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In a cloud forest in Panama, hundreds of frogs turn up dead, the life sucked out of them by a strange fungus.  

In the wetlands of northwest Iowa, where hunters once collected 20 million frogs a year for their meaty legs, there is only one leopard frog left for every thousand frogs the pioneers saw.  

In southern Missouri's mountain streams, scientists struggle to protect dwindling populations of the Ozark hellbender, a wrinkled, primitive salamander that can grow to two feet long.

All around the planet, amphibians such as these are in trouble. It's not just the colorful, exotic rainforest species that are disappearing, but also the common frogs, toads, newts and salamanders that people used to see in backyards across America.

Published on: 2008-05-14 - Read full story..

It's a long way from the thin air of an impoverished mountain village outside Lima, Peru, to the tony atmosphere of the Hamptons. But a group of religious leaders from Peru recently traveled to New York to tell billionaire industrialist Ira L. Rennert that even if he can sleep at night, comfortably ensconced in his 110,000-square-foot estate in Sagaponack, God is watching.

Published on: 2007-06-26 - Read full story..

Published on: 2007-01-01 - Read full story..

In the November/December 2006 issue of Mother Jones, Sara Shipley Hiles and Marina Walker Guevara tell the story of two cities, some 3,000 miles apart, that are intimately linked by one company and one mineral unearthed from the ground. Both La Oroya, Peru and Herculaneum, Mo., are home to lead smelters operated by the Doe Run Co., one of the largest lead producers in the world. The St. Louis-based firm expanded its dirty operations abroad at a time when it was facing increasing scrutiny at home, milking money from its Peruvian operation while claiming it couldn't afford to finish its mandatory cleanup plan there. Meanwhile, 99 percent of La Oroya's children are lead-poisoned - a price some families think they have to pay to put food on the table.

Click here to view photos from La Oroya and Herculaneum

Published on: 2006-10-26 - Read full story..

Would you run into a burning building to save a stranger's life? Would a chimpanzee do the same?

Acts of altruism -- helping an unrelated creature with no apparent benefit to yourself -- have long been an evolutionary puzzle because the behavior seemingly contradicts the notion of ''survival of the fittest." Until now, humans were the only members of the animal kingdom with a proven record of behaving altruistically.

Published on: 2006-03-06 - Read full story..

Slurp up a bowl of noodles at Pho Republique, a hip Asian fusion restaurant in Boston's South End, and you'll get a taste of the latest weapon in the world's war against bird flu.

Star anise, a fragrant, licorice-flavored spice used for centuries in Chinese cooking and medicine, plays a modern role in making one of the most sought-after drugs in the world. Eight-pointed seed pods picked from Chinese evergreen trees form the raw material for manufacturing Tamiflu, one of the few treatments for seasonal flu, and now a possible weapon against an avian flu pandemic.

Published on: 2005-11-14 - Read full story..

The patients kept coming, hot, tired, and some clad in the same stinky clothes they had worn through waist-high flood water. Some people had cuts on their hands and feet from debris or flying glass. Others had run out of medication to treat their diabetes or high blood pressure.

A first aid station in the Superdome had been converted into a makeshift emergency room for the 25,000 people who took refuge there from Hurricane Katrina. Supplies stocked to treat minor ailments during football games quickly disappeared.

Published on: 2005-10-01 - Read full story..

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Federal health investigators warn that the threat of "popcorn workers' lung" could go far beyond Midwestern microwave popcorn factories.

Investigators at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health say that workers who make a wide variety of products, from candy to snack cakes to potato chips, could be at risk of developing a severe lung disease associated with breathing butter flavoring vapors.

Published on: 2004-04-03 - Read full story..

Former workers at a Missouri microwave popcorn plant are slowly suffocating from breathing a chemical that was known to be toxic long before most of them got sick, according to documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch.

At least 31 people who worked at a popcorn factory in Jasper County have been diagnosed with severe lung disease linked to breathing vapors from a butter flavoring. Eight are on waiting lists for lung transplants.

Published on: 2004-02-28 - Read full story..

More than $2.2 billion worth of new development in the St. Louis area stands on
land that was under water in the 1993 flood.

The building boom has brought jobs, services and tax revenue to the region, but
it could lead to a more costly disaster in the future.

Published on: 2003-07-27 - Read full story..

BENHAM, KY. - For years, this eastern Kentucky town had seemed little more than a crumbling memorial to Appalachian coal.

There had been good days, sure. During World War II, Benham was as rich as the black seams of rock that generations of men and women extracted from the surrounding hills - a jewel of Appalachia with its country club, lawn tennis, and theater.

Published on: 2000-12-28 - Read full story..