Is Trick-or-Treating Dangerous?

Halloween strikes fear into parents’ hearts for reasons that have nothing to do with scary costumes. Hospitals have been offering to X-ray candy for decades, and this year a forensic lab in DuPage County, outside Chicago, will inspect suspicious sweets using the technology usually reserved for homicide, sexual assault and burglary. Health officials are warning against letting kids scoop up candy with their germy hands, lest they spread H1N1 flu to the other revelers. In Bobtown, Penn., spooked officials have banned trick-or-treating altogether. But is trick-or-treating really dangerous?

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How Green Is Your SIGG Water Bottle?

SIGG’s trendy aluminum water bottles have scored a lot of free advertising in recent years. In Touch Weekly raved about how Madonna’s kids sipped from the lightweight, eco-conscious and super-cute bottles. Julia Roberts was photographed with one. Jennifer Garner was too. The Swiss brand became the must-have accessory as consumers rushed to find alternatives to plastic bottles that contained bisphenol-A (BPA), a controversial chemical used to harden plastics, which some studies have linked to diabetes, premature puberty in girls and reduced sperm count in men. SIGG’s reusable aluminum bottles seemed the perfect antidote, a one-two punch protecting both our health and the environment.

But many consumers are feeling deceived now that the company has been outed for failing to tell the public that its bottles were not BPA-free, at least not the ones that were manufactured before August 2008. The company had boasted that its proprietary plastic liner didn’t leach BPA into liquid like other bottles did. What it neglected to divulge was that the bottles contained the substance at all. While there’s no evidence that the first-generation SIGGs did in fact leach BPA, there’s still plenty of grumbling at the company’s lack of disclosure. The news is especially troubling since the company internally acknowledged the chemical’s questionable safety record as early as 2006, when it quietly decided to formulate a new, BPA-free liner. (Read about reassessing the dangers of BPA in plastics.)

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In parkour, the city is the gym

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Zen saying goes: the obstacle is the path.

That’s true of parkour, the gritty urban sport that evolved from obstacle course training for the French military into a fitness option for urban youths.

In parkour, the city is the gym. The bridges, buildings and railings are the equipment. The goal is a direct route from one place to another. You see an obstacle, you overcome it.

Now the techniques of this adamantly outdoor sport are coming indoors to a gym near you.

“Parkour is a method to train the body and mind using obstacle coursing as the medium,” said Mark Toorock, who teaches the techniques of parkour at his Primal Fitness gyms in Washington, D.C., Florida and Texas.

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H1N1 vaccine makers struggle with U.S. shot

A U.S. senator accused the Health and Human Services department of over-promising how many and how quickly H1N1 vaccines could be delivered, as disgruntled people lined up outside clinics across the United States seeking immunization.

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Polar Bear to Receive Habitat Protection

Great news…

Washington D.C. (October 22, 2009) — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed today to designate over 200,000 square miles of coastal lands and waters along the north coast of Alaska as a habitat for the polar bear. This proposal is a response to a partial settlement in a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Greenpeace.

The habitat proposal, required under the Endangered Species Act, comes the same week that another Interior Department agency, the Minerals Management Service, approved oil-company plans for exploratory drilling in the polar bear’s habitat in the Beaufort Sea. Interior is considering a similar drilling proposal in the Chukchi Sea.

We all know that polar bears are in serious long-term trouble. Today’s designation of critical habitat is an essential step toward saving this increasingly imperiled species. But we have to do much more if we are to save the polar bear from extinction, said Andrew Wetzler, director of NRDC’s Wildlife Conservation Project. Controlling carbon pollution, reducing commercial hunting in Canada, and stemming the tide of toxic chemicals in their habitat are all necessary to ensure this magnificent animal’s future.”

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Concerned about BPA: Check your receipts

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check out this article…

While working at Polaroid Corp. for more than a decade, John C. Warner learned about the chemistry behind some carbonless copy papers (now used for most credit card receipts) and the thermal imaging papers that are spit out by most modern cash registers. Both relied on bisphenol-A.

Manufacturers would coat a powdery layer of this BPA onto one side of a piece of paper together with an invisible ink, he says. Later, when you applied pressure or heat, they would merge together and you’d get color.

At the time, back in the 90s, he thought little about the technology other than it was clever. But when BPA exploded into the news, about a decade ago, Warner began to develop some doubts.

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Lead Hazards in the Brain

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TERRE HAUTE When Danette Monson first learned that her son Garin had high lead levels in his blood, she wasn’t too concerned.

After all, older generations had grown up with lead and they all seemed fine and they were exposed to it a lot more she said.

Still, she and husband Christian immediately began taking the measures recommended by the Vigo County Health Department to lower her son’s lead levels and also to abate lead hazards in their older, Collett Park home.

She’s glad they did.

Later that year, Monson noticed her son was having a lot of developmental problems.

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Chasing The Silver Dragon

We cruised through the first 6-mile stretch, not exerting too much energy in anticipation of what was to come farther down river. I was able to recall from some landmarks where good sections had been the previous year, and we managed to maximize what was available. I got onto a right that was peeling 50 feet off the steep cement river bank and rode it for about two miles to the stadium-like cheering from the crowd. Every so often I would look over and give a big fist pump or something of the sort, which would intensify the cheer.

It was the first week of October and China was in the midst of massive celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the rise of the Communist Party. Jamie Sterling, a couple of our photographer/filmer friends and myself were in the city of Hangzhou, on the Qiantang River. We’d come to surf the river”the fabled “Silver Dragon.”

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What’s the Most Creative Climate Protest?

Author Bill McKibben never saw this coming.

Founder of 350.org, an environmental campaign aimed at holding atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts-per-million, McKibben sent word that this Saturday would be the day to take to the streets.

The call went viral in ways far beyond anything McKibben and fellow organizers imagined: As of Thursday morning some 4,317 actions and rallies are planned in 171 countries, with 300 events in China, 1,500 across the United States, 500-plus in Central and South America.

Organizers credit the increasing inter-connectedness of Web, cellular and social networks for the spread, saying such random and organic growth would have been impossible even two years ago.

Wasteful habits the source of global water shortage

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Adelaide is the first city in the developed world to suffer permanent droughts, but it is unlikely to be the last, writes JOHN GIBBONS .

THEY CALL it the lucky country. Australia’s nickname comes from a book of the same name, published in 1964 by social critic Donald Horne. He was, however, being ironic. Australia, he suggested, was a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.

Horne’s point was that, while other industrialised countries created their wealth through technology and innovation, Australia’s extraordinary natural bounty of natural resources, climate and distance from trouble spots meant prosperity had come too easily.

And, as we’ve witnessed closer to home, from good fortune springs bad habits. Now, though, Australia’s luck, like its water, appears to be running out. Nowhere is this being more powerfully felt than in the Murray-Darling basin, an area of southeast Australia as large as France and Spain combined. The region is in the grip of a seven-year drought.

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