"New research finds that copper in amounts readily found in our drinking water, the foods we eat and the vitamin supplements we take likely plays a key role in initiating and fueling the abnormal protein build-up and brain inflammation that are hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease."

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 300,000 Americans are getting Lyme disease every year, and the toll is growing."

"Officials raise alert as 'zombie' birds fall to earth amid fears city may be in grip of avian ailment Newcastle disease."

"A study on the fetuses of pregnant rhesus macaque monkeys has shown that exposure to the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, led to changes in their lungs that increased the potential for developing asthma."

"The University of California at Berkeley cut laboratory financing this week for a professor who has complained for years about corporate-led retaliation for his association of health risks with a widely used herbicide."  The herbicide is atrazine.

"MONTREAL -- Tests conducted by an environmental group suggest last month’s Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, train disaster had a devastating impact on water quality and soil in the affected area."

"Kerri was 4 when she started having trouble walking. Justin was 5 when he got a nosebleed that would not stop. Danielle was 7 when her legs began to ache."

"Heat waves are the deadliest of extreme weather events, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week."

"A viable, effective vaccine against malaria has long eluded scientists. Results from a preliminary study have ignited hope that a new type of vaccine could change that. The experimental vaccine offered strong protection against malaria when given at high doses, scientists Thursday in the journal Science."

The study was extremely small and short-term. And the candidate vaccine still has a long way to go before it could be used in the developing world.

"WASHINGTON — As part of the climate change agenda he unveiled this year, President Obama made a commitment to significantly reduce the federal government’s dependence on fossil fuels. The government, he said in a speech in June at Georgetown University, 'must lead by example.' But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf."

"NEW YORK -- All of the notices U.S. regulators received to vouch for the safety of common food additives between 1997 and 2012 were submitted by people who had a vested interest in the outcome of those assessments, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Wednesday."

"The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to let oil companies continue to dump polluted wastewater on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. This includes chemicals that companies add to the wells during hydraulic fracturing, an engineering practice that makes wells produce more oil."

"MELBOURNE, Fla. — The first hint that something was amiss here, in the shallow lagoons and brackish streams that buffer inland Florida from the Atlantic’s salt water, came last summer in the Banana River, just south of Kennedy Space Center. Three manatees — the languid, plant-munching, over-upholstered mammals known as sea cows — died suddenly and inexplicably, one after another, in a spot where deaths were rare."

"In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised to 535,000 its estimate of the number of American children with potentially dangerous levels of lead in their blood."

"Key assumptions about bisphenol A (BPA) exposure and bioavailability may be off base, according to a new report in EHP that questions the traditional interpretation of biomonitoring data underlying current risk assessments of the chemical. Laboratory research suggests that BPA, a widely used chemical for polycarbonate plastics and other products, is an endocrine disruptor with potential adverse health effects involving reproduction, metabolism, and cancer."