Tires and degrading garbage shed tiny pieces of plastic into the air, creating a form of air pollution that UC San Francisco researchers suspect may be causing respiratory and other illnesses.
A review of some 3,000 studies implicates these particles in a variety of serious health problems. These include male and female infertility, colon cancer and poor lung function. The particles also may contribute to chronic pulmonary inflammation, which can increase the risk of lung cancer.
“These microplastics are basically particulate matter air pollution, and we know this type of air pollution is harmful,” said Tracey J. Woodruff, Ph.D., MPH, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at UCSF.
It added that the average annual cost of poor mental health per employee in finance and insurance was £5,379, more than double that in any of the 14 other sectors covered.
The report adds to a growing volume of research on the impact of a global mental health crisis on companies and the workplace.
According to the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization, about 12bn working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing the global economy $1tn annually.
In the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad, a new plant to desalinate seawater is almost ready. For about a billion dollars, it will produce 7 percent of the area’s drinking water, courtesy of the Pacific Ocean. But in these times of record drought, two Texas entrepreneurs are advocating another solution: Instead of pulling fresh water out of the sea, they want to pull it out of the air. The machine they’re developing at Trinity University in San Antonio, called an atmospheric water generator, is still in its pilot phrase. But to hear Moses West tell it, if the climate conditions are right, the AWG has the potential to end drought.
West, who’s testing the machine along with business partner John Vollmer, calls himself “a water farmer.” He explains that there are three potential sources of human drinking water: groundwater, rivers and gas. Thanks to NASA’s GRACE satellite system, which measures the abundance and quality of aquifers, we know that the Earth’s groundwater supply is dwindling — and increasingly contaminated by pesticides and runoff. Rivers, at least near any major metropolitan area, are out of the question as sources for drinking water. That leaves water vapor, which West calls “the purest, cleanest, most abundant, recyclable source of water that exists on the face of the earth.”
The atmospheric water generator was first developed in Spain, another country with perpetual drought problems, but according to West, it performs best in high-heat, high-humidity areas. It can reliably produce between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water per day, and with the proper institutional support, West says, “I know how to scale this up to produce a million gallons a day, 30 million gallons a month.”
Just a few days after the full release of OpenAI’s o1 model, a company staffer is now claiming that the company has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, have intrigued humans for decades. Now and then someone spots something strange in the sky and believes it to be extra-terrestrial. However, there is a kind of UFO that has only recently been seen in space. These are “UFO galaxies” that are a mystery to humans.
UFO galaxies are big, red and really dusty and can only be seen in infrared light, with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first to spot them in deep space.
This is why they were only discovered recently. They appear similar in size and shape to other galaxies but have never been caught on other telescopes, such as the Hubble. Scientists wanted to figure out more about these galaxies and why they were so red and dusty.
face_with_colon_three A gasoline free future could be used for flying vehicles like cars, spaceships, homes, citywide generators, and really shows a kinda Star Trek and alien like future utopian world free of cancerous gases. It could make the world really clean and it would be perfect for spaceships.
This study reports the creation of a model thermodynamic engine that is fuelled by the energy difference resulting from changing the statistics of a quantum gas from bosonic to fermionic.
Much like a tongue freezes to a frigid metal pole, ice can cause speed up the adsorption, or stickiness, of molecules. An icy surface can also cause molecules to degrade in the presence of light, releasing trace gases. Before researchers can measure these reactions and incorporate their impacts in global atmospheric models, researchers first need to understand the structure of ice itself.
InnovativeTsinghua researchers proposed a reconfigurable quantum entanglement distribution network using siliconphotonics, reducing the required wavelength channels to O(N) and improving the scalability, reconfigurability, and performance of quantum technology.
💫 Meet the area of science that even Albert Einstein himself called “spooky”: quantum entanglement! 🤯
Classical physics is the force governing an extremely predictable world, where an apple set on a table stays there until something causes it to move again.
In the quantum world, not only can the apple end up on Mars, but, hypothetically, it could exist both on the table and on Mars at the same time. It could even be inextricably tied to another apple in some other part of the universe through entanglement. Thus, “reality” as we know it is much more uncertain, with the possibility for many solutions or outcomes to exist, rather than just one.
Quantum entanglement remains a spooky part of our world. Check out the resources below to learn more about how NASA scientists are working to unravel the mysteries of our quantum universe.
Transfer RNAs (called tRNAs for short) are small RNA molecules that play an important role in protein synthesis! Each tRNA corresponds to one of the 20 possible protein building blocks in humans called amino acids. As the ribosome reads each codon along an mRNA, the tRNA bring the correct amino acid, which is then added to the growing protein molecule!
Many types of RNA, including tRNAs, fold into specific shapes that help them function and keep them stable. Complementary sequences at different positions along the length of an RNA fold the molecule into loops and other complex structures.
TRNAs are folded into a distinct L-shape that helps them carry out their function. One end of the tRNA has a specific sequence to match a codon on the mRNA, while the other end of the tRNA has a site to carry the amino acid that will be added to the new protein.
Learn more in our RNA fact sheet!
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is an essential molecule that performs many roles in the cell, from carrying the instructions to make proteins to regulating genes.
