Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming could lead to an increase in allergies to ragweed and other plants by mid-century, according to Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School. His study found that ragweed grown in an atmosphere with double the current carbon dioxide levels produced 61 percent more pollen than normal. A doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to occur between 2050 and 2100.
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Calum McLeod writes in the U.K newspaper the ?Independent? about a Chinese researcher who has discovered, close to the Mongolian border, 2,500-year-old stone circles in the same patterns as modern cropcircles.
Zhang Hui, research fellow at the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi, has discovered more than 20 patterns that appear to match examples found in other countries, but may pre-date them by up to 3,000 years. The Chinese stone circles are clearly man-made. ?The primitive peoples who lived there were inspired by the crop circles they saw,? speculates Zhang. ?They thought the circles were a way of communicating with the gods, and so placed rocks in the shape of the circles.?
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The 22-year-old rock star Lance Bass of the group ?Nsync plans to take a ride on a Russian Soyuz capsule to the international Alpha station. California millionaire Dennis Tito became the world?s first space tourist in April 2001 after paying $20 million for a seat aboard a Russian rocket to the international space station. South African Internet tycoon Mark Shuttlesworth is due to fly in April.
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Scientists trying to create alternative food sources for astronauts believe we could grow meat on in a laboratory, without slaughtering fish or animals. Scientists at Touro College in New York have managed to make slices of fish grow bigger this way and believe it will be possible in the future to grow meat in industrial quantities from the muscle cell lines of various animals or fish.
?This could save you having to slaughter animals for food,? says project leader Morris Benjaminson, a bioengineer and veteran of a number of NASA projects on recycling waste onboard spacecraft. He?s working on more varied diets for astronauts, who get tired of freeze-dried dinners and tubes of food.
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