BOURNE, MA — Gov. Maura Healey’s office announced Wednesday that the Cape Cod Bridges replacement project has reached a major milestone after receiving federal approval of its Final Environmental Impact Statement and a Record of Decision from the Federal Highway Administration.

The approval completes the federal environmental review process required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), allowing the project to move into its next phases of permitting and design while bringing Massachusetts closer to securing more than $1 billion in federal funding for construction.

Three electric school buses will kick-start the state’s groundbreaking vehicle-to-grid pilot program once school's out, with more EVs to be added in the coming months.

The company may finally be ready to try to deliver on Elon Musk's years-long promise of launching a robotaxi network of its own.

Tesla has begun testing a production version of its Cybercab that has two seats, but no steering wheel or pedals, in Austin, Texas. For now, the testing is being done with a safety monitor in the right passenger seat, according to a video posted on X, the social media platform owned by the electric car maker’s CEO Elon Musk.

This test is happening nearly two years after Tesla revealed the design of the Cybercab, which is meant to be a fully autonomous robotaxi that can be hailed through Tesla’s app. Roughly a year ago, Tesla began testing a Tesla Robotaxi service in Austin with Model Y SUVs that have, at times, used safety monitors.

Europe’s mortuaries are overflowing, America’s watchdogs are being leashed, public lands are being opened to more drilling, and the control room is still pretending this is a messaging problem.

There are days when the metaphor arrives wearing a little hat, waving politely from the edge of the news, asking if it may please be included somewhere between the congressional dysfunction and the latest judicial renovation of American democracy.

Then there are days when the metaphor is a mortuary in Paris with no room left.

Europe is in the grip of record heat, the kind that makes the old maps look quaint and the old warnings sound less like warnings than apologies issued too late. In France, funeral homes have reportedly been overwhelmed by the number of dead, especially older people, as temperatures pushed past 104 degrees and the heat settled into cities like a verdict. One mortuary owner told reporters, “We’re facing a really catastrophic situation,” which is the kind of sentence that should stop a government in its tracks, make every serious person in a serious office look up from the latest polling memo, and begin moving with the urgency of people who understand that reality doesn’t negotiate.

Some environmental movements, like Earth Day, have been around for decades. But have you ever heard of Plastic Free July?

Environmental groups across L.A. and Orange counties — such as Heal the Bay, L.A. Waterkeeper and the Surfrider Foundation — are all gearing up for the month-long challenge to raise awareness about the prevalence of single-use plastics in our lives, and how we all can take steps to reduce our usage.

I had so many questions. Why hadn’t I come across this initiative before? How come I hadn’t seen it on my social media? What does this challenge entail? So I got to researching.

Permitting delays pushed by the Trump administration threaten to derail 92 gigawatts of clean power, even as electricity demand from AI data centers skyrockets.

Already, permitting changes and federal funding withdrawals have led to the cancellation of 7 gigawatts of generating capacity on federal land in 2025, according to a new study from consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. The additional scrutiny could cancel another 12 gigawatts on federal land and 80 gigawatts on private property.

The Trump administration's moves threaten $121 billion in new solar and wind power, two energy sources that are the biggest contributors to new capacity in the U.S.

The world's largest wildlife crossing will soon allow cougars and other animals to traverse the heavily trafficked 101 freeway.

On a rare, clear day, one can look due west from the Mount Wilson Observatory, perched at nearly 6,000 feet on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and see the wide basin of the San Fernando Valley. A natural bowl flanked by mountains, the valley floor once teemed with life, as foxes, hares, deer, and coyotes coursed through its trough, occasionally plucked by skulking cougars, also known as mountain lions.

For much of that time, this valley also served as a primary transit corridor for the Chumash people, who traveled between inland fields and the coast to gather acorns and seeds, as well as to trade with the Tongva and other tribes. As in so many places, the trails these tribes followed were largely based on the tracks of elk and other nonhuman animals, who had already discovered the most efficient routes from place to place.

As the administration dismantles guardrails for industrial fishing, it's also threatening critical marine ecosystems that are sacred to Indigenous Pacific peoples.

When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on O‘ahu, but like a lot of Native Hawaiians, he had never had the opportunity to visit the uninhabited islands and atolls scattered to the west of the main islands. 

What he saw changed his life. “There’s no places left in Hawai‘i, or very few places, where the environment is so wild and intact that you have your ancestors who are embodied in the environment communicating with you every second: Birds hovering over you, monk seals swimming up to you, fish trying to bite you,” he told Grist. “It’s so raw, the experience up there.”

Rising temperatures are set to drive up emissions from wildfires, fermenting wetlands, and melting permafrost, but these feedback loops are poorly captured in climate models. Scientists are racing to make sense of these emissions to gauge how much warming may lie ahead.

For example, how much more carbon dioxide will be emitted as wildfires increase? How much more methane will bubble up from fermenting wetlands or seep from thawing permafrost? Remarkably, these so-called warming-induced emissions are poorly represented or absent from the most influential climate models — that is, those that inform the assessments of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

As UK police embrace the AI revolution, a WIRED investigation reveals the messy inside story of one region’s experiment with predictive analytics.

The Think Family Database holds records on close to half a million people who live in the city of Bristol, England. For many years, few of them knew anything about it.

Launched in 2016 by the Bristol City Council and the regional Avon and Somerset Police, the database has stored all manner of sensitive information—police intelligence reports, housing status, mental health records, teenage pregnancies, enrollment in parenting courses, free school meals. On top of this sensitive data, officials built machine-learning models to assign scores to thousands of adults and children. They hoped to build what they called a “picture of threat, harm, and risk” in the region. At an event in early 2022 to help officials tackle child exploitation crimes, one police data scientist described part of the approach this way: “I essentially dump all that data in a big bucket and stir it with a data-science spatula, and we come out with a lovely risk score for everybody.”

WIRED, working in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Liberty Investigates, plus the Bristol Cable and Lighthouse Reports, obtained hundreds of pages of documentation from public records requests to build the most comprehensive picture to date of Avon and Somerset’s regional experiment with data collection and predictive analytics. (Liberty, the parent organization of Liberty Investigates, had some early involvement in a potential legal challenge to the program and continues to support Pegram’s litigation.)

The investigation reveals that at least two of these risk-scoring models were quietly abandoned after Bristol City Council staff deemed they could no longer trust them.

The Department of Transportation wants to remove the brake-pedal requirement for vehicles "designed to be driven exclusively by automated driving systems."

Autonomous-driving startup Wayve is riding a tide of investor interest.

The London-based company has pulled in $2.8 billion from a roster of investors and strategic partners that includes big names across the technology and automotive sectors, from Nvidia to Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. In June, Wayve said it will deploy its system in robotaxis from Jeep maker Stellantis, to go on Uber’s ride-hailing network.

“We can take power from a plasma,” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, told TechCrunch. The milestone shows “what’s possible,” he added.

For fusion startups, the hard part is over: Thanks to a groundbreaking experiment in 2022, we know that controlled nuclear fusion reactions can generate more power than they consume. But now companies need to prove their reactors can make enough electricity to be profitable.

One option is to simply turn up the temperature, generating more heat to produce more steam to spin a bigger turbine. Another is to harvest electricity directly from the fusion reactions themselves, an approach that promises to be more efficient.

The ruins, which have become an illicit tourist destination, may reopen soon.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula has received a lot of attention in recent years because of accelerated land movement, but one landslide in the area has been a draw for decades because of its dystopian state with fractured streets.

Nearly 100 years ago, residents of San Pedro’s Point Fermin neighborhood had a dream of living by the ocean, but the cliffs became their undoing. A landslide slowly ripped Point Fermin apart. This southernmost part of Los Angeles County was given a new nickname to fit its troubled state: Sunken City.

“It’s time to turn the heat on the fossil fuel giants that caused this heatwave but are doing nothing to cover the costs."

West Texas is becoming a test case for one of the biggest questions facing the AI economy: who can deliver power fast enough to keep it growing?

Chevron will supply dedicated power to a Microsoft-operated data center in West Texas under a 20-year agreement. Project Kilby is expected to deliver Chevron will supply dedicated power to a Microsoft-operated data center in West Texas under a 20-year agreement. The agreement sits under Energy Forge One LLC, a wholly owned Chevron subsidiary.

New study shows America’s largest underground water source is depleting fast, raising risks for farming, food supply and price volatility.

The largest underground water supply in the United States—responsible for sustaining a vast share of the nation’s farming—is steadily running dry, raising concerns about future food production and price volatility as supplies come under strain.

The Ogallala Aquifer, which lies beneath eight Great Plains states from South Dakota to Texas, provides roughly 30 percent of the groundwater used for irrigation in the U.S. and supports around a fifth of the country’s agricultural output.

All the efforts to rewild a Northern California stream leads to salmon rewilding themselves.

In California, a long-abused river has been reborn. For decades, humans disrupted its course and restricted its flows to the detriment of its ecosystem, only to lately reverse direction and restore it to a facsimile of its natural state. And salmon, the bellwethers of aquatic health, have responded, returning much faster and in greater abundance than anyone anticipated.

This description applies not to the Klamath River — or not only to the Klamath, recently liberated from its four lower dams — but rather to the far less-celebrated Putah Creek.

Citizens suits are powerful tools to enforce the law, which is why the Trump administration is attacking them.

If the government won’t protect you from corporations that pollute your community’s air and water, you have the right to sue them yourself. That right is now under attack.

For more than 50 years, Americans have had the right to file “citizen suits” under federal law against corporations that illegally pollute their communities.

The right of everyday people to hold the powerful accountable to the law is critical to protecting our health, our environment, and our democracy. While President Trump’s administration has done little to enforce environmental laws against polluters, it’s now attempting to give itself veto authority over this powerful tool communities have to fight back.

For years, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. — and now the superefficient appliances are coming for conventional ACs, too.

When approaching the Helgeland coastline, in northern Norway, you can’t miss the Svartisen glacier spilling down the side of Almlifjellet mountain. Below, the gin-clear Holandsfjorden fjord – an extension of the Norwegian Sea – reflects the blue-toned mountain like a mirror.

It’s in this unspoiled environment that you’ll find Svart, which aims to be the world’s first energy-positive hotel when it opens in 2021.