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Category: Environment

The norms the Supreme Court targeted this term all came from the same era

The norms the Supreme Court targeted this term all came from the same era

Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood write: The supreme court, thank heaven, finally adjourned on Thursday, after a week of decisions that blew up much of the framework of American policy and politics. And a key thing to notice about that assault on American norms was how many of their targets were adopted in a few short years in the 1960s and 1970s. Roe v Wade, of course, dates to 1973, the fruit of many year’s work by committed feminists. Thursday’s…

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The genetic power of ancient trees

The genetic power of ancient trees

Jim Robbins writes: In 2005, several of the centuries-old ponderosa pine trees on my 15 acres (0.06 sq km) of forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in Montana suddenly died. I soon discovered they were being brought down by mountain pine beetles, pernicious killers the size of the eraser on a pencil that burrow into the tree. The next year the number of dying trees grew exponentially. I felt powerless and grief-stricken as I saw these giant, sky-scraping trees fading…

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Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Joanna Thompson writes: The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that…

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Viruses survive in fresh water by ‘hitchhiking’ on plastic, study finds

Viruses survive in fresh water by ‘hitchhiking’ on plastic, study finds

The Guardian reports: Dangerous viruses can remain infectious for up to three days in fresh water by hitchhiking on plastic, researchers have found. Enteric viruses that cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets, such as rotavirus, were found to survive in water by attaching to microplastics, tiny particles less than 5mm long. They remain infectious, University of Stirling researchers found, posing a potential health risk. Prof Richard Quilliam, lead researcher on the project at Stirling University, said: “We found that viruses can…

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Russia’s invasion could cause long-term harm to Ukraine’s prized soil

Russia’s invasion could cause long-term harm to Ukraine’s prized soil

Science News reports: By now, wheat planted late last year waves in fields across Ukraine. Spring crops of sunflowers and barley are turning swaths of dark earth into a fuzz of bright green. But with Russia’s war being waged in some of the most fertile regions of Ukraine, uncertainty looms over summer harvesting. Ukrainian farmers braved a war zone to carry out close to 80 percent of spring planting, covering roughly 14 million hectares. Still, Russia’s invasion has raised fears…

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How humans impact the perceptual world of other animals

How humans impact the perceptual world of other animals

Ed Yong writes: In the Tetons, as I watch [a sensory ecologist, Jesse] Barber tagging bats, mosquitoes bite me through my shirt, attracted by the smell of the carbon dioxide on my breath. While I itch, an owl flies overhead, tracking its prey using a radar dish of stiff facial feathers that funnel sound toward its ears. These creatures have all evolved senses that allow them to thrive in the dark. But the dark is disappearing. Barber is one of…

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How fashion giants rebrand plastic as good for the planet

How fashion giants rebrand plastic as good for the planet

The New York Times reports: It’s soft. It’s vegan. It looks just like leather. It’s also made from fossil fuels. An explosion in the use of inexpensive, petroleum-based materials has transformed the fashion industry, aided by the successful rebranding of synthetic materials like plastic leather (once less flatteringly referred to as “pleather”) into hip alternatives like “vegan leather,” a marketing masterstroke meant to suggest environmental virtue. Underlying that effort has been an influential rating system assessing the environmental impact of…

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Catastrophe drives evolution, but life resides in the pauses

Catastrophe drives evolution, but life resides in the pauses

Renée A Duckworth writes: In certain places around the world – in the Badlands near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in the Geulhemmergroeve tunnels in the Netherlands, or in the Hell Creek formation in eastern Montana – you can touch a thin line of rock, and know you are touching the most famous mass extinction event on Earth. This Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary layer is a seam of clay found all over the world, enriched with iridium – an element that appears…

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Pollution from Russia’s war will poison Ukraine for decades

Pollution from Russia’s war will poison Ukraine for decades

Vox reports: In late May, a large plume of pink smoke erupted from a chemical plant and rose above apartment buildings in Ukraine’s eastern city of Severodonetsk. The smoke was toxic — it came from a tank of nitric acid that was struck by Russian military forces. “Do not come out of shelters!” the region’s governor, Sergiy Gaiday, said on Telegram, following the attack. “Nitric acid is dangerous if inhaled, swallowed, and in contact with skin.” Since Russia invaded Ukraine,…

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How do we solve the paradox of protection in Antarctica?

How do we solve the paradox of protection in Antarctica?

Alejandra Mancilla and Peder Roberts write: For more than 2,000 years, Antarctica existed only as a landscape of the imagination. If there was an Arctic continent, Aristotle reasoned in his treatise Meteorology, there ought to be an antipode, an ‘ant-Arctic’. For centuries, scientists, explorers and cartographers speculated about this antipodean Terra nondum cognita, a southern land not-yet known. But it wasn’t until 1820 that the continent was supposedly ‘found’ by three separate groups: a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb…

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What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

What is our hidden consumption of microplastics doing to our health?

Katharine Gammon writes: Martin Wagner was annoyed that his colleagues were always talking about microplastics in the ocean. It was 2010 and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch had been headline news. Here was this massive gyre, formed by circular ocean currents in the Pacific Ocean, reportedly brimming with plastic particles, killing sea turtles and seagulls. Wagner, a professor of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, whose lab focuses on the impact of plastics on human and ecosystem…

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Study identifies outdoor air pollution as ‘largest existential threat to human and planetary health’

Study identifies outdoor air pollution as ‘largest existential threat to human and planetary health’

Inside Climate News reports: Since the turn of the century, global deaths attributable to air pollution have increased by more than half, a development that researchers say underscores the impact of pollution as the “largest existential threat to human and planetary health.” The findings, part of a study published Tuesday in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that pollution was responsible for an estimated 9 million deaths around the world in 2019. Fully half of those fatalities, 4.5 million deaths, were…

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The race against radon

The race against radon

Chris Baraniuk writes: Deep in the frozen ground of the north, a radioactive hazard has lain trapped for millennia. But UK scientist Paul Glover realized some years back that it wouldn’t always be that way: One day it might get out. Glover had attended a conference where a speaker described the low permeability of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years or, in some cases, thousands. It is an icy shield, a thick blanket that locks…

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Indian court rules nature has legal status on par with humans. We are required to protect it

Indian court rules nature has legal status on par with humans. We are required to protect it

Inside Climate News reports: The highest court in one of India’s 28 states ruled last month that “Mother Nature” has the same legal status as a human being, which includes “all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” The decision from Madras High Court, located in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, also said that the natural environment is part of the human right to life, and that humans have an environmental duty to future generations. “The past…

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A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

A climate-driven decline of tiny dryland lichens could have major global impacts

Inside Climate News reports: Lichens that help hold together soil crusts in arid lands around the world are dying off as the climate warms, new research shows. That would lead deserts to expand and also would affect areas far from the drylands, as crumbling crusts fill winds with dust that can speed snowmelt and increase the incidence of respiratory diseases. Biologically rich soil crusts, sometimes called cryptobiotic soils or biocrusts, are spread out across dry and semi-dry regions of every…

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