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Credit: Mj Riches
In the 1995 movie Outbreak, Dustin Hoffman s character realizes, with appropriately dramatic horror, that an infectious virus is airborne because it s found to be spreading through hospital vents.
The issue of whether our real-life pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, is airborne is predictably more complex. The current body of evidence suggests that COVID-19 primarily spreads through respiratory droplets - the small, liquid particles you sneeze or cough, that travel some distance, and fall to the floor. But consensus is mounting that, under the right circumstances, smaller floating particles called aerosols can carry the virus over longer distances and remain suspended in air for longer periods. Scientists are still determining SARS-CoV-2 s favorite way to travel.
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IMAGE: Georgia Tech researcher Jean C. Rivera-Rios obtains air samples from an office on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. view more
Credit: John Toon, Georgia Tech
If you re looking for an indoor space with a low level of particulate air pollution, a commercial airliner flying at cruising altitude may be your best option. A newly reported study of air quality in indoor spaces such as stores, restaurants, offices, public transportation and commercial jets shows aircraft cabins with the lowest levels of tiny aerosol particles.
Conducted in July 2020, the study included monitoring both the number of particles and their total mass across a broad range of indoor locations, including 19 commercial flights in which measurements took place throughout departure and arrival terminals, the boarding process, taxiing, climbing, cruising, descent, and deplaning. The monitoring could not identify the types of the particles and therefore does not provide
Credit: Sheng-Kai Sun / Nature Communications
The agricultural cultivation of the staple food of rice harbours the risk of possible contamination with arsenic that can reach the grains following uptake by the roots. In their investigation of over 4,000 variants of rice, a Chinese-German research team under the direction of Prof. Dr Rüdiger Hell from the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) of Heidelberg University and Prof. Dr Fang-Jie Zhao of Nanjing Agricultural University (China) discovered a plant variant that resists the toxin. Although the plants thrive in arsenic-contaminated fields, the grains contain far less arsenic than other rice plants. At the same time, this variant has an elevated content of the trace element selenium.
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The Deepwater Horizon disaster began on April 20, 2010 with an explosion on a BP-operated oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers. Almost immediately, oil began spilling into the waters of the gulf, an environmental calamity that took months to bring under control, but not before it became the largest oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.
Nearly 10 years have passed since then, and the oil slick has long since dispersed. Yet, despite early predictions, area wildlife are still feeling the effects of that oil, and research published in
Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry has shown that negative health impacts have befallen not only dolphins alive at the time of the spill, but also in their young, born years later.
New research has found that shrimp like creatures on the South Coast of England have 70 per cent less sperm than less polluted locations elsewhere in the world. The research also discovered that individuals living in the survey area are six times less numerous per square metre than those living in cleaner waters.