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☀️Sunny and more pleasant, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 7:40 p.m.
Today we have a shark conservation success story. But first: researchers at MIT have a new way to enrich food with iron, creating crystalline particles that people can sprinkle on food or add to their coffee or tea.
“Two billion people worldwide are iron deficient, and this can lead to anemia. It can lead to cognitive development issues in children and it increases the infant mortality rate,” Principal Investigator Ana Jaklenec told GBH’s Trajan Warren.
Her own mother, she said, grew up in Eastern Europe after World War II and received humanitarian aid — and Jaklenec said she wants to pay it forward.
“There might be people all over the world like her, and the future ‘mes’ out there,” Jaklenec said. “It really warms my heart to know that something that we’re doing here in the lab could help all those people.”
Four Things to Know
1. Fewer Canadians came into Maine last month, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection: agents recorded 277,000 border crossings — a number 28% lower than last July.
This is the sixth consecutive month in which border crossings from Canada to Maine declined, and overall visits since January are down 25% compared with last year.
2. More health care workers at Cape Cod Healthcare signed union cards requesting to join the Massachusetts Nurses Association. That includes nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives.
“I came from a large metropolitan area, from a Level 1 trauma center, and was promised certain working conditions and certain compensation and benefits packages,” said Jacklyn Reis, a physician assistant in the Falmouth Hospital emergency room and urgent care. “Within four months there, it was completely and unilaterally changed on me.”
3. As Gillette Stadium prepares to host seven World Cup soccer games next year, Gov. Maura Healey has asked lawmakers for $20 million in state funding “to support costs related to 2026 World Cup matches hosted in the Commonwealth.”
Healey did not say where exactly the money would go. The legislature has already approved $5 million for transportation, much of which will go toward improving the commuter rail line from Boston to Gillette Stadium.
4. When an elected official gets arrested — as in the recent case of Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins — do other politicians call for them to step down from their jobs?
It depends, GBH’s Adam Reilly says. “I think we are not hearing calls for Tompkins to step down first and foremost, because he is an exceptionally well-connected politician,” Reilly said. “He played a key role in Elizabeth Warren’s first run for Senate back when she was running against Scott Brown. He actually got to know Michelle Wu on that Senate campaign before Wu had ever held elected office in Massachusetts.”
It’s not just great whites. Sand tiger sharks are rebounding in New England.
To tag a sand tiger shark, researchers from the New England Aquarium must first catch it.
They do that off Quincy’s Squantum Marshes, fishing lines hanging off their boat and into the water. GBH’s Craig LeMoult got to join them as Ryan Knotek, an aquarium research scientist, reeled in a toothy 4-and-a-half-foot-long juvenile.
“OK, that’s the biggest sand tiger we’ve ever had!” Knotek said.
As far as local sharks go, great whites tend to get a lot of the attention because, to be fair, they’re pretty magnificent. But sand tiger sharks, which can grow up to 10 feet long and are generally more interested in fish than in humans, have a fascinating story too: after overfishing depleted 70-90% of their population here, catching and keeping these creatures was outlawed in the 1990s.
“We are optimistically starting to see some signs of recovery,” Knotek said, though it’s slow: each year, between 1 and 2 percent of the population is restored.
On the boat, scientist Mike O’Neill put the shark into a tub of water and flipped it onto its back. The shark went still.
“Interesting evolutionary thing, but convenient for us,” said Emily Jones, an aquarium scientist. The phenomenon is called tonic immobility.
Jones injected a local anesthetic. Knotek grabbed a scalpel, made a small incision in the shark’s abdomen, then inserted an ultrasonic tracking tag, about the size and shape of a lipstick tube. That tag will communicate with research buoys along the East Coast, allowing the scientists to track the shark’s travels.
“The goal is to tag as many of these sharks as we can to figure out exactly when, where and why the sharks are in Boston Harbor, with that end goal to maybe get some additional actions towards protections for this species as they try to recover,” he said.
Then Knotek sewed up the incision, put the shark back into the water, and watched as it started swimming away.
“Adios,” Knotek said.
Read (and see and hear!) Craig’s full account here.
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