Power of Shunya - Times Now, India

Nualgi is featured on The Power of Shunya program on Times Now channel, a promo is available on Youtube - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruyNfDv96ZY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

The program will be aired on Times Now on November 16th, Saturday at 5.30 pm and November 17th, Sunday at 9.30 am and 6.30 pm.

We will post the link to the full video when it becomes available on Times Now website - 

http://www.powerofshunya.com/ 

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How can diatom technology clean up our water bodies and provide a lifeline for marine life? #ShunyaSolutions

Toxic algae out break in 2013 fooled U.S. experts

http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2013/11/09/Toxic-algae-out-break-in-2013-fooled-U-S-experts.html

Toxic algae out break in 2013 fooled U.S. experts

Western Lake Erie’s 2013 toxic algae outbreak was worse than expected, fooling the most advanced scientific prediction model the federal government has developed and covering more of the lake’s open water than any of the recent outbreaks except the 2011 record.

The University of Toledo’s top algae researcher, Tom Bridgeman, an associate professor of environmental science and a researcher at UT’s Lake Erie Center, presented a graphic that reflected that information at the UT College of Law’s 13th annual Great Lakes water-law conference on Friday.

The graphic showed this year’s bloom — while not a record-setter — went well beyond the Lake Erie islands and fanned out across more of the lake than expected. It didn’t get past Cleveland and penetrate the lake’s central basin as did the 2011 outbreak.

“The 2013 bloom was second only to 2011 in the open water,” Mr. Bridgeman told nearly 300 people who attended the seminar.

Another noteworthy feature of this year’s bloom: It was so dense along Lake Erie’s southern shoreline that a lot of it spent extended time underneath the water instead of on its surface.

High winds mixed it deep into the water. The lake’s predominant form of toxic algae, microcystis, tends to bubble up and float to the surface as it releases gases. But the mat was so thick that the weight of it kept a lot of the algae deep under water, Mr. Bridgeman said.

That helps explain why the water-treatment plant in Ottawa County’s Carroll Township, which serves 2,000 people, became so overwhelmed by the algae’s toxin, microcystin, that superintendent Henry Biggert took the unprecedented action of shutting it down. Mr. Biggert had service switched over temporarily in September to the system that serves the Port Clinton area.

That was the first time in Ohio history that a Lake Erie water-treatment plant was taken offline because of algae.

The Toledo water-treatment plant, northwest Ohio’s largest and most sophisticated, was able to neutralize the algae. But plant operators there also noticed higher-than-normal spikes and ended up getting $1 million more in emergency funds from Toledo City Council to ward off the threat.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, using a newly developed scientific model, accurately predicted the 2013 bloom would be “significant,” but did not anticipate it being as bad as it was.

“They got close, but they underestimated what the bloom actually was,” Mr. Bridgeman said.

In a 110-page report planned for release later this month, a state task force trying to reduce western Lake Erie’s toxic algae will call for a 40 percent reduction in all forms of phosphorus entering northwest Ohio waterways.

The Ohio Phosphorus Task Force’s report, an update to its initial 2010 study, could affect farmers, sewage plant operators, large land-based businesses such as golf courses, and homeowners — anyone who uses or manages large amounts of fertilizers.

State and federal legislators are expected to use the task force recommendations when deciding whether to expand existing laws or adopt new ones.

Efforts could include a stronger focus on mixing nutrients in farm soil to reduce agricultural runoff into waterways, tighter controls on animal manure — including a ban on winter application — and an effort to fix sewage overflows faster.

The recommendations have been anticipated for months. They were made public by Mr. Bridgeman at the conference.

Mr. Bridgeman said the state task force chairman, Ohio Lake Erie Commission Executive Director Gail Hesse, gave him permission to release an excerpt of the report.

The seminar included discussions of similar algae problems in other parts of America, such as Florida, the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Cheasapeake Bay.

“In Florida, we focus on the public-health threat,” said Monica Reimer, a Tallahassee lawyer employed by Earthjustice, one of the nation’s largest environmental law groups. “It’s not good enough to say fish are dead. Algae’s a public health threat.”

She said dozens of manatees died in the state in 2013 because they ingested toxic algae.

Emily Collins, an Ohio native who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, likened the Cheasapeake Bay’s ecology to that of the Great Lakes.

She said people don’t realize how long it can take a system to recover once it’s been fouled: The full benefit of a 2009 executive order to clean the Cheasapeake, signed by President Obama shortly after he entered the White House, could take 20 to 40 years beyond the target date of 2025 for many of the pollution controls, Ms. Collins said.

Former Ohio Environmental Protection Agency Director Chris Korleski, who leads the U.S. EPA’s Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago, was the keynote speaker. He said the task of restoring the Great Lakes will take decades, even with $1.3 billion allocated under the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative since 2010 to address issues such as algae and other forms of pollution, as well as invasive species.

Climate change complicates restoration efforts, Mr. Korleski said, noting that scientists now believe the greatest factor for algae is the amount of rain that falls between March 1 and June 30.

“Storms don’t feel like they did when I was a kid. They just don’t. And I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” Mr. Korleski said.

“My prediction,” he added, “is we will continue to wrestle with this [algae] issue, we will continue to talk, and — over time — we will make progress.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24508-skeletal-chains-could-help-algae-deliver-drugs.html#.UnUUNHCL9Xs

Skeletal chains could help algae deliver drugs

Skeletons of single-celled algae have been modified while they are still alive to incorporate molecular chains that can harness chemical cargo. The algal bodies are then dissolved away so that their remains can be used to deliver drugs or clean up contaminated water.

The microscopic algae known as diatoms are supported by skeletons made of silica that are about 10 micrometres across. Each species grows intricate innards that yield a range of shapes, from barrels to stars and doughnuts. Tiny folds and crevices give diatom skeletons a much larger surface area than simple spheres or other nanoscale capsules, making them an ideal choice for drug delivery.

Previous work created artificial casts of the skeletons, usually made from biodegradable polymers, by coating the skeleton and then washing away the biological components. But modifying these casts to reliably carry drugs and other molecules has been a challenge, because the method requires harsh organic solvents applied in completely dry conditions that can be costly and time consuming to use. Now Abhay Pandit of the National University of Ireland, Galway, and his colleagues have found a way to make living diatoms incorporate thiols – sulphur-bearing molecular chains – directly into their skeletons as they grow, meaning their casts can carry drugs without having to be treated first.

"This is the first piece of a big puzzle to functionalise diatoms without disturbing the design of their intricate architecture in a substantial way," says Pandit.

Purifying algae

The team grew the diatom species Thalassiosira weissflogii in a nutrient-rich solution at room temperature and exposed it to a light-dark cycle that mimicked a natural day. They added thiol compounds to the growth solution multiple times over eight days, which allowed the algae to take up the molecules as they grew. Thiol-rich diatoms were then treated to make polymer casts. The chains remained attached to the casts even after the rest of the diatom's structure was dissolved away.

Molecular cargo such as drugs could be attached to the chains hanging from the cast's inner wall or outer surface. This would help deliver substances to parts of the body in medical treatments, says Pandit. Thiol chains can also bind with heavy metals so, in future, diatoms with more porous structures could be used for nanoscale water purification, he says.

Nils Kröger at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany is not convinced that modifying live diatoms will prove to be more efficient than growing thiols on casts of their skeletons. But he thinks figuring out the best approach will lead to myriad applications for chain-wielding diatoms.

"Having thiols exposed on the surface of diatoms opens the doors for introducing a host of biomolecules including enzymes, receptors and drugs," he says.

Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3683

A crash course in septic systems and how they’re damaging the environment

http://alldownstream.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/a-crash-course-in-septic-systems-and-how-they%E2%80%99re-damaging-the-environment/#comment-83

A crash course in septic systems and how they’re damaging the environment

Conclusions

Even if you have a septic system in your backyard, your waste ends up in the same place as everybody else’s.  The key difference is that waste flowing to a wastewater treatment plant is more likely to be treated using biological nutrient removal (BNR) technology that dramatically reduces the amount of nitrogen before discharging into a receiving waterbody (source).  Your local wastewater treatment plant is also more likely to be routinely inspected and maintained than your neighbor’s septic system because there are laws that require it.

As for Governor O’Malley’s proposed ban on septic systems in new large housing developments, he’s facing some stern opposition from rural counties and building associations.  Prospectors who have been holding on to agricultural land in the hope of one day selling it to a developer for big bucks are waking up to find their ship may have already sailed.  New residential developments in the middle of nowhere aren’t possible without septic systems.  New growth may actually be focused in existing service districts, otherwise known as Maryland’s Smart Growth areas.  I thought it was funny today when a woman on WYPR (local NPR affiliate) referred to Smart Growth as something the state tried 15 years ago.  Actually, we’ve been trying it every year since; it’s just experienced very marginal success.  A septic system ban would be a huge step in the right direction.

http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2013/10/14/40000-oysters-grow-in-baltimore-harbor.html?page=all

Nearly 40,000 oysters to grow in Baltimore's Inner Harbor

The Inner Harbor waters will soon be home to 37,500 new residents — baby oysters.

The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore is teaming up with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to plant five oyster gardens around the Inner Harbor on Tuesday. It’s another step in the Healthy Harbor initiative, the Waterfront Partnership’s mission to make Baltimore’s harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020.

“If we had a clean Chesapeake Bay we wouldn’t have to do any of this stuff,” saidAdam Lindquist, the Healthy Harbor coordinator for the Waterfront Partnership.

The gardens will be located at five points around the Inner Harbor: near the Rusty Scupper restaurant; near the Lightship “Chesapeake,” between Piers III and IV; between Piers IV and V; and in Fells Point.

The 75 oyster cages in the gardens will each hold 500 baby oysters, which will help clean the water as they mature over the next nine months. After they reach adulthood in June 2014, the oysters will be transported to the Fort Carroll Oyster Sanctuary.

The project costs about $15,000 per year for the materials and use of the Snow Goose, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s boat used to transport the oysters. The cost doesn’t include volunteer hours to maintain the gardens, Lindquist said. A grant from the Abell Foundation will help fund the initiative.

About 12 volunteers each from Brown Advisory, Legg Mason, BGE/Constellation Energy and T. Rowe Price, as well as students from Digital Harbor High School and the Green School of Baltimore, will be responsible for maintaining the oyster cages. That requires pulling them to the surface once a month to scrub off any barnacles, mussels or microorganisms.

If the program is successful, Lindquist said he hopes to repeat it next year with new oysters.

Oysters are filter feeders, meaning they clean the water as they feed on the algae that suffocates aquatic life. The Chesapeake Bay once had enough oysters to filter the entire volume of the bay in three days; today’s oyster population is only 1 percent of historical levels.

But oysters alone can’t clean the Inner Harbor. Stormwater runoff polluted with excess nutrients is the root cause of the harbor’s algae blooms, so Lindquist said the Waterfront Partnership will continue to focus on other measures outside the oyster program to get the harbor to a swimmable, fishable state.

“Oysters are not the only solution,” Lindquist said. “It’s just one more thing we can do to help restore the ecosystem, but really the harbor is just a reflection of the health of our neighborhoods.

http://michiganradio.org/post/mystery-bottom-great-lakes-food-web

A mystery at the bottom of the Great Lakes food web

There’s a mystery at the very bottom of the Great Lakes food web.

Phytoplankton – the algae that are food for plankton which in turn feed fish – are behaving strangely. They’re surrounded by a nutrient they need to grow. But for some reason, they’re not using it.

The puzzle has big implications for how scientists think about the Great Lakes’ future in a warming world.

Tiny creatures

It’s a crisp sunny morning on the St. Lawrence River. All of the Great Lakes’ water flows through here on its way to the ocean.

Michael Twiss is leaning over the edge of his research boat, his face just a couple inches from the water’s surface. He swishes the water like he’s sniffing fine wine.

“Yup, there’s a fall bloom going on, because we’re at the end of the summer.”

DAVID: “That’s those little sparkly crystals in the water?”

“Yes, that’s what you’re seeing right there. Those are algae.”

Twiss is a limnologist at Clarkson University. He studies algae like this – the bottom of the food web that sustains the Great Lakes’ fishery.

The algae – also called phytoplankton – like to eat nitrate – nitrogen plus oxygen. In all of Great Lakes, there’s loads of nitrate. But get this. Twiss says they’re not eating it.

"The mystery is akin to being at a free smorgasbord and ordering out for pizza. You're going to have to wait longer to get your food, and you're going to have to pay for it."

“The mystery is akin to being at a free smorgasbord and ordering out for pizza. You’re going to have to wait longer to get your food, and you’re going to have to pay for it. So why aren’t they using this nutrient that’s available to them?”

Why should we care what the critters eat?

There are two reasons why this matters. First, if they ate more nitrate, they’d grow and become more food for fish.

Second, the algae would also eat more carbon from the atmosphere, just like trees do through photosynthesis.

“These lakes, which hold 20% of the world’s fresh water, play an important role in sequestering carbon and taking it out of the atmosphere and into the bottom of the lakes. That’s a natural process.”

In fact, the Great Lakes do a better job proportionally at sucking up carbon than the ocean does.

So, if only we could get those phytoplankton to eat more nitrate, we’d have more fish and we’d alleviate climate change at the same time, right?

Not so fast. Climate change cuts both ways.

Andy Bramburger is a researcher at the St. Lawrence River Institute in Cornwall, Ontario. He says the warmer climate is changing the kind of algae in the Lakes – from the kind that’s good for fish to the kind that causes toxic algal blooms and kills fish.

“With climate change and with these fluctuations in temperatures, and the rapid warming we’ve been seeing in the early parts of the spring and summer in recent years, we are tipping the balance in favor of algae that are not favorable to our use of waterways,” he says.

The detective cracks the case... a little

Michael Twiss recently made a tiny breakthrough in the phytoplankton mystery. Phytoplankton also need trace metals to eat the nitrate. So when he sprinkled the trace metal molybdenum into water samples – poof – the algae feasted like it was a smorgasbord.

Twiss’ hypothesis is that invasive species like zebra mussels have sucked too many metals and other nutrients out of the water. Twiss says it may be a new paradigm.

“A shift in the way the ecosystem is operating, and it’s up to us to understand how it operates so we can predict what will happen in the future, and so we can manage for change, particularly climate change.”

To protect our clean waters, our fishery, and our relationship with the Great Lakes in the face of climate change, scientists will have to puzzle out the mysteries at the bottom of the food web."

-------------------------------

We have understood the food web and invented a Nano Silica based micro nutrient product to grow Diatom Algae in large lakes.

http://www.livescience.com/39787-super-eruption-seeded-sky-diatoms.html

Super-Eruption Launched Algae Army Into the Sky

Slimy brown algae not only survived a wild ride into the stratosphere via a volcanic ash cloud, they landed on distant islands looking flawless, a new study finds.

"There's a crazy contrast between these delicate, glass-shelled organisms and one of the most powerful eruptions in Earth's history," said lead study author Alexa Van Eaton, a postdoctoral scholar at both the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington and Arizona State University.

The diatoms were launched by the Taupo super-eruption on New Zealand's North Island 25,000 years ago. More than 600 million cubic meters (20 billion cubic feet) of diatoms from a lake flew into the air, Van Eaton reported Sept. 6 in the journal Geology. Lumped together, the microscopic cells speckled throughout Taupo's ash layers would make a pile as big as Hawaii's famed Diamond Head volcanic cone.

Some diatoms drifted as far as the Chatham Islands, 525 miles (850 kilometers) east of New Zealand. "They just hitched a ride," Van Eaton said. The pristine shells in the Chatham Island ash suggest diatoms could infect new niches by coasting on atmospheric currents.

"If they made it there alive, this is one way microorganisms can travel and meet each other," Van Eaton told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "We know that ash from smaller events easily travels around the world." [5 Colossal Cones: Biggest Volcanoes on Earth]

World domination, cell by cell

Diatoms, a golden brown algae, rule Earth's waterways. From Antarctica's glacial lakes to acidic hot springs to unkempt home aquariums, diatoms are everywhere. It's a good thing. The tiny creatures pump out up to 50 percent of the planet's oxygen, said Edward Theriot, a diatom expert and evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study.

The algae look like little petri dishes or footballs,depending on the species, and spend most of their lives drifting on currents. How diatoms manage to colonize new homes remains a mystery: They can't swim.

Yet diatoms get around. When Wyoming's Yellowstone Lake emerged from its mile-thick ice cover 14,000 years ago, diatoms quickly arrived, Theriot said. "They had to be blown in by some mechanism or carried in by water birds," he added.

Diatoms particularly love volcanic lakes, because they are the only creatures that build shells of glass. (Glass sponges, for instance, produce a skeleton of glass spicules — tiny spike-like structures — but not a hard shell.) Silica-rich magma often causes the volcanic explosions that leave behind lake-filled craters, and silica is the key ingredient in diatom shells. Yellowstone Lake, which sits in a caldera created by a super-eruption, contains so many diatoms that the lake sediments are mostly shells (85 percent by weight), Theriot said.

Now scientists know what happens to diatoms when a massive volcanolike Yellowstone blasts through a big lake.

Immaculate preservation

The Taupo Volcano super-eruption slammed through a deep lake that filled a rift valley, similar to the elongated lakes in East Africa. The combination of water and ash created a hellish dirty thunderstorm, with towering clouds and roaring winds. The detonation flung ash and algae upward at more than 250 mph (400 km/h), Van Eaton said. Volcanic hail (called accretionary lapilli) pelted the landscape for miles.

Van Eaton discovered the diatoms while examining the volcanic hail with a scanning electron microscope.

"The first time I ever saw them I was looking at these volcanic ashaggregates and, bam, these gorgeous little symmetrical shells were there," she said. "Their shells are immaculately preserved."

Van Eaton soon determined that one of the three diatom species entombed in the ash only lives on the North Island of New Zealand. This meant she could track the 25,000-year-old ash layers around the South Pacific with a unique biologic marker. The unique North Island diatoms turned up in a few inches of ash on the Chatham Islands. The diatoms' trip to the Chatham Islands took longer than it looks on a map. The prevailing winds blew west at the time, so the shells circled the Southern Hemisphere before landing on the islands, Van Eaton and her colleagues think.

Some of the diatoms even kept their color, both in ash close to the volcano and at the Chatham Islands. The color suggests they weren't cooked to extreme temperatures in the volcanic eruption, Van Eaton said.

Spores infect the sky

But even though the Taupo diatom shells are pristine, Theriot is doubtful any diatoms lived through the eruptions. Instead, he suspects diatom resting spores could travel the atmospheric currents, dropping out and colonizing new ecosystems. Diatoms fashion spores to ride out inhospitable changes in their environment. Two years ago, Danish researchers revived 100-year-old resting spores from muck in a local fjord. Resting spores have been found in clouds. The eruption could have launched spores from the lake bottom into the atmosphere, Theriot said.

"I and many others have joked about Yellowstone blowing up again and dispersing the diatomite that is being created at the bottom of Yellowstone Lake," Theriot said. "This is the most thoroughly studied and best documented example of this phenomenon, and so it really says maybe we can add volcanoes to the list of possibilities [of how diatoms spread]. And volcanoes would be particularly effective." [Infographic: The Geology of Yellowstone]

Van Eaton hopes the discovery will prompt other scientists to search for microscopic life in "wet eruptions," where magma hit water.

"This is potentially another tool to pinpoint where ash deposits come from," Van Eaton said. "If the work is done to characterize the kinds of microbes that are unique to an area, then it could give you a biogenic fingerprint for your eruption deposits. This has likely been going on in modern eruptions, but no one has taken the time to look for them."

Ash travels hundreds of miles, but once it's far from its source, linking a few inches of glass back to a single volcano becomes difficult, particularly in regions like the South Pacific, where volcanoes pop off all the time.

But Theriot is skeptical that diatoms will prove to be a useful tool for tracking volcanic ash. Diatoms are so global that endemic species — known only to one place — are hard to find, he said. "If you found diatoms in ash deposits in a bog in Ohio, you would have no idea if it was from Yellowstone or from that bog," Theriot said. "It would take a really extraordinary set of circumstances, like this New Zealand [diatom] that is clearly out of place, to be convincing that the diatoms had blown in with the ash."