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Aunque en la actualidad más de la mitad de los arrecifes de coral del mundo se ve amenazado por los seres humanos, los científicos acaban de hacer un descubrimiento increíble: un arrecife de coral del tamaño de Delaware floreciendo cerca de la turbia desembocadura del río Amazonas en Brasil.

Los arrecifes de coral no se desarrollan normalmente en aguas turbias, lo que hace el descubrimiento aún más impactante.

Most of us think of that sweet smell after a storm as the aftereffect of rain that has rinsed the air of pollutants and dust. But it turns out that rain also triggers the release of a mist of particles from wet soils into the air, a finding with consequences of its own for how scientists model our planet's climate and future.

The evidence comes in the form of tiny glassy spheres, less than one-hundredth the width of a human hair, discovered at the Great Plains of Oklahoma after a rainstorm and put under scrutiny by scientists at several U.S. Department of Energy facilities. The study appears May 2 in Nature Geoscience.

According to the authors, scientists have largely assumed that organic particles from the soil enter the air through erosion by wind or through agricultural work. The effects of rain splash haven't been part of the discussion.

But the team's field observations indicate that up to 60 percent of particles that are airborne after a rainstorm in certain areas, such as grasslands and tilled fields, come from the soil. These organic particles are carbon-based and come from decaying vegetation and organisms. The tiny bits of organic matter can hold tremendous sway over our climate, playing a role in the fate of sunlight as it hits Earth.

Authors of the study are from two DOE Office of Science user facilities — EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — as well as the Berkeley Lab and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Chemist Alexander Laskin led the team at PNNL and chemical scientist Mary Gilles led the group at the Berkeley Lab.

Coastal wading birds shape their lives around the tides, and new research in The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows that different species respond differently to shifting patterns of high and low water according to their size and daily schedules, even following prey cycles tied to the phases of the moon.

Many birds rely on the shallow water of the intertidal zone for foraging, but this habitat appears and disappears as the tide ebbs and flows, with patterns that go through monthly cycles of strong "spring" and weak "neap" tides. Leonardo Calle of Montana State University (formerly Florida Atlantic University) and his colleagues wanted to assess how wading birds respond to these changes, because different species face different constraints--longer-legged birds can forage in deeper water than those with shorter legs, and birds that are only active during the day have different needs than those that will forage day or night.

La Asociación Americana del Pulmón ha publicado su informe anual "Estado del Aire" y sus conclusiones son preocupantes. La mayoría de los estadounidenses viven en condados donde la contaminación del aire es tan mala que es un grave riesgo para su salud. De acuerdo con el informe, eso significa que 166 millones de personas están en riesgo de una muerte prematura y con problemas de salud significativos, incluyendo asma, cáncer y daños en el desarrollo.

Fue hace 30 años que una crisis en la central eléctrica nuclear de V. I. Lenin en la antigua Unión Soviética lanzó contaminantes radiactivos en el entorno en el norte de Ucrania. La contaminación en el aire de lo que ahora se denomina genéricamente como la catástrofe de Chernobyl, se extendió mucho más allá de las inmediaciones de la planta de energía, y una región de aproximadamente 2,600 Km2 en Ucrania, Bielorrusia y Rusia permanece acordonada, una zona de exclusión, donde la presencia humana está prohibida.