With the sun obscured by a jaundiced haze and the eyes of passersby barely visible above their smoke masks, there’s a general sense of apocalyptic doom hovering over California. It’s no wonder people are making Blade Runner references.
Posted on November 19, 2018 - 6:05pm
A week after the eruption of the Camp Fire near the town of Paradise, California, 142,000 acres have burned, setting state records for wildfire destruction.
Despite the hundreds still missing and worsening air quality in much of the state, there has been significant progress in battling the flames. As of this writing, according to Cal Fire officials, the Butte County blaze is now 45 percent contained, with full containment expected by November 30.
Posted on November 19, 2018 - 9:20am
Tens of thousands of Californians have evacuated as massive fires, driven by intense winds, rage in both Northern and Southern California. The Camp Fire in Butte County, which destroyed the town of Paradise, grew to 70,000 acres overnight. It sent up a pall of smoke that has triggered air quality advisories across a large swath of the northern part of the state, including the Bay Area. In the South, two fires—the Hill and Woolsey fires—are being fanned by Santa Ana Winds and have forced some 75,000 homes to be evacuated in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties.
Posted on November 9, 2018 - 12:51pm
Beneath Irwin Reyes’s desk are ten smartphones hooked up to a computer, running a dizzying number of apps to find out what user information those apps send back to their creators.
Cobalt has been valued for centuries for the deep blue color it imparts to ceramic glazes and glass. Its current value has little to do with such stuff, however. Cobalt is sought today because it’s a critical element in lithium ion batteries, the devices that power our cell phones, computers, and electric vehicles.
Posted on October 26, 2018 - 10:37am
Research out of UC Berkeley shows that animals around the world are becoming more nocturnal in response to human populations.
The study, published in the journal Science in June, found that mammals have, on average, become 1.36 times more active at night. In other words, a creature that normally would have split its activities equally between day and night, now carries out 68 percent of its activities at night, presumably in avoidance of humans.
Amethyst, rose quartz, garnets, pearls…kidney stones? That’s right—it might just be time to add a lesser known formation to the list of gemstones you might want for your engagement ring. Turns out, those uncharming urinary deposits that affect more than ten percent of people across the globe are surprisingly interesting, beneath their rough exterior.
Posted on October 23, 2018 - 10:15am
Located in the high desert of eastern Washington along the Columbia River, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation has played a crucial role in global war and peace for more than half a century. It’s also the most heavily contaminated nuclear site in the country—one that few people know about.
Posted on October 23, 2018 - 10:15am
Today, millions of people practiced their “drop, cover, and hold on” for the Great California ShakeOut. The annual earthquake drill, held a day after the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, celebrated its 10th birthday—with a twist. This year, for the first time, ShakeOut partnered with ShakeAlert 2.0, an earthquake early warning (EEW) system created in collaboration with the Seismology Lab at UC Berkeley.
Posted on October 18, 2018 - 6:30pm
1. You quote a veteran in your book, Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus, who says of his civilian classmates, “…none of the people in this room gave a shit about what I thought was important.” What are some of those important things valued in the military but not on campus?
The Global Climate Action Summit that wrapped recently in San Francisco was trumpeted as a “subnational” approach to climate change solutions, a riposte to the regressive environmental policies of the Trump administration. For three days, delegates from diverse international municipalities, provinces, states and corporations discussed ways to cut carbon emissions and mitigate global warming.
Posted on September 26, 2018 - 12:52pm
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a revolutionary new class of crystalline solids that can be designed to trap myriad kinds of matter, including greenhouse gases, or to be used as nanosized drug carriers. They can also pull water from desert air.
Posted on September 13, 2018 - 1:16am
The world certainly seems more flammable these days. Thousands of homes were lost last year in Sonoma County alone, and wildfires have raged across California all summer. And not just in California: Records from the federal National Interagency Fire Center show that U.S. acreage burned in wildfires leaped from 1.8 million in 1995 to 10 million in 2017.
Posted on September 4, 2018 - 4:50pm
The timber wars are heating up again in Northern California, this time at Rainbow Ridge, a tract of mature Douglas fir near the remote community of Petrolia in Humboldt County. As reported in California earlier this year, the property is the focus of a dispute between the Humboldt Redwood Company (HRC), which intends to log it, and local residents who steadfastly oppose the proposed cutting.
Posted on September 1, 2018 - 10:58am
