The Olympic Games are an ideal venue to showcase new ideas to world. In a world where reducing carbon emissions is a priority, could the Olympics be doing more?
Puerto Rico’s power utility, PREPA, has been decimated by years of scarcity and bad management. But will privatizing it really turn the lights back on for Puerto Ricans?
AP Photo/Carlos Giusti
Many Puerto Ricans are happy to see their broke power utility sold off to whoever can get the lights turned back on. But privatizing the island’s energy grid may bring more problems than relief.
Arguments against climate change tend to share the same flaws.
gillian maniscalco/Flickr
A new study shows that polar bears require more food than previously thought. The scientists used collars that tracked bears’ movements and metabolic rates.
Images created by NASA with satellite data helped the U.S. Department of Agriculture analyze outbreak patterns for southern pine beetles in Alabama, in spring 2016.
NASA
Big data open-access publishing and other advances offer ecologists the ability to forecast events like pest outbreaks over days and seasons rather than decades. But scholars need to seize this opportunity.
An international team has melted a hole through Antarctica’s largest ice shelf to explore the hidden ocean below, and the shelf’s vulnerability to climate change.
At COP23, members of the America’s Pledge network, which brings together those involved in the fight against climate change in the United States.
Patrik Stollarz/AFP
With the US announcement that it would withdrawl from the Paris Accord, several American states are mobilizing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Emmanuel Macron, president of France, gestures during a special address in Davos, Switzerland.
AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
The French president said he would eliminate all coal-fired plants in his country by 2021, while his US counterpart is pushing policies intended to make them more profitable. Either way, the laws of economics will win.
Research can be spun, within hours, into a story of past failure. In fact, it’s a case of continuous improvement.
People collect water piped in from a mountain creek in Utuado, Puerto Rico on Oct. 14, 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were still without running water.
AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa
Climate change threatens to widen the health gap between the haves and have-nots. Here’s why addressing environmental issues that drive poor health is a starting point.
Artist’s view of Aqua, a NASA satellite in orbit around the Earth since 2002 that studies the water cycle.
AIRS/Flickr
René Garello, IMT Atlantique – Institut Mines-Télécom
Several satellites have been launched in recent years with the objective of measuring data related to climate change. They must be complementary to measurements made on earth.
Giant triton molluscs are a useful ally in battling the coral-grazing crown-of-thorns starfish.
AAP Image/AIMS, K Goodbun
The federal government’s new funding aims to spread the net wide in investigating possible ways to protect the Great Barrier Reef’s corals. Winning this battle will require a wide range of weapons.
From biotech to climate change, advances in technology raise significant moral questions. To engage responsibly, our next generation of scientists need training in the arts and ethics.
(Shutterstock)
Universities must train scientists to engage with the ethics of emerging technologies, rather than functioning as cogs in the engine of economic development. Integrating the arts into STEM can help.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, left, and French President Emmanuel Macron.
AP Photo/Francois Mori
Its plan to stop lending money for oil and gas projects embraces the spirit of the Paris agreement at a time when the U.S. is going in a different direction.
Aerial view of the Sydney Football Stadium, which is to be rebuilt, and Sydney Cricket Ground. Questions of stadium design to deal with extreme heat are becoming more urgent.
AAP
The Australian Open tennis and the recent Ashes Test cricket series show why our sporting stadiums need to be “climate-proofed” to deal with extreme heat.
Endangered green turtles like this one on Raine Island in Queensland’s far north face an uncertain future – one that depends largely on effective conservation measures.
AAP
With 99% of green sea turtles in the northern Great Barrier Reef hatching as females due to changing climate, the future for this species now depends largely on effective global conservation measures.
The northern lights dance across the sky in the Arctic.
(Shutterstock)