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[SÃO PAULO] Populations living around Amazon areas where forests are cleared with fires to grow crops in soils fertilised by the ashes might have an increased risk of DNA damage, mutation and cancer because of the air pollution. This was the conclusion drawn by a team of Brazilian researchers who carried out controlled fire experiments to estimate the emissions of greenhouse gases and particulate matter with a diameter of less than 2.5 microns (PM 2.5) produced during burnings in rural [...]

[SÃO PAULO] Brazilian researchers have developed a low-cost method of classifying the most common malignant brain tumour in children, which they say can help medics diagnose and treat the condition. Medulloblastoma, a tumour of the central nervous system, affects one in every 200,000 children and adolescents worldwide and represents 20 per cent of all childhood brain tumours. The World Health Organisation (WHO) divides the disease into four molecular subgroups according to their [...]

Measuring the height of Brazil’s towering rainforests can be a challenging task. But an international team of researchers say they are working together to turn unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into efficient, low-cost data collectors that can monitor the progress of forest restoration. The team developed a drone equipped with three-dimensional laser scanning and hyperspectral imaging systems capable of producing high-resolution maps and collecting hundreds of images at [...]

The intensification of cattle ranching in a particular area to boost its productivity was proposed by experts as a measure to reduce deforestation of new lands in the Amazon, but a new study shows that sometimes it can have the opposite effect. In the Amazon, beef cattle ranching drive deforestation of the rainforest, and more than 60 per cent of the deforested area is used as pasture. The current environmental legislation, the Brazilian Forest Code, allows land-owners to deforest 20 per cent [...]

[SÃO PAULO] The harmful effects of microplastics on the marine environment are widely documented. But now a new study says the tiny plastic debris acts as a carrier for pollutants resistant to environmental degradation, adding to the risks to animal and human health. Microplastics are defined as pieces of plastic less than five millimetres in length, and include remnants of larger plastic items that have degraded, as well as polyethylene microbeads used in some health and beauty [...]

[SÃO PAULO] Brazilian overweight children who often eat ultra-processed food such as cookies, biscuits and sausages tend to be addicted to it in the same way others are to drugs. This is the main finding of a study that analysed the eating habits of 139 overweight children between the age of nine and 11 years old from two schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city. Researchers from the Federal University of Sao Paulo found that 95 per cent of them presented at least one of seven [...]

[SÃO PAULO] The pollution plume produced in the city of Manaus, northwest Brazil, tends to drift towards pristine areas of the Amazon rainforest, elevating up to 50 times the concentration of tiny, harmful particles in parts of the forest with near pre-industrial atmospheric conditions. This is one of the key findings of a team of researchers from the United States, Brazil and Germany studying how humans have affected the Amazon's atmosphere. They analysed how pollution pumped out in Manaus [...]

[SÃO PAULO] A remote monitoring system rolled out in Brazil is taking over the exhausting and risky task of keeping an eye on commercial forests. The system allows researchers and technicians to track forest growth rates in real time, in order to estimate if they are developing properly and detect early infections or pest attacks on plantations. This type of monitoring currently requires 150 to 160 staff each year. It’s exhausting work, and accidents such as attacks by venomous animals are [...]

Biologist Marie-Anne van Sluys straddles two areas of interest in her scientific career: understanding of molecular processes for biological diversification, and the interactions between plants and microorganisms. A member of Brazilian Academy of Science and author of more than 80 scientific papers, she is known for her work on a pioneering project that decoded the first genome of a phytopathogen — an organism that causes disease in plants. van Sluys is also one of three women in an [...]