Biology
Breach
June 7, 2011, from Associated Press
A toxic chemical spilled into a river that supplies drinking water to the scenic city of Hangzhou in eastern China, knocking out supplies to more than half a million people and creating a run on bottled water.
A tanker truck carrying 20 tons of carbolic acid overturned late Saturday night. The chemical, also known as phenol, was washed by rain into the Xin'an River about 150 kilometers (90 miles) southwest of Hangzhou, the city said in a report on its website.
June 7, 2011, from New York Times
It is one of the most fraught topics in environmental health. Are men becoming less fertile, with declining sperm counts and diminishing sperm quality? If they are, then sperm might be an early warning sign of environmental dangers. And the prime suspects have been substances like plastics and pesticides that can have weak estrogenlike effects on cells.
But now 15 years of data from 18-year-old Danish men taking their military physicals show no decline in sperm counts, after all.
June 7, 2009, from Montreal Gazette
The number of days of poor air quality on Montreal Island shot up to 68 last year from 44 days during 2007, the city's air-quality watchdogs said Saturday.
The Reseau de surveillance de la qualite de l'air, or RSQA, placed the blame for that deteriorating air-quality performance squarely on fine-particulate air pollution -- largely caused by the use of residential wood heat.
"The contribution of wood heat to fine-particulate emissions continues to grow and amounted in 2006 to about 61 per cent of the total estimated emissions," the body's freshly released eight-page annual report for 2008 states.
June 7, 2009, from CNN
The massive amount of garbage in the ocean likely complicates the search for the remains of an Air France flight that went missing Monday near Brazil, oceanographers who spoke with CNN said. Earlier this week, investigators said they had located pieces of the plane in the southern Atlantic Ocean, which might have given them clues to the origin of Air France Flight 447's crash.
But on Thursday, Brazilian officials said what they had found was nothing more than run-of-the-mill ocean trash.... Much of the ocean trash is plastic, which means it won't go away for hundreds of years, if ever. And the problem has gotten so bad that soupy "garbage patches" have developed in several locations, called gyres, where ocean currents swirl.
One of them is estimated to be the size of Texas. There are about five or six major trash-collecting gyres in the world's oceans, with the most famous located in the Pacific Ocean about midway between North America and Asia...
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Climate
Chaos
June 7, 2011, from London Guardian
A number of Australia's leading climate scientists have been moved into safer accommodation after receiving death threats, in a further escalation of the country's increasingly febrile carbon price debate.
The revelation of the death threats follows a week of bitter exchanges between the government and the opposition in the wake of a pro-carbon price TV advert featuring actor Cate Blanchett.
The Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra said that it has moved a number of its climate scientists to a secure facility after they received a large number of threatening emails and phone calls.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
June 7, 2009, from Sydney Morning Herald
FEW lawyers are ordained as Buddhist priests or give up lucrative careers to take on a single, unfinancial client. But James Thornton, founder of the environmental law firm Client Earth, has done both.
His inspiration comes in part from a meeting years ago with the Dalai Lama, who advised him that environmentalists should meditate, because "solutions never come from an angry mind"... He sees his legal work not as aggressive but as transformative. "Blame isn't so interesting any more. Changing everything is a delightful opportunity," he said...
June 7, 2009, from Dallas Morning News
Seawater algae -- a cousin to pond scum -- may someday become a significant source of fuel for military jets and airliners, and at the same time rejuvenate farmlands where tumbleweeds fill old irrigation ditches and abandoned cotton gins bake in the Texas sun.
Algae farmers conceivably could become the newest breed of Texas oilmen. For now, that's still a very big "if." Several scientific and technical obstacles must be overcome before the tiny plantlike organisms, which create unsightly rings on boat hulls and slime on fish tanks, can be turned into a viable fuel.... Producing a lot of oil from the algae, cheaply and quickly, is the goal – basically creating, in a matter of days, what took nature millions of years.
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