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Food waste increases UK's water footprint
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Smoke test for kids
the missions, calling their future into question. NASA’s planetary science chief James Green announced on 17 March that the agency is postponing indefinitely its plans for an orbiter round Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The orbiter was to be one-half of a joint mission due for launch around 2020. ESA is still pondering whether to go ahead with its orbiter for Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. NASA funding also looks unlikely for other potential joint missions, including a black hole mission called the International X-ray Observatory.
60 Seconds
Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, and lead author, is pushing for the US government to adopt the test, which screens blood for a nicotine breakdown product called cotinine. He argues that evidence
DESPITE the stereotypical image of smokers being irresponsible parents, it turns out that they are more enthusiastic than nonsmoking parents about testing their children at age 1 and 2 for “Evidence of tobacco smoke exposure to tobacco smoke. exposure in a child will A survey of 477 parents in the strengthen their parents’ US showed that 70 per cent of resolve to quit” non-smokers and 74 per cent of smokers supported the screening of exposure will strengthen if done alongside existing mandatory tests for blood counts smokers’ resolve to quit. Likewise, a positive test for an infant with and lead exposure (Pediatrics, non-smoking parents may prompt DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-2462). them to look for the source. Jonathan Winickoff at the
Virtual water waste Patience is a green virtue
Chuck Mason / Alamy
SO YOU turn off the tap while you ALL that’s needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions relating brush your teeth and take short to air travel is a little patience. showers. Now consider this: the That’s according to a study looking British waste more water by throwing away food than they use at how best to get aeroplanes through busy airports. “There is at home every day. The problem is going to be a significant decrease unlikely to be restricted to the UK. in greenhouse gases from this,” According to a new report by says Hamsa Balakrishnan at the the Waste & Resources Action Massachusetts Institute of Programme and WWF, people in Technology, who led the study. the UK each waste on average 243 The researchers found that by litres a day in the food they throw holding planes at their gates for an away – over one and a half times average of 4 minutes and 18 seconds, what they use in their homes. congestion on busy runways at The report combined data on Boston Logan International Airport the amount of food wasted in the diminished. This allowed planes UK and the water used to produce to depart more efficiently: taxiing each food, known as “virtual time dropped by 20 per cent – water”, to calculate that 6 per cent balancing out the extra time at the of the country’s total water use is wasted as food thrown in the bin. “Food is the number one cause of water use,” says Michael Webber of the University of Texas at Austin, who has shown that US food waste contains more energy than is extracted every year from the nation’s oil and gas reserves. Some wastage stems from fear that food may have gone off, he says, but the real issue is cultural. Food wastage is typical of countries that have an abundance of food. Webber cites large portion sizes in the US and “all you can eat” buffets, saying food should –Carbon taxi– be treated as “precious”.
gate – and fuel use decreased by 75 litres per plane. The study has been published as an MIT Technical Report and was funded by the US Federal Aviation Administration. Balakrishnan now intends to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. Domestic flights in the US emit about 6 million tonnes of CO2 from taxiing per year, Balakrishnan says. Similar emissions occur in Europe, where planes spend an estimated 10 to 30 per cent of their journey time taxiing on runways. A number of airports have already achieved comparable fuel savings by optimising flight paths for planes on arrival. Combining the two strategies could reduce emissions by millions of tonnes per year, Balakrishnan says.
Think salt, taste salt People could reduce their intake of salt by doping food with a tasteless substance that has a smell we associate with the condiment. Volunteers rated cheese that had been flavoured with a sardine odour as more salty than the same cheese without the flavouring (International Dairy Journal, DOI: 10.1016/j.idairyj.2010.09.005).
Mercury gets a satellite The closest planet to the sun now has a satellite to call its own. On 18 March, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft became the first humanmade object to go into orbit around Mercury. The planned year-long mission will use seven scientific instruments to study the composition of the planet’s surface, measure its topology and record its magnetic field.
Ancient trash islands Tree islands scattered throughout the Florida Everglades are not geological features but prehistoric garbage heaps. When archaeologists dug through some of the islands they found 4000-year-old domestic waste at their core, it was reported this week at the Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes and Civilizations in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Diabetes early warning A blood test could identify those at risk of developing type 2 diabetes a decade before symptoms of the disease appear. Blood samples taken from people who went on to develop the disease contained characteristic levels of five amino acids (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.2307).
Not-so-chaste amoebas The tiny organisms are not the asexual reproducers we typically think they are. A review of recent studies suggests many amoebae have sex (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2011.0289).
26 March 2011| NewScientist | 7
Smoke test for kids
the missions, calling their future into question. NASA’s planetary science chief James Green announced on 17 March that the agency is postponing indefinitely its plans for an orbiter round Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. The orbiter was to be one-half of a joint mission due for launch around 2020. ESA is still pondering whether to go ahead with its orbiter for Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. NASA funding also looks unlikely for other potential joint missions, including a black hole mission called the International X-ray Observatory.
60 Seconds
Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston, and lead author, is pushing for the US government to adopt the test, which screens blood for a nicotine breakdown product called cotinine. He argues that evidence
DESPITE the stereotypical image of smokers being irresponsible parents, it turns out that they are more enthusiastic than nonsmoking parents about testing their children at age 1 and 2 for “Evidence of tobacco smoke exposure to tobacco smoke. exposure in a child will A survey of 477 parents in the strengthen their parents’ US showed that 70 per cent of resolve to quit” non-smokers and 74 per cent of smokers supported the screening of exposure will strengthen if done alongside existing mandatory tests for blood counts smokers’ resolve to quit. Likewise, a positive test for an infant with and lead exposure (Pediatrics, non-smoking parents may prompt DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-2462). them to look for the source. Jonathan Winickoff at the
Virtual water waste Patience is a green virtue
Chuck Mason / Alamy
SO YOU turn off the tap while you ALL that’s needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions relating brush your teeth and take short to air travel is a little patience. showers. Now consider this: the That’s according to a study looking British waste more water by throwing away food than they use at how best to get aeroplanes through busy airports. “There is at home every day. The problem is going to be a significant decrease unlikely to be restricted to the UK. in greenhouse gases from this,” According to a new report by says Hamsa Balakrishnan at the the Waste & Resources Action Massachusetts Institute of Programme and WWF, people in Technology, who led the study. the UK each waste on average 243 The researchers found that by litres a day in the food they throw holding planes at their gates for an away – over one and a half times average of 4 minutes and 18 seconds, what they use in their homes. congestion on busy runways at The report combined data on Boston Logan International Airport the amount of food wasted in the diminished. This allowed planes UK and the water used to produce to depart more efficiently: taxiing each food, known as “virtual time dropped by 20 per cent – water”, to calculate that 6 per cent balancing out the extra time at the of the country’s total water use is wasted as food thrown in the bin. “Food is the number one cause of water use,” says Michael Webber of the University of Texas at Austin, who has shown that US food waste contains more energy than is extracted every year from the nation’s oil and gas reserves. Some wastage stems from fear that food may have gone off, he says, but the real issue is cultural. Food wastage is typical of countries that have an abundance of food. Webber cites large portion sizes in the US and “all you can eat” buffets, saying food should –Carbon taxi– be treated as “precious”.
gate – and fuel use decreased by 75 litres per plane. The study has been published as an MIT Technical Report and was funded by the US Federal Aviation Administration. Balakrishnan now intends to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. Domestic flights in the US emit about 6 million tonnes of CO2 from taxiing per year, Balakrishnan says. Similar emissions occur in Europe, where planes spend an estimated 10 to 30 per cent of their journey time taxiing on runways. A number of airports have already achieved comparable fuel savings by optimising flight paths for planes on arrival. Combining the two strategies could reduce emissions by millions of tonnes per year, Balakrishnan says.
Think salt, taste salt People could reduce their intake of salt by doping food with a tasteless substance that has a smell we associate with the condiment. Volunteers rated cheese that had been flavoured with a sardine odour as more salty than the same cheese without the flavouring (International Dairy Journal, DOI: 10.1016/j.idairyj.2010.09.005).
Mercury gets a satellite The closest planet to the sun now has a satellite to call its own. On 18 March, NASA’s Messenger spacecraft became the first humanmade object to go into orbit around Mercury. The planned year-long mission will use seven scientific instruments to study the composition of the planet’s surface, measure its topology and record its magnetic field.
Ancient trash islands Tree islands scattered throughout the Florida Everglades are not geological features but prehistoric garbage heaps. When archaeologists dug through some of the islands they found 4000-year-old domestic waste at their core, it was reported this week at the Chapman Conference on Climates, Past Landscapes and Civilizations in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Diabetes early warning A blood test could identify those at risk of developing type 2 diabetes a decade before symptoms of the disease appear. Blood samples taken from people who went on to develop the disease contained characteristic levels of five amino acids (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.2307).
Not-so-chaste amoebas The tiny organisms are not the asexual reproducers we typically think they are. A review of recent studies suggests many amoebae have sex (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/ rspb.2011.0289).
26 March 2011| NewScientist | 7