This comes from a news item in Nature. It's probably open sourced: Closest known relatives of virus behind COVID-19 found in Laos (Smriti Mallapaty, Nature News September 24, 2021.)

Subtitle: Studies of bats in China and Laos show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.



The paper is in preprint and has not been peer reviewed:

South Africa planning to start nuclear procurement

An excerpt:

From Nature News: Hurricane Ida shows the one-two punch of poverty and climate change

Subtitle:



Nature World View September 21.

It's probably open sourced:



A note about the President:

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge (Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte PNAS 2021 Vol. 118 No. 24 e2103683118)

I was directed to this interesting paper by this article in popular press: Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants (Mongabay by Sibélia Zanon on 20 September 2021 | Translated by Maya Johnson) , which in turn came in my email from my Nature Briefing subscription.

It was my privilege to work in various capacities on the development of several drugs that were discovered originally in plants, two of the taxanes for cancer, originally found in Oregon Yew Tree bark, and irinotecan, originally obtained from the bark of the Chinese "Happy Tree." I supported a group working on the total synthesis. (It was very exciting.) I'm working with a team developing one now, but I can't talk about it.

Although many drugs have been obtained from molecules in plants, or derived from them, we have only scratched the surface of drugs available.

The paper linked above gives an interesting perspective about which I had not thought.

From the introduction:



Figure 1:



The caption:



Another image, Figure 2:



The caption:




The caption:



Figure 4:



The caption:



From the conclusion the paper:



I'm not sure if the PNAS paper is open sourced, but the Mongabay article probably is.

Interesting I think.

It seems that despite all this "green" so called "renewable energy" taking over Germany - we hear time and time and time again that it's "cheap" - and that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark, electricity prices in Europe are surging.

It seems there is a shortage of the dangerous fossil fuel dangerous natural gas to burn followed by unrestricted dumping of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere.

Analysis: Expensive winter ahead as Europe's power prices surge

Short article, but here's a few excerpts:



The reason for this is clear despite all the hoopla we hear about how "cheap" wind and solar are, but almost always escapes attention.

The reason can be made obvious by asking the following question: How expensive is wind energy when the wind isn't blowing?

...Cause Myth."

A Southerner's Reckoning with the Lost Cause Myth, Robert E. Lee and Me.

It's by Gen. Ty Seidule (Ret.) Emeritus History Professor at West Point. He received his bachelor's degree at Washington and Lee University, which includes a chapel dedicated to, um, Robert E. Lee.

In it, General Seidule confronts the racism of his youth, growing up White in Virginia in the 1960's and 1970's, speaking about he was raised to racism and how now, as a man, a soldier, a historian, a scholar and an officer how he needs to confront it, hold it up in the light, and understand how tragically ugly it is.

I grew up in New York, and was raised to praise some distant ancestor who fought for the "Union." General Seidel perceptively announces in the early pages that there was no such thing as a "Union Army." It was the United States Army fighting armed traitors who were killing US Soldiers in order to retain a right to enslave, rape, and torture other human beings on what General Seidule insists should not be called "plantations" but rather what they were, "Enslaved Labor Farms."

But reading of General Seidule's youth, I see, with more than minor squeamishness, striking parallels to my own. After all, I watched the same Disney Movies he decries and read the same Disney books, loving, as he loved it Uncle Remus.. Perhaps I did not read the children's history books on the "Noble" Robert E. Lee, but it took me a long time to really see Lee entirely clearly for what he was, a cruel, vicious slaveholder, who betrayed an oath he took before his God, to kill his fellow Americans to preserve and perpetuate human slavery.

Any white man of my age who wants to face who he is, would do well to read this book. This is not a book for Southern White Men. It is a book for American White Men who came of age in the mid 20th century.

I thought he and his brother were joking with me (a lactovegetarian) by saying they were going to a "meatery."

Wrong.

A meadery is a place where they serve mead, an alcoholic beverage made from honey. They had a "flight of meads" where you got to sample 5 meads for 10 bucks.

It was very interesting I have to say. Some very interesting tastes, exotic in a playful way.

We had a wonderful time.

I've been spending part of the day at MIT's Nuclear Engineering Department where I came across this cool video:

My son, a Materials Science Engineer, has expressed a strong interest, after finishing a two semester Masters under a scholarship award, in pursuing his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.

As he is very busy in the lab, his course work, and the need to write a thesis on his metallurgical work, I have offered, and he has honored me by accepting, my help in reviewing the faculties of the remaining American Nuclear Engineering Schools to give advice and a survey of my thinking of what faculty members are doing to help save the world. This consists simply of a spreadsheet with the institution, the web address of the faculty members, and a brief discussion, one to ten sentences, in what the faculty laboratory is engaged, and my personal views on the technical details of a putative sustainable nuclear future to provide the energy necessary to clean up the mess we've made of the entire planet.

The idea is to give a quick survey into which he can drill for greater depth as he considers his personal future and target schools.

So I came across this guy, who on the surface level seems like he'd be an excellent advisor from whom one could learn an enormous amount of important information: Jacopo Buongiorno

His description on his web page above:



I highlighted with bold two points of interest, one being an area in which I hope my son will develop, two phase flows, and of course, heat transfer, since I am very fond of heat networks to obtain high energy efficiency, a key to addressing, safely, world poverty.

The second is reference to TEPCO, the Japanese power company that built and operated the the now infamous Fukushima reactors. TEPCO is a much maligned company because the reactors failed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake because the back up diesel generators failed.

I used to write quite a bit over at Daily Kos, which is a website devoted to our end of the political spectrum, although as far as energy and the environment is concerned, is overtly antinuclear, embracing the popular, but absurd idea that if nuclear energy is "too dangerous," it follows that climate change is not "too dangerous." Antinuclear rhetoric is, in my long held opinion, our equivalent of the right's creationism, and, even more graphically and explicitly, the right's recent anti-vax, and anti-mask rhetoric. Taking a vaccine can and does involve risks, however the risks are vanishingly small when compared to the risk of dying or being permanently disabled because one has not taken, or worse, refused a vaccine.

The reactionary "renewable energy will save us" fantasy - reactionary because the world abandoned an existing total reliance on "renewable energy" in the 19th century for a reason - has played out. It did not save us, it is not saving us, and it won't save us. Nuclear energy is not risk free, nor does it need to be, to be preferred to all other options when it comes to saving lives that might otherwise be lost to producing energy, any more than vaccines need to be risk free to save lives.

For a time, I was tolerated at Daily Kos, possibly because the polls I wrote, which often involved references to King Kong and lutefisk, were amusing, but ultimately I was banned, as I like to say, "for telling the truth."

I was writing there at Daily Kos when the Fukushima "accident" - it was no accident, it was an unprecedented natural disaster involving the flow of seawater - took place, and in a post I wrote there (they're called "diaries" over there) I offered my impression of the TEPCO engineers addressing the disaster. I did so in response to a correspondent there named George, who, if I have this right and memory serves me well, actually held a Ph.D in geology, but abandoned the field to take up surfing in Hawaii.

This is no surprise to me. I've known quite a number, probably numbering in the hundreds, of holders of Ph.D degrees who are quite useless. Hopefully my son, should he get a Ph.D. will reflect well on that degree and will do something more important than surfing.

By the way, I was nowhere near as well educated about energy and the environment in 2011 as I am now, and actually included a few statements that were wrong. For instance I wrote in 2011 the following:



While this may be what the World Health Organization was saying at the time - which makes my statement directly true but indirectly false - the understanding of air pollution mortality has advanced considerably. The current understanding of the mortality associated with air pollution is, according to the most recent Lancet Survey of global mortality and risks, is around 7 million per year (6.8 million being the most probable amount) meaning one death every 5 seconds, not 15 seconds, from air pollution.

I've made an enormous effort to further educate myself in the last ten years, picking up my pace.

"George" the Surfer wrote a post saying the nuclear engineers at TEPCO, were incompetent, because they built nuclear plants near a fault line. In my post, indirectly addressed to George the Surfer, I asked if this meant that people who built cities near fault lines were incompetent.

I began this line of reasoning thusly:



By the way, the overwhelming number of deaths in the Earthquake/Tsunami at Tohoku involved buildings and seawater.

Consider this publication, published about a year after the Tohoku Earthquake which is often described by anti-nukes, who I personally, again, regard as the precise equivalents of anti-vax types, refer to as "Fukushima" as if the reactors, and only the reactors were worthy of consideration in the event:

Nobuhito Mori, Tomoyuki Takahashi & THE 2011 TOHOKU EARTHQUAKE TSUNAMI JOINT SURVEY GROUP (2012) Nationwide Post Event Survey and Analysis of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami, Coastal Engineering Journal, 54:1, 1250001-1-1250001-27

It contains the following text:



There is, of course, very little consideration ten years later of the 19,278 (if the missing remained missing) deaths from seawater, presumably including deaths in the 128,530 totally or partially damaged houses. They don't matter in the minds of anti-nukes; anti-nukes would much rather discuss the possibility that someone, perhaps multiple people might die from (gasp) radiation. The text suggests that only 9% of the deaths recorded took place in the Fukushima Prefecture, and that they were from seawater. If this 9%, which works out to 1735 human beings had all died from radiation instead of seawater - they didn't - this would amount, in units of time, the number of people who will be killed by air pollution in the next two hours and 20 minutes roughly.

In my Daily Kos Diary, I wrote in defense of the outstanding job done by TEPCO engineers under these extraordinary places.

To wit:



The figures for the number of lives saved by nuclear energy in Japan are, I think, higher than what I wrote in 2011 when I wrote, "tens of thousands."

I continued a consideration of the TEPCO engineers the surfer called "incompetent."



It seems that my son has a reasonable shot at getting into MIT's Nuclear Engineering Department. From my review of the faculty and research staff, I would consider doing so would be something like dying and going to Heaven, if in fact there were such a thing as Heaven. No one should consider acceptance to that august institution a "slam-dunk" but it's reasonable to assume he might be admitted on strong credentials. If he did, would I advise him to take a serious look at working with Dr. Buongiorno's group, run by the TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering?

Damn straight I would, although again, the department is filled with outstanding engineer/scientists working to save the world from itself.

I think the TEPCO guys did a very good job containing and limiting the damage, despite the contempt, fear and ignorance with which they were addressed.

The DailyKos post I wrote in 2011 is here: Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent?

It's interesting to see that this document contains a paraphrase of the true statement, the repetition of which ultimately got me banned at Daily Kos later on, where nuclear energy is "too dangerous" and climate change isn't:



I stand by that statement.

I trust you're having a nice afternoon.

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Simple But Tricky: Investigations of Terephthalic Acid Purity Obtained from Mixed PET Waste (Lelia Cosimbescu, Daniel R. Merkel, Jens Darsell, and Gayaneh Petrossian, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2021 60 (35), 12792-12797). The scientists who authored this paper all work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, just outside of the Hanford Nuclear Complex. (Much of the work at PNNL is directed at handling and treating radioactive materials from the nuclear weapons manufacturing industry that operated in the 20th century. This industry left many of these radioactive materials in poorly contained conditions. This paper is not about radioactivity though; it's about a much worse problem, as it is on a much more massive scale, and more widely distributed, plastic contamination.)

Although this is fine scientific work, I can't say I endorse the scheme I'll briefly discuss related to this paper. My preferred technology for dealing with plastic pollution, including but no limited to microplastics and plastic waste allegedly recycled is steam or supercritical water reforming or dry reforming in a reverse Allam cycle. Thus, my chief interest in posting reference to this paper is with the statistics therein and the elucidation of an issue about which I've not thought much, if at all, the issue of color as a problem in the widely held belief that we can, and even worse, do recycle plastics.

I will bold the sections of the introduction to the paper, which follows, to highlight the interesting statistics and information.



The added italics are also mine.

We all dutifully put our plastics into the recycling bins at home, at work, and in many commercial establishments, without thinking what happens to them afterwards. Much of the plastic nonetheless, ends up in landfills, and some certainly escapes into bodies of water, into land, and as is increasingly clear, into the flesh of living things including, but hardly limited to, humans.

The authors of this paper have proposed a method of plastic recycling by heating colored waste plastics in solvents, investigating ethanol and ethylene glycol - generally made from dangerous fossil fuels - for the process both in the presence of strong base, sodium hydroxide.

The conditions utilized are shown in this table from the text:



Some pictures from the text:



The caption:






The caption:





The caption:



DSC is differential scanning calorimetry, a method relying on the how flow, absorption, or release of heat takes place as a material is heated.



The caption:



XRD is X-Ray Diffraction of the samples as compared to files in a database comprising standards.

From the conclusion:



Again, this is not in my opinion, the ideal approach to dealing with this problem. To my thinking, the entire petrochemical industry, including polymers but clearly not limited to them, should begin and end with carbon monoxide/dioxide and hydrogen as starting materials. I have convinced myself this is feasible, not easy, perhaps not really popular, but feasible.

The Hanford site, outside the PNNL site where this work was conducted, was constructed and operated under paranoid conditions of perceived emergency beginning in the Second World War and proceeding through the "cold war," to isolate nearly isotopically pure (Pu-239) plutonium. The conditions were primitive and sloppy, but need not be so any longer if we want - and we should want - useful plutonium. Much of the plutonium isolated in the 20th century at Hanford remains in nuclear weapons which should, in the mind of sane people, remain useless. It is available however, in a sane world, for use to generate heat, heat being the key intermediate for producing carbon monoxide/dioxide and hydrogen.

Have a pleasant Sunday.