14 premium articles in this collection
Commercial nuclear reactors all work pretty much the same way. Atoms of a radioactive material split, emitting neutrons. Those bump into other atoms, splitting them and causing them to emit more neutr...
Pollution from textile production—dyes, chemicals, and heavy metals like lead and cadmium—is common in the waters of the Buriganga River as it runs through Dhaka, Bangladesh. It’s among many harms pos...
It’s getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-conditioni...
The earth around Lake Naivasha, a shallow freshwater basin in south-central Kenya, does not seem to want to lie still. Ash from nearby Mount Longonot, which erupted as recently as the 1860s, rem...
Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family’s most vital chores: fetching water. Lik...
Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year ...
As many of us are ramping up with shopping, baking, and planning for the holiday season, nuclear power plants are also getting ready for one of their busiest seasons of the year. Here in the US, nucle...
Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revoluti...
Demand for copper is surging, as is pollution from its dirty production processes. The founders of one startup, Still Bright, think they have a better, cleaner way to generate the copper the world nee...
On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up ...
It was October 2024, and Hurricane Helene had just devastated the US Southeast. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia found an abstract target on which to pin the blame: “Yes they can contr...
The crushed-up soda can disappears in a cloud of steam and—though it’s not visible—hydrogen gas. “I can just keep this reaction going by adding more water,” says Peter Godart, squirting some into the ...
