Ahhh — to remember the glory days before dirty air descended on Delhi, a methane leak in California gassed thousands, and catastrophic smog in China prompted people to buy bottled air, of all things. Before the Industrial Revolution, the world was basically one big, serene Walden Pond, right? Wrong. Take off those rose-tinted glasses and get acquainted with the story of […]
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Toxic air pollution in the Indian capital of Delhi has given some 2.2 million children irreversible lung damage, according to a 2010 study from the Kolkata-based Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute that surfaced this month. The report has raised fresh concerns in a country where carbon emissions are forecast to increase for decades.
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Until recently, Pakistan has not used the bulk of its coal reserves – some of the largest in the world – for power generation. Within the past year the government in Islamabad has signed a number of financial and technological agreements with China aimed at exploiting massive coal reserves at the Tharparkar mine in Sindh province, in the south of the […]
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Why the oceans are in trouble! The oceans can no longer handle the damage brought on by the 7 billion people on Earth. Over the decades, the human race has over-fished specific species to near extinction, and polluted them with carbon dioxide emissions, toxic chemicals, garbage, and unrecycled plastics. A shocking new study, recently published in Science, warned […]
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Scientists have long suspected that waste dumped into the ocean would ultimately find its way into the seafood that ends up on dinner tables. A new study provides evidence that this is more than just a theory. After analyzing fish caught off the coasts of California and Indonesia and sold in local markets, researchers found 25 percent contained man-made debris. […]
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Children who attend schools near busy roads could see their brain development hindered by air pollution, according to a new study by Spanish scientists. Researchers in Barcelona spent a year tracking the developmental progress of more than 2,700 children ages 7 to 10 at 39 schools in the city. They found that the cognitive skills of students at schools near […]
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Yanshi, China Dead dogs, pigs: Another sudden mass animal die-off has left many Chinese worried about their own health. Scores of pigs and dogs dropped dead overnight in Dongtun village, apparently from poisonous gas emitted from a chemical plant. “All the dogs in the village had basically died off,” one resident said. “Those that hadn’t died were in their last […]
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The European Union’s environmental agency said targets to curb pollution and climate change by 2050 would he missed without “profound changes” in technology, lifestyle and policy. The agency said poor air quality in Europe causes hundreds of thousands of early deaths a year.
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Public urination is a problem in most major cities of the world, but now another town is using technology to “pee back” the perpetrators, so to speak. Authorities in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, had the walls in this well-known red light district sprayed with a super-hydrophobic nano-coating which is so water repellent that, as tech website gizmag.com […]
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Red lights may prevent deadly auto accidents, but waiting at one poses a different kind of hazard to your health. Car exhausts emit harmful pollutants, known as nanoparticles, which have been linked to heart and lung disease. When researchers from the University of Surrey in England analyzed drivers’ exposure to these pollutants at various points in their typical daily commutes, […]
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