Ebook Discount

From May 27 – June 3  Jonathon Munros will be discounted to 99c on Amazon in the US and 99p in the UK. The third book in a series, in which the evil Jonathon Munro violates the only reason his evil behaviour has as yet not been punished. He is to be replaced by an android, who learns to behave like the real man. However. Jonathon’s inherent evil has been underestimated, and the android, knowing of Jonathon’s obsession with sex, and knowing that sex is needed for reproduction, decides to start reproducing itself. What could possibly go right? A dystopian hard science fiction novel that, while the third of a series, stands alone as long as you accept the characters have a past, and a problem that makes the Terminator seem modest.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EK5T6WE

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A Pox on Them

For those of us somewhat tired of Covid-19, there is more depressing news. An article in Nature (605, 419 – 422) noted that virtually every viral pandemic that has occurred since the beginning of the 20^th century was triggered by the virus jumping from animals to people. Now for more bad news: an analysis of outbreaks over the past four centuries indicates that the annual probability of pandemics could increase several-fold in the coming decades because of human-induced environmental changes. We are doing it to ourselves! But wait: there is a fix, and it only costs the world around $20 billion a year, provided everyone cooperates. (Do I hear the “Good luck with that” comment?) That is asking for about $3 from every person, but given the way incomes are distributed, probably somewhat ore for those in the West.

According to Nature, that is small compared with the millions of lives lost and the trillions of dollars spent as a consequence of SARS-C0V-2. It is also 1/20 of the statistical value of lives lost each year to viral diseases that have spilled over from animals since 1918. Yet interestingly the WHO set up a panel to consider what should be done in the future to prevent such pandemics, and in an 86-page report apparently wild-life got two mentions and deforestation one mention. Either the “experts” did not understand where these pandemics originate, or they did not care. The article suggests four actions are required.

Spillover is more likely to occur when the number of animal-human interactions increase, such as in farming, the trade in wild-life, or when forests are cleared and the animals no longer have their normal environment for living. The article suggests four actions:

1. Tropical and subtropical forests must be protected. Wildlife that survives such cutting of forests includes the wildlife that can live alongside people, and they also often host pathogens capable of killing people. As an example, bats in Bangla Desh carry Nipah virus, which can kill 40 – 77% of the people it infects. These now roost in areas of high human population because their forest habitat has been largely cleared. Loss of forest also increases climate change. Besides stopping such climate forcing, it also stops driving animals out of regions that have become too inhospitable for them to stay. Once upon a time, if the climate changed, animals could migrate. Now their environment tends to be in islands, and if they have to leave, that is into human living areas.
2. Commercial markets and trade of live wild animals must be banned or strictly regulated. Some progress is being made here. In China, the trade and consumption of exotic wildlife has been banned since Covid 19.
3. Biosecurity must be improved when dealing with farmed animals. We need improved veterinary care, better surveillance for animal disease, improved housing and feeding for animals, and quarantines to limit pathogen spread. Up to a point, we have made progress here, in controlling mad cow disease, but more is required. It is important to stop livestock pathogens since nearly 80% of such pathogens can infect multiple host species, including humans.
4. More attention needs to be made to contain early outbreaks, and that includes increasing people’s health and economic security. A big problem is that people in poor health, and particularly people with immunosuppression, can host pathogens long enough for the virus to mutate before being passed on.

If we could stop spillover, we eliminate the need to contain it. As most will recall, disease surveillance, contact tracing, lockdowns, vaccine development and therapeutic development are expensive, and unless done properly, ineffective. As most will realize now, the response to Covid 19 immediately ran into people who refused to have their rights infringed, in the belief they were young enough to get through it, or did not even care. “It won’t happen to me.” That caused 6.25 known million unnecessary deaths, but Nature estimates the deaths to be between 15 – 21 million who would not have died but for the pandemic. By 2025 we will have spent $157 billion on Covid-19 vaccines.

So, the question is, will we do something about it? My guess is, probably not much.

And no sooner did Nature publish that article and we suddenly found we have a new disease: monkeypox. Now guess where that is likely to have come from?

Indigenous Rights in Science

Most readers will have heard of the fights for the rights of indigenous people, but what about people born in the country, whose ancestors have been there for a long period? What rights to they have? Should they have rights to the resources of their own country? You will have heard about animal poaching, where endangered species are smuggled out of the country, and will have a view on that. However, there is a new argument coming in the scientific community, reported in Nature (605, 18 – 19) and it came from an article in the journal Cretaceous Research. The article described Ubirajara jubatus, a 110-million-year-old fossil of a dinosaur that appeared to display the precursors to feathers. The fossil had been collected in Brazil decades earlier but no Brazilian had heard of it. The authors claimed the fossil had been exported with a permit signed by some official, and the skeptic might suspect corruption here.

The publication sparked a revolution. A massive Twitter campaign was launched, and eventually the paper was withdrawn, although how you withdraw a printed paper is another matter. The specimen is in the State Museum of Natural History in Karlesruhe, and apparently the museum is engaged in negotiations to return it.

This practice, called by some colonial palaeontology, has caused a storm across south America. A report that analysed 200 studies published between 1990 and 2021 found that more than half did not involve local researchers, and of the Brazilian fossils used, 88% of them were kept outside Brazil. One of the authors of the Ubirajara paper protested that the study cherry-picked data, and omitted a whole lot of earlier American practices. The author of the report states it picked on starting at 1990 because that was when Brazil introduced laws preventing the export of such fossils, and it would be wrong to criticise a practice that was perfectly legal before then. He also noted it was a curious defence to state that others were doing it, so why not him, despite the law?

Now the South Americans are attempting to persuade scientific journals to act to stop such colonial practices. They noted that none of the 200 studies published an acknowledgement of the permit they should have had to take the specimen out of the country. If you read scientific papers, you often see a remarkable list of acknowledgements, such a X made helpful comments. Acknowledging that you followed the law might seem to be a useful step.

Apparently, this “revolution” had some less that satisfactory behaviour. Members of the public began visibly harassing scientists involved in the Ubirajara research, while the Karlsruhe Museum had to close its Instagram account due to the flood of negative comments.

There followed a spat about how researchers local to where the fossil was found should be involved when the fossil has been in a foreign museum for ages. Our author who protested (above) then continued to protest that this would involve tokenism if they had to include a scientist from the region on the paper. Of course, a way out of that would be to return the fossil. Two other countries particularly affected are the Dominican Republic and Myanmar, both of which have significant fossilized amber, of Jurassic Park fame. What happens next is unclear, although it appears the move to return fossils is growing.

That thought leads to another. Scientific publication involves peer review. It would be interesting to compare the fraction of rejections from third world countries with those from major US/European Universities. Does the address “Harvard” give a serious advantage over some town in Myanmar? Or is it done truly on content?

On a completely different matter, a huge fang of an ichthyosaur has been found from the Swiss alps. From the size of the tooth, the reptile would have measured about 21 meters in length. You might have heard that ichthyosaurs were somewhat vulnerable and only lived in shallow waters. Not this beast. A carnivore the size of a sperm whale would not be a pleasant thing to encounter. However, it died out at the end of the Triassic so no current danger.

Banana-skin Science

Every now and again we find something that looks weird, but just maybe there is something in it. And while reading it, one wonders, how on Earth did they come up with this? The paper in question was Silva et. al. 2022. Chemical Science 13: 1774. What they did was to take dried biomass powder and exposed it to a flash of 14.5 ms duration from a high-power xenon flash lamp. That type of chemistry was first developed to study the very short-lived intermediates generated in photochemistry, when light excites the molecule to a high energy state, where it can decay through unusual rearrangements. This type of study has been going on since the 1960s and equipment has steadily been improving and being made more powerful. However, it is most unusual to find it used for something that ordinary heat would do far more cheaply. Anyway, 1 kg of such dried powder generated about 100 litres of hydrogen and 330 g of biochar. So, what else was weird? The biomass was dried banana skin! Ecuador, sit up and take notice. But before you do, note that flash xenon lamps are not going to be an exceptionally economical way of providing heat. That is the point; this very expensive source of light was actually merely providing heat.

There are three ways of doing pyrolysis. In the previous post I pointed out that if you took cellulose and eliminated all the oxygen in the form of water, you were left with carbon. If you eliminate the oxygen as carbon monoxide you are left with hydrogen. If you eliminate it as carbon dioxide you get hydrogen and hydrocarbon. In practice what you get depends on how you do it. Slow pyrolysis at moderate heat mainly makes charcoal and water, with some gas. It may come as a surprise to some but ordinary charcoal is not carbon; it is about 1/3 oxygen, some minor bits and pieces such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulphur, and the rest carbon.

If you do very fast pyrolysis, called ablative pyrolysis, you can get almost all liquids and gas. I once saw this done in a lab in Colorado where a tautly held (like a hacksaw blade) electrically heated hot wire cut through wood like butter, the wire continually moving so the uncondensed liquids (which most would call smoke) and gas were swept out. There was essentially no sign of “burnt wood”, and no black. The basic idea of ablative pyrolysis is you fire wood dust or small chips at a plate at an appropriate angle to the path so the wood sweeps across it and the gas is swept away by the gas stream (which can be recycled gas) propelling the wood. Now the paper I referenced above claimed much faster pyrolysis, but got much more charcoal. The question is, why? The simple answer, in my opinion, is nothing was sweeping the product away so it hung around and got charred.

The products varied depending on the power from the lamp, which depended on the applied voltage. At what I assume was maximum voltage the major products were (apart from carbon) hydrogen and carbon monoxide. 100 litres of hydrogen, and a bit more carbon monoxide were formed, which is a good synthesis gas mix. There were also 10 litres of methane, and about 40 litres of carbon dioxide that would have to be scrubbed out. The biomass had to be reduced to 20 μm size and placed on a surface as a layer 50 μm thick. My personal view is that is near impossible to scale this up to useful sizes. It uses light as an energy source, which is difficult to generate so almost certainly the process is a net energy consumer. In short, this so-called “breakthrough” could have been carried out to give better yields of whatever was required far more cheaply by people a hundred years ago.

Perhaps the idea of using light, however, is not so retrograde. The trick would be to devise apparatus that with pyrolyse wood ablatively (or not if you want charcoal) using light focused by large mirrors. The source, the sun, is free until it hits the mirrors. Most of us will have ignited paper with a magnifying glass. Keep the oxygen out and just maybe you have something that will make chemical intermediates that you can call “green”.

Biofuels to Power Transport

No sooner do I post something than someone says something to contradict the post. In this case, immediately after the last post, an airline came out and said it would be zero carbon by some time in the not-too-distant future. They talked about, amongst other things, hydrogen. There is no doubt hydrogen could power an aircraft, as it also powers rockets that go into space. That is liquid hydrogen, and once the craft takes off, it burns for a matter of minutes. I still think it would be very risky for aircraft to try to hold the pressures that could be generated for hours. If you do contain it, the extra weight and volume occupied would make such travel extremely expensive, while sitting above a tank of hydrogen is risky.

Hydrocarbons make by far the best aircraft fuel, and one alternative source of them is from biomass. I should caution that I have been working in this area of scientific research on and off for decades (more off than on because of the need to earn money.) With that caveat, I ask you to consider the following:

C6H12O6  ->  2 CO2 +2H2O + “C4H8”

That is idealized, but the message is a molecule of glucose (from water plus cellulose) can give two molecules each of CO2 and water, plus two thirds of the starting carbon as a hydrocarbon, which would be useful as a fuel. If you were to add enough hydrogen to convert the CO2 to a fuel you get more fuel. Actually, you do not need much hydrogen because we usually get quite a few aromatics, thus if we took two “C4H8” and make xylene or ethyl benzene (both products that are made in simple liquefactions) these total C8H10, which gives us a surplus of three H2 molecules. The point here is that in each of these cases we could imagine the energy coming from solar, but if you use biomass, much of the energy is collected for you by nature. Of course, if you take the oxygen out as water you are left with carbon. In practice there are a lot of options, and what you get tends to depend on how you do it. Biomass also contains lignin, which is a phenolic material. This is much richer in hydrocarbon material, but also it is much harder to remove the oxygen.

In my opinion, there are four basic approaches to making hydrocarbon fuels from biomass. The first, which everyone refers to, is pyrolysis. You heat the biomass, you get a lot of charcoal, but you also get liquids. These still tend to have a lot of oxygen in them, and I do not approve of this because the yields of anything useful are too low unless you want to make charcoal, or carbon, say for metal refining, steel making, electrodes for batteries, etc. There is an exception to that statement, but that needs a further post.

The second is to gasify the biomass, preferably by forcing oxygen into it and partially burning it. This gives you what chemists call synthesis gas, and you can make fuels through a further process called the Fischer-Tropsch process. Germany used that during the war, and Sasol in South Africa Sasol, but in both cases coal was the source of carbon. Biomass would work, and in the 1970s Union Carbide built such a gasifier, but that came to nothing when the oil price collapsed.

The third is high-pressure hydrogenation. The biomass is slurried in oil and heated to something over 400 degrees Centigrade in then presence of a nickel catalyst and hydrogen. A good quality oil is obtained, and in the 1980s there was a proposal to use the refuse of the town of Worcester, Mass. to operate a 50 t/d plant. Again, this came to nothing when the price of oil slumped.

The fourth is hydrothermal liquefaction. Again, what you get depends on what you put in but basically there are two main fractions from woody biomass: hydrocarbons and phenolics. The phenolics (which includes aromatic ethers) need to be hydrogenated, but the hydrocarbons are directly usable, with distillation. The petrol fraction is a high octane, and the heavier hydrocarbons qualify as very high-quality jet fuel. If you use microalgae or animal residues, you also end up with a high cetane diesel cut, and nitrogenous chemicals. Of particular interest from the point of view of jet fuel, in New Zealand they once planted Pinus Radiata which grew very quickly, and had up to 15% terpene content, most of which would make excellent jet fuel, but to improve the quality of the wood, they bred the terpenes more or less out of the trees.

The point of this is that growing biomass could help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and make the fuels needed to keep a realistic number of heritage cars on the road and power long-distance air transport, while being carbon neutral. This needs plenty of engineering development, but in the long run it may be a lot cheaper than just throwing everything we have away and then finding we can’t replace it because there are shortages of elements.