Stephanie Hanes

1 week ago | csmonitor.com | Troy Sambajon |Stephanie Hanes

Beside a restored creek in San Geronimo, California, birds soar where birdies once were scored. Formerly home to an 18-hole golf course, the 157-acre property has been rewilded into a thriving nature preserve. The fairway, once groomed to unnatural perfection, is now overgrown with tall grass and wildflowers. Putting greens have become pastures. A sand trap serves as a children’s play area.

1 week ago | csmonitor.com | Stephanie Hanes

As a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University a few years ago, Alexa Schmitz was trying to solve a paradox: To reduce the greenhouse gas emissions warming the Earth, the world needed new energy sources, like solar and wind power. But these “green” technologies depend on the mining of critical minerals, which comes with environmental costs. Biology, she and her colleagues believed, could be a solution.

3 weeks ago | csmonitor.com | Stephanie Hanes

On an arid swath of the Mojave Desert, on the California side of the border with Nevada, sits the only facility in America that mines rare earth minerals – materials policymakers across the political spectrum agree are necessary for the economy and national defense. The mine is called Mountain Pass. The minerals hold a group of elements near the bottom of the periodic table called lanthanides, which are used in everything from drones and missiles to electric vehicles and laptop screens.

1 month ago | csmonitor.com | Stephanie Hanes

Across a canal from the rusted scaffolding and towering concrete chimneys of Tampa Electric’s Apollo Beach power plant, hundreds of people crowd a boardwalk hoping to spot a manatee. Sure enough, one of Florida’s “gentle giants,” as the informational signs describe them, lifts a nose into the air and then submerges into the water. Children jostle for a better view.

1 month ago | csmonitor.com | Stephanie Hanes |Riley Robinson

Dwight Baugher’s sun-dappled orchard is an hour’s drive and a world away from the congestion of northern Virginia, where tar-ribboned exit ramps and windowless warehouses make up what is known as “Data Center Alley.” There, in that concrete expanse, Data Center Alley houses what is casually referred to as “the cloud,” which isn’t a cloud at all, but regimented rows of interconnected computer servers, miles of fiber-optic cables, and a massive network of cooling pipes – the physical backbone...