Radioactive cesium found in Japan’s fish, seawater. PSU study finds 'caffeinated' coastal waters. Public release date: 18-Jul-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: David Santensantend@pdx.edu 503-725-8765Washington State University A new study finds elevated levels of caffeine at several sites in Pacific Ocean waters off the coast of Oregon—though not necessarily where researchers expected.
This study is the first to look at caffeine pollution off the Oregon coast. It was developed and conducted by Portland State University master's student Zoe Rodriguez del Rey and her faculty adviser Elise Granek, assistant professor of Environmental Science and Management, in collaboration with Steve Sylvester of Washington State University, Vancouver. In spring 2010, Rodriguez del Rey and Granek collected and analyzed samples from 14 coastal locations and seven adjacent water bodies as far north as Astoria, Ore., and as far south as Brookings.
High levels were also found following a late-season storm of wind and rain that triggered sewer overflows. [ Print | E-mail. Fukushima as Manufactured Disaster. They may not live in castles anymore, but the glass-plated skyscrapers that tower over the great cities of the world, in faceless anonymity, still signify the imperious domain of the ruling elite. It is from these places, not the featureless depths of the earth’s roiling crust, which were the decisive cause of the triple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant on 11th March 2011. An independent report by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), the first independent investigation committee authorized by the Japanese Diet (parliament) in its 66 year history, was released to both houses of the Diet on July 5. The chairman of the report begins with zero equivocation as to the ultimate cause of the nuclear meltdowns, which are still preventing tens of thousands of people from returning to their homes; returns that for many, are likely never to come: How could such a “profoundly manmade disaster” have come to pass?
“No. Chernobyl's radioactive trees and the forest fire risk. 6 July 2012Last updated at 20:30 ET By Patrick Evans Chernobyl, Ukraine Much of the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant is pine forest, and some of it so badly contaminated that a forest fire could create a devastating radioactive smoke cloud. Heading north from Kiev in Ukraine, you can see old ladies and their grand-daughters sitting waiting expectantly in the long grass, shaded from a sweltering sun, under the straight red eaves of tall, orderly Scots pines which line the road.
It is blueberry season, and they are selling them by the plastic pint glass. You could pull in to haggle, but Sergiy Zibtsev, a professor from the Forestry Institute at the Kiev University of Life Sciences does not recommend it. They are laced with radioactive strontium. Berries are highly efficient at soaking up and storing radionuclides, huge quantities of which were dispersed over large parts of the Soviet Union and Western Europe by smoke plumes from the explosion.
Pine damages easily. EUREAPA | One Planet Economy Network. The scenario functions in EUREAPA enable decision makers to answer questions about the effects of policy on environment, consumption, industry and trade, thus helping to formulate strategies for sustainable consumption and production in Europe and beyond. EUREAPA contains baseline data on the economy, greenhouse gas emissions, ecological footprints and water footprints for every EU member state and 16 other countries and regions of the world. At the heart of EUREAPA is an environmentally extended multi-region input-output model which combines tables from national economic accounts and trade statistics with data from environmental and footprint accounts. The extensive data system models the flow of goods and services between 43 countries and regions covering the global economy for 57 individual sectors over a year. The sectors cover a range from agricultural and manufacturing industries to transport, recreational, health and financial services.
Calculating the environmental footprint of governments. What does your life style do to our planet? And what about your government's decisions? (Illustration photo: Coloubox) From new cars to email messages, from bananas to home-grown tomatoes: everything we buy, produce or consume has an environmental cost that has come to be called a “footprint”. If you want to be a good global citizen, the Internet offers a range of tools that you can use to understand just how big your footprint is – or what your existing lifestyle is doing to the planet.
But what if you are a government decision maker and want to know the impact of different policies on the environment? Now, as global policymakers meet in Brazil at the UN’s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, a group of European researchers has developed a new online “virtual crystal ball” that can help planners envision a greener future and help them get there. Easy to understand graphics A crystal ball But perhaps EUREAPA’s biggest strength is that it can analyse future development scenarios. Amid Censored Radiation Spikes, Major Nuclear Base Run Containment Exercise. Amid a number of reports of massive and bizarre radiation readouts coming from experts, eyewitnesses, radiation facilities, and a key choice news outlet, it has now come out that one of the largest nuclear bases is currently running a ‘nuclear containment exercise’. The Minot Airforce Base exercise, running in North Dakota, reportedly involves the use of B-52 aircrafts.
The news comes after a developing story arose over the potential cover-up of a nuclear situation stemming from near the border of Indiana and Michigan. Sources from near where the elevated levels of radiation were observed say that a Department of Homeland Security ‘hazmat’ fleet has been dispatched after ‘years’ of inactivity. The story first erupted after online geiger readings showed an unprecedented radiation spike in the area, with levels reaching as high as 7.139 counts per minute (CPM) over the average of between 5 and 6. As the story develops, more information will undoubtedly come out on the subject. Natural Society. Climate Change: Carbon Dioxide Levels In World's Air Reach 'Troubling Milestone'
WASHINGTON — The world's air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant. Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn't quite a surprise, because it's been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395. So far, only the Arctic has reached that 400 level, but the rest of the world will follow soon. "The fact that it's 400 is significant," said Jim Butler, global monitoring director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. "It's just a reminder to everybody that we haven't fixed this and we're still in trouble.
" For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed. Until now. Online: Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return? Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust.
Splat! Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of such a possible course for human civilization in the 21st century. Don't look now but we are running in midair, a new book asserts. Instead, the latest global data are tracking one of the most alarming scenarios, in which these variables increase steadily to reach a peak and then suddenly drop in a process called collapse. Randers's ideas most closely resemble a World3 scenario in which energy efficiency and renewable energy stave off the worst effects of climate change until after 2050. Figure courtesy of PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
Today's environment influences behavior generations later: Chemical exposure raises descendants' sensitivity to stress. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Washington State University have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound generations earlier. The findings, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture, with broad implications for how certain behavioral tendencies might be inherited.
The researchers -- David Crews at Texas , Michael Skinner at Washington State and colleagues -- exposed gestating female rats to vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide known to disrupt hormones and have effects across generations of animals. The researchers then put the rats' third generation of offspring through a variety of behavioral tests and found they were more anxious, more sensitive to stress, and had greater activity in stress-related regions of the brain than descendants of unexposed rats.
Gulf Seafood Deformities Raise Questions Among Scientists And Fisherman. While the true extent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill was not known for about 4 years, as Al Jazeera notes in the video above, the repercussions of BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico may become apparent more quickly. Discovering eyeless shrimp, lesioned fish and other mutated and underdeveloped seafood, fisherman in the Gulf are pointing fingers at the BP spill. Biologist Dr. Darryl Felder told the news agency that Gulf seafood populations are dropping at alarming rates and that species richness is "diminished.
" The Gulf Restoration Network's Scott Eust explained the bizarre shrimp deformities. "We have some evidence of deformed shrimp, which is another developmental impact. Al Jazeera reports that both the government and BP maintain that Gulf seafood is safe. Government testing standards were questioned months after the spill. Related on HuffPost: After nuclear disasters, wildlife thrives. Radiation from nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima may, surprisingly, have done the local wildlife no harm at all. Until now, it had been believed that radiation following the Chernobyl disaster must have had a dramatic effect on bird populations by causing damage to birds’ antioxidant defence mechanisms. But British scientists have now modeled the production of free radicals from radiation - and found that the birds’ antioxidant mechanisms could easily cope with radiation at the levels seen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
"I wasn’t really surprised by these findings – there have been many high profile findings on the radiation damage to wildlife at Chernobyl but it’s very difficult to see significant damage and we are not convinced by some of the claims," says professor Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth. Immediately after the Chernobyl accident, extremely high radiation levels did damage organisms. How to Double Global Food Production by 2050 and Reduce Environmental Damage.
To feed the world's growing and more affluent population, global agriculture will have to double its food production by 2050. More farming, however, usually means more environmental harm as a result of clearing land, burning fossil fuels, consuming water for irrigation and spreading fertilizer. Agriculture already imposes a greater burden on Earth than almost any other human activity, so simply doubling current practices would ruin large areas of land as well as poisoning rivers and oceans.
An international research team led by Jon Foley at the University of Minnesota has concluded that five basic changes in the way agriculture operates—and in the ways we eat—could double food production, yet decrease overall environmental impacts. The steps are as follows: improve crop yields, consume less meat, reduce food waste, stop expanding into rainforests, and use fertilizer and water more efficiently.
The changes are reflected in a series of maps. Agro-ecology: Lessons from Cuba on agriculture, food, and climate change. Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty Images. On Thursday, April 12, Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State, will host a live event in Washington, D.C. on the future of food. “Feeding the World While the Earth Cooks” will examine post-climate-change agriculture, the rising demand for meat, and more. Click here for a full agenda and to RSVP. The Studebakers plying up and down Havana’s boardwalk aren’t the best advertisement for dynamism and innovation.
But if you want to see what tomorrow’s fossil-fuel-free, climate-change-resilient, high-tech farming looks like, there are few places on earth like the Republic of Cuba. Under the Warsaw Pact, Cuba sent rum and sugar to the red side of the Iron Curtain. Unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides that 20th-century agriculture had taken for granted, the country faced extreme weather events and a limit to the land and water it could use to grow food. Cuban officials faced the crisis clumsily. Chickens Fed Caffeine, Banned Antibiotics, and Prozac Often Without The Farmer’s Knowledge. Qmnonic'/CC BY 2.0 It’s no surprise that conventionally factory farmed chickens aren't fed the best diet.
We already knew that they were routinely fed arsenic. In fact, a 2004 study from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that more than half of store-bought and fast-food chickens contained elevated levels of arsenic. Roughly 2.2 million pounds of it are being used every year to produce 43 billion pounds of poultry. New research not only confirms use of arsenic, but finds the addition of a frightening elixir of drugs that includes caffeine, banned antibiotics, and even Prozac. Their Feathers Tell the Tale By doing a test on their feathers, which is similar to that of human fingernails in the way it accumulates chemicals, they found caffeine, antihistamines, acetaminophen, fluroquinolones (banned antibiotics), arsenic, and even Prozac (in chicken imported from China).
Farmers Often Unaware. Yet Another Study Links Insecticide To Bee Losses. Halibut pierced with mysterious ’projectile parasite’ The newly-discovered parasite which creates mysterious holes in the Greenland halibut was discovered by Greenlandic fishermen, and researchers have yet to figure out how prevalent this parasite is. (Photo: Kurt Buchmann) The halibut is a popular delicacy among seafood lovers. But perhaps the pretty slices and the fine texture of this fish shouldn’t be taken for granted in the future. During filleting work, Greenlandic fishermen recently noticed that a specimen of Greenland halibut was full of strange cavities and holes that resemble shot wounds. The mysteriously infected fish was sent to the Laboratory of Aquatic Pathobiology at the University of Copenhagen, where researchers examined the holes in detail.
They discovered that the Greenland halibut had been infected with a hitherto unknown parasite, which creates circular holes in the fish muscle. Holes go straight through the flesh The researchers have subsequently nicknamed the parasite ‘the projectile parasite’. No threat to humans. Monsanto’s Roundup Can Cause Amphibians to Change Shape. NASA's Perpetual Ocean animation turns ocean currents into art. Explosion, Pollution, Massive Oil Spill Probable: North Sea Gas Leak.