"Reversing oil and natural gas pipelines or switching the product they're carrying can have a 'significant impact' on the line's safety and integrity—and 'may not be advisable' in some cases, federal regulators told pipeline companies in a recent advisory."
"A chemical ingredient of cosmetics, soaps, detergents, shampoos and toothpaste has been found to trigger liver cancer in laboratory mice, raising concerns about how safe it is for humans, scientists said."
Scientists think they have solved the mystery of what's killing starfish along the U.S. Pacific coast. It's a virus.
"Creepy critters are leaching onto the gills of Wisconsin's brook trout and choking off their oxygen, stoking fears in anglers that the iconic fish may be on the outs in many streams."
"The state has slapped Madison’s sewage treatment plant with 32 air pollution violations alleging excessive emissions from burning biogas and a near absence of effective monitoring and record keeping."
"To many Toledoans, the Detroit River is just another waterway on a map."
"Whitemarsh Run looks a mess, more a construction site than a stream. With its flow temporarily dammed and diverted, a track hoe is carving out a new, more sinuous channel for the badly degraded waterway running through a built-up patch of northeastern Baltimore County. New banks are being built, armored in places with granite boulders — all part of a $13 million makeover that's intended to help clean up the nearby Bird River and the Chesapeake Bay."
"Just hours into the experiment, the prognosis was grim for salmon that had been submerged in rain runoff collected from one of Seattle's busiest highways. One by one, the fish were removed from a tank filled with coffee-colored water and inspected: They were rigid. Their typically red gills were gray."
The Senate's vote next week on legislation to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline may come down to a handful of Democrats, who are now being courted aggressively by advocates on both sides of the debate."
