A new report released by the Environmental Working Group reveals that over 218 million people across the United States are being exposed to potentially unsafe concentrations of hexavalent chromium in their drinking water, a chemical compound known to be toxic and carcinogenic in even extremely low concentrations. Nation-wide testing by local water utilities was ordered by the EPA between 2013 and 2016, resulting in over three-quarters of the 62,386 samples taken testing positive for the hexavalent chromium contaminant. An interactive map illustrating EWG’s findings can be found here.
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Earlier this year, we reported that the countries of Portugal and Germany had set new records by generating electricity using renewable resources, with Portugal running on 100 percent renewables for four-and-a-half days, and Germany reaching 95 percent over the duration of May 8, 2016. But a much bigger achievement made the previous year by Costa Rica went largely unnoticed, where electricity was generated for nearly the entire year of 2015 on renewable resources alone.
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Amongst the many problems that our species is expected to face as time goes on, one of the bigger ones is how to feed a burgeoning population in the face of potential famine and transportation interruption. Many novel concepts have been explored, including growing animal-less meat in a vat, but a new idea, using cockroach milk to nourish the hungry, has been put forward by the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India.
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Scientists have discovered a reliable way to extract renewable energy from ordinary seawater. The research team, from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology in Switzerland, employed a natural process called osmosis, where a fluid permeates through a membrane from one side to another.
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