For the past decade, San Francisco's streets and sidewalks have been increasingly plagued by piles of human shit—and the poop problem is just getting worse. The city officially put together a so-called "poop patrol" task force back in 2018 to deal with the problem, and some Bay Area tech bro even whipped up an app called "SnapCrap" to help city residents file dookie reports to 311, but it looks like the shit crisis continues.

According to a new report this week from Forbes and non-profit watchdog Open the Books, the city had a whopping 28,084 reports of turds in 2018, up five times from what it was back in 2011. And there are already 6,676 shit sightings on the books in 2019.

Despite the danger, there has been little climate change action since the 2016 Paris Agreement — three years later, the world is still on track to exceed the 2°C of warming target by as early as 2040. So this week, the UN is once again sounding the alarm on the unprecedented environmental damage that has proceeded largely unchecked.

In its 6th Global Environmental Outlook report, released today, scientists explore how human actions are threatening the food, water, and natural systems that we take for granted. The report highlights how air pollution from fossil fuels and chemical production kills 6 to 7 million people every year. It underscores the unprecedented scale of biodiversity loss around the planet, which threatens food supplies for billions of people. And it emphasizes the rapid decline of safe drinking water sources around the world as a result of intensive agriculture and chemical contamination.

After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors discover that you haven’t recycled appropriately.

But now much of that carefully sorted recycling is ending up in the trash.

For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

Most are choosing the latter. “We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can’t afford it,” said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin’s residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn’t want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there’s not much she can do. “Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for,” she said.

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Tyson Foods is recalling more than 36,000 pounds of frozen chicken nuggets after consumers reported finding soft, blue pieces of rubber inside the popular food.

The recall comes in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and applies to the company’s Panko Chicken Nuggets that were sold in five pound plastic bags in grocery stores nationwide.

Consumers are being urged to look for bags with the “best by” date of Nov. 26, 2019, the Case Code 3308SDL03 and a time stamp ranging from 23:00 through 01:59. If you’ve got the product, either discard it or return it to the point of purchase for a refund.

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The city is refusing to say what it does to ensure that homeless kids get placed in shelters near their schools, a lawsuit charges.

The Manhattan Supreme Court suit comes on the heels of a dismal report by a legal advocacy group, which found that a record one in 10 students in the Big Apple are homeless.

The nonprofit Partnership for the Homeless had then asked the city’s Department for Homeless Services for data about its efforts to place kids in shelters near schools they attended before ending up on the street. The suit says the DHS responded by saying that only a single relevant document exists, and it’s exempt from disclosure under the state’s Freedom of Information Law because it’s an internal draft.

Solar panels might be the energy source of the future, but they also create a problem without an easy solution: what do we do with millions of panels when they stop working?

In November 2016, the Environment Ministry of Japan warned that the country will produce 800,000 tons of solar waste by 2040, and it can’t yet handle those volumes. That same year, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that there were already 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide and that this number would grow to 78 million by 2050. “That’s an amazing amount of growth,” says Mary Hutzler, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. “It’s going to be a major problem.”

Usually, panels are warrantied for 25 to 30 years and can last even longer. But as the solar industry has grown, the market has been flooded with cheaply made Chinese panels that can break down in as few as five years, according to Solar Power World editor-in-chief Kelly Pickerel.

Authorities said 19 young people were injured — and 12 transported to the hospital — after they were overwhelmed by pool chemicals at a swim school in Thousand Oaks, California, CBS Los Angeles reports. Officials said seven of the injuries were critical but none of the injuries was described as life-threatening.

Most of the victims were teens and kids between the ages of 11 and 15, said Ventura County Fire officials.

The exact cause of the incident is under investigation.

While the National Eating Disorder Association reports that the LGBTQ community is disproportionately plagued by eating disorders, experts are saying that being a minority contributes to this dilemma.

Dr. Norman H. Kim, national director for program development at Reasons Eating Disorder Center, believes that queer people are drawn to unhealthy eating habits because of minority stress. Behaviors such as binging, purging, and undereating are a symptom of chronic social stress LGBTQ people experience as minorities, he told Stylecaster.

The rates at which queer people are having this reaction to being otherized are alarming.

Young Americans are dying in rising numbers because of drugs, alcohol and suicide, according to new federal data.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) issued its annual comprehensive health and mortality report, which analyzes trends in death rates by cause and demographic. Drugs, alcohol and suicide, the report says, have contributed to the first drops in U.S. life expectancy since 1993. While U.S. life expectancy rose from 77.8 to 78.6 years between 2006 and 2016, the trend reversed during the end of the decade, leading to a 0.3-year decline between 2014 and 2016 — in large part because of rising rates of drug overdoses, suicide and liver disease, as well as Alzheimer’s.

From the 16th century to the 19th, scurvy killed around 2 million sailors, more than warfare, shipwrecks and syphilis combined. It was an ugly, smelly death, too, beginning with rattling teeth and ending with a body so rotted out from the inside that its victims could literally be startled to death by a loud noise. Just as horrifying as the disease itself, though, is that for most of those 300 years, medical experts knew how to prevent it and simply failed to.

Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

Slowly but surely, Republicans that supported the trillion dollar Trump tax bill are revealing their true motivations: slashing Medicare and Social Security.

During a Sunday interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) urged entitlement reform as the deficit continues to balloon as a result of the GOP tax cuts.

“I do think we need to deal with some of our spending,” Stivers said. “We’ve got try to figure out how to spend less.”

Burning since late July, Northern California's Mendocino Complex and Carr Fire are among the biggest blazes in state history.

This just in: An alarming new study has found that 47% of beards contain fecal matter, even when washed on the same day.