Earth

Health & Medicine

Pesticide in womb may promote obesity, study finds

One-quarter of babies born to women who had relatively high concentrations of a DDT-breakdown product in their blood grew unusually fast for at least the first year of life. Not only is this prevalence of accelerated growth unusually high, but it’s also a worrisome trend since such rapid growth during early infancy has — in other studies — put children on track to become obese.

Earth

Warming is accelerating global water cycle

Fresh water evaporates from the oceans, rains out over land and then runs back into the seas. A new study finds evidence that global warming has been speeding up this hydrological cycle recently, a change that could lead to more violent storms. It could also alter where precipitation falls — drying temperate areas, those places where most people now live.

Life

Massive count a drop in the bucket

As the decade-long Census of Marine Life totes up thousands of new species, it leaves much yet to discover in the world’s oceans.

Earth

Air pollution appears to foster diabetes

Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.

Physics

Glacier found to be deeply cracked

A new study finds deep fissures in Alaska ice that could affect future responses to melting.

Earth

Contemplating an Arctic oil spill

The waters off northern Alaska may be “the largest oil province in the United States” after the Gulf, notes Edward Itta, a native of Barrow, Alaska. He is also mayor of the North Slope Borough, an 88,000-square-mile jurisdiction that runs across the upper part of the state. And in a September 27 videoconference with the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he tried to impress upon the commissioners just how remote his neck of the tundra is.

Chemistry

BP oil: Gulf sediment at risk, oceanographer claims

Most of BP’s spilled oil remains in the Gulf — with little sign of degrading, according to Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. And much of this surviving oil could be in sediment or on its way there, the scientist reported at a September 27 meeting in Washington, D.C.

Physics

Being single a real drag for spores

Launching thousands of gametes at once helps a fungus waft its offspring farther.

Tech

Poor initial Gulf spill numbers did ‘not impact’ response

In the early weeks after the catastrophic blowout of the deep-water well in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, BP — the well’s owner — provided the government dramatically low estimates of the flow rate of oil and gas into the sea. Did telling Uncle Sam and the public that the flow rate was 1,000 barrels per day and later 5,000 barrels per day — when the actual rate was closer to 50,000 to 65,000 barrels per day — affect the spill’s management?

Climate

Annual Arctic ice minimum reached

Melt isn’t as bad as 2007, but still reaches number three in the record books.

Earth

Clean out your medicine cabinet: Today!

For years, people have been chastised for pitching unused drugs into the trash, turning them into potentially toxic pollutants that can leach into the environment. On Saturday, September 25, the Drug Enforcement Administration is offering to take those drugs off our hands. For free. No questions asked.

Health & Medicine

Disease donations

Sometimes organ donors share more than a functioning body part. They can unwittingly bestow quickly lethal infections. That’s what happened, beginning last November, according to a new case report.