Brent Kearney

This is my summary of the third part of the L.A. Times special feature, Altered Oceans.

The embedded music is from Johnny Cash’s Ragged Old Flag album of 1974. Its amazing that, 32 years ago, he recognized that ‘we’re pouring every kind of evil in the sea’, yet the practice continues to this day. Cash was right: future generations would have to pay the penalty, and the bill, it seems, is due now.

(Click image to enlarge)

The highly toxic Red Tide normally blooms every decade in Florida’s Gulf Coast, but recently it has been coming back every year, and staying around for longer periods. With it comes piles of dead fish along the shores, brain-damaged and/or dead marine mammals, and an ocean breeze that causes severe respiratory problems and other illnesses in humans. Florida has seen a “19% increase in cases of pneumonia, a leading cause of death among the elderly.” Neurotoxins from the red algae have been detected in the air up to 3 miles inland.

The algae is fed by the billions of gallons of partially treated human sewage that we pump into the ocean, and by run-off of fertilizers from coastland farms.

Hundreds of visitors from the Midwest and New England have posted questions and complaints on websites, seeking to learn why, after a short beach vacation on the west coast of Florida, they suffered weeks of coughing, bronchial infections, dizziness, lethargy and other symptoms.

If you think breathing the toxic air sounds bad, try a mouthful of the algae-water directly, like this surfer did:

“I felt like I inhaled a garbage bag,” said Purdy, 33, a former high school swimming champion. “It locked up my lungs and throat like a paralysis.” The seconds ticked by. “I was thinking, ‘Is this the way it’s going to end?’ ”

Eventually, he managed to sneak in a little air. It was like sucking through a cocktail straw. He made his way to shore but didn’t feel much better until emergency medical technicians hooked him up to oxygen.

The dead fish that wash up on the shores are also a hazard to wildlife, and pets, that eat it. During one bloom of red tide, “local veterinarians treated 16 dogs — all twitching, vomiting and suffering from seizures. One died.” Pet owners in the area now know to keep them inside during a bloom. However, staying indoors isn’t enough: the toxin-rich air seeps in on the sea-side of the house, leaving “a metalic taste” in the back of the throat, and a dry cough that makes one sound “like a barking seal”.

Like the sea lions on the west coast, manatees, the “cows of the ocean”, are sucumbing to toxicity from algae around Florida. Greg Bossart, a veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, says the manatees are sentinels for human health: “[the manatee is] Florida’s 2,000-pound canary. We’ve opened a Pandora’s box of health issues.” Specifically, the manatees are dying because they inhale the air just above the algae, and the toxins in the air attack nerve tissue, causing their lungs to fill with blood.

Anyone want to go for a swim in the ocean?

Be sure to check out the videos and photography for Part 3 here.

In a previous article, I introduced the L.A. Times special report, Altered Oceans. The second part of the special report explores a consequence of the extreme algae growth that seems to be taking over the oceans: marine mammals are succumbing to domoic acid poisoning. The new algae that has appeared on the west coast of the U.S. produces domoic acid, and it has made its way into the food chain.

Sea lions have been called the “sentinels of ocean and human health” — if there is something wrong with them, then there is something wrong with the ocean, and if there is something wrong with the ocean, we have a problem too. Sea lions have been found in odd places, disoriented and behaving strangely, some of them going into seizures. The Marine Mammal Care Center at Ft. MacAurthur in San Pedro has been overflowing with them.

The problem turns out to be that domoic acid causes neurological damage: it kills cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for short-term and spacial memory. Damage to this area impairs the ability to navigate. Thus, the reason they are turning up disoriented in strange places. More extensive damage apparently induces seizures and other serious health problems, as many of the sea lions must be euthanized, failing a response to treatment procedures.

Studies of clams along the same shores show high levels of domoic acid as well. Unfortunately the clams are a main part of the diet of a local Native American tribe, and harvested by thousands of others. Sea lions are fairly high level mammals, like us, and if they are getting poisioned from eating the fish in the ocean, then we probably are as well.

This article in Gizmag claims that an Irish company named Steorn has invented a device which apparently breaks the law of conservation of energy, something considered impossible by pretty much everyone in science. They are publicly issuing a challenge, calling for a dozen scientists to verify that their perpetual energy machine does three things:

1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%. 2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts. 3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

It sounds like something that David Copperfield might do. It will surely revolutionize the world as we know it, if it turns out to be fact instead of fiction though! You can see what their CEO and marketing manager have to say in this interview.

As of 09:08 this morning, over 1000 scientists have signed up on Steorn’s website to participate in the debunking or confirmation of their technology. Steorn says that they will choose the twelve most qualified and most skeptical scientists to participate.

Some bloggers are speculating that it is an over-the-top marketing campaign of some sort. Thats an interesting idea. It reminds me of the ingenious campaign for the iRobot movie with Will Smith. The ads mentioned nothing of a movie, and indeed appeared to be a product launch for futuristic robots. It may have been the biggest viral marketing campaign to date, at the time. The only problem with the Hollywood theory is that Steorn has a history in the technology sector… or do they?

Other Blogs on this Subject:

• Steorn’s Free Energy Technology Challenge
• Steorn: inventors of infinite energy, destroyers of laws of thermodynamics?
• Free, clean energy or a marketing ploy?
• Irish Perpetual Motion Machine
• Steorn and free energy: the plot thickens
• Steorn, I’m all out of faith

This blog entry brought my attention to the L.A. Times special report, Altered Oceans. The first part describes how our many years of polluting the oceans has lined the ocean beds with “a virulent pox” in which ancient bacteria and all sorts of nasties are thriving. Now,

… some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

One example is the miles of “hairy growth” that appeared on ocean beds around Australia. Local fisherman have dubbed it, “fireweed”. It is so toxic that to come in contact with it causes skin inflammation and boils, searing welts that won’t stop burning, and leave scars. Residue from it is not a good thing to breathe:

When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air.

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn’t eat solid food for a week.
…
“It’s like acid,” Tanner said. “I couldn’t believe it. It kept pulling the skin off.”

University of Queensland’s marine botany lab identified the toxic weed as “a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.”

Plankton and algae were once consumed by swarming clouds of small fish such as sardines and anchovies. These small fish have been harvested to feed our fish farms, reducing their numbers dramatically, allowing algae to flourish.

…every day about a billion gallons of sewage in South Florida are pumped offshore or into underground aquifers that seep into the ocean. The wastewater feeds a green tide of algae and bacteria that is helping to wipe out the remnants of Florida’s 220 miles of coral, the world’s third largest barrier reef.

97% of elkhorn and staghorn corals, previously the most populous kind, are gone, and threatened with extinction. Marine life in general is dying off, as the algae suck the oxygen out of the water, leaving little for more complex organisms. As fish die and sink to the bottom, even more food for bacteria is created in rot, and a self-perpetuating downward spiral has been gaining momentum. As if our overfishing wasn’t a big enough problem for marine life.

You can (and should!) watch videos and see photographs here. Click the menu bar on the left side after you’re done watching one, and you can select the next video or photo.

A trend seems to be developing as genetic engineering progresses: manipulate the human immune system so that it fights the substance of your choice. This time, Dr. Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute in California has developed a vaccine which stimulates the immune system to suppress the hormone ghrelin, which helps regulate appetite, metabolism and weight. The effect on rats is that they lose weight, despite that they eat the same as other rats who get fat.

The thing about vaccines though, is that they are preventative medicines. Normally one would get vaccinated before exposure to infection. How will this affect already obese people? The research is still in its early stages, so it will be years before we know. Pretty interesting though!

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with an impressive new technique for studying live brain activity. The technique allows them to view cellular-resolution live imaging, non-invasively, from a genetically engineered animal’s brain as it moves about its environment. They came up with the technique as a means to study the role of a particular neural protein, “Arc”, however it can be used for a wide range of studies on the brain.

This advance, coupled with other brain disease models, could “offer unparalleled advantages in understanding pathological processes in real time, leading to potential new drugs and treatments for a host of neurological diseases and mental disorders,” said Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, a co-author of the study.

The scientists’ new imaging system revealed that the Arc gene helps strengthen synapses in the hippocampus during the formation of visual memories, and also inhibits the activity of neurons with “low orientation selectivity” for the visual experience being remembered. The strengthening of neural synapses in this area has the effect of sharpening orientation selectivity as particular visual stimuli are experienced. They witnessed a hitherto unknown molecular filtering mechanism in action, the process by which visual memories are created.

The imaging system made use of a genetically engineered mouse and two-photon microscopy. The mouse was engineered so that part of the protein under investigation, Arc, was replaced by a phosphorescent jellyfish gene, which then left a fluorescent trace when neural activities that normally activate the Arc gene occurred. “This allowed the researchers to image neuronal activation patterns induced by visual experience, thus uncovering the Arc protein’s role in orchestrating neurons’ reactions to natural sensory stimuli.”

This will definitely not be the last that we hear of this technology. Many mysteries still remain in brain science, and this new imaging technique promises to unlock many of them. Here is the official MIT press release.