When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage wildfires.

But as the US Department of Agriculture prepares to release its draft environmental impact statement for the rescission, that justification is unraveling. And many critics of the move see the claim that roads are needed to fight fires in remote forests as cover for a giveaway to the timber industry.

On average, about 8 million acres have burned each year between 2017 and 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office , nearly double the average from 1987 to 1991. Wildfires on federal lands average about five times the size of those in the rest of the country, leading some of the nation’s top land managers to argue that national forests are a front line for fighting the nation’s steep increase in wildland blazes.

Read full article

Comments

Researchers detail ‘surprisingly large’ cardiovascular health benefits of modest shifts in behaviour

Sleeping for 11 minutes more each night, doing 4.5 additional minutes of brisk walking and eating an extra 50g or so of vegetables each day can significantly reduce a person’s risk of heart attack, a new study has found.

Academics found these small changes could help people avoid major cardiovascular events , including heart attacks and strokes, by about 10%. Small behaviour changes are more “achievable and sustainable”, the research team said.

Continue reading...

Why is it like something to be ourselves and how do physical processes create our subjective experience? These questions get to the heart of the knotty problem of consciousness, and they provided the spark for the latest book from award-winning author and journalist Michael Pollan. In A World Appears, Pollan goes in search of answers about what we do and don’t know about consciousness, and why it has proven such an elusive phenomenon. He tells Ian Sample how thoughts and feelings shape our conscious experience, whether we can learn anything about human consciousness from AI, and why he thinks our minds need to be defended in today’s technology saturated world

Order A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan via the Guardian Bookshop

Has a 25-year-old bet taken us a step closer to understanding consciousness?

Continue reading...

When James Prescott Joule lent his name to a unit of energy, he could not have foreseen today’s alarming calculations

The primary unit of climate collapse is the zettajoule. If you have never heard of this term, you are not alone. Even scientists who work on a planetary scale struggle to relate the immensity of the change measured by this titanic unit of energy.

Continue reading...

Jupiter's colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to scientists analyzing data from NASA's Juno spacecraft.

The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU Advances. Researchers used data recorded by Juno in 2021 and 2022, after NASA granted an extension to the spacecraft's operations upon completing a five-year science campaign at Jupiter. Juno remains in good health , but NASA officials have not said if they will approve another extension for the mission. The issue is money.

Questions about the future of Juno and more than a dozen other robotic science missions began swirling nearly a year ago, when the Trump administration asked mission leaders to submit "closeout" plans for how to turn off their spacecraft. Ars first reported the news soon after the White House released a budget request that called for slashing NASA's science budget by nearly half.

Read full article

Comments

On Monday, the Trump administration announced its newest approach to its goal of blocking the development of offshore wind: pay companies to walk away from lease sites they had paid for under the Biden administration. The Department of the Interior, which arranges leases of coastal sites for the development of wind farms, would end up returning about $1 billion to France's TotalEnergies, which has promised both to invest that money in US-based fossil fuel projects and to not do any further offshore wind development in the US.

Rumors of the deal had begun circulating last week . The deal comes in the wake of the administration's repeated failures to block offshore wind projects after construction had started.

The deal would see TotalEnergies invest roughly $1 billion in oil and natural gas projects in the US. Once those commitments are made, the US would pay the company that amount in return for its abandonment of two areas it had leased for offshore wind. One of those areas would have hosted a relatively small project near the Carolinas. But the second project, Attentive Energy , is a large site east of New Jersey that would have the capacity to generate 3 Gigawatts of power—capacity that the nearby states would find difficult to replace with other means.

Read full article

Comments

The rise of touchscreen technology has been a boon in many respects, but for people with long fingernails, there can be issues with the capacitive variety since fingernails are non-conductive and thus don't register on the screen as a touch. One can use a stylus, of course, or simply use the finger pad under the nail, but ideally it would be nice to be able to use one's fingernail. A conductive nail polish might do the trick, according to research presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlanta, Georgia.

The work began as a special project for Manasi Desai, an undergraduate at Centenary College of Louisiana who has an interest in cosmetic chemistry and decided to investigate ways to make fingernails compatible with touchscreen technology. There are a few existing conductive nail polishes that rely on spiking a clear polish with carbon nanotubes, conductive polymers , or metallic particles. And in 2013 and 2014, a proposed press-on false fingernail with a capacitive tip was showcased at CES in Las Vegas, although the technology doesn't seem to be commercially available.

Desai reasoned that existing polishes rely on additives that could be dangerous if inhaled, as well as having a limited shade range given that they impart a black or metallic shimmer. Working with her supervisor, organometallic chemist Joshua Lawrence, Desai decided to try to create a clear, colorless nail polish that didn't use any toxic materials and could be applied over any manicure.

Read full article

Comments

Generally, when you hear “water use” and “sustainability,” you expect those words to be followed by some bad news. Humanity’s enduring ability to ignore the math of declining water supplies is almost impressive. But there are cases where actions have successfully reversed our loss of water resources. A new paper in Science by Scott Jasechko of the University of California, Santa Barbara, examines documented cases of groundwater recovery around the world to identify which strategies have worked.

Groundwater is invaluable for many reasons. For one, it’s (usually) cleaner than surface water. It’s also right under your feet and often close enough to the surface that it doesn’t take much energy to pump it up. And there’s loads of it down there, no matter the season. Because of this, humans use a lot of it for drinking water, agriculture, and every other use you can think of.

Unfortunately, in many places, the rate of groundwater use has grown to exceed the rate at which precipitation soaks into the ground to replenish it.

Read full article

Comments

Hope Scottish pilot will result in heel prick test for rare genetic condition being approved across Britain

Scotland has become the first part of the UK to screen newborn babies for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare genetic condition that causes progressive muscle wastage.

Campaigners, who have long advocated for newborn testing because early detection is critical for treatment outcomes, hope the Scottish pilot will result in approval for the heel prick test across the UK.

Continue reading...