Nature crisis: Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction'

On land, in the seas, in the sky, the devastating impact of humans on nature is laid bare in a compelling UN report.

One million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction.

Nature everywhere is declining at a speed never previously seen and our need for ever more food and energy are the main drivers.

These trends can be halted, the study says, but it will take "transformative change" in every aspect of how humans interact with nature.

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• The teens saving Madagascar's wildlife
• What would a world without humans be like?

From the bees that pollinate our crops, to the forests that hold back flood waters, the report reveals how humans are ravaging the very ecosystems that support their societies.

Three years in the making, this global assessment of nature draws on 15,000 reference materials, and has been compiled by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It runs to 1,800 pages.

Read more at the BBC

Could viruses called bacteriophages be the answer to the antibiotic crisis?

Our generation has been lucky enough to live through a golden age in medicine – the age of antibiotics, where drugs to kill bacterial infections off quickly are readily available. Now, though, growing numbers of bacteria are becoming resistant to our most powerful drugs, evolving into new strains – often called ‘superbugs’ – that we can no longer kill. Already drug resistance kills over 700,000 people globally every year and if we fail to tackle the problem it could cause an extra 10 million deaths a year by 2050.

New antibiotic drugs are proving difficult to find – but there is a completely different approach to killing bacteria that may prove vital in saving us from infections: using viruses.

Read more at BBC 

also Here 

also see Phage therapy: 'Viral cocktail saved my daughter's life

Increased risk of cancer from mobile phone use

The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones

 On 28 March 2018 , the scientific peer review of a landmark United States government study concluded that there is “clear evidence” that radiation from mobile phones causes cancer, specifically, a heart tissue cancer in rats that is too rare to be explained as random occurrence.

Eleven independent scientists spent three days at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, discussing the study, which was done by the National Toxicology Program of the US Department of Health and Human Services and ranks among the largest conducted of the health effects of mobile phone radiation. NTP scientists had exposed thousands of rats and mice (whose biological similarities to humans make them useful indicators of human health risks) to doses of radiation equivalent to an average mobile user’s lifetime exposure.

See also Article from Journal of Environmental research