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Building an ultra-energy efficient industrial-style building in a northern climate is no easy task, but the Wood Innovation Research Laboratory (WIRL) stands as proof it can be done.

Along the Houston Ship Channel, a 52-mile waterway that spills into the Gulf of Mexico, giant vessels cruise beneath the blazing summer sun. Rusty tankers fill their holds with Texas specialties: refined oil products, petrochemicals, and plastic resins. Container ships arrive carrying corrugated boxes of imported T-shirts, electronics, and metals.

The spring morning temperature in landlocked northern California warns of an incipient scorcher, but the small herd of piebald dairy cows that live here are too curious to care. Upon the approach of an unfamiliar human, they canter out of their barn into the already punishing sun, nosing each other aside to angle their heads over the fence. Some are black-and-white, others brown; all sport a pair of numbered yellow ear tags. Some are more assertive than others. One manages to stretch her long neck out far enough to lick the entire length of my forearm.

A magnetic wire used to snag scarce and hard-to-capture tumor cells could prove to be a swift and effective tactic for early cancer detection, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Climate change poses a serious threat to the United States’ internet infrastructure, with more than 4,000 miles of fiber optic cable expected to be under water within 15 years from just 1 foot of sea level rise, according to a new analysis by scientists at the University of Oregon and University of Wisconsin-Madison.