Gleanings of the Week Ending May 23, 2026

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.

05/10/26 Poets.org Forever Plastics – A poem by Ronald Carson. He says “In this poem, I wanted plastics to speak in the first-person plural, tracing the path from postwar convenience to biological saturation, where the environment is no longer outside us but lodged within us.”

04/22/2026 The New York Times You Paid to Have Old Clothes Recycled. Here’s What That Really Means. - Collection services offer convenience, but most garments are shredded into low-grade stuffing or sent abroad to an uncertain fate. The most important thing, experts and environmental activists say, is to buy less in the first place. It’s easier to deal with clothes responsibly if there are fewer of them to begin with.

05/7/2026 Super Age Life Expectancy Gains Are Slowing. Your Choices Are More Important Than Ever - The future of longevity will most likely be shaped less by sweeping public health revolutions and more by targeted, personalized strategies: slowing biological aging, optimizing midlife health, and extending the years we remain active, engaged, and independent.

05/12/2026 Planetizen 16% of roads that received federal funds remain in poor condition - State DOTs are spending most of that money on highway expansions instead of repair and maintenance work. And "Because increasingly lax reporting standards conceal broken roads from public view, and DOTs routinely mis-categorize expensive expansion projects as simple 'maintenance' or lump them into a mysterious 'other' category, Transportation for America suspects the national highway network is actually even more drastically overbuilt than it appears on paper."

05/11/2026 I’m Plastic Free How to Reduce Microplastics Exposure: The Ultimate Guide & Checklist - This guide breaks down exactly how microplastics enter your system, and provides a practical, but very thorough, science-backed checklist to reduce your exposure across your home, diet, and daily habits.

05/12/2026 BBC 'Fatbergs' are taking over city sewers - scientists are fighting back - Reeking coagulations of grease and debris are clotting sewers around the world on a colossal scale. Cities are deploying new technologies to control this modern menace. New York City – where 40% of sewer backups are due to grease – spends around $18.8m annually degreasing and removing blockages from the sewers beneath its streets. 

5/12/2026 National Parks Traveler Musings About the Parks | Things I Worry About – A list from Kurt Rapanshek. He ends the post this way: “Without question, there are many, many things that are uplifting about exploring the National Park System. But if the Park Service truly is going to preserve these places and their natural resources for future generations, it really needs a lot more help from Congress and presidential administrations.”

5/11/2026 Smithsonian Magazine See 15 Stunning Images That Won the German Society for Nature Photography’s Annual Contest – Beautiful and thought-provoking images.

05/06/2026 YaleEnvironment360 Airborne Microplastics May Be Warming the Planet - Tiny particles of plastic amassing in the atmosphere may be intensifying warming. Darker bits of plastic are absorbing heat. And even though lighter particles are reflecting sunlight, with a cooling influence, in the aggregate microplastics are having a warming effect. The warming impact is tiny, far less than the impact of carbon dioxide emissions, and only a fraction of the impact of soot. The microplastic emissions produced globally each year have roughly the same warming effect as running 200 coal power plants for that year….but more study is needed

05/04/2026 CNN The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a plastic trash nightmare. It could also be part of a much bigger, hidden problem - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a significant source of airborne microplastics and nanoplastics, but there are many other places where tiny plastic particles can be whipped up into the skies, including from landfills, roadside litter and car tires. Colored plastics, especially red, yellow, blue and black, absorbed around 75 times more light than pristine, non-pigmented plastics.

05/10/2026 Science Daily Antarctica is melting from below and scientists say it’s worse than expected - Deep beneath floating ice shelves, long channels carved into the ice appear to trap warmer ocean water, dramatically speeding up melting from below. Even regions of East Antarctica once considered relatively stable may be far more vulnerable than scientists realized. Researchers warn that current climate models may be missing this dangerous process entirely, meaning future sea level rise could be underestimated.

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 25, 2026

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.

4/9/2026 Yale 360 A More Troubling Picture of Sea Level Rise Is Coming into View - Sea levels are much higher than we thought. Real-world oceans are making a mockery of flood-risk forecasts based on crude global modeling. And to make matters worse, coastal lands almost everywhere are subsiding faster than anyone realized — often many times faster than the seas are rising. 

4/10/2026 BBC The air throughout our homes is infused with microplastics. But there are things you can do to breathe less of them - Scientists believe the majority of our exposure to microplastics happens when we're indoors. To solve the microplastic pollution crisis will take a lot more than changes within the home – there are plenty of broader sustainability concerns too. If moving to replace synthetic fibers in your home with natural fibers, for instance, there's also the greater water and land use from organic cotton use to think about. Or if choosing to ventilate your home more to usher away microplastics, that pollution is only being pushed outdoors. Short of systemic change and a global reduction from the 460 million tons of plastic made each year, there's only so much individuals can do. 

4/9/2026 National Parks Traveler Deer Test Positive for Chronic Wasting Disease at Catoctin Mountain Park – We enjoyed Catoctin when we lived in Maryland….I’m sad that the deer there and in nearby parks have tested positive for CWD.

4/08/2026 Smithsonian Magazine See the 2,000-Year-Old Ancient Roman Cargo from an Accidental Shipwreck Discovered at the Bottom of a Lake in Switzerland - Roughly 2,000 years ago, an ancient Roman ship sailed across a large lake in what is now Switzerland, transporting supplies ranging from olive oil to chariot wheels. For some unknown reason, the vessel scattered its cargo across the lakebed. The cargo is in good condition, but researchers are concerned it may become damaged or destroyed by erosion, boat anchors, vandals and looters. As a precautionary measure, they decided to bring the most vulnerable pieces up from the depths.

4/10 2026 Artnet How a Hopi Potter Named Nampeyo Became a 19th-Century Art Star - Born in 1859 in the village of Hano, a Tewa village on First Mesa, in modern-day Arizona, Nampeyo (1859–1942) is believed to have learned the art of pottery making from her paternal grandmother. By the 1870s, Nampeyo was selling her works at trading posts throughout the region. Nampeyo’s legacy is a complex one, shaped by ancestry, archaeology, and the shifting trade systems of the still-expanding United States as it entered the 20th century.

4/11/2026 Science Daily Unusual airborne toxin detected in the U.S. for the first time - Scientists searching for air pollution clues stumbled onto something unexpected: toxic MCCPs drifting through the air for the first time in the Western Hemisphere. Although these pollutants have previously been detected in places like Antarctica and Asia, scientists had struggled to measure them in the air over the Western Hemisphere until this study. These chemicals are commonly used in industrial processes, including metalworking fluids and the production of PVC and textiles. They frequently appear in wastewater and can end up in biosolid fertilizer, also called sewage sludge, which is produced during wastewater treatment. The researchers believe the MCCPs they detected in Oklahoma likely originated from nearby fields where this type of fertilizer had been applied.

4/8/2026 My Modert Met Winners of the Scottish Nature Photography Awards 2025 Celebrate Scotland’s Wild Beauty - The winning photos span 10 primary categories, including Environmental, Natural Abstract, Scottish Botanical, and Scottish Wildlife Portrait, among others. I appreciated the beauty among so many other blog posts that were somber….depressing.

4/3/2026 NWF Blog How to Grow More - Conservation outreach professionals are tasked with the challenge of not only clearly explaining conservation programs but also personally connecting with farmers. This combination of technical skills and personal communication skills is rare, since the skills are seldom taught in school and professional development opportunities are uncommon or unsupported.

4/3/2026 The Conversation Toxic dust from California’s shrinking Salton Sea is harming children’s lung growth - As the lake shrinks, wind blowing across the exposed lake bed kicks up toxic dust left by years of agriculture chemicals and metals washing into the lake. That dust makes its way into the lungs of the children of the Imperial Valley. The study began to show that higher levels of dust exposure, especially among those children living closer to the sea, are linked to poorer lung function, as well as reductions in children’s lung growth over time. Reduced lung function increases the risk for chronic respiratory disease, such as COPD, or more frequent respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, as adults.

3/19/2026 Mongabay Should potentially harmful chemicals be appraised by class, not one at a time? - Some scientists and health advocates are pushing for a “Six Classes” framework that evaluates entire groups of chemicals, or chemically related subgroups, together, flagging them for scrutiny before harm is documented rather than after. The framework targets six broad categories of chemicals that share many common traits: PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), flame retardants, phthalates and bisphenols, antimicrobials, certain solvents, and certain metals.

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 18, 2026

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.

4/2/2026 NPR EPA flags microplastics, pharmaceuticals as contaminants in drinking water – A good move….but not enough, by itself, to do what needs to be done to improve water quality. It seems out of step with what the EPA has been doing recently so I am skeptical.

4/2/2026 Science Daily Study finds dangerous lead levels in children’s clothing - Researchers testing children’s shirts from multiple retailers found every sample exceeded U.S. safety limits, raising concerns about toxic exposure—especially since young kids often chew on clothing. Brightly colored fabrics like red and yellow showed particularly high levels, likely due to chemicals used to fix dyes. Simulations suggest that even brief mouthing could expose children to unsafe amounts of lead, a substance known to harm brain development and behavior. None of the items tested met U.S. safety standards.

4/2/2026 National Parks Traveler Seventy-Three Percent of Marine Protected Areas Are Polluted by Sewage - A study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Queensland (attached) found that nearly three out of four of the world's marine protected areas (MPAs) are polluted by sewage. In the ocean regions most critical for coral reefs and tropical sea life, the problem is even worse: between 87 percent and 92 percent of protected areas are affected, and typical pollution levels inside these zones are ten times higher than in surrounding unprotected waters. Over 16,000 MPAs globally were evaluated in the study.

4/1/2026 Clean Technica U.S. Coal Exports Decreased in 2025 after 4 Years of Growth - The decrease in U.S. coal exports largely reflects a 92% decrease in exports to China in 2025 compared with 2024, after China imposed a 15% additional tariff on imports of U.S. coal in February of last year and a 34% reciprocal tariff on imports from the United States in April. It also reflects a global market characterized by ample supply and soft demand, which caused prices to decline, making it increasingly difficult for U.S. coal exporters to earn profits. Finally, coal generation in the U.S. domestic coal market rose 13% in 2025, leading to a 12% increase in electric power coal consumption after three straight years of decreases.

3/9/2026 The Scientist Nearly Ten Percent of Cancer Papers Flagged as Potentially Fake - Over the last two decades, the scientific literature has been flooded by low-quality research papers produced by for-profit organizations known as paper mills. It is estimated that suspected paper mill products account for two to 46 percent of manuscripts submitted to scientific journals, with the estimated rate of problematic articles in biomedical research reaching nearly six percent in 2023.

4/1/2026 Smithsonian Magazine Humans Might Struggle to Make Babies in Space. Sperm Gets Disoriented in Microgravity - Many of the proteins found on sperm act as mechanosensors, tiny molecular devices that detect physical forces. Remove the force of gravity, and it stands to reason that these sensors would be thrown off, disrupting the sperm’s ability to orient and navigate. As we progress toward becoming a spacefaring or multi-planetary species, understanding how microgravity affects the earliest stages of reproduction is critical.

4/1/2026 National Parks Traveler Study Finds Microplastics on 45 Percent of Beaches - A 2025 study collected samples from 209 beaches across 39 countries and 6 ocean basins, discovering that 45 percent of the beaches contained “suspected microplastics” (those visually identified but not yet confirmed through further analysis). Some of the samples came from Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, where microplastics may indirectly reduce the turtle nesting success of species like the endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle.

4/1/2026 NPR The oil industry is betting big on plastics. Here's what that means for the future - Beth Gardiner, a journalist and author of the new book "Plastic Inc.: The Secret History And Shocking Future Of Big Oil's Biggest Bet." In it, she argues that while millions of us have been trying to use less plastic, the fossil fuel industry has been making more. Plasticis Big Oil's plan B. The less we use, the more they make.

4/20/2026 Smithsonian Magazine This High School Student Invented a Filter That Eliminates 96 Percent of Microplastics from Drinking Water - Her current prototype, which is about the size of a standard bag of flour, consists of three modules. The first unit, about a liter in volume, holds the contaminated water inside it, while the second stores the magnetic oil-based ferrofluid. The core process takes place in the third module, which is much smaller. A magnetic field pulls the microplastics out of the water, and the ferrofluid is recovered and reused in a closed loop. --- I hope there is follow-up to this story!

3/30/2026 CNN Millions of preterm births and thousands of infant deaths linked to plastic chemical - Two chemicals used to make plastic more flexible are linked to nearly 2 million premature births and the deaths of 74,000 newborns worldwide in 2018, according to a new study. Babies who survive may have breathing problems, feeding difficulties, cerebral palsy, developmental delay, vision problems, and hearing problems. he two chemicals in the study — Di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, or DEHP, and its cousin diisononyl phthalate, or DiNP — are part of a family of synthetic chemicals called phthalates. Meaningful protection cannot rely solely on individual behavior. The most effective solutions are upstream, including stronger regulations, safer product formulations, better labeling, and improved environmental management and regulatory oversight.