Art Robinson has seeded scientific skepticism within the GOP for decades. Now he wants to use urine to save lives.
Arthur B. Robinson, renegade chemist, failed politician, grandpa of the climate skeptics — and maybe, just maybe, our nation’s next scientist-in-chief — padded across the carpet of his homemade lab in a pair of white athletic socks. “This room, everything you see here, was built by my own sons with their own hands, including the concrete,” he said. Robinson raised and home-schooled six children in this tawny valley scratched into the hills near the town of Cave Junction, Oregon. Now his wife is dead and one of his daughters has moved away, but the rest of his kids — two veterinarians, a biochemist and a pair of nuclear engineers — remain nearby. They’ve got a lot to do: Feed the animals; maintain the lab; ward off cougars; publish their popular home-school curriculums; manage Robinson’s repeated, unsuccessful congressional campaigns; and, of course, perform high-stakes research into medicine and biochemistry.
As deadly wildfires continue to rage across Northern California’s wine country, with winds picking up speed overnight and worsening conditions to now include a combined 54,000 acres of torched land, it now seems more important than ever to understand how wildfires work, and their lasting implications on our health and the environment.
EVERY major fire station in Tasmania is being investigated for potential contamination from toxic chemicals used in firefighting foam — described as “the Agent Orange of firefighting”.
The number of people killed this year while defending their community’s land, natural resources or wildlife has passed 150 – meaning 2017 is on course to be the deadliest year on record.
Like coral reefs, sea anemones—with their flashy, tentacle-like polyps that waggle and wave in vibrant reds, greens, pinks, and yellows—provide homes and hiding spots for dozens of fish species, most memorably the orange clownfish made famous in Finding Nemo. Also like coral, rising water temperatures associated with climate change can severely weaken these anemones, causing them to expel the tiny symbionts that keep them alive and lend them color, a process known as bleaching.
MERRIMACK — Residents say they are concerned and confused by newly released blood test results that indicate a sampling of public water customers have levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) twice those of the average U.S. population.
WEST, Tex. — If her son hadn’t stowed that damn ’66 Chevrolet Impala in her garage, Jeanette Holecek would have died the day her town exploded. But its sloping steel bulk was in just the right place, at just the right time, and it shielded her from the concussion that shattered her home.
CAGUAS, P.R. — Harry Figueroa, a teacher who went a week without the oxygen that helped him breathe, died here last week at 58. His body went unrefrigerated for so long that the funeral director could not embalm his badly decomposed corpse.
Oh, the Superfund program created in 1980 was a very good idea. Industries and businesses would be held accountable, through taxes, for polluting communities all over the United States. Those taxes – paid by landfill owners, chemical companies and industrial manufacturers – paid for cleanups of polluted sites, an often expensive proposition.
The Federal Government could face compensation claims across New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory, after the Department of Defence admitted it was slow to warn people about groundwater contamination from Army air bases.
Researchers say federal agencies use highly inaccurate tests to estimate exposure to BPA—findings that extend to multiple other harmful chemicals that get into our bodies
American industry, aided by federal regulators, is conducting a large-scale, consequential experiment with our hormones and the developing brains and reproductive systems of our children.
