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Air pollution kills half a million people in Europe, EU agency reports dirty air resulted in the premature deaths of more than 500,000 people in the European Union in 2014, the European Environment Agency reports. Pollution needs to be reduced, agency heads and environmentalists agree.In 41 European countries, 534,471 premature deaths in 2014 can be linked to air pollution, the European Environment Agency (EEA) reported. Within the 28 countries of the European Union, that figure is 502,351.Germany saw the highest number of deaths attributable to all air pollution sources, at 80,767. It was followed by the United Kingdom (64,351) and France (63,798). These are also the most populated countries in Europe."As a society, we should not accept the cost of air pollution," EEA Executive director Hans Bruyninckx said in a statement.Transport, agriculture, power plants, industry and households are the biggest emitters in Europe, the agency said.Investing in cleaner transport, ener...

Mexico City, Madrid and Athens say they'll ban all diesel cars in a bid to improve air quality in their polluted cities. Mayors from 85 cities are meeting in Mexico to decide a strategy to fight climate change.The ambitious plan, which will see all vehicles with diesel engines barred from entering four major world cities within a decade, was announced on Thursday at climate change talks attended by leaders of dozens of metropolitan areas.The mayors of Paris, Mexico City, Athens and Madrid committed to the plan in a bid to reduce emissions that experts say are exacerbating major health problems, a statement by the organizers of the C40 summit in the Mexican capital said.The statement cited World Health Organization figures that suggest 3 million deaths a year are directly related to outdoor air pollution, mostly from large cities."Today the mayors say no to air pollution, no to disease and death affecting particularly the most vulnerable among us. We offe courageous answers...

Paris is set to ban all petrol and diesel-fueled cars by 2030. An official told French radio it was part of a long-term strategy to reduce greenhouse gases.Paris's deputy mayor, Christophe Najdovski, told French broadcaster France Info that the mayor's office is planning to ban all combustion-engine cars on the French capital's streets by 2030. Electric cars will not be affected by the ban."This is about planning for the long term with a strategy that will reduce greenhouse gases," said Christophe Najdovski, who is responsible for transport policy at the office of mayor Anne Hidalgo.In an attempt to battle the high levels of pollution in the French capital, the mayor's office had already announced a ban on diesel cars by 2024. Hidalgo also introduced car-free days and zones as well as a 20-mph (32 kph) speed limit throughout the city. Diesel, petrol ban nationwide Although more than 60 percent of Parisians do not own cars and rely on an extensive public tran...

Every year spent in education adds an average of 11 months to people's lifespan, say scientists. The researchers say a person loses two months for every kilogram overweight they are - and seven years for smoking a packet of cigarettes a day. Unusually, the Edinburgh university team found their answers by analysing differences in people's genetic code or DNA. Ultimately they think it will reveal new ways of helping us to live longer.The group used the genetic code of more than 600,000 people who are taking part in a natural, yet massive, experiment.Clearer picture If someone smokes, drinks, dropped out of school and is overweight, it can be difficult to identify the impact of one specific unhealthy behaviour. Instead, the researchers turned to the natural experiment. Some people carry mutations in their DNA that increase appetite or make them more likely to put on weight, so researchers were able to compare those programmed to eat more with those who were not - irrespective of...

The latest European Sentinel satellite went into orbit after taking off from Russia. It will provide data to help emergency services manage their response to natural disasters.Russia on Friday launched the latest Sentinel satellite for the Copernicus initiative, a multi-billion-euro joint project of the European Union and European Space Agency (ESA) to monitor the earth's atmosphere. The ESA's Sentinel-5P satellite was launched in a Russian Rokot missile from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome launch pad in the Arkhangelsk region in northwestern Russia. "The Sentinel-5P satellite is now safely in orbit so it is up to our mission control teams to steer this mission into its operational life and maintain it for the next seven years or more," ESA Director General Jan Woerner said.Once operational, the 820 kilogram (1,808-pound) satellite will use state-of-the-art technology to monitor air pollution, UV radiation, and atmospheric gases such as nitrogen dioxide,methane, and...

The Agriculture, Nutrition, Health, and the Environment in Africa conference is a collaboration between Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University Center for African Studies, and Africa Academy for Public Health. It will be held in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts on Monday and Tuesday, November 6-7, 2017. The conference aims to generate attention and awareness, create opportunities for novel collaborations, and identify a path forward toward solving complex health and development challenges. Understanding the intersections of agriculture, nutrition, and public health is particularly important in Africa, where populations are growing and urbanizing rapidly, and high rates of undernutrition and infectious diseases are exacerbated by an increasing burden of overweight/obesity and noncommunicable diseases. Agricultural production systems are under pressure to keep pace with populatio...

For a century, Russia’s nature reserves - with the world’s strictest wildlife protections - have been largely off-limits to humans. One of them, Kronotsky, boasts geysers, active volcanoes and 800 brown bears. This year marks a century since the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, formally approved a plan to close a vast swathe of Siberian forest to the public - one of his final acts before the Russian empire collapsed in the 1917 revolution. The original aim was to prevent the extinction of a weasel-like creature called the Siberian Sable, highly valued for its fur. But it also founded a unique nature reserve system extending over an area the size of France and rated by the UN as having the world’s highest level of protection for wildlife.The rules governing these nature reserves, known as zapovedniki in Russian, are so strict, and some are so remote, that very few of Russia’s own population have ever been inside one. Since their foundation, only scientists, rangers and s...