650 U.K. schools received educational kits from a charity for testing the lead levels in their water. Students at more than 14 schools then discovered their drinking water had higher lead levels than the recommended maximum. The Guardian reports: Several schools reported levels of lead at 50 micrograms per litre — five times the maximum allowed. Even low levels of lead are toxic and can reduce children's IQ and damage their nervous system... The charity conducted its own tests on samples returned by 81 schools and has confirmed that 14 samples have lead above 50 micrograms per litre, with several more showing signs of elevated levels.

The charity is now contacting the schools to alert them and filtration firm Aquaphor, which co-sponsored the project, said it would supply free water filters to affected schools.
"One of the frustrations of most school science is that it doesn't have any significance," writes Slashdot reader. "This is a story of one that revealed that lead levels were far higher than everyone was assuming..."

A spokesperson for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian that "If a school becomes aware they have lead pipework or have a test which has failed for lead, they should contact their local water company who will be required to enforce the removal of the lead pipe by the owner of the building."

"A mystery lies deep within the Grand Canyon: one billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared," Space.com reported last week.

The BBC explains: Today geologists know that the youngest of the hard, crystalline rocks are 1.7 billion years old, whereas the oldest in the sandstone layer were formed 550 million years ago. This means there's more than a billion-year-gap in the geological record. To this day, no one knows what happened to the rocks in between.

While the missing rock is particularly obvious in the Grand Canyon, the phenomenon is ubiquitous. "It's one of these features that pretty much occurs under a lot of people's feet, when they don't even realise it," says Stephen Marshak, professor emeritus in the Department of Geology at the University of Illinois. He explains that in the centre of any continent, whether you're in the United States, Siberia or Europe, if you drill down far enough you'll hit the two layers of rock involved in this mysterious geological anomaly....

[F]inding out what happened during, and led to, the missing billion years is no trivial matter. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it just so happens to have occurred immediately before another inexplicable event — the sudden proliferation in the diversity of life on Earth 541 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion refers to an era when the oceans suddenly shifted from hosting a scattering of weird and unfamiliar creatures — such as triffid-like leaf-shaped animals and giant steamrollered ovals which continue to defy all efforts to categorise them — to an abundance of life, with many of the major taxonomic groups around today. It happened in the space of just 13-25 million years — an evolutionary twinkling of an eye...

The second is that it's thought Earth underwent radical climate change during the lost years — possibly turning into a giant ball of ice, with an almost entirely frozen surface. Very little is currently known about how this "snowball Earth" formed, or how life managed to cling on.
They share the three good theories. First, "snowball" — the earth develops a global ice sheet, with the speedy glaciers wearing away surface rocks.

The second theory is that it was all lost during the erosion of the supercontinent Rodinia.

And theory #3 is: confusion. The BBC cites new research that "suggests that the epic interruption in the geological record was not a single, discrete phenomenon — but instead is actually at least two mini-gaps, which look like one big one because they occurred at around the same time." Even the missing rocks on the two sides of America's Grand Canyon "may instead have vanished in several separate events over the course of several hundred million years."