TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Slide Show: Glimpses of Undersea Life at Nation's New Marine Monuments With a stroke of his pen, former President George W. Bush created three new marine monuments some 2.5 times larger than the entire U.S. national park system. The ocean reserves in the remote Pacific are bigger than Texas--335,000 square miles (540,000 square kilometers) of ocean in all concentrated around U.S.-controlled islands--and "the largest conservation area ever protected anywhere on Earth," says William Chandler, vice president for government affairs at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Saving the Disadvantaged from Pollution Skin color and wealth remain pervasive fault lines in U.S. society, as best proved by the persistence of economically and racially segregated communities. People living in these places face excessive stressors, including poverty, substandard housing, malnutrition and lack of health care. Environmental burdens--notably pollution from power plants, freeway corridors and chemical manufacturing plants--are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods.Each of these inequalities is bad enough on its own. Yet the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine describes this combined exposure as “double jeopardy,” because social stressors can impair an individual’s ability to fend off illnesses that pollution creates or aggravates. Indeed, studies show that air pollution is more likely to cause respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as premature deaths, among people in lower socioeconomic groups. The combined threat is particularly hard on fetuses, infants and adolescents and on adults who have high blood pressure or diabetes. Individuals in poor rural areas, as well as in low-income urban communities such as Richmond, Calif., suffer disproportionately from childhood asthma, in part because of inadequate housing, deficient medical care and proximity to multiple sources of air pollution. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Offshore Fish Farms Swimming in Controversy With a deadline looming for approval of a federal plan that would open the Gulf of Mexico to deepwater fish farming, House lawmakers and conservationists are plotting strategies to block such offshore ventures until Congress creates a system to regulate them.Democratic Rep. Gene Taylor (Miss.) introduced legislation last Friday that would prevent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and regional fishery management councils from permitting offshore aquaculture under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Management Act. The measure would invalidate existing permits and put future proposals for offshore fish farming on hold until Congress passes new legislation to oversee deepwater aquaculture. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Uncharted waters: Hydrogen and the "law of unintended consequences" Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students are traveling up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont , a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motor. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and will cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew expects to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the third of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Poisoned Water Haunts Bhopal 25 Years After Chemical Accident Twenty-five years after a toxic gas cloud from a pesticide factory killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India, groundwater at the accident site -- a drinking water supply for 15 communities -- remains contaminated, according to a report released today by an advocacy group and a medical clinic.The U.K.-based Bhopal Medical Appeal and the Sambhavna Clinic say water contamination is worsening as chemicals leach through soil into the aquifer. [More] rss.sciam.com |