When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle five years ago, it left boats, cars and trucks piled up to the windows of Bonny Paulson’s home in the tiny coastal community of Mexico Beach, Florida, even though the house rests on pillars 14 feet above the ground. But Paulson’s home, with a rounded shape that looks something like a ship, shrugged off Category 5 winds that might otherwise have collapsed it.  “I wasn’t nervous at all,” Paulson said, recalling the warning to evacuate. Her house lost only a few shingles, with photos taken after the storm showing it standing whole amid the wreckage of almost all the surrounding homes. Some developers are building homes like Paulson’s with an eye toward making them more resilient to the extreme weather that’s increasing with climate change, and friendlier to the environment at the same time. Solar panels, for example, installed so snugly that high …

Prince William arrived Sunday in Singapore for the annual Earthshot Prize awards, the first to be held in Asia, to support environmental innovators with solutions to battle climate change and save the planet.  Upon his arrival, dozens of people waving British flags welcomed him with loud cheers. William, 41, shook hands, signed autographs and sportingly took selfies with many of them during a walkabout.  “It’s fantastic to be back in Singapore for this year’s Earthshot Prize ceremony, after 11 years,” he said in a statement upon landing. “Singapore’s bold vision to be a leader for environmental innovation sets the standard for others to follow.”  “He has this charm,” said Johanes Mario, a Singaporean welcoming William at the airport. “He really fights for … the climate. I believe this is really a good cause for the future of our generation.” At Singapore’s Changi Airport and before greeting the crowd, William stood …

Building a robot that’s both humanlike and useful is a decadesold engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction.  While the latest artificial intelligence craze has sparked another wave of investments in the quest to build a humanoid, most of the current prototypes are clumsy and impractical, looking better in staged performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups from keeping at it.  “The intention is not to start from the beginning and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,’” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.”  Do we even need humanoids? Hurst makes a point of describing Agility’s warehouse robot Digit as human-centric, not humanoid, a distinction meant to emphasize what it does over what it’s trying to be.  What it does, for now, is pick …

Using sidewalks as exam rooms and heavy red duffle bags as medical supply closets, volunteer medics spend their Saturdays caring for the growing number of migrants arriving in Chicago without a place to live. Mostly students in training, they go to police stations where migrants are first housed, prescribing antibiotics, distributing prenatal vitamins and assessing for serious health issues. These student doctors, nurses and physician assistants are the front line of health care for asylum-seekers in the nation’s third-largest city, filling a gap in Chicago’s haphazard response. “My team is a team that shouldn’t have to exist, but it does out of necessity,” said Sara Izquierdo, a University of Illinois Chicago medical student who helped found the group. “Because if we’re not doing this, I’m not sure anyone will.” More than 19,600 migrants have come to Chicago over the last year since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending buses to …

One of modern climate science’s pioneers is warning that the world isn’t just steadily warming but is dangerously accelerating, according to a study that some other scientists call a bit overheated. The work from former NASA top scientist James Hansen, who since leaving the space agency has become a prominent protester against the use of fossil fuels, which cause climate change, illustrates a recently surfaced division among scientists about whether global warming has kicked into a new and even more dangerous gear. Hansen, who alerted much of the United States to the harms of climate change in dramatic congressional testimony in 1988, said Thursday that since 2010, the rate of warming has jumped by 50%. Hansen argues that since 2010 there is more sun energy in the atmosphere, and less of the particles that can reflect it back into space thanks to efforts to cut pollution. The loss of those …

The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardizing the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later. The Danish wind energy developer Ørsted said this week it’s scrapping its Ocean Wind I and II projects off southern New Jersey due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted. Together, the projects were supposed to deliver over 2.2 gigawatts of power. The news comes after developers in New England canceled power contracts for three projects that would have provided another 3.2 gigawatts of wind power to Massachusetts and Connecticut. They said their projects were no longer financially feasible. In total, the cancellations equate to …

Countries moved a step closer Saturday to getting a fund off the ground to help poor states damaged by climate disasters, despite reservations from developing nations and the United States.   The deal to create a “loss and damage” fund was hailed as a breakthrough for developing country negotiators at United Nations climate talks in Egypt last year, overcoming years of resistance from wealthy nations.   But in the past 11 months, governments have struggled to reach consensus on the details of the fund, such as who will pay and where the fund will be located.   A special U.N. committee tasked with implementing the fund met for a fifth time in Abu Dhabi this week — following a deadlock in Egypt last month — to finalize recommendations that will be put to governments when they meet for the annual climate summit COP28 in Dubai in less than four weeks. …

Called cover crops, they top the list of tasks U.S. farmers are told will build healthy soil, help the environment and fight climate change. Yet after years of incentives and encouragement, Midwest farmers planted cover crops on only about 7% of their land in 2021. That percentage has increased over the years but remains small in part because even as farmers receive extra payments and can see numerous benefits from cover crops, they remain wary. Many worry the practice will hurt their bottom line — and a study last year indicates they could be right. Researchers who used satellite data to examine over 90,000 fields in six Corn Belt states found cover crops can reduce yields of cash crops — the bushels per acre. The smaller the yield, the less money farmers make. “I don’t want to abandon it, but as far as just going whole-hog with planting cover crops, …

A thick layer of toxic haze choked Indian capital New Delhi on Friday, and some schools were ordered closed as the air quality index plummeted to the “severe” category. New Delhi again topped a real-time list of the world’s most polluted cities compiled by Swiss group IQAir, which put the Indian capital’s air quality index, or AQI, at 640, which is in the “hazardous” category, followed by 335 in the Pakistani city of Lahore. Regional officials said a seasonal combination of lower temperatures, a lack of wind and crop stubble burning in neighboring farm states caused a spike in air pollutants. Many of New Delhi’s 20 million residents complained of irritation in the eyes and itchy throats with the air turning a dense gray. An AQI of 0-50 is considered good while anything between 400-500 affects healthy people and is a danger to those with existing diseases. “In my last …

Fewer high school students are vaping this year, the government reported Thursday. In a survey, 10% of high school students said they had used electronic cigarettes in the previous month, down from 14% last year. Use of any tobacco product — including cigarettes and cigars — also fell among high schoolers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. “A lot of good news, I’d say,” said Kenneth Michael Cummings, a University of South Carolina researcher who was not involved in the CDC study. Among middle school student, about 5% said they used e-cigarettes. That did not significantly change from last year’s survey. This year’s survey involved more than 22,000 students who filled out an online questionnaire last spring. The agency considers the annual survey to be its best measure of youth smoking trends. Why the drop among high schoolers? Health officials believe a number of factors could …

Colombia will try to control its population of more than 100 hippopotamuses, descendants of animals illegally brought to the country by late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the 1980s, through surgical sterilization, the transfer of hippos to other countries and possibly euthanasia, the government said Thursday. The hippos, which spread from Escobar’s estate into nearby rivers where they flourished, have no natural predators in Colombia and have been declared an invasive species that could upset the ecosystem. Authorities estimate there are 169 hippos in Colombia, especially in the Magdalena River basin, and that if no measures are taken, there could be 1,000 by 2035. Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said the first stage of the plan will be the surgical sterilization of 40 hippos per year and this will begin next week. The procedure is expensive — each sterilization costs about $9,800 — and entails risks for the hippopotamus, including allergic …

Climate change threatens to reverse decades of progress toward better health and well-being, particularly in the most vulnerable communities, according to a new report by the U.N. weather agency. In its annual State of Climate Services report, the World Meteorological Organization on Thursday warned that the climate crisis was generating a global health crisis and said that many ill effects of climate change could be tempered by adaptation and prevention measures. WMO said climate change was causing the world to warm at a faster rate than at any other point in recorded history. “There is no more return back to the good old milder climate of the last century.  Actually, we are heading towards a warmer climate for the coming decades, anyhow,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO secretary-general. “Unless we are successful in phasing out this negative trend” by limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, “we will see …

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that leaders have “a moral, ethical and societal duty” to protect people from the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, as she leads the Biden administration’s push for a global AI roadmap. Analysts, in commending the effort, say human oversight is crucial to preventing the weaponization or misuse of this technology, which has applications in everything from military intelligence to medical diagnosis to making art. “To provide order and stability in the midst of global technological change, I firmly believe that we must be guided by a common set of understandings among nations,” Harris said. “And that is why the United States will continue to work with our allies and partners to apply existing international rules and norms to AI, and work to create new rules and norms.” Harris also announced the founding of the government’s AI Safety Institute and released draft policy guidance …

The World Health Organization warns that disease outbreaks, malnutrition and non-communicable diseases are rising in war-torn Sudan, with devastating consequences for millions of people forced to flee their homes in the face of escalating violence.  Since conflict erupted April 15, more than 4.6 million people have become newly displaced inside Sudan. The number, added to the more than three million who already were displaced within the country before the current conflict, makes Sudan home to the world’s largest internally displaced crisis.  “The health system in Sudan is stretched to breaking point as capacities decline in the face of mounting needs,” said Ni’ma Saeed Abid, WHO representative in Sudan, speaking Tuesday in Port Sudan. “Access to health care continues to be limited due to insecurity, displacement, and shortages of medicines and medical supplies, placing millions of Sudanese at risk of severe illness or death from preventable and treatable causes,” he said.  …

Digital officials, tech company bosses and researchers are converging Wednesday at a former codebreaking spy base near London to discuss and better understand the extreme risks posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence.  The two-day summit focuses on so-called frontier AI — the latest and most powerful systems that take the technology right up to its limits, but could come with as-yet-unknown dangers. They’re underpinned by foundation models, which power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and are trained on vast pools of information scraped from the internet.  Some 100 people from 28 countries are expected to attend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s two-day AI Safety Summit, though the British government has refused to disclose the guest list.  The event is a labor of love for Sunak, a tech-loving former banker who wants the U.K. to be a hub for computing innovation and has framed the summit as the start of a …

An Indonesian court sentenced to jail on Wednesday the chief executive and three other officials of a company whose cough syrup has been linked to the death of more than 200 children, for violating drug safety laws, the company’s lawyer said. The Indonesian company, Afi Farma, was accused of producing cough syrups containing excess amounts of toxic material and prosecutors charged the four officials for “consciously” not testing the ingredients, despite having the means and responsibility to do so, according to a charge sheet.  The company’s lawyer, Reza Wendra Prayogo, said they denied negligence and the company was considering whether to appeal. The officials, including CEO Arief Prasetya Harahap, were sentenced to two years in prison by a court in the town of Kediri, in East Java province, where the company is based. Prosecutors, who had sought up to nine years in prison for the accused, said that Afi Farma …