The links between greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, and health.
Credit: The Lancet
Climate change, if left unchecked, threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in global health. That’s the conclusion of a study released Monday by an international commission convened by the Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK. Declaring it a “medical emergency,” the authors argued that the potential impacts of global warming—such as floods, drought, heat stress, catastrophic storms, the spread of disease, and increased food insecurity—pose a “potentially catastrophic risk” to human health. (emphasis added)
The report notes that deaths from air pollution and heat waves have been on the rise. In 2010, for example, wildfires in Russia burned 2.7 million acres, doubling the amount of particulate matter in the Moscow region. The pollution, combined with a severe heat wave, contributed to an increase of 11,000 deaths in just one month. (Or consider a more recent example, when nearly
Credit: The Huffington Post The typical American diet is loaded with fat and sugar, and it may be hurting not only our physical health, but also our ability to think clearly. New research from Oregon State University finds a high-sugar, high-fat diet causes changes in gut bacteria that seem to lead to significant losses in cognitive flexibility, a measurement of the brain’s ability to switch between thinking about one concept to another, and to adapt to changes in the environment. The study, which was conducted on mice and published this week in the journal Neuroscience, found that a high-sugar diet was particularly detrimental to brain function, leading not only to decreased cognitive flexibility but also to impairments in short- and long-term memory. “We’ve known for a while that too much fat and sugar are not good for you,” Dr. Kathy Magnusson, a biomedical scientist at the university and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “This work suggests that fat and sugar are altering your healthy bacterial systems, and […] Credit: Amir Cohen/Reuters The growing rift between liberal American Jews and the Israeli government was exacerbated last week when the newly appointed Minister of Religious Affairs, David Azoulay, referred to Reform Judaism as “a catastrophe for the people of Israel.” The liberal Reform movement is important in the United States, but relatively insignificant in Israel, where the ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate is a branch of the government. Most Israeli Jews are either Orthodox or completely non-observant. But the majority of American Jews identify with the liberal Conservative and Reform movements, and this fact has become enormously divisive—particularly as the Rabbinate becomes ever more radically right-wing in its religious rulings and political pronouncements. Azoulay, who is a member of the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox Shas party, made his remarks in the context of a meeting with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who is tasked with negotiating a compromise regarding the right of Reform and Conservative women to pray as a group and read from the Torah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Orthodox tradition prohibits women from […] Credit: Shutterstock Why are some people so much more attractive to mosquitoes than others? And what can you do about the pesky little bloodsuckers, especially if you don’t want to resort to DEET? (DEET, while effective, is also weakly neurotoxic in humans.) To start, there are some 150 different species of mosquitoes in the United States, and they differ in biting persistence, habits, ability to transmit disease, and even flying ability. Mosquitoes of the genus Culex are painful and persistent biters and they will gladly fly into your house to bite you. They bite at dusk and after dark, and they can spread West Nile virus. On the upside, however, they are not strong fliers and won’t fly long distances from where they hatched. And, they’d prefer to bite a bird than a human. A common Culex species in the U.S. is C. pipiens, the Northern House mosquito. Then there’s the genus Aedes, which includes A. aegypti and A. albopictus, the Asian Tiger mosquito. The former is not a problem in […] In this Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2015 photo, the Castillio de San Marcos fort, built over 450 years ago, is separated from the Matanzas River by a sea wall in St. Augustine, Fla. St. Augustine is one of many chronically flooded Florida communities afraid their buildings and economies will be inundated by rising seas in just a couple of decades. WASHINGTON, D.C. — In advance of the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell today released a report revealing that national park infrastructure […]
Credit: AP/John Raoux
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
