It’s the Fourth of July in Boston, and residents seek respite from the urban heat island inferno. The commuter rail offers a great escape: the ocean. Just a short train ride away residents can cool down on the North Shore, lay on the hot sand, and settle into a favorite beach read. But a faraway […]
Stopping to smell the roses may seem like a purposeless pastime, but for pollinators, it’s their entire lives. Communicating largely through smell and pheromones, insects with limited vision rely heavily on recognizable scent profiles to identify and locate their lunch. Over millions of years, plants and pollinators have engaged in co–evolution — adapting and evolving
Flowers smell bad (but not how you think!) Read More »
One bottle of water to generate a 100-word email using GPT-4. This is the hidden cost, on average, of outsourcing our everyday tasks to ChatGPT’s newest large language model. Artificial intelligence (AI) models require immense amounts of water for server cooling and electricity generation, which raises concerns in an era of freshwater scarcity. By 2030,
Getting Pretty Thirsty: ChatGPT’s hidden water footprint Read More »
What comes to mind when picturing a mountain landscape? Beautiful scenery of towering peaks and rolling valleys? Howling winds, icy slopes, and jagged rock formations? Thriving life, including thousands of different plants and animals? In fact, the surprisingly rich biodiversity of mountain habitats has important implications for the health of these ecosystems and humans across
Humboldt’s enigma: The mysteriously rich biodiversity of mountain ecosystems Read More »
As the climate warms, recent research has revealed an unsettling possibility: melting glaciers may awaken dormant faults, triggering earthquakes in regions long thought to be geologically stable. The immense weight of glaciers has suppressed seismic activity for years, but rising temperatures may unleash more frequent earthquakes. And no, this is not the plot of a
The unthinkable: Climate change-triggered earthquakes Read More »
While scientists have described over 350,000 plant species, as many as 100,000 plant species remain unknown. These undiscovered plants are the dark matter of botany, their identities and locations obscured to science. Yet, with extinction threatening an estimated 77% of undescribed plant species, the time to document them is running out. Identifying these species is
Plant diversity darkspots: Botany’s dark matter Read More »
Warm spring days are the best times to be outside, but they may involve the dreaded, surprising buzz of a bee’s wings close by. The tiny insects can be startling, causing people to recoil in fear and instinctively cover their ears. Many people share this unease toward these six-legged creatures that are 700,000 times smaller
Opinion: The bees we can’t afford to lose Read More »
In 2023 alone, the United States experienced 56,580 wildfires, 90% of which originated from human actions such as cigarette use and campfires. Due to the rate at which wildfires occur, a great emphasis has been noted on the environmental and physical harm imposed on humans. Skin damage and cardiovascular diseases associated with wildfires have been
How wildfires are negatively impacting more than physical health Read More »
Those from Pennsylvania will probably recognize any mention of Three Mile Island, and older populations may even shudder at the name. These reactions, however, may look a little different — particularly to a more severe degree — if it is revealed that Three Mile Island could be restored to its prior output of energy generation.
Nuclear energy: Soon to be restored as a valuable clean energy source Read More »