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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
The capacity to deliver continuous electricity for refrigeration is one of the central planks of the modern-day food distribution system.
Using fossil fuel-generated energy to refrigerate and freeze foods around the clock produces a lot of pollution – carbon and greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the global climate, as well as emissions of a range of potentially toxic chemicals that deplete the ozone layer and wind up in our waterways and soil.
How soon after the Big Bang could water have existed? Not right away, because water molecules contain oxygen and oxygen had to be formed in the first stars. Then that oxygen had to disperse and unite with hydrogen in significant amounts. New theoretical work finds that despite these complications, water vapor could have been just as abundant in pockets of space a billion years after the Big Bang as it is today.
“We looked at the chemistry within young molecular clouds containing a thousand times less oxygen than our Sun. To our surprise, we found we can get as much water vapor as we see in our own galaxy,” says astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
The month of May brings many things, among them Mother’s Day, tulips, and Lyme Disease Awareness campaigns. But according to Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY, if we want to get a leg up on tick-borne illness we need to become vigilant earlier in the season.
As well as being a beautiful species capable of changing its colour, shape and even gender, new research published today shows that parrotfish, commonly found on healthy coral reefs, can also play a pivotal role in providing the sands necessary to build and maintain coral reef islands.
Hazardous chemicals are a vital part of many industries, but lax and inconsistent safety standards put workers' health and lives at risk all over the world, writes Christian Friis Bach.
Christian Friis Bach is Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
Millions of workers are exposed every day to hazardous chemicals around the globe, in developing and developed countries. These chemicals are purchased and shipped from all over the world and differences in language and labelling could make them even more dangerous. However, thanks to a true success story of international cooperation, the danger is abating every day. This is worth celebrating on the World Day for Safety and Health at Work
El cerebro envejece, al igual que el resto del cuerpo, incluso para aquellos no padecen una enfermedad neurológica, de acuerdo con un Instituto de Medicina.
"Algunos de los cambios que uno observa, no significa que todo ha terminado con tristeza y fatalidad", según dijo al Washington Post Kristine Yaffe, MD, vicepresidente de la comisión.
Si bien el envejecimiento afecta más a unos que a otros, la mayoría de las personas pueden tomar medidas para mejorar su salud, de acuerdo con Yaffe, director y profesor de psiquiatría, neurología y epidemiología en la Universidad de California en San Francisco y director de psiquiatría geriátrica y director de la Clínica de Trastornos de la Memoria en el Centro Médico VA de San Francisco.
