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Before wastewater is treated, scientists can look for traces of illegal drugs. (photo courtesy of flickr user DefMo)

Archaeologists often talk about the importance of trash—you can learn a lot about a culture by looking at what it threw away. Chemists may say the same thing about another kind of waste: sewage. Throughout last year, researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research monitored the illegal drug habits of half a million people in Oslo by chemically sifting through the sewers. The work is an example of the emerging field of “sewage epidemiology.”

The research field has developed over the past decade (Popular Science has a good article on the early days). The idea is that screening for drugs that pass through the body and then get flushed down the toilet may be one of the fastest, most accurate ways to assess a community’s drug use. After all, people can lie in surveys, and segments of the population can be overlooked. It’s harder to manipulate what goes into the sewers (although I can imagine that if sewage epidemiology really takes off, paranoid drug users may look for alternative ways to get rid of their personal waste).

In the Norwegian study, published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, Christopher Harman, Malcolm Reid and Kevin Thomas placed chemical samplers in a wastewater treatment plant and, over the course of a year, looked for cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, Ecstasy and the chemicals that these drugs break down into during digestion. They found some interesting results. For example, concentrations of cocaine went up on the weekends, and Ecstasy spiked in the month of May. The researchers note that this peak coincided with “russefeiring,” a two-week celebration for recent high school graduates.

Based on the concentrations of each drug—and knowing certain factors like how much of a drug gets excreted by the body—the team calculated backward to figure out drug usage. For cocaine, daily consumption averaged between 0.31 and 2.8 grams per 1,000 inhabitants. The researchers say this is in line with estimates from Spain.

The Norwegian study looked only at one wastewater treatment plant that serves much of Oslo and three neighboring areas, but other studies have tracked drug usage over a much larger area. In 2008, researchers collected samples from 96 municipalities in Oregon, accounting for 65 percent of the state’s population. They found that cocaine use was much higher in urban areas whereas methamphetamine was found everywhere.

The Oregon study was only a one-day snapshot of drug habits. But if such a study were maintained over time, sewage epidemiology could be a powerful drug-tracking tool for law enforcement. As the Popular Science article points out, such analyses could allow officials to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-drug campaigns or follow drug supply lines.

The possibility of constant wastewater monitoring may make some people uncomfortable, but I find it fascinating that scientists can track a range of behaviors—from prescription drug use to preferences in cosmetics—with a test tube of sewer water. I wonder what sewage epidemiologists will be looking for next.

The Glass Frog (Centrolenella colymbiphyllum) has skin so translucent that you can watch its heart beating (credit: Carl C. Hansen, Smithsonian Institution)

When I started working on this frog blog post (inspired by the adorable yet deadly poison dart frogs at the National Zoo), my knowledge of frogs was limited to Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows and Kermit. Obviously, I had a lot to learn. I have since discovered many amazing, surprising, disgusting and flat-out weird facts about frogs, and have collected the 14 best to share here with you:

1 )  One gram of the toxin produced by the skin of the golden poison dart frog could kill 100,000 people.

2 )  The female Surinam toad lays up to 100 eggs, which are then distributed over her back. Her skin swells around the eggs until they become embedded in a honeycomb-like structure. After 12 to 20 weeks, fully formed young toads emerge by pushing out through the membrane covering the toad’s back.

3 )  A frog completely sheds its skin about once a week. After it pulls off the old, dead skin, the frog usually eats it.

4 )  When Darwin’s frog tadpoles hatch, a male frog swallows the tadpoles. He keeps the tiny amphibians in his vocal sac for about 60 days to allow them to grow. He then proceeds to cough up tiny, fully formed frogs.

5 )  When a frog swallows its prey, it blinks, which pushes its eyeballs down on top of the mouth to help push the food down its throat.

6 )  The wood frog of North America actually freezes in the winter and is reanimated in the spring. When temperatures fall, the wood frog’s body begins to shut down, and its breathing, heartbeat and muscle movements stop. The water in the frog’s cells freezes and is replaced with glucose and urea to keep cells from collapsing. When there’s a thaw, the frog’s warms up, its body functions resume and it hops off like nothing ever happened.

7 )  A group of birds is called a flock, a group of cattle is called a herd, but a group of frogs is called an army.

8 )  The glass frog has translucent skin, so you can see its internal organs, bones and muscles through its skin. You can even observe its heart beating and its stomach digesting food.

9 )  There is a frog in Indonesia that has no lungs – it breathes entirely through its skin.

10 )  The waxy monkey frog secretes a wax from its neck and uses its legs to rub that wax all over its body. The wax prevents the skin of the frog from drying out in sunlight.

11 )   Most frogs have teeth, although usually only on their upper jaw. The teeth are used to hold prey in place until the frog can swallow it.

12 )  The biggest frog in the world is the Goliath frog. It lives in West Africa and can measure more than a foot in length and weigh more than 7 pounds – as much as a newborn baby.

13 )  There’s a type of poison dart frog called the blue-jeans frog; it has a red body with blue legs. It is also sometimes called the strawberry dart frog.

14 )  The red-eyed tree frog lays it eggs on the underside of leaves that hang over water. When the eggs hatch, the tadpoles fall into the water below.

An icy landscape in northern Canada almost looks like water, as seen from the International Space Station (credit: ESA/NASA)

We live in an age of satellites; the skies above are full of them, usually just beyond our sight. And while we benefit plenty from the information they provide and the technologies they make possible, my favorite satellite product has to be the imagery. Many people marvel at the Hubble pictures of deep space, but my preference is for the images of Earth and especially the ones in which our planet turns into an Impressionist’s dream.

For years, the USGS has collected many of its Landsat images into “Earth as Art” collections, and now many of them are being displayed in an exhibit at the Library of Congress; you can see some here on Smithsonian.com.

But now I (and tens of thousands of others) are enjoying another collection: the European Space Agency’s Flickr stream. I’ve highlighted eight of my favorites from the Earth from Space category in this gallery. Which ones would you consider hanging as art in your home?

The April 6, 2009 earthquake in Italy destroyed many buildings, new and old. Photo courtesy of Frengo2.0.

Last year I wrote about a group of Italian scientists who had just been indicted on charges of manslaughter for not alerting the public that a particularly bad (magnitude 6.3) earthquake would occur on April 6, 2009 in the Abruzzo region. Several months later, after scientists worldwide protested the move, it looked as if the charges would be dropped. But that has now changed, and the scientists are likely to go on trial; if convicted, they face up to 12 years in prison. They’ve not been blamed for not predicting the earthquake, but close enough, as the New York Times explained yesterday:

They do not stand accused of failing to predict the earthquake; everyone agrees that would have been impossible. But prosecutors say that by playing down the risk of a major earthquake, the panel — the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks — failed to uphold its mandate and did not allow the local population to make adequately informed decisions about whether to stay in their homes or move to a safer place.

Here’s what happened back in 2009:

Before the April 6 earthquake, the region had been experiencing smaller earthquakes for some months. Following a magnitude-4.0 quake on March 30, the six scientists now under indictment met with Bernardo De Bernardinis, the deputy technical head of the Civil Protection Agency, to discuss the risk of a larger event. After the meeting, De Bernardinis told reporters at a press conference that “the scientific community tells us there is no danger, because there is an ongoing discharge of energy. The situation looks favorable.”

The minutes of that meeting, however, show that the scientists were cautious in their evaluation of the situation, Nature reports, saying that a major quake in the region was “unlikely” but could not be ruled out.

Either way, the claim that people would have altered their behavior if the scientists had been less cautious and issued a more forceful warning is simply not plausible. The way that you prepare for an earthquake when you live in an earthquake-prone area—be it Italy or California—should be to build to certain standards to make structures as earthquake-proof as possible. You don’t wait for some sign that you should flee the area and then hope for the best.

And it appears that the region had failed that preparation, which was apparent even in the first days after the 2009 quake. From Reuters the day after:

…shocked Italians asked how modern buildings — not just historic churches and stone houses — could crumble into pieces in a region known for its high seismic risk.

“Once again we are faced with the lack of control on the quality of construction,” Franco Barberi, who heads a committee assessing earthquake risks at Italy’s Civil Protection agency, told reporters in L’Aquila.

“In California, an earthquake like this one would not have killed a single person,” he said.

The tragedies in this story keep mounting—309 people died. Innocent scientists could be put in prison. And I have to wonder if the real reason for all those deaths, that modern buildings were apparently not built to adequate standards for the area’s risk, is being completely ignored, thus setting up Italians for more disasters.

Wood models of human heads in the NIST Museum collection (courtesy of National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections, Information Services Division)

At the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian.com, we love collections of stuff. The Institution is, after all, the owner of what is probably the world’s largest collection of stuff—137 million artifacts, specimens and works of art. And so how could we resist helping another collecting institution, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Museum, identify some of its stuff?

Take these heads, for instance, some of the items for which the NIST Museum has only minimal information and for which they are searching for more. NIST has placed images of several of these items, with more to come, on the website of its Digital Archives and is asking the public for help.

“We have some artifacts in our collection we want to identify, so we thought we could exhibit them online and ask for help,” NIST Digital Services Librarian Regina Avila told GovCon Executive. “It was fun to photograph them, but challenging. Some artifacts were broken, others had missing pieces. Some were heavy and others were fragile.”

In addition to the heads, there are stamp dies, a frequency-analysis recording of a cicada, a motor, a drafting set—all objects that someone sometime in NIST’s history used to carry out its mission of advancing the science of measurement and American technologies and setting the standards to make that all possible. A clue to the extensiveness of that mission is held in the brief description of those heads:

Wood models of human heads. Inscription on bottom of models reads “National Bureau of Standards 6-1-1946. Size 7″. Some heads are also inscribed “Size 7.5″. These model heads may be a “95% profile model”. The contours of this type of model human head were said to be common to 95% of the population, and could thus be used to design respirator masks and other equipment that were required to seal firmly against the face.

But who used them and to design exactly what kind of masks remains unknown. Perhaps you know. If you do, send an e-mail to library@nist.gov.