Haze Over Cities Is a Problem Bigger Than China: Today's Pic

China's big industrial cities are learning the hard way that rapid economic growth comes at a price frequently paid by the lungs.

Residents of Bejing and Shanghai live under continuous threat that air pollution will make walking around the block harder than climbing a mountain. This side effect of economic progress turns out to be somewhat contagious, as local pollution goes global, according to a recent study in Nature Communications by scientists from Texas A&M University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Peking University.