Eddyville, Fort Dodge, Clinton, Newton, Cedar Rapids. Communities like these have been mainstays of the Iowa bioeconomy for years, even decades — home to corn and soy processing on the largest world scale, and much much more — integrated complexes of advanced refining where companies share infrastructure and often where the residues of the one process become feedstocks for another. They’ve been to farm products what fossil fuel hot spots like the Baytown, Texas mega-complex have meant to oil refining. Now, they have company. [node:read-more:link]

A region-wide health study shows that the gap between Appalachia and the rest of the U.S. is widening for health indicators such as infant mortality, cancer deaths, and poverty. [node:read-more:link]

The small city of Hopkinsville had its day in the sun -- and dark -- on August 21, as an estimated 150,000 out-of-town guests swelled the city's population by a factor of five. Having company is always a good incentive to spruce things up. Will the town's careful planning for the eclipse pay off with longer-term benefits? [node:read-more:link]

Through telemedicine, healthcare providers can use intranet or internet networks to diagnose, administer, initiate, assist, monitor, intervene, or report a medical procedure. And the services can include mental and physical rehabilitation. Telemedicine touches every medical discipline, including psychiatry. Just about every person from newborns to seniors may have telemedicine influence their lives at some time.One thing hasn’t changed, however. [node:read-more:link]

An Austin television station shows flooding in La Grange, Texas, which is about 100 miles west of Houston. Residents there pitched in to help some businesses evacuate before the waters rose. [node:read-more:link]

When Hale and others learned in February that a white supremacist group known as the Traditionalist Worker Party planned to hold a rally with the National Socialist Movement and the League of the South in Pikeville, they were stunned. In response, Hale headed up a day of making art at the Boone Youth Drop-In Center, where she coordinates workshops. That day, she developed a print that read “No Hate in My Holler,” with the hashtag #GoHomeNaziScum at the bottom. The image stirred something in the community’s imagination, and requests for prints and t-shirts followed. [node:read-more:link]

Want to help the farmers and ranchers recover from the disaster of Hurricane Harvey from afar? Please donate to the State of Texas Agriculture Relief Fund. The Texas Animal Health Commission has set up a Harvey Hotline: 512-719-0799 at the Animal Response Operation Coordination Center. If you or someone you know is looking to volunteer, donate, offer shelter for animals, report live or dead animals please call the Harvey Hotline. [node:read-more:link]

The Nevada regulators’ order was the most extreme example of a nationwide effort by corporate utilities — panicked about losing market share and profits — to roll back net-metering policies. It’s backed by the deep pockets of fossil fuel industrialists like the Koch brothers, conservative lobbying groups like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the electricity industry’s own trade group, the Edison Electric Institute. [node:read-more:link]

In a radio interview in Iowa late last week, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made pretty clear the rational that went into his agency proposing lower levels of cellulosic biofuels, advanced biofuels, and total renewable fuels that would be required for blending under the next Renewable Fuel Standard rule: “Production levels and demand matter.” Pruitt goes on to express his concern that his agency is being “used in setting those [RFS blending targets] in a way to encourage ‘blue-sky’ thinking.” He is referring to the concept that the standard’s annual blending targets (Renewable Volume Obliga [node:read-more:link]

About 1.2 million beef cows are in the 54 counties that have been declared disaster areas due to Hurricane Harvey, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The total is a “conservative estimate” and encompasses 27% of the state’s herd, according to Texas A&M University livestock economist David Anderson. [node:read-more:link]