Soil

The compact yet meandering documentary "Until They Are Home" has its heart in the right place, but its filmmaking is all over the map. With soaring music, archival footage and Kelsey Grammer's serious baritone narration, the movie champions the dedicated efforts of JPAC - the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command - to locate the remains of America's war dead left behind in foreign lands. Director Steven Barber focuses on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa, where a fast, brutal U.S. invasion in November 1943 killed so many so quickly that mass graves were utilized, leaving hundreds of fallen soldiers unaccounted for after the war ended and the island built itself up as a nation.

Three weeks from tonight, an amiable, whip-smart engineer named Ray Baker will be staring into his computer screen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, hopeful and helpless - or, as he puts it, "sweating blood. " The night will have been 10 years and $2.5 billion in the making, incorporating the work of 5,000 people in 37 states. And then, 154 million miles from home, the fate of the most ambitious machine humans have sent to another planet will rest on a seven-minute landing sequence so far-fetched it looks like something Wile E. Coyote devised to catch the Road Runner.

A major landslide along a seaside cliff in San Pedro that could cost up to $70 million to repair was triggered last year by soil saturated with groundwater, a new study shows. A build-up of water was largely blamed for the November collapse of a stretch of Paseo del Mar after a heavy weekend rainstorm, according to an 800-page report from Shannon & Wilson Inc., a geotechnical and environmental consulting firm. The failure took out 600 feet of the scenic road and carved a gaping chasm into the 120-foot-high coastal bluff, where the ground had been creeping seaward for several months.

The next time you kill an insect, you might want to do it quickly - for the sake of the environment. New research shows that whether an animal lives in safety or is terrorized by a predator can change the biochemical trajectory of the local ecosystem where it dies. The findings point to an expanded role for both predators and prey in their local environments, and may affect which species conservationists believe are most important to keep around. The total mass of animals on the planet is puny compared with that of plants and bacteria.

State regulators found inadequate environmental safeguards at a Coachella Valley soil recycling company blamed for noxious odors that sickened children at a nearby school but said the mountains of contaminated soil do not pose a serious health threat. Western Environmental Inc., which operates a waste facility on the reservation of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians near Mecca, did not meet California hazardous waste standards "in a number of significant areas," according to a state Department of Toxic Substances Control report released last week.

Orange County social service staffers who say they work inside a toxic building that has made them sick now contend that the county has tossed out some of their most damning evidence -- 350 tons of potentially contaminated soil. But on Friday, when the employees' union went to court to get a restraining order to prevent any more soil from being disposed of, the judge said it was too late. "Whatever has occurred, has occurred," Orange County Superior Court Judge Steven Perk said.

- Morning fog weaves its way through colorful rows of vegetables, herbs and flowers as staff and apprentices gather at the center of the garden at Esalen Institute. It's 7 a.m. The freshly awakened faces sit calmly in a circle for a morning meditation, listening to the Pacific Ocean until the sound of chimes lets meandering minds know it's time to tend to the day's harvest. Bins of chard, arugula, parsley, radishes and carrots are picked, washed and delivered to the back door of the kitchen, roughly 1,250 feet from the field.

Al Qaeda's ability to conduct terrorist operations against the United States has diminished in the last year, but U.S. intelligence agencies said Tuesday that they now believe Iranian leaders are willing to launch attacks against American targets. The top U.S. intelligence official, James R. Clapper, told a Senate hearing that a purported Iranian plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington in the fall convinced U.S. officials that leaders in Tehran are increasingly likely to support bombings on U.S. soil, especially if they feel that their hold on power is threatened.

A 600-foot section of a bluff-top roadway in San Pedro collapsed into the Pacific Ocean following heavy weekend rains, instantly carving a sheer, gaping canyon into the shoreline. The earth and asphalt moved as a giant block, slipping away gently and swiftly about 3 p.m. Sunday, L.A. City Engineer Gary Moore said. "This entire coast along here is a cliff," Moore told reporters Monday, standing about 25 feet from the edge of the newly formed drop-off. "So nature has created a new cliff.

Eight months after a magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami crippled Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and spewed radioactive material for hundreds of miles, scientists have produced maps showing how much fallout was found in the environment in the weeks after the disaster. In two studies published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers identified "hot spots" where the radioactivity levels were highest as well as the areas that were most safe.