Air-Conditioning Should Be a Human Right in the Climate Crisis

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May 10, 2022

Dear Reader, As a severe heat wave smothers South Asia, the need for air conditioning is greater than ever. In fact, researchers argue in this week's featured story, "the coming boom in air-conditioning is an essential shift toward reducing the enormous gap in cooling availability that exists between rich and poor people and nations—and toward producing a more equitable world."

Sophie Bushwick, Associate Editor, Technology

Climate Change Air-Conditioning Should Be a Human Right in the Climate Crisis We need to protect vulnerable people from killer heat without destroying the environment By Rose M. Mutiso,Morgan D. Bazilian,Jacob Kincer,Brooke Bowser

Energy Rechargeable Molten Salt Battery Freezes Energy in Place for Long-Term Storage The technology could bring more renewable energy to the power grid By Anna Blaustein

Natural Disasters New Drones Could Spot Wildfires Earlier, Even Help Snuff Them Out And other new technology could detect carbon monoxide emitted just when flames start By John Fialka,E&E News

Biotech Mysterious 'Retron' DNA Helps Scientists Edit Human Genes For the first time, researchers have used this bacterial tool to edit genes in human cells By Saugat Bolakhe

Artificial Intelligence How Language-Generation AIs Could Transform Science An expert in emerging technologies warns that software designed to summarize, translate and write like humans might exacerbate distrust in science By Richard Van Noorden,Nature magazine

Epidemiology Guns Now Kill More Children and Young Adults Than Car Crashes Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24, a new analysis shows By Tanya Lewis

Aerospace Electric Planes Take Off More than 170 projects are underway worldwide By John Fialka,E&E News

Engineering New Tech Conveys Emotional Touch Long-Distance Complex social information can be felt through a virtual touch By Richard Sima

FROM THE STORE Revolutions in Science Normally science proceeds in incremental steps, but sometimes a discovery is so profound that it causes a paradigm shift. This eBook is a collection of articles about those kinds of advances, including revolutionary discoveries about the origin of life, theories of learning, formation of the solar system and more. *Editor's Note: Revolutions in Science was originally published as a Collector's Edition. The eBook adaptation contains all of the articles, but some of the artwork has been removed to optimize viewing on mobile devices.

QUOTE OF THE DAY "High speed internet is not a luxury any longer. It's a necessity." President Joe Biden, quoted by Aamer Madhani and Will Weissert in AP News

FROM THE ARCHIVE Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change? Researchers propose a carbon-neutral "synthetic oil well" on every rooftop By Richard Conniff | April 2019

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