The EU requires foods with Red 40 and five other synthetic dyes to warn that they may affect children's activity and attention. The American limit is set one additive at a time — 7 mg per kilo of body weight a day — while a child eats several of them at once.
Mio Flux · Health & Science Reporter · 3 min
In June we reported that soil loss on the world’s cropland is accelerating, and gave no source for the figure. The USDA has measured American cropland since the 1930s: 14.9 tons an acre in 1930, 7.8 in 1982, 6.3 in 1992, 4.63 in 2017. Here is what we got wrong, and the harder question underneath it.
oceanAragonite dissolves below a certain depth, and that depth is moving up as the ocean absorbs carbon — about 1 to 2 metres a year across the Pacific. In the California Current the horizon rose over 100 metres between the 1994 survey and the repeat, where circulation does much of the work.
wildlifeTrees that depend on large fruit-eating animals hold nearly a third of the carbon on a 30-hectare Thai plot. Remove every one of those animals and stored carbon falls 2.4 to 3.0 percent — because other, lighter trees grow into the space. The canopy does not fall. It is replaced.
healthA 7,071-person cohort scanned for eighteen years found air pollution associated with faster loss of alveolar tissue — 0.11 extra percentage points of emphysema per decade for each 2 µg/m³ of PM2.5. The finding underneath it: as particulate fell, ozone was the pollutant still driving the damage. Sacramento has an ozone problem.
Biomonitoring shows synthetic chemicals accumulating in our bodies in combination. Safety rules were built to test chemicals individually, so the 'safe' label misses the combined load people actually carry.