Entries for February 2008

I gave my first-ever radio interview yesterday, discussing on WTOP the emerging link between artificial light and cancer. Here is the audio. Last week, I posted about new research on the subject.

My U.S. News colleagues have also been gabbing it up on the radio. WTOP has an archive of recent on-air interviews.

When Edison invented the light bulb, did he accidentally spawn a cancer epidemic? It's certainly starting to look that way. In study after recent study, exposure to artificial light has been linked to certain kinds of tumors, especially those in the breast.

Consider some of the evidence: Blind women have low rates of breast cancer. So do women in underdeveloped countries, where artificial lighting is an uncommon luxury. By contrast, female nurses and other women who frequently work night shifts have high breast cancer rates. The reason, experts believe, is that their schedules expose them to illumination during what should be the darkest hours of their days, and that disrupts the body's production of the cancer-suppressing hormone melatonin. In lab experiments, human breast tumors have been found to grow relatively quickly when fed by the blood of women who have been in a brightly lit room in the middle of the night. When blood is drawn from women who've been sitting in darkness, it's richer in melatonin and less nourishing to the cancer.

Last Friday, I blogged about a device that people could wear on their knees to convert their motion into electrical energy. Now comes more news about clever ways to harvest so-called free energy from our movement. The natural world is full of energetic motion that can be captured and converted into electricity, theoretically at no cost.

Citing a new study in Nature, the AP reports:

Each time I walk past a health club and see, through the gleaming windows, dozens of people toiling away on treadmills and ellipticals, I silently cry a little. The exercise is good for them, certainly, but what a loss it is for the rest of us. After all, the calories they are so proudly burning had to be produced somehow, and the energy they expend won't be recovered. (At best, it will power the LCD display that tells them just how many calories are being wasted.)

Why can't our physical activity be harnessed to generate real, usable energy? Well, maybe it can be. A seemingly small but clever bunch of scientists has been approaching the challenge from various angles.

The investigative group Center for Public Integrity this morning posted bootlegged portions of what appears to be a disturbing—and purportedly suppressed—government report about environmental contamination across the Great Lakes region. Six years in the making, the report assesses evidence of health-threatening contamination in 26 "areas of concern" covering parts of eight states, and it links contamination in many of those areas to high rates of infant mortality, other infant health problems, and adult malignancies, including breast, colon, and lung cancers.

The scientific evidence supporting those links is only circumstantial—the report describes geographic patterns of contamination and disease but explicitly makes no claims about causes or effects. Nevertheless, the number of people who might be at risk is staggering: The 54 affected counties have more than 9 million residents, including 230,000 whom the report deems particularly "vulnerable."

By 2040, scientists predicted yesterday, the Sierras and Colorado Rockies will shed most of their snowpack by the beginning of April each year. With average temperatures rising across the region, more precipitation will fall as rain and less as snow, and what snow does fall will melt earlier than it has in the past.

The consequences could be diverse. Here are a few of the elements:

Water. Rivers, swollen with rain and snowmelt during the winter and spring, will flow at unusually high levels. Unless reservoirs and other water supply infrastructure get updated to expand their capacity, they could become more susceptible to flooding, the researchers say.