This paper assesses the environmental impacts associated with changes in pesticide use with GM crops at a global level. The main technologies impacting on pesticide use have been crops modified to be tolerant to specific herbicides so as to facilitate improved weed control and crops resistant to a range of crop insect pests that otherwise damage crops or typically require the application of insecticides to control them. Over the 24 year period examined to 2020, the widespread use of GM insect resistant and herbicide tolerant seed technology has reduced pesticide application by 748.6 million kg (-7.2%) of active ingredient and, as a result, decreased the environmental impact associated with insecticide and herbicide use on these crops (as measured by the indicator, the Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ)) by a larger 17.3% between 1996 and 2020. The technology that has delivered the largest change in pesticide use has been insect resistant cotton, where a 339 million kg of active ingredient saving has occurred and the associated environmental impact (as measured by the EIQ indicator) has fallen by about a third.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21645698.2022.2118497 | DOI Listing |
J Am Chem Soc
January 2025
State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory for Coastal Ecology and Environmental Studies, Center for Marine Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology, College of the Environment and Ecology, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361102, China.
The performance of nanomaterials is significantly determined by the interfacial microenvironment, in which a surfactant plays an essential role as the adsorbent, but its involvement in the interfacial reaction is often overlooked. Here, it was discovered that citrate and ascorbic acid, the two primarily used surfactants for colloidal gold nanoparticles (Au NPs), can spontaneously undergo catalytic reaction with trace-level nitrogenous residue under ambient environment to form oxime, which is subsequently cleaved to generate CN or a compound containing the -CN group. Such a catalytic reaction shows wide universality in both reactants, including various carbonaceous and nitrogenous sources, and metal catalysts, including Au, Ag, Fe, Cu, Ni, Pt, and Pd NPs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Sci (Weinh)
January 2025
Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA.
Biopharmaceuticals are the fastest-growing class of drugs in the healthcare industry, but their global reach is severely limited by their propensity for rapid aggregation. Currently, surfactant excipients such as polysorbates and poloxamers are used to prevent protein aggregation, which significantly extends shelf-life. Unfortunately, these excipients are themselves unstable, oxidizing rapidly into 100s of distinct compounds, some of which cause severe adverse events in patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Sens
January 2025
Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-41296 Göteborg, Sweden.
Rapidly detecting hydrogen leaks is critical for the safe large-scale implementation of hydrogen technologies. However, to date, no technically viable sensor solution exists that meets the corresponding response time targets under technically relevant conditions. Here, we demonstrate how a tailored long short-term transformer ensemble model for accelerated sensing (LEMAS) speeds up the response of an optical plasmonic hydrogen sensor by up to a factor of 40 and eliminates its intrinsic pressure dependence in an environment emulating the inert gas encapsulation of large-scale hydrogen installations by accurately predicting its response value to a hydrogen concentration change before it is physically reached by the sensor hardware.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Sci (Weinh)
January 2025
School of Fashion and Textiles, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 999077, China.
Acting as the interface between the human body and its environment, clothing is indispensable in human thermoregulation and even survival under extreme environmental conditions. Development of clothing textiles with prolonged passive temperature-adaptive thermoregulation without external energy consumption is much needed for protection from thermal stress and energy saving, but very challenging. Here, a temperature-adaptive thermoregulation filament (TATF) consisting of thermoresponsive vacuum cavities formed by the temperature-responsive volume change of the material confined in the cellular cores of the filament is proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Histotechnol
January 2025
Mechanical Engineering, Orthopedic Bioengineering Research Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA.
With an increasing concentration of microplastics (MPs) in every biome, laboratories with a focus on creating histology slides from resin-embedded specimens could be partially responsible for expanding the emission of microscopic resinous particles into the environment. With current research elucidating harmful health impacts from MPs, releasing them incautiously is arguably unethical and, in the near future, plausibly illegal. The Orthopedic Bioengineering Research Laboratory (OBRL) is in Colorado, a state known not only for its natural beauty but also for its increasing number of legislative amendments aimed at reducing plastic pollution.
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