Credit: AP / Patrick Sison

Childhood obesity comes with a myriad of health risks, ranging from increased risk of heart disease and cancer to asthma and type 2 diabetes. A new study shows how obesity can have an impact on children’s cognitive development as well.

The study, conducted by epidemiologists at Brown University and published in the journal Obesity, found a link between children’s weight in the first two years of life and their cognitive abilities at school age. According to the study authors, “children on the threshold of obesity or overweight in the first two years of life had lower perceptual reasoning and working memory scores than lean children when tested at ages five and eight.” (The link between weight and working memory was only true for boys, however.) The study also found that overweight or obese children were more likely to have lower IQ scores.

Obesity, which can deregulate certain types of hormones and cause inflammation in the brain, has long been known to be associated with lower cognition in adults, including how they […]

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Chinese workers check solar photovoltaic modules on a hillside in a village in Chuzhou, in eastern China’s Anhui province on April 13, 2017.
Credit: AFP/ STR

The ongoing debate around whether it’s feasible to have an electric grid running on 100 percent renewable power in the coming decades often misses a key point:  many countries and regions are already at or close to 100 percent now.

According to data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there are seven countries already at, or very, near 100 percent renewable power: Iceland (100 percent), Paraguay (100), Costa Rica (99), Norway (98.5), Austria (80), Brazil (75), and Denmark (69.4). The main renewables in these countries are hydropower, wind, geothermal, and solar.

A new international study, which debunks many myths about renewable energy, notes that many large population regions are “at or above 100%” including Germany’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Hostein regions, New Zealand’s South Island, and Denmark’s Samsø island. In Canada, both Quebec and British Columbia are at nearly 100 percent renewable power.

rradiated tanks of water at Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Credit: Spencer Lowell

The Tsunami-Driven Seawater that engulfed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has long since receded. But plant officials are still struggling to cope with another dangerous flood: the enormous amounts of radioactive water the crippled facility generates each day. More than 1 million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks—and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them.

The earthquake and tsunami that hammered Fukushima on March 11, 2011 triggered meltdowns in three of its six reactors. That left messes of intensely radioactive fuel somewhere loose in the reactor buildings—though no one knows exactly where. What is known, however, is that every day, as much as much as 150 tons of groundwater percolates into the reactors through cracks in their foundations, becoming contaminated with radioactive isotopes in the process.

To keep that water from leaking into the ground or the Pacific, Tepco, the giant utility that owns the […]

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