~podcast-25-lead-and | Bookmarks (90)

All history is environmental history, according to Sunil Amrith, an historian and the author of “The Burning Earth,” which traces the disparate, and often disastrous, efforts by civilizations as far back as the Mongol empire to control nature in the name of exploration, expansion, and development.

Microsoft announced a deal to revive Three Mile Island and buy all of the nuclear power plant’s electricity as the demands of its artificial intelligence data centers increase. One anthropologist asks whether a dying 20th century technology that didn’t fulfill its promises should be used to power a new and similarly uncertain one.

Connecting the dots between armed conflict and health is not straightforward. But researchers are developing creative techniques to gauge the extent of armed conflict’s public health harms — an endeavor they say is essential to inform short-term relief efforts as well as long-term policies.

While some residents in hurricane-impacted areas can’t send texts or make calls, amateur radio enthusiasts are helping communicate requests for help and messages between loved ones.

In “Why Animals Talk,” zoologist Arik Kershenbaum casts a skeptical eye on grand claims about animal communication. Instead, he argues, the way information is conveyed is a product of the animal’s need to survive in specific circumstances, and is developed as far as it needs to be, no more and no less.

We humans harbor many cognitive biases — a legacy of the psychological adaptations early humans had to make to survive. In today’s world, could these deeply held thinking patterns be preventing us from breaking the harmful habits that fuel the many environmental threats facing Earth?

Scientists say droughts, wildfires, and volatile weather threaten acequias — ancient irrigation ditches in the Southwest. To safeguard their unique system, irrigators are working on boosting acequias as a sustainable resource, and strengthening legal protections around water rights.

Aging dams built for flood control a half-century ago are at risk of being breached during today’s major rainstorms, resulting in massive damage. But the high price tag to fix what’s broken leaves rural areas with hard choices. One Wisconsin county is considering a controversial plan to dismantle all of their dams.

A federal judge last week handed a major victory to opponents of water fluoridation — one that may highlight a path for other advocacy groups seeking to challenge environmental regulations. The ruling comes after a seven-year legal battle.

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin’s “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine” explores the myriad ways in which playing and listening to music can help to heal our bodies and minds, including its therapeutic benefits in treating trauma, depression, movement disorders, and other afflictions.

Recent movements to ban books and modify school curricula will not be limited to subjects like U.S. history, argues C. Brandon Ogbunu in his column Selective Pressure. Biologists must recognize that these recent attacks on intellectual freedom are part of a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.

Genetic research disproportionately focuses on people with European ancestry. New research suggests that having more diverse genetic data could allow physicians to better target certain medical treatments to patients in Latin America, including Indigenous groups.

A 1970s theory proposed that baleen whales, like bowheads and humpbacks, travel in diffuse herds spanning up to hundreds of miles. Since then, anecdotes of whales seeming to coordinate behavior over long distances have circulated among the research community — but until recently, there has never been hard evidence.

Roughly half of all Britons have said they view the drug industry at least somewhat favorably. By contrast, just 18 percent of Americans report positive views of pharma. The discrepancy may be explained, in part, by the U.K.’s industry-run watchdog, which rules on drug companies’ untoward behavior.

Two Michigan health officials describe how the state is confronting an outbreak of avian influenza among dairy cattle through an aggressive approach that includes declaring an animal health emergency and compensating farmers who participate in research studies to determine the risks to humans and cattle.

Artificial intelligence-driven tools such as ChatGPT threaten to flood the internet with machine-generated content, making the question of what data to archive more challenging. Libraries, with their public support, are the best places to decide what on the web is worth keeping, one cryptographer writes.

In nursing homes, antipsychotic drugs are often used to sedate dementia patients who show agitation or aggression. New data shows that the use of such drugs remains stubbornly high. Some experts say that brings up troubling questions about how and why nursing homes prescribe the drugs.