Even as it gets easier to quantify exactly how much worse our new normal might be, the global financial system hasn’t caught up. The threats to a bungalow on one of Florida’s barrier islands might now be painfully obvious. But as the insurance industry collapses, these individual risks have been collecting upstream, accumulating quietly in mortgage portfolios and downgrades of credit and bond ratings. Like the 2008 subprime crisis, these overlooked risks could set the stage for the next financial disaster. →

Eva Burk's practiced gestures sharpen with frustration as she explains that for decades, residents have been sounding the alarm that Chinook were dwindling, not growing as large, and carrying fewer eggs. When fish navigate the turbulent waters of Alaska’s rivers, they are generally managed by the state, which has its own strained relationship with tribal residents. But salmon mature in the Bering Sea, where the waters between three and 200 miles offshore are regulated by the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council. This fragmented system is a “super toxic, unhealthy space that’s dominated by economic interests,” Burk says. →

Each time she clicked a new video and witnessed another house crumbling, or someone with a flashlight wading through the murky floodwaters, her breath caught. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, where [is] my mom? What happened to her?” she says. →

When a pesticide is first registered with federal regulators, the vast majority of the information available about it is science conducted by the company who made it. “The presumption in the U.S. is in favor of the safety of the chemical,” Burd says. Elsewhere, like the European Union, “chemicals are not presumed safe, they adopt a much more precautionary approach.” →

No one wants to think of their Internet habits as stealing someone else’s drinking water. Looking at your monthly power bill, the link between Apple’s latest AI announcement and your rate increases isn’t necessarily obvious. And technology companies are currently spending a lot of money to make it harder to say that’s happening. But it’s difficult to escape the sinking sense that the benefits of AI are being accrued by a small number of powerful companies, while the physical harms are borne by people out of sight. →

Sarah Wallace was just starting dinner when the ground began to vibrate. The rumble built. She ran out into the street, where she learned what felt like an earthquake was actually the house behind hers colliding into their duplex. Until that night in 2022, Wallace didn't know that—like more than half of downtown Juneau—she lived in a high risk landslide zone. In both Alaska's capital and worldwide, the climate crisis is increasing the number of people exposed to landslides. →

As climate change lengthens hurricane seasons and strengthens storm surges, extreme weather is wreaking havoc on homes nationwide. According to a recent report from major global reinsurer Swiss Re Institute, natural disasters now cost the United States $97 billion a year. Homeowners’ insurance rates have gone up 35 percent nationally since 2021, and insurers themselves are warning that risk reduction is the only way forward. →

On the Kenai, the boreal’s rapid retreat is jarring. The southern peninsula is in a rain shadow, sheltered from moisture by the peaks of a nearby ice field. “It’s not wet enough for the Pacific maritime to advance,” says Dawn Robin Magness, a landscape ecologist at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. “We’re at the trailing edge of a biome shift, with no leading edge.” Whatever habitat eventually emerges here, in other words, will be new. →

“Everybody is trying to make a living,” Nick Bumpaous says. He got up and walked into the union hall, where the names of workers who’d died had been etched into bricks that encircled the room. It was hard not to notice that many of the workers had died young. “It’s not a job to most people, it’s—we’re serving the national mission,” Bumpaous said, frustrated. “You should come home in the same way that you went to work,” he said, standing under the names. “When one day at work changes the trajectory of your entire life—somebody should be held accountable for that.” →

On a quiet summer evening, the Aurora, a sixty-foot cutter-rigged sloop, approaches the craggy shore of eastern Greenland, along what's known as the Forbidden Coast. Its captain, Sigurdur Jonsson, a sturdy man in his fifties, stands carefully watching his charts. Because the splintered fjords create thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline, there's been little effort to map this region. "It's practically uncharted," he says. "You are almost in the same position as you were 1,000 years ago." Until a century ago, Greenlandic hunters would cut maps out of driftwood. "The wooden part would be the fjord, so it would be a mirror image," Siggi says. Compared to a paper map, it was actually quite accurate." Unlike drawings, the contoured wood could be felt, useful in a region where the sun disappears for months at a time. As a source of information, a map is always a way of groping through the darkness of the unknown. →

“I understand the intent of the agreement was to protect salmon, but this is not the solution,” said Brooke Woods, former executive chair for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and a climate adaptation specialist at Woodwell Climate Research Center. The fish face a cluster of overlapping challenges – commercial fishing in the Bering Sea, climate change and disease – that previous limits on subsistence fishing in the river have failed to overcome. Woods, who grew up fishing Chinook on the Yukon with her grandparents, said restrictions on subsistence fishing force tribes to “bear the brunt of conservation.” →

When Adrienne Fabrique bought her house in Astoria, Oregon, she knew the property was in a designated slide zone. “But just like most things, you think, ‘Oh that’ll never happen to me.” As she recently found out, climate change is poised to intensify the risk of slow-moving landslides. But most insurance won't cover the hazards, and many states don't offer emergency assistance for them. →

Helping bees navigate a quickly shifting climate is a daunting task. But as a honeybee knows well, even minute actions add up. “The reason I study honeybees is their complex societies,” Cook says. The monarchy metaphor—the queen rules the hive—is misleading. The hive’s elegant division of labor is controlled by its thousands of workers, who make decisions at a local level that, when acted out, affect the entire colony. This wasn’t inevitable; like many social insects, honeybees evolved from a solitary ancestor. To survive, they adapted to persist through difficult conditions communally. “Everyone is working toward the collective good,” Cook says. “The unit of importance for bees is its society, not the individual.” These are choices, she adds, “that change how we view solutions.” →

"Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” John Basinger said aloud to himself, as he walked on a treadmill. “Of man’s first disobedience…” In 1992, at the age of 58, Basinger decided to memorize Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem, as a form of mental activity while he was working out at the gym. An actor, he’d memorized shorter poems before, and he wanted to see how much of the epic he could remember. “As I finished each book,” he wrote, “I began to perform it and keep it alive in repertory while committing the next to memory." The 12 books of Paradise Lost contain over 60,000 words; it took Basinger about 3,000 hours to learn them by rote. →

On a chilly afternoon last October, at a University of Northern Arizona conference, Thomas Whitham, a plant geneticist, proposed a plan to save hundreds of species from extinction. In a series of experimental gardens, he'd planted different genotypes of the same trees, identifying the genotypes that can best handle environmental stress. Now, the Bureau of Land Management are using the results to replant after forest fires. Some days, Whitham finds the work unbearably depressing. “Thirty years ago, I would have hated what I’m doing," he says. "But then I still had hope that climate change wouldn’t get so bad.” →

A new report finds that one in four people in the U.S. are breathing unhealthy air as rising temperatures and bigger fires create a "climate penalty." →

With Alaska's wildlife numbers declining, agencies are blaming — and culling — predators. The true threat is much more complex. →

In Interior Alaska, a company is preparing to start production at a controversial gold mine near the Native Village of Tetlin. Tribal members claim their leaders broke laws when agreeing to the project, alleging years of corruption and back-door deals. “When you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past,” a tribal member told me. “But if you lie, that becomes part of your future." →

When David Marchant looked at the weather forecast in early July, he had a bad feeling. He watched the river near his farm in Vermont warily as a downpour began. Two months of rain fell in two days--wiping out $150,000 dollars of his crops. As the climate changes, American farmers face a slew of new threats to their harvests and business models. Research from the American Farm Bureau Federation suggests that nationwide, natural disasters caused $21.5 billion in agricultural losses last year. Only about half of those were protected by insurance. →

Beth Pratt refinanced her mortgage and spent most of her life savings on fire-proofing her California home. This summer, during peak wildfire season, her insurance cancelled her policy anyway. →

"Flooding can destroy a house in a night, but the full tragedy, Quinn said, takes years to unfold. “The news crews show up in their windbreakers, they find the worst damage that they can stand in front of while they shoot. And then poof, they’re gone,” he said. “Nobody follows what the survivors go through — the months and years of slow, grinding recovery.” →

Natural disasters now cost the U.S. insurance industry $100 billion a year. What happens when no one wants to pick up the tab? This four-part investigative series, supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, explores America's insurance crisis. →

“People have been killing each other for thousands of years over gold,” he says. “This up here is just a much, much watered-down version.” →

For over a decade, debate has raged over the Keystone XL pipeline project, which aimed to transport Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. After approving the project’s initial stages, the Obama administration rejected a permit allowing the pipeline to cross the national border in 2015. However, the energy company backing the project didn’t take no for an answer: TransCanada soon sued the U.S. for $15 billion dollars — the future expected profits it claimed the pipeline would have earned. →

From professional to youth leagues, a warming planet is forcing athletes to adapt to new extremes. →

“There are no standardized terms yet for the experience of seeing the loss of an inhabitable planet,” says Alison Hwong, a psychiatrist and research fellow at University of California San Francisco. “It’s clearly a threat amplifier for mental health, something that exacerbates existing disparities." →

To understand the scale of the impact when it starts to melt, said Aaron Cooke, an architect and researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Cold Climate Housing Research Center, you have to understand that “to someone in the north, the natural state of the ground, the default status of Earth, is frozen. And thousands of years of culture are built on that knowledge.” While the impacts of permafrost thaw — subsidence, flooding, sinkholes, and landslides — mimic the devastation of natural disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency isn’t responsible for permafrost damage, and it’s difficult to get covered by homeowner’s insurance. “How fast does a disaster need to move for a department that handles disasters to address it?” Cooke asked. →

Every morning, 2,340 briefcase-holding and business card-carrying bodies walk through the halls of Congress and federal agencies with the sole aim of either passing, rejecting, or strengthening the policies that will combat the climate crisis. From Chevron to Chevrolet, from the American Jewish Committee to American Airlines, everybody is funding somebody to argue their case. This Washington insider game is what's determining the climate policies that come out of Washington. How can the everyday citizen get on the same playing field as these lobbyists? →

In July, a record-breaking heatwave began. For 46 days this summer, the mercury never dropped below 100 degrees in Lubbock County, Texas. “I was thinking, ‘Please rain, please rain.’” →

This spring in King County, California, Dusty Ference watched the weather forecast in fascinated horror. First, a series of atmospheric rivers dumped rain. Then, record snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains began to melt. →

Aza Raskin, one of the founders of the nonprofit Earth Species Project, compares the coming revolution in decoding animal vocalizations to the invention of the telescope. “We looked out at the universe and discovered that Earth was not the center,” he says. The power of AI to reshape our understanding of animals, he thinks, will have a similar effect. “These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything.” →

As extreme events like this heatwave become more common, everyone wants to know how much climate is to blame. For a long time, that wasn't a question possible to answer. But now, a group of international scientists is working to to decisively attribute climate blame almost as quickly as disaster strikes. →

Kobus Steenkamp's farm sprawls along a dirt road in South Africa's central plains, where the sky makes everything seem small. Steenkamp woke up here one morning after the rains in 2010 to find something strange happening with his sheep. "You could see there's blood at their backs," he recalls. All his pregnant ewes were losing their lambs. It was every farmer's nightmare. →

It was the world’s hottest June since humans started keeping track. July was even worse. Phoenix—which averaged 102 degrees in July—got so hot that people received third-degree burns from touching doorknobs. In Iowa, livestock dropped dead in their pens. The disasters weren’t limited to heat: Canadian wildfires blanketed large swaths of the United States in smoke, flash floods thundered through Vermont, and wildfires reduced parts of Maui to rubble. →

As temperature and weather records are broken, we don’t know how quickly irreversible changes are coming. →

As the snow-covered fjords brightened in the cold spring morning, crude oil gushed into Prince William Sound. When it hit the water, its chemical composition began to change, releasing benzene into the air and transforming into a sticky tar that clung to anything it touched. Craig Matkin, a marine biologist, was working on his boat in the nearby town of Seward. “I walked up the ramp, and I heard the radio at the Coast Guard office,” he recalls. “And I went, ‘Holy shit.’” →

It's a rainforest settlement, a conglomeration of clapboard houses lining wide, mostly deserted streets, the air always feeling like it's about to rain, that is, if it's not already raining. →

Jenneh Getu, looked out a hospital window at the ambulances in the parking lot being pelted by hard rain, as the psychological-counseling session she'd come for began. "The sickness grabbed my husband," Getu said. "After four days, he died. We had just finished burying him when my son's skin started getting hot." Getu brought her 3-year-old from her rural hometown to Monrovia for help. "My son died on my lap in the taxi," she said. "I was forced to hold that body tight so people didn't know it's Ebola." →

Viviana Limpias, deputy representative of the United Nations Children's Fund in Cuba, said, "There's very little the privileged class has that everyone else doesn't have, except money." After the gallery closed in Havana Vieja, everyone retired to a four-story penthouse after-party. Men in linen suits and white crocodile-skin shoes gathered around the billiards table. Jack Bruce, the bassist of the 1960s British rock band Cream, found the hors d'oeuvres (I wanted to ask, but didn't, if he knew that Fidel had once outlawed the Beatles). The models piled into a velvet-lined hammock. By the time the black-tie clad waiters served the second course and we lit another round of cigarillos, I wasn't so sure Ms. Limpias was right. →

Although China has dramatically increased the availability of methadone in community-based treatment centers, treatment options remain inadequate. Amon explained, "In China, police can pick up anyone based on profiling, and force them to take a urine test." If the sample comes back positive, he said, "People are then taken straight to a detention center, where they are usually kept for two years or more." Previous detainees' ID cards -- used in China for many common activities, like checking into a hotel -- are marked, and police, seeking to meet strict quotas, are allowed to track former addicts' IDs and demand urine samples at any point. →

"Whenever they thought I was not telling the truth, the interrogator displayed a handcuff, an electric baton, and a handgun on the desk," Namgyal, a 37-year-old Tibetan monk, recalled. "They asked me: 'Which would you like to choose? Confession or tools?'" →

At the checkout counter, our grocer stuffed our 13 pound turkey and Lurpak butter into plastic bags with the expertise that had won him third runner-up in the National Grocery Association's Best Bagger Championship, held every year in Las Vegas. This is how I knew I was back in the Heartland, where grocery baggers are still judged on their "speed, distribution of weight, and proper bagging style," where strawberry Jello and Cool Whip is still served as a traditional dessert, and where much nasally lilting small talk is currently being devoted to the unseasonably warm weather. →

Bill McKibben wiped his face and turned toward the sun. "I'm stunned," he said. "Three or four months ago, no one in this country had heard about the Keystone pipeline except a few people along its route. Now it's become in some ways the biggest political flashpoint of the Obama administration." On Sunday, Tar Sands' latest action drew 10,000 people to Pennsylvania Avenue, forming a ring several people deep around the White House. People held hands, chanted, and sang. Actor Mark Ruffalo came and brought his kids. "This is the beginning of the most exciting times of the last two generations," he said. →

From a slump on his couch after a physical therapy session, he says, "I wanted to be a roughneck, to spit tobacco, and to kill the enemy. I was a young cowboy." It's a hard sentiment to hear, and yet somehow easy to understand. He continues, "Being a grunt is over, and that's the only thing I want to be". →

Tracking Fahmy down took several days: endless Google searches, queries of domain registrations, tracking an IP address to a server host, and a call to Maderia, Portugal. Fahmy tries to fly under the radar; like any artist who attempts to provoke, he's gotten himself in trouble. Most recently, he was arrested on May 26 for pasting stickers of what he called the "Mask of Freedom," depicting a mannequin with a gas mask and text that read, "Greetings from the Supreme Council to the free youth of the nation." →

It had been raining for several hours on Evening Song Farm, a 100-acre plot of land in the valley between Button Hill and Burnt Mountain, in the shadow of Killington's ski slopes. David Hibbard Rode was working on a cabin he'd spent several months building by hand when he noticed the creek below the building - the creek that normally ran as shallow as 6 inches - rapidly rising. As he ran back to the farm house, the water chased him into the fields, washing away the topsoil and swamping the farm machinery. →

"The salary of an average Cuban is not enough to buy food for a month," said a Cuban government official on Monday, who asked to remain anonymous because, as she put it, "There can be confusion about who and who is not an enemy of the Revolution, and there are many people in Cuba who unfortunately can't tell the difference between one and the other." Cuba is a country accustomed to living in crisis. →

The same day Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a new carbon tax, Mines Minister Norman Moore, one of the top officials in Western Australia, spoke openly about the possibility of Western Australia seceding, citing the unpopular tax as proof that the federation was broken. How did things get so far? →

As Alaskan oil production dwindles, large multinational corporations like BP are leaving, and smaller firms are moving in. “How Alaska decides to regulate those firms is going to be a big part of our energy future, and what our lands and waters look like in 50 years,” says historian Phil Wight. →

In his book Calming the Fearful Mind, Hanh explains that, at his monastery in France, the entire community gathers once a week in a circle around a vase of flowers. When someone wants to speak, they take the vase, and praise the person they are having trouble with before describing their problem. Everyone else just listens. It was hard to imagine Barney Frank and Allen West dissolving their differences over a vase of flowers, but Hanh seemed convinced that it could work. →

On a recent morning, researcher Dominick Dusseau offers a glimpse into the future of Chelsea, Massachusetts, a small, industrial city just across the Mystic River from Boston. On digital maps he displays over Zoom, great blue splashes cover large swaths of the city—areas where, by his calculations, climate-driven flooding is likely to occur. The maps depict a world where the locals who can least afford it will get hit the hardest. →

The hotly debated Willow oil drilling project has been approved in Alaska, a decision that could exacerbate climate change and imperil wildlife. →

A fifth of conifer forests in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains are now in places that are too hot for them—meaning they may not regrow if wiped out by wildfire or disease. →

A novel sighting in Washington has drawn attention to growing efforts to prioritise wildlife corridors—animal pathways built around our roads and cities. As technology has made it easier to monitor these paths and the animals that use them, it has become clear that they can reduce vehicle collisions, increase movement between habitats and help prevent extinctions. As human development increases, “We’re funnelling animals towards our open spaces, which tend to be our public lands,” says Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning. →

The state's ambitious plan to be carbon-neutral by 2045 relies on carbon offsets through the state’s forests. But scientists say it may be causing more harm than good. →

The current drought began when Kent Norman was just 2 years old. Farming is in his blood. His family has worked the land in Stockton, California, for generations. But the last two decades have created one of the most severe droughts in the region history: Over the courseof his life, south-western North America has become drier than it has been in more than 1000 years. “The California population and agriculture has simply overgrownits water supply," he says. "Now the issue is, who gets what water’s left?” →

Late in the evening, Walton Smith sat on his front porch and watched the tundra burn. For weeks, a wildfire had been licking towards his home in St Mary’s, a town of 600 people in western Alaska. As the sun sank, he could see flames jump between trees. Smith, who is St Mary’s city manager, says that as the cones in the spruce flared, “all of the trees around it would suddenly be engulfed in flames.” The state has been ablaze since April, torching 12,400 square kilometres so far – more than three times what normally burns in a year. →

In the beginning, the story goes, the Earth was formless and empty, and darkness shrouded the surface of the deep. Several millennia later, an independent scientist named James Lovelock started to ponder this primordial arrangement: He imagined a fictional planet called Daisyworld, carpeted with black and white daisies. The pale flowers reflected the sun, while the dusky ones absorbed light and heat. As the sun’s rays grew more powerful, the balance of blossoms shifted, stabilizing the globe’s temperature. A similar process, Lovelock speculated, might have maintained Earth’s temperature over geological time. →

When Tony Kanaan gets behind the wheel of his Number 10 racecar—gunning for victory in the IndyCar Firestone 600 at Texas Motor Speedway, in Fort Worth—he'll steer 1,570 pounds of metal. That can make a guy sweat—especially in turns that create 5 G forces, when drivers in open-wheeled IndyCars are often inches from each other's tires and the slightest muscle twitch can mean the difference between a big win and being airborne. So Kanaan is particular about what he wears in his cramped cockpit for those two hours of white-knuckle concentration. But this season he is wearing something no racecar driver has ever worn before: a shirt with electrically conductive nano-fibers. →

In 1958, the Smithsonian Institution received a plain paper package in the mail. The only hint of its contents was the insurance on the brown carton, registered for one million dollars. Nestled inside the box sat the largest known blue diamond in the world. Diamonds are actually carbon, compressed under intense pressure and high temperatures. We hear a lot about carbon in its connection to climate change, but there's another cycle that carbon plays a critical role in, known as deep carbon, that may be crucial in the origin of life. →

In the absence of hospital-based treatment, it's the people tending the sick, predominantly women, who are at the greatest risk. Paul Farmer says, "It's no accident that up to 75 percent of those afflicted with Ebola are women." If mothers and daughters are becoming default nurses, it's imperative that they be equipped for the job. →

Police drove through Kroo Bay this morning, past the open sewers and snuffling pigs, yelling at people to go inside-largely to no avail. All the 14,000 residents of the shanty town in Freeport, Sierra Leone, had been ordered to stay indoors for three days, to try to stop the spread of Ebola. But a rare spot of good news came in the form of a diagnostic test that may help prevent future epidemics. →

People lined both sides of Boylston Street, rounds of cheers going up as runners approached the end of the 2013 Boston marathon. Then white smoke plumed. Windows splintered. Fifteen seconds later, another explosion, and glass shattered onto blackened cement. The detonations knocked athletes to the ground, in some cases blowing the shoes off their feet. Three people died, and another 264 were injured. In the aftermath, FBI agents turned to a technique called video synopsis that was invented by an Israeli company called BriefCam. But BriefCam isn't the only big tech development to come out of Israel recently. →

Sergeant Alexander Sotkin, a communications specialist in the Russian army, has big gray-green eyes, soft stubble, a strong chin--and a penchant for taking selfies. So far, the 24-year-old has posted 530 photos on Instagram: a typical mish-mash of his best angles, new tattoos, blurry concerts, and friends mugging for the camera. (He even has a few cute kitten pics thrown in for good measure.) But was he really posting pictures to Instagram from the Ukraine? →

Last Saturday in Monrovia, Liberia, neighbors stood in the street trying to block officials as the Liberian Ministry of Health brought 37 bodies of Ebola victims to a small plot of recently purchased land. In the midst of the burial, the excavator failed, leaving a few gaping holes in the ground and a pile of plastic covered shrouds. The bodies were left in open pits filled with water until Sunday, when a new delivery of cadavers was set to arrive. But in the midst of frightening news and growing terror, scientists may have found a new ally to fight the disease: plants. →

On Oct. 1, 2013, Ross Ulbricht was spending a warm sunny afternoon in the science-fiction section of the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco public library. The baby-faced 29-year-old was working on a laptop when he was surrounded by federal agents, who had a straightforward mission: to capture Ulbricht without letting him close his screen. As the sun goes down north of the White Mountains, Ross' mother Lyn Ulbricht sips a cold drink at the bacchanalial Porcupine Freedom Festival. "This case will set precedent for laws that could impact the future and freedom of the Internet," she says. Law, like 3-D printing, is iterative, and setting aside Lyn Ulbricht's vested interest in seeing her son proved innocent, the question of who should regulate new technological developments, and how, is stubbled with controversy." →

A committee of the European Parliament voted on a broad package of climate policies, with the potential to alter not only the way the EU generates electricity in coming years, but also how the EU meets its targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. →

One lesson: Renewable technology benefits from early, consistent government support. →

Most biomass is wood that comes from cutting down forests and making the material into pellets. Because pellets can be burned in existing coal-fired power plants, they provide an easy, comparatively cheap way for countries to reduce their emissions — at least on paper. →

It's not news that cryptocurrency burns through energy: In 2020, the world’s crypto-mining used more electricity than the whole of Switzerland. But what does that demand do to your home's electricity bills? Plattsburgh, a town in upstate New York, recently found out. From 2016 to 2018, crypto-mining in the region increased annual electric bills by about $165 million for small businesses and $79 million for individuals. “Obviously if you’re an investor, you see the value of crypto,” Joe McMahon, Plattsburgh's building inspector says, “but me, living in this community? I don’t.” →

Ice is the keystone of this ecosystem: When it melts, it releases fresh water and nutrients, sustaining algae and phytoplankton blooms, which in turn support some of the biggest fisheries on the planet. When floes form, they shed briny, cold water, forming a frigid ocean curtain that supported Arctic species and kept southern ones, like pollock and cod, out of the Arctic Ocean. This cold pool has been shrinking. In 2018, researchers were shocked when it vanished almost entirely. →

As the climate crisis worsens, the discussion intensifies over what role nuclear power should play in fighting it. →

A decade later, we’re still learning ex8actly what went wrong. But even as scientists continue to investigate, Fukushima has changed global energy policy and raised big questions about the future of nuclear energy. →

Big decisions around COVID-19 and children have been heavy on politics and short on science. New large-scale studies are changing that. →

A dangerous combination of limited resources, stigma, and politics made the coronavirus difficult to track in rural areas, allowing its spread to go largely unnoticed all summer. →

A serious pediatric illness has been linked to a similar condition in adults. Coronavirus inhabiting the gut could be the cause—and it may explain long-lasting symptoms, too. “The data show the virus can linger in stool up to a month,” says Siew Ng, associate director of the Center for Gut Microbiota Research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Other recent research into the viral structure may provide clues both to the disease’s gastrointestinal impact and why some patients’ immune systems go haywire. →

The White House cluster will keep growing - like an ever-expanding spiderweb - without appropriate contact tracing, quarantines, and isolation. But if White House officials wanted to unravel its outbreak, they could use viral genomics. →

Identifying who comes into contact with COVID-19 carriers requires money, people, and time - all resources America has been short of during the crisis. It's so important that we improve our ability to understand who might have been exposed to the coronavirus. Yet months into the pandemic, the US still lacks the people, training, funding in at-risk places, and time to do it well. →

The moral burden of these decisions weighs heavily on providers. That's one of the reasons it's essential to recognize that right now, human resources are our scarcest resource. And it's important to recognize the long-standing problem of healthcare inequities and how that impacts triage decisions. "We are rationing medical care all the time - in the US, we fundamentally ration it by ability to pay," says Julia Lynch, a University of Pennsylvania professor of political science researching health policy. →

Friday March 13 was an unlucky day for Fiona Lowenstein. Over the weekend, the 26-year-old spiked a fever, then she started coughing, and soon she was so short of breath she had trouble speaking. At the hospital, Lowenstein tested positive for COVID-19. She was admitted and put on supplemental oxygen. After two days, she improved enough to go home - but her symptoms didn't stop there. →

What happens when an epidemic meets a pandemic? Experts warn the people who are already the most vulnerable are made even more vulnerable in a pandemic - and they're not getting the medical care they need →

The mountains have vanished in swirling mist. Deep in the highlands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, peaks roll under a wet blanket of fog. Each step is a good faith effort to believe the summit is in blind reach. My hiking companion has a dying cell phone in one hand, eyes glued to a faltering map app. In the other is a Garmin with an inadequately detailed GPX track. In front of us the hillside drops off into pearly space. →

Lightning cracks across the Adriatic Sea, flashing over the white cragged peaks that form the mainland's shore. Wind cut through the trees. Our hammocks began to sway. The water, so clear earlier that day, whipped into black waves. We were camped along an isolated cove on the Croatian island of Cres. Miles from anywhere, as the rain began in earnest, Bernhard Wache remained unruffled. Wache, a German designer and free-diver, was on Cres in pursuit of a dream: "We wanted to escape everyday life," the 46-year-old says. "We were looking for a way to feel what's essential again." →

As the mercury climbed to 118°F in downtown Phoenix, the Pinal County Sheriff's Department got a desperate phone call - two young men had gotten lost and were in bad shape. Michael Snyder, the trooper paramedic who responded to the call, said it wasn't his first of the day - even earlier, two female hikers had run out of water. He loaded the necessary equipment in the helicopter, "in case we needed to do a short haul rope under the helicopter, or rappel people in." As the helicopter took off, he received word that the subject's medical condition was deteriorating rapidly. →

A year-long investigation into an oil refining chemical reveals that it has infiltrated the water of a small Alaskan town, creating one of the state's largest plumes. Families, many worried about health issues, have been left with more questions than answers. The chemical is just one of 86,000 chemicals approved for commercial use—but only a fraction of these are regularly monitored in the environment. →

How will we remember Covid-19? →

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is both a game-changer but also raises some tricky ethical and logistical issues. Because the newly-approved vaccine is one dose and only requires refrigeration, it will be easier to use in under-resourced settings, like for those in the criminal justice system or without housing. These same logistical benefits make it an important time to look at the broader inequalities embedded in our healthcare system. →

Here’s how scientists are rushing to adapt to ever-changing coronaviruses, as they usher in the next stage of the pandemic. →

The two drugmakers behind COVID-19 monoclonal antibodies—Regeneron and Eli Lilly—said the coronavirus variants may partially bypass or weaken the protections afforded by their life-saving therapeutics. This disclosure arrived the same week that the feds inked a $2.6 billion deal with Trump golf club member, Regeneron’s CEO Leonard Schliefer. →

When Heather-Elizabeth Brown spiked a fever in April in Detroit, the only reason she was able to get a coronavirus test was because she was volunteering as a police chaplain and was therefore considered an essential worker. Her results came back negative, and she was relieved. But then, she says, "I just got sicker and sicker." →

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, recently toured North Dakota to meet with officials battling one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country. While she commended the state’s testing efforts, she was distraught by the noticeable lack of face masks in public spaces. “This is the least use of masks that we have seen in retail establishments of any place we have been,” she said at an October 26 press conference. →

On March 15, Melanie Montano woke up with a fever and chills. Her Covid-19 symptoms progressed quickly; she lost her sense of smell and taste and had trouble breathing. Seven months later, she’s still struggling with fevers, brain fog, fatigue, and pain in her arms and legs. She’ll feel better some days, only to feel worse the next, in what she calls the “coronacoaster.” →

Back in March, as Michigan's hospitals filled with #Covid19 patients, physical therapist Dr. Joseph Roche had an idea. He knew from his research into muscular dystrophies that inflammation can do significant damage to the body. As he sifted through early case studies, he started to suspect that the virus was knocking a circulatory pathway off balance - disrupting cytokines. Several months later and 500 miles away, the world's second-fastest computer analyzed data from about 17,000 genetic samples. They came to the same conclusion: Cytokine storms might actually start with bradykinin signaling, causing an inflammatory cascade. This hypothesis provides clues to the disease's weirdest symptoms and insights to #longhaul cases - and new possibilities for life-saving treatments. →

2020 has been very stressful—and that may impact your health. Researchers are now investigating how mental health over the course of the pandemic results in measurable physical changes. Dozens of studies have shown that chronic stress increases the risk of not only catching the common cold, but also developing conditions as varied as asthma and Alzheimer’s disease. We also know stress can be structural: “Discrimination doesn’t stay in the realm of mental health,” says Kathryn Freeman Anderson, a sociologist at University of Houston. “We can actually measure the physical impact on the body." →

Teachers sick in training, students on the first day of class. Half the counties in Mississippi already quarantined. A Kansas teacher started a crowdsourced Google doc because no federal agency is publicly tracking how Covid-19 is impacting schools. Sadly, this was all predictable - the single most important factor in school safety is community transmission. More on the back-to-school mess and how to assess your school's risk. →

The science is clear: Masks slow Covid-19 transmission. But how do we actually get Americans to wear them? The short answer: Shaming doesn't work, and neither does just criminalizing non-compliance. We need public education on why they work. As one expert asks, "What risk should we let people take when their decisions affect others?" →

There are no easy answers about whether to send your child back to child care or school. Everyone's level of risk is different. But your choices will impact others too. Here’s a deep dive into what we know about COVID and kids, including how to assess various studies that initially appear contradictory. Dr. Megan Ranney says, "Your decision impacts not just your kid, but other families. So you have to consider not just your family, but the health of the community at large." →

Despite having an infection rate higher than New York City this spring, the Navajo Nation — under the leadership of its President, Jonathan Nez — has since successfully flattened its curve. He has some thoughts on effectively leading through this crisis, and on addressing some underlying inequities that were problems long before the pandemic. "We framed it within our cultural teaching: We teach that we have fought monsters, but today, we also have modern monsters." →

As of today, globally there have been at least 10,185,374 Covid-19 cases, and 503,862 deaths. These numbers are likely under-reported. Horrors at such a scale can be difficult to put in perspective. Psychologists call this effect psychic numbing. As we face a very grim summer, Paul Slovic, a psychologist who's studied psychic numbing, has some good advice: "Don't let despair stop you from doing what you can. Even partial solutions save whole lives." As causalities mount, here are a few stories from patients, people in Nigeria, Spain, Iran, England, Italy, and New Jersey—they each had different experiences, and their stories show some institutions clearly responded better than others. These aren't meant to be representative. Rather, it's a reminder that behind every Covid-19 statistic is a person with loved ones. →

Desiree Ann Wood is a truck driver who's been organizing donations of PPE for other truckers—people who are struggling to maintain the country's supply chains without adequate PPE to keep themselves safe. Across the country as cases resurge, people like Wood are being forced to fill the vacuum of federal leadership and coordination, organizing grassroots efforts to protect their communities. "We see this over and over again," Wood says. "We've really been left out to the wolves." →

For the last eight weeks, Lauren Nichols, a healthy 32-year old who tested positive for #Covid19, has struggled with varied symptoms: respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological. She calls her experience "a vicious cycle of doubt, confusion, and loneliness" as doctors couldn't help, and symptoms kept re-emerging. Nichols is one of many #Covid19 patients whose recovery takes longer than the 2 weeks WHO says to expect for mild cases. "People need to know this disease can linger and wreck your life and health," one patient says. "And no one knows what to do for us." →

"We know that people with no symptoms but who are infected with the virus can and do transmit it to others," says Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. →

"They didn't want to have masks maldistributed, because of the dire need for, and lack of, PPE for health care personnel," says Eric Topol, a research methods expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, calls WHO's delay "preposterous." But, he adds, "That's not the reason to say you don't need masks — that's the reason to say we desperately need to make masks." →

"This week, the son of one of the residents told me I was taking away their liberties by making them wear a mask in the common areas," says a nursing home administrator in Nebraska. "If they were only harming themselves, I would back off, but they are placing each and every resident here, and my staff, and our families in harm's way." She adds, "I can fight the virus, but fighting the lies is what becomes overwhelming." →

If you measure Covid-19 outbreaks by hospital regions, rural communities are not at all being spared by the pandemic. Andrew Pavia, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine, says, "I think we've oversimplified this idea of peaks. We're not seeing one epidemic nationwide, or even statewide - ' we're seeing different outbreaks, thousands of them playing out in different parts of the country." →

"If we didn't have WHO, we would have to invent it," says Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University and a past critic of WHO's director-general. →

Viruses don't discriminate. American healthcare does. "Saying the black community is at higher risk without providing context is dangerous," says Lubna Ahmed, director of environmental health at New York City nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice. "It's not genetics that makes us more susceptible. You have to understand this is going back to issues of environmental racism. And it's not something that's unique to Covid-19." →

"As an ER doctor trying to treat patients who may have Covid-19, I can't underscore enough how much harder the lack of testing is making our job," Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in western Michigan says. Davidson fears what’s coming next: "With only seven ventilators in my hospital, an overwhelming surge of Covid-19 patients may force me to choose one life over another based strictly on resources." →

An ER doctor in Pennsylvania, who is also a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians, doesn’t mince words. "It's a total clusterfuck. There's no leadership at the top. States are having to outbid each other for supplies because the federal government has refused to take a role, or is taking a role too little or too late." →

Rural America is not prepared for Covid-19 - more than half of U.S. counties don't have ICU beds. The 60 million people who don't live in cities are getting less attention, and have access to fewer resources, but they need help too. The projections all look grim, but as Craig Smith, the surgeon-in-chief of Columbia University, wrote-in an Alaska-appropriate metaphor - "So what can we do? Load the sled, check the traces, feed Balto, and mush on. Our cargo must reach Nome." →

"As an ER doctor trying to treat patients who may have Covid-19, I can't underscore enough how much harder the lack of testing is making our job," Rob Davidson, an emergency physician in western Michigan says. Davidson fears what’s coming next: "With only seven ventilators in my hospital, an overwhelming surge of Covid-19 patients may force me to choose one life over another based strictly on resources." →

Oops, I think I touched my face. Here's what to do if you have a fever and a dry cough. →

Your screen time, your text messages, your location can now be used to detect health problems from Parkinson's to depression - potentially changing everything from insurance rates to medical breakthroughs. But is our personal information at stake? →

I had the opportunity to share my reporting on the long-term consequences some Covid-19 patients are experiencing, and the emerging science on the many ways the virus may impact your body →

Schools in the US are reopening even though kids play a key role in community transmission of Covid-19. I had the chance to share my reporting on what's happening across the country as politicians and school districts wrestle with what happens next. →

Many are still talking about Covid-19 in terms of mortality—I had the chance to talk with Today Explained today about why that obscures the disease's full impact. Plus, weird things like why some Covid patients can no longer bear the smell of garlic. →

Bina Rothblatt sat down at a computer and typed in her memories and thoughts and likes and dislikes for several days. Scientists at Hanson Robotics then took this “mind-file” she’d made and used it to create Bina48: a head-and-shoulders cyborg that appears to have many of the same memories and preferences as the “real” Bina, along with some unique fears and ideas of her own. →

Out the window, a traditional stone and timber village clings to the hills above the churn of an ice-blue river. Cane Petrevski, the head of the sustainability unit of North Macedonia’s Mavrovo National Park, stubs out one cigarette and lights another, gesturing out at the gathering dusk. The rivers, he says, are “the heart of the national park.” But Petrevski was alarmed to find the government had recently changed its zoning to allow hydropower, even in strictly protected areas. →

Huge computer screens line a dark, windowless control room in Corvallis, Oregon, where engineers at the company Nuscale Power hope to define the next wave of nuclear energy. Glowing icons fill the screens, representing the power output of 12 miniature nuclear reactors. Together, these small modular reactors would generate about the same amount of power as one of the conventional nuclear plants that currently dot the United States - producing enough electricity to power 540,000 homes. →

This week, white-clad first responders have finally begun to leave Paradise, California, where they’ve been searching the rubble for human remains. This year has become the state’s most destructive fire season ever, topping even last year’s lethal record-setting. But we may not be accurately calculating the true death tolls of all this incineration. →

The thunderheads loom dark and low as Mike Wiggins Jr. navigates the small motorboat through the shoulder-high grass. "All this," the Bad River Tribal Chairman says, gesturing at the many acres of wetlands that surround us, "could be ruined if that mine goes in." As if on cue, the first low rumble of thunder travels across the water, and a moment later the lightning begins. Wiggins guns the motor, counting seconds between flashes and rumbles. Being on the water during a thunderstorm is one of the few things Wiggins is scared of. Thunder, and the Gogebic Taconite iron-ore mine. →

Medical research is starting to acknowledge the social causes of disease. Since people of color often lack access to healthcare systems, a big part of this is leaving clinical settings - like bringing cancer screenings to barbershops. But an even bigger part is asking questions about how America's disparities dictate who gets sick in the first place. →

The old totalitarian model - the one taught in high school history - was based on a Stalinist state ownership of means. The 21st-century model is quasi-democratic. "Now comes the illiberal version," says Miklós Haraszti, director of research on human rights at the Center for European Neighborhood Studies of Central European University - and a Hungarian who watched his own country transform into a populist autocracy. "There are plenty of names for it, but they all mean the same thing. It's a new state culture, operating through the semblanceof democracy." →

On a recent sunny day before the monsoons began, a thin woman settled to the floor in the cool shade of a nondescript apartment building in Dharampura, where a Perna community lives on the outskirts of Delhi. Rani is not normally awake in the afternoon; the Perna practice a form of inter-generational sex work, which is a strangely polite way of saying that women here expect to be prostituted by their husbands. →

When the monkeys began producing antibodies rather than contracting polio, he took the latest solution, poured into a glass beaker, and knocked it back. According to his biographer, his assistant remembers Koprowski noting that it tasted like cod liver oil. "Have another?" the assistant joked. "Better not," Koprowski said. "I'm driving." →

It was a dark and stormy night and we were in a dim, high-ceilinged room full of leather chairs arranged around custom light fixtures that created little oases in which to drink our scotch. →

Dangerous Dams Podcast We have been drawn to the idea that there's a way to generate energy without negative impacts through renewable energy projects like wind, solar, and hydropower. But perhaps the more honest answer is that for every way we find to produce energy there will be an impact, and we just need to be honest about what that is. →

In an early spring evening in southwestern Albania, Taulant Hazizaj walks between silver-gray olive trees near the Vjosa River. Farms sprawl over the wide river valley, swatches of irrigated green giving way to the rocky swell of surrounding hills. He points to an ancient tree, whose gnarled trunk is wider than a mans outstretched arms. "This village has been here for 2,000 years," Hazizaj says of his hometown, Kuta, tucked above the water's edge. But in 2016, the Albanian government sold a concession to build a dam a few miles downstream, and now this olive grove, and much of the valley — including the village itself — may soon be underwater. "If the dam is built, all of that will be gone," Hazizaj says. →

"Jo diga! Jo diga! Jo diga!" Outside the governmental offices in Tirana, Albania's capital city, dozens of protesters shout in unison. "No dams!" Police officers form a human barricade in front of the demonstrators, a strange mix of local villagers and kayakers geared up in life jackets and GoPro'ed helmets. Many are lugging around boats and paddles, bumping into one another amid the throng. It's a Euro version of The Monkey Wrench Gang. →

Mapping Poverty to Save Lives Early on a recent morning, woodsmoke wafted above the murmur of village life in Gorama, Sierra Leone, as Rupert Allan sat sweating in the shade of a concrete veranda. A member of Missing Maps—a humanitarian project that maps parts of the world vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts and disease—Allan tapped away on a small laptop next to a black goat and a small, tame monkey. Connected by a smartphone hotspot, Allan was in charge of mapping the nearby area. Even local team members were sometimes astonished when they came across villages where their maps had showed blank spaces. "You’re watching light dawn in their eyes, as they see no one has ever been here—no one has ever cared enough to come here,” he says. "There's just people living in the forest hacking their own roads with machetes, essentially unknown to anyone." →

Six hours north of Reykjavik, along a narrow road tracing windswept fjords, is the Icelandic town of Isafjordur, home of 3,000 people and the midnight sun. On a blustery May afternoon, snow still fills the couloirs that loom over the docks, where the Pall Palsson, a 583-ton trawler, has just returned from a three-day trip. Below the rust-spotted deck, neat boxes are packed with freshly caught fish and ice. "If you take all the skins from that trawler," says Fertram Sigurjonsson, the chairman and chief executive officer of Kerecis Ltd., gesturing over the catch, "we would be able to treat one in five wounds in the world." →

The Ello office, in the basement of a renovated loft in Burlington, Vt., is filled with shiny bicycles and Apple products perched on standing desks. Upstairs, espresso makers purr with Counter Culture Coffee grinds, and bespectacled tech bros hunch over laptops. The entryway is painted with a quote from Hunter S. Thompson: "Wow! What a ride!" "Right now we're throwing the coolest party on the Internet," one of the founders says, swinging his leather boots up onto a stool shaped like a robotic rabbit. →

Venezuela and Syria offer a grim vision of how the world might react to a warming future. "In almost all conflict," Homer-Dixon says, "a weak and corrupt state can't evolve market mechanisms to respond to scarcity." This means dysfunction tends to have a snowball effect: Scarcity reinforces corruption, which polarizes a political system and increases inequality. "Then everyone slides down the slope together," Homer-Dixon says. →

When the starting gun went off in Alicante, Spain, on Oct. 4, a stiff breeze was blowing. Seven 66-foot sailboats approached the start line, fighting for the best angle as the wind shifted. Stays chimed. Men scrambled. A bright sun burnt silhouettes of sails across the horizon. Rather than fight for the line, one of the boats-the Dongfeng Race Team, the only Chinese boat ever to enter the event-broke with the rest. →

test Military Defector Puts the Focus on Civilian Deaths The captain of the Venezuelan National Guard placed both hands on the table and leaned forward toward the video camera. "Señores generales," Scott said, "reflect, ask for forgiveness. We are in time to save the country. Tomorrow you yourselves could be victims." →

On Feb. 23, a squad of 30 black-clad military intelligence officers arrived outside Vivas's house on motorcycles and in police cars. The general emerged on the roof of his gate, wearing a flak jacket and carrying a semi-automatic rifle and pistol, an ammo-belt slung around one shoulder. He started to shout. "The only way I will be taken is in a body bag." →

Mountains Do Not Know Borders For many, a sense of displacement has become intergenerational – families living in both present and past, reluctant time travelers for whom resentment can become an antidote to gloominess. One way to forget a certain kind of pain is to feel another. Rarely has understanding how partisan issues divide a country seemed more relevant than today; in the Trump era, social rifts can feel insurmountable. →

Climate of Doubt At the evening Ecstatic Dance, our DJ is in a feathered hat and leopard-print pants. He instructs us: 'No talking to allow for Spirit.' Then we're off, a woman with a mullet rolling on the floor and older white ladies in modest skirts conservatively bopping their knees. When the whooping and hollering starts, I'm swaying, me and this room of elderly strangers, dancing gracelessly and without shame. So science stretches the bounds of human ingenuity in one direction, and faith in the other. →

Mahmud had recently received death threats for staging a protest of a campaign against Valentine's Day. She described being stuck at home, fearing for her life, when the doorbell suddenly rang four times. It turned out to be just a deliveryman. As she recounted the story, she laughed. "Fear is a state of mind," she said. "You can make it much bigger than it actually is." →

As Ukraine descended into war last spring, people on both sides of the border turned to Zello, an app that transforms smartphones into walkie-talkies, to stay up to date on the rapidly shifting fighting. "People were using it to warn about things like air strikes," says the app's co-founder, Alexey Gavrilov, adding that protesters also used Zello to organize protests. But Ukraine wasn't the only conflict zone to pick up on the app. →

Fall on the Mediterranean Sea is unpredictable: The water is warm, the air is cold, and storms are frequent. Conditions like these create chop - small waves the boats pound over like ruts in a road. The weather itself can be a fierce competitor in this nine-month, 38,739-nautical-mile race. This year, an all-female team will compete for the top prize in this traditionally male-dominated sport. →

In September, when the nights cool and the mosquitoes follow the RVs inland, the salt marshes of Assateague National Seashore are perfect for a quick fall paddling escape. →

Hannah Crabtree and Jessie Frost named their home the Rough Draft Farmstead because, Hannah says, "A farm is a constant evolution of ideas, whims, and mistakes." And they're proof it's not just the vegetables that undergo change on a farm. Jessie says, "While picking kale, carrots, and collards, I proposed to her in the gardens where we met and fell in love." →

In 2011, there were 6 billion cell phone subscribers in the world. Especially in developing countries, where cell phones are arriving in hard-to-reach places that have never had landlines, mobile technology is proving invaluable, quickly becoming a ubiquitous health tool. But just the physical presence of cell phones doesn't make the technology a functional tool. As any field-savvy community worker will tell you, "Mobiles don't deliver babies, mothers do." As access spreads, health workers are learning that program designs are invariably limited by how effective their messaging is. →

Sabeen Mahmud has short-cropped hair and rectangular glasses; she'd fit right in hunched over a laptop at Philz or behind the counter at one of Apple's Genius Bars. Her resume matches her style. She's founded asmall tech company, opened a hip coffee shop and organized a successful hackathon. But Mahmud doesn't hail from the Bay - she lives in Karachi, a city more closely associated with extreme violence then entrepreneurs. →

Of the five other transgender candidates on the ballot this spring, two others dropped out. Mazhar Anjo, a.k.a. "Nick," running in a nearby district, quit because people fired shots at her house. "Here if someone dies or someone is killed it only becomes a headline," Rana said. "The very next day everyone forgets whether the person existed." →

ndian Children Discovered to Have Natural AIDS Resistance In India and throughout the developing world, drug trials and medical research are still in a Wild West phase. In the coldest possible terms, these experiments depend on healthy people getting exposed to the disease in order to determine the vaccine's efficacy. →

Every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria. Spread by mosquitos, the disease is most prevalent in the areas that are least equipped to deal with it. In order to detect malaria, a doctor must usually check 100 to 300 "field-of-views," or different perspectives. But this process can be tricky and is expensive; according to WHO, in sub-Saharan Africa around 60 percent of the cases reported are actually false-positives. But the Ozcan Research Group's recent break-through may be about to change all that. →

Nafis Sadik, the Special Adviser to the U.N. Secretary General and former head of UNFPA, is 83 years old, although you wouldn't know it by looking at her. She has shockingly blue eyes, and a husky voice that carries from a podium. At the 2012 mHealth Summit, Dr. Sadik strode out to center-stage in a red power suit as house music whoomped through the convention center's subwoofers. "Growing up in India," she said, "mobile technology meant you had a car. When I was practicing" - she was an obstetrician in Pakistan before entering her career in policy - "few people had heard of mobile phones. Today, men still sit in cafes as they always did, with coffee in one ha →

Mes Aynak, in Afghanistan's Logar Province, boasts one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world. But it is also home to vast archeological ruins, including 5th century Buddhist monasteries and even older Bronze Age settlements. Preservationists - working furiously to excavate the nearby ruins before they are buried under mining rubble - have urged restraint in developing the copper deposits. But those focused on Afghanistan's economic development have urged the country to move full speed ahead, citing the dire need for the $1 trillion in revenue that the mine could bring to the impoverished country. Is the potential for economic growth worth more than the loss of cultural heritage? →

Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco, Talib Kwali - meet Rambo. He's Montenegro's most socially conscientious rapper, and yes, his stage name is a reference to both John Rambo and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He's worried about the "post-industrial informatics revolution going on" right now, and yet lays down rhymes like "only one rule/always stay cool/like a swimming pool." At Eurovision, he shares the stage with a giant Trojan horse, which Rambo claims is actually a donkey. As Rambo himself says, "I am good with words. And by the way, I am also good with music so I can go to places which are beyond any description." →

The afternoon of June 29, the tar on Washington, D.C.'s streets was melting. Citizens and tourists alike collapsed inside in front of air conditioners. Corner stores sold out of ice. When thunderheads began to gather just before dusk, people breathed a sigh of relief. A quiet gloom fell over the city's neighborhoods, shading small square lawns that had been browning in the heat. But when the line of storms arrived, as the lightning cracked and the deluge began, the mercury crept past 104° - the hottest day in June on record. The whip of the derecho's wind blew in undulating patterns, the kind of gusts you can see in the rain. At Reagan National Airport, the weather station reported wind speeds of 75 miles an hour. The next morning, after 22 people died, 4.3 million houses in the region lost power, and Mayor Vince Gray declared a state of emergency, the heat still had not broken →

A messy election could stall Zimbabwe's economic recovery, and political tensions are already flaring over the government's jailing of an MDC legislator over Christmas for allegedly suggesting that Mugabe, who has said in the past that gay people "destroy nationhood," had engaged in gay sex. In a land where a toilet paper roll costs $145,750 and the leader believes only God can remove him from power, the situation threatens to get bleaker and more bizarre before it gets better. →