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China Third Country To Be Hit By 'Brown Tide'
ananyo writes "The species of alga that causes 'brown tides' in the United States and South Africa is also to blame for massive blooms along China's east coast on the Bohai Sea, researchers have found. The finding could be the first step to tackling the problem. It is the fourth consecutive year the country has been hit by the bloom (Slashdot's story on the 2010 bloom), with the situation worsening each time the bloom returns."
First the red flood, now the brown tide...
Both are different algae species and/or the bacteria that accompany the algae decay so its not all that surprising.
A surprise would be something totally different, like getting hit with "Tide with bleach alternative" or "2X Ultra Tide"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It sounds like you're describing a movement made by a woman....
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
It's my fault; beer, pizza, and tacos when one has cholera is not advised. Sorry :(
All we need to do is hit the Brown Tide with Tide with Febreze. It'll get the brown out, *and* it will smell 10x fresher!
PROTIP: it turns out it's super easy to defeat your opponents when they don't exist and you put words in their imaginary mouths. Later, we'll show you how to have an entirely fair and balanced "debate" internally within your own post without ever having to worry about learning something new in the process -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves or you might accidentally learn something!
I don't think it's being a Luddite to be concerned with the safety of something that is engineered, whether it be organic or a high-speed train.
Especially since in the U.S. there has been an awful lot of lobbying aimed to MAKE SURE that extensive long-term tests don't have to happen before these products go to market.
Even regular hybridization can occasionally cause bad side-effects and we've even seen this lately.
Being skeptical and wanting more information is scientific, not being a Luddite.
Not a Santorum campaigner, I presume?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3007228.stm
'Half of the fish species in the Baltic are at levels below the critical biological level, while pregnant Swedish women are being warned not to eat herring - a staple diet - because of dioxins. There is little dispute that St Petersburg - Russia's second-biggest city - is the Baltic's single biggest polluter, and behind many of the problems.'
http://www.euronews.com/2010/02/10/baltic-nations-take-action-on-sea-pollution/
'Northern European nations have been discussing pollution in the Baltic Sea at a conference in Finland. The Baltic is considered one of the most polluted waterways in the world. [...] “Today some of the richest and most environmentally-conscious countries on earth live on the shore of one of the world’s most polluted seas. What a tragedy. It is clear that something has to be done and quickly.” [...] “Today we are also facing a historic international challenge, which I would like to point to as as the issue of chemical and conventional weapons dumped into the Baltic Sea.” [...] Almost enclosed, very shallow, and fed by numerous rivers, the Baltic is a vulnerable sea. 90 million people live around its shores, many of them depending on the sea in some way or other for their livelihoods, but waste from industry, agriculture and daily life ends up in the sea. One of the biggest resulting dangers is too much algae. Excess growth of it robs the water of oxygen suffocating other species.'
etc.
Maybe the Chinese still can change this tide, err, that brown tide.
Observe the Razorbeak as it tends so carefully to the fungal blooms; just the right bit from the yellow, then a swatch from the pink. Follow the Glow Mites as they gather and organize the fallen spores. What higher order guides their work? Mark my words: someone or something is managing the ecology of this planet.
-- Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams"
Already have it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Dust
It's nature healing itself.
PH levels in the sea are rising. This a result of it. Let this bloom grow and it will eventually come in contact with a different PH level current or sea or ocean and disperse and die - the end result is a normal ph level.
No, the pH (note the way it's typed - stands for 'negative log of the Hydrogen ion concentration') is DROPPING (becoming more acid - look it up).
"Nature" doesn't 'heal itself'. It goes along working against entropy. Whether or not that happens to help humans is another issue.
And while you're hanging out on Wikipedia learning about acid - base reactions and buffers, check on the articles about ocean circulations and gyres.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Here's a little advice, for free - when arguing your point, don't advocate for exterminating populations. . . . . It doesn't generally draw that many supporters.
"I don't think it's being a Luddite to be concerned with the safety of something that is engineered,"
There's being concerned the proper tests have been done and then there's dismissing something based on nothing more than dogma. Greenpeace et al are firmly in the latter category.
"Even regular hybridization can occasionally cause bad side-effects and we've even seen this lately."
Life isn't risk free, you mitigate as much as you can. You're just using the standard issue "It went bad once so never use it again" luddite argument. Sorry, but if everyone thought like that we'd still be living in mud huts and riding around on horses. ... Actually no , we'd be walking , because someone once fell off a horse and hurt themselves , best stay away from the dangerous beasts.
In general fear of GM crops seem to parallel fear of cell phone radiation.
Yeah, it's true that there's theoretical ways that either of them could hurt you, but most people who are afraid don't understand much about either topic. It's rare to find someone who even understands how regulators test that GMOs are safe for human consumption, and if you ask them how the testing process should be improved, they can't answer. Then if you ask them to do a cost/benefit analysis for GMO crops, they just stare at you like lost rabbits.
Another similar topic is irradiated food. Blanket fear of radiation.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Because nobody has any idea about the long term implications of using GMOs, or what might be going wrong. They make them, decree they're safe, and then say unless there's evidence to the contrary, they must be.
GMO crops can affect biodiversity, and in the case of Monsanto pollute other people's fields even when they aren't using it, and when it's sent for food aid the recipients are told they can't keep seed to plant next year because they're not "licensed" to grow corn.
It's the law of unintended consequences, really. Except that people take the default position of "what could possibly go wrong?", until something does.
If you think people are against GMO food because they're luddites, then you're an idiot.
People are against it because there's no evidence it's safe either, and there's a lot that can go wrong with it. In fact, there's loads of examples where it has.
Genetically modified pigs have ended up in the food supply and contaminated crops.
It's like pharmaceuticals. The company who makes it has a vested interest in selling it, so if they take a few shortcuts, or leave out the evidence they don't like, or outright fabricate their evidence -- well, then we don't really know what we're getting, do we?
I'm far from a luddite, but I see an awful lot to suggest that people are doing this, doing a piss poor job of actually keeping tabs on it, and not always being up front about it when it goes wrong. With some things (say, thalidomide) you only discover the disastrous consequences after literally years.
Feel free to exercise your choice to eat those things. Me, I'd prefer to avoid it. There's just too many accidents and questions that I'm not convinced there are good enough answers yet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's a fascinating story with Greenpeace and GM corn. The folks making the GM corn did a study where they got both their GM corn and conventional corn that was as similar as possible, and then fed both to lab rats. They weighed the rats every week, then took the rats apart after a while and assayed ... everything. Organ sizes, weights, chemistries, etc. They concluded that there were no significant differences.
Greenpeace sued to get the raw data, something I think they have a right to (since that study was used as the basis for approval). They got some folks (grad students in Germany, I think) to do their own statistics, which concluded that GM corn caused a statistically significant increase in growth rate for male rats and a statistically significant decrease for female rats. I looked at what they did, and it turns out they made a sophomoric statistics error that I teach, well, sophomore undergrads not to make.
What they did, essentially, was to neglect the fact that limited-sample-size uncertainties in "weight of rat at 6 weeks" and "weight of rat at 7 weeks" are correlated when they tested for statistical significance. Of course they're correlated -- they're the same damned rats! (In technical language, they calculated chi-squared based on the naive standard-errors-of-the-mean, rather than on the full covariance matrix which is required for [strongly] correlated data.)
If Greenpeace can't even get undergrad stats right in one of the cases where they *have* shown their work (and it's wrong) then I see no reason to give them any credibility unless someone who's better at this than they are checks their work.
GM corn has been a disaster?
Now, Monsanto's lawyers in combination with patent law have been a disaster -- I'll grant you that. But the technology itself is safe (see above, and see the safety tests on Bacillus thuringensis bacteria themselves, which farmers used to put directly on their corn) and has prevented tons and tons of insecticide from being sprayed on crops.
I was a field hand in a study of Bt cotton vs. conventional cotton. The instructions to farmers were "farm both of these like you normally would, and ignore us -- we're going to come in and count bugs once in a while". The conventional field was a wasteland, since farmers had to spray to kill caterpillars, and then spray again to kill all the things that the predators who're now dead would have eaten.
The Bt field had bugs (and other insects, but mostly bugs) all over it, happily eating each other and eating pests -- especially aphids. Aphids are a notable critter here, since they're resistant to most insecticides but are a tasty snack for all sorts of predators.
Commercial food interests may be greedy and evil but GM food should be evaluated on its own merits.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
That isn't entirely true. No doubt that there are a LOT of people think as you describe. My problem with GM crops is that they are patentable, and it isn't a criminal offense to put a kill gene in the crops. We have seen huge problems with food monoculture where a single disease wipes out enough of a countries food staples that there is wide spread famine. The kill genes mean that the corporations with the patents of the food can artificially create these kinds of situations.
The situation with GM crops almost sounds like it is coming right out of a James Bond story. My problems with GM crops isn't that I believe they are inherently safe. Heck, I would love to be able to buy strawberries that were deliciously sweet, the size of a watermelon, and stayed fresh for a month without refrigeration. My problem with GM crops is that in our legal climate, I don't trust corporations not to manipulate food availability to increase profits. I also would not put it past them to engineer the food to induce greater consumption.
It isn't the scientific issues that worry me. It is the legal ones.