Ecological News

As of 2010, almost three-quarters of Americans drink fluoridated water from community water systems, and the nation’s 30 most populous cities consume it. There's one weird exception: Portland, Ore.

A tree expert has said the biggest threat facing UK trees is likely to come from a disease currently unknown to science. The warning came as a leading UK citizen science programme launched a tree health monitoring project.

A new Dartmouth College study finds human-caused climate change may have little impact on many species of tropical lizards, contradicting a host of recent studies that predict their widespread extinction in a rapidly warming planet. Most predictions that tropical cold-blooded animals, especially forest lizards, will be hard hit by climate change are based on global-scale measurements of environmental temperatures, which miss much of the fine-scale variation in temperature that individual animals experience on the ground, said the article's lead author, Michael Logan, a Ph.D. student in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Want to change the landscape of environmental discourse? Learn the skills necessary on a postgraduate course at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

Researchers found that mercury content of avian blood and feathers doesn’t match that found in eggs, which they say is most indicative of reproductive harm. The results suggest that scientists shouldn’t assume the tissues can be used interchangeably for mercury risk assessment.

Six people were dead and seven missing after a powerful tornado ripped through a neighborhood that included housing for the poor in the north Texas town of Granbury, marking the deadliest severe storm outbreak in the United States so far this year.

Attention swimmers: More than half of the public pools tested in a new study contained bacterial evidence that someone may have pooped in the pool.

How the West Fertilizer Co. fire began still isn’t known. But the probe has unveiled the detailed sequence of a catastrophe: Heat, pressure and shock made dual explosions, milliseconds apart, that killed 15 people and left a town to mourn, clean up and start over.

At least 1,800 garment workers have died in Bangladesh factories since 2005. The tragedy of Rana Plaza is ushering in talk of reform, though skepticism persists in the streets of Dhaka.

Physicist Ernest Moniz won Senate confirmation to lead the Energy Department and help direct clean-energy investments while deciding how much of the U.S.’s natural gas bounty should be exported.

The antagonism between protection of profit and protection of the environment will continue for as long as the two are seen as separate pursuits. To reach a sustainable future, we must merge economic and environmental agendas.

Most us hunting for bargains in a clothing store check the price tag on a T-shirt but never look at the tag that indicates where the garment was made. But as the recent garment factory disaster in Bangladesh shows, frequently the true cost of a piece of clothing isn't always shown on the price tag.

In the United States, more than 4,500 are killed in work places each year. OSHA, which has the responsibility to make sure that 7 million work places are safe for employees, was created in 1970, a year after the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. Both have a history of being understaffed and being plagued with checkered enforcement.

The Obama administration drew sharp criticism from environmental and oil industry groups Thursday when it issued a new draft of regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands.

Physicist Ernest Moniz won unanimous Senate confirmation Thursday to be the nation's new energy secretary. Moniz, 68, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as an energy undersecretary in the Clinton administration.

An invasion of alien "crazy ants," native to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, is making many residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast long for the old days of pesky, biting fire ants.

Thousands of protesters have gathered in the southern Chinese city of Kunming for the second time this month to voice concerns over the environmental impact of a planned chemical plant.

Fed up with oil spills from facilities belonging to Mexico’s state oil company Pemex, residents of two communities in the southeastern state of Tabasco are taking the country’s largest company to court in a bid for compensation for damage to the environment and agriculture.

The U.S. organic food industry is gaining clout on Capitol Hill, prompted by rising consumer demand and its entry into traditional farm states. But that isn't going over well with everyone in Congress.

The Arctic Council added China and five other countries as official observers yesterday, expanding the focus of the organization and underscoring the complicated politics created by newly open waters in the north because of climate change.