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The Boys, a Bummer, Are Gone

Boys exposed to certain pollutants during adolescence are far less likely to have sons in adulthood, according to a study published in today’s edition of the British scientific journal the Lancet. The study looked at thousands of people in the Taiwanese city of Yucheng who used cooking oil containing high concentrations of PCBs. It found […]

Life in the Stupid Zone

Writer Ed Quillen says that town and county planners should adopt a new category called the Stupid Zone. You know some Stupid Zone residents, I’m sure: those nearsighted folks who choose to live at the bottom of avalanche chutes, on top of earthquake faults, or in the middle of a 10-year floodplain. Like me, you […]

Thursday, 11 Jul 2002

Coca Is It! Coca Is It! Efforts by the United States to combat cocaine production in Colombia by spraying coca crops with herbicides are coming up against a provision requiring the spraying to meet the same safety standards as those in the U.S. Translation: The U.S. EPA must certify that the spraying “does not pose […]

Coca Is It!

Efforts by the United States to combat cocaine production in Colombia by spraying coca crops with herbicides are coming up against a provision requiring the spraying to meet the same safety standards as those in the U.S. Translation: The U.S. EPA must certify that the spraying “does not pose unreasonable risks or adverse effects to […]

Lima Beaned

Roughly 1,000 Peruvian peasants arrived in their nation’s capital this week to demand that the government take action against contamination or seizure of land by mining companies. Peru is the world’s fifth-largest producer of copper and eighth-largest producer of gold, and the mining industry is responsible for half of the nation’s annual export income. But […]

Slippery Slope

Cleaning up the mess left by the oil industry on Alaska’s North Slope could cost anywhere from $2.7 billion to $6 billion, but oil companies have so far set aside just a fraction of that money and are not under any legal obligation to meet specific cleanup standards, the General Accounting Office announced yesterday. The […]

Yuck.

The U.S. Senate voted yesterday to approve storage of nuclear waste from around the nation at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, ending, for the moment, one of the most contentious environmental battles of recent decades. The 60-to-39 vote was a blow for environmentalists and Nevadans, who dubbed the plan the “Screw Nevada Bill” when it was preliminarily […]

Hop on POPs

Down the Hatch

With the Senate poised to vote as early as today on a proposed nuclear waste disposal site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, two wavering lawmakers have agreed to support the site in exchange for a favor in their own state. Republican Sens. Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch, both of Utah, met yesterday with Energy Secretary Spencer […]

Frog Days of Summer

For the first time, scientists have found evidence linking agricultural runoff to the rise in grotesque hind-limb deformities in frogs. In the past, the deformities were associated with a common parasite, the burrowing trematode worm, which seemed to affect the development of tadpoles. Now, writing in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National […]