The first time Chris Smith tried to grow taro on his experimental farm in western North Carolina, the plants were too eager. He’d started them in a heated greenhouse one February day a few years ago, thinking the tropical crop would need plenty of time to establish. Within a month, the taro had sprung up […]
The debate over renewable energy projects in the state with the most expensive electricity bills in the country has landed on the desk of Governor David Ige in Hawaii. While the governor has until July 12 to make a final decision on whether to veto a controversial renewable energy bill passed by the Hawaii state […]
In early May, a woman in her 90s was hospitalized in Connecticut with a strange assortment of symptoms: confusion, nausea, chest pain, chills, and fever. Two weeks later, on May 17, she died. The culprit was a blacklegged tick, a minuscule arachnid about the size of a sesame seed when fully grown. Blacklegged ticks, commonly […]
About 55 miles southeast of New Orleans, just before the leg of the Mississippi River splits into its three-toed foot of a delta, a crack in the river’s east bank has swollen into a massive channel. Over the past several years, it’s continued to expand, diverting more and more water from its parent river into […]
Scientists revealed new measurements this week that show parts of the Arctic are warming five to seven times faster than the rest of the world, warming that could bring about even more extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere. The data comes from a portion of the Arctic Ocean north of Norway and Russia. Scientists with […]
In 1942, when Mary Abo was 2 years old, the U.S. government arrested her father and took the rest of the Abo family from Juneau, Alaska, to the Minidoka prison camp in the desert of south-central Idaho. The United States had just entered World War II. The five members of the Abo family spent the […]
It’s looking to be a hot summer for just about everyone in the United States. And there’s not much hope for rain to ease the heat. That’s according to the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate scientists, released Thursday. From June to August, unusually hot temperatures are expected across all 50 […]
Humans have evolved to spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping. How we sleep impacts productivity, alertness, mood, hunger, energy, and other basic functions that comprise a huge chunk of the human experience. But we are not sleeping well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1 in 3 American adults don’t […]
Northeastern Minnesota’s Iron Range has been a major mining hub since the 1860s. Nestled among thick forests and many of the state’s famed “10,000 lakes,” open-pit mines there produce low-grade iron ore that’s shipped to steel mills around the country. But for the last few decades, as the U.S. steel industry has waned and demand […]
Ever since Hurricane Katrina swept across the Deep South in 2005, shredding the region’s railways, it’s been impossible to take a train heading east from New Orleans to the rest of the Gulf Coast. For years, Amtrak has been trying to restore service in the form of a twice-a-day line between New Orleans and Mobile, […]