Month: October 2022

Today, Ethiopian farmers are feeling the pressure to grow modern monoculture crops, thanks in part to a national push to become an agricultural powerhouse. “If you export grains, you want them to be uniform,” says McAlvay. “The global market wants a certain type of wheat for their Wonder Bread. A mixture of three varieties of wheat and four varieties of barley with some other things thrown in really doesn’t make the cut.”

Tesfanesh Feseha, a master’s student in botany who served as a field translator during McAlvay’s interviews with more than 100 farmers, says that with the national embrace of monocultures, new farmers aren’t learning the art of cultivating grain mixtures. “Young farmers didn’t even know the mixtures we were looking for,” she says.

Zemede, who collaborates with McAlvay but was not directly involved in the new paper, remains optimistic. “[The push for] modernization is strong. It comes with technology

Until Ukraine and Russia reach an agreement, the plant remains in danger. “There’s no question: There should not be any military operations at the plant or in the vicinity of the plant,” says Ed Lyman, senior global security scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and coauthor of the book Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster. But, he continues, while neither military’s soldiers have deliberately fired on the plant, anything can happen in the fog of war. A misfired weapon or a missile shot down in the wrong place could exacerbate an already dangerous situation. 

When Russia invaded, Zaporizhzhya—which provides a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity—still had four out of its six reactors online. But after the conflict destroyed all but one of the plant’s external lines to the local power grid, plant operators shut down one, then two, and then three of the reactors this summer.

The plant has

In the early 2010s, brands began phasing out the plastic microbeads they’d been adding to toothpaste and face scrubs to boost their scrubbing power. Some of these products contained hundreds of thousands of microplastics, which washed off of your face and out to sea. It turned out that consumers weren’t particularly happy when they realized what was happening—President Barack Obama made that displeasure into law by signing the Microbead-Free Waters Act in 2015, four decades after microplastic scrubbers were patented in the cosmetics industry.

“In that bill, it was only for wash-off cosmetics, and that was mostly the facial scrubs,” says Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the Gyres Institute, a nonprofit that’s tackling plastic pollution. “But then in cosmetics, there are tons and tons of shredded microplastic particles used as fillers, things to keep stuff on your face for a long time.” Eyeliners, mascaras, lipsticks—they’re still loaded with tens of thousands

In September, Hurricane Ian smashed into the southwest coast of Florida, bringing with it a storm surge that reached 13 feet in the coastal town of Fort Myers. Warm, brackish Gulf water inundated homes and businesses as well as sewers, wastewater pumps, and septic tanks. As the torrential winds and rain mixed everything together into a giant slurry, a highly adaptable microscopic creature gained a foothold: a “flesh-eating” bug called Vibrio vulnificus.

Twenty-eight people were infected with this bacteria, which can quickly degrade skin cells, leach iron from blood, and lead to multiple organ failure. Seven of the infected died. “When you’re in a tropical environment with standstill water that’s very contaminated with debris and whatever else is baking in the sun—that is the perfect cocktail for this bacteria to develop,” says James Williams, an environmental specialist at the Florida Department of Health.

Cases dropped off as floodwaters receded,

The race to remove CO₂ from our atmosphere is on. In an effort to draw down carbon at a meaningful scale, people are looking to the ground. The top meter of the world’s soil holds over three times the amount of carbon currently in our atmosphere—and if we treat our land better, it could suck up even more.

This is good news for farmers. Companies and individuals desperate to offset their emissions by purchasing carbon credits are willing to pay farmers to use sustainable agricultural practices and sequester carbon in their fields. The problem? The process of verifying whether a field has sucked up additional carbon isn’t easy: Physical samples have to be regularly collected across the land and sent to a lab for processing.

Enter Perennial, a startup based in Boulder, Colorado, that says it has the answer. While studying at Brown University, chief innovation officer David