For reasons scientists cannot yet explain, Utah’s Great Salk Lake is laden with toxic mercury. Exactly where the poison is coming from, and how much danger it poses to the millions of migratory birds that feed on the Great Salt Lake, are now under investigation.

Three years ago, tests by the federal Geological Survey showed the lake had some of the highest mercury readings ever recorded in a body of water in the United States. The state warned people not to eat certain kinds of ducks because of the mercury.

The mercury may be accumulating naturally, from some as-yet-unknown source in the ground, or it could be the result of industrial pollution. Mercury released into the atmosphere from coal-fired power plants, gold mines, or industrial facilities may be settling in the lake.

Mobile phones have been around for more than 20 years, and are now used by more than 3 billion people. Yet questions linger over whether mobile phones can contribute to health problems, including cancer. Cell phones have only been mainstream products for 10 years or so, and it may take much longer than that for adverse effects to show up.

New studies on health and cell phones are tough to get going. In the United States, most research on the topic was discontinued at the beginning of the decade, largely because industry groups and government considered the questions resolved and haven’t been willing to finance new studies.

But scientists are concerned that cutting off studies could be a mistake. “It was 15, 20 years after people began smoking that we saw concerns associated with it,” says Michael Kelsh, principle scientist and epidemiologist for Exponent, a scientific consulting firm. “Down the road, the same could happen with phones.”

The latency period for brain tumors can be 10 to 15 years.

The State of California intends to challenge the environmental plan for a bottled water plant that Nestle Waters North America intends to build in Siskiyou County, unless the company revises its contract to pump water from the McCloud River.

“It takes massive quantities of oil to produce plastic water bottles and to ship them in diesel trucks across the United States,” said California Attorney General Edmund Brown Jr. “Nestle will face swift legal challenge if it does not fully evaluate the environmental impact of diverting millions of gallons of spring water from the McCloud River into billions of plastic water bottles.”

The attorney general added that the company’s draft environmental impact report, DEIR, “fails to address in any meaningful way the project’s likely environmental impacts.”

With soaring food prices sparking protests in many countries, and more than 800 million people going hungry every day worldwide, U.S. food portions are under scrutiny.

Portion sizes in the United States not only exceed those in less-developed countries, but also in the developed world. Americans have the highest per capita daily consumption in the world, eating 3,770 calories a day.

One fast-food chain calls its massive burger a “monument to decadence”.

“We’ve looked at large portion sizes almost entirely in terms of whether it’s healthy for us, and now we have to consider is that sort of a demand going to be sustainable,” said Paul Roberts, author of The End of Food. “It would probably be a way to take pressure off of grain markets if we somehow convinced people to take smaller portion sizes.”

The United States isn’t doing enough to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the African-American community, according to a new report from the Black AIDS Institute, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing HIV/AIDS disparities.