The Chinese government has been scrambling to cut down on air pollution before the world’s best athletes compete in the Olympics next month; they’ve closed down factories near Beijing and allowed people to drive their cars only every other day.
But according to researchers from Northwestern University, athletes aren’t the only ones who need to be wary of dirty air. Even spectators, they say, could suffer serious health problems from traveling to China for the games.
We now have an answer to the question nobody was asking: Which would win in a fight—a leopard or a crocodile?
The leopard came out on top, as you can see in the gripping images here. An American photographer was trying to capture hippos at a watering hole in South Africa when this battle began right in front of him.
Aircraft designers are always on the lookout for tough but lightweight materials. Chris Broomell of the University of California, Santa Barbara may have found a new candidate—on the head of a worm.
The ragworm, sometimes called the sandworm (but not to be confused with the hideous but fictional creatures from Dune), boasts two ultra-tough pincers that it uses to burrow into ocean sediment. At 90 percent protein, you’d expect the worm’s mouth-parts to be tough, Broomell told New Scientist, but they have an additional secret—they’re fortified with zinc. The metal bonds those proteins together, and the result is three times stronger than the polymers humans can currently create.
Maybe they should call it “soggy old England.”
Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry published a survey this week finding that U.K. residents used more water, and cared less about their water waste and pollution, than their Western European counterparts. Only 48 percent of British survey subjects said they showered for less than five minutes, as opposed to 59 percent for both the French and Spanish.
As always, it’s hard to know how accurately the survey statistics reflect real life. The French and Spanish appear to be the most water-conscious Western Europeans, but knowing that you’re wasting water isn’t the same as stopping your waste.
On Monday we brought you the story of the Russian scientists forced to evacuate their Arctic research station because their ice floe melted. Today, Nature has an interview with Jürgen Graeser, a German scientist who spent the winter with the Russians at North Pole 35.
So what did Graeser learn during his time up there?
1. Bring a flare gun. Graeser guesses that the team had 30 or so separate run-ins with polar bears, but none of them turned deadly because the flares scared off the bears.
Here’s another case from the “pitting one animal against another” file: Japanese conservationists want to use bees to protect terns from crows.
Seabirds called little terns nest near Tokyo’s airport after migrating north from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. But National Geographic reports that are area’s crows are bad neighbors, prone to attacking and killing young terns.
Earlier this month, we wrote that Santa Claus might have no home this summer as scientists speculate that the Earth could see an ice-free North Pole. Now Russian scientists trying to study Arctic warming have had to abandon their work to keep from ending up all wet.
In September, the Russian team set up North Pole 35, an Arctic headquarters where they could study pollution levels the how fast the ice was melting. Unfortunately for them, and the world in general, the ice melted faster than they anticipated: Their ice floe home, which was almost four miles wide in September, shrank to only one-third of a mile across this summer. Russia evacuated, and the last 20 scientists and their dogs climbed aboard a rescue ship yesterday.
The Telegraph reports that earlier this week in Australia, doctors at Royal Children’s Hospital announced that they’d diagnosed the first case of so-called “climate change delusion.” Doctors Robert Salo and Josh Wolfe say a 17-year-old male had refused to drink any water out of eco-guilt—he believed his water consumption would cause the deaths of millions of people.
The story seems almost too outrageous to be true, but some blogs and newspapers have jumped on the “Al Gore is literally driving people crazy” angle, and blamed media coverage of global warming for this Australian’s mental condition. The scapegoating seems reminiscent of the story last month about the pregnancy pact at a Massachusetts high school (which was a hoax), when culture warriors were quick to blame films like Knocked Up and Juno for supposedly glamorizing pregnancy or single parenthood. So far, however, we haven’t heard anyone blame this young man’s affliction on the anti-consumption message of Wall-E.
Do penguins like salsa?
As the continents have made their slow drift around the world, the landmasses have intermingled in all sorts of ways, and occasionally formed supercontinents like Pangaea and Gondwanaland. Now, University of Minnesota Duluth geologist John Goodge says that in a supercontinent called Rodinia, which sat near the Equator 800 million years ago, Antarctica and Arizona used to be neighbors.
According to Science News, experts have argued over what bordered Laurentia—the geologic name for the large landmass that contained most of what is now North America—during the time the continents were clustered in Rodinia. Australia, Siberia and China were all candidates.
So Goodge tested the presence of different chemical isotopes, trying to get a match. And he did—to Eastern Antarctica. Granite found there matches the chemical composition of granite from the American Southwest, he says, and the Transantarctic Mountains contain the same sediments as Laurentian samples he’s studied.
The Antarctica-America connection may have been short-lived; Rodinia broke apart about 750 million years ago. No word yet whether the split was amicable.
Image: iStockphoto
The creators of The Red Balloon probably never had this in mind.
Aérophile, a French company that produces hot air balloons, has created a model that changes color to tell people how clean—or unclean—the Parisian air is that day. After gathering data from Airparif, an agency that monitors air quality in France, the balloon’s owners will adjust its color to correspond with the pollution level—green meaning excellent air quality, yellow signifying OK, and red meaning highly polluted.
