By Jeffrey Kluger (TIME) – Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was […]
By Anne Thompson6 May 2013 (NBC Nightly News) – Brian Williams: This is just the time of year when gardens across so much of our country should be buzzing with activity. beehives of activity, in fact. But those same bees that scared us to death as kids, we came to appreciate as adults for the […]
25 April 2013 (mongabay.com) – Mobile device giant Samsung has admitted to using tin sourced from a controversial mining operation on the Indonesian island of Bangka, where unregulated mining kills 150 miners a year and causes substantial environmental damage, reports the Guardian and Mongabay-Indonesia. Samsung’s admission came after a campaign by Friends of the Earth, […]
28 February 2013 (EPA) – The proportion of rivers and streams in poor biological condition, based on the Macroinvertebrate MMI, ranges from 26% in the Western Mountains ecoregion to 71% in the Coastal Plains ecoregion. The three most widespread stressors to rivers and streams — phosphorus, nitrogen, and riparian vegetative cover are depicted by ecoregion. […]
[cf. Cities and tribes in Washington State: No coal port, no coal trains here] By Kim Murphy26 April 2013 COLSTRIP, Montana (Los Angeles Times) – Out in these windy stretches of cottonwood and prairie grass, not far from where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer ran into problems at Little Bighorn, a new battle is unfolding […]
27 April 2013 (JIJI) – Samples of groundwater taken from monitoring holes around the sunken reservoirs at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are proving radioactive, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Saturday. Strontium and other radioactive elements were detected in samples taken from 13 of the 22 observation holes dug around the reservoirs, which were […]
By Anne Thompson, chief environmental correspondent26 April 2013 (NBC News) – While the possible construction of the Keystone XL pipeline has made for contentious disagreements from the halls of Congress to ranches in Nebraska, the real environmental debate begins in a place most Americans have never heard of. Nearly 700 miles north of the U.S.-Canada […]
By MARTIN FACKLER24 April 2013 YAKUSHIMA, Japan (The New York Times) – A mysterious pestilence has befallen this island’s primeval forests, leaving behind the bleached, skeletal remains of dead trees that now dot the dark green mountainsides. Osamu Nagafuchi, an environmental engineer with a passion for the island and its rugged terrain, believes he […]
By Neela Banerjee23 April 2013 WASHINGTON (Los Angeles Times) – A federal appeals court unanimously backed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate a controversial form of coal mining called mountaintop removal, overturning a lower court decision that barred the agency from stopping a large coal mine in West Virginia. The ruling by the D.C. […]
By MASAKAZU HONDA22 April 2013 FUKUSHIMA (Asahi Shimbun) – Radioactive cesium levels exceeding 100,000 becquerels per kilogram were measured in mud accumulated at the bottom of swimming pools at two high schools in and around Fukushima city. Mud in the pool of a third high school in Minami-Soma, which is closer to the crippled Fukushima […]
