Credit: Yuepeng Pan
Removal of pollutants from the air, or atmospheric deposition, is a natural cleaning mechanism. However, the removed toxic matters don t just disappear on the Earth. China s Soil Pollution Survey released in 2014 shows that 19.4% of the Chinese farmland soil was polluted and 82% of pollutant was toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, which can cause chronic health problems.
Atmospheric deposition is an important source of these heavy metals in the soil but it tends to be neglected. Unlike sources from irrigation water, sewage sludge, fertilizers and livestock manures, atmospheric deposition can t easily be perceived. And the paucity of measurements also makes it difficult to track what happens to heavy metals when they fall from the air to the soil.
Credit: NOAA
Rutgers scientists for the first time have pinpointed the sizes of microplastics from a highly urbanized estuarine and coastal system with numerous sources of fresh water, including the Hudson River and Raritan River.
Their study of tiny pieces of plastic in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary in New Jersey and New York indicates that stormwater could be an important source of the plastic pollution that plagues oceans, bays, rivers and other waters and threatens aquatic and other life. Stormwater, an understudied pathway for microplastics to enter waterways, had similar or higher concentrations of plastics compared with effluent from wastewater sewage treatment plants, said senior author Nicole Fahrenfeld, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. More research is needed to increase understanding of the full impact of microplastics on ecosystems.
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IMAGE: Benjamin K Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School. view more
Credit: University of Sussex
The hidden social, environmental and health costs of the world s energy and transport sectors is equal to more than a quarter of the globe s entire economic output, new research from the University of Sussex Business School and Hanyang University reveals.
According to analysis carried out by Professor Benjamin K. Sovacool and Professor Jinsoo Kim, the combined externalities for the energy and transport sectors worldwide is an estimated average of $24.662 trillion - the equivalent to 28.7% of global Gross Domestic Product.
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IMAGE: An initial crack in a film creates a RVPB (a). A second crack event in the film (b) causes a collapse front to be formed which sweeps up the RVPB. view more
Credit: Tokyo Metropolitan University
Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have revealed how liquid foams collapse by observing individual collapse events with high-speed video microscopy. They found that cracks in films led to a receding liquid front which sweeps up the original film border, inverts its shape, and releases a droplet which hits and breaks other films. Their observations and physical model provide key insights into how to make foams more or less resistant to collapse.
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A new study shows that a widespread decline in abundance of emergent insects - whose immature stages develop in lakes and streams while the adults live on land - can help to explain the alarming decline in abundance and diversity of aerial insectivorous birds (i.e. preying on flying insects) across the USA. In turn, the decline in emergent insects appears to be driven by human disturbance and pollution of water bodies, especially in streams. This study, published in
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, is one of the first to find evidence for a causal link between the decline of insectivorous birds, the decline of emergent aquatic insects, and poor water quality.