UPFRONT
www.sciencespin.com
medicines at home. However, only one third of these people regularly returned their unwanted medicines to a pharmacy. The study confirms international findings that many people are not aware that medicines should be disposed of properly. Yet, these drugs are likely to end up in groundwater, where they can contaminate supplies. As Prof martin Cormican, Director of the Centre for Health and Environment at NUI Galway, explains, while these drugs may be present in low concentrations, people drinking contaminated water are subect to long term exposure. This is one of the issues that has been causing concern about resistance to antibiotics, and as other irish researchers have found, micro-organisms are adept at picking up genes that confer resistance to widely used antibiotics. many other drugs are biologically active, that, after all, is why they are effective, and they remain so long after they have been discarded. Surprisingly, Ireland has no national strategy for safe disposal of these medicines. As the NUI Galway researchers point out, “many retail pharmacies will take back unwanted medicines, but they do so on a goodwill basis and at considerable cost to them. Prof Cormican said that there has to be a national system in place, similar to the battery recycling scheme, and to back this up, people need to be better informed about safe disposal. 2nd year medical students at NUI Galway, Sarah Cormican (left) and Michelle Furey (right) found that most people do not know what to do with unwanted drugs. Photograph: Andrew Downes.
Flushed
AlmOST every home has tubes, bottles and packs of medicines stashed away long after they have served their original purpose. many of these medicines pack quite a punch, and flushing them away is likely to cause serious contamination of water supplies. Second year medical students at NUI Galway conducted a study to find out what people do with leftover prescription medicines, and it seems that most rely on flushing or burning to dispose of their medical wastes. Sarah Cormican and michelle Furey surveyed 207 people in Galway City, and they found, not surprisingly that most people had leftover
Deep drilling
Drillers on board the vessel, JOiDes resolution expect to penetrate two kms down into the ocean floor off Costa rica in a project that began earlier this year. Geologists from the French CNRS agency, explained that the aim is to reach rocks that underlie rapidly moving plates of the Earth’s crust. Heavy basalts form from cooling of upwelling magma, and when this drop in temperature is slow, a rock called gabbro is formed. By reaching this gabbro layer, the scientists hope to find out more about how oceanic ridges spread. Interest in the Pacific Ocean is high because the spreading of ridges there proceeds faster than areas such as the mid-Atlantic. About one fifth of the Earth’s ridges spread at up at speeds of about eight cm a year, and the material upwelling from these now constitutes about 30 per cent of the Earth’s crust. The ridge off Costa Rica, which started up 15 million years ago, is the fastest of them all, spreading at up to 20 cm a year
www.marine.ie
LIVE LINK
Boole papers
THE celebrated mathematician, George Boole, left a number of books and papers when he died in 1864. University College Cork is gathering these records to make these available to the public in digital form. George Boole’s work laid the foundations of modern computer languages, and during the nineteenth century he was Professor of mathematics at UCC. With the support of corporate sponsorship from EmC, over 4,000 items have gone into the digital archive during the past two years.
[email protected]
LIVE LINK
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 47 Page 3