Tag: chemistry

Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy Director Says Benton Harbor Water Unsafe to Drink, Situation ‘Inexcusable’

The Center Square
Main Street Downtown Benton Harbor

When Liesl Clark, director of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), was asked five times in a row whether Benton Harbor’s water was safe to drink, she repeatedly said, “the state of Michigan wants citizens to be drinking bottled water.”

“Come on, let’s talk like normal people here,” Rep. Steve Johnson, R-Wayland, responded. “It’s a normal question: Is the water in Benton Harbor safe to drink or not?”

Clark eventually answered “no,” and recommended residents drink bottled water.

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50,000 Arizona Cows to Power Vehicles, Heat Homes

The Center Square
Group of cows during the day

Two dairy farms in Arizona soon will be producing more than milk.

Renewable energy company Avolta has begun construction on a renewable gas project in Buckeye that will turn the tons of manure produced daily from the more than 25,000 Holstein dairy cows at Buttermilk farms into biogas.

The manure will be sealed underground and “digested” until methane can be created and extracted. The gas is processed and pumped into a nearby Southwest Gas pipeline, providing the farms with an additional revenue stream and keeping the methane gas out of the atmosphere. 

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Minnesota House Approves Legal Marijuana; Dead Upon Arrival in Senate

The Center Square
green cannabis plant

The Minnesota House voted 72-61 to legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and expunge minor marijuana convictions.

The Senate leader, however, designated the bill dead upon arrival.

“The war on drugs is a failed policy,” House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler said. “The harms caused by current cannabis laws cannot be allowed to continue. Minnesota’s illegal cannabis market creates bad outcomes for everyone. Responsible regulations and safeguards to prevent youth access are a better solution to address the harms our current laws fail to address.”

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Famed Chemist Tells the World: Scientists Are Totally ‘Clueless’ About the Origin of Life

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Students across America are taught an origin of life story that goes a little something like this: billions of years ago, energy from the sun, lightning, and Earth’s heat combined with the planet’s early atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and other gases, creating chemical reactions that formed molecules in a primordial soup that eventually produced a cell, in other words, life.

But one prominent professor argues that that simplistic explanation is not only unproven, it’s highly improbable.

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