Word: air
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nobody pretends that polluted air isn't terrible for your health. Clean up the skies over any dirty city, and the people who live there will all but certainly become healthier. That, at least, has been popular wisdom, but until now, no one had ever put it to a statistical test. Now someone has, and the results are striking: according to a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, when local governments decide to scrub out the smog, local residents actually live an average of five months longer...
...very reassuring," says Dr. Douglas Dockery, one of the study's three authors and an environmental epidemiologist at Harvard's School of Public Health. "We can see some benefits from the regulations of air pollution that have been put in place in the past 20 to 30 years." (See pictures of the world's most polluted places...
...Overall, they found that lifespan in all of the areas increased by an average of nearly three years - from 74 to 77 - as a result of a host of factors, most notably reduced smoking and improved income. But 15% of the change was attributable to cleaner air...
...reasons curbing pollution can have so immediate an effect is that even a little dirt can do a lot of damage. A reduction of just 10 micrograms (10 millionths of a gram) of pollution per cubic meter of air - a degree of improvement many of the surveyed cities were able to attain during the two-decade-plus period - could extend human lifespans a full nine months. How small is 10 micrograms per cubic meter? Consider that simply by living with a cigarette smoker, you're exposed to a daily dose of 20 to 30. Pittsburgh, Pa., is one city...
...magazine's history. The photo was shot and processed in Washington in about three hours, then the art director took the transparencies on a plane to Chicago, where they were taken to TIME's central printing plant, where a color engraving was produced. Then those images were taken by air to printing plants in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and Albany, N.Y. All in all, about 36 hours. Now it's almost instantaneous and done completely digitally...