| Jan 29, 2014 | Environment / Health“It’s been a bit cold here,” my dad told me on a recent phone call. He lives in Chicago; I’m in San Diego. The next time I turned on the news, I saw headlines screaming “Polar Vortex!” with sub-zero temperatures across the Midwest....
| | Environment / HealthWill our fossil-fueled economy make humans go the way of the dinosaurs? There are plenty of reasons to think so. Coal, oil, and gas continue to account for 87 percent of global energy consumption despite scientific consensus that drastic change is essential for...
| Jan 22, 2014 | Environment / Health“There’s a folksy saying my grandma taught me: ‘If it smells like licorice and tastes like licorice, it must be licorice.’ Now it has a corollary: ‘Or it could also be a 4-methylcyclohexane methanol spill into your water supply, so grab...
| Jan 15, 2014 | Environment / HealthWhen American aid worker-turned essayist William Powers went to Bolivia, he found the Chiquitano indigenous people didn’t share our concept of “the environment.” How could a people living in one of the most pristine tropical forests in the world fail...
| | Environment / HealthCan antibiotic medicines, long hailed as miracle drugs, be too much of a good thing? Yes. Two factors are at work here. First, bacteria (one of the earliest forms of life on Earth) are miracles in their own right, with a stunning ability to outsmart the antibiotic...
