Latest Articles
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Teach a Man to Fish and He’ll Have No Job Security
New England’s fishing industry will be substantially scaled back under new federal rules announced Friday. The regulations, which reduce the number of days fishers can work, close key fishing areas, and limit the size of fish that may be caught, were met with dismay by the industry. After more than 400 years of large-scale fishing, […]
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The Agency Formerly Known As the EPA
Perhaps belying its name, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing revisions to some of its own rules in order to allow mining companies to dump dirt and rock waste from mountaintop-removal coal operations into rivers and streams. In mountaintop-removal mining, companies raze mountains to access coal veins and then dump the leftover debris into […]
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Catch the spirit of the Bush administration
Note: You’ll need Flash Player to watch the movie. If you don’t have it, download it now.
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Trout Killing in America
Dam operators could flood part of the Colorado River next year in an effort to save an endangered fish species, rebuild beaches, and kill part of an excessively large trout population. The flood plans were approved yesterday 17 to 1 by a federally appointed panel composed of every major group with an interest in the […]
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Don’t You Hate Your Energy Bill?
After some two months of debate, the Senate energy bill passed by a vote of 88 to 11 yesterday, but no one’s very excited about it. Environmentalists and many Democrats say the bill would do little to encourage energy conservation or the use of renewable resources, while most Republicans and energy industry reps say it […]
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Cherignoble
Sixteen years ago today, a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl exploded, resulting in the worst atomic accident in the history of the world. The explosion affected 3.3 million Ukrainians as well as untold numbers of other people, and sent a radioactive cloud drifting over much of Europe. All of the area within 18 miles of the […]
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Bad Air Day
As if California didn’t have enough of a smog problem all by itself, now it and other parts of the nation are suffering from air pollution blown in from China. Toxic pollutants from power plants, factories, and farms travel on wind currents across the ocean and mingle with our own less-than-perfect air to create an […]
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Nicholas Thompson reviews Digital Biology by Peter Bentley
As every picnicker knows, if you spill strawberry jam in the grass, it will be swarming with ants in no time at all. The ants arrive quickly because they always find the shortest route from their nests to the spill -- but how? That question is one that fascinates cutting-edge engineers, computer programmers, and other scientists, who study nature in order to design better and more efficient technology -- a quest compellingly described in Peter Bentley's new book, Digital Biology.
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Froggy Went a Coughin’ and He Did Die, Mm-hmm
Category: More Bad News About Frogs. Those amphibian-lovers who were dismayed to learn last week that frogs and their fellow kind are being rendered hermaphroditic and otherwise sexually odd by exposure to herbicides will be even more disheartened by the news that trace amounts of DDT and other pesticides administered in lab tests caused near-total […]
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Quick Draw, McGraw
A tiff has broken out between the Department of Interior and the U.S. EPA over proposed gas drilling in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. The energy industry would like to drill more than 39,000 new wells in the area, a plan enthusiastically backed by the Bush administration, especially in the wake of its defeat over oil […]
