The empty highway stretches straight out to the horizon, so I take a moment to peek at the electronic display down in the car’s center console. I read out the numbers on the screen swiftly and glance back to the windshield, when I see … nothing. A dense fog has swallowed the roadway, and I am driving blind. Before I can feel for the foot brake, an unmistakable warning—a brake-light red rectangle—flashes onto the windshield....
Overdoses from synthetic cannabinoids are on the rise, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Synthetic cannabinoids, sometimes called K2 or spice, were first found in the U.S. by authorities in 2008, according to the CDC. Since 2010, the number of overdoses from these compounds has increased each year, according to the new report, published today (July 14). The researchers included 101 U.S. hospitals and clinics in the analysis....
ST. LOUIS, Mich. – Jim Hall was mowing the town’s baseball diamond when he felt a little bump underneath him. “And there it was, a dead robin,” he said. Just last week, he found another one. “Something is going on here,” said Hall, who has lived in this mid-Michigan town of 7,000 for 50 years. Two dead birds may not seem like much. But for this town, it’s a worrisome legacy left behind by a chemical plant-turned-Superfund site....
Dear EarthTalk: How do green groups feel about the new 2012 Farm Bill draft recently released by the Senate?—Roger Wheeler, Miami Like so much of the legislation coming out of Washington, D.C., green groups are mixed on the new Farm Bill now making its way toward a floor vote. No doubt there are some conservation bright spots in the bill, but the question is: Are there enough and do they go far enough?...
Companies and other players involved in the development of experimental Ebola drugs are jockeying to have their products tested in the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, part of a chaotic and politically charged effort to use them in the midst of a crisis. With one vaccine already being used in the field, plans are underway to see if another might also be tested. And as many as five drugs, most of which are not supported by much human data, could be used in head-to-head trials....
Field guides to nature abound, and they are invaluable for pinning down the name of a songbird or hawk that flashes by. Now a veteran science writer has crisscrossed the U.S. photographing and writing a different sort of vade mecum, one to the built environment–the electric-power substations and cargo cranes, cell phone towers, tank farms and derricks that show themselves on highways and country roads, unsung structures as much in need of identification and explanation as any bird....
When a mile-wide tornado roared through Joplin, Mo., it killed 158 people and injured thousands. And it also kicked up toxic remnants from the city’s industrial past that are still haunting its residents on the third anniversary of the disaster. “Trees were uprooted, houses were leveled, everything underground was now on the surface,” said Leslie Heitkamp, Joplin’s lead inspector and remediation coordinator. Before the tornado, the southern part of this city of 50,000 had almost no lead contamination but afterward, about 40 percent of yards were contaminated....
“You are what you eat.” The old adage has for decades weighed on the minds of consumers who fret over responsible food choices. Yet what if it was literally true? What if material from our food actually made its way into the innermost control centers of our cells, taking charge of fundamental gene expression? That is in fact what happens, according to a recent study of plant-animal microRNA transfer led by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University in China....
The San Francisco Bay Area will soon see Google Street View vehicles that not only take snapshots of its streets but also capture snapshots of the air quality in neighborhoods they pass. Google and Aclima, a San Francisco-based air sensor technology developer, announced Tuesday that they are partnering to introduce air quality sensor-enabled Street View cars in the Bay Area, and in the future in other cities. “We want to understand how cities live and breathe in an entirely new way,” said Davida Herzl, co-founder and CEO of Aclima....
For many astronomers, 2018 will be remembered as the Year of the Cow—after the nickname of a spectacular stellar explosion that has kept them busy for months. The unusual event has offered an unprecedented window on to the collapse of a star, two teams of researchers suggest in papers submitted to the arXiv preprint server on 25 October. Contrary to the slow ramp-up of a typical supernova, Cow became stupendously bright essentially overnight, leaving astronomers perplexed....
Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard so much about using Borax for green housecleaning. But if this mineral has to be mined, doesn’t that negate some of its “green-ness?” – Elsa, Lincoln, Nebraska Mining for minerals such as boron (the key ingredient in the “Borax” we use for cleaning, pest control and other household tasks) is an activity that typically leaves behind a big environmental footprint. Mining degrades the local landscape and destroys wildlife habitat, while polluting both air and water....
By Sui-Lee Wee and Adam Rose TIANJIN, China, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Two huge explosions tore through an industrial area where toxic chemicals and gas were stored in the northeast Chinese port city of Tianjin, killing at least 50 people, including at least a dozen fire fighters, officials and state media said on Thursday. At least 700 people were injured, more than 71 seriously, the Tianjin government said on its Weibo microblog, and the official Xinhua news agency said two fires were still burning....
Before setting his sights once again on the far-off moon Pandora for the next Avatar adventure, filmmaker and aquanaut James Cameron has bequeathed arguably his greatest technological accomplishment to science. Cameron’s DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submarine, which he drove to the deepest part of this planet last March, will in June arrive at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, ultimately helping researchers there better understand life in Earth’s last unexplored frontier....
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Monsoon rainfall was 41 percent below average for the week ended July 9, the weather office said on its website on Thursday, the fifth straight week of poor rains after a late start to the season. A poor monsoon season cuts exports, stokes food inflation and leads to lower demand for industries ranging from cars to consumer goods, while even a slow start can delay exports of some crops and increase the need for imports....
The U.S. is expected to reach a major carbon emissions milestone this year: For the first time, carbon dioxide emissions from burning natural gas for electricity in the U.S. are set to surpass those from burning coal—the globe’s chief climate polluter. Emissions from burning natural gas are expected to be 10 percent greater than those from coal in 2016, as electric companies rely more on power plants that run on natural gas than those that run on coal, according to U....
ST. LOUIS — By day, Dan Chitwood of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis is a plant morphologist who studies how the form and structure of tomatoes evolves differently as they adapt to new environments. By night, when he needs to think through a problem or take a break, he plays the viola. Chitwood has now crossed his passions for plants and stringed instruments by publishing a study that documents the evolution of violin shapes using the same methods that he uses for charting the evolving form of leaves....
A record-breaking marine heat wave, which scorched the waters off the Australian coast in 2016, has changed the Great Barrier Reef “forever,” scientists say. Not only has the reef suffered extensive die-offs, but the types of corals that remain are different and less diverse than they were before. The findings published yesterday in Nature by more than a dozen researchers are the product of months of aerial and underwater surveys, starting in the spring of 2016....
By Aaron Mendelson SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco city employees could soon be zipping around the city’s famous hills in car-share vehicles, rather than city-owned cars, under a proposal introduced in the city’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. If approved by the board, San Francisco would join a handful of U.S. cities reducing their fleets of cars in favor of sharing services, including New York, Chicago and Indianapolis. “Anytime we can reduce our carbon footprint and potentially realize savings as a city, we should pursue those ideas aggressively,” said Supervisor Mark Farrell, who introduced the ordinance along with Supervisor John Avalos....
In 2007, when Apple released the iPhone, its big touch screen made it an instant hit. The phone operated exclusively on AT&T’s wireless network in the U.S., and other network providers implored their phone makers to quickly devise competitors. The scramble was on, and the touch-screen alternatives blossomed during the 2008 holiday season. Suddenly available were Research in Motion’s Blackberry Storm, which operates over Verizon’s network, HTC’s G1 (T-Mobile), the Samsung Instinct (Sprint), and others—most retailing for about $200....
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa suffered its first elephant poaching incident in 10 years this week at the country’s largest game reserve, the South African National Parks (SANParks) said on Friday. An elephant bull was “purposefully shot for its tusks” by four suspected poachers at the Kruger National Park in the eastern Mpumalanga province, SANParks said in a statement. Elephant poaching has been a problem in the rest of Africa while poaching in South Africa has been largely confined to rhinos, with more than 1,000 rhinos killed for their horns last year....
