, but I found it scientifically very interesting.”

What no one understood, at least not at first, was that as his grandmother was withering, Taylor was growing, moving beyond mere self-centeredness. The world that he saw revolving around him, the boy was coming to believe, was one that he could actually change.

The problem, as he saw it, is that isotopes for diagnosing and treating cancer are extremely short-lived. They need to be, so they can get in and kill the targeted tumors and then decay away quickly, sparing healthy cells. Delivering them safely and on time requires expensive handling—including, often, delivery by private jet. But what if there were a way to make those medical isotopes at or near the patients? How many more people could they reach, and how much earlier could they reach them? How many more people like his grandmother could be saved?

As Taylor stirred the toxic urine sample, holding the clicking Geiger counter over it, inspiration took hold. He peered into the swirling yellow center, and the answer shone up at him, bright as the sun. In fact, it was the sun—or, more precisely, nuclear fusion, the process (defined by Einstein as E=mc2) that powers the sun. By harnessing fusion—the moment when atomic nuclei collide and fuse together, releasing energy in the process—Taylor could produce the high-energy neutrons he would need to irradiate materials for medical isotopes. Instead of creating those isotopes in multimillion-dollar cyclotrons and then rushing them to patients, what if he could build a fusion reactor small enough, cheap enough and safe enough to produce isotopes as needed, in every hospital in the world?

At that point, only 10 individuals had managed to build working fusion reactors. Taylor contacted one of them, Carl Willis, then a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate living in Albuquerque, and the two hit it off. But Willis, like the other successful fusioneers, had an advanced degree and access to a high-tech lab and precision equipment. How could a middle-school kid living on the Texas/Arkansas border ever hope to make his own star?

When Taylor was 13, just after his grandmother’s doctor had given her a few weeks to live, Ashlee sent Tiffany and Kenneth an article about a new school in Reno. The Davidson Academy is a subsidized public school for the nation’s smartest and most motivated students, those who score in the top 99.9th percentile on standardized tests. The school, which allows students to pursue advanced research at the adjacent University of Nevada–Reno, was founded in 2006 by software entrepreneurs Janice and Robert Davidson. Since then, the Davidsons have championed the idea that the most underserved students in the country are those at the top.

On the family’s first trip to Reno, even before Taylor and Joey were accepted to the academy, Taylor made an appointment with Friedwardt Winterberg, a celebrated physicist at the University of Nevada who had studied under the Nobel Prize–winning quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. When Taylor told Winterberg that he wanted to build a fusion reactor, also called a fusor, the notoriously cranky professor erupted: “You’re 13 years old! And you want to play with tens of thousands of electron volts and deadly x-rays?” Such a project would be far too technically challenging and hazardous, Winterberg insisted, even for most doctoral candidates. “First you must master calculus, the language of science,” he boomed. “After that,” Tiffany said, “we didn’t think it would go anywhere. Kenneth and I were a bit relieved.”

But Taylor still hadn’t learned the word “can’t.” In the fall, when he began at Davidson, he found the two advocates he needed, one in the office right next door to Winterberg’s. “He had a depth of understanding I’d never seen in someone that young,” says atomic physicist Ronald Phaneuf. “But he was telling me he wanted to build the reactor in his garage, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my lord, we can’t let him do that.’ But maybe we can help him try to do it here.”

Phaneuf invited Taylor to sit in on his upper-division nuclear physics class and introduced him to technician Bill Brinsmead. Brinsmead, a Burning Man devotee who often rides a wheeled replica of the Little Boy bomb through the desert, was at first reluctant to get involved in this 13-year-old’s project. But as he and Phaneuf showed Taylor around the department’s equipment room, Brinsmead recalled his own boyhood, when he was bored and unchallenged and aching to build something really cool and difficult (like a laser, which he eventually did build) but dissuaded by most of the adults who might have helped.

Rummaging through storerooms crowded with a geeky abundance of electron microscopes and instrumentation modules, they came across a high-vacuum chamber made of thick-walled stainless steel, capable of withstanding extreme heat and negative pressure. “Think I could use that for my fusor?” Taylor asked Brinsmead. “I can’t think of a more worthy cause,” Brinsmead said.

NOW IT’S TIFFANY who drives, along a dirt road that wends across a vast, open mesa a few miles south of the runways shared by Albuquerque’s airport and Kirkland Air Force Base. Taylor has convinced her to bring him to New Mexico to spend a week with Carl Willis, whom Taylor describes as “my best nuke friend.” Cocking my ear toward the backseat, I catch snippets of Taylor and Willis’s conversation.

“The idea is to make a gamma-ray laser from stimulated decay of dipositronium.”

“I’m thinking about building a portable, beam-on-target neutron source.”

“Need some deuterated polyethylene?”

Willis is now 30; tall and thin and much quieter than Taylor. When he’s interested in something, his face opens up with a blend of amusement and curiosity. When he’s uninterested, he slips into the far-off distractedness that’s common among the super-smart. Taylor and Willis like to get together a few times a year for what they call “nuclear tourism”—they visit research facilities, prospect for uranium, or run experiments.

Earlier in the week, we prospected for uranium in the desert and shopped for secondhand laboratory equipment in Los Alamos. The next day, we wandered through Bayo Canyon, where Manhattan Project engineers set off some of the largest dirty bombs in history in the course of perfecting Fat Man, which leveled Nagasaki.

Today we’re searching for remnants of a “broken arrow,” military lingo for a lost nuclear weapon. While researching declassified military reports, Taylor discovered that a Mark 17 “Peacemaker” hydrogen bomb, which was designed to be 700 times as powerful as the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, was accidentally dropped onto this mesa in May 1957. For the U.S. military, it was an embarrassingly Strangelovian episode; the airman in the bomb bay narrowly avoided his own Slim Pickens moment when the bomb dropped from its gantry and smashed the B-36’s doors open. Although its plutonium core hadn’t been inserted, the bomb’s “spark plug” of conventional explosives and radioactive material detonated on impact, creating a fireball and a massive crater. A grazing steer was the only reported casualty.

Tiffany parks the rented SUV among the mesquite, and we unload metal detectors and Geiger counters and fan out across the field. “This,” says Tiffany, smiling as she follows her son across the scrubland, “is how we spend our vacations.”

Willis says that when Taylor first contacted him, he was struck by the 12-year-old’s focus and forwardness—and by the fact that he couldn’t plumb the depth of Taylor’s knowledge with a few difficult technical questions. After checking with Kenneth, Willis sent Taylor some papers on fusion reactors. Then Taylor began acquiring pieces for his new machine.

Through his first year at Davidson, Taylor spent his afternoons in a corner of Phaneuf’s lab that the professor had cleared out for him, designing the reactor, overcoming tricky technical issues, tracking down critical parts. Phaneuf helped him find a surplus high-voltage insulator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Willis, then working at a company that builds particle accelerators, talked his boss into parting with an extremely expensive high-voltage power supply.

With Brinsmead and Phaneuf’s help, Taylor stretched himself, applying knowledge from more than 20 technical fields, including nuclear and plasma physics, chemistry, radiation metrology and electrical engineering. Slowly he began to test-assemble the reactor, troubleshooting pesky vacuum leaks, electrical problems and an intermittent plasma field.

Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor and Brinsmead loaded deuterium fuel into the machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, Taylor became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction. Yet what would set Taylor apart from the others was not the machine itself but what he decided to do with it.

While still developing his medical isotope application, Taylor came across a report about how the thousands of shipping containers entering the country daily had become the nation’s most vulnerable “soft belly,” the easiest entry point for weapons of mass destruction. Lying in bed one night, he hit on an idea: Why not use a fusion reactor to produce weapons-sniffing neutrons that could scan the contents of containers as they passed through ports? Over the next few weeks, he devised a concept for a drive-through device that would use a small reactor to bombard passing containers with neutrons. If weapons were inside, the neutrons would force the atoms into fission, emitting gamma radiation (in the case of nuclear material) or nitrogen (in the case of conventional explosives). A detector, mounted opposite, would pick up the signature and alert the operator.

He entered the reactor, and the design for his bomb-sniffing application, into the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The Super Bowl of pre-college science events, the fair attracts 1,500 of the world’s most switched-on kids from some 50 countries. When Intel CEO Paul Otellini heard the buzz that a 14-year-old had built a working nuclear-fusion reactor, he went straight for Taylor’s exhibit. After a 20-minute conversation, Otellini was seen walking away, smiling and shaking his head in what looked like disbelief. Later, I would ask him what he was thinking. “All I could think was, ‘I am so glad that kid is on our side.’ “

For the past three years, Taylor has dominated the international science fair, walking away with nine awards (including first place overall), overseas trips and more than $100,000 in prizes. After the Department of Homeland Security learned of Taylor’s design, he traveled to Washington for a meeting with the DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which invited Taylor to submit a grant proposal to develop the detector. Taylor also met with then–Under Secretary of Energy Kristina Johnson, who says the encounter left her “stunned.”

“I would say someone like him comes along maybe once in a generation,” Johnson says. “He’s not just smart; he’s cool and articulate. I think he may be the most amazing kid I’ve ever met.”

And yet Taylor’s story began much like David Hahn’s, with a brilliant, high-flying child hatching a crazy plan to build a nuclear reactor. Why did one journey end with hazmat teams and an eventual arrest, while the other continues to produce an array of prizes, patents, television appearances, and offers from college recruiters?

The answer is, mostly, support. Hahn, determined to achieve something extraordinary but discouraged by the adults in his life, pressed on without guidance or oversight—and with nearly catastrophic results. Taylor, just as determined but socially gifted, managed to gather into his orbit people who could help him achieve his dreams: the physics professor; the older nuclear prodigy; the eccentric technician; the entrepreneur couple who, instead of retiring, founded a school to nurture genius kids. There were several more, but none so significant as Tiffany and Kenneth, the parents who overcame their reflexive—and undeniably sensible—inclinations to keep their Icarus-like son on the ground. Instead they gave him the wings he sought and encouraged him to fly up to the sun and beyond, high enough to capture a star of his own.

After about an hour of searching across the mesa, our detectors begin to beep. We find bits of charred white plastic and chunks of aluminum—one of which is slightly radioactive. They are remnants of the lost hydrogen bomb. I uncover a broken flange with screws still attached, and Taylor digs up a hunk of lead. “Got a nice shard here,” Taylor yells, finding a gnarled piece of metal. He scans it with his detector. “Unfortunately, it’s not radioactive.”

“That’s the kind I like,” Tiffany says.

Willis picks up a large chunk of the bomb’s outer casing, still painted dull green, and calls Taylor over. “Wow, look at that warp profile!” Taylor says, easing his scintillation detector up to it. The instrument roars its approval. Willis, seeing Taylor ogling the treasure, presents it to him. Taylor is ecstatic. “It’s a field of dreams!” he yells. “This place is loaded!”

Suddenly we’re finding radioactive debris under the surface every five or six feet—even though the military claimed that the site was completely cleaned up. Taylor gets down on his hands and knees, digging, laughing, calling out his discoveries. Tiffany checks her watch. “Tay, we really gotta go or we’ll miss our flight.”

“I’m not even close to being done!” he says, still digging. “This is the best day of my life!” By the time we manage to get Taylor into the car, we’re running seriously late. “Tay,” Tiffany says, “what are we going to do with all this stuff?”

“For $50, you can check it on as excess baggage,” Willis says. “You don’t label it, nobody knows what it is, and it won’t hurt anybody.” A few minutes later, we’re taping an all-too-flimsy box shut and loading it into the trunk. “Let’s see, we’ve got about 60 pounds of uranium, bomb fragments and radioactive shards,” Taylor says. “This thing would make a real good dirty bomb.”

In truth, the radiation levels are low enough that, without prolonged close-range exposure, the cargo poses little danger. Still, we stifle the jokes as we pull up to curbside check-in. “Think it will get through security?” Tiffany asks Taylor.

“There are no radiation detectors in airports,” Taylor says. “Except for one pilot project, and I can’t tell you which airport that’s at.”

As the skycap weighs the box, I scan the “prohibited items” sign. You can’t take paints, flammable materials or water on a commercial airplane. But sure enough, radioactive materials are not listed.

We land in Reno and make our way toward the baggage claim. “I hope that box held up,” Taylor says, as we approach the carousel. “And if it didn’t, I hope they give us back the radioactive goodies scattered all over the airplane.” Soon the box appears, adorned with a bright strip of tape and a note inside explaining that the package has been opened and inspected by the TSA. “They had no idea,” Taylor says, smiling, “what they were looking at.”

APART FROM THE fingerprint scanners at the door, Davidson Academy looks a lot like a typical high school. It’s only when the students open their mouths that you realize that this is an exceptional place, a sort of Hogwarts for brainiacs. As these math whizzes, musical prodigies and chess masters pass in the hallway, the banter flies in witty bursts. Inside humanities classes, discussions spin into intellectual duels.

Although everyone has some kind of advanced obsession, there’s no question that Taylor is a celebrity at the school, where the lobby walls are hung with framed newspaper clippings of his accomplishments. Taylor and I visit with the principal, the school’s founders and a few of Taylor’s friends. Then, after his calculus class, we head over to the university’s physics department, where we meet Phaneuf and Brinsmead.

Taylor’s reactor, adorned with yellow radiation-warning signs, dominates the far corner of Phaneuf’s lab. It looks elegant—a gleaming stainless-steel and glass chamber on top of a cylindrical trunk, connected to an array of sensors and feeder tubes. Peering through the small window into the reaction chamber, I can see the golf-ball-size grid of tungsten fingers that will cradle the plasma, the state of matter in which unbound electrons, ions and photons mix freely with atoms and molecules.

“OK, y’all stand back,” Taylor says. We retreat behind a wall of leaden blocks as he shakes the hair out of his eyes and flips a switch. He turns a knob to bring the voltage up and adds in some gas. “This is exactly how me and Bill did it the first time,” he says. “But now we’ve got it running even better.”

Through a video monitor, I watch the tungsten wires beginning to glow, then brightening to a vivid orange. A blue cloud of plasma appears, rising and hovering, ghostlike, in the center of the reaction chamber. “When the wires disappear,” Phaneuf says, “that’s when you know you have a lethal radiation field.”

I watch the monitor while Taylor concentrates on the controls and gauges, especially the neutron detector they’ve dubbed Snoopy. “I’ve got it up to 25,000 volts now,” Taylor says. “I’m going to out-gas it a little and push it up.”

Willis’s power supply crackles. The reactor is entering “star mode.” Rays of plasma dart between gaps in the now-invisible grid as deuterium atoms, accelerated by the tremendous voltages, begin to collide. Brinsmead keeps his eyes glued to the neutron detector. “We’re getting neutrons,” he shouts. “It’s really jamming!”

Taylor cranks it up to 40,000 volts. “Whoa, look at Snoopy now!” Phaneuf says, grinning. Taylor nudges the power up to 50,000 volts, bringing the temperature of the plasma inside the core to an incomprehensible 580 million degrees—some 40 times as hot as the core of the sun. Brinsmead lets out a whoop as the neutron gauge tops out.

“Snoopy’s pegged!” he yells, doing a little dance. On the video screen, purple sparks fly away from the plasma cloud, illuminating the wonder in the faces of Phaneuf and Brinsmead, who stand in a half-orbit around Taylor. In the glow of the boy’s creation, the men suddenly look years younger.

Taylor keeps his thin fingers on the dial as the atoms collide and fuse and throw off their energy, and the men take a step back, shaking their heads and wearing ear-to-ear grins.

“There it is,” Taylor says, his eyes locked on the machine. “The birth of a star.”

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This article was originally published on Undark.

In 2018, news spread around Saroj Duru’s village that four elephants had gathered at a nearby lake. Such creatures didn’t typically visit her region in central India — they were known to stay further north in more forested habitats — and so, out of curiosity, Duru and her neighbors walked down to see them.

The elephants rested in the water as people jostled at the shore, trying to get a closer look. Others climbed trees for a better view. After an hour of savoring the thrill of seeing such large animals, Duru headed back home. She was not sure when she would see them again.

Instead, that same day, a herd rampaged through the village’s farms. “They tore our boundary wall and tore up our banana tree,” Duru said. “They uprooted the gate.”

She was terrified, and, like many of her neighbors, climbed up to her roof for safety. No villagers were killed that night, but the elephants ate budding rice seedlings, damaging the season’s crop.

Around three decades ago, elephants began to push into Chhattisgarh, the state where Duru is from, migrating southwest from their historical habitats. Scientists aren’t sure why they began to move, but some think they were pushed out as mining and other human activities devastated their home forests. India lost 1.6 million acres of forest between 2015 and 2020, second only to Brazil.

Those shifts have generated friction between humans and the pachyderms: Each year, elephants kill around 400 people in India, according to a 2020 study. Around 150 elephants die due to conflict with humans as well, with many more electrocuted by fences or struck by trains.

Now, many people — from farmers to forest service employees to elephant scientists — are working to understand the movements and behaviors of a species that’s been subject to decades of intensive conservation work. As farmers like Duru try to come to terms with their new neighbors, many researchers are developing a nuanced view of elephant life — one which focuses on them less as pests out to eat people’s hard-earned crops, and more as members of complex communities, with distinctive traditions and cultures, undergoing a series of pressures that can have tragic consequences.

In studying human-elephant conflict, researchers have often focused on mapping the animals’ movements and numbers, studying whole populations rather than zooming in on how a single elephant might weigh risk and reward.

“We’ve not really taken behavior as a core or the basis for our decisions,” said Nishant Srinivasaiah, an elephant behavior ecologist based in south India. While group data is also important, he and his colleagues believe researchers should pay more attention to how individual elephants make decisions, understanding them as highly intelligent animals attempting to navigate a changing environmental and social landscape.

An old debate in Indian conservation circles is whether humans have the right to their lives and livelihood in areas where they come up against wildlife, or whether the state should sometimes evict people to protect the animals. This already contentious argument fractures in places like Chhattisgarh, where the state is grappling with how to protect both communities.

Researchers across Asia, like Srinivasaiah, are trying to bridge this gap by gathering data to help understand the complex internal lives of elephants — and what interventions humans can make to nudge the animals away from conflict. When — and whether — those interventions might make a significant difference is still an open question.

It’s a blazing hot afternoon in December 2022, and Srinivasaiah deftly pilots his rugged Maruti Suzuki Gypsy through the narrow one-lane road of a village near the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary in south India. He eventually pulls up to a white concrete house, home to the field office of the Frontier Elephant Program, an interdisciplinary research group.

Srinivasaiah works in the southern state of Karnataka, far from Chhattisgarh. But he and his colleagues want to answer questions that are relevant to people like Duru: How do elephants make decisions about where to forage or migrate? Why has their social behavior changed over time? And how can the animals be nudged away from conflict?

Inside the group’s village office are two cots and a wide table where Srinivasaiah and his colleagues set up their laptops. The heart of the group’s tracking operations hangs on a wall: A large whiteboard that lists the status of the dozens of camera traps that the team has seeded in the deciduous forest near the village.

The devices are installed on trees at about four to five feet off the ground, and take photos when they detect movement. Researchers also follow elephants on foot to photograph them and observe their behavior. These thousands of images create a library of the activities, movement, and habits of hundreds of elephants in and around the 250,000-acre wildlife sanctuary. After spending countless hours sifting through photos, Srinivasaiah and his colleagues can often recognize an individual from the shape of an ear, a chipped tusk, a scar.

The team divides observed behaviors into three categories — affiliative interactions, when elephants bond with each other; agonistic behavior, when they exert dominance; and neutral or self-directed behavior, such as eating, flapping their ears, or dusting themselves. They track how often elephants engage in these behaviors, and the precise places they do them.

Using this information, the team can tease out subtleties of elephant interactions. For instance, researchers have long understood that adolescent male Asian elephants disperse from their natal herds, and generally live a relatively solitary lifestyle until they enter musth, the period during which they seek to mate. But Srinivasaiah has found that in areas populated by humans, bulls are starting to form long-lasting cohesive groups even when they are not raiding crops. In a 2019 study, Srinivasaiah and several colleagues speculated that the male elephants may choose to band together to survive threats from human development.

His team has also observed that, while elephants communicate audibly in forested areas, when they are near humans they switch to infrasound communication at a frequency below the range of human hearing. “Elephants are exhibiting something that is called third-order behavior, which is ‘I know that you know that I am here’,” he said. Only a few other species, such as dolphins and chimpanzees, exhibit this kind of plasticity, Srinivasaiah said.

Understanding these types of behaviors, he and other elephant researchers say, represents a shift in the field of human-elephant conflict. Rather than seeing the species as a monolith that responds to stimuli without variation, researchers are getting a better view of their complexity, which could in turn inform how the government designs interventions to reduce conflicts.

Srinivasaiah said that a newly popular intervention in India, born from the careful observation of elephant decision-making, might help to reduce conflicts. Elephants can dismantle regular electrified fences within months of encountering them for the first time, often just by pushing them down with large branches. In response to this behavior, a new kind of fence consists of lightly electrified wires, suspended several feet above the ground. The free-hanging wires sway in the breeze so that the elephants find it difficult to tear them down, even as they get buzzed by them.

Srinivasaiah’s hope is that the elephants will conclude the reward of passing a fence isn’t worth the pain and hassle. A prototype fence that the Frontier Elephant Program installed around a mango orchard in their study area has successfully kept elephants away for three years now. Elephants had previously raided the same orchard 38 times in the span of two years.

Increased development — such as urbanization and mining projects — means that more undisturbed elephant habitat will be converted to human use, leading to more human-elephant interactions, Srinivasaiah said. “Knowing elephants and how they are deciding their next move, that is critical for us,” he added.

In the 1980s, when researchers began to study how Asian elephants come into conflict with humans, the elephants themselves were on the move, part of a series of massive changes that have reshaped elephant — and human — life in India.

Entire elephant clans, led by their matriarchs, decided to move away from their original habitats in forested areas in southern and eastern India. One of the first recorded elephant migrations in India was in the early 1980s, when around 50 elephants moved from Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, across state boundaries to Andhra Pradesh.

Raman Sukumar, a pioneering elephant ecologist in India, had been observing that clan in a particular valley. “In 1983, my area’s elephants were suddenly not there,” he said.

Researchers outside of India have also noticed the strain that environmental pressures and poaching seem to put on elephant communities, leading to upheaval. Clans have moved to new places. Elephant behavior has shifted. In Kruger National Park in South Africa, researchers found that young elephants who had survived a mass culling suffered psychological distress similar to PTSD.

“Elephant society in Africa has been decimated by mass deaths and social breakdown from poaching, culls, and habitat loss,” a group of researchers wrote in Nature in 2005.

Similar shifts, happening over decades, are felt keenly in places like Gudrudih, where Duru and her neighbors have to adjust to new elephants.

In the nearby village of Borid, which sits adjacent to the Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, elephants are a constant threat. People have changed their cultivation patterns after learning that elephants prefer some crops, such as rice, to others.

Locals feel like they have limited recourse. Under India’s Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972, killing an elephant is punishable by three to seven years in prison which makes people wary of more violent action against the large mammals.

“We have no traditional way to chase elephants,” said Dashrath Khairwar, a farmer. Like others in the area, he believes that the government has conspired to relocate the elephants here from another forest.

Residents say the state has done little to help them adjust to their new neighbors. Though the state’s Forest Department has publicized a helpline for elephant sightings, locals say that they do not always get assistance when they call. Instead, they have to settle for compensation for crop losses of 500 to 700 rupees ($6 to $9) per acre. Saroj Duru said she received the equivalent of about $120 for three years of crop damage, and nothing at all for rebuilding her home compound.

Government officials told Undark in an interview that their interventions have been effective in cutting down on crop damage and loss of life. In 2019, state officials recorded damage to nearly 4,000 acres of agricultural land in Mahasamund district. Between January and July 2022, the state recorded only 2.2 acres of damage in the same district. However, Saroj Duru says that in 2022, around 10 to 15 people in just her village reported crop damage.

Pankaj Rajput, the highest-ranking forest official of the district, attributes the reduction in casualties and damage to a central government initiative called the Gaj Yatra, which roughly translates to Elephant Journey. Based on research by the Wildlife Trust of India, Gaj Yatra — which launched in 2017 — aims to sensitize people to protect elephants. The Forest Department alerts citizens about elephant movements through WhatsApp and educates people about how to engage with them.

In the 14 months since they implemented Gaj Yatra in his district, Rajput said in December, “we have had zero human deaths, zero human injuries and zero elephant deaths or injuries.”

In January 2022, however, a young elephant was killed in an illegal electrified fence in Mahasamund district, said resident Hemlata Rajput. Three people who set up the fence, she said, have been charged.

But, villagers said, the elephants are still there — and still feel like a constant threat.

In Borid, as in Gudrudih village, people are grappling with their own questions. Where did the animals come from? Are they going to be here forever? And can the villagers ever coexist with the elephants?

Like Srinivasaiah, other researchers are now working to understand individual elephant behavior in order to address those questions. “There is a growing focus on how ecological and behavioral data can be applied directly to human-elephant conflict mitigation,” said Joshua Plotnik, a comparative psychologist at Hunter College who studies elephants in Thailand.

In a 2022 paper, Plotnik and his colleagues reported on how elephants’ decisions to raid crop fields or interact with humans can be influenced by sensory information from scents or sounds. Mitigation strategies might target these senses, such as by burning chilies to prevent elephants from smelling crops; or by playing audio of matriarchal elephant groups — which male elephants tend to avoid when not sexually active — to deter the bulls from venturing to human settlements.

Such strategies tap into what researchers already know or are beginning to learn about disgust or disease-avoidance in elephants, as Plotnik and colleagues wrote about in a 2023 paper for the Journal of Animal Ecology.

But while scientists hope such research could lead to engineering solutions that minimize conflict, the fruits of their labor have not yet quite come to pass. Most interventions still rely on a one-size-fits-all approach rather than the more tailored technique that researchers such as Plotnik and Srinivasaiah envision.

If and when such interventions are developed, it’s also not certain that elephants won’t outsmart them. “It becomes sort of like an arms race,” as each new crop raiding solution is bested by the animals, said T.N.C. Vidya, a researcher of elephant socioecology and behavior at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research.

“When you have things like conflict, usually the problem is that people are looking at the conflict from the human point of view,” said Vidya. It’s important, she added, to examine their behavior independent of humans and outside of conflict, “because that probably influences what they’re doing when they’re coming into conflict.”

Frontier elephants exist at the boundary of human-use landscapes, which makes clashes inevitable. And as those boundaries expand, such clashes are likely to increase in frequency.

For now, many people in India feel stuck — uncertain of how to respond to the elephants, reliant on government aid that they said is often not forthcoming, and forced to invest in costly interventions that may have limited effect.

Many of the measures that they can take to protect themselves imply huge long-term investments. In Nandbaru village, close to the Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary, a resident said the village government spent 250,000 rupees, or $3,000, to set up an electrified fence around their village over three years. At one point, an elephant got trapped inside that fence, leaving the entire village stuck inside the perimeter until the Forest Department was able to extricate it.

If elephants decide to move on, this will have been only a temporary deterrent. After a research team in Chhattisgarh radio collared elephants in the northern part of the state, they found that some of them have since moved further, leaving behind only the lingering memories of fear and uncertainty.

Khairwar, the farmer from Borid, lamented the indifference of the Forest Department. When people call helpline numbers for help to chase elephants away from fields, officials do not often come. “They come only after an incident happens,” he said. Resigned to having to deal with elephants for years to come, he added, “They are here to stay.”

Mridula Chari is an independent journalist covering development and the environment from Mumbai, India.

Reporting for this story was supported in part by a grant from the Keystone Foundation, an environmental and conservation advocacy organization based in Tamil Nadu, India, that focuses on sustainable development and indigenous rights.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Back in 2021, President Joe Biden announced the administration’s new Justice40 Initiative through Executive Order 14008. The program’s aim is that 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities. Investments related to climate change, clean energy, reduction of legacy pollution, and the development of water and wastewater infrastructure, among others, all fall within the initiative.

The administration doesn’t intend the program to be a one-time investment, but rather, a way to improve the distribution of the benefits of government programs and ensure that they reach disadvantaged communities. Since it was established, 19 federal agencies have released a total of nearly 470 covered programs, with three agencies joining just last month. While it’s promising that the administration recognizes the need to address long-standing equities, it’s critical to assess how they plan to make environmental justice a reality.

Marginalized and underserved communities must be prioritized to advance environmental justice

Hannah Perls, senior staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program (EELP), says that many of the environmental injustices around the country today are the result of a legacy of disinvestment in low-income communities. This is especially true in communities of color where “racist policies barred or discouraged public and private investment in housing, critical infrastructure, public transit, and natural spaces.”

[Related: Stronger pollution protections mean focusing on specific communities.]

These communities often face greater exposure to industrial pollution, higher health risks from deteriorating infrastructure, and more energy and housing burdens than wealthier, white communities, says Perls. They also lose out often in competitive federal funding processes—and in some cases, funding is intentionally withheld. This only reinforces existing wealth disparities. By explicitly targeting that 40 percent of federal climate investments reach these communities, the Justice 40 Initiative hopes to combat the legacy of disinvestment and equitably distribute the benefits of the transition to renewable energy, she adds.

To identify disadvantaged communities, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) has put out its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a geospatial mapping tool that identifies overburdened and underserved census tracts across all states.

“Agencies can build upon the CEJST as needed, again on a program-by-program basis,” says Perls. “One benefit of this flexibility is that agencies can incorporate burdens specific to their jurisdiction. For example, the Department of Energy’s definition incorporates five measures of energy burden and two measures of fossil dependence.”

The CEJST is an exciting starting point that the federal government can continue to refine. That said, “environmental justice burdens don’t necessarily follow census boundaries, so there should be opportunities for communities to make the case to receive federal dollars if their community is not identified by the tool,” says Silvia R. González, director of climate change, environmental justice, and health research at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

How to ensure that the benefits reach disadvantaged communities

All covered programs are required to consult the community stakeholders, ensure their involvement in determining program benefits, and report data on said benefits. An established number of 40 percent provides clear guidelines and expectations for agencies. To strengthen that goal, a team of researchers and advocates recommend that the 40 percent be a minimum for direct investments in disadvantaged communities.

“A direct investment means the percentage is not just a goal that relies on counting trickle-down benefits,” says González, who was involved in the report. “The straightforward nature of a direct benefit strategy would enhance transparency and accountability to taxpayers because it is tough to measure trickle-down benefits.”

To ensure investment objectives are met, transparency in reporting and evaluation is necessary, she adds. Accountability mechanisms are a must in guaranteeing equitable, effective, and efficient implementation.

[Related: The hard truth of building clean solar farms.]

“We currently have no federal environmental justice law,” says Perls. “As a result, most of the administration’s environmental justice commitments, including the Justice40 Initiative, are established via Executive Order and are therefore not judicially enforceable.”

Fortunately, there are some ways to monitor how the government is living up to its promises. The administration recently published the first version of the Environmental Justice Scorecard, a government-wide assessment of the actions taken by federal agencies to achieve environmental justice goals. Harvard Law School’s EELP also has a Federal Environmental Justice Tracker that tracks the progress of the administration’s environmental justice commitments and other agency-specific initiatives.

Overall, experts say it’s a positive sign that the Justice40 Initiative has catalyzed critical discussions to face climate change and historical disinvestment head-on. But as with any ambitious policy agenda, the implementation will need to overcome many hurdles, says González. The most vulnerable communities tend to be those that are least resourced, and they should not get left behind. Some communities or households may be under-resourced due to language, technology, trust, and capacity barriers to programs that can help them develop financial and health resiliency. There will need to be capacity-building and technical assistance for under-resourced communities to apply for and manage these investments, she adds.

In general, there is strong potential for Justice40-covered programs to bring transformational change from the bottom up. The knowledge and lived experiences of disadvantaged communities could shape targeted investments to ensure that their needs are met. “I hope Justice40 builds a framework rooted in principles of self-governance and self-determination, direct engagement, and collaboration with communities,” says González, “instead of top-down solutions.”

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An unsettling report released barely a year ago painted a grim picture of the plastics industry—only about 5 percent of the 46 million annual tons of plastic waste in the US makes it to recycling facilities. The number is even more depressing after realizing that is roughly half of experts’ previous estimates. But if all that wasn’t enough, new information throws a heaping handful of salt on the wound: of the plastic that does make it to recycling, a lot of it is still released into the world as potentially toxic microplastics.

According to the pilot study recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances focused on a single, modern facility, recycling plants’ wastewater contains a staggering number of microplastic particles. And as Wired explained on Friday, all those possibly toxic particulates have to go somewhere, i.e. potentially city water systems, or the larger environment.

The survey focusing on one new, unnamed facility examined its entire recycling process. This involves sorting, shredding, and melting plastics down into pellets. During those phases of recycling, however, the plastic waste is washed multiple times, which subsequently sheds particles smaller than 5 millimeters along the way. Despite factoring in the plant’s state-of-the-art filtration system designed to capture particulates as tiny as 50 microns, the facility still produced as many as 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater.

[Related: How companies greenwash their plastic pollution.]

The silver lining here is that without the filtration systems, it could be much worse. Researchers estimated facilities that utilized filters cut down their microplastic residuals from 6.5 million pounds to around 3 million pounds per year. Unfortunately, many recycling locations aren’t as equipped as the modern plant used within the study. On top of that, the team only focused on microplastics as small as 1.6 microns; particles can get so small they actually enter organisms’ individual cells. This implies much more plastic escapes these facilities than previously anticipated.

“I really don’t want it to suggest to people that we shouldn’t recycle, and to give it a completely negative reputation,” Erina Brown, a plastics scientist at the University of Strathclyde, told Wired. “What it really highlights is that we just really need to consider the impacts of the solutions.”

Most experts agree that the most important way to minimize coating the entire planet in microplastics is to focus on the larger issue—reducing society’s reliance on plastics in general, and pursuing alternative materials. In the meantime, recycling remains an important part of sustainability, as long as both facilities do everything they can to minimize microscopic waste.

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If humans want to learn more about our higher brain functions and behaviors, some scientists think we should look towards insects—including everything from busy bees to social butterflies  to flies on the wall. A study published May 5 in the journal Science Advances found three diverse, specialized Kenyon cell subtypes in honey bee brains that likely evolved from one single, multi-functional Kenyon cell subtype ancestor.

[Related: Older bees teach younger bees the ‘waggle dance.’]

Kenyon cells (KCs) are a type of neural cell that are found within a part of the insect brain. These cells are  involved in learning and memory, particularly with the sense of smell called the mushroom body. They are found in insects in the large Hymenoptera order from more “primitive” sawflies up to the more sophisticated honey bee. 

“In 2017, we reported that the complexity of Kenyon cell subtypes in mushroom bodies in insect brains increases with the behavioral diversification in Hymenoptera,” co-author and University of Tokyo graduate student said in a statement. “In other words, the more KC subtypes an insect has, the more complex its brain and the behaviors it may exhibit. But we didn’t know how these different subtypes evolved. That was the stimulus for this new study.”

In this study, the team from University of Tokyo and Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) looked at two Hymenoptera species as representatives for different behaviors. The more solitary turnip sawfly has a single KC subtype, compared to the more complex and more social honey bee that has three KC subtypes.

It is believed that the sawfly’s more “primitive” brain may contain some of the ancestral properties of the honey bee brain. To find these potential evolutionary paths, the team used  transcriptome analysis to identify the genetic activity happening in the various KC subtypes and speculate their functions.

[Related: Like the first flying humans, honeybees use linear landmarks to navigate.]

“I was surprised that each of the three KC subtypes in the honey bee showed comparable similarity to the single KC type in the sawfly,” co-author and University of Tokyo biologist Hiroki Kohno said in a statement.  “Based on our initial comparative analysis of several genes, we had previously supposed that additional KC subtypes had been added one by one. However, they appear to have been separated from a multifunctional ancestral type, through functional segregation and specialization.” 

As the number of KC subtypes increased, each one almost equally inherited some distinct properties from a single ancestral KC. The subtypes were then modified in different ways, and the results are the more varied functions seen in the present-day insects.

To see a specific behavioral example of how the ancestral KC functions are present in both the honey bee and the sawfly, they trained the sawflies to partake in a behavior test commonly used in honey bees. The bees, and eventually sawflies, learned to associate an odor stimulus with a reward. Despite initial challenges, the team got the sawflies to engage in this task. 

Then, the team manipulated a gene called CaMKII in sawfly larvae. In honey bees, this gene is associated with forming long-term memory, which is a KC function. After the gene manipulation, the long-term memory was impaired in the larvae when they became adults, a sign that this gene also plays a similar role in sawflies. CaMKII was expressed across the entire single KC subtype in sawflies, but it was preferentially expressed in one KC subtype in honey bees. According to the authors, this suggests that the role of CaMKII in long-term memory was passed down to the specific KC subtype in the honey bee.

Even though insect and mammalian brains are very different in terms of size and complexity, we share some common functions and architecture in our nervous systems. By looking at how insect cells and behavior has evolved, it might provide insights into how our own brains evolved. Next, the team is interested in studying KC types acquired in parallel with social behaviors, such as the honey bee’s infamous “waggle dance.”

“We would like to clarify whether the model presented here is applicable to the evolution of other behaviors,” co-author and University of Tokyo doctoral student Takayoshi Kuwabara said in a statement. “There are many mysteries about the neural basis that controls social behavior, whether in insects, animals or humans. How it has evolved still remains largely unknown. I believe that this study is a pioneering work in this field.”

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Best Overall		Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station		SEE IT	A solar-powered, connected measurement system that’s quick to setup and easy to monitor.
Best For The Money		Tempest Weather System		SEE IT	With a downward-facing intake and 1,000-plus feet of wireless data transmission, this solar-powered, Google Home-equipped station meets all needs.
Best Basic		EZRead Headwind Consumer Products 840-0052 5-in-1 Weather Station		SEE IT	Easy to install and clean, this inexpensive and highly educational station measures more than you’d expect.

With summers getting hotter and hotter each year, wanting a personalized weather statement each day is starting to make more sense. However, if you’re new to the home weather station game, you might not be sure of what you want yet. There are quite a lot of options to choose from, wired and wireless models to deal with, and even some viable analog products out there. When paired with samey-looking digital displays, it can be difficult to decide the overall best product. That’s why we’ve worked diligently to determine customers’ needs in a home weather station, while also avoiding common flaws these systems might have. The result is our list of the best home weather stations purchasable in 2023.

• Best overall: Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station
• Best for the money: Tempest Weather System
• Best with wind speed: WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter
• Best basic: EZRead Headwind Consumer Products 840-0052 5-in-1 Weather Station
• Best budget: Newentor Weather Station

How we selected the best home weather stations

I have experience with consumer weather station usage in a field environment, as per my previous career in the sciences. Used for much the same reason that anyone would want a personal home weather station—the desire to know very local meteorological conditions—I have a bit of insight into what you might desire from a home weather station. Not to mention what problems you might face! For, as it turns out when you have instruments measuring weather, you also have to open them up to the weather, a not always friendly beast. I combined that experience with critical reviews and online user impressions to select our top five models for home weather stations.

The best home weather stations: Reviews & Recommendations

The home weather stations we’ve collected vary in style, functionality, and pricing so that you’ll be able to find something that fits your desires. We’ve also looked at what you’re looking for, such as compatibility with the Google Home system, and found top-ranking products that match those desires.

Best overall: Ambient Weather WS-2902C WiFi Smart Weather Station

Ambient Weather

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Ambient Weather WS-2902C is Amazon’s best-rated home weather station and has robust weather monitoring capabilities.

Specs

• Measures: Wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, rainfall, UV and solar radiation
• Power supply: Solar with AA-battery backup
• Sensor size: 15 x 11 x 10 inches

Pros

• Solar-powered measurement station
• Connects with Ambient Weather system
• Quick setup

Cons

• Measurement station and display device use different types of batteries

The first home weather station, and the overall winner on our list, is the Ambient Weather WS-2902C. The WS-2902C earns this distinction by having appealing features and being the best-rated home weather station by online shoppers.

First and foremost is the easy setup-and-forget nature of this home weather station. After taking a few minutes to place it on a pole, you won’t find yourself fiddling with it often. Part of this is because of its hybrid solar and battery-powered measurement unit. Another important aspect is how easily accessible your data is via the Ambient Weather app environment.

One of the main problems I found with the product was that the display device and measurement stations used different types of batteries—the former taking AAA’s and the latter taking AA’s (may we recommend rechargeables). Admittedly, this is a minor problem, as the display device can be plugged in and the measurement station only needs batteries for cloudy days.

At the end of the day, this is a fantastic wireless weather station that also has nice power-saving features, making it amongst the best eco-friendly home weather stations as well. All for a sub-$200 price point!

Best for the money: Tempest Weather System

WeatherFlow

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Tempest Weather System provides information on par with a professional weather system but at a much more affordable price.

Specs

• Things measured: Temperature, “feels like” temperature, solar and UV radiation, wind speed and direction, dew point, humidity, barometric pressure, lightning strikes, rainfall
• Power supply: Solar with lithium-ion battery backup
• Sensor size: 11.70 x 4.23 inches

Pros

• Downward-facing intakes on measurement device
• Solar-powered
• Works well with Google Home
• 1,000+ foot wireless data transmission range

Cons

• Periodic measurement quirks

The Tempest Weather System provides a myriad of data points in a well-designed package. With the Tempest reporting around a dozen weather stats, it is hard to believe that it has no moving parts, reducing the impacts of age and wear and tear on the system. Furthermore, the design makes sure that any openings are downwards-facing, reducing the chances of clogging.

Unlike a lot of home weather systems, the Tempest Weather System does not have an indoor display unit. Instead, the Tempest Weather Station is “smart” and updates every 3 seconds to 1 minute to a wireless transmission hub you can locate within 1,000 feet of the weather station. From there, info is sent to your smartphone(s) and Internet-of-Things devices. This includes Google Assistant, making it the best weather station for Google Home. You can then use the data to program your smart home, such as by having fans turn on or off depending on temperature readings given by the device.

All of this advanced measurement isn’t 100% perfect, but once you understand the quirks, you’ll be able to get a good read. The rain gauge, for example, uses touch-based vibrational sensors to get a reading. Each pitter-patter of rain on the side gets interpreted as a raindrop. That’s great, but sometimes other vibrations or small things hitting in on the windiest of days will also set it into rain gauge mode. The lightning detection has its own quirks, with user reviews mentioning that the Tempest Weather Station has mistaken gunshots for lightning. However, once these small quirks are acknowledged and accounted for, you are left with the best home weather station for the money due to just how much it can do.

Best with wind speed: WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter

WeatherFlow

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The WeatherFlow WEATHERmeter is your personal handheld view into the world of wind.

Specs

• Things measured: Average wind speed, wind gust, apparent wind speed, true wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity, pressure, dew point, heat index, wind chill, etc.
• Power supply: Internal battery
• Size: Handheld