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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Perhaps you missed the news that the price of hummus has spiked in Great Britain. The cause, as the New York Times reported on February 8: drought in India, resulting in a poor harvest of chickpeas. Far beyond making dips for pita bread, chickpeas are a legume of life-and-death importance—especially in India, Pakistan, and Ethiopia where 1 in 5 of the world’s people depend on them as their primary source of protein.
Recent research by climate modelers Kevin Hamilton and Takatoshi Sakazaki at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) investigated the possibility of using historical observations after large equatorial volcanic eruptions to learn about the properties of the winds in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere 10–30 miles above Earth’s surface.
Scientists have confirmed what native Alaskans have observed for centuries – maritime winds influence the travel patterns of northern fur seal pups. New research presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting here today shows strong winds can potentially displace seal pups by hundreds of kilometers during their first winter migration.
NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible image of Category 3 Tropical Cyclone Gita as it continues to bring heavy rainfall, powerful winds and storm surge to Fiji Islands after pounding the island of Tonga.
To power entire communities with clean energy, such as solar and wind power, a reliable backup storage system is needed to provide energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t out.
A new UC San Francisco study has shown that a cancer-killing (“oncolytic”) virus currently in clinical trials may function as a cancer vaccine – in addition to killing some cancer cells directly, the virus alerts the immune system to the presence of a tumor, triggering a powerful, widespread immune response that kills cancer cells far outside the virus-infected region.
