In a win-win for a cleaner planet, scientists have devised a way to use waste cooking oil and sulphur to extract the neurotoxin mercury from the environment.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the dynamic new canola oil polymer can trap the most dangerous and common types of mercury pollution – mercury metal, mercury vapour and highly toxic organo-mercury compounds which harm both aquatic and terrestrial systems.
>> Read the Full Article
A new study by scientists at Portland State University and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder has found that the effects of climate change, which are apparent in other parts of the Antarctic continent, are not yet observed for glaciers in the western Ross Sea coast.
Published online ahead of print for the journal Geology, the study found that the pattern of glacier advance and retreat has not changed along the western Ross Sea coast, in contrast to the rapidly shrinking glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula.
>> Read the Full Article
Since 2011, a mysterious illness known as Yellow Canopy Syndrome, or YCS, has afflicted Australian sugarcane. The condition causes the mid-canopy leaves of otherwise healthy plants to rapidly turn yellow to a degree that the plant's sugar yield can decrease by up to 30 percent.
In recent years, the syndrome has spread across the continent. Losses are estimated at around $40 million and growers fear it could ruin the industry in Australia.
"At the start of the project, there were many possibilities but little evidence to suggest the cause," says Kate Hertweck, an assistant professor of biology at The University of Texas at Tyler (UT Tyler) and a member of the team of researchers exploring the causes of the disease. "It could be a physiological reaction caused by water or nutrients in the soil. Or it could be a biological cause, like an insect, virus or fungus."
>> Read the Full Article
Patients without calcium buildup in the coronary arteries had significantly lower risk of future heart attack or stroke despite other high risk factors such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or bad cholesterol levels, new research from UT Southwestern cardiologists shows.
>> Read the Full Article
It is a painful lesson of our time that the things we depend on to make our lives more comfortable can also kill us. Our addiction to fossils fuels is the obvious example, as we come to terms with the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change. But we are addicted to nitrogen, too, in the fertilizers that feed us, and it now appears that the combination of climate change and nitrogen pollution is multiplying the possibilities for wrecking the world around us.
>> Read the Full Article