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‘Tis the season to keep propping up the consumer electronics industry and swap out your old phones and tablets and computers in favor of slightly better, slightly more expensive new versions. Whether it’s an iPad 2 replacing an iPad, an iPhone 4s replacing an iPhone 4, or whether you just received an Kindle Fire tablet [...]
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 [...]
Keizo Ishii grabs a dosimeter from a table and strides over to a lump of uprooted grass. It’s a blazing August day in Fukushima City. The professor of nuclear engineering, an with the aura of a mad scientist as sweat drips from his brow and gray hair wisps out from under his baseball cap, has [...]
It’s tough enough dealing with all the hectoring we get about eating less salt, using bigger forks, and making sure that this or that food group makes up only this or that percentage of our diet. All that, however, is only when it’s the nutritionists talking. Things get even harder when the environmentalists enter the [...]
Back in the day, before Al Gore informed us about a certain inconvenient truth, before we started to calculate our commutes in carbon, and before people in the South Pacific had to start heading for higher land, there were beach clean ups. People walked along the sand — maybe sometimes only on Earth Day, like [...]
Processing Indian and foreign electronic waste has become a crucial source of income for thousands of Indians working in the nations’ sprawling scrap markets, but at what cost? Despite laws that prohibit e-waste dumping, India is only growing as a repository for the rest of the world’s electronic waste, and the workers who dismantle it are [...]
The Italian Army arrived in Naples today to help the city deal with some 2,000 tons of uncollected garbage. About 170 troops have been deployed, with around 70 trucks, in a long-running trash crisis that began in 1994 when Italy declared a state of emergency after illegal dumping by the local mafia overflowed the region’s [...]
For smokers, the world has always been one big ashtray, with cigarettes flicked away pretty much anywhere. That’s especially true now, since smokers are increasingly forbidden to light up in restaurants, office buildings and even new no-smoking condos. In the great river of litter human beings create each year, so tiny a thing as a [...]
There aren’t a whole lot of scientific disciplines that haven’t had something to say about climate change over the years — and with good reason. When a problem is global in scale there’s a universe of specialists and subspecialists who have to pitch in to to fix it — meteorologists, chemists, geologists, physicists, zoologists, biologists, [...]
