NNadir
NNadir's JournalI got the Moderna vaccine this morning!
The arm is definitely sore, and I feel vaguely "funky," but so far, nothing worse than how I feel after a flu vaccine.
I'm really excited about the technology behind this vaccine, so this is something about which it is fun to think. Hell, I'm so happy I'll violate my grammatical rule that "A preposition is a part of speech one should never end a sentence with and say, "This is something fun to think about."
My 2nd dose is exactly 30 days away.
I got it at Princeton Penn Medicine Hospital (West Windor, NJ), where they had a very streamlined flow beginning with a short medical review. They scheduled the second dose during the 15 minute required recovery period. I was in and out in less than a half hour.
The staff was friendly, professional, & efficient. I have nothing but praise for the process.
It was a wonderful experience, and I feel great having made it to the first vaccine without contracting the disease.
I also found out this week that the hypochondria by which I was convincing myself that the symptoms I'm having were cancer apparently aren't cancer.
It doesn't get any better than this.
Finally, I have a Covid-19 vaccine appointment!!!
It's the Moderna baby, a very cool pharmaceutical design. I can't wait!
It's Saturday morning. I have to miss Science on Saturday's lecture which is about viral host shifting, but I'm kind of generally aware of the topic in any case.
I am an old fat guy in declining health, so this makes me quite happy, since I'm still very interested in living a bit longer. In terms of "bargaining" in confronting death, I'd love to live to give my son a hard time at his thesis defense for his Ph.D., and he's just started graduate school. (We'll see though, bargaining with death doesn't usually go very far.)
A wealth of discovery built on the Human Genome Project -- by the numbers:
The Human Genome Project was an understated initiative of the Clinton years, just as the space program was an initiative of the Kennedy/Johnson years.
"Big Science" changes the world, usually for the better.
From the Nature News sections, should be open sourced: A wealth of discovery built on the Human Genome Project — by the numbers. (Alexander J. Gates, Deisy Morselli Gysi, Manolis Kellis & Albert-László BarabásiNature 590, 212-215 (2021))
Some excerpts:
A new analysis traces the story of the draft genome’s impact on genomics since 2001, linking its effects on publications, drug approvals and understanding of disease.
The 20th anniversary of the publication of the first draft of the human genome1,2 offers an opportunity to track how the project has empowered research into the genetic roots of human disease, changed drug discovery and helped to revise the idea of the gene itself.
Here we distil these impacts and trends. We combined several data sets to quantify the different types of genetic element that have been discovered and that generated publications, and how the pattern of discovery and publishing has changed over the years. Our analysis linked together data including 38,546 RNA transcripts; around 1 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs); 1,660 human diseases with documented genetic roots; 7,712 approved and experimental pharmaceuticals; and 704,515 scientific publications between 1900 and 2017 (see Supplementary information; SI ).
The results highlight how the Human Genome Project (HGP), with its comprehensive list of protein-coding genes, spurred a new era of elucidating the function of the non-coding portion of the genome and paved the way for therapeutic developments. Crucially, the results track the emergence of a systems-level view of biology alongside the conventional single-gene perspective, as researchers mapped the interactions between cellular building blocks (see ‘No jump for big teams’)...
...These connections offer a snapshot of the evolution of the research landscape before and after the HGP. It shows an intense focus on a small number of ‘superstar’ protein-coding genes, potentially to the detriment of interesting work that could be done on others. There has been a pivot towards non-protein-coding sections of the genome, and to understanding interactions between genetic material and proteins. And drug discovery has been grounded in just a few protein targets.
Some of these trends are familiar to biologists, but to quantify and visualize them is to consider them anew...
...Superstar genes
The popular perception is that the HGP marked the start of the intensive search for protein-coding genes. In fact, the 2001 draft HGP paper signalled the end of a decades-long hunt1,2. Indeed, evidence for the first protein-coding gene emerged in 1902, with the discovery of the hormone secretin4 (SCT gene), 50 years before the structure of DNA was uncovered, and 75 years before genome sequencing became commonplace. Our analysis shows that, between the start of the HGP in 1990 and its completion in 2003 (after the draft was published in 2001), the number of discovered (or ‘annotated’) human genes grew drastically...
A graphic from the article:
...Drug discovery
Before about the 1980s, drugs were found largely by serendipity. Their molecular and protein targets were usually unknown. Until 2001, the probability of knowing all of a drug’s protein targets was less than 50% in any given year. The HGP changed this. Now, the targets are known for almost all drugs licensed in the United States each year (see ‘Twenty years of junk, stars and drugs: Drug targets’)...
This is evidence on how big science, funded by big Government, brings big results with big benefits to humanity.
Glacial episodes of a freshwater Arctic Ocean covered by a thick ice shelf
The article I'll discuss in this brief post is this one: Geibert, W., Matthiessen, J., Stimac, I. et al. Glacial episodes of a freshwater Arctic Ocean covered by a thick ice shelf. Nature 590, 97–102 (2021).
The ocean contains about 4.5 billion tons of uranium, chiefly in the +6 oxidation state as the UO2 2+ ion, cycled through it in a continuous process resulting from tectonic and volcanic activity, and precipitation. (The solubility of uranium in seawater is driven by oxygen in the planetary atmosphere; in general the oxy cations of the pre-curium actinides are far more soluble than the reduced forms.) The fact that the geochemical uranium cycle saturates the ocean with respect to uranium is the reason why uranium resources are inexhaustible at a high enough price.
Thorium, which is sometime represented as being more available than uranium - which it is, but only in terrestrial ores - is far less soluble in seawater, which is why it is not inexhaustible as a fuel and uranium is.
The uranium 238 decay series features two thorium isotopes, Thorium-234, which has a half-life of 24.1 days, and Thorium-230, which has a half-life of around 75,400 years. Because of the differential solubility of the two elements, the ocean is often in disequilibrium with its decay series; the uranium remains in the seawater, while the thorium precipitates and is incorporated in mud in the sea floor.
Waters deprived of access to salts are of course, fresh water. The authors of the paper cited exploited the absence of thorium-230, implying a lack of access to salt water having uranium in it, to show that the artic ocean may have been a fresh water body at one point in its history.
From the article's introduction:
Once produced by decay, 230Th is known to be highly particle reactive and removed to the sea floor close to its site of production within years to decades15, even in very low-particle-flux environments, such as the Pacific Gyres16. One should therefore expect that a substantial amount of meteoric ice with a salinity of virtually zero would be seen as a reduction in the amount of deposited excess 230Th (230Thex). This reduction must be proportional to the amount of displaced seawater. A 1,000-m-thick ice shelf over a seafloor of 2,000-m depth would reduce the available 230Thex sediment inventory by half. If the water underlying the ice shelf had a reduced salinity as well, this would further reduce the 230Thex inventory correspondingly. For a water column consisting of only meteoric ice and freshwater, no 230Thex should be present.
Here we test this hypothesis on a set of sediment cores from the Arctic Ocean that cover the recent glacials; how many glacials exactly is a matter of ongoing debate17,18,19,20,21. We contribute two new high-resolution records of 230Th, together with uranium isotopes and elemental composition, and compare them to other 230Thex records to test our hypothesis and map the spatial and temporal extent of a shelf ice with underlying freshwater in the Arctic Ocean.
Figure 1 reveals two intervals with low or absent 230Thex observed across the entire Arctic and into the Norwegian and Greenland seas (hereafter, assumed to represent the Nordic seas). These minima occur in olive-grey to greyish sand-rich siliciclastic sediments that are virtually barren of autochthonous calcareous microfossils. They are mainly characterized by increased terrigenous coarse fraction, reduced bioturbation, and some laminations (see Methods for more details on lithology).
Fig. 1: A selection of 230Thex and 10Be records from the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic seas.
The caption:
The authors rule out several potential explanations for this phenomenon and conclude that because of ice dams, for periods in geological history, the arctic ocean was actually a fresh water lake.
The authors conclude by noting that this finding may have bearing on other studies of arctic geohistory and call for further research:
Interesting, I think.
Tracking QAnon: how Trump turned conspiracy-theory research upside down
This is an item from the news section of the scientific journal Nature: Tracking QAnon: how Trump turned conspiracy-theory research upside down
By Jeff Tollefson. (Nature 590, 192-193 (2021))
I believe it's open sourced, but a few excerpts anyway:
By taking fringe ideas mainstream, the former US president taught new and dangerous lessons about manipulating social and mass media.
For people around the world, the now-iconic images of a man in a horned headdress roaming the US Capitol during the 6 January insurrection came as a shock. For Kate Starbird, the images were frighteningly familiar. ‘QAnon Shaman’ — the online persona of Jacob Anthony Chansley, or Jake Angeli — is a known superspreader of conspiracy theories that her research group has been monitoring for years.
The storming of the Capitol was “this physical manifestation of all of these digital characters we’ve been studying”, says Starbird, a social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who investigates the spread of disinformation on social media. “To see all of that come alive in real time was horrifying, but not surprising.”
The epic battle against coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories
Starbird is among a cadre of researchers in the United States and abroad who study the way disinformation and conspiracy theories take root and spread through social and mass media. As US president and a prolific tweeter, Republican Donald Trump turned their research upside down when he helped to push typically fringe theories into the mainstream — most recently by downplaying the coronavirus pandemic and promoting the unfounded claim that the US presidential election had been stolen from him.
With Trump out of office, this group of researchers is now working to make sense of the deluge of data that they’ve collected from platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. It’s been a lesson in modern populism: a world leader amplified once-obscure conspiracy theories, with each tweet and retweet strengthening the ideas and emboldening their supporters. Now, researchers are retooling to understand — and prepare for — what comes next...
...One debate in the conspiracy-theory research community is whether Trump has pushed more people into QAnon, or whether he just emboldened those who already believed. Polling suggests that QAnon adherents remain a small, if increasingly vocal, minority, says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida who has been tracking public support for several years...
...QAnon has clearly gained ground under Trump in recent years, says Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The activity that she and her team monitor online, as well as the real-world protests and political rallies taking place, add up to “a growing interest in or dedication to these ideas”, she argues...
...“Conspiracy theories are fundamentally a form of political propaganda,” says Quassim Cassam, a philosopher at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. Although Trump failed to overturn the election, Cassam says the former president was very successful at mobilizing his political base — and radicalizing the Republican Party...
A graphic from the article:
For Only the 3rd Time in Its Records, the CO2 Readings at Mauna Loa Are Above 417 ppm.
As I have remarked many times in this forum, and when I was writing there, the E&E forum, somewhat obsessively I keep a spreadsheet of the weekly data, reported at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, of carbon dioxide concentrations, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is.
I have noted many times, with sadness and regret, that we on the left are not free of such fear ignorance and dogma, although I wish we were. We cannot, with justice, attribute this outcome to Ronald Reagan, George Bush the first and second, and Donald Trump. We bear responsibility, no matter how much we pat ourselves on the back for our insane, and frankly, delusional worship of so called "renewable energy."
The amount of money "invested" in so called "renewable energy" in the period between 2004 and 2018 is over 3.036 trillion dollars; dominated by solar and wind which soaked up 2.774 trillion dollars.
Source: UNEP/Bloomberg Global Investment in Renewable Energy, 2019
This is an amount that is larger than the GDP of India, a nation with 1.4 billion people in it.
It is obvious that all the money thrown at so called "renewable energy" did not work, is not working, if the definition of "working" reflects dealing with climate change. I, for one, am absolutely and irrevocably certain that even more money, tens of trillions of dollars, will not work if this is the goal, and not simply keeping the mining and semiconductor industries flush with money changing hands.
The reason is physics. The laws of physics are not determined by popular opinion, delusional or otherwise. They are independent of politics, and politicians ignore them at the peril of all humanity. The reason that so called "renewable energy" has failed, is failing and will always fail is the low energy to mass ratio associated with it, along with its intrinsic variability.
The data at Mauna Loa fluctuates with the seasons, a roughly sinusoidal curve whose axis is a quasi-linear (slightly parabolic actually) pretty much monotonically increasing line:
The annual maxima are usually seen sometime in May of any given year; the annual minima usually occur in September or October,
Here is the data from the Mauna Loa observatory for the week beginning January 31, 2021:
Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Week beginning on January 31, 2021: 417.12 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 414.50 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 392.19 ppm
Last updated: February 7, 2021
This is only the third such measurement to ever exceed 417 ppm at the Mauna Loa observatory, going back to the 1950's. Weekly data points are available for the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory going back to the week beginning May 25, 1975, when the reading was 331.10 ppm. Last year, the annual maximum was recorded as 417.43 ppm for the week beginning May 24, 2020, and the week after, beginning May 31, 2020 recorded a value of 417.20 ppm.
In terms of the comparison with weekly measurements recorded 10 years ago, the difference recorded here, 24.93 ppm, is the 10th highest among all 10 year week to comparisons, out of 1891 such data points available in my spreadsheet.
There is considerable noise in these measurements. There has been a lot of speculation about the effect of Covid-19 on carbon dioxide accumulations in 2020, and it is possible that this year may show up as "lighter than usual" - at least for these times, although the trend in annual increases, since the first weeks of 2021 have been showing unusually mild increases over the previous year, averaging "only" 1.96 ppm higher than the same four weeks of 2020. Similarly the last 4 weeks of 2020, the weeks of December, the average was "only" 2.22 ppm.
I'm personally not mislead, since the average of all week to week comparators between weeks of 2020 and weeks of 2019 was 2.58 ppm, which, compared with values in the 20th century, is obscenely high.
Here is how the Mauna Loa observatory calculates annual increases:
The estimated uncertainty in the Mauna Loa annual mean growth rate is 0.11 ppm/yr. This estimate is based on the standard deviation of the differences between monthly mean values measured independently by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and by NOAA/ESRL. The annual growth rate measured at Mauna is not the same as the global growth rate, but it is quite similar. One standard deviation of the annual differences MLO minus global is 0.26 ppm/year.
Using this method of calculation, there were, in the 40 year period between 1959 and 1999 five years in which the carbon dioxide concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide increased by more than 2.0 ppm. In the 21st century, 13 out of 20 have exceeded 2.0 ppm increases.
However, the preliminary figure for the increase, perhaps calculated differently, linked on the data page at the Mauna Loa website shows the increase for 2020 as being 2.57 ppm.
The trends are clear enough from this bar graph on the Mauna Loa website:
Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii
If any of this troubles you, don't worry, be happy. Head on over to our E&E forum and read all about how some bourgeois person over there has put solar cells on the roof of his or her McMansion, and is saving money which he or she can use to buy his or her Tesla electric car.
It doesn't do much for me, but maybe you're different than I am.
Have a nice Sunday afternoon.
Finally I get what the orange racist meant while saying "Make America Great Again."
It's a goal he may yet achieve.
He actually helped it to come about, by first taking a great country, the United States, and nearly destroying it, making it into a "shithole country," to use his locution, in order to serve his chief financier and owner, Vladmir Putin, so that a man like Joe Biden can come in, clean the country up and, in fact, make it great again.
A twisted path, but the very real one utilized by the ignorant racist orange buffoon.
A Very Brief Note on Following the Presence of Biofuels in Fossil Fuels by Radioactivity Mesurements
I'm catching up on my reading before focusing on a topic (later in the day) on the environmental behavior of plutonium at the Nevada National Insecurity Site, and came across this very cute and mildly interesting paper by scientists working (at Chevron) for the dangerous fossil fuel industry, an industry which I oppose (Chevron): Liquid Scintillation Counting Method for the Refinery Laboratory-Based Measurements of Fuels to Support Refinery Bio-Feed Co-Processing (Matthew Hurt, Josephine Martinez, Ajit Pradhan, Michelle Young, and Michael E. Moir Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (2), 1503-1510).
I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing about this paper, but here are a few cool excerpts about how the (disturbed) radioactive C-14 measurements, widely and famously used for carbon dating, apply to following the addition of biomass to dangerous fossil fuels:
...14C is a radioactive isotope of carbon produced in the upper atmosphere through a neutron capture reaction by 14N atoms.(16) The production of 14C is relatively constant, with current atmospheric concentration changes due mostly to human activity either through the detonation of nuclear weapons (caused a spike in 14C concentration that peaked in the 1960s) or the excess production of CO2 through fossil fuel combustion (driving factor of current variation).(17,18) Living organisms take up all of the isotopes of carbon 12C, 13C, and 14C in the same proportions as they occur in the atmosphere for their life span.(19) For short-lived organisms, it can be assumed that the 14C concentration in the atmosphere is constant over the life span of the organism, which is a safe assumption for many fuel crops as they are typically harvested within 1 year of planting. It can also be assumed that crude oil has no 14C since the half-life of 14C is 5730 years, and crude oil is millions of years old.(1)
Commonly, refineries focus on running methods certified by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). There are currently two methods that are ASTM approved for the detection of 14C and are described in D6866 with the most recent version being D6866-20.
The authors note that the standard methods are expensive to run, and have a long lead time for turn around, and are not suitable for continuous processing, so they seek to find a fast convenient method that can be utilized as an in process control.
The expensive method, which was used for calibration:
The cheap fast method using ambient radioactivity:
According to the conclusion of the paper, it worked quite well:
Although I oppose fossil fuels, I believe that a possible means to keep some essential self propelled vehicles, rescue vehicles, farm machinery, transport trucking, using thermally reformed biomass (as opposed to fermented biomass such as ethanol as currently produced). This suggests, therefore some useful information, especially to detect cheating by the addition of dangerous fossil fuels after a regulated dangerous fossil fuel phase out, which is urgently necessary.
It has always been an American political genius to follow a disastrous Presidency with a great one.
Although I was very pleased to support President Biden, I wondered, at his age, if he was going to have in him to be that kind of President.
Clearly, I need not have been concerned.
It's out of FDR; it's out of Lincoln, and indeed Obama.
China opens its 50th nuclear reactor.
Hualong One Reactor Now Operating in China (Darrell Proctor, Power, February 1, 2021.Hualong One is a third-generation pressurized water reactor, developed by China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power. It is the fifth reactor now operating at Fujian Province’s Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant. It began commercial operation on Jan. 30 after being connected to the grid on Nov. 27 of last year. Construction of the reactor began in 2015...
...“This marks that China has mastered independent third-generation nuclear power technology following the United States, France, Russia and others,” CNNC said in a statement on the company’s official WeChat account. The Hualong One units are designed with power generation capacity of 1,161 MW, with a 60-year lifecycle.
CNNC has touted Hualong One as a reactor in which about 90% of the equipment used, including all elements of the core, was made in China. “We must not only export our own nuclear power but also build it according to our own standards, so that we can’t be controlled by others,” chief designer Xing Ji said in a statement...
Coal-fired power accounts for about two-thirds of the country’s generation mix. China capped total coal-fired generation at 1,100 GW last year, though the country still has hundreds of coal plants in its development pipeline.
Net-Zero Carbon Goal
...President Xi in September 2020 announced the country had a goal to cut its net carbon footprint to zero by 2060, but analysts have said coal-fired power is important to the country’s economic recovery after the coronavirus pandemic.
China has built most of its 50 reactors in the 21st century, after a "pause" for Fukushima for "safety." This is amusing: Pretty much every day in China, more people die from air pollution than have died in entirety of the 60 year history of nuclear power operations worldwide.
China's annual death toll from air pollution was reported in 2015 as being 1.6 million deaths per year:
The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale (Lelieveld, J., Evans, J., Fnais, M. et al., Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015)
Figure 1: Mortality linked to outdoor air pollution in 2010.
From: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale
The caption:
Despite much world wide attention, it is clear that the famous and much discussed bogeyman at the Fukushima reactors destroyed by a natural disaster did not account for 1/1,000,000th as many deaths as air pollution in China kills each year. Most of the deaths associated, in fact pretty much all of the 20,000 deaths from the earthquake that destroyed the reactors were attributable to drownings from seawater associated with the Tsunami as well as collapsing buildings, thus proving that coastal cities are "too dangerous" and need to be phased out.
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