By Oscar Lopez and Andrew Jacobs 14 July 2018 SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (The New York Times) – Maria del Carmen Abadía lives in one of Mexico’s rainiest regions, but she has running water only once every two days. When it does trickle from her tap, the water is so heavily chlorinated, she […]
By Cassie Martin 17 July 2018 (Science News) – America is built on lead. Networks of aging pipes made from the bluish-gray metal bring water into millions of U.S. homes. But when lead, a poison to the nervous system, gets into drinking water — as happened in Flint, Michigan — the heavy metal can cause […]
By Laurel Hamers 9 July 2018 (Science News) – Air pollution caused 3.2 million new cases of diabetes worldwide in 2016, according to a new estimate. Fine particulate matter, belched out by cars and factories and generated through chemical reactions in the atmosphere, hang around as haze and make air hard to breathe. Air pollution […]
By Maddie Bender 17 July 2018 (CNN) – Death rates from liver cancer increased 43 percent for American adults from 2000 to 2016, according to a report released Tuesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. The increase comes even as mortality for all cancers combined has declined.Liver […]
By Olivia Rosane 11 July 2018 (EcoWatch) – Asbestos killed at least 45,221 Americans between 1999 and 2015, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found. But President Donald Trump has long expressed his support for the dangerous mineral currently banned by 65 countries.”If we didn’t remove incredibly powerful fire retardant asbestos & replace it […]
By Edward Curtin 22 June 2018 (Counterpunch) – Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.But we hear a lot about the small number of suicides, by comparison, who kill themselves quickly by their own hands. Of course their sudden deaths elicit shock and sadness since their deaths, usually so unexpected even when […]
By Kathryn Hansen 28 June 2018 (NASA) – In recent decades, northern India has been plagued by a double-dose of air pollution due to nearby sources of desert dust and increasing amounts of airborne particles from human activities. New research suggests that winds are spreading the problem, moving some of the pollution southward in ever-increasing […]
By Nita Bhalla; editing by Claire Cozens 4 July 2018 NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — After a severe drought last year, East Africa was hit by two months of heavy rains, disrupting the lives of millions of people in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Tens of thousands of survivors of Kenya’s worst floods in recent […]
By Jason Alvarez 19 June 2018 (UC Merced) – In 2012, Environmental Systems graduate student Lauren Schiebelhut was collecting DNA from ochre sea stars living along the Northern California coast — part of an effort to study genetic diversity in various marine species that serve as indicators of habitat health. She had no idea that […]
8 June 2018 (UN News) – After four consecutive poor rainy seasons that brought Somalia to the brink of famine, the country is now seeing near-record rainfall, and with it, flooding that has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday.According to the agency, about 230,000 people, over […]