Fried Porcelain

At the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences in Beijing, apparently one of the best environmental institutes in the country.  This place was crazy—I only got to see one of the many research buildings, but in just one building they had SIX floors full of in vitro and in vivo testing, multiple mass spectrometers, and all kinds of cool experiments going on.  Studying how various human-made gases react in the atmosphere, how to more efficiently purify water, bio-remediation, effects of pollutants on the growth of plants and animals, etc.

This was a particularly awesome room full of fish tanks.  These tanks each have water with different concentrations of certain pollutants running through them.  One study in this lab was on the intergenerational male:female ratio of these fish when they are exposed to the pollutants.  Apparently by the third generation, there were no more males in the population (I don’t remember what chemical they were testing.)