WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is considering ways to allow many industrial facilities that emit at least one of 188 hazardous air pollutants to avoid having to comply with the most stringent technology controls to limit pollution. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, released the draft proposal Monday, two days before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meets to consider President Bush’s nominee, Bill Wehrum, to serve as head of EPA’s air office. NRDC noted in a statement that the proposal was drafted during Wehrum’s current tenure as acting head of that office. John Walke, NRDC’s clean air director, said the timing was not politically motivated. The agency’s current 1995 policy requires facilities that annually emit 10 tons or more of a single air pollutant or 25 tons or more of a group of pollutants to use the maximum achievable technology controls to lower their pollution, sometimes by up to 95 percent. A draft proposal would let oil refineries, hazardous waste incinerators, chemical plants and dozens of other types of facilities that drop below those annual thresholds to reclassify themselves as minor sources of pollution under the Clean Air Act’s air […]
Craig Venter, whose team mapped the human genome, predicts breakthroughs like vastly deeper understanding of disease and creating species. But computing power and speed is a constraint. The greatest demand for computing resources will come from biology and medicine as researchers start to use the growing knowledge of genetics to predict and prevent illnesses–and even to create new species from scratch, predicts genetics pioneer J. Craig Venter. Venter, who led the effort that mapped the human genome at Celera Genomics, spoke Sunday at the InformationWeek Spring Conference in Amelia Island, Fla. Venter described a future in which we have tens of millions of individuals who have their genetic makeup mapped, and medical professionals analyze that information against medical histories in order to better understand what genetic factors cause disease. ‘This is going to happen certainly in your lifetime, and possibly in the next 10 years,’ says Venter, who’s now president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, which does basic research to advance genomics science. ‘It’s totally dependent on the technology.’ Venter offered colon cancer as a reason why that knowledge could be useful. Colon cancer has a 90% survival rate if caught well before symptoms appear. […]
Canada’s new Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that Ottawa does not intend to reintroduce legislation to legalize small amounts of marijuana. Speaking to the Canadian Professional Police Association, Harper received applause when he reiterated that the legislation drawn up by the previous Liberal Party government would not be reintroduced when the new Parliament sits Monday. The bill, which had alarmed law enforcement officials in Canada and the United States, died on the floor of the House of Commons after the Liberal Party lost elections in January. Under the bill, getting caught with about half an ounce or less of marijuana would have brought a citation akin to a traffic ticket, not a criminal record. While possession of marijuana would have remained illegal, the bill was intended to prevent young people from being saddled with a lifelong criminal record. U.S. authorities worried the legislation would have weakened their efforts to curb marijuana exports from Canada, which has numerous marijuana farms, particularly in the lush western province of British Columbia. Canadian marijuana activist Marc Emery of Vancouver, known as ‘the prince of pot’ and recently profiled by the CBS’ ’60 Minutes,’ is under U.S. […]
ST. LOUIS — Going to the hospital is rarely fun. If you weigh over 300 pounds like Beth Henk, it can be embarrassing. ‘I’ve flipped an exam table - I sat on the end of it and it just flipped up,’ said Henk, whose weight peaked at 745. When her son was born three years ago, ‘I had to sit in the hospital bed the whole time - the hospital’s rocker wouldn’t fit my butt.’ Today Henk helps Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis find better ways to deal with the growing number of very obese patients, an issue for many U.S. hospitals. Barnes-Jewish is replacing beds and wheelchairs with bigger models, widening doorways, buying larger CT scan machines, even replacing slippers and gowns. Last year, patient care director Colleen Becker decided to check the numbers. She looked at a daily hospital census - about one-third of the 900 patients weighed 350 pounds or more. Startled, Becker checked another date, then another. The numbers were consistent. On some days, half the patients were obese. Some weighed 500 pounds or more. ‘We ran the data again to make sure we weren’t hallucinating,’ Becker said. ‘We weren’t. So […]
It’s true-you might die of loneliness, but not until you’re older. In a new University of Chicago study of men and women 50 to 68 years old, those who scored highest on measures of loneliness also had higher blood pressure. And high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease, the number one killer in many industrialized nations and number two the United States. Lonely people have blood pressure readings as much as 30 points higher than non-lonely people, said the study leaders Louise Hawkley and Christopher Masi. Blood pressure differences between lonely and non-lonely people were smallest at age 50 and greatest among the oldest people tested. Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging, which funded this research, said he was ‘surprised by the magnitude of the relationship between loneliness and hypertension in this well-controlled, cross-sectional study.’ Nothing worse The researchers separated loneliness out from depression, age, race, gender, weight, alcohol consumption, smoking, blood pressure medications, hostility, stress, social support and other factors. Also, loneliness does eat at you. The morbid health effect of loneliness accumulates gradually and faster as you get older, the study found. Loneliness was worse for […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
