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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Long-term exposure to air pollution has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, but the biological process has not been understood. A major, decade-long study of thousands of Americans found that people living in areas with more outdoor pollution —even at lower levels common in the United States — accumulate deposits in the arteries that supply the heart faster than do people living in less polluted areas. The study was published May 24 online in The Lancet.
Over fifty percent of the United States energy comes from coal and petroleum based fuels. Powering a nation in which the average person uses the amount of energy in 15,370 lbs of coal or 165,033 sticks of dynamite in a year is not sustainable. When thinking of a solution, the well-known renewable energy source that most likely comes to mind is solar power.
Solar panels are an impervious surface. Impervious surfaces already take up 32,868.61 square miles of roads, parking lots, driveways, and more. These surfaces displace rainwater to surrounding areas and have great impacts on the water table and soil quality. Utilizing already cleared land rather than clearing more would be beneficial to the environment, as solar fields require large amounts of cleared land.
La mayoría de los organismos vivos adaptan su comportamiento al ritmo de día y de noche. Las plantas no son una excepción: las flores se abren por la mañana, algunas hojas de los árboles se cierran durante la noche. Los investigadores han estado estudiando el ciclo de día y noche en las plantas durante mucho tiempo: Linneo observó que las flores en un sótano oscuro continuaron abriendo y cerrando y Darwin registró el movimiento durante la noche de las hojas de plantas y tallos y lo llamaron "el sueño".
Durante años, uno de los principales argumentos que se han hecho en contra de los cultivos transgénicos (OGM) es el temor de que, mediante la manipulación de ADN de una planta, potencialmente se podría causar problemas de salud para los consumidores. Es una preocupación comprensible, sin embargo, el consenso científico actual parece ser innegable: Cualesquiera que sean las fallas que los cultivos transgénicos puedan tener, son seguros para el consumo humano.
The UN intersessional negotiations on climate change (UNFCCC) which started in Bonn last week enter their second week with the big question - how to find and allocate by 2020 the $100bn as agreed in the Paris Agreement. Delegate Pavlos Georgiadis reports.
The burning question for week two of these negotiations is how to raise and allocate the $100bn agreed as part of the Paris Agreement
The first week of the negotiations started slowly, and ended even slower. Negotiators look like they still have some sort of bad hangover, thanks to the fact they are still celebrating the Paris agreement. And while discussions take place inside the UN building in Bonn, Sri Lanka tries to recover from the worst floods in its history, India reports the hottest day every recorded in the countryand Carbon Brief warn that we only have five years until the 1,5°C carbon budget is blown.
Unlike the declining populations of many fish species, the number of cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish and squid) has increased in the world's oceans over the past 60 years, a University of Adelaide study has found.
The international team, led by researchers from the University's Environment Institute, compiled a global database of cephalopod catch rates to investigate long-term trends in abundance, published in Cell Press journal Current Biology.
