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There are two things you can be certain about when it comes to flu pandemics: they’re inevitable and you never know when one will strike. That unpredictability makes it difficult to prepare for a pandemic — some 40 years passed between the pandemic of 1968 and 2009, yet only a little more than a decade [...]
Border customs agents are on the look out for many things: illegal drugs, stolen goods, smuggled liquor and sometimes even people. Add one more target: animal-borne viruses. In a new study published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS One, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the EcoHealth Alliance, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) [...]
The sun will set early in Haiti tonight. By 5:23 PM, night will have come to the island nation, and while night comes to virtually every part of the world virtually everyday, throughout much of Haiti, the darkness will be much deeper. It’s been nearly two years since the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed [...]
At the start of the fall, greens were not happy with President Obama. There was lingering disappointment about the failure of climate legislation a year before—a failure that many environmentalists blamed on insufficient action from the White House. That was bad enough, but at the beginning of September Obama shocked many of his environmental allies [...]
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator LISA JACKSON, in a statement announcing the release of the EPA’s long-awaited rules on mercury and other air toxics. The regulations—which have been in the works for two decades—are the first to restrict emissions of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, from power plants. According to the EPA, the new rules—with which [...]
It’s a very good thing that neural tube defects are relatively rare in the U.S., because they are very cruel conditions for a newborn to suffer. The two most common types of such birth defects are spina bifida – in which the backbone and spinal canal do not close properly — and anencephaly, in which [...]
Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather [...]
Bjorn Lomborg’s middle name is not actually “controversial,” but maybe it should be. The Danish economist—and TIME 100 selection—gained notoriety for books like The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It that called into question the basic green assumptions that the world is getting worse and that climate change is an existential threat to the human race. In recent years [...]
Given how the cracks in our food system have recently expanded into troubling chasms – remember the ground turkey Salmonella scare, and the emergence of an antibiotic-resistant Salmonella strain – health experts are once again fretting about farms and the drugs used in them. And with good reason. Antibiotics may be some of the best [...]
