Around the plastic world in 455 days - a citizen science global transect quantifying microplastics in the oceans

Public perception of plastics in the oceans has increased over the last few decades, but only more recently has the potential harm to organisms due to ingestion of microplastics started to be recognized. The monitoring of larger plastics lends itself to Citizen Science projects but sample collection and analysis of microplastics (0.05 – 5 mm) is more challenging. In this Citizen Science project, world-renowned, single-handed yachtsman Jon Sanders (AO, OBE) teamed up with Western Australian Isotope and Geochemistry Centre (WA-OIGC) researchers at Curtin University, to raise awareness of microplastics in the oceans, and to quantify the numbers of microplastic particles present along a global transect using daily water filtration. In particular, the study aimed to provide data for remote areas of the southern hemisphere for which very little data existed previously. The voyage was carried out by Jon Sanders on board Yacht Perie Banou II, departing Fremantle port, Western Australia, on 3rd November 2019 and returning on 31st January 2021, a total of 455 days (somewhat longer than anticipated due to the Covid-19 Pandemic) and spanning 46,100 km. Approximately 115 L of seawater was pumped per day from an inlet in the hull, close to the bow of Perie Banou II, and filtered onto stainless steel woven filters with 43 µm aperture (equivalent imperial: mesh 325). No plastic was present in the filtration system. During stopovers in ports, the filters were couriered to the WA-OIGC laboratories for processing and analyzes by Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). A total of 177 filters were analyzed resulting in a mean count of 33 microplastics m-3 seawater across the entire global transect. The Pacific Ocean was found to contain the least numbers of microplastic particles with 23 and 15 microplastics m-3 seawater for the eastern and western sides of the Pacific transect respectively. The highest recorded numbers were 291 and 246 microplastics m-3 seawater for two contiguous stations south of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, both of which were over 600 km from the Brazilian coastline. Microplastic particles found were typically close to the lower size limit defined as microplastic i.e. 50 µm and were mostly grey/black in color. The collaboration between Jon Sanders’ Citizen Science team and WA-OIGC researchers was highly successful. The study was the first global transect of microplastics in the oceans that utilized consistent sampling methods throughout. The data was consistent with other scientific surveys of remote areas of ocean and could act as a benchmark for future studies into microplastics in the oceans

Author Correction: Rapidly-migrating and internally-generated knickpoints can control submarine channel evolution (Nature Communications, (2020), 11, 1, (3129), 10.1038/s41467-020-16861-x)

© 2020, The Author(s). The original version of this Article contained an error in the labelling of the cross-section in Fig. 2g and the vertical axis in Fig. 2b. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article

Characterisation of the muon beams for the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment

A novel single-particle technique to measure emittance has been developed and used to characterise seventeen different muon beams for the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE). The muon beams, whose mean momenta vary from 171 to 281 MeV/c, have emittances of approximately 1.2–2.3 π mm-rad horizontally and 0.6–1.0 π mm-rad vertically, a horizontal dispersion of 90–190 mm and momentum spreads of about 25 MeV/c. There is reasonable agreement between the measured parameters of the beams and the results of simulations. The beams are found to meet the requirements of MICE

Research campaigns in the UK National Health Service: patient recruitment and questions of valuation

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) aims to improve national ‘health and wealth' by providing infrastructural support to enable clinical research in National Health Service settings in England and Wales. Cognisant of the consequences of studies' failure to achieve required numbers of participants, it also actively campaigns to promote patient awareness of research, and willingness to participate in trials. In this paper, we analyse recent NIHR campaigns and policies designed to encourage patients to participate in clinical research to interrogate how they are implicated in the national bioeconomy. In doing so we expand the notion of ‘clinical labour' to include the work of patient recruitment and highlight an emergent obligation on patients to contribute to research processes. Whereas once patient knowledge and experience may have been devalued, here we draw on the concept of ‘assetisation' (Birch 2012) to explore the emergent relationship between healthcare system and patient as research participant. We consider how patients' contribution goes beyond the provision of standardised objects of valuation so that patients themselves may be perceived as assets to, not only recipients of, the national healthcare system

Intercalibration of the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS experiment at start-up

Calibration of the relative response of the individual channels of the barrel electromagnetic calorimeter of the CMS detector was accomplished, before installation, with cosmic ray muons and test beams. One fourth of the calorimeter was exposed to a beam of high energy electrons and the relative calibration of the channels, the intercalibration, was found to be reproducible to a precision of about 0.3%. Additionally, data were collected with cosmic rays for the entire ECAL barrel during the commissioning phase. By comparing the intercalibration constants obtained with the electron beam data with those from the cosmic ray data, it is demonstrated that the latter provide an intercalibration precision of 1.5% over most of the barrel ECAL. The best intercalibration precision is expected to come from the analysis of events collected in situ during the LHC operation. Using data collected with both electrons and pion beams, several aspects of the intercalibration procedures based on electrons or neutral pions were investigated