Ban the box! 

Ban bossy!

Ban…the beads?

(Better believe it, baby).

California will soon join Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey in banning plastic “microbeads,” or tiny plastic spheres of less than 1 mm in diameter, commonly used in personal care products. Minnesota also has anti-microbead legislation in progress. 

So what’s up? Do politicians really hate exfoliation? 

We couldn’t find any California lawmakers to comment on the state of their skincare, so we actually can’t answer that.

The reason for the recent bead bans, however, is less aesthetic and more environmental. 

Since they are designed to wash down drains, microbeads…wash down drains. (Don’t feel bad, we didn’t see it coming either).

Their small size prevents them from being filtered out by water treatment plants, meaning that they wash into waterways en masse. 

Once in a river, lake, or bay, plastic microbeads absorb pollutants from their surroundings. Aquatic animals mistake the beads for fish eggs and eat them, along with the acquired toxins.

Unfortunately, plastic is very slow to decompose, and can’t really be digested, meaning that they persist in the environment for decades.

That’s even longer than a weekend shower. 

After President Obama’s decisive reelection, the Conservative Party (UK) hired Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina. They sought to recapture an outright majority in the 2015 British elections.

Now, one could question whether an American could replicate such success in Britain. And many did- pollsters predicted a tie with the Labour party, and gambling houses based their odds based on the polls.

But, after the Conservative romp in Thursday’s elections, the house will lose a lot of money to people who bet on the Tories. The largest British, Irish, and Scottish bookkeepers all reported paying out six- to seven-figure sums.

As shocking as the Conservative victory was, it was even more influential.

The Labour Party saw a crushing defeat. Though they polled even with the Tories, they won 232 to the Conservatives’ 330. Labour collapsed in Scotland: the Scottish National Party wiped out the Labour’s stronghold in Scotland, winning 56 of 59 seats. 

Much of Britain’s future, including how it interacts with the world, hangs in the balance. Conservative leader David Cameron has promised a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. Such a move would cost British businesses billions in trade.

But all of the worries can wait for tomorrow. For now, British gamblers can rejoice. They sided with Obama’s acclaimed campaign manager, beating the house- a rare feat.

Prof. Susan McDonough was accepted into the prestigious 2015 NEH Summer Institute on “Negotiating Identities: Expression and Representation in the Christian-Jewish-Muslim Mediterranean," to be held in Barcelona, Spain, this summer.  In the seminar, scholars from around the country will rethink the history of the late medieval Mediterranean. Prof. McDonough also won a competitive Dean's Travel Award for her project, “Vile Sluts and Gassy Whores: Prostitutes in the Medieval Mediterranean.” Congratulations to Prof. McDonough!

UMBC is sending a record number of interns this year to the summer 2015 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. The highly competitive internship program offers students in the science, mathematics, and engineering fields the opportunity to participate in undergraduate research at NIST’s Gaithersburg, Maryland or Boulder, Colorado offices.

This year, 26 students were accepted into the program and 20 will be participating. The interns include several Meyerhoff Scholars and Honors College students.

Thomas Cronin, biological sciences, and Alexandra Kingston, Ph.D. candidate in biological sciences, worked with scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts to find that squid and cuttlefish possess light-sensitive proteins called opsins on their skin. Their findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Biology last week and have received widespread media coverage.

Their discovery suggests, but does not prove, that cephalopods might be able to sense light through their skin. “All the machinery is there for them to be light-sensitive but we can’t prove that,” Cronin told National Geographic. “We don’t know if they contribute to camouflage or are just general light sensors for circadian cycling or are driving hormonal changes. They have a job to do but we don’t know what it is.”

Click here to read “Octopuses, and Maybe Squid, Can Sense Light With Their Skin” in National Geographic.

Additional coverage:
Light Sensors in Cephalopod Skin (The Scientist)
Scientists say octopuses use opsins in their skin to detect light and color, not their eyes (Standard Daily)
Cephalopods can sense Light through Skin (NY City News)
Cephalopods skin is intrinsically light sensitive contributing to unique and novel patterning abilities (US Finance Post)

Earlier this week, UMBC CyberDawg Christopher Gardner ’18, computer science, took first place out of approximately fifty competitors at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Kaizen Capture The Flag event held at the Jailbreak Brewing Company in Laurel, MD.

The event focused around navigating through a series of progressively harder cybersecurity obstacles. The challenge’s theme centered around a narrative that competitors were assisting the FBI in finding and then defusing a bomb. Competitors needed to complete a series of increasingly harder challenges to locate clues and other information, such as examining an Android .apk to find a wireless access point password, finding the login page for an website’s administration panel, and gaining access to a web server’s log directory.

Congratulations again to Christopher and to all of the CyberDawgs who competed.

In light of the Baltimore protests, President Hrabowski penned an essay in Inside Higher Ed about the importance of UMBC’s continued work in the community and the need for ongoing conversations with students about confronting systematic injustice and inequality.

Dr. Hrabowski began by sharing his experience in the Children’s March and how it developed into his life’s work of making education accessible to all Americans. He drew comparisons to the Baltimore protests, saying that the most important work of fighting issues of poverty and injustice is yet to come.

Sharing examples of UMBC’s commitment to Baltimore city through initiatives such as The Choice Program, Dr. Hrabowski emphasized the role of universities as “community anchors, educators and researchers.” “The future will depend heavily on universities– not only the policies we shape but the leaders we produce,” he wrote.

He also called for higher education institutions to encourage its students to connect with people from different backgrounds and circumstances and to apply their classroom discussions of justice, economics, and history to work in the community. “We are having renewed conversations on our campus about how we can deepen our ties to the community and keep issues of inequality and inequity at the forefront of our teaching and service,” he shared.

To read the article titled “After the Cameras Leave” on Inside Higher Ed, click here.

Dr. Hrabowski also participated in a discussion with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker at the Urban Institute on Wednesday, May 18. The conversation centered around how to reduce racial opportunity gaps for boy and men of color and create trust between the police and impoverished communities.

Dr. Hrabowski spoke about the need to support boys and men of color and how The Choice Program at UMBC is one strategy for increasing trust. “We need many more programs like this so that before the difficulty arises, these people know each other,” he said. “There’s a role for places like universities to play in building these intervention strategies that can build trust.”

Click here to read excerpts from the conversation at the Urban Institute.