Did Sean Casten run as an environmentalist? Yes. Is that why he won? Maybe.

By Aaron Dorman Medill Reports Sean Casten was driven to run, and eventually win, the election in Illinois’ sixth congressional district, for one simple reason: Peter Roskam wasn’t listening to his constituents about the environment. Potentially carcinogenic air pollutants from a commercial sterilization plant in Willowbrook, declining water supplies and weather extremes causing floods due […]

Bloomberg and Brown bolster a business-friendly climate for climate change solutions

By Aaron Dorman Medill Reports “Fighting climate change and growing the economy go hand in hand,” Michael Bloomberg insisted at the Global Climate Action Summit this fall. Al Gore, California Gov. Jerry Brown and Harrison Ford repeated this message throughout the main and affiliate events that gathered  hundreds of regional politicians, business leaders and environmental […]

Star-Studded global climate summit mobilizes action plans to combat climate change

Aaron Dorman Medill Reports If climate activists and local governments can’t work with Washington on climate change, they plan to work around it. More than 300 U.S. cities including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles have vowed to uphold the Paris Agreement – bypassing the Trump Administration’s intention to withdraw. And now dozens of cities […]

New funding pushes lab-grown meat closer to reality

Mosa Meat

By Brady Jones Medill Reports Netherlands-based Mosa Meat announced Tuesday that it had secured €7.5 million in new funding to support its efforts to produce the world’s first lab-produced commercial meat product, prompting them to predict the culinary revolution could appear on the market by 2021. The funding, which equates to roughly $8.7 million, came […]

Shell stuff: Monitoring the health of California’s shellfish amid climate change

This is the second is a series about Medill News Service reporter Rebecca Fanning’s embedded reporting experience at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Lab in Bodega Bay, California. Read the original post here.  By Rebecca Fanning Endangered black abalone receive an aromatic spa treatment while hundreds of baby oysters float in tiny cages next to winding […]

Tracking marine life on the edge of the Pacific

By Rebecca Fanning Medill Reports Bodega Bay, California. I’ve spent the past several weeks working with marine ecologists –holding tiny porcelain crabs, named for their propensity for losing limbs, picking seaweed out of small buckets to be dried and weighed for an animal diet experiment, peering through microscopes at fish larvae and gazing at baby […]

Making Sense of Surface Chemistry

THESE NU SCIENTISTS WANT TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THEIR WORK, AND THE VALUE OF OBSCURE SCIENCE. By David Thill Medill Reports There’s a language barrier between Mike Mattei and most of the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s more of a dialect barrier. Mattei, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Northwestern University’s Department of Chemistry, […]

Climate scientists gather to tackle urgent challenges for the planet

By Janice Cantieri “You can’t open a McDonald’s ketchup packet without the little notch. Try it, okay?” noted climatologist Richard Alley. Without the little notches, plastic ketchup packets are almost impossible to open no matter how much you pull or tear. Cracks in the world’s ice sheets are like those little notches, Alley said. Once […]

The dual force of climate change on sea level rise

By Kelly Calagna Sea level rise – a direct impact of a warming climate and melting ice – threatens island nations and coastal communities across the world. [vimeo 192673914 w=640 h=360] What Causes Sea Level Rise? from Medill Reports on Vimeo. Photo and video by Kelly Calagna.