How air pollution is making life tougher for bugs

Whether you love them or loathe them, we all depend on bugs. Insects help to pollinate three-quarters of the world's crop varieties, making them a treasured resource.

Climate change worsening heat waves, air quality: UN

Climate change is driving more intense and more frequent heat waves, which in turn generate a "witch's brew" of pollutants, threatening the health of humans and other living things, the UN warned Wednesday.

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Ozone

Ozone or trioxygen (O3) is a triatomic molecule, consisting of three oxygen atoms. It is an allotrope of oxygen that is much less stable than the diatomic O2. Ground-level ozone is an air pollutant with harmful effects on the respiratory systems of animals. The ozone layer in the upper atmosphere filters potentially damaging ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth's surface. It is present in low concentrations throughout the Earth's atmosphere. It has many industrial and consumer applications.

Ozone, the first allotrope of a chemical element to be recognized by science, was proposed as a distinct chemical compound by Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1840, who named it after the Greek verb ozein (ὄζειν, "to smell"), from the peculiar odor in lightning storms. The formula for ozone, O3, was not determined until 1865 by Jacques-Louis Soret and confirmed by Schönbein in 1867.

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