Science & Environment

The Environmental Protection Agency is tightening the standard for how much soot in the air is safe to breathe. Fine particles come from the combustion of fossil fuels by cars and industrial facilities. They're linked to all kinds of health problems, including heart attacks and lung ailments like asthma. States will be required to clean up their air to the level specified by the new standard.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

After the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, many parents dropping their kids off at school this morning are facing a lot of anxiety. Today in Your Health, we asked NPR's science correspondent Shankar Vedantam to come by to talk about how tragedies shape our perceptions of risk.

Shankar, good morning.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Good morning, David.

GREENE: So tell us what we know from school shootings of the past. I mean, what sort of impact will this tragedy have on parents and how they think?

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Japan's tsunami and earthquake last year essentially erased the village of Rikuzentakata. Also lost, their famous coastal pine forest, all 70,000 trees, except for one. NPR News's Chris Benderev has the story of the miracle pine tree.

CHRIS BENDEREV, BYLINE: Yoshihisa Suzuki is standing on the beach, flipping through old photos, looking for one in particular. Then he finds it.

YOSHIHISA SUZUKI: (Foreign language spoken)

Could you handle a world that looked upside down? Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of The Annals of Improbable Research, shares a case study in which the subject was made to wear vision-flipping goggles. Ten days later, the man was riding a bicycle and playing catch in the park--his only impairment the strange headgear itself.