科技前沿
How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…
AI 资讯
Is Slate Auto’s new electric truck the EV Americans need?
EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems…
AI 资讯
The next big thing in hydrogen could be underground
There’s a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It’s often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water…
AI 资讯
Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried…
科技前沿
As temperatures get hotter, pesticides are more dangerous to farmworkers
Research shows heat amplifies the dangers of pesticides.
AI 资讯
How much hydrogen awaits us underground?
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat…
AI 资讯
Wildfire smoke now bigger prenatal threat than human sources of air pollution
Regulations reduced prenatal exposure to harmful emissions, but wildfire smoke is erasing gains.
AI 资讯
What’s behind this summer’s heat, and why 2027 could be worse
This summer has been a scorcher for much of the Northern Hemisphere. June and July marked the hottest two-month stretch in Europe since record-keeping began. The contiguous US endured its hottest month on record in July. South Korea saw its highest-ever recorded temperature. The heat isn’t over yet, but some scientists are already looking ahead…
科技前沿
Tracking extreme heat by the hour makes climate change seem even worse
Hot hours of summer could triple in the coming decades.
科技前沿
Mount Toba eruption doesn't seem like it could nearly kill our species
The massive Toba eruption seems to have had little climate impact.
科技前沿
The World Is Too Hot. El Niño Is Partly to Blame
Heat waves are simultaneously hitting Europe, North America, and Asia, driven in part by the hot waters in the tropical Pacific—and climate change.
AI 资讯
How an overlooked geothermal plant got a second chance
In June 2024, a small company called Zanskar purchased a geothermal power plant in New Mexico that was failing fast. The water coming from the underground reservoir was getting colder by the day, making the plant uneconomical to run. Now, two years later, that plant is running at full capacity again, thanks to a new…
产品设计
How to Bring a Geothermal Well Back from the Dead
Startup Zanskar has created one of the most productive geothermal wells in the US at a power plant that had been in decline for years.
科技前沿
France Records Its First-Ever Pyrocumulonimbus Cloud Amid Record-Smashing Fires
Extreme fire conditions on the ground have created unprecedented conditions in the atmosphere.
开发者
How lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear reactors
Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser…
AI 资讯
The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags
On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE).…
科技前沿
Fans Flocked to World Cup Host Cities—Causing 80 Percent of the Tournament’s Emissions
The latest estimates reveal that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions from large-scale events such as the FIFA World Cup stem from spectators traveling to host cities.
产品设计
As mosquito ranges expand, better monitoring is key to preventing disease
Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks.
开发者
Google-backed satellites for wildfire detection launch as smoke chokes US, Canada
The FireSat program can spot wildfires that other satellites miss.
开源项目
The report oil companies are worried about: Climate attribution science
New report says our ability to tie weather damages to climate change is improving.