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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(4)
Plague/Virus:(4)
Climate Chaos:(12)
Resource Depletion: (6)
Biology Breach:(6)
Recovery:(8)
This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
climate impacts  ~ death spiral  ~ carbon emissions  ~ stupid humans  ~ antibiotic resistance  ~ bad policy  ~ contamination  ~ overfishing  ~ global warming  ~ alternative energy  ~ arctic meltdown  



ApocaDocuments (6) for the "Biology Breach" scenario from this week
[see full week] ~ [see full Biology Breach scenario and stories]
Sun, Sep 13, 2009
from Minneapolis Star Tribune, Karen Youso:
Plastic elastic and other confessions of a plastic sinner who tried, for a few days, to go without.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean floats a mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas. Acres of bobbing bottles, bags and Barbie shoes, it's where plastic trash comes to rest in the ocean. Actually, it doesn't rest. Despite what we've heard -- that plastic lasts a thousand years -- it doesn't. A recent study reveals that plastic breaks down a lot faster than that, but into toxic elements. To what end, nobody yet knows. Long before it's trash, however, plastic leaches toxins into our bodies (a premise strongly objected to by the FDA and the plastics industry), and nobody knows the long-term consequences of that, either.... I think I hate plastic. I'm going to forgo plastic for six days, a plastic mini-Lent, it might be called, and learn a new way of living. Split with plastic, and worries about the health effects, recycling and pollution all go away. ...


Six days without plastic is like a month without sunshine.

ApocaDoc
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Thu, Sep 10, 2009
from NUVO Newsweekly:
Downwind of the big dairy farm
...On a warm August day at the Stickdorn's farm, Eric Stickdorn reaches down, tears off a few blades of grass from the back lawn of their farmhouse, and tosses them in the air. A light breeze blows the grass at an angle toward the neighboring dairy. "That's pretty much south, maybe a little southeast," Stickdorn says. It's a good day. "That's why we're not smelling anything," he explains... Within a month after the odor from Samuel Lantz' cattle began to permeate the Stickdorn's house in October 2003, both Eric and Lisa Stickdorn developed some new and disturbing symptoms. "We began to experience a lot of coughing and had fluid in our lungs," Eric says. "We started having mysterious joint and tendon pains. We had [earaches] and headaches. We had really bad shortness of breath." A fatigue crept over Lisa. She'd been exercising hard on top of her farm work. "I thought I just overdid it. I quit exercising and still felt really, really tired. I couldn't figure it out." ...


Glad the closest I get to a dairy farm is a glass of milk!

ApocaDoc
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Wed, Sep 9, 2009
from Los Angeles Times:
Cellphones and brain tumors: Report revives nagging questions
People have been asking for years whether cellphones can give you a brain tumor. And for years, the wireless industry has been telling us not to worry our pretty heads. So that's settled, right? Maybe not. A group called the International EMF Collaborative issued a report the other day warning that cellphones may be more dangerous than users have been led to believe by health authorities. The report, titled "Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons for Concern," says the latest research indicates that regular use of cellphones can result in a "significant" risk of brain tumors. It also says kids are at greater risk than adults because their still-developing brain cells are more vulnerable to electromagnetic radiation. ...


Call me later so we can talk this over.

ApocaDoc
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Tue, Sep 8, 2009
from The Vancouver Sun:
Forest fires caused by lightning nearly double
British Columbia is being hit with an explosive growth in wildfires caused by lightning, with 2,161 lightning-fuelled fires ignited since April 1. The number represents an 84-per-cent jump over the entire 2008 fire season, and is far higher than 2004, which recorded the second-highest number of wildfires caused by lightning in the last 10 years. Between April 1 and September 7, B.C. has had 3,002 wildfires. Of those, 72 per cent were caused by lightning, according to the B.C. Wildfire Management branch.... ...


Sounds like Thor is mighty disquieted.

ApocaDoc
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Tue, Sep 8, 2009
from Environmental Health News:
Dust, not food, main source of lesser known flame retardants
...These results suggest that house dust is a significant contributor to human exposure to HBCDs. The use of HBCD-treated products, rather than industrial pollution, may thus contribute more importantly to human exposure. In addition, infants and toddlers may be at greatest risk of exposure because they crawl on floors and may increase their exposure due to hand-to-mouth behavior. While exposure to other persistent organic pollutants appear to occur primarily through food, this result is consistent with studies of other flame retardants, such as PBDEs, which suggest that the main exposure sources are located in homes and other indoor environments. ...


Does that mean the "three second rule" no longer applies?

ApocaDoc
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Tue, Sep 8, 2009
from SciDev.net:
Air pollution cutting China's 'vital' rain
China's increasing air pollution has cut the light rainfall essential to the country's agriculture over the last 50 years, new research suggests. The research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last month, is based on rainfall data collected from weather stations across China. The number of light rain days -- those with precipitation of less than ten millimetres -- in northeast and southeast China has been cut by 7 and 8 days respectively per decade for the past five decades, researchers have found.... The authors say that increased levels of aerosols -- particles of pollution in the air above China -- are caused by increasing fossil fuel consumption, particularly in big cities like Beijing. ...


Economic growth as a WMD? Is this a trap we laid?

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