Today is the first day of COP22 , the twenty second annual meeting of international climate change negotiators. This year’s conference is like none of the previous ones, because – this time – there’s an international climate agreement in effect. The Paris Agreement entered into force last Friday, November 4 th . That agreement has the support of all 195 negotiating parties, and has already been ratified by one hundred parties , accounting for nearly seventy percent of global greenhouse gas

Enrico Fermi is a household name in Italy, revered as the greatest Italian scientist of the modern age. But on this side of the Atlantic, he’s less well-known despite having changed the course of history with his work on the Manhattan Project and other atomic-age advances. Husband-and-wife team Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin have brought Enrico Fermi’s life and times to a wider audience with their new book, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age . Fermi was known as

The internet is so ingrained in our daily lives, that it can be hard to remember life before it. And it changes so quickly it’s equally hard to know what the future might hold. One thing that’s clear is that more and more people will be connected and doing more and different things with this technology. It’s a bit tricky to pinpoint when the internet began. Was it the first email? The first public network? What we do know is exactly when we started keeping a record of what’s on the web - October

For as long as there has been life on earth, there have been new species arising and others disappearing. A handful of times, the rate of disappearances has temporarily skyrocketed during what scientists call mass extinction events. Scientists say we’re in the midst of the planet’s sixth such event – this one of our own making. Note: A longer version of this interview originally aired on August 17, 2015. With animals going extinct at one thousand times the natural rate, it can be easy to lose

Carl Safina is a marine conservationist and professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island who has been an advocate for the ocean for many years. Safina says he started out researching seabirds. “I left science behind, not intentionally,” he told WCAI. “I started getting involved in these conservation debates. I thought I would do it for the non-field season, for a year or two. Then I realized my research was farther and farther back in the wake and I was not going to circle back to it.”

Many scientists think we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, and it’s out fault. The idea of bringing back extinct animals has gotten more attention in recent years as labs around the world get better at sequencing their genes. Could we once again have herds of woolly mammoths grazing the tundra of the north? Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at U.C. Santa Cruz asks a different question: should we? She answers it in her book, How to Clone A Mammoth: The

Humans are taking a toll on ocean ecosystems – pollution, overfishing , climate change. Jeremy Jackson has watched human impacts sap the ability of Caribbean coral reefs to recover from natural disasters. But he says the greatest threat to ocean health is right inside our heads. When Jackson first started studying coral reefs in the late 1960s, he was drawn by their beauty, by the fun and excitement of learning new things about corals. Over time, he and colleagues began to notice changes caused

You may have heard that there’s a floating island of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The truth is, there isn’t. In fact, the problem is far more insidious, more akin to smog. One estimate found that there are hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic - more than five trillion pieces, most about the size of a grain of rice - floating around in the world’s oceans. Anna Cummins and Marcus Eriksen met - and got engaged - on a research cruise studying ocean plastics. Marcus made a

Thanks to Galileo, it's common knowledge that the Earth orbits the sun. What's not as commonly known is that the sun - and our entire solar system - is orbiting around a massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. It takes 225 million Earth years to make one loop around the Milky Way. A small group of science enthusiasts thinks we should all stop and ponder this and other amazing facts about our place in the universe once in a while, and they’ve declared a holiday this Thursday for exactly

Emily Callahan was working at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 when she noticed something strange. The workers said they couldn’t wait to get back to fishing near oil rigs. She thought they were crazy until they told her, “That’s where the fish are.” That experience started her down the path of promoting a program that lets companies turn old oil rigs into artificial reefs that support a surprising array of sea life. Emily Callahan and Amber Jackson met as graduate students at the Scripps