Barn Raiser

1 week ago | barnraisingmedia.com | Rachael Hanel

At a student housing complex near the university, residents went about their business. Bright moods matched the weather: the weekend neared and there were just a few more weeks to go before summer break. But it wasn’t just students at the housing complex that day. Right before lunch, plainclothes agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pulled up in unmarked cars and took 20-year-old international student Mohammed Hoque into custody.

1 week ago | barnraisingmedia.com | S. Nicole Lane

About 75 years ago, Great Lakes fish were nearly wiped out and the fishing industry as we know it completely eradicated. A so-called vampire was lurking, overpopulating and infiltrating the waterways of the region, putting the lakes at risk of becoming a graveyard of what once was. In the 1830s, a parasitic fish, called the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus), found its way into the Great Lakes and latched onto helpless native fish, depleting them of life.

3 weeks ago | barnraisingmedia.com | Sharon Udasin

In 1938, Roy was seeking out an alternative for the hazardous refrigerants that were used to keep food cold at the time. As part of this process, he stored a gas called tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) in cylinders at very low temperatures—assuming that he would still find a gas afterwards. Yet when he sawed open the cylinder, he found a white powder instead. Roy’s initial reaction was one of disappointment; Now we’ll have to start all over again! he thought.

3 weeks ago | barnraisingmedia.com | Winona LaDuke

On March 19, a jury in Mandan, North Dakota, in Morton County, leveled a blistering $660 million verdict against Greenpeace for its part in the Standing Rock resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Anyone who was at Standing Rock knows that Greenpeace was barely there, but they have a name, and Energy Transfer, the pipeline’s owner, made an example out of them. I was in the courtroom when the verdict came in. It was sickening.

4 weeks ago | barnraisingmedia.com | Bill Pluecker |Ames Alexander

Slick marketing and the ubiquity of misleading “eco friendly” products at big box and local gardening supply stores could lead to unwitting contamination in your home garden. Here are a few tips to help you reduce the risk to your plants and soil. PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a large family of chemicals with extremely strong carbon-fluorine bonds that are virtually impossible to break.