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Mother Jones •

Polling has an AI respondent problem

Imagine you’re doing market research to advise a soda company on which flavor to emphasize in its next advertising campaign: regular cola or cherry? You might aim to find and survey a wide variety of potential customers online. But now there’s a quicker, cheaper alternative: Polling mainstays like Qualtrics and newer firms like Synthetic Users are proffering “silicon” respondents—large language models (LLMs) that will pretend to be lots of different people and answer questions based on how the m...
Mother Jones •

The battle over solar on farms

“Tell me that is a gorgeous country.” Dave Rogers, an Oregon farmer, points across an expanse of green ryegrass fields. “My goodness, look at that.” 


We’re walking along a stretch of land that is under contract for solar development by Hanwha Qcells, a Seoul-based firm known for opening the United States’ largest solar manufacturing facility in 2023. Rogers describes the new project, dubbed Muddy Creek Energy Park, as a “huge amount of construction, three miles of solar panels, a football fie...
Mother Jones •

Trans health care "skeptics" lost a key ally—now they're having a meltdown

Colleagues call Gordon Guyatt the “godfather” of evidence-based medicine.


Guyatt, a distinguished professor of medicine at McMaster University in Canada, has had sweeping influence on medical research: GRADE, the framework he helped pioneer to assess the evidence behind clinical recommendations, is a standard at more than 100 medical organizations, including the WHO. Before Guyatt, medicine relied much more on the judgment calls of senior clinicians; today, standardized research is increasing...
Mother Jones •

"We're going to do whatever it takes to keep her safe"

On Susan’s birthday five years ago, her 10-year-old slid a note under her door. Today, she can recite it from memory: “Hey Mom, I wanted to ask, when you talk about me in the future, if you could use he/him or they/them pronouns because she/her pronouns make me really uncomfortable.” Then, “Happy Birthday.”


Susan, the mother of two kids in Connecticut, remembers letting out a deep breath. She had been deeply worried about Kai, her youngest, who had been severely depressed and struggling with...
Quanta Magazine •

The Physicist Decoding the Nonbinary Nature of the Subatomic World

Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.
Hadronization is different. It’s the process by which elementary particles called quarks and gluons join together to form protons and...
Washington Blade •

LGBTQ youth love TikTok. Does TikTok love them back?

When Jocelyn was stuck inside during most of 2020, they did what any high school senior would do: scrolled through TikTok. They found themself on the hashtag #tiktokmademegay a lot. (To protect privacy, the Blade is opting to only use Jocelyn’s first name).


“At the time, I didn’t give it a lot of thought,” they say, acknowledging that most users viewed it as “more of a joke.” 


Now a senior in college, where Jocelyn will graduate with a degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and C...
Mother Jones •

An epic battle over 1 mile of land in Wisconsin is tearing environmentalists apart

Judge William M. Conley watched as the Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line inched toward the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge—a 240,000-acre bird sanctuary through which the fully funded power project lacked the permits to pass. By January 2022, he’d seen enough. It “amounts to little more than an orchestrated trainwreck,” Conley, an Obama-appointed federal judge from the Western District of Wisconsin, wrote in a scathing 23-page opinion that delayed construction.

More than...
Mother Jones •

First they tried to "cure" gayness. Now they're fixated on "healing" trans people.

The conversion therapists met last November at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of a Hampton Inn conference room, a middle-aged woman wearing white stockings and a Virgin Mary blue dress issued a call to arms to the 20-some people in attendance. “In our current culture, in which children are being indoctrinated with transgender belief from the moment they’re out of the womb, if we are confronted with a gender-confused child, you must help,” declared...
Mother Jones •

What the fight over one small amphibian in Nevada says about the future of green energy.

The Endangered Species Act has been one of the country’s most valuable environmental tools, but it faces new threats. As the law turns 50, we’re asking whether this “pit bull” of an environmental law, as one expert described it, can survive the challenges of our time—from political attacks to climate shocks. You can read all the stories here.
Almost as quickly as the Dixie Valley toad was discovered, it became apparent the toad could be lost.
Richard Tracy, a biology professor at the University...
Mother Jones •

Are these $2,000 water bills racist?

When Tyrone Pettway saw his water bill in October 2021, he thought it was a typo. The bill was for $2,384.51, some $2,300 more than what he usually owed the Prichard, Alabama, water board every month.

The document claimed Pettway, his wife, and their five kids had used 167,000 gallons of water over the course of the 34-day billing period, amounting to nearly 5,000 gallons a day. But Pettway was sure they had used no more water that month than they normally did: 3,700 gallons total, or about 18...
5280 •

More Exciting Than Watching Grass Grow: Restoring Colorado’s Prairie Could Help Fight Climate Change

At first look, the shortgrass prairie is not exceptional. Located east of Denver, the expanse of green and golden stalks stretches to the horizon with only the occasional muted shrub and forb adding texture to the landscape. “It’s called the plains because it’s pretty plain,” says Fendi Despres, natural resource specialist with the City of Aurora. “The prairie is boring for most people.”
But even if the North American Plains aren’t marked by towering trees or flashy flowers, like in tropical rai...

Science Writing

Climate Lit •

Keeling Curve

The Keeling Curve is a graph that depicts the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere every day since 1958. It shows the ongoing increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, alongside the seasonal variation in CO2 levels.

The curve is named after Charles David Keeling, who began the monitoring program in 1958. He was the first person to make regular measurements of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Keeling received the National Medal of Science for his work in 2001 and oversaw the...
OSU Extension Service •

OSU chef-turned-entomologist takes on vineyard pest

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Alexander Butcher’s passion for food — which led him to culinary school and a decade-long career as a professional chef — has now brought him to Oregon State University, where he is pursuing a doctorate in entomology.

The career shift, he said, is rooted in concern about food waste.

“Working in the restaurant industry, I noticed so much food waste, and it really started to bother me,” Butcher said. “That led me toward agriculture and pest management and trying to reduce food...
OSU Extension Service •

OSU researcher demonstrates bee pesticide monitoring is due for an upgrade

CORVALLIS, Ore. — By the time she was studying the mechanics of stag beetle pinchers as an undergraduate, Emily Carlson knew she had been bitten by the research bug.

Literally.

“Basically, I just got them really angry, saw how hard they could pinch and then dissected their heads,” Carlson said.

A disclaimer, she added: Beetles aren’t “true” bugs, though the term is commonly used in the United States.

Carlson went on to work in natural resources nonprofits and local governance as she explored...
OSU Extension Service •

Grazing research cuts wildfire fuels and feed costs in Malheur County

ONTARIO, Ore. — In 2015, the Soda Fire burned 280,000 acres in southwest Idaho and southeast Oregon, including large areas of Malheur County.

One of the biggest contributors to that fire — and others like it — is invasive grasses, often called “fine fuels.” These grasses not only intensify wildfires but also outcompete native plants that support the unique biodiversity of the Northern Great Basin, where Malheur County is located.

Sergio Arispe, who has worked with the Oregon State University E...
OSU Extension Service •

Statewide team works to slow emerald ash borer spread

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Even as lead of the Oregon Forest Pest Detector Program, Dan Stark missed the moment emerald ash borer breached Oregon’s borders.

“I went up to a concert for the first time since COVID,” he said. “I was out in the Sierra Nevada.”

He returned to the news: The dreaded invasive beetle — which had been making its way across America, leaving a path of damaged, dying and dead ash trees in its wake — had been found in Oregon. The Oregon Departments of Agriculture and Forestry and ot...
OSU Extension Service •

OSU responds to reemergence of Eastern Filbert Blight in Oregon orchards

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Nik Wiman thinks about things in the big picture.

Wiman, an orchard crop specialist with the Oregon State University Extension Service and College of Agricultural Sciences, said that this is what brought him to the specialty in the first place.

“Orchards are really interesting agricultural systems because they're somewhat permanent," he said.

Unlike annual crops, Wiman explained, “where you kind of start from zero every year, with an orchard you have the opportunity to do th...
OSU Extension Service •

Rising Fusarium canker raises concerns for Oregon hop growers

CORVALLIS, Ore. — When Cynthia Ocamb was invited to tour a hop field in the early 2000s, she did not expect to see a prevalence of Fusarium canker higher than the single digits.

Driving around the field in Marion County, Ocamb was gobsmacked. A disease that generally affected 5% of the crop plants was affecting 75% in this field.

“I was shocked,” the Oregon State University professor of plant pathology remembered.

It was a sign of the shift in what diseases the Oregon hop industry would be co...

Video Editing

Mother Jones •

“We’re Going to Do Whatever It Takes to Keep Her Safe”

► For more, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/

“Please help us.”

The months since Trump’s inauguration have been hell for families with transgender children. They’ve already lived through record-breaking years of anti-trans state legislation, followed by the most anti-LGBTQ presidential election cycle in decades.

Now, as Trump turns the weight of the federal government against trans kids—attacking their health care and support in school, declaring “gender ideology” to be a form of child abuse—they’re dealing with canceled appointments, harassment, and the reemergence of mental health challenges they’ve fought to overcome.

Two of our reporters spent the last three months getting to know seven of these families: listening to their stories, hopes and fears, and plans to survive the Trump era. Some are making plans to move away. Some have already fled. Parents talk about doing anything for their children.

Without exception, these families asked us to conceal their identities. But you can listen to them tell their stories in their own words, and I’d recommend doing so. As a reporter, you know some interviews will stay with you forever. These are a few.


#transgender #politics #lgbt

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