Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
“Wildfires burn millions of acres across the U.S. every year. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Policy Analysis, wildfires cost the U.S. approximately $424 billion annually, including firefighting resources, evacuations, health care costs, property damage, agricultural losses, and post-fire recovery. NOAA’s satellite observations play a vital role in wildfire response by …
“A new report released today by the Sierra Club finds that most major U.S. public pensions are failing to adopt climate-solutions investing strategies needed to protect workers’ retirement savings from escalating climate-related financial risks. This kind of investing is a critical component of a broader set of actions public pensions must take to mitigate systemic …
Press release: “Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return …
IFI CLAIMS Patent Services: Fast Growing Technologies Look For Circular Economy – “The big 2025 technology story was a recurrence of what we saw in 2024 and 2023: artificial intelligence, and all the ways AI is changing (and will surely transform) the way the world does business and the structure of society. So you would think IFI …
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 …
Via LLRX – The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health, and the Rule of Law – Part 6 – As we approach January 20, 2026, the one year mark of the second Trump administration, Americans are witnessing the exercise of vast, often illegal and unconstrained presidential powers, unprecedented in our history. The impact of …
404 Media: “A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, are using open-source intelligence to map the growth of America’s datacenters. The team pores over satellite imagery, building permits, and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings springing up across the United States. They take …
Wes Silver’s Newsletter The Fish and Wildlife Service’s over-holiday review, and what it means for 850 million acres of public land and water – “Of all our public acres, it’s wildlife refuges that rely most on conservation rather than preservation. The system was conceived by the Boone and Crocket Club, an early advocate for what’s …
Washington Post [no paywall]: “Explore the ways animals and plants protect human health and what’s at stake when species are endangered. This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center and is helping to rewrite the story of the big, bad wolf, with a surprise twist. Studies have found that wolves in the Midwest and Canada …
Data Innovations: Researchers at IBM Europe and the European Space Agency have released ImpactMesh, a global, open dataset focused on measuring the impact of extreme floods and wildfires. The team collected satellite images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites, which regularly observe the same areas using both optical imagery and radar, and paired images taken before …
“The Trail Status Program Report, obtained by The Washington Post, [no paywall] concludes public lands are deteriorating quickly after the Trump administration cut staff. Trails maintained by the U.S. Forest Service nationwide are being “abandoned” and deteriorating rapidly, threatening visitor safety, after the Trump administration cut staff, according to an internal report obtained by The …
