CHAMPAIGN, Illinois. – Scientists have finalized a five-year study of newborn and fetal dolphins found stranded on beaches in the northern Gulf of Mexico between 2010 and 2013. Their study, reported in the journal Diseases of Aquatic Organisms, identified substantial differences between fetal and newborn dolphins found stranded inside and outside the areas affected by […]
By John Seewer 10 April 2016 TOLEDO, Ohio (Associated Press) – Responding to the crisis in Flint, Michigan, school officials across the country are testing classroom sinks and cafeteria faucets for lead, trying to uncover any concealed problems and to reassure anxious parents. Just a fraction of schools and day care centers nationwide are required […]
By F. Brinley Bruton 9 April 2016 WANA, Iraq – The possibility of annihilation hangs over Saddeq Hassan and his neighbors. Their town of Wana is just 7 miles downriver from the troubled Mosul dam, which U.S. officials warn is in danger of failing — which could kill between 500,000 and 1.47 million people. A […]
By Will Worley7 April 2016 (The Independent) – Radioactive boars are running wild and breeding uncontrollably in the northern region of Japan contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The animals have been devastating local agriculture and eating toxic, nuclear-contaminated food from around the accident site. Mass graves and incinerators have been unable to cope with […]
By Tim Stelloh 4 April 2016 (Associated Press) – A federal judge in New Orleans granted final approval Monday to an estimated $20 billion settlement, resolving years of litigation over the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The settlement, first announced in July, includes $5.5 billion in civil Clean Water Act penalties […]
HONG KONG, 22 March 2016 (AFP) – Coal plants are draining an already dwindling global water supply, Greenpeace warned on Tuesday, consuming enough to meet the basic needs of one billion people and deepening a worldwide crisis. Announcing its first global plant-by-plant study, Greenpeace said coal power use will increase with newly built plants, causing […]
By Daniel Swain1 April 2016 (The California Weather Blog) – Since early 2013, the state of California has been in the grip of an extraordinary multi-year drought. The accumulated precipitation deficit over the course of the ongoing drought is unprecedented in California’s century-long observational record, and when the additional drying effects of record-high temperatures are […]
By Soutik Biswas 27 March 2016 (BBC News) – On 11 March 2016, panic struck engineers at a giant power station on the banks of the Ganges river in West Bengal state. Readings showed that the water level in the canal connecting the river to the plant was going down rapidly. Water is used to […]
[The blog is here: GooBing Detroit.] By Kate Abbey-Lambertz26 March 2016 (The Huffington Post) – Google Street View’s trove of data and visuals has been used to collect images of streets that made history, of colorful glitches and surreal scenes of oblivious bystanders. For Alex Alsup, it’s a tool to track Detroit’s rapid and continuing […]
By Aaron Sheldrick and Minami Funakoshi; Editing by Bill Tarrant10 March 2016 (Reuters) – The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima’s nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean “ice wall” around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t how to […]
