Biology Breach
February 13, 2012, from AP, via HuffingtonPost
A mysterious epidemic is devastating the Pacific coast of Central America, killing more than 24,000 people in El Salvador and Nicaragua since 2000 and striking thousands of others with chronic kidney disease at rates unseen virtually anywhere else. Scientists say they have received reports of the phenomenon as far north as southern Mexico and as far south as Panama....
Many of the victims were manual laborers or worked in sugar cane fields that cover much of the coastal lowlands. Patients, local doctors and activists say they believe the culprit lurks among the agricultural chemicals workers have used for years with virtually none of the protections required in more developed countries. But a growing body of evidence supports a more complicated and counterintuitive hypothesis.
February 13, 2009, from Forbes
People exposed to secondhand smoke may face as much as a 44 percent increased risk of developing dementia, a new study suggests.
While previous research has established a connection between smoking and increased risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, this new study is the largest review to date showing a link between secondhand smoke and the threat of dementia, the authors said.
"There is an association between cognitive function, which is often but not necessarily a precursor of dementia, and exposure to passive smoking," said lead researcher Iain Lang, a research fellow in the Public Health and Epidemiology Group at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England.
What's more, Lang said, the risk of impaired cognitive function increases with the amount of exposure to secondhand smoke, the findings suggest. "For people at the highest levels of exposure, the risk is probably higher," he said.
February 13, 2009, from Latin America Press
More than 3,000 workers at a sugar plant owned by Nicaragua's most powerful company have died from chronic renal failure since 1990 and a victims' group says another 5,000 workers have since developed the condition for the company's use of agrochemicals.
The San Antonio Refinery is owned by the Nicaragua Sugar Estates Limited, a part of Grupo Pellas, which produces Flor de Cana rum as well as ethanol and runs an electricity generator in Chichigalpa in the northern León department... Grupo Pellas denies any wrongdoing, accuses the sick workers of being alcoholics or drug addicts, and says that the illness is provoked by other causes. But a 2006 study by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, cited by Artoni, found that 95 percent of the 26 wells that serve the northwest of the country and close to 96 percent of the small family-only use wells are contaminated with feces, herbicides, bacteria and agrochemicals.
According to a recent investigation by the university, there is a possible cause-effect relation between the laborers' work and kidney failure.
Dr. Cecilia Torres, an occupational health researcher at the university told the Latin American Regional Office of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations that environmental neurotoxins, such as heavy metals -- arsenic, cadmium and lead -- and agrochemicals such as aldrin, chlorothalonil, maneb, copper sulfate, endrin and Nemagon, are major causes of chronic kidney failure in Nicaragua.
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Climate Chaos
February 13, 2012, from PhysOrg
Last August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based on the wide extent of flooding, that Irene was a "100-year event": a storm that only comes around once in a century.
However, researchers from MIT and Princeton University have found that with climate change, such storms could make landfall far more frequently, causing powerful, devastating storm surges every three to 20 years. The group simulated tens of thousands of storms under different climate conditions, finding that today's "500-year floods" could, with climate change, occur once every 25 to 240 years. The researchers published their results in the current issue of Nature Climate Change....
But with added greenhouse gas emissions, the models found that a two-meter surge flood would instead occur once every three to 20 years; a three-meter flood would occur every 25 to 240 years.
February 13, 2011, from Reuters
Thawing permafrost is triggering mudslides onto a key road traveled by busloads of sightseers. Tall bushes newly sprouted on the tundra are blocking panoramic views. And glaciers are receding from convenient viewing areas, while their rapid summer melt poses new flood risks.
These are just a few of the ways that a rapidly warming climate is reshaping Denali, Kenai Fjords and other national parks comprising the crown jewels of Alaska's heritage as America's last frontier.
These and some better-known impacts -- proliferation of invasive plants and fish, greater frequency and intensity of wildfires, and declines in wildlife populations that depend on sea ice and glaciers -- are outlined in a recent National Park Service report.
February 13, 2009, from Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Climate refugees."
It's a term we should get used to, researchers warned on Thursday, predicting a flood of new residents driven north by heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming.
With one speaker raising the specter of a new migration on the scale of the Great Depression, state and county officials admitted they have barely started getting ready.
The warnings came at a conference of planners, scientists and government officials drilling into the results of a study released this week examining what Washington faces -- for our food supply, our forests, our drinking-water supplies and public health, among other fronts -- as the globe warms in coming decades.
"We're going to have an influx of climate refugees," said Richard Hoskins, an epidemiologist with the Washington Health Department. "This is going to have a tremendous impact on our public health (system). Local public health has a very full plate as it is."
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Resource Depletion
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Recovery
February 13, 2012, from New Scientist
HOW do you get more power out of an electric car than its main battery pack can deliver? Simple, turn the car's very bodywork into a battery, extract power from every bounce of its suspension system and, while you're at it, suck energy from the road surface too.
Such are the measures being built into an electric racing car capable of reaching 320 kilometres (200 miles) per hour by a UK-based consortium. Their aim is to perfect a multitude of novel electric-vehicle (EV) technologies and ultimately to transfer them to road cars.
February 13, 2012, from ABC Environment
It looks more like squid than steak and because it lacks the fat and protein found in real cattle, does not taste like traditional beef. So why would anyone eat meat grown in a lab?
Cultured or in-vitro meat may still be years away from our supermarkets, but scientists in The Netherlands say they will be able to grow a hamburger by the end of this year.
Professor Mark Post, who is refining the meat-making process at Maastricht University, says once perfected, the technology could slash the environmental footprint of growing food... Livestock for human consumption takes up 70 per cent of the world's arable land. They use eight per cent of global freshwater and produce 18 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions - some 3,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year (that's more than the entire world's transport sector). Deforestation to create farmland accounts for a third of those emissions.
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