In this issue, we spotlight the year's most incredible inventions, from a cheaper prosthetic hand to a jet-propelled body board.
Plus: Science versus science fiction in summer blockbusters, the dogged persistence of bedbugs, and more.
Read the issue here.
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ALLENTOWN, Pa. ? Federal environmental officials say that testing has revealed contamination in three private water wells following an April blowout at a Pennsylvania natural gas drilling site.
Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Roy Seneca said Friday that EPA took water samples from seven private water wells near the Chesapeake Energy Corp. drilling site near Canton in in northeastern Pennsylvania's Bradford County.
EPA briefed residents on the sampling results Thursday. Seneca declined to reveal the nature of the contamination. He says EPA will sample the wells again in July.
The Chesapeake well spilled thousands of gallons of salty, chemical-laced water into fields and a stream.
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PHOENIX ? The largest wildfire in Arizona history left a charred landscape of blackened forest, burned-out vehicle hulks and charred fireplaces as it destroyed more than 30 homes. It also inflicted a serious toll on an ecosystem that's home to numerous endangered species.
The flames spared three packs of endangered Mexican gray wolves but likely killed at least some threatened Mexican spotted owls as it roared through more than a half-million acres of a pristine forest on the New Mexico border.
Though some spots were untouched or had only undergrowth burn, the effect of the human-caused Wallow fire will last for decades because it burned so hot in many areas that it completely denuded the landscape, forest specialists said.
"The natural fires are good for a healthy forest, but these fires ? where the debris has been allowed to build up and it just hasn't been addressed ? they come out very hot and just scorch everything. As soon as the monsoon shows up, there's a potential for a lot of soil to move," said Tom Buckley, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman.
Forest managers are warning homeowners in the White Mountains to get flood insurance immediately because summer storms will likely create severe runoff.
It's part of the steep human cost from the 832-square-mile blaze that continues to churn through thousands of new acres per day in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.
The fire destroyed 32 homes and four rental cabins. The charred skeletons of vacation homes are physical reminders of disrupted lives and bygone memories. For many Arizona desert dwellers, the mountains provided an escape from the heat for generations.
The Wallow fire was 67 percent contained by Thursday night but still slowly growing on the south and southeast flanks.
Two other major fires are burning in the state. The 44-square-mile Monument fire near Sierra Vista, Ariz., has destroyed 57 homes. Authorities lifted an evacuation order for an estimated 200 to 300 homes Thursday, but about 300 remain evacuated. The 348-square-mile Horseshoe Two fire atop southeastern the Chiricahua mountains has destroyed nine homes in the world-renowned bird watching area.
The three wolf packs in the Apache-Sitgreaves all had pups and were in or near their dens when the fire that broke out on May 29 roared through, said Jim Paxon, a spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Firefighters on the ground have seen two of the packs moving around with their pups. Radio collars on the three adults in the third pack show they are alive, but the status of their pups remains unknown because they are in an area still too hot for ground crews to enter.
"They're there, and functioning, and able to persist and take care of their pups," Paxon said. "We feel very confident that our wolves are out there and they've all got pups, and that's a good thing."
The Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday it had not confirmed the pups survived.
The wolves were reintroduced into Arizona and New Mexico beginning in 1998. Managers had hoped to have more than 100 in the wild by 2006, but the count stood at 42 at the beginning of 2010.
The spotted owls are another matter.
Crown fires in overgrown forests have become the greatest cause of unusual losses for the birds, and 73 protected nesting areas were burned in the fire, said Beth Humphrey, Apache-Sitgreaves biologist. There are 145 protested nest sites in the entire 2.1 million acres forest.
Any nestlings or eggs caught in the fire were surely lost, although mortality among adults was likely limited, Humphrey said.
"We don't know the severity of the impacts of those owl sites," Buckley said. "Fires don't burn evenly, so we have a lot of hope that some survived."
Fish and Wildlife is looking to see if prey for the wolves and owls will return quickly enough to let the animals stay in their regular areas.
The burned forest supports more than a dozen other endangered or threatened species, including snails, frogs and fish. Dozens of other species live in the forest that aren't rare, including bear, deer, antelope and a herd of elk that, at about 6,000, is among the state's biggest.
Only two dead elk have been found, Paxon said. A yearling calf had to be euthanized because its hooves were badly burned.
"These ungulates, the elk and the deer and the antelope, they're a whole lot smarter than people are when it comes to evacuations," Paxon said.
"When they feel heat, they will move away from heat toward a cooler area, and generally that's perpendicular to the way the fire's going. If it's not a huge fire, they often circle around and come back in. If it is a pretty widespread fire front, they simply get out in front of that and go over the hill into the next drainage."
The next round of damage will come once summer rains hit. The National Weather Service is warning of major flash floods and debris flows even with a 15-minute-long moderate downpour.
A 23-square-mile fire outside Flagstaff, Ariz., last June led to severe flooding from summer rains that inundated more than 80 homes and led to the drowning death of a 12-year-old girl.
The flooding from the Wallow will kill fish, since it will carry major flows of ash and sediment and clog streams. Decades-long efforts to restore endangered Apache and Gila trout to the streams that flow from the mountain will be hurt.
Already, plans are being made to pull pure Apache trout from streams where it is expected they will die, to preserve the lineage, said Julie Meka Carter, native trout conservation coordinator for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. They could be put in other streams or placed in hatcheries for as long as three years, until the ash and sediment flows subside.
"The forest will be very changed, very, very different," said Apache-Sitgreaves forest supervisor Chris Knopp.
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LONDON (AFP) ? Wild animals could be banned from circuses in Britain if a cross-party alliance of MPs succeeds with a call on Thursday for government action.
MPs will vote on a motion brought forward by backbenchers from the three main parties proposing a ban.
The campaign to stop the use of animals has gathered momentum, with an open letter by a group of celebrities to the Prime Minister on Wednesday urging the government to act.
The vote on the backbench motion will not be binding on the government, but if passed will put extra pressure on ministers.
Agriculture Minister Jim Paice has so far ruled out an outright ban on wild animals in circuses, partly because the government fears being sued by circus owners using human rights laws.
The open letter to David Cameron was organised by campaign group Animal Defenders International (ADI) and signed by high-profile names, including actor Brian Blessed, comic Ricky Gervais and Queen guitarist Brian May.
It said a system of stricter regulations favoured by ministers would not be effective in protecting circus animals.
"The coalition government's decision is completely at odds with public and parliamentary will," it says.
"Every legal obstacle that the government has recently put forward has now been knocked down."
ADI says it has received legal advice that an outright ban on the use of wild animals would not breach the Human Rights Act or the EU Services Directive.
X Factor diva Leona Lewis has also joined the fight, writing a letter to her MP Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington).
She said: "I am shocked and outraged that there needs to be a debate about whether it is OK for wild animals to perform tricks in the big top."
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FRIDAY, June 24 (HealthDay News) -- Children who live in stress-filled homes experience more air pollution-related lung damage than kids in less stressful environments, a new study finds.
Researchers looked at the effects of traffic-related pollution and parental stress on 1,400 children, aged 10 to 12, in California. There were no significant associations noted between parental stress alone and lung function levels in the children.
But as exposure to traffic pollution increased, lung function decreased among children in high-stress homes. This did not occur among children in low-stress homes, said the researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Certain factors associated with low socioeconomic levels were also linked with high stress, such as an annual income below $30,000, low education levels among parents, no air conditioning in the home and a lack of health insurance.
The study appears online ahead of print in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
"One possible explanation for the stress-related pattern of [traffic-related pollution] respiratory effects is the biological pathways common to effects of traffic-related pollution and stress," lead researcher Talat Islam, an assistant professor in the environmental health division at Keck, said in a news release from the American Thoracic Society.
"Like air pollution, stress has been linked to both inflammation and oxidative damage at the cellular level, so this may explain the association," he added.
The public health implications of this finding are clear, he noted.
"The magnitude of the traffic-related pollution-associated deficits in [lung function] levels in children growing up in high-stress households was larger than deficits reported for children exposed to maternal smoking during pregnancy and secondhand tobacco smoke," Islam said.
"Our findings suggest that by regulating traffic-related pollution levels around residential areas and schools, we could reduce the adverse effect of traffic-related pollution on lung function among vulnerable children," he concluded.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about respiratory health and air pollution.
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PHOENIX ? The largest wildfire in Arizona history left a charred landscape of blackened forest, burned-out vehicle hulks and charred fireplaces as it destroyed more than 30 homes. It also inflicted a serious toll on an ecosystem that's home to numerous endangered species.
The flames spared three packs of endangered Mexican gray wolves but likely killed at least some threatened Mexican spotted owls as it roared through more than a half-million acres of a pristine forest on the New Mexico border.
Though some spots were untouched or had only undergrowth burn, the effect of the human-caused Wallow fire will last for decades because it burned so hot in many areas that it completely denuded the landscape, forest specialists said.
"The natural fires are good for a healthy forest, but these fires ? where the debris has been allowed to build up and it just hasn't been addressed ? they come out very hot and just scorch everything. As soon as the monsoon shows up, there's a potential for a lot of soil to move," said Tom Buckley, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman.
Forest managers are warning homeowners in the White Mountains to get flood insurance immediately because summer storms will likely create severe runoff.
It's part of the steep human cost from the 832-square-mile blaze that continues to churn through thousands of new acres per day in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.
The fire destroyed 32 homes and four rental cabins. The charred skeletons of vacation homes are physical reminders of disrupted lives and bygone memories. For many Arizona desert dwellers, the mountains provided an escape from the heat for generations.
The Wallow fire was 67 percent contained by Thursday night but still slowly growing on the south and southeast flanks.
Two other major fires are burning in the state. The 44-square-mile Monument fire near Sierra Vista, Ariz., has destroyed 57 homes. Authorities lifted an evacuation order for an estimated 200 to 300 homes Thursday, but about 300 remain evacuated. The 348-square-mile Horseshoe Two fire atop southeastern the Chiricahua mountains has destroyed nine homes in the world-renowned bird watching area.
The three wolf packs in the Apache-Sitgreaves all had pups and were in or near their dens when the fire that broke out on May 29 roared through, said Jim Paxon, a spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Firefighters on the ground have seen two of the packs moving around with their pups. Radio collars on the three adults in the third pack show they are alive, but the status of their pups remains unknown because they are in an area still too hot for ground crews to enter.
"They're there, and functioning, and able to persist and take care of their pups," Paxon said. "We feel very confident that our wolves are out there and they've all got pups, and that's a good thing."
The Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday it had not confirmed the pups survived.
The wolves were reintroduced into Arizona and New Mexico beginning in 1998. Managers had hoped to have more than 100 in the wild by 2006, but the count stood at 42 at the beginning of 2010.
The spotted owls are another matter.
Crown fires in overgrown forests have become the greatest cause of unusual losses for the birds, and 73 protected nesting areas were burned in the fire, said Beth Humphrey, Apache-Sitgreaves biologist. There are 145 protested nest sites in the entire 2.1 million acres forest.
Any nestlings or eggs caught in the fire were surely lost, although mortality among adults was likely limited, Humphrey said.
"We don't know the severity of the impacts of those owl sites," Buckley said. "Fires don't burn evenly, so we have a lot of hope that some survived."
Fish and Wildlife is looking to see if prey for the wolves and owls will return quickly enough to let the animals stay in their regular areas.
The burned forest supports more than a dozen other endangered or threatened species, including snails, frogs and fish. Dozens of other species live in the forest that aren't rare, including bear, deer, antelope and a herd of elk that, at about 6,000, is among the state's biggest.
Only two dead elk have been found, Paxon said. A yearling calf had to be euthanized because its hooves were badly burned.
"These ungulates, the elk and the deer and the antelope, they're a whole lot smarter than people are when it comes to evacuations," Paxon said.
"When they feel heat, they will move away from heat toward a cooler area, and generally that's perpendicular to the way the fire's going. If it's not a huge fire, they often circle around and come back in. If it is a pretty widespread fire front, they simply get out in front of that and go over the hill into the next drainage."
The next round of damage will come once summer rains hit. The National Weather Service is warning of major flash floods and debris flows even with a 15-minute-long moderate downpour.
A 23-square-mile fire outside Flagstaff, Ariz., last June led to severe flooding from summer rains that inundated more than 80 homes and led to the drowning death of a 12-year-old girl.
The flooding from the Wallow will kill fish, since it will carry major flows of ash and sediment and clog streams. Decades-long efforts to restore endangered Apache and Gila trout to the streams that flow from the mountain will be hurt.
Already, plans are being made to pull pure Apache trout from streams where it is expected they will die, to preserve the lineage, said Julie Meka Carter, native trout conservation coordinator for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. They could be put in other streams or placed in hatcheries for as long as three years, until the ash and sediment flows subside.
"The forest will be very changed, very, very different," said Apache-Sitgreaves forest supervisor Chris Knopp.
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A machine that uses exhaust heat to treat onboard sewage
Clean Machine After a weeklong cruise, a typical 3,000-passenger cruise ship may hold nearly 200,000 gallons of wastewater in toilets?a problem, inventor Namon Nassef says, that the ZLD could easily eliminate. John B. Carnett
When Namon Nassef had to buy a new engine for his boat, he saw an opportunity. He could finally install the invention he had been working on, a machine he calls the Zero Liquid Discharge Sewage Elimination System (ZLD). The device uses engine heat to oxidize and evaporate toilet, shower and galley waste.
A typical combustion engine makes use of only 30 to 35 percent of the energy contained in fuel; the rest escapes as heat through the radiator or the exhaust. The microwave-oven-size ZLD puts that exhaust heat to work. When a passenger flushes a boat?s toilet or drains the waste-containment tank, the wastewater runs through a pipe to the ZLD, which can be installed anywhere in the craft. First the waste enters the machine?s equalization tank, which grinds it into pieces a quarter of an inch or smaller in diameter. Next it moves to the homogenizer, a container with three sets of blades that dissolve solids into 0.002-inch-diameter particles. Then an injector pump pressurizes the waste stream and sprays it through a nozzle into the engine?s exhaust system as a fine aerosol.
The exhaust of an idling engine is at least 550�F, which is hot enough to flashevaporate the waste and thermally oxidize the organic materials. Quite simply, the device can break down anything organic that?s put into it. The process eliminates all odors, Nassef says, and the main by-products are carbon dioxide and clean water vapor.
How It Works: Zero Liquid Discharge: Waste flows from the boat?s toilet to an equalization tank, which breaks it into small pieces. The material next moves into the homogenizer, a container where it gets chopped into particles. The injector pump pressurizes the material and sprays it through a nozzle into the engine?s exhaust system, where the heat cleans it. �Blanddesigns.co.uk
Nassef is starting with boats, but the ZLD has the potential to work in just about any vehicle with hot-enough exhaust and a toilet. He?s drawn interest from RV manufacturers and the U.S. military, which often resorts to burning waste with jet fuel (at a total cost of $400 per gallon) at its forward operating bases. Another promising market is airlines, which could plug the ZLD into existing toilets, allowing some planes to shed up to 500 pounds of wastewater weight over the course of a flight.
Name: Zero Liquid Discharge
Inventor: Namon Nassef
Time: 7 years
Cost: ?Hundreds of thousands of dollars"
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CALI, Colombia (AFP) ? Greenhouses lined with genetically modified marijuana sit on a mountainside just an hour ride from Cali, Colombia, where farmers say the enhanced plants are more powerful and profitable.
One greenhouse owner said she can sell the modified marijuana for 100,000 pesos ($54) per kilo (2.2 pounds), which is nearly 10 times more than the price she can get for ordinary marijuana.
Local authorities said the arrival of genetically modified seeds, which are imported from Europe and the United States have allowed "a bigger production and better quality at the same time".
A police commander in the Cauca region where Cali is located, Carlos Rodriguez, said one of the modified varieties goes by the name, "Creepy".
Another seed modified in The Netherlands is fetching a good price in the area, said a foreign researcher, who asked to remain anonymous. That version, well-known in Europe as "La Cominera", is named for the Colombian village where it grows.
"La Cominera's" higher value is due to its increased concentration of THC, the plant's principal active ingredient, and the modified plant verges on an 18 percent concentration level, compared to a normal marijuana plant's two to seven percent, said the researcher.
Despite the fact that marijuana production is illegal in Colombia, farmers say they continue to sell both traditional and modified marijuana because of economic advantages. One resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he can sell 11 kilograms of marijuana for 160,000 Colombian pesos ($87).
In the greenhouses outside of Cali, in a secret location accessible only by foot, it is easy to recognize the famous plant with star-shaped leaves, where it grows amid other legal crops.
"I don't like growing marijuana, but it ended up that way," one farmer said. "I received a loan to grow coffee, but I was drowning and I had to sell my harvest very cheap. My sister told me it would be better to plant marijuana."
Marijuana was first introduced to the country in the 1930s and residents of Cali said that for economic reasons, they have never stopped cultivating the plant since.
They added they cannot sustain themselves on coffee and banana crops alone, because prices fluctuate widely and it is difficult to reach markets in time to sell the perishable items before they spoil, due to a poor road network.
The hemp plant was originally legally used in the production of textiles and soccer balls until 1962, when authorities banned the use of marijauana in those products in order to comply with international standards.
According to botanist Luis Miguel Alvarez, a teacher at the University of Caldas in Manizales and the author of several marijuana studies, after marijuana is grown and dried, it can endure long periods without spoiling, which is a strong economic advantage.
Police commander Rodriguez said the crop's growth poses a problem for local law enforcement, because profits are often used to finance other criminal activity.
"We believe that the sixth front of the FARC guerrilla forces are 90 percent financed by marijuana," he said. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia is Latin America's largest and longest-fighting insurgency with 47 years of armed struggle and 8,000 fighters.
Marijuana production and sales are growing in Colombia, which was also the world's biggest producer of cocaine in 2009, according to available statistics, he said.
"This year we have already seized 27 tons (of marijuana by June), compared to 23 tons last year. It is troubling that the resources of armed groups are growing and because of this they can acquire arms and explosives," Rodriguez said.
Nationwide, authorities say they have seized 41.8 tons of marijuana to date in 2011, compared to a total of 228 tons in 2010.
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Tank killers, nightmares for Hitler, bombed-out volcanoes and more explosive ideas from World War II-era PopSci.
October 1943
After celebrating the 67th anniversary of D-Day this week, it's only fitting that we publish a gallery documenting World War II-era PopSci. A warning, though: this was the 1940s, so practically nothing in here conforms to our modern-day notion of political correctness. Some of these headlines may sound a little extreme, but rest assured, we took care to elaborate on the idea from a scientific standpoint.
First, let's go back three years earlier to 1942, when the Germans unveiled their 88-mm tank gun in Libya and Egypt. After the American and British press acknowledged its spectacular showing, we ran a story to assure our readers that our weaponry could vanquish the Nazi troops any day. "American Guns Do Not Lack a Punch, They Are -- Tank Killers With a Wallop!" we proclaimed.
Like "Tank Killers," "Nightmares to Order for Hitler" coasted on the nation's optimism for an Allied victory. Other features, such as a spread titled "This is How a Defenseless America Could Be Invaded" reflect the apprehension Americans felt while watching footage of bombings in Europe and the Pacific.
If there's one feature that still holds up today, it's an illustrated narrative titled "Yankee Ingenuity Licks Prison-Camp Hardships." Here, Major William Orris describes how he and his fellow POWs survived in a Luftwaffe prison camp by fashioning kitchen devices out of old cans and tin sheets--a combination of The Great Escape and MacGuyver, if you will, but more importantly, a compelling story about how simple gadgetry directed these men toward a certain future.
Click through our gallery to read about the decoy tanks, the kamikaze fighters, and one geologist's plans to bomb Japan's volcanoes.
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A group of designers are working on an initiative to build a floating pool in New York City?s East River that will filter water from the river itself.
The designers are creating a pool not on the river, but within the river itself, using an innovative infiltration system that is still in the creation process. They are still trying to raise money to start preliminary infiltration tests.
"When it?s an incredibly hot summer, the first thing you want to do is jump in a pool," one of the designers said in a video message on their website, PlusPool.org. "We looked at the river as something we would like to get into and how surreal it would feel to actually be in that river and see what the city looked like from it."
The +Pool will be made up of four different pools put together ? a children?s pool, sports pool, lap pool and lounge pool to form a giant plus sign, creating a sleek design that resembles an intersection.
The + Pool's design filters river water through the pool's walls, similar to a giant strainer dropped into the East River. The concentric layers of filtration materials that make up the sides of the pool are designed to remove bacteria, contaminants and odors, leaving only safe and swimmable water that meets city, state and federal standards of quality, according to the site.
"This pool will be the first of its kind, which is of course very exciting, but really we just want to be able to swim in the river,? the site said.
The site also notes that the pool can be used independently to cater to all types of swimmers, combined to form an Olympic-length lap pool or opened completely into a 9,000 square foot pool for play.
In the first few days, the designers have raised $25,000 and are still accepting donations on the site.
This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Reach TechNewsDaily senior writer Samantha Murphy at @SamMurphy_TMN
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