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‘Really Livid’ — Colorado Community Fights Plan to Spray Weed Killer From Drones
Soon, the chemicals will start falling from the sky over the Red Hill area of Boulder County, Colorado. The wildland is known for its biodiversity, home to hundreds of important species and a concentration of rare environmental resources. It is a key habitat for beloved herds of elk and bighorn sheep, with farms and ranchland lying at its base.
But any day now hundreds of acres of Red Hill are set to become the target for drone spraying of a chemical herbicide that comes with a host of concerns.
County officials and other proponents of the plan say it’s an effective and essential move that will wipe out invasive weeds and mitigate the risk of dangerous and costly wildfires that could use the unwanted vegetation as fuel.
Major Toy Companies Did Not Disclose Toxic Chemicals in Maine
The Portland Press Herald reported:
Brands like Crayola reported known carcinogens to other states while shipping unreported supplies to Maine stores. Several manufacturers of popular children’s products disclosed using hazardous chemicals like cancer-causing formaldehyde in other states while failing to report those toxic ingredients to Maine regulators, public records show.
The findings highlight a vulnerability in the state’s public health oversight: laws designed to protect consumers rely on corporate self-reporting, allowing companies to reveal chemical hazards to regulators in some states while keeping local officials and families in the dark.
Investigators at Defend Our Health, a Portland-based advocacy group, uncovered the reporting gap while auditing filings in a multistate chemical clearinghouse shared by Vermont, Washington and Oregon.
A Remarkable New Picture Is Emerging of How the Air Around Us Could Harm the Brain
Last year, startled scientists reported that the average human brain they studied contained roughly the weight of a plastic spoon in microplastics and nanoplastics. Now, a deeper look suggests a much broader assortment of material from the outside world — silica, metals, soot and other debris — is getting through.
Researchers from the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center and other institutions examined, in extraordinary detail, brain tissue from 11 people who died at ages 80 to 91. They discovered that some particles had penetrated deep into the brain, reaching the amygdala, a region that helps shape emotion and memory. The finding is part of a broad shift in how scientists are thinking about the link between air pollution and conditions that impact the brain such as dementia, Parkinson’s and autism.
For years, a leading explanation has been that pollution harms the brain indirectly, by triggering inflammation and other changes throughout the body. That idea hasn’t gone away. But scientists are now exploring whether that pollution may also act more directly.
Exactly how the particles get there remains unsettled.
Forever Chemical Levels in US Drinking Water May Be More Than Twice as High as Reported
Toxic contaminants known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have become ubiquitous in our lives. Nicknamed “forever chemicals,” they resist breaking down in the environment and have been found virtually everywhere — including community water systems. A new study suggests the U.S. may be underestimating PFAS levels in its drinking water by roughly half.
The findings, published today in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, point to a significant gap in PFAS reporting. By counting PFAS levels that fall below minimum reporting thresholds as zero, current methods capture only 44% of the average concentration of 25 types of PFAS in community water systems, the study finds.
“‘Below the reporting limit’ does not mean ‘zero,’” first author Gehendra Kharel, an associate professor of environmental and geological sciences at Texas Christian University, told Gizmodo in an email. “About 98% of the roughly 1.86 million individual PFAS test results in the January 2026 dataset were below reporting limits. Those records still carry information: Each one says the concentration was somewhere between zero and the limit.”
Atrazine Found at Harmful Levels in Nearly a Quarter of US Rivers, New Study Finds
Nearly a quarter of rivers and streams across the continental United States contain the herbicide atrazine at concentrations the Environmental Protection Agency itself considers high enough to harm aquatic life, according to a new analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity reported on October 17, 2026.
The group’s environmental health science director, Nathan Donley, led the study, which estimates that almost a million miles of American waterways are affected and that roughly one in five surface-water drinking intakes in the country draws from these contaminated rivers. Atrazine is the second most widely used herbicide in the United States after glyphosate, with about 70 million pounds applied annually, primarily on corn, sorghum and sugarcane to control broadleaf and grassy weeds.
The study compared river and stream monitoring data against the EPA’s own aquatic life benchmarks, the thresholds the agency uses to judge when pesticide concentrations in water pose ecological risk, and found that roughly a quarter of monitored waterways exceeded them.
Study Finds Costa Rica’s Pesticide Use More Than 10 Times Global Average
Costa Rica uses pesticides on its farmland at a rate more than ten times the global average, according to a scientific study that raises new concerns about the potential effects of agricultural chemicals on human health and the environment. The research, published in the September 2026 issue of the scientific journal Environment International, found that pesticide use on Costa Rican cropland averaged 21.91 kilograms of active ingredients per hectare annually.
That compares with a global average of 2.18 kilograms and a Central American average of 7.16 kilograms. The findings highlight our heavy dependence on pesticides, particularly in large-scale banana and pineapple production, two of Costa Rica’s most important agricultural exports.
The study, titled Grounding Pesticide Use Intensity and Hazards with Real-World Data: Toward Correcting Global Models in Tropical Agriculture, was conducted by researchers Soledad Castro-Vargas of the University of Zurich, Santiago Alvarez-Fernandez, an independent researcher in Spain, and Ryan E. Galt of the University of California, Davis.
