Da Nature<\/em><\/span><\/strong> Una notizia che fa discutere parecchio, anche all’OMS. Sempre\u00a0Declan Butler<\/a><\/p>\n Infectious-disease scientists are protesting the removal of the coordinator of a European effort to respond to disease outbreaks. Matthias Niedrig, a virologist, has led the European Network for Imported Viral Diseases (ENIVD) since it was created in 1995. But in late August, the head of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin, which hosts the network, informed Niedrig that he would be reassigned to work on health issues related to climate change.<\/em><\/p>\n Non credo sia colpa solo di Niedrig, ma l’ENIVD s’\u00e8 mobilitato tardi – ok, come tutti meno MSF…<\/p>\n Per chi si \u00e8 perso la nuova Lista Rossa <\/a>delle specie a rischio pubblicata due settimane fa dell’IUCN, Richard Monastersky<\/a> fa il punto<\/p>\n The report evaluated more than 76,000 species, a big increase over earlier editions. But that is just 4% of the more than 1.7 million species that have been described by scientists, making it impossible to offer any reliable threat level for groups that have not been adequately assessed, such as fish, reptiles and insects.<\/em><\/p>\n e presenta una sua valutazione (non molto diversa, gli anfibi sono sempre i pi\u00f9 vulnerabili), sotto forma di grafico<\/a>:<\/p>\n Recognizing these caveats, Nature pulled together the most reliable available data to provide a graphic status report of life on Earth (see \u2018Life under threat\u2019). Among the groups that can be assessed, amphibians stand out as the most imperilled: 41% face the threat of extinction, in part because of devastating epidemics caused by chytrid fungi. Large fractions of mammals and birds face significant threats because of habitat loss and degradation, as well as activities such as hunting.<\/em><\/p>\n Le specie acquatiche sono pochissime, perch\u00e9 si conoscono poco e sono difficili da censire? O perch\u00e9 si acclimatano meglio ai cambiamenti, come diceva un paper<\/a><\/strong> su Nature Climate Change<\/em>?<\/p>\n La rivista ha anche anticipato on-line quello<\/a> <\/strong>di Nikolaos Christidis et al. sulla maggiore probabilit\u00e0 di ondate di calore estive in Europa dal 2040 in poi:<\/p>\n Here we investigate how the likelihood of having another extremely hot summer in one of the worst affected parts of Europe has changed ten years after the original study was published, given an observed summer temperature increase of 0.81 K since then. Our analysis benefits from the availability of new observations and data from several new models. Using a previously employed temperature threshold to define extremely hot summers, we find that events that would occur twice a century in the early 2000s are now expected to occur twice a decade. For the more extreme threshold observed in 2003, the return time reduces from thousands of years in the late twentieth century to about a hundred years in little over a decade.<\/em><\/p>\n A proposito di specie marine a rischio o meno, Emma Marris<\/a> ha sentito i pareri di specialisti sulla ricerca del Five Gyres Institute<\/a>, uscita ieri su PLoS One<\/em><\/a>, che ha quantificato la plastica e la “micro-plastica” finita negli oceani:<\/p>\n More than 5 trillion plastic pieces, with a combined mass of more than 250,000 tonnes, are floating in the ocean (…) \u00a0On its face, the estimate is shockingly high \u2014 but it is still much lower than expected, amounting to less than 1% of the annual global production of plastic….<\/em><\/p>\n Ah be’ allora. Bibliografia<\/a>.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n A Cambridge, UK, lo chiamavano “Lucky Jim”<\/strong> ***<\/p>\n Da Science<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n – un editoriale<\/a> su Ebola e l’obiettivo dell’ONU “Zero infezioni” entro giugno 2015;<\/p>\n – un grosso inserto speciale con i genomi di uccelli arcaici e moderni, con la loro evoluzione e quella dei geni per il canto paragonato ai nostri.<\/p>\n – Gretchen Vogel commenta<\/a> i due papers che confermano come la mutazione di un singolo gene produce una resistenza del plasmodio all’artemisinina, di nuovo nel Sud-Est asiatico dove c’era stata la prima evoluzione di zanzare resistenti al DDT:<\/p>\n Now it is happening again. Over the last decade, artemisinin, the most powerful drug available to cure malaria, has failed in more and more people in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and border regions of Thailand. Researchers and public health experts worry that history will repeat itself and the resistant parasites will go global. Though efforts to contain and eliminate resistant strains have been so far unsuccessful, two papers published online this week in Science offer new insights into the genes behind the threat\u2014insights that should help scientists identify and track resistant parasites and perhaps find better ways to kill them.<\/em><\/p>\n E ancora niente vaccino.<\/p>\n – Dennis Normile<\/a> segue la bonifica di Fukushima-Daiichi, dove le “pareti di ghiaccio” si sono rivelate inefficaci:<\/p>\n Every day 300 tons of ground water leak into the basements of the buildings, get contaminated, and must be pumped out and stored. There are now nearly 1000 tanks on site holding more than 560,000 tons of contaminated water. Plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. finally has a process that removes all radionuclides except for tritium, which is bonded into water molecules. Existing tritium-removal techniques are deemed too costly and impractical. So the Japanese government is funding the development of promising alternatives. A U.S.-based company is working on a catalytic method it claims can squeeze all the tritium into just 5 cubic meters of water for disposal. It has until March 2016 to prove it can scale up the process to meet the Fukushima challenge<\/em>.<\/p>\n La societ\u00e0 \u00e8 la Kurion<\/a> di Irvine, California, che ha sviluppato il “combined electrolysis catalytic exchange<\/a>” con l’universit\u00e0 di Stanford e l’ha collaudato a Hanford<\/a>. Non con 300 tonnellate d’acqua al giorno, per\u00f2.<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/span><\/p>\n Riccardo Reitano<\/a> ha segnalato il nuovo post<\/a> di Tamino (Grant Foster<\/a>, Riccardo, il mago delle Fourier wavelets<\/a>), decisamente in gran forma, sulla “significanza statistica” di un cambiamento nella tendenza delle temperature (mi ripeto, ma \u00e8 solo uno degli effetti del risc. glob., vedi sopra il paper sull’acclimatazione delle specie).<\/p>\n Questo grafico delle p-values per le varie serie \u00e8 stupendo:<\/p>\n For no choice of start year, for no choice of data set, can you make a valid claim to have demonstrated a slowdown in warming. As a matter of fact, in no case does the p-value for any choice of start year, for any choice of data set, get as low as the\u00a010%<\/b> level. To put it another way, there\u2019s just no valid evidence of a \u201cslowdown\u201d which will stand up to statistical rigor.<\/em><\/p>\n Con mesi di ritardo, Real Climate<\/a> festeggia il suo decimo compleanno.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Giornate piene, letture poche, e questo week-end assemblea di Action Aid, bref, giusto qualche segnalazione, soprattutto per ONG. Nonostante il dispiegamento di aiuti da fine agosto, Ebola non si ferma, per\u00f2 la mortalit\u00e0 sembra calare un po’. Domani riunione all’OMS per approvare test diagnostici ancora sperimentali. Purtroppo quelli “robusti” che non richiedono elettricit\u00e0, catena del… Continua a leggere Fast digest<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,10,17,20,23],"tags":[866,2109,2831,3541,3690,4013,4725,4936,5415,6166,6514],"class_list":["post-26715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-altri-animali","category-ambiente","category-clima","category-genetica","category-medicina","category-non-profit","tag-biodiversita","tag-ebola","tag-fukushima-daiichi","tag-inquinamento","tag-james-watson","tag-lista-rossa","tag-nature","tag-oceani","tag-plastica","tag-science","tag-statistiche","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26715"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42771,"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26715\/revisions\/42771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archivio.ocasapiens.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDeclan Butler <\/span>riassume<\/a> le novit\u00e0 che raccontavo forse troppo speranzosa in questi mesi.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n
\nJames Watson aveva venduto<\/a> all’asta la sua medaglia Nobel per $4,1 milioni da donare a istituti di ricerca e “riscattarsi” dopo dichiarazioni pubbliche di un determinismo genetico un po’ razzista. Aggiornamento<\/a> della BBC: il miliardario russo che l’ha comprata gliela restituisce…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tamino.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/12\/pvals.png\")
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