Surprise, surprise. The Washington DC is short-changing cleaning up heavily contaminated areas around military bases. Per The Guardian,
The cost of cleaning up toxic PFAS “forever chemical” contamination around hundreds of US military installations is ballooning, but Congress and the Pentagon are failing to keep pace, a development that is leaving service members and civilians indefinitely at risk, a new analysis finds. The estimated total cost for remediating about 50 contaminated military sites has soared to $31bn , up by $3.7bn from 2016 to 2021, the last year the Department of Defense provided estimates. But its requested cleanup budget increased just $400m over the same period, according to the new report by Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit that tracks the military’s PFAS pollution.
At this pace, many of the sites will remain tainted for at least 50 years. If it’s up to politicians happy to pass the buck, it will take hundreds of years. https://bit.ly/41OTUWd
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has been a lighting rod for conspiracy theories and misinformation. Lately, an old claim pertaining to polio vaccines and cancer has reappeared. The Associated Press debunked the theory.
CLAIM: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that 98 million Americans were given a “cancer virus” through the polio vaccine. AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The CDC has made no such statement, and the claim misrepresents a fact sheet put out by the agency more than 10 years ago about some polio vaccines that were administered between 1955 to 1963. The agency has said that that 10-30% of the 98 million shots administered in that period were contaminated with simian virus 40, or SV40, but that most studies have found no causal relationship between SV40 and cancer in humans.
The old rumor was given new life this week when an Instagram user posted a screenshot of an article making the erroneous claim. https://bit.ly/436fne5
The Titanic continues to fascinate the public and researchers alike. With that in mind, recent attempts to create a digital version of the sunken ship offers some stunning details. Per the New York Times,
An ambitious digital imaging project has produced what researchers describe as a “digital twin” of the R.M.S. Titanic, showing the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner with a level of detail that has never been captured before. The project, undertaken by Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, yielded more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images and a high-resolution video. The visuals were captured over the course of a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, Atlantic Productions, which is working on a documentary about the project, said in a news release.
You can really lose yourself – albeit for a moment – in the video. Use your imagination. It’s fun. https://bit.ly/3Mh7vzV
Here’s some good news, compliments of the BBC,
Officials in Colombia say four children missing since their plane crashed in the jungle have been found alive and well more than two weeks later. Their mother and the other adults were killed in the crash. The government's child welfare agency, ICBF, said it had received information "from the field" that the children had been found in good health. A pilot said he had also been told the children had been found by indigenous people deep in the rainforest. Soldiers taking part in the search, however, have yet to see the children for themselves.
The Cessna 206, they had been in was flying from Araracuara, deep in the Amazon jungle in southern Colombia, to San José del Guaviare, when it disappeared. Its pilot had earlier reported engine problems. https://bit.ly/41IXFfO
Thanks for reading. Let’s be careful out there.
