Mountaintop-removal mining is not only bad for the environment, it's bad  -- very bad -- for the health of the people who are exposed to it. A new study, based on a door-to-door survey, found that in communities exposed to this type of mining, cancer rates were twice as high as in communities that weren’t exposed. That's after controlling for all of those other cancer-causing factors: age, sex, smoking, occupation, etc. Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones puts this in context: Nationally, 3.9 percent of Americans are cancer survivors, according to the Centers for Disease Control, but the rate in West …

Yosemite National Park is a great place for appreciating nature, what with the mountains and the wildlife and so forth. But there's one thing spoiling the bucolic beauty for everyone: All those damn trees. They are so in the way! They're like the mist that comes up off Niagara Falls and ruins all your photographs. If only they'd cut them down, so we could get back to looking at nature! That's what the park's wildlife officials say, anyway. They want to cut down about 1,000 cedars and Ponderosa pines, which have gotten too big for their britches from living in …

Here's a novel idea: if your local extraction industry is causing hundreds of earthquakes, make them stop doing whatever it was that was causing the earthquakes. That's exactly what the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission did yesterday, when its members voted to shut down a fracking fluid disposal well and ban the drilling of new ones. The Associated Press explains: Those wells are near a fault system that has spawned dozens of earthquakes this year. A magnitude-4.7 earthquake in February near Greenbrier was the most powerful to hit the state in 35 years. After two of the four stopped operating …

Women hate swimsuit shopping, am I right? And we all know why: Because swimsuits do not disintegrate when buried underground for 180 days. Luckily, designer Linda Loudermilk has come out with the world's first line of compostable swimwear. Yes, they're hideously unflattering (warning: image mildly NSFW, definitely NSFA where A is aesthetic sense). But they achieve the thing women really care about in a swimsuit: disposability. Plus, they look like garbage bags, so their compostability is never far from your mind -- because when people look at you in a bikini, you want their first thought to be about decomposition. Loudermilk …

Rush Limbaugh says "almost no temperature records were broken" during the recent heat wave, and Newsbusters writer Noel Sheppard says there were "only 34 new all-time daily temperature records set." Only 34? Why, that's barely a record-breaking heat wave at all! Except for the fact that a) 34 records is nothing to sneeze at and b) by "34," Sheppard means "somewhere between 70 and 7,612." "All-time daily record" is not a thing, but there are daily records and all-time records. Daily records compare the max and min temperatures that day to the same date in previous years. All-time records compare …

Parlee Cycles and tech company Deeplocal are working together on a bike inspired by the Toyota Prius. It's a reasonably slick-looking machine, but the really weird and bizarre part is the "neuron shifting." The bike uses a gaming neuroheadset, which detects the brain's electrical activity like an EEG, to let riders shift between gears using only their minds. Of course, this makes the bike about a million times more complicated than a regular bike. For one thing, shifting gears suddenly requires electricity. For another, you sort of have to relearn how to ride a bike, and we are all repeatedly …

If you're riding a bike and get doored, it sucks no matter what. But what if, like Stephen Mann, you get doored by a cop? Judging from Mann's account, it's even worse than getting hit by your run-of-the-mill inconsiderate driver. He told Gothamist that the cops asked him maybe 10 times if he were on drugs, if he was drunk, how long he'd been riding a bike, and why he was riding a bike in the street. (Uh, as opposed to on the sidewalk, illegally?) They also wouldn't give him their names or a copy of the accident report. Relations …

Want to support Tim DeChristopher? Go to Washington in August to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. "Consider this your call to action," said Peaceful Uprising, the group DeChristopher founded. BREAKING: Conservative white dudes (aka the Jim Inhofe Fan Club) are most likely to think they're smarter than science, i.e. doubt the existence of climate change. In California, though, everyone -- even conservatives -- supports cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Europeans want their own fracking boom. In Montana, 60 percent of inspected Yellowstone River shoreline has oil on it. In Michigan, a year after the oil spill there, workers are still working to …

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has extended the moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon through the end of the year, and House Republicans are grumpy. I mean, there's uranium there ... the hole is already mostly dug ... it's basically a perfect mining opportunity! So they're sticking a rider onto an Interior Department appropriations bill that would open the land back up. Salazar says he would prefer a 20-year moratorium on the mining, which could threaten not only the integrity of a national landmark but also water quality in the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to …

Sickening amounts of green algae, fed by nitrous waste from French farms, have been growing on the Brittany coast, where French and British people go for vacation. When the algae decomposes, it gives off hydrogen sulphide, a poisonous gas. Two years ago, a man died from inhaling the gas. The next victim: a horse. This year more than 30 wild boars have died mysteriously on the beach, and the evil algae is the prime suspect. French people, who prefer to do their own air pollution via cigarettes and cheese, are getting upset about this, although the French government is so …