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Justine Calma

Justine Calma

Senior Science Reporter

Justine Calma is a senior science reporter at The Verge, where she covers energy and the environment. She’s also the host of Hell or High Water: When a Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals. Since reporting on the adoption of the Paris agreement in 2015, Justine has covered climate change on the ground in four continents. "Power Shift" her story about one neighborhood’s fight for renewable energy in New Orleans was published in the 2022 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Find her on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and X.

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Amazon opened up its $5 monthly RxPass to Medicare patients.

Until now, patients with Medicare — a government-funded insurance program mostly for older adults — haven’t been eligible to enroll in the RxPass program Amazon debuted last year. The RxPass offers Medicare patients “unlimited access” to 60 different prescription medications for $5 a month and a prime membership. For now, patients with Medicaid — state-funded insurance for lower-income Americans — are still ineligible for the program.


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Amazon union workers and Teamsters team up.

The Amazon Labor Union voted to ink an affiliation agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Workers at a Staten Island warehouse became the first Amazon employees to vote to unionize in 2022. They still don’t have a contract, as the union struggles to get Amazon to the bargaining table. Joining forces with the Teamsters infuses their fight with fresh resources, The New York Times reports.


This Pride flag is made from NASA imagery.

It includes images of cloud vortices (white), an aurora (pink), a solar flare (light blue), Jupiter’s North Temperate Belt (brown), Jupiter’s moon Io (yellow), Mars (orange), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (black), a red sprite cluster (red), an algal bloom (green), Neptune (blue), and crab nebula (purple).

Happy Pride!


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AI makes Google Search gobble up more energy and water.

Data centers already use a lot of water and electricity, and adding AI overviews to Google Search only makes those problems bigger.

AI uses “orders of magnitude more energy” than traditional search engines, Hugging Face researcher Sasha Luccioni tells Scientific American.

Correction: Apple’s AI emoji are generated on device, not in data centers.


What is ‘nature-based carbon removal’ and is it any better than carbon offsets?

Planting trees is a controversial way to fight climate change, but tech companies still rely on the strategy to meet sustainability goals.