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Naturally occurring CO2 also a serious threat

Photo of carbon dioxide seeping from the ocean floor
Droplets rising from the Champagne vent on the ocean floor in the Mariana Islands. Fluids venting from the site contain dissolved carbon dioxide. NOAA Ocean Explorer

Deep sea carbon reservoirs once superheated the Earth – could it happen again?

Lowell D. Stott, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

As concern grows over human-induced climate change, many scientists are looking back through Earth’s history to events that can shed light on changes occurring today. Analyzing how the planet’s climate system has changed in the past improves our understanding of how it may behave in the future.

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Carbon dioxide has a huge impact on Earth’s climate

Artist drawing of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory Satellite
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite makes precise measurements of Earth’s carbon dioxide levels from space. NASA/JPL

Climate explained: why carbon dioxide has such outsized influence on Earth’s climate

Jason West, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

CC BY-ND

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

I heard that carbon dioxide makes up 0.04% of the world’s atmosphere. Not 0.4% or 4%, but 0.04%! How can it be so important in global warming if it’s such a small percentage?

I am often asked how carbon dioxide can have an important effect on global climate when its concentration is so small – just 0.041% of Earth’s atmosphere. And human activities are responsible for just 32% of that amount.

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The puzzling questions of the coronavirus

Photo of nearly empty Brooklyn Bridge
The typically crowded Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, now nearly desolate in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. Getty Images / Victor J. Blue

A doctor addresses 6 questions that are stumping physicians

William Petri, University of Virginia

Editor’s Note: As researchers try to find treatments and create a vaccine for COVID-19, doctors and others on the front lines continue to find perplexing symptoms. And the disease itself has unpredictable effects on various people. Dr. William Petri, a professor of medicine at the University of Virginia Medical School, answers questions about these confusing findings.

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Using Genetic Decoding to Trace Covids Spread

Image of map
The steady rate of genetic changes lets researchers recreate how a virus has travelled. nextstrain.org, CC BY

The coronavirus genome is like a shipping label that lets epidemiologists track where it’s been

Bert Ely, University of South Carolina and Taylor Carter, University of South Carolina

Following the coronavirus’s spread through the population – and anticipating its next move – is an important part of the public health response to the new disease, especially since containment is our only defense so far.

Just looking at an infected person doesn’t tell you where their version of the coronavirus came from, and SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t have a bar code you can scan to allow you to track its travel history. However, its genetic sequence is almost as good for providing some insight into where the virus has been.

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The science of infectious aerosols

Image of person sneezing
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Coronavirus drifts through the air in microscopic droplets – here’s the science of infectious aerosols

Shelly Miller, University of Colorado Boulder

During the 1970s when I was growing up in Southern California, the air was so polluted that I was regularly sent home from high school to “shelter in place.” There might not seem to be much in common between staying home due to air pollution and staying home to fight the coronavirus pandemic, but fundamentally, both have a lot to do with aerosols.

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Building a mirror for one of the world’s biggest telescopes

20 tons of Ohara E6 borosilicate glass being loaded onto the mold of one of the GMT’s mirrors. Ray Bertram, Steward Observatory, CC BY-ND

Buddy Martin, University of Arizona and Dae Wook Kim, University of Arizona

When astronomers point their telescopes up at the sky to see distant supernovae or quasars, they’re collecting light that’s traveled millions or even billions of light-years through space. Even huge and powerful energy sources in the cosmos are unimaginably tiny and faint when we view them from such a distance. In order to learn about galaxies as they were forming soon after the Big Bang, and about nearby but much smaller and fainter objects, astronomers need more powerful telescopes.

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Teens and Parents Stuck at Home – Together

The last thing adolescents want is to be trapped at home alone, by order of their parents. Roos Koole/Moment via Getty Images

Teens are wired to resent being stuck with parents and cut off from friends during coronavirus lockdown

Catherine Bagwell, Emory University

“Can’t I just go see one friend?”

“I need to hang out with my friends.”

“You are being overprotective and unreasonable!”

Social distancing is both necessary and hard. If my Facebook news feed and anecdotal experience in my own family are at all representative of larger trends, adolescents are especially feeling the pain. Separating from others goes against basic human needs for companionship and connection that everyone feels, yet the challenge of social distancing may be especially difficult for teenagers.

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Digital Surveillance – During a Pandemic

Digital footprints. Prasit photo/Moment via Getty Images

Digital surveillance can help bring the coronavirus pandemic under control – but also threatens privacy

Jennifer Daskal, American University

Apple and Google are collaborating on new technology that will alert smartphone users who have come in sustained contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. Users will need to opt-in to the contract tracing system, which will use Bluetooth technology in both iPhone and Android phones in ways designed to protect privacy.

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Blood sugar levels may influence vulnerability to coronavirus

syringe and glucose monitor
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Blood sugar levels may influence vulnerability to coronavirus, and controlling them through conventional means might be protective

Can watching your blood sugar help fight COVID-19?

Sugar is not only something that sweetens our food. It is also something that is an essential part of the proteins that make up our bodies.

That led me to believe, as I wrote in the Journal of Medical Virology, that control of blood glucose by diet and exercise, as well as better control of blood sugar in diabetics, especially when ill with COVID-19, may possibly help control the severity of the disease and even its spread.

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COVID-19 May Hit Rural Residents Hard

Arial photo of rural town
The empty streets of Hebron, Illinois, population 1,200, a village three miles south of the Illinois/Wisconsin border.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

COVID-19 may hit rural residents hard, and that spells trouble because of lack of rural health care

Kevin J. Bennett, University of South Carolina

The burden of COVID-19 in rural areas has been under the radar, as the toll of the disease so far has been heaviest in dense urban areas. But up to 30% of the U.S. population lives in rural America, which already has experienced more than 128 hospital closures since 2010, including 19 last year.

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