Mark your calendars, bring your kids and prepare to learn about some cool, new science! Open to the public, EPA will unveil a prototype air monitoring system on Saturday, June 22, from 10 a.m. to noon. The celebration will take place at the air monitoring system’s first home – Durham County South Regional Library, located at 4505 S. Alston Ave. in Durham, North Carolina.

It’s all part of the Village Green Project, a study to develop a self-powered, low-maintenance monitoring system to measure air quality. The system is built into a park bench made from recycled milk jugs. Testing in a community environment is being made possible through a partnership with Durham County.

EPA scientists and local officials will participate in the ribbon-cutting ceremony, which includes the raising of a flag as part of EPA’s School Flag program to increase awareness of air quality conditions.  Afterwards, booths and activities will be available for adults and children of all ages.

The Village Green park bench

You will be able to connect with the real-time data collected from the system through your smartphone, or other internet devices, either right beside the air sensor or even at home! This nifty project will measure fine particles and ozone minute by minute, which are all known to impact human health.  It will also measure local weather stats such as wind speed and humidity.  The platform provides an opportunity to test new low maintenance air quality sensors.

Being a local resident myself, I am proud to see the Raleigh-Durham area hosting such innovative science projects and events.

With great efforts from EPA, Durham County government and Durham County Library officials, this research project will be a wonderful educational and informative experience. It will help to develop the next generation of air quality monitors for use by this and other communities interested in learning more about their air quality.

I visited the library numerous times during this collaboration and found out its theme is ‘Air,’ so Village Green will fit right in! Now after checking out books at the library, you can sit on the bench, read and check out the local air quality and weather trends with a simple scan of your smartphone!

• What: Village Green Project Celebration
• When:  Saturday, June 22, 2013, from 10 a.m. to noon
• Where: Durham County South Regional Library, 4505 S. Alston Ave., Durham, N.C.

About the Author: Katie Lubinsky is a student contractor working with EPA’s Office of Research and Development on communicating new and engaging science and research topics.

You can’t watch the news lately and not hear the word “ricin.” Letters laced with ricin have been sent to the President, other federal officials, and New York City’s Mayor. And while the letters have not reached their intended recipients, ricin can contaminate mail sorters and buildings.

What is ricin? Where do you even find it? These were the questions I asked when I first heard a letter addressed to the President was contaminated with ricin. From an intensive google search, I learned ricin comes from castor beans. It is extremely toxic (a few particles the size of table salt grains can kill a human) and the effects depend on whether it is inhaled, ingested, or injected.  The ricin that contaminated the letters, in these cases, was in the form of a powder, but ricin can also be used by terrorists as mist, a pellet, or it can be dissolved in water or weak acid, too.

While everyone is deemed safe at this point, an element I wondered about was who decontaminates the mail sorters and equipment the letters came into contact with, or the buildings where it was produced, and how? This is where EPA’s homeland security research comes into play.

While the “who” part depends on where the incident happens, the “how” is being researched day in and day out – looking for the best sampling methods and decontamination techniques.

One focus of homeland security research at EPA examines the efficacy of different decontamination methods, for example, using liquids, fumigants, or foggers. Scientists and engineers have identified ways to contain decontaminants and ways to dispose of the waste after decontamination. Hydrogen peroxide, pH-adjusted bleach, and chlorine-dioxide fumigation decontamination technologies are techniques researchers have tested and found to be successful decontaminants in different scenarios.

Researchers here have also developed a suite of decision support tools to assist in the safe disposal of waste and debris that might be generated during a contamination incident. The research helps decision-makers make the most appropriate choices for each situation and gives them the tools to make sure the environment is safe following an event.

While the health of those who may have been exposed is always first and foremost during a situation like this, responders also want to make sure they can decontaminate effected buildings, rooms, and equipment and mitigate any subsequent exposures. To learn more about EPA’s homeland security indoor and outdoor cleanup research,  please visit: http://www.epa.gov/nhsrc/aboutdecon.html

About the Author: Lahne Mattas-Curry is a frequent blogger covering water issues, but has recently expanded to share how researchers and engineers keep us safe from all the bad stuff, specifically in events of terrorism – chemical, biological, or radiological – or natural events like hurricanes, earthquakes and nuclear accidents.

Our previous blog posts have featured how EPA diving scientists support cleanups in the nation’s waterways.  In this post, we talk about how our divers stay safe through the development of safe practices and standards, well before they hit the water, so that the best science is delivered safely.

Sometimes things go wrong

We’ve all heard about a diver fatality at one time or another in the news, and such tragedies are particularly hard hitting when it is a colleague.  The dive community is a close knit one, and these tragedies hit close to home.  A diver’s death brings us together to grieve and—perhaps more importantly—to learn.  Are human factors the source of what occurred or should our safety rules be changed so we don’t have a similar event? We work to prevent repeating mistakes, and avoiding future tragedies. “Near misses” are evaluated for safety protocol improvements as well.

Peer groups make the difference

The diving control board meets to discuss safety.

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Standards for scientific diving, scientific divers must operate under a “diving control board” that meets regularly to update their standards for recent safety issues.  Annually, the control board meets to discuss safety incidents that occur with military, commercial, or scientific divers and determines how to change the diving rules to keep us safe.

Beyond our own control board, we look to other “standard setters” in the dive industry.  The American Academy of Underwater Sciences, Association for Dive Contractors International, and others develop standards that exceed basic OSHA requirements.  Indeed, this type of diving safety peer review is part of the reason why the data suggest scientific diving is among the safest forms of diving (Dardeu et. al., Diving and Hyberbaric Medicine, 2012).  Developing “best practices,” such as sharing critical information across the profession is key for working safely in such an unforgiving environment!

Always learning

Divers learn early that their training never ends.  In addition to learning from diving accidents and standards of industry, the board disseminates critical new information to divers on the ground.

Deputy unit diving officer Chad Schulze demonstrates a new first aid oxygen delivery system.

Though the demands of the underwater environment are relatively static, technology changes much of what we know about the effects of pressure on a diver’s body.  Sifting through new research, changing dive rules, and informing working divers about new practices is the control board’s number one job in keeping EPA divers safe.

EPA’s diving culture is all about safety.  Every diver can refuse to dive for any reason, and every divemaster can call off a dive.  Not only have each of us aborted more than one dive, we often gauge newer divers most on their concern for safety. Have they considered not diving due to a cold, an equipment issue, or just a feeling that the stars are not completely aligned? That’s what we want. Whether it’s conditions, equipment, or anything else, we all work together to pursue our underwater science safely.

In 2010, a clam boat off the coast of Massachusetts dredged up some most unwelcome bounty: old, World War I era munitions. Shortly after the haul, one of the crew members came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to mustard gas, a chemical weapon and nerve agent.  Almost immediately after the sickened deckhand was rushed to the hospital (he survived), EPA scientists and engineers moved in to help analyze the suspected culprit in the old munition, and assist with decontamination and cleanup operations.

“We knew mustard gas was the target to test for because both clinical symptoms and test results from the crew member were available before any environmental samples even arrived at our laboratory,” said Ernest Waterman, Laboratory Branch Chief at EPA’s New England Regional Laboratory in Chelmsford, MA.

For the clean-up effort, the regional lab was able to perform all the environmental sample testing in-house. However, Waterman says, “Had there been a need to send samples to other labs around the country it would have been important that all the labs use the same method of analysis.  At the time, there were no plans in place on how to achieve that, so I think it would have taken some time to ensure that we were, in fact, all going to analyze the samples in the same way. If this had been a large-scale event, we would not have been able to move as quickly as we would have liked.”

To help in such scenarios, EPA homeland security researchers have developed a library of selected methods, the Selected Analytical Methods for Environmental Remediation and Recovery, or SAM for short. The guide helps labs around the country quickly and efficiently select the appropriate environmental testing and analysis methods to use after a wide-scale event.  It’s part of a research program that for nearly a decade has been helping the nation be better prepared for an accidental or deliberate release of chemical, biological or radiological agents.

Teams of experts worked with EPA reviewing and revising lists of chemical, biological and radiological substances that could cause mass harm. EPA’s focus is to make sure laboratories nationwide have the capability to test for these substances and that the testing can be done the same way across all the laboratories, so that one lab’s results can be easily compared with another.

SAM is not a plan on how to handle an emergency, but rather a library of selected methods that laboratories can use as a guide to run their tests. The testing protocols cover several hundred harmful substances ranging from mustard gas and ricin to plutonium and others that could cause the plague or typhoid fever.

“The nice thing about SAM is you can click onto the method and it provides resources that labs can use in a major incident or accident,” said Dr. John Griggs, director of EPA’s National Analytical Radiological Environmental Laboratory in Montgomery, Ala., and coordinator of the radiological section of SAM.

“At regular intervals we go and see if we need to add other radionuclides and then select appropriate methods based on information received from Homeland Security or intelligence. It’s an ongoing process.”

In the case of an act of terrorism or other major incident requiring coordinated, large-scale laboratory response, labs need to analyze many samples taken from the air, water, soil, and indoor and outdoor surfaces. Using the selected methods identified through SAM should  increase the speed of analysis and improve data comparisons among labs across the United States.

“When an incident produces multiple samples,  a large network of labs will be required to conduct the analysis simultaneously,” said Kathy Hall, a health physicist at EPA’s National Homeland Security Research Center in Cincinnati, Ohio and a coordinator for SAM.  “What we are looking at is ways we can produce comparable results when we use state and commercial labs to analyze samples.”

EPA is preparing the 142 private and government labs that are part of the Environmental Response Laboratory Network with a list of selected methods to help keep the sampling and analysis consistent when it’s most important.

Lear More

To access SAM2012, please visit: www.epa.gov/sam

EPA Homeland Security Research

EPA Science Matters Newsletter Homeland Security Issue

When you win an award, it’s easy to lose sight of the small victories that brought you to a successful finish.

Members of the Conscious Clothing team – winner of the EPA/HHS My Air, My Health Challenge – almost didn’t apply for the challenge.

A friend told team leader Gabrielle Dockterman about the InnoCentive website, a crowdsourcing and open innovation platform. Dockterman said she felt there might be a challenge that would tap into the talents of people she knew. She emailed her friend Dot Kelly, a chemist, and inventor David Kuller, her boss from a previous job.

They stumbled on the My Air, My Health Challenge eight days before the deadline for proposals.

Kuller says that fortunately, all three team members were between projects and at stages in their lives when they could commit to the opportunity.

Eight days later, they submitted their entry just before midnight.

Dot Kelly, David Kuller, and Gabrielle Dockterman

Using Skype to stay connected across the country and the world, the team explored options for building a prototype that could account for both air pollution and related health metrics, such heart rate or breathing.

On top of that, they had to create a system that could be easily worn or carried.

“It was like being a little kid with Legos,” Kuller said.

The team’s design incorporates an open-source Arduino platform microcomputer that lies against the chest and a particulate matter air sensor that hangs near the neck. The system takes advantage of the common place where men and women typically wear ties, necklaces or other fashion accessories.

Stretchy strips of silver-knitted yarn wrap around the wearer’s ribcage to measure breathing. The integrated system gives wearers an estimate of their pollution exposure by comparing the air quality to how deeply the person breathes.

The data are streamed to any Bluetooth-enabled device, such as a cellphone, and LED lights transform the sensor measurements into visual cues, what the team calls “making the invisible visible.”

Dockterman says the group will next focus on tailoring prototypes for several different applications: consumer athletics, sleep apnea research and children’s asthma research.

Built in large batches, the Conscious Clothing sensor system could cost as little as $20 and could be sewn directly into clothing. The design represents the continuing shift to next-generation sensors that cost less, are easier to use, and can be applied to many different fields.

“I’d like to think we’re going to bridge what could have been a 20-year development gap,” Kelly said.

About the author: Dustin Renwick works as part of the innovation team in the EPA Office of Research and Development.

Your new TV or fancy bottle of wine came in a cardboard box that can be recycled, but thanks to a small, eco-friendly business, those white packing pieces that cushion and protect consumer goods inside boxes could go a step further in the product life cycle.

Ecovative, located in New York, wants you to throw the packaging in your compost pile.

Typically, those pieces are made of polystyrene foam, which hangs around in landfills for hundreds of years after it’s been discarded. Ecovative can replace that foam with another white material: mycelium.

Fungi absorb nutrients with their mycelia. Think of them as the roots of a mushroom.

In a five-day process, Ecovative can grow mycelia into all-natural packaging. Better yet, mycelia don’t need water or light to curl and coil into a dense, customizable form that packs eight miles of fibers into each cubic inch of material.

The other major selling point for the mushroom-based materials is that they grow in agricultural waste streams that can be adapted to regional sources. Corn stalks can be used in the Midwest, but a factory in China could use castoffs from rice production. The mycelia grows throughout the organic mass until the mold is filled, and then Ecovative heats the material to stop growth.

The company won an EPA Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant in 2009, two years after co-founders Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre started out. It is also one of the new SBIR awardees announced today, each another potential success story. (Read Ecovative’s winning research proposal: Growth of a Fungal Biopolymer to Displace Common Synthetic Polymers and Exotic Wood.)

“EPA was first to take the leap and validate this tech,” said McIntyre, the company’s chief scientist.

“The EPA SBIR was really critical for our early stage of development for several reasons. One of the most important was the peer-reviewed validation. And the funding really supported early-stage efforts in moving from the lab bench to a commercially viable prototype production line.”

Bayer, the company’s CEO, recently told The New Yorker that Ecovative aspires to be the new Dow or Dupont. McIntyre said those companies represent ubiquity for consumer products.

“We’d like to be the same,” he said. “We want to have the broadest impact possible in terms of providing environmentally friendly solutions.”

McIntyre and Bayer started small, but their company now employs 54 full-time workers overseeing projects such as new construction materials, opportunities in the automotive market, and a way to replace common plastics in packaging. The work has attracted more EPA SBIR contracts and other awards.

In May, the Small Business Administration recognized Ecovative with the Tibbetts Award, which highlights the best SBIR projects each year. The three criteria for the Tibbetts are technical innovation, business impact and broader social and economic benefit.

Mushroom materials are innovative, durable alternatives to products we often use but rarely think about. In fact, there’s a chance parts of your next house might be grown instead of fabricated or built, adding a new twist to living in harmony with nature.

About the author: Dustin Renwick works as part of the innovation team in the EPA Office of Research and Development.

EPA STAR Fellow Jessica Dawn Pratt

As a native Midwesterner, I was not impressed with the brown and shrubby coastal sage scrub ecosystem that covered hillsides around my new home when I moved to southern California in September of 2005. It was drab, short and prickly compared to the northern hardwood forests to which I was accustomed.

But, as an ecologist, I was excited to live in a “biodiversity hotspot,” a place that rivals the species diversity of many tropical forests and is home to numerous endemic and endangered plant and animal species.

I quickly learned that September was the end of the summertime drought that characterizes California’s Mediterranean climate. As I watched the brown and shrubby hillsides come to life with the winter rains, I fell in love with the coastal sage scrub ecosystem.

In addition to being incredibly diverse and unique, the coastal sage scrub ecosystem also faces many threats, including development, habitat fragmentation, pollution, climate change, invasive species, and wildfire. So, in 2008 when I began the Ph.D. program in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine, I was determined to work on questions related to its conservation and restoration. A Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowship from EPA allowed me to do just that.

My graduate research examines how California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), an icon of the coastal sage scrub ecosystem, is responding to environmental changes like climate change and nitrogen pollution, and how the response of this important plant species affects the animals that depend on it.

It is my hope that understanding how important species respond to environmental change – and how those responses “scale up” throughout the ecosystem to affect other species – will help us predict and mitigate the impacts.

The first part of this work, published online in Global Change Biology and summarized on UC Irvine’s web site, shows that sagebrush in the southern part of its range will adjust better to climate change than sagebrush in the north.

To determine this, plants collected from a 400-mile stretch of coastal California were grown in experimental plots in Orange County where we tested their response to altered precipitation. Populations from southern sites, where year-to-year rainfall amounts have historically been rather variable, were more flexible to altered precipitation than populations from the north, where precipitation has been more predictable. The findings indicate that a species’ response to climate change won’t always be equal across its range.

Moreover, we saw that year-to-year variability in rainfall at weather stations across the species range is increasing more rapidly in the north, in the very regions where plants may be the least able to tolerate this effect of climate change. As such, including southern sagebrush in northern restoration plantings may be one way to ensure that we give this species an opportunity to adapt to our changing climate.

As we move forward with habitat conservation and restoration in this era of change, it may be prudent to consider the flexibility of the plants that we use in such endeavors so that the greening up of California’s shrubby hillsides each fall may continue long into the future.

About the Author: Jessica Pratt is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examining plant and insect community responses to environmental change in Southern California is funded through the EPA’s STAR Fellowship Program.

“The Queen Viper”

“Go fly a kite!” While that phrase has become a euphemism for not-so-politely telling someone to buzz off, the scientists, engineers, and others working in EPA’s Western Ecology Lab in Corvallis, Oregon recently challenged local school students to do just that.

As part of the lab’s 2013 Earth Day activities, the EPA staff held a juried kite contest called “The Sky’s the Limit” that invited local sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students to build a kite that sends a message about sustainability, recycling, or another environmental theme. Students could enter one of two categories: functional (a kite that flies), or decorative (a display kite with an environmental message or design); kites also had to contain at least one recycled element.

Each participating school selected six semifinalists from each category. Finalists, along with their teachers and parents, visited the lab on Earth Day for a reception and a chance to show off their entries to a panel of judges that included lab director Thomas Fontaine, local artist Zel Brook, and Corvallis Mayor Julie Manning.

Team members from Kings Valley Charter School.

“We made everything with reusable materials. It flies really well and we spent a lot of time on it. It sends a message that all animals are important to Earth, even if they are kind of scary,” wrote Andi Beck, who along with fellow Kings Valley Charter School classmates Victoria Fite and Sairah Ziola took home top prize in the functional category. You can see their kite—which they named “The Queen Viper” because of its resemblance to a snake—in the picture above. “The body is several segments of fabric sewn together, with triangles of fabric sewn on top of the segments to the end of the snake,” adds Sairah Ziola.

The winners of the artistic category are from Franklin School.

In the artistic category, the judges selected the kite made by Anabel Chang, Lucy Meigs, and Travis Hinz, which uses Chinese calligraphy to convey a message about the importance of sustainable energy. “The middle characters mean energy, the top means water, and the white means wind,” explains Anabel Chang. “It says that we should use energies that are better for our environment,” adds Lucy Meigs, while Travis Hinz points out the kite “is in the shape of a wind turbine, with three wings.”

These grand prize winners received a unique “recycled” trophy designed and constructed by EPA scientist Bill Rugh. Going along with the sustainable energy theme, the trophies function as wind speed generators! All participants also received Olympic-style medallions made from used coffee cup lids.

The artistic kite winner.

“The Sky’s the Limit” contest helped the lab and the local community engage in a fun-filled learning experience for all. The scientists and others at the lab got to share a little bit of what they do to advance environmental research, and the students got to learn about sustainability and help spread the word about why it is important. It’s enough to make you want to go fly a kite!

About the Author: Joan Hurley has worked at EPA’s Western Ecology Division lab as an Information Specialist and helping run outreach events, such as Earth Day, since 2005.

Little Big Horn River, Montana. Photo by John Doyle.

Until the 1960s, many families on the Crow Reservation still hauled river water for home use, a practice most of us remember from our childhoods.  As agriculture expanded and river water quality visibly deteriorated, wells and indoor plumbing became available and rural families switched to home well water.

In many parts of the Reservation, this was a hardship, not a blessing: the groundwater tapped for home wells is high in total dissolved solids and often so rich in iron and manganese that it’s undrinkable. The hard water build-up or “scale” also ruins hot water heaters. We have learned that the majority of home wells (55%) have water that presents a health risk, due to mineral or microbial contamination or both.

As a country, we may imagine our citizens have universal access to safe drinking water—but for millions of rural residents with poor quality well water, and who can’t afford cisterns, treatment systems, or all the bottled water they might want—this simply is not the case.  In our communities, people are cooking with poor tasting, contaminated water, and living with the health consequences.

In 2004, Tribal members who were—and still are—passionate about and dedicated to addressing community-wide water quality issues and health disparities joined forces as the Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee. They recruited academic partners and Little Big Horn College science majors to help.

We have been working together to research what is contaminating local groundwater and surface waters, what the health risks are from domestic, cultural, and recreational uses of these water sources, and how best to educate the community about the risks.

Crow women getting water for camp from the Little Big Horn River, close to present day Crow Agency, Crow Reservation, Montana. Photo courtesy Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian (N13758). Photo by Fred E. Miller.

One challenge is that various traditional practices involve respectfully consuming (untreated) river and spring water right from the source. Maintaining these cultural practices “is part of what makes us Crow,” so, instead of expecting people to simply give them up, we are collaborating with the Tribe on pursuing additional funding opportunities to address the pollution sources affecting our rivers and a culturally-important spring.  We are also helping to make clear that traditional uses of river water, including drinking it untreated, need to be considered in planning, risk assessments, and policy decisions.

We are working to restore the health of our rivers and of our community.  We realize it takes passion, commitment, mutual support and a broad-based, grassroots effort.  We have learned that we are all close neighbors when it comes to water.  How we treat our water is the respect we show to our neighbors, and how we would want them to treat us.

About the Authors: MJ Lefthand, SL Young and JT Doyle are members of the Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee (CEHSC). The Committee is made up of Crow Tribal members with varied expertise in environmental science, water resources, health, law and culture. MJ Eggers is an academic partner from Little Big Horn College and Montana State University Bozeman.   A Plenty Hoops works for the Crow Tribal Environmental Protection Program.  Additional contributors are members of the CEHSC, academic partners or student interns.

Among the ways the Internet has affected scientific endeavors, creating more scientists stands as an interesting result. Thanks to the budding “citizen science” movement, you don’t need a doctorate to take part in high-quality research.

Citizen science refers to projects where non-specialists – maybe you, your neighbor, your child – can add their energies to the pursuit of specialized knowledge. Examples include efforts to:

• Count bees or fireflies.
• Transcribe historical ship logs.
• Report weather events.

EPA has tapped volunteer water monitors for decades. Now, developments in low-cost, portable air sensor technologies have created the opportunity for citizen scientists to contribute to air monitoring.

“It’s an opportunity for these groups to leverage some kind of response to poor air quality,” said EPA’s Patricia Sheridan, who coordinates citizen science for the Agency’s regional office that serves New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and eight Tribal Nations (EPA Region 2). She has helped the Region lead several efforts to educate and engage citizens and community groups who are interested in assisting researchers by collecting air quality data.

EPA scientist Marie O’Shea, the Region 2 science liaison, said even low-tech methods, such as counting the number of diesel trucks driving past a neighborhood playground, can empower citizens and give them quantitative evidence to share with community leaders.

But the biggest challenges for EPA citizen science projects involve the data those projects generate, from volume to accuracy to relevancy for different applications.

“The monitoring itself has become easier,” said Thomas Baugh, science liaison for EPA’s southeast regional office (Region 4). “The other steps that are always surrounding the use of data – what it means, how to assess it, who needs to be involved with it – become more important when it’s coming from many different people and many different sources.”

For example, a network of only 10 sensors that report readings each minute for one year will yield more than 5.25 million data points in that time. With additional factors like device calibration or end uses of the data, the sensor picture starts to take the form of a Jackson Pollack painting.

“The need is for EPA to have some way to make meaningful use of that data, to evaluate it and assess it,” Baugh said.

First steps toward clarifying the role of citizen science at EPA include defining what a good data set looks like for different EPA needs and sharing how citizens can meet those standards.

Another Agency scientist, Patti Tyler, who serves as the science liaison in the regional office for the mountain and plains states (Region 8), points out that communication about data collection, standards and use remains important. She distilled the citizen science process into three C’s: coordinate, collaborate, communicate.

Air sensor technologies continue to progress toward smaller, cheaper designs, and with EPA’s guidance, citizens themselves can potentially research their own air quality.

About the author: Dustin Renwick works as part of the innovation team in the EPA Office of Research and Development.