Body

University of Alberta-led research has confirmed that a relatively harmless inorganic form of mercury found worldwide in ocean water is transformed into a potent neurotoxin in the seawater itself.

After two years of testing water samples across the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found that relatively harmless inorganic mercury, released from human activities like industry and coal burning, undergoes a process called methylation and becomes deadly monomethylmercury.

STONY BROOK, NY, April 27, 2011–An international team of scientists, led by the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University, has used DNA to determine that groups of dusky sharks (Carcharhinus obscurus) and copper sharks (Carcharhinus brachyurus) living in different coastal regions across the globe are separate populations of each species. Both are large apex predators that are heavily exploited for the shark fin trade, which claims tens of millions of animals every year to produce the Asian delicacy, shark fin soup.

A new test shows promise for detecting the early stages of a major cause of failure in joint replacement implants, so that patients can be treated and perhaps avoid additional surgery. More than 1.5 million total joint replacement operations are performed worldwide each year. While the success rate is 90 per cent, almost 10 per cent of implants fail and require additional surgery, report appears in the ACS journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Scientists are reporting development of a process for producing large quantities of a much-needed new imaging agent for computed tomography (CT) scans in heart disease, breast cancer and other diseases, and the first evidence that the material is safe for clinical use. The imaging agent is a tantalum oxide nanoparticle, which is inexpensive, and stays in the body long enough to image many different organs. The report appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In a pair of studies—one recently published online* and the other soon-to-be published**— researchers at the Hollings Marine Laboratory (HML), a government-university collaboration in Charleston, S.C., report that persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are consistently showing up in the blood and eggs of loggerhead sea turtles, that the turtles accumulate more of the contaminant chemicals the farther they travel up the Atlantic coast, and that the pollutants may pose a threat to the survival of this endangered species.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have shown that the electronic properties of two layers of graphene vary on the nanometer scale. The surprising new results reveal that not only does the difference in the strength of the electric charges between the two layers vary across the layers, but they also actually reverse in sign to create randomly distributed puddles of alternating positive and negative charges. Reported in Nature Physics,* the new measurements bring graphene a step closer to being used in practical electronic devices.

New research shows that high maternal viral load and co-infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are the only risk factors associated with vertical transmission of the hepatitis C virus (HCV-VT). A variation in the infant's IL28B gene (CC) is associated independently with the spontaneous clearance of HCV genotype-1 among infected children. The status of IL28B in the mother or children did not increase risk of HCV-VT in this study. Findings are published in the May issue of Hepatology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.