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Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"

For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.

"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.

Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.

Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.

"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.

Various: No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico says the New York Times.

...At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb.

They are approaching the job like an archeological dig—only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive...

Cheryl Rofer, a former Los Alamos scientist points out that some of the extra care concerning explosives may be unwarranted. LANL used to blow up old explosives on a frequent basis in the area close to the dump, and Rofer suspects that:

...that the 1970s interview contained a comment by the old-timer that they disposed of explosives out there. The interviewer, accustomed to the practice of burying things in pits, took this to mean that the explosives were buried and wrote that down. The Los Alamos environmental restoration program, and now the New York Times, live with that to this day.

Slate: Acid rain has been a major problem since the Industrial Revolution. Acidification can cause imbalances in soil chemistry, exacerbating problems for watersheds and plant life, and threaten sensitive tree populations like the Red Spruce in the Northeast mountains.

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act require power plants make significant cuts on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions—which cause acid rain—by installing "scrubbers" in their smokestacks and switching to low-sulfur coal.

Cap-and-trade programs came online in 1995 for sulfur dioxide and 2003 for nitrogen oxides. Vehicles, which emit large amounts of nitrogen oxides, became cleaner thanks to the catalytic converters.

According to the National Emissions Inventory, sulfur dioxide emissions from all sources fell from nearly 26 million tons in 1980 to 11.4 million tons in 2008. Nitrogen oxides decreased from 27 million tons to 16.3 million tons in the same time frame.

However, despite these improvements, much of the rainwater in the East is between 2.5 and 8 times more acidic than it should be.

NPR: A hundred years ago, the Welsbach and General Gas Mantle factories kept the lights on across the country by making a popular precursor to the light bulb called a mantle, but they left a toxic, radioactive legacy behind in Camden and Gloucester City, NJ. As part of the economic stimulus package, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to spend more than $25 million to accelerate the cleanup at the Welsbach and General Gas Mantle Superfund site. It's one of 50 contaminated properties getting injections of cash totaling $600 million from the recovery funds. That's more than double what the EPA usually spends on these projects each year.

McClatchy: After the White House intervened, the Environmental Protection Agency last week weakened a rule on airborne lead standards at the last minute so that fewer polluters would have their emissions monitored. The EPA on Oct. 16 announced that it would dramatically reduce the highest acceptable amount of airborne lead from 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter to 0.15 microgram. It was the first revision of the standard since EPA set it 30 years ago. However, a close look at documents publicly available, including e-mails from the EPA to the White House Office of Management and Budget, reveal that the OMB objected to the way the EPA had determined which lead-emitting battery recycling plants and other facilities would have to be monitored.

Environmental News Network: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under fire for apparently discounting the impact of climate change, on Thursday said global warming poses real risk to human health and the American way of life.

The New York Times: The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday a first draft of a rule that will govern injecting carbon dioxide into underground storage.

Washington Post: The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

The New York Times: Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was involved in removing statements on health risks posed by global warming from a draft of a health official’s Senate testimony last year, a former senior government environmental official said on Tuesday.