News Category: News
Girl Power Wins at Google’s First Science Fair
July 13, 2011, The New York Times
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
If Google’s first science fair is any indication, the top scientists of the future will be women. Google has announced the fair’s winners, and they are all young women.
Shree Bose, age 17, from Fort Worth, Tex., won the grand prize for developing a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients who have developed a resistance to chemotherapy. Naomi Shah, 16, from Portland, Ore., found ways to improve indoor air quality and decrease people’s reliance on asthma medications. And Lauren Hodge, 14, from Dallastown, Pa., researched the effects of different marinades on potential carcinogens in grilled chicken.
“As a girl, to see that my gender actually is going to come into this field that’s been so dominated by men is exciting to me, and to be a part of that is even more exciting,” Ms. Bose said in an interview.
Surprisingly for Google, a computer science company, the winners each did bioscience projects. But the entries were wide-ranging, as was the science fair. Teenagers from all over the world could enter the fair in areas from computer science to space exploration. Unlike other science fairs, like those of Intel and Siemens, students entered online instead of presenting their projects in a school gymnasium.
Ten thousand students from 91 countries entered 7,500 projects in the science fair, including transforming recycled cans into solar ovens, building robotic prosthetic limbs and developing 3-D indoor navigation for blind people. For a clue about what tomorrow’s scientists care most about, the most popular category was earth and environmental sciences.
Google invited 15 finalists to its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters this week. The winners received scholarships, internships at Google, CERN and Lego, and for Ms. Bose, a trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Explorer.
Google started the science fair to promote curiosity about science and experimentation among students, and it is one of the company’s several education projects. It is also a marketing tool for Google Apps, which compete with Microsoft and other companies. Google hoped to introduce students to Google’s Web products, like Google Sites, App Inventor and SketchUp, so they might continue to use them in college and the workplace.
That plan may have paid off. Ms. Bose said that she started her project planning to “cut and paste it onto a board” to present at an in-person science fair. But entering it online was much easier, she said. She used Google Sites, Docs and Scholar, and plans to continue to use the services.
Promoting women in science was not an explicit goal of Google’s and gender did not play a role in the judges’ decisions, said Vint Cerf, a Google Science Fair judge and the company’s chief Internet evangelist.
“But I was secretly happy to see that happen, because for ages men have dominated the science field, and in many cases women who have done excellent work have been ignored,” Mr. Cerf said in an interview.
In Silicon Valley, where men vastly outnumber women, Google has consciously tried to recruit more women. One way it did that was to hire women early on, like Marissa Mayer in engineering and Susan Wojcicki in ad sales, because the founders thought women would be more likely to join the company if they saw other women working there.
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A little creativity turned pirate into profit
Vancouver firm rebrands illegal YouTube videos as corporate money-makers
By Scott Simpson, Vancouver Sun, May 31, 2011, p. C9
You can fight them, or you can work with them.
By taking the latter approach with some of the Internet’s more benign “pirates,” a British Columbia-based Internet business is carving out a potentially formidable space for itself on the world wide web.
BroadbandTV, brainchild of Shahrzad Rafati, is already a profitable venture that boasts business relationships including YouTube, the National Basketball Association, Electronic Arts, United Way, Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers.
Rafati started the company in 2005, a year before she graduated from the University of B.C. in computer sciences.
The company began by offering foreign language television entertainment over the Internet, and still does.
But it was Rafati’s innovations that have piqued wider interest; this month, Fast Company listed her as one of the world’s top 100 creative business thinkers.
She has developed computer programs -search algorithms -that comb the web for certain kinds of content.
(The creators of Google on a much larger scale developed computer programs as the foundation of its prodigious search engine.)
In the case of the NBA, for example, BroadbandTV looks for fan-or “user”-generated videos -such as a LeBron
James slam dunk compilation that a Miami Heat fan might post on YouTube or another basketball site or webpage.
The NBA has a copyright for all images involving its teams and players so, technically, a fan who is posting game highlights is violating the copyright -in effect, pirating the NBA’s proprietary video content, even if it’s just intended as a tribute. But instead of antagonizing fans with lawsuits, the NBA has a contract with BroadbandTV to rebrand their clips as official content.
Rafati’s algorithms scan the web for unauthorized video clips. When they find one, BroadbandTV staff screen -or “curate” -it for potential objectionable content and remove it, and then attach advertisements. A pirate clip posted on YouTube is rebranded into a revenue-generating league asset.
The ensuing ad revenue is shared among partners in the venture, including the NBA and BroadbandTV.
“I consume a lot of videos online myself. I watch a lot of content on YouTube and other sites,” Rafati said in an interview at BroadbandTV’s new offices in downtown Vancouver.
“When first YouTube came around, and a lot of other video portals that might not even be around now, the majority of the content on these platforms was uploaded by users. The majority of the uploaded content was not videos of cats and dogs. It was an NBA clip, an American Idol clip.
“I thought -the guys that are uploading are not really thinking of themselves as pirates. These are fans that are going out there, they are uploading the videos, they are sharing them with their friends and they’re very enthusiastic. They’re posting it on their Facebook wall.
“We thought, how can we come up with a solution to a problem that the content partners are facing where we give them control?”
A deal to clean up user generated content was the first step. The next one was persuading the clients to let BroadbandTV create unique, legitimized Internet video channels where fans could upload their clips -and attach advertisements that would drive revenue.
The company created a “consumer brand,” VISO, that operates on YouTube and offers a series of channels dedicated to content from video games, other sports, music, television and movie trailers.
As with the NBA channel, BroadbandTV is using the new promotional channels to curate fan-driven content, attach advertisements, and drive revenue growth.
There’s a VISO Gamer channel for video gamers to post video clips from their in-game adventures -Electronic Arts is a partner on that one.
VISO Trailers shows movie trailer and other film fan content, VISO Games shows video game trailers, and MISO Music features concert clips and other music videos.
“At the end of the day you are giving the end user what they are looking for, not looking at them as pirates but as fans, enthusiastic fans that are going out there sharing, uploading content, sharing it with their friends and educating them,” Rafati said.
Getting the attention of a large, internationally regarded corporate entity such as the NBA or EA or Sony was not easy for a tiny Vancouver company with a CEO barely out of university.
“For us, when we were approaching the content partners it was very difficult at the beginning. It was months and months of negotiation with different content partners but, at the end of the day, we provided them with stats, data, on user activity associated with their video assets.
“They had two options. Either they had no control or they have control -and there was a business model behind it, a real business model. There are real revenues associated with user activity around the user uploaded content,” Rafati said. “Because there was no risk on their end and we were doing all the work and bringing them a revenue stream, we were able to get them on board.”
Those stations are in addition to others that offer more traditional TV content, such as an online BroadbandTV channel for watching Venezuelan soap operas, or old movies in the public domain, or other content that can’t find its way onto a local network or specialty television station.
Even here, BroadbandTV is offering to help curate content and monetize it for its owners.
Rafati’s favourite new channel is VISO Give, which enables charitable enterprises to post their own content and generate revenue from it.
They don’t need to plead for donations. Instead, charities on VISO Give need only to have people watch their videos to generate revenue from the advertisements that are attached to them.
For the public, a 90-second video of yelping puppies at an animal shelter means advertising revenue for the shelter that costs nothing more than the 90 seconds it took to watch the video.
The more people you can attract to your video, the more revenue you can generate.
“You see a lot of technology companies that just create technology for the sake of creating something really cool and hoping that someone is going to acquire the company. For us it’s solving a real problem that exists out there,” Rafati said.
“It’s something I’m personally passionate about because it’s doing something good within the community and truly helping the non-profits. We are hoping to get more and more non-profits on board to really create a kick-ass, aggregated hub destination for the nonprofits.”
Meanwhile, Rafati is talking with potential investors about a first, significant round of venture capital funding -a Series A venture that would put the company, and Canada, on the digital map.
“We’ve been fortunate,” she said.
“The business is cash-flow positive. We have a proven model. As a result of that, we want to grow rapidly and we think it’s best to go out there and raise some money and truly scale the business.”
Once-hated basking shark back in favour
Slaughtered en masse in the ‘60s, scientists seek to help world’s second-largest fish recover
By Judith Lavoie, Vancouver Sun, May 19, 2011. p. A13
Five decades ago, fishermen and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans made a concerted push to slaughter the remaining basking sharks off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Today, with a dramatic turn in attitudes, all efforts are concentrated on helping the population recover.
The eradication program for basking sharks, the second largest fish in the world, ran from 1955 to 1969. A similar killing program was carried out in California.
Knives were attached to the bows of vessels to chop the sharks into pieces.
There was little contest from the plankton-eating fish, which had aroused the ire of fishermen by becoming entangled in salmon gillnets as they basked on the surface of the ocean swallowing small crustaceans and fish larvae.
There is no point in dwelling on the past, said Heather Brekke, DFO recovery planner for basking sharks, who recently presented recovery plans at the International Marine Conservation Congress in Victoria.
“Times change,” she said. “Back in the 1950s, times were different.
”[Awareness] of general conservation issues and the marine environment have changed so drastically in the last 50 years.”
Pacific basking sharks, which can grow to more than 12 metres, were listed as endangered under the Species At Risk Act last year after populations declined by more than 90 per cent in two generations.
It is estimated there are now between 321 and 535 animals remaining from southern Alaska to northern Mexico. The DFO is working on recovery plans with the U.S. and Mexico, Brekke said.
But the basking shark is shy and difficult to spot.
Since a tagging program started last year, only one has been tagged, off the coast of San Diego.
“It’s opportunistic because sightings are so rare,” Brekke said. “There have been 13 confirmed sightings since 1996 off the west coast of Vancouver Island.”
There have also been unconfirmed sightings, and the DFO wants help from the public as it attempts to catalogue where the animals might be living and what threats they face, Brekke said.
“We are talking to anyone who’s out there on the water,” she said.
Ideally, Brekke wants video or photos for sightings to be confirmed.
Scottish research scientist Mauvis Gore, of Marine Conservation International, specializes in the northeast Atlantic population of basking sharks and was startled to hear at the Conservation Congress about the recovery plans.
“I am very surprised I have never heard from these people,” Gore said.
Basking sharks swim vast distances and it is possible the Atlantic and Pacific populations could sometimes meet, she said.
“So this population is really important.” In the northeast Atlantic, the population crashed because of fishing and the sharks are now protected in the U.K.
In Scotland, basking sharks are becoming a tourist draw, Gore said. “They are magnificent,” she said.
It can be alarming to see the huge mouth approaching if people do not realize the sharks are plankton eaters, Gore said.
“But they are very gentle. The only thing they can do is slap their tail.”
Brekke hopes that, one day, basking sharks will also return to the west coast of Vancouver Island in historic numbers.
“I am a big optimist. I think they are out there and every year we are getting more information. I hope this is the year of the basking shark,” she said.
Anyone who sees a basking shark can call 1-877-50SHARK or fill out a form on the DFO website.
We’re talkin’ prehistoric trash
Early man caused ‘tree islands’ in Florida Everglades: study
By Randy Boswell, Vancouver Sun, March 23, 2011, p. B7
Canadian researchers have solved a long-standing mystery about the existence of “tree islands” in the Florida Everglades -rare heights of dry, semi-forested land that serve as nesting sites for alligators, refuges for endangered panthers and crucial hubs of biodiversity in the world-famous swamp.
A McGill University-led study of the islands reached an unexpected conclusion: these life-sustaining sources of nutrients for one of America’s iconic ecosystems originated thousands of years ago as the trash heaps of prehistoric people who lived around present-day Miami.
“This goes to show that human disturbance in the environment doesn’t always have a negative consequence,” McGill paleo-ecologist Gail Chmura said in a summary of the study, detailed Tuesday at a conference in New Mexico.
Chmura, a McGill geography professor and director of Quebec’s six-university Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre, said in an interview that the islands appear to have begun as aboriginal middens -dumping grounds for bones, shells, charcoal, food waste and other discarded material that gradually built up over generations into permanent mounds of earth.
“During the rainy season, the marshy area of the Everglades becomes flooded and this is the only high ground,” Chmura said. “The highly endangered Florida panther may have dens there; birds roost in the trees. It provides a shady, dry area in what is otherwise an exposed, saturated wetland.”
About a decade ago, Florida wildlife officials identified the tree islands as an important “natural” resource for the vast wetland that covers much of the southern part of the state.
Scientists had previously theorized that the islands were formed on top of “perched” layers of a naturally occurring mineral called carbonate that underlies the Everglades.
But excavations by the McGill researchers and others showed the prehistoric garbage dumps appeared to kick-start the process of carbonate accumulation that was deepened and hardened as tree roots repeatedly drew up groundwater and dissolved minerals.
The Everglades are among a small handful of major marshlands in the world identified by UN conservation agencies as having global ecological significance.
Chmura said archaic human cultures are known to have occupied the Florida peninsula as early as 12,000 years ago. But the specific paleo-Indian population thought to have created the “landfill” sites that evolved into the Everglades’ tree islands began occupying the region about 5,000 years ago, she said.
“The early middens have remains of aquatic animals even then, so people were exploiting the sinkhole lakes” of the area, said Chmura. “Unfortunately, most of those early people disappeared, assumed to have been wiped out by disease carried by the Spanish who explored the region.”
She noted in an email that the Seminole tribes that populated Florida in recent centuries also occupied the tree islands, “and they are still valued today by Seminoles and newer Floridians who have built camps [cottages] on some.”
But the chief ecological value of the islands, the researchers say, is their role in nutrient cycling and in providing “distinctive havens of exceptional ecological richness” amid growing threats from human development.
Testing Device Brings Lab to the Field
By Jean Sorensen – Vancouver Sun – March 14, 2011, p. A10
Infant mortality indeveloping countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia is a major concern as doctors are often left guessing which antibiotics toadminister asthousands of newlyborn infants succumb to bacteria-causing diarrhea. But, a team from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) School of Engineering Science is close to a technology breakthrough that will change that.
“Normally, samples [from an infant] would have to be sent to a lab for tests, and in rural areas this can take two or three days,” says Dr. Ash Parameswaran, P.Eng. For the newly born and infants that are only a few months old, this delay can mean their small bodies are robbed of fluids, leading to death.
Parameswaran and his team of plastic microfluidics researchers (including graduate researchers Carlyn Loncaric, Sumanpreet Chhina and Mona Rahbar) have developed a low-cost test device, a “lab-on-a-chip” (LOC), which can deliver results in just hours and can be used in the field. This chip’s “platform,” now in the advanced prototype stage, is a small case made of common, hardware-store Plexiglas. Tiny channels are fabricated in the case using ultraviolet radiation, where bacteria extracted from fecal matter (a simple procedure that can be done in the field by most health care technicians) is introduced into a food culture laced with an antibiotic. The food mixture carries a color tracer orflorescent dye. If the bacteria digest the food and survive, waste byproduct will be created and an ultraviolet LED light will show it as fluorescing green. If the light test shows no color traces, then the bacteria has consumed a fatal meal and physicians know the antibiotic administered is the correct one.
This method of testing is known as an antibiogram. Parameswaran and his team knew the test existed and knew how it worked in a laboratory; the question for the team became one of how to take a lab procedure and bring it into the field where it could be performed under the most basic and rudimentary conditions. Cost was a major consideration as the test device had to be placed within the financial grasp of countries that face severe poverty brought on by civil strife, drought, or lack of resources.
Parameswaran’s team quickly realized that a low-cost, easy-to-use test device would have other field applications. It could be used in areas sustaining major disasters such as an earthquake where established facilities are disrupted or destroyed. It might also be applied to areas affected by civil war where medical laboratories have become difficult to access.
Initially, the idea took root more than three years ago when Parameswaran, visiting India, gave a number of lectures to Indian organizations highlighting SFU’s strides in microfabrication research into microfluidics technology. Out of discussions that followed the talks came the suggestion that a portable, low-cost test was badly needed to prevent infant deaths in rural areas.
Funding was obtained from the Shastri Indo- Canadian Institute, and Parameswaran, working with SFU graduate students Mona Rahbar and Suman Chhina, developed the first prototype. The material for the lab-on-a-chip had to be a common source item that could be accessed in any country at a reasonable cost. Plexiglas, called PMMA (poly methyl methacrylate) fit that need and it was also a material that plastic manufacturing plants around the world recognized, could easily obtain and knew how to work with.
Once the first prototype was ready, it was shipped to India where laboratory technicians were able to introduce the disease-causing strains of bacteria to the lab-on-a-chip and the food cultures in 2009. A refined prototype followed with more testing in the Indian laboratory, and while the second generation worked more smoothly, there was an emerging glitch. The top and bottom components of the micro-fluid shell were glued together and fused with heat. The laboratory found that the adhesive, in cases, interfered with the test results.
“The adhesive was not intended to be used in a biological product,” observes Parameswaran, adding that when the adhesive companies were called and told of the specialized need, a company in the Eastern U.S. did some research that lead to an adaptable solution. “They shipped us some adhesive free of cost,” he said.
This second prototype is now being refined at SFU and it is expected to be shipped to India where it will go into field trials.
The ability to produce a quick test on a portable template doesn’t stop with attempting to find a solution to high rates of infant mortality in developing nations. Parameswaran and his researchers see it as just the beginning, and are exploring other areas where this technology might be used. He notes that a major medical concern today is attempting to find a way to detect cancer.
“It is an area where we need to do more study,” he admits, but this kind of simple, disposable test is something that is becoming more common place in the medical field today. It is taking testing out of the structured laboratory and placing it in less rigorous conditions.
Oilsands’ water taint confirmed
Vancouver Sun – March 11, 2011, p. B2
A governmentsponsored scientific committee studying water monitoring in Canada’s oilsands has backed assertions that multibilliondollar energy developments are polluting waterways and it urges more stringent oversight.
The report by the independent scientists, appointed by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, said an incendiary study by water ecologists last year appeared to be right in its contention that toxic substances downstream from the developments do not occur naturally.
An industry-funded body had long said heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic compounds, or PACs, found in the Athabasca River watershed north of Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, occurred naturally as bitumen leached into the river.
“Taking into consideration all data and critiques, we generally agree … that PACs and trace metals are being introduced into the environment by oilsands operations,” the panel said in its evaluation of four reports.
The Alberta oilsands are the largest source of oil outside the Middle East and are the target of billions of dollars worth of development plans. However, the environmental impact, including greenhouse gas emissions, forest destruction and water pollution, are under criticism by green groups.
Stelmach asked the six-member panel to examine the studies in September after University of Alberta scientists Erin Kelly and David Schindler released their report that concluded oilsands plants are sending toxins including mercury, arsenic and lead into the watershed. Schindler also sharply criticized work by the government-supported and industry-funded Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program, which had held to the naturally occurring line.
The studies prodded both the provincial and federal government to appoint scientists to study the effectiveness of current monitoring programs and make improvements.
“We agree with Kelly et al that it is improbable that the snowpack-deposited contaminants could have resulted from wind erosion of bitumen outcrops or bitumen-containing soils in undisturbed landscapes -especially under snow-cover,” the Stelmach-appointed committee reported.
Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner said the report will be used by the province’s own panel as it works to design a better monitoring system.
Humans, primates share aging patterns, study reveals
We age slower than other mammals
By Clara Ho – Vancouver Sun – March 11, 2011, p. B2
Humans and wild primates not only share many physical features, they also experience similar aging patterns, according to a new study by the University of Calgary.
The study Aging in the Natural World, which appears in the March 11 issue of Science, reveals that humans and their hairier cousins see their risk of dying increase with age at similar rates.
“We examined patterns of mortality and mortality risk from infancy to adulthood,” said Dr. Linda Fedigan, co-author of the study and a professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary, in a release.
“We found that all primates followed a pattern similar to that of humans where there are high mortality risks in infancy, which level off for juveniles and into early adulthood, and then increase once individuals reach full adulthood.”
Early research compared human lifespans to those of shorter-lived species such as rats and mice and concluded that humans age more slowly than other mammals.
But this is the first study to compare aging in humans to aging in several species of wild primates, measuring the aging rates of 3,000 individual wild primates from seven different species. The findings determined that wild primates, like humans, also “aged gracefully” and more slowly than other animals.
The study also showed that male humans and male primates die sooner than their female counterparts, attributing the higher risk of early death to the stress and aggression of male competition.
There are still many unanswered questions as to the maximum human life span, especially with access to modern medicine and health care, Fedigan said.
“The questions we can ask get better the longer we can study the lifespans of primates,” she said. “All we can go by is the longest reliable record we have right now.”
SCWIST Member Dr. Maria Issa profiled in Metro News
Carving her niche in science
KRISTEN THOMPSON
METRO VANCOUVER
Published: March 08, 2011 2:43 a.m.
When Dr. Maria Issa first began her studies at the University of B.C. in the late 1960s, she was one of only a handful of other women studying science.
“When I started, women weren’t as well represented in science education and still had to be convinced that hey needed to take math and science,” said Issa.
Today she is a clinical associate professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at UBC and, by carving a niche in an industry once dominated by men, helped pave the way for the next generation of female scientists.
“Now as far as 53 per cent of undergrad science classes are made up of women. There are amazing young women … graduating with degrees in science and they don’t realize this was not (common) when I was in school,” said Issa.
But breaking into a science career wasn’t easy, and a lot of women — herself included — have had to put their work on hold to have babies.
“It really slows down a woman’s career path,” Issa said. “The commitment and the flexibility is not there for women in science and … they need support. Economically it makes way more sense to use brains you’ve trained, (but) we perceive women as moms and we forget that they have an economic power.”
A big help to all working moms, Issa said, would be access to universal and affordable childcare so women could enjoy motherhood and the challenge of their work.
“Women work because it’s fulfilling and satisfying. Without that we feel like we’re not contributing.”
“Science is everywhere and when you start looking at it that way, the wonder and joy of it, it’s brilliant. I don’t know how I would have lived without science.” – Maria Issa
Arctic birds bear brunt of throwaway society
Researchers find that the stomachs of the small, vulnerable creatures are full of plastics
By Margaret Munro – Vancouver Sun – March 7, 2011, p. B1
When biologist Jennifer Provencher headed to the Arctic, she signed on to help assess how seabird diets are changing as temperatures climb in the North.
She never expected to find plastics on the menu. But she and her colleagues at the Canadian Wildlife Service are pulling remarkable amounts of trash from birds in some of the remotest spots on Earth.
Fulmars are strong flyers that skim the surface swallowing tasty tidbits, and 84 per cent of the ones the researchers examined from two Arctic colonies had plastics in their guts.
One had swallowed the mangled remains of a red bottle lid, with a striking resemblance to a Coke cap, along with 20 other bits of plastic.
“It’s hard to believe a bird could have that much plastic,” said Provencher, who has been combing through the stomach contents for her graduate work at the University of Victoria. “That’s the equivalent of a human being having a baseball-sized chunk of plastic in your stomach.”
Even more “shocking,” she said, is that 11 per cent of thickbilled murres from five Arctic breeding colonies had plastics in their guts when examined -the first evidence of trash in an “auk” species in Canada’s Arctic.
“We are so concerned about the melting ice,” said Provencher. “Yet one of the consequences of melting ice is more shipping and more tourism and that is directly impacting the wildlife through plastics ingestion.
“It’s not just birds. ... They are just the indicator of a problem that is also affecting fish, bears and other species.”
SEALIFE THREATENED
Vast amounts of plastic have been collecting in the world’s oceans for the last 50 years. Bottles, bags and other plastic trash are carried off on currents and can keep travelling for years, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces.
There are the obvious threats to sea life of entanglement and blockages -albatrosses have been known to swallow toothbrushes and plastic toys. And scientists are increasingly concerned about subtle effects, including reduced appetite, stunted growth and exposure to pollutants that can leach out of plastics.
The United Nations Environment Program warned Feb. 17 that marine plastics, and the “micro-plastics” generated as plastic is broken down by wave action and sunlight, could be “a new toxic time bomb.”
None of this is good for seabirds, which in the case of Canada’s Arctic are already under pressure due to dramatic changes underway in their ecosystem.
The Canadian Wildlife Service team, led by Anthony Gaston at Environment Canada, has found Arctic cod, long a mainstay of the diet of Arctic seabirds and their chicks, is being replaced with less nourishing capelin and sandlace that are moving north as the ice retreats -along with an increasing amount of plastic.
The biologists are gauging the birds’ health at Arctic breeding colonies, where they climb over rocks and cliffs to weigh and tag adults and their chicks. At the end of the last four field seasons, Provencher headed back to B.C. with dozens of frozen stomachs.
“When I open up the gut, I find these plastic pieces packed up around the bottom of the stomach and around the sphincter that leads into the intestine,” Provencher said.
She has an intriguing collection of glass jars, with white, grey, brown, red and even fluorescent plastic bits she’s found inside the birds. There are industrial pellets and “nurdles” that fell into the ocean on the way to and from plastic factories, and an array of oddshaped fragments that are hard to identify.
No one knows how much plastic is in the oceans, but the UN Environment Program said there is “an urgent need” to better monitor its fate and impact on marine ecosystems.
Plastics use has climbed sharply, despite recycling efforts. UNEP estimates the average person in North America and western Europe now uses around 100 kilograms of plastic a year, a figure it predicts will increase to 140 kg by 2015. In Asia the average person uses around 20 kg of plastic a year, which is projected to grow to 36 by 2015.
Plastics do not just float around the ocean but are sinking and piling up on the seabed. “Plastic debris has been observed on the ocean floor from the depths of the Fram Strait in the North Atlantic to deepwater canyons off the Mediterranean coast,” UNEP reports.
Canada, unlike Europe, does not have a coordinated program to deal with marine debris, but the birds in the Arctic and those washing ashore on the west coast point to a growing problem.
‘FLYING DUSTBINS’
“My numbers are approaching those seen in the North Sea,” said biologist Stephanie Avery-Gomm, who looked at the stomachs of 36 fulmars that washed up on Vancouver Island after a storm and were picked up by volunteers with Bird Studies Canada.
One of the fulmars contained several dozen pieces of plastic, including industrial pellets, a chunk of sponge, fishing line and a bristle from a hairbrush. “Plastics do really last forever,” said Avery-Gomm, who is doing graduate work at the University of B.C. She is so concerned about plastic pollution, she opens up and examines seabird stomachs in her spare time.
Fulmars, a petrel found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, are surface feeders often enticed by floating plastics. They’ve been described as “flying dustbins,” though scientists prefer to call them “sentinels” that reflect the amount of trash in the marine environment.
Canada’s Arctic was still living up to its “pristine” reputation in the 1970s, when a study of 181 fulmars turned up no plastic, the CWS team reports. But seabirds now indicate plastics are embedded in the Arctic ecosystem.
Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Mark Mallory collected 144 fulmars in the Arctic between 2003 and 2006 and found more than 30 per cent carried plastic. More recently Mallory, Provencher and their colleagues collected another 25 fulmars at a High Arctic colony and another on eastern Baffin Island.
Provencher pulled plastic out of 21 of the 25 birds, or 84 per cent, which is approaching the incidence seen in the much more industrialized North Sea, where 95 to 100 per cent of the fulmars carry plastic.
Since Mallory had found plastic in Arctic fulmars before, Provencher said they weren’t all that surprised to find plastic in the birds again. “The surprising thing was the number of birds that had plastics in them,” she said.
“But what was shocking was to open up the murres and find plastics,” she said, noting that she found it in 11 per cent of the 186 thick-billed murres she slit open for the most recent study.
Penguin-like murres are not “trash-eaters,” Provencher said. They dive down to feed below the surface, which, judging by the birds’ stomachs, is now home to increasing amounts of plastic.
Most of the plastics were too weathered to identify, but one murre had swallowed a fluorescent yellow ball about the size of pea. It turned out to be a pellet for a toy air gun that somehow ended up in northern Hudson Bay, said Provencher, who found between one and nine pieces of plastic in the murres. Toe fulmars carried much more, with an average of 5.5 pieces per bird -one had 21 pieces.
EUROPE A LEADER
It is not known how long plastic stays inside seabirds, but Provencher suspects most of it eventually passes through and back into the ecosystem, where it can be picked up by other creatures.
The murres examined were taken from five colonies, with the most plastic found in birds from Akapotok Island, south of Baffin Island, and the lowest amount in birds from the colony on Prince Leopold Island in the High Arctic.
The biologists reported recently in the Marine Pollution Bulletin that finding plastic in the birds “suggest(s) that this is a widespread occurrence [among] thick-billed murres in Canada.”
“The murres sampled earlier in the year have way more plastic -so they are potentially bringing them from the North Atlantic where they winter,” Provencher said. “But we also find them in August with plastics so they are eating them locally [in the Arctic] as well.
“It’s a mixed bag, and we won’t know more till we do more research,” she said.
Like Avery-Gomm, Provencher would like Canada to follow Europe’s lead and tackle the problem head-on.
The Save the North Sea project, involving seven European countries, has set acceptable limits for plastic ingestion by birds, and has an aggressive program to reduce and monitor marine litter by checking fulmar stomachs.
“No one is doing it for Canadian waters, but every time we sample, we are surprised by the amount of plastics we find,” said Provencher, who has just returned from Europe.
“It’s time we also started monitoring plastic pollution in Arctic water, and building the infrastructure for proper garbage disposal and recycling.”
Testing of aging drivers ‘not realistic,’ scientist says
Doctor’s office setting is not the same as crowded, active streets
By Tom Spears – Vancouver Sun – March 4, 2011, p. B4
The testing commonly used to gauge older drivers’ ability to keep driving isn’t realistic, says a Canadian brain scientist, because a doctor’s office is nothing like a crowded street.
Sure, a senior can read letters on an eye chart, says Allison Sekuler of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. But the doctor’s office is a setting that doesn’t require quick decisions, the ability to see through “clutter” or concentrate on traffic and still notice a pedestrian stepping off the curb.
“Most important, especially as we get older, is the fact that as you’re driving you’re doing more than one thing at the same time,” she said.
“You’re trying to see what the car in front of you is doing, trying not to exceed the speed limit, paying attention to where the stop signs are,” and watching buses, car doors opening, pedestrians, and so on, “all at the same time.”
“That is a little more difficult that reading an eye chart.”
Part of the problem is “everyone ages at a different rate,” she said. One of her test volunteers, at 95, performs like a man in his early 40s, she notes, while others go the other way.
Sekuler is a professor of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour at McMaster, and also associate vice-president and dean of graduate studies. She was speaking Thursday to a gathering of MPs and senators about her research on the aging brain.
One issue for older drivers is that although they may see clearly, it takes longer for the brain to process those signals. An elderly driver may take 250 milliseconds (a quarter of a second) to recognize a picture that a young adult can recognize in 150 milliseconds, she said. “If you’re slower, that has an impact in the real world that you wouldn’t see in the clinic.”
The good news, she said, is that “you can teach an old brain new tricks.”
The brain keeps making brain cells as the years pass, though their function isn’t always understood yet. And we can often recruit help from different areas of the brain when one area fades.
For instance, the visual centre of the brain can weaken, and the brain compensates by using areas normally used for memory and for paying attention. That, she suggests, may be one reason why aging reduces our ability to remember and focus attention.
She says her lab has shown older people can be taught, by simple practice, to multi-task as well as teens and young adults.
A whale of a problem
Watchers, boats pose serious risks to marine mammals: zoologist
By Sandra McCulloch – Vancouver Sun – March 4, 2011, p. A2
An endangered clan of killer whales faces serious health issues from the emissions of whalewatching and pleasure boats, a study by a Victoria zoologist has found.
Over two and a half years, Cara Lachmuth studied vehicle traffic and atmospheric conditions near the endangered clan, known as the southern resident killer whales, which has 87 members.
What she observed is “worrying,” Lachmuth said in an interview Thursday.
“We’re right at the threshold of where you would expect to see health effects,” said Lachmuth.
“Right now, there are no limits on the number of boats that can whale watch. If you want to go fishing, you need a permit, but with whale watching that doesn’t exist.”
The current guideline restricting Canadian boats to 100 metres from killer whales is adequate, she found. Whales in U.S. waters are protected by a 91.44-metre boundary by law. Environmentalists in the U.S. are pushing to have that distance doubled.
But boaters who -through ignorance or recklessness -breach the recommended distance, increase the health risk to the whales through their vehicles’ exhaust, said Lachmuth, whose study was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.
As it is, under average conditions, killer whales have to breathe at least five times more carbon monoxide than is found 100 metres from a busy Los Angeles highway.
“That really surprised me -I didn’t think it was going to be that high,” said Lachmuth.
“It’s because when you’re out on the water there’s an inversion because the ocean is so cold and in the summer the air is a lot warmer -the CO is sticking right at that interface and it’s not moving vertically at all.”
Lance Barrett-Lennard, a senior marine mammal research scientist at the Vancouver Aquarium and Lachmuth’s research supervisor, said: “I remember years ago seeing clusters of fishing boats on the water on a still summer day and that blue haze all around, from their own exhaust.”
The challenge of Lachmuth’s study was to figure out what quantity of pollutants caused difficulties for whales, he said.
”[Lachmuth] had to do the work of figuring out what these doses would mean for an animal that doesn’t have sinuses, that can’t filter air, that holds its breath and is substantially larger than humans,” Barrett-Lennard said.
Lachmuth found that killer whales are more sensitive to air pollutants than humans and experience toxic effects from as little as 39 per cent of the amount which would be toxic to humans.
“For a one-hour exposure to average case whale-watching conditions, we calculated the southern resident killer whales receive doses of carbon monoxide that are at the threshold of adverse health effects,” the study said. The southern resident killer whales are exposed to whalewatching vessels for 12 hours a day, Lachmuth noted.
One area of study that needs to be explored is the effect of pollutants on whales as they take breaths and dive into depth. Also unclear is how much more vulnerable calves and older whales are to the pollutants.
Amiee Chan One of BC’s 2011 Influential Women in Business
Honoured for her contributions to industry and influence in the local community, Amiee Chan, President and CEO of Norsat International was named one of BC’s 2011 Influential Women in Business.
Wed Feb 01
