Three years ago, Kim Cobb was feeling “completely overwhelmed” by the problem of climate change. Cobb spends her days studying climate change as director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, but she felt paralyzed over how to be part of the solution in her personal life. The barriers felt immense. She […] More
A decade ago, climate change projections pointed to a distant future, 50 or 100 years down the road. But with each storm and fire season seemingly more ferocious than the last, it’s clear we’re already facing the impacts of climate change: Sea levels are rising, and storms, wildfires and droughts are intensifying, fueled by warmer […] More
Hurricane Maria roared across Puerto Rico in late September 2017. The storm caused an estimated $90 billion in damage, demolished the power grid (SN: 2/15/20, p. 22) and left more than half of the island’s residents without safe drinking water. Dachiramarie Vila recalls the smell of gasoline from generators choking the air. “The smell was […] More
In the film Planet of the Humans, producer and director Jeff Gibbs and executive producer Michael Moore take aim at renewable energy technologies and the environmental organizations such as 350.org and the Sierra Club that promote them. The film’s premise is that green tech is not so green and that turning to this technology as […] More
Human beings have a superpower — sweating. When temperatures rise, beads of sweat exude from our pores and evaporate, releasing energy that cools the skin and keeps our bodies from overheating. This self-cooling mechanism has helped humans spread to every hot and humid corner of the globe. But that sweating superpower has a theoretical upper […] More
Microbe communities living in the seafloor off Peru haven’t bounced back from a deep-sea mining experiment 26 years ago. The populations are still reduced by 30 percent in this part of the South Pacific Ocean, researchers report April 29 in Science Advances. From 1989 to 1996, the DISturbance and reCOLonization, or DISCOL, experiment plowed grooves […] More
Superconductivity under pressure, Science News, May 2, 1970 – Cooling certain metals to temperatures near absolute zero turns them into superconductors, substances without electrical resistance, in which currents flow without power loss. In recent years it has become apparent that in some cases pressure as well as cooling has something to do with inducing superconductivity. Metals are […] More
Superconductors are getting edgy. For the first time, scientists have spotted a superconducting current traveling along the edge of a material, like a trail of ants crawling along the rim of a dinner plate without venturing into its middle. Normally, such superconducting currents, in which electricity flows without any loss of energy, permeate an entire […] More
