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CLIMATEWIRE | How can projects that scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere reduce their sky-high costs?

For a planned development in Texas, one answer is to draw power directly from a wind farm.

The innovative project, announced Monday by three European companies, could be the world’s first direct air capture development to rely primarily on so-called behind the meter electricity. That means the DAC facility would run mainly with low-cost clean power that’s generated on site, not metered out from the grid.

The facility is slated to come online in 2028 and is intended to eventually remove up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year — more than the average annual emissions of a natural gas plant, according to EPA data. The planned facility is larger than any other direct air capture plant currently in operation, although several DAC projects under development are similarly sized.

The new Texas project is being led by Return Carbon, a Dutch project development and investment company, and Skytree, a direct air capture technology firm also based in the Netherlands, with wind power from the North American renewables subsidiary of EDF, the state-owned French utility. Carbon dioxide the facility pulls from the sky would be stored permanently underground by the Texas firm Verified Carbon.

“It is a new framework, which we have agreed with EDF,” said Martijn Verwoerd, the co-founder and managing director of Return Carbon, said in an interview before publicly revealing the deal. “That’s why we’re announcing it.”

The novel agreement would ensure that Return Carbon, which plans to own and operate the direct air capture facility, has access to consistent supply of low-cost clean energy from Texas’s windy gulf coast. Verwoerd declined to say the price per kilowatt-hour Return Carbon has locked in and said the consortium would decide on a precise location later this year.

For EDF, the deal would reduce the likelihood that it has to sell its electricity at a loss or even pay to add it to the grid, Verwoerd explained. Utilities can suffer so called negative power prices when electricity production exceeds the demand for power.

The agreement also allows EDF to redirect its electricity from Return Carbon onto the grid when there is “peak pricing in the market,” he said. In that scenario, the direct air capture facility could operate using renewable energy from a separate agreement Return Carbon has struck with other power providers or go offline until electricity prices fall to an acceptable level.

It’s a “win-win for all parties,” Verwoerd said.

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say the world needs to immediately reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main source of which is the burning of oil, gas and coal. At the same time, countries and companies need to begin deploying carbon dioxide removal technologies such as direct air capture to reduce the amount of carbon that’s already been spewed into the atmosphere.

Neither are happening quickly enough, with President Donald Trump promising to double down on oil drilling while slashing federal support for climate-related initiatives.

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Sleepovers were mostly a nightmare for me as a child, and I mean that literally: I had nightmares every single time I slept over at a friend’s house. Too embarrassed to tote my babyish night-light from home, I’d lie awake roiled with terror. Come morning—my Rolodex of anxieties exhausted—I’d immediately begin lobbying my mother on the drive home for the exact same sleepover routine the next weekend. I loved sleepovers.

Sleepovers helped me escape my nerdy little comfort zone. They were an opportunity to be silly and a touch subversive, and to get a glimpse of how other families lived their lives. Old-school prank phone calls were usually on offer—an act of mild sociopathy I would have sooner died to avoid than try alone in my own home, or by daylight. I once got a concussion after an excitable girl hit me with a blunt object, and I had to be driven home in the middle of the night. Another time a friend and I got in trouble for deliberately pouring copious amounts of “blood” (red food coloring) on her sheets as a joke.

We occasionally snooped around family areas that were clearly off-limits, and I recall that some of the more louche parents had Playboy magazines in full view in their bathrooms. My own family home was particularly attractive as a sleepover venue because, apart from the distinction of having a “cool” mom who provided junk food, we also had access to my father’s medical journals, which featured black-and-white photos of naked adults with genital tumors and other afflictions.

My childhood spanned the era of what I’ll call, unscientifically, “Peak Sleepover,” a period from roughly the mid-1960s to the early ’80s that’s fondly remembered (by those of us with poor memories and limited insight) for its laissez-faire parenting norms. Today’s parents appear more skeptical of sleepovers. On TikTok, a father and psychiatrist got millions of views for a pair of videos in which he explains why he doesn’t let his children attend sleepovers. In 2023, The Washington Post published an article featuring parents worried about their kids being exposed to a range of concerns, including excess screen time and domestic violence.

I’m not unsympathetic to some of the no-sleepover arguments, but denying our children a chance to learn up close from other families shortchanges children’s autonomy. I think it’s fair to ask why adults can’t organize our lives better to give children reasonable and age-appropriate experiences that put them at non-zero but nonetheless, limited risk, and that benefit their maturation.

No one is suggesting—certainly I am not—that children should be entrusted to unsafe households for a night. I’m deeply aware of all that can go wrong when adults fail to protect a child. I’ve spent my professional life trying to persuade adults to take children’s needs seriously. But one badly neglected need is that of acquiring resilience and self-sufficiency.

Basic due diligence (asking about firearms in the home, or whether older siblings’ friends or a new boyfriend are visiting, for example) is essential for any interaction between kids and other families. But after the threshold for safety has been met, why does it matter if our kids eat junk food for a night, or hear unwelcome political views, or sit through the wrong kind of prayers (or no prayers) at dinnertime? Why would we want to deprive a child of the occasional strange or uncomfortable experience at another family’s house—even one that might directly conflict with our values or our preferred practices? Isn’t an understanding of human differences a bulwark against frailty and narcissism? We’re not talking about moving in with a new family, just spending the night!

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Forget the canary in a coal mine: today the danger zone is the entire U.S., and the sentinel species comprise a growing list that includes the Golden-cheeked Warbler, the Florida Scrub Jay and the Mottled Duck.

These are among 42 U.S. bird species that have been placed on “red alert” by the conservation initiative Road to Recovery—and included in State of the Birds 2025, a new report released by a separate group of governmental and nonprofit organizations called the North American Bird Conservation Initiative. The report analyzes population trends for more than 700 bird species across the U.S. and its key habitat types—and identifies a total of 229 species that experts deem to be of high or moderate conservation concern. “Bird populations are continuing to decline, and one third of species in the U.S. require urgent conservation attention,” says report co-author Amanda Rodewald, an ecologist at Cornell University.

This is bad news for humans, too, she emphasizes. The concerning declines in bird populations “indicate to us that environments are changing in ways that can have negative outcomes for people as well,” Rodewald says. “We live in the same habitats as birds, so if they’re not healthy for birds, they’re not healthy for us.” In addition, bird-related activities, such as purchasing bird seed for feeders or equipment for bird-watching and photography, contributed some $279 billion to the U.S. economy in 2022 alone.

Road to Recovery had looked at population trends for each species, identifying birds on the “tipping point” and grouping them into three color-coded categories based on total and recent trends. For example, the Greater Prairie Chicken, an eye-catching and iconic bird that has lost much of its habitat and splintered into small groups with little genetic diversity, is listed as a “red alert” tipping-point species. In contrast, a “yellow alert” tipping-point species called the Pinyon Jay has also lost its woodland habitat because of drought and insects, among other factors, but its populations are stabilizing.

The new report evaluates how birds that are reliant on particular ecosystems are faring. Those that are found only in grasslands or in arid landscapes, for example, are doing quite poorly, with populations decreasing by more than 40 percent since 1970. Among 31 species that rely on arid landscapes, none are showing population increases.

One new development raises particular concern: duck species overall have seen steep declines in the past few years, potentially because of drought, Rodewald says. “That is certainly sobering,” she says, noting that waterfowl and waterbirds overall had always been a “bright spot” in similar analyses.

Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the new report but conducted 2019 work showing that the U.S. had some three billion fewer birds than in 1970, says that the new findings offer a valuable look at which species need the most urgent response.

Both Rodewald and Marra highlight shorebirds as a group to be concerned about. Species in this group rely on the delicate regions where freshwater or saltwater meets land, Marra says. “We’re changing the natural landscape in multiple and complex ways, and to expect these species to persist is just crazy,” he says.

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But pediatricians and nutritionists say there are a few things to know before doling out dark chocolate to your little ones.

“It would be recommended that the child not eat dark chocolate in excess and avoid providing it before bed,” Amy Reed, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, told HuffPost.

The main reason is that dark chocolate contains caffeine, she explained.

While there’s no harm for most kids to eat some dark chocolate (and any other kind of chocolate), moderation is key, explained Anet Piridzhanyan, a clinical dietitian in the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

“All foods, including candy, have a place at the table,” she told HuffPost. But here’s what you should know about giving your kids dark chocolate.

How much caffeine is in dark chocolate — and is it too much for kids?

An ounce of dark chocolate with 60-69% cacao contains 24 mg of caffeine, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s about the same amount as a quarter cup of coffee, Beth Natt, system medical director of pediatrics at Atlantic Health System, told HuffPost.

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After delivering a keynote to an audience of district managers and C-Suite leaders, several attendees came up to me afterward to talk about how I balance leadership responsibilities with being a parent. Interestingly, it was a group of five men, and their questions prompted me to write this entire article.

“How do your leadership philosophies shape your parenting style?” he asked me.

“It’s simple,” I replied. “The philosophies are the same.”

I shared that as both a leader and a mother, one of my greatest ambitions is to empower the people around me. To me, leadership, whether at home or at work, isn’t just about strategy and execution; it’s about fostering resilience, encouraging critical thinking and nurturing confidence.

Another leader asked, “Can you share some of the things you teach your clients and your kids?”

And this is what I shared.

The first is: Embrace mistakes as opportunities to grow

In our home, my husband and I see mistakes as learning moments. We both feel strongly about having children who feel they can run to us when they make a mistake — not run from us. To do this, we make it a point to acknowledge our own mistakes openly, demonstrating to our kids that this is a safe space and showing that taking accountability is a strength, not a weakness.

This lesson extends beyond the home — whether in the workplace or the boardroom, creating a culture where people can learn from mistakes leads to stronger, more innovative teams. I’ll never forget when a teacher told me our oldest daughter walked into school and proudly shouted to the entire class, “My mom makes a lot of mistakes!”

The second is: Be curious before you point fingers

A pivotal moment in my parenting journey was when a member of my team posted to LinkedIn announcing the launch of a new product. The only problem with that move was that we weren’t planning on announcing the product quite yet. We had a marketing plan in place, social media posts in the works, and a landing page that wasn’t live. I was in the kitchen when my phone started buzzing with all of these alerts congratulating me, and I had no idea. Then I saw the post. And my stomach dropped. I just kept saying, “Oh no… oh no…” My daughter was next to me and saw I was upset.

“Are you going to fire him?” She asked.

“No,” I said. “I need to figure out what he was thinking when he made this decision so we can talk about it.”

Before bedtime, my daughter could see I wasn’t myself.

“What are you going to do?” she asked me.

“I’m going to try to find the silver lining.”

She asked what that meant, and I explained it.

When you find the silver lining, if you find something else that’s good on top of that, will that be your gold lining?” she inquired.

“You know what? It should be,” I said. “Once I find the silver lining, I’m going to try the gold lining for sure.”

She then asked, “Did all of the people who know you see this post?”

“No,” I said.

“Then the silver lining can be that you still have a lot of people to tell.”

And she fell asleep.

In parenting, when my kids make a mistake, we don’t ask, “Why did you do that?!” We choose to take a step back and ask, “What were you thinking?” In work scenarios, I’ve found approaching situations with curiosity before blame leads to constructive conversations and deeper understanding. My team and I grew stronger from this misstep, and my daughter got to see what it looks like to take a step back and understand a mistake before making any major decisions. She also learned the valuable skill of finding the good in things — even when that feels hard.

The third is: Prioritize effort over outcome

Success isn’t defined solely by results — it’s about the dedication and perseverance behind them. When my daughter proudly presents a project she has worked on, I focus on the effort.

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The world is divided by war. Influenza outbreaks smolder in livestock herds and bird flocks for years. The public is deeply skeptical of the value of medical interventions. Public health agencies offer misleading advice and are focused only on keeping the public calm. There is a shortage of qualified medical professionals, with no end in sight.

No, this isn’t 2025—it’s 1918. In the pivotal book The Great Influenza, historian John Barry lays out the conditions that primed the population of the U.S. that year for one of the worst plagues in history and acted like so much dry tinder just waiting for a spark. That spark exploded into the conflagration of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and left many others disabled.

A little more than a century later, now is perhaps as good a time as any to ask the question: How prepared are we for another influenza pandemic? On the surface, this is an easy question to answer. Modern medicine and public health have advanced far beyond 1918. Whereas the scientists of that era struggled to identify the germ that caused the pandemic, we live in a time of genomic sequencing and global infectious disease surveillance, of mRNA vaccine technology and antiviral medications. Our governments have pandemic preparedness plans, stockpiles of vaccines and drugs, and, having dealt with the COVID pandemic, experience with contact tracing and isolation.

Other conditions, however, are eerily similar to those of 1918. Geopolitical crises crowd public health concerns off the front page of newspapers. A dangerous influenza strain, in this case the H5N1 avian flu virus, has recently been circulating freely within poultry flocks, spreading widely in livestock herds in the U.S. and causing infections in farm workers. False lessons drawn from the COVID pandemic have driven public skepticism of medical information to all-time highs. Public health agencies sometimes offer contradictory and falsely soothing messages, further eroding their credibility. And after five years of COVID, hospital systems are stretched thin, and burnout and staffing shortages have thinned the ranks of the doctors and nurses who will be on the front line of the next pandemic. Making matters worse, the Trump administration’s interventions over the past two months have gravely weakened surveillance of and control over the virus’s spread.

The global response to the COVID pandemic offers little solace. In late 2019, as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, gripped China, infectious disease surveillance failed across much of the rest of the globe. Western governments faltered right out of the gate at limiting the spread of the virus—contact tracing detected fewer than 2 percent of all COVID cases in the U.S., for example. The pandemic response plan was ignored, and molecular tests were too few and too late. There were not enough high-quality masks, and antiviral drugs for COVID had not yet been developed. The plan was to “flatten the curve,” but in practice, hospitals ran out of beds, intensive care units ran out of oxygen and morgues ran out of space. While lives were saved by social distancing and eventually vaccines, millions also died needlessly across the globe. They were victims of poor pandemic policy and a sluggish public health response, as well as misinformation and disinformation about vaccines and other health measures.

But that was—and still is—a different pandemic, one caused by a coronavirus rather than influenza, with a far lower death rate for acute cases and a somewhat different set of challenges. In contrast, when pandemic influenza hit in 1918, it killed 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population, and around half of those deaths were in young and healthy people. A pandemic similar in scale today would leave 200 to 400 million dead.

Revisiting the Deadly 1918 Pandemic

It’s hard to imagine now, but the 1918 influenza was far worse than the flu we know. Although many affected people experienced a severe bout of seasonal flu—fever, chills, body aches and headaches, followed by recovery—some fared a lot worse. As Barry puts it, these people “came with an extraordinary array of symptoms, symptoms either previously unknown entirely in influenza or experienced with previously unknown intensity.” Those symptoms included agonizing joint pain, burning pain above the diaphragm, subcutaneous emphysema (which occurs when pockets of air accumulate just beneath the skin), ruptured eardrums, kidney failure and severe nosebleeds.

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What does an eclipse look like from the moon? Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander just sent back a stunning image from the lunar surface.

The commercial space company’s lander, which touched down on the moon without a hitch on March 2 as part of a mission for NASA, took a high-definition image of the eclipse from its top deck in the early hours of Friday — and it’s mighty beautiful.

“Blue Ghost got her first diamond ring! Captured at our landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth,” Firefly Aerospace wrote online. (A “diamond ring” effect happens during a total solar eclipse when the sun just begins to appear from behind Earth; it also happens just before Earth totally blocks the sun.)

From our perch on Earth, it was a total lunar eclipse, and from the moon it was a total solar eclipse. These unique events happen when the sun, Earth, and moon align, allowing Earth to cast a shadow on the moon and block most sunlight from reaching the lunar surface. But our planet’s atmosphere still allows red wavelengths of light to squeeze through and travel through space, illuminating the moon in reddish, rusty, orangish, or crimson colors.

According to the company, it’s “the first time in history a commercial company will be actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface.”

Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 launched on Jan. 15 and landed on the moon on March 2 after a 45-day trip — and the photos Blue Ghost has been sending back are breathtaking. In the above photo, you can also see the Blue Ghost lander’s NASA equipment, including a Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager, Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder mast, and X-band antenna.

.Blue Ghost moon lander just beamed back stunning photo of the eclipse

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An Australian man in his forties has become the first person in the world to leave hospital with an artificial heart made of titanium. The device is used as a stopgap for people with heart failure who are waiting for a donor heart, and previous recipients of this type of artificial heart had remained in US hospitals while it was in place.

The man lived with the device for more than three months until he underwent surgery to receive a donated human heart. The man is recovering well, according to a statement from St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, where the operations were conducted.The Australian is the sixth person globally to receive the device, known as BiVACOR, but the first to live with it for more than a month.

“This is certainly an important development in the field,” says Julian Smith, a cardiac surgeon at the Victorian Heart Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

“It is incredibly innovative,” says Sarah Aitken, a vascular surgeon at the University of Sydney, but she adds that there are still many unanswered questions about the level of function that people with it can achieve and the ultimate cost of the device. “This kind of research is really challenging to do because it is very expensive” and the surgery involved is very high-risk, says Aitken.

The latest success will help researchers to understand how people cope with this device in the real world, says Joseph Rogers, a heart-failure cardiologist and president of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. “They weren’t being constantly monitored by medical teams,” says Rogers, who led the first trial of the device in the United States last year.

In all cases, the BiVACOR was used as a temporary measure before a donor heart became available. Some cardiologists say that it could become a permanent option for people not eligible for transplants because of their age or other health conditions, although the idea still needs to be tested in trials. In the United States, close to 7 million adults live with heart failure, but only about 4,500 heart transplants were performed in 2023, in part because of a shortage of donors.

Suspended rotor

BiVACOR was invented by biomedical engineer Daniel Timms, who founded a company named after the device, with offices in Huntington Beach, California and Southport, Australia.

The device is a total heart replacement and works as a continuous pump in which a magnetically suspended rotor propels blood in regular pulses throughout the body. A cord tunnelled under the skin connects the device to an external, portable controller that runs on batteries by day and can be plugged into the mains at night.

Many mechanical heart devices support the left side of the heart, and typically work by pooling blood in a sack, which flexes some 35 million times a year to pump blood. But these devices have many parts and often suffer failures. BiVACOR, which only has one moving part, will in theory experience fewer problems of mechanical wear, says Rogers.

US trials

The Australian recipient of BiVACOR had severe heart failure, and received the titanium device in a six-hour operation in November. In February, he was discharged from hospital, stayed in a residence close by and led a relatively normal life. In March, he received a donor heart.

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Imagine a world where everyone had brown skin. Tens of thousands of years ago, that was the case, say scientists at Pennsylvania State University. So, how did white people get here? The answer lies in that tricky component of evolution known as a genetic mutation.

Out of Africa

Scientists have long known that Africa is the cradle of human civilization​. There, our ancestors shed most of their body hair around 2 million years ago, and their dark skin protected them from skin cancer and other harmful effects of UV radiation. When humans began leaving Africa 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, a skin-whitening mutation appeared randomly in a sole individual, according to a 2005 Penn State study. That mutation proved advantageous as humans moved into Europe. Why? Because it allowed the migrants increased access to vitamin D, which is crucial to absorbing calcium and keeping bones strong.

“Sun intensity is great enough in equatorial regions that the vitamin can still be made in dark-skinned people despite the ultraviolet shielding effects of melanin,” explains Rick Weiss of The Washington Post, which reported on the findings. But in the north, where sunlight is less intense and more clothing must be worn to combat the cold, melanin’s ultraviolet shielding could have been a liability.

Just a Color

This makes sense, but did scientists identify a bonafide race gene as well? Hardly. As the Post notes, the scientific community maintains that “race is a vaguely defined biological, social, and political concept…and skin color is only part of what race is—and is not.”

Researchers still say that race is more of a social construct than a scientific one because people of purportedly the same race can have as many differences in their DNA as people of separate so-called races do. It’s also difficult for scientists to determine where one race ends and another begins, considering that people of supposedly different races may have overlapping features in terms of hair color and texture, skin color, facial features, and other characteristics.

Members of Australia’s aboriginal population, for example, sometimes have dark skin and blond hair of various textures. They share traits with people of African and European ancestry alike, and they are far from the only group not to fit squarely into any one racial category. Scientists posit that all people are roughly 99.5% genetically identical.

The Penn State researchers’ findings on the skin-whitening gene1 show that skin color accounts for a minuscule biological difference between humans.

“The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome—the complete instructions for making a human being,” the Post reports.

Skin Deep

When the research was first published, scientists and sociologists feared that the identification of this skin-whitening mutation would lead people to argue that whites, Blacks, and others are somehow inherently different. Keith Cheng, the scientist who led the team of Penn State researchers, wants the public to know that’s not so. He told the Post, “I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different.”

His statement captures what racial prejudice is in a nutshell. Truth be told, people may look different, but there’s virtually no difference in our genetic makeup. Skin color really is just skin deep.

Not So Black and White

Scientists at Penn State continue to explore the genetics of skin color. In a 2017 study published in the journal Science, 2 researchers report their findings of even greater variants in skin color genes among native Africans.

The same appears to be true of Europeans, given that, in 2018, researchers used DNA to reconstruct the face of the first British person, an individual known as the “Cheddar man” who lived 10,000 years ago. The scientists who took part in the reconstruction of the ancient man’s face say that he most likely had blue eyes and dark brown skin. While they do not know for sure what he looked like, their findings dispute the idea that Europeans have always had light skin.

Such diversity in skin color genes, says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff, the lead author of the 2017 study, likely means that we can’t even speak of an African race, much less a white one. As far as people are concerned, the human race is the only one that matters.

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