Author: Errica Jensen

When you enter the Chicago Loop on a typical Tuesday afternoon, you’ll notice the familiar urban weight of the area: commuters passing through underground passageways that connect buildings, the rumble of a CTA train somewhere below street level, and the glass towers of the financial district catching afternoon light. It appears sturdy. It appears to be permanent. After three years of placing sensors throughout that same district and mapping what was going on beneath it, Alessandro Rotta Loria and his team at Northwestern University discovered that the ground beneath it has been subtly deforming for decades, expanding and contracting in…

At first glance, driving through the Sierra Nevada on a clear morning appears to be how mountain forests should appear. The air has a certain sharpness of pine resin and elevation, tall conifers press against the hillsides, and the scale of everything—the trees, the ridgelines, the silence—has a permanence that seems almost geological. It appears to be healthy. enduring. Just the way it ought to be. Examining vegetation data dating back to the 1930s, researchers have discovered that much of what you see isn’t exactly what it seems. The trees are living things. However, the climate beneath about 20% of…

Imagine that there is water in your living room when you wake up. Not a tiny leak. The couch floats. For the second time in five years. When you call your insurance company, you don’t get sympathy or a visit from a claims adjuster. A letter informing you that the policy will not be renewed is the response. In other places, premiums have tripled. The mortgage lender has called. And in a market that has begun to price in risk the way actuaries always knew it should but politicians never permitted, the house—the one you saved for, the one the…

A company called Factorial Energy spent more than ten years in a lab outside of Boston failing at something that everyone in the battery industry told them was almost impossible to manufacture at scale. Co-founded by Siyu Huang and Alex Yu, the team’s goal was to create a solid-state battery that would replace the combustible liquid electrolyte found in modern lithium-ion cells with a solid substance and be able to manufacture enough of them to fit inside a moving vehicle. For years, the factory yield was around 10%. In other words, nine out of ten of the cells they constructed…

You would anticipate certain things when you drive through a mountain town in February: crowded parking lots, the sound of snowguns in the distance, lift lines winding past warming huts, and the smell of wet wool inside a base lodge that has been operating at full capacity since before Thanksgiving. Nowadays, you find something quieter more frequently, in more locations than the industry would like to acknowledge. Emptier. lodges with only half of the regular staff. rental stores that still have equipment on the racks. Tan and patchy slopes that should be white, as though the mountain hasn’t fully committed…

The thought that one of the planet’s most potent engines—a vast network of ocean currents that has been operating for millennia—might be losing control is subtly unsettling. Not loudly. Not with any discernible warning from the coast. Just a gradual, imperceptible loosening, as determined by sea surface temperatures, ice melt rates, and saltwater density, all of which are monitored by scientists using sensors suspended thousands of feet below the Atlantic’s surface.That engine is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. It transports warm surface water from the tropics northward to Greenland and Europe, where it cools, gets heavier with…

Twenty years ago, what yeast cells are doing inside a fermentation tank in a technology park in the Brazilian state of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto would have seemed like science fiction. They have been given a copy of the genetic code that instructs a cow’s body on how to produce whey and casein, two types of milk protein, and they are doing so. The same proteins exactly. When added to cheese, yogurt, or a protein shake, they have the same molecular structure, functional characteristics, and taste behavior. There’s no cow involved. Pasture is not necessary. Just tanks, sugar, yeast, and…

When the extent of Pakistan’s devastating floods became evident in September 2022—a third of the country was under water, 33 million people were displaced, crops were destroyed, and entire villages were washed away—Pakistan’s then-climate minister, Sherry Rehman, made a statement that unnerved many comfortable people. She referred to it as “climate injustice.” Rich polluters have to pay, she said. She noted that less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from Pakistan. It was listed as one of the top eight nations in the world for disasters caused by climate change. It was drowning, too. In actuality.She was…

Imagine an eight-hour shift in July 2023 as a traffic warden in Las Vegas stands at his corner. The temperature is close to 106 degrees Fahrenheit, and the asphalt is radiating heat back up through the soles of his shoes. By all accounts, he is working in one of the most hot environments in the industrialized world. Additionally, he belongs to a population that will appear significantly less exceptional by 2050, according to a recent study from the University of Oxford.According to the study, which was published in the journal Nature Sustainability in January 2026, approximately 1.54 billion people, or…

In 2019, the word was ubiquitous throughout major financial conferences, appearing in panel titles, booth signage, and the practiced vocabulary of portfolio managers who were unable to complete a sentence without it. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. With a framework that was going to drastically alter how capital was distributed, how businesses were assessed, and how Wall Street viewed risk, it had the vitality of a movement finding its moment. Institutional flows into ESG-labeled funds reached an all-time high by the end of that year. There was a real sense that something was changing.The letters have mostly vanished…