The Joe Manchin Trolley Problem
It’s hard to live in the modern world without feeling like you should start committing some felonies.
Nature
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Bugs detected by D.C.’s weather likely include cicadas – The Washington Post
The cicadas across our region have been relentless, sparking a social media frenzy and keeping nature reporters in the D.C. area busy. Now they’ve made their way onto weather maps, too. They, along with other insects, can be seen on Doppler radars ordinarily used to track storms. Over the weekend, plots from D.C.-area weather radars…
Satellite Images Show Vast Swaths of the Arctic On Fire
Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites. Pierre Markuse, a…
The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong | Environment | The Guardian
Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. “There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly,” she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. “It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe…
No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime – The Atlantic
At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Naturalists can tell the two apart because hagfish, unlike other fish, lack backbones (and, also, jaws). For everyone else, there’s an even easier method. “Look at the hand holding the fish,” the marine biologist Andrew…
‘We held a memorial service’: the keeper of the last male northern white rhino | Life and style | The Guardian
Sudan was at the front of my mind for much of my life. He had a different character from other rhinos – he was so very gentle – and he was like a member of my family. Sudan was born in the wild in Sudan in 1973, captured when he was two and taken to…
The Unequal Distribution of Catastrophe in North Carolina | The New Yorker
It is unsettling, and maybe emblematic of many American lives today, to perch safely but uneasily on the edge of catastrophe. Rainfall in eastern North Carolina passed thirty inches during Hurricane Florence, cutting off the coastal city of Wilmington from road access, and this week the state’s rivers are swelling as they return the water…
National parks report on climate change finally released, uncensored | Reveal
Backing away from attempts at censorship, the National Park Service on Friday released a report charting the risks to national parks from sea level rise and storms. Drafts of the report obtained earlier this year by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed park service officials had deleted every mention of humans causing climate…
What’s happening inside Hawaii’s Kilauea, the world’s longest-erupting volcano – The Washington Post
A plume of ash rises from Kilauea on Thursday. (USGS/Reuters) On Monday, a lava lake vanished from the top of Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii. The flow of liquid rock that normally fills Puu Oo crater, on the volcano’s eastern flank, had been abruptly turned off. Days later, a crack opened in the ground at a subdivision more than 10 miles…
Hawaii volcano: Kilauea lava destroys Leilani Estates homes, earthquakes rattle Big Island – The Washington Post
Less than a week ago, Leilani Estates was the picture of serenity on Hawaii’s Big Island, a subdivision in the island’s eastern Puna district filled with wooden homes nestled in tropical plant-filled lots. The latest eruption of the island’s most active volcano changed everything. Shortly after Kilauea erupted Thursday, the ground split open on the east…