More Than 65 Percent of U.S. Has Unsafe Levels of Toxic Chemicals In Drinking Water

Levels of a widely used class of industrial chemicals linked with liver toxicity, developmental problems, tumour growth and hormonal disruptions exceed federally recommended safety levels in public drinking-water supplies for 33 states in the U.S. according to a new study led by researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The chemical contaminants that …

Richard Conniff – New Green Challenge: How to Grow More Food on Less Land

For researchers trying to figure how to feed a world of 10 billion people later in this century, the great objective over the past decade has been to achieve what they call “sustainable intensification.” It’s an awkward term, not least because of conventional agricultural intensification’s notorious record of wasting water, overusing fertilizers and pesticides, and polluting habitats. But the ambition …

Huge News: Monsanto to Pay $80 Million for Misrepresenting Round Up Earnings

Monsanto just keeps being forced to pay the piper. The mega-corp has lied to consumers about the safety of GM seed and their best-selling herbicide, and now it is being held accountable for stealing from and cheating its investors. The company will pay an $80 million settlement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a penalty for lying about earnings …

Act Now, Urges Study, or Planet Faces 10,000+ Years of Climate Doom

“The next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.” The actions that policymakers take in the next couple of years will have “profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies” for the next 10,000 years and beyond, …

Colin Todhunter – “Lies, Lies And More Lies” – GMOs, Poisoned Agriculture And Toxic Rants

Have you ever read all of those pro-GMO scientists-cum-lobbyists professing their love of science? They are always talking about how science must prevail over ignorance and ideology then they play on the public’s ignorance by using ideology and sloganeering to try to get their points across. As as been well documented (see here and here), it is the pro-GMO lobby/industry that distorts and …

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR & ALEXANDER COCKBURN – A Secret History of the Monarch: How the Biotech Industry Conspired to Knock Off One of the World’s Rarest Butterflies

On May 20 1999, Nature magazine sounded what might have been the death knell of the biotech food industry. A short paper in the respected British science magazine by John Losey, an assistant professor of entomology at Cornell University, reported the ominous results of his laboratory study on the effects of pollen from genetically modified corn on the Monarch butterfly. Losey found …

Brooke Borel – The problem with science journalism: we’ve forgotten that reality matters most

It’s the job of science journalists to look beyond data – we have to look at the people doing the science and whether they have conflicts of interest s a science journalist, a lot of your time is spent reporting on new studies, natural phenomena and how research may affect our lives. But there is another key piece to science, …

Warrior Connection – 11.01.15

The November 1 Warrior Connection was a very valuable discussion led by Denise Nichols, RN, (BS/ MS) and Doug Rokke with Dr Nick Osborne, Ph.D.- interim director of the Center for Wounded Veterans in Higher Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, We discussed benefits, expectations, and support for veterans once they enroll in college and specifically under the auspices of this new UIUC program. We also expanded our discussion as applicable to other colleges and universities. Clearly the UIUC has a unique program. Doug a UIUC alumni (MS 1986, Ph,D, 1992) and retiree along with Denise who both have extensive college and military education/ training experience offered many valuable suggestions. Nick is in a unique position with tremendous maybe unsurpassed abilities to help student veterans succeed given he served as an enlisted sailor and then as a commissioned officer in the Coast Guard then rose through the ranks in academia. Nick has gathered a very capable staff too.

http://woundedvetcenter.ahs.illinois.edu

The Global Warming Slowdown Is An Illusion

Global warming has not slowed. The so-called hiatus remains just that – so-called. The world is warming as predicted and any apparent evidence that it is not doing so is a statistical illusion, according to US scientists. They report in the journal Climatic Change that they applied “rigorous, comprehensive, statistical analysis” to the global temperature data and came up with …

Increased carbon dioxide levels in air restrict plants’ ability to absorb nutrients

The rapidly rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affect plants’ absorption of nitrogen, which is the nutrient that restricts crop growth in most terrestrial ecosystems. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have now revealed that the concentration of nitrogen in plants’ tissue is lower in air with high levels of carbon dioxide, regardless of whether or not the …