Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.
But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.
Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.
Set to a backdrop of stunning photography from the International League of Conservation Photographers, leading marine scientists from Stanford and MBARI discuss the role of the ocean in climate change and the potential impacts of a targeted 2C rise in global temperature. This is an iLCP media production in partnership with Center for Ocean Solutions. More on Climate Change and the Ocean here.
Tata Group, the Indian company behind the tiny, super-cheap Nano car, has just announced it will be selling a low-cost water filter.
The Tata ‘Swach’ purifier is less than one metre tall, and does not need running water or electricity to work…. The Swach uses ash from rice milling to filter out bacteria, and also uses tiny silver particles to kill harmful germs that can lead to diseases like diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid.
The health consequences of poor water quality are enormous for developing countries like India, with millions of people affected.
Tata says the Swach will cost under 1,000 rupees. That’s about 10 to 20 times the daily wages in rural India, which makes it affordable for the country’s working poor.
Most simply, a snow crystal forms when an already supercooled cloud particle freezes. However, this event is the result of a delicate balance among the variables described in the Nakaya Diagram.
In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.
A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The findings were the latest update on a 10-year census of marine life.“Parts of the deep sea that we assumed were homogenous are actually quite complex,” said Robert S. Carney, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University and a lead researcher on the deep seas.Thousands of marine species eke out an existence in the ocean’s pitch-black depths by feeding on the snowlike decaying matter that cascades down — even sunken whale bones. Oil and methane also are an energy source for the bottom-dwellers, the report said.The researchers have found about 5,600 new species on top of the 230,000 known. They hope to add several thousand more by October 2010, when the census will be done.The scientists say they could announce that a million or more species remain unknown. On land, biologists have catalogued about 1.5 million plants and animals.
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Sea turtles are sensitive to numerous effects of warming. They feed on reefs, which are dying in hotter, more acidic seas. They lay eggs on beaches that are being inundated by rising seas and more violent storm surges.
More uniquely, their gender is determined not by genes but by the egg’s temperature during development. Small rises in beach temperatures can result in all-female populations, obviously problematic for survival.
“The turtles are very good storytellers about the effect of climate change on coastal habitats,” said Carlos Drews, the regional marine species coordinator for the conservation group W.W.F. “The climate is changing so much faster than before, and these animals depend on so much for temperature.”
If the sand around the eggs hits 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), the gender balance shifts to females, Mr. Drews said, and at about 32 degrees (89.6 Fahrenheit) they are all female. Above 34 (93), “you get boiled eggs,” he said.
On some nesting beaches, scientists are artificially cooling nests with shade or irrigation and trying to protect broader areas of coastal property from development to ensure that turtles have a place to nest as the seas rise.
