A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. In less than two weeks, leaders from 196 countries and around 25,000 delegates, activists and protestors will descend on the Scottish city of Glasgow for the United Nation’s 26th global climate summit, or COP26. It is no small...

Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles: A sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this...

New York City will mandate Covid-19 vaccination for all city workers, eliminating a testing option. Starting Wednesday, all employees who get their first shot at a city-run site will receive an extra $500 in their paycheck. The benefit will end on Oct. 29, the deadline for employees to submit proof of at least one dose, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. Employees not vaccinated by then...

The U.K. unveiled its net-zero strategy on Tuesday as it tries to showcase its green credentials ahead of key climate talks later this month. It will move taxes from electricity to gas, fund carbon-capture, and offer grants for cleaner home heating. It estimates the cost of the transition could be 1-2% of GDP by 2050, and moving away from fossil fuels will also hit tax revenue. The government...

A scientist from Guangdong, China plans to appeal to the Tibetan government to conserve recently discovered fossils of handprints and footprints on a rock on the world’s highest plateau—because they may be the oldest prehistoric art ever recorded and the earliest evidence of human life in the region. Dr. David Zhang, who found the impressions with his research team in Quesang on the...

Star Trek's Captain Kirk, now 90, returns from space with a message for everyone, including Jeff Bezos

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A NASA spacecraft named Lucy rocketed into the sky with diamonds Saturday morning on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids. Seven of the mysterious space rocks are among swarms of asteroids sharing Jupiter’s orbit, thought to be the pristine leftovers of planetary formation. An Atlas V rocket blasted off before dawn, sending Lucy on a roundabout journey...

As workers continue to comb beaches for tar balls in California’s Orange County after an underwater pipeline ruptured on Oct. 2, another massive fossil fuel cleanup operation is just getting underway on a 55-year-old rig anchored 120 miles up the coast. It’s a taxpayer-funded, $60 million debacle that reveals just how difficult and costly it may be to shut down aging oil rigs in the...

More than 75 years separate Queen Elizabeth II from climate activist Greta Thunberg, but both share similar reservations with world leaders who talk a good game on climate change but aren’t prepared to back it up with action. In remarks caught on a livestream Thursday, the British monarch was heard talking about COP26, the UN climate conference that begins in Glasgow later this month....

On Oct. 13, actor William Shatner, 90, best known for his role as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk, went to space for real aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. He was aloft for only 10 minutes—but they were 10 minutes that forever transformed him. The day after his return, Shatner—now the oldest person to have ever traveled to space—sat down with TIME to talk about...

Even if you follow these things closely, it can be hard to understand where the world’s fight against climate change stands. On the one hand, news abounds of the clean energy revolution, as wind farms and solar panels pop up in communities across the globe and automakers promise to go electric. On the other hand, scientists continue to warn that fossil fuels have placed the planet and...

You could be forgiven for never having heard of The Butler’s Night Off, an obscure 1951 Canadian film that was a little bit of noir, a little bit of comedy and a whole lot of forgettable. Indeed it would have been forgotten entirely, were it not for a small part played by a 20-year-old actor whose character name was simply listed as “a crook” and whose real name, as posted in...

The rule for most Mars missions, or at least those looking for signs of life? Follow the water. Choose a place that was once wet—and Mars’s now-dry riverbeds, sea basins and ocean floors offer plenty of those—and do your spelunking there. With limited missions and a multitude of promising sites, however, the trick is to choose just the right landing zone. Now, a new paper in...

On Oct. 6, the World Health Organization recommended use of the first vaccine to fight malaria. The decision is momentous and highly anticipated for many reasons: among them is that this is the first vaccine to help reduce the risk of deadly severe malaria in young children in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease remains a leading killer. The vaccine offers hope that there can be a circle of...

The legendary primatologist has spent decades persuading us to change the way we treat animals and the planet, and she does it one story at a time.

Two scientists, working independently of each other, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work into molecular construction and its impact on a range of uses from solar cells to battery storage. Benjamin List, from the Max-Planck-Institut in Germany, and David MacMillan, a professor at Princeton University, won the award for developing “an ingenious tool” for building molecules,...

Almost a third of adult single men live with a parent. Single men are much more likely to be unemployed, financially fragile and to lack a college degree than those with a partner. They’re also likely to have lower median earnings; single men earned less in 2019 than in 1990, even adjusting for inflation. Single women, meanwhile, earn the same as they did 30 years ago, but those with...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. Anyone who has followed U.S. climate policy is familiar with the cycle of bold attempts to enact climate rules that eventually sputter, followed by years of inaction. President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax before backing away under...

ESG funds—investment funds that are supposed to include companies that score the highest marks in environmental, social and governance factors—have become increasingly popular as more people look to put their money where their environmental concerns are. When BlackRock debuted a new ESG-aligned fund in April, investors couldn’t get enough. They poured $1.25 billion into...

For all of our 21st-century trappings, our human paths align across the millennia.

A group of more than 20 current and former employees are accusing Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket ship company of being a toxic work environment and not adhering to proper safety protocols. The workers claim in an essay that there’s sexism at the Kent, Washington, company. The employees, led by former head of Blue Origin employee communications Alexandra Abrams, state that...

“They are, in some sense, mutually exclusive.”

In the early years of World War II, when Jane Goodall was around 6 years old, she was often woken from her sleep by the blare of air-raid sirens. The sound warned that Nazi planes were flying over Bournemouth, the English seaside town where Goodall’s family had moved at the outbreak of the war. Her…

When you toss a plastic bottle into your recycling bin, there’s no guarantee it actually gets recycled. In fact, odds are, it doesn’t. According to the World Economic Forum, just 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling globally. And because of complexities in the recycling process, huge amounts of single-use plastic (as well as…

(WASHINGTON) — In what officials call a key step to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency is sharply limiting domestic production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, highly potent greenhouse gases commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners. The new rule announced Thursday follows through on a law Congress passed last year and is intended to decrease U.S. production...

Tell Vinisha Umashankar that your teen years pale in comparison to hers, and she is quick to remind you that everyone has a different life journey. But the 14-year-old also knows that the future looks very different for her generation if the world doesn’t act to slow global warming and the effects of climate change. Still, she’s optimistic that “collective action” of...

"I think the book holds open the possibility of a more joyous and a more rewarding way of being in the world"

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. After a summer of devastating hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires, Facebook’s new measures to address climate misinformation leave something to be desired. In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking they were a joke. In a blog...

But the tech may not actually be very green

Mars is the solar system’s near-miss world. Earth may have gotten everything right when it came to sustaining life—atmosphere, water, proximity to the sun. Mercury, Venus and the outer planets, with their extreme temperatures and inhospitable chemistry, may have gotten everything wrong. Mars, on the other hand, came so close, yet fell short. Thanks to data from rovers and other...

Odds are you can’t account for where you were on every one of the 200 days that elapsed from November 23, 2014 to June 11, 2015. But Samantha Cristoforetti can, since she spent them all aboard the International Space Station. Cristoforetti, Italy’s first female astronaut, set what was then a record for single-mission duration by a woman in space—and that achievement was just...

The number of green investment funds is skyrocketing, but many are investing in companies that aren’t aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement. That’s according to a report published on Aug. 27 by InfluenceMap. The London-based climate change think tank accused the majority of green funds of falling short. InfluenceMap assessed 723 equity funds—with over $330 billion in...

Developed countries’ pledges to provide $100 billion of annual financing, made over a decade ago and seen as key to unlocking upcoming climate talks, are unlikely to be met even five years after the target, according to a new report. That not only threatens the success at the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow starting in weeks, but also the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Four space tourists safely ended their trailblazing trip to orbit Saturday with a splashdown in the Atlantic off the Florida coast. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the ocean just before sunset, not far from where their chartered flight began three days earlier. The all-amateur crew was the first to circle the world without a professional astronaut. The...

Prince William announced 15 inaugural finalists Friday for the Earthshot Prize, his ambitious global environmental award that aims to find new ideas and technologies to tackle climate change, air pollution and the Earth’s most pressing challenges. The finalists include a 14-year-old student who proposes using solar energy to replace charcoal to power millions of roadside ironing carts in...

Studies from COVID-19 vaccine makers and public health officials have been suggesting for a while that protection provided by the vaccines wanes over time. In a new study published on Sept. 15 to a preprint server—the study is not yet peer-reviewed—researchers at Moderna, which makes one of the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (the other is from Pfizer-BioNTech), report that people...

In the end, the camping trip up the flank of Mt. Rainier that the Inspiration4 crew made back in April may have done more than anything else to prepare them for tonight’s successful launch into Earth orbit, at 8:02 p.m. ET from pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Even the day before the launch, at a T-minus-27-hour press conference, they were still talking about the experience and what it...

Are you ready to go to space? Join TIME and Netflix as we bring you the launch of Inspiration4—the first-ever all-civilian orbital mission—live. The Inspiration4 crew, including mission commander Jared Issacman, mission pilot and geoscience professor Dr. Sian Proctor, payload specialist and Lockheed Martin aerospace engineer Chris Sembroski, and medical officer and St. Jude...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. One of the perks of going out on a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in the Arctic is something called Ice Liberty. Ports are few and far between when you’re north of the Arctic Circle, so instead of shore leave, Coastguardsmen and women...

When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in early September, Tonya Freeman-Brown made the difficult decision to stay in the city. The 53 year-old and her family sheltered in an old brick hotel in the downtown area, watching fierce winds of up to 150 mph pelt rainwater at the windows, and remembering the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, 16 years earlier to the day. It was stressful, but...

For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly. This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in...

At the bottom of the pacific ocean lies a solution to the imminent battery shortage ... at a great potential cost to biodiversity and life on earth

As the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over the northeast Wednesday night, dumping a record-shattering 3.15 inches of rain on New York City in a single hour, water began to pour into the city’s subways. The system flooded in 46 locations and the MTA cut service across all lines overnight. Rescue operations had to be carried out to reach those unlucky enough to be caught in at least 15...

Some two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Aug. 18 that nursing homes must require their staff to get vaccinated or risk losing their Medicare and Medicaid funding, Genesis HealthCare, which manages about 250 facilities nationwide that offer long-term care and other services, had said its workers would need to be vaccinated. “The growing spread of the Delta variant makes...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. For many climate reporters, myself included, the arrival of Hurricane Ida brought a recognizable pit to the stomach. The details of the stories emerging as the storm barreled toward the Gulf Coast were new—of course—but they...

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in late August 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with building a new flood-defense network. Congress allocated billions of dollars to build pumps, dikes and floodwalls for a system meant to withstand a so-called “100-year storm.” That’s typical. In building flood protection, engineers can’t...

Rising extreme heat will make it increasingly hard for workers to do their jobs, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off the U.S. economy each year. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank focused on climate adaptation. It’s a stark warning about the...

We are in a planetary emergency. Horrific heat waves and fires blaze across North America, Turkey and Russia. Extreme floods wreak destruction and cause death from Europe to Africa to Asia. Ocean temperatures and the amount of carbon in our atmosphere have reached unprecedented highs. July was the hottest month in recorded history. Our planet, as the United Nations recently warned, is flashing a...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. It’ll take billions of dollars, tens of thousands of new forestry workers, and a systematic rethink of the way we build homes and manage the land to solve some parts of California’s wildfire crisis. Other aspects might be...