Category: Health

President Donald Trump spent most of 2025 hacking away at large parts of the federal government. His administration fired, bought out, or otherwise ousted hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Entire agencies were gutted. By so many metrics, this year in politics has been defined more by what has been...

Bill Johnson has witnessed the extent of US Magnesium’s pollution up close. He’s seen the wastewater pond that was so acidic it bubbled like a cauldron. He noted where the corrosive liquid had eaten through the soil beneath, and where it burned through earthen barriers and spilled into the neighboring...

A long, warm plume of airborne water snaked its way from the subtropical Pacific Ocean toward the U.S. West Coast at the beginning of this month. As the so-called atmospheric river made its way north, it sucked up moisture from above-average sea surface temperatures. When the airborne river washed ashore...

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado is getting a name change. The groundbreaking research institute will no longer have the word “renewable” in its title, the U.S. Department of Energy announced earlier this month, and will instead be called the “National Laboratory of the Rockies.” The announcement does not...

If we’re being honest, 2025 did not start out great. For basically the whole month of January, a series of wildfires raged across Los Angeles, killing hundreds (more on that number below). On the other side of the country, an Arctic blast brought historic snowfall and bitter cold deep into...

The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth...

At a White House roundtable last Monday, president Donald Trump, alongside Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and a handful of other leaders in the government, announced a $12 billion farm aid program intended to offset the economic blowback that U.S. farmers have faced this year as a result of the president’s...

The county health worker scanned the Omaha home with an X-ray gun, searching for the poison. It was 2022, and doctors had recently found high levels of lead in the blood of Crystalyn Prine’s 2-year-old son, prompting the Douglas County Health Department to investigate. The worker said it didn’t seem...

Karen Budd-Falen, a top official at the Department of Interior, has financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada — a project that the Trump administration worked to fast-track during its first term. In recent months, the administration took an equity stake in the mine and...