Research Finds Black Carbon Breathed By Mothers Can Cross Into Unborn Children (theguardian.com) 107
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Air pollution particles have been found on the fetal side of placentas, indicating that unborn babies are directly exposed to the black carbon produced by motor traffic and fuel burning. The research is the first study to show the placental barrier can be penetrated by particles breathed in by the mother. It found thousands of the tiny particles per cubic millimeter of tissue in every placenta analyzed. The link between exposure to dirty air and increased miscarriages, premature births and low birth weights is well established. The research suggests the particles themselves may be the cause, not solely the inflammatory response the pollution produces in mothers.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, examined 25 placentas from non-smoking women in the town of Hasselt. It has particle pollution levels well below the EU limit, although above the WHO limit. Researchers used a laser technique to detect the black carbon particles, which have a unique light fingerprint. In each case, they found nanoparticles on the fetal side of the placenta and the number correlated with air pollution levels experienced by the mothers. There was an average of 20,000 nanoparticles per cubic millimeter in the placentas of mothers who lived near main roads. For those further away, the average was 10,000 per cubic millimeter. They also examined placentas from miscarriages and found the particles were present even in 12-week-old fetuses.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, examined 25 placentas from non-smoking women in the town of Hasselt. It has particle pollution levels well below the EU limit, although above the WHO limit. Researchers used a laser technique to detect the black carbon particles, which have a unique light fingerprint. In each case, they found nanoparticles on the fetal side of the placenta and the number correlated with air pollution levels experienced by the mothers. There was an average of 20,000 nanoparticles per cubic millimeter in the placentas of mothers who lived near main roads. For those further away, the average was 10,000 per cubic millimeter. They also examined placentas from miscarriages and found the particles were present even in 12-week-old fetuses.
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That's right! Let them breathe coke!
Okay with you if I stay upwind?
Re:Awww (Score:5, Insightful)
That lower limit is probably a good thing, and studies suggest that current levels of pollution are still causing health problems. But given the current levels of pollution compared to the much higher past levels, there is no reason to believe we are heading for some acute and serious health crisis. On the contrary.
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In the US the air is noticeably cleaner in the last 30 years. Improvements in car emission standards made unbearably smoggy L.A. into a place with generally decent air with only a few air quality alerts per year.
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I'm pretty sure that's unconstitutional and will be held up in court. It makes no sense that a state cannot choose to have standards or have higher standards. California is not telling other states what to do but those other states clearly see the merits of our emissions laws and therefore copy them.
Arizona should have ever right to pollute and live in a cesspool. They should also be able to copy California or maybe somewhere between two such extremes.
It's called states rights and no where in the Constituti
curious about the who levels (Score:3)
What I want to know if anywhere, is under the WHO levels. People who live far enough from population usually use open fire wood cooking inside their dwelling too so I wonder about that as well.
how realistic is it as a goal? what is the limit based on?
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BWHO's pdf is at http://www.euro.who.int/__data... [who.int]
Its 96 pages of meta analyze for those who are interested. One of the first few conclusions it do draw is that engine pollution is very different from other sources, i.e normal firewood.
The only thing I can really get from skimming it, is that its a meta analyze. Its flawed by its source material, where we have not yet figured out what factors make western children more sickly than people who migrated in from the third world. Traffic might be a factor, but
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If your argument is that air quality is better in most of the world than during the height of the industrial revolution, and before it was exported to China, all i can say is no. Fucking. Shit.
We are already having an acute and serious health crisis. This stuff kills many people every day. That it was even worse for many people in the past is wholly irrelevant.
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all i can say is no. Fucking. Shit.
Yep. All you ever say is fucking shit, never backed by any data without any reputable source ever agreeing with you.
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Yep. All you ever say is fucking shit, never backed by any data without any reputable source ever agreeing with you.
If you have a problem with a specific claim I've made, then spit it out, and I'll provide a citation. If you don't, then perhaps you should sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up? Because the captain has turned on the sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up light.
Re: Awww (Score:1)
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You know what causes a lot of premature births and low birth weights?
Oh, I dunno, maybe knee-jerk, hysterical bans on vaping that will, if successful, result in making it far harder for current smokers to quit by banning a tool that has successfully helped many thousands quit tobacco, and if the bans are on flavored vape liquid excepting tobacco flavors, then kids will use the tobacco flavors and when they can't get their tobacco-flavored vape, cigarettes seem like a decent alternative to the "yutes", as they've already developed a taste-tolerance for tobacco.
There are also
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Solutions:
1. Stop driving internal combustion cars in your cities. Use mass transit. Get an electric car if you can't/won't use mass transit.
2. Start programs to improve and promote geothermal systems for heating/cooling.
3. Use more wind and solar to generate electricity vs. coal and gas.
There's three to get you started. You still get to have a city and the benefits without as much pollution.
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What makes you imagine that geothermal isn't polluting? Only people unfamiliar with it think that.
Will someone please MAKE IT STOP! (Score:5, Insightful)
We get it, okay. Pollution bad. We should do what we can about pollution. What bothers me though is that just because we can detect the pollution does not make it some kind of emergency.
We can detect soot in the placenta, that's great. We can also detect the radio transmissions from probes we sent beyond the orbit of Pluto.
What we are seeing are children with eyesight problems because they don't go outside enough. These children also tend to have screwed up immune systems because they didn't get to go play in the dirt by their parents. They get asthma and allergic reactions from common food and plants. The human body expects a certain level of stress or it finds things to get stressed about.
I believe this is the same for the human mind, it needs a certain level of stress or it will create it. Things are just absolutely awesome right now. For the most part in the USA and the rest of the western world there's no real risk of hunger, disease, war, or crime. I say for the most part because I recognize that it's not paradise everywhere, there's still kids getting sick and criminals preying on the innocent. What has caused some (again, SOME) of this is the imaginations of some greater threat from vaccines or being too hard on criminals. That's not saying there aren't any risks from vaccines, or that the criminal justice system is perfect. It's that we've done so well in addressing these problems rationally and scientifically that the irrational portions of our minds are sensing something is wrong but it's not sure what. So we create a bogeyman to dump our fears into.
The air is exceeding clean, the water is exceptionally pure, and there aren't evil capitalists trying to poison your children for another buck. They have children too and they live in this world like you do.
All these people talking about pollution and global warming are starting to sound like the crazy people that talk about chem-trails. Back off the hysteria, it's only going to drive you to insanity and an early grave.
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How about we don't force the most populous US states to abandon their emissions standards? How's that for a start.
Or maybe it's "I'm pro-life, unless it means I have to give up my Ford F-250 Texas Edition, because that's in the goddamn Constitution, tell you what."
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I would agree if you in turn agree that women entering the workforce en masse has led to a deevaluation of the worker as a whole and children being brought up by "strangers" and overworked parents probably has its own set of repercussions.
Dogma is bad, no matter which side spewed it.
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Pro-life only means that we protect you 'til you're born. Once you're born, we don't give a flying fuck about you anymore.
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Re:Will someone please MAKE IT STOP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah? How many pro-lifers do you see arguing for ANY kind of aid for those kids after they're born into poverty? Neonatal care? Affordable preschool? School lunches? Hell, any kind of support for those kids?
George Carlin put it best. Pro-life means if you're pre-born you're fine, if you're pre-school, you're fucked. They'd fight tooth and nail for you to get born, but as soon as you're born, they don't give a shit about you anymore.
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I don't know. I was lucky enough that I was actually a child my parents wanted. I don't know if I'd prefer to be unwanted to being simply never born. The latter seems less painful with essentially the same outcome.
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If you didn't know: a large (perhaps all of them) fraction of them don't care about what happens after birth, they just want as many 'souls' to be born on Earth, so that when The End comes and Jesus comes to take The Faithful back to Heaven, as many 'souls' as possible can be 'saved'. Or somesuch nonsense as that. So they make as many babies as possible themselves, and insist that everyone else do the same, regardless of how they got pregnant (rape, incest, unintentional, etc) or whether the
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If it's god's plan to make people suffer, he's an asshole. Plain and simple.
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Preschool? Kindergarten isn't enough of a waste of human resources for you, you want to steal money to pay for preschool also!
Government-paid "free" school lunches are another waste, the money the parents save go to booze, cigarettes, drugs, jumbo TVs and cable fees. Parents need to be made responsible for their actions.
You want to see pro-lifers arguing for aid to poor kids? Go to church. And kick in some money yourself, hypocrite.
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They want to take responsibility for a mistake and rectify it, but you don't want to let them.
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The F-250 diesel is a certified ULEV-II vehicle and is cleaner than a great number of gasoline vehicles on the road.
Newer diesel vehicles have been some of the cleanest vehicles on the road and emit nearly no soot whatsoever thanks to the Diesel Particulate Filter that is required by law to capture soot emitted from the engine.
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If I remember correctly, the Volkswagen diesel was also ULEV-II...until it wasn't.
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Your argument is what, that Ford must also be cheating? Do you have any evidence of that?
Do you really think that is a substantive argument?
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How about the states stop thinking that they can make their own laws and obey the federal government?
Stop calling it a federal government if you don't accept the principles of federalism.
We can't have 50 different standards. One is best.
One best that applies for every situation? One solution that is agreeable to 300 million people, instead of 50 solutions that address the needs of 50 unique situations?
In a common law system, shared by the US, UK, and commonwealth nations. There are multiple jurisdictions which apply the law according to precedent set in their jurisdiction. You can't standardize on a single system without also changing our entire legal sys
Re: Will someone please MAKE IT STOP! (Score:3)
Found the fascist!
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The air is exceeding clean, the water is exceptionally pure, and there aren't evil capitalists trying to poison your children for another buck.
Three lies in one sentence. Are you trying to outdo the President?
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Three lies in one sentence. Are you trying to outdo the President?
I was referring to the USA, where I live. I don't know where you are with the dirty air and water. As for lying presidents, I'm pretty sure that's common among all nations.
Re:Will someone please MAKE IT STOP! (Score:4, Informative)
We estimate that anthropogenic PM2.5 was responsible for 107,000 premature deaths [in the US] in 2011, at a cost to society of $886 billion. Of these deaths, 57% were associated with pollution caused by energy consumption [e.g., transportation (28%) and electricity generation (14%)]; another 15% with pollution caused by agricultural activities.
- Goodkind et al 2019 [pnas.org]
Increases of 10 g per cubic meter in PM2.5 and of 10 ppb in ozone were associated with increases in all-cause mortality of 7.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 7.1 to 7.5) and 1.1% (95% CI, 1.0 to 1.2), respectively. When the analysis was restricted to person-years with exposure to PM2.5 of less than 12 g per cubic meter and ozone of less than 50 ppb, the same increases in PM2.5 and ozone were associated with increases in the risk of death of 13.6% (95% CI, 13.1 to 14.1) and 1.0% (95% CI, 0.9 to 1.1), respectively.
- Di, Wang, Zanobetti et al 2017 [nejm.org]
Air pollution science under siege at US environment agency - Nature, March 2019 [nature.com]
EPA science adviser allowed industry group to edit journal article - Science mag, Dec 2018 [sciencemag.org]
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
- Jonathan Swift et al
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Anyone who points out how often Trump lies is "deranged"? You've got to be kidding me.
Seems like you've got his Sharpie so far up your ass that it's affecting your judgement.
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Somebody sure got their knickers in a twist, what's up with that?
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Somebody sure got their knickers in a twist, what's up with that?
I'm getting tired of having people finding new and creative ways to describe the same problem. How about we discuss solutions? Can we have solutions that don't involve increasing my taxes and reducing my freedoms?
This is a forum for discussing technology, is it not? How about we discuss the technology? There's a lot of good science and engineering out there. People creating a lot of good stuff. Making nearly incredible devices that solve the problems of how much carbon is being put in the air.
Oh, and
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If you'd like to see practical alternatives, then I imagine you're all in favour of extensive subsidies to speed the development, scale-up, and adoption of alternative technologies.
No, I do not favor subsidies.
This is how I see subsidies, a source of funding for bad ideas. If someone had a good idea, an idea that is going to produce products that solves a problem people want solved at a price they can afford, then they will be able to find people to invest in it's development. Those that can't find people to invest turn to the government. There is a high probability for some politician to be willing to spend other people's money on a project that they believe will get them re-elect
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What I want is the government to get out of the way.
And return to burning rivers in the US. Awesome.
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All energy comparisons are done using levelised costs, which include construction, lifetime maintenance, and decommissioning, in addition to fuel (otherwise solar would be considered completely free). This already includes dealing with old vanes. If you can find any evidence that it doesn't, feel free to cite something.
Sadly, levelised costs generally do not include other external costs like air pollution, or fossil fuels would have been phased out long ago for being far too expensive [imf.org].
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Probably not, snowflake. Suck it up. There are a lot of people on the planet, and you're not the most important.
This is a forum for discussing technology, is it not?
No. It's "News for Nerds". For those of us who are biology nerds, the current state of our environment is an extremely important and interesting topic.
A carbon tax is just bad policy.
False. Research has been shown that it's excellent policy (
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A carbon tax is just bad policy. Unless people are given viable alternatives to petroleum based fuels the tax only takes people's money. Once the government has our money there's no assurance that they will spend it any more wisely than the people they took it from. The only way to lower the use of petroleum based fuels is giving people something better. This also ignores the fact that in any place where people get to vote there is the near zero probability that people will vote themselves higher taxes.
Who is giving people something better? How will this better thing be paid for?
Carbon taxes are the best solution. It's not an engineering solution, or a political solution, it's an economic solution to an economic problem.
You claim to understand the problem, but I don't think you do. Air is currently unpriced in our global economy. There is no practical method for pricing it. Therefore, we need to artificially increase prices on complimentary items [wikipedia.org] to compensate.
Once we correct this economic fl
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We get it, okay.
Citation needed, because your comment suggests you do not.
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LOL sounds like you want to ignore a problem because it is too complex for your brain?
Switch out of fossil fuels, go electric. This global warming and pollution thing is easily solvable, stop pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere .. is that so hard? Start with cars then switch over to solar or nuclear power plants.
Just buy a Tesla, it is way better in nearly every category -- safety, acceleration, and reliability. If you don't like Elon Musk then there are other electric car options such as C
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JFC - where does your car's electricity come from? The energy present at your outlet represents ~40% of the potential energy in the coal/oil/gas being burnt at the plant. And you're just shifting the pollution elsewhere from your tailpipe.
Switching to electric cars is a great step, and an important one to kick-start the movement, but please put some solar panels on your roof to help it along. Simply buying EVs that increase the demand for grid electricity is more of a 3-steps-forward, 2-steps-back path.
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Dunno about JFC or you, but 100% of the electricity that comes out of my socket* is from renewables. I don't have any solar panels on my house (yet) either.
How can this be? Well, it's through a regulated market where "anyone" can generate and anyone can sell electricity. My particular vendor only buys renewables from the generators, so that is all I receive. We're all pro-choice too, so if you want yours from coal, or burning babies or whatever, then you're free to buy that if you can find a vendor that wil
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That's great to hear, and you're part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
FWIW, I'm off-grid with solar PV and batteries, but I drive a conventional car. I don't have the roof space for enough PV to keep an EV charged, and run the household. So I guess I'm part of the problem *and* part of the solution.
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And that's a great start, since it's easier to control pollution at one source, then at many.
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Never mind that the larger engines get, the more effective they are. Those gains do add up when you compare auto mobile engines with a city scale generator.
Then the additional benefit of filtering come in, where the larger thing is easier to find a decent filter solution.
Which still leaves us with air pollution from tires vs asphalt, toxic paint, and many many more sources. And there will always be more, because with a urban environment people are pressed together.
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LOL sounds like you want to ignore a problem because it is too complex for your brain?
Did you even read past the subject line? I don't want to ignore the problem, I'm getting tired of the problems being brought up again and again when it's becoming clear that the risks from the problems that remain are very small.
Going back a while it was lead in the gasoline. We fixed that. Then it was carbon monoxide and volatile organics. We got catalytic converters for that. Then it was NOx, followed by better catalytic converters. Then came sulfur and low sulfur fuels. Now the complaint is about
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"the water is exceptionally pure"
cough*Flint, Michigan*cough. There are those for whom human health and safety is of secondary concern to profits.
But you're mostly right - things have been improving *generally* since the 1970s
Until certain folk decide to roll back the previous govt's emissions standards.
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You might think it was an emergency if you knew your child was going to be adversely affected by it before they were even born, possibly leading to a lifetime of disadvantage due to poorer health.
I'm surprised at you blindseer, this was a perfect opportunity to shill for the nuclear industry and you passed it up. For all it's faults, nuclear is at least relatively low CO2 in some cases.
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You might think it was an emergency if you knew your child was going to be adversely affected by it before they were even born, possibly leading to a lifetime of disadvantage due to poorer health.
We already know that air pollution is bad. What we have now is a means to quantify the risks and finding the risks appear to be very small in any developed nation.
I'm surprised at you blindseer, this was a perfect opportunity to shill for the nuclear industry and you passed it up.
I didn't see it relevant here.
For all it's faults, nuclear is at least relatively low CO2 in some cases.
No, it's the lowest in nearly every case. Certainly on the average nuclear power is the lowest CO2 emitting energy source we have available to us.
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and finding the risks appear to be very small in any developed nation
...at least until one starts reading the research articles.
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Well, according to the lifetime numbers in the website I just closed and am too lazy to look back up, nuclear generates less CO2 than photvoltaic, but a little more than onshore wind energy, so it's the second lowest CO2 emitting energy source.
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I'm surprised at you blindseer, this was a perfect opportunity to shill for the nuclear industry and you passed it up.
I didn't see it relevant here.
Well at least you're no longer denying you're a shill for the nuclear industry.
No, it's the lowest in nearly every case. Certainly on the average nuclear power is the lowest CO2 emitting energy source we have available to us.
Except for all of the diesel used to crush rock to get uranium, the coal power used to make concrete to build them and, the coal used to power the enrichment plants.
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You clearly haven't understood the Koch's and their history. They really are evil, they really don't care about dirty water if it makes them money, and if they help to destroy the planet with excess CO2 emissions, they will say it was worth it for the money it made them. Carbon is their middle name, and they'll be damned if they are going to support the health care of people who were too poor to fix them from the carbon they injested from Koch Industries.
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The air is exceeding clean, the water is exceptionally pure, and there aren't evil capitalists trying to poison your children for another buck.
Wow. I'm not sure I'll be able to take you seriously after this nonsense ever again. What fucking world do you live in?
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I get my water from a store with a huge filtration device. They got numerous county inspection reports backing up that the water is indeed really good. We fill up 5 gallon jugs to use for cooking and drinking.
If I was in a detached home instead of a townhouse I would probably invest into a water system that cleaned up the city water for the whole house. My parents do this for the well water they use on their property.
What my parents have is ideal, but they couldn't do any of this until they got to their gol
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Uhhh, apple and hand-grenades much?
A butterfly flaps it's wings..
Are you omniscient? Prescient? God in disguise, all-knowing and all-seeing? Like Doc Strange, can sit there and go through millions of possible scenarios and see the outcome of all of them? No? Didn't think so.
This is human-caused pollution and it's crossing the placental barrier. What if it's causi
Diesel nanoparticles (Score:2)
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The reason diesel is so popular in many countries in the EU is the result of a tax loophole.
Traditionally, personal cars are gasoline, while trucks are diesel. EU states wanted to tax personal cars more than trucks, the reason being that personal cars, especially gas guzzlers are more of a luxury while trucks are an essential part of the economy. Higher fuel prices for trucks means higher shipping costs, hindering the movement of goods, and slowing down the economy as a result. So the obvious idea was to ta
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Good info, ignore the troll.
Periodic table (Score:3)
Re:Periodic table (Score:5, Informative)
If only there was some way to find answers to questions like that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, and PM2.5 is particularly nasty. It passes through the gas exchange regions of the lungs, and is difficult to filter out. Masks and the like don't work. HEPA filters are effective but you need a somewhat sealed environment for them to be effective, i.e. good windows and closed doors.
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Can't find this so called black carbon. What way does it differ from regular carbon?
Black carbon is regular carbon. We've been forced to use this modifier to differentiate it from carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions.
It's unlikely you will see it, at least not without some kind of magnification. This is not soot because catalytic converters and other emission controls gets most of that. This is about exceedingly small particles that are small enough to be carried in the wind.
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Golly, if only there were lists of what things mean other than the periodic table.
When will all those other fields ever bother to write anything down?!
I mean, like, dude, are you really sure you're literate? And by "literate" I mean, not aliterate.
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Can't find this so called black carbon. What way does it differ from regular carbon?
It's scarier. And if it had a pistol grip it would be called assault carbon.
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Practically everything you've seen that was black had black carbon (in the form of "carbon black" in it. Note that this doesn't include things which are actually just very darkly colored, like clothing.
Black paint is black because of carbon, which is the cheapest way to get a true black. We used to get it for oil paint by burning bones, I'm not sure what the scheme is now.
All you have to do to find some black carbon is go outside and breathe.
The worrying kind of black carbon is very small particles we gener
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So if pollution is causing miscarriages... (Score:2)
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It must be illegal in Alabama. Right?
That's right. Now they have to use smokeless powder in their muskets.
What does this historically mean? (Score:2)
Seeing that human women for most of the modern human existence (appr. 200000 yrs) have been using open fires for cooking?
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"Open fires were just that: open. And people weren't cooking 24 hours/day. People living in polluted areas are breathing this air 24 hours/day, potentially for their entire lives."
Humans (and humanoids) have been building "open fires" for cooking and warmth, inside their dwellings (hut, cave, igloo etc), for hundreds of thousands years, exposing women and children to this polluted air 24/7, (men were able to spend a little more time outdoors). Perhaps the most polluted areas in China are worse, where kids
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What it means is that it's been happening. So? You think that means it's good?
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500 meters from road better (Score:2)
If I'm reading it right, you want to live at least 500 meters from a big road. This is some scary shit. Even though we are starting to have more electric vehicles, the population everywhere is just going up and up so more cars. FUCK.
"Low residential BC exposure during pregnancy was defined as: (i) entire pregnancy and third trimester of pregnancy exposure to residential BC25th percentile (0.96g per m and 0.63g per m, respectively), and (ii) residential proximity to major road >500m."
That article is racist! (Score:1)