TO A PHOTON, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.)

One steamy morning last July, Ana Rausch commandeered a shady corner of a parking lot on the northwest side of Houston. Downing a jumbo iced coffee, she issued brisk orders to a dozen outreach workers toting iPads. Her attention was fixed on a highway underpass nearby, where a handful of people were living in tents and cardboard lean-tos. As a vice president of Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, Ms. Rausch was there to move them out.

Accretion is one of the most fundamental processes in the cosmos. It is a universal phenomenon triggered by gravity, and the process by which bits of matter accumulate and coalesce with more bits of matter. It works inexorably on all scales to attract and affix smaller things to bigger things, from the tiniest dust grains to supermassive black holes.

Long discussed but rarely used, carbon capture and storage projects — which bury waste CO2 underground — are on the rise globally. Some scientists see the technology as a necessary tool in reducing emissions, but others say it simply perpetuates the burning of fossil fuels.

We’ve supersized our capacity to ship stuff across the seas. As our global supply chains grow, what can we gather from the junk that washes up on shore?

Aviation has long been a pain in the neck for those working to cut human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It is the pinnacle of a "hard-to-decarbonise" sector: energy-intensive, lacking in immediate technical options to make it lower carbon, and strongly associated with the lifestyles of the richest and most powerful in society.

The Russian army has burned forests and poisoned water supplies, flouting international law. As the UN draws up new guidelines, is it possible to wage an “eco” war?

The numbers are startling. We know roughly how much more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere before we exceed our climate goals—limiting warming to 1.5° to 2° C above preindustrial temperatures. From that, we can figure out how much more fossil fuel we can burn before we emit that much carbon dioxide. But when you compare those numbers with our known fossil fuel reserves, things get jaw-dropping.

How did a Usenet troll and encryption genius become a criminal mastermind? For a man who built an empire in pixels, Paul Le Roux seemed like a digital phantom. After his name surfaced in the press in late 2014, I spent the better part of a year trying to understand him through the same means by which he’d directed his massive pharmacy business: the Internet. Late at night, I would open my laptop and plunge into an online wormhole, searching for clues about who Le Roux had been and what he became.

Climate scientists have been clear that if we want to reduce carbon emissions and slow the pace of global warming, one crucial step is moving from a transportation system run on fossil fuels to one powered by electricity. But it's possible that doing so might neutralize other toxic aspects of the petroleum industry, such as volatile prices and armed conflict.

As the bankers from J.P. Morgan’s London offices stepped off the two-hour private flight from Johannesburg onto the hot runway, soldiers sporting sunglasses and semiautomatics watched them closely. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s brutal civil war had ended several years earlier, but peace remained tenuous, and the Lubumbashi airstrip was still heavily militarized.

That winter of 2003—you remember it, and so do I—the world assembled, arms linked, to protest the prospect of war in Iraq. What times those were, and how the passions swelled. The fervor of the public reached a peak on February 15th, when millions of people in more than sixty countries claimed the streets, voicing their opposition. “listen to us,” a sign in London read. In New York, demonstrators stormed the avenues with a huge inflatable globe. Young and old turned out, and citizens and foreigners. A few weeks later, the United States was at war.

Power outages from severe weather have doubled over the past two decades across the U.S., as a warming climate stirs more destructive storms that cripple broad segments of the nation’s aging electrical grid, according to an Associated Press analysis of government data.

In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth. How?

We live in a distracted world, almost certainly the most distracted world in human history. And if you’re part of this circus, you’re drowning in options and gadgets and screens and you’re being pulled in a million directions seemingly all at once.

“I’m in shock,” said Cavier Coleman, a New York-based photographer and artist, the day after Heather Rhiannon Morgan was arrested. “She’s a great person.” The two had been friends for nearly five years; he remembered that she would bring him bags of pecans from her grandmother’s tree, and was passionate about making sure her friends were treating the coronavirus seriously.

As temperatures fall sharply and the number of unhoused people swells throughout the United States, anarchists are forming a decentralized network that builds and distributes tent-safe, alcohol-based heaters to those without shelter.

The demise of the city’s independent news outlets has left hundreds of journalists out of a job. Many are not coming back.

Everyone reading this sentence likely (hopefully!) agrees that women deserve the same rights as men. But just a couple of centuries ago, that idea would’ve been dismissed as absurd.

Mark Kennedy spent seven years pretending to be a climate activist. People he deceived are still rebuilding their lives.