Chemicals

Two small, homemade chemical bombs, one of them already detonated, were found Monday along the running track at Huntington Beach High School, marking the second time in a month that school custodians have discovered small explosive devices on campus. There were no injuries or arrests. The devices--crafted from two-liter soda bottles filled with volatile chemicals, probably muriatic acid--were far from classrooms and open-air corridors but posed a threat to passersby, police said.

Chemicals seized in PCP drug arrests and illegally dumped in roadside pits at the Pitchess jail in the 1970s are seeping into ground water, according to a new study conducted for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department estimates it could cost as much as $50 million to remove all the chemicals, but the report said more study is needed to determine the most cost-effective way to deal with the problem.

Chemicals seized in PCP drug arrests and illegally dumped in roadside pits at the Pitchess jail in Castaic in the 1970s are seeping into ground water, according to a new study conducted for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department estimates that it could cost as much as $50 million to remove all the chemicals, but the report counseled that more study is needed to determine the most cost-effective way to deal with the problem.

Workers along East Occidental Street were forced to evacuate Thursday when chemicals being mixed at a small factory reacted, creating billowing, noxious smoke. Firefighters ordered nearly 100 people to leave offices and factories along the street for about two hours until fumes dissipated from the chemical fire at California Composite Design. No injuries were confirmed, although a handful of people complained of stinging eyes and an unpleasant smell.

Dramatically pushing back the emergence of life on Earth by nearly 400 million years, scientists Wednesday said they have found chemical traces in the world's oldest known sediments that suggest that simple life forms thrived 3.85 billion years ago. The discovery could be the first evidence of the primordial microbes that arose when inanimate matter organized itself into the earliest living molecules.

Though a mountain of research has established that cigarettes can cause lung cancer, a study released Thursday shows for the first time exactly how a chemical in smoke sets the stage for the disease by damaging a key human gene. Scientists said the study--done at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Smithville, Texas--offered a new kind of evidence that smoking triggers molecular events leading to lung cancer, the nation's No.

One morning in March, a chemical weapons specialist at the CIA's sprawling headquarters complex put a cassette into a tape recorder and listened to a replay of a Baltimore talk show from the previous October. The guest, Persian Gulf War veteran Brian T. Martin, was describing how his 37th Army Engineer Battalion had blown up the Khamisiyah weapons bunker in Iraq in 1991. The CIA man--who had heard about Martin's appearance--had been looking for information on just such operations.

Nearly 200 employees at about five businesses were evacuated and several streets closed Tuesday when a drum of chemicals overheated, causing smoke to billow from a small fire, authorities said. Authorities later determined that the smoke was not toxic and allowed employees to return to work after four hours. About 3:30 p.m.

Six apartments were evacuated when fire destroyed an apartment at 1010 Yorba Linda Blvd. Tuesday night, because of chemicals found after the blaze was extinguished, authorities said. One second-story apartment was gutted and the apartment below suffered extensive water damage in the blaze, which broke out at 5:25 p.m. in the Terrace Apartments complex, said Matt Reynolds, a Placentia police services spokesman.

Deep in the Canadian Arctic, the native Inuit live on permafrost so thick they must rely upon the bounty of the icy blue sea. Like their ancestors a millennium ago, they hunt the whale, seal and trout they call "country food." Life seems unspoiled in the polar wilderness a thousand miles from the nearest industrial center. But in reality, these Arctic people carry in their bodies the world's biggest loads of immune-suppressing pollutants--mirroring the poisons found in whale blubber.