Environmental monitoring is often expensive, cumbersome, and time-intensive. Equipment that can run quick and easy tests for pollutants like pesticides in our food are almost nonexistent. However, researchers in Canada are working on a new biomonitoring technique using treated paper on a stick that can quickly identify trace amounts of pesticides in your chicken soup, or your first early morning cup of joe [Technology Review]. Could these dipsticks lead to DIY pollution monitoring one day? That may still be far off, but this technology could give researchers a reliable and cheap way to get a better picture of what pollutants—even at trace amounts—are in the environment, and how they interact with our bodies.
In the study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, the researchers describe a new paper-based test strip that changes color shades depending on the amount of pesticide present. In laboratory studies using food and beverage samples intentionally contaminated with common pesticides, the test strips accurately identified minute amounts of pesticides. The test strips, which produced results in less than 5 minutes, could be particularly useful in developing countries or remote areas that may lack access to expensive testing equipment and electricity, they note [R&D Magazine]. If the dipsticks pan out, restaurant customers may one day have more to complain about than a stray hair in their soup.
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Image: ACS
It seems that every day brings a new electronic gadget to the market, whether it’s a smart phone, an electronic reader, a laptop the size and weight of a magazine, or a television the size of a wall. But each advance adds to the world’s electronic waste, which is the fastest-growing component of solid waste. Much of the electronic refuse ends up in developing countries, where workers strip down the gadgets to get at the copper and other valuable metals inside, often exposing themselves to toxins in the process. Now, scientists are calling for federal regulations in the United States to stem the tide.
Although the U.S. is one the world’s largest producers of electronic waste (e-waste), it is hardly a leader in addressing this problem, given that the country has “no legally enforceable federal policies requiring comprehensive recycling of e-waste or elimination of hazardous substances from electronic products,” the researchers say [Scientific American]. Instead, e-waste policies are left to the states, not all of which have laws on the books. In the article, published in Science, the authors note that the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention, which regulates the movement of hazardous wastes across international borders and has the support of 169 of the 192 United Nations member countries [Scientific American].
Electronics can contain a host of dangerous materials, from heavy metals to toxic chemicals. Toxic e-waste shows up in forms as varied as high lead levels in the blood of children in Guiya, China, where millions of tonnes of e-waste are illegally dumped, and as fire-retardant chemicals in the eggs of California’s peregrine falcons [CBC News].
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Image: Basel Action Network. E-waste in a Nigerian dump.
A study that set out to determine the how many of the fish in our nation’s streams are contaminated with mercury came back with an ominous answer: quite possibly, all of them. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey sampled 34 species of fish at 291 stream sites across the country, and found mercury in every single fish they tested. “This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds, and many of our fish in freshwater streams,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said [Los Angeles Times].
A quarter of the fish had mercury levels that are considered unsafe for people who eat fish regularly, according to the Interior Department. The main source of mercury to most of the streams tested, according to the researchers, is emissions from coal-fired power plants. The mercury released from smokestacks rains down into waterways, where natural processes convert it into methylmercury — a form that allows the toxin to wind its way up the food chain into fish [AP]. But fish with high mercury levels were also found in Western areas that have been mined for gold or mercury.
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Image: flickr / kasperbs
In the first known case that appears to link nanoparticles to health problems in humans, seven women fell ill after working with paint containing the particles at a factory in China, and two later died, according to an article in the European Respiratory Journal. However, some other experts debate the paper’s conclusions, saying that more mundane toxic materials are to blame.
The women developed itchy eruptions on their arms and faces, along with breathing problems, after working without proper protection at a factory producing paint that contains nanoparticles, which can be as tiny as one-billionth of a meter, or one nanometer. The women were all found to have ball-like collections of immune cells in the lining of the lung that form when the immune system is unable to remove a foreign body. They also had excessive, discoloured fluid in the lung lining. Particles around 30 nanometres in diameter were found in lung fluid and tissue [Nature News]. Sporadically used cotton gauze masks were the only protection the women wore during the five to 13 months they worked spraying paint on polystyrene boards in an unventilated room, and it’s likely they breathed in smoke and fumes. Once the factory was closed, no additional workers fell ill.
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A new political fight is brewing over where to locate a mercury storage facility, as state officials and residents around the seven sites in consideration have grown alarmed at the prospect of the federal government forcing thousands of casks of the toxic metal on them. Ironically, the conflict began when the federal government passed a law to forbid sending the dangerous metal abroad, but nobody seems eager to keep it at home.
Last year, then-Senator Barack Obama sponsored a bill to bar mercury exports beginning in 2013, and President Bush signed it. The bill also requires the Department of Energy to identify a safe, long-term storage site for up to 17,000 tons of mercury, which is so dense that it would fill less than half of an Olympic-size swimming pool. That includes stockpiles held by the federal government, as well as commercial supplies [AP]. The seven sites in consideration for the storage facility are scattered across the country, in South Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Texas, and Washington.
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Although electronic cigarettes have recently been marketed as a safer alternative to traditional smokes, a new analysis of 19 types of the e-cigarettes revealed that they contain toxic chemicals. The FDA has classified the devices as combination drug/medical devices, prohibiting their import, but hasn’t removed them from American shelves. Opponents of e-cigarettes hope the findings will spur the FDA to take more stringent action against the devices.
The results of the FDA’s new analysis, which were announced yesterday, revealed that although e-cigarettes don’t burn tobacco, the devices contain substances known to be toxic, such as diethylene glycol, a component of antifreeze that proved deadly when it was illegally added to toothpaste. They also contain nitrosamines, known carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. The findings, which were announced on Wednesday, contradict claims by electronic cigarette manufacturers that their products are safe alternatives to tobacco and contain little more than water vapor, nicotine and propylene glycol, which is used to create artificial smoke in theatrical productions. When heated, the liquid produces a vapor that users inhale through the battery-powered device [The New York Times].
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The Greek poet Homer was first to make written reference to a “sardonic smile,” and in the millennia since the phrase has been used to denote a bitter or cynical grin. Now, researchers in Italy say they’ve discovered a poisonous herb that gave rise to Homer’s coinage: a plant called hemlock water-dropwort that grows wild across the island of Sardinia and was used in the ancient Sardinians’ death rituals. The plant was used in pre-Roman times for the ritual killing of old people who had become a burden to society. “According to ancient historians, elderly people unable to support themselves were intoxicated with the herb and then killed by being dropped from a high rock or by being beaten to death,” the research team wrote [Telegraph]. The plant’s toxins can cause facial muscles to contract, researchers note, leaving an eerie smile frozen on the face of the corpse.
The poet Homer first used the word ’sardonic’ as an adverb when describing Odysseus’ smile. The Greek hero “smiled sardonically” as he dodged an ox jaw thrown by one of his wife’s former suitors. According to some scholars, Homer coined the word after learning that the Punic people who settled Sardinia gave condemned people the smile-inducing potion [Discovery News].
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China’s recent economic boom has come at the cost of polluted landscapes and newly endangered species, and now a new study explains how another species has been left teetering on the brink of extinction. The endangered Chinese sturgeon live in the East China and Yellow seas and return to China’s Yangtze River to spawn. Construction of dams on the river is thought to have contributed to a decline in the species, and an artificial propagation effort has not resulted in recovery of the fish [AP]. But the new study shows that a chemical called triphenyltin (TPT), which is commonly used in paint, may be the true culprit behind the sturgeon’s decline.
The tin-containing organic compound TPT is extensively used in paints to prevent the fouling of ship hulls and fishing nets. It is also used in fungicide to treat crops in China. A derivative of TPT is also used to eliminate snails in paddy fields [Reuters]. In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that river water polluted with the chemical is producing sturgeon with misshapen skeletons and deformed eyes.
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As early as 1400 B.C., the people of the Andes dug deep to mine the mercury ore called cinnabar, which they crushed to produce a bright red pigment. The pigment, vermilion, was used in ancient Andean rituals and is frequently found adorning gold and silver ceremonial objects in ancient burials of kings and nobles in South America [National Geographic]. While obvious traces of those mines were obliterated by later mining operations run by the Incas and then the Spanish colonists, a clever new study used sediment samples from lake bottoms to uncover evidence of the ancient mining–and the accompanying mercury pollution.
Researchers found that the cinnabar mining started long before the Chavín culture—which Cooke described as “the cradle of complex Andean culture”—peaked, between 800 B.C. and 400 B.C. in central Peru. “The traditional thinking has been that large-scale mining and metallurgy only begins after you get the emergence of large-scale societies that have social stratification and people can specialize in different crafts,” Cooke said [National Geographic]. Instead, Cooke suggests that mining may have encouraged the rise of complex society, as a leader with access to vermilion could have held great sway over a large group of people.
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Researchers may have finally figured out the mechanism of the tragic birth defects caused by thalidomide, the drug taken by pregnant women in the late 1950s as a remedy for nausea: It is thought to have inhibited development of new blood vessels at a crucial stage in the pregnancy.
Women usually took the drug at about five to nine weeks into their pregnancy to combat morning sickness, a specific window that lead researcher Neil Vargesson says “is crucial as that is when the limbs of babies are still forming…. The blood vessels involved in this process, at this stage of pregnancy, are still at an immature stage when they rapidly change and expand to accommodate the outgrowing limb” [BBC]. The most common birth defects caused by thalidomide were babies born with stunted or malformed limbs.
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Seven grassroots activists who fought powerful polluting industries and often stood up to intimidation are now receiving rewards and recognition: They’re winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes called the environmental Nobel Prize. Each year winners are chosen from the six inhabited continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America [USA Today]. Each winner receives a $150,000 purse.
The winner from North America, Maria Gunnoe, took her stand against coal mining companies in Appalachia, where companies commonly blast the tops of mountains apart to expose hard-to-reach coal seams, and dump the debris in the valleys. “I never even knew I was an environmentalist,” Gunnoe, who lives in southwestern West Virginia, said with a chuckle. Though raised to mind her own business, she was also taught to fight when attacked. That’s how she sees the destruction of her gardens and orchard…. Gunnoe’s home sits below a valley fill and has been flooded with coal waste seven times since 2000 [AP].
Gunroe says she has received numerous threats from miners angered by her opposition the coal industry; after she helped convince a judge in 2007 to shut down an operator working without a legal permit, a “wanted” poster printed with her face hung in local stores until the FBI demanded its removal [Mercury News].
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The biodefense lab that was associated with the anthrax mailings of 2001 is temporarily shutting down most research to allow officials to make a thorough accounting of every germ, virus, and poison that’s being stored at the facility. The lab, at Fort Detrick in Maryland, has come under intense scrutiny since the FBI accused researcher Bruce Ivins of sending the 2001 letters laced with anthrax. (Ivins killed himself while under investigation.) Now, officials want to comb through storage rooms and refrigerators to ensure that every dangerous agent is listed in the lab’s inventory. The suspension started Friday, and the tedious process of counting thousands of vials could take up to three months, institute spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden said [AP].
The order to stop most work came after a spot check last month found 20 samples of Venezuelan equine encephalitis in a box of vials instead of the 16 that had been listed in the institute’s database [Washington Post], officials say. “I believe that the probability that there are additional vials of BSAT [biological select agents and toxins] not captured in our … database is high,” Skvorak wrote in a memo to employees [ScienceInsider]. Researchers at the lab work with some of the most dangerous infectious diseases known, like anthrax and Ebola, but officials stressed that they do not know of any missing vials of lethal substances.
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A new study has found higher than expected levels of a controversial plastics chemical in people who had fasted for 24 hours. This surprised researchers because the chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), was thought to be ingested when trace amounts leaked from plastic food containers and bottles, and researchers thought it quickly passed through the system.
The finding suggests that exposure to BPA may come from many different sources, not just food products, or that the body doesn’t metabolize the chemical as fast as has been thought, the researchers said…. “What this study shows is that either we are getting exposed to a lot more BPA than we thought, or it’s hanging around longer than we thought, or both,” said lead researcher Dr. Richard W. Stahlhut [HealthDay News].
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Disoriented and emaciated brown pelicans are turning up in California’s suburban backyards and parking lots, far from their coastal habitats, and biologists are struggling to figure out what’s wrong with the ailing birds. The pelicans are exhibiting very strange behavior, they say. A social animal, it is rarely found alone. So it was startling to find one bewildered bird in a Kmart parking lot in Lompoc, another outside a Costco in Goleta and a third on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport. One pelican was found at an elevation of 7,200 feet in the New Mexico snow…. “Normally, they’re on piers and places where they can find fish,” said Rebecca Ryan of the Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo, which has stabilized several sick birds. “Now they are appearing in really unusual places” [San Jose Mercury News].
Researchers first wondered in the culprit might be neurotoxin domoic acid, which is produced by microscopic algae in the coastal waters; the birds ingest the acid by eating fish that consumed the algae. But researchers say that the pelicans’ symptoms don’t match the usual pattern seen in a domoic acid outbreak. Domoic acid poisoning usually causes seizures, researchers say, and these birds have had none. The toxin also typically affects marine mammals as well as birds, and no such problems have been reported in sea lions or other mammals. Finally, most of the hundreds of ailing pelicans are thin, but birds poisoned by domoic acid are typically of good body weight [AP].
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As the cleanup continues of the billion gallons of ash that spilled out of a reservoir at a Tennessee coal-fired power plant two weeks ago, nearby residents continue to worry about the long-term health and environmental effects of the waste material. Residents of Kingston, Tennessee, say they’ve gotten conflicting messages regarding the gray sludge that poured into the Emory River and coated their fields and roads. Meanwhile, other coal-burning power plants around the country are inspecting their own waste storage systems for weaknesses.
Preliminary results from water samples taken in the spill area show no unsafe levels of toxins, said Leslie Sims, on-scene coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency. The testing includes municipal supplies and private wells, he said. However, samples of the fly ash scooped up along roadsides and river banks show elevated levels of arsenic that normally would trigger an EPA response, Sims said. “These are levels that we consider harmful to humans,” he said [CNN]. But the EPA is not responding because the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the plant, is already working on cleaning up the pollution, Sims said.
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