California Highway Spill (NSFW)

Major Slut Spill on California Highway (NSFW)

Lead Toxicity and Nigerian Gold

Yvonne Ndege reports on severe health effects due to lead exposure among villagers in Zamfara province, northern Nigeria. Six villages have been affected according to Marcel Lagenbach of Medecins Sans Frontieres. The villagers say they will continue to mine for gold despite lead in the dust that is killing their children. Critics accuse the government officials of turning a blind eye and focusing instead on signing lucrative mining deals with China.

COAL SLUDGE CONTAMINATION IN TENNESSEE

Appalachian State University environmental scientists report on their measurement of heavy metal concentrations in the vicinity of the Kingston Fossil Plant along the Emory River in Tennessee. Sludge ponds at the plant spilled into the river when a dam broke. Contaminants are now getting into the river water which is used as a drinking water source downstream. Natural springs and groundwater aquifers may also become contaminated.

Protection of Georgia's Coastal Marshes
The Georgia coast is "mesotidal," meaning that it has a relatively large "tidal range" between the mean high tide and the mean low tide. In other words, there is a great expanse of brackish to saline marsh, bog, wetland, or however you wish to refer to it. The delicate balance of physical and chemical conditions in these coastal marshes supports extremely diverse assemblages of plants and animals.
As shown in the above figure¹, plants in Georgia's coastal marshes are distributed in zones determined by elevation, substrate, water chemistry, and tidal dynamics. In view of their considerable research value^2,3,4 to biologists, chemists, and geologists as well as their value in maintaining the chemical and biological health of Georgia's coastal environments, the marshes definitely deserve protection from the rapid development of our coast for tourism, recreation, and other commercial purposes. The Coastal Marshes Protection Act ( O.C.G.A. 12-5-280, et seq.) does just that, providing the Coastal Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR) with the authority to protect tidal wetlands. A permit from the DNR Marshlands Protection Committee is required to dredge, fill, or build on any coastal marsh.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, the DNR Coastal Resources Division is currently proposing amended rules for protecting coastal marshes. The state legislature is supposed to be voting sometime this week on these rules, which propose a 25 foot buffer "between the upland component of the project as measured horizontally inland from the coastal marshland-upland interface." The "buffer" appears to be adapted from an approach that has been taken for floodplains of inland waterways. Tidal marshes are considerably more complex. The Sierra Club is claiming that these rules will weaken the protection of the coastal marshes, because lawsuits they are pursuing against developers have yet to be decided in the courts. Similar comments have also been submitted by Jim Stokes, president of the Georgia Conservancy. Stokes notes that recommendations solicited from the Georgia Coastal Research Council, funded by the DNR itself, have not been followed in the amended rules. Hopefully the rules will be rewritten so that they are clear enough to be implemented but strong enough to ensure protection of the coastal marshes.

¹Teal, John M., 1962, Energy flow in the salt marsh ecosystem of Georgia. Ecology 43: 614-624.
²Odum, Eugene P., and Smalley, Alfred E., 1959, Population energy flow of two invertebrate species in a salt marsh ecosystem. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 45: 617-622.
³Sherr, Evelyn B., 1982, Carbon isotope composition of organic seston and sediments in a Georgia salt marsh estuary. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 46(7): 1227-1232.
⁴Alber, Merryl, and Hollibaugh, James T., 2003, Why is the Coastal Marsh Dying? The Network Newsletter 16(2).

Breathy Diagnosis - Researchers at ETH Zurich, Switzerland have devised a simple and rapid method for analysing both volatile and non-volatile compounds in breath as it is exhaled. Breath "fingerprints" were identified for a healthy male Asian subject before and after eating cheese. Using the same techniques, the researchers have also identified fingerprints for beer, tobacco, and garlic.

I really need to brush my teeth more often.