Read the full story at Ars Technica. When it comes to community investments, Microsoft appears to be no better or worse than other companies building data centers. Amazon, another big player in the field, may not have offered environmental commitments as strong as Microsoft’s, but it has also provided one-time grants of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a handful of local charities, We Make Indiana members told Ars.

Read the full story in the Columbia Journalism Review. In late August, flash floods swept down a steep mountain valley in the Himalayas, killing more than thirteen hundred people in Nepal and Tibet. Thousands remain missing. The floods were caused, in part, scientists say, by the collapse of a glacier. Four years ago, Rebecca Hersher, a correspondent at NPR who has covered climate for the past decade, hiked a valley in Nepal to…

Read the full story from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Coastal communities are facing a hidden threat that is making rising seas far more dangerous: the land beneath them is sinking. New research shows that people in densely populated coastal regions experience an average relative sea-level rise of about 6 millimeters per year, nearly three times the global coastal average.

Read the full story in the New York Times (gift article). The Trump administration is rolling back protections for endangered species. Countries around the world are failing to deliver on their conservation commitments. Corporations are backpedaling on environmental pledges. Still, 100 imperiled animals and plants got some good news on Tuesday. A new fund called the Phoenix Species Project said it would pump $200 million into efforts to pull these animals and plants back from the brink of extinction and even restore them in the wild.

Read the full story from NPR. Sunflower stars are one of the Pacific Ocean's most endangered sea creatures. For the past year, University of Washington researchers have worked closely with the Samish Indian Nation to bring this 24-armed creature back from the brink of extinction after a vast underwater pandemic nearly wiped it out.

Read the full story at Ars Technica. Elon Musk’s talk about maintaining a million-strong AI data center satellite megaconstellation may not exactly be practical or economical, but it might be unique. It’s about the closest we’ve come to confronting a scheme that would export a considerable amount of valuable materials into space. Humans aren’t doing a great job of material sustainability, but normally we’re talking about stuff escaping a recycling pipeline rather than…

Read the full story at Retraction Watch. While reading a chapter from a 2024 book on restoring biodiversity in post-industrial land earlier this month, an ecologist came across a reference to a study on rewilding she wanted to look up. But the ecologist, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the chapter authors, couldn’t find a record of the 2020 paper, purportedly published in…

Critics of needle exchange programs often express concerns about syringe litter. Spencer Platt/Getty Images by Pranav Padmanabhan, University of Colorado Anschutz; Katherine LeMasters, University of Colorado Boulder, and Paul Christine, University of Colorado Anschutz The City Council of Pueblo, Colorado, voted to ban the distribution of syringes through syringe service programs starting in May 2024.

Read the full story at Waste360. Across the country, sports franchises, fans, venue operators and university campuses are actively cutting waste, conserving energy and modernizing cleanup protocols. These initiatives do more than protect natural resources; they deliver substantial economic value.

Read the full story at The Nature of Cities. There is an urgent need to address the unintended consequences of our pursuit of green and to return to mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the root problem.

Read the full story at Block Club Chicago. Located next to three Belmont Cragin schools, the Chicago Farm Lab is a place where students learn to grow and neighbors get free access to produce.

Read the full story from NPR. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Glory Dolphin Hammes, CEO of IQAir North America, about the difficulties of tracking wildfire smoke.

Read the full story from MIT. Can a city’s seawall stand up to a blockbuster storm? Will a region’s power grid hold against record-breaking heat? And can a town’s fire-fighting resources contain a major wildfire? To answer these questions, communities will first need to know how such extreme events could unfold. How far is a wildfire likely to spread? How much of a region might a storm impact?

Read the full post at Heather Boushey's Substack. Hello from New York City, where I (and many many others!) have been at Climate Week. A theme coming out of this week’s events is how capital—rather than politics—is shaping the clean energy transition because scaling climate solutions increasingly depends on private investment, philanthropy, development finance, and insurance markets. Penn Climate hosted a fantastic…

Data Science DISCOVERY: Foundations of AI and Data Science is an open-access platform through a cross-campus collaboration at The University of Illinois. Their mission is to provide open, accessible, and zero-paywall educational access for anyone to gain a deep understanding of foundational concepts in artificial intelligence and data science. Led by Dr. Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider and Dr. Karle Flanagan, the platform includes:

Read the full story at Ars Technica. The federal government’s war on fuel efficiency claimed another victim today. The Department of Transportation released a new rule for the country’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, which, as expected, discourage the very idea of economical vehicles. Among the changes is a rollback to fuel economy numbers not seen in more than a decade, below…

Read the full story from Illinois Public Media. Danville residents are rallying behind a proposed extension of the Kickapoo Rail Trail. The trail currently runs from Urbana to St. Joseph. When complete, it will be 24.5 miles long and run from Urbana to Kickapoo State Recreation Area. The extension would add 3.5 miles of trail, connecting Kickapoo State Recreation Area to Ellsworth Park in Danville.

Read the full news release. Historically, biodiversity data were stored on paper copies, available only to those who knew where to look. This is no longer the case. Over the past two decades, there has been a major surge in the number of online biodiversity portals, platforms and tools offering insights to biodiversity trends and supporting different stakeholders with determining what action they can take to protect ecosystems.

The Abandoned and Derelict Vessel Reporting database, developed by the BoatUS Foundation for Boating Safety and Clean Water, identifies and tracks Abandoned and Derelict Vessels (ADVs) in the United States, Freely Associated States and U.S. Territories. BoatUS Foundation collects information through individual reports to understand the scope of the problem of ADVs and track prevention and removal efforts by states and partners.

Read the full story at Waste360. Asphalt shingles remain the most popular roofing material in the United States, generating roughly 13 million tons of waste annually from manufacturing scrap and tear-offs. Because asphalt shingles can take up to 400 years to decompose in landfills, sustainable disposal is critical. Yet, according to Business Insider, only about 10% of this annual waste currently reaches material recovery facilities.

Read the full story from the Internet Archive. Beginning in January 2025, we witnessed an unprecedented removal of material from U.S. federal websites — documents related to education, health, science, and more, gone from public view almost overnight. Dozens of articles appeared on this topic, including this one from IEEE Spectrum, published in February 2025, shortly after the beginning of the new presidential term.

Read the full story at Ars Technica. Last year, the Trump administration did what it could to shut down work on the next US National Climate Assessment, eliminating funding for the US Global Change Research Program and booting hundreds of contributing authors. The administration even took past reports offline, forcing others to host copies so the information would still be accessible.

Kim, S. S. Y., Deng, W. H., Vaughan, J. W., Su, B., Su, W., Agarwal, A., Li, S., Jaggi, M., Goldstein, D. G., Shah, N. B., & Dudík, M. (2026). Use and effects of LLMs in peer review: A randomized experiment and survey at ICML 2026 (Version 1). arXiv. Abstract LLMs are rapidly reshaping peer review, making it important to understand how reviewers use them in practice and how different LLM-use policies affect review outcomes.

From the project page: Betting the House is a pop-up collaboration of journalists reporting on what the climate crisis means for the places we call home. As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, the questions around where we live, and how it will be affected by a warming planet, become more pointed. In this series, four independent climate journalists based in the US have joined together to simultaneously report the story of housing and climate change — from different states, with different angles, for different media.

Read the full story at Heated. I am not meant to be in Miami in August. The thick air, the searing cement, the tepid ocean—it’s all teaching me what scientists mean when they say some places are becoming too hot for the human body to survive. Is Miami technically one of those places? No. But my dripping knee pits don’t care about technicalities.

Read the full story at Ars Technica. In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn’t required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization. Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, …

Read the full story at Ars Technica. Global warming is leading to more extremely hot weather. There is perhaps no more obvious consequence of climate change. But changing how we analyze this problem can still help scientists think about it in a different way that may yield surprises. Generally, studies on heat extremes work with some combination of daily minimum, maximum, and mean temperatures.

Read the full story from the Arizona Republic. The Arizona Republic used air quality records to estimate exactly how much energy could be guzzled by data centers in Maricopa County, where The Republic identified 71 data center campuses planned or operating... Data centers' water use for cooling varies drastically; the facilities can range from water guzzlers to negligible water use. A large-scale data center using evaporative cooling can use as much as 4 million gallons a day; some data centers, using energy-intensive air-cooled systems with closed loop, claim to use less than 10 million gallons a year.

Read the full story at Biocycle. A string of recent grant awards is putting millions of dollars into new and expanded composting infrastructure across the U.S., with communities using the funding to move projects from planning into construction and operation. Recent awards in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and several Tribal Nations are funding everything from full-scale processing facilities to food scrap collection, composting equipment, vehicles, staffing, and site improvements.

Read the full story at How-To Geek. Online AI services are a great way to search through and parse long documents, but they come with some drawbacks. Your data is held by someone else, you use up tokens or require a subscription to get access, and you need internet access for it to work. By switching to a local-only approach, I can ensure that no sensitive documents can be leaked accidentally, and I don't have to worry about whether my private data is being used to train cloud models.

Read the full story at Canary Media. The product that was supposed to redefine both roofing and home solar never moved beyond expensive niche status. Does the new plan reflect lessons learned?

Read the full story from CBS News. Visitors to Bay Area beaches are starting to see a disturbing sight: dead and dying seabirds. They're called murres, and wildlife rescuers are scrambling to try to save them as they fall victim to a rapidly warming ocean. At the International Bird Rescue hospital in Fairfield, they've received more than 100 in just the last few days.

Read the full story at Packaging Dive. E-commerce remains a dominant force in retail, but some aspects of consumer sentiment toward the channel and its packaging have shifted during the last year, according to newly released survey results from logistics company Ryder. Consumers are prioritizing premium experiences and sustainability more than in the past. While they still seek value amid economic uncertainty, it’s a lower priority than last year.

Read the full story at The Walrus. It turns out a lot of people ask Google when the sun will set. It’s a good fact to know. Getting a ballpark on twilight can help you plan a bike ride, barbecue, or a perfectly timed promposal. The occurrence lasts only between two and a half and four minutes, and it happens dynamically depending on your proximity to the equator, making it a tricky event to keep tabs on.

Read the full story at ProPublica. Asking the federal government for public records didn’t always feel like a shell game. But bounced emails and broken portals seem like the new normal.

Read the full story from the CBC (via MSN). Driscoll’s berries are on many Canadians’ plates and all over Canadian grocery stores, with their tagline claiming to be “only the finest berries.” But a whistleblower lawsuit in California alleges the finest berries were not sent to Canada: instead, millions of pounds of fruit containing non-compliant levels of pesticides and chemicals crossed the border, and the company tried to cover it up.

Read the full report. Almost none of what the United States calls “solar recycling” is closed-loop recovery. Three practices dominate instead — landfilling, offshoring, and camouflaging (disposal disguised as recycling) — and all three are the same failure in different clothing: the material never becomes clean feedstock again, and a customer, an investor, or a regulator usually cannot tell any of them apart from the real thing.

Read the full story from the Washington Post (via Yahoo News). I don't often add editorial comments but I really hope MLB drops this idea. The Field of Dreams game takes place at a privately owned space specifically built for baseball. National parks have no connection to the game and the adverse impacts on conservation on these public lands would be profound.

Read the full story from Monash University. Researchers at Monash University have published a capacity maturity model for assessing how prepared a country is to defend itself against disinformation campaigns, backed by a 103-page white paper that lays out the reasoning behind it in far more depth than the university’s public summary of the project disclosed. The model and white paper…

Read the full story from the Associated Press. OpenAI has disclosed six reports of “unexpected or concerning” behavior in artificial-intelligence models as the debate on AI safety becomes increasingly heated. The AI company also said Wednesday it was introducing a new framework for tracking, probing and disclosing instances of what it called “misalignment,” including cases where AI models acted without authorization, coordinated with other models or evaded oversight.

The Associated Press Wildfire Tracker is an interactive map that shows active fires in the United States, including California, Oregon and Washington, as well as Canada. Data comes from Integrated Reporting of Wildfire Information (IRWIN) through the National Interagency Fire Center's Open Data Site.

Via the NYU/Tisch ITP Thesis Archive. The Experimental Paint Archive by Sophia Collender is a publicly accessible and open source collection of biodegradable, non-toxic, and reusable fine art materials. The history of paint is entwined with a history of material experimentation, and of people who have often taken considerable financial, physical, and environmental risks in order to attain specific visual effects.

Read the full story in the New York Times (gift article). OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes. The incidents involving the Commerce Department and the S.E.C.

Read the full story in the Daily Illini. The Champaign County Data Center Activities Task Force held a meeting Monday to discuss two sections of its draft ordinance on large data center development. The previous task force meeting was Aug. 31 and consisted of three hours of public input on sections of the draft concerning water use, energy use, screening and more.

Read the full story at ESG Dive. Best Buy has achieved a key sustainability goal set in 2021 that aimed for the company to have zero waste at all its supply chain facilities. The consumer electronics giant announced Tuesday that all 29 of its supply chain facilities had been certified as zero waste and met requirements outlined under the Total Resource Use and Efficiency designation from the…

Defend Our Health reviewed the public websites of more than 200 cookware brands, attempted to locate their California-required AB 1200 Materials Disclosures, and created a searchable directory based on their findings. The directory includes information the brand publicly shares regarding their use of intentionally-added PFAS in their products. If the brand states that they use PFAS in some or all of their products, a summary of that information is provided in the rightmost column of the chart. To view the product disclosures for each brand, click on the Yes link in the Chemical Disclosure Located column.

Read the full story at Engadget. It seems like every portable gadget comes with a USB cable. Nowadays, they come with USB-C cables, which means you have less and less need for a traditional USB-A cable. Chances are, somewhere in your house is one of those overstuffed drawers filled with extra cables, batteries and other accessories you don't use but somehow swear one day you might need.

Read the full story at Grist. Biden’s incentives gave Qcells a leg up. Now Trump’s tariffs may help it thrive.

Read the full story at Ars Technica. Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update. Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later. Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea.

Read the full story at Retraction Watch. Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) has retracted 165 papers this year, most for “suspicious” changes in authorship or editorial conflicts of interest. The retractions have come after STOTEN was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November after the index put it on hold due to concerns about article quality. The journal published over 10,000 articles in 2024; so far this year it has published fewer than 1,000.