Earth
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Humans
Beefy hormones: New routes of exposure
On any given day, some 750,000 U.S feedlots are beefing up between 11 million and 14 million head of cattle. The vast majority of these animals will receive muscle-building steroids — hormones they will eventually excrete into the environment. But traditional notions about where those biologically active pollutants end up may need substantial revising, several new studies find.
- Earth
GPS bolsters view that big Cascadia quakes could hit inland
Satellite tracking of plate movements shows that a magnitude-9 tremor in Pacific Northwest could strike close to urban areas.
- Agriculture
Nation by nation, evidence thin that boosting crop yields conserves land
Intensifying agriculture may not necessarily return farmland to nature without policy help.
- Earth
Toxic playgrounds
No kid should ever play in arsenic. Especially at school. Yet many probably do, according to findings of a study presented today.
- Chemistry
PCBs: When green paint isn’t ‘green’
It seems we're literally painting the air -- from the Great Lakes to Antarctica -- with persistent pollutants. Including at least one whose safety has never been studied.
- Chemistry
Case of the toxic gingerbread man
Featured blog: A search for the source of some indoor-air anomalies turns up a surprising culprit.
- Earth
Where humans go, pepper virus follows
Plant pathogen could help track waters polluted with human waste.
- Climate
Climate might be right for a deal
The upcoming Copenhagen negotiations will take steps toward an international, climate-stabilizing treaty.
-
- Health & Medicine
PCBs hike blood pressure
No one would choose to eat polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — yet we unwittingly do. And a new study finds that the cost of their pervasive contamination of our food supply can be elevated blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease.
- Earth
Plastics ingredients could make a boy’s play less masculine
Study links boys' fetal phthalate exposure to tendency toward gender-neutral play later on.
- Humans
Record chills are falling, but in number only
Weather-monitoring stations in the Lower 48 have been logging record daily highs in temperature at twice the pace of record lows. Yet more evidence of climate warming. Many people have pointed to colder than normal winters — or summers — as evidence that global warming is a myth. Climatologists have countered that weather, the meteorological features that we experience at any given hour or day, may show anomalies even as Earth’s overall climate warms. So weather can locally mask the planet’s overall slowly rising fever. Except that any such mask appears to be disappearing throughout most of the United States, according to a new study.
