After nuclear disasters, wildlife thrives Radiation from nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima may, surprisingly, have done the local wildlife no harm at all. Until now, it had been believed that radiation following the Chernobyl disaster must have had a dramatic effect on bird populations by causing damage to birds’ antioxidant defence mechanisms. But British scientists have now modeled the production of free radicals from radiation - and found that the birds’ antioxidant mechanisms could easily cope with radiation at the levels seen after Chernobyl and Fukushima. "I wasn’t really surprised by these findings – there have been many high profile findings on the radiation damage to wildlife at Chernobyl but it’s very difficult to see significant damage and we are not convinced by some of the claims," says professor Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth. Immediately after the Chernobyl accident, extremely high radiation levels did damage organisms.
How to Double Global Food Production by 2050 and Reduce Environmental Damage To feed the world's growing and more affluent population, global agriculture will have to double its food production by 2050. More farming, however, usually means more environmental harm as a result of clearing land, burning fossil fuels, consuming water for irrigation and spreading fertilizer. Agriculture already imposes a greater burden on Earth than almost any other human activity, so simply doubling current practices would ruin large areas of land as well as poisoning rivers and oceans. An international research team led by Jon Foley at the University of Minnesota has concluded that five basic changes in the way agriculture operates—and in the ways we eat—could double food production, yet decrease overall environmental impacts. The steps are as follows: improve crop yields, consume less meat, reduce food waste, stop expanding into rainforests, and use fertilizer and water more efficiently.
Agro-ecology: Lessons from Cuba on agriculture, food, and climate change Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty Images. On Thursday, April 12, Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State, will host a live event in Washington, D.C. on the future of food. “Feeding the World While the Earth Cooks” will examine post-climate-change agriculture, the rising demand for meat, and more. The Studebakers plying up and down Havana’s boardwalk aren’t the best advertisement for dynamism and innovation. Under the Warsaw Pact, Cuba sent rum and sugar to the red side of the Iron Curtain. Unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides that 20th-century agriculture had taken for granted, the country faced extreme weather events and a limit to the land and water it could use to grow food. Cuban officials faced the crisis clumsily. Cuban peasants proved more enterprising than the government and demanded change. But that took the farmers only so far. In Cuba, peasants encouraged scientists to adopt this approach. So has it worked?
Chickens Fed Caffeine, Banned Antibiotics, and Prozac Often Without The Farmer’s Knowledge qmnonic'/CC BY 2.0 It’s no surprise that conventionally factory farmed chickens aren't fed the best diet. We already knew that they were routinely fed arsenic. In fact, a 2004 study from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that more than half of store-bought and fast-food chickens contained elevated levels of arsenic. Roughly 2.2 million pounds of it are being used every year to produce 43 billion pounds of poultry. It's called roxarsone and it's used to fight parasites and increase growth in chickens. New research not only confirms use of arsenic, but finds the addition of a frightening elixir of drugs that includes caffeine, banned antibiotics, and even Prozac. Their Feathers Tell the Tale By doing a test on their feathers, which is similar to that of human fingernails in the way it accumulates chemicals, they found caffeine, antihistamines, acetaminophen, fluroquinolones (banned antibiotics), arsenic, and even Prozac (in chicken imported from China).
Halibut pierced with mysterious ’projectile parasite’ The newly-discovered parasite which creates mysterious holes in the Greenland halibut was discovered by Greenlandic fishermen, and researchers have yet to figure out how prevalent this parasite is. (Photo: Kurt Buchmann) The halibut is a popular delicacy among seafood lovers. But perhaps the pretty slices and the fine texture of this fish shouldn’t be taken for granted in the future. During filleting work, Greenlandic fishermen recently noticed that a specimen of Greenland halibut was full of strange cavities and holes that resemble shot wounds. The mysteriously infected fish was sent to the Laboratory of Aquatic Pathobiology at the University of Copenhagen, where researchers examined the holes in detail. They discovered that the Greenland halibut had been infected with a hitherto unknown parasite, which creates circular holes in the fish muscle. Holes go straight through the flesh The researchers have subsequently nicknamed the parasite ‘the projectile parasite’. No threat to humans
NASA's Perpetual Ocean animation turns ocean currents into art NASA's stunning Perpetual Ocean animation visualizes ocean currents (Image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is an unlikely entrant in the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. Its “Perpetual World” animation may have failed to appeal to the judging committee of the 2011 edition of the competition, but it sure succeeded in catching our eye. The jaw-dropping animation visualizes the flow of surface ocean currents around the world. The raw data regarding the currents from June 2005 through to December 2007 has been turned into a work of art reminiscent of van Gogh. The data used to present the hypnotizing swirls in the video below comes from NASA’s ECCO2 model. However, learning to predict possible climate outcomes on the basis of both observed and modeled behavior of the different factors that make up the ocean ecosystem is by no means straightforward. While ECCO2 provides data on the ocean flows at all depths, only surface flows have been visualized.
Explosion, Pollution, Massive Oil Spill Probable: North Sea Gas Leak The French energy company Total boasted today that they have discovered the source of the natural gas leak, which is steadily casting a plume of natural gas into the air and a six-mile long 'sheen' in the ocean surrounding the oil and gas platform in the North Sea; however, as fears of a catastrophic explosion increase, current options for plugging the leak carry great risks and may take months to complete. Aerial shot of Total's Elgin Wellhead Platform in the North Sea off the shore of Scotland. (AP Photo / Greenpeace, Martin Langer) One option is to drill a relief well to stop the release of gas, which could take up to six months. Meanwhile, environmental groups are now warning that a major oil spill could be triggered at the platform. Such a spill would have "catastrophic consequences for the environment, marine life and sea birds in Shetland, the Faroe Islands and the Norwegian coast," said Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland.
Today's environment influences behavior generations later: Chemical exposure raises descendants' sensitivity to stress Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Washington State University have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound generations earlier. The findings, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture, with broad implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited. The researchers -- David Crews at Texas , Michael Skinner at Washington State and colleagues -- exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide known to disrupt hormones and have effects across generations of animals. The researchers then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found they were more anxious, more sensitive to stress, and had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.