Each state determines its own workers’ compensation benefits, which means workers in adjoining states can end up with dramatically different compensation for identical injuries. An amputated arm can literally be worth two or three times as much on one side of a state line than the other.

Thousands forced to escape to pollution-free regions as haze descends on the country’s northern industrial heartland. By Tom Phillips.

The National Transportation Safety Board asked tech companies to add the locations of grade crossings into digital maps and to provide alerts for drivers. By Daisuke Wakabayashi.

"The standard model of the future accepted through most of the peak oil scene started from a set of inescapable facts and an unexamined assumption, and the combination of those things produced consistently false predictions." By John Michael Greer.

Scientists meeting in San Francisco issue their 2016 report card. By Christopher Joyce.

Warnings by scientists and environmentalists about an imminent collapse are dismissed by Iraqi officials as far-fetched. [Not so much.] By Barbara Bibbo.

Tiny gravity changes can be picked up much faster than seismic waves. By Katherine Lindemann. (Nov. 22, 2016)

We think of outer space as distant and unreachable, but in fact events out in the cosmos may have helped and hindered the evolution of life on Earth. By Philip Ball.

Beaver dams have been demolished, burbling fountains silenced, and the drinking water in one southern town has taken on the light brownish color of sweet tea… By Jeff Martin.

Japan’s trade ministry has almost doubled the estimated cost of compensation for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and decommissioning of the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant to more than 20 trillion yen ($177.51 billion), the Nikkei business daily reported on Sunday. By Osamu Tsukimori.

An Interview with Deanna Day. By Jeffrey Kastner.

“Whether mining these nodules will help end cycles of war and peace still remains to be seen, but Mero was right about one thing: They are now the precious targets, worth millions of dollars, of an emerging deep-sea mining industry, and that’s making many researchers like Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, cautious.” By Sarah Fahmy.

By studying hills that formed after an asteroid struck the Yucatán Peninsula, researchers found that materials deep in Earth’s crust were brought toward the surface. By Nicholas St. Fleur.

Totally no need to worry or anything though. By Daniel Oberhaus.

There has been a concerning question surrounding the newly-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump. And that question is: What were people thinking? By John Kuroski.

What’s the difference? By Jeff Masters and Bob Henson.

Democrats who defended the extraordinary expansion of executive power under President Obama may suddenly be having second thoughts. By Alex Emmons.

Still, there's a colony of herpes-infected monkeys in Florida. By Mariana Zapata.

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen a well-known climate skeptic to oversee the transition of the country's Environmental Protection Agency. The Republican Party has pledged to shut down the regulatory entity. By Dave Keating.

Enthusiasm for precision medicine, from the White House down to everyday physicians, is at an all-time high. But serious problems with the databases used to interpret patients’ genetic profiles can lead to “inappropriate treatment” with “devastating consequences,” researchers at the Mayo Clinic warned on Monday. By Sharon Begley. (Oct. 31, 2016)