Excerpts from the Globe’s environmental blog.
Now it’s your turn to make sure they don’t make it to Boston by participating in a survey on Saturday from 9 to 11 a.m. near Boston Common.
The invasive Asian longhorned beetles have no known predators in the United States and attack many kinds of hardwood trees. The Department of Agriculture estimates the beetle has the potential to cause $41 billion worth of damage to the nation’s lumber, maple syrup, nursery, and tourism industries.
The shiny black bug has irregular white spots and antennae at least as long as its 1- to 1 1/2-inch body. It kills a tree by essentially cutting off its circulation: The female lays eggs in the bark, and wormlike larvae then bore into the healthy tree, feeding on tissue during the fall and winter before emerging through bark holes.
Volunteers will be taught how to look for the beetles by looking for tree damage. Signs of an infestation include smooth, round, dime-size holes left by adult beetles exiting a tree, sawdust-like material on the ground around the trunk or on tree limbs, and oozing sap.
So get on some walking shoes, bring some water, and meet at the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Arlington Street. Survey leaders will be wearing ALB buttons and shirts.
“It was a private citizen who reported the state’s first Asian longhorned beetle in the Worcester area over a year ago, and we are counting on the public again to help us win the battle against this invasive pest,’’ said state Agricultural Resources Commissioner Scott Soares.
But that potential contamination pales compared with arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh, Nepal, and other South Asian countries. Every year, tens of thousands of people get sick when arsenic in rock seeps into drinking water supplies.
People can suffer skin lesions and cancers.
It’s a global health crisis, but three Dartmouth College engineering students have come up with an ingenious solution that won $15,000 in the recent 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition.
Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and Dana Leland built an inexpensive, reliable device made of materials available in any place suffering from high levels of arsenic in ground water.
The team uses electrocoagulation, a process used in many modern cities’ water treatment plants to scrub contaminants from water - but scaled down to fit into three 5-gallon buckets. Untreated water is placed in the first bucket, and current from a 6-volt battery is sent through two steel plates. Tiny iron particles are released and bond with the arsenic in the water.
The water is then poured into a bucket of clean sand that sits over the third bucket. The sand filters out the iron-arsenic particles and drinkable water collects in the bottom bucket.
The team tested its device using water that contained 200 parts per billion of arsenic. By the time it made it to the third bucket, the water contained less than 1 part per billion of arsenic.
US officials consider water safe for drinking at 10 parts per billion or less.
The contest is a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, sponsored by the Abbott Fund, the nonprofit foundation of the global health care company Abbott, and the US Patent and Trademark office.
