|
|
This year’s TIME 100 is, as always, full of personalities whose influence is at once lasting and admirable, and who have done big, powerful things to shake the world. But many big, powerful things have their roots in small, humble things – things like the inch-and-a-half-long zebrafish created by a University of Exeter team that [...]
It’s that time of year again—and no, I don’t mean International Jugglers Day, or even worse, Newspaper Columnists Day. It’s the annual unveiling of the TIME 100 list, our roundup of the most interesting and influential people in the world. It’s a group that ranges from Presidents to pop stars. It’s triggered a dance off [...]
That’s the number of deaths that could occur worldwide due to air pollution by 2050 if nothing is done to change the fossil fuel-heavy energy mix, according to a new report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). That’s up from 4 million a year today, and it means that air pollution—which includes [...]
Border customs agents are on the look out for many things: illegal drugs, stolen goods, smuggled liquor and sometimes even people. Add one more target: animal-borne viruses. In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS One, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the EcoHealth Alliance, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) [...]
Bjorn Lomborg’s middle name is not actually “controversial,” but maybe it should be. The Danish economist—and TIME 100 selection—gained notoriety for books like The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It that called into question the basic green assumptions that the world is getting worse and that climate change is an existential threat to the human race. In recent years [...]
Environmentalists here in the U.S. are not happy with President Obama, in part because he pulled back on a promise to tighten ground-level ozone and smog standards for air pollution. But American greens should remember: much of the rest of the world has it far, far, far worse. That’s one takeaway from a new report [...]
Solar, wind, biofuels and other renewable sources of energy get the hype, but there’s no getting around the fact that most of our electricity still comes from fossil fuels. About half the U.S.’s electricity and 40% of the world’s power comes from carbon-intensive coal. That’s bad news for the climate—coal is the single-biggest source of [...]
If there’s one thing you’re guaranteed to see in media coverage of the wildfires raging through the Southwest, it’s numbers: people evacuated, homes destroyed, and square miles swallowed by the savage flames. While these are crucial slices of information in any natural disaster, it’s important to remember the other, more secondary damage too – the [...]
Cross posted from Healthland: Endocrine disruption, diabetes, obesity—to the list of ills potentially associated with exposure to the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), you can add one more: childhood asthma. In a new study presented over the weekend at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Denver, researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine found [...]
Crossposted from Healthland: It can sometimes seem that we spend most of our journalistic time trying to scare you. Or maybe that’s just my posts — I tend to get the environmental danger of the week. But, sorry to say, I’ve got another thing for you to be frightened of, and it’s something you might [...]
