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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Are there similarities between the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry when it comes to legal liability? Could, for example, energy companies that rely on fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases be held accountable for the damage caused by climate change? Two researchers in the Faculty of Law have set out to answer these important questions.
Federal scientists forecast that this summer’s Gulf of Mexico dead zone – an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and other marine life – will be approximately 8,185 square miles, or about the size of New Jersey.
This would be the third largest dead zone recorded since monitoring began 32 years ago – the average Gulf dead zone since then has been 5,309 square miles.
Supercomputers help design automobiles and aircraft, create new medical drugs and discover the mysteries of the universe. Now, in a column for the Tri-City Herald, the director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Steve Ashby, introduces a new national collaboration to take supercomputers to the next level of performance.
At least 1.4 million seagulls feed at landfills across North America, which aside from the nuisance it might pose, is also a threat to the health of nearby waters, a new Duke University study finds.
NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of Tropical Storm Cindy after it formed and was already affecting the U.S. Gulf Coast states. Cindy continues to crawl toward land and Tropical Storm warnings are in effect for June 21.
On June 21 at 11 a.m. EDT, a Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for San Luis Pass, Texas to the mouth of the Mississippi River.
When NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the Gulf of Mexico on June 20 at 19:15 UTC (3:15 p.m. EDT), Tropical Depression 3 was already upgraded to Tropical Storm status and named Cindy. The storm was classified as a tropical storm at 2 p.m. EDT. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua showed Cindy’s center of circulation in the central Gulf of Mexico with a large area of thunderstorms sweeping from northwest to southeast of the center, stretching from eastern Texas to Florida.
Fathers-to-be, take note: You may be more useful in the labor and delivery room than you realize.
That’s one takeaway from a study released last week that found that when an empathetic partner holds the hand of a woman in pain, their heart and respiratory rates sync and her pain dissipates.
“The more empathic the partner and the stronger the analgesic effect, the higher the synchronization between the two when they are touching,” said lead author Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at CU Boulder.
The study of 22 couples, published in the journal Scientific Reports last week, is the latest in a growing body of research on “interpersonal synchronization,” the phenomenon in which individuals begin to physiologically mirror the people they’re with.
