Health Effects of Gillnets on Sea Turtles along the Cape Fear River

The lower portion of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina is home to fisheries and sea turtles which is a costly combination for both. In this area, fishermen use gillnets, or large mesh nets used to capture fish, that are hazardous to both sea turtles and the fishing industry. Sea turtles can get caught in the nets, ruin them, and inflict injury or death upon themselves.

In an effort to decrease mortality rates, North Carolina law requires fishermen to supervise their gillnets during the summer months. Since gillnets are in the water for an average of twelve hours (soaked), many fishermen don’t supervise their nets for the full time in an effort to cut costs (1).

Many sea turtles escape the gillnets only to die later on from boating accidents, predators, or their injuries. In an effort to decrease sea turtle mortality, researchers from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and Grice Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina analyzed sea turtle blood biochemistry to determine the likelihood of survival after entanglement and release.

The researchers captured eighteen sea turtles using a mesh gillnet soaked for a maximum of six hours from May to October. To ensure the safety of the animals, the sea turtles were immediately brought to the surface if they were in danger of drowning.

Once the sea turtles were detangled/ released the researchers drew blood immediately after the turtle was brought on board. They then tested the turtles reflexes, checked for injuries, and monitored behavior before the turtle was released about ten meters from the capture site.

The scientists rated the turtles from A to D, with A meaning perfect condition and D being low activity, severe injuries, and missing or delayed reflexes.

Only three of the eighteen sea turtles rated as an A

Only three of the eighteen sea turtles rated as an A. Out of those who did not, their blood work showed elevated levels of lactate, LDH (lactate dehydrogenase), and other chemicals which cause an increase in metabolism. Due to the increased metabolism, the sea turtles have to spend longer periods of time on the surface in order to recover. These longer surface times greatly increase the risk of death for the turtles.

The researchers hope their study would determine a maximum unattended soak time for fishermen that would also minimize the unintentional capture of sea turtles. Due to other factors that lead to sea turtle deaths, the scientists recommended the current restriction remain. However, the scientists also recommend that captured sea turtles be brought onboard to assess their physical well-being.

They outline that fishermen can do a gentle touch to the tail or eyelid to assess reflexes and a simple visual inspection to check for injuries. They also suggest that fishermen take the turtles to a rehabilitation facility at the first sign of injury or distress.

1. Snoddy, J. E. (2009). Blood Biochemistry of Sea Turtles Captured in Gillnets in the Lower Cape Fear River North Carolina, USA. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 8(73), 1394-1402.

Pesticides, Urine and Vacuum Dust: What’s the Connection?

Dust is nearly as ubiquitous as the wind, floating and flying into every crevice of our lives. It begins as a speck of dirt or a couple of hairs, and as it settles over every surface, it clings together as a fuzzy blanket or a furry tumbleweed. That blanket—and every particle that binds it together—holds evidence of what you breathe each day.

That evidence inspired Dr. James Starr to conduct a study on what was in the dust in people’s homes. A physical research scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Starr was particularly interested in a specific ingredient that he suspected he would find in the dust—pesticides.

According to Starr, almost no one can avoid the presence of pesticides. The neatest, most compulsive housekeeper who eats organic food and shuns furry companions may provide even the slightest exposure to pesticides in the air. Most times, the exposure goes unnoticed. Although most people won’t ingest even a fraction of the pesticides needed to make them sick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention periodically assesses people’s exposure to pyrethroid pesticides by examining their urine. Pyrethroids are a type of pesticide commonly used to control insects on farms, in homes and on pets.

When someone uses a pesticide—whether it’s a shot of ant or roach spray in a corner or a flea product on a dog—that pesticide remains where it is applied. Once it enters the environment, the original parent pesticide, and the altered compounds that comprise it—called degradates—enter the body with a breath or a bite of food, may be further metabolized, and may exit the body through the urine.

In the urine, Starr says, the metabolized parent pesticide and the degradates look identical when they are analyzed. Starr wanted to know if urinary analyses were accurately measuring the amount of the original pyrethroids in a person’s body or if some of the person’s exposure came from the less toxic degradates. If people were inhaling both the parent pesticide and the degradates, results from urinary analyses would be unnecessarily alarming. So he decided to test dust samples vacuumed from people’s homes.

“We’re interested in dose, the follow-up to exposure,” Starr says. “That’s where the chemicals have the ability to have an effect.” The greater the toxicity of a substance and the more that’s ingested, the more likely the substance is to have an effect.

To purify the dust samples, Starr sent them to a lab in Maryland to be zapped with gamma radiation. Dust is as nasty as it seems; it’s a collection of skin cells, bacteria, hair, dirt, and any other particle flying around in the air. Starr says he only works with dust inside a fume hood.

“If you can smell the contents of the bag when you vacuum, you are redistributing dust throughout your home,” he says.

The pyrethroid products in the dust samples—in doses too miniscule to likely be harmful—included the degradates.

“This shows that exposure can be to the degradates in addition to the parent compound,” says Starr. “If you don’t know which, you may overestimate exposure to the more harmful parent.”

Thanks to Starr, we can all breathe easier.

Reference: Starr, J., Graham, S., Stout, D., Andrews, K. and Nishioka, M. Pyrethroid pesticides and their metabolites in vacuum cleaner dust collected from homes and day-care centers. Environmental Research, 108 (2008) 271-279.

Soverign Wealth Funds: Risk and Reward

Norwegian Risks Pay Off

Jim Allen

So what’s the big deal about Norway? “It’s a hereditary monarchy and parliamentary democracy, cold, and has universal health care, but what’s risky about that”, is what one might pronounce. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) performed better than its private sector counterparts with a higher associated risk, according to a recent study published by North Carolina State researchers in The World Economy. Funds like the one in Norway are large and growing, and are just recently coming into public light.

Sovereign Wealth Funds are basically large government investment funds which function like mutual funds in terms of risk and return on investment. While not all SWFs are the same, they each have a similar goal: “to achieve maximum income subject to a level of risk and certain portfolio constraints specified by its Ministry of Finance.” In Norway, the Fund allows government spending to be smoothed out relative to the volatile pattern of the nation’s oil revenue. SWFs are essentially savings accounts for governments; citizens have banks, and now government entities do also. Many nations which have SWFs are also oil producing nations; SWFs provide a stabilizing effect for nations which have erratic economies related to fluctuations in oil prices. These nations include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Norway, and even the U.S.

According to the research, “Total assets held by SWFs have been estimated to be around US$3 trillion (Jen, 2007)” (See the figure below). This value is greater than the total assets of hedge funds (US$2 trillion) but less than total official monetary reserves of central banks (US$6 trillion).” By 2013, the holdings of SWFs are estimated to exceed US$6 trillion. These are just approximations because the literature on SWFs has been limited and descriptive at best, up till now. The large amount of money held Worldwide by SWFs was quite alarming to the researchers at NC State when they looked at the relative return ratios and how much risk the SWFs were taking to achieve these returns.



Researchers found that the Norway Fund had average monthly returns of 0.36%, while the Social Choice Fund (generally accepted as a balanced and fiscally responsible fund) had a return of 0.16%. To explain this, the research also included data on return on investment versus risk. Not surprisingly, the increased returns also carried increased risk. More specifically, the Norway return to risk ratio was 0.14 while the Social Choice Fund had a much lower ratio at 0.07. Critics also point out mistakes made by SWFs in recent years, and in particular investments in American corporations such as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch.

This research effort with the Norwegian SWF Fund (referred to as “The Fund”) is one of the first of its kind since the Norwegian government has allowed a high level of transparency unrivaled by other Funds. Researchers stated that “The Fund demonstrated transparency by providing detailed and reliable information about its activities in a timely manner.” Because of this, researchers were able to analyze important data about how The Fund affects global markets and what kinds of returns its investors receive.




Caner, Mehmet, and Thomas Grennes "Sovereign Wealth Funds: The Norwegian Experience." World Economy 33.4 (2010): 597-614. Wiley Interscience. Web. 1 Mar. 2010. .

Nightmare on Hog Street

The nightmare is always the same: I’m a kid again, riding in the passenger seat of my mom’s 1997 Chrysler Town and Country, playing Pokémon happily with the wind blowing in my face. All of the sudden, I feel it creep up my spine – a dark matter with properties beyond comparison.

I’m talking, of course, about the foul, foul, foul odors emitted by hog and chicken farms. Driving two hours from Raleigh in any direction is putting your nose at serious risk and heading toward the beach is a death wish.

In fact, North Carolina produced 781,000,000 chickens and produced 2.96 billion eggs in 2007, compromising 38.8% of North Carolina’s total farm income. However, the process of taking animal byproducts like skin, bones, and feathers and processing them into useful products produces extremely foul odors.

There may finally be a solution!

Dr. Praveen Kolar, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at NC State, has devised a new inexpensive treatment process that significantly eliminates foul odors and air pollutants emitted by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

Working with Dr. James Kastner at the University of Georgia, Dr. Kolar “has designed an effective filtration system that takes advantage of catalytic oxidation to remove these odor-causing pollutants.”

Catalytic oxidation uses specially-designed catalysts and ozone to break down the odor-causing compounds.

Catalysts are things that are added to a process to start or change the rate of the process’ chemical reaction, and the catalyst is not consumed by the reaction itself, meaning a catalyst can be used many times.

Kolar and Kastner developed the catalysts by “coating structures made of activated carbon with a nanoscale film made of cobalt or nickel oxide.”

Activated Carbon’s porous structure gives it a very large surface area in which to expose the odorous agents.

“The cobalt and nickel oxide nanofilms make excellent catalysts, Kolar explains, ‘because they increase the rate of the chemical reaction between the odor-causing compounds and the ozone, making the process more efficient. They are also metals that are both readily available and relatively inexpensive.’”

Another advantage of catalytic oxidation is that it takes place at room temperature, meaning there are no energy costs, and the only two byproducts created are carbon dioxide and water.

The current system, which uses chemical “scrubbers” to remove the odor-causing agents, has many disadvantages.

Most obviously, it is ineffective. All the empirical evidence you need is your nose.

Also, some of the odor-causing animal compounds are aldehydes, which are used in making plasticizers and detergents. These aldehydes can “combine with other atmospheric compounds to form ozone – triggering asthma attacks and causing other adverse respiratory health effects.”

Although Kolar has only targeted industrial poultry farms, he is using his research to target hog farms next. "’This technology could be applied to swine operations to address odors and ammonia emissions,’ Kolar says. ‘My next step is to try to pursue this research on a large scale."

OCD: Relieving the Obsession

How many times do you have to wash your hands until they are really clean? One time a day? Five times a day? Would you be surprised if some people wash their hands over 100 times day? This “germ phobia”, while disrupting to daily life, is sometimes the least of worries for people suffering with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in the department of psychology is offering new insight into OCD and ways to treat/alleviate it. With over 3.3 million Adults in America suffering from OCD each year and the high probability of countless more undiagnosed cases, this research is close to offering some answers.

Jonathan S. Abramowitz and co-workers in the Department of Psychology at UNC-CH have shown there to be an unmistakable connection between the concepts of experiential avoidance with the symptoms of OCD. Experiential avoidance, commonly described as a person going to irrational measures to avoid experiencing such unpleasant triggers as disturbing thoughts, emotions, etc., has been previously thought to relate to OCD, but this is the first study proving that it indeed does.

“There are competing theories for explaining obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms and this study was designed to try to figure out which theory is stronger. Knowing this can help with better understanding and treating people with OCD,” said Abramowitz.

The study was conducted using 353 volunteer students from UNC-CH enrolled in an introductory psychology course. The students, under confidentiality, were administered three questionnaires via internet at their convenience measuring: 1) tendency for experiential avoidance; 2) tendency towards depression; and 3) tendency towards specific OCD symptoms, such as hand-washing, hoarding, checking, etc. After scoring the questionnaires based on certain criteria published in literature, the researchers divided the scores into two groups, one with a higher degree of obsessive compulsive (OC) symptoms, and another with a much lower degree. The analysis at the core of the journal article was created from the data specific to the group with a higher OC tendency.

Upon examining the results from a statistical analysis of the higher OC group, the researchers discovered that “As expected, the High-OC group evidenced greater levels of…experiential avoidance relative to the Low-OC group.”

But how is this new and what does this mean for the public afflicted with OCD?

From the results of this research, “…people with OCD probably have specific dysfunctional beliefs that underlie their OCD symptoms moreso than having a general tendency to avoid unpleasant experiences. Also, that treatment might be focused on modifying obsessive beliefs which underlie the problem, rather than helping patient develop more psychological flexibility in general,” said Abramowitz.

When looking at what is to come next, “Future research should examine this same question using actual treatment-seeking patients with OCD…[rather than using a]… non-clinical sample of people scoring highly on a measure of OCD symptoms,” says Abramowitz.

It can sometimes be difficult to treat such an illness as OCD, but what remains certain is that the illness can never be treated or cured if you are focusing on the wrong aspect of the illness. Thanks to Abramowitz and co-workers at UNC-CH, even more successful treatments for this condition are that much closer to becoming a reality.

Steven Burgess

Peer-reviewed literature:
Abramowitz, Jonathan S., Gerald R. Lackey, and Michael G. Wheaton "Obsessive-compulsive Symptoms: The Contribution of Obsessional Beliefs and Experiential Avoidance." Journal of Anxiety Disorders 23 (2009): 160-166.

Picture from:
http://bit.ly/9r0nSJ

Science Journalism: Magazine vs. Online Series

The 2009 AAAS Science Journalism Award Recipients in the magazine and online categories approach the concept “explaining science to the public” in divergent ways.

Gary Wolf’s magazine article, “A Simple Plan to ID Every Creature on Earth” manages to keep a nice balance between the science and the overall story. He explains the science involved using specific details and easy-to-understand explanations. The cold hard science about placing a barcode on species by analyzing the CO1 Mitochondrial gene is tempered by descriptions that inspire the different senses. This results in a story that is both engaging and highly informational.

Contrarily, the online series by Lisa Friedman concerning the displacement of people in Bangladesh due to climate change and global warming, begs the question, “where is the science?” It takes a very humanistic approach to a topic that has inundated the news of late and it presents the consequences of human actions. To that effect, it is a well-written human interest story. Because it does not explain anything scientifically, though, it really shouldn‘t have won an award for scientific journalism. Instead it is a nice story of how humans are suffering because of a scientific phenomenon.

The two winners both use pictures to enhance the pieces. The online series takes it a step further with a short video clip. This video clip tugs on the heartstrings but it does not explain any science and does not add much to the overall. Both stories are well-written, had clarity, and flowed from beginning to end. However, where the former is scientifically dense, the later is watered down and contains almost no scientific basis or fact.

Large & Small (But Really Long) Newspaper Articles

Carl Zimmer’s three long newspaper articles are on very different topics: “Now: The Rest of the Genome”, “10 Genes, Furiously Evolving”, and “Blink Twice If You Like Me”.

Zimmer’s “Now: The Rest of the Genome” is about Encode (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) and what they are doing. It is full of scientific language referring to terminology that I have heard many times but never fully comprehended. Altough Zimmer does explain it, the It is full of very long sentences and paragraphs compared to the small newspaper article “’One mother loses five of her kids in ‘worst-case scenario’, which is full of short, informative sentences and paragraphs.

It’s main focus is providing a reformative definition for ‘gene’:

‘”These new concepts are moving the gene away from a physical snippet of DNA and back to a more abstract definition. “It’s almost a recapture of what the term was originally meant to convey,’ Dr. Gingeras said.”

This is all I really retained from this article. I got bored many times throughout and can’t imagine someone who is not interested in science finding this interesting or sitting down to read the article in its entirety.

“10 Genes, Furiously Evolving” is about the evolutionary biology of viruses. Virologists study the complexity and mystery surrounding the evolution of viruses. Viruses are described in scientific language, filled with quotes from doctors, etc.

Zimmer includes interesting trivia such as "Virologists have estimated that there are a million trillion viruses in the world's oceans." Further, Zimmer explains that birds are constantly mixing up the constellation of viruses.

This is certainly a relevant article considering the recent swine flu outbreak that has caused everyone to panic. It does a good job explaining how swine flu has evolved and it flows well. Its length was not as daunting as “Now: The Rest of the Genome.”

“Blink Twice if You Like Me” is the most interesting article Zimmer wrote. Although the other two are arguably more important and impactful than cannibal butterflies, they didn’t interest me nearly as much.

Zimmer again used very long paragraphs with very long sentences. However, multimedia such as audio recordings, photos, and videos on the left side of the page add some color and life and detract from the massive wall of text going down the page.

The article is interesting because everyone loves fireflies. Hating fireflies is like hating rainbows. Who hates rainbows? The science was interesting enough and Zimmer explained the observable traits and practices of firefly mating.

However, I found the end of the article the most fascinating: when the author talked about Photuris predators, their deceitful flashes, and how evolution and natural selection came into play. It seemed to be disconnected from the rest of the article, and I’d like to read an expanded article on this topic.

“Lethal Legacy” by Amie Thompson may be from a small newspaper, but it is a long, long, long, long, long article. It’s so long that it needs a few headings: “Merciless Killer”, “Road to Montana”, etc. as well as includes pictures throughout. Long narrative of history of family. There is not much science. It is a sad story and seems to have TONS of information that is just thrown at the paper.

This may be harsh, but I got bored listening to the stories of more and more people getting sick and dying. Compared to ‘One mother loses five of her kids in ‘worst-case scenario’, it bores me and seems to just tell a story of everyone dying. It was all over the place and I didn’t like it one bit. The pictures on the right were the same pictures every new page (and there were six long pages).

“One mother loses five of her kids in 'worst-case scenario'” is on the contrary a short article with short paragraphs that does the job. It doesn’t ad tons of detail or take a long time explaining the science, but gets straight to the point and briefly portrays the tragic events.

This article does not have too much science in it, but it is also far shorter. I think this article would be the article most likely to be completely read by the average reader (including me) because it is not intimidating, unlike the others.

In my opinion, “Disease leads neurologist on research odyssey” is the best article about Pallido-Ponto-Nigral-Degenration (PPND). It is medium in length and I feel its readability and flow are the best. It focused on Wszolek’s research and path instead of jumping around to a bunch of different people and stories like “Lethal Legacy” seemed to do. It seems to be a step up from the shortest article, and step down from the longest article, but still explains all needed information.

Zimmer’s Large Newspaper Articles

Carl Zimmer’s three long newspaper articles are on very different topics: “Now: The Rest of the Genome”, “10 Genes, Furiously Evolving”, and “Blink Twice If You Like Me”.

Zimmer’s “Now: The Rest of the Genome” is about Encode (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) and what they are doing. It is full of scientific language referring to terminology that I have heard many times but never fully comprehended. Altough Zimmer does explain it, the It is full of very long sentences and paragraphs compared to the small newspaper article “’One mother loses five of her kids in ‘worst-case scenario’, which is full of short, informative sentences and paragraphs.

It’s main focus is providing a reformative definition for ‘gene’:

‘”These new concepts are moving the gene away from a physical snippet of DNA and back to a more abstract definition. “It’s almost a recapture of what the term was originally meant to convey,’ Dr. Gingeras said.”

This is all I really retained from this article. I got bored many times throughout and can’t imagine someone who is not interested in science finding this interesting or sitting down to read the article in its entirety.

“10 Genes, Furiously Evolving” is about the evolutionary biology of viruses. Virologists study the complexity and mystery surrounding the evolution of viruses. Viruses are described in scientific language, filled with quotes from doctors, etc.

Zimmer includes interesting trivia such as "Virologists have estimated that there are a million trillion viruses in the world's oceans." Further, Zimmer explains that birds are constantly mixing up the constellation of viruses.

This is certainly a relevant article considering the recent swine flu outbreak that has caused everyone to panic. It does a good job explaining how swine flu has evolved and it flows well. Its length was not as daunting as “Now: The Rest of the Genome.”

“Blink Twice if You Like Me” is the most interesting article Zimmer wrote. Although the other two are arguably more important and impactful than cannibal butterflies, they didn’t interest me nearly as much.

Zimmer again used very long paragraphs with very long sentences. However, multimedia such as audio recordings, photos, and videos on the left side of the page add some color and life and detract from the massive wall of text going down the page.

The article is interesting because everyone loves fireflies. Hating fireflies is like hating rainbows. Who hates rainbows? The science was interesting enough and Zimmer explained the observable traits and practices of firefly mating.

However, I found the end of the article the most fascinating: when the author talked about Photuris predators, their deceitful flashes, and how evolution and natural selection came into play. It seemed to be disconnected from the rest of the article, and I’d like to read an expanded article on this topic.

“Lethal Legacy” by Amie Thompson may be from a small newspaper, but it is a long, long, long, long, long article. It’s so long that it needs a few headings: “Merciless Killer”, “Road to Montana”, etc. as well as includes pictures throughout. Long narrative of history of family. There is not much science. It is a sad story and seems to have TONS of information that is just thrown at the paper.

This may be harsh, but I got bored listening to the stories of more and more people getting sick and dying. Compared to ‘One mother loses five of her kids in ‘worst-case scenario’, it bores me and seems to just tell a story of everyone dying. It was all over the place and I didn’t like it one bit. The pictures on the right were the same pictures every new page (and there were six long pages).

“One mother loses five of her kids in 'worst-case scenario'” is on the contrary a short article with short paragraphs that does the job. It doesn’t ad tons of detail or take a long time explaining the science, but gets straight to the point and briefly portrays the tragic events.

This article does not have too much science in it, but it is also far shorter. I think this article would be the article most likely to be completely read by the average reader (including me) because it is not intimidating, unlike the others.

In my opinion, “Disease leads neurologist on research odyssey” is the best article about Pallido-Ponto-Nigral-Degenration (PPND). It is medium in length and I feel its readability and flow are the best. It focused on Wszolek’s research and path instead of jumping around to a bunch of different people and stories like “Lethal Legacy” seemed to do. It seems to be a step up from the shortest article, and step down from the longest articles, and

Megabeast and Barcoding Life: A Comparison of Award-Winning Science Media

I am sure we are all glad that sabertooth tigers, wooly mammoths, and other giant beast of the ice age are no longer around, but we still wonder why they are no longer around. Of course like any other insect and animal of today “megabeast” of the past would still be classified into different species. An “automatic animal identifying machine” would be useful for that task.

Animals of the ice age are never coming back, but we may know why they're extinct and we do in fact have an “automatic animal identifying machine.”

Gary Wolf is a human, who wrote the 2009 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) award winning article A Simple Plan to ID Every Creature on Earth in Wired Magazine; if you want to make sure you can use Paul Herbert’s “automatic animal identifying machine.”

Wolf’s article tells the story of Herbert quest to rid the biology world of “operational taxonomic units” an imprecise method of classifying organism until identification as a species. Herbert uses CO₁ mitochondria DNA a unique “barcode” to separate specimens into species.

While pictures are few, Wolf uses anecdote and simple language to keep the reader engaged. Herbert’s machine is not widely accepted by the scientific community and Wolf shows that with quotes from the opposition.

In comparison you have Doug Hamilton’s AAAS awarding winning documentary The Last Extinction of the controversial new theory on the extinction of the “megabeast” of the Ice Age.

Hamilton goes where the scientists go showing the scientist triumphs or failures making viewers feel like they are there when their theory is proven right or wrong. Like Wolf, uses opposing opinions to keep viewers engaged while also informing them of alternate theories.

It be could that I found DNA more interesting than extinct ice age animals, since I thought that Wolf did a better job explaining and entertaining readers than Hamilton. To decide for yourselves read/ watch the originals at:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-10/ff_barcode?currentPage=1

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/clovis/

Genes and Climate Change: Recognizing Great Science Writing

Every year the American Association for the Advancement of Science gives out awards to journalists to acknoledge great achievement in the area of science reporting to the general public. What makes these writers so good? What do they have in common? Why is it important to recognize science wrting to a genral audience? These are all questions one may ask of the AAAS, and questions which deserve to be answered.

The first three awards for 2009, for "Large Newspaper" articles which received over 100,000 copies, had to do with genetics and biology. What made these articles particulaly spectacular was their ability to describe immensly detailed and profound research and findings in ways that any adult could understand. This was achieved very sublty using a combination of images, metaphors, and analogies. By relating a complex theory or idea with a simple to understand idea or concept, the reader can gain a fuller understanding and appreciation of the topic. This method of writing was prevelant in all of the newspaper articles. Additionally, the articles made a point to answer the "so what" question that all readers have.

This "so what" question was especially important in the online publications. Online content allows for the author to include links to other content, show pictures and other multimedia, and by doing so draw readers into the article. In the online publication titled "Bangladesh: Where the climate exodus begins", the following image is used to draw out the pathos of the reader.

http://www.eenews.net/special_reports/bangladesh/part_one


Similar techniques are used in other posts in order to give relevance to the subject matter which will make the general public want to keep reading. The use of such techniques of writing, media presentation, as well as the overall presentation is what made these publications very compelling to the general public while still conveying science in a meaningful and accurate way and thus makes them deserving of praise and recognition by the scientific and journalism communities.