Anuradha

How Icelanders are grieving the loss of 'dead' and melting glaciers Iceland’s glaciers are disappearing. For locals, it’s a profoundly sad loss.

Iceland is becoming no-ice land.

Tawny owl

Six weeks ago, I picked up a year-old tawny owl with a broken leg off the main road near our home and dropped him off at our nearest vet.

After a few days, I received one of the most bizarre phone calls I’ve ever had, asking “So when are you coming to pick up your owl?” 🧵

The fact they jumped straight to AI actors modeled after women when, if I’m not mistaken, male actors are a higher labor cost kind of says it all doesn’t it,

The climate movement’s biggest weakness What the climate movement is getting dead wrong.

Meat is a blind spot for people who care about climate. When I used to have dinner with my colleague Wally Broecker, the climate scientist who coined the term “global warming”, he would always order a steak.

Headline: openai admits ai hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

Headline: law enforcement is using ai to synthesize evidence. Is the justice system ready for it?

Two recent headlines. Can you spot why this is scary?

The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born Meet the startups trying to engineer a desktop fertility machine.

Sperm-injecting robots.

UK's first rice crop ripe for picking after hot summer Paddy fields are thriving in a quiet part of east England and might help feed us in the future.

"Nobody has tried this before, but with climate change, we have crops that, 10 years ago, we wouldn't have thought would be viable. In 10 years time, rice could be a completely perfect crop for us," Nadine says.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I don't have a fight in this. But I do think it's interesting that in this moment where she's being called out for being a billionaire who manipulates fans to overconsume "collectibles" and not speaking out on the fascism or Gaza she made an exclusive album deal with Target

The Insatiable Energy Demands of Data Centers Could Increase Fossil Fuel Emissions in California By 2030, the centers could consume the equivalent of adding another city the size of L.A. to the state’s power grid.

NEW INVESTIGATION

California predicts data centers will consume as much power as adding another LA to grid by 2030

A utility anticipates additional emissions equal to 21 gas plants

Some environmentalists see reducing gas power as “a lot less likely” due to AI capitalandmain.com/the-insatiab...

Incredible story of a solar revolution.☀️🔌💡

Fiction writers constructing their characters from bits and pieces of everyone they’ve ever met

YouTube video by Drilled Are News Influencers a Climate Problem?

Another real head-exploding moment in this was our conversation around "news influencers" and how *not* media literate Gen Z is in terms of understanding the actual sources of information and how it gets shaped.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vghv...

Lead has been central to technological development for centuries; however, its release into the environment and subsequent human exposure pose significant public health risks. The review presented here critically assesses the contemporary environmental lead risk as global lead production and use are rapidly increasing, largely driven by the rising demand for electrification. We show that environmental lead exposure persists today due to legacy contamination, ongoing coal usage, and insufficient protection of workforces during production, use, and recycling of lead-acid batteries and other lead-containing products, particularly in low- and middle- income countries. We estimate that contemporary childhood lead exposure alone leads to an annual global economic loss exceeding $3.4 trillion (2021 US dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity), with pronounced disparities between high- and low- and middle- income countries. To prevent a large-scale resurgence in lead exposure, we identify four critical areas for urgent policy intervention.

Lead pollution persists in the 21st Century and could get worse - review paper

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Call for pitches: we're assigning for @thelocal.to's winter issue. Going back to our roots with a healthcare issue, and specifically interested in stories about privatization and places where money and health collide. Features, essays, first-person, etc, starting at 0.75 cents/word. nick@thelocal.to

In general I think it's hard to combat scientific misinformation when some of the best research is locked behind an academic paywall, while lots of nonsense gets published free for everyone to read in predatory journals.

When Fire Met Food, The Brains Of Early Humans Grew Bigger Because we had better food, our brains grew bigger than those of our primate cousins, scientists say. Early humans cooked, which makes meat and veggies more digestible and nutrients more available to ...

A theory about why humans have such big brains is because we learned to cook food and cooking unlocks calories. Gorillas spend NINE hours a day eating

Every basic scientist & PhD program director should be watching how cell culture and rodent models of Tylenol exposure are being used by motivated parties (e.g. it depletes your glutathione! Science proves it PMID...) to sell a narrative and sow confusion right now.

China's S1500, the world's largest flying wind turbine, completed its first flight in Xinjiang. This 60m airborne power plant has 12 turbines producing megawatt-scale electricity, cuts material use by 40%, energy costs by 30%, and can be deployed in hours for remote, disaster, or island zones.

I had been asked by a startup to sell such flying wind turbines like 10 years ago. They were underfunded.
All the more I'm happy to see the concept survived and became quite sophisticated. I wish best of success for all stakeholders!
We need to think and act out of the box.

Psychiatry and psychology often serve as a loudspeaker that amplifies the message and ideology of corporate capitalism, stating that emotion regulation is entirely an individual's responsibility.

Our new research looks at solar deconstruction networks. We advance the concept of ulterior ruination—a determined yet deferred technological breakdown for the present mitigation of the climate crisis with intentionally concealed socioecological dynamics to achieve particular political results. ☀️🔌💡♻️

Imagine if wealthy people funded independent and quality reporting - from a range of sources- and did not try to control it but just supported it, helped a thousand flowers bloom, etc.?

UPDATE Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years, 3 months for attempting a military coup, with plans to assassinate President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, VP Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, to stay in power after his 2022 election loss

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Re: the male loneliness epidemic, there is *still* not enough emphasis on how many heterosexual girls and women are staying single out of self-preservation, because the sexual norms that many heterosexual boys and men have adopted are exceptionally dangerous.

Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump

Shareholder capitalism makes everything terrible.

Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis The heat that hit Svalbard in February was so intense that scientists could dig into the ground with spoons, "like it was soft ice cream."

Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis.

The heat that hit Svalbard in February was so intense that scientists could dig into the ground with spoons, "like it was soft ice cream."

grist.org/climate/trou...

#Arctic #Climate #Ice #Water #Heat #Norway #Permafrost

Solar panels

IEA data indicates renewables use far less water than coal or oil.

9/10

Boom time: why climate change could blow up ammo stockpiles Some are vulnerable to heatwaves and wildfires

The first explosion happened around midnight. People in Maiduguri, Nigeria, jolted from their sleep in terror. Some fled into the streets.

Sweltering weather had caused weapons in a nearby munitions store to spontaneously explode.

www.thereengineer.pro/p/boom-time-...

In Germany, the area of golf courses would be sufficient.
But hey, wE have nO land and sOLaR is sO exPenSiv!!1!1!
Leave those dumb naysayers in the dark and go solar, regardless. Also, with large scale solar thermal plants for district heating and industrial process heat! Just do it.

First came the wildfire. Then came the scams. As extreme weather becomes more frequent, so too have post-disaster contractor scams like excessive billing and shoddy repairs.

First we get scammed by fossil fuel companies responsible for climate disasters, then we get scammed by post-disaster contractors.