Tag Archives: Mauritius

Rémi Quirion has an opinion about US-Canada science and about science diplomacy

Rémi Quirion is chief scientist of the province of Québec, Canada, chief executive officer of Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ), and president of the International Network for Governmental Science Advice (INGSA), Auckland, New Zealand. His March 13, 2025 editorial about science, collaboration, and US-Canada relations in light of Mr. Donald Trump’s constant assaults against Canadian sovereignty was published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science magazine, Note: A link has been removed,

A partnership can be demanding, and as with any couple, can have good days and bad. The United States–Canada relationship is most definitely having a bad one. It’s difficult to fully comprehend all the dimensions of the current threats to one of the world’s strongest, longest, and multifaceted alliances. From contemptuous musings on annexation to a tariff war that could wreak economic havoc on both sides of the border, the insults and aggravations are stoking uncertainty about a relationship that has flourished for decades. …

The number one partner for Canadian science is by far the United States. For the past 5 years, 27% of all Canadian scientific publications were coauthored with American colleagues (according to a Canadian bibliometric database and the Web of Science). And the reverse is true as well. Canadian scientists are prominent international partners of American scientists in published research. Long-standing major programs between the two countries include joint research projects on the Great Lakes, the Arctic, space, health (including global public health), climate monitoring, artificial intelligence (AI), subatomic physics, and data sharing. Despite the uncertainty around tariffs, active partnerships have recently been reconfirmed and even extended between federal funding organizations in both countries. These include interactions between the US National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada as well as Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Such efforts are also strong at the regional level. For instance, research between Massachusetts and Québec focuses on climate change, biotechnology, and transportation, an alliance rooted in enduring cultural links.

… For decades, graduate students in Canada have continued training in the United States as postdoctoral fellows, and some have chosen to stay and forge fruitful collaborations with scientists in Canada. … American fellows coming to Canada to pursue their studies are not as numerous but are particularly interested in AI, quantum computing, clean energy, and environmental studies as well as the life sciences. Considering the current situation, it may be tempting for Canada to use the opportunity to lure both younger and well-established Canadian scientists back to Canada. Indeed, Canada is already receiving inquiries in that regard. …

On both sides of the border, additional collaboration should focus on building capacity to advise elected officials and high-level policy-makers on scientific issues. Going further, the International Network for Governmental Science Advice (INGSA) and its 130 member countries, of which I am chair, aim to take on this challenge globally with three chapters in the Global South (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Port Louis, Mauritius) as well as new European (Oxford, United Kingdom) and North American (Montreal, Canada) chapters that will be inaugurated over the next 2 years. A major objective is to increase the ability to offer advice not only at the national level but also to subregional and local officials who often must make critical decisions under emergency conditions.

Strengthening science diplomacy is more urgent than ever in North America and around the world. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science) and the United Kingdom’s Royal Society have just released an updated framework on this topic as did the European Commission. In Québec, the Fonds de recherche du Québec launched a program this year to create new chairs in science diplomacy that will cultivate a network of experts across scientific disciplines throughout the province. The intent is to leverage the network to establish strong international science and policy partnerships.

Canada now has a new prime minister in place, and with the stability of US-Canada relations at stake, scientific partnerships should be upheld by the leaders of both nations. …

Here’s a link and a citation,

Uphold US-Canada science by Rémi Quirion. Science 13 Mar 2025 Vol 387, Issue 6739 p. 1127 DOI: 10.1126/science.adx2966

This editorial appears to be open access.

US science no longer no. 1

Not mentioned in Quirion’s editorial is the anxiety that the American scientific community appears to be suffering from. The days when US science led the world have either come to an end or will shortly depending on what opinion piece you’re reading. What’s not in question is that the days when US science dominated the world scene are over as this January 21, 2022 article by Jeffrey Mervis for the AAAS’s Science Insider makes clear,

A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds.

That loss of hegemony raises an important question for U.S. policymakers and the country’s research community, according to NSF’s oversight body, the National Science Board (NSB). “Since across-the-board leadership in [science and engineering] is no longer a possibility, what then should our goals be?” NSB asks in a policy brief that accompanies this year’s Science and Engineering Indicators, NSF’s biennial assessment of global research, which was released this week. (NSF has converted a single gargantuan volume into nine thematic reports, summarized in The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022.)

“It would be the height of hubris to think that [the United States] would lead in everything,” Phillips [Julia Phillips, an applied physicist who chairs the NSB committee that oversees Indicators] says. “So, I think the most important thing is for the United States to decide where it cannot be No. 2.”

At the top of her priorities is sustaining the federal government’s financial support of fundamental science. “If we lead in basic research, then we’re still in a really good position,” she says. But the government’s “record over the last decades does not give me a lot of cause for hope.” For example, Phillips says she is not optimistic that Congress will approve pending legislation that envisions a much larger NSF over the next 5 years, or a 2022 appropriations bill that would give NSF a lot more money right away.

Falling behind

[Note: The graphic which illustrates the statistics more clearly has not been reproduced here.]

The United States trailed China in contributing to the growth in global research spending over the past 2 decades. China 29% United States 23% South Korea& Japan 9% Other Asia 7% Other 14% European Union 17% Contribution to global R&D growth (Graphic) K. Franklin/Science; (Data) The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022/National Science Foundation

Canadians certainly. know a thing or two about not being no. 1 and maybe we could offer some advice on how to deal with that reality.

In the meantime, the US looks more and more frantic as it attempts to come to terms with its new status both scientifically and in every other way.

Technology for mopping up oil spills

It’s a little disheartening to write about technology for mopping up oils spills as there doesn’t to be much improvement in the situation as Adele Peters notes in her June 4, 2021 article (A decade after Deepwater Horizon, we’re still cleaning up oil spills the same way) for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

Off the coastline of Sri Lanka, where a burning cargo ship has been spilling toxic chemicals and plastic pellets over the past two weeks, the government is preparing for the next possible stage of the disaster: As the ship sinks, it may also spill some of the hundreds of tons of oil in its fuel tanks.

The government is readying oil dispersants, booms, and oil skimmers, all tools that were used in the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. They didn’t work perfectly then—more than 1,000 miles of shoreline were polluted—and more than a decade later, they’re still commonly used. But solutions that might work better are under development, including reusable sponges that can suck up oil both on the surface and underwater.

Dispersants, one common tool now, are chemicals designed to break up the oil into tiny droplets so that, in theory, microorganisms in the water can break down the oil more easily. But at least one study found that dispersant could harm those organisms. Deep-sea coral also appears to suffer more from the mix of dispersant and oil than oil alone. Booms are designed to contain oil on the surface so it can be scraped off with a skimmer, but that only works if the water’s relatively calm, and it doesn’t deal with oil below the surface. The oil on the surface can also be burned, but it creates a plume of thick black smoke. “That does get rid of the oil from the water, but then it turns a water pollution problem into an air pollution problem,” says Seth Darling, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who developed an alternative called the Oleo Sponge [emphasis mine].

… a team from two German universities that developed a system of wood chips that can be dropped in the water to collect oil even in rough weather, when current tools don’t work well. The system is ready for deployment if a spill happens in the Baltic Sea. Another earlier-stage solution proposes using a robot to detect and capture oil.

I’m glad to see at least one new oil spill cleanup technology being readied for deployment in Peters’ June 4, 2021 article, we should be preparing for more spills as the Arctic melts and plans are made to develop new shipping routes.

Amongst other oil spill cleanup technologies, Peters mentions the ‘Oleo Sponge’, which was featured here in a March 30, 2017 posting when researchers were looking for investors to commercialize the product. According to Peters the oleo sponge hasn’t yet made it to market; it’s a fate many of these technologies are destined to meet. Meanwhile, scientists continue to develop new methods and techniques for mopping up oil spills as safely as possible. For example, there’s an oil spill sucking robot mentioned in my October 30, 2020 posting, which features yet another article by Peters.

In the summer of 2020 there were two major oil spills, one in the Russian Arctic and one in an ecologically sensitive area near Mauritius. For more about those events, there’s an August 14, 2020 posting, which starts with news of an oil spill technology featuring dog fur and then focuses primarily on the oil spill in the Russian Arctic with a brief mention of the spill near Mauritius in June 2020 (scroll down to the ‘Exceptionally warm weather’ subhead and see the paragraph above it for the mention and a link to a story).

Replacing nanotechnology-enabled oil spill solutions with dog fur?

Coincidentally or not, this research from Australia was announced a little more than a month after reports of a major oil spill in the Russian Arctic. A July 10, 2020 news item on phys.org announces a new technology for mopping up oil spills (Note: Links have been removed),

Oil spill disasters on land cause long-term damage for communities and the natural environment, polluting soils and sediments and contaminating groundwater.

Current methods using synthetic sorbent materials can be effective for cleaning up oil spills, but these materials are often expensive and generate large volumes of non-biodegradable plastic wastes. Now the first comparison of natural-origin sorbent materials for land-based oil spills, including peat moss, recycled human hair, and dog fur, shows that sustainable, cheaper and biodegradable options can be developed.

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) project found that dog fur and human hair products—recycled from salon wastes and dog groomers—can be just as good as synthetic fabrics at cleaning up crude oil spills on hard land surfaces like highway roads, pavement, and sealed concrete floors. Polypropylene, a plastic, is a widely-used fabric used to clean up oil spills in aquatic environments.

A July 9, 2020 Univesity of Technology Sydney press release on EurekAlert completes the story,

“Dog fur in particular was surprisingly good at oil spill clean-up, and felted mats from human hair and fur were very easy to apply and remove from the spills.” lead author of the study, UTS Environmental Scientist Dr Megan Murray, said. Dr Murray investigates environmentally-friendly solutions for contamination and leads The Phyto Lab research group at UTS School of Life Sciences.

“This is a very exciting finding for land managers who respond to spilled oil from trucks, storage tanks, or leaking oil pipelines. All of these land scenarios can be treated effectively with sustainable-origin sorbents,” she said.

The sorbents tested included two commercially-available products, propylene and loose peat moss, as well as sustainable-origin prototypes including felted mats made of dog fur and human hair. Prototype oil-spill sorbent booms filled with dog fur and human hair were also tested. Crude oil was used to replicate an oil spill. The results of the study are published in Environments.

The research team simulated three types of land surfaces; non-porous hard surfaces, semi-porous surfaces, and sand, to recreate common oil-spill scenarios.

“We found that loose peat moss is not as effective at cleaning up oil spills on land compared to dog fur and hair products, and it is not useful at all for sandy environments.” Dr Murray said.

“Based on this research, we recommend peat moss is no longer used for this purpose. Given that peat moss is a limited resource and harvesting it requires degrading wetland ecosystems, we think this is a very important finding.” she said.

The research concluded that, for now, sandy environments like coastal beaches can still benefit from the use of polypropylene sorbents, but further exploration of sustainable-origin sorbents is planned.

The researchers say that future applications from the research include investigating felted mats of sustainable-origin sorbents for river bank stabilisation, [emphases mine] as well as the removal of pollutants from flowing polluted waters, similar to existing membrane technology.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the study,

Decontaminating Terrestrial Oil Spills: A Comparative Assessment of Dog Fur, Human Hair, Peat Moss and Polypropylene Sorbents by Megan L. Murray, Soeren M. Poulsen and Brad R. Murray. Environments 2020, 7(7), 52; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/environments7070052 Published: 8 July 2020 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Pollution Prevention/Environmental Sustainability for Industry)

This paper is open access.

As for the Russian oil spill

A June 4, 2020 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online article outlines the situation regarding the oil spill and the steps being taken to deal with it,

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has declared a state of emergency after 20,000 tonnes of diesel oil leaked into a river within the Arctic Circle.

The spill happened when a fuel tank at a power plant near the Siberian city of Norilsk collapsed last Friday [May 29, 2020].

The power plant’s director Vyacheslav Starostin has been taken into custody until 31 July, but not yet charged.

The plant is owned by a subsidiary of Norilsk Nickel, which is the world’s leading nickel and palladium producer.

The Russian Investigative Committee (SK) has launched a criminal case over the pollution and alleged negligence, as there was reportedly a two-day delay in informing the Moscow authorities about the spill.

Ground subsidence beneath the fuel storage tanks is believed to have caused the spill. Arctic permafrost has been melting in exceptionally warm weather [more information about the weather towards the end of this posting] for this time of year.

Russian Minister for Emergencies Yevgeny Zinichev told Mr Putin that the Norilsk plant had spent two days trying to contain the spill, before alerting his ministry.

The leaked oil drifted some 12km (7.5 miles) from the accident site, turning long stretches of the Ambarnaya river crimson red.

The leaked diesel oil drifted some 12km (7.5 miles) from the site of the accident [downloaded from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52915807]

Getting back to the June 4, 2020 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online article,

“Why did government agencies only find out about this two days [May 29, 2020?) after the fact?” he asked the subsidiary’s chief, Sergei Lipin. “Are we going to learn about emergency situations from social media?”

The region’s governor, Alexander Uss, had earlier told President Putin that he became aware of the oil spill on Sunday [May 31, 2020] after “alarming information appeared in social media”.

The spill has contaminated a 350 sq km (135 sq mile) area, state media report.

The state of emergency means extra forces are going to the area to assist with the clean-up operation.

The accident is believed to be the second largest in modern Russian history in terms of volume, an expert from the World Wildlife Fund, Alexei Knizhnikov, told the AFP [Agence France Presse] news agency.

The incident has prompted stark warnings from environmental groups, who say the scale of the spill and geography of the river mean it will be difficult to clean up.

Greenpeace has compared it to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

Oleg Mitvol, former deputy head of Russia’s environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, said there had “never been such an accident in the Arctic zone”.

He said the clean-up could cost 100bn roubles (£1.2bn; $1.5bn) and take between five and 10 years.

Minister of Natural Resources Dmitry Kobylkin warned against trying to burn off such a vast quantity of fuel oil.

He proposed trying to dilute the oil with reagents. Only the emergencies ministry with military support could deal with the pollution, he said.

Barges with booms could not contain the slick because the Ambarnaya river was too shallow, he warned.

He suggested pumping the oil on to the adjacent tundra, although President Putin added: “The soil there is probably saturated [with oil] already.”

An update of the situation can be found in a July 8, 2020 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article (issued by Thomson Reuters),

Russia’s environmental watchdog has asked a power subsidiary of Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel to pay almost 148 billion rubles, or $2.8 billion Cdn, in damages over an Arctic fuel spill in Siberia.

Rosprirodnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision of Use of Natural Resources, said in a statement on Monday [July 8, 2020] that it had already sent a request for “voluntary compensation” to the subsidiary, NTEK, after calculating the damage caused by the May 29 [2020] fuel spill.

Norilsk Nickel’s Moscow-listed shares fell by 3 per cent after the watchdog’s statement.

A fuel tank at the power plant lost pressure and released 21,000 tonnes of diesel into rivers and subsoil near the city of Norilsk, 2,900 kilometres northeast of Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin subsequently declared a state of emergency in the region, and investigators detained three staff at the power plant.

Norilsk, a remote city of 180,000 people situated 300 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, is built around Norilsk Nickel, the world’s leading nickel and palladium producer, and has a reputation for its pollution.

Rosprirodnadzor said the damages included the cost for nearby water bodies, estimated at 147.05 billion rubles, $2.8 billion Cdn, and for subsoil, estimated at 738.62 million roubles, $14 million Cdn.

I can’t find any August 2020 updates for the oil spill situation in Russia. (Note: There is now an oil spill in a ecologically sensitive region near Mauritius; see August 13, 2020 news item on CBC news online website.)

Exceptionally warm weather

The oil spill isn’t the only problem in the Arctic.Here’s more from a June 23, 2020 article by Matt Simon for Wired magazine (Note: A link has been removed),

On Saturday [June 20, 2020], the residents of Verkhoyansk, Russia, marked the first day of summer with 100 degree Fahrenheit temperatures. Not that they could enjoy it, really, as Verkhoyansk is in Siberia, hundreds of miles from the nearest beach. That’s much, much hotter than towns inside the Arctic Circle usually get. That 100 degrees appears to be a record, well above the average June high temperature of 68 degrees. Yet it’s likely the people of Verkhoyansk will see that record broken again in their lifetimes: The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet—if not faster—creating ecological chaos for the plants and animals that populate the north.

“The events over the weekend—in the last few weeks, really—with the heatwave in Siberia, all are unprecedented in terms of the magnitude of the extremes in temperature,” says Sophie Wilkinson, a wildfire scientist at McMaster University who studies northern peat fires, which themselves have grown unusually frequent in recent years as temperatures climb.

The Arctic’s extreme warming, known as Arctic amplification or polar amplification, may be due to three factors. One, the region’s reflectivity, or albedo—how much light it bounces back into space—is changing as the world warms. “What we’ve been seeing over the last 30 years is some relatively dramatic declines in sea ice in the summertime,” says University of Edinburgh global change ecologist Isla Myers-Smith, who studies the Arctic.

Since ice is white, it reflects the sun’s energy, something you’re already probably familiar with when it comes to staying cool in the summer. If you had to pick the color of T-shirt to wear when going hiking on a hot day, she says, “most of us would pick the white T-shirt, because that’s going to reflect the sun’s heat off of our back.” Similarly, Myers-Smith says, “If the sea ice melts in the Arctic, that will remove that white surface off of the ocean, and what will be exposed is this darker ocean surface that will absorb more of the sun’s heat.”

If you’re interested in the environmental consequences of the warming of the Arctic, this is a very good article.

Finishing up, I wish the clean-up crews (in Russia and near Mauritius) all the best as they work in the midst of a pandemic, as well as, an environmental disaster (both the oil spill and the warming of the Arctic).

The extinct dodo bird in 3D

This piece is to honour my father who was from Mauritius, former habitat of the now extinct dodo bird.

A March 25, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily announces the first 3D atlas for the dodo,

The dodo represents one of the best-known examples of extinction caused by humans, yet we know surprisingly little about this flightless pigeon from a scientific perspective. Now, for the first time since its extinction, a 3-D atlas of the skeletal anatomy of the dodo has been created, based upon two exceptional dodo skeletons that have remained unstudied for over a century. This atlas, published as the fifteenth Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, represents the culmination of nearly five years of work and thousands of man-hours of digital investigation on the only two associated, near-complete skeletons of the dodo in existence.

A March 25, 2016 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus), an extinct, giant flightless pigeon once endemic to the island of Mauritius, may arguably be the most widely known animal species to have gone extinct in human history. However, despite its prominence in popular culture, surprisingly little is known of the anatomy and biology of this animal. The dodo was extinct by 1693, less than one hundred years after the discovery and colonization of Mauritius by the Dutch. There is not a single complete specimen that exists from 17th century collections, only a few fragments remain; a single desiccated head, a skull, a beak, and a foot. There are also a few genuine but often contradictory contemporary written accounts and drawings. It was not until the discovery of a mid-Holocene fossil concentration-Lagerstätte on Mauritius in 1865, the Mare aux Songes (MAS), that scientists, most notably Sir Richard Owen, were able to reconstruct the dodo’s skeletal anatomy by constructing composite, partially incomplete skeletons. Surprisingly, only few additions to our knowledge of dodo anatomy, paleoecology and extinction have been made since Owen’s 1866 seminal publication, a vast library of semi-popular works on the dodo notwithstanding.

The fossil discoveries made by barber and amateur naturalist Etienne Thirioux between 1899 and 1910 include some of the best dodo remains existing today, including the only complete skeleton known from a single bird (housed in the Natural History Museum in Port Louis, Mauritius), and another largely complete skeleton (housed in the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa). Sadly, Thirioux’s discoveries never received the attention they deserved. Our anatomical atlas of the Thirioux skeletons, produced using modern techniques such as 3D laser surface scanning, opens a new window into the life of this famous extinct bird.

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir number fifteen is the first complete, comprehensive treatise on dodo skeletal anatomy ever produced and only the third monograph on dodo skeletal anatomy; the last one dating from 150 years ago. It represents years of collaborative efforts from a large team of international scientists, with a substantial contribution from undergraduate student researchers in the 3-D laser surface scanning 3-D of the Thirioux skeletons.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the fifteenth memoir,

ANATOMY OF THE DODO (RAPHUS CUCULLATUS L., 1758): AN OSTEOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE THIRIOUX SPECIMENS by Leon P. A. M. Claessens, Hanneke J. M. Meijer, Julian P. Hume, and Kenneth F. Rijsdijk (Editors). Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 15, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Vol. 35, Supplement to No. 6.

This atlas is behind a paywall.