Venezuelan Court: Chávez Swearing-In Can Be Postponed



CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles is condemning the Supreme Court's endorsement of a delay in President Hugo Chavez's inauguration.


The Supreme Court sided with Venezuela's government and ruling party earlier Wednesday in the heated dispute with the opposition while the ailing leader struggles with complications a month after cancer surgery in Cuba.


Capriles says that "institutions should not respond to the interests of a government."


Supreme Court President Luisa Estella announced that it's legal for lawmakers to delay Chavez's swearing-in for a new term, which had been scheduled for Thursday.


Pro-Chavez lawmakers voted Tuesday to delay the ceremony, allowing Chavez to take the oath of office at a later date before the Supreme Court.


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Men and Women of (Limited) Letters: Must-Follow Twitter Accounts of 2013






Scientific American editors voted in recent weeks on the 20 most informative Twitter accounts to stay abreast of the latest ideas, issues and developments in science and technology. We weeded through hundreds of lists and feeds to select the most brilliant and engaging, as well as the quirkiest of the bunch.Our picks are often witty, sometimes eccentric and occasionally silly, but each brings valuable insights to his or her area of expertise. For the latest, greatest tweets on science, technology, journalism, astronomy, physics, mathematics and more, check out these top 20 Twitter accounts of 2013, listed here in alphabetical order.





 Must-Follow Twitter Accounts of 2013Next »
BBC Science
@BBCscience

 Pay attention to BBC Science for breaking science and environmental news from a global perspective. Tweets are most often serious, with the occasional story about whether a toilet seat really is the dirtiest item in the house. The BBC offers variety suitable to both the casual consumer and the diehard nerd.









« Previous
Intro
Must-Follow Twitter Accounts of 2013Next »
Deborah Blum
@DeborahBlum

Deborah Blum’s tweets about poison, murder and other interesting articles and quips aren’t all that make her Twitter feed unique. It also stands out for her insights into science journalism. Blum often posts jobs, tips and tricks of the trade that will motivate any aspiring science blogger to break out the laptop and start posting.
By day, Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist. By night he’s a “truth vigilante.” The Caltech researcher writes lofty pieces about eternity and dark matter, and tweets fascinating facts about his field.


 This NASA Twitter account gained notoriety when the car-size rover Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012. With its witty persona, pop culture references and updates on its forays across the surface of the Red Planet, @MarsCuriosity is a must-follow for 2013—and the rest of its multiyear tour. Also check out the “Curiosity Explorer” badge on Foursquare and watch the rover’s New Year’s Eve message on YouTube
David Dobbs is an accomplished science journalist who is big on audience engagement in the new media milieu. His Twitter feed is punctuated with responses to readers weighing in on a wide variety of topics, especially cognitive science. Dobbs also tweets sporadically about his personal life and his work for Wired. He’s working on his fifth book.
Maryn McKenna, a specialist on food policy, public health and infectious disease, has built and cultivated a dedicated online following. Her tweets and posts are smart, quirky and highly informative. A seasoned science journalist, she uses social media to nerd out on a daily basis, so join in the geeky fun.
Former Scientific American special projects guru Christopher Mims isn’t shy. Opinionated and straightforward, the technology and sustainability journalist, now at QuartzNews, stays ahead of the pack. Mims frequently engages with his audience and uses crowd-sourcing to gather material for many of his stories.
Scientific American editors enjoy checking in on Nature News‘s hard-nosed, clever twitter feed.  One might suspect that our favor for it derives from the fact that Scientific American is also part of Nature Publishing Group, but we actually operate as editorially independent units. Follow Nature News especially for investigative reporting on science scandals and international science policy, as well as the latest important biomedical and physics news.


 Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Tim O’Reilly reports technology trends and comments on advocacy issues. His Twitter feed is dominated by references to Silicon Valley and e-book deals. Follow his tweets for insightful coverage of the technical world.
John Allen Paulos is a PhD with character. He’s wearing a bow tie in his profile picture, and his favored emoticon is a winking smiley face. Paulos’s tweets can be a tad cryptic for the layperson, but the mathematician has such a great sense of humor that you’re sure to laugh out loud at some point—even if you don’t quite understand the joke.
Accomplished blogger Phil Plait has just migrated his popular “Bad Astronomy” blog to Slate. The author, skeptic, father and punster primarily covers the ins and outs of the solar system. The best part about Plait’s Twitter feed is his daily #BAFact, wherein he throws strange-but-true scraps of science to his curious followers.


 Veteran science journalist Paul Raeburn has turned his eye in recent years to good-natured meta-media, covering science reporting itself for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker while also covering reseach on fatherhood. Raeburn takes reporters to task for sloppy thinking, points out inaccuracies and addresses ethical dilemmas. Follow his account just to read the back-and-forth between him and his targets.
Andy Revkin is a leader in the environmental reporting field, covering everything from fracking to global warming. Check out Revkin’s DotEarth blog in The New York Times too for his breaking news coverage—it’s all the environmental news that’s fit to cover.


 Science Friday, part of National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation radio program, packs its Twitter feed with tantalizing links that just beg to be clicked on. @SciFri looks at daily news through a scientific lens, including live tweets to provide context during the weekly broadcast. The result is an entertaining bundle of scientific discoveries, intrigues and debunkings.
Scientific American‘s contributors are a brilliant group of reporters, bloggers and commentators, if you’ll pardon this moment of pride. Creativity, skepticism and authoritative context are a big part of what makes our coverage so engaging and worthwhile. Check out this Twitter list and follow your favorites.
Nate Silver, the most celebrated political statistician of the 2012 election, started out as a forecaster of baseball player performance. When he turned his attention to U.S. presidential elections, using statistical models to accurately predict what was thought to be unpredictable, he became a sensation. Although this past year’s electoral frenzy is behind us, Silver is still at work making predictions we’d be foolish to ignore.
Steven Strogatz holds the esteem of math wunderkinds as well as those who are iffy on formulas. He’s hardly a typical numbers-cruncher. The Cornell University professor has a knack for taking on complex topics and making them interesting, even to full-on mathphobes. In his recent book, The Joy of X, discussions range from the number of people one should date before settling down to how HBO’s The Sopranos can help us understand calculus. His Twitter account is similarly entertaining.
Not following Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter? Beware: science nerds who don’t wake up each morning to the rational witticisms of NGT in their feed risk losing all geek cred. If you fit this description, please remedy that situation—now.
Blogger Ed Yong diligantly weaves a love of data into his prose, while still managing to craft posts that are accessible to readers with little to no science background. By covering new findings skeptically and tweeting prolifically, he has built a readership that relies on him for science news. Join the club.
A self-described “champion of underappreciated life-forms,” Carl Zimmer tends to tackle stories about parasites, viruses and quantum earthworms. Follow his feed, probably the most followed of any science writer, for solid reporting and captivating writing.





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Ed Yong
@EdYong209
Must-Follow Twitter Accounts of 2013Restart the list »
Introduction

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs.Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2013 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.
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David Bowie's New Single Is No Splashy Comeback















01/09/2013 at 05:00 PM EST



"Where Are We Now?" ponders a plaintive David Bowie on his comeback single after seemingly retiring from music. Indeed, this august, atmospheric ballad previews his first album in 10 years, The Next Day, due out March 12.

Out of nowhere the song was dropped in the middle of the night on Jan. 8 – which just happens to be Bowie's birthday (he turned 66). The low-key release certainly suits the understated tone of the tune, which is hardly the splashy comeback one might have expected from the glam god who was once Ziggy Stardust.

Instead, Bowie plays the reflective elder statesman dispensing some existential lyrics: "The moment you know, you know you know."

While the track – produced by Tony Visconti, who also worked on the star's Berlin Trilogy from 1977 to 1979 – ultimately doesn't give many answers, it at least tells us where Bowie has been lately. And it's a welcome return from one of our great rock heroes.

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Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down


WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.


Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.


"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.


But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.


Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.


The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.


Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.


Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.


But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.


Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.


Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.


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Wall Street slips as earnings season gets under way

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Tuesday, retreating from last week's rally on the "fiscal cliff" deal in Washington, as companies started to report results for the fourth quarter.


After a 4.3 percent jump in the two sessions around the close of the fiscal cliff negotiations, the S&P has declined a bit, with investors finding few catalysts to extend the rally that took the benchmark to five-year highs.


"We had a brief respite, courtesy of what happened on the fiscal cliff deal and the flip of the calendar with new money coming into the market," said Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Alabama.


Shares of AT&T Inc dropped 1.7 percent to $34.35, making it one of the biggest drags on the S&P 500, after the company said it sold more than 10 million smartphones in the quarter.


This figure beat the same quarter in 2011, but also means increased costs for the wireless service provider. Providers like AT&T pay hefty subsidies to handset makers so that they can offer discounts to customers who commit to two-year contracts.


Fourth-quarter profits are expected to beat the previous quarter's lackluster results, but analyst estimates are down sharply from October. Quarterly earnings are expected to grow by 2.7 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Dow component Alcoa, the largest U.S. aluminum producer, reported results after the closing bell.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> dropped 55.44 points, or 0.41 percent, to 13,328.85. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 4.74 points, or 0.32 percent, to 1,457.15. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> lost 7.01 points, or 0.23 percent, to 3,091.81.


"The stark reality of uncertainty with regard to earnings, plus the negotiations on the debt ceiling, are there and that doesn't give investors a lot of reason to take bets on the long side," Hellwig said.


With AT&T's fall, the S&P telecom services index <.gspl> was the worst performer of the 10 major S&P sectors, down 2.7 percent.


Sears Holdings shares dropped 6.4 percent to $40.16 a day after the company said Chairman Edward Lampert would take over as CEO from Louis D'Ambrosio, who is stepping down due to a family member's health issue. The U.S. retailer also reported a 1.8 percent decline in quarter-to-date sales at stores open at least a year.


Markets went lower as some of the first reported earnings were weak.


"It doesn't seem to be bouncing back, it might stay here or sell off a little further," said Stephen Carl, head of U.S. equity trading at The Williams Capital Group in New York.


Shares of restaurant-chain operator Yum Brands Inc fell 4.2 percent to $65.04 a day after the KFC parent warned sales in China, its largest market, shrank more than expected in the fourth quarter.


GameStop was one of the worst performers on the S&P 500 as shares slumped 6.3 percent to $23.19 after the video game retailer reported low customer traffic for the holiday season and cut its guidance.


Shares of Monsanto Co gained 2.5 percent to $98.42 after reaching a more than four-year high at $99.99. The world's largest seed company raised its earnings outlook for fiscal year 2013 and posted strong first-quarter results.


Volume was below the 2012 average of 6.42 billion shares traded per day, as 6.19 billion were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq.


Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,495 to 1,458, while on the Nasdaq decliners beat advancers 1,305 to 1,158.


(Reporting by Gabriel Debenedetti; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)



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British Soldier Killed by Afghan Soldier





KABUL, Afghanistan — A British soldier who was helping to build new quarters for the Afghan National Army at a small base in southern Afghanistan was fatally shot by an Afghan soldier in the first insider attack of 2013, military officials said Tuesday.




The attacker, who struck on Monday evening, also shot and wounded six other British soldiers in the engineering regiment, three of them seriously, before being killed, Afghan and British officials said.


During the attack, which occurred at Camp Hazrat, a joint patrol base in the Nahr-e-Seraj District of Helmand Province, several Afghan soldiers were also shot at but were not wounded, said Maj. Gen. Sayed Maluk, the commanding general of the Afghan Army’s 215 Corps, in a statement to the British Forces Broadcasting Service, an arm of the British Defense Ministry.


“It was the British team that sustained injuries,” General Maluk said. “Unfortunately, they were engineering personnel and they were building billeting for the A.N.A.”


He said the Afghan Army was doing everything it could to prevent such attacks. Until 2011, insider attacks, also known as “green on blue” attacks, were a relatively minor problem for the Western military forces in Afghanistan.


But last year, 62 international troops and civilian contractors died in attacks by Afghan forces. Two additional attacks are still under investigation.


Many in the military see the escalation as a game changer that requires Western troops to stay at arm’s length from the Afghans they are supposed to be training and mentoring.


At one point late last summer, Gen. John R. Allen, the commander for international forces in Afghanistan, temporarily suspended joint patrols unless they were approved at the highest levels because of the risk.


Members of NATO units were required to carry weapons with a loaded magazine, and each unit assigned some troops as “guardian angels” to protect fellow soldiers from insider attacks during meetings with Afghans as well as on patrol.


The Afghan Defense Ministry overhauled its screening process for new recruits and rescreened those already deployed.


“Prior to this incident happening we have done almost everything that we can,” General Maluk said.


He said Afghan soldiers have been told by religious leaders inside the corps that the coalition forces “are not invaders, they are our friendly forces; they are not here to invade, but rather they are here to help us reconstruct this country.”


“But to them, the enemy is the enemy,” he said.


The Taliban claimed responsibility for arranging the infiltration into the Afghan Army of the soldier responsible for Monday’s shooting.


A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yusuf, said that the attacker’s name was Mohammed Qasim and that Mr. Qasim had “fulfilled his blessed duty.”


Mr. Qasim, who was between 23 and 25 years old and was known as Sheik Mohammed by his fellow soldiers, was a reticent young man who came from eastern Afghanistan, said Col. Abdul Saboor, an officer with the 215 Corps.


The sequence of events that led to the attack are still unclear, but it seems that the attacker, Mr. Qasim, was on guard duty in a tower as punishment for an infraction and initially began shooting at his Afghan compatriots. It is not clear if Mr. Qasim intended to kill them or whether it was a ploy to draw the British troops closer so that he could target them more easily.


Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul, and Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting from Kabul.



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Google offers New York City neighborhood free WiFi






(Reuters) – Google Inc and a New York redevelopment organization are providing a Manhattan neighborhood with free public WiFi Internet access, making it the largest area of coverage in New York City.


The search giant and the non-profit Chelsea Improvement Co are making Internet access available outdoors in Chelsea, which is home to Google’s New York offices and several technology start-ups.






The neighborhood is also home to many students, as well as residents of one of the city’s public housing developments.


Google does not plan to extend the program, a company spokesman said on Tuesday.


The company also provides free Internet access to the city of Mountain View, California, where its main campus is located.


New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer helped unveil the initiative.


(Reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)


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Organ donations fall in Germany after scandal


BERLIN (AP) — Organ donations have dropped sharply in Germany following a scandal over alleged corruption at several transplant clinics.


The German Foundation for Organ Transplantation says the number of organs donated fell almost 13 percent to 3,917 last year, the lowest figure in a decade.


Several German clinics are being investigated over allegations that doctors manipulated waiting lists to help some patients appear sicker than they were and so receive transplants sooner.


The foundation said Monday that the scandal had "massively shaken" the public's faith in the transplant system.


Some 12,000 people in Germany require organ transplants each year.


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Wall Street edges off five-year high, awaits earnings

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks lost ground on Monday, as investors drew back from recent gains that lifted the S&P 500 to a five-year high, in anticipation of sluggish growth in corporate profits.


Shares of financial companies dipped after a group of major U.S. banks agreed to pay a total of $8.5 billion to end a government inquiry into faulty mortgage foreclosures. The KBW bank index <.bkx>, a gauge of U.S. bank stocks, was down 0.3 percent.


Other sectors were hit as well, most notably energy and utilities. The S&P 500 energy sector index <.gspe> fell 0.8 percent and the utilities sector <.gspu> was off 1.1 percent.


The day's decline came a session after the S&P 500 finished at a five-year high, boosted by a budget deal and strong economic data. The S&P 500 rose 4.6 percent last week, the best weekly gain in more than a year.


"It's a little bit of taking some risk off the table ahead of profit season, you're not going to see anything all that great" on earnings, said Larry Peruzzi, senior equity trader at Cabrera Capital Markets Inc in Boston.


Earnings are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results, and analysts' current estimates are down sharply from where they were in October. Fourth-quarter earnings growth is expected to come in at 2.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.


Aluminum company Alcoa Inc begins the reporting season by announcing its results after Tuesday's market close. Alcoa shares fell 1.7 percent at $9.10.


The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> dropped 50.92 points, or 0.38 percent, to 13,384.29. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> fell 4.58 points, or 0.31 percent, to 1,461.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> lost 2.84 points, or 0.09 percent, to 3,098.81.


Ten mortgage servicers - including Bank of America , Citigroup , JPMorgan , and Wells Fargo - agreed on Monday to pay $8.5 billion to end a case-by-case review of foreclosures required by U.S. regulators.


In a separate case, Bank of America also announced roughly $11.6 billion of settlements with mortgage finance company Fannie Mae and a $1.8 billion sale of collection rights on home loans.


The bank also entered into agreements with Nationstar Mortgage Holdings and Walter Investment Management to sell about $306 billion of residential mortgage servicing rights.


Bank of America shares lost 0.2 percent at $12.09 while Nationstar Mortgage Holdings jumped 16.8 percent to $38.83.


Citigroup shares were up 0.09 percent to $42.47, and Wells Fargo shares fell 0.5 percent to $34.77.


"The financials probably have the wind behind them now with a lot of the regulations coming out ... the market has to absorb a lot of the gains, and for that reason there's a pullback from this level," said Warren West, principal at Greentree Brokerage Services in Philadelphia.


Shares of U.S. jet maker Boeing Co dropped 2 percent after a Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft with no passengers on board caught fire at Boston's Logan International Airport on Monday morning.


Amazon.com shares hit their highest price ever at $269.22 after Morgan Stanley raised is rating on the stock. Shares were up 3.6 percent at $268.46.


Video-streaming service Netflix Inc shares gained 3.4 percent to $99.20 after it said it will carry previous seasons of some popular shows produced by Time Warner's Warner Bros Television.


Walt Disney Co stock fell 2.3 percent to $50.97. The company started an internal cost-cutting review several weeks ago that may include layoffs at its studio and other units, three people with knowledge of the effort told Reuters.


Volume was lower than average, as 4.78 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq. This is well below the 2012 average of 6.42 billion per session.


Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,629 to 1,363, while on the Nasdaq decliners beat advancers 1,438 to 1,066.


(Reporting By Gabriel Debenedetti; Editing by Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)



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Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level


Todd Korol/Reuters


An aerial view of a tar sands mine in Alberta, where cancer-causing compounds have been rising according to a study.







OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.




For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.


“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”


The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.


Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.


“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.


The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.


Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.


The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.


“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.


He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he Hs not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.


Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”


He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”


Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-bit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.


Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.


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