Posts Tagged → Gift Links

The Atlantic: The Ticks are Winning – Gift Link

The Atlantic: The Ticks are Winning – Gift Link

From a report published in 2023, on no longer not-so-hidden powers of tick saliva:

The secret behind tick stealth is tick saliva—a strange, slippery, and multifaceted fluid with no biological peer. It keeps the pests’ bites bizarrely itch- and pain-free, and allows them to feed unimpeded by their hosts’ immunity. As climate change remodels the world, spit is also what’s helping ticks enter new habitats and hosts—bringing with them the many deadly viruses, bacteria, and parasites they so often import.

Gift link.

NYT: How Heat Affects the Brain – Gift link

NYT: How Heat Affects the Brain – Gift Link

This week’s NYT Climate Forward newsletter surveys recent research into how brain function changes when temperatures rise.

A growing body of research has shown that our brains work differently when temperatures spike. Test scores fall and drivers honk more often. The good news is that we’re learning a lot more about how heat affects the brain. In fact, hundreds of peer-reviewed papers on the connection between heat and health have been published in recent years.

But there are longer-term effects of exposure to heat to consider, too. Recent research has found that hotter weather may make the brain more vulnerable to air pollution, increasing the risk for dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

And this, on the impacts of the air pollution and heat combination:

Exposure to particulate air pollution, known as PM 2.5, is associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in older adults, they wrote. It can also affect brain development in young people, increasing the risk of anxiety and depression. The report cited an estimate that one in four dementia deaths is attributable to air pollution.

Link.

NYT: Don’t Look Now, but the Green Transition Is Still Happening – Gift link

NYT: Don’t Look Now, but the Green Transition Is Still Happening – Gift link

As I often tell anyone within listening distance, the transition to renewables continues to grow and expand, and is unstoppable. That’s not to say that the lies, rhetoric and strong-armed tactics of the Trump administration and its climate change dismissive acolytes aren’t reversing some of the momentum and influencing policies around the world, or that the transition is happening fast enough, because it’s not, even in the remotest sense. But it’s not all doom and gloom either. David Wallace-Wells writes:

In January, a total of seven gas-powered cars were sold in all of Norway. This year, Pakistan expects that parts of the country will get more electricity from decentralized rooftop solar than from its entire electricity grid during parts of the day. In the United States, where we often tell ourselves we are in the grips of climate backlash and fossil fuel retrenchment, Texas has been setting new solar records through frigid February, around 90 percent of all new power capacity installed anywhere in the nation last year was green, and the share of renewables is expected to be even higher next year. The new “breakout star” of the battery world is the notorious petrostate Saudi Arabia, the countries with the biggest growth in solar power are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia’s breakneck pursuit of clean energy too cheap to meter is so far along that electricity prices in some regions have fallen by a third in a single year. 

Gift link.

It might just be the sun shining outside today, which always manages, even if only briefly, to renew a sense of optimism. Today, like Wallace-Wells, it’s transition optimism.