With electricity demand expected to increase by about a third in the coming decade, at least 20,000 more linemen are needed to build out the grid and upgrade outdated power lines in virtually every town and neighborhood across the United States. It’s hard work, requires extensive training, but pays well. The median 2023 annual salary for linemen was $80,000, about $41.50 an hour, not including overtime and emergency responses. 

“The baby boomers are retiring,” said Bill Bosch, Northwest Lineman College vice president of apprenticeships and client solutions. “On any given day, there are 7,000 to 10,000 unfilled jobs in the electrical trade, from linemen, to substation technicians, to metering.”

As many as 60,000 linemen a year travel on short notice to natural disasters to rebuild downed power lines, help devastated communities get back onto their feet. Linemen “are often the first to arrive in hazardous situations—they go in even before police and fire are allowed to—but are not classified as first-responders,” Bosch said. Read the full story here›

More than 81,000 people died in 2023 due to synthetic opioid overdose. Almost 75,000 of those deaths were due to illicit fentanyl.

To help address the opioid crisis, doctors such as Dr. Colin Haile of the University of Houston’s Drug Discovery Institute are hoping to block fentanyl’s ability to enter the brain, eliminating the drug’s euphoric effect, or “high.” Early results suggest that their method, a vaccine, not only accomplishes that goal but also eliminates fentanyl’s lethality in the vaccinated.

Thanks to the positive results and lack of adverse side effects in the immunized rats, human clinical trials are projected to start in early 2025. "[A fentanyl vaccine] will eventually be available to help, and it'll save lives," Haile said. "There's hope." Read the full story here›

Residents of Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands can see the towers of China’s Xiamen even on a cloudy day. It was in Kinmen, just 4 miles from mainland China, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) failed to wipe out its opposition before it fled to Taiwan during the closing phases of a brutal civil war 75 years ago. It was in Kinmen, on Aug. 23, that Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said the people of Taiwan will not submit to the CCP today.

Though 75 years have passed since CCP leader Mao Zedong tried and failed to exterminate his opposition here, the embers of that conflict remain and are threatening to flicker to life once again. 

For residents of Kinmen, that threat is as real as ever. Though they can see mainland China, they are more than 100 miles from the main island of Taiwan, and the number of Chinese vessels in the waters around their islands grows with every passing month. Read the full story here›

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