By Amy Adams
Emails are out inviting a representative sample of Stanford faculty to provide feedback on issues relating to the new school focused on climate and sustainability. Those faculty will have an opportunity to discuss the school in depth, ask questions of a panel and provide feedback that will guide decision-makers.
Kathryn Moler, vice provost and dean of research, is leading the effort to create a school focused on climate and sustainability along with Stephan Graham, dean of the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. (Image credit: Andrew Brodhead and Tom Shahar)
The school, announced by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne in May, arose as part of the Long-Range Vision as a way of focusing Stanford research and education on urgent issues facing the planet. Throughout the fall, a Blueprint Advisory Committee composed of faculty from all seven schools and many institutes met to discuss organization for the new school. In December, that group submitted rep
The finding raises troubling questions about how to effectively eliminate the poison from children’s bodies.
The battery recycling industry is responsible for much of the lead soil contamination in poor and middle-income countries.
Decades after the industrialized world largely eliminated lead poisoning in children, the potent neurotoxin still lurks in one in three children globally.
“Once the lead is in the environment, it stays there pretty much indefinitely without remediation,” says study lead author Jenna Forsyth, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Ultimately, we want to work toward a world in which battery recycling is done safely, and lead never makes it into the soil or people’s bodies in the first place.”
Decades after the industrialized world largely eliminated lead poisoning in children, the potent neurotoxin still lurks in one in three children globally. A new study in Bangladesh by researchers at Stanford University and other institutions finds that a relatively affordable remediation process can almost entirely remove lead left behind by unregulated battery recycling – an industry responsible for much of the lead soil contamination in poor and middle-income countries – and raises troubling questions about how to effectively eliminate the poison from children’s bodies.
Workers dig up contaminated soil and waste at the site of a former lead battery recycling operation in Kathgora, Bangladesh. (Image credit: Pure Earth)
Water isn’t just crucial for life, it’s fundamental to increasing opportunities for women and girls in rural areas across the globe. A new Stanford study reveals how bringing piped water closer to remote households in Zambia dramatically improves the lives of women and girls, while also improving economic opportunities, food security and well-being for entire households. The research, published in
Social Science & Medicine, could spur governments and NGOs to more carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of piped water as an alternative to less accessible communal water sources. Go to the web site to view the video.
Video by Michelle Horton
By Josie Garthwaite
Record-setting wildfires torched huge swaths of western states in 2020. They blotted out the sun, produced hazardous air pollution in cities far from the blazes and sent toxic smoke wafting clear across the country and beyond. Such far-reaching effects are no longer aberrations, Stanford scholars write in research published Jan. 12 in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wildfire smoke shrouded the San Francisco Bay Area and blocked sunlight on Sept. 9, 2020. (Image credit: Aaron Maizlish / Flickr Creative Commons)
The number of homes at direct risk from wildfires – and the investment in firefighting resources to protect them – is on the rise. Nearly 50 million homes in the U.S. now sit in the wildland-urban interface where houses are close to forests and highly combustible vegetation, according to the authors, led by Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences