The European Union’s Copernicus climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that June and July were the hottest on record in western Europe. The period saw an estimated 25,000 heat-related deaths. CNN has before-and-after photos of Europe’s dried rivers, calling it “a crisis so dire it can be seen from space” River Read more…
Researchers have found a clever new way to map a part of Earth’s upper atmosphere that is notoriously difficult to observe. Using orbital data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites, they reconstructed changes in atmospheric density about 500 kilometers above Earth. […] The resulting density patterns also showed strong consistency with Read more…
Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. Read more…
Three years ago environmental regulators discovered garbage burning deep inside California’s Chiquita Canyon Landfill. Few imagined the calamity that would follow. Somehow the landfill’s pollution control system introduced oxygen below, causing decades-old waste to rapidly decompose, generating intense heat and eventually widespread smoldering, federal and state environmental agencies say. The Read more…
German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the U.S. after reaching a $1.2 billion payout deal with President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior (DoI). RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900 million in a Read more…
Google’s $15 billion data-center project in Visakhapatnam is facing protests and legal challenges over fears that it will worsen local water shortages and disturb wildlife near the Kambalakonda sanctuary. Google says the campus will use advanced air cooling and comply with Indian law, while state officials deny that residential or Read more…
Several US senators have written a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), inquiring about the agency’s “plans to crack down on prediction markets” that offer “contracts for individuals to bet on wildfires.” “Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering, all so the rich and powerful Read more…