Author: Reporter

Justin Ralph estimates he has made about 200 trips delivering grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle this year. They were accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to take the harvest from a total of about 800 acres each of corn, soybeans, and wheat to market. What they were not used to are the distances they had to drive the past couple years, a consequence of bad weather that was only expected to increase in their area as a result of climate change. They used to take advantage of a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky...

Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says. The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released last November with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level. Overall, it paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger problems in the future. Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have...

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers. Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of...

Recent research estimated that hearing loss affects approximately 37.9 million Americans, being more common in rural areas than urban ones and in men than women. The study was published in January in The Lancet Regional Health-Americas Journal. It was the first to estimate hearing loss rates at the state and county level, and was led by NORC at the University of Chicago. The estimates are from 2019, and only included people who have hearing loss in both ears. While the study could not explain the reason for the geographic divide, experts who treat hearing loss say there are two...