Articles by Grist staff

We Hear Helsinki Is Beautiful This Time of Year

The desertification of southern Europe may be under way With 2003’s deadly European heat wave still lingering in memory, this summer’s spiking temperatures, rampant forest fires, and record droughts along the Mediterranean are increasingly being seen not as freaky aberrations, but signs of global warming. Dozens of fires have burned from Greece to Portugal. Some […]

Britty Twister

Estrogen exposure blamed for upswing in male chest-reduction surgery British men are flocking to clinics for surgery to reduce their man mammaries. Here we pause a moment to savor that sentence … OK, done. U.K. doctors blame increased exposure to female hormones for a reported doubling over one year of the number of operations for […]

Arsenic and Old Rice

Arsenic levels in U.S. rice could pose health risk U.S.-grown rice contains an average of 1.4 to 5 times the amount of arsenic found in rice from Europe, India, or Bangladesh. According to a study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, people consuming American rice at a “subsistence level” — about one pound […]

Hustle and Flow

Montana and mining companies to fund massive river cleanup, restoration An historic financial settlement between the state of Montana and two mining firms has opened the door to a project of ecological scope virtually unprecedented in the U.S.: the removal of Montana’s Milltown dam, located at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers, […]