"CHICAGO -- When city students arrived for the first day of school under the blazing temperatures of a Midwest heat wave, staff greeted them with some unusual school supplies: water bottles, fans and wet towels to drape around their necks."
"Eating raw oysters in the summertime is always risky; aqueous pathogens peak when the ocean is warm, which is part of why folk wisdom suggests one should only eat raw shellfish in months with an 'R' in the name. But this summer's been riskier than ever."
"Steps such as quitting smoking and controlling blood pressure and cholesterol could save more than 200,000 Americans a year, a report finds."
"SAN FRANCISCO -- The use of pesticides and the planting of genetically engineered crops on U.S. national wildlife refuges are illegal and damaging to the environment, say four advocacy groups who have filed a federal lawsuit to halt these practices on national wildlife refuges across the Midwest."
"Paul Bailey made the White House pitch on July 31. Flanked by six colleagues from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the coal industry’s most public voice, Bailey pressed the case for 'achievable' greenhouse gas emissions standards for coal-fired power plants."
Conservation biologists have successfully trained dogs to use their sharp sense of smell to help in a variety of conservation tasks.
"The pending closure of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station is the latest in a string of planned plant retirements that many industry analysts say forecast a shrinking role for nuclear in the nation’s energy mix."
"Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren't too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely 'natural' disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain."
"Scientists used to be well represented among the nearly half of Americans who voted Republican. But that's changed over the years, and one poll found that just 6 percent of scientists call themselves part of the GOP now."
"Desiccated corn and sun-scorched soybeans have been in high supply lately -- and we're paying through the nose for them. The federal government forked out a record-breaking $17.3 billion last year to compensate farmers for weather-related crop losses—more than four times the annual average over the last decade."
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