The captain of the Latvian tugboat Orkāns ("storm" in Latvian) could not believe his eyes when he saw a dozen physicists, engineers and technicians from four different European countries hastily working on the funnel of his vessel moored at the Riga Shipyard on the Baltic Sea. They were connecting a long pipe to a strange truck installed on shore. The reason for this turmoil is the choice of old and rusty Orkāns as a test-bed for the first futuristic experiment of cleaning the exhaust gas of a ship diesel engine, using a particle accelerator, with the goal of reducing the content of harmful pollutants.
Seaports act as hubs for the global spread of MtrBTN2,1 a rare contagious cancer affecting mussels. In this disease, cancer cells can be transmitted, like parasites, from one mussel to another nearby. While, in nature, such contagion mainly occurs between mussels in the same bed, ports and maritime transport facilitate the spread of MtrBTN2 to other locations, through biofouling, whereby diseased mussels attach themselves to ship hulls. This finding, the fruit of research by a team led by scientists from the CNRS and the University of Montpellier,2 will be published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B on February 21.