As Offshore Wind Ramps Up, Scientists Flag Potential Impacts
Aug 21, 2023 · L ast year, the Biden administration announced an ambitious goal: enough offshore wind to power 10 million homes by 2030. The move would reduce carbon emissions, create jobs, and strengthen energy security. It would also help the United States — which was responsible for just 0.1 percent of the world’s offshore wind capacity last year — catch up with renewable energy leaders like China ...
Down on the Body Farm: The Forensics of Decaying Corpses
Nov 11, 2019 · In the early hours and days after death, medical examiners rely on three hallmark measurements: algor mortis (body temperature), rigor mortis (stiffness), and livor mortis (the settling of the blood). But those signs fade quickly. As decomposition gets rolling, forensic anthropologists mark five physical stages of decay: “fresh,” during ...
Long Division: The Persistence of Race Science
Dec 12, 2022 · LONG DIVISION is an ongoing journalistic project by Undark Magazine, published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, that examines the fraught legacy of race science.The multipart series, supported in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, grew out of a workshop held in June 2022 at Harvard University, which brought together journalists, science historians, and other ...
For Some Survivors, Polio Casts a Long Shadow - Undark Magazine
Jan 2, 2023 · Brad Fuller was a toddler when he contracted polio in 1952 and was sent to a hospital miles from his northeast Pennsylvania home. He stayed there for nine months, enduring long stints in an iron lung, a large metallic ventilator that helped him breathe. Fuller’s parents were allowed only rare visits.
For Forest Blazes Grown Wilder, an Alternative: The ‘Good Fire’
Oct 25, 2021 · Desautel and his community have been especially skilled fire-tree matchmakers, deliberately lighting the kind of a fire a pine forest craves through a practice called prescribed burning, also known as “good fire.”. And good fire actually helps protect forests, by giving trees like Ponderosas a sort of healthy pruning that allows them to ...
Baring Teeth: The Long Battle Over Fluoride Comes to a Head
Mar 6, 2024 · Berridge retired from the agency in the spring of 2023, upset by the handling of the fluoride report. “That’s not the way I want to do science,” he said. “So I decided to do something different.”. Fluoride strengthens teeth because teeth are like living rocks: tissue sheathed in a mesh of crystals called enamel.
Breathing Life Into the Corpse Flower - Undark Magazine
Jan 11, 2021 · T he alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year.In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than 300,000 people viewed it online. But despite the corpse flower’s fame, its future is uncertain.
The Deep Toll of Tar Sands On Canada's Indigenous People
Nov 22, 2021 · Over the course of only a decade the mines began to multiply. Eight active tar sands mines now form a 40-mile chain along the Athabasca River, their giant shovels gobbling up the earth like an invasion of mechanical caterpillars. The town of Fort McKay, population 765, sits in the middle of all this.
In the Great Lakes, the Pandemic Disrupted Sea Lamprey Control
Sep 5, 2022 · In order to protect the Great Lakes’ $7 billion fishery, the two countries spend about $25 million annually on sea lamprey control, according to Gaden, with the U.S. contributing nearly 70 percent of the funding. Though there are over 180 invasive species in the Great Lakes, none are more destructive than the sea lamprey, Gaden said.
In Cape Cod, New Efforts to Coexist With Sharks - Undark Magazine
Jul 7, 2021 · In Cape Cod, being able to predict the presence of sharks in the water could allow beachgoers to coexist with the 2.5-ton animals whose ancestors have dominated the ocean for 450 million years. Sharks were once abundant in the Northwest Atlantic. Almost 200 years ago, Henry David Thoreau took a series of trips from his home, about 20 miles west ...