SLEEP TIGHT: Beds across America are under attack from tiny, blood-sucking bugs, but as the Science Times and the AP report today, no one is really sure why. Bedbugs are "nest parasites" that have preyed on people ever since we lived in caves, and they were common in U.S. homes up until the 1900s, when a parade of pesticides like DDT and chlordane virtually wiped them out of the country. Most of those pesticides were banned in the 1970s once they were found to cause environmental problems, even cancer in some cases, and pests like mosquitoes and roaches quickly rebounded. Bedbugs, on the other hand, didn't bounce back, and they were largely forgotten by scientists and public health experts. In fact, a new report released by the CDC and the EPA this month points out that bedbug research "has been very limited over the past several decades." But suddenly, bedbugs mounted a surprise comeback in the late '90s and early 2000s. "The first time I saw one that wasn't dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001," a bedbug expert tells the Times. That resurgence is now humming along, with bedbug outbreaks sweeping the country, especially in Northeastern and Midwestern states such as New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And while bedbugs aren't known to spread any disease — another mystery that baffles scientists — the swarms are annoying enough to drive some Americans to vigilante pest control. The AP reports that U.S. homeowners and exterminators are increasingly applying outdoor pesticides inside, or simply using illegal chemicals to rid homes of bedbugs, since the pests are resistant to many legal ones. And while the pest-control industry is pushing the EPA to legalize toxins like propoxur for bedbug treatment, some experts say it's not worth the trade-off. "Propoxur is not a silver bullet," one tells the AP, "and given time, bedbugs would likely become resistant to it, too." (Sources: Associated Press, New York Times)

 

EARLY WARNING: After months of relative calm, the Atlantic Ocean is suddenly a bustling hurricane highway this week, with the fading Tropical Storm Danielle followed closely by up-and-coming Hurricane Earl as well as Tropical Storm Fiona. And while Danielle steered clear of most land masses, the same can't necessarily be said for Earl and Fiona. Earl is currently a monstrous Category 4 storm, featuring maximum sustained winds of 135 mph, and it brushed across Puerto Rico last night as it churns west-northwest in the general direction of the U.S. East Coast — with a projected path that could take it ashore anywhere from the Carolinas to Cape Cod. It's currently undergoing an "eyewall replacement cycle," CNN reports, a common characteristic of powerful hurricanes in which a new eyewall forms around the old one, essentially swallowing it. Earl is a few miles northeast of Hispaniola this morning, and is expected to be within striking range of U.S. coasts by early Friday. Meanwhile, Fiona has grown into a tropical storm with 40 mph sustained winds, and is moving west-northwest at a blistering 24 mph, nearly twice the speed of Earl. While her fate remains much hazier than Earl's, the National Hurricane Center doesn't currently expect Fiona to become a hurricane, although she could still threaten land over the weekend or early next week. And as Danielle and Earl have already shown, a storm doesn't necessarily have to hit land to be deadly — a surfer drowned off Florida's Atlantic coast Saturday, and a swimmer disappeared off Maryland Sunday, both of whom were presumably caught in hurricane-related rip currents. (Sources: National Hurricane Center, CNN, AOL News, AP)

 

IN THE HOT SEAT: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has received a firm slap on the wrist from an independent review committee, which urges the U.N. panel in a new report to establish stricter standards to avoid reputation-rattling gaffes like January's so-called "Glaciergate" scandal. The review comes after months of mounting pressure on the IPCC over errors in its 2007 overview of climate science, namely a since-debunked claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. That assertion was later traced back to the environmental advocacy group WWF, raising concerns that the IPCC was falling short of its mission to only include peer-reviewed science in its assessments. The review calls for the IPCC to adopt more transparent practices and to bring in new management, and while it emphasizes that previous IPCC reports were successful overall, it says the panel's response to the discovery of errors in its latest report has been "slow and inadequate." The Glaciergate scandal came at a bad time for climate scientists in general, since the "Climategate" controversy had bubbled up just a few months earlier, and together the two stories seemed to erode some public confidence in the certainty of climatology. But as IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri (pictured) points out, subsequent investigations into both scandals vindicated the basic science, and mainly criticized the scientists' public-relations skills. Harold Shapiro, the economist who led the review of IPCC practices, said in a press conference Monday that the panel "has been a success and has served society well." (Sources: Wall Street Journal, Guardian)

 

DIRTY MONEY: It's perfectly legal in the U.S. to blast the peak off a mountain in the name of coal, or to pull up fields of gooey, polluting oil sands in Canada, and so banks have seen no problem in helping finance such projects over the years. But as banks now struggle with an unrelated PR problem, thanks to the global recession, some are starting to take a closer look at the environmental consequences of the activities they finance, the New York Times reports. One of the most recent examples is Wells Fargo, which noted in a report last month "considerable attention and controversy" surrounding the practice of mountaintop removal, and pledged that its lending to coal-mining companies that remove mountaintops is "limited and declining." It's a major paradigm shift for once-indifferent banks, and follows years of urging and even boycotting by environmental activists. All that "attention and controversy" now appears to be paying off, since Wells Fargo is just the latest in a string of banks to back away from lending money to environmentally questionable clients. Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank have all begun to more closely scrutinize — or have completely stopped — their lending to companies that engage in mountaintop removal, while the Royal Bank of Scotland recently endured a week of rowdy protests in Edinburgh over its financing of oil sands development in Canada. While activists acknowledge that energy developers will still find ways to get financing, they say every bank that stops such lending chips away at the damaging practices. "Bottom line," says the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, "as access to capital becomes more constrained it will be harder for mining companies to finance the blowing up of America's mountains." (Source: New York Times)

 

— Russell McLendon