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Australia’s tropical rainforests are some of the oldest in the world.Credit: Alexander Schenkin
Trees are dying in Australia’s rainforest
The risk of trees dying in the tropical forests of northern Australia has doubled since the mid-1980s. The results come from an extraordinary catalogue of tree deaths recorded at 24 sites for almost 50 years. The team recorded 2,305 deaths among dozens of species and found that the trees’ death rate increased from an average of 1% a year to 2% a year. The rise in trees dying has occurred at the same time as a long-term drying trend in the atmosphere that researchers link to the warming climate.
Monkeypox in United States and Europe
A small number of people who’ve caught monkeypox, a chickenpox-like infection, has been identified in the United Kingdom, United States, Spain and Portugal. Some of these individuals have not travelled to West or Central Africa, where the disease is more common and is thought to jump to people through contact with wild animals. This suggests that the virus is spreading under the radar in the United States and Europe. “We’re seeing this expansion of confirmed and suspect cases globally,” says Jennifer McQuiston at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have a sense that no one has their arms around this to know how large and expansive it might be.”
Pollution kills 9 million people a year
One in six deaths worldwide in 2019 was related to pollution. Almost all of these — 90% — occur in low- and middle-income countries. The good news is that deaths attributable to the types of pollution associated with extreme poverty — such as poor sanitation and household air pollution caused by burning fuel indoors — are dropping. But newer forms, including particles from burning fossil fuels and lead from shoddy recycling of batteries and electronic waste, are on the rise. So, overall, the situation has not improved since 2015. “The number of global early deaths from exposure to pollution doesn’t surprise me,” says atmospheric scientist Eloise Marais. “What’s most concerning is the lack of adoption of measures to address the issue”.
Reference: The Lancet Planetary Health paper
Features & opinion
Look to climate treaties for better health
Global-health efforts should be bolstered by a network of international treaties and legal agreements similar to those that protect the climate, argues Alexandra Phelan, a lawyer and researcher specializing in the governance of pandemics and climate change. “The key point is not to look at any single treaty, accord or policy as the outcome — there have been so many disappointments,” she writes. Instead, we should look at how these mechanisms function together to form a scaffolding that supports complex global cooperation.
How to build a better mask
Origami-inspired folds, soft silicone and a transparent design are among the features of the ten finalists of the Mask Innovation Challenge, run by the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Despite masks becoming less ubiquitous in some places, there is a big appetite for innovation in the “rather underfunded and a little stagnant” mask-development landscape, says Kumiko Lippold, a BARDA pharmacologist and toxicologist who organized the challenge. And pollution, rather than pathogens, is the primary target of many of the mask developers.
Liverpool’s lost synchrocyclotron
In 1951, Liverpool, UK, was still marked by bomb damage from the Second World War. Nevertheless, led by Nobel-prizewinning physicist James Chadwick, the city’s university managed to construct a world-leading synchrocyclotron. Built into the Earth underneath the crypt of the city’s partially built cathedral, it was the first of its type that allowed the beam of accelerated particles to be directed at an outside target. By 1968, it was supplanted by machines at CERN in Geneva, and no trace of it remains.
Infographic of the week
Source: A. S. Bernstein et al. Sci. Adv. 8, eabl4183 (2022).
