Science

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is rallying various agencies to fight wind power — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s health and human services, which historically has had nothing to do with offshore wind farms. The reasoning? A conspiracy theory that wind turbines emit electromagnetic fields that could harm human beings.

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated Jon Batiste’s hometown of New Orleans. We now know that climate change made warm ocean temperatures that fueled the storm more likely and increased its maximum sustained wind speed.

“If they overturn this, it would leave the public responsible for cleaning up, not the companies that knowingly polluted the land,” University of California, San Francisco professor Tracey Woodruff tells The New York Times, which first reported on the proposal.

We’ve grown so accustomed to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets launching and landing after deploying Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, or sending real astronauts and cargo to the ISS, that it’s almost become dial tone — you just expect it.

After four explosions (flight tests seven, eight, and nine, as well as one on the ground), SpaceX successfully launched another prototype vehicle Tuesday night. This time, the Super Heavy booster rocket splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico as planned, as Starship deployed Starlink simulator satellites, then splashed down under control in the Indian Ocean.

There’s plenty of disinformation trying to blame the nascent offshore wind industry for whale deaths without evidence. Not only is that misleading, it also takes the focus away from solutions that might actually address the leading causes of death — vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear.

Trump’s tariffs on solar panels — with 80-plus percent coming from China — are complicating the affordability equation in the US, but record low prices due to overproduction is good news for the rest of world bent on switching to clean energies.

Apple says no, but a lawsuit accuses Jay Blahnik of creating a toxic work environment, reports The New York Times:

So it’s no surprise Meta is supporting a new solar farm in South Carolina that’ll provide power for the first data center the tech company is building in the state. Developers also have to race to take advantage of Biden-era tax credits for renewables before they expire, a victim of Republicans’ big spending bill.

Footage captured by ones of Sen’s 4K SpaceTV-1 streaming cameras installed on Airbus’ ISS Bartolomeo platform reveals the truly staggering scale of Hurricane Erin. According to the National Hurricane Center today, Erin “remains a sprawling hurricane, with its tropical-storm-force winds extending nearly 500 n mi across.”

The exceptionally bright meteor was spotted last night at around 11pm local time.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) hasn’t given it a name yet, but NASA has announced that astronomers discovered a new moon orbiting Uranus using images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared camera last February.

The draft, obtained by Politico last week, outlines the health secretary’s plan to “make our children healthy again.” As spotted by Ars Technica, that apparently includes a study to “identify gaps in knowledge” on the same kind of radiation emitted by 5G towers and Wi-Fi routers — a common subject of conspiracy theories.

The New York Times has the story.

In local battles over who foots the bill for new energy infrastructure, it’s about “power in the literal sense — the electrons that keep the lights on and fuel modern technology — and power in the political sense,” Ivan Penn and Karen Weise write for the The New York Times.

That was the US Health Secretary’s explanation regarding the administration’s decision to cancel millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine contracts.

Plastic production, and the mountains of waste that creates, are still growing exponentially, Grist shows us in helpful, albeit eye-watering, charts. Whether things start to turn around depends on on thousands of delegates meeting in Geneva this week to try to negotiate an international plastics treaty.