By Steve Graham, Networx

A reputable exterminator should list the active ingredients in their pesticides. The exterminator also should tell you the potential health threats associated with the pesticide, symptoms of poisoning and any additional instructions for minimizing exposure and health impacts.

While each company likely has a unique formula, the most common ingredients in professional-grade pesticides are pyrethroids and pyrethrins, according to a June 2010 study in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology. Piperonyl butoxide and hydramethylnon are the next most common ingredients. Chlorpyrifos, diazinon and other organophosphates were once very common, but have become nearly obsolete since the Environmental Protection Agency restricted the use of these toxic ingredients starting in 2001.

Here is some more information about each of the four most commonly used pesticide chemicals, as well as a couple of other pesticides that are growing in popularity.

Pyrethroids and Pyrenthrins

Permethrin is the most common active ingredient in insecticides applied by licensed exterminators. It is one of a large class of chemical insecticides known as pyrethroids. They mimic pyrethrins, which are botanical insecticides typically derived from Australian and African chrysanthemum flower varieties. Both pyrethrins and pyrethroids work to paralyze and eventually kill a wide variety of insects.

(Photo: Ford Excursion by MSVG/Flickr)

Despite their best efforts, automakers don’t always hit the mark with new vehicle introductions. Some vehicles have missed the mark more wildly than others — and these are the cars that will be remembered as the greatest flops of the past 15 years.


Ford Excursion
Bigger isn’t always better, and the Ford Excursion helps prove this point. Ford introduced this super-sized SUV in 1999 as a model year 2000 vehicle but stopped production just five years later. The Excursion was plagued by controversy from the start with environmental groups voicing concerns about the 19-foot long, 7,200-pound behemoth.

The Sierra Club actually held a nickname contest for the Excursion, and the winning name was the Ford Valdez, a nod to the Exxon Valdez oil tanker. The Excursion faced other problems including that it was too tall to fit into a standard garage and its dismal 12-mpg fuel efficiency.


General Motors EV1
General Motors’ EV1 was a car that was ahead of its time. GM brought the EV1 to market in 1996, and by 2002 more than 1,000 EV1s had been produced.  It wasn’t the vehicle itself that made the EV1 a flop, it was the actions taken by GM that led to the car’s inclusion on this list.

The EV1 was only available for lease, and despite an extremely loyal customer base, GM pulled all of the EV1s off the road in the early part of this century. Customers were willing to pay a premium price to purchase an EV1 outright, but GM refused and instead began the arduous process of destroying the majority of EV1s that it had produced.


Lincoln Blackwood
What was the leadership at Ford thinking when they decided to produce a pickup truck under the Lincoln luxury label? The truck was produced for 15 months between 2002 and 2003, one of the shortest production runs of a mass-produced vehicle, and fewer than 4,000 were sold.

There were many problems with the Blackwood — including its more than $50,000 price tag. If a consumer is going to spend $50,000 on a pickup truck, it better act like a pickup truck. Unfortunately the Blackwood was not equipped with four-wheel drive,  and the cargo bed had limited space thanks to a poorly designed cover.

One of the biggest reasons to buy a truck instead of an SUV is the storage space in the bed; if an owner can’t use this space, the vehicle is essentially worthless. This point was proven by the early demise of the Lincoln Blackwood.


Dodge Durango Hybrid
Chrysler was a day late and a dollar short when it introduced a hybrid. The company’s choice for its first hybrid models was the Dodge Durango SUV and its cousin, the Chrysler Aspen. This hybrid project was doomed to fail, even if it wasn’t entirely Chrysler’s fault.

The hybrid SUV, with a $45,000 price tag, was released just when the economy started to crash in late 2008. After a summer with record-high gas prices, a hybrid alternative to a fuel-sucking SUV sounded great. Unfortunately, Chrysler and the American public in general were not in a position to support the launch of these vehicles.

Shortly after the two vehicles became available, Chrysler halted production and eventually closed the plant used to manufacture the models.



More from Mother Nature Network:

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• How a wrecking ball could fix city traffic
• Five more really dumb cars

Check out Yahoo! Green on Twitter and Facebook.

By Alyssa Ford, Experience Life

Many of us are well aware of macronutrients, such as carbohydrates, protein and fat, as well as micronutrients, such as the vitamins and minerals that are listed on FDA-regulated food labels. But too few of us are familiar with phytochemicals — plant-based micronutrients that offer many health benefits and may help ward off chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

[ Prevent Disease With Phytonutrient Power ]

It’s a time-tested truth: Plant-based foods, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, are good for you. But researchers recently have discovered that plant molecules connect with human cells in striking ways. In other words, we’ve known they were good for you — just not this good.

“I don’t think there’s been this much excitement since vitamins and minerals were discovered more than 100 years ago,” says Beverly Clevidence, PhD, the research leader at the USDA-funded Food Components and Health Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

The discoveries — partly because of the work of the Human Genome Project — are revolutionizing the way we think about food.

In the past 20 years, for example, researchers have discovered that carrots, kale and peanuts are not just plant tissues embedded with vitamins and minerals that are easily encapsulated in multivitamins. Rather, these plant tissues are made up of tens of thousands of phytochemicals (“phyto” is from the Greek phuton, meaning plant).

You’ve probably heard of a few phytochemicals without even knowing what they are. For example, lycopene is a powerful phytonutrient found in tomatoes that helps fight heart disease and a variety of cancers. And the phenols found in strawberries protect against cancer and autoimmune diseases, and help reverse nerve-cell aging. But there are tens of thousands of other phytochemicals about which most of us know nothing. Experts in the nutrition field are buzzing about these chemicals with tongue-twisting names like glucoraphanin, zeaxanthin and saponin.