Beyond The Bench

Before you turn on the tap, consider this: only 2.5% of the world’s water is fresh, and of that water, only 0.3% is available from rivers/lakes/reservoirs. (The rest is locked away in polar ice, glaciers, or soil moisture.) Furthermore, pollution threatens even these scarce freshwater sources. Thus, with our backs approaching the proverbial wall, we have begun to seek sustainable alternatives. One resource seems almost too obvious: rainwater.

Harvesting rainwater requires a fairly simple system:

• a roof (or other collection area)
• a conveyance system of gutters/piping
• a filtering device
• a storage tank
• some sort of redistribution system

Calculating a building’s potential for harvesting rainwater is also fairly straightforward:

Collection Area (sq. ft.) x Rainfall (in./yr.) / 12 (in./ft.) = cubic ft. of Water / yr.

(cubic ft./yr. x 7.43 gallons/cubic foot = gallons/yr.)

In some cities, like Portland, Oregon, harvesting rainwater has become part of a growing trend in environmental conservationism. In 1996, urban ecologist innovators Ole and Maitri Ersson introduced a residential rainwater harvesting system that provided enough water (i.e. 27,000 gallons) to keep the couple supplied for nine months out of the year. Station Place, a 13-story housing tower, received a City of Portland BEST Award in 2005 for storm water management; the building fills a 20,000-gallon cistern, adequate to flush up to 76 toilets on seven floors. And at Portland State University, a mixed-use classroom and dormitory building collects rainwater on its roof and plaza and uses that water to irrigate the landscape.

In other locations—like on islands, where fresh water can be scarce or even nonexistent—harvesting rainwater is not just meant to preserve the environment; it is essential for survival. In Bermuda, for instance, every house must be built so that its roof will collect 80% of rainwater. In St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, each house is required to have a certain roof area and water storage tank capacity, depending upon the number of tenants it contains.

Whether mandated or not, several large non-residential structures around the world have also been designed to harvest rainwater. The 60L Green Building in Melbourne, Australia, is one such building: every year, more 132,000 gallons of rainwater are caught, stored in two tanks on the ground floor, then filtered, sterilized, and sent back to tenants in taps and showers. Likewise, the Ryogoku Kokugikan Sumo-wrestling Arena in Sumida City, Japan uses its 8,400 m² rooftop to collect rainwater, which is drained into a huge underground storage tank. The water is then used for toilets and air conditioning.

Whether or not you intend to point your drain spouts into rain barrels anytime soon, keep an eye on the news. Because the law may make that decision for you:

• Read about LA’s potential mandatory rainwater harvesting law.
• Read about a Colorado bill passed in 2009 that allows residents to collect rainwater…legally!

Most of us know about recycling. Most of us are familiar with separate bins for separate materials: paper, plastic, and maybe even glass. But what about used coffee filters? Or the spaghetti you didn’t finish? Or your paper cups?

While the science of composting (i.e. the combination of microorganisms, unique balance of carbon and nitrogen, and various heat levels required to turn food scraps into fertilizer) has only existed for the past fifty years or so, composting itself has been practice for centuries. Ancient documents such as the Talmud, the Old Testament, and the Bhagavad Gita provide evidence of humans returning waste to the earth, and there are written records of Greeks, Romans, and Chinese doing so, as well.

Today, however, as our populations grow, we are being forced to consider how to manage the incredible amounts of waste being produced. Gradually, individuals, companies, and even governments around the world are recognizing this need and we are taking measures. One such measure is corporate composting.

In the United States, there are several different kinds of corporate composting initiatives. In Maine for instance, individuals can learn about medium and large-scale composing by enrolling at the Maine Compost School, a research farm that is part of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension Program.

So, armed with knowledge, people like Randy Nelson put that know-how to work: in April 2003, he started a composting program at the San Francisco Marriott. The hotel purchased a 20-yard capacity compactor. Every 5-6 days, Golden Gate Recycling hauls away the 15,000-17,000lbs of collected compact organic waste to a processing site, where the waste is then converted into nutrient-rich mulch.

Similar to Golden Gate, Community Recycling & Resource Recovery, Inc. also collects the waste materials of various companies and processes that waste into fertilizer. Community, however, is considerably larger: it owns California’s largest composting facility, which operates at a capacity of 1,700 tons a day, and services over 1,200 grocery stores and restaurants.

If it is difficult for corporations to find incentive to start composting programs, grant money can sometimes help. An environmental sustainability team in the United Kingdom called the Waste & Resource Action Programme offers monetary assistance—with the help of governmental grants—to companies developing food waste processing technologies (i.e. composting).

Likewise, the company Ferti-Val Inc.—a Canadian open-air soil factory that collects, composts, and redistributes organic waste materials from industrial-supplier clients such as Kruger, Scott Paper, and Cascades —was started in 1993 with help from the Ministry of the Environment. Later, it received another investment on behalf of Canada’s Sustainable Development Strategy.

One final consideration is that, unlike standard “recycling,” where the glass/plastic/paper is shipped away and never seen again, compost can become useful again and reused on site. For instance, schools in Kita Ward, Tokyo, Japan installed equipment that allows them to compost lunch scraps. They then use that compost as fertilizer on the schools’ flowerbeds and fruit trees.

Get involved by attending the US Composting Council’s Annual Conference and Exhibition this January 24-27!

Read about composting practices on the EPA website.

…Sweden
A crematorium in Halmstead (a town in western Sweden) is aiming to use the energy from its ovens to start heating homes, business, and other local buildings. This heating process will not only help to preserve the environment by using a natural fuel source, but will also save the business money in filtering costs. When a body is cremated, the burnt corpse releases toxins that must be filtered out before the emissions can be released into the air. The filtering is done by cooling the smoke from around 1,000°C down to 150°C. Circulating the hot smoke through a public heating system provides the community with much-needed heat while simultaneously cooling and filtering the smoke, thus saving the crematorium money on an otherwise costly cooling/filtering process.

Meanwhile, in Stockholm, Jernhuset—a Swedish government real estate agency—is also recycling heat, only of the more “lively” kind. The company has undertaken the task of turning Stockholm Central Station into its very own self-heating unit by using the station’s ventilation system to capture the body heat of approximately 250,000 commuters who pass through the station daily. The heat is then transferred to warm water, which is then pumped through pipes to heat a nearby hotel, office building, and several small shops.

… China
Sun Dexing, a professor of Environmental Science at Harbin Institute of Technology, has found a way to make use of something we all cannot help but create: human waste. Working with the standard heat pump model found in air conditioning units, he has developed a system that extracts heat from raw sewage. Using a series of filters to hold back solid waste, the liquid sewage flows into the pump and transfers its heat to a coil filled with Freon (the gas used as a refrigerant). The pump then filters the liquid sewage back out, while the Freon is compressed and then diverted to a condenser, which heats a water-filled coil. Finally, a fan blows air through the hot coil, heating the room. (In summer months, the process works in reverse: the water-filled coil absorbs heat from the air, which is then transmitted back to the condenser and then on to the liquid portion of the sewage, which is then piped back out of the building to a treatment plant.)

… South Africa
In a country with an overabundance of sunshine, inventor and ETA awards semi-finalist Kobus Engelbrecht has found a way to use the relentless natural resource to heat homes in wintertime. The Green Ceiling Heater is comprised of a standard blower fan built into a home’s ceiling. The contraption includes a temperature controller and two sensors: one positioned below the ceiling—inside the living space—and the other above the ceiling—in the roof space. When the temperature of the living space is lower than that of the roof space (which, even in winter, can reach temperatures up to 86°F), the fan automatically turns on, blowing warmer air from the roof space into the living area—thus heating the home.

Scientists have extracted biofuel from algae and built twenty-story-high wind turbines. However, with these “earth-saving” laboratories using 5-10 times more energy than office buildings of equal size, what steps are the scientific community taking to improve their environmental impact?

UCLA is one institution that has taken action. The university recognized that although its labs accounted for only 10% of building space on campus, they used 60% of the campus’s energy. To try and improve this situation, the university created a Laboratory Energy Efficiency Program (LEEP) to encourage conservation. The LEEP website features a number of lab-specific tips, such as keeping fume hoods’ sash heights at 18” when working; however, many of the tips are applicable to any work environment, such as turning off the lights before you leave or using stairs instead of the elevator.

Meanwhile, Concordia University accepted the challenge to maintain its identity as “the most energy efficient university in Quebec.” As part of this initiative, they built the Richard J. Renaud Science Complex, which won an ASHRAE Technology Award in 2005 for its innovative and effective design. To conserve energy, motion detectors not only shut off lights, but regulate ventilation rates when areas of the building are vacant.(*) Meanwhile, the building is heated with a runaround glycol loop (basically a coil of fluid that transfers heat), enabling the system to reincorporate heat from the building’s various internal heat sources (i.e. cold room compressors, growth chambers, freezer rooms, electrical substation, electrical and telecom rooms, computer rooms, etc.).

A project currently under construction is the Genome Science Laboratory Building at University of North Carolina (to be completed in 2011). Here, one of the major “green” design elements is a green roof: the roof includes an all-glass greenhouse for growing laboratory plants while actually improving insulation for the building. Additionally, engineers enhance natural light—in order to cut down on the need for electrical light—by designing pod-shaped fixtures with vertical fins that shade the east and west sides of the building from low-angle sun glare while using horizontal planes to direct daylight deep into the building.

While these labs are taking (literally) groundbreaking measures to improve their energy efficiency, scientists can take small, cumulative steps that will, ultimately, make a difference. After all, if scientists want to help save the planet, they’re already starting in the lab. This is just one more way to start.

Here are a few helpful hints:

Read UCLA’s full list of laboratory energy efficiency tips here.

Learn more about how to make your lab a part of Labs 21.

View the slideshow version of “A Design Guide for Energy-Efficient Research Laboratories” for ways to give your laboratory an energy-intensive overhaul.

* When labs are occupied, the ventilation rate is kept at 10 air changes per hour (ACH). During the day, when the motion detectors do not detect any occupants, the rate falls to 6 ACH. At night—assuming there is still no motion detected—the rate falls to 3 ACH.

By Manos Mavrakis, Ph.D.
CNRS Researcher, Institute of Developmental Biology of Marseille

Microscopy techniques are taking up an ever-increasing amount of time in modern biologists’ lives, whether it is to capture images of single cells in culture or images of living, developing tissues. Advances in the development of user-friendly, commercially available microscopes—and the availability of a wide range of reagents to label one’s favorite molecules in the test tube or in living animals—have made microscopy an enormously powerful tool in the biological community. This pertains in particular to modern cell and developmental biologists who are in possession of a wonder-molecule: green-fluorescent protein (GFP; “GFP glows gold”), which they can use to unravel the dynamics of genes, proteins and organelles inside living cells, or of groups of cells within tissues. Scientists are spending a good part of their days acquiring images, which they then need to process or modify and use for data quantitation, or prepare for presentations or publications.

Admittedly, presenting biological data through the use of images can be powerful. Besides the esthetically pleasing effect of images to an audience, it is a most direct way that allows one to visualize data. Images can be very “telling” and seeing can indeed be believing. However, benefits often come with downsides, and the use of images to convey scientific data is no exception; the manipulation of images poses a continuous “threat” to publishing journals and scientific integrity and credibility as a whole, and it has become a growing practice among cell and molecular biologists.

More often than not, image manipulation is “innocent” and arises from the unawareness of the perpetrators themselves. Producing an image implies that the image has to be acquired properly, the image modified if necessary, and prepared for quantization or presentation purposes. During this process, scientists that are not experienced with image handling can modify their images in ways that seem innocent (e.g., “cleaning up” the background in cell micrographs, or increasing the contrast to “illustrate better” an aspect). Such treatments could, however, be treated as scientific misconduct and lead to misinterpretation or even falsification of data. Moreover, the advent of Photoshop has made it so much easier to manipulate images, which makes the temptation even bigger. Finally, the fact that scientists are under increasing pressure to publish clean, clear-cut stories in high-impact journals is among the major factors that feed this trend. Thus, the temptation to manipulate images so the data looks flawless can drive them over the limits of scientific practice, thus risking their own careers. “Seeing is believing” is converted to “believing is seeing” in many cases, and this is a serious threat to scientific credibility.

One might wonder whether and how the journals have reacted to this new “trend.” Mike Rossner, the managing editor of the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB) was the first one to introduce a forensics procedure in 2002 to screen each and every article accepted for publication in JCB, in order to identify tell-tale signs of image manipulation (Rossner and Yamada, 2004). It was surprising at the time that guidelines for image manipulation and presentation were largely missing from journals. JCB still provides among the most thorough guidelines for which manipulations are acceptable or not; however, most journals have come up with such guidelines, which vary in comprehensiveness and clarity.

Who is to blame, and how should the scientific community react to this plague? The issue could certainly be brought up during one’s academic studies: Education for postgraduate students about image manipulation and scientific misconduct is largely absent from current academic programs. Should the supervisors follow more closely the work of their students and postdocs, and be more demanding about raw data or detailed procedures about data processing? Should journals come up with more stringent and more specific guidelines so that the reader can clearly follow all the procedures to which images are subjected in each published study? Until we tackle the problem at the level of academic education so that each and every scientist thinks twice before “touching up” any image and considers carefully how to use their images, image manipulation will continue to pose a threat and undermine the quality and credibility of all published work.

Opting for a glass of soy milk over a glass of cow’s milk might seem like a radical ethical choice, but it’s not a radical dietary one. Choosing to fill a baby’s bottle with soy milk, however, is—and it might be a harmful choice, too.

Adults can eat and drink soy products because we get nutrients from other food groups throughout the day. Babies, on the other hand, consume almost nothing except for milk. Therefore, replacing cow’s milk (or breast milk) with soy milk has a huge nutritional impact.

Soy products contain phytoestrogens (plant-based substances that mimic the effects of estrogen). In adults, phytoestrogens have shown beneficial implications for conditions in learning and memory and type II diabetes. However, infants consume much higher levels of the hormones, which could prove injurious.

A study conducted by Kenneth Setchell of Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati (The Lancet, 1997) found that five leading brands of soy-based baby formula contained six to eleven times the amount of phytoestrogen it would take to alter a woman’s menstrual cycle (i.e. the amount that would be found in 6-11 contraceptive pills).

The counterargument to this harrowing data is obvious: infants have been fed soy formula for years, and no horribly obvious effects have been witnessed as a result. However, researchers such as Setchell and NIEHS epidemiologist Walter Rogan remain unconvinced.

[When] we’ve had so many infants raised on soy formula and we haven’t really seen these horrendous effects that people keep saying these compounds cause, then there’s probably no reason for concern. However, I accept that the lack of evidence is not evidence for the lack of effect. – Setchell

I think this is something that a lot of people are interested in, but everybody’s carrying out discussions in a data-free environment. – Rogan

For now, the jury is out. Even the worldview on soy formula is divided. In the United States, soy formula is available freely for public purchase; in Europe, soy formula is available only by prescription. The bottom line is, no matter where you live or what your eating habits are, think twice about what you put in your baby’s bottle.

How much does the power of suggestion effect our health? Could thoughts actually make you sick?

The use of thought to cure a patient, or at least trick a patient into improving his or her condition, has been used by the medical community since the 18th century. Whether the medication or treatment contained any active ingredients or not, the belief that it would make a patient well could sometimes activate mental or biological processes that would have cured them anyway, without any true medical intervention. It is a physical effect, without a physical cause. This is called the placebo effect.

Unfortunately, the effect can work in reverse. The placebo effect means, in Latin, “I shall please,” while its counterpart, the nocebo effect, means “I shall harm.” It is an effect whereby a patient who, in believing a treatment or medication will have a harmful side effect, actually causes that symptom to occur, whether or not any active ingredients are present.

The nocebo effect has not been well studied, due to obvious ethical constraints: doctors are expected to cure ill patients, not to induce illness in healthy ones. However, the experiments that have been conducted have proven the validity of the nocebo effect beyond the realm of anecdotal evidence. In one study, conducted in the 1980s, researchers told thirty-four students that they would have an electric current passed through their heads and warned them that they may contract a headache as a result. Although no actual electricity was used, more than two thirds of the students reported experiencing headaches.

Several recently published studies have yielded similar results. In one study (Pain, 2008), Researchers at the University of Turin Medical School used verbal and visual suggestion to condition subjects before they received tactile or low-intensity painful electrical stimuli. The subjects who were conditioned to expect pain turned the tactile stimuli into pain and low-intensity pain into high-intensity pain. In another project, this same team of researchers found that across trials for anti-migraine medication, nocebo effects (i.e. complaints from the group receiving sugar pills) included vomiting and memory difficulties (Pain, 2009). These results demonstrate the nocebo effect in play: the subjects got what they expected.

In an age when there seems to be treatments, therapies, or medications for everything, some feel that it is a doctor’s responsibility to identify and coach certain patients through the nocebo effect. This is the argument made by Arthur Barsky in his paper “Nonspecific Medication Side Effects and the Nocebo Phenomenon” (JAMA, 2002). Some patients, due to prior negative experiences, will somatize adverse side effects to medical treatments or medications. Barsky argues that it is up to physicians and health care professionals to collaborate with patients and ameliorate these reactions.

And while those such as Barsky are working to lessen the nocebo effect, others, including Cardiology Researcher Brian Olshansky are intent on maximizing the potential “positive tricks” of the placebo effect. “Placebos enhance health,” Olshansky argues in “Placebo and Nocebo in Cardiovascular Health: Implications for Healthcare, Research, and the Doctor-Patient Relationship” (JACC, 2007). “Wise placebo use can benefit patients and strengthen the medical profession.”

Precisely why and how placebo and nocebo effects occur still remains somewhat of a medical mystery. However, as scientists invest more time and resources to encourage the former and prevent the latter, the power of positive thinking may yet prevail. In the meantime, don’t let your thoughts get you down…or sick.

Imagine this: you need to take a trip. Instead climbing onto a plane or into a car, you board a train that, minutes later, is hovering above the earth and traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. Sound futuristic? Such trains already exist, thanks to a tremendously powerful, pollution-free, underutilized resource: magnetic energy.

The proper name for this type of high-speed train travel is Maglev—short for Magnetic Levitation. As the name implies, the train’s “flight” is propelled not by wings, but by magnets, which are embedded into the train’s undercarriage. These huge magnets are then repelled by a magnetized aluminum coil running along the track (called a “guideway”), which is what causes the train to “float” 1-10 cm above the guideway. To propel the train forward, coils embedded into the walls around the guideway are charged with electric current to create alternating polarity. This generates an attractive magnetic field at front end of the train, pulling it forward, and a repulsive field behind the train, adding thrust.

Because they do not make contact with the physical track, Maglev trains can operate at speeds up to 500 km/hr—nearly as fast as an airplane. Maglev trains also produce considerably less pollution than cars or airplanes, but without sacrificing speed. Airplanes can travel 400 miles in approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes (including check-in and boarding time), while cars take slightly over 7 hours. Maglev trains can travel 400 miles in 2 hours and 54 minutes—about 30 minutes more than a plane, but at half the environmental “cost.” Maglev trains produce 0.47 lbs. CO₂ per passenger mile (ppm), while a car produces 0.77 lbs. ppm, and plane produces 1.06 lbs. ppm.

Maglev trains also use less energy to run than airplanes or cars. Airplanes require 3264 British thermal units (Btu) ppm, and cars use 3445 Btu ppm. Maglev trains, meanwhile, use 1180 Btu ppm. Furthermore, instead of running on oil—like airplanes and cars—they run on electricity, which can be produced by nuclear, hydro, fusion, wind, or solar power plants—all significantly “cleaner” and renewable sources of energy.

“Floating trains” may sound like an invention of the future, but Maglev projects have actually been underway since the late 1900s.

• In the United States, Congress created the U.S. Maglev Deployment Program in 1998. Since then, two major projects have been deployed in the northeast:
  • Baltimore-Washington Maglev Project
  • Pennsylvania High-Speed Maglev Project.

  Meanwhile, projects are being planned in other areas of the country:

  • Atlanta-Chattanooga Project in the south
  • California-Nevada Interstate Maglev Project in the west.
• Japan currently operates two experimental Maglev trains: the HSST, developed by Japan Airlines, and JR-Maglev, which is owned and operated by Japan Railways.
• China hosts the only commercial Maglev train line currently in use: the Shanghai Maglev Train, which runs 19 miles between Shanghai city center and Shanghai Pudong International Airport. It began making regular passenger trips in 2004, and extensions to Shanghai Hongquiao Airport and Hangzhou will begin in 2010.

To read more, check out the following sites:

You’re worried about the purity of straight tap water, but you don’t want to buy bottled water, either. Your third option is to buy a water filter. Personal water filters, such as Brita or PUR, claim to “reduce copper, chlorine (taste and odor) and mercury.” However, is filtered water really better—or necessary?

Pitcher filters work by running water through a porous carbon sheet. The sheet acts as a sieve, catching and filtering larger particulate matter. Then, chemical and organic pollutants such as chlorine and pesticides bond with the carbon and, thus, are removed from the water. Meanwhile, ion resin beads filter out metals such as copper and lead by attracting the metals and releasing H+ or Na+ ions “in exchange.” The result is purer H₂0.

Small, disposable, inline water filters were first produced by Omnipure Filter Company in 1970. One of their biggest attractions was—and is—that they would protect consumers from the poisonous properties of lead. (Adverse health effects include damage to the brain and kidneys, fetal developmental defects, and neurological development in young children.) Sixteen years later, the Environmental Protection Agency updated its regulations, limiting lead levels in drinking water to no more than 15 parts per billion (compared to the previous 50ppb level). Water treatments around the country have complied, and lead levels are now often so low as to be undetectable, rendering the lead-removal properties of personal water filters superfluous.

The other attraction of water filters is their ability to remove chlorine. (See the health risks of chlorine in Part 1 of this series.) Unfortunately, chlorine is a fat-soluble substance, so you absorb just as much from taking a shower as you do from drinking water out of your tap. Thus, unless you purchase a whole-house filtration system (such as those offered by companies like Culligan), drinking de-chlorinated water does not prevent chlorine consumption.

In fact, filtering chlorine from the drinking water could actually be unhealthy. Water treatment plants intentionally add chlorine to drinking water in order to kill harmful bacteria. Because the filter’s carbon sheet removes chlorine, filtered water is considerably more susceptible to bacterial contamination. A 2005 study published by Springer compared filtered water to ordinary tap water and found that, in two thirds of the samples tested, the filtered water contained greater bacterial counts than the tap water—in some cases 10,000 times more. Considering that bacterial illnesses such as typhoid, dysentery, and cholera were all historically linked to drinking water, you may be better off taking your chances and ingesting the chlorine.

The bottom line is that, although they may make water taste better, domestic water filters are largely unnecessary. In modern developed nations such as the United States, government regulations limit levels of harmful substances in drinking water. Yet filters could be potentially useful in third world countries, where every day over 10,000 children under the age of 5 die due to drinking water that is contaminated with either bacteria or harmful metals (as reported on Lenntech). Some initiatives have already been undertaken by researchers at UC Santa Cruz, a professor at George Mason University, and even a Slippery Rock University graduate in Pittsburgh, PA.

So if you’re suspicious of the liquid flowing from your faucet, where do you get a safe, drinkable water supply?

Some people rely on bottled water. Its popularity is undeniable: the U.S. market contains more than 700 regional and 75 imported brands of water, and, according to a report by Beverage Marketing Corp., bottled water consumption has more than doubled in the last ten years. Reasons for this increase vary, but one common conviction is that bottled water is purer than tap water.

Yet this conviction is somewhat of a misconception. Yes, some water truly is bottled from sparkling mineral springs; however, more than 25% actually comes from a municipal supply which sometimes isn’t purified any more than the water that comes out of your tap.

But if convenience isn’t enough, and you really want purer water . . . are water filters the answer? Find out next week in Part 3.