If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure […]

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Researchers at the University of Michigan said in a study published on Friday that house dust mites are living evidence against the popular theory that organisms cannot reverse their own evolutionary process.

‘All our analyses conclusively demonstrated that house dust mites have abandoned a parasitic lifestyle, secondarily becoming free-living, and then speciated in several habitats, including human habitations,

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Reporting in the journal Nature Climate Change, an international team of researchers writes that the northern latitudes have experienced a significant reduction in temperature and vegetation seasonality. They contend that vegetation growth at Earth’s northern latitudes is starting to look a lot like the green latitudes to the south. The study’s findings are based on a 30-year record of land surface and satellite data sets.

The researchers looked at the relationship between changes in surface temperature and vegetation growth from 45 degrees north latitude to the Arctic Ocean. The study’s findings reveal that temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now appear like those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.

Lead co-author Liang Xu, a Boston University doctoral student, says that increased warming in the northern latitudes above the Canada-USA border is lowering temperature seasonality because the colder seasons are warming faster than the summer.

Researchers note that total amount of heat available for plant growth in these northern latitudes is increasing because of the reduction in temperature seasonality. The extra heat is turning Earth’s northern latitudes green. Patches of ‘vigorously productive vegetation

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Here’s what 8th graders in Louisiana know, for sure, about the 1960s rabble-rousers better known as hippies (emphasis mine):

They went to Canada or European countries to escape being drafted into military service.

They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.

How do they know it? Because their history textbook - ‘America: Land I Love

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I was there. And ‘there

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