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Scientists Solve Riddle of Toxic Algae Blooms
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from the Victoria Times Colonist: "After a remarkable 37-year experiment, University of Alberta scientist David Schindler and his colleagues have finally nailed down the chemical triggers for a problem that plagues thousands of freshwater and coastal ecosystems around the world." Punchline: "Phosphorus."
This week's lesson: this discovery comes not long after phosphorus was eliminated from most household laundry detergents by federal law.
According to a chemistry major I know, adding one gram or so of phosphorus can cause more devastating algae ownage than adding two or three kilograms of carbon.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
From TFA:
There are now 146 coastal regions in the world in which fish and bottom-feeding life forms have been entirely eliminated because of a lack of oxygen. One dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is about the size of the city of New Jersey and growing.
I can understand dumbing-down the units of measure to Volkswagens or Libraries of Congress, but the last time I looked at Wikipedia, New Jersey was still the 3rd state admitted to the Union. I mean, come on... it's already the brunt of every New York comedian's jokes, and now you Brits are trying to demote it to a mere "city"?
(Of course, I'm from Texas, where an "area the size of the STATE of New Jersey" would barely be counted as a moderate-sized ranch.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I was wondering what was so important about this study because the effects of phosphorous on aquatic life have been known for decades (hence the phosphate ban on detergents) but then I RTFA (which also mentioned the ban) and what the experiment really showed was that efforts to control nitrogen runoff are useless because it turns out nitrogen is not the problem (the implication being we are wasting money^Weffort controlling it).
Bottom line: nitrogen is not the problem, phosphorous is _still_ the problem and needs more effective pollution control measures.
More music, fewer hits
New Jersey, Northumberland, New Brunswick, Canada This is an article from Canada after all.
I'm taking it as a very clever form of satire: confusing New Jersey as a state versus a city; confusing Canada with England.
I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's a Canadian article because it's in English and Canada is the only state in the Union that speaks English.
...is an essay by Isaac Asimov, first published in the April 1959 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, then latter in his collections Fact and Fancy (1962) and Asimov on Chemistry (1974).
In it the Gentle Doctor argued that phosphorous has the greatest relative concentration increase going from its abundance in the natural environment to that in life of all sorts. It thus was often the limit to growth of life as it was scavenged up and held in the biomass.
It's always important to confirm by testing in specific cases, as with this one, as there are other limits, such as dissolved iron. I can't remember where, but I recently read that low blood iron may be a defensive mechanism to make it hard for bacteria to grow during some infections--and that treating the low iron may be the wrong treatment here.
...fish waist...
Fish don't have waists. That's why they seldom wear pants.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!