"Federal regulators have a range of solutions available to tackle the widespread contamination of farmland with toxic chemicals, according to a new report by US academics."
"Jessica Allen crunched through fallen leaves among Manzanita trees hunting for something few have spotted before: the Manzanita butter clump — a rare and little-known yellow mushroom found, so far, only along North America’s Western coastlines."
"Chemicals increasingly used to replace the toxic plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA) may disrupt fertility, fetal development, and reproductive health through many of the same biological mechanisms, according to a narrative review of human, animal and laboratory studies."
"The Food and Drug Administration has reversed course and agreed to review Moderna’s application for the first mRNA-based flu vaccine under a revised approach, company and federal officials said Wednesday."
"President Donald Trump plans to nominate a former senior aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as director of the National Science Foundation."
"National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya will also temporarily become acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an administration official said Wednesday."
"In a bold bid to put costly US Roundup litigation behind it, Bayer on Tuesday announced a $7.25 billion proposed class action settlement for users of its glyphosate-based weed killing products who have cancer now or develop cancer in the next several years, with average awards ranging from $10,000 to $165,000."
"When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its bedrock endangerment finding Thursday, it explicitly excluded a controversial report issued last year by the U.S. Department of Energy that argued the dangers of human-induced climate change were being overstated."
"More than three dozen Democratic senators have begun an independent inquiry into the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a huge change in how the agency measures the health benefits of reducing air pollution that is widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis."
"Billions of American chestnut trees once covered the eastern United States. ... But by the 1950s, this venerable tree went functionally extinct, culled by a deadly airborne fungal blight and lethal root rot. A new study out Thursday in the journal Science provides hope for its revitalization, finding that the genetic testing of individual trees can reveal which are most likely to resist disease and grow tall, thus shortening how long it takes to plant the next, more robust, generation."
