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GUARDIAN Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:53:06 GMT
Report casts doubt on Caroline Spelman's claim that majority of UK air pollution comes from continental Europe
Air pollution is prematurely killing 13,000 people a year in Britain compared with fewer than 2,000 deaths a year from road accidents, a major study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded. Of these, cars and lorries are thought to be responsible for 7,000 deaths, aviation almost 2,000, power plants 1,700 with the rest coming from shipping, factories and domestic emissions.
But the report suggested that environment secretary Caroline Spelman may have been wrong to say earlier this year that the most likely cause of a major air pollution event at the London Olympic games in August would come from dirty air drifting in from the continent. The report calculated that about 60% of the polluted air breathed by Britons comes from domestic sources, the rest coming from air crossing the channel from mainland Europe. The researchers estimated for the first.....
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GUARDIAN Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:55:02 GMT
Charmed by a whimsical eco‑expedition
Every year, anything between 2,000 and 10,000 containers tumble off ships into the sea. They don't make news. But when the containers in question were full of rubber ducks, and when those ducks are still, endlessly and unsinkably, wandering the watery ways of the world and washing up on beaches thousands of miles from the spill, the story became irresistible. Washed-up ducks now go for hundreds of pounds on eBay. They've already inspired books by Eric Carle (of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame) and Christopher Brookmyre, and countless pages of journalistic spilled ink.
Among the first things you learn from Donovan Hohn's book on the subject – which is an unusual combination of whimsy and factual punctiliousness – is that they aren't rubber and that only one in four of them is a duck. The Floatee bath toys, which ditched in the mid-Pacific en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington in January 1992, included a yellow duck, a red beaver, a blue...
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GUARDIAN Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:44:18 GMT
OECD report says pollution will become biggest cause of premature death, killing an estimated 3.6 million people a year by 2050
Urban air pollution is set to become the biggest environmental cause of premature death in the coming decades, overtaking even such mass killers as poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water, according to a new report.
Both developed and developing countries will be hit, and by 2050, there could be 3.6 million premature deaths a year from exposure to particulate matter, most of them in China and India. But rich countries will suffer worse effects from exposure to ground-level ozone, because of their ageing populations – older people are more susceptible.
The warning comes in a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is a study of the global environmental outlook until 2050. The report found four key areas that are of most concern – climate change, loss of biodiversity, water and the health........
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GUARDIAN Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:22:00 GMT
Google's policy of penalising companies by removing them from its index for infringing rules on paid links may have come back to haunt it
Google is wrestling with a thorny conundrum: should it block its own Chrome browser from its search index for between a month and a year for breaking its own rules on paid links, after a mixup by some bloggers for a video advertising scheme?
The problem has arisen after Google paid Unruly Media, an international media agency, to get a number of paid bloggers to promote a video for its Chrome browser featuring a US flour company.
But while the bloggers did the job they had been asked to, and put up the video, some went beyond what Unruly Media – and Google – had expected them to, and included links to places where you could download the Chrome browser. Crucially, though, they didn't use the "nofollow" text that Google mandates for paid links. That, strictly, took them over the line on paid links.
The "sponsored" blogposts (such as this one,...
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GUARDIAN Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:29:52 GMT
It is scarcely one quarter the length of the Severn; it rolls not, like London's river, down to the mighty sea, but only as far as Sonning Lock, where it loses itself in the Thames
It is scarcely one quarter the length of the Severn; it rolls not, like London's river, down to the mighty sea, but only as far as Sonning Lock, where it loses itself in the Thames. But many who cherish it for its wildlife, for its fishing, or simply as a chalk stream to stroll by on a summer evening, must be dismayed by reports that the river Kennet is at present reduced at points to little more than a trickle. "Parallel with the street," wrote the topographer HW Timperley in the 1930s, "and a bowshot from it, the Kennet rolls its deep and clear chalk waters beneath the bowery margins of a score of pleasant gardens ..." Not now it doesn't. This same stretch of the river, lovingly commemorated by Betjeman, who was at Marlborough College, has become a miserable spectacle. Richard Benyon, the minister.....
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GUARDIAN Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:00:03 GMT
What does a small Scottish town, bones and radioactive fallout have in common?
This week's element is the alkaline earth metal, strontium, which has the atomic symbol Sr and the atomic number 38. Strontium is a soft silver-white or yellowish (when oxidised) metallic element that is even more chemically reactive than its "little sister", calcium. If you drop strontium into water, for example, it will react vigorously to produce strontium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. Finely powdered strontium metal ignites spontaneously in air at room temperature. But most of us are familiar with strontium because strontium salts are commonly used in fireworks and flares to give a bright (some might say blinding) red color to flames.
Strontium is the 15th most abundant element on Earth, but because of its reactivity, strontium is not found roaming freely in the wild: it is occurs in minerals, mostly in strontianite and celestite. In fact, strontium was given its name in honour of the Scottish......
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