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I Just Met a Girl Named Maria

Senate Backs Redefinition of Nuke Waste The Senate voted narrowly yesterday to allow the Department of Energy to reclassify some high-level nuclear waste as “low-level” and leave it in place (albeit covered in concrete) rather than transport it to Nevada to be buried deep underground. The reclassification, contained in a provision inserted by Sen. Lindsey […]

Film plot rings true as NOAA runs up against White House

The brewing storm. Image: NOAA. Even after grapefruit-sized hail and monster tornadoes assault major cities in the Northern Hemisphere in the film The Day After Tomorrow, Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, still can’t get the ballooning crisis of global warming through the thick skull of the vice president. “I […]

10 Things I Haiti About You

Deforestation in Haiti Increases Flood Danger More than 90 percent of the country of Haiti is deforested. If you think that’s depressing, consider that the lack of trees to hold soil in place has left Haiti’s rural residents vulnerable to periodic floods in which torrential rainwater tumbles down mountains, picking up gravel and boulders that […]

Punch-drunk Lovelock

Famed Ecologist Argues Nuclear Power Needed to Fight Global Warming A prominent ecologist is raising a ruckus in environmental circles by arguing that the world needs to immediately embrace nuclear energy if it’s to have any chance of combating climate change. James Lovelock, the U.K. scientist whose Gaia Hypothesis — that the earth itself is […]

Mighty Morphin’ Coal-power Rangers

NAFTA Commission Critical of Coal-Fired Power Plants Overall pollution in North America declined by 10 percent from 1998 to 2001 (the last year for which figures are available), but coal-fired power plants continue to lag behind other sources in the pace of improvement and in reducing the total amount of pollution, according to a new […]

Coal Hand Luke

EPA Proposal Altered to Favor Coal-Fired Power Plants On the heels of today’s report that 46 of the top 50 polluters in North America are coal-fired power plants comes this tidbit: A U.S. EPA proposal to curb interstate air pollution was altered by the White House at the last minute in a way that heavily […]

Elizabeth Grossman reviews The Whale and the Supercomputer by Charles Wohlforth

Out on the ice that forms the shores of the Arctic Ocean, the Iñupiaq whalers of Barrow, Alaska, hauled in their catch, a bowhead whale that weighed more than 100,000 pounds. The entire village turned out to pull the enormous mammal ashore and butcher it. Sleds and snowmobiles were piled with maktak (energy-laden slabs of whale blubber and skin) and fresh bloody meat.

Phunny Pharm

Pharming Again on the Rise The practice of splicing human genes into common crops to produce proteins for use in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals — known as biopharming, or pharming — is again on the rise among biotech companies, says a new report, under the cover of an approval process that is shrouded in secrecy. […]

Kids These Daze

Kids’ Brains Harmed by Chemicals, Report Says Children’s brain development is being impaired by some of the more than 70,000 human-made chemicals on the market, says a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. The report, which surveyed current research in the field, charges chemicals with such neurological effects as poor memory, reduced visual recognition […]

Crimes of the Heart

American Heart Association Deems Air Pollution Bad for Heart It’s official: Air pollution is not only bad for your kids, your lungs, and your view — it’s bad for your heart as well. So says the American Heart Association, the authority on all matters cardiovascular. The AHA had long remained skeptical about the connection between […]