Manufacturers are increasingly using encapsulated coal ash from power plants as a low-cost binding agent in concrete, wallboard, bricks, roofing and other building materials. But a new study by U.S. and Chinese scientists cautions that coal ash from high-uranium deposits in China may be too radioactive for this use.

Sulfur dioxide is an air pollutant that causes acid rain, haze and many health-related problems. It is produced predominantly when coal is burned to generate electricity.

Air pollution in the Indian capital of Delhi has reached extraordinarily high levels, equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, the nation’s doctors and public health experts warned this week.

Significant financial stress is associated with a 13-fold higher odds of having a heart attack, according to research presented at the 18th Annual Congress of the South African Heart Association.

A new systematic synthesis by researchers at the University of Hawai?i at M?noa shows that there are at least 27 different physiological pathways in which a heatwave can kill a human being, and everyone is at risk.

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a new drug screening technique that could lead to the rapid and accurate identification of fentanyl, as well as a vast number of other drugs of abuse, which up until now have been difficult to detect by traditional urine tests.

The method, outlined in the current edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry, addresses a serious public health emergency related to opioid addiction and unintentional overdose deaths: the lack of a reliable and inexpensive test that allows for comprehensive surveillance of synthetic drugs flooding the illegal market.

Encouraging children to drink plain water with their school lunches could prevent more than half a million youths in the U.S. from becoming overweight or obese, and trim the medical costs and indirect societal costs associated with these problems by more than $13 billion, a new study suggests.

Conventional thinking holds that current climate warming will increase the prevalence and transmission of disease. 

Bulent Mutus is a micro mechanic.

But instead of fixing cars with wrenches and grease, the biochemist rolls up his sleeves and chops up and rebuilds proteins using microscopes and Petri dishes.

The recent uproar about seats on a British Airways flight crawling with bedbugs is only one of the unintended consequences that urbanization worldwide has on evolution, says a University of Toronto researcher whose new study takes a comprehensive look at those consequences.
 
 “As we build cities, we have little understanding of how they are influencing organisms that live there,” says Marc Johnson, an associate professor of biology at U of T Mississauga who is also a director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban Environments.