Occupational safety and health

The air quality in Seattle, Washington was bad enough make the city the most polluted in the world on Saturday, amid ongoing wildfires. Out of around 90 major cities, the Pacific Northwest metropolis reached the top of the worst list, according to IQAir’s Air Quality Index (AQI). The Index value for Seattle peaked at 5 p.m. local timeat around 190, in the high range of “Unhealthy.”Note: IQAir tracks air quality globally, using data from its own sensors as well as governmental data from the EPA, UN, and other sources, but…

Even as someone who writes about climate all the time, it’s still a shock to see satellite imagery of climate crises, to really get a grasp on how large human influence can be on our warming planet. Here’s how this summer of droughts, heatwaves, floods, and wildfires looked from space.First up, above: Jaw-dropping images of the Cerro Prieto reservoir in northern Mexico show how the reservoir dropped to just 0.5% of its capacity in July, compared to its much fuller state in July 2015. Mexico endured punishing drought…

Smoke from the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire hovers over Las Vegas in May.Photo: Robert Browman/The Albuquerque Journal (AP)A town in New Mexico is facing a triple punch of climate impacts from wildfire, drought, and intense rainfall. The city of Las Vegas, New Mexico is set to run out of drinking water in September, thanks to pollution and debris from the largest wildfire in state history.Some residents at the fringes of Las Vegas, a city some 65 miles (105 kilometers) to the west of Santa Fe, were forced to evacuate in…

The Hog Fire burns outside of Susanville, California, in July 2020.Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP (Getty Images)The way plants sweat could be a valuable tool in helping us predict how wildfires behave. That’s the conclusion of a recent study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography from researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.The temperatures of plants can tell us a lot about their health and the health of the ecosystems they live in. Under normal conditions, plants take in water through their roots and release it…

Image: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)Over-the-counter hearing aids in the U.S. are officially becoming a reality. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration finalized the regulations needed for hearing aids to become widely available without a prescription. These OTC aids may save money for millions of Americans with poor hearing and are expected to reach retail shelves in as little as two months.The arrival of OTC hearing aids has been a long time coming. Five years ago, as part of the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017, the…

Simone Martin says her work as a UPS delivery truck driver was especially difficult on July 21, during a heat wave in NYC. In the summer months, Martin often dips a cooling cloth into a container of ice that she keeps in her truck and wraps it around her neck. But during that recent heat wave, nothing she did kept the discomfort at bay.“That was the worst day for me,” she told Earther. “​​I felt like I was going to pass out. I had to keep stopping and reapplying the ice thing to my neck and to my head.”Martin fears for…

Tourists on a street in a theme park in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province on July 9, 2022.Photo: FeatureChina (AP)At least 1 million people in the city of Wuhan, the city where covid-19 first spread to humans in late 2019, have enter a lockdown, as China shows it’s still not ready to give up on eradicating the disease. And with the country reporting less than 1,000 new cases on Wednesday in a country of 1.4 billion people, they’re succeeding at controlling the pandemic, whatever you think of the government’s…

Firefighters search in the debris of homes destroyed by a gas incident in Massachusetts in 2018; one person was killed, while more than 80 fires destroyed buildings in three towns.Photo: Charles Krupa (AP)Leaks from the pipelines that supply gas to your home and stove are happening more often than you may think—with deadly consequences. A new report from a group of environmental nonprofits finds that, over the past decade, there were around 2,600 reported cases of methane leaks in the U.S. gas pipeline system, adding up…