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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
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?
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!
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.
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.