This Plastic-Eating Bacterium Might Help Deal With Waste One Day

Plastic makes great food packaging. It's waterproof and flexible. And best of all, it's impervious to all known bacteria – until now. Researchers have found a bacterium in the debris fields around a recycling plant in Japan that can feed off a common type of plastic used in clothing, plastic bottles and food packaging.

The bacterium is a new species called Ideonella sakaiensis, named for the Japanese city Sakai where it was found growing on plastic debris made from a type of plastic called PET or polyethylene terephthalate. "It's the most unique thing. This bacterium can degrade PET and then make their body from PET," says Shosuke Yoshida, a microbiologist at Kyoto University and lead author on the study published in Science on Thursday.

Most plastics are insurmountable obstacles for microbes because plastics are large chains of repeating molecules called polymers. The entire chain is far larger than the individual microbe. "So the organism can't take it inside the cell to metabolize it," says John Coates, a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley who was not involved with the work. Imagine a baby trying to eat an enormous pizza from the middle. It can't do it. The pie is too big.

But Ideonella sakaiensis, which we here at NPR have decided to call "the polymer chomper," has two enzymes that can slice and dice the plastic polymer into smaller pieces. In other words, the baby gets a pizza cutter. The bacterium can then take the pieces and eat them, eventually converting the plastic into carbon dioxide and water.

After Yoshida and his colleagues isolated the polymer chomper, they were able to watch it disintegrate a plastic film in about six weeks. It would be great if we could culture the bacteria, spray landfills down with them and let them deal with our mountains of plastic refuse. But alas, that may never happen. "It grows very fast," Yoshida explains, "but it's likely not so useful in the field" because it chomps very slowly.

And if getting rid of our plastic waste were so easy, Coates notes, the bacterium would likely have already been found in landfills and anywhere you find mounds of plastic waste.

But with more research, Coates thinks that the bacterium might be engineered for such a purpose. "It's certainly a move in the right direction. Having an organism that seems to be capable of biodegrading these components directly will help us develop a bioremediation technology," he says. Certain species of fungi have been found to be able to degrade plastics before – though none have been converted to landfill-munching purposes. The polymer chomper offers new hope, Coates says, because bacteria are easier to work with and engineer. npr

CAROTENOID PIGMENTS MAKE EXTINCT DUCK A RARE BIRD INDEED

The pink-headed duck was no lucky duck. In 1948 a single specimen of this waterfowl,Rhodonessa caryophyllacea, was donated to the Division of Birds of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The following year was the last time anyone spotted one of its species—which lived in Bangladesh, Nepal, India and Myanmar—alive.

Now, despite that it is likely extinct, new research has revealed this bird was a rare duck indeed. By shining lasers on the pink head feathers of the lone Smithsonian specimen and analyzing the spectral wavelengths of reflected light, Daniel Thomas of Massey University, New Zealand, and Smithsonian ornithologist Helen James determined it is one of only two species of waterfowl known to incorporate carotenoid pigments in its plumage. Carotenoids are of special interest to scientists because the evolutionary history of their appearance in bird plumage is unresolved. A paper on their study was published recently in the journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances, with Thomas as principle author.

Carotenoid pigments originate in what a bird eats and many of the most vibrant feather colors (red, orange, yellow) are the result of carotenoids, James explains. “Some come straight into the plumage from the diet unmodified and some are modified physiologically by the bird before they go into the plumage.” Flamingoes, for example, get their pink color from the carotenoid pigments in the brine shrimp and blue-green algae they eat.

“There are about 40 types of molecules classed as carotenoid pigments that have been found in bird plumage, they are very common in the songbirds, but until recently it had been thought there were none in waterfowl—ducks, swans and geese,” James adds. “Most visible colors in waterfowl plumage are a combination of melanin pigments, which are not ingested, and structural colors, which are not a pigment but just the structure of the feather.”

In 2014 James and Thomas discovered carotenoid pigments, for the first time, in the plumage of a duck: Australia’s pink-eared duck (Malacorhynchus membranaceus). This bird has tiny pink ‘ear’ spots on each side of its head. “So, we were curious about the pink-headed duck,” James says.

The two scientists then used Raman spectroscopy to study the pigments in the pink-headed duck’s feathers because it is a process that would not damage the Smithsonian’s lone specimen. Traditional methods for identifying pigments in feathers require plucking some feathers and destroying them. During the study Raman spectra were collected from the feathers of 20 other bird species in the Natural History Museum collections to provide a comparative dataset for studying the carotenoids found in the pink-eared and pink-headed duck. Raman analysis of both pink-headed and pink-eared duck plumage suggests that the pink plumage of both birds may be colored with the same type of carotenoid pigment.

“Yet these two ducks are not close evolutionary relatives within the family tree of ducks, waterfowl and geese,” James points out. An inflated balloon-shaped bony structure or bulla in the trachea of male pink-headed ducks has fenestrae or little windows in it—a type that is only found sea ducks and diving ducks, James says. The pink-eared duck is more closely related to stiff tailed ducks. “So it appears the deposition of carotenoids into their plumage was a step that arose separately in each species.”

This coincidence has James pondering a deeper evolutionary question, she says. “Is there a metabolic pathway for putting a carotenoid from the bloodstream into a developing feather that was just turned on or turned off and it happened to be only turned on in these two species of modern Anseriformes [ducks, geese and swans]? This is not a question we can answer. It is one that interests us though.”

Just what the pink-headed duck had in its diet that contained the carotenoid pigments that made its head pink is also a question no one can answer. “Almost nothing is known about what they ate. We really have so little information.” As the duck now appears to be extinct this question may never be known. smithsonianscience.si.edu

Record-Busting Star Explosion Baffles Sky Watchers

A mind-boggling stellar explosion is baffling astronomers, who say this cosmic beast is so immensely powerful that no one's sure exactly what made it go boom.

The recently discovered inferno is about 200 times more powerful than a typical exploding star, or supernova, and 570 billion times brighter than our sun. It was first spotted in June by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, nicknamed the "Assassin" project, so it's called ASASSN-15lh.

Astronomers describe their finding in a study published Thursday in the journalScience. 

Even though it's the brightest supernova on record — if indeed it is a supernova — it can't be seen with the naked eye from Earth, since it is 3.8 billion light-years away.

Even telescopes don't help much. "It looks like a little smudge," says Subo Dong, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. "This is because it's so far away. It doesn't look so spectacular."

And if you could get into a spaceship and fly closer, you wouldn't want to, says astronomer Ben Shappee, at the Carnegie Observatories. That's because this monster puts out a lot of ultraviolet radiation, so if you actually got close enough to get a good look, "you would be dead right away," he points out.

Initially, the scientists didn't realize just how bright this beast was.

"We knew it was probably a supernova, but we didn't know at that time how interesting or how important it is," Dong recalls.

But soon, more observations from a different telescope made him realize "it was the most luminous supernova yet discovered." Dong says he was so excited when he got the news by email one night at 2 a.m., he couldn't go back to sleep at all.

Supernovas have captured the imaginations of sky watchers since ancient times. The first one was observed nearly 2,000 years ago. What's more, you wouldn't be here without them, because almost everything in your life is made up of the remnants of these violent stellar deaths.

"If you look around here on Earth, anything that's not hydrogen or helium was actually made inside of a star," explains Shappee. "It actually has to go through a supernova explosion to be distributed across the galaxy."

This new one is more than twice as bright as the previous record holder. What's powering it?

"Honestly, the answer is, 'We don't know,' " says Dong.

Astronomers will continue to watch it in the coming months with all kinds of telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope. Shappee says he is not sad that this explosion has already peaked and will slowly fade.

"We get more and more information — you see basically deeper and deeper into the supernova the longer you observe it," he says. "How it changes with time can give us additional information."

Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard University, says this find is exciting because "it's often, I think, the most extreme events that teach us the most about the range of possibilities that the universe comes up with, especially when it comes to exploding objects."

Most supernovas are the result of some sort of exploding star, says Berger.Superluminous supernovas are at least 10 times brighter than more garden-variety ones, and they're rare. Scientists know only of about 30 of these more powerful explosions, and while they have theories about what drives them, ASASSN-15lh is so extreme that current models can't explain it.

"The event itself seems to be coming from the center of the galaxy," says Berger. "And so I think that raises the possibility that it could be related to the supermassive black hole that resides in the center of a galaxy like that. And perhaps it is due to a very different mechanism than the explosion of a star." Perhaps a star got too close to the black hole, which is now ripping it to shreds.

"It's a story that continues to evolve. It will be interesting to see where we are a year from now," says Berger. "We might have a completely different version or story of what we think this object is."

Still, while this explosion is awesome, Berger says it's not the biggest bang astronomers have seen. Gamma ray bursts, for example, are much more energetic and luminous.

"In the world of supernova explosions, if this is what this object really is, then it is currently the record holder," says Berger. "But relative to a gamma ray burst, in fact, this explosion is actually kind of puny." npr

4 New Elements Are Added To the Periodic Table

For now, they're known by working names, like ununseptium and ununtrium – two of the four new chemical elements whose discovery has been officially verified. The elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will get permanent names soon, according to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

With the discoveries now confirmed, "The 7th period of the periodic table of elements is complete," according to the IUPAC. The additions come nearly five years after elements 114 and 116 were added to the table.

The elements were discovered in recent years by researchers in Japan, Russia, and the United States. Element 113 was discovered by a group at the Riken Institute, which calls it "the first element on the periodic table found in Asia."

Three other elements were discovered by a collaborative effort among the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The new elements' existence was then confirmed by further experiments that reproduced them – however briefly. Element 113, for instance, exists for less than a thousandth of a second.

"A particular difficulty in establishing these new elements is that they decay into hitherto unknown isotopes of slightly lighter elements that also need to be unequivocally identified," said Paul Karol, chair of the IUPAC's Joint Working Party, announcing the new elements. His group also includes members of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

The elements' temporary names stem from their spot on the periodic table – for instance, ununseptium has 117 protons. Each of the discovering teams have now been asked to submit names for the new elements.

International guidelines for choosing a name say new elements "can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist," according to the IUPAC.

In 2013, Swedish scientists confirmed the existence of the Russian-discovered ununpentium (atomic number 117). As the Two-Way described it, the element was produced by "shooting a beam of calcium, which has 20 protons, into a thin film of americium, which has 95 protons. For less than a second, the new element had 115 protons."

While you're not likely to run into the new elements anytime soon, they're not the only ones with have short existences. Take, for instance, francium (atomic number 87) and astatine (atomic number 85).

As Sam Kean, author of a book about the periodic table called The Disappearing Spoon, wrote of those elements:

"If you had a million atoms of the longest-lived type of astatine, half of them would disintegrate in 400 minutes. A similar sample of francium would hang on for 20 minutes. Francium is so fragile, it's basically useless."

As for why scientists keep pursuing new and heavier elements, the answer, at least in part, is that they're hoping to eventually find an element – or a series of elements – that are both stable and useful in practical applications. And in the meantime, they can learn more about how atoms are held together. npr

Toxicity of mercury hot spots can be reduced with application of activated carbon, researchers discover

Hot spots of mercury pollution in aquatic sediments and soils can contaminate local food webs and threaten ecosystems, but cleaning them up can be expensive and destructive. Researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and University of Maryland, Baltimore County have found a new low-cost, nonhazardous way to reduce the risk of exposure: using charcoal to trap it in the soil.

Researcher Upal Ghosh spreads SediMite, a mixture containing activated carbon, onto a marsh. An activated carbon mixture, like this one, can make mercury stick to it instead of seeping into water or the food web. The alternative—digging up the soil—could devastate the ecosystem. (Photo by Cynthia Gilmour, SERC)

Mercury-contaminated “Superfund sites” contain some of the highest levels of mercury pollution in the U.S., a legacy of the many industrial uses of liquid mercury. But despite the threat, there are few available technologies to decrease the risk, short of digging up the sediments and burying them in landfills—an expensive process that can cause significant ecological damage.

In a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Cynthia Gilmour (SERC), Upal Ghosh (UMBC) and their colleagues show that adding activated carbon, a form of charcoal processed to increase its ability to bind chemicals, can significantly reduce mercury exposure in these highly contaminated sites. With funding and support from several industry and federal partners, the team tested the technology in the laboratory with mercury-contaminated sediments from four locations: a river, a freshwater lake and two brackish creeks. To reduce the harm from mercury, the sorbents also had to decrease the amount of methylmercury taken up by worms.

“Methylmercury is more toxic and more easily passed up food webs than inorganic mercury,” said Gilmour, the lead author on the study. “Unfortunately, methylmercury is produced from mercury contamination by natural bacteria. To make contaminated sites safe again, we need to reduce the amount of methylmercury that gets into animals.”

Added at only 5 percent of the mass of surface sediments, activated carbon reduced methylmercury uptake by sediment-dwelling worms by up to 90 percent. “This technology provides a new approach for remediation of mercury-contaminated soils—one that minimizes damage to contaminated ecosystems, and may significantly reduce costs relative to digging or dredging,” said Ghosh, co-author on the study. Activated carbon can be spread on the surface of a contaminated sediment or soil, without physical disturbance, and left in place to mix into the sediment surface. Called “in-situ remediation,” the use of sorbents like activated carbon has been proven to reduce the uptake of several other toxic pollutants. However, this is the first time activated carbon had been tested for mercury-contaminated soils.

The research group is now testing its effectiveness in the field at several Superfund sites across the country. If successful in the field, this approach of treating soil with activated carbon may be able to reduce the risk of mercury exposure in polluted sites and subsequent contamination of food webs. –Kristen Minogue, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center  smithsonian

Chemicals In Sunscreen Are Harming Coral Reefs, Says New Study

New research about sunscreen's damaging effects on coral reefs suggest that you might want to think twice before slathering it on.

Reports about the harmful environmental effects of certain chemicals in the water have been circulated for years, but according to the authors of a new study released Tuesday, the chemicals in even one drop of sunscreen are enough to damage fragile coral reef systems. Some 14,000 tons of sunscreen lotions wind up in coral reefs around the world each year.

This Sept. 2015 photo provided by the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources shows partially bleached coral in Kaneohe, Hawaii.

The ingredient oxybenzone leaches the coral of its nutrients and bleaches it white. It can also disrupt the development of fish and other wildlife.

Scientists conducted the new study in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Hawaii, but reefs all over the world are at risk, according to a 2011 report by the World Resource Institute.

While destructive fishing, pollution and development all pose threats to the coral reef, the study reveals that sunscreen is a serious danger to the health of coral.

"The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue," Downs said according to the Washington Post.

"We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean," co-author Craig Downs said. "Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers."

Local economies also depend on the tourism that coral reefs attract. As a result, some local businesses have started to ban the use of harmful sunscreen in their waters. In Akumal, Mexico, an area known for its reefs and sea turtles, visitors are warned against wearing sunscreen and are restricted to certain areas to prevent too much disruption of reef life.

But damaging sunscreen from beach-goers is just part of the concern. Any time people wear sunscreen, it's going to wind up in the waterways when they clean it off, just like harmful chemicals in household cleaning products that are washed down drains and into the sewage systems.

"People come inside and step into the shower. People forget it goes somewhere," co-author John Fauth told the Post.

So how can you avoid harming coral reefs without allowing the sun to damage your skin?

The U.S. National Park Service for South Florida, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa recommend using "reef-friendly" sunscreen (those made with titanium oxide or zinc oxide, which are natural mineral ingredients) and wearing clothing and hats to protect the skin from the sun. npr

Distant Pluto Comes To Life

Pluto is not dead. That's the bottom line, according to new research published in the journal Science. The dwarf planet is home to mountains, glaciers and a hazy atmosphere that stretches for a hundred miles above the surface.

"It is this really active dynamic world," says Cathy Olkin, the deputy project scientist of NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew past Pluto on July 14.

Even though the spacecraft whizzed past Pluto months ago, new results are still coming back. That's because data flows at a trickle over the more than 3 billion-mile chasm between New Horizons and Earth. "It is way slower than an old dial-up connection," Olkin says. 

The newly published results provide an official radius for Pluto of 1,187 kilometers (smaller than Earth's moon). Olkin says the research also shows that the large, heart-shaped feature on Pluto's southern hemisphere is a glacier made of carbon monoxide ice.

Pluto also has a nitrogen atmosphere mixed with different hydrocarbon molecules. "There's widespread haze to a really high altitude, like a hundred miles above the surface," Olkin says.

Researchers still want to learn why Pluto is so active. One possibility is that the dwarf planet has some sort of heat source deep within its core that causes glaciers to form and mountains to erupt from the surface.

But Michael Brown, an astronomer from Caltech not associated with the work, says other possibilities should be considered. "They have yet to demonstrate that internal heat is required for any of the features seen on Pluto," he says. For example, it could be that the ices on the surface move around and change the landscape.

Either way, Brown says, this look at Pluto is incredibly valuable. Astronomers now know that it is one of a whole class of "dwarf planets" lurking at the edge of our solar system.

"By looking at Pluto, we learn about the many many other things like it in the outer solar system," Brown says. "That's the reason why I am super excited about this." npr

Gasping for air: nutrients, warming trigger ocean oxygen deficit

“When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters,” once a tagline of the American Lung Association, today it might easily describe what is happening in many areas of the ocean. Hypoxia, the lack of oxygen in our estuaries, coastal and deep ocean waters, is on the rise and endangering marine life around the world. Its causes are a complex mix of excess nutrients and our warming world. Agriculture, human waste, and rising levels of atmospheric CO2 underlie these changes.

Denise Breitburg, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. near the Chesapeake Bay, answers a few questions about marine hypoxia.

Breitburg and Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography were co-authors of a recent article on ocean deoxygenation in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Q: Where does hypoxia occur in the ocean?

Breitburg: It occurs in estuaries, along our coasts and in the deep ocean.

In estuaries, the areas where fresh and salt water meet, and in some coastal waters, hypoxia is caused by overstimulation of algal growth by nutrients from human activities, primarily agriculture and human waste. Some nutrients are OK but large amounts result in too much algae. Algae that aren’t consumed by animals die and decompose in great quantities. Decomposition depletes the oxygen in the water causing low-oxygen zones. Basically, many microbes use oxygen and release carbon dioxide when they respire, just like people do when they breathe.

A truck applies nutrient rich liquid manure to a farm field, some of which will end up in streams, estuaries and the ocean. (Photo courtesy Chesapeake Bay Program)

In the deep ocean, deoxygenation is mainly a natural phenomenon. Oxygen is mixed into the water at the surface but once you reach a certain depth you no longer get much benefit from that mixing. In addition, organic matter produced near the ocean surface can wind up sinking to bottom waters. Microbial decomposition of this organic matter depletes the deep oxygen and creates large deoxygenated zones.

Coastal and open-ocean hypoxia have long been regarded by scientists as distinct, but our world is highly interconnected. For example, there is some evidence that nutrient enrichment from human activities, a known cause of coastal hypoxia, could also increase deeper water low oxygen zones. Some systems, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence, experience hypoxia that appears to be caused both by nutrients coming from land and the inflow of deep oceanic water that is naturally low in oxygen.

Oxygen is mixed into the ocean at the surface, but beyond a certain depth there is no benefit from this surface mixing. (Flickr photo by David Robertson)

Q: Do deep water hypoxic zones stay down deep?

Breitburg: No. Deep areas of low oxygen water become a problem when they upwell near shore, bringing their very low oxygen waters right up to the shallows. The upwelling also brings nutrients to the surface, which is one reason we have incredibly productive fisheries along the west coasts of many continents including North America, South America and Africa.

Upwelling of deep ocean water is caused when a combination of persistent longshore winds and the earth’s rotation push coastal surface water out to sea. In response, deep water moves up to bathe the continental shelves in hypoxic water that is also more acidic than open ocean surface water. Warming atmospheric temperatures very definitely affect wind patterns that cause this upwelling.

Continental margins, shelves and estuaries around the world that were previously well oxygenated, now experience hypoxia either seasonally or episodically. For example, upwelling is creating seasonal dead zones on the inner Oregon Shelf.

A phytoplankton bloom is visible off the coast of Argentina, just south of the Rio de la Plata estuary (visible in the top of the image). (Photo Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC | NASA Earth Observatory)

Q: What happens to marine animals during these events?

Breitburg. Animals like bivalves, worms or corals that can’t easily swim away from areas of low oxygen are especially vulnerable, but even fish that are strong swimmers can be trapped and killed. Low oxygen levels in oceanic and estuarine waters can alter food webs, growth rates, and make organisms more susceptible to disease. If a low-oxygen event is severe or long-lasting, it can have a devastating impact on a region. This can translate into a loss of the ocean resources humans depend on.

Q: Would removing nutrients from estuaries help?

Breitburg: It’s not a matter of trying to get nutrients out of the estuaries or the ocean. It’s a matter of trying to reduce what we are putting in. If we turn the spigot off, these systems will, over time, clean themselves up. In some cases it would be very quick, maybe a few years, not necessarily hundreds or thousands.

There are a lot of efforts worldwide to reduce nutrients going into estuaries and other coastal waters. Some of them have been very successful. Some are making slow incremental progress. Overloading a system with nutrients is a problem that is much better to prevent than to try to correct.

Algae blooms are often referred to as red tides because of their red color in the water. Red tides, like this one in La Jolla, Calif., can form as a result of nutrient pollution. (Flickr photo by Alejandro Díaz)

smithsonianscience.si.edu

The Microbes on the Handprint of an 8-Year-Old After Playing Outside

We all know our bodies are home to countless millions of bacteria and microorganisms, but without seeing them with our bare eyes it’s almost impossible to comprehend. This petri dish handprint created by Tasha Sturm of Cabrillo College, vividly illustrates the variety of bacteria found on her 8-year-old son’s hand after playing outdoors. The print itself represents several days of growth as different yeasts, fungi, and bacteria are allowed to incubate.

It’s safe to say almost everything you see growing in this specimen is harmless and in many cases even beneficial to a person’s immunity, but it just goes to show why we sometimes it’s good to wash our hands. Sturm discusses in detail how she made the print in the comments of this page. (via Ziya Tong)

science puns

ikaite

Calcite after Ikaite (CaCO₃·6H₂O) var. Glendonite concretion.The rock was found at Kola Peninsula, Russia. Ikaite is a rare mineral that occurs in nature at temperatures up to 7°C in alkaline, phosphate-rich marine and continental waters. Although ikaite has generally been replaced by calcite (this replacement is called glendonite), it has preserved its original crystal shape. Because of the rather restricted conditions under which ikaite/glendonite forms, it serves as a marker for near-freezing water temperatures. Hydrohalite, a form of salt, precipitates at low temperatures from highly saturated brines. It is not well-preserved in sediments because of its high solubility, but its former existence can be inferred from the presence of halite or other minerals that preserve the shape of the original crystals. Minerals are just one of many proxies used by geologists to reconstruct past climates. Some minerals like ikaite define a very narrow set of conditions, while others, like the clays, appear in a number of geologic and climatic settings. Minerals along with other indicators — fossils, tree rings, pollen, ice cores, geochemistry or isotopes — provide tantalizing clues to ancient climates.

Female scientists post 'distractingly sexy' photos

Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt was roundly criticised when he detailed his thoughts about the "trouble with girls" at a conference of science journalists. "Three things happen when they are in the lab," he said, "you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry."

He said his comments were meant to be "light-hearted, ironic comment", but whatever the intention, it went over like a heavy metallic dirigible in a field with some widely acknowledged gender issues. Hunt has now resigned from his position at University College London.

On Thursday the hashtag #DistractinglySexy began taking off, with more than 10,000 tweets in a matter of hours. The trend was prompted by a shout-out by the feminist online magazine Vagenda which urged female scientists to share pictures of themselves at work. WARNING: the photos below are not graphic in the slightest.

bbc

It's Raining Nitrogen In A Colorado Park. Farmers Can Help Make It Stop

It's May in Rocky Mountain National Park, but on a mountainside 10,829 feet above sea level, snow is falling. It's pelting Jim Cheatham, a biologist with the National Park Service. Shrugging off the cold, Cheatham seizes a teachable moment. This snow, he says, holds more than just water.

"Chances are it's carrying the excess nitrogen we're talking about," says Cheatham.

For the past eight years, the biologist has spent most of his time thinking about how nitrogen pollution is changing the park's forests, wildflowers and alpine lakes. He's also been looking for a way to stop it.

As Cheatham explains, it's not that nitrogen is bad in and of itself. It's that there's too much of it in the park. Think about putting fertilizer, which is basically nitrogen, on your lawn or garden, he said.

"What if you applied that fertilizer — and that's exactly what it is — at that rate — 15 times what's on the label," he says. "Weird things are going to happen."

Weird things are happening in the park's alpine meadows and in the lakes nestled beneath its craggy peaks. Cheatgrass, an invasive weed, is making its way higher and higher into the park, buoyed by extra fertilizer, as are other weeds. Native trees are weakened by the extra nitrogen. Rivers are becoming more acidic.

Cheatham recalled a moment one day when he was driving through the park with his family, in what should have been a relatively pristine alpine environment.

"And I happened to catch what I thought was Canada thistle, you know catch sight of that while driving," said Cheatham. "I stopped, and I panicked."

Those spiky, purple flowers are a highly invasive weed. That thistle isn't supposed to be there. When it is, that means it is crowding out native plants, like wildflowers.

And it gets weirder.

"This past year, for the first time we saw an algal bloom in one of our high mountain lakes," said Cheatham. "Never been seen before, never been documented before."

Scientists are still investigating the links between the algae bloom and nitrogen, said Cheatham. Regardless of if the link is direct, they are sure of one thing: Too much nitrogen is throwing off the park's ecological balance. If nitrogen levels stay high, the park could look completely different in just a few decades.

After he saw that invasive thistle, Cheatham called out what he called a "SWAT team" of biologists who attacked and removed the weed. A better solution, though, would be to stop the extra nitrogen from getting to the park in the first place.

That's where Jon Slutsky comes in. He's a dairy farmer in Wellington, Colo., about 50 miles east of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Slutsky admits that at first it's hard to make a connection between a dairy farm on Colorado's Eastern Plains and biological weirding in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Yet strange as it might seem, farmers on the plains are responsible for a significant amount of the extra nitrogen that's falling in the park, as rain, or snow.

Other sources include automobiles, oil and gas operations, and other industrial activities from within Colorado. Some nitrogen comes from as far away as California, Nevada, Nebraska and Iowa, according to a 2009 report. Spurred by a 2004 petition from Trout Unlimited and the Environmental Defense Fund, the Park Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment began to focus on reducing nitrogen in the park.

Pointing at a corral where a few of his 1,500 dairy cows were chowing down, Slutsky says this is where the problem starts.

"Ammonia is created out in the corrals — the cows are designed so perfectly, they provide everything — so the urine hits the ground and it creates ammonia," Slutsky says.

Ammonia, which contains nitrogen, can come from a cow urine and manure reacting with the air. Ammonia is a gas, and it can be transformed into another type of particle, ammonium nitrate, that is small and easily carried on the wind.

Normally, wind comes from the west. So most of the nitrogen created at dairies like Slutsky's, and other farms, is carried to places like Nebraska. A few times a year, though, the winds change.

"Not real often. But on occasion they do. Maybe a dozen times a year," says Slutsky.

When that happens, the nitrogen gets carried up into the park. If it rains or snows, it falls on the park, providing fertilizer for weeds like Canada thistle and stressing out the park's ecosystem.

Neither Cheatham nor cattle feedlot owners want this to happen. That's why the Park Service and other federal agencies are partnering with groups of Front Range farmers to use a novel alert system.

Slutsky and around 50 other farmers signed up for a voluntary program where they get an alert when the winds are blowing the wrong way, from the east, and a system is likely to move in and rain nitrogen down on the park.

The alert tells them how long the weather system will last, often two days or less. In response, the farmers can implement conservation practices that keep nitrogen out of the air. Slutsky might decide to move manure another day. Another farmer might postpone a fertilizer application.

Texas A&M University professor Brock Faulkner is a consultant for the project, which went through a trial run in 2014, sending out 10 warnings to Eastern Plains farmers.

"If we could shift the timing of those practices so that those emissions occur at a time when they're less likely to cause detrimental environmental impacts, that would be fantastic," says Faulkner.

Participants ironed out the kinks and showed that the alert system functioned. Faulkner said during the trial run, at least 60 percent of the farmers notified were willing to change their practices to avoid releasing more nitrogen.

While nitrogen levels haven't started declining in the park, Cheatham says they have stopped increasing.

Farmers hope it works. As Slutsky says, they're doing it because they want to, but also to avoid future regulations: "We all either have either the hammer over or our conscience or both."

It's not just Rocky Mountain National Park that could benefit.

If this type of voluntary program works, it could be a model for other places where pollution from agriculture has caused problems, like the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Erie. npr