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A recent study documenting an upsurge in marine debris and sea-dwelling insects grew out of a unique collaboration between Scripps researchers and a high school science fair contestant.

The study, published in the journal Biology Letters last week, found that plastic debris in parts of the Pacific had increased 100-fold in 40 years, fueling an explosion of marine insects.

Its authors were Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers Miriam Goldstein and Lanna Cheng, and Marci Rosenberg, then a Torrey Pines High School student seeking a science fair project.

“It was wonderful,” said Rosenberg, now a freshman in neuroscience at UCLA. “Miriam was the best mentor I could have asked for.”

The study measured tiny plastic particles that have accumulated in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Though most of the particles are smaller than a fingernail, they form a miniature archipelago of floating surfaces where a rare marine insect can lay its eggs.

“We were really surprised,” Goldstein said. “Other studies that looked at other areas of the ocean had not found this increase (in plastic), so we did not know it would be this large.”

Marine currents converge in the area, she said, creating a permanent state of glassy calm.

“There’s nothing but water for thousands of miles in each direction,” Goldstein said. “The animals that live there would not have been able to be very abundant.”

But plastic particles trapped in the doldrums have formed new habitat for a marine insect, Halobates sericeus, which inhabits water surfaces and lays its eggs on natural flotsam in the open ocean.

With the influx of plastic debris, researchers found that the “sea skaters” have exploited the garbage to lay more eggs.

“While these animals have an important role, you don’t want to have tons and tons of them, because that’s really unstable,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein served as chief scientist of SEAPLEX, a 2009 voyage of graduate students aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon, to examine marine trash a thousand miles west of California.

She returned from the trip to receive a letter from Rosenberg, then a Torrey Pines High School student who hoped to do a project on marine trash for a school science fair.

With an older brother who holds a Ph.D. in physics, Rosenberg said she grew up “on a steady diet of Birch Aquarium classes and San Diego Zoo classes. So I already had an interest in science.”

Goldstein met with Rosenberg, who offered to help analyze samples from the voyage.

Although previous studies based on the SEAPLEX research had looked at plastic ingestion by fish, Goldstein said she wanted to study smaller creatures.

“I really like invertebrates,” she said. “So I was never going to do anything on fish.”

For two years, Rosenberg spent several hours in the lab each Saturday with Goldstein and a handful of other volunteers, painstakingly sorting and cataloging the plastic debris and the animals among it.

In addition to the insect eggs, Rosenberg said, she encountered a microscopic world of other creatures such as salps —- gelatinous filter feeders —- and janthina, small purple sea snails.

“They don’t get as much media coverage as the dolphins, but they’re just as cool,” Rosenberg said.

Goldstein described Rosenberg as a meticulous researcher, and credited her as second author on the Biology Letters article —- a rare accomplishment for an undergraduate, let alone a freshman.

“She did fantastic work,” Goldstein said. “She kept me more organized than I’d naturally be.”

Rosenberg said the time scale for her own science fair project pushed them to analyze results quickly.

“We had to think about the story the data was telling much earlier than we would have,” she said.

Rosenberg presented the findings at her school science fair, at the state science fair, and in a poster at the Western Society of Naturalists Conference in November 2010, Goldstein said.

Although Rosenberg was one of the few participants younger than legal drinking age, she still benefited from the conference bar.

“My poster was next to the line for cocktails,” she said. “So I had a captive audience. I’d say, ‘Would you like to hear about my research?’ And even if they didn’t, they really didn’t have a choice.”

Goldstein said she was proud of her assistant’s work, but disappointed that Rosenberg doesn’t plan to continue in marine biology. Rosenberg said she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience research, but is toying with adding a minor in conservation biology.

Goldstein said she plans to follow up with other studies on marine trash, perhaps looking at whether the debris is allowing transport of invasive species through the open ocean.

“The subtropical gyres are the majority of the world’s oceans,” she said. “They’re important for regulating climate, so you don’t want to mess that up.”

Editor’s note: Miriam Goldstein is married to North County Times Business Reporter Eric Wolff.

http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/region-science-fair-project-helped-spur-scripps-study-on-marine/article_bc565960-60de-5750-a863-49cabda09695.html

Three students make it to Intel Isef conference in the US. PHOTO: THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE

PITTSBURGH: 

Three Pakistani teenagers managed to snag fourth place at the international science fair in the US on Friday.

The project entitled “Energy Square for Cattle,” created by Mahnoor Hassan, Shiza Gulab and Bushra Shahed of the Institute of Computer and Management Sciences in Peshawar, took fourth prize, and a $500 award, in the Animal Sciences Category at the Grand Awards Ceremony of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh.

The event is the world’s largest pre-college science fair.

Hassan and Gulab, who were present to collect their prize, explained that their project is good for livestock in times of a natural disaster.

“People think of themselves in times of disaster before animals,” said Gulab, while referring to the recent floods in Pakistan. “This square makes it easier to look out for the well-being of livestock also,” she added.

The girls said that just a few licks of their energy square controlled diseases, increased milk production and increased weight in cattle after just 28 days.

The squares are a dry mix of a variety of ingredients, such as mulberry, urea and calcium, which provide vitamins and protein to the animal.

“Because people who have animals are usually poor, we have created an affordable option for them,” said Gulab.

The fair, held between May 13-18, concluded on Friday afternoon in a confetti haze as the top prizewinner was announced. The winner was 15-year-old Jack Andraka from the US state of Maryland, who created a Non-Invasive Pancreatic Cancer Detection Tool.

“This competition encourages millions of students to engage their skills for innovation and develop promising solutions for global challenges,” said Executive Director of the Intel Foundation Wendy Hawkins.

Meet the finalists

If you’re looking for inspiration, look no further than Pakistan’s finalists at the Isef.

“I want to be the greatest scientist in the world,” proclaimed finalist Syed Shahzeb Zarrar. Zarrar, along with two other finalists, arrived in Pittsburgh last week. While five finalists were named in Pakistan, only three managed to obtain a visa.

“Every Pakistani should know about Isef. Everyone has a hidden talent. Because of Isef, I was able to discover mine,” said Zarrar.

It took him approximately eight months to complete his project entitled ‘Production of Artificial Magnetic Domains in Non-Metals’. He explained that electricity could be produced cheaply if non metals were employed and added that his project could easily be used in Pakistan.

“I’ve made friends from India, Japan, and even New Mexico thanks to this conference. It’s amazing,” said Zarrar, who attends Iqra Army Public School and College in Quetta.

Another finalist who missed the event was Musa Rahim Khan of Aga Khan Higher Secondary School in Chitral, whose project was titled, ‘Water and Heat Detector’.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 20^th, 2012.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/381538/pakistani-teens-bag-prize-at-international-science-fair/

WASHINGTON — When NATO nations meet in Chicago on Sunday, one question will top the agenda: What happens in Afghanistan when US combat troops leave?

To be sure, some troops from NATO countries, led by the United States, will likely stay behind after 2014 – both to train Afghans and act as a hedge against the Taliban‘s return. The summit will try to iron out some of those details.

But perhaps even more crucial – certainly for Afghanistan itself – is the question of who will foot the bill for Afghans to protect themselves. Afghanistan does not have remotely enough money to defend itself. Left alone, it could afford to pay about 30,000 soldiers and police officers. Currently, with international aid, it has more than 300,000 – a number that some experts say is too low.

As a result, much of the Chicago summit will be a passing of the hat for Afghanistan. With NATO countries war-weary and economically strapped, the commitments may not exactly fill that cup to overflowing.

It points to a NATO role in Afghanistan that will continue for years after the end of the international combat mission in 2014, but at a much-reduced and still uncertain level. And it suggests that for all the heady words spoken by NATO leaders, funding and troop pledges for an event still two years away are likely to remain vague.

The two-day meeting “will be something of a tin-cup exercise and should give us some idea of what the [NATO] coalition countries’ post-2014 commitments to Afghanistan will look like,” says Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In a clear reflection of this reduced commitment to Afghanistan, the gathering is expected to endorse the scaling back of the Afghan National Security Forces. Army and national police forces once envisioned to hover around 350,000 personnel for years after NATO’s departure are now seen as gradually scaling back to something over 200,000 by 2018.

“The idea is to gradually reduce the size of the Afghan forces to make them more affordable,” says James Dobbins, a former US Afghanistan envoy and now director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corp. in Arlington, Va.

US share: about $2 billion per year

Pre-summit discussions among NATO countries resulted in a consensus that foresees the US picking up “the largest part of the cost,” Ambassador Dobbins says, with other countries making up the rest. That US share is expected to be about $2 billion a year, with other countries making up the difference of an annual bill of about $4 billion.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has indicated that he doesn’t think the $4 billion will be enough. During the recent surge, the US was spending about $100 billion a year to maintain its force of 100,000 troops.

Dobbins says he expects the pledges at Chicago to remain general, in part because countries are reluctant to make specific funding commitments for what is still a few years off. Moreover, NATO nations are concerned that promised gains in Afghanistan have not panned out.

1. “The thinking was that the US surge would kick the stuffing out of the Taliban, they would thus be on the road to defeat, and we’d be handing off a much simpler job,” says Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “Instead, in 2015 we’ll be handing off a stalemate and a war that in fact is not going to be ending anytime soon.”

   The reluctance to pledge long-term commitments to Afghanistan extends to the US as well. Some members of Congress are already warning that there is likely to be a dwindling appetite for picking up a $2 billion annual check for the Afghan security forces after 2014 – even as the White House counters that the price tag is a small fraction of the $88 billion the Pentagon expects to spend in Afghanistan in 2013.

   Yet even if NATO countries stick to vague commitments, which will be enough to satisfy the modest goal the US has set for Chicago, regional experts say, the US wants to make a decade-long commitment to troop levels and funding in Afghanistan, and it wants to make sure it is not left on its own.

   “What [the US wants] is for NATO to endorse that” general commitment, says David Pollock, a former State Department planning staff official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But with national budgets tight and with “people convinced that Afghanistan’s long-term success is a long shot,” he says that “at best [the US] will get a statement of long-term goals – without any long-term commitments.”

   ‘We’ll be handing off a stalemate’
   
   President Obama wanted to signal this long-term commitment by signing the US-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) in Kabul, Afghanistan, this month.

   “That was definitely a setup for the NATO summit, to underline the message that ‘the US has done its part, so now you, too, should stand up,’ ” Dobbins says.

   But some analysts doubt that the agreement, which is short on specific US commitments to Afghanistan, will have any impact on the summit.

   “The US having failed to sign the SPA by Chicago would have been seriously problematic, but the converse doesn’t hold, largely because it commits people to so little,” Mr. Biddle says.

   What could come from Chicago is a concrete decision formally to shift NATO’s mission from combat to training ahead of schedule – in 2013. That transition has already been taking place, Biddle notes, but formalizing it and suggesting that the conditions exist to speed it up could create the perception that NATO is in the mopping-up phase, placating voters and giving NATO members political cover to stay involved a little longer.

   “The beauty of changing the mission is that it leaves the political top cover for the allies to stay,” Biddle says.

   No aura of ‘mission accomplished’
   
   Such a maneuver could become even more of an imperative after the election to the French presidency of François Hollande, who promised to have French troops out of Afghanistan by around the end of this year.

   Whatever is agreed to in Chicago, no one expects the aura of “mission accomplished” that permeated Mr. Obama’s brief mission to Kabul.

   Afghanistan: 5 areas of concern after the US leaves

   Many of America’s NATO partners want little to do with Afghanistan, but they also want to stay on the good side of the US and to keep the US committed to the alliance. The result is that coalition countries are likely to come through eventually with commitments, but they will be modest and have more to do with maintaining good relations with the US than with Afghanistan.

   NATO countries “will calculate that they can scale down, because they can stay on our good side practically without being” in Afghanistan, says the Washington Institute’s Mr. Pollock. Vague talk of long-term commitments aside, he adds, “the drift is to quietly close this chapter in NATO’s history.”

   This article, “NATO summit: Who will foot the bill for long-term Afghanistan security?,” first appeared at CSMonitor.com.

   © 2012 The Christian Science Monitor

   http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47491840/ns/world_news-christian_science_monitor/