When Joy Domingo-Kameenui spent two weeks in her native Hawaii as part of MIT class 1.091 (Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences), she was surprised to learn about the number of invasive and endangered species. “I knew about Hawaiian ecology from middle and high school but wasn’t fully aware to the extent of how invasive species and […]
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It’s hard to calculate the sheer devastation in Rolling Fork, Miss., after a deadly tornado ripped through the small rural community. According to reports, at least 26 people died in the storm that passed through Mississippi and Alabama on Friday. Roughly half of those deaths were in Rolling Fork, a predominantly Black town with less […]
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This season, as of February 19, the total number of chill hours is 746, compared to a historical average of over 1,100. Both peaches and blueberries, which are produced in abundance in the American South, depend on a certain number of what’s known as “chill hours” in winter to trigger fruit production in the spring […]
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Other reasons used to deny bond included that they were muddy and wet (they were all in a forest, and it had rained) and had the jail support number on them (common practice during protests). Another individual was a law student arrested at a food truck who would have been forced to withdraw from law […]
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On Wednesday, Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw told a Senate hearing he was “terribly sorry” for February’s fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The train was loaded with poisonous chemicals. The most notable was vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen. The resulting spills and plumes sickened many residents, killed 40,000 fish, and caused a […]
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Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl […]
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Watch live: Biden to announce two new national monuments | The Hill Skip to content [embedded content] President Biden is announcing several major initiatives Tuesday aimed at protecting natural and culturally significant areas and addressing other environmental issues at an event the White House has titled the Conservation in Action Summit. Foremost in the program […]
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The Tribune notes that such hesitation in the face of an AR-15 had led police in other shootings—including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—to respond less quickly. Republicans, both in Texas and nationally, have opposed banning or further regulating weapons like the AR-15—even now as police […]
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The Tribune notes that such hesitation in the face of an AR-15 had led police in other shootings—including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando—to respond less quickly. Republicans, both in Texas and nationally, have opposed banning or further regulating weapons like the AR-15—even now as police […]
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A new research collaboration with The Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones (DANAT) will seek to develop advanced characterization tools for the analysis of the properties of pearls and to explore technologies to assign unique identifiers to individual pearls. The three-year project will be led by Admir Mašić, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, […]
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NewsOne Featured Video Source: Patrick Smith / Getty March Madness means 68 teams vying to become champion, Cinderella runs for a few underdogs and big business for the NCAA, which earns 85% of its annual operating budget during the men’s basketball tournament. But all of that comes at a tremendous cost: An estimated 463 million […]
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This month, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against two petrochemical companies that may be the reason why St. John the Baptist Parish of Louisiana or “Cancer Alley” has the highest cancer risk in the entire nation, per The Guardian. Residents say the suit is too late, after being subject to poison pumped […]
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And money talks. Hoeven has seemingly expressed little public concern about the rail industry since the East Palestine derailment. In 2021, however, he, Cramer, and Armstrong did send a letter to the Surface Transportation Board advocating for the Canadian Pacific (CP) and Kansas City Southern (KCS) merger. As The American Prospect reports, Hoeven was rewarded […]
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WASHINGTON — A growing chorus of conservative pundits and politicians have said the failure of Silicon Valley Bank was the result of the bank’s “woke” policies, blaming the California lender’s commitments to workplace diversity and environmentally and socially conscious investments. These claims are without merit. The bank’s collapse was due to financial missteps and a […]
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If the bill is passed into law, Florida would also refuse to recognize any out-of-state licenses issued to undocumented people. Authorities would be directed to take DNA samples from undocumented people who are booked into jails or detention facilities per orders from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Finally, the bill orders Medicaid-accepting hospitals to ask […]
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“Biden approved Willow knowing full well that it’ll cause massive and irreversible destruction, which is appalling,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “People and wildlife will suffer, and extracting and burning more fossil fuel will warm the climate even faster. Biden has no excuse for letting this project go […]
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Almost every large corporation is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 but lacks a roadmap to get there, says John Sterman, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and leader of its Climate Pathways Project. Sterman and colleagues offer a suite of well-honed […]
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In a lab on the fourth floor of MIT’s Building 56, a group of Massachusetts high school students gathered around a device that measures conductivity. Vincent Nguyen, 15, from Saugus, thought of the times the material on their sample electrode flaked off the moment they took it out of the oven. Or how the electrode […]
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When MIT’s Office of Sustainability (MITOS) first launched in 2013, it was charged with integrating sustainability across all levels of campus by engaging the collective brainpower of students, staff, faculty, alumni, and partners. At the eighth annual Sustainability Connect, MITOS’s signature event, held nearly a decade later, the room was filled with MIT community members […]
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Assil Halimi has loved science since he was a child, but it was a singular experience at a college internship that stoked his interest in nuclear engineering. As part of work on a conceptual design for an aircraft electric propulsion system, Halimi had to read a chart that compared the energy density of various fuel […]
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A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation. The study, which appears today in Nature, […]
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Photo: 1-800-Flowers.com Even if you don’t have plants of your own, it’s hard not to love the Plant Kween Instagram account. Plant influencer and educator, Christopher Griffin started it in 2016 to share the joys that come along with being a plant parent along with lessons for caring for your ficus and ferns. CC Off […]
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How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the short-term mindset of contemporary life was expanded to encompass new dimensions of past and future — diving into the depths of geological history and projecting forward to imagine the […]
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And Cruz has done his best to earn the corporate cash. In 2021, he co-sponsored legislation narrowing the amount of time agencies have to complete environmental reviews of proposed federal action, and assigning penalties to agencies that don’t comply with those timelines. Cruz also pushed a bill in the same Congress, alongside Senators John Kennedy […]
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Composers find inspiration from many sources. For renowned MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover, reading the Richard Powers novel “The Overstory” instantly made him want to adapt it as an operatic composition. This might not seem an obvious choice to some: “The Overstory” is about a group of people, including a wrongly maligned scientist, who […]
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Climate policies are typically designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from human activities and drive climate change. The largest source of these emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels, which increases atmospheric concentrations of ozone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other air pollutants that pose public health risks. While climate policies may result […]
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The ruling was catastrophic for Donziger, who has denied any wrongdoing. Kaplan’s findings led to Donziger’s disbarment in New York and the District of Columbia. When federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute Donziger for any alleged offenses, Kaplan hired a private law firm to prosecute him on six counts […]
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As officials investigate the recent derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in eastern Ohio, concerns about the disaster’s effects on human health and the environment are growing, and experts warned that understanding the causes and consequences could require a more comprehensive investigation than what they have seen so far. “There’s just a lot of […]
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MIT senior Sylas Horowitz kneeled at the edge of a marsh, tinkering with a blue-and-black robot about the size and shape of a shoe box and studded with lights and mini propellers. The robot was a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) — an underwater drone slated to collect water samples from beneath a sheet of Arctic […]
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As plastic pollution continues to mount, with growing risks to ecosystems and wildlife, manufacturers are beginning to make ambitious commitments to keep new plastics out of the environment. A growing number have signed onto the U.S. Plastics Pact, which pledges to make 100 percent of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and to see 50 […]
Read MoreMeanwhile, the environmental campaign was picking up steam. Days after the ship departed, Turkish officials asked their Brazilian counterparts for a new inventory of hazardous substances. Dissatisfied with the response, Turkish officials canceled import permission. The ship and its tug, which by then had reached Gibraltar, had to turn back. Environmental groups counted it as […]
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