ICYMI: No Sex Please—We're Crayfish, "the Gas of Life," & More

A weekly roundup for busy people

By Paul Rauber

February 9, 2018

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Illustration by Peter Arkle

A mutation in a marbled crayfish in Germany allowed it to clone itself asexually in great numbers. The six-inch crayfish is now spreading rapidly across Europe. In Madagascar, where it has also become established, it is displacing native crayfish.

At the urging of Senator Angus King (I) of Maine, the Unicode Consortium includes a lobster among its 157 new authorized emojis. 

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt now accepts that climate change is happening but disputes whether “that necessarily is a bad thing.”

Pruitt deletes from his Twitter feed a picture of himself with the proprietors of a Florida nursery (whom he called “#TrueEnvironmentalists”) after it is revealed that they grow medicinal cannabis

A home contractor from New Jersey, whose wife has been on the Trumps’ household staff, is hired to be a special assistant to the EPA’s regional office in New York. 

Due to fracking and horizontal drilling, the United States is now a net exporter of natural gas.

The natural gas rig that exploded near Quinton, Oklahoma, on January 22, killing five, was not covered by OSHA workplace-safety standards because the oil-and-gas industry is exempt. 

As the world’s permafrost melts, it could release 15 million gallons of mercury, a potent neurotoxin—10 times as much as all human-caused mercury emissions in the past 30 years.  

In Trump’s first year in office, the U.S. solar industry lost nearly 10,000 jobs. The coal industry gained 500 jobs.

Epidemiologists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health identify the largest cluster of black lung disease ever reported. 

The White House withdraws Kathleen Hartnett White, a climate change skeptic, from consideration as head of its Council on Environmental Quality. Hartnett had written that carbon dioxide was “the gas of life.” 

Dunkin’ Donuts says that it will stop using polystyrene foam coffee cups by 2020.