Getting in the Way of a Big Ship Might Kill You: From Heart Disease or Lung Cancer

The next time you visit your doctor, he or she may ask about more than your diet and exercise: how close you live to a major shipping lane may be on the list of questions. Pollution from marine shipping causes some 60,000 premature cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths, according to James Corbett of the University of Delaware, James Winebrake from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and colleagues, who published their results in the December 15, 2007, issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Alchemy at Work? Seaweed Transformed into Stem Cell Technology

A polymer found in common brown seaweeds has been transformed into a device that can support the growth and release of stem cells at the site of an injury or the source of a disease. The device, say the scientists, Randolph Ashton and Ravi Kane of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and their colleagues, marks an important step in efforts to develop new medical therapies using stem cells. They published results of their research online in the journal Biomaterials on September 19, 2007.

First International Deep-Sea Marine Protected Area Proposed

In the dark abyss of the Pacific Ocean, in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) west of Central America, lie the world's largest fields of manganese nodules—boulders of rock laden with nickel, copper, and cobalt strewn across the seafloor. This vast resource soon may attract mining companies.

Bear Predation Drives Salmon to Old Age

The annual fish feast enjoyed by brown bears in southwest Alaska as spawning sockeye salmon migrate upriver affects the rate at which the salmon age, according to scientist Stephanie Carlson, currently at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She and colleagues published their results in the December 2007 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

Dybas, C.L. 2008. Ripple marks—The story behind the story. Oceanography 21(1):8–11, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.73.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.