Word: goodness
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Dinglasan has found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us. Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game...
...talking about the deaths of small children. They can't get past the age of 5. I don't know if you can measure the full impact of that." You can't. Nor can you measure the sense of global relief when that kind of suffering is over for good...
...rising seas, increased drought and wildfires, shrinking water supplies and more acidic oceans. For the plants that form the very foundation of the food chain, though, an argument can be made that both global warming itself and the rising carbon dioxide levels that cause it are actually a good thing. CO2, after all, is essential for the photosynthesis that most plants depend on for nourishment. And as winters get milder and shorter, plants will have longer growing seasons. More food plus more time to eat it seems like a recipe for very happy vegetables...
Climate change will, moreover, lead to different effects in different parts of the world. "In northern areas," says Lobell, "you'll see an expansion of the growing season" - which, if the Finnish study is correct, won't necessarily help forests, but could be good for crops, since you can deliberately plant seeds that are suited to long summers. But in arid parts of the tropics, he says, where plant growth is limited by the availability of water, more frequent droughts could make things worse. "Large parts of the world," says Field, "are already at the warm edge of where things...
...principle, plants can shift their ranges as the climate changes. But as Kuparinen and her colleagues are only the most recent to note, that shifting won't necessarily keep pace with a shifting climate. "In general," says Field, "we don't have very good understanding of the mechanisms that allow plants to move around on the landscape." Current estimates, he says, are based largely on studies of ancient ecologies. "But our models are mostly not validated for the modern, human-dominated environment...