If you're reading this while the blinds are drawn against yet another heat wave and wondering whether it’s finally time to buy an air conditioner, you're far from alone. At the end of June, as temperatures climbed well above 40° Celsius across Europe, shoppers in France literally forced their way into stores to snatch up portable fans and ACs before they sold out. Such scenes are likely to become more common. As the planet warms, the demand for cooling is rising worldwide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts two-thirds of households could own an AC by 2050.

Politicians are, of course, turning ACs into a weapon in their broader culture wars. Far-right figure Marine Le Pen pledged to roll out air-conditioning across France if her party comes to power, while the British Conservatives vowed to overturn net-zero rules that restrict AC installation in new builds. On the left, the argument runs that air-conditioning would mainly benefit the rich and not those who need it most. It would also lock Europe into the same high-energy cooling spiral seen in the US and Asia. To date, only around 20 percent of Europeans have AC at home (and a mere 4 percent in the UK), compared with roughly 90 percent in the US, where electricity is considerably cheaper.

In Europe, air-conditioning is no longer just about comfort. It helps adults stay productive through extreme heat, and children concentrate in poorly ventilated schools. It helps people nod off when the air is still stiflingly warm long after sunset. It can even save lives. One research group estimated that air-conditioning prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths among people over 65 in 2019 alone.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and countries that once had relatively mild summers are now experiencing increasingly frequent and intense heat waves. Research by Nicole Miranda and her colleagues at the University of Oxford suggests that countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland could see some of the largest relative increases in heat exposure and cooling demand if global warming reaches 2° C above preindustrial levels.

“We will need more cooling to protect people”, says Miranda, a senior lecturer in engineering and carbon reduction manager at the university. “The question is how to provide it in a way that is efficient, equitable, and smart. Not by panic-buying inefficient, energy-intensive portable ACs.”

June’s record-breaking heat wave offered a glimpse of what lies ahead. In northern Europe, homes and offices built to retain heat during long winters turned into ovens. A recent report by the UK's Climate Change Committee warns that by mid-century, over 90 percent of existing homes could overheat during severe heat waves. Even further south, centuries-old architectural adaptations—such as thick stone walls, white-painted façades, blinds and small windows designed to block the sun—are reaching their limits. People in Europe are already fed up with the extreme heat.

But simply adding more air-conditioning is not necessarily the answer—at least not in its current form. Because air-conditioning is built on a paradox: The machines that keep us cool are also heating the planet. The electricity they consume already accounts for roughly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, slightly more than the aviation industry. “We expect cooling to become one of the biggest drivers of electricity demand growth worldwide, along with data centers,” says Fabian Voswinkel, an energy-efficiency policy analyst at the IEA. With new units being installed worldwide every minute, electricity demand for space cooling could more than triple by 2050.

Solar power will help cut emissions, but it won’t clear air-conditioning’s bad reputation. Conventional ACs still run on a century-old principle: refrigerants cycle between liquid and gas to pull heat out of rooms and dump it outside. Manufacturers continue to refine the technology, but many of the refrigerants remain problematic. Fluorinated gases, for instance, have a global warming potential thousands of times greater than CO₂ if they leak into the atmosphere. The EU therefore introduced a regulation in 2024 to phase them out gradually. “In the next few years, air conditioners and heat pumps using these gases won't even be able to be sold here”, says Voswinkel. But alternative gases bring their own trade-offs: Propane is highly flammable, while ammonia is toxic.

This impasse has led some scientists and companies back to the drawing board to ask: Instead of searching for a better refrigerant, what if air-conditioning systems didn’t need one at all? Their answer lies in materials that change temperature when exposed to external forces—a field known as solid-state cooling, which could revolutionize how we cool the air around us.

Paul Motzki, professor of smart material systems at Saarland University in Germany, heads an EU-funded scientific consortium focusing on nickel-titanium. When the metal is stretched and released, it snaps back to its original shape, absorbing heat from its surroundings and generating what is known as an elastocaloric cooling effect. In practice, the technology could be used to cool rooms by 5° to 10° C and, according to Motzki, do so even more efficiently than conventional AC systems today. The team is currently testing the prototype in the lab, but expects to deploy it in new buildings within the next few years. If the technology works, it “could lead to disruption, even a paradigm shift, because the technology is so different from established cooling systems,” Motzki says. The group is collaborating with Irish company Exergyn, which is also developing a refrigerant-free heat pump.

Brooklyn-based Mimic Systems has developed a heat pump based on semiconductive materials capable of moving heat in and out of rooms when an electric current passes through. The prototype is being tested in an apartment in Vancouver. Magnotherm, a spinoff from the Technical University of Darmstadt, is using magnetic fields in refrigerators and will test its prototype in a German supermarket chain later this year before taking on air-conditioning. In the UK, University of Cambridge spinoff Barocal is experimenting with flexible plastic crystals that, when squashed and released in a pressurized chamber, release heat. The startup recently raised $10 million in seed funding.

Motzki says Europe is clearly at the forefront in solid-state cooling, including in efforts to bring the technology to market. “I see a major opportunity for Europe to achieve technological leadership all the way through to market maturity,” he adds. “Of course, this will all depend heavily on private capital and public funding.”

Lindsay Rasmussen sees the same potential. At Third Derivative, a climate-tech accelerator founded by the US nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, she works with startups such as Mimic Systems and Magnotherm on next-generation cooling. She stresses that solid-state cooling technologies are still in their early stages—promising, but unproven at scale. But “the space can move quickly if the right capital and partnerships are in place.”

The real question is not just whether these new technologies will work, but who will scale them and how quickly. History suggests the path won’t be linear, nor will it necessarily stay in Europe. Solar photovoltaics, for instance, began with research breakthroughs in Europe, moved into commercialization in the US, and ultimately scaled in Asia through vertically integrated supply chains. Solid-state cooling could follow a similar trajectory. As Rasmussen explains, innovations typically leave the lab and startups once they become commercially viable and are picked up by major manufacturers. Today’s cooling market is already dominated by multinational conglomerates such as Daikin and Samsung, which closely track emerging technologies and are ready to move quickly.

As the world rushes to cool itself, one reality risks getting lost: Installing more air conditioners will not, on its own, solve Europe's overheating problem. Many of its cities trap heat in tightly packed buildings and concrete streets, and the challenge is how to cool them without compromising the aesthetics that make them so distinctive.

Both University of Oxford researcher Miranda and IEA analyst Voswinkel call for a “cooling hierarchy”: The priority should be preventing buildings from overheating in the first place—through trees, shade, reflective materials, and natural ventilation. Active cooling should come later, focused on the places that need it most, such as schools, hospital wards, and care homes. From Paris, where he is based, Voswinkel points to one efficient example: Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, the city expanded its district heating network to also distribute chilled river water through underground pipelines, cooling public buildings. “I think that these heat waves are making more and more policymakers realize that we have to face this new reality and make good plans,” he says.

This story originally appeared at wired.com.

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Back in 2024, we reported on the discovery of the Quest shipwreck, the polar exploration vessel that served Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his last voyage. Shackleton died before reaching their destination, and the ship itself sank in 1962. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) has now released the first images of the wreck more than 60 years after it sank, published in Canadian Geographic magazine.

Shackleton, of course, is most famous for his ill-fated voyage on the Endurance, which became trapped in sea ice in 1914 and sank. Shackleton and his crew defied the odds and survived. (The Endurance shipwreck was finally found in 2022.) By the time Shackleton got back to England, the country was embroiled in World War I, and many of his men enlisted. Shackleton was considered too old for active service. He was also deeply in debt from the Endurance expedition, earning a living on the lecture circuit. But he still dreamed of making another expedition to the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to explore the Beaufort Sea. He got funding from an old school chum, John Quillier Rowett.

Shackleton purchased a wooden Norwegian whaler, Foca I, which his wife Emily renamed Quest. When the Canadian government withdrew its support, the mission shifted back to the Antarctic, and the Quest received an extensive retrofit. The improvements included a new deckhouse, a heated crow’s nest, a wireless set, and an odograph for tracing and charting the route automatically, as well as a Lucas deep-sea sounding machine, a large and pricey collection of cameras and photographic equipment, and even a small airplane.

The Quest expedition to Antarctica set sail in 1921. Shackleton never reached the planned destination, falling ill in late December just as the ship was about to leave Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He had begun drinking heavily to “deaden the pain,” despite not usually allowing alcohol while at sea. The Quest reached south Georgia on January 4, 1922, and Shackleton made his final diary entry before retiring to bed.

By 2 am, he was complaining of back pains and requesting painkillers. Ship physician Alexander Macklin suggested Shackleton might try leading a more normal life. Shackleton asked what Macklin thought he should give up. “Chiefly alcohol, boss, I don’t think it agrees with you,” the physician replied. Then Shackleton “had a very severe paroxysm” and died. The official recorded cause of death was coronary thrombosis. His body was buried in a Norwegian cemetery in Grytviken, the grave marked by a rough cross (later replaced by a granite column).

The expedition was cut short. There were a few scientific papers that came out of the journey and some useful geological and survey work, but on the whole, the expedition’s accomplishments were minor.

The ship was retrofitted a couple more times over its existence. It was used in several other expeditions in the 1930s and on various rescue missions. Quest served in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II as a minesweeper and light cargo vessel and returned to commercial sealing operations after the war. It was on one such seal-hunting expedition on May 5, 1962, when the plucky little ship was pierced by ice and sank—the same damage suffered by Endurance decades before. And like the Endurance, her entire crew survived.

A thriving ecosystem

The RCGS led the effort to locate the wreckage, investing some $365,000 in the project. CEO John Geiger spearheaded the search, which initially involved scouring through ship’s logs, navigation records, and other documents. The 23 crew members fought through dense fog and dealt with equipment issues after leaving port on June 5. But their patience was rewarded after 17 hours of scanning the ocean floor with sonar: Geiger spotted an odd shape pop onto his screen that was unmistakably the Quest.

This latest mission, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) as a partner, relied on a Falcon remote-operated vehicle and an ALVIN deep submergence vehicle to explore the wreck site further, launching on July 2. These are just the first images; more will be forthcoming. The team ultimately plans to create a 3D digital twin of the wreck site using underwater photogrammetry technology.

Initial sonar images back in 2024 gave the team hope about the overall condition of the ship. These new images, however, revealed that Quest is in worse condition than previously thought, with fishing nets, floats, and other bottom trawling gear snagged on the stern and much of the starboard side. The bridge superstructure is missing entirely, although the aluminum bridge is still attached. Expedition research director Antoine Normandin was disappointed at first, but then realized that "Quest itself is now becoming a science experiment," he told Canadian Geographic.

WHOI biologist Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser told Canadian Geographic that the Quest shipwreck has been transformed into a thriving underwater ecosystem. The surviving structures and materials are now host to various marine life: soft corals clustered around the top of the bow, for example, and threatened species such as the spotted wolffish. “It’s really cool to me that the impact of human history is that we’re creating a habitat," she said. "We’re increasing biodiversity on the local scale of the wreck, and maybe also on the regional scale because now it’s a stepping stone for some of those things to spread.”

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US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain.

Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, where the scale of magnet manufacturing remains larger than the nascent production in the US.

China’s lock on global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals has become a national security concern in the US and other Western nations, since Beijing started restricting access to them. The metals are crucial to 21st-century technology and are used in the manufacturing of everything from weapons guidance systems to electric vehicle batteries.

Nick Myers, chief executive of Phoenix Tailings, said Japanese customers were “clamoring” for the rare earth metals it produces, given the dramatic cut in exports of the materials from China this year.

The start-up’s customers were “primarily in Korea and Japan,” he said. “Unless the [US defense] primes move quickly, I will sell out... other companies are paying top dollar faster.”

Phoenix, backed by a CIA-funded venture capital firm named IQT, is scaling up production but is not yet a significant producer and does not disclose sales figures.

A host of US companies have outlined plans to mine rare earths and produce magnets domestically, but the industry will take time to grow, experts said.

“Today, there are two countries where [neodymium iron boron] magnets are produced at scale. One is Japan, the originator, and one is China,” said Thomas Kruemmer, author of the Rare Earth Observer blog. The magnets are used in everything from cars to fighter jets and the semiconductor industry.

MP Materials is the leading US rare earths producer by a wide margin. The Nevada-based company’s sales of neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxide and metal—its largest division by revenue—were “primarily generated” under MP’s agreement with Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, which distributes the material to Japanese customers, its latest quarterly earnings show.

Some material also goes to an unnamed US technology and industrial company, under a deal penned in the first quarter of 2026.

In the same quarter a year ago, the largest portion of MP’s sales by revenue—mined material, not NdPr—went to China’s Shenghe Resources. But MP has stopped selling to Shenghe as part of its deal with the US government.

MP ultimately plans to produce its own magnets at scale, which would require it to consume much of what it produces. Mined rare earths are turned into oxides, which are used to make metals and alloys that go into magnets.

The company has penned agreements with General Motors and Apple to supply them with its magnets. It said in May that it expected to begin shipping finished magnets to GM this year.

Meanwhile, Energy Fuels—which won $725 million in conditional government funding in June—plans to scale its production of rare earths and also has eyes on Asia.

“We will be sending oxides in the near-term to Korea,” said chief executive Ross Bhappu. Last year, a major South Korean manufacturer made a small amount of Energy Fuels’ NdPr into magnets.

Energy Fuels is in the process of acquiring Australian Strategic Materials, which owns a rare earths metal-making plant in South Korea. It also announced a $1.9 billion deal to buy German magnet maker Vacuumschmelze (VAC) in June, which Bhappu said would result in more of Energy Fuels’ products going to VAC’s US operations.

China is the largest global producer of the widely used neodymium iron boron magnets. Outside China, Japan produces 10,000-15,000 tonnes per year, while South Korea produces 2,000-3,000 tonnes annually, and the US produces 1,000 tonnes or less, according to John Ormerod, a rare earths consultant at JOC LLC. There is also some production in Europe.

Phoenix, which secured a conditional $500 million from Washington in June, said government funding would help it scale up metal and oxide production, which would “expand the pie for everyone.”

MP’s recent earnings have been boosted by the money it receives under its US government deal—which guarantees a minimum sale price for some products and tops up any shortfall from the price paid by third parties.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don't agree on how they formed. "The continents started appearing around about four billion years ago—that's the oldest continental rock we know about,” said Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make that continental crust."

Johnson and his colleagues are now arguing that the formation of continents on Earth was caused largely by an intense, sustained barrage of asteroid impacts that kept the early crust hot and thin enough to make buoyant continents possible. In short, the lands we live on are here because of ancient bombardment from space.

Plates and plumes

The problem with studying the formation of continents is that the geological evidence of this process is almost gone. The oldest known continental-type rocks crystallized around 4.03 billion years ago, right at the end of the Hadean eon (the earliest era in Earth’s history, spanning the first 500 million years of its existence). Rare basaltic rocks date back about 4.2 billion years, and a handful of the oldest zircon crystals push the record back to 4.4 billion years. Beyond that, there's hardly anything else. So, scientists looking into the origin of continents had to rely largely on educated guesses. “There are huge debates about what was going on in the early Earth, because the data is so scarce,” Johnson said.

One dominant idea holds that plate tectonics, much like today's, was already running in the Hadean, with continental crust forming above subduction zones—areas where tectonic plates collide. The other claims that early Earth was too hot for rigid plates, and that crust instead formed above mantle plumes rising from deep within the planet, a phenomenon comparable, Johnson said, to the wax blobs rising inside a lava lamp.

The issue with both these ideas, though, was that Earth, based on most models, appeared too cold for all this to happen. “People have tried to understand Earth's heat budget through time, and nobody could make it fit,” Johnson said. “Nobody could make it fit because we did not consider the energy coming from outside of Earth.” This energy, he argues, came from asteroid and meteorite impacts that were far more frequent back when the solar system was young. Adding these impacts to the early Earth’s heat budget, though, proved rather challenging because Earth has a peculiar way of healing its scars.

The moon shot

The reason we don’t really know what was happening on Earth four billion years ago is that plate tectonics effectively recycles the surface of the planet back into the mantle. “One place where we do know what was going on back then is the Moon,” Johnson said. “We have sent people there. We have collected sample from there. We have immense amounts of high-quality data from the Moon." Because the Moon does not have plate tectonics, its crust is a single, solid, continuous shell. And this shell, Johnson’s team noted, is peppered with impact craters.

Calibrated against dated lunar samples, crater counts on the Moon let Johnson’s team estimate how frequently large bodies were hitting our closest celestial neighbor shortly after the Earth had formed. “Scaling that flux up to Earth’s larger size and stronger gravity makes it clear the planet must have been hit by thousands of impactors that were greater than 10 kilometers in diameter,” Johnson said. When his team determined the most probable frequency of impacts and the size of impactors, they could calculate how much energy this immense bombardment delivered to Earth and, consequently, how much heat it produced.

It turned out it was a lot of heat.

Most prior modeling of early Earth's heat budget focused on internal sources like heat left over from accretion and core formation plus the ongoing decay of radioactive isotopes—we thought these were absolutely dominant. Johnson’s space bombardment model showed they were not.

Bringing the heat

The team focused on modeling how the kinetic energy of each impact would ultimately end up as heat. The physics, Johnson said, is straightforward even if the details are complex. "It really is as simple as converting the size and the velocity of the impactor into energy," he explains. When a large body hits, some of the impact energy goes into vaporizing or melting rock right at the impact site. But, especially when an impactor is big, most of it propagates into the mantle below. "This energy basically heats up the entire upper mantle," Johnson said.

This heat drives more melting and more basaltic volcanism, a process that plays out not just in the minutes-to-hours timescale of the actual collision, but in tens or even hundreds of millions of years afterward. When Johnson and his colleagues added up these contributions, impact heating exceeded radiogenic and core heat for most of the Hadean by roughly an order of magnitude.

Feeding this reworked heat budget into geodynamic simulations led the team to the conclusion that the Earth’s crust in the Hadean was thin and largely molten underneath. The models suggest it was less than 5 kilometers thick, with widespread partial melting starting just 2 to 3 kilometers below the surface. At around 5 kilometers depth, melt fractions exceeded 30 percent by volume—well past the point where rock can hold together as a coherent slab.

The key takeaway was that plate tectonics could not work in such conditions. "Subduction and plate tectonics require that your lithosphere is rigid and it can jostle around and subduct,” Johnson said. “That's just not possible if our calculations are anywhere close to the mark.”

The simulations that captured the localized effects of individual large impacts also produced wholesale recycling of crust back into the mantle, with material dripping down to depths of at least 600 kilometers. Johnson thinks this recycling explains why so little Hadean crust survived to the present. It also explains, he argues, the near-total absence of shock-deformed Hadean zircons in the geological record. The researchers suggest that with so much melt present at shallow depths, it would have absorbed and scattered shock waves before they left lasting deformation in surviving crystals.

A turning point

The impact flux didn't stay high forever; it declined more or less exponentially. Between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago, it had dropped enough that internal heat sources took over as the dominant influence on the crust. As impact heating faded, the upper mantle cooled, and the once-thin basaltic crust thickened.

The team's modeling suggests crustal thickness reached around 30 kilometers by the early Archean, the era that came after the Hadean. This thicker, cooler, more rigid crust was also finally able to support plate tectonics, and it's around this same time that the first continental rocks show up in the geological record. "As soon as you can create thick crust and you can create a mantle lithosphere underneath, you can start building continents," Johnson said.

The team admits much of the argument rests on physics-based modeling rather than rock samples. In the absence of geological evidence, though, Johnson thinks reliance on modeling is justified. “We need to start taking seriously the outputs of these models rather than just say, well, we can't find any rocks, so let's give up," he said. But ancient rocks, as hard to find as they are, may also pop up in near future—the Earth is extremely good at covering the tracks of its history, but it’s not perfect.

“In Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada, a team of North American researchers has recently dated a dark, mafic rock as 4.2 billion years old,” Johnson said. “I also know another group has found a rock which is possibly even older. Hopefully you will be able to read about it in the next couple of months.”

Science, 2026.  DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb5402

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The last time America celebrated a big anniversary, I was all of three years old. Even so, I retain a few fuzzy memories from a sunny summer afternoon in small-town Michigan: climbing on a cannon in front of the courthouse, watching a parade, and seeing my dad, a veteran and Centreville city councilman, giving a short talk about democracy.

Only later would I realize the significance of the date: July 4th, 1976, America’s bicentennial.

America was imperfect and inconsistent in its approaches to "freedom," but the country had done some big, difficult things in recent decades. We had led the charge to roll back the tide of fascism and Holocaust during World War II. We had begun to confront internal demons through the nonviolent activism of the civil rights movement. And, critically for my own life trajectory, we had landed on the Moon.

The '70s were hardly a simple or heroic time, but I was too young to experience the turbulence of the era. My dad fought in Vietnam but returned before I was born, and I have no recollection of Watergate or waiting in lines for gasoline during the 1970s energy crisis.

Instead, I came of age in the 1980s, watching the Berlin Wall fall and American pop dominate the global charts. When I entered the job market during the 1990s, the economy was booming. Our investments in basic research and universities made this country the preeminent scientific and economic power in the world. By the start of the new millennium, with China only beginning its rise, there stood just a single superpower in the world. Despite our many problems and failures, America remained something one could still celebrate in an imperfect world.

And then—what?

It remains difficult to pinpoint the moment in my life when it felt like my country started to lose the plot. Oh, there were signs, like the September 11 attacks and the botched response that drew us into interminable entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq without "fixing" either country. The financial collapse in 2008 accelerated wealth inequality. Increasingly online, Americans started populating echo chambers and imbibing conspiracies, and distrust of the media grew. No one could agree on a common set of facts anymore, let alone debate them in good faith. More kids wanted to become social media influencers than astronauts.

Anger, isolation, and paranoia rose. Big things weren't getting done, couldn't get done. With the rise of smartphones, life shifted even further toward screens to mediate the world. The forces of ignorance and grift even managed to turn parts of Americans against vaccines, arguably the single most life-saving medical invention in human history.

All of this played out against an increasingly poisonous political environment. When Donald Trump was first elected a decade ago, many Americans were struggling and felt unserved by the existing political class. Trump campaigned on addressing those frustrations, promising disruption instead of the status quo. Americans chose disruption, and they got it. They also got hatred, contempt, bullying, misogyny, narcissism, corruption, lies, and a palpable love for dictators—and what were these but symptoms of advanced political disease?

The numbers show that Americans have been unhappy with the direction of the country—though for different reasons—for twenty years. And in 2026, Americans' optimism about their own futures has fallen to a record low, lower even than during the pandemic, when people at least still believed tomorrow would be better.

The author, at left, climbs onto a cannon on America's bicentennial. Credit: Bruce Berger

For someone who has watched the last quarter of a century unfold in real time, all this can feel a little hopeless. And as a father of two daughters who recently became young adults, I worry about the world we're leaving to them.

Because we have real problems. The planet is warming. Generation Z is coming into a workforce with uncertain job prospects and futures darkened by artificial intelligence. Billionaires increasingly run the show—and often not in society's best interests. Goodness knows when younger people will be able to buy a home, once considered the bedrock of achieving the American dream. And we've thrown so many addictive habits at them, from corrosive social media to pervasive online gambling, how can we expect them to thrive?

Finding some hope

It would be easy to wallow in this mess—to doomscroll as the world washes away.

But on this anniversary of the United States of America, I believe we are not without hope. It may feel like America has been careening along the highway of enshittification since the turn of the century, but the thing about driving on highways is that you can always take an off-ramp. The truly remarkable thing about this country is its ingenious ability—through elections, immigration, freedom of speech, and economic mobility—to constantly remake itself.

We need to become makers once again, working against the rage, the despair, the grifting, and the misinformation wherever we find them. And we can. Based simply on what I've seen as a journalist over the last quarter century, reasons for hope remain. It can be useful once in while to gather these reasons about us as armor against despair.

About a decade ago, when I left the Houston Chronicle newspaper to write about space full-time for Ars Technica, I also started a website focused on local weather. Our purpose was clear: In an era of sensationalized storm coverage, Space City Weather would provide no-hype information about weather impacting the lives of people in Houston. We stuck to that, and when giving public talks, I often joke, "Boring is our brand."

But in a world awash in clickbait and shouting, the quiet work we have done with Space City Weather still resonated with people. When storms threaten the community, it turns to us—because it trusts us. For many Americans, there remains a hunger for credible, evidence-backed news and information. Of course, if you're reading Ars Technica, you share such a hunger already. But you are not alone.

I spend most of my days writing about space, and I've met so many good people in this industry working to extend humanity's reach to the Moon, to Mars, and to worlds beyond. Courageous and ingenious people build satellites to spy deforestation on Earth, to gather sunlight for energy rather than burning fossil fuels, to connect people around the world, and to secure resources from asteroids and other worlds so we need not strip-mine our own planet. Not all of this will succeed, and not all of these actors are heroes, of course. But if you want to find faith that humanity can still build toward a brighter future, you could do worse than spend a little time on the space beat.

More generally, much of my life has been spent writing about science. I revere the people who gather insights about our universe and attempt to tease out new secrets from nature. It has been a dark time for science, with the White House attempting to slash science funding across federal agencies, undermining "woke" research, and setting ridiculous health policies over vaccines. But even here, where the damage is being done gleefully and wantonly, the US Congress has stood up to these funding cuts in a bipartisan manner. For most Americans, knowledge is not yet the enemy.

Progress does continue, even among the retrograde orbit of our political life. In recent decades, we have seen great advances against cancers like childhood leukemia and metastatic melanoma, and the next 10 to 20 years should bring additional progress with cancer vaccines. As our population ages, there will be a greater focus on advancing aging science. We will continue to see wins with genetic diseases. The story is similar in physics, astronomy, chemistry, and the other sciences.

When I first started writing about science in the mid-1990s, consider how difficult it was for scientists to collaborate using the time-tested tools of books, printed journal articles, and telephones. Today, researchers can access almost every bit of knowledge about a specialized topic, instantly; work globally with hundreds of scientists; sequence genomes cheaply; and run models on powerful supercomputers. And science is now global. No single government or religion can halt its progress. When America showed the world during the latter half of the 20th century that basic research begat economic development in a big way, the world took note.

Finally, reality itself has a way of fighting back against lies and propaganda. Yes, it takes far longer than one would like. But in the end, badly built rockets explode. False medical claims don't cure. Companies with corrupt accounting—early in my career, I covered Enron's bankruptcy case in New York City—eventually fail. More recently, we have seen commercial satellite imagery and communications provide incontestable truths about Russian activities on the ground in Ukraine, undermining attempts at propaganda. As Shakespeare wrote, "Truth will out."

Power surge

There are so many reasons to be unhappy about the state of America, the world, and humanity as we come to the nation's 250th birthday. But America has been resilient. And the beauty of this country is that every person has the power—small in isolation but much greater in the aggregate—to make change. That power is not wholly spent, nor wholly eclipsed, by anti-democratic forces. Because I am unlikely to greet America when it turns 300 years old, the best time for me to exercise that power is today. I hope you'll join me.

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Tina Peters’s ostentatious lack of remorse hasn’t stopped Polis from tripling down in the handjob he personally delivered to Donald Trump:

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday fired two members of his clemency board after they spoke out against his decision to commute the prison sentence of the election denier Tina Peters.

The board members, Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, had objected to Mr. Polis’s decision in May to release Ms. Peters from prison after pressure from President Trump.

After the commutation, Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi revealed that the board — appointed by Mr. Polis — had twice voted unanimously to reject Ms. Peters’s application for a shortened sentence. Mr. Polis, a Democrat, has the final decision, and overruled the board.

The board normally operates in secret, and does not disclose the pardon and commutation recommendations it makes to the governor. Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi said they had been compelled to pierce that veil of secrecy in Ms. Peters’s case.

On Wednesday, they said they had paid the price. They received a letter from the governor saying they were being dismissed for violating the board’s confidentiality standards.

I admire their courage in calling out Polis’s grotesque betrayal of American democracy.

The post What the fuck is wrong with Jared Polis? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.