This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A hundred years ago, the plant scientist Arthur Watkins launched a remarkable project. He began collecting samples of wheat from all over the globe, nagging consuls and business agents across the British empire and beyond to supply him with grain from local markets. His persistence was exceptional and, a century later, it is about to reap dramatic results. A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by ..read more

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here. As president, Donald Trump’s tax policy heavily favored corporations and the wealthy. Trump’s signature tax legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, overwhelmingly benefited those groups.  But as a presidential candidate, Trump campaigns as a populist. In his 2024 campaign, he’s touting a proposal to end federal taxation on tips. He made the announcement last month in Nevada, a key battleground state with a large service industry that relies on tips ..read more

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. René Heiden pulls two glass yogurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty. His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favor of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right. “You need a range of packaging to make it as convenient as possible for the consumer,” says Heiden. An oil bott ..read more

In a Princeton University lecture hall one morning last December, Peter Singer, one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—living philosophers, offered his Philosophy 385 (“Practical Ethics”) students a brief overview of their upcoming final. The registrar, he noted, had scheduled the exam for the following Sunday evening. This, he proclaimed, “seems unethical.” The line got a good laugh. A hint of winter chill hung in the air, the undergrads having just sloughed off their Canada Goose parkas and settled into the seats of Wood Auditorium in McCosh Hall, a Tudor Gothic behemoth that ..read more

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last month, Oscar Hernández couldn’t sleep. The cook, who worked at a restaurant located inside of a Las Vegas casino, had found that after coming home from his shifts, his body would not properly cool down.  The air conditioning at work had been broken for about four months. Hernández worked eight-hour shifts during the restaurant’s brunch service, whipping up eggs, waffles, and fried chicken. He spent hours in front of a scaldingly hot grill—an older mo ..read more

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. What is the value of a tree? It can provide a cool place to rest in the shade, a snack in the form of fruit, lumber to build a home, and cleaner air. But trees are increasingly being prized for one thing: their ability to capture carbon and counteract climate change.  Billions of dollars are flowing into projects to plant and protect trees so that governments and businesses can claim they’ve canceled out their emissions. Saving forests and planting trees ..read more

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. About five miles south of Broken Bow, in the heart of central Nebraska, thousands of cattle stand in feedlots at Adams Land & Cattle Co., a supplier of beef to the meat giant Tyson Foods. From the air, the feedlots look dusty brown and packed with cows—not a vision of happy animals grazing on open pastureland, enriching the soil with carbon. But when the animals are slaughtered, processed, and sent onward to consumers, labels on the final pro ..read more

If you go on TikTok or Instagram, you’ll see legions of wellness influencers promoting the benefits of unpasteurized “raw” milk, which hasn’t been heated to kill off illness-causing microorganisms. Raw milk is risky business at the best of times, and despite what some influencers claim, there are no nutritional benefits to drinking it, according to the CDC. But it’s now also a vector for H5N1, the new bird flu spreading through cows. On April 1, it was confirmed that H5N1 had spread to at least one person who worked with cattle—as of April 30, 36 dairy herds have been confirmed to have had cas ..read more

This article was produced by The Bittman Project and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. It is co-published here with permission. EHRP’s high-quality journalism is co-published with mainstream media outlets, to help readers understand and address systemic hardship. Cooking and food shopping are very different in America than they used to be. For one thing, there’s an often overwhelming “time tax” on many workers, leaving us with mere minutes for cooking–the average American has only ab ..read more

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves. Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt. Dusty shrublands run into sleepy residential streets, which run into neat fields of cotton and alfalfa. Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company ..read more