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A new way of looking at how pollutants ride through the atmosphere has quadrupled the estimate of global lung cancer risk from a pollutant caused by combustion, to a level that is now double the allowable limit recommended by the World Health Organization.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition online, showed that tiny floating particles can grow semi-solid around pollutants, allowing them to last longer and travel much farther than what previous global climate models predicted.

Researchers at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) within the Mailman School of Public Health report evidence of potentially harmful flame-retardants on the hands and in the homes of 100 percent of a sample of New York City mothers and toddlers. The study also found that, on average, toddlers in New York City had higher levels of common flame-retardants on their hands compared to their mothers.

Earth is currently in what climatologists call an interglacial period, a warm pulse between long, cold ice ages when glaciers dominate our planet’s higher latitudes. For the past million years, these glacial-interglacial cycles have repeated roughly on a 100,000-year cycle. Now a team of Brown University researchers has a new explanation for that timing and why the cycle was different before a million years ago.

Burlington, ON – IKEA Canada has signed agreements to acquire an 88MW wind farm located near Drumheller, Alberta approximately 130km east of Calgary. Consisting of 55 turbines, the Wintering Hills wind farm will generate 275 million kWh (kilowatt hours) of energy, the equivalent to the electricity consumption of 54 IKEA stores or nearly 26,000 Canadian households.

A highly toxic form of mercury could jump by 300 to 600 percent in zooplankton – tiny animals at the base of the marine food chain – if land runoff increases by 15 to 30 percent, according to a new study.

And such an increase is possible due to climate change, according to the pioneering study by Rutgers and other scientists published today in Science Advances.

“With climate change, we expect increased precipitation in many areas in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to more runoff,” said Jeffra K. Schaefer, study coauthor and assistant research professor in Rutgers’ Department of Environmental Sciences. “That means a greater discharge of mercury and organic carbon to coastal ecosystems, which leads to higher levels of mercury in the small animals living there. These coastal regions are major feeding grounds for fish, and thus the organisms living there serve as an important source of mercury that accumulates to high levels in the fish people like to eat.”