Communities in the American Southwest Were Exposed to Nuclear Fallout. Can They Get Compensated?
Universal History Archive/Getty This story was originally published by Undark. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The atomic bomb was born in the desert. In the early hours of July 16, 1945, after a spate of bad weather, a 20-kiloton plutonium-based nuke referred to as “the gadget” detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Firsthand testimonies…
Dozens of ICE Detainees Were Pepper-Sprayed by Guards for Protesting at a Louisiana Jail
Shane Bevel/The (Shreveport) Times/AP Immigrants held at a Louisiana jail say they were beaten and pepper-sprayed Friday after protesting their indefinite detention at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mother Jones obtained several text messages sent by detainees to attorney Lara Nochomovitz, who represents clients held in the Bossier (Parish) Sheriff Medium Security Facility,…
Trump’s Signature Looks Like an Audio Waveform. So We Synthesized Sound From It.
Mother Jones illustration President Trump’s signature has been scrawled across 8×10 glossies, MAGA hats, and controversial executive orders. It’s been analyzed by handwriting experts and parodied by meme experts. But one thing stands out most about his signature: it looks like an audio waveform. Through the miracle of science, researchers have been able to convert…
A Teen Scientist Figured out How to Suck Microplastics from the Ocean. There May Be Hope for Humanity.
Fionn Ferreira On Monday, Fionn Ferreira, an 18-year-old from Ireland, took home the top prize—which includes, in addition to a lifetime of bragging rights, a $50,000 educational scholarship—at the Google Science Fair for his project on microplastic pollution. Microplastics are plastic fragments less than 5 millimeters in size and they pose serious environmental and a public…
Here’s How Globalization Has Affected America
How much has globalization hurt the American worker? Entire forests have been felled around this question, but here’s a simple way of getting a rough read on things. Globalization mainly affects what’s called the tradeable sector—that is, stuff that can be traded between countries. These are mostly physical goods like cars and coal and lumber.…
Trump Praises Kim Jong Un’s “Beautiful Vision for His Country”
Dong-A Ilbo/Getty North Korea—a country best known for its systemic human rights violations and unpredictable, authoritarian leaders—fired two short-range missiles on Friday, the South Korean media reported. This latest weapons test, the hermit kingdom’s third in eight days, would typically inspire some element of concern or retaliatory action from the United States, which North Korea…