Tag Archives: environment

Announcing the winners of the #ScientistAtWork photo competition

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Thanks to everyone who took part in the inaugural Naturejobs photo competition

This week in Nature, we announce the winners of the Naturejobs #ScientistAtWork photo competition. Here are the photos that won. You can also check out Nature‘s podcast for a further interview with the final winner of the competition, Kseniia Ashastina. You can also check out Nature India‘s own excellent photo competition here.

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Kseniia Ashastina’s winning entry — a researcher collects samples from a permafrost outcrop {credit} Kseniia Ashastina {/credit}

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Career paths: Into the laboratory wild

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Time away in a different environment can give young researchers new perspectives and challenges that could help them develop as scientists and people, says Lauren Emily Wright.

Guest contributor Lauren Emily Wright

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‘Where there are experts there will be no lack of learners.’ -Swahili Proverb

Scientists know that any time away from academic data gathering and preparing the next publication is another nail in the coffin for a research career. The struggle for balance is a source of constant mental turmoil. Losing focus just a bit could mean losing the race for a faculty position.

I don’t want to believe that.

At the end of this year I will finish my first postdoc and embark on a project to counteract brain-drain in Ethiopia. I’m taking time away from the bench to work with a non-profit organisation called TReND (Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development) in Africa. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Queuing up in the urban jungle

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Getting through the mountains of paperwork and bureaucracy when moving countries can be difficult, but don’t forget the reasons why you moved in the first place, says Gina Maffey in the third part of her adventures from Scotland to Brazil.

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{credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

I stared blankly at the wall. The air-conditioning unit was humming away merrily, but it could offer no advice to my conundrum. The man behind the desk repeated the question, asking where I was born. The form in front of him said England, but my passport said that I was British. My mind was hurriedly trying to piece together an answer, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. How on earth do you explain the fact that the United Kingdom is comprised of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and that England is a country within that kingdom… in Portuguese.

Our first week had been punctuated with encounters such as this as my husband and I sought to get all our documents in order. Hours of waiting in queues; passing from one desk to another; seeking approval from banks; the federal police; the tax office. The path to adventure had a seemingly slow and bureaucratic beginning. Continue reading →

Egypt’s scientists want to redirect sunlight to narrow streets

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A group of Egyptian scientists at Ain Shams University have come up with the idea for translucent panels that are specifically fitted to be able to divert natural sunlight into densely-crowded alleyways, and can get easily positioned over roof tops, on a lower budget.

The scientists argue that a variety of health problems in overcrowded spaces—as seen all across the Arab world, including Egypt—are a result of the lack of sun exposure.

The proposed panel improves illumination by 200% and 400% in autumn and winter as per research simulations – the corrugated “sine-wave-shaped” structure is to be ideally installed on building roofs, only one meter beyond the roof edge, facing the sun and directing its light downwards into the alleys by diverging it.

“We expect the device to provide illumination to perform everyday tasks, and improve the quality of light and health conditions in dark areas,” Amr Safwat, a professor of electronics and communications engineering at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, told Science Daily.

Safwat is one of the authors of the study proposing the panel, published in Optics Express this month.

Previous structures used redirecting panels or guiding tubes that are optimized for certain solar altitude ranges, and which were suited for Middle Europe specifically; they also only direct the light upwards into the depth of a room and not into the depth of narrow streets, the researchers wrote. But the suggested panel, an improved model, can be tilted and operates over a wider range of solar altitude. “The fan-out angle exceeds 80% for certain solar altitudes and the transmitted power percentage varies from 40% to 90% as the solar altitude varies from 10°C degrees to 80°C,” the study reads.

The idea was to still use a sustainable source of energy to replace a conventional one—saving energy and reducing carbon emissions—while maintaining cost-effectiveness. The researchers say they have done this; the panels are made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), a type of thermoplastic material similar to synthetic glass available at low costs, and common press forming equipments are used in the panel’s manufacture.

Safwat and his team told the press they would eventually build a full-scale model 10 times bigger for validation and testing purposes, and they plan to market and commercialize their panels.

The Ain Shams university researchers were funded by the Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF).

World Wildlife Fund’s Dr Brendan Fisher on improving fish diversity and conservation agriculture in Mozambique

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Dr. Brendan Fisher is a research scientist at the World Wildlife Fund. His research and fieldwork lie at the nexus of conservation, development, and natural resource economics. Brendan is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed articles on topics such as poverty, human welfare, ecosystem services and biological conservation, and the co-author of two books, Valuing Ecosystem Services (Earthscan, London, 2008) and A Field Guide to Economics for Conservationists (Forthcoming, Roberts and Company). 

He is a Fellow of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont and a Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) at the University of East Anglia.  He was recently a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow working on relationships between the ecological conditions of coastal regions, gender inequality and childhood health.  When he’s not working he spends most of his time hiking, skiing, and enjoying the Vermont outdoors with his wife and three children.

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Green films for the masses

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Films on environment and wildlife have come a long way in India in the last decade. Celluloid seems to be quite a medium of choice to take the message across. The film making format has also seen a change with many film makers changing over to new ways of storytelling.

However, documentary films screened at environment and wildlife film festivals, viewed by select audiences most of whom are already aware of  the issues, do not somehow seem to go beyond that mandate. Yes, the challenges to cross over to the other side, the mainstream, and be seen by the masses are many — no one goes to a movie theatre to be preached, they go there for entertainment.

Is there a middle path for environment & wildlife film makers? A still from 'Life of Pi'.{credit}Life of Pi movie/Flickr{/credit}

At the other end of the spectrum are big budget movies such as ‘Life of Pi’, which every middle class and upper class household in India worth its salt went to check out last weekend. The movie taught children a thing or two about animal behaviour and survival strategies (though many could scientifically challenge some of the films contents, specially the dream-like carnivorous island). Agreed that it takes one Ang Lee and truckloads of money to make such movies but the take home message here is the art of storytelling.

Is their a way of telling a story, beyond the documentary mode, that could perhaps make a movie much more ‘mainstream’? Why don’t more environment and wildlife film makers use innovative ways of telling stories? That, in no way, is intended to belittle the classic documentary format, which will forever continue to charm the more intellectually-oriented — the classes, as cinema lingo labels them. As for the masses, these festivals will perhaps need to reinvent themselves in form and tenor for people to sit up and take note.

The organisers of environment and wildlife film festivals seem to realise this and are struggling hard to reach their message across to more people every year.

One of the biggest film festivals in this genre in India — the multi-city traveling festival CMS Vatavaran that began in 2002 — boasted of 300 entries from 27 countries last year. It is still travelling this year with the theme ‘biodiversity conservation’ and is scheduled to screen films in the West Bengal capital Kolkata next week (December 3-8, 2012). Their theme was a good fit for Hyderabad’s COP-11 to the Convention on Biological Diversity, where they hosted the ‘International Biodiversity Film Festival’ with more than 50 Indian and international films on biodiversity issues.

The organisers say,”Ideals are abstract, but they are necessary, too. They can be transformed into a felt experience, but can get only as febrile as the passion that pushes it. The questions that provoked us a decade ago remain.”

Being screened in New Delhi next week is ‘Quotes from the Earth‘ (December 6-7, 2012), an environment film festival organised by advocacy group Toxics Link and India International Centre, Delhi. It will have about 25 films from across the world, some of which are currently on show at the more mainstream film event ‘International Film Festival of India (IFFI 2012) in Goa (November 20-30, 2012).

That brings us to films with overt or covert environment/wildlife themes being screened at the more talked about and attended IFFI, 2012. Of these films, just about a couple adopt the documentary-style story telling technique. While the Greek film ‘Boy eating Bird’s Food’ is the story of a boy and a canary bird with insights into the bird’s life, the Hebrew-Russian ‘Igor and the Crane’s Journey’ is the story of a father and son tracing the journey of migratory birds from Russia to Africa. English film ‘Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’ is a visionary sheikh’s passion for a peaceful pastime of salmon fishing and the ‘Last dogs of Winter’ tells the story of wild bears peacefully sharing a barren strip of coastal land with a large number of chained dogs during polar bear season in Manitoba, Canada. ‘Fogo’, featuring a small community in the Fogo island that is forced to leave as the tundras take over their habitats and ‘More than Honey’, a personal perspective of a beekeeper’s grandson in Switzerland, are a couple of others to mention.

Adopting the documentary style are Elemental (by Gayatri Roshan and Emmanuel Voughan-Lee) which narrates the journey of three people connected by their deep bond with nature and driven to confront some of the most pressing ecological challenges of our times, the Vidarbha farmer suicides story ‘Cotton for my Shroud’, and the self explanatory ‘Himachal’s Avian Paradise: Pong Dam Wildlife Sanctuary’ and ‘Mangroves: Guardian of the Coast’.

‘Tiger Dynasty’, a popular film in wildlife film circuit by director-producer-cinematographer S. Nallamuthu shows the life of a young tigress taken from her home in Ranthambore National Park and released in Sariska with the hope that she will raise a new dynasty there. The film maker has been filming the tigress ever since she was a cub and he reveals what challenges such displaced animals feel in their new environments. ‘Char: the No Man’s Land’, is an account of environment refugees from India and Bangladesh.

Girish Kasaravalli’s national award winning film from 2002 ‘Dweepa’ is also a refreshing entry — it deals with the issues of building dams and displacement of natives — with some master storytelling and camera.

I’m sure the issue has been debated in umpteen panel discussions, perhaps in these very film festivals, but it would be good to know what film makers in this genre think about marrying entertainment with hard-core information-packed story telling techniques?  Is there a middle path for environment and wildlife messages? Infotainment, without dumbing down the message? What are the cult movies in this genre, according to you?

Reporting climate change

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Climate change seems to be our favourite punch bag, whatever the calamity — droughts, failed monsoons, floods or cyclones. How much science goes into deciding which of these natural phenomena are an offshoot of the global climate change phenomenon? Is climate change reporting as robust (or weak?) as the scientific evidence to back accentuated glacial melts or sea level rise?

The workshop

A regional meet of climate change communicators from the SAARC nations currently underway in Kathmandu, Nepal (August 24-30, 2012) is seeking to look at all that is good with our reportage and all that we need to improve. It would look and feel like any of the umpteen such well meaning ‘workshops’ which fail to make much headway but for the presence of some real ‘experts’ who have toiled it out on the ground. From Nepalese journalists who have trekked the Hindukush range to Sri Lankan scribes who have shrugged off the ‘small island nation’ tag to influence policy across south Asia; spirited Editors of newspapers, magazines and television channels from SAARC countries to radio reporters whose voices reach the farthest corners of our villages — the mix at the meet organised by PANOS is eclectic and therefore works.

The basic premise of their coming together is to corroborate what we know all along but need occasional nudging to recall — that the rules of science and the rules of journalism are actually the same: to question, to inquire and to investigate.

The rigour of the week-long workshop and its academic nature notwithstanding, the stand-out feature has been the brilliant anecdotal asides that each session throws up, which the editor of a Bhutanese daily described as media’s ‘dazzle’ stories on climate change.

For instance, shepherds in the Hindukush Himalayas are actually happy with the tiny lakes being formed from glacial melts — it means fresh water and more pastures for their sheep. Women in some Indian villages have been rendered unmarriagable because of the water scarcity in the region (who wants water-stingy in-laws?) . No cars can ply on the roads of Bhutan on Tuesdays, even if you are dying and need to be rushed to a hospital — an example of an extreme step taken by the government to keep the effects of climate change at bay. While wildlife activists in Colombo might be fighting hard to protect their cultural emblem — the elephant –, villagers facing the wrath of the pachyderms want the beasts to die. They just won’t cast their votes unless the government ensures electric fencing around villages to keep wild elephants away.

Climate change communicators from across South Asia are attending the workshop.

These lesser known stories and many more such have thrown open another debate on the sharp urban-rural perception divide on issues such as environment, wildlife and climate change. While we were busy framing protocols and worrying about wording them correctly, people most affected by climate change were sitting in faraway foothills and forests oblivious of the threat posed by the burning global issue.

That said, all victims certainly are not  ignorant or unperturbed. A number of cases of indigenous knowledge in action also got into the anecdotes lore of the workshop. Like the heart-warming story of 75-year-old civil engineer Chewang Norphel who is building artificial glaciers in the driest villages of Ladakh for perennial water supply. Or the Lahore man who lives in a quiet ‘green’ house in a neighbourhood hopelessly drowned in the whir of generators.

The media’s coverage of climate change came in for scrutiny as data from University of Colorado was pulled out to show peaks in the graph only during significant annual events such as the Copenhagen climate change conference of 2009 or the Cancun or Durban conferences. The graph also peaked when there was a natural calamity — a drought, a flood, a cyclone — presumably linked to climate change. This, the workshop felt, needs to be changed with more regular policy features, success stories and informed opinion. The media’s role to warn policy makers and imminent victims in the run up to a natural disaster through science-backed reportage was also discussed at length.

And since I must end with a smiley,  here it is. They are hunting like crazy for the unique half-plant-half-insect Cordyceps sinesis in the highlands of Bhutan, Nepal and India. It sells for a couple of lakhs of rupees a kilogram for its aphrodisiac virtues.  As we know, Bhutan measures its progress with the Gross National Happiness (GNP) index (into which an environment component is built in, by the way). I’m sure there are a lot of happy people in the beautiful ‘60% forests country’ right now!

Boston study: Many household and beauty products contain suspect chemicals

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Ruthann Rudel walks up to the shelf in a Cambridge Rite Aid pharmacy and picks up an “Arm and Hammer Essential Naturals” deodorant stick .  The bright yellow package has jaunty lettering and a green leaf on the label and announces that it offers “Aluminum Free — Paraben Free Natural Protection.”

Tinker Ready photo

Ruthann Rudel

But, Rendel – a scientist who studies chemicals in everyday products– said she checked the ingredients before buying it and was surprised to find triclosan.

“It’s way worse than paraben,” she said of the antibacterial additive. Triclosan is a hormone mimic under review by the FDA, which reports that it improves some products but offers little improvement over conventional soaps and body washes.

Rudel is part of a team that has been looking much more systematically into the presence of suspect or untested additives and ingredients in everyday products. In a peer-reviewed paper published today in the journal “Environmental Health Perspective,’’ she and her fellow researchers from the Silent Spring Institute in Newton report that tests of everyday household products found traces of 55 different hormone disruptors, as well as chemicals linked to asthma, many not listed on the label.

And, they didn’t  just stick to the shampoos, sunscreens and cat litter in CVS. They also had a shopping trip at Whole Foods and tested what one might expect to be bonefide natural products. Of the 44 “alternative” products they tested, 32 included their target chemicals. All of the “conventional products” had some of the target chemicals.

“It is impossible to control exposure to them,” Rudel said. “Everyone is exposed.”

They looked at 50 different product types, including make-up, sunscreen, wet mops, perfume, vinyl shower curtains, hand sanitizer, diapers and glass cleaner.

At the Whole Foods store next door to the CVS, lotions and shampoos have names like “Nature’s Gate” and products come with a label that promises “the safest, most natural body care product.”

“Even if you pick these alternatives, you are still going to be exposed to a pretty large number of our target chemicals,” Rudel said.

Still, more than fifteen years after the book Our Stolen Future laid out the possible risks of hormone mimicking chemicals, the impact on human health remains unclear.  Animal studies link the substances with breast cancer; data from humans is harder to come by.

“Most of these endocrine disruptors are very, very difficult to study in humans,” Rudel said.  “There are so many different chemicals, we don’t know how to measure all the exposures, we don’t’ know how to add them up or which ones are acting together.”

Tinker Ready photoIt may be years before the full impact of hormone disruptors is well understood. In the meantime, Rudel thinks that some people may not want to take their chances. There are ways to avoid them – by using soap and water instead of chemical cleaners. And in some cases, like triclosan, they don’t offer much of a benefit, so it won’t be much of a loss.

The abstract concludes: “Common products contain complex mixtures of EDCs (endocrine disrupting compounds) and asthma-related compounds. Toxicological studies of these mixtures are needed to understand their biological activity.

For epidemiology, findings raise cautions about potential confounding from co-occurring chemicals and misclassification due to variability in product composition. It appears that consumers can avoid some target chemicals—synthetic fragrances, BPA, and regulated active ingredients—using purchasing criteria. More complete labeling would enable consumers to avoid the rest rest.”

At some point, the impact on human health will be clearer, Rudel said.

“Scientists are working hard to understand what endocrine-disrupting chemical we need to be concerned about.”

Endocrine Disruptors and Asthma-AssociatedChemicals in Consumer Products

Robin E. Dodson, Marcia Nishioka, Laurel J. Standley, Laura J. Perovich, Julia Green Brody, Ruthann A. Rudel

https://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1104052

Online 8 March 2012