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A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association says long-term exposure to the air pollution in some of America?s biggest cities significantly raises the risk of dying from lung cancer and is as dangerous as living with a smoker. The danger comes from combustion-related fine particulate matter, which is soot emitted by cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants and factories. This risk can be found in many big cities and even some smaller ones, according to the researchers from Brigham Young University and New York University.
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Ice cream researchers have come up with an additive to eliminate the grainy texture that ice cream gets when it sits in the freezer too long. The ingredient is a wheat protein that blocks the formation of the large, rectangular-shaped crystals that ruin the texture of ice cream.

Douglas Goff and his colleagues at the University of Guelph in Canada used a class of proteins from winter wheat, which has adapted to survive winter by halting the growth of ice crystals. The cells of the wheat plant secrete proteins which bind directly to the ice crystals and stop their growth.
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Old computers are being dumped in Asia where they are releasing toxic materials into the environment. The report ?Exporting Harm: The Hi-Tech Trashing Of Asia? describes a group of villages in China where computers from America are picked apart with the remains littered along rivers and fields. ?I?ve seen a lot of dirty operations in Third World countries, but what was shocking was seeing all this post-consumer waste,? says Jim Puckett of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, one of the authors of the report.
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Over a quarter of all deaths of adult beluga whales in Canada?s Saint Lawrence Estuary are caused by cancer, researchers have found. Such high rates of cancer are unprecedented in wild animals, except for fish. Industrial pollution is the most likely cause.

Belugas live entirely in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. There are approximately 70,000 worldwide and about 650 of these live in a small region of the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec. Between 1983 and 1999, 263 dead whales were reported. Daniel Martineau of the University of Montreal and his team conducted 100 autopsies of the whales and found that cancer, particularly cancer of the digestive tract, was the cause of death of 18 per cent of juvenile belugas and 27 per cent of the adults.
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