Study finds exposure to common air pollutants alters adolescent brain development

For the first time, researchers at OHSU evaluated the long-term impact of air pollution on adolescent brain health and development.
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / AI generated

Physician-scientists at Oregon Health & Science University warn that exposure to air pollution may have serious implications for a child’s developing brain.

In a recent study published in the journal Environmental Research, researchers in OHSU’s Developmental Brain Imaging Lab found that air pollution is associated with structural changes in the adolescent brain, specifically in the frontal and temporal regions — the areas responsible for executive function, language, mood regulation and socioemotional processing.

Air pollution causes harmful contaminants, such as particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and ozone, to circulate in the environment. It has been exacerbated over the past two centuries by industrialization, vehicle emissions, and, more recently, wildfires.

Exposure to PFAS and PCBs linked to higher odds of MS

Aina Vaivade and Kim Kultima have measured the levels of common environmental pollutants in the blood of people with MS using a mass spectrometer (pictured).
Photo Credit: Tobias Sterner/Uppsala University

People who have been exposed to both PFAS and PCBs are more likely to be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). These new research findings are based on analyses of blood samples from more than 1,800 individuals in Sweden, one of the most comprehensive studies to date on the influence of chemical environmental exposure on the development of MS. 

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease in which both genetic and environmental factors can contribute to the risk of the disease. In the current study, researchers analyzed blood from individuals who had recently been diagnosed with MS to investigate concentrations of the common environmental contaminants PFAS and PCBs. 

Storms in the Southern Ocean mitigates global warming

Visible satellite image showing storms sweeping across the Southern Ocean on 4 January 2019.
Photo Credit: NASA Worldview Snapshot

Intense storms that sweep over the Southern Ocean enable the ocean to absorb more heat from the atmosphere. New research from the University of Gothenburg shows that today’s climate models underestimate how storms mix the ocean and thereby give less reliable future projections of our climate. 

The Southern Ocean is a vast expanse of ocean encircling the Antarctic continent, regulating Earth’s climate by moving heat, carbon, and nutrients out in the world’s oceans. 

It provides a critical climate service by absorbing over 75 per cent of the excess heat generated by humans globally. The Southern Ocean’s capacity to reduce climate warming depends on how efficiently it can absorb heat from our atmosphere.  

Biodegradable wet wipes remain in rivers for more than five weeks

Photo Credit: Christine Sandu

Scientists have tested, for the first time, how biodegradable wet wipes break down when flushed rather than composted discovering that most wipes remain after five weeks – a finding the research team says challenges the marketing of these products. 

Researchers from Cardiff University’s Schools of Biosciences, Chemistry and Engineering tested two widely available brands of wipes labelled as ‘biodegradable’ in ten urban rivers and streams in Cardiff, UK 

For five weeks, the team tracked the degradation of the wet wipes in these locations by testing their tensile strength loss, and recording environmental factors such as microbial biomass, water chemistry, temperature, and river-level fluctuations. 

Fine particles in pollution are associated with early signs of autoimmune disease

Photo Credit: Chris LeBoutillier

A new study has linked air pollution exposure and immune-system changes that often precede the onset of autoimmune diseases. 

McGill University researchers analyzing Ontario data found that fine particles in air pollution are associated with higher levels of a biomarker linked with autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus. 

“These results point us in a new direction for understanding how air pollution might trigger immune system changes that are associated with autoimmune disease,” said Dr. Sasha Bernatsky, a James McGill Professor of Medicine and member of the McGill Centre for Climate Change and Health, the Division of Rheumatology and the Centre for Outcome Research and Evaluation. “We know some genetic factors play a role in autoimmune disease, but they don’t tell the whole story.” 

SoMAS Study: Microplastics in Oceans Distort Carbon Cycle Understanding

Plastic items, such as this part of a swimming float (blue), are often seen at ocean shorelines. These products eventually break down into microplastics, which permeate the oceans and add to the distribution of carbon along with organic matter.
Photo Credit: Luis Medina.

A study by researchers in Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) shows that when microplastics are accidentally collected and measured with natural ocean organic particles, the carbon released by plastics during combustion appears as if it came from natural organic matter, which distorts scientists’ understanding of the ocean’s carbon cycle.

The carbon cycle in our oceans is critical to the balance of life in ocean waters and for reducing carbon in the atmosphere, a significant process to curbing climate change or global warming.

Microplastics are everywhere in the oceans. These small plastic fragments come from the breakdown of larger plastic items polluting the seas. Once they reach the sea through rivers, wastewater or runoff, they spread through coastal and open-ocean waters.

Temporary carbon removals can compensate warming from methane emissions

Photo Credit: Marita Kavelashvili

Carbon removal projects could prove vital in offsetting methane emissions – the second largest contributor to global warming. 

Nature-based schemes that aim to remove CO2 through methods such as afforestation and reforestation are criticized for being temporary – the carbon removed is often re-released once projects end – as well as fraught with risk.  

But climate change researchers have shown they can play an important role in neutralizing the environmental impact of methane. 

Methane and carbon dioxide behave differently over time: methane warms the planet much more rapidly than carbon dioxide, causing more damage in the short to medium term, but methane has little long-term impact on global temperatures as it dissipates over time.  

Heat and drought change what forests breathe out

Qingyuan County forest research site
Photo Credit: Kai Huang/UCR

Scientists have long warned that rising global temperatures would force forest soils to leak more nitrogen gas into the air, further increasing both pollution and warming while robbing trees of an essential growth factor. But a new study challenges these assumptions. 

After six years of UC Riverside-led research in a temperate Chinese forest, researchers have found that warming may be reducing nitrogen emissions, at least in places where rainfall is scarce.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the result of UCR’s collaboration with a large team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers stationed in China’s Shenyang City. These researchers maintained the infrastructure used to take more than 200,000 gas measurements from forest soil over six years.

The mystery of the missing deep ocean carbon fixers

Alyson Santoro Associate Professor Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology
Alyson Santoro's research focuses on microbes involved in nutrient cycling in the ocean, especially of the element nitrogen. This research combines laboratory experiments with field observations, and to date has used genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and stable isotope geochemistry as tools to uncover the activity of microbes in the mesopelagic ocean.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of California, Santa Barbara

In a step toward better understanding how the ocean sequesters carbon, new findings from UC Santa Barbara researchers and collaborators challenge the current view of how carbon dioxide is “fixed” in the sunless ocean depths. UCSB microbial oceanographer Alyson Santoro and colleagues, publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience, present results that help to reconcile discrepancies in accounting for nitrogen supply and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) fixation at depth.

“Something that we’ve been trying to get a better handle on is how much of the carbon in the ocean is getting fixed,” Santoro said. “The numbers work out now, which is great.”  

Rising levels of banned toxic chemicals in otters from Wales

Photo Credit: Lilian Dibbern

New research has found that the levels of toxic industrial chemicals, which were banned over 40 years ago, are rising in otters in Wales. 

The Cardiff University Otter Project, in collaboration with Natural Resources Wales analyzed liver samples from Eurasian otters (Lutralutra) collected across Wales between 2010 and 2019. The team found Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in every otter they tested. Of the otters sampled, 16% exceeded a toxic threshold, which is known to impair reproduction. 

PCBs were once widely used in electrical equipment, paints, and plastics due to their stability and heat resistance. Although banned in the 1980s, their environmental persistence means they continue to accumulate in wildlife and can be found in high concentrations in top predators. 

Counting salmon is a breeze with airborne eDNA

A male Coho salmon, featuring the characteristic hooked nose, returns to spawn from the Oregon Coast.
Photo Credit: NOAA Fisheries

During the annual salmon run last fall, University of Washington researchers pulled salmon DNA out of thin air and used it to estimate the number of fish that passed through the adjacent river. Aden Yincheong Ip, a UW research scientist of marine and environmental affairs, began formulating the driving hypothesis for the study while hiking on the Olympic Peninsula.

“I saw the fish jumping and the water splashing and I started thinking — could we recover their genetic material from the air?,” he said.

The researchers placed air filters at several sites on Issaquah Creek, near the Issaquah Salmon Hatchery in Washington. To their amazement, the filters captured Coho salmon DNA, even 10 to 12 feet from the river. Scientists collect environmental DNA, or eDNA, to identify species living in or passing through an area, but few have attempted to track aquatic species by sampling air.

Clean biogas – measurable everywhere

Ayush Agarwal worked on the analysis of biogas during his doctoral studies at the PSI Center for Energy and Environmental Sciences at PSI.
Photo Credit: © Paul Scherrer Institute PSI/Markus Fischer

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have developed a new analytical method that can detect even tiny amounts of critical impurities in biogas. This procedure can be used even by small biogas plants without the need for major investment – thus facilitating the energy transition.

The market for biogas is growing. According to the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, Switzerland fed 471 gigawatt hours of this fuel into the natural gas grid last year – roughly twice the amount fed in ten years ago. This comes with an increase in the need to measure impurities in the biogas quickly and reliably, because strict quality criteria apply to this green gas.  

Researchers at PSI’s Center for Energy and Environmental Sciences have now come up with a solution to this problem. The analytical method they have developed can simultaneously detect the two most critical impurities in biogas: sulfur compounds and siloxanes. They have now presented their method in the journal Progress in Energy. 

Researchers Warn: Climate Change Could Expand Habitats for Malaria Mosquitoes

“Our climate scenarios show that we can prevent much of this by limiting climate change.," says lead author of the study, Tiem van der Deure.
Illustration Credit: University of Copenhagen

An insistent buzzing at sunset followed by itchy, spotted legs. Here in Denmark, mosquitoes are mostly an annoying – but generally harmless – nuisance. That is far from the case in many parts of the world. 

Every year, around 600,000 people die from malaria, a mosquito-borne disease – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and children are the most vulnerable. This makes malaria one of the deadliest infectious diseases globally. 

A new study from the University of Copenhagen, published in Global Change Biology, shows that future climate change could create more favorable conditions for malaria mosquitoes, exposing millions of people across large parts of Africa to more dangerous mosquito bites.  

Over half of global coastal settlements are retreating inland due to intensifying climate risks

Hurricane Florence moved toward the U.S. East Coast as it intensified to a Category 4 storm, with one-minute sustained winds of 130 mph Monday September 10, 2018. This image, captured by the GOES East satellite at 10:00 am ET, showed Florence in the western Atlantic, about 600 miles southeast of Bermuda, at Category 3 intensity. The storm had developed a small but well-defined eye and a symmetrical appearance typical of major hurricanes that are rapidly intensifying.
Image Credit: NOAA

For centuries, coastlines have attracted dense human settlement and economic activity. Today, more than 40 percent of the global population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast, facing accelerating sea-level rise, coastal erosion, flooding, and tropical cyclones. 

Although moving away from the coast - known as “retreat” - is often viewed as an adaptive strategy, its global extent and drivers have remained unclear. A new study published in Nature Climate Change fills this gap by providing the first global evidence that coastal retreat is driven more by social and infrastructural vulnerability than by historical exposure to hazards. 

The study was conducted by an international team led by researchers from Sichuan University and included remote sensing experts from the University of Copenhagen (Alexander Prishchepov and Shengping Ding, IGN). It maps settlement movements across 1,071 coastal regions in 155 countries. By integrating nighttime light observations with global socioeconomic datasets, the researchers found that 56% of coastal regions have retreated from the coast from 1992 to 2019, and 16% of regions, including the Copenhagen area in Denmark, have moved closer to the coast, while 28% have remained stable. 

Scientific Models Overestimate Natural Processes That Mitigate Climate Change

Silky lupine plants at Lassen National Park in California
Photo Credit: Duncan Menge

High levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide intensify climate change, but high carbon dioxide levels can also stimulate plant growth. Plant growth removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, partially mitigating the effects of climate change. However, plants only grow faster in the presence of high levels of carbon dioxide if they can also acquire enough nitrogen from the atmosphere to do so. The actual amount of nitrogen acquired from the atmosphere was reassessed in a study co-led by Columbia faculty that was released this summer; it was shown to be significantly lower than previously estimated.

Microplastics pose a human health risk in more ways than one

Bio-beads collected near Truro.
Photo Credit Beach Guardian

A new study shows that microplastics in the natural environment are colonized by pathogenic and antimicrobial resistant bacteria. The study team calls for urgent action for waste management and strongly recommends wearing gloves when taking part in beach cleans. 

Microplastics are plastic particles less than 5mm in size and are extremely widespread pollutants. It is estimated that over 125 trillion particles have accumulated in the ocean (surface to seabed) and they have also been detected in soils, rivers, lakes, animals and the human body. 

An emerging concern associated with microplastics is the microbial communities that rapidly make their home on the particle surface, forming complex biofilms known as the “Plastisphere”. These communities may often include pathogenic (disease-causing) or antimicrobial resistant (AMR) bacteria. 

Antarctic mountains could boost ocean carbon absorption

Glaciers transport sediments from Antarctica to the coast.
Photo Credit: Dr Kate Winter, Northumbria University

Research involving scientists from Newcastle University has revealed new hope in natural environmental systems found in Antarctica which could help mitigate the overall rise of carbon dioxide. 

As Antarctica's ice sheets thin due to climate change, newly exposed mountain peaks could significantly increase the supply of vital nutrients to the Southern Ocean which surrounds the continent, potentially enhancing its ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide over long timescales, according to the research published in Nature Communications. 

Led by Northumbria University, a team of scientists looked at analysis of sediment samples from East Antarctica's Sør Rondane Mountains. They discovered that weathered rocks exposed above the ice surface contain iron concentrations up to ten times higher than previously reported from the Antarctic continent. This bioavailable iron is transported to the ocean by glaciers and icebergs, where it fuels the growth of phytoplankton – microscopic marine organisms that absorb CO₂ through photosynthesis. 

Environmental Science: In-Depth Description

Photo Credit: Esa Kaifa

Environmental science is an interdisciplinary academic field that integrates physical, biological, and information sciences to study the environment and identify solutions to environmental problems. By combining disciplines such as ecology, biology, physics, chemistry, plant science, zoology, mineralogy, oceanography, limnology, soil science, geology and physical geography, and atmospheric science, it seeks to understand the complex interactions between the natural world and human societies.

The primary goal of environmental science is to learn how the natural world works, to understand how we interact with the environment, and to determine how we can live sustainably without degrading our life-support system.

5,500 toxic sites in U.S. at risk of flooding because of sea level rise

U.S. face rising flood risks due to sea-level rise.
Photo Credit: Wes Warren

More than 5,500 hazardous sites across the U.S. are projected to be at risk of coastal flooding by 2100, according to newly published research led by University of California scientists.

The researchers found that if heat-trapping pollution grows unchecked, rising sea levels will flood a wide range of sites, including facilities that handle sewage, toxic waste, oil and gas, and other industrial pollutants, posing serious threats to public health and neighboring communities. The peer-reviewed study — Sea level rise and flooding of hazardous sites in marginalized communities across the United States – was just published in the London-based scientific journal Nature Communications. 

Study shows waste cardboard is effective for power generation

Photo Credit: Jon Moore

A new study has shown for the first time that waste cardboard can be used as an effective source of biomass fuel for large scale power generation. 

Engineers from the University of Nottingham have provided the first comprehensive characterization of cardboard as a potential fuel source and created a new method to assess the composition of the material providing a practical tool for fuel assessment for cardboards. The study has been published in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy.