Proper Medicine Disposal Prescribed Daily

Among many reasons not to flush medicines down the drain or throw them out with the trash is to prevent the chemicals from decomposing in soil and water supplies.

Chemicals are passed on to wildlife and humans consuming that water, and the chemicals may destroy important bacteria in soils and water that actually help purify those resources. To date, wastewater treatment systems are not setup to remove those contaminants, and that does not consider the runoff leaking directly into bodies of water or consumed by wildlife.

In an effort to halt flushing and tossing, the National Association of Counties has adopted a resolution the “Support of a Safe, Convenient Medicine Return Program” that places at least some of the responsibility of proper medicine disposal on the vendors supplying medicine to consumers. The Association is identifying non-governmental funds available to locate a pharmaceutical manufacturer who can collect medicine for proper disposal.

Similar functioning efforts, known as take back programs, are working throughout communities in America and Canada. In an era when nearly everyone is taking some sort of medication, popular prescriptions including anti-depressants, cholesterol controllers, and oral contraceptives, statistics are showing frightening rates of improper disposal. According to the investigative work conducted in informing the policy’s reviewers and decision makers, medicine metabolites are found in the drinking supplies of “24 major metropolitan areas affecting 41 million Americans.”

http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/40293

http://featured.matternetwork.com/2009/7/proper-medicine-disposal-prescribed-daily_8047.cfm

Where the fiasco is at today, a Cash for Clunkers update

As the whole “Cash for Clunkers” program has transitioned from Congressionally-passed legislation to NHTSA rule book, it has at same time gone from a great way to get old gas guzzlers off the road to something resembling a fiasco. Over the course of the past week, dealers have worried that they might be subject to income taxes on the rebates they collect and customers who thought they had qualifying clunkers learned otherwise.

Bailey Wood of the National Automobile Dealers Association, at least, has some good news for his group. According to NADA, there is no net taxable income from the rebates so dealers are off the hook. Of course they still have to pay the costs of disabling the cars they take as trades which involves filling the engine with sodium silicate to seize it up. Meanwhile Chrysler dealers are seeing an influx of potential customers for the first time in a while thanks to a decision to to double down on the rebates and match what the government offers.

Meanwhile, some customers are finding this week that there supposed “clunkers” no longer are while others can’t get the efficient cars they want. The folks at the EPA went through their listings of fuel economy ratings on older cars to do some “quality control” on the numbers and ended up re-calculating the ratings for many older cars based on the new formula. As a result, dozens of cars went from combined mileage ratings of 18 mpg to 19 mpg, thus disqualifying them from the program. Conversely some new cars are now eligible that weren’t before.

Finally some of the most sought after models are in short supply and thus unavailable for purchase right now. One prime example is the 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI.

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/07/29/where-the-fiasco-is-at-today-a-cash-for-clunkers-update/

The Space Elevator Games – Next Big ESPN Series?

In final proof that sports channels don’t know what the hell they’re doing, for the last five years NASA and The Spaceward Foundation have been running “The Space Elevator Games” – a competition to build a robot and cable to literally CLIMB INTO SPACE – and TV still shows skateboarding instead.  The future is happening, and nobody’s watching.

Similar to the X Prize and the Google Lunar Prize, the Space Elevator games are based on offering a big chunk of money to access the incredible inventive potential available outside of established agencies.  The games attract university teams of student researchers, the next generation of the field, with a total prize purse of four million dollars.  Which is more than you’ll get at the average track meet.

The games have two events: climbing space cables, and making them.  The Climber battle is an awesome combination of edge-pushing technologies as it requires lightweight cargo-carrying robotics and power-beaming technology to drive them.  As a model of an actual space elevator, a cable into orbit, the machines can’t carry any power source – they need to have energy transmitted to them.  This means that the games involve experimental robots climbing a one kilometer cable suspended by a helicopter while high energy lasers fire at them, or in other words, about five action movies happening at once.

The second stage of the competition is building a the cable, or “tether”, so the competition really is bootstrapping space elevation: they’re working out how to build the cable and then climb it, aka “Most of the stuff you need to get this scifi idea actually working.”  While the climbing prize is based on speed, the cable competition requires continual improvement: to win the prize you have to do 50% better than last years winner.  If there’s ever been a better acceptance of exponential technology acceleration we’ve yet to see it.

It’s an awesome motivation for a whole new generation of scientists, and even those who don’t win have an incredible boost in the field of “Thinking of something awesome and making it happen.”  Plus, with a $900,000 prize awarded at a climbing speed of 2 m/s (and the most recent record being 1.8 m/s) sometime soon a student dorm is going to have the best bigscreen in the world.

Luke McKinney

Space Elevation http://www.spaceward.org/elevator2010

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/-the-space-elevator-games-next-big-espn-series.html

Small Marine Life Powers the World’s Oceans – Comparable to Wind & Tides

“We’ve been studying swimming animals for quite some time,”"The perspective we usually take is that of how the ocean—by its currents, temperature, and chemistry—is affecting the animals. But there have been increasing suggestions that the inverse is also important—how the animals themselves, via swimming, might impact the ocean environment.”

John Dabiri, Caltech assistant professor of aeronautics and bioengineering 

Using a combination of theoretical modeling, energy calculations, and field observations, researchers from Caltech have for the first time described how some of the ocean’s tiniest swimming animals can have a huge impact on large-scale ocean mixing.

Scientists have been debating about how marine life might play a role in larger-scale ocean mixing, the process by which various layers of water interact with one another to distribute heat, nutrients, and gasses throughout the oceans. 

Dabiri notes that oceanographers have previously dismissed the idea that animals might have a significant effect on ocean mixing, saying that the viscosity of water would damp out any turbulence created, especially by small planktonic animals. “They said that there was no mechanism by which these animals could impact large-scale ocean mixing.”

But Dabiri and his team thought there might be a mechanism called Darwinian mixing (first discovered and described by Charles Darwin’s grandson) might be involved.

“Darwin’s grandson discovered a mechanism for mixing similar in principle to the idea of drafting in aerodynamics,” Dabiri explains. “In this mechanism, an individual organism literally drags the surrounding water with it as it goes.

Dabiri and colleagues did some mathematical simulations of what might happen if you had many small animals all moving at more or less the same time, in the same direction. Each day, for example, billions of tiny krill and copepods migrate hundreds of meters from the depths of the ocean toward the surface. Darwin’s mechanism would suggest that they drag some of the colder, heavier bottom water up with them toward the warmer, lighter water at the top. This would create instability, and eventually, the water would flip, mixing itself as it went.

What the Caltech researchers also found was that the water’s viscosity enhances Darwin’s mechanism and that the effects are magnified when you’re dealing with such minuscule creatures as krill and copepods. “It’s like a human swimming through honey,” Dabiri explains. “What happens is that even more fluid ends up being carried up with a copepod, relatively speaking, than would be carried up by a whale.”

.To verify the findings from their simulations, several team members traveled to the island of Palau, where they studied this animal-led transport of water–otherwise known as induced drift–among jellyfish, which are the focus of much of Dabiri’s work.

“From a fluid mechanics perspective, this study had less to do with the fact that they’re jellyfish, and more to do with the fact that they’re solid objects moving through water,” Dabiri explains.

The jellyfish experiments involved putting fluorescent dye in the water in front of the sea creatures, and then watching what happened to that dye—or, to be more specific, to the water that took up the dye—as the jellyfish swam. And, indeed, rather than being left behind the jellyfish—or being dissipated in turbulent eddies—the dye traveled right along with the swimming creatures, following them for long distances.

These findings verified that swimming animals are capable of carrying bottom water with them as they migrate upward, and that movement indeed creates an inversion that results in ocean mixing. But what the findings didn’t address was just how much of an impact this type of ocean mixing performed by tiny sea creatures could have on a large scale.

After a series of calculations, Dabiri was able to estimate the impact of this so-called biogenic ocean mixing.

“There are enough of these animals in the ocean,” he notes, “that, on the whole, the global power input from this process is as much as a trillion watts of energy—comparable to that of wind forcing and tidal forcing.”

In addition, says Dabiri, they have yet to consider the effects of such things as fecal pellets and marine snow (falling organic debris), which no doubt pull surface water with them as they drift downward. “This may have an impact on carbon sequestration on the ocean floor,” says Dabiri. “It’s something we need to look at in the future.”

Dabiri says the next major question to answer is how these effects can be incorporated into computer models of the global ocean circulation. Such models are important for simulations of global climate-change scenarios.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/small-sea-creatures-power-the-worlds-oceans-new-research-shows.html

‘Organic’ May Not Mean Healthier

Food that beckons from the organic aisles of grocery stores may not be any better for you than what lines the rest of supermarket shelves.

According to a British review of studies done over the past 50 years, organic and conventionally produced foods have about the same nutrient content, suggesting that neither is better in terms of health benefits.

“We did not find any important differences in nutrient content between organically and conventionally produced foods,” said study author Alan Dangour, a registered public health nutritionist with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Nonetheless, the researchers noted, organic foods continue to grow in popularity. In the United Kingdom, the market share for organic foods increased 22 percent from 2005 to 2007, they said.

Likewise, the market for organic foods in the United States has grown at about a 20 percent rate each year since 1990, reaching $13.8 billion in consumer sales in 2005, according to the Organic Trade Association. That represents 2.5 percent of total food sales in the country, the trade group noted.

“As a registered dietitian, it is good to see that a systematic review of the literature supports what has long been believed — that the nutritional content of traditionally grown foods and organic foods are comparable,” said Connie Diekman, director of university nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis and past president of the American Dietetic Association. “This report provides confirmation for consumers that if they choose conventionally grown foods or organic foods they will be meeting their nutritional needs.”

The review zeroed in on 162 studies that dealt with the nutrient content of foods. Only 55 were of what the researchers considered to be “satisfactory quality” — a strong indicator that, overall, the science on the subject is not up to snuff.

They found no noted differences between conventional and organic crops with regard to vitamin C, magnesium, calcium, potassium, zinc and copper content. Organic crops did have higher levels of phosphorus, and conventionally produced crops had higher levels of nitrogen.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=8206608&page=1

Search Spammers Hacking More Websites

The head of Google’s Web-spam-fighting team warns that spammers are increasingly attacking websites.

The head of Google’s Web-spam-fighting team, Matt Cutts, warned last week that spammers are increasingly hacking poorly secured websites in order to “game” search-engine results. At a conference on information retrieval, held in Boston, Cutts also discussed how Google deals with the growing problem of search spam.

Search spammers try to gain unfair prominence for their Web pages in search results, thereby making money from the products that these sites offer or from advertising posted on them. The practice, also known as “spamdexing,” exploits the way search engines’ algorithms figure out how to rank different pages for a particular search query. Google’s page-rank algorithm, for instance, in part gives prominence to pages that are heavily linked to other material on the Web. Spammers can exploit this by adding links to their site on message boards and forums and by creating fake Web pages filled with these links. Garth Bruen, creator of the Knujon software that keeps track of reported search spam, says that some campaigns involve creating up to 10,000 unique domain names.

“We’re getting better at spotting spammy pages,” said Cutts after his talk, adding that spammers are increasingly hacking legitimate websites and filling their pages with spam links or redirecting users to other sites.

“As operating systems become more secure and users become savvier in protecting their home machines, I would expect the hacking to shift to poorly secured Web servers,” said Cutts. He expects “that trend to continue until webmasters and website owners take precautions to secure Web-server software as well.”

“I’ve talked to some spammers who have large databases of websites with security holes,” Cutts said. “You definitely see more Web pages getting linked from hacked sites these days. The trend has been going on for at least a year or so, and I do believe we’ll see more of this.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23095/

GIANT JELLYFISH PICTURES: Japan’s Nomura Invasion

Eat your heart out, Godzilla. A massive menace from the sea seems poised to invade Japan anew this summer, experts predict.

In 2005 Japanese waters were inundated with swarms of Nomura’s jellyfish–like the pair seen above cruising off the coast of Fukui Prefecture in November 2007. The giants clogged fishing nets and poisoned potential catches with their toxic stings, costing coastal fishers billions of yen.

Scientists have since been racing to unlock the mysteries of this giant jellyfish species in an attempt to forecast invasions and prevent damages.

This June researchers at Hiroshima University made some of the first surveys of the jellyfish’s spawning grounds off the Chinese coast. The team found a huge new brood lurking in the waters, prompting experts to warn that another giant jellyfish invasion may be on the horizon.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/photogalleries/giant-jellyfish-invasion-japan-pictures/index.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090729-giant-jellyfish-invasion-japan.html