HINKLEY, CALIFORNIA—We all love a neat, tidy Hollywood ending to a David and Goliath story. Sadly, in the real world, they are hard to come by. More often than not, the little guy might win a battle, but Goliath prevails over the long haul -- winning the war.

Before I went to Hinkley, I did, of course, watch the movie once again. As it turns out, Erin Brockovich is accurate in many respects.

Water that is heavily contaminated with chromium-6 turns bright yellow. Public utility testing shows more than 70 million Americans drink tap water tainted by chromium-6. Photo by Cameron Hickey.

You might remember the woman who gets a big check at the end of the movie after the down-on-her-luck, crusading legal assistant has brought a giant utility to its knees for polluting the groundwater beneath the tiny desert town half way between L.A. and Las Vegas.

In the movie, she was known as Donna Jensen (and played by Marg Helgenberger). There is no real-life Donna Jensen -- the details of her story are a composite of several real-life travails.

But Roberta Walker was the main inspiration. Naturally, it was not long after I met her that I asked her what she thought of the movie.

“Oh, it was a piece of crap,” she said. “The only true thing about the movie is that [Pacific Gas and Electric] poisoned us. We didn’t bring a giant to their knees obviously; we just woke them up -- woke up the dragon.”

Roberta is not allowed to say how much she got from the $333 million dollar settlement that gave the screenwriters such a nice bow to wrap up the movie. It was, however, enough to allow her and her husband to build a new home on a hill overlooking Hinkley.

“We loved it here, everything about it,” she told me. “The peace, the quiet, the privacy, and we built it. We had our well tested…and there was no chromium.”

But there is now. And Roberta is looking to move again -- out of Hinkley. But that does not guarantee she will find chromium-6 free water.

For the past 60 years, water polluted with chromium (VI) has plagued Hinkley, Calif., the desert town made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich." Although residents there won their lawsuit against the polluter, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., there’s still a debate over whether the compound causes cancer in drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency says yes, but industry scientists disagree. Image: PBS NewsHour

The real-life Erin Brockovich has moved onto the national stage as a consumer advocate and now curates a crowd-sourced map of reported cancer clusters. It is a real eye-opener. And it makes you wonder why environmental regulators don’t do this kind of thing.

A few years ago, The Environmental Working Group did a study of U.S. tap water, and it found a chrome-plated, potentially carcinogenic mess. They tested tap water samples from 35 cities and found chromium-6 in 31 of them.

The highest concentration EWG discovered, came from Norman, Oklahoma. But at nearly 13 parts per billion, the water there is still considered safe according to the 22-year-old EPA standard (100 ppb). It is, however, more than 600 times greater than the public health goal established by the California Environmental Protection Agency in the wake of the Hinkley well poisoning scandal.

Naturally, I was wondering about the tap water in my office/apartment in Bethesda, Maryland. Turns out it is .19 parts per billion (ppb.) That is ten times more Chromium-6 than the Cal/EPA public health goal.

I am a big proponent of tap water. I think the widespread use of bottled water is an environmental disaster. So I bought myself a countertop filter. And now I won’t drink anything straight from the tap anymore. I might soon upgrade to an under-sink model.

It is a shame that we cannot be more confident about the water that flows into our homes. Regulators at the state and federal level say they have to weigh public health concerns against the economic realities of tougher drinking water standards.

In the U.S., we have a Food and Drug Administration to ensure that any chemicals we ingest in the form of drugs are safe before they are allowed on the market.

Should we apply the same burden of proof to chemicals that are widely used by industry, which all too frequently poison our wells?

David Heath of the Center for Public Integrity contributed to the report.

I was born in 1981 and, because of that, I largely missed the part of American history where our rivers were so polluted that they did things like, you know, catch fire. But it happened. And, all things considered, it didn't happen that long ago. The newspaper clippings above are from a 1952 fire on Ohio's Cuyahoga river. Between 1868 and 1969 that river burned at least 13 times.

That's something worth remembering — not just that we once let our waterways get that trashed, but also the fact that we've gone a long way towards fixing it. We took 200 years of accumulating sewage and industrial degradation and cleaned it up in the span of a single generation. At Slate, James Salzman writes about that reversal of environmental fortune, a shift so pronounced — and so dependent upon a functioning government in which a diverse spectrum of politicians recognize the importance of investing in our country's future — that it seems damned-near impossible today.

... discharging raw sewage and pollution into our harbors and rivers has been common practice for most of the nation’s history, with devastating results. By the late 1960s, Lake Erie had become so polluted that Time magazine described it as dead. Bacteria levels in the Hudson River were 170 times above the safe limit. I can attest to the state of the Charles River in Boston. While sailing in the 1970s, I capsized and had to be treated by a dermatologist for rashes caused by contact with the germ-laden waters.

In 1972, a landmark law reversed the course of this filthy tide. Today, four decades later, the Clean Water Act stands as one of the great success stories of environmental law. Supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, the act took a completely new approach to environmental protection. The law flatly stated there would be no discharge of pollutants from a point source (a pipe or ditch) into navigable waters without a permit. No more open sewers dumping crud into the local stream or bay. Permits would be issued by environmental officials and require the installation of the best available pollution-control technologies.

The waste flushed down drains and toilets needed a different approach, so the Clean Water Act provided for billions of dollars in grants to construct and upgrade publicly owned sewage-treatment works around the nation. To protect the lands that filter and purify water as it flows by, permits were also required for draining and filling wetlands.

Read the rest of the story

Image from the Blog on Smog, which also has a really nice timeline of cleanup on the Cuyahoga.

At Grist, Jess Zimmerman has an interesting piece about a lake near a notoriously leaky former Soviet nuclear research site, where the radiation level is so high that an hour on the beach can be enough to kill you.

You can’t really blame Lake Karachay for acting up — it comes from a really rough area. The lake is located within the Mayak Production Association, one of the largest — and leakiest — nuclear facilities in Russia. The Russian government kept Mayak entirely secret until 1990, and it spent that period of invisibility mainly having nuclear meltdowns and dumping waste into the river. By the time Mayak’s existence was officially acknowledged, there had been a 21 percent increase in cancer incidence, a 25 percent increase in birth defects, and a 41 percent increase in leukemia in the surrounding region of Chelyabinsk. The Techa river, which provided water to nearby villages, was so contaminated that up to 65 percent of locals fell ill with radiation sickness — which the doctors termed “special disease,” because as long as the facility was secret, they weren’t allowed to mention radiation in their diagnoses.

Read the rest at Grist

Suzanne Paulson, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, saw "Carmageddon" as an opportunity to make use of a "natural experiment." She and a colleague "measured pollutants in the air during the LA freeway shutdown last year, and have now released their findings.

Air quality near the normally busy highway improved by 83 percent that day last July, relative to comparable weekends. Elsewhere in West Los Angeles, the improvement was equally dramatic. Air quality improved by 75 percent on that side of the city and in Santa Monica, and by 25 percent throughout the entire region, as a measure of the drop in ultrafine particulate matter associated with tailpipe emissions.

"We saw what we expected: you take motor vehicles away, the air gets really, really clean," Paulson says, "which tells us that most of the pollution is from motor vehicles from one type or another in this area."

More: L.A.'s 'Carmageddon' Produced Dramatic, Instantaneous Air Quality Improvements (The Atlantic).

(Image: Dallas Traffic 10/19/11 1227pm, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from nffcnnr's photostream)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/science-of-l-a-s-carmagedd.html/feed 21 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/05/model-boats-will-explore-conta.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/05/model-boats-will-explore-conta.html#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:10:02 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=179496 The Newtown Creek Armada preview from Newtown Creek Armada on Vimeo.

Nathan Kensinger is an artist "whose work explores hidden urban landscapes, off-limits structures, and other liminal spaces." He told me about a project that he, Laura Chipley, and Sarah Nelson Wright are working on called The Newtown Creek Armada:

It's a public art installation that is using remote control boats and underwater cameras to explore the Newtown Creek, a federal Superfund Site in New York City.

The installation opens this weekend, when we will be inviting the public to pilot our fleet of nine miniature boats, and to film their own voyage on the Newtown Creek. We will also be presenting several videos of our voyages that document the more polluted parts of the creek, which is home to the second largest oil spill in the United States, and has been used as a dumping ground for heavy industry and raw sewage for over 150 years. Despite this history, nature is slowly returning to the area, as we discovered on our voyages.

The Newtown Creek Armada

20 AUGUST—34°42' N 140°19' W

In the middle of the night, I dream that I am at the wheel of a great ship, sailing the Pacific Ocean. A hundred and fifty feet of steel, crowned with a dozen broad sails, forces itself forward through the waves. The rigging creaks with the roll of the ship. Water hisses along the lee rail. I adjust the wheel, peering at the binnacle to see our heading.

We’ve been at sea for nearly a week, and for weeks more we have no hope of seeing land. What we do hope to see, though, is something much rarer, something that amounts to a new and dark wonder of the world.

We are aboard the Kaisei, sailing to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Most people have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: a swirling vortex of ocean currents where untold tons of floating plastic trash gather into the planet’s broadest debris field. For a decade or more, the Garbage Patch has haunted the dreams and small talk the of the environmentally-minded. So when you reveal—very casually, not boasting at all—that you are about to become one of the very few people in the world to have actually visited the place, well, people want to talk.

These Garbage Patch conversations tend to follow a certain profile. First there is the flash of recognition, embedded with nuggets of misinformation and cliché:

Right! The giant plastic island! The one the size of Texas!

It's not an island, you say.

You also want to interrogate them on the subject of Texas. Why must the Garbage Patch’s size must always—always—be measured in Texas units?

Ok, it’s not an island, they say, backing away a little. It's more of a pile.

You narrow your eyes. Seriously, how do you pile anything on the ocean? Eventually, with coaxing, they let go of the island imagery, of impractical notions of how things pile, of Texas. Then comes the inevitable question: Can it be cleaned up?

A lot of people have considered this question, and a broad consensus has emerged among scientists and environmentalists. I'm happy to summarize: GET REAL. I know everybody loves the pipe dream of a technological fix, but we're talking about the ocean here. Even assuming that it’s possible to drag nets back and forth across hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, and that it would be worth the massive use of fuel … even granted these improbabilities, there remains the intractable fact of the confetti.

As a plastic object spends year after year in the water, it gradually breaks into smaller and smaller bits, becoming a plastic confetti that might be the most troublesome thing about the Garbage Patch. Nets and larger objects may strangle marine life, and bottle caps and disposable cutlery may fill the stomachs of baby albatross, but it’s the small particles that have the potential to introduce toxins at the bottom of the food chain, toxins that may be concentrated by their passage up the chain to large animals like tuna and humans. In 2009, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found plastic in the stomachs of nearly a tenth of all the fish they sampled in the Garbage Patch, and they estimated that tens of thousands of tons of plastic are consumed by fish there every year.

How then to clean it up? To remove a billion large and tiny pieces of the ocean from itself? A cosmic coffee filter? And then, how to avoid also straining out every whale and minnow in the sea, every sprite of plankton?

It is no surprise, then, to find that organizations devoted to this issue tend to avoid the idea of cleanup, instead focusing on raising awareness about the overuse of plastic, or on doing science. Which made it all the more remarkable to come across Project Kaisei, a Bay Area non-profit with the confident motto—and mission—of “Capturing the plastic vortex.”

Not content to tilt at the windmill of keeping plastics out of the ocean in the first place, Project Kaisei has chosen to go after the biggest windmill of them all: finding some way to clean it up.

For my part, I was on a quest to visit the world’s most polluted places, sticking my nose into the ultimate examples of environmental ruin I could find, and the prospect of sailing the plastic seas was irresistible. Whatever I might have read about the prospects for ocean cleanup, when I discovered in the spring of 2010 that Project Kaisei was sending its namesake ship to the Garbage Patch, I realized it was likely my only chance of hitching a ride to one of humanity’s grandest monuments to pollution and waste.

And they needed deckhands.

. . .

I first saw the Kaisei at its dock in Point Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco. A steel-hulled, square-rigged, 150-foot-long brigantine, it was a striking sight. Think metal pirate ship and you will have the image. From the moment I first stepped aboard, I tasted that flavor of excitement that has in it a note of terror. The Kaisei had two great masts, from which majestic square sails would drape, sails that belonged in a Patrick O’Brian novel. Dozen upon dozen of cables and lines led from wooden pins on the deck to points above. Was I going to be asked to climb those masts, to edge out along those yards, approximately a thousand feet up? Like most sensible people, I don't really have a fear of heights—only a fear of falling to my death. On the other hand, what is the point of being on a tall ship if you don't experience the tallness? I knew that when asked to go aloft, I would force myself to do it. And so what I really feared was that I wasn't afraid enough.

We departed in late summer. As we made our way through the mouth of San Francisco Bay, I talked with Mary Crowley, the co-founder of Project Kaisei and the mission’s leader. A toothy woman in late middle age, she had a warm smile and an unshakeable belief in the possibilities of marine debris cleanup. She went so far as to envision ocean-borne plastic retrieval as an actual industry. "Fishing for plastics, so to speak, is not that different from fishing for fish," she told me, leaning on the Kaisei's starboard rail.

The goal of the current voyage, Mary said, was to use ocean-current models being developed by scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and at the University of Hawaii to pinpoint the areas with the largest plastic accumulation. By comparing our observations with the scientists' models, it would be possible to devise effective ways of finding the plastic, a critical precondition for future cleanup.

She said we would also be "working on the most effective ways to use commercial ships—tugs, barges, fishing boats—to do actual collection," or, as a Project Kaisei press release put it, "further testing collection technologies to remove the variety of plastic debris from the ocean." The word further alludes to the Kaisei's voyage of the previous summer. I had heard many references in the previous week to the technology developed as part of that voyage, especially "the Beach," a device designed to deal with the plastic confetti. Passively powered by wave motion, the Beach allowed water to run over its surface, I was told, capturing the confetti without the need for impractical filtering, and without catching marine life as well.

Mary’s position, as she explained it to me, was that it simply wasn't enough to talk about stemming the flow of plastic from land, as most organizations did. She had spent her entire life on and around the ocean, building a successful sail-charter business. The ocean was her life's work. She felt she had to do something. "So we have to work very vigorously to stop the flow," she said. "But we also have to effect cleanup."

14 AUGUST—37°49' N 123°29' W

The crew of a ship about to go out of range becomes diligent with its telephones. As we headed out from land, I texted my friends and family one last time, and posted a picture from the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I received one, too, from a friend posted on the Marin Headlands. On the boat, we looked at it, the picture of ourselves. It showed the mouth of the bay, opening out from the land of the Golden Gate. Our ship was in the center of the picture, our huge steel ship, barely a dozen pixels wide, the merest smudge against the sky-colored sea.

As with all true adventures, though, ours was to be remarkable for its long stretches of boredom. Soon our lives became an endless series of watches and off-watches—three hours on, six hours off, three on, six off, repeated forever—and I began to learn a bit about the seafaring life. Our main duty on watch, unsurprisingly, was to watch: to keep an eye to port and to starboard for anything that might threaten to destroy us, other than boredom itself. During nighttime watches, I would stare into the darkness and try to see anything at all. On the second evening, tiny birds danced at the edge of our running lights, and I killed entire hours wondering if they were real.

Watch was also a time for gossip. Ships run on gossip, and it is the most reliable way to spread information among the crew. Boredom creates a powerful suction in the mind for anything interesting, or anything related to your situation—the situation, that is, of being marooned on a small, metal island. Night watches, when the rest of the crew were sleeping, were especially productive. Entire shifts were spent speculating about whether Mary's goals for the voyage were at all achievable.

The space between conversations, normally reserved at sea for communion with the mysteries of the deep, was instead filled by Gabe, a recent Oberlin graduate who, for the duration of the voyage, maintained a running series of food fantasies. Night and day, becalmed or in high seas, he welcomed us into his inner restaurant, a sensual wonderland of Thai green curries and simmering stews. At times it seemed Gabe had no other way to approach the world. Once, during a discussion of the myth of the Garbage Patch as a "plastic island," I caught him staring into space, licking his lips.

"It's more like … like a thin minestrone," he said.

16 AUGUST—36°55' N 129°27' W

Around eight thirty in the morning, I spotted one of our first items of debris: a large bundle of synthetic yellow rope, to starboard. After only three days at sea, our minds were already so tuned to the featurelessness of the ocean surface that this was cause for major excitement. We went thronging to the rail, just in time to see the rope slide out of sight.

There was more trash that day, small pieces here and there. But we had no illusions that we were anywhere near our destination. We hadn't traveled far enough, and the weather was still cool and windy, not the warm doldrums we could expect once we reached the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre—the Garbage Patch’s home waters. Still, several people went up into the crosstrees to keep lookout, and soon there was another rope sighting. Gabe and I went thronging to the rail. You must always throng to the rail, I felt, even if there are only two of you. There it was: a tattered section of rope, maybe eighteen inches long.

"Oh, shit," said Gabe. "That is going to fuck up some ecosystem."

A new task was added to our watch duties: debris lookout. Two crew members would sit in the bow, using a walkie-talkie to report anything they saw to a third member of the watch, who would note its latitude and longitude and the time of sighting in the logbook.

My inner nerd was unsatisfied. How could our observations be compared to the ocean-current models if we didn’t make them in a methodical or standardized way? But there would be no real data collection, no quantitative sampling. There wasn't even any consistent method for eyeballing it. Should we be looking everywhere and anywhere? Or should we be looking at a defined area, so that the debris count from one watch might be meaningfully compared with that of the next?

Soon, a pair of work lights were strapped to the netting underneath the bowsprit, and debris watch extended around the clock. Now we stood at the rails even at night, staring into the tiny pools of light that trickled forward onto the rising, falling, onrushing ocean. In active seas, the prow of the ship became a mesmerizing twilight zone, where I stood watching bow waves crash aside. Above me, the Kaisei's great square sails strained forward, taut against the night. But when we couldn't find this reverie, some of us grumbled. What, exactly, was the point?

The point, we realized, was that our goal was not to study the debris in any useful way, but simply to find it. We were looking for what Mary referred to as "current lines" of trash, narrow bands of high density. Mary spoke again and again of the current lines, and began to suspect that if the Kaisei returned to port heavy with trash, it would serve to validate Project Kaisei’s dream of cleanup. But for that, we would have to find the mother lode. It was the paradoxical symbiosis that can afflict any activist. You come to depend on the problem you’re fighting. That we were so focused on finding the Garbage Patch in a concrete and spectacular form was tragic—particularly because it isn’t a visually spectacular problem. As we would discover once we reached the Gyre, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch doesn’t actually look like much—unless you’re paying attention. The plastic confetti are invisible unless you scrutinize the surface of the water. And the millions of plastic bottles and laundry hampers and snarls of old fishing tackle are not clumped into a single mass. Yet the Garbage Patch is indeed a problem of vast scale and implications.

This conflict between the reality of the problem and its non-visual nature is at the root of the myth of the plastic island. We hunger for a compelling image to help us understand the issue. But depending too much on spectacular imagery can actually limit our understanding. We create islands where none exist, and then waste our time searching for them. We become Ahabs without a whale.

If we absolutely must have an image to use in thinking of the Garbage Patch, it should be that of a galaxy. The Garbage Patch is like the Milky Way, an impossibly massive spiral that, because of its very vastness, is also phenomenally diffuse. You could pass right through it without ever bumping into a star or a planet. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. And please note: Your galaxy is many times the size of Texas.

19 AUGUST—35°05' N 138°42' W

On our fifth day—sixth? twelfth?—we got our first real taste. There was debris in the water again. Someone brought out a long pole with a basket of netting at its end, and we started hunting. In this way, like Vikings spearfishing from the deck of a warship, we brought several scraps of trash aboard.

Meanwhile, a pair of volunteers took the dinghy out, buzzing around to pick up bits of debris spotted by people aloft. I grabbed a walkie-talkie and took bow watch, calling in sightings for the log. There was also a radio in the dinghy. If any of us saw something particularly interesting—a bucket, a large piece of tarp—the dinghy would skip across the ocean in hot pursuit.

Robin—a witty, retired science teacher from Hawaii—came forward to the bow to say hello. People liked to say hello when you were in the bow, not only because it was scenic and quiet but also because it was one of the few places where you could talk without being overheard.

I told him I didn't think our work was very useful.

“It's a joke!” he said, making a face.

And what of “further testing collection technologies,” as had been planned? So far, we were innocent of any such initiative, except for Robin's project on the wheelhouse roof. He was working—at Mary's suggestion, I think—on jury-rigging a wide, rigid net that, were we to drag it through a dense swath of garbage, might snag a share. This was technology development on the Kaisei: a warmhearted, wisecracking retiree gamely slinging a screw gun. I had noticed something else on the wheelhouse roof. It was the Beach, stored from last year. This was the innovative wave-action device purpose-designed by Project Kaisei to isolate plastic confetti from the ocean water.

It was a slope-topped plywood box.

Someone on the ship had built it during the previous summer's voyage. Now it was tied down just aft of where we stood at the wheel, steering the ship. For a long time I hadn't noticed it. Because it looked like a plywood box. The rift between my interest in the Garbage Patch and my skepticism about cleanup was growing ever wider.

The dinghy zipped by on an intercept course for another scrap of debris. Robin reached out with two fingers together, as if he were going to pinch the ocean.

"It's like you're standing on the beach and picking up one tiny, tiny bit of sand," he said.

And still the Kaisei surged forward on the wind, across the deepening cobalt of the ocean, taking us deeper and deeper into the heart of the Garbage Patch.

Adapted and reprinted from Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell. Copyright (c) 2012 by Andrew Blackwell. By permission of Rodale, Inc. Available wherever books are sold.

Dolphin carcasses are displayed by conservationists and environmental police officers at San Jose beach, 40kms north of Chiclayo, Peru, on April 6, 2012. The cause of death of over 800 dolphins in the last four months on the shores of Piura and Lambayeque are still being researched, Gabriel Quijandria, Deputy Environment Minister said on April 20, 2012. More about the ongoing investigation into the possible cause of these mass die-offs: CBS News, MSNBC, AFP, DPA, CNN, (REUTERS/Heinze Plenge)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/24/why-have-almost-900-dead-dolph.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/15/new-hypothesis-proposes-a-link.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/15/new-hypothesis-proposes-a-link.html#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:57:38 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=149543

Let me preface anything else in this post by clarifying something important. What we are talking about here is a hypothesis—it's not been proven. In fact, it's not even really been tested yet. The studies that will put the hypothesis to the test are currently underway. So please (please, please, please) do not walk away assuming this is a given. It's not. It could very well be completely and utterly wrong. But it's interesting. And it will be in the news. And I want you guys to hear about it in the proper context.

Make sense? Okay, then ...

There are scientists who think that there could, possibly be a connection between air pollution and obesity.

This idea is (for now) based on "what if" extrapolation rather than data. But it's not totally crazy. We know air pollution affects health in ways would not have been obvious just a few decades ago. For instance, there is a strong, well-documented connection between air pollution and heart disease. In 2009, Aruni Bhatnagar, professor of medicine at the University of Louisville, told me that studies from 250 different metropolitan areas in the United States showed that a spike in air pollution was reliably followed by a spike in cardiac deaths within next 24-48 hours. The people primarily at risk are those who already have underlying heart health problems, but it's not always clear who those people are. We don't yet know exactly how pollution affects the heart—it could well be a cascade of effects that actually starts in the lungs—but we can see that the affect is there.

This new hypothesis, proposed by Arne Astrup, head of the department of obesity and nutrition at the University of Copenhagen, does not come with that kind of supporting evidence. Instead, it's more of an extrapolation.

At Discovery News, Emily Sohn explains why this hypothesis could make sense—and why it's way too early to say whether or not it's actually right.

The idea proposes that breathing in extra CO2 makes blood more acidic, which in turn causes neurons that regulate appetite, sleep and metabolism to fire more frequently. As a result, we might be eating more, sleeping less and gaining more weight, partly as a result of the air we breathe.

...Obesity and its associated health risks have escalated dramatically in the last few decades. And even though just about everyone thinks the reason is obvious -- we are eating too many calories and exercising too little -- research has revealed that obesity is far more complex than that, with multiple genes, metabolic pathways and even gut microbes involved, said obesity researcher David Allison, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Read the full story at Discovery News

Earlier this week, I told you about a new study tracking radioactive fallout from the nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

It started with a team of researchers in California, who had been monitoring radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere since 2009. Last spring, after an earthquake and tsunami critically damaged several reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, those researchers watched the levels of radioactive sulfur skyrocket, relatively speaking. The amounts of radioactive sulfur that reached the California coast weren't high enough to be a threat to humans, but they made a big impact on extremely sensitive monitoring equipment.

Using that data, the researchers were able to figure out where the radioactive sulfur came from and back-calculate how much would have been produced at the site of the disaster—information that can tell us something about how dangerous the disaster really was to people living nearby.

But these researchers weren't the first to collect radioactive isotopes from Fukushima on American shores. And they weren't the first to offer up improved estimations of how much radiation leaked from the damaged power plant in the early days of the disaster. I thought this study was interesting. But, like a lot of you, I was left wondering why it was important.

Then yesterday, I interviewed Antra Priyadarshi, the lead author on the peer-reviewed paper that was published about this study. And I realized I'd gotten the story all wrong. This paper is about radioactive sulfur from the Fukushima disaster. But it isn't about the Fukushima disaster. It's not even about nuclear power. Not really.

In reality, this is a paper about coal. And it's important because of what it can tell us about the sort of air pollution that is much more mundane—and more deadly—than the fallout from a single nuclear disaster.

To get this, you first have to understand who the researchers are and why they've been monitoring radioactive sulfur for so long. It has nothing to do with nuclear power or nuclear weapons.

Antra Priyadarshi is a postdoc—a scientist who has recently earned their Ph.D., but is doing research under the guidance of another, older scientist. You can think of it like an apprenticeship program, in a way. Priyadarshi works in the lab of Mark Thiemens, an atmospheric scientist. The Thiemens Lab is interested in questions of climate systems and the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. In particular, they're interested in ozone.

Ozone is a molecule of three oxygen atoms bound together, and it's the same stuff that makes up the protective ozone layer around there Earth. Way off in the upper atmosphere, ozone is a Good Thing. But context matters. When ozone ends up on our level, where humans can breathe it in, it becomes a problem. That's because ozone can, essentially, give the lining of your lungs a sunburn. The more ozone you inhale, the more damage to your cardiovascular system.

There's a couple of reasons ozone and people come into contact. One is pollution: On hot days, chemicals from car and factory exhaust can turn into ground-level ozone. But ozone from the upper atmosphere can also get transported down to our level naturally. One of the key things the Thiemens Lab is trying to understand is how those natural movements work, why they happen, and what that means for the way pollution-based ozone gets transported from exhaust-rich urban areas to other parts of the world.

This is where the radioactive sulfur comes in, because there's a natural source of that, as well.

In the upper atmosphere, where the naturally occurring ozone is formed, high-energy particles from cosmic rays react with argon to form radioactive sulfur. When air from high altitudes intrudes on our atmospheric level, it brings both ozone and radioactive sulfur along for the ride. Antra Priyadarshi has been monitoring radioactive sulfur both because of the role those isotopes play in climate—there's some evidence that they can serve as points for clouds to condense around and produce raindrops—and because of what the movement of sulfur can tell her about the movement of ozone.

So that explains why Priyadarshi and her colleagues were out there monitoring radioactive sulfur to begin with. But why is this paper important? What does it add to her research?

For that, you have to look to China, and a different form of sulfur.

When we burn coal, one of the things that goes up in smoke is sulfur dioxide. It's not radioactive, but it is dangerous. Sulfur dioxide, like ozone, damages human respiratory and cardiovascular systems. It's a key ingredient in acid rain, which harms crops and other plants, and damages buildings. And it's also a major player in producing particulate matter—tiny grains that get inside your lungs and cause long-term damage.

Particulate matter is also an important factor in climate change. That's because, while particulates are very bad for human health, they also play a role in cooling down the planet. Basically, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap heat and particulate matter in the atmosphere prevents heat from the sun from getting in. These two forces work against each other, even though, in man-made terms, they come from the same place—fossil fuel emissions.

When we talk about cleaning up emissions, we're usually talking about reducing the amount of sulfur and particulates produced, but not the amount of greenhouse gases. So, ironically, cleaner tailpipes and smokestacks save lives in the short term, but contribute to a rising global temperature in the long term.

That's why people are watching China. Western countries started scrubbing sulfur out of their emissions decades ago. Our emissions aren't sulfur-free, but they're a lot cleaner than they used to be. China, on the other hand, is rapidly ramping up the amount of coal it burns, and the emissions aren't being cleaned up. It's the world's largest sulfur dioxide polluter today. And scientists are curious about how that sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere is masking the effects of greenhouse gases. When China starts cleaning up its smokestacks, what will happen to the global temperature? How does sulfur dioxide from China affect the rest of the world?

That second question has been very difficult to answer. Think of all the coal that gets burnt everywhere, every day. In order to know something about how sulfur dioxide travels, you have to be able to separate the sulfur dioxide from one factory, or one power plant, and trace it as it moves through the atmosphere. That's like listening to five symphonies playing at once and trying to pick out the work of a single flautist.

Until now.

This is why a study of radioactive sulfur from Fukushima matters. That disaster produced so much radioactive sulfur that it was obvious when the plume from Fukushima reached the shores of California. This signal was loud enough to stand out from the noise. The radioactive sulfur from Fukushima isn't exactly the same thing as the sulfur dioxide from Chinese power plants, but it is close enough that it can serve as a marker. It's a model that can tell scientists some important things about how sulfur travels through the atmosphere and how it crosses great distances, like the Pacific Ocean.

"There are lots of sources of sulfur pollution and a lot of uncertainty in the models," Antra Priyadarshi said. "But this is a case when we can know better how much radioactive sulfur was produced at the source, and how much arrived, and you can neglect the natural background signal. That gives you a better estimation of how much sulfur could be transported over the Pacific."