Climate Change Has Made Our Stormwater Infrastructure Obsolete

https://earther.gizmodo.com/climate-change-has-made-our-stormwater-infrastructure-o-1836909668

We are not ready for the extreme rainfall coming with climate change. A quick dramatic thunderstorm in New York on Wednesday flooded Staten Island so badly that brown murky water joined bus riders for their evening ride home.

It’s just one in a growing number of examples of infrastructure not being up to the task. And now, a newly published study shows just how unprepared our infrastructure across the U.S. is to handle extreme rainfall events. Many cities’ water management systems—think stormwater drains or dams—aren’t equipped to handle climate change-influenced weather shifts, according to the study published in Geophysical Research Letters. Staten Island got a taste of that when stormwater infrastructure failed to handle about the inch of rain that fell in 20 minutes. That’s because the system wasn’t built to withstand that much rain in such short a time. But New Yorkers aren’t alone in this predicament.

“The take-home message is that infrastructure in most parts of the country is no longer performing at the level that it’s supposed to because of the big changes that we’ve seen in extreme rainfall,” lead author Daniel Wright, a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.

The team of researchers looked at the data from more than 900 weather stations for the years 1950 to 2017 to find out how often extreme storms shot past the standards city infrastructure can handle. The scientists found that extreme weather events are happening 85 percent more often in the eastern U.S. in 2017 compared to 1950. In the West, overwhelming storms are happening 51 percent more often.

Climate change is shifting precipitation patterns and making rainfall event more extreme as our planet’s rising temperature is increasing the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. We’re seeing that play out already, but these events are expected to grow much worse: If we continue with business as usual, today’s most extreme downpours could become five times more likely by the end of the century.

When infrastructure gets backed up, the result is often floods or even flash floods that can be dangerous. People and cars can be swept away if they’re not expecting the water to rise. Standing water also poses risks to health and infrastructure. It can contain contaminants (see: Hurricane Florence) that can ruin people’s homes and have averse impacts on health, which is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend avoiding wading into floodwaters. 

If the water infrastructure could handle this amount of water in such a short amount of time, however, it wouldn’t be such a hazard. The study authors hope their findings help inform a new age of renovation. Many presidential candidates like to go on about updating infrastructure, and well, here’s a start. Get to it.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

August 2, 2019 at 03:06PM

Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614052/scientists-are-making-human-monkey-hybrids-in-china/

In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey, reports the Spanish daily El País.

Daring biologist: According to the newspaper, the Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who operates a lab at the Salk Institute in California, has been working working with monkey researchers in China to perform the disturbing research.

Their objective is to create “human-animal chimeras,” in this case monkey embryos to which human cells are added. 

Why, why? The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kidney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such animals could be used as sources of organs for transplantation.

Making chimeras: The technique for making chimeras involves injecting human embryonic stem cells into a days-old embryo of another species. The hope is that the human cells will grow along with the embryo, adding to it.

Izpisúa Belmonte tried making human-animal chimeras previously by adding human cells to pig embryos, but the human cells didn’t take hold effectively.

Because monkeys are genetically closer to humans, it’s possible that such experiments could now succeed. To give the human cells a better chance of taking hold, scientists also use gene-editing technology to disable the formation of certain types of cells in the animal embryos.

Controversial? Extremely. In the US, the National Institutes of Health says federal funds can never be used to create mixed human-monkey embryos. However, there is no such rule in China, which is probably why the research is occurring there.

So far, no part-human part-monkey has been born. Instead, the mixed embryos are only being allowed to develop for a week or two in the lab, at which time they can be studied. That is according to Estrella Núñez, a biologist and administrator at the Catholic University of Murcia, in Spain, who told El País her university is helping to fund the research.

Asked if the El Pais report is accurate, the Salk Institute did not reply. Núñez said in an email she could not comment further until “the results are published.”

Questions: Pablo Ross, a veterinary researcher at the University of California, Davis, who previously worked with Salk on the pig-human chimeras, says he doesn’t think it makes sense to try to grow human organs in monkeys.

“I always made the case that it doesn’t make sense to use a primate for that. Typically they are very small, and they take too long to develop,” he says. 

Ross suspects the researchers have more basic scientific questions in mind. Injecting human cells into monkey embryos could address “questions of evolutionary distance and interspecies barriers,” he says.

via Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories https://ift.tt/1XdUwhl

August 2, 2019 at 01:56PM