Do you want to go out in the fresh air? Are you running out of seats ● The Nile Delta could be a memory ● Were you afraid of viruses coming out of the permafrost? You have a reason too

Do you want to go out in the fresh air? You don’t have much space left

A disarming study by researchers at Monash University in Australia and published in The Lancet Planetary Health tells us that there is almost no place left on this planet to breathe clean air.

Practically only 0.001% of the planet’s population benefited from a reduction in air pollution. And you can find these areas in Australia, New Zealand, South America and Oceania. But don’t pack your bags, because the pollution has started to make itself felt there as well. It has grown significantly in Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean.

Obviously, the most polluted areas remain East Asia, North America and Europe, the most industrialized areas, although in the last two levels of air pollution have decreased in recent years.

According to researchers, the most important causes of air pollution are the burning of fossil fuels, automobile emissions, heating with wood or coal, the natural gas we use for cooking, wildfires and sandstorms that produce a toxic cocktail of nitrates, carbon, and lead. and arsenic that remains in the atmosphere.

Microparticles of plastic are added to them, which are blown away by the wind. If you add the figure of 8 million deaths per year caused by the mentioned factors alone to everything that the Australian experts said, you will get an idea of ​​what these people wanted to emphasize in their study.

The Nile Delta may become a memory

Massive levels of pollution, rising sea levels, erosion of coastal areas, a significant reduction in Nile flow amid prolonged drought, and a lack of research to account for better water distribution in the agricultural and domestic sectors have led to a near-catastrophic situation in the Nile Delta.

The study from which we learn all this, published in the journal Earth’s Future, also tells us that the level of pollution is enormous. The sediments brought by the Nile are heavily polluted with heavy metals (cadmium, chromium, copper, lead or zinc), especially due to agricultural activities.

And all this comes at a huge cost, both to the 60 million people who depend on the region’s agriculture and water supply, and to the millions of birds and other animals for which the Nile Delta has been a haven.

From this point of view, the situation is irreversible, the authors of the study emphasize. At most, urgent measures can be taken to reduce the level of future pollution. As if this were not enough, the prolonged drought has led to an acute water crisis, and the Egyptian authorities are faced with a huge dilemma: to provide the same amount of water for agricultural work (and increase the level of pollution) or to reduce the level of irrigation (with harsh consequences) and preserve as much water quality as possible .

In essence, a civilization that had flourished for 7,000 years on the banks of the Nile had just reached the point of no return.

Were you afraid of viruses that come out of permafrost? You have a reason too

This is what a team of microbiologists, whose members come from research institutes in Germany, France, Sweden and Russia, tells us. Their research, published in the journal Viruses, tells us that we shouldn’t be so quiet thinking that the risks of some viruses coming back to life from tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago will be very low.

Researchers at the Melnikov Institute in Yakutsk managed to isolate 13 new viruses from seven samples of Siberian permafrost. And what is interesting, the mentioned viruses were able to infect single-celled organisms, such as amoebas. Absolutely all of them did something similar in laboratory studies. And this, according to specialists, should sound the alarm.

At the moment, no one knows whether and how such viruses can infect humans. However, there is no doubt that our immune system evolved according to what it encountered in the environment. And in the face of viruses that are tens of thousands of years old, we no longer have immunity. Well, it’s not something we didn’t know either.

It would be worse if the ancient bacteria came to light from the permafrost, the quoted researchers say. This is believed to have led to an anthrax outbreak in 2016 that killed thousands of reindeer and infected dozens of people in northwestern Siberia.

What we are not told, and what was important to point out, is what we can do in the event of danger. Most likely, we will have to rely on ongoing research happening right now to identify such threats and learn how to counter them.

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