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How do you decide which environmental issues to pursue? I know I definitely put too much store in social context: what my friends, the media, and my favorite politicians – and, embarrassingly, celebrities – are talking about. If people are talking about climate change and factory farming over lunch, then that’s got to be the [...]
Tritium is one of those elements that just sounds bad. There’s something about the name that simply feels radioactive even before you know what the stuff is. That’s one of the reasons people have been so spooked by a new investigation the Associated Press conducted of Nuclear Regulatory Commission records, revealing that tritium has leaked from [...]
If the apple you had for lunch seems almost too perfect, you can thank the chemical industry. Conventional farmers use pesticides liberally in their orchards, in part to prevent blemishes that can hurt the value of their product. As a result, Americans have come to assume that apples should be as taut and unblemished as [...]
It’s worth stating at the outset: while more than 10,000 people have almost certainly died in the March 11 quake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, not a single person has been killed in the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. As Abrahm Lustgarten reported in ProPublica yesterday, most experts believe that even in [...]
America is a great country, but we do tend to make other people’s dramas our own. You know that uncle who comes over to Thanksgiving dinner, hears about another relative who recently had a heart attack and spends the rest of the meal asking everyone at the table if they think the chest pain he [...]
There are few environmental dangers that spook people more than radioactivity. And there is surely no country in the world that comes by that fear more rightly than Japan — which, alone among nations, has felt the pain of a nuclear conflagration first hand. So it’s understandable that the Japanese public is terrified by the [...]
I have a post over on Healthland looking at the recent study showing that cell phone radiation does indeed affect brain activity. The cancer question is still an open one—but I describe a few easy steps to reducing radiation exposure just in case you’re the safer rather than sorrier type. Check out the post here.
iPhone users around the world experienced a rude awakening on New Year’s Day. Or rather, they didn’t—because of a glitch in the iPhone’s calendar software, alarms set over the weekend failed to go off, causing tens of thousands of people around the world to be late, at least according to the tweets. It’s unclear just [...]
If anyone would be receptive to the idea that cell phone radiation might play a role in cancer, it would be Dr. Devra Davis. The epidemiologist and toxicologist is an expert in environmental health, and she’s made a career out of the idea that cancer often has more to do with what’s happening to us [...]
Do you know how much radiation your cell phone emits? You will from now on if you live in San Francisco. Yesterday the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to require all retailers to display the amount of radiation a phone emits, a regulation that’s believed to be the first in the U.S. The new ruling, [...]
