Blue Planet News

A favourite with anglers, lugworms may accelerate the arrival of toxic substances in our food by gorging themselves on grains of waste plastic in sediment.

The particles are bits of plastic waste that are broken down in the sea and which then soak up waterborne contaminants. Since lugworms are sediment-feeders and low in the food chain, the contaminants will be concentrated when the worms are eaten by fish and crabs.

“It accelerates the mechanism by which contaminants accumulate in the food chain,” says Emma Teuten at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Teuten and her colleagues demonstrated in the lab that grains of plastic are much better than grains of sand or silt at adsorbing the common pollutant phenanthrene from water. Phenanthrene belongs to a family of hydrocarbons linked with cancers and respiratory problems, and plastic particles soak up 1000 times more of it than natural ones (Environmental Science & Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es071737s). “They kind of mop it up out of seawater like a sponge,” says Teuten.

source: here

English researchers released Wednesday that human activities such as burning oil, coal and producing CO2 in excessive quantities through by whatever means not only heat the Earth’s surface, but they also increase humidity in the atmosphere whose air we all breathe.

In less than 30 years the humidity at the surface of the planet rose about 2.2%.

They sustain that this sudden rise in the level of humidity will be harmful to people, as more and more will suffer from heat stress. It will also intensify the power of the oceanic winds, the power of tropical storms.

Lead researcher Nathan Gillett of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, told AFP that Earth’s humidity levels will increase by 10 percent by 2100. Click here to continue…

American scientists have created a new porous substance that can soak up heavy metals. The material could potentially be used to remove pollutants such as mercury or lead from water.

The compound, developed by a team at the University of Illinois, is a new type of aerogel. Aerogels, which are a rigid foam in which the water has been replaced with air, are usually used to make superconductors. This areogel, however, was made using chalcogenides rather than silica or carbon.

It works in a similar way to sponge, removing heavy metals from a solution. It