Don’t ask me why, but I’m suddenly thinking about my vegetable garden. For the past few weeks our backyard and my garden have been sitting there under a three-foot blanket of snow. Here in the nation’s capital metro area we’ve had the greatest snowfall for an entire winter already. I’ve measured more than 60 inches at our house. The average is 15 for winter season. Maybe I’m thinking ahead because by this morning, I almost can see the earth in the garden plot.
...

I was watching one of those classic movies on TV the other day and in one scene the camera pushed in on a glass with a set of false teeth floating there peacefully. I can still remember my grandmother taking her teeth out before she went to sleep and I hoped that wouldn’t happen to me.

...

Despite growing up in the city and then in a heavily populated suburb in Connecticut, I know something about forest fires, believe me. Technically, I’m talking about brush  fires, but they do have something in common: There’s nothing good about either. Or so I used to think. I’ll begin with a confession. In our early teens, while my buddies Larry and Bobby and I were roundly praised by the fire department for helping put a good-sized blaze in the woods not far from my house, we have never glowed with pride. The reason: one of us kind of set the fire.
...

My wife eats a ton of blueberries every morning, piled high on her low-fat cherry, peach or raspberry yogurt, and I don’t mind telling you how much this suddenly scares me. Don’t misunderstand me. I know blueberries are full of those wonderful antioxidants and I, myself, try to eat a lot of foods that contain these goodies. I hope the berries keep her healthy for decades and decades, and so far so good. But what I’m afraid is that her memory is going to get better and better, as mine gets, well, you know the word I’m searching for here. The problem is that I don’t eat blueberries very often and a new study finds that blueberry juice improves your memory. ...

Here’s something you need to know before you read any further: I have no mechanical skills. None. The best thing about those impossible-to-open plastic packages for things you have to assemble at home is that they save me the frustration of struggling to put things together. I can’t open the hard plastic wrapping, so I don’t have to spend an hour reading instructions I can’t follow. There are times, though, when there is no packaging, and that’s when I get scared.

...

When I was a small boy growing up in Hartford, Conn., the insurance capital of the nation, furnaces heated the apartment house where we lived. I don’t know how it happened, but I fell in love with coal. I used to go down to the basement where the huge furnaces were and watch the janitor shovel loads of the stuff into the blazing furnace. As a bonus, the janitor had a cat named Dinah who always seemed to be giving birth to a basketful of kittens. My friends and I liked to play with those kittens.

Not only did I love the coal in its natural state, but I loved the ash. Now, here’s where the story gets a little weird. Our apartment building had two sections and they would line up trash cans of coal ash in front of each. If my side would have fewer cans of trash on pickup day, I would cry. True story.

So you can imagine how interested I was when I saw a study about coal that appeared in last week’s ACS PressPac. The study concluded that the volcanic eruptions thought responsible for Earth’s largest mass extinction — which killed more than 70 percent of plants and animals 250 million years ago — is still taking lives today. And for the first time, the study found that the high silica content of coal in one region of China may be interacting with volatile substances in the coal to cause unusually high rates of lung cancer. The study, which helps solve this cancer mystery, appears in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly publication.

David Large and colleagues note that parts of China’s Xuan Wei County in Yunnan Province have the world’s highest incidence of lung cancer in nonsmoking women — 20 times higher than the rest of China. Women in the region heat their homes and cook on open coal-burning stoves that are not vented to the outside. Scientists believe that indoor emissions from burning coal cause cancer, but are unclear why the lung cancer rates in this region are so much higher than other areas. Earlier studies show a strong link between certain volatile substances, called PAHs, in coal smoke and lung cancer in the region.

The scientists found that coal used in parts of Xuan Wei County had about 10 times more silica, a suspected carcinogen, than U.S. coal. Silica may work in conjunction with PAHs to make the coal more carcinogenic, they indicate. The scientists also found that this high-silica coal was formed 250 million years ago, at a time when massive volcanic eruptions worked to deposit silica in the peat that formed Xuan Wei’s coal.

To read more, go to coal. Image courtesy of the U.S. Dept. of Energy

One cold day late last month I’m walking out of the grocery store with a half gallon of peach iced tea in a plastic bag and it hits me: honey bees. Yes, I think of honey bees in early winter. The reason: it occurs to me that the iced tea isn’t diet iced tea and it probably has high-fructose corn syrup in it. I like diet drinks because they have little or no calories. Apart from its high caloric content, there is something else about the sweetener that I remember....