Every day, we scour the news to bring you the science stories that matter
CLIMATEWIRE | EPA was already facing a mad dash to complete climate rules in the next six months. A government shutdown could make that harder. The agency has run behind schedule to propose and finalize regulations throughout the Biden administration, and the government’s looming closure threatens to make it harder for the agency to complete work …
Editor’s Note (9/29/23): This article from March 10 reported on a study claiming the discovery of room-temperature superconducting material that was published in Nature. Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported that nearly three quarters of that paper’s co-authors had contacted the publisher to ask that the study be retracted because it had flaws. …
Controversy Surrounds Blockbuster Superconductivity Claim Read More »
“Find your passion!” Whether we hear it from our parents, teachers, bosses or college commencement speakers, this injunction is woven into the fabric of American culture. It is well-intended and meant to inspire. But is it good advice? “Finding” a passion implies that it already exists fully formed and is simply waiting to be discovered. …
Stop Trying to 'Find' Your Passion–There's a Better Way to Love What You Do Read More »
Artificial intelligence has pervaded much of our daily life, whether it’s in the form of scarily believable deepfakes, online news containing “written by AI” taglines or novel tools that could diagnose health conditions. It can feel like everything we do is run through some sort of software, interpreted by some mysterious program and kept on …
As young lawyers, working out of the dusty attic in an aging townhouse, a few of us were given a simple but monumental task: figure out how to make a new law—the Clean Air Act—work. The struggle for clean air we engaged in five decades ago is, sadly, relevant once again as the Environmental Protection …
EPA's Critics Recycle Nonsense about Cost to Cut Pollution Read More »
People in parts of the U.S., Mexico, and Central and South America are in for a rare celestial treat in October: an annular eclipse of the sun. An annular eclipse is similar to a total solar eclipse, in which the moon completely covers the sun’s face, except at the former’s peak, the moon is too …
How to See the 'Ring of Fire' Annular Solar Eclipse of October 14 Read More »
Supermassive black holes may tear apart and devour their disk of surrounding dust and gas at a shocking speed, perhaps explaining the behavior of a mysterious class of rapidly brightening quasar. Weighing a million to a billion times the mass of the sun, supermassive black holes are thought to sit at the centers of galaxies, …
Supermassive Black Hole Feeding Frenzies May Explain Blinking Quasars Read More »
If you buy into the hype, quantum computers promise to revolutionize the world. Scientists hope future versions of this nascent technology could allow pharmaceutical companies to discover new drugs in weeks instead of years or enable governments to calculate the logistics of how to feed the world’s growing population. Tech giants, start-up companies and university …
What's a Qubit? 3 Ways Scientists Build Quantum Computers Read More »
CLIMATEWIRE | The federal government is planning to withhold $8 billion in disaster funds from states due to temporary new spending restrictions outlined in a previously unreported document that shows how the budget turmoil in Congress could affect the nation. The restrictions, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency imposed on itself, threaten to delay thousands of …
Congressional Budget Turmoil Stops FEMA from Doling out $8 Billion Read More »
Born as Sarah Loguen in 1850, Sarah Loguen Fraser found her calling as a child when she helped her parents and Harriet Tubman bandage the leg of an injured person escaping slavery. When the Civil War ended, and Reconstruction opened up opportunities for African Americans, Loguen Fraser became one of the first Black women to …
Reconstruction Helped Her Become a Physician. Jim Crow Drove Her to Flee the U.S. Read More »
