Rebecca Herscher
speaker
404 appearances
55 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2025
last heard 3 Sep
Rebecca Herscher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 54 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 12.
Appearances
That's because of a combination of higher fuel costs, increased electricity demand from AI data centers and inflation.
A new report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association warns the cost of cooling an average home in the United States will be about 8% higher this summer compared to last summer.
The high cooling costs come as millions of people in the U.S.
are already struggling to afford basic food and transportation, with high gas prices and grocery prices straining family budgets.
Rebecca Herscher, NPR News.
The warning comes from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit that tracks the reliability and security of the continent's electrical grid.
It says that electricity demand from data centers could overload the electrical grid.
Data centers are the engines that power artificial intelligence tools as well as cryptocurrency mining.
They use a lot of electricity, and their demands on the electrical grid change second by second.
The warning notes that such rapid oscillations can overload the grid, causing blackouts.
The group is asking grid operators and utilities to share information about data center effects to inform future federal rules on the topic.
Rebecca Herscher, NPR News.
Most microplastics and nanoplastics are smaller than a single bacteria cell.
They come from plastic garbage and are all different colors as a result.
A new study conducted by scientists in the US, China, and Italy looked at plastic bits that are dark in color.
Darker colors absorb more heat.
They found that dark-colored plastic particles in the atmosphere may be contributing to global warming by trapping extra heat from the sun.
However, the warming effect from plastics appears to be relatively small compared to other heat-absorbing particles like soot.
The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Rebecca Herscher, NPR News.
Showing 81–100 of 404 · page 5 of 21
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