If you are going to drive an electric vehicle (EV), you’re going to have to learn to speak the language of electricity. Some people think that’s asking too much—that even though you understand units like inches and feet, meters and kilometers, cups and gallons, milliliters and liters, kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes, you’ll never learn the basic units of electricity. And even though you already have appliances in your house, like hair dryers and microwave ovens, that have the wattage printed right on the front, there are some people who think electricity is just too complicated. So when it comes…

Most Americans take clean drinking water for granted as a convenience of modern life. The United States has one of the world’s safest drinking water supplies, but new challenges constantly emerge. For example, on May 6 researchers at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University reported that 43 states have sites where water is contaminated with toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS. And many farm workers in California’s Central Valley have to buy bottled water because their tap water contains unsafe levels of arsenic and agricultural chemicals that have been linked to elevated risks of infant death and cancer…

Beginning in January, gas-burning stoves will be increasingly hard to find in Berkeley, California. The city is the first in the country to prohibit gas lines to new residential buildings as part of an effort to trim carbon emissions. Photo: Tim Evanson / CC BY-SA / Flickr California’s push to become carbon neutral by 2045 may hurt amateur chefs where it hurts most—in their own kitchens. Berkeley, Ca. last month became the first city in the country to ban the use of natural gas in new low-rise residential buildings. The edict, which takes effect on Jan. 1, will compel homeowners…