The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article. (Note: I have changed the format to include the date and source of the article.)

11/30/2025 NPR More cities are seeing PFAS pollution in drinking water. Here's what Louisville found - What we do is manage risk, and we start that at the river. It sounds weird, but source water protection – keeping the stuff out of the river – is a big deal.

11/25/2025 Artnet Radiant Tiffany Landscape Window Leads Major Auction of the Studio’s Masterpieces – Beautiful glass…there are some coming to auction in December. I enjoyed the pictures in the article.

12/2/2025 Washington Post ‘Everywhere chemicals’ are in our food, decades after scientists recognized dangers - A large body of science has linked phthalates to a variety of serious health conditions, including premature birth and infertility. The costs to society are huge. A 2024 NYU-led study that catalogued health effects from phthalates exposure in the United States — including contributions to diabetes levels and infertility — estimated that dealing with phthalate-related diseases cost $66.7 billion in a single year. Previous Washington Post article on phthalates from last September: The health risks from plastics almost nobody knows about.

12/2/2025 Science Daily Is your gut being poisoned? Scientists reveal the hidden impact of everyday chemicals - Many chemicals designed to act only on one type of target, say insects or fungi, also affect gut bacteria. Some of these chemicals had strong effects. For example, many industrial chemicals like flame retardants and plasticizers -- that we are regularly in contact with -- weren't thought to affect living organisms at all, but they do.

12/7/2025 Clean Technica Your Single-Use Plastic Bottles Are Killing Endangered Sea Turtles - A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that plastic ingestion has been documented in nearly 1,300 marine species, including every seabird family, marine mammal family, and sea turtle species. Researchers analyzed data from more than 10,000 autopsies from marine creatures killed by ingesting plastic; they calculated amounts consistent with a 90% likelihood of death:

23 pieces (0.098 cm3/cm) in seabirds;
29 pieces (39.89 cm3/cm) in marine mammals: and,
405 pieces (5.52 cm3/cm) in sea turtles (377 for juveniles).

12/2025 Greenpeace Plastic Merchants of Myth: Circular Claims Fall - After decades of meager investments accompanied by misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable, plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable. (Press release for the document)

12/8/2025 The Conversation PFAS in pregnant women’s drinking water puts their babies at higher risk – Data on all births in New Hampshire from 2010-2019 were analyzed. The 11.5 thousand births that occurred within 3.1 miles of a site known to be contaminated with PFAS and where mothers were served by public water system (well based) were selected for further analysis. PFAS was greater in the water system wells downstream from the site. Births in the area served by wells downstream were 43% more likely to be low-weigh (under 5.5 pounds), 20% greater chance of preterm birth, and 191% greater chance of the infant not surviving its first year. Research was done at University of Arizona.

12/8/2025 Science Daily Humans are built for nature not modern life - Human biology evolved for a world of movement, nature, and short bursts of stress—not the constant pressure of modern life. Industrial environments overstimulate our stress systems and erode both health and reproduction. Evidence ranging from global fertility declines to chronic inflammatory diseases shows the toll of this mismatch.

12/7/2025 Clean Technica The Floating Solar Revolution - Despite this year’s sharp U-turn in federal energy policy, the renewable energy transition continues to branch out in new directions. One emerging factor is the relatively new area of floating solar. The field has already begun to scale up in some regions around the world, and innovative solar firms are carving out new opportunities here in the US as well.

12/7/2025 Science Daily New moonquake discovery could change NASA’s Moon plan - Scientists have discovered that moonquakes, not meteoroids, are responsible for shifting terrain near the Apollo 17 landing site. Their analysis points to a still-active fault that has been generating quakes for millions of years. While the danger to short missions is low, long-term lunar bases could face increasing risk. The findings urge future planners to avoid building near scarps and to prioritize new seismic instruments.

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Surprisingly vibrant color of 12-million-year-old snail shells – Polyenes (includes carotenoids) preserved almost unchanged…and found in fossils.

Asbestos: The strange past of the 'magic mineral' – Asbestos was woven into textiles fit for kings and used for party tricks. One 18th-Century philosopher even slept in a night-cap made from it. It was also used to make the funerary shrouds for monarchs; because it didn't burn, it helped to keep their ashes separated from the rest of the pyre. An account from Ancient Greece describes a golden lamp made for the goddess Athena, which could reportedly burn for a whole year without going out and had a wick made from "Carpathian flax" – thought to be another name for asbestos. In 1899, an English doctor recorded the first confirmed case of a death linked directly to the material – a 33-year-old textile worker who had developed fibrosis of the lungs. In the UK, all asbestos was banned in 1999, but much of the asbestos added before this date remains in place – as buildings degrade, it is posing a significant health risk.

Rise of Peru’s Divine Lords – Hilltop sites in the Andes…early examples of divine lordship - a form of leadership that would endure in Peru for more than 1,000 years.

Amid Record Drop in Fossil Power, Europe Sees Wind Overtake Natural Gas - The E.U. power sector is undergoing a monumental shift - fossil fuels are playing a smaller role than ever as a system with wind and solar as its backbone comes into view. Coal generation fell by 26 percent, while gas generation fell by 15 percent.

Student Design Competition: Integrating Solar and Agriculture - Some 2.8 gigawatts of agrivoltaics exist across the U.S. Many combine solar energy with pollinator habitat and sheep grazing. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is looking for new design proposals from graduate and undergraduate landscape architecture students to push the agrivoltaics envelope!

The Moon Is Shrinking, Causing Moonquakes at a Potential NASA Landing Site - Researchers examined data on moonquakes detected by lunar seismometers, which have been on the moon since Apollo program astronauts left them there more than 50 years ago. They also used mapping data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify the telltale creases on the moon. Through modeling, they linked these faults to seismic activity.

Texas Reservoirs Reach Dangerous Lows - In Corpus Christi, on the south Texas coast, authorities last month stopped releasing water aimed at maintaining minimum viable ecology in the coastal wetlands, even as oil refineries and chemical plants remain exempt from water use restrictions during drought. On the lower Texas coast, the Rio Grande has not been flowing consistently, and Colorado River water releases have been minimal as that river faces shortages farther upstream.

Extreme Birding: Gull Watching at the Landfill - You can find gulls around North America (and many parts of the world), including in interior states. At least 28 gulls can be seen in North America, with additional vagrant species showing up from time to time. Individual species look different depending on age and other factors. A gull goes through three feather molts in its first year.

Poisonous Seed Stash Discovered in the Netherlands – Black henbane contained in a hollow goat (or sheep) thigh bone sealed with a plug of black birch bark…from AD 70-200.

Ocean Sponge Skeletons Suggest a More Significant History of Global Warming Than Originally Thought - An analysis of six sea sponges—centuries-old creatures with an internal chemistry that holds secrets about climate history—points to global temperatures already having increased by 1.7 degrees Celsius due to human activity --- that’s more than scientists currently agree upon….so there is a flurry of activity to corroborate the finding.