Ten years ago, an EPA report revealed that medical waste incinerators were a major source of airborne carcinogens, and hospitals across the country were criticized for using mercury thermometers, burning plastics, and allowing used syringes to wash up on beaches.
“It caused a real uproar in local communities,” says Adele Houghton of Health Care Without Harm, an international non-profit that was formed in 1996 in response to the waste incineration problem. The hospitals polluted the air and water, causing a rise in chronic diseases, she says. “It’s a vicious cycle—especially when your mission is supposed to be ‘first do no harm.’”
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By early October, the summer tourists have left Martha’s Vineyard. 
For more than a century, the world’s forests have been under siege—by the timber industry, by the wild mushroom and maple syrup industries, by agricultural development, and even by millions of indigenous people living at the forests’ borders. Disappearing forests mean disappearing habitats for thousands of species.
You are what you eat—or, if you’re a 2 million-year-old hominid fossil, what you ate.
“During the war a helicopter arrived on a remote island in the Pacific carrying a doctor who was needed urgently for emergency surgery. The doctor was led to a small hut which staff had readied for the operation. Once scrubbed, he approached the makeshift operating table and surveyed his patient. Ready to begin, he reached for an instrument, but the nurse shook her head and handed him a different implement. ‘Oh . . . don’t tell me,’ he sighed, ‘a Hopkins nurse.’”
Though lead-based paint was banned from household use in 1978, lead poisoning hasn’t gone away — especially in kids. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than 300,000 children nationwide under age 5 have dangerously high levels of lead in their blood.
Shortly after Britni Lonesome was accepted into Justin Hanes’ chemical engineering lab, he asked her to present to the lab group. Then a high-school senior, Lonesome was to explain her new project: making a plastic implant that could release medication, continuously and consistently for three months, into the bloodstream of a tuberculosis patient.
