Day: June 6, 2019

A deep-sea fish can hide its enormous, jutting teeth from prey because its chompers are virtually invisible – until it’s too late.

What’s the dragonfish’s secret? The teeth are transparent, and now scientists have discovered how the fish accomplished that trick. 

Findings were published Wednesday in the journal Matter.

The dragonfish is a small predator with jagged, needle-like teeth protruding from a jaw that can extend to bite into prey up to half its body size.

“They look like monsters,” said Marc Meyers of the University of California, San Diego. “But they’re mini monsters” – about as long as a pencil.

Despite their short stature, these fish are at the top of the food chain in their deep-ocean realm where it’s almost pitch black. 

To find food or mates, many animals carry bacteria that generate blue or red light. That’s called bioluminescence.

Using microscopes, Meyers and his research team examined the teeth of dragonfish they had dredged up from about a third of a mile (500 meters) underwater off the coast of San Diego. 

Dragonfish teeth are made of the same materials as human teeth – a protective layer of enamel on the surface and a tough, deeper layer of dentin. But the minerals have a much finer microscopic structure that is organized more haphazardly. 

“That was very surprising to us,” Meyers said. 

The result is that light in the environment or from bioluminescence- even from dragonfish themselves – doesn’t reflect off the teeth. Instead, most light passes through the teeth so they’re almost completely concealed. 

This, the researchers believe, makes the dragonfish a stealthier hunter.

Transparent teeth could be a common strategy among deep-sea predators, said Christopher Kenaley, a fish biologist at Boston College who wasn’t part of the study, noting that some other fish share this feature.

Among the most well-known of the others are anglerfish, stubby creatures that wave a glowing rod-like growth from their heads to lure prey.

Nobody has actually seen dragonfish feed in the wild, but the researchers make a good case that these transparent teeth are an evolutionary adaptation for hunting in the deep sea, Kenaley said.
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Kenyan farmer Abel Mutie Mathoka thought it must be a joke when he was told he could irrigate his drought-hit crops more cheaply, cleanly and efficiently using a pump fueled by cotton waste.

“Who could believe it’s possible to make a fuel better than diesel from cotton seeds? I didn’t!” laughed Mathoka, crouching down to inspect the watermelons on his 10-acre (four-hectare) shared plot in Ituri village in Kenya’s southeast Kitui county.

“But it works,” he said, walking over to a nearby tree and plucking a large green pawpaw. “Irrigation with this biodiesel water pump has helped me get higher yields, especially during drought periods.”

Mathoka said his earnings had doubled in the two years he has been pumping water using biodiesel, which is both more efficient and 20 shillings ($0.20) per liter cheaper than regular diesel.

Good for farmer and planet

The biodiesel he is using is not just good news for him, it is also good news for the planet.

Unlike most biofuels, which are derived from crops such as maize, sugarcane, soybean, rapeseed and jatropha, it is made from a byproduct of the cotton-making process.

That means that as well as being cleaner and cheaper than regular fuel, it is more sustainable than other biofuels because no extra land is needed to produce it.

From Brazil to Indonesia, the rush to cultivate biofuel crops has driven forest communities off their land and pushed farmers to switch from crops-for-food to more profitable crops-for-fuel, exacerbating food shortages.

“Our biodiesel comes from crushing cotton seeds left over as waste after ginning — the process of separating the seeds from raw cotton,” said Taher Zavery, managing director of Zaynagro Industries Ltd, the Kitui-based company producing the biodiesel.

“We started producing and using it to power our cotton ginning factory in 2011. With increased production, we now use it for our trucks, sell it to the United Nations to run some of their buses, and also to local farmers for irrigation.”

More than 1,200 farmers in Kitui have so far invested in biodiesel pumps for irrigation as part of an initiative launched by Zaynagro in 2015, said Zavery.

Dry riverbeds

Climate change is taking a toll across east Africa and increasingly erratic weather is becoming commonplace in countries such as Kenya, Somalia, Uganda and Ethiopia, resulting in lower rainfall.

The recurring dry spells are destroying crops and pastures and are starving animals, pushing millions of people in the Horn of Africa to the brink of extreme hunger.

The number of Kenyans in need of food aid in March surged by almost 70% over a period of eight months to 1.1 million, largely because of poor rains, according to government figures.

With almost half Kenya’s 47 counties declared to have a serious shortage of rain, humanitarian agencies are warning of increased hunger in the months ahead.

“Only light rainfall is forecast through June … and this is not expected to alleviate drought in affected areas of Kenya and Somalia,” said the Famine Early Warning Systems Network in its latest report. “Well-below-average crop production, poor livestock body conditions, and increased local food prices are anticipated, which will reduce poor households’ access to food.”

In Kitui’s Kyuso area, the signs are already evident.

Rivers, water pans and dams are drying up as a result of the prolonged dry spell.

Villagers complain of trekking longer distances, sometimes more than 10 km (6 miles), with their donkeys laden with empty jerry cans in search of water.

Small-scale farmers, most of whom are dependent on rain-fed agriculture, discuss plans to sell their goats to make ends meet if the harvest is poor.

Battling drought with biodiesel

But not all Kitui’s farmers are worried.

A small but growing number are shedding their burden of reliance on the weather and investing in irrigation systems powered by Zaynagro’s cotton seed biodiesel through a pay-as-you-go scheme launched more than three years ago.

Neighboring farmers band together to invest in the irrigation system, which includes the biodiesel pump, 12 meters of pipes and 10 liters of biodiesel, at costs starting from 32,000 shillings, depending on the size of the pump.

The farmers make an initial payment, then pay interest-free monthly installments until the total is paid off. They buy the biodiesel to run the pumps from Zaynagro at 80 shillings a liter.

Farmer Alex Babu Kitheka, 39, said the biodiesel pump allowed him to irrigate a larger portion of his 1-acre plot, where he grows a variety of vegetables including maize, tomatoes, spinach and sweet potatoes.

“With a diesel pump, maize yields were lower and I would get 15,000 shillings in three months. With the biodiesel pump, I can earn 45,000 shillings,” said Alex Babu Kitheka, standing near his plot in Ilangilo village, 40 km (25 miles) from Kitui town.

Circular economy

Other farmers point to the scheme as a major benefit in helping improve their output.

“The installment scheme is good. Most farmers don’t have the money and cannot easily get a loan to buy a pump like this,” said Maurice Kitheka Munyoki, 41, as he stood next to his blue biodiesel pump. “Having a scheme like this helps us a lot. Our yields are good, which means we can pay off the cost of the pump slowly in small amounts, and have money left over to pay the school fees.”

Zaynagro’s initiative is still in its early stages, with few farmers having repaid the full cost of the pumps.

But such biofuel schemes are promising because they create a circular economy by turning waste to biofuel for profit, said Sanjoy Sanyal, senior associate for Clean Energy Finance at the World Resources Institute.

The simplicity of the model — easy-to-use, robust technology, assured supply of biodiesel combined with a pay-as-you-go scheme — could help electrify rural Africa, he said.

“There is a mosaic of sustainable energy options in the world. The key issue is testing ideas and approaches in a collaborative fashion,” Sanyal said.

“Other cotton ginning factories in the region should try and learn from this experiment. Financial institutions should start experimenting with loans to groups of farmers. International donors and investors need to support experimentation.”
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As if life was not bad enough for Adnan Kadhim – he lives in a slum where municipal authorities dump Baghdad’s rubbish – now someone is setting the waste on fire, making his children sick.

As the United Nations marks World Environment Day on Wednesday, Iraq is suffering a pollution crisis, with trash piling up across the country and thick clouds of smoke produced by inefficient factories hovering above Baghdad.

“The dirt, our children are sick, our families are sick. My daughter has asthma, and I had to take my family to the hospital last night. We had to go at 2 am to give her oxygen. What have we done wrong to deserve this?” asks the 48-year-old, with mountains of rubbish behind him.

No one in his unplanned neighborhood within Baghdad’s southeastern Zaafaraniya district knows who is setting the rubbish on fire, and their complaints to government and municipal authorities have fallen on deaf ears because they are technically not supposed to be living in the area.

“For about a week or ten days now we haven’t been able to sleep or work. We just sitting around because of this smoke, said Jabbar, a builder.

“Every day, it starts at sunset and doesn’t stop until the morning. You can see the tractors (shoveling trash) in front of you. We are being destroyed. We implored the government, and no one did anything, we went to the municipality and still nothing,” he added.

Officials say Iraq suffers from the lack of a formal waste management system, but that they are working on introducing one which they hope will alleviate the country’s numerous environmental hazards which also include pollution from oil production – Iraq is OPEC’s second-largest producer of crude oil – and other industries.

“I am sorry to say there are no hygienic official landfills. All what we have are unorganized areas for waste collection,” said Deputy Environment Minister Jassim Humadi. “We are working hard today to issue legislation establishing the National Center for Waste Management.”

Increasing pollution rates and other “environmental challenges” could be linked to rising rates of chronic diseases such as cancer and respiratory issues, as well as birth deformities, he said.

Iraq is working with the international bodies on a plan to help it clean up, he added.

Change is Costly

Business owners say they are doing what they can to operate in a more environmentally-friendly manner but that it is too costly. The government needs to help them do so, they argue.

At a brick factory in Nahrawan, east Baghdad, ovens running on crude oil are releasing thick smoke, making it hard to breath, or see anything.

“Crude oil, if burned in an incorrect way, the way we burn it, of course has emissions. The new ovens which we are upgrading to will reduce these emissions by 60 percent, but that should not be the ceiling of our ambitions,” says Ali Rabeiy, the factory owner.

More environmentally-friendly ovens can fashion bricks and produce only 5 percent of the current harmful emissions, and some even produce none, he said, but they cost anywhere between 4 and 6 billion Iraqi dinars ($3.2-4.8 million), which is not financially feasible for a business like his.

($1 = 1,186.4300 Iraqi dinars)
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Working in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak in 2015, researcher Katherina Thomas noticed that while experts and aid workers had lots to say, no one was listening to ordinary people affected.

She and a team set about interviewing patients and community members about their experiences, creating an oral history archive which she believes could help responders struggling to gain the trust of Ebola-hit communities in Congo today.

Ebola has been spreading in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo since August in the world’s second biggest outbreak, which has killed 1,354 people and surpassed 2,000 cases this week, according to government figures.

Struggling to contain outbreak

Aid workers have said they are struggling to contain the outbreak because of community resistance, with people refusing vaccines, concealing symptoms and attacking treatment centers.

“People are asking why community members don’t trust the responders, but I think we should be asking, why aren’t we trusting them?” said Thomas, currently a writer-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the United States.

“They don’t have a seat at the table, but their voices and insights are so crucial,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Reasons for resistance

Community resistance was also a problem during the West Africa outbreak, which hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the reasons were sometimes surprising, said Thomas.

She and her colleagues interviewed the young men who attacked an Ebola quarantine center in Liberia in 2014 and found they believed they were saving their community, she said.

Although the context is different in eastern Congo, an active conflict zone, Thomas said some of the insights are relevant and she hopes to make the archive available for public use.

The Red Cross has been leading efforts to collect community feedback during the current outbreak with over 700 volunteers doing interviews by going door-to-door.

Perceptions are changing

By analyzing which comments are most frequent and where, they have been able to see how perceptions of Ebola are changing and what concerns need to be addressed, said Ombretta Baggio, senior advisor for community engagement at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

“If you start from where they are, they listen to you differently,” Baggio said of the people affected.

Right now, for example, there is a rumor going around that in treatment centers patients are given a pill to make them die, she said.

The West Africa outbreak reached a turning point when communities themselves became engaged in stamping out the disease, rather than just aid workers, she said.

“I think sharing those lessons learned — not by responders but by communities — would be so powerful,” said Baggio.
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