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Mongabay California Academy of Sciences researchers and collaborators described 72 new-to-science species in 2025, including a bird, fish, plants, sea slugs, and insects found across six continents, from ocean depths to national parks. The discoveries include the first new plant genus found in a U.S. national park in nearly 50 years — a fuzzy wildflower …
The New York Times Gift Article [no paywall] – “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the health benefits of reducing air pollution, using the cost …
EOS – Cuts to funding and staff needed to maintain trusted datasets of reference Earth system observations could limit their availability and quality, undermining hazard predictions and risk assessments. From farming and engineering to emergency management and insurance, many industries critical to daily life rely on Earth system and related socioeconomic datasets. NOAA has linked …
Data is Beautiful – JoonSimJoon: “When researchers write “recent studies show…” – how recent is recent, really? I scraped 749,853 references from 19,108 papers across 200 academic fields using OpenAlex data to find out. TL;DR: Average “recent” = about 5 years Virology/Pandemic research: 2 years (half their citations are from the last 2 years!) Philosophy/History: …
Washington Post [no paywall]: “Five years ago, President Donald Trump pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast. Trump, openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, They …
Urban Institute, December 31, 2025: “On any given night, hundreds of thousands of people across the country do not have a safe and stable place to sleep. Though this homelessness crisis affects every state, each person and community experiences homelessness differently. As a result, local data about the number of people unhoused and the resources …
The Atlantic – And that could change everything for the tech industry. Alex Reisner: “On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained …
The Pragmatic Engineer: “No longer a hypothetical question, this is a mega-trend set to hit the tech industry, Gergely Orosz, Jan 06, 2026. “This winter break was an opportunity for devs to step back from day-to-day work and play around with side projects – including using AI agents to juice up those half-baked or incomplete …
