"City testing of Chicago homes with water meters found nearly 1 in 5 sampled had brain-damaging lead in their tap water, but Mayor Rahm Emanuel's water commissioner acknowledged Thursday that the city continued installing new meters after learning about the alarming results in June."

"Just before Hurricane Michael made landfall last month, a ferocious red tide that had scoured Florida’s Gulf Coast for a year, depositing countless dead sea turtles, dolphin and other marine life on beaches before spreading to the Atlantic coast, had finally started to wane."

"A new study says that many large-scale hydropower projects in Europe and the US have been disastrous for the environment."

"The Pacific archipelago of Palau has become the first nation to ban sunscreens that some researchers believe are killing off coral reefs and damaging marine environments."

"Minnesota regulators on Thursday granted key permits to the long-planned PolyMet copper-mining project that’s opposed by environmentalists who fear it could someday foul waters, including Lake Superior."

"A small, brownish weasel that spends much of its life in the water, hunting for fish and frogs, the American mink is a signal for the ecological health of where it lives. Right now, the mink is not doing very well along the Hudson River, largely due to decades of PCB pollution ... ."

"For nearly a year and a half, top officials in Newark denied that their water system had a widespread lead problem, despite ample evidence that the city was facing a public health crisis that had echoes of the one in Flint, Mich."

"The flood maps don’t factor in sea level rise or changes in extreme weather, and many are years out of date. In Mexico Beach, 'minimal-risk' homes were swept away."

"The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday."