H1N1 virus
Readers, all of you, I’m sure, know that Swine Flu is the BIG story out there just now – and that if we’re unlucky, it may get a lot bigger.
I don’t think there’s much I can add to this subject.  If you are concerned about it, and who’s not, then you’ll be out there looking for breaking news.  I am to.
I wish all of us good luck on this one.
Water levels in some of the world’s most important rivers have declined significantly over the past 50 years, US researchers say.
They say the reduced flows are linked to climate change and will have a major impact as the human population grows.
The only area with a significant increase in water flows was the Arctic due to a greater snow and ice melting.
The study was published in the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Journal of Climate.
Rainfall patterns ‘altered’
From the Yellow river in northern China to the Ganges in India to the Colorado river in the United States – the US scientists say that the major sources of fresh water for much of the world’s population are in decline.
The researchers analysed water flows in more than 900 rivers over a 50-year period to 2004.
They found that there was an overall decline in the amount of water flowing into the world’s oceans.
Much of the reduction has been caused by human activities such as the building of dams and the diversion of water for agriculture.
But the researchers highlighted the contribution of climate change, saying that rising temperatures were altering rainfall patterns and increasing rates of evaporation.
The authors say they are concerned that the decline in freshwater sources will continue with serious repercussions for a growing global population.
While some major rivers, including the Brahmaputra in South Asia and the Yangtze in China, have larger water flows, there is concern that the increased volume comes from the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas.
This means that in future these rivers might decline significantly as the glaciers disappear.
To the original… ➡
The Colorado River system supplies water to tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland, and has never experienced a delivery shortage. But if human-caused climate change continues to make the region drier, scheduled deliveries will be missed 60-90 percent of the time by the middle of this century, according to a pair of climate researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
“All water-use planning is based on the idea that the next 100 years will be like the last 100,” said Scripps research marine physicist Tim Barnett, a co-author of the report. “We considered the question: Can the river deliver water at the levels currently scheduled if the climate changes as we expect it to. The answer is no.”
Even under conservative climate change scenarios, Barnett and Scripps climate researcher David Pierce found that reductions in the runoff that feeds the Colorado River mean that it could short the Southwest of a half-billion cubic meters (400,000 acre feet) of water per year 40 percent of the time by 2025. (An acre foot of water is typically considered adequate to meet the annual water needs of two households.) By the later part of this century, those numbers double.
The paper, “Sustainable water deliveries from the Colorado River in a changing climate,” appears in the April 20 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
More… ➡
Living in another country can be a cherished experience, but new research suggests it might also help expand minds. This research, published by the American Psychological Association, is the first of its kind to look at the link between living abroad and creativity.
“Gaining experience in foreign cultures has long been a classic prescription for artists interested in stimulating their imaginations or honing their crafts. But does living abroad actually make people more creative?” asks the study’s lead author, William Maddux, PhD, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, a business school with campuses in France and Singapore. “It’s a longstanding question that we feel we’ve been able to begin answering through this research”
More… ➡
Will problems associated with environmental issues improve in the next two decades? According to an analysis of student performance on PISA 2006–an international assessment of 15-year-olds–students who are the best informed about environmental science and the geosciences are also the most realistic about the environmental challenges facing the world in the next 20 years. Meanwhile, students who are least informed in these areas are the most wildly optimistic that things will improve.
These attitudes are among the results presented in Green at 15?, a study done by sociologist David Baker and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, in collaboration with a team of researchers at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, an international organisation that helps governments tackle the economic, social and governance challenges of a globalised economy. A PISA assessment is done every three years. PISA 2006 focused on science, assessing the knowledge and skills of more than 400,000 students in 57 countries around the world.
More… ➡
Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years.
In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious disaster tale about the microbe.
The Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location miles offshore.
For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal.
Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium — a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.
Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves.
More… ➡
– Research thanks to California Refugees In New Zealand
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.
For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.
‘It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,’ says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. ‘Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.’
Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn’t even close. ‘We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,’ he says. ‘No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.’
More… ➡
– Research Thanks to Robin S.
For the first time, scientists have isolated the parasite Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia) from professional apiaries suffering from honey bee colony depopulation syndrome. They then went on to treat the infection with complete success.
In a study published in the new journal from the Society for Applied Microbiology: Environmental Microbiology Reports, scientists from Spain analysed two apiaries and found evidence of honey bee colony depopulation syndrome (also known as colony collapse disorder in the USA). They found no evidence of any other cause of the disease (such as the Varroa destructor, IAPV or pesticides), other than infection with Nosema ceranae. The researchers then treated the infected surviving under-populated colonies with the antibiotic drug, flumagillin and demonstrated complete recovery of all infected colonies.
More… ➡
– Research Thanks to Bruce S.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has
not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.
I am making such material available in my effort to advance
understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.
I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted
material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this
site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for
purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain
permission from the copyright owner.