About That Tainted Seafood from Texas

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I’ve been thinking about spring. It’s just been that kind of winter, described by a Wisconsin native in our local paper as “a cold spell,” which is definitely one way to talk about a week when the windchill dropped to -50 Fahrenheit.

When I look out the window – it’s just been that kind of winter – I try to look past the drifts of snow and see trees leafing into green, a bright chorus of birds in the branches, backyard cookouts, spring evenings with steamed shrimp and cold wine. One of harbingers of warm weather here in Madison is the arrival of trucks packed with seafood from Galveston, Texas. The fishermen park alongside a gourmet wine shop, hoist a banner proclaiming “Never Been Frozen” – which is, yes, slightly ironic here on the Midwestern tundra – and simply wait for customers to cue up.

Imagine me in that cue, as I have been for many years, breathing the balmy spring air and loading up on seafood from the famous bay. And imagine how dismayed I was when I discovered, while doing some background reading on dioxins, that the state of Texas has been allowing that and other notable industrial compounds – to seep into those waters – and, of course, into the fish that live there. The dioxins, in particular, have been directly traced from waste pits on the edge of the San Jacinto River as it rambles from Lake Houston and into this, one of our country’s great estuaries.

“Most people just aren’t aware of this,” Jackie Young, an environmental activist with Texans Together, tells me ruefully. She adds with some cynicism: “The state hasn’t been in a hurry to let people know. There’s a lot of Galveston Bay seafood sold on the open market and there’s a lot of revenue involved.”

Of course, I’m obsessing on seafood and, as Young reminds me, the real story – and the more important one- is that of an environmental disaster years in the making. The San Jacinto waste pits have tainted the soil, the  river, the private wells of nearby communities as well as the bay. In 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the disposal site as a Superfund clean up project.

The agency has scheduled a community meeting tonight, in fact, to discuss further options in managing the slow spill of poisonous materials into the waterways.

But to start at the beginning. In the mid-1960s, the Champion Paper company decided to create a disposal site for the chemical wastes from its mill in Pasadena, Texas. It chose a sandy region along the main channel of San Jacinto, east of Houston, so that it could move the waste by barge. No permit was required. By 1966, the waste pits covered 14 acres and over the following decades they were loaded with a toxic stew of compounds. The EPA lists the worst of them as polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, polychlorinated furans (dioxins and furans), and some metals. By “some” metals, the agency means lead and mercury, in particular. None of this is what you might call friendly chemistry. The agency classifies dioxins and furans as suspected human carcinogens, and notes that they are also known to be immunosuppressive and implicated in birth defects. Lead and mercury are famously neurotoxic. And they, as well as dioxins, bioaccumulate, meaning that they tend to be stored in the body.

In retrospect, it’s easy to argue that dumping them near a major waterway, that lead into a major fishing resource, was not a brilliant idea. Because, of course, those “safely” stored chemical wastes leaked into the river. (Not an isolated problem, as we all know from recent events in West Virginia).
But not one either that has gotten the same degree of national attention, even though, as Young points out, wells used for drinking water in that area are now measurably contaminated.

In fact, her family lives in one of the at-risk areas, a tidy blue-collar community called Highlands, which (with the Houston area’s famous disregard for zoning), is situated near the waste pits. “It might look like an industrial area but it is surrounded by residential properties,” Young says. After her father unexpectedly developed a festering acne-like skin condition – one of the classic signs of dioxin exposure – she and her mother did a door-to-door health survey, finding what they considered dismaying rates of autoimmune and other diseases. “We found eight cases of lupus on one street.”

Young turned her analysis over to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which concluded that although the community well was just over a mile from the disposal site, it did not believe that tainted ground water should be a health issue. A full copy of that report is archived here.

It was at that point that Young became a dedicated environmental activist. And it wasn’t sick people that brought the issue to forefront; the state has not conducted a full epidemiology assessment. What happened as that dioxin levels started mysteriously rising in Galveston Bay. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality started back-tracking up the San Jacinto and eventually found that the sandy soils around the old waste pits were startlingly high in dioxin levels. A form of analysis called chemical fingerprinting established that the toxic compounds had traveled both into the Houston shipping channel and into the Galveston Bay fisheries. The toxicity levels had not decreased in any meaningful way over the past decade.


As it turned out, the waste pits tucked into unstable sand were simply subsiding into the river. The companies now responsible for the waste pits – International Paper and Waste Management – rather than going through an expensive removal process decided to simply cap the pits and stop the seep.
But so far, that method has not proved entirely successful; due to continued subsidence, the cap itself has started to fail. The corporations are moving to reseal the waste pits but the contamination is now considered so severe that Harris County, where Houston is located, has filed a $100 million lawsuit against them for mismanagement. And tonight’s community meeting is designed to let the EPA get citizen input on whether it should require a complete cleanup of the waste pits, moving the compounds to a disposal site where massive water pollution is not an issue.

Which, of course, brings me back to the issue of tainted seafood. If you go to the website of the Galveston Bay Foundation, you’ll find a detailed page on the health risks associated with eating fish out of these waters. There are four main areas of the bay where even the state of Texas recommends against seafood consumption, three of those are contaminated with dioxins. The highest risks, according to these advisories, are catfish, sea trout, and blue crab. But there are parts of the bay, where the toxicity levels are so high and so wide spread that the recommendation is against eating any species at all.

And there’s this too, which I’ve pasted in as a direct quote:

Women of childbearing age and children under the age of 12 – DO NOT EAT ANY AMOUNT OF THE SPECIES LISTED!

Women past childbearing age and adult men – DO NOT EAT MORE THAN 8 OUNCES PER MONTH OF THE SPECIES LISTED!

And my point here – as I look out the window and dream of greener days –  is that pollution is is never really just someone else’s problem, that the poisons never just stay in some else’s back yard. That’s a fiction we need to let go by, along with that 1960s attitude that we could trust companies like this to do it right. Yes, the risks here are much higher for close by communities. But we share in it.
 And it makes no sense to  step back while this sludge from our unregulated past seeps into water supplies, taints a river,  poisons a fishery, and contaminates  not only local residents but people across the country.

I hope that Texans Together makes a lot of noise, that  community members pack that EPA meeting tonight, angry and determined and demanding a real clean up. And I hope they get it.
We all deserve, as Rachel Carson said far too long ago, a much better spring.

Images: Courtesy of Texans Together

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-seller, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She writes for a range of publications including Time, Scientific American, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times (and even the literary journal, Tin House). She is currently working on a sixth book about poisonous food.

Read more by Deborah Blum
Follow @deborahblum on Twitter.

Meet Borophene, a Two-Dimensional Nanomaterial that Could Rival Graphene

By Victoria Turk

Borophene is made of boron atoms, arranged in a flat disk with a hexagonal hole. Image via Wang Lab/Brown University

After all the hubbub around graphene, the race is on to find more wonder materials—ones that might be even more promising than the Nobel Prize-honoured, 2D carbon lattice.

Earlier this month we reported on a type of sodium bismuthate that had earned itself the nickname “3D graphene” and pointed toward a future of hard drives with ten times their current capacity. Now, another long-theorized nanomaterial looks set to take on graphene on the 2D plane: borophene.

To be clear, borophene hasn’t actually been made yet. But physical chemists at Brown University have made one unit of a boron cluster, called B36, and detailed its interesting structure on a supercomputer. The university claims this demonstrates “that a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility.”

Boron is next to carbon (which graphene is made of) in the periodic table, but no one has previously demonstrated experimentally how it could be arranged in a similar one-atom-thick sheet.
Professor Lai-Sheng Wang and lead author Zachary Piazza headed up a team that assembled experimental evidence of how borophene might work, and published their findings in Nature Communications.

Graphene is well-known for its honeycomb, or “chicken wire” structure. “However, boron cannot form graphene-like structures with a honeycomb hexagonal framework because of its electron deficiency,” the researchers explained. “Computational studies suggest that extended boron sheets with partially filled hexagonal holes are stable; however, there has been no experimental evidence for such atom-thin boron nanostructures.”

Until now; they showed a two-dimensional boron lattice can be made out of a triangular pattern with hexagonal holes. Their results, they wrote, present “the first experimental evidence that single-atom layer boron sheets with hexagonal vacancies are potentially viable.”

So what does it mean? They only physically made one of the symmetrical 36-boron-atom clusters, not yet a whole graphene-like sheet. But if this precursor structure could be extended into borophene, it’s expected to be a material to rival graphene in terms of the qualities it will possess. It would be strong and two-dimensional, and possibly even more conductive than graphene. As CleanTech reports, “That quality means that borophene could find itself being of more use, in some regards, than graphene.”

Before it can steal graphene’s crown, of course, it actually has to get made. But thanks to this research, that prospect is looking ever more feasible.

By Victoria Turk

When Homeschool Parents Call Other Parents “Selfish”

January 30, 2014 By Libby Anne Leave a Comment

I was raised in the homeschool movement. I grew up on its ideas and its rhetoric. And yet, I send Bobby to daycare and Sally to preschool and will be sending both to public school when they are old enough. This runs smack up against the ideals of good parenting I was raised with, and in the eyes of some homeschool parents, it de facto makes me selfish. I was reminded of this by a facebook comment by a homeschool parent I noticed in the discussion of Virginia’s HJ 92.



I highlight this comment because it so fully encapsulates everything I heard growing up about parents who send their children to public school. I learned that public school is “free babysitting” and that parents who send their kids to public school can’t wait to “get rid of” their kids. And there was the same derision about parents freaking out over snow days and delays—were they really so eager to shuffle their kids off on someone else? What was their problem! They must hate their children! I fully agreed with this reasoning.

I now am that parent.

We’ve been having delays for the weather, and it sucks. Sean and I look at each other and begin to haggle. “How important is your meeting? Can you miss your meeting so that I can make my class, or should I skip class?” School delays are difficult not because we can’t “get rid of” our kids sooner, they’re difficult because we have work, and when there is a delay one of us has to skip work. Snow days are worse. We’ve had days where we shift the kids back and forth all day, taking turns so that we can both get our most important things done—the things we can’t skip. And even for families with a stay at home parent, delays throw off the schedule, and enough of them make everyone cranky.

And now I am horrified at the things I used to think, to say.

But even as I am now horrified that I used to deride parents like myself for being so annoyed at delays and snow days, I’m absolutely boggled that fully grown homeschool parents do so. When I thought those things, I was a child. I didn’t know what it was like to be a parent with so many responsibilities to handle. But the homeschool parents who say those things? They know that most parents work. They know that things like delays and snow days throw of people’s schedules and sometimes mean taking an unpaid day off of work or missing important meetings or scheduled appointments. They have no excuse.

But it’s more than this. It’s also this all-pervading idea that parents who send their children to school are just sending them for “free babysitting,” and that anyone who sends their children to school must simply not be able to stand being around their children. This idea that the parents who de facto win the parent of the year award are the ones who are home with their kids homeschooling 24/7, that parents who send their kids away for 6 or 8 hours a day must be bad parents.

So let me break this down for them really simply.

Most parents work. While there are stay at home parents who send their kids to school, most parents work. In 2010, over 70% of all families with children under 18 were headed by either two working parents or a single parent. Parents don’t generally send their children off to school and then spend those hours watching Netflix. Most parents spend those hours working, and even those who don’t have things to do—errands to run, laundry to fold, etc. And yes, some parents work when they technically could afford to stay home, but there are quite a few good reasons for that—things like putting aside money for the future, trying to provide their children with the best childhood possible, or building a resume toward the future.

Parents generally send their kids to school to learn. Parents really do send their children to school to get an education, not because they don’t like them and can’t stand to get rid of them. School is not “free babysitting.” I dare any homeschool parent to say that to a school teacher’s face. Public schools may not be perfect, but a lot of them are very good, and even those that have their problems generally do manage to provide at least some education. Most parents also see the school experience itself as a positive thing for their children, including social activities and extracurriculars and the feel of community. There are a whole plethora of good reasons for sending children to school that have nothing to do with wanting to get rid of your kids because you can’t stand them.

But even as parents generally send their children to school both to get their children an education and because they themselves have to work, it’s important to bear in mind that wanting a break is healthy.
This idea that if you really love your children you will want to spend twenty-four hours a day with them seven days a week is not only a lie, it is also toxic. If you are a parent, you need time off from your children, and they need time off from you—and this is not a bad thing. It is natural and good. I love my husband Sean dearly, and yet, he and I still go to work each day, headed in separate directions. To date, I have never heard anyone accuse me of not loving Sean because we part ways every day instead of spending every second of every day together.

I am in a moms group on facebook, and every so often a stay-at-home mom of small children posts there saying she that is about to lose her sanity, asking for someone to tell her it gets better, or considering taking a part time job so she can have a break from the kids. She loves her kids dearly, she explains, but she’s going crazy at home with them and needs time to recharge. And then everyone in the group offers her support and encouragement, because we understand. She is not a bad mother, she is just overwhelmed. Would homeschool parents like the one who left the comment at the beginning of this post tell mothers like this that they are selfish, unloving, bad mothers for wanting a break? I certainly hope not.

It’s also as though homeschool parents who trash talk public school parents as selfish for sending their children to school away all day forget that even they need—and take—breaks. I know my own homeschooling mother did. When I was very little, she would go shopping with a good friend at night after the children were in bed. She and her friend would go up and down the aisles at Walmart, enjoying the bliss of being alone together—just them, chatting and catching up. Sometimes they would stay out for hours, getting home well past midnight, tired but refreshed. When I was older, mom would call up another homeschool mom and they would go out for a lengthy lunch together at Olive Garden or somewhere similar while we older children fed the younger ones sandwiches and carrots and put them down for their nap. Our homeschool community even held “moms’ night out” activities for mothers like mine, with tea and chatting.

This idea that parents who send their children off to public school are t he selfish ones also ignores the fact that the choice to homeschool itself can, for some parents, be a selfish one. There are parents out there who homeschool for bad reasons, and who don’t put their children’s needs and interests first. Being a homeschool parent does not de facto make one selfless—and I have seen the idea that it does get in the way of efforts to prevent abusive parents from using homeschooling to isolate their children and hide their abuse—because, homeschool parents tell me, abusive parents would never homeschool. Homeschooling involves being home with your kids all day! Abusive parents would do the easy, lazy, selfish thing, and ship their kids off to public school each day!

Are there parents who send their children to public school who are selfish and continually put themselves first at the expense of their children? Certainly—and there are homeschool parents for whom the same is true. Both homeschool parents and public school parents can be selfish and uncaring, and both homeschool parents and public school parents can be devoted and loving.
Creating a “homeschool parents good / public school parents selfish” dichotomy helps no one.

Stop Legitimizing the Loony Anti-GMO Voices

By Keith Kloor | January 30, 2014 4:56 pm 

 

 

A hypothetical:

You are a journalist who has written a great deal about the anti-vaccine movement and you have been asked to participate in a panel on the safety of childhood vaccines. This panel was organized by professional medical and health journalists.

Also on this hypothetical panel would be a prominent scientist, such as Paul Offit, who has authored numerous books rebutting myths and misinformation about vaccines (and more recently, alternative medicine practices). The third panelist would be a persistent anti-vaccine activist, perhaps someone from the group Age of Autism.

I’m guessing that Paul Offit and the science journalist (say, Seth Mnookin) would not want this panel to be derailed or hijacked by an anti-vaccine activist spouting loads of misinformation.

For this reason, maybe they would decline to participate in such a forum. I’m only speculating.

I raise this hypothetical because I just turned down an opportunity to participate in an upcoming panel on GMOs. The organizer initially asked if I would moderate a panel that included scientists and advocates “pro- and con-GMO.” I expressed interest after hearing that the objective was “to foster a lively and factual discussion on GMO’s with a well-rounded panel.”

And then I learned that Jeffrey Smith was one of the invited panelists.

Just to be clear: I am in favor of a robust discussion on any topic, especially one with a diversity of perspectives. (For the anti-GMO side, I suggested the organizer invite representatives from the Union of Concerned Scientists.) But I don’t think that someone with fringe views and assertions wholly unsupported by science can help “foster a lively and factual discussion on GMOs.” And make no mistake, Smith is as fringe as they come. As I have previously discussed here, he has asserted that autism and Alzheimer’s disease, among many other medical problems, can be attributed to GMOs. Did I mention that he has no expertise?

That Smith has become a go-to person for the anti-GMO movement speaks as much to his marketing skills as it does to the kind of forums he is regularly invited to and the lack of vetting by those (who should know better) who invite him to participate in otherwise well-meaning events. It’s unfortunate (but not surprising) that Dr. Oz has irresponsibly given Smith a huge forum (twice!). Science-minded organizers who confer legitimacy on Smith with speaking invitations should ask themselves if they would similarly invite anti-vaccine cranks to expound on the health and safety of vaccines.

CATEGORIZED UNDER: biotechnology, genetically modified foods, GMOs, science communication, science journalism, select

MORE ABOUT: anti-GMO movement, anti-vaccine movement, biotechnology, GMOs, Jeffrey Smith, science journalism, vaccines

 

Vestas says record powerful wind turbine in operation

    

A photo taken on June 29, 2012 shows a Vestas wind turbine near Baekmarksbro in Jutland

Danish wind technology giant Vestas said on Thursday that the world's most powerful wind turbine has begun operating, sweeping an area equivalent to three football fields. [DJS -- that's almost three or four per sq. kilometer of space the turbines take, not to mention the pollution in a poor part of southern China where all the "dirty and toxic" industrial and mining work is done to build them -- but what do we care about China?]

A prototype for the group's first V164 8 megawatt offshore wind turbine has successfully produced its first electricity, the Aarhus-based group said.

"We expect that it will reduce the cost of energy for our customers," spokesman Michael Zarin said.[Only if you don't count the massive tax breaks and direct subsidies they get -- nobody pays for that, right?]

"You can have fewer turbines to have the same amount of electricity. ... You can save a lot of the expense on things like the foundations, the cabling or the substation," he added.[To produce the same amount of electricity as what?  A 1,000,000 megawatt standard nuclear or fossil plant?  I -- well, there's just this thing called lying, which you can away with here because so many of us are so scientifically illiterate, and too lazy to check facts before rousing up opinions.]

The 8 megawatt turbine, which will be the flagship product for a joint venture between Vestas and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has the capacity to produce electricity for 7,500 European households.[Let's see.  7500 households is a very small town.  A single, decent sized city -- we're not even close to the entire country -- will have some 100 times that many households, plus industry and business of all sides, and public transportation.  So we will need 100-200 of these behemoths, using up to a total 25-60 sq kilometers worth of land, or a square 5-8 kilometers on side.  Actually more, because you will need space between them.  With all that spare land Europe has, especially kilometers and kilometers of flat, windy, unpopulated country, this should be no problem. Even when you scale it to national and continental levels.  Oh, and those poor Chinese workers don't mind dying and suffering at the 1-200 times rate -- much more, in the end -- they did for one turbine.  And once again, with all that infinite taxpayer money, no problem with finances.

It's been installed on land at the Danish National Test Centre for Large Wind Turbines in Oesterild in northwestern Denmark. Vestas said serial production could begin in 2015 if there is enough demand.

The most powerful onshore wind turbine on the market is currently the 7.5 megawatt E-126 by Germany's Enercon, while the largest offshore turbines are the 6 megawatt models produced by Germany's Siemens and France's Alstom.[Interesting, Germany is.  Although lauded for the greatest use of wind power and other "recyclables", they are still, year after year, among the top CO2 emitters of the West, especially per capita, because of all the coal and oil they have to burn to sustain their lifestyle and security.  Even with their nuclear plants helping -- I know, they're all so dangerous, we have to get rid of them! -- as the people who know nothing about the history, science, and technology of nuclear will holler; even those don't help much.  Perhaps trying to support thousand of utterly stupendous, economically unsustainable turbines will collapse the German -- and then European -- economy, and they can make work tearing down the plants that actually served her electricity needs.  Brilliant!]

 

Competition in the sector is fierce: South Korea's Samsung Heavy Industries installed a 7 megawatt offshore wind prototype turbine in Scotland last year.

France's Areva and Spain's Gamesa said last week they were holding talks on combining their offshore wind turbine activities, and that they planned to accelerate development of an 8 megawatt turbine.

Explore further: Spain launches first offshore wind turbine

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-vestas-powerful-turbine.html#jCp

PubChemRDF is Launched

PubChem Blog

News, updates and tutorials about PubChem

 

Posted on January 30, 2014 by PubChem by Peter Murray-Rust ‏@petermurrayrust

http://pubchemblog.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2014/01/30/pubchemrdf-is-launched/ 

Introducing PubChemRDF!
The PubChemRDF project encodes PubChem information using the Resource Description Framework (RDF).  One of the aims of the PubChemRDF project is to help researchers work with PubChem data on local computing resources using semantic web technologies.  Another aim is to harness ontological frameworks to help facilitate PubChem data sharing, analysis, and integration with resources external to the National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) and across scientific domains.

What is RDF?
RDF stands for resource description framework and constitutes a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications for data interchange on the Web. RDF breaks down knowledge into machine readable discrete pieces, called “triples.” Each “triple” is organized as a trio of “subject-predicate-object.” For example, in the phrase “atorvastatin may treat hypercholesterolemia,” the subject is “atorvastatin,” the predicate is “may treat,” and the object is “hypercholesterolemia.” RDF uses a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to name each part of the “subject-predicate-object” triple. A URI looks just like a typical web URL.

RDF is a core part of semantic web standards.  As an extension of the existing World Wide Web, the semantic web attempts to make it easier for users to find, share, and combine information.  Semantic web leverages the following technologies: Extensible Markup Language (XML), which provides syntax for RDF; Web Ontology Language (OWL), which extends the ability of RDF to encode information; Resource Description Framework (RDF), which expresses knowledge; and RDF query language (SPARQL), which enables query and manipulation of RDF content.

How can PubChemRDF help your research?
PubChem users have frequently expressed interest in having a downloadable, schema-less database. PubChemRDF enables the NoSQL database access and query of PubChem databases.  Using PubChemRDF, one can download the desired RDF formatted data files from the PubChem FTP site, import them into a triplestore, and query using a SPARQL query interface. There are a number of open-source or commercial triplestores, such as Apache Jena TDB and OpenLink Virtuoso (a list of triplestores can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplestore).
Other than triplestores, PubChemRDF data can also be loaded into RDF-aware graph databases such as Neo4j, and the graph traversal algorithms can be used to query the RDF graphs. At last but not least, the ontological representation of PubChem knowledge base allows logical inference, such as forward/backward chaining.

The RDF data on the PubChem FTP site is arranged in such a way that you only need to download the type of information in which you are interested, so you can avoid downloading parts of PubChem data you will not use.  For example, if you are just interested in computed chemical properties, you only need to download PubChemRDF data in compound descriptor subdomain. In addition to bulk download, PubChemRDF also provides programmatic data access through REST-full interface.

Where can you learn more about this?
To get an overview of the PubChemRDF project, please view this presentation.  To learn more about detailed aspects of PubChemRDF and how to use it, please view this presentation. The PubChemRDF Release Notes provide additional technical information about the project.

Additional blog posts will follow on PubChemRDF project topics, including: the FTP site layout, the REST-full interface, and ways to utilize PubChemRDF for research purposes including using SPARQL queries.

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