Dartmouth scientist Rachel Obbard was looking at samples of Arctic sea ice for small organisms when something else caught her eye: tiny, bright-colored bits and pieces and miniature string-like objects that did not seem to belong.

Those small specks turned out to be a type of pollution known as microplastics. Their presence in sea ice collected from the central Arctic Ocean showed that some of the vast quantities of garbage and pollution floating in the world’s seas has traveled to the northernmost waters.

For Obbard, an assistant engineering professor who specializes in polar-ice studies, the appearance of microplastics in Arctic sea ice was an unpleasant surprise. “I was kind of shocked. I said, ‘This shouldn’t be here in such a remote place,’ ” she said.

Worse yet, that sea ice holding the small bits of trash is thinning and likely to shed them back into the water, where they can be ingested by fish, birds and mammals, said a study by Obbard and fellow scientists that was published online Tuesday in the scientific journal Earth’s Future.

Extrapolating the findings from the examined cores and factoring in the ongoing transformation of thick multiyear ice to thinner, single-year ice, Obbard and her colleagues found that […]

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So what plans does your family have for the summer? I’m going to assume they don’t involve golf.

That’s because about every number coming out recently regarding the state of the sport is a negative, with millennials – as in, young people, as in, the future of the game – in particular abandoning, or having no interest at all in, a good walk spoiled.

There are a lot of theories as to why this is happening, including the grumpy old (in mind or body) coot’s favorite scapegoat, everybody-gets-a-trophy leagues. However, I have no doubt that a big issue is the sport getting out of sight, out of mind for a declining middle class. Golf’s high cost to entry and association with an older, moneyed elite has resulted in young people sending it to the same golden scrap heap as formerly mass activities such as tennis, attending college football games, and democracy.

One of the latest indicators of golf double-bogeying the sport of life was the disappointing quarterly earnings report issued May 20 by Dick’s Sporting Goods. The company said its difficulties were related to golf and hunting, but looking at the numbers, it’s golf that’s the bigger concern. Dick’s same-store sales at its […]

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In 1946, there was a famous ad that read ‘more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” In 1976, Coke’s slogan was ‘Coke adds Life!” Fast forward a few decades, and we all know better. Both of those ads, however amusingly anachronistic they may now seem, fooled a lot of people and helped damage the bodies of millions of people, the only upside being that now at least, there’s a warning label on cigarettes. I think Coke should have one too. A few years back former Mayor Bloomberg got close by banning sales of super-sized sodas in NYC, a move applauded by all of us in the health community. Not surprisingly, soda manufacturers fought the measure, hoping to shout down health and safety concerns, but the word got out and finally, soda’s getting the bad rap it so richly deserves. With this in mind, just in time for summer, I want to remind you to eliminate soda and soft drinks, sugared or diet, from your life and your family’s. Here are 4 simple reasons to make your soda break-up a no-brainer:
1. They Do a Number on Your Body

There is no conceivable benefit to drinking soft drinks, and their health […]

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Not only are people around the world capable of growing nutrient-dense, nourishing food that will feed their communities, even if they live in an urban setting, but they can also do it with élan. Some of the most creative urban gardening projects around the globe can inspire us to create our own green space in the city, or add luster to a space that’s already underway which just needs a little oomph. Here are some off-the-(biotech)-chain gardens that will get our creative juices flowing so that we can carry the dream of living pesticide and GMO-free, further:

Everyone who has kept abreast of national news has heard of the urban blight that has devastated Detroit. This once burgeoning center of the auto-trade in America is now a sprawling concrete wasteland – or is it? Food Field is an urban farm in the middle of central Detroit. It grows heaping amounts of organic produce using permaculture. They even raise chickens and ducks, grow food utilizing aquaculture, raise honey bees, and have their own organic fruit orchard. This all happens on a piece of land that is smaller than that of many McMansions. Even in one of this country’s most economically depressed cities, […]

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The GOP candidate for the open Nebraska Senate seat who believes that the ‘government cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances” wrote a dissertation while at Yale documenting the number of times the government did just that – and how the unintended consequences of doing so were key to mainstreaming conservative politics.

Ben Sasse, who is widely expected to to win the seat being vacated by Sen. Mike Johanns in November, authored a dissertation – The Anti-Madalyn Majority: Secular Left, Religious Right, and the Rise of Reagan’s America – in which he argued that the modern conservative movement began not with ‘the Reagan Revolution,” but with two Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s in which mandatory public school prayer and Bible reading were struck down as unconstitutional.

The first of them, Engel v. Vitale, inspired a Republican Congressman from New York, Frank Becker, to action. He was a true believer – a man who, according to Sasse, was a ‘tenacious focus derived less from a studied assessment of his audience than from his heartfelt conviction that the hope of America lay in its special relationship with the Almighty, and in the nation’s resolve to doggedly oppose the […]

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