Category: Nature
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National parks caught in the crossfire of the shutdown
As the 2025 government shutdown stretches into its first week, America’s national parks sit in uneasy limbo. The Department of the Interior announced that most parks would remain open, but with only a fraction of the usual staff. Roughly 9,300 of the National Park Service’s 14,500 employees have been furloughed, leaving just a third of
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Rare double meteor shower peaks tonight under dark skies
The sky will put on a rare double feature this July, as two separate meteor showers reach their peak on the same night. On the evening of July 29 into the early morning hours of July 30, the Southern Delta Aquariids and Alpha Capricornids will streak across the atmosphere, offering a chance to witness up
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8 wild dandelion facts every curious kid should know
They pop up in parks, schoolyards, and sidewalk cracks. Some people call them weeds. But dandelions? They’re so much more than that. Turns out, this little yellow flower has some big-time superpowers, and a lot to teach us if we look closely. From floating through the air to helping the planet and our bodies, dandelions
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China’s clean air efforts may be speeding up global warming
In 2013, China launched an ambitious campaign to clean up its air. Cities like Beijing, once blanketed by thick industrial smog, began to see blue skies. Sulphur dioxide levels across East Asia dropped by approximately 75 percent over the following decade. It was a global public health victory, saving lives and improving daily life for
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Cascadia’s threat: The quake that could redraw the Pacific Northwest in minutes
Off the coasts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia lies a 600-mile geological fault that’s been ominously quiet for over 300 years. This is the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the smaller Juan de Fuca Plate pushes beneath the North American Plate. Instead of sliding smoothly, the plates are locked. Strain builds year after
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Study shows we can hear when a forest is alive
No formal training. No field guides. No binoculars. And yet, we still know the sound of life when we hear it. That’s the premise of a new study out of Germany’s iDiv biodiversity research center. Researchers asked people with zero scientific background to sort forests by how biodiverse they seemed, just based on photos and
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No forest, no deal: Norway rewrites the rules on public spending
Norway just became the first country in the world to make its public spending deforestation-free. That means no government contracts for companies that can’t prove their products were made without razing tropical forests. No palm oil tied to burned peatland. No soy grown on cleared Amazon acreage. No wood cut from unverified logging zones. The
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Wind and solar just got taxed. Here’s who benefits.
Late last week, while most of the country was heading into the weekend, Senate Republicans quietly slipped a new provision into their 940-page budget bill. The provision is an excise tax targeting future wind and solar projects. Not just a rollback of clean energy support. A penalty. Under the proposed bill, any wind or solar
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Strange Beauty At 10,000 Feet: Kilimanjaro’s Towering Green Guardians
They don’t look like anything you’d expect to find on Earth, but you’ll see them as soon as you step into Kilimanjaro’s high moorland: towering rosettes with thick stems that store water like living canteens. These giants are Dendrosenecio Kilimanjaro, the Kilimanjaro giant groundsels. They’re only found between about 10,000 and 13,000 feet on the