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The lack of a rigorous inspection program at Freedom Industries is at least partly to blame for the massive leak of (4-methylcyclohexyl) methanol (MCHM) from a tank at a the company’s storage site in West Virginia in January, according to the Chemical Safety Board (CSB). The board found no record of a formal, industry-approved inspection performed on any of the speciality chemical company’s storage tanks prior to the incident on 9 January....

If the Arab Spring taught us something, it is that the effects of climate change can serve as stressors, contributing to regional instability and conflict, experts said. In a report published last week, researchers from the Center for American Progress, the Center for Climate and Security and the Stimson Center examined the role of climate change in the Middle East’s upheaval during 2010 and 2011. Looking at long-term trends in rain, crops, food prices and migration, they were able to determine how these factors contributed to social instability in the region....

The world may finally acknowledge that global warming is a major environmental hazard. But new research shows that reducing the main greenhouse gas behind it may be even more difficult than previously believed. The reason: the world’s oceans and forests, which scientists were counting on to help hold off catastrophic rises in carbon dioxide, are already so full of CO2 that they are losing their ability to absorb this climate change culprit....

March 1968 Hayflick Limit “Could man’s life-span be extended, or is there an inescapable aging mechanism that restricts human longevity to the present apparent limit? Until recently few biologists ventured to attempt to explore the basic processes of aging; obviously the subject does not easily lend itself to detailed study. No doubt many mechanisms are involved in the aging of the body. In our own laboratory at the Wistar Institute we have addressed ourselves to one question: the limitation on cell division....

Questions answered in this episode: “If I’m near the speed of light, and someone else comes against me near the speed of light too, will we be nearly twice the speed of light relative to each other.? Would we be moving so fast in different directions that the time to reach to each other would be distorted to compensate for the speed?” - Bruno Portel “Lets suppose an object is moving faster than the speed of light....

The most quiescent environment ever engineered by humans exists some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, scientists announced Tuesday. There, shielded inside a European Space Agency spacecraft called LISA Pathfinder, two 4.6-centimeter gold-platinum cubes have reached an almost-perfect state of stillness, subject to scarcely more than the pure force of gravity as they orbit around the sun. All other influences that could cause the cubes to move—jostling molecules, impinging cosmic rays and wavering electromagnetic fields—only impart a collective force roughly equivalent to the weight of a single virus held in your hand....

That is a main finding of a report, three years in the making, published Wednesday by a team of 12 scientists who study hormone-altering chemicals. Dozens of substances that can mimic or block estrogen, testosterone and other hormones are found in the environment, the food supply and consumer products, including plastics, pesticides and cosmetics. One of the biggest, longest-lasting controversies about these chemicals is whether the tiny doses that most people are exposed to are harmful....

Almost every day the bodies wash ashore. Sleek, once-powerful swimmers now lie in the surf, wasted by disease and pocked by lesions. Sometimes fishermen spot the creatures in their final throes of illness, swimming erratically before stranding themselves on the beach. The death toll has now climbed to 1,441. But more than a year after the die-offs started to climb upward, scientists are still grasping for answers about the cause of the bottlenose dolphin deaths that have piled up since last summer along coastlines from New York State to Florida....

When President George W. Bush unveiled his plan for a new moon shot two years ago, a lot of people worried that it was long on rhetoric and short on cash–ultimately forcing NASA to raid its science budget to pay for it. On close examination, though, the trajectory seemed reasonable. The money freed up by phasing out the space shuttle and the International Space Station was not an implausible amount to build a postshuttle spacecraft (known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV) and send it moonward by 2020....

CLIMATEWIRE | EPA’s proposal to limit toxic pollution from heavy-duty trucks is stronger than anything that has come before it. But state and local air quality agencies say it’s not aggressive enough to meet the federal regulator’s own clean air standards. The National Association of Clean Air Agencies — which represents 115 local air pollution control agencies across 41 states, four territories and the District of Columbia — estimates that more than a third of the U....

The pathology of a stroke is deceptively complicated. In the simplest sense, strokes occur when the blood supply to a particular region of the brain is interrupted, cutting off the area to oxygen and nutrients. This deprivation results in injury and death to the local brain cells. But for days after the breach in blood flow, the immune system also does its own fair share of damage to the already injured brain through an inflammatory response....

Immunologists James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work in the relatively new field of cancer immunotherapy. Allison, a professor at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, discovered that a molecule called CTLA-4 (cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4) acts as a “brake” on the immune system; remove the brake and—in many cases—immune cells are unleashed to fight the cancer....

Dear EarthTalk: I pruned back an overgrown bush in my back yard last fall and now the soil around it is covered in dandelions and other weeds. Is there any way to get rid of these weeds without resorting to RoundUp and other chemical herbicides? —Max S., Seattle, Wash. Weeds are nothing if not opportunistic. While you may not have bargained for getting one form of eyesore (weeds) by clearing another (an overgrown bush), dandelions and other fast-growing, quickly spreading plants know no bounds when some new territory opens up....

Researchers are concerned that China’s official reports on the number of coronavirus infections have not been including people who have tested positive for the virus but who have no symptoms. They fear the practice is masking the epidemic’s true scale. But public health experts say China is right to prioritize tracking sick patients who are spreading the disease. Since the early days of the outbreak, the country’s National Health Commission has reported daily infection counts, which infectious-disease researchers outside China have been relying on to model the outbreak’s spread and severity....

The past few decades have seen intensive efforts to find the genetic roots of neurological disorders, from schizophrenia to autism. But the genes singled out so far have provided only sketchy clues. Even the most important genetic risk factors identified for autism, for example, may account for only a few percent of all cases. Much frustration stems from the realization that the key mutations elevating disease risk tend to be rare because they are less likely to be passed on to offspring....

The notion that robots must be rigid metallic automatons made mobile by wheels, tracks or even legs has constrained the imagination of their designers. The weight of all those rods, gears and motors quickly adds up, and complex mechanical and electrical control systems are needed for robots to handle delicate objects or navigate across different types of terrain. A team of researchers, including Harvard University chemist and materials scientist George Whitesides and Robert Shepherd, a postdoctoral fellow at Whitesides’s lab, has eschewed this vertebrate-inspired approach in favor of a softer touch....

JULY 1957ELEMENTARY PARTICLES — “In the strangeness theory, then, we have a means of classifying strange particles. The theory is consistent with the fundamental idea of four groups of particles and three types of reactions. At present our level of understanding is about that of Mendeleyev, who discovered only that certain regularities in the properties of the elements existed. What we aim for is the kind of understanding achieved by Pauli, whose exclusion principle showed why these regularities were there, and by the inventors of quantum mechanics, who made possible exact and detailed predictions about atomic systems....

Could life on Earth have originated on Mars? over the past two decades that question has left the pages of science fiction and entered the mainstream of empirical science. Planetary scientists have found that rocks from Mars do make their way to Earth; in fact, we estimate that a ton of Martian material strikes our planet every year. Microorganisms might have come along for the ride. The impacts that launched these rocks into Earth-bound trajectories were violent, high-pressure events, but experiments show that certain species would survive....

During the last centuries of China’s Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon, rich and varied in its manifestations. Rulers and elites sacrificed animals and humans to appease spirits or the ancestors. Just as humans met their ends, dogs were often right beside them. Now a study in Archaeological Research in Asia, published in March, shows that people from the Shang dynasty relied heavily on sacrificial puppies to accompany them in death....

Actor Jeremy Piven, best known as loudmouth talent agent Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage, has made an early exit from the Broadway play Speed the Plow, blaming a mercury-rich sushi diet and possibly use of herbal medicine. His doctor says tests revealed Piven has mercury levels five to six times higher than normal, and has ordered a fish-free diet and rest. “I talked to Jeremy on the phone, and he told me that he discovered that he had a very high level of mercury,” playwright David Mamet told Variety....