NSAS Idea Suggestion #18 - Just How Dangerous Is Air Pollution?
In this series I propose daily ideas for new members who are interested in becoming #steemstem authors.
I will post an idea a dayish (it is the goal to post daily, but again real life>steemit for now). With this idea I will include a short description about aspects you may be interested in. If you read this idea proposal, and you like it, and you want to write about it:
Obviously "username" is where you write your own username. This is so that I know who is interested in @steemstem and science in general and I am always looking for a good read. This is honor system stuff, so please respect someone claiming an idea. Again, this is just the first step towards writing a good science post. There is more to it. Do your research, use scientific sources and try to use some proper language and attractive design.
This series will have their own hashtag #nsas, so that you can go back and sort through some of the ideas I have shared and what people made out of it. If you decide to use the idea I propose, please also include #nsas on your posts so that I can have a look at it and maybe get you connected in the steemstem group.
Please also visit @steemstem on steemit as well as on Discord. Follow the guidelines and appreciate the community. That means engage, upvote and comment until your fingers bleed.
Laugh at me if you must, but I am enrolled in a one credit PE course called "Fitness Walking". Originally I wanted to sign up for swimming, but that did not work with my schedule (of course). So yeah, every Tuesday and Thursday morning I am fitness walking through Birmingham. How does this relate to air pollution? My university is close to a very busy street. There is a trail by that street and we sometimes fitness walk on that trail. Part of the trail is right by the street, while a different part is a few meters off the street in a park. Our instructor/yoga coach (don´t laugh about me for being in this class - I had to) only walks the park route because she thinks that working out so close to exhaust from the street erases the benefits we get from fitness walking.
We know that air pollution is bad. However, we did not know how bad. The WHO recently stated that air pollution is linked to 7.000.000 deaths every year. This is a massive number.
Here is the proposed idea. You should do some research into air pollution in general. In order to establish the problem, you should look into some statistics, and figure out where specifically air pollution is a problem. From here, you can go into some more science and aswer questions like: What are the dangerous contents? How may they harm us?
You can then describe the main sources of air pollution and provide a short commentary about how they could be prevented. Some countries are regulating air pollution, which you could mention.
Something controversial you could write about are some proposals in Germany. They are thinking about regulating provate households burning wood as means of heating. Thus they are effectively supporting heating with gas and oil, which are known to be worse than wood. If you want to make this post more political, you could explain how politicians are tackling this problem. Is trying to limit private sources of air pollution more effective than limiting industry? You could also write about Germany thinking about banning Diesel cars from cities. There are many things you can write about.
A good website to start of your research is the air pollution subsite of the WHO. Here is a link.
Previous Idea Suggestions:
- Suggestion #1: Onions and their Health Benefits
- Suggestion #2: Tea - The Silent Killer
- Suggestion #3: Essential Oils
- Suggestion #4: Biotechnology And Beer-Brewing
- Suggestion #5: Antioxidant Hype - Claimed by @deholt, build on by @csusbgeochem1
- Suggestion #6: Your Diet Changes Your Gut Microbiome Faster Than You Think
- Suggestion #7: Target Delivery Of Cancer Therapeutics – claimed by @lianaakobian
- Suggestion #8: Science Behind The Conspiracy Theory Phenomenon
- Suggestion #9: Influence Of Drug Overuse On The Human Microbiome
- Suggestion #10: Does The Brain Talk To The Immune System?
- Suggestion #11: Synthetic Cells
- Suggestion #12: The Forest – claimed by @davidrhodes124
- Suggestion #13: The Science Behind Friendships
- Suggestion #14: Is Bread Certain Death? – claimed by @davidrhodes124
- Suggestion #15: Our Savior Yoghurt
- Suggestion #16: The Perfect Shot
- Suggestion #17: Sexy Science
Helpful Links
- How To Find Scientific Sources For Free - Post
- SteemSTEM Guidelines - Link
- Everything You Need to Know about Uploading Images on Steemit [Tutorial & MarkDown] – Link - by @katerinaramm
As always,
Cheers @lesshorrible!
Increased levels of fine particles in the air are linked to health hazards such as heart disease, altered lung function and lung cancer. Particulates are related to respiratory infections and can be particularly harmful to those already suffering from conditions like asthma.
Heard that, too. I have not looked at scientific sources for this yet. Again, this is an idea proposal for stem authors, not an actual scientific post. Thank you for your comment. Cheers!
Thanks for the guideline for new steemSTEM authors. I personally find the "Helpful Links" section very useful for a new user like me. That free scientific document searching post is really cool. I even bookmarked that post.
Cheers, man.
Glad I can help! That´s what this series is about. Cheers!