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Researchers map how people in cities get a health boost from nature
Trees lining a street may encourage people to take a longer stroll or choose to bike to work. New research shows how access to natural areas in cities can improve human health by supporting physical activity. The researchers plan to equip city planners with tools to create healthier, more sustainable cities around the world. By Sarah Cafasso
Your local city park may be improving your health, according to a new paper led by Stanford University researchers. The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lays out how access to nature increases people’s physical activity – and therefore overall health – in cities. Lack of physical activity in the U.S. results in $117 billion a year in related health care costs and leads to 3.2 million deaths globally every year. It may seem like an intuitive connection, but the new research closes an
Now, there is new evidence that allergy season is increasing in the Bay Area and researchers say climate change may be to blame.
For more than 20 years, Dr. Theodore Chu has used this special collector in Los Altos to measure and record pollen counts. Now, researchers at Stanford have analyzed his data from 2002-19.
“The number of weeks in which pollens are active is going up,” said Bibek Paudel, post doctoral researcher at Stanford School of Medicine. “If it was three months, now it is four to five months and maybe in time with a change in climate, there may be a time when half the year is impacted by pollens.”
Increasingly ferocious wildfires in the western US are taking a devastating toll on the region’s air quality, with wildfire smoke now accounting for half of all air pollution during the worst wildfire years, according to a new study. Scientists from Stanford University and UC San Diego have found that toxic plumes of smoke, which can blanket western states for weeks when wildfires are raging, are reversing decades of gains in cutting air.