A Different Kind of Powerball

Last year, during the Biden administration, the EPA concluded that there is no safe amount of PFOA or PFOS and, for the first time, issued final rules for limiting the amount of two compounds. The agency also established standards for three other PFAS chemicals and restricted mixtures for some of them. The pollutants are in the drinking water of nearly half of all Americans. Water utilities are required to monitor the chemicals and to be transparent with the public about complying with the new regulations.

Last week, the Trump administration announced it will attempt to end some of the limits and extend compliance with others by two years until 2031. Water suppliers and the chemical industry were supportive of the administration.

There are legal problems with the EPA’s intention to undo the restrictions. First, the agency would have to show that there is evidence that the chemicals are safe—despite many studies showing they aren’t.  Second, as FastCompany reports, the agency cannot extend the deadline for water utilities to comply because the Safe Drinking Water Act allows, at most, five years for compliance.

The compounds have been used for decades in many household products like stain-resistant fabrics and carpeting, as well as nonstick cookware. They have also been used in firefighting foam and semiconductors. The chemicals don’t break down in the environment for a very long time. Low levels of PFAS are linked to many health issues including cancers and harm to the nervous system and reproductive organs. 

The spheres are part of a system called StEnSea (Stored Energy in the Sea) developed by the German Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology. The system works by opening a valve in the sphere to let seawater rush in, which given the high pressure on the seafloor drives a turbine to generate electricity. After the water fills the sphere, it can be pumped out using surplus renewable power from the grid, emptying and recharging the sphere for use when it is needed again.

The Institute plans to install a prototype off Long Beach, California, by the end of next year. They have already tested a smaller version in Europe and hope to be able to utilize a sphere that is about 100 feet in diameter.

The system is similar to pumped storage hydropower on land, where there are two reservoirs, one higher than the other. Water is released to the lower pool generating electricity as it falls. It’s then pumped back to the upper reservoir when excess renewable power is generated and not in high demand.

The company says its ocean storage system has an advantage over pumped hydro because it doesn’t take up land.

New research from Scripps Institution of Oceanography is offering hope by creating a scent that “smells like home” to baby corals, which will help them find a place to live and thrive.

Many corals reproduce through a remarkable phenomenon called “broadcast spawning,” where over days or weeks, male and female reproductive cells merge to form larvae. These larvae then float with the currents before eventually finding a hard surface to latch onto. Guiding them to a suitable neighborhood are chemical signals in the water released by algae. If the larvae don’t get a whiff of the right scent, they’ll just keep on drifting. The problem is that degraded reefs can’t release enough of the attractive smells and sometimes have algae with scents that turn baby corals off.

To solve this problem, the Scripps team developed a gel that releases some of coral larvae’s favorite “scents.” Samapti Kundu, a materials scientist involved in the work, told H2O Radio that the gel, called SNAP-X, was made from crustose coralline algae collected at a healthy reef in Hawai’i. When the gel was applied to substrates in lab experiments, it increased coral larvae settlement by up to 20 times compared to untreated surfaces.

Kundu said SNAP-X has the potential to help save reefs because it is like an extended-release drug that dispenses the attractive chemicals over time and for up to a month. They plan to test SNAP-X on an artificial reef during a spawning event this summer to see if larvae find it alluring.

The research, published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, was conducted with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Reefense program, which seeks to develop self-healing, hybrid biological, and engineered reef-mimicking structures to protect coastlines and safeguard fisheries.

It didn’t. Instead, in a study done in 2023, they found that wrinkles were caused by blood vessels contracting beneath the skin. But that wasn’t the end of the story. When they wrote about their research on the nonprofit news website The Conversation, a curious kid asked, “Do the wrinkles create the same pattern every time?”

That stumped the Binghamton team, so they investigated more, and, in a paper out last week, they say that, why yes, they do form the same pattern! As ScienceAlert explains, it’s because when water seeps into sweat ducts in our skin, it decreases the concentration of salt in the outer layer. Nerve fibers sense the change and trigger blood vessels to shrink, dragging our skin down with them. The authors say the reason the pattern stays the same is because blood vessels don’t change their position much on our hands.

During their research, the team also made an interesting discovery. They learned that people who have median nerve damage don’t develop wrinkles on their fingers. For the rest of us, the wrinkled response serves a purpose. It creates a more textured surface to grip objects or in the case of our feet, a way to walk safely on slippery ground.

While the study was conducted to answer a child’s simple question, the findings could have important implications for forensics, particularly in identifying fingerprints at crime scenes or bodies found underwater.

The study was published in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials.