Cleaner air, less soil pollution: Unintended but beneficial side effect of Clean Air Act
2021-03-02
(Press-News.org) Removal of pollutants from the air, or atmospheric deposition, is a natural cleaning mechanism. However, the removed toxic matters don't just disappear on the Earth. China's Soil Pollution Survey released in 2014 shows that 19.4% of the Chinese farmland soil was polluted and 82% of pollutant was toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, which can cause chronic health problems.
Atmospheric deposition is an important source of these heavy metals in the soil but it tends to be neglected. Unlike sources from irrigation water, sewage sludge, fertilizers and livestock manures, atmospheric deposition can't easily be perceived. And the paucity of measurements also makes it difficult to track what happens to heavy metals when they fall from the air to the soil.
Earlier in 2013, a series of control measures was launched to improve air quality in China. As a consequence, the concentrations of fine particles and sulfate aerosols were reduced significantly during 2013 to 2017.
Dr. Yuepeng Pan with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences was a researcher dedicated to tracking atmospheric processing and deposition of air pollutants and their impacts on ecosystem. He was greatly encouraged by the positive effect of the Clean Air Act and meanwhile he wondered, "Will the Clean Air Act also affect the atmospheric deposition? If yes, what implication can we get?"
In a recent study published in Atmosphere, Dr. Pan and his group tracked the atmospheric depositions of heavy metals at an agricultural site of rural Beijing. They found that the deposition flux of heavy metals that exist entirely in fine particles declined significantly compared to those that exist in coarse particulate form, indicating that the Clean Air Act implemented in recent years were highly effective, with beneficial "side effect" in reducing ambient heavy metals from anthropogenic emissions.
Pan also noticed that while the bulk deposition flux of heavy metals declined substantially compared to the records ten years ago, the current deposition flux of lead is still higher than that reported in Europe. In addition, Pan and his team found that the annual bulk deposition flux of heavy metals tended to decrease during 2017-2020, coinciding with the annual variations of particulate matter. They attributed this decline to the fluctuations of the emissions from their major sources rather than to precipitation controlling the deposition processes.
"This beneficial side effect of Clear Air Act is totally unintended, but from this we can learn that to further reduce the airborne heavy metals in the North China Plain, future control measures should pay more attention to soil/dust, biomass burning, coal combustion and industrial emissions," Pan suggested, "because these sources contributed to ~90% of chemical components in atmospheric depositions. "
INFORMATION:
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-02
Currently, the roles of free D-amino acids and D-amino acid residues in proteins are garnering extensive attention in biological fields such as molecular biology, physiology, microbiology, and pathophysiology. Because it is crucial to analyze these materials rapidly and accurately, many methods have been employed. However, samples for measurement are currently limited to solutions containing target molecules in the pure form. Hence, there is need for an analytical method for the in situ measurement of biological samples placed on a solid support.
We report the construction of a multidimensional ...
2021-03-02
Earth's surface environments are highly oxygenated - from the atmosphere to the deepest reaches of the oceans, representing a hallmark of active photosynthetic biosphere. However, the fundamental timescale of the oxygen-rich atmosphere on Earth remains uncertain, particularly for the distant future. Solving this question has great ramifications not only for the future of Earth's biosphere but for the search for life on Earth-like planets beyond the solar system.
A new study published in Nature Geoscience this week tackles this problem using a numerical model of biogeochemistry and climate and reveals that the future lifespan ...
2021-03-02
In the group of Prof. Karl Leo, physicists, material scientists and engineers are working jointly on the development of novel organic materials and devices for high performance, flexible and possibly even biocompatible electronics and optoelectronics of the future. Increasing the performance of organic devices is one of the key challenges in their research. It was only last year, when the team headed by Dr. Hans Kleemann announced an important breakthrough with the development of efficient, printable vertical organic transistors.
Now Dr. Zhongbin Wu, Dr. Yuan Liu, and PhD student Erjuan Guo present the first electronic device that combines a vertical organic permeable base transistor (OPBT) and an OLED. With this novel device concept of an organic permeable base light-emitting ...
2021-03-02
Active or voluntary learning is a major topic in education, psychology, and neuroscience. Over the years, numerous studies have shown that when learning occurs through voluntary action, there is a modulation of attention, motivation and cognitive control that makes the process much more effective. Consequently, memory is benefited. However, although the physiological processes underlying this reality had been identified in the brain of mice, their existence in our species had not been corroborated.
Now, an international group of researchers led by ICREA Research Professor Paul Verschure from the SPECS laboratory at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and Professor Nikolai Axmacher from the Department of Neuropsychology at Ruhr-Universität ...
2021-03-02
The first observations of a space hurricane have been revealed in Earth's upper atmosphere, confirming their existence and shedding new light on the relationship between planets and space.
Hurricanes in the Earth's low atmosphere are known, but they had never before been detected in the upper atmosphere.
An international team of scientists led by Shandong University in China analysed observations made by satellites in 2014 to reveal a long-lasting hurricane, resembling those in the lower atmosphere, in the polar ionosphere and magnetosphere with surprisingly large energy and momentum deposition despite otherwise extremely quiet geomagnetic conditions.
The analysis ...
2021-03-02
The Acheulean was estimated to have died out around 200,000 years ago but the new findings suggest it may have persisted for much longer, creating over 100,000 years of overlap with more advanced technologies produced by Neanderthals and early modern humans.
The research team, led by Dr Alastair Key (Kent) alongside Dr David Roberts (Kent) and Dr Ivan Jaric (Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences), made the discovery whilst studying stone tool records from different regions across the world. Using statistical techniques new to archaeological science, the archaeologists and conservation experts were able to reconstruct the end of the Acheulean period and re-map the archaeological record.
Previously, ...
2021-03-02
An impressive body of evidence published this week reveals the answer to a mystery that has puzzled plant scientists for more than 30 years: the role of the molecule suberin in the leaves of some of our most productive crops. This discovery could be the key to engineering better crops and ensuring future food security.
Highly productive crops such as sugarcane, sorghum and maize belong to the type of plants that use the more efficient C4 photosynthetic pathway to transform water, sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugars.
Scientists have known for a long time that one of key factors that makes C4 photosynthesis more efficient is that they have the capacity to ...
2021-03-02
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 1, 2021-- A novel computer algorithm that could create a broadly reactive influenza vaccine for swine flu also offers a path toward a pan-influenza vaccine and possibly a pan-coronavirus vaccine as well, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications.
"This work takes us a step closer to a pan-swine flu virus vaccine," said Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a co-author on the paper. "The hope is to eventually be prepared with an effective and rapid response if another swine flu epidemic begins to spread in humans, but this swine flu vaccine could also be useful in a veterinary setting." The immune responses to the vaccine showed very promising breadth against diverse viral variants. "The same basic principles ...
2021-03-02
Nearly everything author Malcolm Gladwell said about how information spreads in his 2000 bestseller "The Tipping Point" is wrong, according to a recent study led by UCLA professor of sociology Gabriel Rossman.
"The main point of 'The Tipping Point' is if you want your idea to spread, you find the most popular person in the center of any given network and you sell them on your idea, and then they'll sell the rest of the world on it," Rossman said.
But Rossman's latest study, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pokes holes in that widely accepted notion ...
2021-03-02
Law enforcement seizures of drugs, particularly marijuana and methamphetamine, dropped at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, then increased significantly in the following months--exceeding pre-pandemic seizure rates and providing clues about the impact of the crisis on substance use, according to a new study in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
The research was conducted as part of the National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS), which uses real-time surveillance to detect early signals of potential drug epidemics. NDEWS is led by a team of researchers at the University of Florida, New York University, and Florida Atlantic University, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Cleaner air, less soil pollution: Unintended but beneficial side effect of Clean Air Act
