By Nanette Wiser
SMELL-A-VISION
As far back as the mid-1990s, residents of the Childs Park neighborhood in St. Petersburg have complained about “the smell.” Starting in September 2022, researchers from Eckerd College and the University of South Florida began walking through the neighborhood in 30-minute intervals several times a week using hand-held sensors to try to determine what is causing the stench. The Eckerd team of students Alexis Vargas and Hailey Thomas was led by Polina Maciejczyk, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at the college. After almost 6,000 measurements, they recently presented their preliminary findings at a Childs Park Neighborhood Association meeting. Among those findings: possible concern for exposure to elevated levels of hydrogen sulfide, a toxic chemical emitted from some industrial plants. It smells like rotten eggs. The findings of the research teams have been shared with the city, Pinellas County, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers also will start new rounds of testing this fall and winter to check their work, put their data on maps and identify more compounds in the air.
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES
Scientists now know a lot more about trees and the forests they live in, and beneath the soil, there is a wood-wide web of communication. Using new tools, researchers have watched and recorded the exchange of information, the many ways a plant community communicates and the elaborate way a forest community functions.Rethink everything we know about trees, forests, and plants. It no longer makes sense to think of a tree as an individual plant – a tree is an interactive part of a cooperative network. The complexity of that network raises issues of whether trees have consciousness, what kind of consciousness that might be, and whether trees are, in fact, sentient. Deep in the forest floor, there is a huge web of tiny mycelial (fungal) threads that interconnect with the roots of trees. Using the new technology that makes the molecular level visible. Researcher Suzanne Simard discovered that the extensive mycelial network transferred carbon between birches and firs, enhancing growth and revealing a network of trees that cooperated and shared resources. It was a single whole with internet-like, complex communication facilitated by the mycelial fibers or a wood-wide web.
