The rapid adoption of heat pumps in the United States is becoming little short of a revolution, such that these clever HVAC devices in a few years will effectively replace previous systems.
Indeed of all new homes built last year, 46% were completed with heat pumps, just 1% below other more recognizable systems like water boilers, gas furnaces, and air conditioners.
240 years ago today, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, the National Poet of Scotland, was published in Kilmarnock. It was a hit, and catapulted him to Scottish Stardom. Among the collection is one of his two most famous poems, To a Mouse, which is actually called To a Mouse, on turning up her nest, with the plough, November. Of Burns’ reputation as the “ploughman poet” who writes about rural life, this title is typical, but not as dramatic as The auld Farmer’s new-year-morning Salutation, to his auld Mare, Maggy, on giving her the accustomed ripp of Corn to hansel in the new year. READ some of these poems… (1786)
It’s been almost 20 years since Argentina launched what was at the time the world’s first attempt at reintroducing the giant anteater to a landscape it had disappeared from.
A woman was able to help a partially disabled airport worker retire after she witnessed him hobbling across the tarmac on a flight out of Los Angeles.
Heartbroken watching him limp up to the plane she was sitting on, she captured a video of the man for her TikTok account and posted it with a caption asking if anyone knew who he was.
For the 3rd consecutive year, global hunger as measured by malnourishment among continental populations has fallen.
It’s also the first time that the malnourished as a share of global population has fallen below 8% since the government-enforced business closures and supply disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A sprinkle of crushed basalt rock has turned out to be the fairy dust that newly planted forests need to develop faster and absorb more carbon.
That’s what scientists from Imperial College London are reporting in a new study from the largest field experiment studying how “enhanced weathering” and soil microbiome enrichment can potentially improve new forest establishment.
On this day 96 years ago, at the conclusion of the inaugural FIFA World Cup, La Celeste, or Uruguay, won the trophy. Rarely considered as favorites in the tournament’s editions these days, Uruguay was on a tear by the time the first World Cup kicked off in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital. They had won the 1924 and 1928 Olympic football tournaments. Beating Argentina 2-1 in the ’28 Olympics, they beat their cross-border rivals again, 4-2, to win the World Cup. READ about the history of the competition… (1930)
From Big Sky Country comes a rescue story so cliche that even Hollywood scriptwriters would pass it over.
A 14-year-old obsessed with roping cattle rescued a man who’d fallen into a river Indiana Jones-style, catching him around the neck and arm with his lasso.
A changing climate seems to be shortening Africa’s dry season, resulting in less land scorched during the wildfire season according to new science.
For all the column inches devoted to the record wildfire seasons in France, Spain, or the Amazon, it is still and has always been Africa that’s the center of world wildfires.
Once upon a time, in a little town called Atlanta, there was a dad who decided on a lark to take his 4-month-old baby girl to the library.
He didn’t know it at the time, but the Georgia native had planted the magic bean that would grow into a giant beanstalk of brotherhood and paternity, known simply as the Library Dads.
A hospital in Trinidad and Tobago was the site of an incredible, 12-day surgical marathon.
When the scrubs were finally hung up, 3,000 people had regained vision free of charge thanks to the Church of the 7th Day Adventists, who organized donated cataract and pterygium surgery work through its community hospital.
On this day in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created. The US Congress was spurred to create the federal agency by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first orbital satellite. Two of the goals were to expand human knowledge of the Earth’s atmosphere and space, and the improvement of space vehicles. It consistently places as the most popular government agency. READ More… (1958)
