Earth
- Agriculture
Nation by nation, evidence thin that boosting crop yields conserves land
Intensifying agriculture may not necessarily return farmland to nature without policy help.
- Earth
Toxic playgrounds
No kid should ever play in arsenic. Especially at school. Yet many probably do, according to findings of a study presented today.
- Chemistry
PCBs: When green paint isn’t ‘green’
It seems we're literally painting the air -- from the Great Lakes to Antarctica -- with persistent pollutants. Including at least one whose safety has never been studied.
- Chemistry
Case of the toxic gingerbread man
Featured blog: A search for the source of some indoor-air anomalies turns up a surprising culprit.
- Earth
Where humans go, pepper virus follows
Plant pathogen could help track waters polluted with human waste.
- Climate
Climate might be right for a deal
The upcoming Copenhagen negotiations will take steps toward an international, climate-stabilizing treaty.
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- Health & Medicine
PCBs hike blood pressure
No one would choose to eat polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — yet we unwittingly do. And a new study finds that the cost of their pervasive contamination of our food supply can be elevated blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease.
- Earth
Plastics ingredients could make a boy’s play less masculine
Study links boys' fetal phthalate exposure to tendency toward gender-neutral play later on.
- Humans
Record chills are falling, but in number only
Weather-monitoring stations in the Lower 48 have been logging record daily highs in temperature at twice the pace of record lows. Yet more evidence of climate warming. Many people have pointed to colder than normal winters — or summers — as evidence that global warming is a myth. Climatologists have countered that weather, the meteorological features that we experience at any given hour or day, may show anomalies even as Earth’s overall climate warms. So weather can locally mask the planet’s overall slowly rising fever. Except that any such mask appears to be disappearing throughout most of the United States, according to a new study.
- Earth
Buried-lakes story wins top award
Some readers may be unaware of our sister publication, Science News for Kids, a weekly online magazine for middle-school readers. This morning, we learned that one of the site’s feature stories — Where Rivers Run Uphill — won this year’s top science journalism award for reporting news for children.
- Earth
Asteroid impact could have stirred the ocean
Model offers one explanation for sudden change in deep-ocean chemistry almost 2 billion years ago.
