Clean Up Pollution with Spinach
In neighborhoods near industrial areas, dangerous levels of lead have been found in residents’ backyards. The amount of lead varies widely from yard to yard, and even within each yard, making some of them dangerous to play or grow vegetables in, since lead can cause learning disabilities. How to soak it up??Plant spinach (just don’t eat any of it).
Soil scientist Samantha Langley-Turnbaugh planted spinach gardens in several contaminated yards in Bayside, Oregon, to see if the plants could help clean up contaminated soil. She says, “People were planting backyard gardens and hadn’t even thought about the fact that there were heavy metals in the soil that could be taken up into the plants.”
read more
Life is Everywhere in Space
Astronomers now think that life spread throughout the Milky Way via microbes hitching a ride on asteroids and comets, and that it didn’t originate on Earth. It will eventually leak out into other galaxies?if it hasn’t already. This means that life is probably widespread, although the planet(s) where life originated may now be barren or may never be identified. However, this doesn’t mean ET will look familiar, because evolution can take many twists and turns.
read more
Global Dimming
In 1985, researcher Atsumu Ohmura discovered that it’s too dark. When he checked the levels of sunlight recorded in Europe and compared them to similar measurements made in the 1960s, he found that levels of solar radiation hitting the Earth had declined by more than 10%.
David Adam writes in The Guardian that this is happening despite the fact that the planet is getting hotter. Ohmura says, “I was shocked. The difference was so big that I just could not believe it.” Scientists now refer to this as “global dimming.” Over the past 50 years, the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth has decreased by about 3% a decade.
read more