Not only do compact fluorescent light bulbs contain mercury, but they also produce ‘dirty energy’, according to this report by CBC News. I found that CFL’s do not perform well in dimmer-controlled lighting and this explains it. LED bulbs are more expensive, but much cleaner to run and longer lasting than CFL’s.
Tag: Mercury
“What it’s like to have fracking in your backyard”
Tara Lohan writes for Fracking West Virginia about the highly destructive practice of horizontal hydraulic fracturing. She includes this video of an interview with Harrison County, West Virginia resident, Leanne Kiner.
Lohan gives further details on the predicament Kiner and her neighbors are facing due to the fracking process. She writes(emphasis mine):
As if the disruptions to her quality of life and property values weren’t bad enough, Kiner’s water well became contaminated with unsafe levels of arsenic. She came home from work one day to find that, without any notice, someone working for the drilling company had disconnected her house from her well and installed a large “water buffalo” tank outside her home. Companies have been known to supply water tanks to affected residents (although usually with no admission of guilt) temporarily, and then leave the residents high and dry months or years down the road, even when water pollution problems persist.
Water is a big and multifaceted issue when it comes to fracking. Horizontal wells in the Marcellus can take upward of 5 million gallons of water during fracking. The wells can be fracked multiple times and there can be as many as 10 wells drilled on a single well pad. Multiple that by the thousands of wells that have been fracked thus far and that’s a lot of water. All those hundreds of millions of gallons are often taken from local streams and creeks.
Then there is the wastewater to contend with, beginning with “drilling brine” which can contain high levels of salts, as well as arsenic, mercury, chromium and naturally occurring radioactive materials. What to do with this wastewater? “In the past, the drilling brine, with the cuttings have been put in pits, and after the solids are settled, the liquid has been sprayed on the land,” reports the West Virginia Sierra Club. “If too concentrated it kills vegetation, so even if sprayed thinly enough not to be deadly, it cannot be helping the land. The pits with remaining solids and plastic liner, if used, are buried on site.”
There is also the wastewater from the fracking process, and what’s called “produced water,” which flows from the well as it it producing. This can contain some of the toxic mix of chemicals (which most companies won’t reveal) that does not remain underground. WV Sierra Club reports, “Because of the increased volume of wastewater to be disposed of from Marcellus wells, the WV DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] is asking drillers to dispose of it by injection in underground injection wells.” Much has been written about the potential risks (including earthquakes) from this manner of disposal and some companies have been nabbed for illegally dumping this toxic wastewater into storm drains, creeks and other waterways. And there have been reports of it dumped on roads.
On May 26, 2012 Christina Woods was mowing the lawn when a truck dumped water on her road for dust suppression. Christina and her husband Wayne had made numerous complaints about the road condition since fracking operations began. At times, the dust from constant truck traffic had made it impossible for them to even open their windows or sit outdoors. After the truck went by on May 26, Christina Woods immediately got a sore throat and her tongue felt numb. They quickly realized it wasn’t clean water that was being sprayed on the road. “The emergency response team didn’t come until three days after,” said Wayne, “and the morning they did the air quality samples it rained.” The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) did find that the company, Jay-Bee, had sprayed “wastewaters from natural gas production” on their road and issued a fine.
But water is just one of the issues. For those living near fracking sites, life itself is drastically changed. Diane Pitcock and her husband and son moved from near Baltimore, Maryland to a rural haven of over 100 acres in New Milton, West Virginia six years ago. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. “It’s so sad because we never moved here expecting this,” said Pitcock, who has started an organization called West Virginia Host Farms Program to call attention to what is happening in her community. Her neighbor leased his property to Antero Resources and now the Pitcock’s land abuts a drilling site known as the Ruckman well pad of the Erwin Valley Project. “It’s four separate well pads on his land, having 27 individual permits for horizontal legs,” she explained.
Read more here.
“Sweating detoxifies dangerous metals, petrochemicals”
Sajer Ji reports on studies that show that a good sweat is more than just a way to cool down the body. The founder of Green Med Info writes, “Sweating has been found to facilitate the elimination of accumulated heavy metals and petrochemicals, indicating that if we want to be healthy we should put regular effort into doing more sweating.”
Ji cites from a study published in 2011 in the Archives of Environmental and Contamination Toxicology that found that, “Induced sweating appears to be a potential method for elimination of many toxic elements from the human body.”
He writes:
The researchers also made the important observation that, “Biomonitoring for toxic elements through blood and/or urine testing may underestimate the total body burden of such toxicants. Sweat analysis should be considered as an additional method for monitoring bioaccumulation of toxic elements in humans.”
These are truly novel findings insofar as sweating, at least from the perspective of evolutionary biology, is considered to exist primarily for thermoregulation (sweat cools the surface of the skin and reduces body temperature, functioning as a wholebody cooling system). While the sweat glands have a well-known secondary role for the excretion of water and electrolytes, this function is not generally understood to be a form ‘detoxification.’
Also, this study underscores just how common it is for conventional medical practice to overlook the relevance of environmental factors in health (e.g. exposures to metals, petrochemicals, toxins), as many of these ‘vectors’ of exposure/poisoning are not properly measurable via blood or urine tests; that is, when they even care to look. This blind spot, of course, feeds the delusion that one can suppress bodily symptoms associated with environmental exposures with additional patented chemicals, in the downward spiral that is drug-based medicine. The obvious alternative method – identify and remove the poisons – isn’t even on the table, unless the practitioner happens to be aware of natural, integrative or functional medical principles and has the courage to go against the FDA-approved and liability-shielding grain to employ them.
Why Blood and Urine Analysis May Fail To Reveal The Problem
These preliminary research findings were further confirmed in a 2012 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Public and Environmental Health. The study titled, “Arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury in sweat: a systematic review,” was performed by researchers from the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, Ontario, Canada, and was based on a review of 24 studies on toxicant levels in the sweat.[2]
The researchers discovered the following:
- In individuals with higher exposure or body burden, sweat generally exceeded plasma or urine concentrations, and dermal could match or surpass urinary daily excretion.
- Arsenic dermal excretion was severalfold higher in arsenic-exposed individuals than in unexposed controls.
- Cadmium was more concentrated in sweat than in blood plasma.
- Sweat lead was associated with high-molecular-weight molecules, and in an interventional study, levels were higher with endurance compared with intensive exercise.
- Mercury levels normalized with repeated saunas in a case report.
The researchers concluded, “Sweating deserves consideration for toxic element detoxification.“
Ji has also cites two studies that conclude that endocrine-disrupting petrochemicals can be eliminated via sweat glands. The article continues:
The first study, involving 20 subjects made to undergo induced sweating, found that the ubiquitous petrochemical Bisphenol A (BPA) was excreted through sweat, even in some individuals with no BPA detected in their serum or urine samples.[3] This clearly indicates that the body uses sweat to rid itself of the BPA that has bioaccumulated in tissue.
The second study by the same research group, also involving 20 subjects, found that phthalate, a plasticizer tied to breast cancer and various other conditions associated with endocrine disruption, was present in concentrations twice as high in their sweat compared to their urine, and in several individuals was found in their sweat but not in their blood serum, “…suggesting the possibility of phthalate retention and bioaccumulation.”
Read the full report at Green Med Info, click here. I would add that using deodorants that contain aluminum is not a good idea. In general, the use of lotions that clog the pores is a poor choice as well. The skin is the largest organ in the human body. Sweating is good for your health.
European study shows coal pollution causes 22,300 premature deaths a year
Source: Guardian
Environmental editor, John Vidal reports for the UK Guardian:
Air pollution from Europe‘s 300 largest coal power stations causes 22,300 premature deaths a year and costs companies and governments billions of pounds in disease treatment and lost working days, says a major study of the health impacts of burning coal to generate electricity.
The research, from Stuttgart University’s Institute for energy economics and commissioned by Greenpeace International, suggests that a further 2,700 people can be expected to die prematurely each year if a new generation of 50 planned coal plants are built in Europe. “The coal-fired power plants in Europe cause a considerable amount of health impacts,” the researchers concluded.
Analysis of the emissions shows that air pollution from coal plants is now linked to more deaths than road traffic accidents in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. In Germany and the UK, coal-fired power stations are associated with nearly as many deaths as road accidents. Polish coal power plants were estimated to cause more than 5,000 premature deaths in 2010.
The cumulative impact of pollution on health is “shocking”, says an accompanying Greenpeace report. A total of 240,000 years of life were said to be lost in Europe in 2010 with 480,000 work days a year and 22,600 “life years” lost in Britain, the fifth most coal-polluted country. Drax, Britain’s largest coal-powered station, was said to be responsible for 4,450 life years lost, and Longannet in Scotland 4,210.
According to the study, Polish coal power plants have the worst health impact in the European Union. The Polish government and Polish utilities are planning to build a dozen new power plants. The utility companies with the worst estimated health impacts, according to the report, are PGE (Poland), RWE (Germany and UK), PPC (Greece), Vattenfall (Sweden) and ČEZ (Czech Republic).
Acid gas, soot, and dust emissions from coal burning are, along with diesel engines, the biggest contributors to microscopic particulate pollution that penetrates deep into the lungs and the bloodstream. The pollution causes heart attacks and lung cancer, as well as increasing asthma attacks and other respiratory problems that harm the health of both children and adults.
“Tens of thousands of kilogrammes of toxic metals such as mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium are spewed out of the stacks, contributing to cancer risk and harming children’s development,” says the Greenpeace report, which does not emphasise the impact of coal burning on climate change.
The 300 plants produce one-quarter of all the electricity generated in the EU but are responsible for more than 70% of the EU’s sulphur dioxide emissions and more than 40% of nitrogen oxide emissions from the power sector. The Greenpeace report notes that coal burning has increased in Europe each year from 2009 to 2012.
ScienceCasts: Sunset Triangle – Venus, Jupiter and Mercury in the West
Description from ScienceAtNASA on you-tube:
The three brightest planets in this month’s night sky are lining up for a beautiful sunset conjunction at the end of May.
Planet Mercury Hollow?
Phys.org has published the latest Mercury findings about a crater near its equator that appears to be bubbling. NASA scientists suggest that Mercury could be hollow inside, or at least partially so.
NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft captured the photo close up of the interior of the crater. They theorize that these types of craters, which have been observed in various other places on the planet are young and caused by, “Solar wind.” Jason Major of Phys.org writes:
A recent image acquired by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft shows the interior of Eminescu, a youngish 130-km (80 mile) wide crater just north of Mercury’s equator. Eminescu made science headlines last year with MESSENGER’s discovery of curious eroded blotches called “hollows” scattered across its interior and surrounding its central peak, and now it looks like the spacecraft may have spotted some of these strange features in their earliest stages of formation along the inner edge of the crater’s rim.
This is what NASA scientists believe causes these porous-looking craters, writes Major:
It’s thought that hollows are formed by the solar wind constantly blasting Mercury’s surface, scouring away deposits of volatile materials in its crust that have been left exposed by impacts.
Phys.org provides a definition for solar wind, partially sourced from Wikipedia.
The solar wind is a stream of charged particles—a plasma—ejected from the upper atmosphere of the sun. It consists mostly of electrons and protons with energies of about 1 keV. The stream of particles varies in temperature and speed with the passage of time. These particles are able to escape the sun’s gravity, in part because of the high temperature of the corona, but also because of high kinetic energy that particles gain through a process that is not well-understood.
The solar wind creates the Heliosphere, a vast bubble in the interstellar medium surrounding the solar system. Other phenomena include geomagnetic storms that can knock out power grids on Earth, the aurorae such as the Northern Lights, and the plasma tails of comets that always point away from the sun.
Organic Material Covers Frozen Water on Mercury
NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has found frozen pockets of ice covered by what they believe to be organic material on the planet Mercury, reports Discovery News. The Baltimore Sun has also published about this major announcement by the Messenger mission. Scott Dance reports:
“Instruments aboard Messenger discovered deep deposits rich in hydrogen using spectroscopy, which views radiative energy outside of the visible spectrum. Scientists then used a laser altimeter to make detailed maps of Mercury’s topography, much like ships use sonar to detect variation in the ocean floor, which corroborated evidence of irregular deposits.”
NASA held a press conference today, making this announcement:
“Observations by the MESSENGER spacecraft have provided compelling support for the 20-year old hypothesis that Mercury hosts abundant water ice and other frozen volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters. Three independent lines of evidence support this conclusion: the first measurements of excess hydrogen at Mercury’s north pole with MESSENGER’s Neutron Spectrometer, the first measurements of the reflectance of Mercury’s polar deposits at near-infrared wavelengths with the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA), and the first detailed models of the surface and near-surface temperatures of Mercury’s north polar regions that utilize the actual topography of Mercury’s surface measured by MLA. These findings are presented in three papers published online today in Science Express.”
News and Views 