Global Warming Issues

A German ban on smoking in indoor public places should be overturned for small bars, the country’s highest court ruled on Wednesday.

The Karlsruhe-based Federal Constitutional Court said small bars were at an unfair disadvantage due to the ban, rendering it in breach of the constitution. The measures came into effect in most of Germany’s 16 states at the start of the year.

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NASA next week is holding another one of it Centenial Challenges this time $300,000 is up for competitors who demonstrate aircraft that are safer, less expensive and easier to operate, while having fewer negative effects on the environment and communities surrounding airports.

The focus in this challenge is on what NASA calls Personal Air Vehicles (PAVs) which are small, relatively inexpensive aircraft that can be used for personal travel — basically a car in the sky. NASA aeronautics developed the PAV concept with the idea of transporting people to within just a few miles of their doorstep destination at trip speeds three to four times faster than airlines or cars. NASA predicts that up to 45% of all miles traveled in the future may be in PAVs. This will relieve congestion at metropolitan hub airports and the freeways that surround them, reduce the need to build new highways and save much of the 6.8 billion gallons of fuel wasted in surface gridlock each year, NASA said.

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Beijing’s Olympic organisers are planning new emergency measures to reduce pollution after the draconian steps introduced a week ago failed to stop a grimy haze from smothering the host city.

Air quality has failed to reach national standards for four of the seven days since the city took more than 1m cars off the roads and shut hundreds of factories.

With less than two weeks until the opening ceremony, organisers are planning more drastic steps to ensure that the “Greyjing” tag does not undermine the promise of a green Olympics and force endurance events such as the marathon, triathlon and 10km open-water swim to be postponed.

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‘Evolution Canyons’ I and II are in Israel. They are similar, each with a hot south-facing slope and a cooler north-facing slope. The sun-exposed ‘African’ south-facing slopes get eight times more solar radiation than the shady, green, lush ‘European’ north-facing slopes. Scientists studied 131 strains of Bacillus simplex and found that bacteria on different slopes have evolved differently, forming different ‘ecotypes’ of the same species.

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We told you about the AKC attempting to find a dog for Sen. Barack Obama. Having a canine companion on the campaign trail and (presumptively) in office would be great for Obama. But the best idea would be for him to get a puppy from a shelter.

Now PETA has sent the Obama family a letter, urging them to save a puppy from a shelter. And the letter has a great angle on it.

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American triathlete Jarrod Shoemaker already knows what it is like to try to compete in a demanding endurance sport while breathing some of the world’s worst air.

Shoemaker swam, biked and ran the Olympic triathlon course in Beijing for both training and competition in each of the last three years. The smog was especially difficult in the last two years, he says.

“You can really feel the particulate stuff getting into your lungs,” Shoemaker says. “After the race, when we tried to talk or laugh or cough, it was pretty tough. You could feel it in your lungs. There was a burning.”

Shoemaker says it was even challenging to simply stand on the sidelines while his teammates raced in the women’s event.

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Scientists from Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development (Canada), the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and University of California, Davis (USA) have investigated soil C balance in distinct agroecosystems under different management practices including soil tillage, N fertilization, elimination of fallow, and establishment of grass. In each case, C sequestration occurred in response to higher C input to soil; however, increase in SOC was confined to labile fractions such as the light fraction and larger soil aggregates.

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As the world’s greatest athletes prepare to participate in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, there is increasing concern from some athletes about the growing pollution caused by smoke and smog from coal-fired plants that helped boost Chinese exports 21 percent last quarter to a whopping $666.6 billion in trade.

“We found that in 2005, fully one-third of China’s greenhouse gas emissions were due to production of exports. This proportion has risen quickly, from 12 percent in 1987 and only 21 percent in 2002,” said Weber, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

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Their study is scheduled for the August 6 issue of ACS’ Crystal Growth & Design, a bi-monthly journal.

In the new study, Andrei Sommer, Dan Zhu, and Hans-Joerg Fecht point out that scientists have theorized for years that the chemical precursors of life gradually evolved from a so-called “primordial soup” of simpler molecules. But the details of how these simpler amino acids molecules, the building blocks of life, were assembled into complex polymers, remains one of science’s long-standing mysteries.

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