Blogs / Discoblog

A Beverly Hills liposurgeon has been accused of using his patients’ liposuctioned fat to fuel his and his girlfriend’s SUVs. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this story is that no one came up with the lipo-fat-as-fuel idea before.

Give Dr. Alan Bittner this: He was never secretive about what happened to the leftover liposuction fat from his practice, Beverly Hills Liposculpture.  According to Forbes.com, he even ran a Web site dedicated to human fat fuel.  On the now defunct lipodiesel.com, Bittner wrote, “The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel—and I have more fat than I can use… Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving the Earth.”

Experts say animal fat is just as good as vegetable fat and a gallon of either will get you about the same mileage as a gallon of regular diesel.  The only caveat is that animal fat requires an additional processing step to remove free fatty acids.  Due to a recent surge in soybean oil prices, biodiesel manufacturers say that over half of this year’s biodiesel came from animal sources, such as pig lard.  Other new sources of biofuel include turkey feathers (see the DISCOVER story Anything Into Oil), coffee grounds, pond scum, and rainforest fungus.

(more…)

Jun Wang dumped fuel from his tanker trunk into Little Beaver Creek in Kettering, Ohio. Allesandro and Carlos Giordano, a father and son team, imported and sold cars that didn’t meet U.S. emissions standards. These are just some of the characters on the Environmental Protection Agency’s new “Most Wanted” list of environmental fugitives.

The list is posted on the agency’s website and includes mugshots of 23 people along with their alleged violations and suspected whereabouts. And the EPA wants your help in capturing them. The Web site has information on who to call if you see any of the suspects—it’s usually the Criminal Investigation Division office in the city where they were charged. There are also Wanted posters you can print out.

But don’t, they warn, take green justice into your own hands:

(more…)

Sometimes to make a point, you have to release some greenhouse gas. On September 29, artist Francesca Galeazzi climbed to a pristine spot on the Jakobshavn fiord in Greenland and—to the shock and horror of her fellow travelers—released a 6 kg tank of CO2 gas. “The CO2 came out violently, freezing the air around the nozzle,” she wrote on her website.

Galeazzi’s act of pollution may have been blatant, but it was just a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of carbon emissions each of us produces, and we do so no less consciously. In the U.S., that number is nearly 20 metric tonnes per person per year. Before Galeazzi pulled the stunt, she purchased an equivalent offset from one of the online Gold Standard Carbon Offsetting schemes—demonstrating how many of us justify our bad behavior. Buying carbon offsets seems to be a growing trend among the green-conscious, a form of environmental penance in which you can pay cash to have someone else wipe away your carbon footprint. In a recent interview, Galeazzi explained her criticism of carbon offsets:

(more…)

This holiday season, Santa’s toy bag will again overflow with plastics. From Legos to Barbies to the Nintendo Wii, most toys today are made from non-degradable and non-renewable plastics derived from fossil fuels. Now a company is developing a bio-plastic that’s made from trees. Could ARBOFORM, or liquid wood, cure us of our plastic addiction?

Liquid wood is made mostly of lignin, one of the three major components of wood, the other two being cellulose and hemicellulose. Lignin is discarded during the paper-making process. A few years ago, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany took the lignin and combined it with natural fibers like natural fibers made of wood, hemp, and flax and natural additives such as wax to produce plastic granules. The resulting material was tough, melt-able, and mold-able, and has already been used to make car parts, hunting rifles, and golf tees. But there was one major problem: It stunk from the sulfurous substances that are used to extract lignin from wood and make it non-water-soluble.

(more…)

The fish are acting funny because they’re on Prozac.

In the U.S., more than 200 million prescriptions for antidepressants are given out every year. A lot of the contents of those pills eventually end up in our water supply, either from patients’ excretions or from pills flushed down the toilet. Since water treatment plants aren’t designed to remove pharmaceuticals, we’re effectively medicating our streams and rivers.

Chemists have found that water downstream of water treatment plants holds a veritable medicine cabinet worth of antidepressants, including venlafaxine, bupropion (Wellbutrin), citalopram (Celexa), fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft).

The concentrations of antidepressants in the water—billionths of a gram per liter—aren’t enough to affect larger species, but they are enough to make small fish and fish babies feel woozy. Researcher Meghan McGee tested the effect of antidepressants on young minnows by exposing unhatched and newly-hatched minnows to levels of antidepressants commonly found downstream of water treatment plants. The drugged minnows appeared lethargic and took twice as long to react to stimulus, making them much more vulnerable to predators.

(more…)

• It’s all in the hands: Did early humans stone the Neanderthals into extinction?

• “Debby was a great bear. She acted like a grumpy old bear a lot of times. It was great. She had a lot of life in her, a lot of feistiness.” The world’s oldest living polar bear is no more.

• The Great Ape Trust is having an auction of ape paintings—that’s paintings done by (non-human) apes—to raise money for conservation. Is it just us, or these look suspiciously like those elephant paintings?

(more…)

Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds hover at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, at altitudes of 76 to 85 km. They’re so high up that they reflect the sun even at night, producing an electric-blue glow. Now some scientists say these high-flying clouds may come with a metal lining – not made of silver, but of sodium and iron.

For the last two years, the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite mission has been studying noctilucent clouds, also known as polar mesospheric clouds. A curious property of these clouds is that they reflect radar, which scientists thought might be due to charged particles in the clouds. But new mathematical calculations published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres by Paul Bellan, a physicist at Caltech, suggests the reflections could be due to a thin layer of metal coating the clouds.

(more…)

1. Every year during the summer and fall, ocean currents move penguins from southern Argentina to the beaches of Brazil. But this summer, almost four hundred penguins were swept away and ended up stranded hundreds of miles from their normal feeding home. The lost penguins were picked up and flown 1,500 miles on a C-130 Hercules military plane to the southern beaches and, upon landing, flopped into the sea. But the penguins didn’t get a free ride; Scientists tagged their flippers so they could track their future migration patterns. Hopefully they stick to the Mapquest route a little better next year.

2. Hundreds of adorable pandas (which may or may not be an evolutionary mistake) needed help after the Chinese Earthquake in May of 2008. The earthquake hit in a terrible spot, just 20 miles from the famous Wolong Giant Panda Reserve holding 86 pandas (all safe now). Some of the 1,200 pandas living in the wild, however, are still missing. The State Forest Administration sent in shipments of bamboo to help the reserve pandas survive.

3. Bermuda petrels were thought to be extinct for centuries. But in the 1950s, 18 nesting pairs were found. When a hurricane in 2003 destroyed the birds’ habitat, scientists moved the birds to higher ground at Nonsuch Island. (Despite the name, it does exist, we swear.) By removing the nestlings to artificial burrows on the new island, the scientists were able to build a new colony. There are now 85 pairs happily nesting there.

(more…)

Feathers aren’t just for dusters anymore. The latest in green architecture may come from the chicken coop. Filipino scientist Menandro Acda has been developing a new low-cost building material made of cement and chicken feathers.

There’s no shortage of free feathers to use: Six percent of a chicken’s weight is feathers, and the Philippine poultry industry produces 40 million chickens per year. The disposal of feather waste is a huge problem. The keratin protein that makes feathers sturdy (it’s also found in hair and butterfly wings) takes a long time to degrade in landfills. Burning the stuff releases greenhouse gases. So why not use all that fluff to build houses?

(more…)

At a bar, intoxicated people may fall victim to the notorious “beer goggles” effect. Now, researchers have discovered that in the fish world, pollution can have the same effect as a six-pack of Heineken.

Scientists already know that female African cichlids are partially blind, and have evolved into a new species over the past 30 years. The cichlids in Lake Victoria’s polluted waters are vanishing, causing “the largest human-witnessed mass extinction of vertebrates.” And now, pollution is also causing closely-related species of cichlids to interbreed, all because they can’t see each other.

(more…)