Biology
Breach
June 4, 2015, from LA Times
Corrosion had eaten away nearly half of the metal wall of a pipeline that ruptured and spilled up to 101,000 gallons of crude oil along the Santa Barbara coast last month, federal regulators said Wednesday... The 10.6-mile pipeline had "extensive" external corrosion, and the thickness of the pipe's wall where it broke had degraded to an estimated one-sixteenth of an inch, the pipeline agency said.
June 4, 2015, from Beaver County Times
University of Pittsburgh researchers say a groundbreaking study focusing on southwest Pennsylvania released Wednesday shows that pregnant women living near natural gas fracking wells are more likely to have babies with lower birth weights... The team determined that the mothers closest to wells with hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking, were 34 percent more likely to have babies who were "small for gestational age" compared to mothers who lived farthest away from wells.
June 4, 2013, from Alternet
How did genetically modified wheat produced by the agricultural corporation Monsanto end up in Oregon? That's the question many people want answered after the discovery of the wheat by a farmer in Oregon, according to a report in the New Scientist. Genetically modified wheat has not been cleared for commercial use anywhere in the world, though the Federal Drug Administration approved it as safe for human consumption in 2004. It was never put on the market in the U.S., though, since Monsanto dropped it after citing a lack of demand. The Associated Press reported that the wheat was also not developed because "wheat growers did not want to risk retaliation from their biggest export markets."
June 4, 2012, from Mongabay
Following research linking neonicotinoid pesticides to the decline in bee populations, France has announced it plans to ban Cruiser OSR, an insecticide produced by Sygenta. Recent studies, including one in France, have shown that neonicotinoid pesticides likely hurt bees' ability to navigate, potentially devastating hives. France has said it will give Sygenta two weeks to prove the pesticide is not linked to the bee decline, known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
France's decision comes after its National Agency for Food, Safety, and the Environment (ANSES) confirmed the findings of two recent studies published in Science. The two studies found that neonicotinoid pesticides, although not immediately lethal, likely hurt bee colonies over a period of time.
June 4, 2012, from Washington Post
For years, Canada has been seen as an environmental leader on the world stage, pushing other nations to tackle acid rain, save the ozone layer and sign global treaties to protect biodiversity.
Those were the old days. The government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is rewriting the nation's environmental laws to speed the extraction and export of oil, minerals and other materials to a global market clamoring for Canada's natural resources.
June 4, 2012, from Center for Public Integrity
...The federal standard in place to protect workers like Revers from beryllium is based on an Atomic Energy Commission calculation crafted by an industrial hygienist and a physician in the back of a taxi in 1949. For the last 12 years, an effort to update that standard has been mired in delay. A plan to address another toxic hazard -- silica, a mineral that also damages the lungs -- has been tied up even longer: 15 years.
June 4, 2009, from Scripps News
An Indiana manufacturer unknowingly used metal blended with a dangerous radioactive isotope to make parts for 1,000 La-Z-Boy recliners more than a decade ago.
The discovery of that contamination -- which received virtually no publicity at the time -- triggered a federal and state effort to keep the popular chairs out of American living rooms, a Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found. The isotope -- Cobalt-60 -- used by No-Sag Products Co. of Kendallville, Ind., had been blended in Brazil into metal No-Sag used in 1998 to make brackets for the chairs, according to Rex Bowser, director of the Indoor Air and Radiological Health Emergency Response Program of the Indiana State Department of Health.... Experts said that the amount of radioactivity in the recliners, though relatively low, could have posed a health threat over time....in Indiana and across the United States -- even though scrap yards and recycling operations are the primary line of defense against rogue radiation -- neither the federal government nor any state requires those businesses to screen metal goods for radiation or report it when found.
June 4, 2009, from Wiley-Blackwell via EurekAlert
Laboratory studies in rats have shown that injecting the insecticide rotenone leads to an animal model of PD and several epidemiological studies have shown an association between pesticides and PD, but most have not identified specific pesticides or studied the amount of exposure relating to the association.
A new epidemiological study involving the exposure of French farm workers to pesticides found that professional exposure is associated with PD, especially for organochlorine insecticides.... The study found that PD patients had been exposed to pesticides through their work more frequently and for a greater number of years/hours than those without PD. Among the three main classes of pesticides (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides), researchers found the largest difference for insecticides: men who had used insecticides had a two-fold increase in the risk of PD.
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Climate
Chaos
June 4, 2015, from Grist
...Barbara Boxer's decision to step down from her Senate seat in 2016 has brought a host of potential contenders for her seat. (California Attorney General Kamala Harris and U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez are believed to be the current frontrunners.) But only one candidate, Beitiks, promises to talk about absolutely nothing but climate change. His campaign photos have captions like, "We're literally going to die" and "Why aren't we all screaming?"
June 4, 2013, from London Guardian
Scientists across the Mediterranean say a surge in the number of jellyfish this year threatens not just the biodiversity of one of the world's most overfished seas but also the health of tens of thousands of summer tourists.
"I flew along a 300km stretch of coastline on 21 April and saw millions of jellyfish," said Professor Stefano Piraino of Salento University in southern Italy. Piraino is the head of a Mediterranean-wide project to track the rise in the number of jellyfish as global warming and overfishing clear the way for them to prosper. "There are now beaches on the island of Lampedusa, which receives 300,000 tourists a year, where people can only swim for a week in the summer," said Piraino.
June 4, 2012, from Climate Central
...an otherwise harmless side effect of one new geoengineering study might turn out to be deeply troubling. Geoengineering itself is a sort of Plan B, a way to fix global warming after the fact if we fail to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. One such scheme involves spewing particles of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cut down on incoming sunlight -- and according to new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, that could make that canopy of deep blue a thing of the past. Instead, Ben Kravitz, of the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford and his colleagues say, the sky will become a washed-out white.
June 4, 2012, from National Science Foundation
The glacier lily as it's called, is a tall, willowy plant that graces mountain meadows throughout western North America. It flowers early in spring, when the first bumblebees and hummingbirds appear. Or did.
The lily, a plant that grows best on subalpine slopes, is fast becoming a hothouse flower. In Earth's warming temperatures, its first blooms appear some 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, scientists David Inouye and Amy McKinney of the University of Maryland and colleagues have found.
The problem, say the biologists, with the earlier timing of these first blooms is that the glacier lily is no longer synchronized with the arrival of broad-tailed hummingbirds, which depend on glacier lilies for nectar.
By the time the hummingbirds fly in, many of the flowers have withered away, their nectar-laden blooms going with them.
June 4, 2011, from University of Bristol via ScienceDaily
Baby clownfish use hearing to detect and avoid predator-rich coral reefs during the daytime, but new research from the University of Bristol demonstrates that ocean acidification could threaten this crucial behavior within the next few decades. Since the Industrial Revolution, over half of all the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by the ocean, making pH drop faster than any time in the last 650,000 years and resulting in ocean acidification. Recent studies have shown that this causes fish to lose their sense of smell, but a new study published in Biology Letters shows that fish hearing is also compromised.
June 4, 2009, from IRIN News (UN)
Camel farming could be an option for some 20 million to 35 million people living on semi-arid land in Africa, who will soon be unable to grow crops because of climate change, says the co-author of a new study.
By 2050, hotter conditions and less rainfall in an area covering 500,000 sq km to one million sq km of marginal farmland -- about the size of Egypt -- would make it harder for people grow crops.... Various climate projections have indicated that the length of the reliable growing season on the affected land would drop below 90 days, making it impossible to cultivate maize -- the staple food in much of Africa -- and in some places even "drought-tolerant crops, such as millet" would be difficult to grow.
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Resource
Depletion
June 4, 2009, from University of Maryland, via EurekAlert
Weak enforcement combined with fishermen facing serious economic hardships are leading to widespread violations of fisheries regulations along the Northeastern United States coast. This pattern of noncompliance threatens the success of new fisheries management measures put in place to protect and restore fish stocks, according to a new study published online this week in the journal Marine Policy.... nearly a doubling of the percent of total harvest taken illegally over the last two decades in the Northeast multispecies groundfish fishery (NEGF).... "To many fishermen, the current situation has reached an economic and moral tipping point where the potential economic gains from illegal fishing far outweigh the expected cost of getting caught."
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Recovery
June 4, 2015, from KCRG.com
Students in one small southern Iowa district will return to see big technology changes this fall. Workers over the summer will transform the school buildings into Iowa's first district completely powered by the sun... WACO's solar conversation became a teachable moment this spring as 5th and 6th graders eagerly took daily measurements and computed the power output. Teacher Chad McClanahan said students began rooting for sunny days so the system would produce more power.
June 4, 2009, from Long Beach Press-Telegram
The giant cable reeled into position, an engineer pulled the handle, and like that, pollution equivalent to 187,000 passenger cars was lifted from local skies.
A 941-foot BP oil tanker that just arrived from the Alaskan frontier became the globe's first such vessel to plug into a dockside electrical outlet Wednesday - an engineering feat expected to cut at least 30 tons of emissions in the coming year... It took nearly five years and $24 million to design and build the dockside power outlet at Pier T, which every few days accommodates hulking tankers carrying a million-plus barrels of oil.
The Navigator previously burned about 10,000 gallons of diesel each day in port to power massive pumps needed to off-load the oil.
Electrification required port engineers to build a million-pound underwater outlet anchored by a series of 168-foot concrete pilings and holding a massive steel cable that connects to the ship.
June 4, 2009, from Mongabay
Indigenous communities in Peru will be paid 5 soles ($1.70) per hectare ($0.68/acre) of preserved forest under a new conservation plan proposed by Peru's Ministry of Environment, reports the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) in its bi-monthly update.
Antonio Brack, Peru's Minister of Environment, says the scheme could generate $18.3 million dollars for forest communities, which control some 11 million hectares of forest in the country, beginning in 2010. Brack says money has already been set aside for the program in the 2010 budget.... Nevertheless the program will represent a substantial increase in funding over the $30,000 per year indigenous communities presently receive in direct international support for forest conservation, according to Brack.
June 4, 2009, from Guardian (UK)
Green energy overtook fossil fuels in attracting investment for power generation for the first time last year, according to figures released today by the United Nations.
Wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted $140bn (£85bn) compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation, with more than a third of the green cash destined for Britain and the rest of Europe.
The biggest growth for renewable investment came from China, India and other developing countries, which are fast catching up on the West in switching out of fossil fuels to improve energy security and tackle climate change.
"There have been many milestones reached in recent years, but this report suggests renewable energy has now reached a tipping point where it is as important -- if not more important -- in the global energy mix than fossil fuels," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN's Environment Programme.
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