More than 97 million United States residents have been exposed to contaminants in their drinking water that are unregulated and could affect their health, a new analysis by Silent Spring Institute has found.

Hispanic and Black communities have a higher likelihood of their water being contaminated by unsafe levels of toxic chemicals, a press release from Silent Spring said. They are also more likely to live close to sources of pollution.

The findings add to increasing concern about U.S. water quality and contamination’s disproportionate impact on communities of color.

Nearly 100 contaminants are regulated under the country’s Safe Drinking Water Act, which means public water utilities are required to test for them, as well as take measures to make sure levels don’t exceed set limits.

“Yet, we know there are thousands of other harmful chemicals that are not regulated that make their way into groundwater and surface waters, and some of these chemicals can ultimately end up in drinking water supplies,” said co-author of the findings Laurel Schaider, a Silent Spring Institute senior scientist, in the press release.

Schaider and the research team reviewed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data compiled from 2013 to 2015 under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule program. They analyzed figures from 4,815 public water systems only to discover that 27 percent had detectable levels of one or more of the following: 1,4-dioxane, a solvent listed by EPA as a likely human carcinogen that is used in consumer products; per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) “forever chemicals,” widely used in products such as non-stick cookware and waterproof rain gear and associated with thyroid disease, high cholesterol, cancer and other health issues; chlorodifluoromethane (Freon 22), a gas that contributes to depletion of the ozone layer and was previously used in fluoropolymers like Teflon and as a refrigerant; and 1,1-dichloroethane, a solvent found in plastics, pesticides and paints that is associated with cancer.

Communities with more Hispanic and Black residents were found to be generally more likely to have exposure to the unregulated contaminants through their drinking water and more often lived near pollution discharge sites such as wastewater treatment plants, military training areas, industrial sites and airports.

“Our findings show that the percentage of Hispanic and Black residents in a community is a consistent predictor of poorer water quality,” said lead author of the study Aaron Maruzzo, a Silent Spring Institute scientist, in the press release.

Maruzzo said the racial disparities were not explainable by income or other ways of measuring socioeconomic status, which suggested that issues like racism and historical redlining could be a factor in the disproportionate placement of industrial facilities.

The new study builds on earlier research by the institute, which found that Hispanic communities are more likely to have exposure to higher nitrate levels in their drinking water. A legal limit was set by the EPA on nitrate decades ago for the protection of infants from fatal “blue baby syndrome.”

More recent evidence has suggested that nitrate exposure at levels lower than the federal standard can also increase the risk of bladder and colorectal cancer.

A study from 2023 co-authored by Shaider investigated community water systems from 20 states and discovered that those with more Hispanic and Black residents reported higher PFAS levels in their drinking water.

The new analysis by Silent Spring is the first to scrutinize disparities in PFAS exposure, as well as other unregulated contaminants, within all U.S. states, territories and Tribal lands.

Schaider said that, since recent testing has shown PFAS to be much more prevalent in drinking water than was previously believed, the number of individuals impacted by contaminants when the data was collected is an underestimate.

In April of last year, EPA announced new standards for six PFAS chemicals in drinking water. The new findings highlight the necessity of federal regulatory action for more contaminants, as well as the need for the federal government to provide additional resources to communities of color concerning the impacts of pollution.

“Ultimately, we need to do a better job at protecting source waters and reducing discharges of pollutants into water bodies that feed into our drinking water supplies,” Schaider said.

The post Nearly One-Third of U.S. Residents Exposed to Dangerous, Unregulated Contaminants in Drinking Water, Analysis Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

An open letter calling for efforts to increase food production to avert a world hunger catastrophe has been signed by more than 150 winners of the Nobel and World Food Prizes.

The signatories made a plea for political and financial backing to come up with “moonshot” technologies in the next quarter century, a press release from the World Food Prize said.

The laureates warned that humans were “not even close” to meeting the global food needs of the future.

The letter predicted that, by mid-century, humanity would be faced with an “even more food insecure, unstable world,” unless international efforts to support the latest research and innovation were ramped up.

“All the evidence points to an escalating decline in food productivity if the world continues with business as usual,” said Cary Fowler, joint World Food Prize laureate for 2024 and the outgoing United States special envoy for global food security, who coordinated the appeal. “With 700 million food insecure people today, and the global population expected to rise by 1.5 billion by 2050, this leaves humanity facing a grossly unequal and unstable world.”

In its call for “planet-friendly ‘moonshot’ efforts leading to substantial, not just incremental, leaps in food production for food and nutrition security,” the letter cited challenges including climate change, market pressures and conflict.

Among those who endorsed the letter were 1978 Nobel Prize-winner in physics Robert Woodrow Wilson, whose discovery supported the “big bang theory” of creation; the 14th Dalai Lama; Wole Soyinka, who was the first Black African winner of the Nobel Prize; and Sir Roger Penrose, whose work helped advance the understanding of black holes.

“We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods and economic development. We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today’s crisis will become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” Fowler said in the press release.

The letter’s signatories emphasized the climate crisis’ threat to food production, especially in Africa, which has the fastest rate of population growth coupled with forecast declines in staple maize crops across nearly all of the continent’s growing area.

“It’s almost as if people are burying their head in the sand,” said Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist who was the British co-recipient of the 2024 World Food Prize, as The Guardian reported. “It’s very easy to defer tackling it, but if we wait until there really is a massive food crisis then we’ll have 10 to 15 [years] to live in that crisis.”

“You can’t solve that sort of problem overnight. From the time you start a research programme to the time it can have a significant impact on production, you’re talking 10 to 15 years,” Hawtin said. “It does require political will, international political will. It really needs the focused attention of international institutions.”

Other factors impacting crop productivity include land degradation, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, conflict, water shortages and policies that restrict agricultural innovation.

“The impacts of climate change are already reducing food production around the world, but particularly in Africa, which bears little historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions yet sees temperatures rising faster than elsewhere,” said President of the African Development Bank Akinwumi Adesina, recipient of the 2017 World Food Prize, in the press release. “Future temperature rises are expected to be most extreme in countries with already low productivity, compounding existing levels of food insecurity. In low-income countries where productivity needs to almost double by 2050 compared to 1990, the stark reality is that it’s likely to rise by less than half. We have just 25 years to change this.”

The letter cited the most promising emerging fields of research and scientific breakthroughs that could be prioritized in order to boost food production, even in the face of existing and future challenges. These included developing cereals that are able to biologically source nitrogen and grow without fertilizer; improving photosynthesis in crops like rice and wheat to optimize growth; and boosting research into nutrition-rich, hardy Indigenous crops that have mostly been overlooked.

The letter also outlined “moonshot” goals for the improvement of the shelf life and storage of fruits and vegetables, as well as creating nutrient-rich food from fungi and microorganisms.

“This is an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ moment for global hunger. Having the world’s greatest minds unite behind this urgent wake-up call should inspire hope and action. If we can put a man on the moon, we can surely rally the funding, resources and collaboration needed to put enough food on plates here on Earth. With the right support, the scientific community can deliver the breakthroughs to prevent catastrophic food insecurity in the next 25 years,” said Mashal Husain, incoming World Food Prize Foundation president, in the press release.

There will be a webinar on the letter on Thursday, January 16.

“The research-driven green revolution that has dramatically lowered malnutrition across the globe over the past 60 years is losing momentum, with food insecurity once again on the rise, and a looming crisis emerging by 2050. Investment in research, especially in the places that are likely to be affected in the future, will improve food security now, and help alleviate potential future crises,” said Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, in the press release. “This is an eminently solvable problem, relatively inexpensive, with a payoff benefitting all of humanity.”

The post Nobel and World Food Prize Winners Call for ‘Moonshot’ Effort to Curb Global Hunger appeared first on EcoWatch.

As deadly wildfires continue to blaze around greater Los Angeles, the economic cost of the fires has now been estimated to be over $200 billion. That has made this tragedy, which started on January 7, potentially the most expensive wildfire event in U.S. history.

At least 24 people have died as of the time of writing, according to CBS News.

As Earth.org reported, the fires have already burned around 40,000 acres and counting, totaling an amount of land larger than San Francisco. More than 12,300 structures have been destroyed.

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Of the five major fires burning in the Los Angeles area in early January, three are still active. The Hurst fire has burned 799 acres and is 97% contained at the time of writing. The Eaton fire has burned 14,117 acres of the Altadena and Pasadena areas and is currently 35% contained. The largest of the five fires, the Palisades fire, has burned ‎23,713 acres and is 17% contained as of 8 a.m. PT on Tuesday, January 14, according to data available from CAL FIRE.

Map of active LA fires on Jan. 14, 2025). California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection

Official estimates of the damage have yet to be released; however, AccuWeather meteorologists have estimated the cost of these wildfires to be between $250 billion and $275 billion, an increase from the company’s initial estimates of $135 billion and $150 billion.

“These fast-moving, wind-driven infernos have created one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern U.S. history,” AccuWeather chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter said in a statement. “Hurricane-force winds sent flames ripping through neighborhoods filled with multi-million-dollar homes. The devastation left behind is heartbreaking, and the economic toll is staggering.”

The Palisades fire burned through a high cost of living area, where homes have a median value of more than $2 million, according to Porter.

“Should a large number of additional structures be burned in the coming days, it may become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss,” Porter added.

However, the economic damage does not just include the cost of multimillion dollar homes, but also lost businesses, relocation costs, job losses and emergency and long-term healthcare costs for fire-related injuries and exposure to poor air quality from the smoke.

“Tragically, lives have been changed forever in just a matter of minutes. Many families may not be able to afford to rebuild or repair and return. Businesses may not be able to recover, and jobs will be permanently lost. Thousands of people are in desperate need of help, initially the basic and life-sustaining needs of food, water and shelter, as this tragedy unfolds,” Porter said. “Many families will face significant unexpected costs to relocate to another area in Southern California. The recovery process will be extremely expensive and emotionally challenging in the months and years to come.” 

AccuWeather is not alone in its prediction that this will be the costliest wildfire event in U.S. history. Aon PLC, an insurance broker, and Moody’s, a data analytics company, both echoed the sentiment, although they did not provide cost estimates, The Associated Press reported.

The Los Angeles wildfires are expected to cost at least $20 billion in insured losses, Reuters reported. This would cause these fires to surpass the previous most costly wildfire, the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California, which killed 85 people and cost $12.76 in insured losses.

Residents now fear a worsening housing crisis in the greater Los Angeles area, as rental prices have already started spiking despite a law preventing price increases of more than 10% for housing, food, medical supplies and other essentials during emergencies. As LAist reported, Zillow listings in Los Angeles were found to increase by 15% to 64% in the wake of the fires.

“It will put a squeeze, especially on the adjacent communities,” Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at University of California, Los Angeles, told LAist. “That might be particularly acute from the Palisades effect on the Westside.”

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Most spiders have eight legs, no ears and use fine leg hairs connected to nerve cells or their webs to hear sounds in their environment. But how do they smell?

A new study by an international team of researchers has found that male spiders “smell” with their legs, using olfactory hairs — wall-pore sensilla — as their “nose” to detect sex pheromones released by females.

“Spiders have always lived alongside humans, so it’s surprising how much we still don’t know about them. One long-standing mystery was related to how spiders detect smells. Now, our latest research has finally uncovered the secret,” Dan-Dan Zhang, one of the study’s authors and a sensory biology researcher at Lund University, wrote in The Conversation.

Other contributors include Gabriele Uhl, a professor of general and systematic zoology at the University of Greifswald, and Hong-Lei Wang, also a sensory biology researcher at Lund.

The discovery came after a decade of searching for the sensilla, which the research team identified and mapped.

The study, “Olfaction with legs — Spiders use wall-pore sensilla for pheromone detection,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Spiders have been evolving for approximately 400 million years and are known for their sense of vibration. Some species, like jumping spiders, also have excellent vision, but their sense of smell remained a mystery.

There was ample scientific evidence that spiders have the ability to detect odors like sex pheromones, but there were still two main questions. The first was, what is the primary olfactory organ spiders use to detect scent? The second was built upon previous studies suggesting that spiders did not have wall-pore sensilla, leading scientists to wonder how they were able to smell anything.

“Our study has solved these long-standing questions. We discovered previously overlooked wall-pore sensilla on the walking legs of male wasp spiders (Argiope bruennichi) and demonstrated that they can use them to detect airborne sex pheromones with high sensitivity,” Zhang wrote in The Conversation. “We showed that the wall-pore sensilla are not unique to wasp spiders but are prevalent across the spider tree of life.”

The team looked at female and male A. bruennichi spiders using high-resolution electron microscopy. They found that all male spiders’ walking legs had thousands of wall-pore sensilla and discovered specific features of the sensilla. They determined that they are distinct from those of insects and other arthropods.

The sensilla are found on the upper region of the legs of male spiders, close to the body, in areas that rarely come into contact with the surface as spiders walk, mate or capture prey.

“This distribution pattern already suggested the role of wall-pore sensilla in detecting airborne odours (olfaction). Interestingly, wall-pore sensilla were found exclusively in adult male spiders, not in juvenile males or females, which strongly indicates their function in mate searching and recognition,” Zhang and colleagues wrote in The Conversation. “A. bruennichi is one of the few spider species in which the chemical structure of the sex pheromone has actually been identified. Female spiders release gaseous pheromones that attract males from a distance.”

The researchers tested whether a pheromone compound would trigger a response in the wall-pore sensilla. They used a microscope to observe live male spiders, placing a recording electrode into one of their wall-pore sensilla.

“We then exposed each sensillum to a puff containing the pheromone compound. We found that even a tiny amount of the pheromone compound — just 20 nanograms — was sufficient to elicit a clear response as a burst of activity in neuronal cells from a wall-pore sensillum, and the response became stronger as the dose increased. We consistently observed the response of wall-pore sensilla to the pheromone compound, regardless of which leg pair was tested,” the researchers wrote.

Contact and non-contact areas on body appendages of a male A. bruennichi. Slow-motion footage (500 frame per second) of a male walking on a horizontal skewer. The video highlights that only the distal leg segments make contact with the surface. PNAS

The results demonstrated that the olfactory sensilla of spiders are extremely sensitive in comparison with insects’ most responsive sex pheromone communication systems. Spiders have thousands of sensilla on each of their walking legs, enabling males to pick up even faint traces of airborne sex pheromones.

To get a better sense of the broader world of wall-pore sensilla, the research team looked at 19 other species of spiders across 16 families. They found that, in most species, males have wall-pore sensilla.

They also discovered that “basally branching spider groups” like basal trapdoor spiders in Asia did not have sensilla. The pattern the researchers uncovered suggested sensilla have evolved independently within spiders multiple times, but had been lost in some lineages.

“Our study paves the way for exciting future discoveries about how spiders perceive the world through olfaction. Many intriguing questions await further investigation,” the trio of scientists wrote in The Conversation. “How do female spiders smell without wall-pore sensilla? And beyond sex pheromones, what other chemicals can spiders detect and how are these relevant to their behaviour and ecology? Also, what is the molecular and neural basis of spiders’ olfaction? Finally, how has the sense of smell evolved across the vast diversity of spider species?”

“These questions set the stage for an exciting new chapter in our understanding of spider biology,” they said.

The post Spiders ‘Smell’ Using Their Legs, Research Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Global sea temperatures reached an all-time high in 2024, according to a new study published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. 

The 54 researchers from seven countries deployed thousands of instruments to collect ocean data both at the surface and up to 2,000 meters below the surface — the latter called ocean heat content — covering all the world’s oceans. 

“The broken records in the ocean have become a broken record,” professor Lijing Cheng with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a press release.

The researchers found that all three major metrics they analyzed broke records this year: global sea surface temperature, average global sea surface temperature and the temperature of water up to 2,000 meters below the surface. 

From 2023 to 2024, the researchers recorded an enormous increase of the upper 2,000 meters of ocean heat content of 16 zettajoules. That increase represents about 140 times the world’s total energy production in 2023.

Kevin Trenberth, a co-author and researcher at the University of Auckland, said it’s unusual for all three metrics to break records in a single year.

“The biggest years on record globally are the year following an El Niño event,” Trenberth told EcoWatch in a video interview. “The last major one was 2016. That’s the last time that the global mean surface temperature and the sea temperatures and the ocean heat content were all at record levels.”

2024, like 2016, was a year marked by the tail-end of an El Niño event, which, as lead author Lijing Cheng explained on a video call, leads to higher-than average sea temperatures. “During El Niño,” he said, “global surface temperature is very high. La Niña is cold… so year-to-year fluctuations are dominated by El Niño-La Niña cycles.”

Cheng explained that although the El Niño phenomenon has an enormous impact on sea surface temperatures, it only has a minor role on ocean heat content — or ocean temperature below sea level — which also broke record highs last year.

Ocean temperatures are a critical indicator of human-caused climate change. The vast majority — about 90% — of the Earth’s excess heat from global warming is stored in the oceans. 

The researchers used multiple instruments to record ocean data, John Abraham, a co-author and researcher at the University of St. Thomas, told EcoWatch in an email. “Most importanly, we use devices called Argo floats which are robotic sensors that move up and down in the oceans 2000 meters and send temperature data to laboratories through satellites.”

Abraham also explained that the researchers used instruments called expendable bathythermographs with long wires going up to the surface that dropped from ships passing the ocean to record data. “Other instruments,” he added, “are buoys that have sensors, and we also attach sensors to animals so they gather data as they swim.”

The authors estimate in the study’s concluding remarks that the recorded 16 zettajoule increase in ocean heat content in the upper 2,000 meters of the oceans led to a sea level rise of 1.0 millimeters, with a total rise of 54 millimeters since 1960. “Sea level rise, in turn, increases the risk of coastal infrastructure and habitats being impacted by saltwater intrusion, coastal erosion and flooding in low-lying regions,” the study says.

Warming oceans also tend to lead to more and more intense storms, Trenberth explained. 

“The warmer ocean temperatures, in general, means that there’s capacity for greater evaporation over the ocean, and so that puts more moisture into the atmosphere, which gets gathered up by weather systems, and where it’s raining, then it rains harder,” he said. 

This is especially true for hurricanes, which are fueled by warm waters.

Cheng said that even if we were to stay under the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of 1.5° C of warming, ocean heating will still continue to rise. “Even if we meet the Paris target, the surface warming can be controlled by two degrees Celsius [but] ocean warming will continue, because ocean warming is delayed response.”

“Climate change mitigation and adaptation need to continue even if we meet can meet [the] Paris Agreement,” she said. “It’s a long-time preparation for the future of climate change.”

The team plans to continue keeping track of ocean warming going forward. “They’ve been putting out these reports in January for the last five years, or something like that. Now the group in China seems to be committed to continuing this, and I think they like the publicity they’ve received in the past,” Trenberth said. 

“It indicates that their work is important, and for the funding that they get within China to continue. And as you may know, there are some stresses between the U.S. and China,” he said. 

“Congress has been prevented from interacting with Chinese scientists for the most part now, which is rather unfortunate. I think they still can, to some extent, in the area of climate, but [for] areas that involve sophisticated technology of certain kinds then there are restrictions as to how much people can interact on the climate. It’s very much a global phenomenon. It’s very important that everyone who has information share that data, and then we can get a more complete picture of what is going on, and so that’s what our paper is about.”

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