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ES&T Online News: Can drugs found in water harm humans?

Researchers agree that aquatic species face the greatest risk from exposure to low levels of pharmaceuticals, such as synthetic hormones, which can act as endocrine disrupters at environmental levels. However, little is known about the potential human health effects arising from complex drug mixtures.

Well, it is often more difficult to analyze complex mixtures because Experimental Design 101 makes you want to isolate the effects. And when you do compounds one by one in series, the tendency is to always add them up from the individual experiments. Unfortunately, body chemistry is not like that. I’ve always wanted to design a study that started complex and then tried to isolate later.

To his surprise, Pomati observed that this mixture of drugs at environmental levels inhibited the growth of human embryonic kidney cells. After 48 hours of exposure, cell proliferation was reduced by 10–30% compared with controls. However, no inhibition was observed when cells were exposed to only the toxic cancer drug at environmental levels.

Well, that seems conclusive enough, but here comes the “Experimental Design 101” Scold:

The results show that the growth inhibition is not due to the single most cytotoxic compound alone. But that does not conclusively prove that synergistic or additive effects exist between drugs in the mixture, cautions Thomas Heberer of the Institute of Food Chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin. To show that the individual drugs behave additively, Heberer suggests that researchers should analyze the effects of compounds with a common mode of action, such as antibiotics, alone and in various mixtures.

No, No, and No. Doing this presupposes that you know that mechanism of action, meaning you’ve half answered your question. The question Heberer is trying to answer is “do individual drugs with the same mode of action behave additively”. The question Pomati is trying to answer is “Can we demonstrate cytotoxic effects of a cocktail of drugs at ambient levels in a laboratory setting”? These are two completely different questions and Pomati’s question is more valuable at this point in time. Heberer’s strategy, on the other hand, will keep a lab well funded for years to come! But, it is very much the final step.

It is more important at this point in time to demonstrate other effects such as endocrine disruption, mutagenicity, etc in the lab at environmentally relevant levels of mixtures. Then we can get a better handle on which  effects are relevant and which ones to ignore.

The utilization of solar energy on a large scale requires its storage. In natural photosynthesis, energy from sunlight is used to rearrange the bonds of water to O2 and H2-equivalents. The realization of artificial systems that perform similar “water splitting” requires catalysts that produce O2 from water without the need for excessive driving potentials. Here, we report such a catalyst that forms upon the oxidative polarization of an inert indium tin oxide electrode in phosphate-buffered water containing Co2+. A variety of analytical techniques indicates the presence of phosphate in an approximate 1:2 ratio with cobalt in this material. The pH dependence of the catalytic activity also implicates HPO42– as the proton acceptor in the O2-producing reaction. This catalyst not only forms in situ from earth-abundant materials but also operates in neutral water under ambient conditions.

In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co2+ — Kanan and Nocera, 10.1126/science.1162018 — Science

Don’t you just love the title of the paper? I would have titled the paper “Splitting Water for Cheap”. The author is interviewed here. This catalyst can split water into H2 and O2 using the energy from a solar cell. Then, when you need electricity, you recombine them in a fuel cell to make water and electricity. So, a closed loop with the only external input being the solar energy. Solar energy can now be stored almost painlessly.

It is so simple. I am listening to the interview and the author says this can be replicated in a chemistry lab as it only needs a phosphate buffer, cobalt electrode and a conducting glass.

Wonderful. Now, please stop building coal plants.

Tags: Environment, Solar energy

Well, I am not sure if the Clean Air Act has all the right tools to regulate CO₂, but the kind of vehicle-to-vehicle and plant-to-plant focus that the Clean Air Act brings could be a good starting point. If the court decides in favor of the states, and the EPA can get its rule making together, we can start seeing regulation in 5 years. I am not sure if this is early enough, and it is definitely insufficient. A “pollutant” as ubiquitous as CO₂ needs a a comprehensive national and global policy effort even bigger than the Montreal Protocol to be effective. Kyoto was meant to be a starting point, but is stalled at the moment.

Forcing motor vehicles to lower their emissions and increase efficiency is a no-brainer. If it takes the Clean Air Act to make this happen, I am all for it! But this will not really address the power plants that are the other huge contributor, most of the existing plants will be grandfathered in and as we know from previous experience, these grandaddies are bionic and immortal!

Any chance that the Supreme Court will find in favor of this addition? I don’t think so. I predict 6-3 for the government on this one.

Supreme Court to Hear Key Environment Case – New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court’s most important decisions on the environment. A dozen states, a number of cities and various environmental groups asked the court to take up the case after a divided lower court ruled against them. They argue that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to limit carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles under the federal Clean Air Act because as the primary ”greenhouse” gas causing a warming of the earth, carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

The biodiesel boom has a high environmental cost, however. Critics say it’s contributing to global warming. Tropical forests help remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Burning and clear-cutting not only eliminates one of the planet’s crucial air-filtration systems, the process also releases even more carbon dioxide into the air, in smoke or as gases released during the decomposition of forest waste. Annual clearing of Indonesia’s carbon-rich peatlands alone releases some 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases, according to a Greenpeace report. Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the U.S. and China, says the World Bank. “We liken what’s going on [in Indonesia] to pouring petrol on a fire,” says Martin Baker, a Hong Kong–based communications officer for Greenpeace International. “It’s completely ridiculous to produce green fuels from places like this.”

When Biofuel is Bad for the Environment – TIME

This just makes we want to jit my head against the wall. Tropical forests are some of the most efficient sinks of carbon, and countries that hold these sinks should be paid as well as countries that are sources of carbon. Yes, this means setting a realistic carbon pricing scheme that can eliminate this perverse incentive to destroy tropical rain forests so Western nations can claim to be environmentally friendly.

This is not a bribe, or an incentive, it is recognition of the fact that carbon sinks have a monetary value.

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Tags: biofuels, environment

Overall, the study estimates that fires in the contiguous United States and Alaska release about 290 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is the equivalent of 4 to 6 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning. But fires contribute a higher proportion of the potent greenhouse gas in several western and southeastern states, especially Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Arizona. Particularly large fires can release enormous pulses of carbon dioxide rapidly into the atmosphere.”A striking implication of very large wildfires is that a severe fire season lasting only one or two months can release as much carbon as the annual emissions from the entire transportation or energy sector of an individual state,” the authors write.

US Fires Release Large Amounts Of Carbon Dioxide

In a study that is sure to be seized upon by global warming refuseniks everywhere, it has been discovered that fires release CO2. Um, however you do it, if you burn 12 grams of carbon completely, you will get 44 grams of CO2 (as you probably learned in middle school chemistry).

I am glad this study was done, but it’s not news, and it is not a STRIKING IMPLICATION by any means. If you know the acreage of forest fires, and you have some estimation of biomass density, it’s trivial to come up with an estimate of CO2 emissions.

What forest fires also do is put a lot of fine particulates into the air, now that is truly hazardous for people in the vicinity and has much more STRIKING IMPLICATIONS on air quality.