In the late 1990s, Vaughan learned that Aqua Life, an ornamental-fish-breeding operation on a small island in the Bahamas, was shutting down. Harbor Branch made a bid to buy what…
Tag: Science / Environment
Technology Can Fix the Climate Mess—but Not Without Help
Advances in battery technology, for instance, have driven down electric vehicle prices, leading to increased adoption among drivers. The costs of lithium-ion batteries, and of wind and solar power, dropped…
How Does a Newt Cross the Road? With Lots of Human Help
Around a hundred miles to the south of Chileno Valley Road, another group of volunteers—the Alma Bridge Newt Patrol—have been painstakingly documenting more than 5,000 newts a year that perish…
Biden Invokes the Defense Production Act to Fix the Lithium Shortage
The first question to ask about the lithium shortage is whether there is a shortage at all. Lithium is an element that is at once everywhere and nowhere. Gather up…
Companies May Soon Have to Reveal a Hidden Risk: Carbon Emissions
In 2020, Microsoft decided it wanted to be “carbon negative” by the end of the decade—to remove more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it produces. That first year, it…
A Bold Idea to Stall the Climate Crisis—by Building Better Trees
Now a Californian startup has taken the same approach, but this time with poplar trees. In a non-peer-reviewed preprint first posted on February 19, scientists at Living Carbon claimed that…
A Global Boom in Fences Is Harming Wildlife
Fence construction is growing rapidly throughout the world. An extension of the dingo fence is underway to add another 460 miles. Stout, often impermeable, fences are going up on national…
The Deadly Cyclone That Changed the Course of the Cold War
Frustrated, Frank got back in the Vauxhall to get to his next meeting. The car inched with the traffic past walls full of political slogans splashed in red paint in…
Scientists Map Yellowstone’s Plumbing With … a Helicopter
You probably know that Yellowstone National Park’s iconic Old Faithful, which fires geysers up to 180 feet in the air, gets its kick from underlying magma that heats and propels…
Underwater Permafrost Is a Big, Gassy Wild Card for the Climate
The result is the worrisome image shown above—a massive sinkhole indicating that the subsea permafrost has thawed and collapsed. This sinkhole is a giant among dozens of pockmarks the researchers…