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Top 10 Most Polluted Air Bakersfield–Delano, Calif. Visalia–Porterville, Calif. Phoenix–Mesa–Glendale, Ariz. Los Angeles–Long Beach–Riverside, Calif. Hanford–Corcoran, Calif. Fresno–Madera, Calif. Pittsburgh–New Castle, Pa. Birmingham–Hoover–Cullman, Ala. Cincinnati–Middletown–Wilmington, Ohio–Ky.–Ind. Louisville-Jefferson County-Elizabethtown-Scottsburg, Ky.-Ind; Modesto, Calif. Every year the American Lung Association (ALA) prepares a “State of the Air” report, using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agency measures the air quality of U.S. cities in terms of ozone, year-round particle pollution and short-term particle pollution....

Cracks in sea ice are funneling additional mercury to the Arctic surface, raising concerns about the toxic element seeping into the food chain of the delicate ecosystem, according to a new study. The research, published yesterday in Nature, finds that channels of open water in Arctic ice, known as leads, are stirring up air so that mercury is pumped from higher in the atmosphere to air close to the surface. Warming temperatures are increasing the amount of seasonal sea ice that melts every summer, which in turn helps create the leads, said study lead author Christopher Moore, an assistant research professor at the Desert Research Institute....

In a sweltering summer in New York City back in 1999, Yolanda Baldwin was eight months pregnant with her first child. She lived near a gas station and across the street from an intersection choked with exhaust-spewing cars and buses. Sometimes the air was so thick with pollution that she could see it, breathe it, smell it, even taste it. And she often wondered what it might be doing to her unborn child....

The Discovery is a 2017 Netflix film in which Robert Redford plays a scientist who proves that the afterlife is real. “Once the body dies, some part of our consciousness leaves us and travels to a new plane,” the scientist explains, evidenced by his machine that measures, as another character puts it, “brain wavelengths on a subatomic level leaving the body after death.” This idea is not too far afield from a real theory called quantum consciousness, proffered by a wide range of people, from physicist Roger Penrose to physician Deepak Chopra....

Another summer is heating up Down Under, and the forecast looks as worrisome and as potentially deadly as last summer’s. A decade of drought is parching landscapes, devastating farmers, killing gum trees, and forcing a new definition of conservation into the continental nation’s colorful lexicon. Could Australia see a day when a bottle of water is worth more than a bottle of Shiraz? They just might. “This is literally a country running out of water,” says author–activist Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water to the United Nations....

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is drawing near to its long-awaited reboot. More than a year after the European collider’s initial start-up was quashed by a helium leak caused by a faulty electrical connection, particle beams have been injected into the collider, known as the LHC, and may be guided fully through its rings in the coming hours. “We’re hoping to have beam overnight in the LHC,” James Gillies, a spokesperson for CERN, the European particle physics lab that operates the LHC, said Friday....

Without the cold war, Apollo 11 never would have happened. The urge to beat the Soviets to the moon and prove U.S. technological superiority motivated Congress to devote almost 4.5 percent of the U.S. national budget to NASA at the peak of the space race in 1966. Yet after the first moon landing three years later, the agency never again received more than 2 percent of the budget, and it has gotten around half a percent every year since 2010....

Forensic science has been the backbone of mystery stories from Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin adventures to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales to Jack Klugman’s Quincy television series to today’s wildly successful forensics shows. Holmes’s methods presaged many actual techniques for linking physical evidence to the perpetrator of a crime, such as blood testing. Forensic science was codified as a profession in the early 1900s and exploded into the public consciousness in the 1990s with the advent of DNA analysis....

Given a choice between dengue fever or another mosquito-borne disease called chikungunya fever, choose dengue every time. Neither has an available vaccine or treatment, but chikungunya (pronounced chik-un-GUHN-ya) is far more severe – it literally means “that which bends up” because patients are often stooped over from debilitating joint pain. If you’re a resident of the Caribbean island of St. Martin (or lucky enough to be traveling there for the holidays) you are now at risk of both....

Matthew Tejada has been tapped as the EPA’s new Director for the Office of Environmental Justice. As executive director of the Air Alliance Houston for five years, Tejada fought against pollution in poor neighborhoods surrounding Gulf Coast ports. Expected to begin his new role in early March, he’ll have no shortage of challenges ahead. As EHN’s series, Pollution, Poverty, People of Color, highlighted last summer, a legacy of lingering environmental problems and new dangers are jeopardizing people of color in low-income communities nationwide....

In a cavernous Smithsonian Institution workshop, a team of imaging experts laser scans a small, hand-carved cedar hat. It was crafted more than 140 years ago from a solid piece of wood and depicts a bear with large copper eyes. In a few hours, the experts will have a videoconference with members of the Haida Nation in British Columbia to go over the progress they’ve made on their collaborative goal: creating a digital three-dimensional model of this clan crest hat, an object of significant cultural importance for the Haida....

Buried in frozen soil across the Arctic, billions of tons of carbon lies trapped in the ground. Just a few degrees of warming could unleash it into the atmosphere. At least, that’s what the past would suggest. According to a new study, it’s happened before. The research, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, looks back 27,000 years into Arctic history. On at least three occasions, the study finds, periods of rapid climate change caused huge swaths of permafrost—a layer of carbon-rich frozen soil widespread in the Arctic—to quickly thaw or collapse....

» Giant page of links to all sorts of quantum experiments » Author’s review paper on macroscopic entanglement » The classic buckyball quantum experiment: » Latest record-breaking experiment on quantum interference of large molecules » Michael Moyer’s news story on quantum effects in photosynthesis » George Musser’s news story on entanglement in out-of-equilibrium systems » John Matson’s news story on record-breaking numbers of entangled trapped ions » High-temperature experiments with magnetic salts...

Natural gas will not be a bridge fuel to a post-carbon future in the absence of an overarching climate change policy, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Nature. That’s because the fuel is likely to displace low-carbon renewable energy sources as well as coal from the energy mix, the study finds. So the net impact on global warming of using abundant supplies of natural gas would be rather small, said Haewon McJeon, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and lead author of the paper....

The misuse and overuse of antibiotics has led to the rise of so-called superbugs–bacteria that have developed a resistance to widely used antibiotics and pose a threat to public health. Scientists have thus been investigating alternative treatment options. At a presentation given yesterday at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., researchers unveiled one such candidate: a novel type of antibiotic that has shown promise against bacteria that survive in the face of conventional medications....

Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is linked with greater satisfaction with one’s relationship. Seeing your relationship through those same lenses, on the other hand, can actually lead to less satisfaction, according to a longitudinal study of 61 newlywed couples reported in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study found that for spouses higher in dispositional optimism, a stable personality trait, marital well-being declined less during the first year of marriage....

If you’re a soldier, firefighter or even a hiker, a new soft robotic suit could one day help you carry hefty loads, a new study finds. The wearable robot, or exosuit, reduces the amount of energy used while carrying a heavy weight by about 7 percent, on average, the researchers found. The suit also reduced the amount of work done by the hip, knee and ankle joints, all without affecting a person’s stride, the researchers said....

Quick - what’s the most effective for you to save energy? If you’re like many Americans, you’d say turn out the lights or turn up the AC’s thermostat. And, like many Americans, you’d miss the mark. Turns out, when figuring what we can do to go green, most of us overstate. We think about curtailment—unplugging appliances, driving less, turning off lights—when improving the efficiency of our cars, appliances and home would take the biggest chunk out of our energy footprint....

When dolphins swim through the ocean, it looks effortless. By whipping their tail up and down, the sleek marine mammals propel themselves forward in a seamless glide that could make any human swimmer jealous. But this up-down tail motion puts a lot of stress on a dolphin’s body, compressing its organs and sending pulses of blood pressure to its brain. Now researchers in Canada have a theory as to how cetaceans—dolphins, whales and porpoises—manage to protect their brain from these swimming-induced blood pressure pulses....

For all we know about animals, we know relatively little about their travel habits. New tracking technologies are quickly filling in this information gap, giving biologists insights about animal foraging, mating, migration, and more. Geographer Cheshire and designer Uberti teamed up to collect the stories of scientists who are tracking animals and to illustrate the maps of those animals’ daily routes. The result is a stunning translation of movement onto paper: penguin nesting sites gathered from satellites; the restricted territories of mountain lions boxed in by freeways in California; the daily flight of an average bumblebee in Germany....