White House Goes Big on Microbiome Research.

      The US government is launching a new effort to study the vast, and mostly invisible, array of microbes that thrive in the human body and across ecosystems.

      The US$121-million National Microbiome Initiative (NMI) will attempt to map and investigate these collections of microorganisms over the next two years, with help from multiple federal agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said today.

      Private investors will contribute another $400 million to the effort over several years. Among them is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which will spend $100 million over four years on nutrition and pest control programmes in developing countries, and several research institutions that will examine microbes' role in subjects such as cancer therapeutics and marine microbiology.

      Scientists' interest in microbiomes has grown in recent years. Improvements in genome-sequencing, imaging and computing tools have begun to reveal the breadth of microorganisms' influence on areas such as human health, food production and climate change.

Yet much about Earth's microbiomes is unknown, says Tim Donohue, a bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. "I think we know how to figure out who's there," he says. "But we don’t have the tools to generate the knowledge about what they’re doing and how their activities benefit ecosystems or are detrimental to ecosystems."

FUNDING FIGHT

      The White House project still faces a major hurdle: convincing Congress to approve the full funding proposed by the White House. Its plan for the initiative rests on lawmakers approving the bulk of the NMI's funding as part of the government's fiscal year 2017 budget.

      But the Republican lawmakers who control the House of Representatives and the Senate have generally not supported US President Barack Obama's initiatives. And they may be especially reluctant to devote more money to research on microbes’ role in alternative energy and climate change.

“I think it’s going to be a fight,” says Stefano Bertuzzi, director of the American Society of Microbiology in Washington DC.

      Under the White House plan, the US Department of Agriculture, which is interested in how soil microbes affect crops and animals, is proposing nearly $24 million for the effort. The National Institutes of Health hopes to add $20 million to the hundreds of millions that it already spends to understand the role that microbes play in infectious disease and conditions such as obesity and mental health. And the National Science Foundation proposes to spend about $16 million to fund a wide variety of microbiome research.

      Also joining in are the Department of Energy, which plans to spend $10 million on interests such as the potential for producing biofuels, and NASA, which is interested in searching for extraplanetary life and how microbes affect humans in space.

Few, if any, science initiatives have included so many different government agencies, Bertuzzi says. “The Da Vinci who can summarize all the expertise needed is no longer the case because it’s gotten so complicated and so specialized,” he says. “That’s why we need initiatives like this.”

Woman Taken To Hospital With Shark Still Attached To Her Arm.

      A 23-year-old woman has received a bite from a small shark in Boca Raton, Florida. That's enough to ruin anybody’s day at the beach. But to make matters even worse, she had to be taken to the hospital with the shark still clamped onto to her arm. Talk about being clingy.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Boca Raton Ocean Rescue captain Clint Tracy told The Sun Sentinel local newspaper. “Never even heard of anything like this.”

      The woman was reportedly in a stable condition after she received medical attention. As for the shark, it eventually died after struggling to breath outside of the water. However, its jaw remained firmly locked down.

"The shark wouldn't give up. It was barely breathing but it wasn't letting go of her arm, like it was stuck to her or something," said beachgoing witness Shlomo Jacob, also speaking to The Sun Sentinel.

      The shark is believed to be a nurse shark, which are fairly common to the waters around Florida. Although this species is usually around 3 meters (9.75 feet) long, this little nipper was barely 0.6 meters (2 feet.) Usually, they’re not particularly dangerous to humans, but their serrated teeth can evidently cause some damage if they’re feeling antagonized.  

Hawaii Is At Risk Of A Mega-Tsunami.

      A somewhat unnerving study has suggested there is a small – but significant – chance that an earthquake and resulting tsunami could devastate Hawaii in the next 50 years.

Published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the study from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM) says there is approximately a 9 percent chance of a magnitude 9 or greater earthquake hitting the Aleutian Islands (which extend west from Alaska) in the next half a century, producing a mega-tsunami that could engulf Hawaii. 

      A previous report suggested that a large tsunami would put more than 200,000 residents of Hawaii at risk, and cause $40 billion worth of damage. If the scenario described above did play out, people on the Hawaiian islands would have about 4 hours to get to safe higher ground before the tsunami struck.

      This latest study is not based on any recent activity in the Aleutian Islands, though. It is instead a numerical model based on the global rate of large earthquakes, combined with previous activity reported in the Aleutian Islands’ subduction zone, where one of Earth’s tectonic plates passes under another, known as a fault. 

      The model also incorporated previous tsunamis caused by earthquakes, such as the one that hit Japan in 2011.

“These are rare events,” lead author Rhett Butler toldHawaii News Now. “They don't happen all the time but there is a chance for them and our effort here is to try to define what that chance might be.”

In 2014, Butler and his team found a pile of marine debris in a giant sinkhole that they think is evidence of a huge tsunami 9 meters (30 feet) high hitting Hawaii half a millennium ago. They believe this was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake from the Aleutian Islands. Now, they think there is a risk of another one.

      The team stress that they aren’t trying to cause alarm, but rather they are hoping to alert people who might be affected. However, as the study is just a mathematical model at the moment, this theory will no doubt require verification from other scientists before any firm conclusions can be drawn.