Air Pollution This is the most dangerous kind of pollution and is very harmful not only to humans but

all living things. It is generally due to the smoke given out by the factories, the fumes emitted by motor vehicles or the burning of fuels such as coal, petroleum. The radioactive particles discharged by nuclear weapons also pollute the atmosphere. All this causes great harm to mankind. Air pollution damages buildings and contaminates the atmosphere.

Water Pollution Water pollution is the contamination of water bodies (e.g. lakes, rivers, oceans, aquifers and groundwater). Water pollution occurs when pollutants are discharged directly or indirectly into water bodies without adequate treatment to remove harmful compounds. Water pollution affects plants and organisms living in these bodies of water. In almost all cases the effect is damaging not only to individual species and populations, but also to the natural biological communities.

Land pollution Land gets polluted by excessive use of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides. Our household rubbish, such as rotten food, groceries, etc., also contributes to pollution of land and soil.

Noise Pollution has been strengthening its grip on the society since last two decades. Damages caused by other problems are reversible to some extent whereas in case of noise pollution, its irreversible. The three major sources of noise pollution are: Industry & Machinery. Transportation i.e. surface and air traffic. Community activities like entertainment, construction works etc.

Natural Disaster- is the effect of a natural hazard- (e.g. flood, tornado, hurricane, volcanic eruption, earthquake, or landslide) that affects the environment, and leads to financial, environmental and/or human losses. The resulting loss depends on the capacity of the population to support or resist the disaster, and their resilience. This understanding is concentrated in the formulation: "disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability." A natural hazard will hence never result in a natural disaster in areas without vulnerability, e.g. strong earthquakes in uninhabited areas. The term natural has consequently been disputed because the events simply are not hazards or disasters without human involvement.

Recent Discoveries
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Image of the Day: The "Red Dwarf Galaxy"

Many of the recent discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope have been "named" with numbers. Gone are the poetic, mythic names like Milky Way or Andromeda or Pegasus. Let's have some fun and help NASA out and create names for these awesome celestial objects. We took poetic license and named today's pick the "Red Dwarf Galaxy." It's actual name is spiral galaxy NGC 5792 a typical spiral, almost edge-on, with blue spiral arms and some dust features, what is cool is its neighbor, a red dwarf that is actually part of the Milky Way. This M dwarfs are the most common type of star, making up about 75% of all stars in the Milky Way. Image of the Day: You Name the Cosmos

In further proof that the universe can kick our butt at just about anything, the double galaxies of NGC4676 are putting on a pyrotechnics display that Jerry Bruckheimer couldn't imagine if he mainlined LSD and directly applied two thousand volts to his visual cortex. They're colliding in a process leading astrophysicists describe as "totally awesome". They've got a sense of cinema style to it too, drawing the stellar spectacular out in extreme slowmotion - a few hundred million years, now showing in a cosmos near you. We think astronomers could do a better name these fantastic objects.

Image of the Day: "The Milky Way's Twin"

This swirling beauty is NGC 7331, often called "Milky Way's Twin," is a spiral galaxy about 40 megalight-years (12 Mpc) away in the constellation Pegasus.Do you get that funny feeling that Earth's Twin might be there too? Image of the Day: Space Observatories at Mauna Kea -World's Tallest Mountain

The peak of Hawaii's Mauna Kea is 13,796 feet (4,205 m) above mean sea level but 33,476 feet (10,203 m) above its base on the floor of the Pacific Ocean makes it the world's tallest mountain, taller than Mount Everest, which is the highest mountain above sea level.
The summit of Mauna Kea houses the world's largest observatory for optical, infrared, and submillimeter astronomy.

December 3, 1984. The worst industrial chemical disaster ever, Bhopal evokes images of panic and thousands of corpses found in the morning after a deadly fog drifted across the city in Madya Pradesh county, India. Reports claim between 3,000 and 4,000 fatalities in the wake of the leak from the Union Carbide pesticide factory, with around 50,000 people treated for illnesses related to the leak, including blindness and liver and kidney failure. Activists say that 20,000 deaths since the leak can be attributed directly to the chemical accident. Studies have suggested serious insufficiencies in the safety measures at the installation, including lack of safety valves to prevent the mixing of water into the Methyl isocyanate tanks which started the evolution of the toxic gas and the failure of scrubbers to treat the gas leak--apparently they were out of service for repair. Union Carbide claims the incident could only result from sabotage. Tests to prove the theory of a water leak due to inferior system engineering failed to prove a credible hypothesis for how water entered the MIC tank. Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of Dow, paid the Indian government $470 million in a 1989 settlement of a lawsuit claiming $3 billion. Bhopal raised awareness for care in placing dangerous installations and for using less hazardous chemicals wherever possible. Engineering risk assessments and independent, fail-safe protections for all hazardous processes became standard as industry commitment and regulations drove improvements.

Scientists at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, in cooperation with Dow Chemicals, can make chemical raw materials from biomass rather than from petroleum. We have long wondered why the discussion about peak petroleum always emphasizes how expensive personal transportation will become as petroleum supplies dwindle. The better question is why are we wasting such a valuable raw material by burning it in our cars? The forces of nature that pushed carbon molecules together into longer chains in the form of petroleum have subsidized modern development for almost a century now. When petroleum runs out, putting together the raw materials for modern products ranging from pharmaceuticals to paints to plastics is not so eas
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