The Temperature is, we guarantee, the only climate and health newsletter that can happily say we love love, and back it up with news from a Boulder researcher who helps unhappy voles take a paws on their relationship.
This Very Special Valentine’s Day Edition of The Temperature is absolutely a packed mailbox full of news about moony voles, a mega-recycling plan for all of Colorado, high school students cleaning up the planet from their base in Cañon City, and personalized cancer treatments that could transform medicine.
An attempt at positive news for a feel-good day, or just coincidence? We’ll let you decide, right after you run out to buy the flowers you forgot to get while you were calling into radio talk shows about whether San Francisco should have taken the ball first in overtime.
Thanks for putting in the hard work to solidify our newsletter relationship, and here’s hoping the world loves you back.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
LOVESICK RODENTS
The neuroscience of committed relationships as seen through little beady eyes
When it comes to romance, Zoe Donaldson has seen it all: arranged marriage, unrequited love, long distance, breaking up. The CU Boulder professor matches up couples and looks at their brains in love, and once she’s done, she sends them to get fed to the raptors.
For more than 20 years, Donaldson has studied the brains of prairie voles for insights into the neuroscience of committed relationships. These rodents are in the 3%-10% of mammals that practice monogamy, which makes them a top contender for lab research on human romance. They’ve helped Donaldson understand how love and grief shape the vole brain, in hopes of understanding human ones.
(Find more of Clare Zhang’s amazing v-o-l-e/l-o-v-e story on today’s ColoradoSun.com, we are repeating her opening here because it’s just too darn good not to.)
“I immediately fell in love with them,” Donaldson said. “They’re really cute, right? They’re furry little tennis balls with short ears and short tails. They smell way better than laboratory mice.”
But what makes them most compelling to people are their parallels with human relationships, she said. A more classic lab animal, like a mouse, is likely to mate with several males and raise her children either alone or with a group of other females. In comparison, a prairie vole romance is a little more fairy tale, with dating (for at least six hours), moving in together and often raising multiple litters together over their lifetimes.
In Donaldson’s lab, researchers play matchmaker for male and female voles, leaving them together in their cage until they get attached, then separating the happy couple to see how their brains react. In January they published findings on the role of dopamine in pair bonds. Their work suggests biological evidence of humans’ high motivation to get close to a partner, as well as our ability to get over that partner if we break up.
Researchers first tested the voles with distance, placing pairs on opposite sides of a transparent barrier. In some cases, one vole had to press a lever to join its partner. In the others, it would scamper over a wall three times its height to reach the other side. The vole’s nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward system, released much more dopamine when going to its partner rather than to an unfamiliar vole.
“When they get to the top of the barrier, they could just hop out of the cage entirely, but instead they just always drop down,” Donaldson said. “I think it’s fascinating, because their drive to escape is overcome by their drive to go hang out with their partner for 30 seconds.”
CLIMATE
A true statewide recycling system would cost fractions of a penny per package, study says
60%
Upper range of what Colorado’s recycling rate could be in the highest-cost scenario
But then again, fractions of a penny add up in a state with nearly 6 million residents buying consumer goods every day. A baseline report meant to set out options for how to run a new “producers responsibility fee” to promote more recycling shows that the highest-case fee scenario would generate $290 million a year.
Still, recycling advocates were excited by the potential they say the baseline report shows for improving Colorado’s dismal landfill-diversion rates. The new study, part of the process set up by the legislature when it authorized a recycling fee on consumer packaging that would be guided … by a producers’ committee, estimated current diversion rates at 22% to 28% of Colorado waste. (Consumer advocates like CoPIRG, which include a wider variety of waste to calculate their ratios, say Colorado is only diverting about 16% of its waste.)
Using packaging fees to fund expanded curbside recycling efforts in Colorado communities that currently lack them would boost diversion to 47% to 54% of the waste stream in the low-fee scenario studies, and to 54% to 60% diversion if the Cadillac plan moves forward.
Some people had anticipated an effective recycling program might need $1 billion in fees to run properly, said CoPIRG’s Danny Katz. “And here we’re coming in at the $100 to $250 million range. Ultimately, all three scenarios will at least double our recycling rates.”
The state health department is taking public comments on the draft assessment here. Once state officials approve the study, the governing board for the packaging producers will spend the next year creating a detailed plan for the statewide packaging fees and recycling program. Read more about the study and next steps in coming days at ColoradoSun.com
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
CLIMATE
Cañon City high schoolers take a lead in reuse
623,702
Pounds of electronic waste diverted from landfills by Canon City High School
In an example of how various Colorado communities have to take recycling and reuse into their own hands, Sun correspondent Sue McMillin writes that more than 600,000 pounds of mostly electronic waste has been diverted from landfills over the past 12 years by the students who run Tiger Recycling at Cañon City High School.
To be precise: 623,702 pounds of laptops, dismantled desktops, cell phones, printers, televisions, and the assorted detritus of outdated, broken, waterlogged or unwanted gear has been prepped by students and delivered to 3R Technology Solutions, according to 3R CEO Pete Mikulin, who says they track every pound that comes through the doors.
Amid the haul were assorted small appliances – mixers, sewing machines, toasters – and batteries and cords that students disassemble or sort. Tiger Recycling and 3R, its primary vendor, take just about anything that plugs in or runs on batteries except for large appliances such as washers and dryers.
While all this stuff is getting reused or repurposed, the students learn how to take things apart, safely handle potentially hazardous waste, identify and sort materials (such as clean or dirty aluminum, steel and plastic), prepare items for shipping, fill out bills of lading, and take in and weigh items from customers.
This student-run business is unique in a couple of other ways: Tiger Recycling is certified for recycling by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, and it earns money.
“That program, if you look at it as a whole, these kids learn a lot of skills,” Mikulin said. “They take ownership in it every year. They don’t look at it as just a class, they look at it as a company. It is registered with the state of Colorado, and it abides by all the state’s laws and rules for recycling.
“They are practicing sustainability, diverting materials from the landfills. It’s been pretty cool all these years.”
He calls Tiger Recycling the “showcase” of school recycling programs and credits program coordinator Ken Cline with bringing it from the brink of collapse into a self-sustaining business.
See more of Sue’s reporting about Cañon City recycling in today’s ColoradoSun.com.
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Using your genetic code to keep cancer drugs from making you sicker
You have, right now inside you, a gene known as UGT1A1. But that’s so formal. Let’s just call him Eugene.
Eugene holds instructions for making enzymes that help your body break down certain substances, like bilirubin. This is great because it prevents you from developing jaundice. But Eugene also works on other chemicals, including the chemotherapy drug irinotecan.
Now, Eugene isn’t the same in everybody; he has a lot of different variations. One of those variations, known as *28, causes people to metabolize these substances slower. And that’s a problem for doctors trying to correctly dose irinotecan.
“If you have UGT1A1 *28, you are a very slow metabolizer,” said Dr. Wells Messersmith, a medical oncologist at UCHealth and an associate director at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. “If we give you a normal dose, you are going to get very sick.”
“In other words, it’s like an inadvertent overdose,” he said.
In the old days, doctors had to prescribe a dose and wait to see if bad things happened before adjusting. But this is where cutting-edge medicine comes in.
In connection with the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine, certain cancer patients at UCHealth now undergo genetic screening at the start of their treatment. With the patient’s consent, these results then go into the center’s biobank, which links up with UCHealth’s electronic health record system.
Now, when a doctor goes to prescribe irinotecan to someone with a funky variant of Eugene, an alert pops up letting the doctor know of the genetic risk and recommending a different dose.
The Center for Personalized Medicine has around 230,000 patients in its biobank, and it recently crossed the 50,000 mark for patients receiving clinically relevant genetic results.
“Everybody always says, ‘This is so cool, it’s the future of medicine,’” said Dr. Christina Aquilante, the director of pharmacogenomics at the Center for Personalized Medicine. “It’s not the future. It’s the now. It’s happening.”
You can read more of this story in the coming days on ColoradoSun.com.
John Ingold | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
If you’ve heard the leading GOP candidate for president promise to “drill baby, drill” from his first day in office, and wondered what exactly we’re doing right now, we’ve got you covered. As some commentators have pointed out, the U.S., under a Democratic administration, is currently producing more oil and gas than it ever has — and has been the world leader in petroleum output for a few years now. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, we leave up to you.
The chart also gives visual confirmation to current geopolitical realities about oil power. The U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia are by far the leaders in production, with anybody else in the world quite a ways back in ability to influence markets.
Where does Colorado fit in? Here’s a mindset-breaker: We’re tied with Alaska for 4th among U.S. states producing the most oil and gas. That puts the latest efforts to ban new oil drilling in Colorado in some more perspective. Colorado currently puts out about 3.7% of the U.S. total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Texas leads at 42.5% and New Mexico second at 13.3%. Sparsely populated oil giant North Dakota has moved up to 3rd, at 8.9%.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
HEAT MAP
CLIMATE
HEALTH
OK, if you read all this before texting your partner or your kids or your parents or your BFF that you love them, seriously go do that now. We appreciate your time, and in case you were wondering, no, “Love Actually” is a Christmas movie not a February movie, but we won’t tell anybody it’s already in your queue.
— Michael & John
Corrections & Clarifications
Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.
