Biology
Breach
July 26, 2014, from The Independent (UK)
Superbugs resistant to some of the most powerful antibiotics in the medical arsenal have been found for the first time in a British river - with scientists pinpointing a local sewage-treatment plant as the most likely source.
Scientists discovered the drug-resistant bacteria in sediment samples taken downstream of the sewerage plant on the River Sowe near Coventry. The microbes contained mutated genes that confer resistance to the latest generation of antibiotics.
The researchers believe the discovery shows how antibiotic resistance has become widespread in the environment, with sewage-treatment plants now acting as giant "mixing vessels" where antibiotic resistance can spread between different microbes.
July 26, 2011, from Rolling Stone
American shoppers use an estimated 102 billion plastic shopping bags each year -- more than 500 per consumer. Named by Guinness World Records as "the most ubiquitous consumer item in the world," the ultrathin bags have become a leading source of pollution worldwide. They litter the world's beaches, clog city sewers, contribute to floods in developing countries and fuel a massive flow of plastic waste that is killing wildlife from sea turtles to camels... "There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere," the United Nations Environment Programme recently declared. But in the United States, the plastics industry has launched a concerted campaign to derail and defeat anti-bag measures nationwide. The effort includes well-placed political donations, intensive lobbying at both the state and national levels, and a pervasive PR campaign designed to shift the focus away from plastic bags to the supposed threat of canvas and paper bags -- including misleading claims that reusable bags "could" contain bacteria and unsafe levels of lead.
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Climate
Chaos
July 26, 2014, from Telegraph (UK)
Ocean temperatures have a soared to a seven-year high off southwest Britain - making our seas as hot as California.
Marine scientists say the water has reached 20.4C (68.7F) off Start Bay, Devon, and 20.1C (68.2F) off Perranporth, Cornwall.
That is even warmer than readings taken from Santa Monica beach in Los Angeles, where its currently lagging behind at 19.4C (66.9F) and only 8C short of the sea temperature in Bali.
Temperatures off the British coast are also rising by almost 4C a month - twice as fast as normal....
"Increasing sea temperatures will change the community structure and certain species will be better adpated to the warmer temperatures. That's both the microscopic plants, the phytoplankton and the large plants, the kelp.
"Jellyfish tend to like warm waters so there might be an increase in the jellyfish population although bathers shouldn;t be unduly concerned."
Meanwhile hot temperatures blowing in from Europe are bringing with it pollutants and these are reacting with sunlight to produce a soup of chemical smog which endangers health.
July 26, 2011, from London Guardian
The Sea Shepherd director has been convicted in absentia in Norway, spent 80 days in a Dutch prison, and has had the Japanese, Icelandic and Danish navies trying to arrest him for trying to defend whales, seals and fish. But now the animal rights and environmental activist Paul Watson faces the ignominy of having the flagship of his fleet, the Steve Irwin, sold by Scotland unless he raises nearly £1m in the next two weeks.
Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace and the director of the Sea Shepherd conservation society based in California, was about to leave Lerwick in the Shetland isles en route for the Faroes last week when Maltese company Fish and Fish lodged a complaint against him in the Scottish courts over alleged damage sustained when Sea Shepherd freed hundreds of bluefin tuna from the company's nets in a a clash off the coast of Libya last year. The Steve Irwin was impounded by the court on 15 July and now the man described by the Japanese as a pirate has just days left to post a bond for £860,000.
July 26, 2011, from http://news.discovery.com/earth/climate-change-yellowstone-fires.html
As Earth's climate warms up, Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons are likely to experience large fires more frequently, according to a new study. Within just a few decades, big fires may become as much as 10 times more common than they have been in the last 10,000 years.
A bump in fire frequency would reverberate through the environment in unpredictable ways -- affecting the kinds of plants that grow in the area, the kinds of animals that can find habitats there and the amount of carbon that vegetation might be expected to pull out of the atmosphere.
Such a fiery future would also threaten people and homes throughout the northern Rockies.
July 26, 2009, from London Observer
Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.
The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere...
The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.
Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.
July 26, 2009, from Macedonian International News Agency
India rejected key scientific findings on global warming, while the European Union called for more action by developing states on greenhouse gas emissions.
Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers.
He dismissed scientists' predictions that Himalayan glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming.
"We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere," he said.
"Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience."
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Resource
Depletion
July 26, 2009, from Denver Post
Here's the sad news: Even as the demand for organic food continues to explode, organic farmers in America are getting thrown under the very beet cart they helped build.
The Chinese are taking over market share, especially of vegetables and agricultural commodities like soy, thanks to several American-based multinational food corporations that have hijacked the organic bandwagon they only recently jumped onto.
When mega-corporation Dean Foods acquired Silk soy milk -- which I used to drink as if it were the staff of life -- the prospects looked good for American organic soy farmers. Silk had always been committed to supporting domestic organic farmers, and with the new might of Dean Foods behind it, I assumed that Silk would likely grow. Silk did grow, but it also dropped its commitment to domestic soy.
When Midwestern farmers and farmer cooperatives in the heart of American soy country were told by Silk they had to match the rock-bottom cost of Chinese organic soybeans, they found it was a price they simply could not meet. Organic agriculture is labor-intensive, and China's edge comes largely from its abundance of cheap labor.
July 26, 2009, from Environmental Research Web
Traditionally India has relied on surface storage and gravity flow to water crops but in recent years it has come to depend heavily on groundwater to irrigate crops and to cope with dry spells. Today the number of irrigation wells equipped with diesel or electric pumps in the country stands at more than 19 million, compared with just 150,000 in 1950.
This dependence is only likely to increase in the future as more and more rural farmers scavenge this water using small mechanical pumps and private tubewells. The practice has a large carbon footprint and groundwater pumping using electricity and diesel accounts for an estimated 16–25 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions or up to 6 percent of the total carbon dioxide produced by India.
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Recovery
July 26, 2012, from DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, via EurekAlert
A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers....
This technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides, that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult to taylor their properties by chemical means....
"Our technology requires only electrode and gate deposition, without the need for high-temperature chemical doping, ion implantation, or other expensive or damaging processes," says lead author William Regan....
This makes it possible for electrical contact to and carrier modulation of the semiconductor to be performed simultaneously."...
In one configuration, working with copper oxide, the Berkeley researchers shaped the electrode contact into narrow fingers; in another configuration, working with silicon, they made the top contact ultra-thin (single layer graphene) across the surface. With sufficiently narrow fingers, the gate field creates a low electrical resistance inversion layer between the fingers and a potential barrier beneath them. A uniformly thin top contact allows gate fields to penetrate and deplete/invert the underlying semiconductor. The results in both configurations are high quality p-n junctions.
July 26, 2009, from Infection Control Today
According to a recent paper published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiological Infectious Diseases, a certain kind of honey can be an effective agent in topical wound care, particularly where antibiotic resistance is an issue. The irony is that this most exciting new treatment has been around since the dawn of history -- honey was first used as a first aid treatment 4,000 years ago in Egypt.
The paper, "The unusual antibacterial activity of medical-grade Leptospermum honey: antibacterial spectrum, resistance and transcriptome analysis," describes the palliative effects of Leptospermum honey, a particular kind of honey indigenous to New Zealand and Australia. Leptospermum honey has been shown to possess unique plant derived components that make it an ideal wound dressing, including novel antimicrobial and immune-modulatory compounds. In addition, the honey has several properties that also aid in wound healing.
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