Citizen scientists, Nurdle Patrol needs your help! Nurdles are tiny plastic pellets that are used to make almost every plastic item we use, so they’re everywhere! Ships, trucks, and trains all carry them, and when they spill out on their way to manufacturing facilities, they reach the ocean and wash up by the millions on beaches across every coast. The issue with nurdles is that they are harmful or even deadly for sea creatures, and if we clean them up from beaches, new ones will simply find their way back. That’s why the Nurdle Patrol is determined to make a permanent change.
We are excited to announce that two new graduate students will be joining the lab in the Fall; Yunzhi Zheng and Nick Chen. We look forward to welcoming you both to UT!
In a new paper in Cell, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin offer the largest survey to date of proteins in plants, examining 13 different species across 1.1 billion years of plant evolution. Their findings could have practical applications such as increasing crop yields, understanding disease and stress resistance in plants and informing biofuel production. Read Read more about Researchers Create Largest Ever Map of Plant Proteins and Their Assemblies
If you’ve been a citizen scientist for Nurdle Patrol, you’re probably familiar with the collection process: going out to your local shores, picking up plastic pellets from the waterline, and logging the data. But you may have wondered, what’s next? Clearly, you wouldn’t just fling them out into the ocean again. So, what do you do with these newly collected nurdles to make sure they don’t end up polluting a different beach?
Jace Tunnell, reserve director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, gets this question all the time. His suggestion is to “put the
We are excited to announce that the Nurdle Patrol sampling methodology was published in February 2020 in the science journal Marine Pollution Bulletin. The paper identifies not only how sampling is conducted, but how the data can be used in helping to guide policy. With the paper being open access, this means it can be downloaded and shared for free, by anyone! We are hoping this paper helps communities across the country use the Nurdle Patrol data for future research and litigation against companies that are releasing plastic pellets into the waterways. Anyone in the world can add data
Scientists conducted laboratory experiments to learn more about particle emissions when bubbles on an oil slick burst. They observed that bubbles bursting on slicks containing crude oil and dispersant mixtures aerosolize micro-sized droplets (diameter is one thousandth of a millimeter) and nano-sized droplets (diameter is one billionth of a meter). In ambient air, there is a tenfold increase in the concentration of submicron-sized droplets (<one millionth of a meter) when large bubbles (>500 μm) burst on slicks containing dispersants. These results
