New research by Kerry Ard, a CFAES environmental sociologist, shows that despite an overall improvement in American air quality over the past 70 years, air pollution remains a serious health problem in low-income communities, especially communities of color. Read the story.
A new CFAES task force is offering help to farmers and their families dealing with the emotional impacts of Ohio’s farming crisis.
Interested in growing your own greens? Early spring is a good time to start. Lettuce can tolerate cool soil and weather, writes Master Gardener Volunteer Faye Mahaffey in a piece published by OSU Extension’s Brown County office, “so you can plant seeds in a well-prepared seedbed as much as 4 weeks before your last frost date.”
Further, if you have limited space or mobility, you can easily grow lettuce in pots, compact salad boxes, and raised salad tables, too.
Ohio’s last frost date ranges from the first week of May to the first week of June, depending on where you live. See when yours is.
Learn more about CFAES’s Master Gardener Volunteer program. (Photo: Getty Images.)
The Environmental Professionals Network (EPN) presents its next public breakfast program, “Healthy Planet, Healthy Patients: Hospitals Reduce Their Environmental Footprint” from 7:15-9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 16, in the Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Building on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Registration is $10, free for students, and includes breakfast. Find out more and register.
EPN, a statewide professional group, is a service of CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources.
What’s being done to keep you safe from Lake Erie’s harmful algal blooms? Hear from some of the people doing the work in the video above. It’s new from Ohio Sea Grant.
“We’re taking advantage of something plants have been doing for millions of years” — evolving chemicals to defend themselves from pests — “to hopefully get a leg up on mosquitoes.”
So says CFAES scientist Pete Piermarini, pictured, explaining a recent study. In it, he and scientist Liva Rakotondraibe of Ohio State’s College of Pharmacy discovered a possible new mosquito-fighting chemical in a plant from Madagascar.
Read the full story. (Photo: Ken Chamberlain, CFAES.)
Ohio State scientists, including from CFAES, have successfully tested a new chemical to control mosquitoes, including the ones that spread Zika, and it comes from a traditional medicinal plant found only in Madagascar.
Read the story. (Photo: Zika’s main carrier, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, iStock.)
Not all water filter pitchers are created equal when it comes to removing toxins from harmful algal blooms. So says a new study led by Justin Chaffin, research coordinator at CFAES’s Stone Lab. Read the Ohio State press release.
Do toxins from Lake Erie algal blooms get into Lake Erie fish you might eat? What about vegetables that growers watered with water they pulled from the lake? Scientists with CFAES, funded by Ohio Sea Grant and the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s Harmful Algal Bloom Research Initiative, are helping find answers.
Read the full story (with video) by WOSU Public Media’s Elizabeth Miller.
This is a jar of algae taken from Lake Erie. That's not a healthy lake. https://t.co/OFciYYdtNz pic.twitter.com/54nnKWIyPu
— WOSU News (@wosunews) September 19, 2017