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    According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, there are nearly 2,800 working satellites in space. We depend on these devices for technology we use every day, such as video calls, online maps, satellite TV, and weather tracking. Scientists use them to study space and learn more about our planet.

    But there are many other satellites in orbit that are no longer working. They’re among the objects cluttering up space. Some of these eventually fall back toward Earth, either landing or burning up in the atmosphere. But much of this space junk circles Earth for decades.

    Orbital debris, a type of space junk, is any human-made object that has stopped working but continues to float around the Earth. This includes abandoned satellites and pieces of spacecraft, such as rocket stages.

    Space junk also includes fragments of objects. These occur when satellites collide with things. They also result from an object crashing into an old rocket stage that still contains fuel, causing an explosion.

    Heather Cowardin works at NASA. She says the United States is tracking more than 23,000 pieces of space debris. These tiny fragments can damage working satellites, which can affect research in space. That’s why cleanup efforts are so important.

(Karena Phan. www.timeforkids.com, 16.10.2020. Adaptado.)

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    In the summer of 2014, Markie Miller discovered she’d been drinking toxic coffee. Miller lives in Toledo, Ohio, where fertilizer runoff from farms had caused blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Erie, her water supply. The city issued an alert at 2 am, but by the time Miller saw it she’d already been sipping her morning drink.

    Miller started meeting with other residents to figure out how to protect their water. But what to do? You could sue a polluter (for polluting) or a government agency (for neglecting its regulatory duties), but even if you won, the damages would be too small to be an impediment. You could assemble a class action suit of hurt residents, but that’s a ponderous and uncertain process. The real problem, of course, was that the lake itself was polluted — and individuals can’t sue over that. In the eyes of the law, they don’t have “standing.” That’s when one activist raised an idea: What if the lake itself had standing? What if the citizens of Toledo passed a law giving it legal rights?

    The idea of giving personhood to nature has been slowly gaining supporters. Environmentalists have encouraged governments and courts to award rights to lakes, hills, rivers, and even individual species of plants.

    As intrigued as I am by the idea of mountains suing mining companies, though, I’m not sure the rights of nature will hold up in US courts. Corporations are against it. Even some indigenous thinkers aren’t keen on the idea, arguing that these new laws could infringe their treaty rights. And there’s some hubris here too. How do we humans know what nature wants or if it cares if humans survive?

    Still, I think the approach is worth trying. The climate crisis is fully main stage, with California burning and Florida drowning. If we’re going to forestall worse to come, we need innovation not just in tech — more clean energy, resilient cities, genetically modified crops that need less fertilizer — but in law, the rule sets that architect our behavior.

    The deep value of the personhood movement isn’t merely legal. It’s cultural. We’ve spent generations regarding the wilderness as a bottomless box of tissues, to be used and discarded at will. So we need a better way of talking about hills and forests and oceans; we need to see them with fresh eyes. Indigenous wisdom got this right, millennia ago. If we’re going to control our abuse of nature, we need to see it as our equal.

(Clive Thompson. www.wired.com, 17.12.2019. Adaptado.)

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

    Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
    Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
    Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
    Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

(Matt McGrath. www.bbc.com, 26.06.2018. Adaptado.)

    A host of social, environmental and psychological factors could play a role in the link between a neighborhood’s socioeconomic status and the risk of its inhabitants developing dementia. For example, poorer areas have lower access to healthcare and less green space, which has been shown to protect older adults from dementia risk, according to recent studies. Air pollution, which was tied to cognitive decline in a study by Chinese researchers, tends to be worse in poorer neighborhoods. Multiple studies have linked a healthy diet with improved cognitive function, but healthy foods are more expensive in many regions.

     Crime and social disorder, which impact a person’s perception of safety and community cohesion, may also increase dementia risk for residents in lower socioeconomic status areas. Chronic stress due to structural disadvantages, discrimination and economic adversity will wear down a person’s brain, as high cortisol — the hormone that correlates with stress — produces neurotoxic effects, according to multiple studies. “With healthy lifestyle habits a key factor in reducing or delaying your risk of developing dementia, it is important for everyone to have access to local facilities such as gyms and public pools, green spaces and health care, but unfortunately that is not always the case,” said Professor Matthew Pase.

BARTOV, Shira Li. Disponível em: http://newsweek.com Acesso em: out. 2022.