Update: October 31, 2007

BEAM ME UP!

By Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

WHEW! THAT STINKS!
For our first story for this week’s column I bring you an unexpected consequence of the global warming that many people still insist isn’t happening.  A researcher in Alaska brought a public radio crew to the permafrost to show them what can happen when it melts.

Katey Walter, a scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, studies methane emissions from arctic lakes, especially the connection between thawing permafrost and climate change.  As permafrost around a lake’s edges thaws, the organic material in it--dead plants and animals--can enter the lake bottom, where bacteria convert it to methane, which bubbles into the atmosphere, sometimes in spectacular fashion.  Methane is much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Graduate students Sudipta Sarkar, center, and Laura Brosius, left, and researcher Katey Dr. Walter and the radio crew certainly found methane bubbling in a spectacular fashion.  When they reached their destination, they found even more than they bargained for: a lake violently boiling with escaping methane. As the permafrost thaws, more and more methane will be released which could cause sudden increases in atmospheric methane with potentially large affects on global temperatures.  Walter’s project is one of many at the University of Alaska that are a part of the International Polar Year, an international event that will focus research efforts and public attention on the Earth’s polar regions.

Walter pose Near a large methane vent in the ice of a frozen lake in Alaska in October 2007. (Credit: Photo by Dragos Vas)

BIRDS AND FIRE ANTS
Next, two biology stories, both about birds.  A female bar-tailed godwit, a large shorebird has been tracked by satellite making the longest recorded bird flight ever. 

The bird, designated E7, was tagged with a small, battery-powered satellite transmitter in New Zealand in February of this year.  She left New Zealand in March and flew non-stop to mainland China, a distance of 6,300 miles.  She made the journey in eight days.

She stayed in China for five weeks and then flew on to Central Alaska where she built her nest.  That part of the journey covered over 4,000 miles and took 5 days.  But E7 wasn’t done with the record books.

In the early morning of 29 August, E7 took off from the Yukon Delta and headed south.  She overflew the Hawaiian Islands, and then passed 300 miles north of Fiji.  Then she turned south.
In the early afternoon of September 7th she passed just offshore of North Cape, New Zealand, and then turned back southeast, making landfall in the late evening at the mouth of a small river, eight miles east of where she had been captured seven months earlier.

The last leg of E7's journey is the most extraordinary, entailing a non-stop flight of more than eight days and a distance of 7,200 miles, or one-third the Earth’s circumference.  Since they’re land birds, godwits like E7 can't stop to eat or drink while flying over open-ocean.  The constant flight speeds at which E7 was tracked by satellite indicate that she did not stop on land.

So here’s to E7.  Birds have been making these flights for millions of years, but at least, we humans have PROOF!!

And now for a slightly less uplifting bird story.  Researchers at Texas A&M University have discovered something really awful.  The decline in songbird numbers in the southern US may have less to do with global warming than previously thought and more to do with  . . . . fire ants.

In a two-year study of black-capped and white-eyed vireos, researchers kept records on a total of 72 nests of both species.  They attached Arinix – a nylon plastic cable wrap developed for use in protecting electrical equipment from fire ants – around branches that contained some of the nests.  Some of the wraps were permeated with permethrin insecticide and some not.  This blocked fire ants from reaching these nests.

Only 10 percent of the baby birds fledged (grew feathers) and were able to leave the nests that were not protected against fire ants.  In the nests that were protected against the ants, 32 percent fledged. 
The researchers believe that fire ant predation can occur in any songbird species, although mortality rates would vary depending upon local populations of fire ants and how close to the ground the birds were nesting.

Although there is no question that the brown tree snake has decimated Guam’s birds, one has to wonder if it’s the whole problem!

PREVENTING SUICIDE AND KEEPING IT CLEAN
And now a couple of health stories.  Been feeling depressed lately?  Sometimes you feel like you just don’t want to go on?  Professor David Gunnell, a researcher in Sri Lanka has discovered that Sri Lanka’s import restrictions on the most toxic pesticides were followed by marked reductions in suicide.  Between 1950 and 1995 suicide rates in Sri Lanka increased 8-fold to a peak of 47 per 100,000 in 1995.  By 2005, rates had halved.  The researchers investigated whether restrictions on the import and sales of the most highly toxic pesticides in 1995 and 1998 coincided with these reductions in suicide.
They found that 19,800 fewer suicides occurred in 1996-2005 compared with 1986-95.  Other factors that affect suicide rates such as unemployment, alcohol misuse, divorce and war did not appear to be associated with these declines.  Pesticide self-poisoning is thought to account for an estimated 300,000 deaths in Asia – over a third of the world’s suicides. 

Professor Gunnell said: “Changes in the availability of a commonly used method of suicide may influence not only method-specific but also overall suicide rates.  Pesticides are readily available in most rural households in low income countries and are commonly used by young people who impulsively poison themselves in moments of crisis.”

And in a surprising bit of research, scientists at a university health center have compared several methods of eliminating the dangerous bacterium Clostridium difficile and found that the best way is through washing the hands in plain old soap and water.

They tested five separate hand-washing protocols that emulated hospital conditions as closely as possible.  After the hands of the ten volunteers were contaminated with C.difficile, they washed successively with: regular soap and warm or cold water, antiseptic soap and warm water, an alcohol-based solution, and eventually with a disinfectant towel.

They discovered that the protocols that involved washing with water eliminated more than 98% of the bacteria, while washing with an alcohol-based solution eliminated almost none!  The protocol involving a disinfectant towel eliminated around 95% of bacteria.

When Mom said, “Wash your hands” she wasn’t kidding!

ELIMINATING THE STICK
One of the biggest bugaboos in my job as Planetarium Director is chewing gum.  I have a lovely carpeted area where people lie back and enjoy the show and no one wants to have trouble getting up again because they’re stuck to the carpet with gum.  Unfortunately, kids like to chew gum and keeping them from doing so in the Planetarium is an on-going battle.

Researchers have finally come to my aid.  Revolymer, a spin out company from the University of Bristol, in Great Britain, has completed development of its new Clean Gum that can be easily removed from shoes, clothes, pavements and hair.  Preliminary results also indicate that the gum will degrade naturally in water.

Professor Terence Cosgrove, of the University of Bristol and Chief Scientific Officer of Revolymer said: "The advantage of our Clean Gum is that it has a great taste, it is easy to remove and has the potential to be environmentally degradable."

Bully for Terence Cosgrove!  My Planetarium carpet thanks him, too!

And in a sticky application that has broad applications for all of us; don’t you just HATE it when you can’t get the catsup out of the bottle?  When there’s enough salad dressing in the bottle for at least two more salads and it just WON’T COME OUT!

This isn’t just a frustrating problem for you.  In some cases, up to 20 percent of the content is left in the packaging when it’s dumped in the trashcan.  This is not only maximo annoying for consumers, but also poses difficulties when recycling. 

The leftovers have to be removed from the packaging, which is expensive, time-consuming, and uses a great deal of water.  If the products in question are pharmaceuticals, chemicals or pesticides, the rinsed-out leftovers also have to be disposed of in a suitable manner. Enter researchers from Germany.  They apply thin inert films, no more than 20 nanometers thick, to the inside surface of the packaging.  The first of these coated containers are already on the market in Europe.  The scientists are now working to improve the applied coatings by improving properties such as adhesive strength.  Their goal is to produce coatings that don’t change the properties of the containers.  They must remain capable of being industrially processed to form bottles, tubes, or stand-up pouches of the kind typically used for liquid soap.  In two to three years these new, improved bottles could be freely yielding their last drop of ketchup to consumers.

A new type of packaging -- pictured is a bottle of ketchup -- will reduce the leftover traces by at least half. On the left is a conventional bottle, on the right a coated one. (Credit: Copyright Fraunhofer IVV)

THE REPLIMAT IS AROUND THE CORNER
It’s a simple matter to print an E-book or other document directly from your computer, whether that document is on your hard drive, at a web site or in an email.  But, imagine being able to 'print' solid objects, a piece of sports equipment, say, or a kitchen utensil, or even a prototype car design for wind tunnel tests.  US researchers suggest such 3-D printer technology will soon enter the mainstream once a killer application emerges.

Such technology already exists and is maturing rapidly so that high-tech designers and others can share solid designs almost as quickly as sending a fax. The systems available are based on bath of liquid plastic, which is solidified by laser light.  The movements of the laser are controlled by a computer that reads a digitized 3D map of the solid object or design.

US researchers think this technology will eventually move into the mainstream, allowing work environments to ‘print’ three-dimensional objects like plastic paperclips, teacups, or components that can be joined to make sophisticated devices, perhaps bolted together with ‘printed’ nuts and bolts.  The possibilities for consumer goods, individualized custom products, replacement components, and quick fixes for broken objects, are almost unlimited.

From the business perspective, e-commerce sites will essentially become digital download sites with physical stores, retail employees, and shipping eliminated.  It is only a matter of time before the 'killer application,' the 3-D equivalent of the mp3 music file, one might say, arrives to make owning a 3-D printer as necessary to the modern lifestyle as owning a microwave oven, a TV, or indeed a personal computer.

Beam me up Scotty!!  I’m ready!!