Weather is an endlessly fascinating topic: It affects everybody and can literally be a matter of life and death. Forecasting seems to many some kind of black art, but the basic principles are fairly simple: Collect a lot of observations, plug them into a set of theoretical models, and turn the crank repeatedly to advance […]
I began my journey through a red tape jungle about 20 years ago, on a quest to clean up a pond and then to help out some toads. Here’s where my regulatory travails took me… There has always been a segment of the US population that felt any restraint on the use of land was […]
RI is situated in a part of the country rich in sources of inspiration. Our ever-changing landscape of soft woodland hills, fieldstone pastures, ponds and streams, industrial mill valleys, suburbs and cities is edged to the east with quaint old coastal towns, sun-drenched beaches, reedy marshes, rocky peninsulas and rugged islands. We have an abundance […]
Content by Jen Long
In the age of climate-change denial and “alternative facts,” science communicator Bill Nye has proven to be a vital source of information when it comes to the current state of our world and our environment. Most Millennials grew up with Nye from his popular ‘90s TV show “Bill Nye the Science Guy” while the older […]
Wind energy is all it’s blown up to be. States like Texas and Oklahoma know wind to be a viable and powerful source of renewable energy, and have been tapping into it on their plains and prairies for decades. Rhode Island, being a bit short on plains and prairies inventory, took the best route […]
Simply reading the 77-page decision by the Rhode Island Supreme Court provides a thorough and authoritative tutorial to the exercise in backroom politics that lies behind the approval of the Deepwater Wind “demonstration project” off Block Island. It’s all there: how the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) initially found that the agreement to sell wind power […]
Young people interested in traditional scouting that emphasizes outdoor activities and interaction with nature had few opportunities if they felt excluded by policy from more widely known scouting organizations. The Baden-Powell Service Association (BPSA) seeks to remedy that by opening its membership without discrimination on the basis of religious views, sexual orientation or gender, aiming […]
[See main article: motifri.com/gmofood] Surprisingly, the first and hardest problem of talking about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is defining them. Advanced biotechnology since the 1990s makes possible direct modification of cellular genetic material through genetic engineering, but the results are distinguishable only by their precision from traditional breeding techniques used for millennia with plants and […]
[See sidebar: motifri.com/gmoguide] Food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) made by genetic engineering (GE) has been in the news recently following the May release of results from a major study conducted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), a private non-profit corporation funded entirely by the federal government and originally chartered by […]