Environmental Engineering & Toxicology

YOU HAVE NO real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier–it may, in fact, be the norm—but because no one has enough data to say for sure. ...

Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2017 AGU Fellow. Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members.

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Living on the edge of urban sprawl in Los Angeles inevitably means dealing with the wild creatures who have lived here for thousands of years before homes were built, including rodents. But using anticoagulant rodenticide to control the rat and mouse population around homes can expose pets and local wildlife to this deadly poison, writes Fellow Nancy Steele.

Women in Comms capped off a productive, insightful and fun afternoon spent discussing the future of technology and the progress being made for women in the industry by recognizing two women who are leading the charge on technology and making a material difference for women in comms. Congratulations to the our newest 2017 Leading Lights: Most Inspiring Woman in Comms: Heather Kirksey, Executive Director, Open Platform for NFV Project Inc.

The U.S. Navy is enlisting the help of seals – but not the kind of highly trained special operatives with whom it usually associates. Real seals, specifically their whiskers, may be the key to a new way for ships and underwater vehicles to sense their environment, scientists think. When a fish swims by, a hungry seal senses the wake with its whiskers. It can tell characteristics of the fish, such as shape and size, and track the location even when it’s murky or dark. ...