Starting College? High School? Student Teaching? Getting back to the books means getting back into rooms full of students, teachers, and the onslaught of flu season. Check out this Q&A with NRDC Senior Scientist Dr. Gina Solomon and learn more about what school and swine flu can mean for you.

While we’ve been enjoying summer in the Northern hemisphere, flu season has been raging in the Southern and in that time “swine” flu (or the H1N1 flu strain) has become the dominant flu strain, spreading four times more quickly than the seasonal flu. In Australia, this winter eight out of every ten people with the flu had the new flu strain. President Obama has even taken the step to recommend that Americans get vaccinated for H1N1 flu when the vaccine becomes available in mid-October. NRDC Senior Scientist Gina Solomon answers questions about the pandemic and who it might affect.

By Paul McRandle

Not only does every coastal state suffer from polluted and contaminated beaches but those problems resulted in more than 20,000 closing and swimming advisory days in 2008 alone—such is the sorry state of affairs noted in NRDC's latest Testing the Waters report. Unlucky beachgoers can suffer infections, rashes, stomach flu, hepatitis and worse. But because storm water runoff is one of the major causes of beach pollution, we can help prevent it at home. Below are a few ways you can help reduce runoff and otherwise improve the quality of our beaches and oceans.

Posted on Switchboard by Kathryn McGrath

Two years ago Beth Terry decided to stop using plastic and began chronicling her saga on a blog, fakeplasticfish.com. She recently issued a challenge to readers to collect all their plastic trash for a week and submit photographs and tallies (the results are posted here). Inspired and curious, I decided to keep track of all those bits of plastic refuse.

Here are the results of my second week cataloging and saving all my plastic waste. Despite the long list, it's a big improvement over last week's results.