So, scientists in South Korea went and cloned themselves a puppy. (Not for the first time, mind you—don't forget Snuppy in 2005.)

No, today's cloned dog, Ruppy the beagle, has the dubious honor of also glowing ruby red (thank you, sea anemones) under ultraviolet light. Hooray, science?

From the New Scientist:

A cloned beagle named Ruppy – short for Ruby Puppy – is the world's first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light.

A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

Don't miss the second photo of cute, creepy, glowing Ruppy. Here's a slow loris chaser if you need one. Via Digg, that teeming cesspool of fascination.

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The rare element osmium is on the rise globally. Why? Because of the increased consumption of refined platinum, the primary ingredient in catalytic converters used in cars to reduce smog.

Ooops. Hate it when that happens. You know, unintended consequences.

A volatile form of osmium is generated during platinum refinement and also during the normal operation of cars and is now dispersed globally through the atmosphere. Osmium occurs naturally. But Dartmouth researchers were surprised to discover that most of the osmium in rain, snow, and in the surface waters of rivers and oceans is produced during the refining of platinum. Their paper is forthcoming in PNAS.

"It’s interesting, maybe ironic, that we stopped adding lead to gasoline in the 70s so that catalytic converters could be introduced to remove smog from car exhaust," says Dartmouth Associate Professor of Earth Sciences Mukul Sharma.

The research team measured osmium in precip in North America, Europe, Asia, and Antarctica, in surface water and deep water from the North Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans. Human-made osmium also comes from chromium smelters, hospital incinerators, and the normal operation of cars, but it’s primarily the industrial extraction and refining of platinum that produces the bulk of the osmium found in rain and snow.

Some 95 percent of the world’s platinum comes from South Africa and Russia where it's roasted at extremely high temperatures during extraction and refinement. The heat turns the sulfur in the ore into sulfur dioxide and releases osmium. Neither country has environmental regulations for the process.

"It’s surprising that we are seeing this measurable increase in osmium on a global scale," says Sharma. "And we can virtually blame it on one thing: our insatiable demand for platinum-based catalytic converters. Fortunately, unlike lead, the concentration of osmium in water is extremely small and may not adversely affect biology."

Well let's just hope that's true.
 

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The Center for Public Integrity analyzes the coal industry's strategy to keep coal-fired power plants burning long in to the future:

As Butch Cassidy might say, “Who are those guys?”

They’re the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a collection of 48 mining, rail, manufacturing, and power-generating companies with an annual budget of more than $45 million — almost three times larger than the coal industry’s old lobbying and public relations groups combined.

CPI reports ACCCE spent nearly a quarter of that budget last year lobbying the Senate. That's more than Citigroup spent lobbying altogether last year, and double what Bank of America spent. The rest went to advertising and political donations—all in the name of convincing the public clean coal exists.

The coal industry is actually lobbying to receive support for technology that captures carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants. That technology doesn't make coal any cleaner, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu says carbon-capturing technology will take ten years to prove itself. But the coal industry's lobbying and PR efforts have already reaped one huge benefit: The new draft (PDF) of Henry Waxman and Ed Markey's climate change legislation—about which the House energy committee is holding hearings all week—includes a provision what would allow new coal-burning power plants as long as they capture a large part of their carbon output. This is a major shift on Waxman and Markey's part: Only a year ago they backed a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants.

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More than 35 years ago, Congress enacted the legislation now known as the Clean Water Act. The law had been around since its first incarnation—the Federal Water Pollution Control Act—in the Truman era, but the bill Congress passed in 1972 was a sweeping overhaul of the original act. The Clean Water Act set limits on the amount of pollutants industries and cities could discharge and gave the Environmental Protection Agency the power to sue and penalize polluters that exceeded those limits.

But after Ronald Reagan came to Washington, his administration established a program of voluntary compliance with Clean Water Act standards. That program is the launching point for Frontline’s documentary Poisoned Waters (airing Tuesday at 9 pm on PBS), which examines widespread pollution in two US waterways—Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound—caused by 25 years of unregulated toxic industrial, agricultural and municipal runoff.

Narrator Hendrick Smith shows us the first striking snapshot of aquatic pollution when he joins one environmental activist on a flyover of a Purdue chicken farm in Maryland: Behind each shed of 40,000 chickens, we see huge brown splotches of phosphorus- and nitrogen-heavy chicken manure. Rainwater eventually causes the chicken waste to leach in to one of the streams that make up the Chesapeake’s massive aquatic footprint. As Smith shows, chicken waste dumped into a tributary in Richmond could eventually end up in your drinking water in Baltimore.

Poisoned Waters is filled with those types of images: Frogs with six legs, once-male bass in West Virginia rivers that have morphed into females, and an underwater waste pipe spewing a constant noxious cloud of brown goop into Puget Sound. Smith and his crew use those images as segues to the documentary’s crucial point: Any pollution that kills aquatic life can harm humans. Finding dead fish floating belly-up on the surface of a river is a bad omen for humans drinking its water.

While deregulation emerges as the main culprit for the nation's polluted waterways, Smith implicates another group of culpable offenders—us. We’ve spent years creating new chemicals for everything from pesticides to household cleaners, all without pushing for up-to-date technology to purify our water of these toxins. Smith talks to one team of scientists who test for toxins in the Potomac River, both before and after its water is run through a treatment plant just north of Washington, DC. The plant’s outdated filters only remove a third of the pollutants in the Potomac.

So what can we do about it? Poisoned Waters concludes the impetus to clean up aquatic pollution—and halt it in the future—carries the most force when it comes from the electorate. But a pure environmental argument doesn’t always resonate with the voters. As Chris Miller, an activist with the Virginia-based Piedmont Environmental Council, says, “Getting up in front of a crowd and saying, ‘The bay’s in tough shape, and the pollution’s getting worse, and we’ve gotta change our lifestyles to save it,’ really doesn’t get you anywhere.” And with three-quarters of the US population living near waterways, hundreds of millions of Americans are affected by unregulated pollution. The trick is getting us all to care.

Note: I wasn't aware PBS would be advertising this program on our site until after I watched and reviewed Poisoned Waters. —S.A.

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