Photo: Bernd Dittrich/Unsplash (CC0)
We’re closing out the week at Squirrel News talking about how Beijing dramatically lowered air pollution, how England and Wales cut theft rates by over 80% since 1995, and the clandestine book club in Afghanistan giving women access to revolutionary texts.
According to new data levels of PM2.5 – small particulate that can enter the lungs and bloodstream – fell 41% nationwide in the decade since 2014, with levels of PM2.5 dropping by 69.8% in Beijing alone thanks to a ten-point action plan.
Source: France 24
Kraków, long known as the smog capital of Poland, is proof that politicians wield the power to save lives by cleaning the air. A drop in soot levels since 2013, when the city announced it would ban coal and wood in home heating, has averted nearly 6,000 early deaths over a decade.
Source: The Guardian
The tobacco and vapes bill will also outlaw smoking, vaping and using heated tobacco in playgrounds and outside schools and hospitals. Smoking in cars containing anyone under the age of 18 has been illegal in England since 2015, but the new legislation will extend that prohibition to the use of vapes and heated tobacco.
Source: The Guardian
New data suggests that theft in England and Wales has fallen sharply in recent decades. Vehicle-related thefts peaked in 1995 at about 4.3 million incidents – including car thefts, break-ins and stolen parts like radios – while burglaries also peaked in the mid-1990s.
Source: Our World In Data
When a nerve is cut during surgery, it sprouts a basic scaffold that it tries to regenerate along, but which only last about 10 days. The silk from the Golden orb-web spider acts like a stronger scaffold, lasting for 150 days. Researchers are now seeing whether these silk fibres could be implanted to repair nerves before degrading into the body.
Source: BBC News
A third bacterial state could be key to fighting antibiotic resistance. Between being active, where antibiotics will kill them, and dormant, where they survive and can create resistant infections, new research reveals a stage where they could potentially be targeted by additional medication.
Source: NPR
An Ecuadorian court has blocked construction of a highway after concluding that it poses an imminent and irreversible threat to the rights of the Jambato harlequin toad. Ecuador is the only country in the world whose constitution recognises nature’s rights to exist, regenerate and be restored.
Source: Inside Climate News
Research shows that illuminating night skies is bad for a wide range of species, disrupting their feeding, reproduction and navigation. Belgium’s Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse national park has allocated €308,000 to restore night-time darkness, treating it as beneficial for nature in the same way as restoring a pond or a woodland.
Source: The Guardian
Banned from education, a clandestine reading circle meets to pore over novels by that deal with issues of power, suffering, and the place of women. They meet every week for an hour-and-a-half at the home of one of the members, varying the location to avoid scrutiny in a country where women’s freedoms have been severely curtailed.
Source: The Guardian
Inari Sámi is an indigenous language that’s only spoken in the area of Lake Inari in Finland. Now, special nurseries known as “language nests” are taking part in a novel, immersive language experiment to save it.
Source: BBC News
