Ecoclimax

See that white crusty stuff building up around showerheads ? It's limestone deposits from hard water. They plug up the spray holes, which cuts your water pressure. Bacteria like growing in there too. Your shower gets weaker, the spray pattern turns uneven, and suddenly it takes forever to rinse conditioner out. Most people grab whatever's under the sink. There's probably something better sitting in your pantry right now—cheaper and easier on both you and the environment. Baking soda showed up in American kitchens in the 1840s. For a long time, people just used it for everything—baking, cleaning, deodorizing. Then companies figured out they could sell you ten different products for ten different jobs. But the chemistry that makes baking soda work hasn't changed, and understanding it might make you reconsider how many bottles you actually need. What Makes Baking Soda Work? Sodium bicarbonate . That's the chemical name, formula NaHCO₃. They make it industrially through...

Political borders follow wars, treaties, and colonial deals. Rivers follow gravity. These two systems rarely line up, and that creates serious problems for water management. A cartographer at VividMaps recently made this problem visible by creating a world map where countries follow river basins instead of political boundaries. The familiar shapes of continents break apart into entirely different configurations. Countries get renamed after their rivers: Amazonia, Congolia, Mississippia. Water systems operate as unified wholes, but we chop them into pieces with arbitrary political lines. Rivers don't stop flowing when they cross from one state into another. Pollution released upstream doesn't magically disappear at a county line. Floods don't respect jurisdictional boundaries. The Amazon basin covers 5.9 million square kilometers (2.3 million sq mi)—roughly two-thirds the size of the United States. But it gets divided among nine countries, each making its own decisions abou...

Screens have become our default. Work happens there, socializing happens there, killing time happens there. We've built entire lives around these glowing rectangles without really deciding to. Vivid Maps recently visualized DataReportal's global data on average daily internet use by country. The numbers are staggering. South Africa leads at 9 hours and 38 minutes online per day. Brazil follows at 9:32. The Philippines at 9:14. That's over a third of every day - sleep included - spent looking at screens. And remember, averages hide extremes. Plenty of people are spending even more. The patterns shift when you separate mobile from computer use. In the Philippines, phones eat up more than 5.5 hours per day—nobody else comes close. South Africa's the opposite story: about 4.5 hours daily on computers, which puts them at the top of that list. You could shrug and say this is just modern life. And in many ways, it is. But these habits carry costs we don't usually conside...

  When María Branyas Morera invited doctors to study her biology before she died at 117, she gave scientists a rare, detailed portrait of extreme ageing: blood, saliva, urine and stool samples that were analyzed across many biological layers — genome, immune markers, metabolites, epigenetics and the gut microbiome — and reported as a multi-omics study . The team found that her DNA carried some uncommon variants tied to lower risk of dementia and cardiovascular disease, her cells behaved molecularly younger than her years on some epigenetic clocks, and her gut microbiome looked more similar to younger adults . The investigators were careful to emphasise that these findings are descriptive: one person cannot prove cause and effect for everyone, but the case points to biological pathways worth investigating.  The study’s authors and science reporters also highlighted the lifestyle side of the equation. Branyas avoided smoking and heavy drinking, kept active with long daily walks...