Earth
- Health & Medicine
Vinegar: Label lead-tainting data
Under California’s Proposition 65 law, products containing chemicals that may cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive toxicity must carry a warning label at their point of sale. Among such products: pricy balsamic and red-wine vinegars that contain lead. At least some California groceries apparently have taken a conservative approach and post labels suggesting all such vinegars are dangerously tainted. Although they aren't.
- Paleontology
Pollination in the pre-flower-power era
Scorpionflies with long-reaching mouthparts may have helped plants procreate long before blossoms evolved.
- Earth
Nanoparticles’ indirect threat to DNA
Tiny metal nanoparticles can damage DNA, essentially by triggering toxic gossip.
- Earth
Small earthquakes may not predict larger ones
Quakes far from tectonic plate boundaries may simply be aftershocks of ancient temblors.
- Climate
Kyoto climate treaty’s greenhouse ‘success’
There are 33 days until the opening of formal negotiations in Copenhagen on the next global climate-protection treaty. The hoped-for accord would take up where the current treaty leaves off. But to get some perspective on just where that is, a new United Nations report describes for negotiators and the public just how much the Kyoto Protocol has achieved. And real strides have been made in slowing the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, thanks to many European nations (albeit with little help from North American ones or Japan).
- Climate
Mount Kilimanjaro could soon be bald
The world-renowned ice caps could disappear by 2022, new research suggests.
- Chemistry
Aerosols cloud the climate picture
A NASA model incorporates how atmospheric aerosols and greenhouse gases interact, yielding better estimates of the gases' warming and cooling effects.
- Earth
Unicorn fly of the Cretaceous
An ancient fly discovered trapped in amber sports a horn atop its head and topped with three eyes.
- Earth
World’s longest cave formation still growing
Minerals still accumulate in New Mexico’s Snowy River.
- Chemistry
How leaves could monitor pollution
Trees near high-traffic areas accumulate tiny particles.
- Climate
Winter forecast: Sustained blizzard of climate news
At least in our area of the country, consumers are already being assaulted — well before Halloween — with Christmas music, decorations and holiday-themed goods. Reporters are smack in the throes of their own early seasonal blitz: News items carrying a climate or global-warming theme. And I don’t expect the crush of climate news and seminars to diminish until around Christmas. That’s when the next United Nations COP — or Conference of the Parties — will end this year’s pivotal round of negotiations in Copenhagen aimed at producing a new climate treaty.
- Earth
Johnstown Flood matched volume of Mississippi River
A modern survey of terrain determines flow rate of the 1889 flood that was one of America's deadliest disasters.
