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Duke Energy this afternoon completed the installation of a permanent plug at its site in Eden, N.C., to stop releases from an ash basin at the Dan River Steam Station. Overnight, crews filled a section of the pipe with a concrete grout material and capping system. The material cured and hardened over the next 12 hours and was successfully tested by workers Saturday afternoon. The company will continue to fully grout the entire pipe. "Plugging the pipe was clearly job one, but we're continuing our efforts and working closely with all the agencies involved in this response," said Charlie Gates,...

A new toxicology report suggests rat poison may have killed actress Brittany Murphy. Murphy died from pneumonia in 2009, according to the Los Angeles County Coroner. Her husband, 40-year-old Simon Monjack, also passed away from the same ailment five months later.

Why is there arsenic in your beer? © ShutterstockThe Germans take the purity of their beer seriously. Back in the 16th century the Reinheitsgebot, or beer purity law, specified that the only ingredients that could be used in beer were water, barley and hops. Once it was realised that yeast was involved in the brewing process that was allowed as well. Today, the Provisional German Beer Law allows slightly different components but it certainly doesn't specify that arsenic can be added to the beer. Mehmet Coelhan of the Weihenstephan research centre at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, however, has...

Transport proteins show 4,000-fold preference for phosphate over arsenate.A bacterium that some scientists thought could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorus it can find.The finding clears up a lingering question sparked by a controversial study1, published in Science in 2010, which claimed that the GFAJ-1 microbe could thrive in the high-arsenic conditions of Mono Lake in California without metabolizing phosphorus — an element that is essential for all forms of life.Although this and other key claims of the paper were later undermined (see 'Study challenges existence...

Army soldiers formed a militia group in Georgia that plotted to overthrow the U.S. government — and they killed a fellow soldier and his girlfriend to keep the plot secret, prosecutors alleged Monday, according to the Associated Press. Prosecutors in the Long County, Ga., case say that the militia group planned to overtake the nearby Fort Stewart, to bomb a dam in Washington state and poison the state’s apple crop and ultimately overthrow the government and assassinate the president, according to reports.

The unexpected death of conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart just got a whole lot more mysterious. Only two months after Breitbart’s passing, the coroner that investigated the cause of death may have succumbed to arsenic poisoning. Michael Cormier, 61, passed away on April 20, the Los Angeles Times reports this week. Although Cormier’s death is only being publicized now, the timing of actual passing actually came within hours of the release of the preliminary autopsy report of Breitbart. Commenting to the Times on the latest news, Lt. Alan Hamilton of the Los Angeles Police Department says that investigators have not ruled...

Authorities said a Los Angeles County coroner's official, Michael Cormier, appears to have died from poisoning. "At this point we haven't ruled out foul play," said Lt. Alan Hamilton of the Los Angeles Police Department. "It is one of the things being considered. We are waiting for the coroner's results." Law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, said that finding the presence of poison does not necessarily mean the death was a homicide because the substance could have accidentally entered his system

<p>He spent his life trying to determine how people died. But now his colleagues are searching for answers after he died under mysterious circumstances.</p>

BURBANK (CBS) — An official with the Los Angeles County coroner’s office may have been poisoned with arsenic, police said Friday. KNX 1070′s John Brooks reports investigators are taking a closer look at the death of 61-year-old Micheal Cormier Cormier, a respected autopsy and forensic technician who also was a photographer with the special operations response team, was rushed to St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank from his North Hollywood home one week ago. Hospital staff eventually advised police that there may be “suspicious circumstances” surrounding Cormier’s death, said LAPD Lt. Alan Hamilton. “We have information that could potentially include...

Arsenic has long been recognized as a poison and a contaminant in drinking water, but now concerns are growing about arsenic in foods, especially in fruit juices that are a mainstay for children. Controversy over arsenic in apple juice made headlines as the school year began when Mehmet Oz, M.D., host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” told viewers that tests he’d commissioned found 10 of three dozen apple-juice samples with total arsenic levels exceeding 10 parts per billion (ppb). There’s no federal arsenic threshold for juice or most foods, though the limit for bottled and public water is 10 ppb....

Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has announced it will suspend the sale of an animal drug used by poultry producers in the US after traces of arsenic were found in treated chickens. The study found higher levels or arsenic, a known carcinogen, in the livers of chickens treated with Roxarsone than untreated chickens.

An iron-rich, porous material can remove arsenic from drinking water in under two hours, say Chinese scientists. Arsenic is notoriously toxic, proving fatal to the majority of living organisms in high doses. Elevated levels of arsenic in groundwater in countries such as Bangladesh pose a serious threat to human health. But traditional methods to remove the arsenic struggle to eliminate the more dominant arsenic ion, arsenite. Now, Kang Li and colleagues from Harbin Medical University have removed arsenite from water samples using ferrihydrite - a low cost, natural mineral found on the Earth's surface. Already known to absorb arsenic, its efficiency is...

Amid a flurry of criticism, a NASA-funded team on Thursday backed off the more extravagant, textbook-changing claims they'd made about a bacterium that had allegedly substituted arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA. The original announcement, made at a NASA news conference Dec. 2, seemed to break a cardinal rule of biology that all organisms need some phosphorus to survive. NASA researchers claimed to have discovered an exotic organism in California's Mono Lake that lived instead on arsenic, thus broadening the types of life that may exist in the universe. The news made headlines worldwide including a New York Times story...

I gave it the front-page treatment when the big announcement was made, so now the big skeptical response gets front-page treatment too. Simply devastating — so much so that I wonder why it fell to an outfit like Slate to put it together. Did the Times or WaPo not have enough of an inkling about NASA’s discovery to survey naysayers before writing up their reports on the “discovery”? This information would have come in a lot handier when everyone was still paying attention to this story. As soon Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. “I was outraged...

NASA has set the interwebs a-tremble with a teasing announcement to the global media that a news conference will be held in Washington DC on Thursday "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The space agency's routine ploy of trailing major briefings in advance has caused trouble before. In 2008, "revelations" that the White House had been informed of a NASA announcement's content before the media caused fevered speculation ahead of a briefing on data from the "Phoenix" polar Mars lander.

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167 NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the...

Life in space? Not quite. But to scientists in the arcane field of astrobiology, it's still pretty cool. Scientists at NASA's Astrobiology Institute report they have found bacteria -- in Mono Lake, Calif., not in space -- that could be made to live on arsenic. The organism is called GFAJ-1. The finding is important because it expands the prevailing view of what it takes for living things to survive.

Alan Boyle writes:NASA's secret is finally out: Researchers say they've forced microbes from a gnarly California lake to become arsenic-gobbling aliens. It may not be as thrilling as discovering life on Titan, but the claim is so radical that some chemists aren't yet ready to believe it. If the claim holds up, it would lend weight to the idea that life as we know it isn't the only way life could develop. Organisms with truly alien biochemistry could conceivably arise on a faraway exoplanet, or on the Saturnian moon Titan, or even here on Earth. "Our findings are a reminder...

Take a hastily arranged NASA press conference, add a vague allusion to an “astrobiology discovery,” and you’ve got a recipe for mass web-fueled speculation that E.T. is finally coming home. On Tuesday, the U.S. space agency announced a press conference to be held at 2pm EST on Thursday to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” While that brief teaser is all NASA has said on the issue, many others have since taken to the web to complete the narrative. “If I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on...

Incredible microbe found in California lakeNasa scientists are set to announce that bacteria have been discovered that can survive in arsenic, an element previously thought too toxic to support life, it can be revealed. In a press conference scheduled for tomorrow evening, researchers will unveil the discovery of the incredible microbe - which substitutes arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth - in a lake in California. The remarkable discovery raises the prospect that life could exist on other planets which do not have phosphorus in the atmosphere, which had previously been thought vital for life to begin. But it...