By Eve Andrews

Braddock, Pennsylvania is not what most people would call a farm town. White plumes of methanol, ammonia, zinc, and manganese billow throughout the day from its last remaining steel mill, while cars and pickups and freight trucks roar back and forth across the nearby Rankin Bridge. Despite its diminutive size, the town is well-known in the Pittsburgh region for its air quality, which ranks among the worst in the nation for year-round dust, soot, and smoke pollution.

And yet, inside a wide, windowless warehouse set just a block or two back from the banks of the Monongahela…

By Zoya Teirstein

Not long ago, I went on a walk with some friends through a field near my house in upstate New York. When we stopped for a break, something moving on my pants caught my eye. There were about a dozen reddish-brown ticks crawling up my legs. I looked closer and found ticks tangled in my socks, latched on to the insides of my shoes, hanging by hooked legs to the backs of my knees. The big ones, American dog ticks, were easy to spot, but the little ones, blacklegged nymph ticks the size of poppy seeds, were…

By Zora Thomas

Sometime in the blur of September 2020, I stood on a ridgeline in the Plumas National Forest in Northern California and watched as the year’s deadliest fire ripped nearly 30 miles down the Middle Fork of the Feather River. The northeast winds that fueled the blowout howled around me and the other members of my crew throughout our 18-hour shift, peeling hard hats from heads, cracking lips, sandblasting eyelids until they puffed shut around grit-scratched corneas.

It was the middle of my first season on a Forest Service Hotshot crew. We’d come up to the mountaintop in…

By Kate Yoder

Lucie Basch knew that people threw away food that was perfectly good to eat — bananas with a few black dots on the peel, cans of beans just past the expiration date. But when she started working at Nestlé’s factories in the United Kingdom in 2014, she realized the world had a big problem. Much of the food she saw go down the production line — chocolate bars, coffee capsules, and cereals — would never be eaten.

One-third of the food produced worldwide, Basch learned, ends up rotting in fields, the back of people’s fridges, or in…

By Maddie Stone

At an abandoned coal mine just outside the city of Gillette, Wyoming, construction crews are getting ready to break ground on a 10,000-square-foot building that will house state-of-the-art laboratories and manufacturing plants. Among the projects at the facility, known as the Wyoming Innovation Center, will be a pilot plant that aims to takes coal ash — the sooty, toxic waste left behind after coal is burned for energy — and use it to extract rare earths, elements that play an essential role in everything from cell phones and LED screens to wind turbines and electric cars.

The…

By Maddie Stone

For the past several years, as state legislators across the country have held hearings to consider “right-to-repair” bills that would make it easier for consumers to fix their electronic devices, lobbyists representing manufacturers have shown up to repeat the same arguments over and over: Letting people fix their own stuff is too dangerous. It creates cybersecurity risks. It infringes on intellectual property. It won’t help reduce electronic waste.

But while it remains to be seen whether these arguments will win over any of the dozen state legislatures currently considering a right-to-repair bill, one authoritative body isn’t buying…

By Shannon Osaka

America’s favorite teenagers are back. Brood X, a group of 17-year “magicicadas” (yes, that’s short for “ magic cicadas”) have started to emerge from the soil all over the Eastern U.S., marking the beginning of a cicada season that will eventually see billions of the bugs molting, screeching for mates, and — after just a few weeks — dying, leaving their carcasses strewn across lawns and roofs from New Jersey to Illinois.

It’s a once-every-two-decades bonanza that serves as a sometimes unwelcome reminder of the passage of time. “Periodical cicadas are the ‘bugs of history,’” said Gene…

By Jessica McKenzie

One decade and $1 trillion after the debut of Bitcoin, the environmental footprint of “mining” the cryptocurrency is still hotly contested. What’s certain, however, is that the amount of electricity the process requires is growing at a breakneck speed. Each time transactions are added to Bitcoin’s digital ledger, they have to be verified by its network, which requires “miners” to devote huge quantities of computational power to solving cryptographic problems. …