Gleanings of the Week Ending October 10, 2026

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

09/30/2026 NPR Swiss glaciers suffer another year of record ice loss - Switzerland's glaciers lost more than 5% of their ice in 2026, marking another year of rapid decline. The loss reflects a wider global trend: Glaciers around the world have been shrinking at increasingly rapid rates, a phenomenon scientists link directly to global warming.

09/30/2026 Clean Technica Ameren Missouri Proposes Pollution-Heavy Future to Power Data Centers -Ameren Missouri filed a proposed long-range energy plan with its regulators at the Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC). If approved as proposed, Ameren Missouri would significantly increase its reliance on fossil fuels, including a large increase in gas-burning power plants and extended coal-burning at its Labadie and Sioux plants. Labadie is the deadliest coal plant in the country.

09/29/2026 Smithsonian Magazine Rare, Double-Headed Turtle Hatchling Discovered on Cape Cod - The tiny diamondback terrapin was brought to a wildlife center on September 17. At the time, the creature weighed about as much as a nickel.

09/29/2026 Science Daily The ice blasting from Saturn's moon Enceladus is stranger than scientists realized - Saturn's moon Enceladus is covered in ice, but beneath that frozen shell lies a global ocean. Near the moon's south pole, fractures in the crust release water vapor and ice particles into space. Those particles give scientists an unusual way to study an alien ocean without having to drill through kilometers of ice. These salt-rich grains are far more chemically diverse than an average ocean composition would suggest

09/29/2026 BBC Future The US state replacing power plants with home batteries - Spread across thousands of ordinary homes, this "power plant" has become Vermont's largest power source. It's protecting owners from outages and providing cheaper, cleaner energy. Whichever technologies end up powering virtual power plants, they're likely to involve local communities more than traditional energy systems have. People working in large groups, he says, can be as big as a power plant.

09/25/2026 Yale Environment 360 Alaska’s ‘Rusting’ Waters More Acidic Than Mining Wastewater - As the Arctic warms and tundra thaws, minerals long trapped in frozen soil are leaching into rivers, turning them orange and acidic. Analyzing records of water quality, researchers also determined that rusting began in the summer of 2019, the hottest summer on record in the state of Alaska. Since then, rusting has been recorded in more than 200 rivers in Alaska, as well as in waterways across much of northern Canada. There are fears that rusting may have led to the collapse of the chinook salmon fishery in the region.

09/30/2026 Clean Technica Is the US Going to End DEAD LAST In Vehicle Electrification? - If current trends continue, it’s very easy to see the US being the last country in the world — not just the last major auto market or major economy — to electrify its light vehicle market.

09/30/2026 Science Daily NASA's Perseverance Mars rover finds groundwater, lakes, and hot fluids in one place - The Margin Unit was not shaped by a single lake environment. Instead, it became a meeting point for several different water systems that altered the same rocks at different stages of Mars' history.

10/01/2026 Planetizen Evidence-based planning in a time of information overload - Information has exploded in the past few decades, including research information relevant to planning. The new landscape of open-access publications has benefits…and some problems. An important problem is that the onus of judging the quality of the research is left to the reader. And yet it may not be obvious to the reader which kind of journal they are accessing. Furthermore, researchers face publication fees. There may be an emerging role for librarians to help the profession manage information more effectively, though the enduring question is: who would pay?

10/01/2026 The Conversation 3 iconic animals show the value of the US Endangered Species Act – and the harm in stripping it away - The new interpretations, if they hold up to court challenges, could leave a vast number of endangered species at higher risk. Many of the country’s shipping, logging, mining and development practices are influenced by the Endangered Species Act’s protections. In some cases, entire species could face extinction. Featured species: Florida panther, North Atlantic right whale, Monarch butterfly. Hunting is not the primary threat today to the Florida panther, the North Atlantic right whale or the monarch butterfly. Their survival instead relies on the pine flatwoods being in good health, the ocean remaining quiet, and milkweed corridors existing across the continent.

Gleanings of the Week Ending December 2, 2023

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Scientists found hundreds of toxic chemicals in recycled plastics - More than 13,000 chemicals used in plastics with 25% classified as hazardous. Numerous studies show that hazardous chemicals can accumulate even in relatively close-loop plastic recycling systems. We need to rapidly phase-out plastic chemicals that can cause harm to human health and the environment.

Giant Sequoias Are in Big Trouble. How Best to Save Them? - Giant sequoias are, by volume, the largest trees in the world, indigenous only to California. Reaching heights of 300 feet, they occur in 80 groves or grove complexes along the western flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Central California. Many of these trees live for thousands of years: The oldest sequoia is more than 3,200 years old. In North America, only bristlecone pines grow longer. The 2020 and 2021 fire seasons were a wake-up call: flames had killed between 13 and 19 percent of all giant sequoias more than 4 feet in diameter, and many trees were far larger.

Batteries of the future? How cotton and seawater might power our devices - In markets where consumers appear to really care about the sustainability of the products they buy, appropriately sourced alternative battery materials might have more of a chance – whether batteries are made with biowaste-derived carbon or any other potentially more sustainable substance. The public could play a big role in really pushing that effort forward.

Designing cities for 21st-century weather – A data-driven model to predict how urban areas across the country will grow by 2100 found that how a city is laid out or organized spatially has the potential to reduce population exposures to future weather extremes. Carefully designed urban land patterns cannot completely erase increased population exposures to weather extremes resulting from climate change, but it can generate a meaningful reduction of the increase in risks.

Stunning 2,700-Year-Old Sculpture Unearthed in Iraq – 18 tons of alabaster. 2,700 years old. 12.5x12.8 feet. Largely intact except for its head which is missing.

Larger Beaks, Smaller Bodies: Could Climate Change Literally Change Birds? – A study analyzed 129 species of North American migratory birds collected over the prior 40 years and found bodies are shrinking and wings growing longer. Smaller species of birds, like tiny warblers or kinglets, shrink faster than bigger birds like robins and grackles, so their rate of change over the 40 years, is much, much faster. They’re able to maybe adapt to warming temperatures faster than these bigger birds.

A step closer to injection-free diabetes care: Innovation in insulin-producing cell – Potential this safer and more reliable way to grow insulin-producing cells from a patient's own blood could eventually allow transplants without the need for anti-rejection drugs.  

The Life and Death of American Dams - Many dams are now poorly maintained, clogged with silt, and pose an increasingly high risk of catastrophic failure. The recent recognition of the damage dams cause and the movement to remove them is part of the rewilding of America, long overdue.

An exotic tick that can kill cattle is spreading across Ohio – Asian longhorned ticks. The size of a sesame seed in some life stages and pea-sized when engorged. Surveillance showed they returned the following summer to the farm despite the application of pesticides in 2021. Asian longhorned ticks' secret colonization weapon is the ability to reproduce asexually, with each female laying up to 2,000 eggs at a time -- and all 2,000 of those female offspring able to do the same.

How Urban Design Impacts Public Health – Urban planning and design affects everything from air quality to temperature to risk of injury on roadways. Often with developers of public spaces it’s a sin of omission rather than of commission. In many cases, what is rarely apparent is what the health cost is, because that cost is born in a different sector and often at a different time.