Newsflash: pollution is bad for you! Ok this might not be news, but a study reveals that it may be worse than we think.

The study tracked steel-foundry workers in Italy and found that breathing in polluted air doesn’t just damage the lungs; it can do some serious damage to our DNA, reprogramming genes in as little as three days, increasing rates of cancer and disease.

Scientists think the same damage can occur in normal city dwellers who breath in mildly polluted air everyday, but that it would take months instead of days for the damage to show up. DNA that is damaged includes the genes that suppress tumors and cancer growths. While the link between lung cancer and pollution has been established, the actual morphing of DNA is an alarming discovery, and other scientists say the findings needs more support than the 63 Italian men who participated in the most recent study.

What do you think – does think make you nervous about living in a city or glad that you don’t? Find out what you can do to stop pollution in its tracks.

Source:Do Something
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Permafrost melt poses long-term threat, says study Wed May 27,2009

PARIS (AFP) – Melting permafrost could eventually disgorge a billion tons a year of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, accelerating the threat from climate change, scientists said Wednesday.

Their probe sought to shed light on a fiercely-debated but poorly-understood concern: the future of organic matter that today is locked up in the frozen soil of Alaska, Canada, northern Europe and Siberia.

The fear is that, as the land thaws, this material will be converted by microbes into carbon dioxide, which will seep into the atmosphere, adding to the greenhouse effect.
This in turn will stoke warming and cause more permafrost to thaw, which in turn pushes up temperatures, and so on.
But how and when this vicious cycle could be unleashed is unclear.

Indeed, some voices have argued that it will not present a significant threat, as plants will start to grow on the soggy, warmer earth and suck in carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, thus blunting the problem.

Schuur's team used hand-built, automated chambers, which they deployed at three sites that represented minimal, moderate and extensive amounts of thaw.

From 2004 to 2006, the chambers measured how much carbon was escaping from the soil and how much was being absorbed by any vegetation.
In areas that had thawed for the previous 15 years, there was a net uptake of carbon, meaning that the newly-established plants sucked up more CO2 than was lost from the soil.
But in areas that had begun to thaw decades before, the reverse was true.

There was a net loss of CO2, the principal greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, as older stocks of carbon were gradually released to the atmosphere.

Most of the 13 million square kilometers (five million square miles) of permafrost remain frozen, but thawing is already under way around the region's southern fringes and is thought likely to expand this century.

In that scenario, the permafrost could release around a billion tons a year of carbon, roughly equivalent to the contribution to greenhouse emissions each year by deforestation in the tropics, the paper said.
Even as the Arctic greens, the rising loss of older carbon "could make permafrost a large biospheric carbon source in a warmer world," it said.

Burning fossil fuels adds about 8.5 gigatons of emissions each year, but it is a process that can theoretically be controlled.
Permafrost thaw, though, would be self-reinforcing and could be almost impossible to brake.

"If we address our own emissions either by reducing deforestation or controlling emissions from fossil fuels, that's the key to minimizing the changes in the permafrost carbon pool."

Source:Yahoo! News