Virginia’s plan for adult recreational cannabis use was approved in February, with a major bill review scheduled for 2022 and legalization set for 2024. When it comes to the use of cannabis taxes, the pro-legalization community is split. Governor Ralph Northam, the mayor of Richmond Levar Stoney, and some other Democrats support using the largest portion of taxes for targeted PreK programs...

Fig and pomegranate trees, grapes, carrots, and narcissus flowers are some of the plants that Aveen Ismail likes to grow in the Domiz refugee camp in Northern Iraq where she lives. That's because these plants remind her of Syria and home. At first, Ismail did not find the dry land welcoming ...

Giving circles bring people together to practice collective philanthropy. In the same spirit, representatives of giving circles and giving circle networks across the U.S. are now convening to build power. And this past April—when 82 members of dozens of giving circles in the U.S. met for two days in Seattle, Washington, to share stories, hopes and plans for building a stronger giving circle movement—women were leading the conversation.

Songbirds may be nature’s pop stars, but the females are still waiting for a turn in the spotlight — we don’t even know if females sing in about 70 percent of songbird species. This is because the study of birds has a gender gap: most previous research has focused on male song. Participants in the Female Bird Song Project are looking to right this imbalance.

The descendant of Alabama farmers and handcrafters, artist Jane Ingram Allen has worked in fiber arts, sculpture, and other media. In the 1990s, she became concerned that her pieces did not benefit the environment and began thinking about creating more sustainable art... Completed quilts are laid on beds of earth, where they bloom and grow...

At the peak of a Virginia summer, the difference between the sun and shade is stark. High urban temperatures can be dangerous in the capital city of Richmond. Trees can provide substantial cooling, pull pollution from air and water, and beautify neighborhoods. But in Richmond and other U.S. cities, the racist housing policy of redlining has resulted in less tree canopy for many neighborhoods with predominantly Black residents, making them now hotter in the summer.

Accurately capturing a raindrop’s journey to the ground is tricky business. Evaporation can cause a raindrop to shrink between the time it is captured by radar in a cloud and when it hits a farmer’s field, and this can make it hard to rely on radar-based rainfall estimations in some areas. Researchers from the University of Missouri in Columbia are taking a closer look at evaporation. With the use of specialized weather algorithms ...

Artificial skins can help prosthetics and robotic limbs to process sensations and perform tasks with more dexterity. A new silicone rubber skin designed by engineers from the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is unique in that it can sense shear force with high accuracy.

A recent study of a science grant application process at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found male applicants received higher scores than women, even in a blind review. At the foundation’s request, a team from the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed this imbalance and reported that factors like scientific discipline and position, publication record, and grant history were not factors — the main difference was in the language used in proposal titles and descriptions.

Blacksmiths in Colorado use their anvils to turn guns into gardening tools, reshaping America’s gun culture one strike of the hammer at a time. This is the work of the “Swords to Plows” initiative of the nonprofit RAWTools. Gun owners from around the country send RAWTools their disassembled weapons for transformation. Most guns can be made into several tools ...

The COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdowns have created new challenges for nearly all educators and students, and their families. This is especially true in the realm of special education. Each public school student who receives special education services is required to have an individualized education program (IEP) that outlines their instruction, goals, services, and more. According to a new government study (PDF), fulfilling children’s IEP’s during remote learning has proved difficult...

In May 2018, NASA announced the three teams that would be receiving five-year grants of about $8 million each to study astrobiology: the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life in our universe. Studies will explore the development of Earth’s organisms; the possibility of life on Saturn’s largest moon ...

For incarcerated young people, art can be a vital means of self-expression, a lifeline to the world outside, and a medium through which to dream and advocate. Performing Statistics, a nonprofit in Virginia, connects youth impacted by the juvenile justice system with artists, educators and policy advocates. Together, they imagine and work toward a world where no kids are locked up.