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Matt Simon

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United States

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English

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Biology/Microbiology
Environment
Robotics

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wired.com

Don’t Believe the Biggest Myth About Heat Pumps

If you’re one of the 100 percent of humans who lives somewhere warmer than –460 Fahrenheit, we’ve got good news: You probably qualify for a heat pump. Instead of generating heat, this emissions-slashing superhero transfers warmth from even freezing outdoor air into your home. If the air is warmer than –460 F, or absolute zero, it’s got thermal energy in it. “Just because it feels cold doesn’t mean there’s no energy available,” says Jan Rosenow, who studies heat pumps at the Regulatory Assistance…

6 months ago

wired.com

The World Is Ignoring the Other Deadly Kind of Carbon

Once again, vast expanses of Canadian wilderness are on fire, threatening towns and forcing thousands to flee. It appears to be a breakout of “zombie fires”: wildfires from last year that never actually went out completely but carried on smoldering underground, reigniting ground vegetation again this year. They’ve been pouring smoke—once again—into northern cities in the United States. That haze is loaded with a more obscure form of carbon, compared to its famous cousin CO2: black carbon. By May…

6 months ago

wired.com

These Electric School Buses Are on Their Way to Save the Grid

The big yellow school bus is a US icon, but perhaps not one that future Americans will remember fondly. Chugging through neighborhoods, idling in front of kids’ houses, the vehicles spew both noise and fossil-fuel pollution all across town. In a city like Oakland, California, that significantly worsens air quality, especially in underserved neighborhoods already struggling with pollution. This August, though, 1,300 special-needs students in the Oakland Unified School District will start riding i…

6 months ago

wired.com

City Trees Save Lives

The humble tree has long protected humans from sickness and even death—and in the modern city, it’s still doing so. As global temperatures rise, so too does the “urban heat island effect”—the tendency for cities to absorb and hold on to the sun’s energy, which is a growing public-health crisis worldwide. On a small scale, the shade under a single tree is an invaluable refuge on a blisteringly hot day. Scaling that effect up, neighborhoods with more tree cover are measurably cooler. Now research…

7 months ago

wired.com

The One Thing That’s Holding Back the Heat Pump

7 months ago

wired.com

Get Ready for Monster Hurricanes This Summer

For over a year, global ocean temperatures have been consistently shattering records, shocking scientists. Now hurricane watchers are getting even more worried, given that ocean heat is what fuels the biggest, most destructive cyclones. Researchers at the University of Arizona just predicted an extremely active North Atlantic season—which runs from June 1 to the end of November—with an estimated 11 hurricanes, five of them being major (meaning Category 3 or higher, with sustained wind speeds of…

7 months ago

wired.com

Green Roofs Are Great. Blue-Green Roofs Are Even Better

You might visit Amsterdam for its famous canals, and who could blame you, really. But the truly interesting waterways aren’t under your feet—they’re above your head. Beautiful green roofs have popped up all over the world: specially selected plants growing on structures specially designed to manage the extra weight of biomass. Amsterdam has taken that one step further with blue-green roofs, specially designed to capture rainwater. One project, the Resilience Network of Smart Innovative Climate-A…

7 months ago

wired.com

US Infrastructure Is Broken. Here’s an $830 Million Plan to Fix It

There’s one word that will get any American fuming, regardless of their political inclination: infrastructure. Pothole-pocked roads, creaky bridges, and half-baked public transportation bind us nationally like little else can. And that was before climate change’s coastal flooding, extreme heat, and supercharged wildfires came around to make things even worse. US infrastructure was designed for the climate we enjoyed 50, 75, even 100 years ago. Much of it simply isn’t holding up, endangering live…

7 months ago

wired.com

The Paradox That's Supercharging Climate Change

No good deed goes unpunished—and that includes trying to slow climate change. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will spew out fewer planet-cooling aerosols—small particles of pollution that act like tiny umbrellas to bounce some of the sun’s energy back into space. “Even more important than this direct reflection effect, they alter the properties of clouds,” says Øivind Hodnebrog, a climate researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “In essence, they…

7 months ago

wired.com

Mexico City’s Metro System Is Sinking Fast. Yours Could Be Next

That includes the city’s Metro system, the second-largest in North America after New York City’s. Now, satellites have allowed scientists to meticulously measure the rate of sinking across Mexico City, mapping where subsidence has the potential to damage railways. “When you’re here in the city, you get used to buildings being tilted a little,” says Darío Solano‐Rojas, a remote-sensing scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “You can feel how the rails are wobbly. Riding the M…

8 months ago

wired.com

Why the East Coast Earthquake Covered So Much Ground - WIRED

Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, jostling not just nearby New York City, but Philadelphia and Boston and Washington, DC. The United States Geological Survey is urging the region to prepare for aftershocks of smaller magnitude. For a region not accustomed to earthquakes, it was a jolt. Its…

8 months ago

wired.com

The Next Heat Pump Frontier? NYC Apartment Windows

Future generations will marvel at the ridiculous ways we’ve been keeping warm. With a furnace, you’re inefficiently burning toxic, planet-warming gas. In a big city like New York, your building might have a boiler that burns oil or gas to heat water or produce steam, which feeds wheezing radiators in every unit. Electric-resistance space heaters are more efficient, but even they’re not nearly efficient enough, as you’ll see in your utility bill if you run one too much. For many decades now, ther…

8 months ago

wired.com

Enjoy Your Favorite Wine Before Climate Change Destroys It

Unless you’ve got a cellar stockpiled to last you the rest of your life, climate change is probably coming for your favorite wine. Temperature fluctuations during the growing season create the flavors, alcohol content, and even color of your preferred fermented grape juice—producing a beautiful ballet in a bottle. So as global temperatures soar and water availability in many regions plummets, the characteristics of individual wines are changing. Up to 70 percent of today’s wine regions could be…

8 months ago

wired.com

The Feds Are Trying to Get Plants to Mine Metal Through Their Roots

Gouging a mine into the Earth is so 1924. In 2024, scientists are figuring out how to mine with plants, known as phytomining. Of the 350,000 known plant species, just 750 are “hyperaccumulators” that readily absorb sky-high amounts of metals and incorporate them into their tissues. Grow a bunch of the European plant Alyssum bertolonii or the tropical Phyllanthus rufuschaneyi and burn the biomass, and you end up with ash that’s loaded with nickel. “In soil that contains roughly 5 percent nickel—t…

8 months ago

wired.com

The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point

The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, joining an alarmingly large mountain of defunct TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, routers, electric toothbrushes, headphones. This is “electrical and electronic equipment,” aka EEE—anything with a plug or battery. It’s increasingly…

8 months ago

wired.com

The Designer Who’s Trying to Transform Your City Into a Sponge

Your city isn’t prepared for what’s coming. The classical method for dealing with stormwater is to get it out of town as quickly as possible, with gutters and sewers and canals. But more and more, that strategy is breaking down: As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture, spawning ever-wetter storms that overwhelm this creaky infrastructure. Your city was built for a climate of 100, 200, 300 years ago, but that climate no longer exists. The hot new strategy in urban design, which was pio…

8 months ago

wired.com

Get Ready to Eat Pond Plants - WIRED

If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, doubling its biomass as quickly as every two days to conquer small bodies of water. The duck doesn’t know it—and who could blame it, really—but azolla may soon spread across human civilization, becoming food for people and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel. “I’m not out here saying ever…

9 months ago

wired.com

Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea Level Rise: They’r...

An alarming new study in the journal Nature shows how bad the problem could get in 32 coastal cities in the United States. Previous projections have studied geocentric sea level rise, or how much the ocean is coming up along a given coastline. This new research considers relative sea level rise, which also includes the vertical motion of the land. That’s possible thanks to new data from satellites that can measure elevation changes on very fine scales along coastlines. With that subsidence in mi…

9 months ago

wired.com

Less Sea Ice Means More Arctic Trees—Which Means Trouble

Anywhere else in the world, more trees would be a blessing. But in the far north of Alaska, they’re a reckoning. As the Arctic warms up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, white spruce trees are now spreading into tundra that was once inhospitable. Bully for the white spruce, but not so much for the Arctic: Because the trees are darker than snow, they absorb more of the sun’s energy, potentially further heating the region and further driving dramatic change. That, in turn, could rel…

9 months ago

wired.com

US Cities Could Be Capturing Billions of Gallons of Rain a Day - WIRED

Urban areas in the United States generate an estimated 59.5 million acre-feet of stormwater runoff per year on average—equal to 53 billion gallons each day—according to a new report from the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group specializing in water. Over the course of the year, that equates to 93 percent of total municipal and industrial water use. American urban areas couldn’t feasibly capture all of that bountiful runoff, but a combination of smarter stormwater infrastructure and “sp…

9 months ago

wired.com

What Would Happen if Every American Got a Heat Pump

One of the most powerful weapons you can wield to fight climate change is … an appliance. A heat pump is a fully electric device that transfers warmth from outdoor air into a building, then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioning unit. It’s much more efficient than burning planet-warming gas in a furnace, and will save the average American household more than $550 a year on their utility bill, according to one estimate. Emphasis on average. Every American home is different in size…

9 months ago

Matt Simon

Science Journalist at Wired

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