In The News / May 21

• How a bunch of scrappy Marines could help vanquish breast cancer.

  Beginning in the 1950s, toxic chemicals at Camp Lejeune intermingled with its water supply. An estimated 750,000 people regularly drank the water, bathed and swam in it, and inhaled its vapors. Their destinies could prove important for researchers seeking insights into the murky environmental causes of breast cancer. Mother Jones

• War on weeds.

  Farmers, plant geneticists, chemists, and agronomists are engaged in an arms race against weeds that have evolved resistance to the common herbicide glyphosate. A second generation of herbicide-tolerant crops has been developed to battle resistant weeds, but they have sparked concerns about overreliance on chemical controls. Chemical & Engineering News

• In US Steel town, fatal gas explosion goes unpunished.

  Gas leaking at a U.S. Steel plant near Pittsburgh found an ignition source and exploded, propelling Nick Revetta backward into a steel column and inflicting a fatal blow to his head. His death did not make national headlines. No hearings were held into the accident that killed him. No one was fired or sent to jail. Center for Public Integrity

• The book Big Tobacco doesn't want you to read.

  Science historian Robert Proctor has written a devastating new compendium of the tobacco industry's sins that lays out in head-shaking detail how a handful of companies painstakingly designed, produced, and mass-marketed the most lethal product on the planet. Mother Jones

• Mineral-rich Mongolia rapidly becoming 'Minegolia.'

  Mongolia is riding a mineral boom that is expected to more than double its GDP within a decade. The rapid changes simultaneously excite and unnerve many Mongolians, who hope mining can help pull many out of poverty, but worry it will ravage the environment and erode the nation's distinctive, nomadic identity. Morning Edition, NPR

• Cooking up a cleaner, safer open-fire stove.

  Developing a cheaper, cleaner method of cooking for the three billion people throughout the world who cook on open fires could curb the environmental damage caused by fumes from indoor cooking fires and reduce the 1.9 million premature deaths linked to them each year. New York Times

• Ever-cleaner auto exhaust.

  Emissions cleanup systems on today’s cars and trucks scrub engine exhaust of nearly all pollutants. Even so, carmakers continue to search for catalytic chemistry methods to further reduce emissions levels—especially diesel emissions, which until recently were not regulated—to comply with ever-tightening engine emissions laws. Chemical & Engineering News

• Maryland set to ban arsenic-containing drug in chicken feed.

  Gov. Martin O’Malley is expected to sign a bill this week making Maryland the first state to end a practice in existence since 1944. The law would take effect Jan. 1 for hundreds of growers on the Eastern Shore that continue to use Roxarsone as an antibiotic with a side effect that bursts blood vessels, making meat look pink and plump. Washington Post

• California condors hit a milestone: Population of 405.

  The California condor population just topped 400, which is the most since the effort to save the species began 30 years ago as it teetered on extinction's edge. But challenges remain, such as lead poisoning caused by condors eating animals, or gut piles from animals, shot with lead ammunition. Portland Oregonian, Oregon

• A windborne clue to a mysterious childhood disease.

  What climate researchers have discovered about Kawasaki disease could open up a whole new understanding into how other human pathogens are spread. No human disease has ever been shown to cross an entire ocean by wind and still remain infectious. All Things Considered, NPR

• Heartland Institute facing uncertain future as staff depart and cash dries up.

  As the latest Heartland climate conference opens in a Chicago hotel on Monday, the thinktank's claims to reasoned debate lie in shreds and its financial future remains uncertain. The Guardian, United Kingdom

• Source found for missing water in sea-level rise.

  Climate change, with its associated melting ice caps and shrinking glaciers, is the usual suspect when it comes to explaining rising sea levels. But a recent study now shows that human water use has a major impact on sea-level change that has been overlooked. Nature Geoscience

• Senator asks Ohio EPA for answers on lead contamination.

  A U.S. senator called for Ohio's top environmental regulator Sunday to answer questions about lead contamination around former factory sites and what's being done to ensure families living in fallout zones around 17 former lead smelting sites are protected. USA Today