Flushed down toilets, poured down sinks and excreted in urine, a chemical component in birth control pills ends up in various waterways and collects in fairly heavy doses. That's where fish soak it up. The US Geological Survey found that fish exposed to a synthetic hormone…
Earth’s forests aren’t soaking up our carbon pollution like they used to. That means humans will have to replace the decades-old safety net with sharper cuts in emissions to limit global warming. Published in Nature, a vast study spanning 30 years and covering 189,000…
Studying incarceration as a disease has helped experts reveal its impact on populations. The mental health of neighborhoods is the latest angle explored. The key result: Law-abiding Detroiters living in areas with high prison-admission rates were significantly more likely…
It’s not just a problem in developing countries; nearly 90,000 people living along the Texas-Mexico border are thought to live without access to running water.
There’s no cure to counter chronic arsenic poisoning, but new research suggests that some people have adapted genetically to quickly flush it out of their system. In a small Andean town in Argentina, some people have picked up a cluster of mutations in the gene, called…
You may have notice we frequently include stories about indoor air and indoor cookfires. Here’s why: WHO estimates that 4.3 million people die each year from chronic respiratory conditions linked to indoor air pollution. This latest IPS story from India documents the…
Diseases spread by dirty water and poor sanitation kill more women than AIDS, diabetes or breast cancer, according to WaterAid. Analyzing data from the Seattle-based Institute of Health Metrics, WaterAid concluded:
20 years of steep declines in air pollution in Southern California have left children with significantly improved lung function and growth, according to a 2-decade study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by USC scientists.
A new feature-length documentary takes China’s government to task for air pollution, exposing the health and economic costs of this disaster in the works. Created by former TV journalist Chai Jing, “Under the Dome” is China’s version of “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Veep…
It’s not wrong to say it’s been 31 years since the worst industrial catastrophe in history, when more than 80,000 pounds of toxic gas leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. But it’s not right, either.
