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We’ve written before about how prescription drugs aregetting into water supplies. It’s recently been discoveredthat water in London is tainted with Prozac. How well do ourwater treatment plants get rid of these drugs?

Wastewater treatment plants that use a combination ofpurifying techniques followed by reverse osmosis, wherewater is forced through a barrier that only water can passthrough, do a good job of removing chemicals. But old-styletreatment plants do not remove prescription drugs from thewater we drink.
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In the film “Amadeus,” actor Tom Hulce played Mozart as atwitchy character who was sometimes out of control. Now a TVdocumentary in the U.K. suggests that Mozart had theobsessive compulsive disorder called Tourette’s syndrome.

British composer James McConnel, who also has Tourette’s,has made a film called “What Made Mozart Tic?” McConnelsays, “He wrote some absolutely disgusting letters andalthough people in the eighteenth century were pretty crudeanyway, he took it to another level. He wrote songs withtitles such as ‘Hung like an ox’ or ‘Lick out my arsehole,’which is really just his sense of humor going wrong, as canoften happen with people who have Tourette’s.”
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Crop Circle Research of Canada is beginning to report thekind of complex circles that used to be seen only in theU.K. In Canada, these formations started out as simplecircles and have advanced in complexity every year. One ofthese formations had a “key” shape of the kind seenextensively in the U.K. in the past.

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A new government report calledOurChanging Planet says people are responsible for the globalwarming of the past 30 years. This idea has long beenaccepted by scientists, but has been resisted by bigbusiness interests in the White House who don’t want toforce industries to curb their greenhouse gas emissions orproduce low-emission cars.

Maggie McKee writes in New Scientist that the report, whichsummarizes recent computer simulations by 13 governmentagencies, reports that global warming in the first half ofthe 20th century “was likely due to natural climatevariation,” including increased solar activity. But thetemperature rise over the second half of the century,especially in the last 30 years, can only be explained byhuman activity.
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