Now that those costs are clear, we need to reinvent just about everything.

everything we make today was invented or designed in a more innocent time, one when shoppers and industrial engineers alike had the luxury of paying little attention to the adverse impacts of what was made.

By switching to brands that have better profiles, we can shift market share toward ecological benefits

It also rates them on their environmental impact and the company's social performance

Here's the good news: if I were shopping for kid-safe toys now, I could use GoodGuide, a neat piece of free software that I downloaded the other day on my iPhone

glassmaking's negative impacts; the chemicals released into the air from the glass factory run from relatively high levels of carbon dioxide to trace amounts of toxic metals like cadmium

Life-Cycle Assessment (or LCA)

But our perceptual system misses the signals when the threat comes in the form of gradual rises in planetary temperature, or minuscule chemicals that build up in our body over time.

decry

coral reefs

For instance, an ingredient in sunscreen primes the growth of a deadly virus in coral reef

price tag

that sporty racer sits atop my desk. I never gave it to my grandson.

lead costs less than alternates, cheaper toys are more likely to contain it

lead in paint makes colors

wooden racing car

stings and bites

fire ants

Their appetite for wood can wreak havoc on all kinds of structures, from homes to bridges

Cats

rats

rodents’ worldwide occupation stems from about 3,000 years of hitchhiking on human boats

hitchhiking in used tires shipped from its native Asia

mosquitoes

shows us that this is a massive problem that’s getting worse

Still, getting a global look is very important

. “There are major gaps in the data

The team then constructed a statistical model that estimated yearly costs, adjusting for factors like inflation, different currencies and timescales

19,000 published papers

By estimating the global cost, we hoped to raise awareness of the issue and identify the most costly species

invasions cost the global economy

These invaders, often thrust into new environments unintentionally

Cleaning up

The newly discovered exotic chemistry of these toxin-makers doesn’t surprise Jason Stajich of University of California, Riverside, who studies other cyanobacteria in his genetic explorations of microbial evolution

In this case, now that the suspect has been nabbed, there’s even more reason to get rid of the Hydrilla invaders that facilitate the toxin making

solving the mystery couldn’t have come soon enough.

The weedy Hydrilla stops flourishing and starts leaking bromine-rich compounds. That’s when the cyanobacteria have the ingredients to make their deadly toxin.

Researchers discovered that the invasive Hydrilla builds up extreme concentrations of bromine compounds, 20 times greater than the concentrations in the lake bottom mud and 500 to 1,000 times greater than in lake water

Bromine

test animals

lurking in the splotches marking the bacterial colonies, was a previously unknown compound, with abundant bromide molecules

They collected wild weeds glopped with cyanobacteria from lakes with confirmed VM outbreaks.

This cyanobacteria soup didn’t seem to bother the test chickens at all, however. Microscopic analysis found no tiny holes in their brains

raised enough cyanobacteria for their first trial feeding a watery solution of it to test animals

hard to grow in the lab

This cyanobacterium turned out to be a new species (Aetokthonos hydrillicola)

but leaf-clingers weren’t typically menaces.

Some other cyanobacteria, which slosh around as soup in water, release great flushes of toxins that kill fish and threaten human swimmers

That revealed splats of cyanobacteria gripping the undersides of leaves and protecting their colonies with goo

fluoresce

exploring whether the plants and their ride-along cyanobacteria might sometimes destroy brains

Checking the ill animals’ brains

The eagles, coots and some other birds lost their motor coordination, struggled to fly or even walk, and had seizures.

The mystery of the unknown toxin began at an Arkansas lake during the winter of 1994–95 with the nation’s largest unexplained die-off of bald eagles

Yet those bromide building blocks are not routinely abundant in southern lake water. That’s where the life story of a particular water weed comes in.

University of Georgia in Athens

the toxin has an unusual chemical structure requiring building blocks rich in the element bromine

AETX

a research team has found a toxin that could be the culprit.

cyanobacteria

Mysterious deaths of bald eagles, mallards and other lake life in the southeastern United States have puzzled scientists for more than 20 years