NNadir
NNadir's JournalI hope I cheered my doctor up.
I had to go see my doctor for a problem not related to Covid-19. As it happened, my son had seen him earlier, whereupon my son reported that he was basically freaking out about the vaccine/mutation situation.
Apparently he was thinking it was never going to end, and was extremely stressed about the vaccine supply apparently because the State of New Jersey had a disconnect with the status of his vaccine supplies and the people who could get it and now he was forced to field a lot of calls from anxious and sometimes angry people. He was worried about the mutants.
So after the exam was done, I asked him, cheerfully, if he was having "fun" with Covid. He looked really frazzled and said, "No! No!"
Happily - unhappily because it was a disease - I am a veteran of the industrial scale up of HIV protease inhibitors, and was intimately aware of what people go through under such a circumstance, a circumstance wherein a logistical screw up, or perhaps, a regulatory or process screw up means, literally, that people will die. So you do everything you can to do everything right.
It's serious, a huge responsibility, but in those times, one in which pharmaceutical teams, I'm happy to say, rose to the occasion - you saw the best in people mostly, and very little of the worst. I was very, very, very proud of the opportunity to have been involved.
"Look," I told my doctor, "for about a year, I was dealing with people begging me for supplies and then, all of a sudden, the whole thing dried up, because so many players rushed in that eventually there was an over supply."
As for mutations, I said, I know, I know, I know, retroviruses suck because they mutate so rapidly. But I told him, and of course he knows this, that this is reason we now give HIV protease inhibitor cocktails, because any virus with a single nucleotide polymorphism, or even a polynucleotide polymorphism is going to be hit by one or the other.
We saw these SNP's and PNP's all the time, but lives are still, almost 30 years later, being saved with protease inhibitors.
I told him about the glycosylation patterns on the coronavirus, contrasting them with HIV, and letting him know that this was a different, easier, ball game and finally about how these nucleotide drugs are easy to re-engineer to a moving target.
"Look," I said, "it's going to be, at the worst case, ultimately, like when you ask me to get a flu shot every year. You're going to ask me did I get my annual Covid shot. The infrastructure will be there, and sales guys will be calling on you to tell you why their vaccine is better than the other guy's, begging you to use theirs."
Expecting a doctor to really know about the industrial operations of the pharmaceutical industry is rather like expecting your car mechanic to know about how an auto parts plant works. Your mechanic doesn't need to know about the metallurgy of a water pump to fix your car. He just needs to know if the part fits and if it works.
I felt my doctor felt better. I hope so. He's under a huge amount of strain, and I could see it.
I feel better because adults are in charge of the country again, which makes everything better automatically. It doesn't mean we're "there yet," but at least we know where we're going.
Life is interesting, and then you die.
Why cats go crazy for catnip.
The following is a news item in the premier scientific journal Science. It should be open sourced, and is here: Why cats are crazy for catnip (Sofia Moutinho, Science, January 20, 2021).
Some excerpts:
“This study essentially has revealed a new potential mosquito repellent” by examining the “pharmaceutical knowledge” of cats, says Emory University biologist Jacobus de Roode, who did not participate in the study.
Catnip (Nepeta cataria) and silver vine (Actinidia polygama) both contain chemical compounds called iridoids that protect the plants against aphids and are known to be the key to the euphoria produced in cats. To determine the physiological effect of these compounds, Iwate University biologist Masao Miyazaki spent 5 years running different experiments using the plants and their chemicals.
First, his team extracted chemicals present in both catnip and silver vine leaves and identified the most potent component that produces the feline high: a minty silver vine chemical called nepetalactol that had not been shown to affect cats until this study. (The substance is similar to nepetalactone, the key iridoid in catnip.) Then, they put 10 leaves’ worth of nepetalactol into paper pouches and presented them, together with pouches containing only a saline substance, to 25 domestic cats to gauge their response. Most of the animals only showed interest in the pouches with nepetalactol...
...Next, the researchers measured beta-endorphins—one of the hormones that naturally relieves pain and induces pleasure by activating the body’s opioid system—in the bloodstreams of five cats 5 minutes before and after exposure. The researchers found that levels of this “happiness hormone” became significantly elevated after exposure to nepetalactol compared with controls. Five cats that had their opioid systems blocked did not rub on the nepetalactol-infused pouch...
It appears, however, that nepetalactol also repels mosquitos:
If you have a cat, and have seen him or her around catnip, you knew, at least intuitively, that it acts on opioid receptors. I didn't know about mosquitos however. I might try some myself.
The full scientific paper to which this article refers is here, and is, I believe, open sourced: The characteristic response of domestic cats to plant iridoids allows them to gain chemical defense against mosquitoes (REIKO UENOYAMA, TAMAKO MIYAZAKI, JANE L. HURST, ROBERT J. BEYNON, MASAATSU ADACHI, TAKANOBU MUROOKA, IBUKI ONODA, YU MIYAZAWA, RIEKO KATAYAMA, TETSURO YAMASHITA, SHUJI KANEKO, TOSHIO NISHIKAWA, MASAO MIYAZAKI, SCIENCE ADVANCES 20 JAN 2021 : EABD9135)
Nepetalactol:
The cabinet page at Whitehouse.gov
When I need to be happy and confident in the future, I'll look at it.
This is America:
The Cabinet, Whitehouse.gov
Recovery of Trivalent Lanthanides and Transplutonium Actinides with Resin Supported Diglycomides.
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Scaling Trivalent Actinide and Lanthanide Recovery by Diglycolamide Resin from Savannah River Site’s Mark-18A Targets (Kevin P. McCann, Mark A. Jones, Edward A. Kyser, Tara E. Smith, and Nicholas J. Bridges Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2021 60 (1), 507-513).
The elements in the two rows below the "main" periodic table are collectively called the "f elements." The row beginning with the chemical symbol Ln (lanthanum) are called "the lanthanides" - and somewhat more commonly in an annoying and misleading term, "rare earths" - and the row beginning with the chemical symbol Ac (actinium) are called the "actinides." They are placed below the main elements of the periodic table only to make the table fit nicely in the width of a sheet of paper. Properly drawn they represent another "step" in the step shapes in the main part of the table, properly the table should have 32 columns, not 18, although the congener relationship in purely chemical terms between, say protactinium and praseodymium is weak and not all that worthy of consideration.
The lanthanides, with some exceptions, generally exhibit the +3 oxidation state, the "trivalent" state, because the "f orbitals" which are being filled across the row do not participate to any appreciable extent in chemical bonding because of shielding effects.
This is not true for the lower actinides before americium, only actinium itself exhibits only the trivalent state. For a very long time, until the 1940's, when interest in actinide chemistry exploded - no pun intended - thorium was thought of as a congener of hafnium and zirconium, because like them, its most common oxidation state is +4, and protactinium was considered a congener niobium and tantalum because its common oxidation state is +5, and uranium, a congener of molybdenum and tungsten because of its common oxidation state of +6.
Actinium, thorium, protactinium, and uranium all occur naturally in weighable amounts, thorium and uranium on a billion ton scale - their decay is largely responsible for the internal heat of the Earth - actinium and protactinium occur in trace amounts, in concentrations so low that they are best accessed not by isolation from the ores in which they occur, but by the use of nuclear reactions, neutron or proton bombardment.
In 1940's, as he worked on the discovery of new synthetic elements in the periodic table, especially neptunium, plutonium, americium and curium, Glenn Seaborg had the insight that the chemistry of these elements could be discerned by recognizing that they were, in fact, "f elements" as opposed to "d elements" like hafnium, tantalum, and tungsten.
The actinides become "lanthanide-like" at americium. Although americium can be oxidized to higher oxidation states, it's major oxidation state is +3; this is also the case with curium, berkelium and californium.
When I was a kid, the first mass spec with which I was used by one of the companies for which I worked had a californium ionization source; I'm an old guy. (Modern mass specs have other types of ionization inductions, notably electrospray ionization (ESI) for which John Fenn won the Nobel Prize.) The californium where I worked (in California) was the 252 isotope, which has a half-life of about 2.64 years, decaying both by spontaneous fission and by alpha decay to curium-248. The spontaneous fission of californium-252 made it a useful source of neutrons, and it was widely used in chemical analysis using neutron activation analysis, which has been mostly displace by high sensitivity ICP/MS instruments that for most elements can record parts per trillion.
Perhaps a current motivation, particularly in the days of antibody payloads is in neutron boron therapy, where small portable Cf-252 sources might displace the need for expensive accelerators, particular in rural or remote regions: Boron neutron capture therapy: Current status and future perspectives (Dymova, M.A., Taskaev, S.Y., Richter, V.A. and Kuligina, E.V. (2020), Cancer Commun., 40: i-i.)
In the 1960s and 1970's an effort was made to produce large (large being milligram quantities) of californium-252 as a neutron source and as an ionization source. (Mass specs in space robots generally use curium sources because of their longer half-lives.)
Another important isotope is plutonium-244, which has a half-life of 80 million years, and which is used as an internal standard in actinide analysis, and as a target for super-heavy element analysis.
The United States is running out of plutonium-244, and the paper listed above is about recovering it, as well as the transplutonium elements therein. The introduction to the paper covers things on which I touched above:
To recover the valuable materials, the Mark-18A material recovery flowsheet separates the target’s aluminum cladding by caustic dissolution, leaving most of the fission products and the actinides as a solid material. The undissolved material is filtered and then subsequently dissolved in >7 M HNO3 at elevated temperatures. The resulting high nitrate solution, containing dissolved plutonium, actinides, and most of the fission products, will be sent through an anion exchange column using Reillex HPQ resin, similar to its use in the SRS’s HB-Line Facility.(10?13) Reillex HPQ achieves Pu/Am decontamination factors on the order of 14,000.(11,12) The high decontamination factors are a result of Reillex HPQ’s high selectivity for the Pu(NO3)6 2– anion at >7 M HNO3 and little to no affinity for lanthanides (Ln), americium, curium, and fission products. As a result, in the Mark-18A material recovery flowsheet, the Ln, Am, Cm, and remaining fission products remain in the raffinate and require additional processing to recover heavy Cm from the >7 M HNO3 raffinate...
The Reillex HPQ resin is an anion exchange resin, a polyvinyl-N-methylpyridinium resin, that intereacts with the anionic plutonium (IV) hexanitrate anion (-2). In Reillex 402, the methyl group is replaced by a proton, in other N-pyridinium alkyl primary ammonium groups of various chain lengths to give a dicationic species.
The structure of these complexes are nicely shown in this cartoon:
Molecularly Engineered Resins for Plutonium Recovery
(S. Fredric Marsh, D. Kirk Veirs, Gordon D. Jarvinen, Mary E. Barr, and Eddie W. Moody, Los Alamos Science 26 (2000) 454-463)
The Los Alamos people note that some of the designed resins may also extract transplutonium nitrate complexes, but it would appearl that straight up Reillex HPQ (the methyl pyridinium is selective toward tetravalent plutonium nitrate complexes) and thus can be utilized in the current setting, where the target are trivalent species, specifically transplutonium actinides and lanthanides.
To save the world, the required inventory of plutonium - even in the "breed and burn" scenario where only a critical mass (realistically a little more) is required for start up - is on the order of hundreds of metric tons, and it is unrealistic that Reillex HPQ would be of much use on that scale.
These charged resins thrill, perhaps in the form of ionic liquids, the imagination about the possibility of electroprocessing.
I recall that when I was writing over in the E&E forum a lot, an anti-nuke of the particularly dull sort announced that nuclear energy was "too dangerous" because a tunnel at the Hanford site which had been abandoned collapsed. Pretty typically this person who is happily on my ignore list was far less interested in the 7 million people who died last year from air pollution while dumb guys get wedgies in their underwear about tunnels built in the 1950's which may contain (gasp) radioactivity. On investigation, it turns out that the tunnel contained some old abandoned chemical reactor vessels for plutonium purification ob rail cars, with trace plutonium on their surfaces. The number of lives lost associated with the collapsed rail tunnel was zero.
Reillex HPQ would be good to decontaminate the decontamination wash solutions to clean off the chemical reactors such as may exist from reprocessing efforts, but not for large scale processing. Let's be clear though, on a scale of risk, when compared with the very real and rising catastrophe of dangerous fossil fuels, unless one is a complete idiot - and sadly complete idiots exist - plutonium stains on a 50 year old chemical vessel is a non starter.
But in the case of the Mark-18A targets, these contain curium on a scale of a few hundred grams, and thus the resins have much to recommend them. Since the quantities are relatively small, but extremely valuable, column scale separations are entirely acceptable.
The authors note that during the last campaign to milk the Mark-18A targets for their valuable components, which took place in the early 1970s, a Dowex anion exchange resin was utilized. A difficulty with this resin, although it was clearly workable, was the release of sulfate from the sulfonylphenyl groups on which this relatively primitive anion exchange resin was based. Sulfates tended to contaminate the eluted products and raffinates, requiring additional clean up steps. Moreover, combustion of the used resins was problematic.
The more modern resin under discussion here contains only carbon oxygen and thus can be readily destroyed in an appropriate oxidation setting designed to contain residues.
The historical separation process is described as follows:
To prevent leaks, the authors were looking for a way to avoid the use of pressure, hence the evaluation of a new approach to the separations. All of the fermium and einsteinium in the targets has now decayed to lower actinides, of course, so they are no longer relevant to the case.
They write:
Although I do not have access to the exact structure of the commercial DGA resin, the structure of these resins is probably something along these lines:
(cf Mohapatra et al., RSC Adv., 2014,4, 10412-10419)
The authors conducted two tests, one using non radioactive fission product simulant with neodymium standing in for the actinides, and a second, also loaded with a fission product simulant spiked with the actinide americium.
The flow chart calls for the dissolution of the aluminum clad targets with caustic (which dissolves aluminum), leaving behind a solid residue of oxides which are then dissolved in 7M nitric acid. It is the nitrate complex which is separated as anionic species by the resin.
Some pictures from the text:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
A new wrinkle in this method as opposed to the method utilized in the 1970s also concerns the detection. For the purposes of these experiments, the complexes were monitored by their UV absorption spectra.
The caption:
The caption:
The authors conclude as follows:
...Americium tracer experiments validated that Am breakthrough closely follows Nd breakthrough. An in-line UV/vis spectrophotometer was able to track the ingrowth of Nd in the raffinate solution. In full-scale processes, detection of Nd in the in-line UV/vis system will indicate Am breakthrough and serve as a warning that Cm breakthrough is forthcoming. Future work will focus on column design for the full-scale process in SRNL hot cells. Additionally, research is underway to apply the CHON principle and incinerate the loaded DGA Resin to reduce volume while directly converting the loaded metal to a stable oxide form for shipment.
Cool paper I think, with some application, for cleaning chemical reaction vessels used in the essential - if we are to save the world - separation of the higher actinides.
I trust you are enjoying, as much as I am, the first weekend in the already magnificent Presidency of Joe Biden, and are doing so safely.
Conspiracy (2001), Kritzinger's Warning.
The Wannseekonference took place on January 20, 1942. The conference lasted about 2 hours, and was conducted as a lunch meeting. It was held to plan the murder of the Jews of Nazi occupied Europe, and discussed plans for the murder of Jews in countries that had not yet been conquered by Germany, Great Britain, for instance.
The participants were highly educated and efficient men.
The conference was organized by Reinhard Heydrich, a talented musician, skilled athlete who was educated at a German Naval Institute. He later became the "protector" of Moravia and Bohemia, where he was assassinated by British trained Czech partisans several months after the Wannsee conference. Heydrich is considered by historians to have been one of the purest embodiments of pure Nazi evil.
Notes from the meeting were discovered in 1947 from the files of Martin Luther, a minor Nazi official, probably the lowest ranking figure at the meeting, who had, in fact, ended up in a concentration camp himself before the war was over.
Several films, including documentaries have been made about the Wannsee conference, one in German in 1984, another in English in 2001, called "Conspiracy." It stars Kenneth Branagh in a chilling portrayal of Heydrich.
If one has ever been to a high level executive meeting in any capacity, one can recognize the tenor of the meeting as portrayed in "Conspiracy." The goal is to "get things done" while schmoozing in a genial way, juggling for position, clarifying issues, coming to a final agreement and understanding.
In this sense it is frightening, and I advise young people "on their way up" in their careers to study it in this light, to see how easy it can be to slip into a kind of officiousness that is divorced in every way from morality, how easy it is to divorce one's self from ethics by "going along," "not making waves." There is surely an element of that in all kinds of business meetings, including those where the business is criminal.
A scene in the film came to mind, because I have felt myself being consumed with rage and anger and, yes, frankly hatred over the last four years.
The scene comes at the end of the film, after all of the participants in the conference have left, after agreeing in an affable business-like sense to murder all of Europe's Jews in a two hour meeting. Heydrich (Branagh), Adolf Eichmann (played by Stanley Tucci), and Heinrich Mueller, head of the Gestapo, sit together to have a drink and commiserate about the outcome of the meeting. They discuss a story told by Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, a State Secretary in the chancellery, who is portrayed in the film as having had reservations about the murder of the Jews, although it is not clear in the historical record that this actually was the case for the real Kritzinger.
The scene has stuck in my mind for many years as a kind of warning should one let oneself be consumed and defined by hatred.
No one here, I'm convinced, is consumed by race based hatred like Heydrich's Eichmann's and Mueller's hatred of the Jews, but I know for myself, I have repeatedly felt consumed by perhaps a more justified hatred over the last 4 years, which, irrespective of its origins and its justifications, is hatred all the same.
Speaking only for myself, in these days of liberation and relief, I want to let go of it; as hard as it is, I want to let go of the hatred. It does nothing good for me.
Still high...
Amanda Gorman's poem deepens my conviction that this coming generation is going to a great generation like none we've seen, and Yo Yo Ma, the beautiful comforting voice, the happiness, the Amazing Grace.
And then there's that old white guy, sprinting around the White House filled with fire, as if with a magic wand, expelling demons.
That old white guy makes me feel so much better about being an old white guy, which has been something of an embarrassment of late.
Suddenly I feel, at least, the joy of youth.
Yo Yo Ma, how beautiful, how unbelievably beautiful:
This old man is glad to have lived to see this!!!!!
What is the status of the children separated from their parents...
...and caged?
I'm not hearing anything. Am I just missing it?
Of all the wonderful stuff the President has worked to address, for me, this horror is the one most important to me.
Does anyone know where we are on this?
I'm seeing a lot more titles in this forum with "Biden" in them than...
...reference too long.orange national nightmare.
I love it.
Isn't it wonderful? The wind is finally blowing in California...
(Graphics in this and previous posts of mine may not be visible in Google Chrome, but should show up in Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Android.)
It appears that all of the wind turbines in the entire state California are producing as much energy as the two nuclear plants operating at Diablo Canyon are producing in two relatively small buildings along the coast.
Source: CAISO Supply Page (Accessed 1/20/21 3:50 pm)
I haven't seen this much wind energy very often in California in recent checks, most of which were around the winter solstice. But I heard that the wind is blowing in California, so hard that trucks are being over turned, so I decided to look.
It's something of a shame that because California is densely crisscrossed by copper power lines to collect all that wonderful so called "renewable energy" that they've had to shut some of those power lines because of, um, wind, and the consequent risk of fire, but one cannot have everything, can one?
As of this writing about 40 minutes later (16:40 PST to be precise) than when I downloaded the above graphic - I was called away to relish President Biden's Press Secretary's first press briefing, a thing of beauty - all of the wind turbines in California are producing 1,563 MW, but don't worry, be happy, at 12:20 they were producing 2,271 MW for a few minutes.
The two remaining nuclear reactors are producing as of this writing, 2,268 MW in two buildings, and have been consistently producing, without interruption, reliably roughly that amount of power all day long, +/- 4 MW.
Solar's been great today, and peaked out at 7,138 MW for a few minutes around 14:30 (2:30 PM) PST, but now, as the sun is falling, is down to 601 MW.
Don't worry, be happy. California, as of 16:45 (4:45) PM is "only" dumping 8,180 metric tons of carbon dioxide an hour to power its (partially shut) grid.
The Press Secretary for the President was very refreshing. She promised something we've been missing, "reality."
This post, by the way, is reality.
We are over 414 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere.
Shortly after I started writing here, January 2003, we were at around 375 ppm.
I'm looking forward to a new day, and I hope everyone else is too, but a new day is impossible without a serious day, and we haven't had too many of those.
We are about to have a President, Mr. Joe Biden. So why?
How is it that we have so many posts on DU discussing a lump of shit being loaded on a plane to head for a swamp?
Profile Information
Gender: MaleCurrent location: New Jersey
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 33,515
