Latest Articles

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

Have Trash, Will Travel

Like a cross between hitchhikers and shipwrecked sailors, marine animals are straying from their normal habitats by catching rides on sea-borne trash, according to an article appearing in the current issue of the journal Nature. Marine organisms have always traveled from place to place via natural debris such as floating wood and pumice, but now […]

Phil Anthropist

Phil Anschutz is an unlikely hero for Native Americans and environmentalists. One of the richest people in the country and a mega-donor to the Republican Party, Anschutz made his fortune in oil before launching Qwest Communications. Last year, his oil company, Anschutz Exploration, won permission from the Bureau of Land Management to drill in Montana’s […]

We Lake It

In a blow to the property-rights movement, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday against Lake Tahoe property owners who had argued that they were entitled to monetary compensation from the government for restrictions placed on use of their land. The origins of the legal battle stretch back two decades, to when the Tahoe Regional Planning […]

Hi, I’m Not in Delaware

In the latest blow to its image, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has suspended a planned $311 million deepening of the Delaware River after learning that the General Accounting Office was preparing to question the project’s economic justification. Sources said GAO investigators believed the Corps had overstated the potential economic benefits of the project […]

Corn Huskers Motion

By a vote of 68 to 31, the Senate yesterday killed an attempt to remove a measure in the Democratic energy bill requiring U.S. refiners to triple their use of ethanol by 2012. The measure would increase nationwide use of the corn-based fuel additive from about 1.7 billion gallons this year to 5 billion gallons […]