For more than 150 years, industrial pollution, chemical waste, and sewage have flowed into Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. Microbes in the Gowanus sediment have evolved methods of coping with and even subsisting off of the contamination, according to new research co-authored by Hénaff. Algal and microbial growth in a laboratory aquarium at NYU, emerging from toxic sediment collected from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. The danger is why the EPA has been working to dredge and cap the Gowanus’ toxic sediments. But until the sludge is permanently buried and the microbes dead beneath a concrete tombstone, why not treat the canal as more than a mistake?