September 29th & 30th, 10am to 6pm at the Felton Farm, in Felton, CA

The report, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, said Olympia oysters, once an integral part of the Native American diet and a staple during the San Francisco Gold Rush, are functionally extinct.

“Essentially, today, the number of oyster reefs is zero,” said Rob Brumbaugh, restoration director for the Nature Conservancy and co-author of the study. “It’s the complete elimination of a key species and habitat on the West Coast.”

The loss of native oysters – not to be confused with the farm-raised Japanese Pacific oysters – is a serious issue, he said, because oysters clean the water by filter feeding. A single oyster can filter up to 30 gallons of water a day, removing nitrogen and other pollutants, Brumbaugh said. The oyster beds, or reefs, they create provide habitat for myriad fish, crabs and other creatures.

“What they do for us is filter water and help remove nitrogen pollution while increasing the growth and survival of other fish,” Brumbaugh said. “Oysters and the reefs that they create are great pollution scrubbers.”

Excerpted from an article by: Peter Fimrite, a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Read the whole story at: sfgate.com

However, Böning points out that, due to considerable mixing and dilution, the level of radioactivity reaching the US will be much lower than that released by the Fukushima plant. “The levels of radiation that hit the US coast will be small relative to the levels released by Fukushima,” he said. “But we cannot estimate accurately what those levels will be because we do not know for certain what was released by Fukushima.”

Excerpted from article written by: Nadya Anscombe, a freelance science journalist based in Bristol, UK

Simulated distribution of contaminated water between 1 and 10 years after the Fukushima incident. The colours illustrate the dilution relative to the initial concentrations off the Japanese coast: after 1 year maximum values still exceed 0.1% (red areas); after 10 years they will have dropped below 0.01% almost everywhere (blue areas).

Read the whole story at: EnvironmentalResearchWeb

Ever since mass-produced plastic products have made our lives easier, the sea has gradually begun to change into a gigantic soup of plastic – today not a single square kilometer of seawater is free of plastic particles. As standard plastic is not biodegradable, these pieces are broken up into constantly smaller pieces and enter the food chain. And so the garbage ends up on our plates, with serious consequences for our health.

The exhibition presents collected plastic garbage from all the world’s seas and illustrates the full extent of this ecological catastrophe. In addition the project looks at the advantages and disadvantages of plastics and at their influence on health. The approaches to a solution such as reducing, reusing or recycling encourage to consumers of plastics to take action. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly diverse educational program that aims at encouraging active confrontation with the material at different levels.

The central installation: Every 15 seconds this amount of plastic garbage gets released into the sea

Learn more at: www.plasticgarbageproject.com/en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PlasticGarbageProject

Several active organisms were identified, including two distinct isolates of Pestalotiopsis microspora with the ability to efficiently degrade and utilize PUR as the sole carbon source when grown anaerobically, a unique observation among reported PUR biodegradation activities.

Polyurethane is a big part of our mounting waste problem and this is a new possible solution for managing it. The fungi can survive on polyurethane alone and is uniquely able to do so in an oxygen-free environment. The Yale University team has published its findings in the article ‘Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi’ for the Applied and Environmental Microbiology journal.

courtesy: mashable.com