Aug 7, 2023 | Salon.com
Residents of Alaska’s capital, Juneau, are undergoing an emergency evacuation as of Monday due to major flooding, which began due to a glacier lake outburst flood. This is a situation when a dam containing a glacial lake — in this case the Suicide Basin, a side basin on the Mendenhall Glacier — suffers a breach....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 7, 2023 | History, Salon.com
When we typically think of an ice age, the first thing that comes to mind is often prehistoric humans hunting wooly mammoths or battling saber-toothed tigers. Technically, an ice age is a prolonged period of colder climates when polar and mountain ice sheets are unusually extensive across the earth’s surface and on geological timescales, they happen regularly....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 6, 2023 | Salon.com
Five days before astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot upon the Moon, the American president who sent him there dispatched his Vice President to go on an important mission of his own. Speaking to the American Medical Association Convention, Spiro Agnew reflected that although America was “capable of catapulting men to the Moon,” the nation was also “in mortal danger of devouring its irreplaceable life-sustaining elements through simultaneous genius and foolishness.”...
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 6, 2023 | Salon.com
In early August 2023, Finland’s food authority ordered three of the nation’s fur farms to slaughter 50,000 of their animals. The purpose was not to create new fur coats, but to stop a virus: the H5N1 influenza strain, also known as “bird flu,” which had been detected on those farms....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 5, 2023 | Salon.com
If you could wander inside your own lungs from a microscopic vantage point, it would seem like a horror-fantasy universe straight out of Guillermo del Toro or H. P. Lovecraft.
As you wander through the tubes of your upper and lower respiratory tract, you’d be surrounded by mucus and hair-like structures known as cilia....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 3, 2023 | Salon.com
Thousands of acres are burning as of Wednesday from California and Oregon to Washington and the US-Canada border, all due to wildfires being exacerbated by climate change. Because humans are emitting greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels, we are exacerbating unprecedented extreme weather events like extreme wildfires.
As of Wednesday, California’s York fire has torched more than 82,000 acres of Mojave desert, including thousands of iconic Joshua trees....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 2, 2023 | Salon.com
In Christopher Nolan’s hit biopic “Oppenheimer,” real-life Danish physicist Niels Bohr is more than just a major character. As depicted by Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh, he is a living legend, looming large both over the film’s depiction of the Manhattan Project and over the psyche of the titular protagonist himself, J....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 1, 2023 | Salon.com
The so-called “dark universe,” as its nickname indicates, is that region of the universe which is so distant from Earth that it is extremely difficult to observe. However — thanks to the European Space Agency’s new powerful telescope, Euclid — the dark universe is now a little less dark than it was before....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 31, 2023 | Salon.com
New data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reveals that Antarctic sea ice is growing at its lowest rate in recorded history, with the continent missing an Argentina-sized amount of sea ice.
Because climate change is melting Antarctic sea ice at an unprecedented rate, scientists have mostly focused on the problems caused by the infusion of so much water into the ocean — problems like rising sea levels and collapsing ocean currents....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 30, 2023 | Salon.com
Michael was a 46-year-old Black man, Marcie Roth recalled to Salon, and his life was destroyed following a heart attack.
Roth is the executive director and chief executive officer of the World Institute on Disability, an international nonprofit center on public policy. As she recalled Michael’s story, her voice was filled with emotion....
Originally posted on salon.com