Technology

"Every year, navel orangeworms eat through roughly 2% of California’s almonds before they can make it to grocery store shelves. With climate change threatening to make the situation worse, researchers are hoping to sterilize millions of moths a day with radiation and drop them from airplanes."

"Even greater efforts to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will fail to avert climate change catastrophe as rising global temperatures threaten to cross a key threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), scientists said on Wednesday."

"When he was just 18 years old, Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars."

"President Biden on Wednesday signed legislation exempting semiconductor manufacturing facilities from environmental reviews — despite objections from some Democrats and green activists who have expressed concerns about the potential for toxic waste."

"In a quiet patch of forest in Nova Scotia, a company is building a machine designed to help slow global warming by transforming Earth’s rivers and oceans into giant sponges that absorb carbon dioxide from the air."

"The owner of the shuttered Pennsylvania plant plans to bring it online by 2028, with the tech giant buying all the power it produces."

"Researchers have found several promising ways to thwart the fungus, which causes the deadly white-nose syndrome in bats."

"Yorba Linda is a small, sunny city southeast of Los Angeles. It’s perhaps best known for being the birthplace of President Richard Nixon. But in the past few years, Yorba Linda has picked up another distinction: It’s home to the nation’s largest per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) water treatment plant of its kind, according to the city."

"We toured a facility in Northern Virginia to see how it works and to understand why water use and energy consumption are such a concern."