A new pollution study in Europe using a van to chase other vehicles and measure their tailpipe emissions finds that newer, diesel-fueled, heavy trucks and buses emit, on average, 34% more of the health and climate hazard known as black carbon than older vehicles of the same types.
Continue reading Tailpipe Study: Newer Trucks Emit More Black Carbon
In Europe, concerns about health, taste, and origin collide in olive oil. Its high value, complex flavor, and ever-growing list of known health benefits, combined with a long history of fakes and adulteration, have made it one of three focus foods in a 12-million-euro ($13 million) European Union research project on high-tech tracking of food quality and provenance. (The other two are Scotch whisky and fish.) Paul Brereton, coördinator of the project, says that assuring food’s integrity is in some ways more complex than assuring its safety: instead of just looking for a few known toxins, fighters of food fraud must detect something harder to identify: any adulteration or substitution that might occur to a crook.
In a green field outside Madrid, at the foot of the snow-covered Guadarrama mountain range, lies a sun-faded snail shell. Its opening sealed with a cap of dried mud, the shell contains the larva of a wild, solitary bee, together with its first meal of bee bread — a mixture of pollen and nectar. Entomology graduate student Daniel Romero picks up the shell and, concluding that it contains the nest of a mason bee, stores it in a clear plastic tube, labels the red cap with a marker, and closes it.
Back at the Complutense University of Madrid, Romero sets ten tubes of the nesting bees he collected on his professor’s desk. They are just a fraction of the hundreds of samples that he and his colleagues will gather during a four-year Spanish government-funded study of how artificial chemicals are affecting the biodiversity of wild pollinators and their immune and reproductive systems. In the warmth of the office, some of the young adults twitch and scratch at their now-crumbly mud doors. Researchers watch the young adult bees slowly emerge into their new world. When the air cools and the humans leave the room, the bees return to their pollen pillows. Unlike honeybees, solitary bees buzz to their own drum.
See an album of photos I took while reporting this story.
Google has gotten better at forgetting. A year ago, a European court ruled that Google search results in the European Union were subject to European data-protection rules. That meant that while private individuals might not be able to force a newspaper to retract an irrelevant or outdated story about them, they could ask Google to remove links to the story. Despite a slow start, the search giant has now caught up with the requests. In the meantime, Americans, Japanese, Koreans, and others around the world are proposing the adoption of similar privacy-protection policies.
Continue reading Google’s Year of Forgetting
