Word: cadmium
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...gravel. From the summit, a lifeless brown wasteland stretches to the horizon, like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Mountains of mine tailings, some as tall as 13-story buildings, others as wide as four football fields, loom over streets, homes, churches and schools. Dust, laced with lead, cadmium and other poisonous metals, blows off the man-made hills and 800 acres of dry settling ponds. "It gets in your teeth," says Sparkman, head of a local citizens' group. "It cakes in your ears and hair. It's like we've been environmentally raped...
...immense underground cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine waste flushes into drinking wells. When the water rises in Tar Creek, which runs through the site, a neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions, a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are saturated with cadmium--which may explain, local doctors say, why three different kidney dialysis centers have opened here to serve a population of only...
...pound machine." His solution: the Segway, the recently unveiled high-end scooter that goes up to 13 m.p.h., is powered by an electric motor and runs on just a nickel's worth of electricity a day. The batteries today are standard nickel- metal hydride and nickel-cadmium, but the scooters could easily be switched over to a hydrogen-based power source. One of the $8,000 machine's coolest features is its steering and braking system, which uses a series of gyroscopes to sense and respond to your body's movements: lean forward, and the Segway accelerates. Lean backward...
...hard to imagine a more inhospitable place on earth than the hydrothermal vents that pepper the ocean floor. These cracks in the sea bottom spew water superheated by rising magma to as high as 750[degrees]F and contaminated with toxic substances such as hydrogen sulfide, cadmium, arsenic and lead. Yet despite these lethal conditions, life not only survives but thrives in the form of colonies of microbes that feed on poison and multiply in temperatures that could hard-boil...
...peninsula, obscuring visibility and dusting everything in yellow. Last week's storm-2002's first-was Korea's worst in at least 40 years. Dust concentrations were 20 times normal in parts of Seoul. Worse still, some scientists now fear the crud clouds are picking up toxins, such as cadmium and arsenic, as they cross China's northeastern industrial belt. The pollutant payload is small but "very, very bad for your health," says an environmental studies professor. The problem stems from spreading desertification across huge swathes of China. Says Goh Kun, the mayor of Seoul: "We need radical and aggressive...