Six on Geography & Science (No Coronavirus): Report reveals ‘massive plastic pollution footprint’ of drinks firms; Wendell Berry: “A Poem on Hope.”; Hunting, wildlife trade and threats to habitat key factors in viral spillover; Magnificent Microphoto

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Six on Geography & Science (No Coronavirus): Report reveals ‘massive plastic pollution footprint’ of drinks firms; Wendell Berry: “A Poem on Hope.”; Hunting, wildlife trade and threats to habitat key factors in viral spillover; Magnificent Microphotography: 50 Tiny Wonders; To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time; Soil gets its smell from bacteria trying to attract invertebrates; Which cities will feel the brunt of climate change

Report reveals ‘massive plastic pollution footprint’ of drinks firms | Plastics

Report says plastic from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Unilever products could cover 83 football pitches [soccer fields] every day"

Report reveals ‘massive plastic pollution footprint’ of drinks firms | Plastics | The Guardian

Report reveals ‘massive plastic pollution footprint’ of drinks firms | P... Report%20reveals%20%u2018massive%20plastic%20pollution%20footprint%u2019%20of%20drinks%20firms%20%7C%20Plastics%...

Magnificent Microphotography: 50 Tiny Wonders

Magnificent Microphotography: 50 Tiny Wonders

Magnificent Microphotography: 50 Tiny Wonders Amazing microphotography of cells, tiny organisms and more.

To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time

"In The Order of Time, physicist Carlo Rovelli challenges our concept of time. Time passes more quickly the closer one is to a gravitational mass (like a planet or a star or a black hole). This fact is popular in science fiction. A space traveler might return to Earth to find that her friends and family have aged more than she has. Even at different altitudes on Earth, time is different. Rovelli writes that if identical twins separate early in life and live one in the mountains and one below sea level, then they will find in old age that the one below sea level has aged more, being closer to the center of the planet.

Time, Rovelli claims, is not linear. It is a gravitational field. If he is right, time is like everything else in the universe and must be made up of extremely tiny particles. There is no past or future; we only experience it this way.

So why, my grief asks, can’t we change times simply by changing our perceptions? Rovelli suggests that our linear experience of time is due to thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the total amount of entropy in the universe can never decrease, only increase. For us, or at least in our section of the universe, time operates in only one direction."

To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time

To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time Matthew Salesses considers the impact of his wife’s passing, and other factors, on his experience as a human pas...

Animals hunted, traded and homeless host twice as many viruses that infect us

Human pressure on wildlife increases risk of diseases like Covid-19, study finds

• Hunting, wildlife trade and threats to habitat key factors in viral spillover
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• Research adds to growing evidence about the role of humans in the emergence of new infections

"Animals threatened with extinction by human degradation of their habitat, or through hunting and the wildlife trade, host twice as many viruses known to infect people, compared with species threatened for other reasons, the researchers found.

“Spillover of viruses from animals is a direct result of our actions involving wildlife and their habitat,” said lead author Christine Kreuder Johnson, director of the EpiCentre for Disease Dynamics at the One Health Institute, a UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine programme.

“The consequence is they’re sharing their viruses with us. These actions simultaneously threaten species’ survival and increase the risk of spillover. In an unfortunate convergence of many factors, this brings about the kind of mess we’re in now.”

The research examined around 140 zoonotic viruses that infect humans and have been found in specific animal species before 2014. It looked for trends among those species, using data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Red List of Threatened Species."

Animals hunted, traded and homeless host twice as many viruses that infect us

Animals hunted, traded and homeless host twice as many viruses that infe... Hunting, wildlife trade and threats to habitat key factors in viral spillover.

Soil gets its smell from bacteria trying to attract invertebrates

"Soil gets its characteristic earthy smell from certain chemicals produced primarily by soil-dwelling bacteria called Streptomyces. But until now, we didn’t know why these bacteria produce these odours and what role they play in the soil ecosystem.

To find out more, Paul Becher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp and his colleagues set up field traps in woodland containing colonies of Streptomyces. They thought that the smell may act as a signal to other organisms that they are poisonous, because some bacteria like Streptomyces can be toxic.

Instead, the smell – which comes from gases released by Streptomyces, including geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol (2-MIB) – seems to attract invertebrates that help the bacteria disperse their spores.

Becher and his team found that springtails – tiny cousins of insects – that feed on Streptomyces were drawn to the traps containing the bacterial colonies, but weren’t drawn to control traps that didn’t contain Streptomyces. By comparison, insects and arachnids weren’t attracted to the traps containing Streptomyces."

Read more: Soil gets its smell from bacteria trying to attract invertebrates

Soil gets its smell from bacteria trying to attract invertebrates Gege Li Soil’s earthy smell comes from chemicals produced by bacteria called Streptomyces, which use the odour to attrac...

See which cities will feel the brunt of climate change

See which cities will feel the brunt of climate change

See which cities will feel the brunt of climate change The whole planet will feel climate change's impacts over coming decades. But some cities will see more dramatic ...