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Archive for July 6th, 2015
Radioactive city: how Johannesburg’s townships paying for mining past
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 6th, 2015
Guardian: Johannesburg’s mine dumps look strangely beautiful from a distance. Lustrously yellow in the sun, blazing red at dusk, their huge molehill shapes provide the city with its distinctive skyline.
Up close, it’s a different story. Rasalind Plaatjies has lived in the shadow of a “tailing” – as these piles of mine waste are known – all her adult life. Today, the 62-year-old grandmother from the city’s Riverlea district suffers severe respiratory problems. For 16 hours a day, she is hooked up to an oxygen...
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Climate change compounding threats to Australia’s ecosystems, studies find
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 6th, 2015
Guardian: Climate change is compounding existing threats to Australia’s forests, wetlands and deserts, with several key landscapes now at risk of total collapse, a landmark series of new studies have found.
An assessment of 13 ecosystems across Australia, ranging from the wet tropics of far north Queensland to rare shrubland in Western Australia, found what researchers call a “worrying” climate change impact that adds to existing harm caused by urban development, agriculture and invasive species.
The...
UCSC astronomers court controversy new telescope Hawaii
Posted by Sentinel: None Given on July 6th, 2015
Sentinel: An international coalition of astronomers, including key personnel from UC Santa Cruz, are building the largest telescope in the world at the summit of a sacred Hawaiian mountain.
Construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, which is considered hallowed ground to native Hawaiians, has sparked heated protests and indefinitely closed the summit of the mountain to the public.
If completed, the $1.4-billion telescope’s 98-foot (30 meters) aperture would allow for more than nine times...
What’s in your landscape? Plants alter West Nile virus risk
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on July 6th, 2015
ScienceDaily: A new study looks at how leaf litter in water influences the abundance of Culex pipiens mosquitoes, which can transmit West Nile virus to humans, domestic animals, birds and other wildlife. The study found that different species of leaf litter in standing water influence where Culex pipiens mosquitoes deposit their eggs, how quickly the larvae grow, how big they get and whether they survive to adulthood. Because the mosquitoes feed on bacteria that grow on leaf litter, the team also measured how...