A new system called the Transient Artifact and Continuous Learning System (TACLS) combines satellite data and machine learning to help the National Weather Service identify flood-prone areas faster and issue earlier alerts. The technology comes after incidents like the June flash flood in Lanesville, Indiana, where over 8 inches of rain fell in hours and residents received evacuation warnings only after flooding had already begun.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-18
NOAA data shows the contiguous United States just endured its warmest summer since record-keeping began, with an average temperature of 75.6°F and daytime highs averaging 88.6°F, surpassing the previous record set jointly by 2021 and 1936. The South and West bore the brunt of the heat, while Arizona logged its second-hottest summer ever and Alaska and Hawaii each posted their third-warmest.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-17
A coalition including the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, Environmental Defense Fund and NRDC has filed a petition asking the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to review the EPA's recent repeal of climate rules for power plants. The groups argue the repeal violates the Clean Air Act and could lead to thousands of preventable deaths by leaving the largest industrial source of climate pollution unregulated.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-17
Stanford researchers who previously showed human brain organoids could survive and function inside baby mice have now genetically engineered mice so their own brains don't fully develop, allowing human tissue to fill the gap more extensively. The approach aims to create better models for studying brain injury and development, while forcing the team to set explicit ethical limits on how far the chimeric brain research should go.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-09-17
MIT Technology Review's latest list of under-35 innovators highlights researchers and founders working on climate tech, including Jae-Won Chung's software for measuring AI models' energy consumption, Jing Wei's AI-based pollution tracking, and Zhonghua Zheng's city-specific climate models. The list also features Mohammad Alkhadra of Lithios and Benjamin Mowbray of Rock Zero, two startups developing faster, cheaper methods to extract lithium from brine and hardrock ore respectively.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-09-17
Al Gore, speaking with TechCrunch alongside Generation Investment Management's Lila Preston, argued that AI data centers' emissions are far smaller than critics claim, comparing them to landfill emissions and global air conditioning use. He said what worries him more are warnings emerging from within the AI industry itself.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-16
The breakdown of the Milne Ice Shelf in Canada's High Arctic caused the freshwater lake that once floated atop denser seawater behind it to empty out within a matter of months. This lake was the last known epishelf lake in the Canadian Arctic, formed by a rare balance of ice-shelf structure and layered water that has now been broken.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-16
Maine recorded a wave of great white shark encounters this summer, including a lifeguard pulled underwater near Scarborough and a dozen sightings near Pine Point Beach within two days. Several beaches closed temporarily as sharks were spotted through Labor Day weekend, with one caught by a fisherman about 30 miles down the coast. Experts say warming waters play a role, but the bigger driver is a decades-old conservation success rebuilding seal and shark populations, combined with more beachgoers using tech that spots sharks.
wired.com
· 2026-09-16
The Trump administration's EPA, led by Lee Zeldin, has finalized plans to eliminate federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas power plants, rolling back rules established under the Biden and Obama administrations. A companion rule would also try to block future administrations from reinstating such restrictions on power plant emissions.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-15
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather analyzed his own usage of Anthropic's Claude Code assistant and calculated that a typical day of work consumed between 1.2 and 5.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity, comparable to running two refrigerators nonstop for a day. He found that 96 percent of the roughly 3.2 billion tokens processed over eight weeks came from the agent repeatedly re-reading its own accumulated memory at each step, rather than generating visible output.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-15
The IPCC announced in March it is developing AI systems to assist with literature reviews and processing reviewer comments for its climate assessments. A commentary in Nature warns these tools could influence which studies are surfaced, how evidence is clustered, and what signals reach report authors, long before any text is drafted.
nature.com
· 2026-09-15
Researchers warn that this year's El Niño event, combined with ongoing global warming, resembles a rare pattern last observed in the late 1990s. They caution that the interaction between these two forces could produce extreme weather events that fall outside the range of existing climate models and historical data.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-14
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