"Japan’s tourism industry relies on the $9bn a year generated by cherry blossom season. Such is the craze in the country that a town near Mount Fuji cancelled this year’s festivities because it was being overrun by visitors in search of 'Instagrammable' spots."
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Tree characteristics change in mixed forests, leading to more wood production than in single-species plantations🌳
buff.ly/GcBwwGA
🧪🌍️
NOAA Map of the U.S. notable weather and climate events in March 2026. Source - https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202603
NOAA Contiguous US Analysis for March 2026
🔴 Warmest March on Record.
🔴 Jan–Mar period was the driest on record.
🔴 Dry conditions expanded drought to nearly 60%.
🔴 The April 2025–March 2026 period now stands as the warmest 12-month span ever recorded.
www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/nationa...
Map showing the western United States mean temperature for January to March 2026 relative to a 1991-2020 departure.
Almost the entire Western United States is averaging more than 5°F warmer than the most recent 1991-2020 climate baseline so far in 2026, which is truly remarkable. Off the color scale here!
Graphic from wrcc.dri.edu/my/
This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
Americans have spent an estimated $20.5 billion more on gas and diesel since Trump attacked Iran ...
... funding colossal war profits for Big Oil from Riyadh to Moscow to Houston (next post)
1/2
iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu
Wetlands are considered to be the world’s most productive ecosystems.
Yet, they are being lost at an alarming rate.
The Global Wetland Watch provides vital data for the protection of these ecosystems. globalwetlandwatch.org
The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment since 1952. We just got the first Iran-afflicted measure for April, and it's at the lowest level ever recorded.
Do you have the sense that summers feel different than when you were younger? That they start quickly, and remain intense until the fall? You’re not wrong. (thread)
It is hard to capture what a sweeping strategic defeat the war in Iran has been for the United States. I’m going to thread here some of the posts today that try to capture those effects. Here’s the first:
I had a great conversation with @jenniferweeks83.bsky.social about floral creativity, now published in edited version at @yalee360.bsky.social
e360.yale.edu/features/dav...
“The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration.”
www.propublica.org/article/trum...
Dice games have been a key tool for social cohesion for many Native American cultures for thousands of years, as oral traditions, modern practices and archaeology reflect.
The oldest documented dice are 12,000 years old and from the western US, a study finds.
www.sciencenews.org/article/olde...
Nicknamed the “God Squad” by groups who say it can decide a species’ fate, the committee comprises several Trump administration officials and is chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The committee on Tuesday granted an exemption for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
We just published a review 🗞️😁:
‘The ecology of adaptive radiation’ revisited: A 25-year reflection
Dolph Schluter’s book inspired the interest in adaptive radiation, and we wanted to revisit it.
academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...
1/5 🧵
Hundreds of millions of people live close enough to data centres used to power AI to feel warmer average temperatures in their local area
What would happen in the US if people stop getting vaccines for just four key diseases? Someone did the modeling for this
projects.propublica.org/childhood-va...
The slippery narrative of Fermi's Neugebauer on why it is building off-grid fossil gas power plants: we want to shield consumers from data center costs & provide reliable "baseload" power. Google's Peterson explains how this is enormously wasteful & will end up increasing ratepayer burdens.
The AI economy looks...really precarious. So @matteowong.bsky.social & I did a bunch of reporting to try to figure out what happens when a potential bubble collides with a war in Iran and a potential resource shortage. The answer is...arguably the most dire stuff i've heard from smart ppl in a while
As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.
US has caused $10tn worth of climate damage since 1990, research finds
US, top carbon emitter in history, has "a lot of responsibility" for causing ‘substantial’ harm globally, scientist says
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Out today is our paper 'Genomic history of early dogs in Europe', in which we uncover the identity of the dogs that lived in Europe before agriculture—during the Paleolithic & Mesolithic periods: doi.org/10.1038/s415.... A thread ⬇️ (10)
@biouea.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social
A new study suggests that US drought in the late 1980s is responsible for a major collapse in Gulf fisheries in the early 1990s: 🌊🧪 ocean2climate.org/2026/03/25/u...
Payment-based open access is biasing scientific participation from the Global South in ecology nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
New research challenges what we thought we knew about men's friendships. A new study by @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social Sociology grad student, Emily Fox (@emilycfox.bsky.social), asks: is the "gender friendship gap" really about gender? Spoiler: not exactly. 🧵 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The ongoing record-breaking heat wave in the West will continue while expanding across the Central U.S. through the weekend. Based on preliminary data, there have been around 50 March high temperature records broken since March 17 and more than 150 daily high temperature records broken.
So, yesterday the US set a new March temperature record of 110 degrees, beating the old record by two degrees.
Today the US set a new March temperature record of 112 degrees, beating the new record by two degrees and the old one by four degrees.
THREAD: Cherise Doyley was in her 12th hour of contractions at the hospital when a tablet was brought to her bedside.
On the screen was a Zoom call with a judge and several lawyers and doctors.
She was in court, a nurse told her. The reason? For failing to agree to a C-section.
