We take for granted the endless flow of electrons that enable modern life just as we take for granted the air we breathe. Yet, an outage can occur at almost any time, usually when too much demand is placed on some portion of the circuit distributing energy around a neighborhood. As misfortune would have it, the rush to electrify the cars we’ve come...

<?xml encoding="UTF-8"> The spotlight There are few experiences more soul-sucking than sitting in traffic. According to NPR, the average American lost nearly an hour a week to traffic congestion in 2022. Drivers lose an additional 17 hours per year hunting for parking, USA Today reports — and in the same survey, 34 percent of U.S. drivers...

For nearly a decade, Holly Alpine (née Beale) loved working at Microsoft. Shortly after finishing college, in July 2014, she landed a job there as a technical account manager. Less than four years later, Alpine was leading a program that invests in environmental projects in the communities where Microsoft’s data centers are located. She was also helping...

A quarter of the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from electricity generation. The biggest polluters in the sector are the country’s coal-fired power plants — decades-old facilities that emit enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the air. Federal regulators and policymakers have spent years coming up...

Every email you send has a home. Every uploaded file, web search, and social media post does, too. In massive buildings erected from miles of concrete, stacked servers hum with the electricity required to process and store every byte of information that modern lives rely on. In recent years, these data centers have been rapidly expanding in the United...

When Chelsea Wood was a child, she would often collect Periwinkle snails on the shores of Long Island.  “I used to pluck them off the rocks and put them in buckets and keep them as pets and then re-release them,” Wood said. “And I knew that species really well.” It wasn’t until years later that Wood learned that those snails were teeming...