Biology
Breach
November 17, 2011, from Reuters
Johnson & Johnson, responding to complaints about a potentially carcinogenic chemical in its baby shampoos, said it plans within two years to eliminate formaldehyde-releasing preservatives from hundreds of its baby products.
Chief Executive William Weldon made the pledge on Wednesday in a letter to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a consumer group which earlier this month urged J&J to remove from its baby shampoo a preservative called quaternium-15.
The chemical is considered by the government to be a possible trigger for some cancers and skin allergies. It is added to many cosmetic products to prevent spoiling and contamination, and works by releasing formaldehyde to kill bacteria.
November 17, 2009, from San Francisco Chronicle
Chevron Corp. has sued a lawyer who used to represent the plaintiffs in a $27 billion pollution lawsuit against the oil company in Ecuador, hoping to cast doubt on the case.
Chevron on Friday filed a complaint for malicious prosecution against Cristobal Bonifaz, who worked on both incarnations of the long-running lawsuit up until 2006. The oil company, the nation's second largest, is seeking more than $4 million. Bonifaz was lead attorney for the original lawsuit, filed in New York in 1993, in which residents of Ecuador's oil-producing region claimed soil and water contamination ruined their environment and made them sick. Bonifaz also worked on the lawsuit's current version - filed in Ecuador - which could see a judgment next year.
November 17, 2009, from Reuters
The rapid adoption by U.S. farmers of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton has promoted increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and more chemical residues in foods, according to a report issued Tuesday by health and environmental protection groups.
The groups said research showed that herbicide use grew by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008, with 46 percent of the total increase occurring in 2007 and 2008.... The report by the environmental groups states that a key problem resulting from the increase in herbicide use is the emergence of "super weeds," which are difficult to kill because they have become resistant to the herbicides.
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Climate
Chaos
November 17, 2013, from Science Daily
... In the meantime, automated-event-detection software was put to work to comb the data for anything unusual.
When it found two bursts of seismic events between January 2010 and March 2011, Wiens' PhD student Amanda Lough looked more closely to see what was rattling the continent's bones....
Will the eruptions punch through a kilometer or more of ice above it?
The scientists calculated that an enormous eruption, one that released a thousand times more energy than the typical eruption, would be necessary to breach the ice above the volcano.
On the other hand a subglacial eruption and the accompanying heat flow will melt a lot of ice. "The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice -- many lakes full," says Wiens. This water will rush beneath the ice towards the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf.
By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica.
"We weren't expecting to find anything like this," Wiens says.
November 17, 2013, from Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel
Ocean acidification impairs digestion in marine organisms, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Researchers from Sweden and Germany have studied the larval stage of green sea urchins Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis. The results show that the animals have problems digesting food in acidified water.
November 17, 2011, from Labspaces
The first climate study to focus on variations in daily weather conditions has found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.
Princeton University researchers recently reported in the Journal of Climate that extremely sunny or cloudy days are more common than in the early 1980s, and that swings from thunderstorms to dry days rose considerably since the late 1990s. These swings could have consequences for ecosystem stability and the control of pests and diseases, as well as for industries such as agriculture and solar-energy production, all of which are vulnerable to inconsistent and extreme weather, the researchers noted....
Constant fluctuations in severe conditions could alter how the atmosphere distributes heat and rainfall, as well as inhibit the ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, possibly leading to higher levels of the greenhouse gas than currently accounted for.
November 17, 2009, from London Guardian
International agreements such as Kyoto and any successor deal do not come into force the moment they are signed, but after they are subsequently ratified by individual countries. Kyoto, which Bill Clinton did not even submit to the Senate because he knew it would be rejected, took seven years to come into force.
Under the US constitution, such ratification needs a two-thirds majority in the Senate. It is this, not Obama, that stands in the way of a deal at Copenhagen.
Obama needs time to build domestic support for any treaty, and specifically to get legislation in place to set up a US carbon trading scheme. Until that is done, he dare not nose the US international position ahead of the domestic one. To do so would risk another Senate rejection, which would leave such a deal fatally wounded.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
November 17, 2009, from Scientific American
Together the world's 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock -- an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us requires a minimum of 1,500 calories a day, civilization will have to cultivate another Brazil's worth of land -- 2.1 billion acres -- if farming continues to be practiced as it is today. That much new, arable earth simply does not exist. To quote the great American humorist Mark Twain: "Buy land. They're not making it any more."... Clearly, radical change is needed. One strategic shift would do away with almost every ill just noted: grow crops indoors, under rigorously controlled conditions, in vertical farms. Plants grown in high-rise buildings erected on now vacant city lots and in large, multistory rooftop greenhouses could produce food year-round using significantly less water, producing little waste, with less risk of infectious diseases, and no need for fossil-fueled machinery or transport from distant rural farms.
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