Fuck the military industrial complex, and I'm sure this administration will find a way to make this an environmental mess, but switching from fossil fuels to nuclear is in fact a step forward which is shocking.

Ahead of Fat Bear Week, avid fans are glued to the spectacle of brown bears devouring salmon at Brooks Falls in Alaska

More than 40% of children under the age of 10 globally are already experiencing at least 20 additional “heat-stress days” due to climate change.

This is according to a new attribution study, published in Science Advances, which combines climate models with demographic data to assess the age groups and regions that are exposed to the most hot, humid days.

The study finds that children up to the age of nine already face more additional heat-stress days globally as a result of climate change than any other age group.

Florida gets a lot of attention for its sinkholes, especially when they swallow cars and entire houses. But its sinkhole risk has nothing on Alaska’s.

Much of Alaska’s soil is permafrost – ground that remains below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) for at least two consecutive years. It is often rich with ice, but when that ice melts, the ground can collapse. As temperatures rise, that’s happening more often across the Arctic.

Yet despite the high potential for damage, up-to-date maps of permafrost thaw that could help Arctic residents and community leaders prepare are often rare. To fill in the gap, our team, led by hydrologists and data scientists, created an interactive website to track permafrost thaw in near-real time across the Arctic, using a unique quality of the Arctic’s version of the sinkhole.

One of the few things AI is actually useful for, pattern recognition on massive scales. Stop ruining our art and instead focus on protecting our planet.

Chasing perfect sustainability often keeps people from starting at all. Real environmental progress comes from consistent, imperfect action across a few well-chosen habits.

With only six days left in the legislative session, lawmakers refuse to back several of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s controversial proposals for reducing how much for-profit utility companies must pay after causing a wildfire.

The classic blue color of denim has an environmental cost: Dyeing a single pair of jeans uses 20 gallons of water and requires industrial chemicals. But a new approach to digital printing re-creates the same look with around 2 tablespoons of water and bio-based dyes.

A startup called Wtrlss, now beginning to work with major brands, developed a patented biochemistry dye that’s added directly to rolls of fabric using its industrial-scale inkjet printers.

Digital printing isn’t new, but typically it involves printing only on the surface of the fabric. Instead, this new technology fully bonds to the fiber without additional steps, resulting in a fabric that the startup says looks indistinguishable from traditionally dyed denim.

“We built the first indigo replacement color set that works with digital,” says CEO Dustin White. “This is really a groundbreaking technology in the sense that it’s the first time we have indigo blue that can be deployed onto the fabric without indigo.” Wtrlss cofounder Mickaël Mheidle, a Switzerland-based scientist, developed the technology.

Climate change, vanishing habitats, invasive species, overfishing: none of these pressures are letting up, and ecosystems everywhere are absorbing the hits.

A new synthesis paper asks the question sitting underneath all of that damage.

What actually lets an ecosystem take a punch and keep functioning – still producing the fish, the clean water, the food webs that people and wildlife depend on – instead of quietly unraveling?

The answer, according to researchers at the Center for Ecosystem Management, comes down to something almost counterintuitive: mess. Specifically, the kind of ecological mess that comes from genuine variety.

The Mississippi River carries fertilizer runoff from the Midwest to the Gulf – and increasingly extreme rain is making the problem more urgent.

DUNEDIN, Aotearoa New Zealand — At a U.N. meeting in 2015, Aotearoa New Zealand’s then Prime Minister John Key made a major announcement that drew praise from international conservation groups: His administration would turn a swath of waters far larger than the country’s land mass into a marine protected area (MPA). The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, planned for New Zealand’s northern waters, would have been one of the largest fully no-take MPAs in the world, but the sanctuary violated Māori fishing rights enshrined decades earlier.

Incidents of damaged trees at Burnt Cedar beach have been reported since 2022 and seem to be linked, officials say

Technically NV news, but also CA.

People are betting on wildfires on prediction markets. What could go wrong?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/aug/23/ella-baron-on-ai-and-the-drought-cartoon

Michigan is giving a green light to a new industrial dairy operation that would add millions of gallons of animal waste to a region where water quality is already suffering.

You might know a tomato when you see one, but for the federal government, identifying one is harder. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? In 1893, this question went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that, for tax purposes, at least, a tomato was a vegetable. What about milk? For a bureaucrat setting standards, a straightforward explanation such as “liquid from a cow’s udders” won’t quite cut it; according to the FDA, milk is “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.”

Even for the government, however, tomatoes and milk are relatively simple to define compared with ultra-processed foods. Although many researchers agree that these creations are negatively affecting people’s health, they cannot agree on what foods do and don’t belong in that category. That’s not keeping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from trying: After months of promising the federal government’s first formal definition of ultra-processed foods, the secretary of Health and Human Services announced on Monday that the department is finalizing one.
He stopped short, though, of sharing the exact text in either the public announcement or at a “food policy celebration” held Monday at HHS’s Washington headquarters; the definition is still being reviewed by the White House. This effort may have real upsides. Having a regulatory definition of ultra-processed foods (or UPF, as they’re often referred to) could at the very least advance inquiries into the harms of these products. But the effort also raises the question: Can the government adequately define a problem before researchers know its true cause?

So far, scientific efforts to define UPF have revealed only how fuzzy the category is. The most commonly used definition, which was developed by Brazilian researchers, takes the most expansive approach: It lumps all foods with industrial ingredients, such as sweeteners and emulsifiers, into the ultra-processed category. A classification system created by academics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, meanwhile, defines “highly processed foods” as products “processed to the extent that they are no longer recognizable as their original plant/animal source.” Yet another well-respected system, this one designed by a French analytics company, attempts to incorporate additional factors, such as a food’s salt, sugar, and fat content, as well as the “function, number, and potential health risk of additives.”

These rubrics are distinct enough from one another that flavored yogurt is an ultra-processed food under the Brazilian system and a moderately processed food under the UNC system. Under the French system, the classification depends entirely on the yogurt itself (even though a paper from the group found that 95 percent of flavored yogurts in French grocery stores were indeed ultra-processed).

Researchers disagree on how to define these foods, because the science around how and why they may be harmful is ambiguous. Epidemiological studies have found that UPF-heavy diets have consistently been associated with a range of maladies including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. But although researchers suspect that certain additives are causing dietary issues, the number of industrial ingredients or additives in Americans’ food is so large that many more may also be causing trouble. Nor do researchers know what processing steps cause everyday food ingredients to go from healthful to harmful. That means Kennedy and his department are essentially trying to define a food group that no one really understands.

Kennedy is under no illusions about how little we know about the American food supply. He has frequently criticized a decades-old loophole that allows food companies to put new additives in their food without even telling the FDA. On Monday, he announced a new proposal to fix this issue; if finalized, the rule would require companies to let the FDA know when they’re introducing a new additive. But even that won’t fully solve America’s additive problem.

The $8-billion Airo fleet promises cleaner, more reliable service as passenger rail enjoys record ridership — and faces an uncertain future in Washington.