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Category: Environment

Bees can’t find food in dirty air

Bees can’t find food in dirty air

Lina Zeldovich writes: When foraging for flowers, bees search for the familiar scents that blooms puff out into the air to attract them. Scientists call these little fragrant air pockets “odor plumes.” Once bees detect an odor plume, they start following it, flying from side to side to navigate to wherever the odor is strongest—scientists call this “casting”—until they land on a flower. “If you think of a flower, it’s basically acting as a message beacon,” says Ben Langford, an…

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Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants

Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants

John Timmer writes: Cellulose is the primary component of the cell walls of plants, making it the most common polymer on Earth. It’s responsible for the properties of materials like wood and cotton and is the primary component of dietary fiber, so it’s hard to overstate its importance to humanity. Given its ubiquity and the fact that it’s composed of a bunch of sugar molecules linked together, its toughness makes it very difficult to use as a food source. The…

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Why is the sea so hot?

Why is the sea so hot?

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In early 2023, climate scientists—and anyone else paying attention to the data—started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the poles, was just a shade under seventy degrees. Typically, the highest sea-surface temperatures of the year are observed in March, toward the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Last year,…

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Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

Nature reports: Plastics are just about everywhere — food packaging, tyres, clothes, water pipes. And they shed microscopic particles that end up in the environment and can be ingested or inhaled by people. Now the first data of their kind show a link between these microplastics and human health. A study of more than 200 people undergoing surgery found that nearly 60% had microplastics or even smaller nanoplastics in a main artery. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely…

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The worst wildfire in Texas’ history has a complex link with climate change

The worst wildfire in Texas’ history has a complex link with climate change

BBC Future reports: The worst wildfire in Texas’ history is leaving wide scars on the landscape. Why is the blaze so extreme? Temperatures dropped and snow began to fall on the Texas panhandle, dusting the scorched grasslands, thousands of dead cattle, and hundreds of burnt-out buildings with a fine layer of white powder. It was a welcome relief – and an apocalyptic image – for the state, which has been battling its worst wildfire in history. The Smokehouse Creek fire,…

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Indigenous peoples deserve as much protection as the threatened environments they inhabit

Indigenous peoples deserve as much protection as the threatened environments they inhabit

Robert Williams writes: Over 600,000 tourists travel to Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area each year, and many will catch a glimpse of the Great Migration: the famed trek of more than one million wildebeests and thousands of zebras, gazelles and other animals crossing over the Mara River into Kenya and back. Yet the Tanzanian government believes it can attract many more tourists seeking the safari adventure of a lifetime: five million by 2025, bringing $6 billion with them per year, according…

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AI is consuming drinking water from the desert

AI is consuming drinking water from the desert

Karen Hao writes: One scorching day this past September, I made the dangerous decision to try to circumnavigate some data centers. The ones I chose sit between a regional airport and some farm fields in Goodyear, Arizona, half an hour’s drive west of downtown Phoenix. When my Uber pulled up beside the unmarked buildings, the temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The air crackled with a latent energy, and some kind of pulsating sound was emanating from the electric wires above…

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How a solar revolution in farming is depleting the world’s groundwater

How a solar revolution in farming is depleting the world’s groundwater

Fred Pearce writes: There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free water available in almost unlimited quantities to grow their crops, their lives could be transformed. Until the water runs out. The desert state of Rajasthan is the Indian pioneer and has more solar pumps than any other. Over the past decade, the government…

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One of the world’s largest cities may be just months away from running out of water

One of the world’s largest cities may be just months away from running out of water

CNN reports: Alejandro Gomez has been without proper running water for more than three months. Sometimes it comes on for an hour or two, but only a small trickle, barely enough to fill a couple of buckets. Then nothing for many days. Gomez, who lives in Mexico City’s Tlalpan district, doesn’t have a big storage tank so can’t get water truck deliveries — there’s simply nowhere to store it. Instead, he and his family eke out what they can buy…

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Plastics reckoning: PVC is ubiquitous, but maybe not for long

Plastics reckoning: PVC is ubiquitous, but maybe not for long

Nicola Jones writes: The word “vinyl” might sound innocuous, bringing to mind everyday items like LP records, flooring, pipes, or shiny plastic pants. The plastic this name refers to — polyvinyl chloride (PVC) — is the world’s third-most widely produced synthetic polymer, with more than 50 million tons cranked out each year for everything from window frames to food wrap, fake leather car seats to medical products. It’s everywhere. But environmentalists and NGOs have been raising alarms about PVC for…

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Ill-judged tree planting in Africa threatens ecosystems, scientists warn

Ill-judged tree planting in Africa threatens ecosystems, scientists warn

The Guardian reports: Misguided tree-planting projects are threatening crucial ecosystems across Africa, scientists have warned. Research has revealed that an area the size of France is threatened by forest restoration initiatives that are taking place in inappropriate landscapes. One project in particular, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, aims to plant trees across 100m hectares (247m acres) of land by 2030. Scientists have warned that the scheme plans to plant trees in non-forest ecosystems such as savannahs and grasslands, potentially…

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Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows

Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows

Too much fresh water from Greenland’s ice sheet can slow the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Paul Souders/Stone via Getty Images By René van Westen, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Utrecht University Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences. While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised…

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The world is losing migratory species at alarming rates

The world is losing migratory species at alarming rates

Inside Climate News reports: Humans are driving migratory animals—sea turtles, chimpanzees, lions and penguins, among dozens of other species—towards extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of migratory species ever carried out. The State of the World’s Migratory Species, a first of its kind report compiled by conservation scientists under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found population decline, a precursor to extinction, in nearly half of the roughly 1,200 species listed under the Convention…

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Invasive ants disrupt lions’ hunting behavior in Kenya

Invasive ants disrupt lions’ hunting behavior in Kenya

GrrlScientist writes: In a remarkable, but accidental, real-life experiment demonstrating the ecological connections between all life regardless of how great or small, a study recently came out that documents how a tiny ant is affecting the mighty lion on the savannahs of Kenya. This ant is invasive and it’s far from home. It probably arrived from the island of Mauritius, located in the Indian Ocean, early during the last century, and began establishing itself in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in…

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Many but not all of the world’s aquifers are losing water

Many but not all of the world’s aquifers are losing water

Science News reports: The world’s precious stash of subterranean freshwater is shrinking — and in nearly a third of aquifers, that loss has been speeding up in the last couple of decades, researchers report in the Jan. 25 Nature. A one-two punch of unsustainable groundwater withdrawals and changing climate has been causing global water levels to fall on average, leading to water shortages, slumping land surfaces and seawater intrusion into aquifers. The new study suggests that groundwater decline has accelerated…

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Greenland losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour, study reveals

Greenland losing 30 million tonnes of ice an hour, study reveals

The Guardian reports: The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought. Some scientists are concerned that this additional source of freshwater pouring into the north Atlantic might mean a collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is closer to being triggered, with severe consequences for humanity. Major ice loss from Greenland…

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