Donald Trump
Credit: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is at a record high, Europe is in the midst of a hellish heat wave, and extreme weather is ravaging large swaths of the globe, but President Donald Trump dismissed the need for climate action during the G20 summit in Japan on Saturday and falsely claimed that air and water in the U.S. are the “cleanest” they have ever been.

Trump told reporters during a press conference Saturday morning that he is not ignoring the threat of the climate crisis, but he doesn’t want to take action to confront the emergency because such a move would threaten corporate profits.

“So we have the best numbers that we’ve ever had recently,” Trump said. “I’m not looking to put our companies out of business.”

“I’m not looking to create a standard that is so high that we’re going to lose 20-25 percent of our production. I’m not willing to do that,” Trump continued. “We have the cleanest water we’ve ever had, we have the cleanest air—you saw the reports come out recently. We have […]

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A gel at the heart of this solar still produces a record amount of fresh water. Credit: XINGYI ZHOU AND YOUHONG GUO/UT AUSTIN

Tanklike devices called solar stills use the sun to evaporate dirty or salty water and condense the vapor into safe drinking water. But large, expensive stills can only produce enough water for a small family. Now, researchers have developed a new material that speeds the process of evaporation, enabling a small solar still to provide all the drinking water one family needs. If the technology proves cheap enough, it could provide millions of impoverished people access to clean drinking water.

Today 783 million, or nearly one in 10, people around the world lack such access, according to UNICEF. These people spend a collective 200 million hours a day fetching water from distant sources. And even though technologies exist for purifying contaminated water and desalinating seawater, these typically require expensive infrastructure and lots of energy, putting them beyond the reach of many communities.

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Plane contrails have been found to increase heat in the upper atmosphere. Credit: Nurphoto/Getty

The aviation industry has long been criticized for its large environmental footprint, particularly its climate-warming carbon emissions. But a new study suggests that another byproduct of airplanes—the white contrails they paint across the sky—has an even bigger warming effect, one that is set to triple by 2050.

Planes create their mesmerizinfg contrails as they soar high in the thin, cold air. Water vapor quickly condenses around soot from the plane’s exhaust and freezes to form cirrus clouds, which can last for minutes or hours. These high-flying clouds are too thin to reflect much sunlight, but ice crystals inside them can trap heat. Unlike low-level clouds that have a net cooling effect, these contrail-formed clouds warm the climate.

A 2011 study suggests that the net effect of these contrail clouds contributes more to atmospheric warming than all the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by planes since the dawn of aviation. And those effects are predicted to get worse as air traffic—and the resulting […]

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Cognitively challenged Trump voter
Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump famously proclaimed “I love the poorly educated!” Well, if “poorly educated” is a euphemism for “cognitively challenged,” new research finds they loved him right back.

It reports Trump voters, on average, performed more poorly than Hillary Clintonsupporters on a standard test widely regarded as a good indicator of intellectual ability.

“Intellectual factors played an important role in the 2016 election,” writes a research team led by Yoav Ganzach of Tel Aviv University. “These results suggest that the 2016 U.S. presidential election had less to do with party affiliation, income, or education, and more to do with basic cognitive ability.”

In the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Ganzach and his colleagues analyzed data from the American National Election Studies, which included 5,914 participants in 2012 and 4,271 in 2016.

Besides expressing their attitudes toward that year’s presidential candidates, participants took a standard test of verbal ability. Specifically, they were presented with 10 sets of words, and asked […]

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Associate Justice Elana Kagan

On Thursday morning, the supreme court voted 5–4 to withdraw from questions of partisan gerrymandering, with the court’s five most conservative justices in the majority. The ruling effectively gives states the ultimate power to decide on the legality of voting maps, and leaves in place extreme cases of partisan redistricting in states such as Maryland and North Carolina.

In a powerful dissent, an edited extract of which appears below, Justice Elena Kagan, together with the courts’ three other more liberal justices – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonya Sotomayor – claimed the court has abdicated its duty to protect the US constitution and American democracy.

‘Partisan gerrymanders have debased and dishonored our democracy’

For the first time ever, this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of […]

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