There’s an element of tension pervading Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s Kurdish region. The police and military keep a tight watch on the city, and political demonstrations are common.

The American withdrawal from Iraq has stoked fears of a Kurdish uprising, and the government has stepped up its military presence in the regions bordering Iraq. Most recently, protests broke out in late December after 35 civilians were killed in a botched air strike near the Iraqi border.

Given the conflict, many Kurdish youth feel alienated from the rest of Turkey and they cannot easily escape the poverty of their surroundings, according to experts. But a basketball training program in the neighborhood of Baglar is offering just that.

Read More at Duetsche Welle

The report finds that there are relatively few baseline measurements of water quality in an aquifer before drilling begins to draw on for scientific analysis.

“Some states have revised regulations specifically for shale gas development; regulatory gaps remain in many states, including the areas of well casing and cementing, water withdrawal and usage, and waste storage and disposal,” states the report.

It also finds that hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a technique used to extract natural gas, is not directly responsible for contaminating groundwater with chemicals or methane.

Instead, the scientists laid the blame on accidents connected to gas development that are on the surface or just below, closer to water aquifers. These could include other aspects of drilling such as improper casing and cementings of well bores, spills of produced water, improper disposal and subsurface blowouts.

Their report echoes previous findings regarding groundwater contamination and natural gas extraction.

“The immediate concern with shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing was that fracking was several thousand feet below the surface,” Charles Groat at the university’s Energy Institute said in a video report. “We put chemicals in the groundwater that people drank that would be bad for your health. So people are very much opposed to hydraulic fracturing from that point of view.”

But fracturing itself — a process in which water, sand and chemicals are shot at shale at high pressures underground to cause fractures and release natural gas — does not lead to contamination of aquifers, said Groat. It takes place at about 8,000 feet below ground level, which is thousands of feet below typical municipal water aquifers.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways for fracturing fluids or flowback waters to get into groundwater supplies, and that brings us closer to the surface than where hydraulic fracturing takes place,” said Groat.

He acknowledged that for the layperson, fracturing can encompass all the activities related to natural gas development, not just the drilling process below ground. But it is important to make the distinction so regulators can focus on which part of the extraction process actually leads to contamination, he said.

The problem is the industry is moving at such a fast pace that it is difficult for science to keep up, he said. He then added that, on the positive side, the techniques of drilling also improve each day.

The study was funded entirely by the University of Texas. The researchers had initially sought industry funding but were unable to secure support due to demands industry made over the timeline and method of completion.

The report includes 450 pages of white papers from various experts and examines instances of contamination recorded in the Barnett, Marcellus and Haynesville shales. Its research agenda was designed in cooperation with the Environmental Defense Fund and Syracuse University. It is meant as a systematic review of existing scientific literature, though it is not peer reviewed.
Regulations

The study finds that in most places in America, no one keeps track of chemicals in groundwater before oil and gas drilling begins, making it difficult to get a read on how gas production changes the water.

It also finds that regulators ought to use more careful methods for analyzing and sampling water. A lack of scientific rigor can affect regulators’ ability to attribute pollution to specific causes.

Gas drilling is mostly regulated at the state level, and while some states are on track to developing regulations tailored to the industry, some are lax, according to the report.

Among some of its specific recommendations:

“States not having regulations for blasting in environmentally sensitive areas or for shot hole plugging during the shale gas exploration phase may want to consider adding these requirements.”

“States may also need to more uniformly require a plan for disposal of wastes (including drilling fluids, drill cuttings, and flowback and produced water) and to ensure that the methods of disposal (e.g., centralized facility, surface discharge with permit, discharge to POTW or injection well, land application) conforms with regulations and best practices.”

“States may need to update or put in place adequate regulations for disposal of wastes containing naturally-occurring radioactive material (NORM) — as for oil and gas operations in general.”

The report also calls for greater enforcement of the regulations: “Evaluation of state enforcement is hindered by several factors, including differing methods of collecting, organizing, and recording violations and enforcement actions; variances in the completeness of records; and responsiveness of agencies to information requests.”
Methane

The report also finds that methane in water wells in some shale gas areas such as the Marcellus can “most likely be linked to natural sources and likely was present before the onset of shale gas operations.”

Fears surrounding methane contamination were first highlighted to a national audience by the documentary “Gasland,” which showed a homeowner’s tap water catching on fire because of the presence of methane.

Subsequently, a study by Duke University researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that drinking water near Marcellus Shale gas wells was more likely to be contaminated with methane. People interpreted the study as evidence that the technique of hydraulic fracturing caused the contamination.

But scientists disputed this interpretation, saying the contamination was more likely the result of leaky gas well casings from three nearby wells rather than fracturing. They also pointed out that the study did not have data on the composition of groundwater in these wells before drilling began to get a comparison.

No one has so far studied the health effects of sustained exposure to low levels of methane.

Reporter Mike Soraghan contributed.

He was 42, a ranger in the nearby forest, and a tree branch fell on his head. Like funerals elsewhere in West Africa, the entire town is in exuberant mourning. There is plenty of cane juice (alcohol made of sugar cane) and beer to go around, courtesy of the Forestry Development Authority. Supplies were fetched from Greenville, the closest ‘city’, and everyone has been drinking heavily for the past few days.

Once the cans are empty, children pick them and pretend to be adults as they dance to high life music while swigging down invisible spirits.

Heavily armed officials from the immigration authority march through the town, keeping on their vests and boots and hats despite the heavy heat.

Goats for slaughter are paraded in front of officials who’ve turned up at the funeral. Men use the chance to ask for jobs, and the village football team dances in at a critical juncture to demand a football to play with.

Tears finally flow as the coffin is hoisted up on the shoulders of his friends and colleagues and left on the outskirts of the village. The next day, the man’s family shave their heads in a cleansing ritual.

Germany is still recovering from one of the world’s worst outbreaks of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli, which as of 18 June had sickened more than 3,200 people and caused 39 deaths¹. The unusually deadly bacteria moved undetected through the food supply from livestock to agriculture to the dinner table, and the response to the outbreak was branded slow and inefficient by physicians and scientists (see ‘Microbe outbreak panics Europe‘).

Now a group of health professionals assembled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has called for biosurveillance efforts in the United States and worldwide to be streamlined to help recognize and respond to threats quickly.

“We are trying to create an international immune system, a system that has the capacity to recognize abnormalities,” says Ian Lipkin, co-chair of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee (NBAS) and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York.

Read at Nature News

As she took a drag out of her pipe, she surveyed the scene from atop the building.  The Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn lay before her—multi-story brown housing with off-white blankets stuffed into rectangular window panes; gray cement roads filled with old model SUVs; the yard of a pipe-manufacturing plant; a metal salvage yard with a three-storey-tall pile of rusted hubcaps and the backbones of schoolroom chairs; black polythene bags caught in the barbed wire fences; faded graffiti on the walls; a memoriam to a young man named “Peanut Head”.

Her hair was tightly tied back and ended in a bunch of small blonde curls sticking up around the top of her head like a crown.  Her eyes were cyan-blue, big and glazed.  Her lashes were long—she had pretty eyes.  They helped her turn tricks in the primarily non-white neighborhood.  They got her attention from the cops—hefty white men who hung out two to a block on street corners.  When they saw an unkempt white girl walking down the street, they knew she was either an addict or a prostitute.

Amy was both.  She wanted to be so much more, but she didn’t know how.  She was stuck between her past, and the lack of a future.  Crack, and sometimes dope, and sometimes whatever she could get—angel dust, tranquilizers—helped her turn away from a past of sexual abuse she said she had suffered at the hands of her older brother in her middle-class duplex home in Vermont.

When the cops moved away, the dealers occupied the same corners—two or three outside La Crema Deli or the Dominican restaurant.  They knew her, too.

They knew she’ll “bust a head”—“bust head” is the new term for a “crack head because they will meaning service men for cheap—for $20 or a crack hit.  Especially when she was on a binge.  They tempted her.

“Hey, you want something?”

Sometimes, she ignored them, shouting, “Leave me alone.”

Most times, she took whatever drug or money was offered.  With her income she supported Eric Irizarry, 33 (or “Eddie Machete”), her boyfriend of seven years, and their landlord—a phantom-like man who shared his living space with them for $10 a day and whatever amount of crack she could give him.  She didn’t like sharing, but didn’t have much of a choice—it was better than being homeless.

She shared her crack pipe; she used to share her needles when she had done heroin.  She didn’t have HIV despite sharing a barely-sterilized needle with a HIV-positive man.

She sat at the edge of the roof, staring down, cocaine smoke rising around her. She had not been home in three days.  She was in the middle of a crack binge, selling her body to satisfy the cravings of her mind.

Four days ago, she hadn’t smoked crack for a few days in a row.  If she didn’t smoke in the morning, she’d be clean for the entire day.  But Eddie had become impatient for money.  The next day, he’d placed a crack pipe below her nose and woken her up.  She’d smelled the drug and had to smoke.  Then she’d left in search of highs bigger than the previous hit.

She knew she shouldn’t be with him, but she had nobody else.  And ultimately, using drugs was her choice. She dragged him down as well, tempting him when he tried to stay clean.  They dragged each other down.

Amy Keenan is one of approximately 2.1 million current users of cocaine aged 12 and older in America, and 8.5 million lifetime users in 2007, a number three times larger than the number of heroin injectors[1] [2].  Crack cocaine is widely available on the streets and is cheap.  Although its popularity among the younger generation has declined since the late 1980s, about 350,000 people aged 12 and older smoked it for the first time in 2007.[3] And research has revealed that consistent users of crack persist with their addiction for a decade or longer.[4]

[2] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies (2008). Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (NSDUH Series H-34, DHHS Publication No. SMA 08-4343). Rockville, MD: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nsduh/2k7nsduh/2k7Results.cfm#TOC

[3] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies (2008). Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (NSDUH Series H-34, DHHS Publication No. SMA 08-4343). Rockville, MD: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k7NSDUH/tabs/Sect8peTabs1to42.htm#Tab8.30A

[4] Falck, R. S., Wang, J., & Carlson, R. G. (2007). Crack cocaine trajectories among users in a midwestern American city . Addiction , 102, 1421-1431.

16. As agreed at the first Meeting of the Parties, each Party is expected to pay an annual subscription of €3,000.  To date only one Party has complied: the host of the Technical Committee meeting, the Government of Rwanda has paid for both 2009 and 2010.  Invoices were sent to Parties on March 17, 2010, and again on July 7, 2010. As a result of the non-payment by most Parties, the Gorilla Agreement and its activities have, to date, been funded entirely from contributions from donors.

17. The CMS Standing Committee, at its 37th meeting in November, 2010, expressed concern at the apparent lack of commitment shown by the Gorilla Agreement Parties, as evidenced by the non-payment of overdue contributions. They noted that this situation could be very discouraging to potential donors asked to contribute funds to an initiative to which the range states themselves had yet to demonstrate a firm commitment.  The Vice-chair of the Standing Committee sent a letter to all range states that same month, urging Parties to pay their contributions, and urging non-Parties to accede to the Agreement.

18. This meeting has been made possible by grants from Monaco and Germany, both of whom have also made funds available for past field activities.  UNEP/CMS Secretariat on behalf of the Parties to the Gorilla Agreement thanks these donors and specifically looks to Governments and organizations to further sponsor and promote such activities aimed at
implementing the Agreement’s Action Plans

19. The UNEP/CMS Secretariat continues to encourage Parties to pay their contributions as soon as possible.

Flickr photo courtesy __Wichid__

A study published today in Nature Geoscience¹ suggests that one trigger for the near-apocalyptic ‘great die-off’, which killed 96% of marine species and 70% of land-based vertebrate organisms, was a volcanic explosion in coal and shale deposits in Siberia. Within days, ash from the eruption, raining down onto the Canadian Arctic, sucked oxygen from the water and released toxic elements.

Read at Nature News

Monoclonal antibodies light up rat tissue culture

I wrote about the cancer drug ipilimumab last year, which has been hailed as miraculous by some. The drug has been through Phase 3 clinical trials and results will be presented on June 6 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Meanwhile, following announcements of the miracle cure in three men having prostate cancer, ipilimumab has also been show to be modestly effect against lung cancer, according to the company.

Ipilimumab works by targeting an inhibitor of the immune system called CTLA-4 (cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen 4) and subsequently boosting the response of the killer T-cells. It belongs to the highly promising monoclonal antibody field of therapeutics.

Quote from a press release sounds like the company is excited:

“We are excited by the potential of immuno-oncology, an entirely new paradigm in the treatment of multiple types of cancer in which a patient’s own immune system is activated to fight cancer cells,” said Elliott Sigal, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president, chief scientific officer and president, Research and Development, Bristol-Myers Squibb.

“We are leading the way with ipilimumab, the most advanced investigational compound in our immuno-oncology portfolio, in testing this new paradigm and we look forward to presenting results from the ipilimumab clinical development program at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting.”

But while the promise of the basic science is cool, it’ll be difficult to draw conclusions about the real-world application of the drug until the results are formally presented and peer reviewed.

Identification and Biochemical Studies on Novel Non-Nucleoside Inhibitors of the Enzyme Adenosine Kinase

Authored by Jae Park, Gayathri Vaidyanathan, Bhag Singh & Radhey Gupta

Department of Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University

Adenosine Kinase is an enzyme that adds a phosphate to adenosine.

Adenosine is one of four bases in DNA, and when it has three phosphates attached, becomes the energy currency of the cell, called ATP.