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Our lawsuit concerns the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, which involves the mass interception and searching of Americans’ international Internet communications. The court held that our clients lacked “standing” to bring suit, because they had not plausibly alleged that their communications were being monitored by the NSA. That’s just plain wrong.

The court’s opinion relies heavily on the Supreme Court’s decision in a previous ACLU lawsuit, Amnesty v. Clapper, a challenge to warrantless surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. In February 2013, the Supreme Court dismissed that case on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove that they had communicated with the NSA’s targets.

“California is a big agricultural state, and it often is a bellwether for the nation. We often see the FDA following suit or other states following suit,” said Elisa Odabashian of Consumers Union, a supporter of the bill, speaking of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Consumers Union, the policy arm of Consumer Reports, says that roughly 70% of medically-important antibiotics are given to livestock in the U.S. These drugs are the same kind used in human medicine. The antibiotics are intended to promote growth and prevent disease in food-producing animals, but their overuse is a significant contributor to the 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths caused by drug-resistant “superbug” bacteria each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency has recommended phasing out antibiotic use in otherwise healthy livestock. [2]

Meanwhile, 62 percent of the samples tested positive for AMPA, glyphosate’s metabolite, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at the Socio-Environmental Interaction Space (EMISA) of the University of La Plata in Argentina.

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“This gives us an unprecedented tool to control a quantum system, perhaps even atom by atom,” said Patil, lead author of the paper. Atoms in this state are extremely sensitive to outside forces, he noted, so this work could lead to the development of new kinds of sensors.

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When your only fixed living cost is truck insurance, you can save a large chunk of your income.

One San Francisco-based Google employee in this exact situation, who lives in a 128-square-foot truck in the company’s parking lot, saves about 90% of his take-home pay.

Brandon — who asked to withhold his last name and photo to maintain his privacy — doesn’t use electricity, and his phone bill is handled by his employer, meaning his one recurring cost is his $121 monthly truck insurance.

“I’m going for a target of saving about 90% of my after-tax income, and throwing that in student loans and investments,” the 23-year-old software engineer tells Business Insider.

He graduated with $22,434 worth of student loans, and has paid it down to $16,449 over the course of four months. He expects to have the loans fully paid off within the next six months, which will save him thousands of dollars in interest that can add up over the standard 10- or 20-year repayment plans.

Saving on rent has also allowed him to dine at nice restaurants and enjoy San Francisco more than if he opted for living in an apartment.

Environmental Protection Agency officials confirmed 99 of 135 beta-radiation sensors in its RadNet system—which monitors in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico—aren’t working and have been turned off. Officials blame electromagnetic interference from sources such as cellphone towers and said efforts to resolve the problem have been unsuccessful.

EPA officials said the beta-detection problem cropped up in 2006 when they started putting the real-time monitors into the field.

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Some nuclear experts said that in an emergency, knowing as much as possible about whether beta or gamma emitters are present, and in which amounts, can be crucial for making decisions such as how large an area might need protective measures. In instances where only a beta emitter is present, the lack of a working monitor could leave officials unaware of potentially dangerous levels of contamination, they added.

The beta-monitoring issue could fuel critics who contend the EPA has been pulling back on its radiation-protection mission—an assertion the agency strongly disputes.

Gamma- and beta-emitting radionuclides can be carried by the wind long distances from a nuclear event, such as an explosion or power-plant accident. Gamma rays from those radionuclides can then travel hundreds of feet or more and penetrate objects, including human tissue, according to federal government websites. Beta particles generally travel only several feet from their emission source. While they can penetrate skin, their main health threat comes if inhaled or ingested in tainted food or water.

The EPA upgraded the RadNet system after 9/11 to monitor and transmit data on both types of radiation. While the attacks didn’t involve radioactive material, “one of the weaknesses identified in the post-9/11 reassessment of the RadNet air network was that decision makers were not receiving data quickly enough,” the EPA said in 2012.

Officials said they don’t know why some beta monitors still work, including locations in Phoenix, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

Real-time information on various types of radiation “is very important to the emergency-response community” because it could help determine the need for ordering evacuations or telling people to stay indoors, said Jim Hardeman, retired manager of the environmental radiation program at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

Federal officials said they can still obtain beta data by retrieving the filter from each monitoring station. These filters, which collect particles from air flowing through the machines, are sent to an EPA lab for analysis. The EPA said filters are typically changed once or twice a week.

Even with the beta-detection problem, the RadNet system, along with other government radiological resources, has enough capability to do the job, EPA officials said. “We can confidently say that this system is fully capable now and fully operational now with the current monitors it has to detect fairly minute levels of radiation,” said Jonathan Edwards, director of the EPA’s radiation protection division.

EPA officials acknowledged that one major radionuclide—strontium-90, which can get into people’s bones—emits only beta particles. However, they said, an event releasing a large amount of strontium-90 would also release large amounts of gamma-emitting radionuclides that could be picked up. Even with beta monitors, laboratory filter analyses would be needed to confirm the strontium, they added.

But some experts, inside and outside of government, argue that being able to separately and quickly detect the presence of a beta emitter such as strontium-90 could influence evacuation or other emergency plans. The 2012 EPA report also said gamma monitoring wasn’t sufficient to deal with the threat from strontium-90, which could “cause large-scale public health impacts.”

“If real-time beta measurements were unnecessary, why did the government spend money installing the capability in the first place?” asked Daniel Hirsch, a lecturer on nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a longtime critic of federal radiation-protection efforts who has studied the RadNet system. The EPA’s explanation “seems like an after-the-fact rationalization when they discovered the monitors didn’t work.”