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A volume phase holographic (VPH) grism, a combination of a diffraction grating and a prism. This grism combines a grating from Kaiser Optical Systems Inc. with prism wedges from Janos Technology Inc., and was assembled at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) by Al Camacho and Heidi Yarborough. It is used in the new Multi-Aperture Red Spectrometer (MARS, which is CryoCam resurrected).
Image credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF
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A couple of years ago, a quantum physicist suggested to Vulture South that one of the best uses for quantum computers might be to model reality. Now, Google reckons its boffins have done just that.…
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Patients sent to rehabilitation facilities to recover from medical crises or surgery too often suffer additional harm from the care they get there, according to research by U.S. health officials.
The short-term rental platform has hired Eric Holder as outside counsel to help it craft a new anti-discrimination policy. Individuals and researchers have reported racial bias by the site's users.
In an unusual move, Twitter has decided to ban a troll. The company suspended the account of a technology editor at the conservative news site Breitbart after he tweeted offensive posts to Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters actress.
Twitter says it's reviewing its hateful-conduct policy. The suspension of conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos has prompted a new focus on the company's ongoing struggle to reign in abusive messages.
The suspension of Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos comes amid a recent campaign in which users tweeted hundreds of racist and abusive messages at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.
In 2012, the corporate Twitter account for a bookstore in London posted a joke about Pokemon. "I'm in love," a woman responded. More tweets followed, then a date. The wedding was last weekend.
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Old Blue - The saviour of the species.
The NZ Black Robin went through the most severe population bottleneck that you could imagine in the late late 70's. By 1980 she was the only breeding female left of the entire species! At one point the whole population consisted of just 5 individuals.
The fact that there are more than 200 Black Robins alive today is incredible.
If you don't already know about this species I recommend checking it out :)
"South Florida is the frontline of climate change, where we have seen its negative impact in the form of rising sea-levels and the erosion of our coastal communities. Our goal...is to shift the debate from whether climate change is real to what we can do to mitigate its effects."
"In the 2012 election we did focus groups with young voters...and we asked them to describe a Republican, and their #1 word was 'dinosaur., We asked them why, and their biggest example was 'climate change.'"
"First and foremost, it's a moral issue." Climate change is "negatively impacting people, as well as the environment, which we're called to take care of by God."
"If we have an environmental policy, I don't know what it is....we're virtually defenseless on this issue. Any purple state, we are at risk and we don't know it. Period."
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Pics The surviving members of the Viking Mars probe team have been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first probe to make it down onto the surface of the Red Planet, send back pictures, and perform scientific experiments.…
At Facebook's F8 Developer Conference this year, Mark Zuckerberg revealed more details about his laser-firing drones that will encircle the world and relay Facebook, sorry, the internet to far-flung places, reaching potentially all seven billion of us.…
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Ohio is an open-carry state, so many people at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are toting firearms. For some, it's about protecting police. For others, it's about keeping protesters safe. The Atlantic spoke with two of these gun-wielding civilians about why they're armed at the RNC.
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A terrible drought hit Ghana in the 1400s, far worse than today's conditions. Yet people had enough to eat, while today they go hungry. What changed? In a word, colonialism, a new study suggests.
Design has the potential to be an industry of influence. And for that to happen, every design business and those working within it need to recognise, get comfortable with and develop their potential for influence. By becoming experts in influence, they become better communicators which encourages their clients to be braver with their decisions delivering more for all parties.
What does this mean for you and what needs to happen for it to take place within your business?
A consultancy that is seeing the impact of this change within their business is Open Water. I spoke with Creative Director and Head of the business, Philip Hansen about his experience of a shift in influence.
For Hansen, it's about the bigger picture: “New approaches to influence rather than just selling are just one indication of a more general move towards design thinking within businesses,” he says. He has noticed changes in his clients and the way they are treating their customers. They are setting their businesses up in a far more customer focused way, focussing ‘on' them rather than ‘at' their clients.
Open Water is acting on this observation. Hansen says the consultancy is “using this insight to improve relationships with clients. We are asking: ‘How can we look at things from their perspective?'”
This has lead Open Water to think more about what it is it brings, with a focus, not just on the deliverables but on the interactions that shape the deliverables. “We bring more than an end product. We bring our thinking,” says Philip.
What can get in the way of this shift? Pressures at both ends play a part, around both time and money.These can force consultancies and clients to be speedy at the expense of opportunity with a rush to the end product. And what you focus on will develop. If you focus on your end product, you're saying ‘this is all we do'.
Hansen believes that “design businesses offer such a broad range of things, services etc they've always got something to offer. But an approach that is more focused on the process, that uncovers problems and keeps focus on the customer is surely more positive and has greater intrinsic value.”
What impact has growing their own idea of influence had on Open Water? Hansen explains that “As we have become more comfortable about influence, our clients have become better. The kind of work we get improves, but interestingly, the quality of what we do hasn't changed. But what has improved are our ability and skills to guide clients.”
How has this shift happened? When a consultancy starts to think of influence as a natural and ever present part of the conversation, and part of its expertise it then becomes something that can be managed.
Take for example, a typical situation for a design business, receiving feedback on work. If feedback is always seen as negative, you end up with a jarring communication with your client. What Hansen did was turn that into more of a conversation.
He says: “We ask a client questions about the view they have put forward. We are curious and during this process it may emerge in fact it often does that we can answer these questions in a different way.
“What happens next is that we enter a new position with our clients. When they come to us with a new piece of work, the client starts to ask us these questions before the process has started. For us this is an example of practical influence, it's desirable to all sides.”
When designers are faced with a situation where they could use influence, they don't always think about it in a design way. They may think, ‘the barrier is insurmountable or out of their control.' But actually it's about something that both parties are trying to work towards. Do they have the skills to change that position? Surely they do. These are the skills that got them here in the first place, to the point where they have an idea to present.
So what happens when a client says ‘I don't like this…' or ‘I prefer it this way.' These are opportunities for design businesses to use skills of influence.
How might you go about developing your approach to influence? Here are some questions to ask. If your sales process is about developing a way to create income that is authentic to the business, how does your sales ethos compare with the ethos of the business? Do you have a clear idea of what these are and are they aligned? Sometimes the sales team is separated from the business and protected. They are allowed their own culture because it's ‘the way they work' or ‘how sales have to happen'. But if your business ethos and sales ethos are misaligned? What might you be missing out on? What extra opportunities can you create from these being in-tune with each other?
Hansen also has a rallying call to the industry as a whole: “Being a designer is like living a thousand lives. You get to work with your clients on their business in ways that others don't. If the industry doesn't see itself as an industry of influence, it's too reliant on clients coming to their own conclusions. And that limits our potential for change in the long-run.”
John Scarrott works with design business leaders and their teams on their sales, presenting and networking skills. Follow him @JohnDScarrott or find him at johnscarrott.com
The post How to influence your clients and not just sell to them appeared first on Design Week.
Starbucks has launched a new concept café in Canary Wharf which looks to make buying coffee faster and easier for London's busy commuters.
The new express café has been designed by Starbucks' in-house design team, and follows on from similar stores in New York, Toronto and Chicago. The London store marks the first of this style in Europe.
It features a walk-around interior, with a touchscreen at its centre allowing customers to place their orders. Seating and tables are limited and arranged around the peripheries of the store and outside the main entrance, allowing more space for people to walk in and out.
The menu included at this early order point has been “streamlined”, says Starbucks, providing a shorter, more succinct list of coffees to choose from to give customers a speedy ordering experience.
The express store is aimed at customers “on-the-go” who are already well-acquainted with the Starbucks menu, so “know what they want” before they get to the till, says the company.
Included in the short menu is a selection of coffees, espresso shots and some of the more popular food items such as breakfast sandwiches. These items are displayed on digital menu boards which rotate daily.
Customers are also able to order ahead, via Starbucks' own mobile order and pay system through the store's app, customers can locate the store they want to collect from, order their drink then pay via their phone, ready to pick up in store.
The express store follows on from another Starbucks café concept which opened in London earlier this year, which looked to slow down rather than speed up customers.
The Reserve coffee bar, based opposite the Noel Coward Theatre near Leicester Square, encourages pre-theatre-going customers to relax over coffee cocktails, wine and an antipasti platter, while providing break-out spaces and charging points for people wishing to work and study. This café also uses the mobile order and pay system.
But the express store is aimed specifically at commuters in a rush on their way to work, and hopes to “improve convenience for customers”, says Starbucks EMEA vice president of operations Rhys Iley.
He adds that the concept is the “latest in Starbucks' evolving store portfolio”, though there are currently no hints as to future formats. The express store is open seven days a week and based at the centre of the City of London's financial district, in Canary Wharf.
The post Starbucks launches new concept café for “busy London commuters” appeared first on Design Week.
Ichneumon wasp (Trychosis sp.) collected at rare Charitable Research Reserve, Ontario, Canada, and photographed at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics (sample ID: BIOUG22570-F02; specimen record: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_RecordView?processid=RRMFE3045-15; BIN: http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BarcodeCluster?clusteruri=BOLD:ACW1110)
Aside from everything that has happened politically over the last month, I've always found it strange that the UK is at the very centre of the €1 and €2 coins, despite the fact that we never adopted the currency.
The UK of course remains part of Europe, even if it will no longer be in the European Union. But the Euro coin, as any mint currency around the world, should present a more accurate representation of its geographical spread.
Let's go for big, clunky and impractical: the juke box. Many 20th Century revamps have resulted in designing things smaller, streamlined and minimal. I'd like to see the opposite for a change. I don't mean an app-version or a mini digital version of a juke box (I'm sure they exist), I want to get up and properly juke!
Remember the pure joy of sifting through atrocious music choices, deciding on a pretty crap song, yet feeling ecstatic when it (eventually) came on? I would like to relive that experience. Look at how popular Photo Booths are in Berlin, and pin-ball machines are still thriving (there's even an Angry Bird one). So, here's to crap music choices, and dancing like no one's looking.
Practically every consumer product in our world has got smaller, but noticeable exceptions are TV screens which have got larger and better quality, and cars which have got larger and heavier, taking up more space on the road and using more fuel than they would if they were smaller.
The BMW Mini is a prime example of what was once a miracle of space management, that has now bloated into what 50 years ago would have been a medium sized family car.
What would be really wonderful (and maybe commercially attractive) would be to look at remaking the Mini to its original dimensions, but using modern materials and technology to make it safer, more efficient and better than it ever was.
The original Saab 900 turbo convertible. More specifically, the Monte Carlo yellow special edition. Sharp at both ends, self-assured and happy, it's a glorious car to look at. It was ahead of its time mechanically and for a car of that age is comfortable, with well-designed leather seats and decent internal space for a convertible.
I fell in love with it as a copywriting intern at KHBB on Charing Cross Road and pledged that one day I'd have one. And I do a J reg, bought on eBay. It drives like running in trainers three times too large, drinks fuel like a tired mum on Prosecco and my hood's stopped working.
I'd love it to be reissued with a great fuel-efficient engine, modern electronics and properly engineered body/chassis arrangement but don't anybody change the body shape. GM did, and it just wasn't a 900.
Straight out of art college in 1991 I couldn't wait to get my hands on a little black & white Mac Classic in fact I've still got it! It was also around the same time I first played on the Nintendo NES.
Since then I've always seen Nintendo as the Apple of the gaming consoles. So in a similar vein, albeit very cute, tiny, not connected to the internet and with a limited number of games, I'd like to see Apple reproduce the black & white, connected to the internet version of the Mac Classic (Prince of Persia included).
The Contax T2 35mm point & shoot film camera. In an age of VSCO filters and pixel peeping, an affordable reissue of this beautifully simple, well built and well equipped pocket film camera would be a breath of fresh (1990's) air. No need to make it over just reissue it in all its glory to the same spec including the Zeiss lens.
The post Which 20th Century product would you like to see get a 21st century makeover? appeared first on Design Week.
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have worked alongside the V&A to create a wind-powered installation that is set to be displayed at the inaugural London Design Biennale this September.
Alongside installations from more than 35 other countries, Forecast Barber and Osgerby's entry on behalf of the UK has been designed to coincide with the biennale's theme of “Utopia by Design”. The concept celebrates the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's famous work, Utopia, as part of Somerset House's UTOPIA 2016 season.
Supported by British Land, the installation will be displayed in the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court at Somerset House throughout the course of the event. It is made up of a group of wind masts and rotating elements, inspired by weather measuring instruments.
Based on a simple kinetic structure, the installation is designed to respond to the elements, moving when the wind picks up or changes direction. “Forecast responds to the theme of Utopia by linking our seafaring past to a future of truly sustainable power,” say Barber and Osgerby.
“As an island nation, Britain has historically been reliant on harnessing the power of the wind and the waves for transportation, migration, trade and exploration. Today, the UK is a world leader in offshore wind energy. Forecast is intended to reference this and highlight the opportunity for a more sustainable future.”
Victoria Broackes, V&A curator, adds: “Striking a delicate balance between functionality and beauty, Forecast will be an expression of what might be possible: much like Thomas More's vision of Utopia itself.”
The inaugural London Design Biennale London Design Festival's sister event will present newly commissioned contemporary design, design-led innovation, creativity and research by designers from countries across the world.
It will run from 7-27 September at Somerset House, London. Tickets are available here.
The post Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby design installation for London Design Biennale 2016 appeared first on Design Week.
Ireland's international festival has shown the merits of merging different art forms while reawakening enthusiasm for a much-reprised Beckett classic
They were dancing in the streets last week in Galway. It wasn't simply because the city's international arts festival was in full swing but because it had just been announced that Galway had been named European capital of culture for 2020.
As a regular visitor to Galway, I was delighted but also felt a pang of envy. Of the €45m (£38m) budget for 2020, €39m will come from EU and state funds. Presumably, in a post-Brexit world, no UK city will ever again be eligible either for the award or for the financial boost that comes with it. If Galway deserves the recognition, it is partly because its annual arts festival, under the direction of Paul Fahy, is a powerhouse of ideas and innovation.
Related: Arlington review dance, art and poetry explode in Enda Walsh's brave new world
Continue reading...The Big Apple's early 20th-century building boom transformed the city with skyscrapers, subways and an awful lot of cement as documented in these photographs from the New York Public Library's archives
Continue reading...Slovakian photographer Mária Švarbová stages atmospheric shots of pastel-hued swimming pools, full of pristine waters and blood-red bathing caps
Continue reading...Norway's roadside architecture project, part of its National Tourist Routes, has led to the creation of bridges and viewing platforms that make every journey a tour de force and more new designs are on the horizon
Vertigo-inducing viewing platforms, island-hopping bridges, and some of the funkiest toilet facilities in the northern hemisphere: these are just a sample of the design flourishes that Norway's National Tourist Routes programme (NTR) has introduced across the country over the past 15 years. Add to this the fact that the roads programme has been a great incubator for Norway's young, vibrant architectural scene which is respected for its daring and imagination across Europe and for anyone heading north this summer, with design leanings or simply curious, a road trip beckons.
This is a far cry from the NTR's beginnings. The first pilot project by the then young and today highly respected firm of Jensen & Skodvin Architects (JSA) was completed in western Norway in 1997. Aimed at drawing tourists into the stunning, if rarely visited, landscape through appealing roadside architecture, a full programme was subsequently launched, with 18 routes across Norway's south, its coastal regions and the far north eventually chosen in 2004. The pieces were primarily architectural, though in places, art installations and sculptures were also introduced, and by the end of the decade a host of impressive works were adding roadside lustre to the grandeur of Norway's geography. A programme of rest stops, viewing platforms, bridges, walkways and restaurants was rolled out, with some jaw-dropping moments such as Tommie Wilhelmsen and Todd Saunders' Aurland lookout.
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Childcare in New York City is extremely expensive, so many Chinese families will have their children in America and immediately send them back to be cared for by relatives. Then, when they reach the age of five or six, the children return to the U.S. to be enrolled in school. In her film, Satellite Baby, Jenny Schweitzer sheds light on the trauma that these children experience after being shuttled between two worlds. More often than not, they feel like they don't belong anywhere.
It's a beautiful day here in New York and I just received my first ever copy of “Overview” in the mail! The book looks nicer than I could have ever imagined so we decided to photograph it appropriately. Pre-orders happen to be discounted on Amazon at the moment and every copy sold will be hugely impactful for the book's awareness when it ships in the fall. If you would like support our efforts, the link to pre-order is in our profile. Thanks to my good friend @lazza____ for the steady flight and capture from Overview-1! (at New York, New York)
Tomato plants grown in large-scale outdoors are often selected for hardiness more than taste. What if you could boost disease resistance, flavor and yield? Researchers think they can — by grafting.
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Address environmental injustice, allowing local communities who bear a disproportionate burden of polluted water to participate in developing solutions to drinking water infrastructure challenges.
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Read more: Environmentalism, Environment, Environmental Justice, Landfills, Toxic Waste, Green News
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Spiroplasma, a small helical-shaped microbe, is responsible for bringing out a ‘male-killing' instinct in African Queen butterflies, according to research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.…
Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.
I don't mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully -- not as fear or loneliness -- but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.
"Roger Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue! We're breathing again! Thanks a lot!" I sank back into my chair, looked at Deke [Slayton] -- we were grinning from ear to ear. This was my greatest experience, until I had the opportunity to land on the moon myself almost three years later.
[...]
The enormity of the achievement hit me later when I began to reflect that this feat had occurred less than ten years after the first man had gone to space. It was a tremendous accomplishment and the culmination of years of planning and training and managing. All of us felt a great sense of pride and fulfillment to have been part of this flight. Everyone was popping their buttons, our chests were so swelled with pride.
The magnificent desolation of the moon was no longer a stranger to mankind. We came to experience firsthand the utter desolation of the orb's lifeless terrain. In contrast, the achievement realized by scientific enterprise and teamwork in designing and engineering the rockets that could send two men to land on the moon was magnificent. I could not help marveling that the very first footsteps we had taken, and the footprints we had left on the moon's surface, would remain undisturbed for millions of years to come.
Hello Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.
I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have done. For every American this has to be the proudest day of our lives, and for people all over the world I am sure that they, too, join with Americans in recognizing what an immense feat this is.
Now in my late forties, I wasn't yet three years old when Apollo 11 made it to the Moon on July 20, 1969. My mother had plunked me in front of the family television set in the den that would become my bedroom a few years later. I sat in the middle of the carpeted floor, with my parents, one of them cradling my brother, surely behind me on the green upholstered couch, to watch the event along with an estimated 500 million other viewers worldwide that Sunday. Somehow, I knew that the hazy black-and-white images of two men in gleaming spacesuits were important. There were people inside those bulky, bouncing spacesuits; I listened to their crackling voices. The Moon seemed a place I might visit someday. Upon that image of the Moon landing, everything I have experienced and know has been built.
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Reported cases of algal blooms, when algae grow rapidly from an influx of nutrients in waterways, have been rising at an exponential rate in recent decades. Industrialized countries have the highest incidence with North America, Europe and eastern Asia being hotbeds for new cases due to runoff from industry and cities as well as these areas' intensive use of manufactured fertilizers.
These events often cause a noticeable change in the color and smell of natural water bodies and may be accompanied by highly visible fish kills or even respiratory distress in humans who inhale tiny, aerosol particles created by wind and waves.
A highly visible new case recently developed in Florida, where a particularly intense bloom of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) formed in Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater lake in the state. As is often the case with today's larger, more intense blooms, the event was visible to satellites orbiting in space. This year's Lake Okeechobee bloom was first noticed on Landsat 8 images during early May 2016 and persisted through at least midsummer.
While blooms of this nature are not uncommon in Lake Okeechobee, this one received more attention because of its intensity and size - it covered 33 square miles. Also, the bloom was exported to the coast when water managers released water from Lake Okeechobee in response to several months of heavy rainfall and concerns that rising water levels in the lake, which is contained by a dike, would cause flooding.
Upon reaching the coast through two man-made diversions that short-circuit the lake's natural, southerly flow to the Everglades, the bloom persisted instead of dispersing, causing economic damage to local tourism, fishing and boating businesses. Florida's governor subsequently declared a state of emergency in three of the hardest-hit counties on the Atlantic coast and in one county on the Gulf coast.
Apart from the economic damages, Floridians are also bothered by the environmental degradation these events cause. What are the environmental and health dangers from this sort of large-scale algal bloom?
Blue-green algae are one of three types of single-celled algae that frequently cause harmful blooms in coastal waters. In Florida and elsewhere, the blue-greens tend to bloom in fresh water and at the upper ends of estuaries, near where freshwater runoff first starts to mix with coastal seawater. The other two algal types, diatoms and dinoflagellates, tend to bloom at more seaward locations (especially the dinoflagellates).
While the fundamental causes of coastal algal blooms are well understood, there is considerable uncertainty about the details. A large part of the debate involves determining which cocktail of nutrients - whether it's nitrate, ammonia, orthophosphate or organic nutrients such as urea - promotes one particular bloom type over another.
One of the well-understood fundamentals about algal blooms is that land use has a strong bearing on the types of nutrients that are delivered downstream to bloom-prone water bodies.
Urban development introduces new nutrients from sewage, manufactured fertilizer and rain-borne emissions from burned fuel to downstream parts of local drainage basins. Agriculture, especially row crops, can introduce manufactured fertilizer in large amounts to drainage basins. Intensive animal feed lots may also introduce excessive nutrients; hog farms in North Carolina and duck farms on Long Island are two well-known examples of intensive animal production leading to harmful algal blooms and lowered water quality. In Florida's case, intensive feed lots are not common, but the other two land-use types are.
Also well-understood is that water stagnation encourages blooms by giving the algae enough time to remain in calm surface waters where the light needed for photosynthesis is most abundant. In Florida and elsewhere, water is withdrawn from rivers and streams for various municipal, agricultural and industrial purposes, and these withdrawals tend to increase the incidence of stagnation. On the other hand, there are coastal areas both inside and outside of Florida that are relatively immune to stagnation and algal-bloom formation because tidal flushing is strong there.
Once blooms have formed, they can have two types of effects, indirect and direct. The most prominent indirect effect is low dissolved oxygen in the water, or hypoxia. During a bloom, the algae produce dissolved oxygen while they photosynthesize during the day, but then consume dissolved oxygen at night in the dark as they respire.
Although the balance between these two opposing processes (photosynthesis vs. respiration) can be either positive or negative, the trend toward hypoxia becomes stronger as the algae from the bloom start to die off and decompose. First, the sick and dying cells stop producing as much oxygen through photosynthesis, and then the total amount of respiration surges once nonphotosynthetic bacteria start to break down the newly abundant, dead algae cells for food.
Hypoxia can lasts minutes to months, but is nearly permanent in some bodies of water.
Why should we be concerned about hypoxia? Basically, the answer is that hypoxia determines which animals can survive in a given body of water.
Hypoxia and anoxia (the complete absence of dissolved oxygen) kill aquatic organisms of all sizes, but the less-mobile bottom animals are usually the first to go. In some cases, hypoxia/anoxia spreads throughout much of the water body, resulting in fish kills. Even if fish kills do not occur, the likely loss of bottom animals eliminates a critically important food supply for the fish community.
Many aquatic animals, especially larger predators such as fish, obtain their energy from food webs that include bottom animals; even fish and other aquatic animals that do not eat bottom animals directly may be affected. A study of European fisheries revealed that this food-web effect translated into a dramatically changed composition of the fish community over a period of decades. As algal blooms became more common, highly valued fish that were once abundant in the harvest became scarce.
Toxicity, however, is the most direct effect of algal blooms. Some types of bloom are never toxic, but still cause harmful hypoxia, and others are toxic in some cases but not others.
Blooms of algal types such as the red tide organism (Karenia brevis, a dinoflagellate) always appear to be toxic once the blooms exceed a threshold density of cells. Karenia's toxic product, brevitoxin, mostly kills fish, although other marine life, including dolphins and manatees, have also been killed by red tide. Nutrients released from the decomposing fish are believed to prolong the blooms.
The toxins from various types of algal blooms can become dangerously concentrated within shellfish, especially filter-feeding clams, mussels, oysters and scallops. While the detection of blooms often leads to the closure of shellfish beds by authorities, human deaths have occurred in areas where such regulation does not exist, and also in areas where new blooms are believed to be forming for the first time, catching people off-guard.
One study identified 2,124 cases of saxitoxin poisoning in the Philippines, with 120 deaths between 1983 and 2002. These cases were attributed to Pyrodinium bahamense, the same dinoflagellate that blooms intensively in Tampa Bay, apparently without becoming very toxic (yet).
Researchers are starting to suspect that asthma and other human respiratory ailments are more related to algal blooms than previously believed. Also, there is concern that with continued environmental change, blooms that are presently mildly toxic could become far more toxic in the future.
Given these economic, environmental, and human-health impacts at the coast, what can be done? In Florida, managers release freshwater from the interior to the coast for flood control and water supply. But ecosystem health at the coast must also be managed.
In accordance with the U.S. Clean Water Act, the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program, which sets pollution limits in bodies of water, is being implemented to lessen the nutrient runoff that fuels algal blooms. The TMDL program provides a geographic accounting of pollutant sources, including excessive nutrient runoff. Yet new blooms keep forming.
In addition to TMDLs, further development and implementation of best management practices for agricultural and urban land use needs to continue with the goal of curbing excessive nutrient runoff, particularly during rainy periods.
Detailed computer models of water circulation should be used more routinely in the course of water management to predict where coastal algal blooms are likely to form. Finally, natural wetland buffers should be used to intercept nutrients before they reach the coast (provided this does not cause a different set of problems in the interior), and the construction of engineered treatment wetlands should be considered.
In the Lake Okeechobee case, restoration of flow to the Everglades may go a long way toward solving Florida's current problems at the coast.
Ernst B. Peebles, Associate Professor of Biological Oceanography, University of South Florida
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Read more: Water Quality, Water, Pollution, Blue-Green Algae, Algal Bloom, Algal Blooms, Toxic Algae, Environment, Florida, Gulf Coast, Great Lakes, University of South Florida, Green News
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