Fred Pearce: Solving the Ozone Problem→

Yale360:

“Did the Montreal Protocol fix the ozone hole? It seemed so. With chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-eating chemicals banned, many scientists said it was only a matter of time before the ozone layer recharged, and the annual hole over Antarctica healed for good.

But 30 years on, some atmospheric chemists are not so sure. The healing is proving painfully slow. And new discoveries about chemicals not covered by the protocol are raising fears that full recovery could be postponed into the 22nd century – or possibly even prevented altogether.

In mid-September, the United Nations is celebrating the protocol’s 30th anniversary. It will declare that “we are all ozone heroes.” But are we patting ourselves on the back a bit too soon?

The ozone layer is a long-standing natural feature of the stratosphere, the part of the atmosphere that begins about six miles above the earth. The ozone layer filters out dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and damage many life forms. It may have been essential for the development of life on Earth.”

Emily Nonko: The Roots of NYC Subway System Woes→

Curbed NY:

“New Yorkers now use a transit system in a state of emergency. The past few months have laid bare the enormity of the problems currently facing the century-old subways, from aging infrastructure to a lack of federal dollars available to help make things better.

Much has also been said about how the world’s largest public transportation system has gotten so bad—the lack of funding, of course, but also Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s penchant for prioritizing flashy projects over system maintenance, along with years of mismanagement within the MTA, an agency that’s admitted to misspent funding that doesn’t go toward maintenance.

But start looking at the decline of, and disinvestment in, New York’s rail lines—from the subway to commuter rails like the Long Island Rail Road—and you’ll find that those problems go back much, much further. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they seem to lead to one man in particular: Robert Moses.”

Kirsti Marohn: Surveying Fish in Streams for Water Health→

MPR:

“Chad Anderson and John Sandberg slosh through a muddy stream in hip waders, pausing occasionally to duck under overgrown branches or swat a mosquito.

Sandberg carries a long pole with a metal ring on the end. He moves it through the water, sending out an electrical current that temporarily stuns the fish. Anderson comes behind him with a net, scooping them up. “We want to capture every single species, every fish,” Anderson said. “The little species are sometimes just as important as the big ones...”

This slow and sometimes painstaking work is part of the MPCA’s effort to document and monitor all 80 of Minnesota’s major watersheds. The work has produced a wealth of data about the health of Minnesota’s rivers, lakes and streams.”

Steven Verburg: Farm Pollution Exacerbated by Zebra Mussels→

Wisconsin State Journal:

“An explosion of the zebra mussel population in Lake Mendota this year could mean more foul-smelling shoreline slime and repeats of the major fish kill and vast bloom of toxic bacteria that hit Madison’s lakes already this summer, experts say.

Farm pollution is the main driver of this month’s surprisingly severe water quality woes, but the invasive mollusks now covering much of Lake Mendota’s bottom aren’t going to help matters.

“We’ve been shocked to see how many there are,” said Jake Vander Zanden, UW-Madison’s top expert on zebra mussels.

Zebra mussels change a lake by filtering food from water, which makes water clearer so that additional sunlight reaches the bottom. The sunlight, along with nutrients mussels excrete on the bottom, spur plant growth and the potential for more dead vegetation washing up and decomposing in smelly piles on shores, Vander Zanden said.

This year divers are finding a typical zebra mussel by-product — bottom-clinging mats of algae that look like green cotton candy — all over Lake Mendota, he said.”

Kate Wagner: The Rise of the McModern→

Curbed:

Rachel Sender

“From busy rooflines to plastic shutters, mismatched windows to four-car garages, the McMansion has dominated the American suburban residential landscape for almost 40 years without a notable change in aesthetics. Many people know a McMansion when they see one. The typical McMansion follows a formula: It’s large, cheaply constructed, and architecturally sloppy.

How to identify a McModern, as per McMansion Hell:
-Single-family detached home
-Constructed from inexpensive materials, such as vinyl, stucco board, and veneers, rather than traditional materials such as stucco or reinforced concrete
-Contrasting exterior cladding materials and colors
-Attached garage and/or two-story foyer
-Sometimes features non-modern details like Tuscan columns or windows with stylized muntins
-Massing and rooflines may be over-elaborate, combining several roof forms, e.g. terrace, shed, “butterfly,” or “M-shaped”
-May include decorative forms like extruded walls or cantilevers clad in differing materials
-Windows are erratically sized and placed in “artistic” configurations without consideration for overall composition”

See more from Kate Wagner at McMansion Hell

Carl Zimmer: A Plague Killing Deer and Elk→

New York Times:

“Dr. Zabel and his colleagues are developing plans to burn plots of National Park Service land in Arkansas and Colorado. If the experiments turn out as the researchers hope, they will spare some elk and deer a gruesome death.

Across a growing swath of North America, these animals are dying from a mysterious disorder called chronic wasting disease. It’s caused not by a virus or bacterium, but a deformed protein called a prion.

When ingested, prions force normal proteins in the animal’s body to become deformed as well. Over the course of months, prions can gradually wreck the animal’s nervous system, ultimately killing it.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of chronic wasting disease. In the September issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Dr. Zabel, an immunologist at Colorado State University, and his former graduate student Aimee Ortega survey what scientists have learned about the slow-spreading plague.

It makes for ominous reading. “There’s a lot that we still don’t know and don’t understand about the disease,” Dr. Zabel said in an interview. Once chronic wasting disease gets a foothold, it can spread relentlessly. It’s now documented in 24 states, and continues to expand into new ranges. In some herds, as many as half of the animals carry prions.”

Adam Rogers: Apple's New Headquarters is Old Culture→

Wired:

“You can’t understand a building without looking at what’s around it—its site, as the architects say. From that angle, Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general. People rightly credit Apple for defining the look and feel of the future; its computers and phones seem like science fiction. But by building a mega-headquarters straight out of the middle of the last century, Apple has exacerbated the already serious problems endemic to 21st-century suburbs like Cupertino—transportation, housing, and economics. Apple Park is an anachronism wrapped in glass, tucked into a neighborhood.”

Apple can't be good at everything. Steve Job grew up in a suburb and his formative experiences likely influenced his ideals of corporate headquarters.

Lucas Reilly: The Most Important Scientist You've Never Heard Of→

Mental Floss:

“For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself...

on the prairies and farms of central Iowa, a 2-year-old boy named Clair Patterson played. His boyhood would go on to be like something out of Tom Sawyer. There were no cars in town. Only a hundred kids attended his school. A regular weekend entailed gallivanting into the woods with friends, with no adult supervision, to fish, hunt squirrels, and camp along the Skunk River. His adventures stoked a curiosity about the natural world, a curiosity his mother fed by one day buying him a chemistry set. Patterson began mixing chemicals in his basement. He started reading his uncle’s chemistry textbook. By eighth grade, he was schooling his science teachers.

During these years, Patterson nurtured a passion for science ... Luckily for the world, the child who’d freely roamed the Iowa woods remained equally content to blaze his own path as an adult. Patterson would save our oceans, our air, and our minds from the brink of what is arguably the largest mass poisoning in human history.”

SAS: Machine Learning: What it is and Why it Matters→

SAS:

“Because of new computing technologies, machine learning today is not like machine learning of the past. It was born from pattern recognition and the theory that computers can learn without being programmed to perform specific tasks; researchers interested in artificial intelligence wanted to see if computers could learn from data. The iterative aspect of machine learning is important because as models are exposed to new data, they are able to independently adapt. They learn from previous computations to produce reliable, repeatable decisions and results. It’s a science that’s not new – but one that’s gaining fresh momentum.

While many machine learning algorithms have been around for a long time, the ability to automatically apply complex mathematical calculations to big data – over and over, faster and faster – is a recent development.”

Ron Meador: Recreational Shooter Blood Pb Levels→

MinnPost:

“Wherever you stand on the question of whether it’s guns that kill people or people who kill people, you might be impressed by new findings about shooting ranges as a source of serious lead poisoning among their enthusiasts.

In occupational health and workplace safety circles it has long been recognized that police officers, soldiers and others who train intensively with firearms are exposed to lots of lead dust and fumes as they make holes in targets. Same for their trainers. There are workplace rules intended to limit that exposure and to monitor blood-lead levels for dangerous conditions...

Half the studies found BLLs above 20µg, and 17 found them above 30 µg, at which point “prompt medical evaluation” is recommended. Fifteen found readings in excess of 40 µg.

The three dozen studies included both professional and recreational facilities worldwide and the new analysis did not attempt to distinguish them by BLL results. Rather, it makes the sensible and perhaps even obvious point that the health risks in both venues ought to be of equal concern and receive equal attention.”

Erica Cirino: Our Medicated Surface Waters→

Ars Technica:

“The United States of America is a highly medicated country: almost seven in 10 Americans take prescription drugs. That translates to 4.4 billion prescriptions and nearly $310 billion spent on medication in 2015. Painkillers, cholesterol-lowering medications, and antidepressants top the list of drugs most commonly prescribed by doctors.

Americans aren’t just putting these drugs into their bodies; they’re also putting more drugs into the environment. A growing body of research suggests all types of drugs, from illegal drugs to antibiotics to hormones, enter the environment through sewage and cesspool systems across the country. And while pharmaceutical drugs—when used as prescribed—are capable of curing disease and alleviating symptoms in people, they can wreak havoc on nature.

There, they persist for long periods without breaking down. Hormones in medications like birth control cause changes such as intersex development in fish and amphibians. Antidepressants have been found in the brain tissue of fish downstream from wastewater treatment plants. Research on the presence of illegal drugs in water bodies has revealed some interesting trends: drug concentrations are highest on weekends and skyrocket after social events, such as music festivals, where large quantities of drugs are often consumed.”

Diana Gitig: New Hypothesis about Declining Monarch Butterflies→

Ars Technica

“Anurag Agrawal ... has written a book about them called Monarchs and Milkweed: A Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution. Monarches and their sole food source, the toxic milkweed plant, provide a great example of coevolution. Monarch caterpillars are born on milkweed leaves, where their mothers deposited them as eggs. They grow fat eating the plant. They are not pollinators; the milkweed gets nothing out of the relationship. In fact, the plant goes to great lengths to fight the monarchs. Milkweeds exude latex (the “milk” responsible for the eponym), which contains a noxious chemical cocktail suspended in the sticky rubber. A newly hatched monarch caterpillar’s teeth and feet can, and often do, get easily mired. “More than 60 percent of monarchs died in the burst of latex that accompanied their first bites into the plant,” Agrawal tells us. “Less than 10 percent make it to full size.”

Because monarch butterflies are disappearing. They have experienced a 75-percent drop in their numbers over the past 25 years, and a number of reasons for this decline have been suggested. One is that their overwintering grounds, already quite small, are being threatened by logging, hunting, cattle grazing, and climate change.

But the prevailing idea is that monarchs are disappearing because milkweed is disappearing due to urbanization, the expansion of agriculture, and especially the indiscriminate overuse of herbicides enabled by the advent of herbicide-resistant crops. Monarch caterpillars have nothing to eat, this idea goes, and so they die.

Despite the popularity and the appeal of this hypothesis, Agrawal does not buy it.”

Scott Johnson: Lakes Soaking up Road Salt→

Ars Technica:

“Road salt became common in the 1940s, and the amount used has increased over time. The US puts down around 18 million tons of salt each year. Roadsides along highways obviously get dosed with more than their fair share of salt, but salt also runs off (sometimes via storm drains) into streams and lakes where it can accumulate. That makes road salt a common target in local efforts to protect bodies of water. Although this has sometimes been studied on the local scale, there hasn’t been much big-picture analysis. A new study led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Hilary Dugan works to fill in that gap by estimating how widespread salt contamination is in North America.

The researchers used data from 371 lakes that covered at least four hectares and had chloride measurements going back at least 10 years. That’s not a purely random sampling, but it’s the best way to find trends. Most are in the US Midwest and Northeast, with a handful from southern Canada and some spread over the rest of the US. One-third of the 371 lakes showed a significant upward trend in salt concentration.”

Boom times for fish populations→

NSF:

“We’re all familiar with the idea of extreme events. Meteorologists keep us up to date on hurricanes, floods and high temperatures. Economists watch the stock market for signs of crashes or rallies. Researchers spend a lot of time trying to better predict these events, yet are often surprised by the outcomes. According to a new study in the journal Limnology & Oceanography Letters, when it comes to nature’s extremes, nothing seems to beat what happens underwater.

Scientists at the National Science Foundation (NSF) North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site — one of 28 NSF LTER sites — are routinely measuring everything from water temperature to nutrient concentrations to fish populations in Wisconsin lakes.

Taking advantage of several decades’ worth of data, Ryan Batt, the paper’s lead author, and a team of researchers compared data on various physical, chemical and biological variables — 595 variables in total. They found that as the lakes’ temperatures rose and their nutrient concentrations increased, so did the number of organisms living there.”

Natalie Sopinka: Fish Habitat Loss in Canada→

Canadian Science:

“Favaro and Olszynski quantified a net loss of over 2 million m2 of fish habitat. This loss of habitat was calculated assuming perfect compliance of habitat compensation requirements. The net loss of habitat jumped to almost 4 million m2 when only 80% of required habitat compensation occurred.

An overall loss of fish habitat suggests effectiveness of policies should have been enhanced not reduced; the former Act did not go beyond conservation goals (e.g., no net loss of habitat) as the goals were not even being met. If the HADD regime as previously set out in the Fisheries Act was not adequately protecting habitat why change what the law says? Why change the rigor of how projects causing harm are reviewed? Favaro and Olszynski contended the language of the former Act (i.e., inclusion of HADD) should be reinstated and that future amendments be informed by data accessible to all stakeholders. The authors obtained data for the study through the Access to Information Act and recommended a public registry of DFO authorizations be created. Favaro and Olszynski published their findings earlier this year in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (CJFAS) and submitted them to FOPO.”

Todd Reubold: The Biggest Sources of Nutrient Pollution in Cities→

University of Minnesota:

“New research from the University of Minnesota points to lawn fertilizers and pet waste as the dominant sources of nitrogen and phosphorus pollutants in seven sub-watersheds of the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The study — published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — is the first to compare the urban watershed budgets of nitrogen and phosphorus. And the results can be applied to urban watersheds around the world impaired by excess nutrients.

The research team — led by Sarah Hobbie, Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior and an Institute on the Environment Fellow — discovered households are the main sources of nutrient pollutants in the Twin Cities urban watershed. Household nitrogen fertilizer use in particular is more than 10 times greater than commercial fertilizer use by golf courses, college campuses and other non-residential locations, and pet waste is the leading source of phosphorus to these watersheds.”

John Myers: Protection of 13 miles of Lake Superior Shoreland→

Pioneer Press:

“The Nature Conservancy of Canada announced this week that it has acquired more than 13 miles of pristine Lake Superior shoreline in Ontario just across the Minnesota border on the way to Thunder Bay. The nonprofit conservation group said they paid $6.4 million in U.S. funds — from government, conservation groups and private contributions on both sides of the border — for the North Shore property.

The 2,500 acres of nearly undisturbed boreal forest is home to bald eagles, nesting peregrine falcons and rare Arctic and alpine plants. It also includes cliffs, cobble beaches and stretches of open bedrock. Included in the purchase is Big Trout Bay, the last undeveloped, privately owned bay on Lake Superior between Duluth and Thunder Bay. A U.S. owner had proposed to develop the property into 300 cabin lots which had been approved by the local township.”

Dennis Anderson: Minnesota Buffer Law→

Star Tribune:

“While Republicans in the Legislature again take aim at the state’s new stream-and-ditch buffer law, John Mages rests easy.

Mages, a past president of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, farms 850 acres of good soil in Stearns County, planting corn and soybeans in spring and harvesting the crops in fall. To save topsoil and reduce overhead costs, he practices minimum tillage. And if the weather cooperates, his yields are superb: The past two years he’s averaged more than 200 bushels an acre of corn, without irrigating.

But one day last week, as Mages showed a visitor around his well-kept operation, the issue wasn’t crops but buffers. In all, he has about 30 acres of grasslands bordering waterways that either abut his croplands or run through them.”

Rae Ellen Bichell: We're All Dumber Due to Lead Pollution→

NPR:

“Exposure to lead as a child can affect an adult decades later, according to a study out Tuesday that suggests a link between early childhood lead exposure and a dip in a person’s later cognitive ability and socioeconomic status.

Lead in the United States can come from lots of sources: old, peeling paint; contaminated soil; or water that’s passed through lead pipes. Before policies were enacted to get rid of lead in gasoline, it could even come from particles in the fumes that leave car tailpipes.

And when lead gets into a human body, it can mess with brain development, decades of research has shown. “It’s toxic to many parts of the body, but in particular in can accumulate in the bloodstream and pass through the blood brain barrier to reach the brain,” says the study’s first author, Aaron Reuben, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Duke University...

Reuben says, children who experienced higher lead exposures “saw their intellectual abilities decline from their baseline starting point” as time wore on. He adds, “people who saw that decline also experienced downward social mobility.” The children who’d had high lead exposure — defined at the time as more than 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood — were more likely than the other kids to go on to have jobs that required slightly less education and brought in a little less income compared to their parents’ jobs.

In Reuben’s study, every 5 microgram increase in lead concentration in the blood at age 11 corresponded to a drop in IQ of 1.6 points at age 38 — primarily because of a drop in scores on perceptual reasoning and working memory. (Today the health standards for lead are stricter; 5 micrograms per deciliter is considered high exposure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and no amount of lead is considered safe.)

The dips in IQ and in socioeconomic status were mild. But, Reuben says, “even small changes in IQ had some significant influence on the course that people’s lives took.””

You would have been a genius, instead you are mediocre. You can thank some greedy corporate executives who at the time railed against government regulations.

Jame Walsh: Working on Century-Old Storm Sewers →

Star Tribune:

““When we started this project, we saw a large section lit up and we thought: ‘Wow, this is a perfect opportunity to take some nice photographs and video of the tunnel and show the community what happens beneath the ground,’ ” said Anna Eleria, division manager with the watershed district. “A lot of our work happens underground or in structures that are not evident to the general public. This was a chance to show the importance.”

The video offers a glimpse into a 6-mile underground tunnel system that travels from Como Lake in St. Paul and Lake McCarrons in Roseville and eventually carries stormwater to the Mississippi River. It carries 3.9 billion gallons of rainwater and snow melt from neighborhoods in St. Paul, Roseville, Falcon Heights and Maplewood to the Mississippi River.”