Where’s the Gulf oil? … In the food web, study says
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists say they have for the first time tracked how certain non-toxic elements of oil from the BP spill quickly became dinner for plankton, entering the food web in the Gulf of Mexico. The new study sheds light on two key questions about the aftermath of the 172 million-gallon spill in April: What happened to the oil that once covered the water’s surface and will it work its way into the diets of Gulf marine life? “Everybody is making a huge deal of where did the oil go,” said chief study author William “Monty” Graham, a plankton expert at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. “It just became food.” The study didn’t specifically track the toxic components of the oil that has people worried. It focused on the way the basic element carbon moved through the beginnings of the all-important food web. Graham said the “eye-opening” speed of how the oil components moved through the ecosystem may affect the overall health of the Gulf. Michael Crosby of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida didn’t take part in the study but said what fascinated him was that the carbon zipped through the food web faster than scientists expected. That in itself isn’t alarming, but if the non-toxic part of the oil is moving so rapidly through the food web, Crosby asks: “What has happened to the toxic compounds of the released oil?” Graham said it was too hard to study the toxins in tiny plankton, which are plant and animal life, usually microscopic. So he had to go with an indicator that’s easier to track: the ratio of different types of carbon in microbes and plankton around and even under the BP oil slick. That important ratio jumped 20 percent, showing oil in the food web …
Look out … your medicine is watching you
(Reuters) — Novartis AG plans to seek regulatory approval within 18 months for a pioneering tablet containing an embedded microchip, bringing the concept of “smart-pill” technology a step closer. The initial program will use one of the Swiss firm’s established drugs taken by transplant patients to avoid organ rejection. But Trevor Mundel, global head of development, believes the concept can be applied to many other pills. “We are taking forward this transplant drug with a chip and we hope within the next 18 months to have something that we will be able to submit to the regulators, at least in Europe,” Mundel told the Reuters Health Summit in New York. “I see the promise as going much beyond that,” he added. Novartis agreed in January to spend $24 million to secure access to chip-in-a-pill technology developed by privately owned Proteus Biomedical of Redwood City, California, putting it ahead of rivals. The biotech start-up’s ingestible chips are activated by stomach acid and send information to a small patch worn on the patient’s skin, which can transmit data to a smartphone or send it over the Internet to a doctor …
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