Author: David Bradley

The American Chemical Society reports today that beach pollution is worst during a new and full moon.

A new study of 60 beaches in Southern California suggests that water pollution varies with the lunar cycle, reaching the highest levels when tides are ebbing during the new and full moon. The findings could help beachgoers and managers better assess the potential risk of swimming. The study is published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Alexandria Boehm of Stanford University and her colleagues at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project found that in the full and new phases of the moon, levels of enterococci were higher at the vast majority of the beaches studied. Boehm found that during so-called “spring tides”, when water levels vary the most between high and low tides, a beach is twice as likely to be out of compliance with water quality standards. Spring tides are exceptionally high or low tides that take place during the full and new moons, but have nothing to do with the season of the year.

Beach managers can now use tides as they currently use rainfall to assess warnings, Boehm suggests. When it rains, managers recommend that swimmers not enter the water for three days. “They could also suggest that during spring tides — and especially spring-ebb tides — water quality is more likely to be impaired, and those who are risk-averse should avoid swimming,” Boehm says.

So, no more moonlit beach parties for all you West Coasters…unless you fancy a dose of the squits…you can always blame the barbecue chef.

My wife uses a facial toner from a famous UK store that claims to have “Plant extracts at levels that really work” and is obviously marketing at the cynically savvy consumer who has realised “homeopathic levels” are a nonsense. That’s all well and good, but the list of ingredients in this product still looks to be pretty much a standard set of cosmetic chemicals to me – “Aqua, butylene glycol, alcohol denat., glycerin, polysorbate 20…and at last…Equisetum arvense, then phenoxyethanol, lactic acid, glycolic acid, parfum, citric acid, dipropylene glycol, malic acid, sodium citrate and tartaric acid…

…that plant extract is from the noxious weed field horsetail. Is this really something you’d want to be rubbing on your skin at “levels that really work”? I better warn my wife.

A Eurekalert report discusses the topic of PubChem, a database I mentioned last year in a Nature news item.

This time, the issue is more contentious than an announcement of how useful such a database might be as certain toes in the profit-making-not-for-profit sector have been trod on.

According to my good friends Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa, an XML-based approach to the communication of chemical information in the biomedical literature would prevent the loss of crucial information and facilitate the re-use of data – and would be easily achievable using existing open tools and resources. They have published a commentary article in the Open Access journal BMC Bioinformatics arguing that it is time chemistry followed in the footsteps of bioinformatics and structural biology and moved towards the creation of an open semantic web facilitating access to chemical information.

PMR of the University of Cambridge, John Mitchell and Henry Rzepa of Imperial College London argue using three case studies that conventional methods such as cutting-and-pasting chemical information are time-consuming and introduce errors. The authors argue in favour of an open XML architecture linking to connection tables or open databases such as PubChem, to identify chemical compounds mentioned in the biomedical literature. Their article thus provides additional support for open chemical databases like PubChem, which is currently at the centre of a legal battle between the NIH and the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The chemists explain that an open XML-based architecture would provide a cost-effective and user-friendly way to publish chemical information.