Mar 10, 2024 | Salon.com
Good feminists or adept film buffs may be familiar with the Bechdel Test, a metric for gauging female representation in film. Created by comic author Alison Bechdel in the 1980s, a movie has to meet three standards to pass: It must have at least two women in it, the women need to talk to each other and they should discuss something other than a man....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 8, 2024 | Salon.com
Dr. Kevin Trenberth is one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate change. He is a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, worked for the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and has published more than 600 articles on climatology. Yet despite these impeccable credentials, as Trenberth spoke with Salon about his recent paper in the Journal of Climate Action, Research and Policy, an unmistakable tone of frustration crept into the scientist’s voice....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 7, 2024 | Salon.com
As far as candidates for nearby worlds that may contain life, Jupiter’s frosty moon Europa is one tantalizing place for scientists to look. Astrobiologists speculate that alien life forms could reside in Europa’s icy crust and the massive ocean that churns underneath. Yet these prospects appear somewhat less likely in light of a recent study by the journal Nature Astronomy, which finds that Europa has much lower amounts of oxygen — an element essential to all known forms of complex life — than previously thought....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 5, 2024 | Salon.com
Our industrial society is underpinned by drug use, though we don’t typically think of it as such. After all, two out of three Americans drink coffee daily, according to the National Coffee Association. The American coffee market is expected to exceed $28 billion in 2024 and the industry creates 2.2 million jobs a year, which in turn generates more than $100 billion in wages for employees....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 4, 2024 | Salon.com
Black holes are some of the most powerful, destructive and massive objects in the known universe, devouring stars at unimaginable speeds and ripping them apart with such ferocity that they discharge luminous flares visible from millions of lightyears away. When black holes collide into each other, they produce gravitational waves, as scientists learned in 2015 after recording a pair of stellar-mass black holes colliding for the first time....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 4, 2024 | Salon.com
As the climate crisis grows worse every year, alternative energy options are increasingly important. Much recent debate has focused on nuclear energy, which has an understandably troubled reputation after the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and is further tarnished by its association with the devastating potential of nuclear weapons....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 1, 2024 | Salon.com
President Biden described climate change deniers as “Neanderthals” during a speech on Thursday in Brownsville, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Fox News and other conservative media appears to be depicting this as an unacceptable insult — but perhaps it was most unfair to the Neanderthals.
“I’ve been helicopters in the West, in the Southwest and Northwest, flown over more land burned to the ground, all the vegetation gone, than the entire state of Maryland,” Biden told his audience, partly referring to the wildfires now raging in Texas....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 1, 2024 | Salon.com
Andrea Zaccardi had just moved to Idaho Falls, a city of roughly 70,000 people not far from Yellowstone National Park, when she was startled by the shadowy creature that darted in front of her. This was roughly a decade ago and Zaccardi was up early in the morning to drive to her new job....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 29, 2024 | Salon.com
As ExxonMobil pursues litigation against activist shareholders who seek to push the biggest of all Big Oil behemoths to tougher environmental standards, CEO Darren Woods knows who to blame for the worsening climate crisis. It’s not his company or its major competitors.
In a recent interview with Fortune, Woods argued that the oil industry is not primarily to blame for climate....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 28, 2024 | Salon.com
Humanity’s closest cousins are in trouble. The great African apes, which includes gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos are renowned for their intelligence and fascinate both scientists and laypeople because of their physical and genetic similarities with humans.
Yet as a recent study in the journal PLOS Climate demonstrates that, even though apes and humans are part of the same family tree, humans are the inconsiderate relatives who destroy their hosts’ home: Human-caused climate change is going to have a devastating impact on ape species throughout Africa....
Originally posted on salon.com