Articles by Grist staff

Mr. Green Genes?

When you’ve skyrocketed into the public eye, become an overnight billionaire, and successfully mapped the human genome, what do you do next? Why, find the solution to global warming, of course. J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who gave the federal government’s Human Genome Project a run for its money and accelerated the pace of […]

Cells Sell

The internal combustion engine took one small step toward obsolescence yesterday, when General Motors announced the addition of an 80,000-square-foot research facility in upstate New York that will be wholly dedicated to the commercialization of fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity by mixing hydrogen and oxygen; the only byproduct of the process is water. The […]

Lies, Damn Lies, and Economic Analyses

In an unprecedented act, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced yesterday that it would suspend work on about 150 congressionally approved water projects to review the economics used to justify them. The move follows last week’s decision by the Corps to suspend its deepening of the Delaware River to review the economic analysis, one […]

Goodbye, Farewell, So Lung

About one in two Americans breathe unhealthy air, according to a report released today by the American Lung Association. In real numbers, that translates to more than 142 million Americans living in areas where the U.S. EPA has found smog levels to be unhealthful. A lot of those areas are in — you guessed it […]