small 0000190.43002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows that most of the 1.9 million tons (1.7 million metric tons) of discarded cell phones, computers and televisions, among other electronic goods, went into landfills, because those are the agency's own figures.

The EPA also knows that this so-called e-waste contains cadmium, mercury and other toxic substances, and it is responsible for making sure that lead-laden monitors and television sets with cathode-ray tubes (CRT) are disposed of properly and the parts recycled. But congressional investigators charge that the EPA has failed to even attempt to clean up the mess—or keep it in check. The agency has "no plans and no timetable for developing the basic components of an enforcement strategy," concludes a report released this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress's investigative arm.

GAO official John Stephenson testified at a House hearing yesterday that his investigators had posed as would-be buyers of CRT waste in Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Vietnam and found at least 43 recyclers willing to export the toxic e-waste from the U.S. in direct violation of EPA regulations. In addition, unlike the European Union (E.U.), the EPA has no regulations concerning the disposal of other types of used electronic devices, despite their dangers. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

"This is a failure to enforce even the weak regulations they have," says Democratic Rep. Gene Green of Houston, who introduced a House resolution calling for a ban on the export of e-waste. (Sen. Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) introduced a similar measure in the Senate.) "EPA is sometimes not as interested in doing what statutorily they should be."

According to the report, the EPA told GAO officials that it prefers "nonregulatory, voluntary approaches" to the growing e-waste problem. "EPA currently has 10 ongoing investigations and the [regional offices] plan to conduct inspections at electronic waste collection and recycling facilities this year," wrote assistant administrators Granta Nakayama and Susan Parker Bodine in response.

When such e-waste is exported to places such as Guiyu in China, it ends up in vast recycling centers where laborers earn a pittance smashing, cracking, melting and cooking old electronic goods to extract the valuable materials they hold, ranging from gold to plastics. But burning off wire insulation, cooking circuit boards and using acid to extract gold all take a health and environmental toll. A study published last year in Environmental Health Perspectives found that children in Guiyu had lead levels 50 percent higher than those in surrounding villages and 50 percent higher than safety limits set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead is known to cause brain damage.

That toll is not confined to China. According to a recent study by chemist Jeffrey Weidenhamer of Ashland University in Ohio, the lead in recalled children's jewelry bears a proportion of tin and copper that are "consistent with an origin from recovered solder." And U.S. prisoners are often exposed to the same conditions working at disassembling e-waste for the government-owned corporation UNICOR Federal Prison Industries in Washington, D.C. "I visited a federal prison in California and I saw prisoners with hammers smashing apart CRT monitors," says Ted Smith, chairman of the advocacy group Electronics TakeBack Coalition. "There are prisoners who have been made ill and a number of prison guards as well."

As a result, at least nine states, including California, Maine and Maryland, have implemented their own controls on the proper handling of e-waste, and the electronics industry has voluntary guidelines to reduce it. "We have a national system to collect and recycle all products we put our name on," says Mark Small, vice president for corporate environment, safety and health at Sony Corporation of America, which has partnered with Waste Management, Inc., to recycle e-waste. "We have eliminated probably 99 percent–plus of the toxic materials in our products. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com We use lead-free solder and changed the design of TVs from CRT to new [liquid-crystal displays]." http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

Other companies, such as Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have similar programs, and Samsung is set to launch a free take-back program for all their electronic products, including old televisions, on October 1.

The E.U. in 2002 imposed a comprehensive ban on the export of any e-waste, along with a requirement for producers of such electronic goods to take back used electronics. Violators face fines up to 1.2 million euros or imprisonment. In contrast, the EPA to date has imposed only one fine of $32,500 on a single exporter, according to the GAO report.

But given the difficulty and expense of dealing with e-waste properly, unscrupulous E.U. recyclers have taken to labeling their shipments as used electronics that can be employed in developing countries to bridge the digital divide. "The containers arriving in ports like Lagos [Nigeria] were loaded with 75 percent junk and 25 percent material that could be resold in the marketplace," Smith says. "They take that material that was not salable, dump it and burn it."

He adds: "There are an awful lot of bottom-feeders in this industry."

But some companies, such as Columbus, Ohio–based Redemtech, have found that coping with the more than three billion electronic devices purchased each year by U.S. companies and consumers can be good business. "Per weight of e-waste, 90 percent of it is moderately valuable nontoxics like steel, aluminum, plastics," says Redemtech president, Robert Houghton, which the company handles at one of six plants in North America. The rest is sent to centralized facilities with the safety equipment to handle toxic materials such as lead. "If we send 1,000 pounds of toxic-bearing circuit cards, we expect to have 1,000 pounds of materials liberated."

The volume of e-waste, particularly lead-bearing CRTs, will likely grow exponentially next February, when U.S. television networks switch from analog to digital signals. And it would appear, based on the GAO report, that EPA is not ready to enforce regulations for the proper handling of such toxic materials.

Further, the liquid-crystal display televisions that are likely to replace them contain mercury in the fluorescent lightbulbs inside them. "We don't know how to take out the mercury, let alone deal with it responsibly," Smith says.

In the future, light-emitting diodes might prove a toxic-free alternative, according to Sony's Small. But that would just unleash another onslaught of e-waste if all TV owners were to make the switch again—and much of that would likely end up shipped out of the country. "Only 5 percent of imports are inspected," Small notes. "One can only imagine how many exports are inspected."

"We can't just ship it overseas any longer and pretend it doesn't exist," says Rep. Mike Thompson (D–Calif.) who supports federal e-waste legislation. "It should be regulated to prevent harm to human health and the environment overseas—and right here in this country." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

olfactory Louis J. Sheehan

Most of the brain does fine with its original brain cells, but parts involved in smelling and remembering sometimes need some new recruits.

In mice, new neurons are needed to remember mazes and keep their scent-sensing organs plump (but aren’t necessary for detecting smells), a new study shows. Another recent study demonstrates that some antidepressants require neurogenesis — the creation of fresh neurons — to work.

Both studies are part of a new wave of research that shows neurogenesis — once thought to be impossible in the brain — plays an important role in the organ’s function.

“These are both very good papers and consistent with the growing appreciation for the importance of adult neurogenesis in general and in particular in behavior,” says Fred “Rusty” Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif.

Neurogenesis creates new neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain linked to learning and memory, and in the olfactory bulb, an organ that detects smells and pheromones. But scientists didn’t know why it was necessary to make new cells in those brain regions.

Japanese researchers led by Ryoichiro Kageyama, a neuroscientist at Kyoto University, report August 31 in an advance online publication of Nature Neuroscience that neurogenesis plays different roles in the two brain structures. http://louis2j2sheehan.us

Nearly all of the cells in the olfactory bulb are replaced, and that refreshing of neurons is required to maintain the shape and volume of the bulb, the researchers report. But mice with shrunken olfactory bulbs had no trouble sniffing out sweet treats, suggesting that a few old neurons are all that’s needed to maintain a sense of smell.

Neural stem cells that make new olfactory bulb neurons seem to act like the adult stem cells that maintain skin, blood and gut, says Kageyama. But the researchers don’t yet understand why a breakdown in maintenance doesn’t destroy the mice’s sense of smell.

“Smell is so important for mice that redundancy in olfaction could be intensive,” Kageyama says. “It is also possible that the mice have some olfactory defect that we are so far not aware of.” The team has not yet tested whether mice with atrophied olfactory bulbs can still detect pheromones.

In contrast to the olfactory bulb, far fewer new neurons are added to the hippocampus. More than 10 percent of neurons are replaced in the hippocampus, but their addition doesn’t make the brain region bigger, and blocking neurogenesis doesn’t make the hippocampus shrink, Kageyama and his colleagues found. There might be only a few new neurons, but they are important for mice to form memories, the researchers say. Blocking neurogenesis impaired mice’s ability to remember a maze for more than week, while mice with intact hippocampuses remembered the maze two weeks after learning to run it. http://louis2j2sheehan.us

“It’s not a straightforward linkage between neurogenesis and memory,” says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute in Toronto, who was not involved in the new studies.Memories can still form in the absence of neurogenesis, but may be subtly different from those made when new neurons are present, he says. Neurogenesis may help form a timeline for memories, with new neurons helping to keep track of memories formed at the time the cells joined the hippocampus.

Neurogenesis in the hippocampus slows down as mice age. Similar slowing in people could help explain why memory fails as people get older, Kageyama says.

Another mystery about neurogenesis concerns antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, the class of drug that includes Prozac. Those drugs were previously shown to stimulate neurogenesis in the hippocampus, but scientists were not sure if that was a side effect of the medication or necessary for its action.

Now, a study on mice in the Aug. 14 Neuron shows that neurogenesis in the hippocampus depends on the action of a protein called TRKB, and that neurogenesis is required for the antidepressant effects of SSRIs.

That doesn’t mean that depression is caused by a defect in neurogenesis, says Luis Parada, who led the study with colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. But the research could shed light on why some people don’t respond to antidepressant therapy and lead to the development of new drugs to treat depression.

“There is exciting evidence that in a variety of animal models neurogenesis accompanies response to antidepressants,” he says. “We’re getting an idea of what molecules mediate this.”

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A new cosmic crowd has captured the distance and heavyweight titles for galaxy clusters discovered deep in the universe. The record-breaker sits billions of light-years from Earth and weighs about a thousand times the mass of the Milky Way, astronomers report in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“To discover a cluster that is so distant yet so big was quite lucky,” says study coauthor Georg Lamer of the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam in Germany.

Lamer and his Potsdam colleagues first spotted the massive cluster, dubbed 2XMM J083026+524133, when scrutinizing data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope. In 2001,the X-ray satellite captured the cluster’s signature while imaging a distant, active galaxy. Surveying the satellite’s catalogue earlier this year for nearby galaxies and distant clusters, the team was startled that the new cluster’s X-ray signal had been overlooked.

BRIGHT SPOTThis XMM-Newton image shows the X-ray signal of the most distant, massive cluster of galaxies, at far right. The telescope’s original target for this observation was an active galaxy — the bright spot in the upper left.ESA XMM-Newton, EPIC, G. Lamer

“It was so bright,” Lamer says.

Optical images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey established that the light could not be coming from a nearby galaxy in that particular cosmic region. So the team took a deep field exposure with the Large Binocular Telescope at the Mt. Graham International Observatory near Safford, Ariz. The cluster appeared and was calculated to be 7.7 billion light-years from Earth. The previous record-holding cluster sits only 3.5 billion light-years away and weighs slightly less than a thousand Milky Ways. http://louis-j-sheehan.info

“The new cluster, at its great distance and with its mass,” Lamer says, “can only be explained by the existence of dark energy.”

Dark energy is an unexplained force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. Without this force, Lamer says, nearby clusters should be much more massive than those that are billions of light-years away. Distant clusters, he says, should be less massive because they had less time to conglomerate.

“It is notoriously hard to compare cluster masses,” he notes. “But, the ‘neighboring’ Coma Cluster and this new, distant cluster actually seem to have comparable masses.”

Still, it is an overstatement to claim that dark energy exists based on observations of this one cluster, comments astrophysicist Stephen Murray of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Although, he says, the discovery does add an important data point in the study of galaxy clusters, which help astronomers test cosmological models that include dark energy.

The strength of dark energy at various cosmic times can be determined if astronomers compare the number of massive clusters found at different distances, Lamer says. But far-off, massive clusters are rare, and XMM-Newton scans too little of the sky to find them. So astronomers must wait until 2011 for the launch of eROSITA, a German X-ray telescope, to scan the entire sky for the predicted 100 or so remaining deep-space, cluster heavyweights, he adds. http://louis-j-sheehan.info