Minnesota lakes are loaded with chemicals -- even cocaine

By Emily Sohn
Discovery News

www.startribune.com

From urban and developed to remote and isolated, lakes around Minnesota contain a wide range of chemicals, including DEET, BPA, prescription drugs and even cocaine.

The findings, which came out of the first large-scale, systematic statewide study, suggest that it might be worth taking a wider look at bodies of water around the country for chemicals that have potential consequences for both the environment and human health.

For now, it’s not clear how all of the chemicals are getting into Minnesota’s lakes or exactly what effects they might be having on animals or people.

“It’s not as though people should worry about going to the lake or taking their dogs to the lakes,” said Mark Ferrey, an environmental scientist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which published the new report. “We’re talking about how we’re affecting lakes and rivers in ways that we probably don’t understand yet.”

“It’s disquieting,” he added. “We could be affecting fish populations or entire ecosystems in ways that are largely invisible to us.”

Starting about a decade ago, in routine reconnaissance, Ferrey and colleagues began collecting surface waters from rivers and streams around Minnesota. As expected, analyses showed contaminants downstream from wastewater treatment plants and in other highly developed areas. But the researchers were surprised when chemicals also turned up in background samples collected in lakes with mostly untouched shorelines.

For the new study, which was part of a larger national project, sampling crews collected water from 50 Minnesota lakes, which were randomly chosen by a computer program that picked geographic coordinates. Samples were then analyzed in a Vancouver lab for a suite of 125 chemicals.

Forty-seven out of 50 lakes contained at least one chemical on the list, the researchers reported. The bug-repellent DEET was the most widespread, turning up in 76 percent of the lakes sampled. BPA, a plasticizer that has been linked to reproductive and developmental problems, showed up in 43 percent of the lakes.

About a third of the lakes contained cocaine. A similar proportion contained the antidepressant amitriptyline. And the same number contained carbodox, an antibiotic used in pigs, which showed up even in lakes that were not surrounded by agricultural land. Triclosan, a chemical used in antimicrobial soaps, appeared in 14 percent of the lakes.

It’s still a mystery how all of those chemicals are getting into lakes in the first place, but Ferrey suspects that some may be riding on specks of dust in the air. One study in Italy found that cocaine attaches to particles that are about 2.5 microns in size, and more cocaine floats through the air in places where cocaine use is more prevalent.

Concentrations of chemicals were very low, measurable as parts per trillion. But some research suggests that hormone-disrupting chemicals can have effects even at those low levels, Ferrey said. In one study in an experimental lake, dosing the water with an estrogenic contraceptive at five parts per trillion caused populations of fathead minnows and trout to plummet. When researchers stopped adding the chemical to the water, the fish rebounded.

“Even at very low doses,” Ferrey said, “things that are hormones or hormone-like don’t have to be toxic or poisonous to exert strong effects.”

The new findings add important detail to previous work that had documented the presence of a smaller number of compounds in lakes around the country, said research hydrologist Dana Kolpin, head of the emerging contaminants and environment project at the U.S. Geological Survey in Iowa City.

For now, the new study remains a one-time snapshot of what’s out there, he said. Future work will determine if levels change throughout the seasons and whether the findings are cause for concern.

“I want to be middle of the road,” Kolpin said. “I don’t want to say the sky is falling. But these certainly are compounds that wouldn’t be occurring naturally. That means this warrants more research to see if there is something we need to be concerned about.”

Minnesota lakes are loaded with chemicals -- even cocaine

Soul and Soil: How Whole Foods Feeds the Virtuous Cycle

ForaTv

Soul and Soil: How Whole Foods Feeds the Virtuous Cycle

America's engine of the future to get 'Made in China' label

mazautolv 

Fox News

Thanks to generous support from a foreign backer, there is renewed hope for an American attempt to revolutionize, modernize and sanitize the automobile engine.

The catch?  The finished product will be stamped “Made in China.”

EcoMotors, a startup engineering company based in Allen Park, Mich., plans to produce up to 150,000 of its opposed-piston, opposed-cylinder (OPOC) two-stroke engines annually in a factory funded by Zhongding Power. The facility will be located in China’s Anhui Province, west of Shanghai.

EcoMotors CEO Don Runkle told FoxNews.com that Zhongding has committed to building a plant for the engines with the hope of supplying generator companies and builders of medium-duty trucks.

“We have talked to a number of automobile manufacturers in the United States, as well as in China,” Runkle said.  He added that EcoMotors has “a letter of intent with Generac,” an American manufacturer of generators that currently buys engines from John Deere and Iveco.

Although Chinese-built generators and motorcycles are becoming more common in the United States, engines produced there have rarely seen duty in American automobiles. The first was when General Motors dropped a Chinese-made 3.4-liter V-6 into its 2005 Chevrolet Equinox and Pontiac Torrent crossovers.

In 2010, when Zhongding agreed to invest up to $18 million toward engineering costs for the OPOC engine, Runkle announced that “this initiative will create a range of high-skill R&D jobs here in southeast Michigan, further underscoring the region's critical role as the incubator of tomorrow’s high-efficiency powertrain solutions.”

The OPOC two-stroke engine is a markedly different concept than the four-stroke engines fitted to most modern automobiles. While two-strokes are generally lighter, have fewer moving parts and a higher power density than comparable four-strokes, they are often not as durable and burn a lot of oil, resulting in worse emissions. EcoMotors claims to have overcome these hurdles with its new technology.

The EcoMotors-designed power plant does without valves and cylinder heads, and places two pistons facing one another in each cylinder like boxers' gloves, with the pistons in turn connected to identical counterparts in an adjacent cylinder. The expansion stroke on one side creates a compression stroke in the other.

“Our innovation is an unusual engine architecture,” Runkle said.

The company says the motors can be configured to run on a variety of fuels, including gasoline and diesel, and will be cheaper to build while delivering between 20 and 50 percent better fuel economy than conventional internal combustion engines, depending on their application.

Production of the OPOC is set to begin in 2014.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2013/04/24/america-new-engine-future-to-be-made-in-china/#ixzz2RPLVRI4O

America's engine of the future to get 'Made in China' label

Eco-friendly funerals: Six feet greener

EconomistMagazine

Eco-friendly funerals: Six feet greener

Filmmakers capture 75 minutes glacier breakup

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Filmmakers capture 75 minutes glacier breakup

Could asteroid dust counter climate change on Earth?

Scientists have proposed creating a dust cloud made of asteroid material that could help to cool Earth. Here, an artist's depiction shows what a spacecraft spewing asteroid dust might look like.

NBC news/ By Charles Choi Contributor

To combat global warming, scientists in Scotland now suggest an out-of-this-world solution — a giant dust cloud in space, blasted off an asteroid, which would act like a sunshade for Earth.

The world is warming and the climate is changing. Although many want to prevent these shifts by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat from the sun, some controversially suggest deliberating manipulating the planet's climate with large-scale engineering projects, commonly called geoengineering.

Instead of altering the climate by targeting either the oceans or the atmosphere, some researchers have suggested geoengineering projects that would affect the entire planet from space. For instance, projects that reduced the amount of solar radiation Earth receives by 1.7 percent could offset the effects of a global increase in temperature of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that climate models suggest average global temperatures will rise by 2 to 11.5 degrees F (1.1 to 6.4 degrees C) by the end of this century.

"A 1.7 percent reduction is very small and will hardly be noticeable on Earth," said researcher Russell Bewick, a space scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. "People sometimes get the idea of giant screens blocking the entire sun. This is not the case ... as [the device] is constantly between the sun and the earth, it acts merely as a very light shade or filter."

Shading Earth One proposal to shade Earth from the sun would place giant mirrors in space. The main problem with this concept is the immense cost and effort needed either to build and launch such reflectors or to construct them in outer space — the current cost to launch an object into low Earth orbit runs into thousands of dollars per pound. Another would use blankets of dust to blot out the sun, just as clouds do for Earth. These offer the virtue of simplicity compared with mirrors, but run the risk of getting dispersed over time by solar radiation and the gravitational pull of the sun, moon and planets. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

Now, instead of having a dust cloud floating by itself in space, researchers suggest that an asteroid could essentially gravitationally anchor a dust cloud in space to block sunlight and cool the planet.   More >>

Could asteroid dust counter climate change on Earth?

Tackling climate change: Carbon capture and storage

EconomistMagazine

Shell

Tackling climate change: Carbon capture and storage

Ice melt found across 97 percent of Greenland, satellites show

Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory

About 40 percent of Greenland's ice sheet thawed at or near the surface on July 8. Four days later, the melt had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed.

By Miguel Llanos, NBC News

Three satellites found that 97 percent of Greenland -- the land mass second only to Antarctica for its volume of ice -- underwent a thaw never before seen in 33 years of satellite tracking, NASA reported Tuesday.

Satellite experts at first didn't trust their readings, especially since they showed an incredible acceleration. Over four days, Greenland's ice sheet -- which covers 683,000 square miles -- went from 40 percent in thaw to nearly entirely in thaw.

"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: Was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA's statement about the findings.

More >>

Ice melt found across 97 percent of Greenland, satellites show

Frack contamination [hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction]

Frack contamination [hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction]

Oil Spill - Site 23051, Not Going Away

SkyTruth 
Pretty sizable slick emanating from Site 23051 shown in yesterday's MODIS image. Below is the image with no markups:

MODIS Aqua image from 5/30

And the same image below showing the size of the slick using the tools in Google Earth to measure the perimeter of the spill:

The outline of this slick is over 27 miles in diameter, the area of the spill is over 11,000 acres. The report from the NRC which is collected daily by our SkyTruth Alerts on this spill lists it as 11.55 gallons of oil. The SkyTruth calculations, assuming a minimum average thickness of 1/1000th of a millimeter (1 micron) on the surface, comes out to  more than 11,700 gallons. You can see more images of this site on our SkyTruth Oil Spill Reports site here, and you can look over our Site 23051 Chronology page which is updated everyday.

Oil Spill - Site 23051, Not Going Away

Robotic 'fish' take to seas to catch pollution sooner

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More >>

Robotic 'fish' take to seas to catch pollution sooner

800-year-old tree falls victim to cedar poachers

Wilderness Comittee/Torrance Coste, an activist with the Wilderness Committee on Canada's Vancouver Island, surveys the stump of an 800-year-old red cedar that poachers cut up and hauled out of Carmanah-Walbran Provincial Park.

Read >>

800-year-old tree falls victim to cedar poachers

The Lexicon of Sustainability

By PBS

Our earliest descendants were hunter/gatherers who foraged for their food, were in tune with their surroundings, and ate with the seasons. After foraging was essentially replaced by agriculture, people became increasingly detached from where their food came from. Foraging offers people a way to reconnect with nature and shows that food is all around us. 

The Lexicon of Sustainability

Shell Reports 10-Mile-Long Slick in Deepwater Gulf of Mexico

Sky Truth/

Posted: 12 Apr 2012 02:37 PM PDT

Yesterday evening Shell reported sighting a 10-mile by 1-mile oil slick between two of their major deepwater oil production platforms, Ursa and Mars. (Here's what Mars looked like after getting walloped by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005.) Actually, federal employees with BSEE who happened to be out there noticed the slick and helpfully pointed it out to Shell, who then mobilized a nearby cleanup vessel and some ROVs to do seafloor inspections.So far Shell claims the slick is not caused by any of their operations, and they note the presence of known natural oil seeps nearby. 

This is located in the Mississippi Canyon area of the Gulf, 130 miles south of New Orleans and about 60 miles beyond the tip of the Mississippi Delta, in water about 3,200' deep. 

Yesterday's low resolution MODIS/Terra satellite image of the area, shot at 16:50 UTC (10:50 am local time) shows what appears to be a narrow, 17-mile-long slick in the vicinity of the two platforms.  We often see slicks from known natural oil seeps that are about this size; some in the Green Canyon area to the west show up well on this same image.  Low clouds and their shadows are scattered across the lower half of this view:

Here is the same scene; we've traced the slick in yellow:

 And here is the same scene again. We've added the locations of known oil and gas platforms (orange dots) and seafloor pipelines (orange lines).  Green dots indicate the locations of known natural oil seeps, based on data provided by Florida State University. Sea-surface wind data collected from the Mars platform show that the wind was blowing from the west or northwest for most of the day on April 11, so we think this slick should originate from a source near the west (left) end.  We don't see any obvious candidates near that end of the slick, so at this time we're not sure what to make of this:

Our friend in the air, Bonny Schumaker, flew out over this site today and reported seeing a thin patchy slick of rainbow sheen but no obvious source.  She'll post photos and video to her site soon.  In the meantime, check out the report, videos and photos from her Gulf overflight on April 6, documenting continuing chronic leakage from the Taylor Energy / 23051 site and a few other surprises - some good, some not so much.

Shell Reports 10-Mile-Long Slick in Deepwater Gulf of Mexico

World's First Air-Powered Car: Zero Emissions

Popular Mechanics June 1, 2007 3:05 AM

This six-seater tax is powered entirely by a tank filled with compressed air.

India's largest automaker is set to start producing the world's first commercial air-powered vehicle. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine's pistons. Some 6000 zero-emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008.

Barring any last-minute design changes on the way to production, the Air Car should be surprisingly practical. The $12,700 CityCAT, one of a handful of planned Air Car models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units; MDI says it should cost around $2 to fill the car's carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi. Drivers also will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car's built-in compressor to refill the tanks in about 4 hours.

Of course, the Air Car will likely never hit American shores, especially considering its all-glue construction. But that doesn't mean the major automakers can write it off as a bizarre Indian experiment — MDI has signed deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

Read more: Here >> and  Here >>
Also  Here >>

World's First Air-Powered Car: Zero Emissions

Bill Gates Pours Millions Into Geoengineering

Infowars.com/ Paul Joseph Watson

Microsoft founder Bill Gates continues to pour millions of dollars into high-risk geoengineering projects that purport to offer a solution to global warming yet have been savaged by environmentalists as potentially posing a greater threat than climate change itself.

“Concern is now growing that the small but influential group of scientists, and their backers, may have a disproportionate effect on major decisions about geoengineering research and policy,” reports the London Guardian, quoting critics who allege that Gates’ funding has enabled geoengineering advocates to “dominate the deliberations of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

In 2010, Gates was criticized for ploughing $300,000 dollars into a sea trial of cloud-whitening technology which involved spraying clouds with microscopic particles in an effort to make them reflect more sunlight, an experiment dubbed “dangerous” by environmental campaigners.

The report reveals that Gates has backed Professors David Keith, of Harvard University, and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, to the tune of $4.6 million dollars to fund studies based around the premise of injecting sulphur particles into the upper atmosphere designed to reflect sunlight.

As we have previously documented, experiments similar to Caldeira’s proposal are already being carried out by U.S. government -backed scientists, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, who in 2009 began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.

Exposure to sulphur has been linked to innumerable physical and neurological diseases, including reproductive failure, behavioral changes, damage to the immune system, as well as liver, heart and stomach disorders.

Even pro-geoengineering scientist Mark Watson, admits that injecting sulphur into the atmosphere could lead to “acid rain, ozone depletion or weather pattern disruption.”

Rutgers University meteorologist Alan Robock also, “created computer simulations indicating that sulfate clouds could potentially weaken the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing rain that irrigates the food crops of billions of people.”

Bill Gates Pours Millions Into Geoengineering

Canada's Oil Sands - Come see for yourself...

Canada's Oil Sands - Come see for yourself...

Global warming creates 'new normal' in Arctic

By Pete Spotts Staff writer

Christian Science Monitor

Global warming has brought a "new normal" to the Arctic, with warmer air and ocean temperatures, thinner and less expansive summer sea ice, and greener vegetation in coastal regions abutting the open water.

In addition, longer periods of open water during the annual sea-ice melt season is allowing the ocean to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to seasonal bouts of ocean acidification in some areas.

These broad observations, along with more-detailed looks at some 32 environmental indicators, appear in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2011 Arctic Report Card, released Thursday.

The changes have wide implications, from opening new sources of offshore oil, gas, and minerals to speeding the release of heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere as permafrost melts.

Even on a continental level, changes in atmospheric circulation patterns at the top of the world can affect the intensity of winter weather well into the lower latitudes.

More >>

Global warming creates 'new normal' in Arctic

Last Chance for Kyoto Protocol

Scientific American
By Jon Herskovitz and Agnieszka Flak

Countries have been at loggerheads for years and hopes are slim of any major progress, despite increasingly dire warnings from climate scientists 

Here >>  and   Here >>

Last Chance for Kyoto Protocol

1000 Naked Israelis Strip to Save the Dead Sea

Karin Kloosterman

 

Spencer Tunick’s naked shoot at the Dead Sea in Israel: yes, some women even got covered in Dead Sea mud.

Cloaked in secrecy, they wouldn’t know the location until they got into the bus. While politics in the Middle East seems to overshadow environmental issues, some passionate Israelis decided to be a part of history, and photographer Spencer Tunick’s dream of his latest “Naked Sea” installation, at the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth.

The nude models aged 18 to 77 met early Saturday morning, according to one participant, calling it both exhilarating and strangely natural to be part of one of the latest Tunick projects. Tunick who comes from a religious Jewish family in New York has done about 75 naked installations in cities around the world. This one was about environmental awareness and freedom in the Middle East. The Dead Sea is rapidly sinking due to water shortages from one end in the north as the Jordan River runs dry, and greedy chemical companies from Israel and Jordan on the south side. More >

1000 Naked Israelis Strip to Save the Dead Sea