Dust

Thousands of first responders, workers, volunteers and local residents involved in the rescue and cleanup of the World Trade Center site, along with workers at the Staten Island landfill where wreckage was taken, are left a decade later with a range of physical and psychological ailments. Respiratory illnesses were among the earliest and most prominent health effects — including the most common one, known as the "World Trade Center cough. " Today, doctors understand World Trade Center cough to be more than just a cough.

Mars doesn't have tornadoes. It doesn't have thunderstorms. But the Red Planet can kick up a truly unholy dust devil. Such a phenomenon -- 12 miles high in fact -- was photographed last month on the surface of the planet. "It really is the size of it that is the unique thing," said Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Ashwin Vasavada. "Conditions allowed this single giant vortex to form and survive to suck up dust all the way to that height. " The sun beats down on the desert-like surface of Mars and -- with the lack of water and the "extremely thin atmosphere" -- convection begins, said  Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory.

The product: Dust, cigarette smoke, pollen and pet dander: With so many irritants floating around our homes and work places, clean air is a hot commodity. Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on furnace filters and air cleaners each year. Though some consumers are simply trying to bring a little extra freshness into their lives, many others hope that their investment will help relieve their asthma or allergies.

The ceiling is painted with cherubs and voluptuous nudes, the maroon carpet so worn that one customer fondly calls the Gold Dust Lounge "classy and dirty at the same time. " Located near tourist-heavy Union Square, the storefront has been a watering hole since 1918 - save for short interruptions during Prohibition and a brief interlude when it housed a flower shop. But the cocktail lounge that once counted Janis Joplin and Jack LaLanne as regulars is now in a fight for its existence - an ugly fight.

The news in the architecture profession has been dominated for much of the summer by a few guardians of homeland and propriety -- one of whom happens to be first in line to the British throne. In London, a pitched debate continues over efforts by Prince Charles, long known as a champion of traditional architecture, to block firms he considers avant-garde from working in the vicinity of his favorite landmarks. Offended by a $5-billion plan by architect Richard Rogers for the Chelsea Barracks in southwestern London, Charles complained to the emir of Qatar, who was bankrolling the project, and succeeded in having it canceled.

In the predawn hours Friday, while those on the West Coast still snooze, a rocket is scheduled to punch a 13-foot-deep hole in a crater at the moon's south pole that hasn't seen sunlight in billions of years. The purpose: to find out whether ice lies hidden there. NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, which set out for the moon in June, made a late-course correction Tuesday to better position itself to steer the rocket into the 2-mile-deep crater Cabeus at 4:30 a.m. PDT on Friday.

Burning Man , the mash-up of art, music and "radical self-reliance" in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, will light up its signature Big Burn of the Man at 9 p.m. PDT Saturday. Tickets sold out for the first time in the festival's 25 years, so those who couldn't get access to Black Rock City (population right around 50,000) for the big event likely will be watching on the live streaming webcast . The website is chock-full of all that happens at Burning Man, but my favorite story so far was posted Thursday on the Burning Blog by John Curley, who has been in attendance since 2004: "The Burning Man guide book will tell you that love on the playa is a complicated thing.

I don't often write in praise of TV programs. However, I do want to thank CBS for "Children of the Dust" (Feb. 26 and 28). It was totally enthralling and showed a past history that we should all learn more about. What a pleasure to see Sidney Poitier, we don't see him often enough. Maureen Shrubsole, Huntington Beach

The dark dust thrown up by human activity in the deserts of the Southwest hastens the melting of Rocky Mountain snow and ultimately reduces the amount of water flowing into the upper Colorado River by about 5%, scientists reported Monday. The lost water amounts to more than 250 billion gallons — enough to supply the Los Angeles region for 18 months, said study leader Thomas H. Painter, a snow hydrologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. "That's a lot of water," said Painter, whose study was published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Where will we be when the dust settles? Since the beginning of January, we have started each day to jackhammers, ground tapers, cement trucks and dust flying everywhere. In addition, streets are reduced to one lane, and parking on both sides of the streets is almost completely eliminated. All of the people who used to drive to patronize us have by this time given up. Our street is just half a block from all the improvements taking place on Broadway. The city is replacing sewers.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

Silver Lake residents can't wait for this construction job to bite the dust. More than two dozen residents living along the path of a $40-million water pipe project say they are suffering respiratory problems from particulate matter stirred up by construction trucks and heavy-duty trenching machines. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is replacing a massive neighborhood water conduit as part of a larger, federally mandated plan to retire the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, which are exposed to airborne contaminants.

At the height of Eddie Murphy's popularity, millions of Americans flocked to his hit films like "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Coming to America. " Paramount Pictures executives are crossing their fingers that even a fraction of that interest surfaces for the actor's "A Thousand Words," a comedy that arrives in theaters this weekend nearly four years after it was made and seemingly a lifetime removed from Murphy's 1980s heyday. Going out with minimal publicity support from the star, the DreamWorks production has generated tepid interest in pre-release surveys, and analysts expect an opening weekend box office of less than $10 million.

Teachable moments Re "How to grade a teacher," Opinion, Jan. 29 Coleen Bondy nails the truth about the witch hunt perpetrated against teachers. As class sizes rise, support services are cut and students become increasingly unruly and cynical, teachers are scapegoated. With the L.A. Unified School District preparing to threaten teachers with 5,400 pink slips in March, it's time the public understands the reality. The district is a cash cow for administrators, who hire new committees to wastefully purchase the next expensive cure-all that does nothing to fix the glaring problem: understaffed and underfunded schools with teachers increasingly under the gun to produce results.

The genocide issue Re "Genocide bill riles Turkey," Jan. 28 The Armenian genocide question will not go away in France or in Turkey until the genocide is recorded, recognized and honored with dignity in Turkey. Getting to this point has taken nearly 100 years of parrying Turkish opinion that the killing of more than 1 million Armenians starting in 1915 does not meet the legal standard of genocide - intent to exterminate a race or a group - although many historians agree it does.

For a nation in perpetual motion, to cross the lands that make up the Mojave National Preserve has long meant only one thing: You are very nearly somewhere else. For westward-bound travelers, whether they came through open wilderness, along the now-overgrown Mojave Road or later by the legendary lanes of Route 66, this most American of deserts was little more than an obstacle to more promising lands. Long before them, Native Americans traded regularly across these harsh miles, as enamored as everyone else with speed.

Like her mother and grandmother before her, Ganga Gohel, 80, crouches in a narrow alley, carefully working an 8-inch brush over the cracked concrete with gnarled hands, her back permanently bent after a lifetime on the job. In a nation where thoroughfares are rarely clean, this twisted lane in the ancient walled city of Ahmadabad is spotless, at least temporarily, after she finishes. "It is very strenuous work," she said, her hair pulled back in a bun, her delicate features buried behind deep wrinkles.

John Fante's literary alter ego Arturo Bandini strolls onto the opening pages of 1939's "Ask the Dust" with little to do, scarcely any money, even less to eat and a lot to say. He is a frustrated writer, newly arrived in L.A., as arrogant as he is self-loathing, struck by beauty and choking on fumes, lustful and cold. He sneers when offered something he wants despite the fact that he wants it so desperately.

Sun and Earth have a chat. "Well, Happy New Year, Little blue Earth! You've made one more lap 'Round my blazing hot girth. "Through my merciless winds, For yet one more year You've kept a firm hold On your atmosphere. " "Dear Sun, you're most generous With all of your praise. You know it's a feat To defend from your blaze. "For you hurl out harsh rays And electrical dust That could fry life on Earth.

Lost in Death Valley Ryan, 10 Magic Pen Kids Laguna Hills We had a bowl of grapes and half a bottle of water. The day we got lost in Death Valley. On the day of the Big Fire. Just four kids and one mom in a broken-down Escalade with a flat tire. And no salvation in sight. The white sand hills were as barren as our hopes. They stared at us with unseeing eyes like the ancient Great Pyramids of Giza where the dead sleep inside. As my mom passed out one red grape each, I savored that one grape for an hour – lolling it about my tongue to suck its sweet juices.