Happy Earth Day!

I want to wish you all a Happy Earth Day!

(and I also want to wish Earth Day a happy 40th Birthday.)




For the last 40 years, environmentally conscious people have been joining together on April 22nd to help instill change.

Since the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970, smog levels have decreased by a quarter, and lead levels in the air are down more than 90% (according to an article by Discovery News). Rivers and streams that used to burn due to pollution are now open to swimmers. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act helped change the way businesses could treat the environment.

Environmental progress isn't only about laws. The environmental problems that face us today aren't nearly as visible as they were forty years ago; people tend to pay more attention when a river is burning than they do when someone shows them a chart about greenhouse gas levels.

Nancy Sutley, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said "The Cuyahoga River is not on fire anymore, and air quality in Los Angeles is not as bad as it was 40 years ago. I think people get those connections. People get that something is changing about our climate."

No matter how you feel about climate change, do your part to help the planet this Earth day.

Recycle that can of Diet Coke.
Turn off the lights when you leave the house.
Use reusable shopping bags.
Drink tap water instead of bottled (it's fine, I promise.)
Walk to the store instead of drive.

All the little things add up, so put down that can of Aquanet and do your part this Earth Day!

Sushi is Good For You... Except When It's Not

If you, as sushi lovers, are anything like me, you tend to look down your nose at the questionable looking Stop & Shop tuna rolls that sit in a sad display next to the fish counter. You prefer, instead, a more credible sushi restaurant. Unfortunately, a new study show that mercury levels in restaurant tuna sushi are higher than the tuna rolls at the supermarket.


Excess mercury levels in our fish is nothing new, Swordfish and Herring are known offenders. Mercury concentrations tend to be higher in species at the top of the food chain and those species at the top of the food chain tend to be bigger. This is a problem for sushi lovers since bluefin tuna can weigh over 500 kg.

Image from: Sealionsushi.com

The levels of mercury present in Tuna can cause severe neurological problems in humans. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommend that pregnant women and young children limit they amount they consume. This advice is for general fish consumption, not just for sushi.

Also, studies show that there are different levels of mercury in different tuna species. Michael Gochfeld, a scientist from Rutgers University, did a study to find out which types of tuna hold the greatest amount of mercury. The team identified 100 sushi samples from 54 restaurants and 15 supermarkets using specific genetic markers to determine which species of tuna was in the roll.

The tuna sushi sold in restaurants had higher mercury concentrations than the sushi sold in supermarkets. Bigeye and bluefin tuna were more prevalent in restaurants and had mercury concentrations that approached or surpassed the FDA mercury limit of 1.0ppm. Yellowfin tuna is cheaper and is therefore more prevalent in supermarket sushi. It contains much less mercury than the bluefin tuna, but almost all of Gochfeld’s samples surpassed the EPA mercury limit (which is more conservative than the FDA limit). The mercury found in the samples of the bigeye and yellowfin tuna actually surpassed the FDA’s estimates of the amount of mercury contained in this fish.

Gochfeld warns sushi eaters that “If you’re going to eat sushi frequently, you should certainly stay away from tuna sushi, it should only be an occasional treat.”


Note to self: swap tonight’s tuna roll for a Philly roll instead.

Scientists Create Human Embryo with 3 Parents

Debates in bioethics range from stem cell research to genetically altered foods and everything in between. British scientists may have given us something new to debate.

Scientists from Newcastle University in the UK have created human embryos with three parents. The “test-tube” embryos, made from in vitro fertilization (IVF) were created using DNA from one man and two women.

During fertilization, the mitochondria in the sperm are destroyed, leaving only the mitochondria from the female to be passed on to the offspring. Mitochondria are, essentially, the power plants that provide energy in the cell. Faulty genetics in the mitochondria can result in a build up of poisons responsible for more than forty different diseases. Somewhere around one in 4,000 children develops a mitochondrial disease by age 10. Such diseases include fatal liver, heart, and brain disorders, deafness, muscular problems, and epilepsy. These diseases are often debilitating or even fatal, and until now, there was no cure in sight.

The idea of this research was to prevent women with errors in their mitochondrial DNA from passing diseases onto their children. The UK scientists believe that these diseases could be avoided all together if at-risk embryos were given an effective mitochondrial transplant.


Scientists use IVF to create a zygote and then remove the nucleus from said fertilized egg. The nucleus is then placed in a donor egg whose DNA has been removed. The resulting fetus inherits its genes (from the nuclear DNA) from the original sperm/egg pairing, but its mitochondrial DNA would come from a third party.

Image: from Nature

Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team is quoted as saying, “The idea is to swap the bad diseased mitochondria – give a transplant, if you like – for good healthy ones from a donor.”

Presently, this technique has only been used in a laboratory, using abnormal embryos left over from regular IVF therapy. The eight three-parent embryos that were successfully created were destroyed within six days, after reaching a blastocyst stage of about 100 cells.

Although these six day old blastocysts are the only examples of human embryos with 3 parents, scientists first used this technique on mice and then later on rhesus monkeys. The mice grown from these 3 parent embryos have successfully reached adulthood and reproduced themselves. The monkeys, however, are only one year old.

Even though the effects of this research aren’t yet known, strict opposition is already appearing.

The US’s Family Research Council says “This technology…is a further step toward tampering with the very essence of humanity, and demonstrates not just a contempt for life itself – all the embryos in this experiment were destroyed for science – but a profoundly dangerous and arrogant belief that we can tamper with the genetic makeup of our fellow human beings.” Members of the team, and the scientific community at large, is somewhat exasperated by such claims, saying “We’re trying to prevent kids being born with fatal diseases.”

The more common objection is that of “designer children” created from altering heritable traits. The general public opinion is that altering DNA is perfectly fine when its changes aren’t inherited, such as gene therapy to repair eyes, but altering heritable DNA is extremely troubling. Countries like France and Germany have banned germline genetic engineering due to fears of designer babies and unknown health problems. Although the US has not banned germline genetic engineering, it does not currently provide any support for IFV research.

Doug Wallace, mitochondrial geneticist from the University of California looks at the ethical dilemmas in a different way. “Is it fair for society to make it impossible for a woman who has a high percentage of mutant mitochondrial issues to have a healthy baby?”

From fear of designer children, critics to the UK techniques could be preventing mitochondrial troubled parents from having children at all. The British scientists report that if the program moves ahead as planned, they may be able to offer this medical technique within the next three to five years.

There's a New T-Rex in Town

I usually believe the discovery of a new species to be cause for celebration.

I'm not so sure this time...

In fact, I’m fairly certain that I would have been happier never knowing this animal existed.

An enormous-toothed leech was pulled from the nose of a Peruvian girl bathing in the Upper Amazon river. The original report can be found in the journal PLoS ONE. The leech, named Tyrannobdella rex (translated to “tyrant leech king,”) is less than two inches long, but it supports “ferociously large teeth” in its single jaw.

(Image Credit: Phillips, et al. PLoS ONE 2010)

This find adds to some of the 700 known species of leeches, which exist worldwide. Because the range of the species is so vast, scientists believe that a common ancestor existed on Pangaea, the prehistoric super-continent that existed before modern continents broke apart. The Tyrannobdella rex find will lead to the revising of the leech family that feeds from the body orifices of mammals.

Anna Phillips, a graduate student and first author of the paper believes “the leech could feed on aquatic mammals, from their noses and mouths for example, where they could stay for weeks at a time.”

Mark Siddall, a collaborator on the story and curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History explained that they “…named it Tyrannobdella rex because of its enormous teeth.”

So use caution if you’re ever swimming in the Upper Amazon, you don’t want one of these toothy fiends to latch themselves up your nose.

Siddall added this amusing insight: “Besides, the earliest species in this family of these leeches no-doubt shared an environment with dinosaurs about 200 million years ago when some ancestor of our T. rex may have been up that other T. rex's nose.”

Not to insult the king of the dinosaurs, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather face him any day... at least he couldn't live undetected in my body for months at a time.

Plus, facing an extinct organism is far less frightening than finding out a toothy beast has taken hold of your sinuses for its dinner.

US Science Literacy Issues Swept Under the Rug

For a country founded on the idea of religious freedom, it seems counter intuitive that Americans are some of the least likely in the world to believe that humans evolved from earlier species or that the universe began with a big bang.

Anyone who considers themselves a scientist would assume that these basic scientific principles should be considered matters of scientific literacy. The National Science Foundation (NSF) agreed too, publishing the findings of repeated surveys of scientific literacy in their biennial report on the state of global science… until this year.

In a last minute and highly controversial decision, the NSF board decided to omit these key issues from the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators’ chapter on public attitudes toward science and technology. The section describing the survey results was edited out of the massive report by the National Science Board (NSB). The board is receiving flak from the White House and the nation’s science educators for its decision.

The NSB argued that the survey was misleading and didn’t properly reflect what Americans know about science. Survey authors vehemently disagree, stating that excluding the topics “downplays the controversy.” Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education stated that “discussing American science literacy without mentioning evolution is an intellectual malpractice.”

NSB officials insist that their decision to drop the survey questions on evolution and the big bang from the 2010 report was based on concerns over the nonpartisan nature of the survey questions. According to John Bruer, a philosopher and the lead reviewer for the chapter, he recommended removing the text because the questions “seemed to be very blunt instruments, not designed to capture public understanding.” Astrophysicist Louis Lanzerotti called the questions “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because the responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.”

White House officials, to whom the board officially submits the Indicators report, were extremely surprised by the NSB’s action. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have asked for and were given the board’s explanation for the removal of the text. The authors of the survey disagree with the decision, and those struggling to keep evolution education in the classroom say the subject’s omission could hurt their efforts.

Science obtained a copy of the deleted text, which they say does not differ substantially from what appeared in previous editions of Indicators. The two questions have been part of a NSF funded survey on scientific understand and attitudes toward science since 1983.

The deleted section notes that the percentage of Americans who answered “true” to the statement “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is similar to the survey results of other years (45%). This percentage shows that the public belief for human evolution is much lower in the US than in Japan, Europe, China, or South Korea, where 78%, 70%, 69%, and 64% of the public answered “true,” respectively. A similar international separation exists in response to the statement “The universe began with a big explosion,” to which only 33% of Americans agreed.

Bruer stated that by removing these sections, indicators could be developed that “were not as value-charged as evolution.” When Bruer proposed the deletes from Indicators last summer, he also recommended that the board drop the sentence noting that “the only circumstance in which the US scores below other countries on science knowledge is when many Americans experience a conflict between accepted scientific knowledge and their religious beliefs,” which, ironically, was a qualifier the NSB added to the report at his request that the offending sections be removed from the 2008 Indicators.

To support his claim, Bruer notes that a 2004 study found that 72% of Americans answered correctly when the statement about human evolution was prefaced with the phrase “according to the theory of evolution.”

George Bishop, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati who has studied American’s attitudes towards evolution, believes that the board’s argument has merit. He is quoted as saying “Because of biblical traditions in American culture, that question is a measure of belief, not knowledge,” whereas in Europe and other societies, “it may be more a measure of knowledge.”

Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center, which conducts the science knowledge survey for Indicators disagrees with the idea that the questions are flawed. In fact, he believes that prefacing the questions with qualifiers might lead to flawed results since “that could have the effect of tipping respondents off about the right answer.” Smith says that NSF has yet to ask him to make any changes to the survey, which is slated to be used in the 2012 Indicators. NSF hasn’t asked for any changes… not yet, at least. Lanzerotti, as well as the director of the NSF’s statistical office say that it is time to take a fresh look at the survey questions.

John Miller, a science literacy researcher at Michigan State University says that “Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion.” He argues that, “if a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe… how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate?”

Miller believes, as do many educators who believe that evolution should be taught in the classroom, that removing the entire section from the Indicators report was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment.

As a comparison he says, “Nobody likes our infant death rate, but it doesn't go away if you quit talking about it.”

Welcome, Ununseptium!

After years of trying, scientists have finally filled the ever-persistent hole in the periodic table. Nearly a decade after the creation of the heaviest known atom, element 118, physicists have managed to synthesize a few atoms of its neighbor on the periodic table, element 117. Led by Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institue of Nuclear Research, scientists shot a beam of calcium ions into berkelium. The chemical collision spit out three or four neurons and resulted in the creation of two different isotopes of an element with 117 protons.

So what does this mean? Well, besides for filling in a blank space on the periodic table, scientists hope that this discovery will strengthen the notion of an “island of stability,” a group of superheavy nuclei that may be as stable as Earth’s naturally occurring 92 elements.

Most elements beyond the 92^nd element, uranium, do not exist stably in nature and must, therefore, be made artificially in a laboratory. The 92 elements that are naturally occurring on earth are all stable enough to have existed over Earth’s billion year history. However, the elements after uranium, have shorter half-lives. As heavier elements were synthesized, it appeared that the heavier the element the shorter its half-life. The heaviest elements are highly radioactive and can have a half-life of only milliseconds.

In the 1960’s, nuclear physicists found that key numbers of protons and neutrons on an element added extra stability on a nucleus. If these “magic numbers” existed in larger and previously undiscovered elements, then perhaps some of superheavy elements with the required quantities of protons and neutrons would last longer, producing an “island of stability.”

With the hope of this island of stability present, researchers have strained for ways to create new elements. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research has been the most successful in recent years, having synthesized elements 113 – 116 and 118. Making element 117 was their next step, though a tricky one. Scientists pummeled the berkelium target with carlicum-48 ions 24 hours a day for 5 straight months. From this painstaking work, scientists managed to pin down just six atoms of element 117. Until the results have been verified, it will be called “Ununseptium,” the Latin word for 117.

Although this might seem like an enormous amount of work for nothing, very rarely do scientific experiments results in leaps and bounds. Experiments like this explore the physical world in a way that explorers and sailors did in previous centuries.

I, for one, welcome Ununseptium to the periodic table!

Multi-Cellular Life Thrives in a Permanent No-Oxygen Environment!

In my last post, I talked about the organisms that can, amazingly, thrive without any source of light. The deep sea is the home to hundreds of extremophiles (organisms that flourish in extreme environments) but recently, researches found something that puts even the chemosynthetic life on the hydrothermal vents to shame.

Scientists and researchers previously thought that only single-celled organisms could survive in the anoxic (oxygen deprived) areas of the deep ocean. Even when multi-cellular organisms were found in these areas, they were assumed to have sunk from the oxygen-filled waters of higher ocean zones.
Roberto Danovaro, et al, at BMC Biology discovered the first multi-cellular animals that survive in these zero oxygen environments. These organisms live and reproduce entirely without oxygen. Over the past ten years, Italian and Danish scientists sent multiple expeditions to collect sediment from the hypersaline anoxic basins of the Mediterranean Sea, located almost two miles below the ocean surface. Ecosystems like these are permanently devoid of oxygen and, until recently, have had completely unexplored biodiversity.

Danovaro and his team discovered that the sediments collected from the L’Atalante basin, are inhabited by three distinct multi-cellular species of the phylum Loricifera completely new to science. Although researchers don’t completely understand the biochemistry of these new organisms, they know that these organisms lack mitochondria (the organelle present in most animals cells and is sometimes called the cell’s “powerhouse”). Instead, these organisms seem to have organelles called hydrogenosomes that use anaerobic chemistry and are usually associated with endosymbiotic prokaryotes.

This first evidence of a complete life cycle for a multi-cellular organism in a no oxygen environment is very compelling. It also makes the idea of complex life forms on oxygen-free planets seem much less like a giant leap of faith and more like a distinct possibility.

(For more information and for the original photos see BMC Biology.)

Hydrothermal Vents: The Key to Life On and Off the Earth?

For countless years, scientists believed the assumption that all the life on Earth was based on ecosystems with photosynthetic organisms (organisms getting energy from sunlight) as their foundation. Even the deep sea creatures that managed to survive in the pitch black zones of the ocean were thought to depend on sun-based food webs. And while it’s true that many deep sea organisms feed on small animals and falling debris from the ocean’s surface, in 1977 a group of scientists discovered an entirely new form of life.

The first hydrothermal vent (also known as a “black smoker”) was discovered in 1977 by the scientists of the Galapagos Reef Expedition. The scientists, who were mapping the bathymetry of the area’s seafloor, came upon the vent surrounded by giant tube worms about eight feet tall. It was an amazing discovery. Up until this point, sedentary organisms weren’t thought to be able to survive in the desolate ocean floor landscape. The seafloor was thought to be so bare, that the group didn’t even have a biologist with them on the expedition.

When Robert Ballard, the Co-Chief Scientist of the historical expedition spoke at a class of mine in college, he said that when they brought the worm back to the surface, they had to confiscate all the alcohol of everyone on the vessel in order to preserve the sample. (No biologist equals no formaldehyde.) The only way to maintain the worm was to submerse it in high-proof liquor and, unfortunately for the members of the cruise, eight feet of worm takes a whole lot of vodka to preserve it. The remaining scientists, though not very pleased to lose their entertainment on the long research cruise, seemed happy to aid in the discovery. John Edmond, the geochemist on the expedition is quoted as saying “We were dancing off the walls…it was a discovery cruise…like Columbus.”

So, how did these miraculous worms survive? How did they even evolve? Well below the 1000 meter depth mark that bids goodbye to the last particles of light from the surface; their ecosystem was thriving despite the seemingly impossible conditions. As it turns out, their proximity to the hydrothermal vents was no coincidence. Here, miles below the surface, a new base to the food web had developed.

The smoking vents are actually towers of crystalline zinc sulfide, blowing sulfur-rich smoke that can reach temperatures of over 700 degrees F. This ecosystem relies not on the photosynthesis of the rest of the world but instead on special chemosynthetic bacteria. These bacteria are the base of the food web for the rest of the vent area, directly and indirectly feeding a whole myriad of species never before seen. Bright red tube worms, blind shrimp, and giant crabs are just some of the more than 300 specially evolved species that exist in these unique vent ecosystems. Geochemist Gisela Winckler says that, “Most of the deep ocean is like a desert, but these vents are oases of life and weirdness.”

The harsh smoke in the waters can have a pH as low as 2.8 (an acidity higher than table vinegar) and biologists have reported seeing “naked snails” that were unable to form their calcium

carbonate shell because of the harsh pH environment.

Despite the environment, these areas are some of the most fertile all the ocean, rivaling coral reefs with their levels of unique biodiversity thanks to the bacteria that feed on the seemingly noxious soup of chemicals spewing from the vents. Deep sea shrimps have been known to number in the millions near these vents.

Since they were discovered, hydrothermal vents have been a focus of origin of life studies. Chemosynthetic ecosystems like these may very well be where the first life on Earth developed. If life can exist in such harsh conditions on earth, could it exist elsewhere in the universe?

This is exactly what many scientists believe.

Jupiter’s ice moon Europa, which is commonly believed by planetary scientists to house a subsurface ocean is a likely candidate for hydrothermal vent activity due to the fact that the planet’s bulk composition is similar to Earth’s. Elsewhere in the Solar System, the Mars rover “Spirit” has been dragging one wheel around the surface of Mars for quite a few years. One of the gouges from the wheel revealed a mineral deposit on the Mars surface. Scientists believe that this mineral deposit was most likely caused by hydrothermal vent activity, implying that a large amount of water was present on the planet’s surface when the vent was active.

While not necessarily little green men, it’s still entirely plausible that since life exists on the desolate seafloor, that life exists in other seemingly impossible environments in our galaxy in the deep, dark reaches of space.

You just shouldn't expect to get abducted by a tube worm.

Though it might not be exactly what he meant, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.

A Scientist without a Lab

Somehow, over the course of my education and the start of my professional career, I have ended up as a desk jockey. A veritable IT person masquerading as a Marine Biologist.

I had hoped to find my niche in the cushy and ever-present world of federal employment. Instead, I find myself sitting in a cubicle, looking at a computer screen, and fondly remembering my college jobs conducting messy field work and doing the ever-tedious lab work, I even miss the six months I spent throwing up for a living on a fishing boat. Now I just stare at the computer all day.

A monkey could do my job.

Well, no, maybe not a monkey... but certainly any high school computer team member with even the slightest knowledge of code.


After hitting my snooze button no less than six times, I roll out of bed in the morning. I connect to millions of people around the world before I even bother to brush my teeth.

Thanks to the internet, I can easily catch up on any and all important affairs that took place during the five hours I pass off as a good night’s sleep. I brew my morning coffee and where past generations would have sat at the kitchen table and opened their local newspaper; I sprawl back onto my couch in my tiny apartment and open my laptop.

I have pretty much convinced myself that my Google homepage houses every headline I could possibly need. CNN, BBC, National Geographic, and Discovery News all show up first thing in the morning.

My caffeine deprived mind skims over the celebrity death notices and marriage announcements that somehow pass as international news and I skim articles, chastising myself for not taking the time to read them properly. On most mornings, I make do with scanning articles, mentally flagging the ones to revisit at work when I need a break from the monotony of my day or to stop myself from jumping out my third floor office window. I head to the office confident, at the very least, that the President was not shot, a miracle cure for cancer had not been discovered, and World War III did not break out while I was sleeping.


Inevitably, besides concise updates on world affairs, the articles I always read are the ones in National Geographic, Discovery, Scientific American... Reading science news articles throughout my day is as ingrained in my routine as my 10am cup of coffee. Even when I'm actually doing work at work, I usually listen to science podcasts on my ipod.


I'm not trying to deny how dorky this all sounds. I am a self-proclaimed geek in almost everything I do. No one can read actual scientific study articles (not just science news articles) for fun and not be a nerd. I just like to share my nerddom.

That, good readers, is the purpose of this blog.

Someone who reads as much science news as me should have a place to post it. SciEm.Blogspot.com will be the happy home to any and all science news or breakthroughs that I find interesting.

I hope you enjoy it.

-Emily