I’ve been staring at this damn screen for so long this morning that my coffee has gone cold, my eyes are scratchy, and I’ve become all too aware that I’ve not showered yet. My problem is I am really susceptible to depression, and it hits me hard in the winters.
As a result, I’ve been watching a lot of youtube crap. Scottie asked me to do these “Daily Thoughts”, but my problem is that I’ve had zero daily thoughts! I’m just restlessly flipping from video short to video short, then finally I find something interesting to write about and I’m stuck on telling you that I’ve got nothing to tell you.
For anyone out there who is like me, strangling on the crap this world forces me to take in, I say fuckitall. I’m scrapping this dang staring contest I’m having with my computer. I’m going to go wash my stinky butt, put on some grown up clothes and go eat something I didn’t have to make myself, something my doctor would most surely disapprove of.
Sorry Arteries. I’ve got some bad news coming to you…
Good Morning, Everyone! Let’s make today a good one. I’ll work on a real post later, Scottie. Or not. 🙂
The news below is grand news for the planet and the people everywhere. Water is going to be a desperately needed highly valuable necessity. Also I have another doctor’s appointment this morning. Hugs
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04 December 2024
A novel approach to make seawater evaporate faster than freshwater has been hailed as a significant breakthrough in desalination technology that will benefit billions of people worldwide.
Up to 36% of the world’s eight billion people currently suffer from severe freshwater shortages for at least four months of the year, and this could potentially increase to 75% by 2050, threatening the survival of humans.
Seawater desalination is one of the most effective strategies to alleviate the impending scarcity, but existing processes consume massive amounts of energy, leaving a large carbon footprint.
Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA) have already demonstrated the potential of interfacial solar-powered evaporation as an energy-efficient, sustainable alternative to current desalination methods, but they are still limited by a lower evaporation rate for seawater compared to pure water due to the negative effect of salt ions on water evaporation.
UniSA materials science researcher Professor Haolan Xu has now collaborated with researchers from China on a project to develop a simple yet effective strategy to reverse this limitation.
By introducing inexpensive and common clay minerals into a floating photothermal hydrogel evaporator, the team achieved seawater evaporation rates that were 18.8% higher than pure water. This is a significant breakthrough since previous studies all found seawater evaporation rates were around 8% lower than pure water.
“The key to this breakthrough lies in the ion exchange process at the air-water interface,” Prof Xu says.
“The minerals selectively enrich magnesium and calcium ions from seawater to the evaporation surfaces, which boosts the evaporation rate of seawater. This ion exchange process occurs spontaneously during solar evaporation, making it highly convenient and cost-effective.”
Considering the global desalination market – which numbers around 17,000 operational plants worldwide – even small declines in desalination performance can result in the loss of tens of millions of tons of clean water.
“This new strategy, which could be easily integrated into existing evaporation-based desalination systems, will provide additional access to massive amounts of clean water, benefitting billions of people worldwide,” Prof Xu says.
The researchers say the hydrogel evaporator maintained its performance even after months of immersion in seawater.
The next steps will involve exploring more strategies that can make seawater evaporation faster pure water evaporation and apply them into practical seawater desalination.
The findings have been published in the journal Advanced Materials.
The mineral materials used in the process included halloysite nanotubes (HNTs), bentonite (BN), zeolite (ZL), and montmorillonite (MN) in combination with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and sodium alginate (SA) to form a photothermal hydrogel.
January 3, 1961 A nuclear reactor exploded at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho, killing three military technicians, and released radioactivity which, in the words of John A. McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, was “largely confined” to the reactor building. One technician was blown to the ceiling of the containment dome and impaled on a control rod. His body remained there until it was taken down six days later. The men were so heavily exposed to radiation that their hands and heads had to be buried separately with other radioactive waste. ===================================================== January 3, 1967 Carl Wilson Carl Wilson of the the Beach Boys was indicted for draft evasion. Claiming conscientious objector status, he eventually won his battle against the charges. ===================================================== January 3, 1971 On her first day as a member of Congress, Bella Abzug (D-New York) introduced a resolution calling for the withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia. Bella Abzug Born in the Bronx in 1920, one month after the passage of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th amendment granting women the right to vote, she was the first Jewish woman elected to Congress. After attending Columbia University Law School, she practiced civil rights and labor law for twenty-three years. Throughout her career, she was known as one of the most vocal proponents of civil rights for women, as well as for gays and lesbians. Background on the indomitable Bella ======================================================= January 3, 1993 The United States of America and the Russian Federation agreed to cut the number of their nuclear warheads to between 3,000 and 3,500 (nearly half).U.S. President George H.W. Bush, just before leaving office, and his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – Start II – in Moscow. Start II marked the biggest reduction in nuclear arms ever agreed, eliminating land-based multiple warhead missiles, and putting limits on submarine-based missiles. Read more ======================================================= January 3, 2003 Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, suspended purchase of 12 new fighter planes, saying money could be better used to relieve hunger. More about Luiz Inacio
There was no shortage of mind-bending new science about black holes this year, these are just 5 of our favourites.
Blast “Supermassive Black Hole” by English rock band Muse and enjoy!
Scientists take even crisper images of supermassive black holes
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration made the highest resolution black hole observations ever from the surface of Earth, capturing M87* and Sagittarius A* at the centres of the Messier 87 and Milky Way galaxies.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) identified a black hole that confirmed the theory that some supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel needed to make new stars.
The complex dynamics of black holes in the centres of galaxies, including how they slow down and interact with each other, were revealed in a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Largest stellar black hole in the Milky Way discovered
The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission found a massive stellar black hole, named Gaia BH3, just 2,000 light years away in the constellation Aquila. It is 33 times the mass of our Sun, more than 50% bigger than the next biggest stellar black hole – Cygnus X-1.
A black hole was discovered with two orbiting stars for the first time. One star orbits the black hole, V404 Cygni, every 6.5 days. The other orbits at a significantly greater distance and makes the same trip every 70,000 years.
Researchers are announcing that a 53-year-old man in Germany has been cured of HIV.
Referred to as “the Dusseldorf patient” to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.
Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.
MORE: Man apparently cured of HIV
“It’s really cure, and not just, you know, long term remission,” said Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen, who presented details of the case in a new publication in “Nature Medicine.”
“This obviously positive symbol makes hope, but there’s a lot of work to do,” Jensen said
For most people, HIV is a lifelong infection, and the virus is never fully eradicated. Thanks to modern medication, people with HIV can live long and healthy lives.
The Dusseldorf patient joins a small group of people who have been cured under extreme circumstances after a stem cell transplant, typically only performed in cancer patients who don’t have any other options. A stem cell transplant is a high-risk procedure that effectively replaces a person’s immune system. The primary goal is to cure someone’s cancer, but the procedure has also led to an HIV cure in a handful of cases.
Blood samples are seen in a lab.
STOCK PHOTO/ Manuel Romaris/Getty Images
HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, enters and destroys the cells of the immune system. Without treatment, the continued damage can lead to AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, where a person cannot fight even a small infection.
With about 38.4 million people globally living with HIV, treatments have come a long way. Modern medication can keep the virus at bay, and studies looking into preventing HIV infection with a vaccine are also underway.
The first person with HIV cure was Timothy Ray Brown. Researchers published his case as the Berlin patient in 2009. That was followed by the London patient published in 2019. Most recently, The City of Hope and New York patients were published in 2022.
“I think we can get a lot of insights from this patient and from these similar cases of HIV cure,” Jensen said. “These insights give us some hints where we could go to make the strategy safer.”
MORE: Breakthrough treatment cures woman of HIV
All four of these patients had undergone stem cell transplants for their blood cancer treatment. Their donors also had the same HIV-resistant mutation that deletes a protein called CCR5, which HIV normally uses to enter the cell. Only 1% of the total population carries this genetic mutation that makes them resistant to HIV.
“When you hear about these HIV cure, it’s obviously, you know, incredible, given how challenging it’s been. But, it still remains the exception to the rule,” said Dr. Todd Ellerin, director of infectious disease at South Shore Health.
The stem cell transplantation is a complicated procedure that comes with many risks, and it is too risky to offer it as a cure for everyone with HIV.
However, scientists are hopeful. Each time they cure a new patient, they gain valuable research insights that help them understand what it would take to find a cure for everyone.
“It is obviously a step forward in advancing the science and having us sort of understanding, in some ways, what it takes to cure HIV,” Ellerin said.
Kaviya Sathyakumar, M.D., M.B.A., is a family medicine resident physician at Ocala Regional Medical Center in Florida and member of ABC News Medical Unit.
They won’t get nearly the jabber that Liz Cheney’s and Bennie Thompson’s medals are getting, and all are good people. I emboldened a bit especially pertinent to this blog.
Biden Giving Liz Cheney A Fancy Medal Today, So That’ll Make Trump’s Butt Itch by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Every 2024 Presidential Citizens Medal winner is a better human than the bastard who’s about to be president again. Read on Substack
The first time Donald Trump was president, one of the ways he absolutely beclowned the office and rendered it meaningless was who he’d pick to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other similar honors.
Historically, such awards went to people who had done something important. Under Trump 1.0, it was more like “Here is the presidential medal of excellence in giving me money!” It went to Miriam Adelson, AKA one of Trump’s big bucks no whammies donors. (That’s the one where he got in trouble recently for saying Adelson’s award was better than Medal of Honor winners, AKA the military’s highest honor.)
Trump gave the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, before that guy waddled off to hell. He gave it to Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, for excellence in doing congressional coverups for Trump or something.
We are sure Trump 2.0 will make those recipients look like American patriots.
The Presidential Citizens Medal is the award just below the Medal of Freedom, and Trump didn’t seem to give much of a shit about it during his first term. He awarded it in 2019 to a 9/11 first responder, posthumously. But that appears to be it. The award is given to someone “who has performed exemplary deeds or services for his or her country or fellow citizens,” so you can see why it might not get Trump very excited.
President Joe Biden is big on giving it, though. In 2023, he gave it to people like Capitol Police officers Michael Fanone and Aquilino Gonell, who protected Congress during the terrorist attack Trump’s supporters committed on January 6, 2021. (He awarded it posthumously to former Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after he was assaulted by Trump supporters at the Capitol that day.) Also to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Georgia election workers Rudy Giuliani owes all his money to, for repeatedly lying about and defaming them.
In all, he gave it to 12 people who in various ways defended American democracy from Trump’s attacks in 2020.
Now, today, Biden is giving another set of 20 of these medals for 2024, and damn, they are just more people Donald Trump could never ever fucking be, not in a million years, not if he went to the Emerald City and grabbed the Wizard by the pussy and begged him for a soul, or for integrity, or decency, or goodness. (In this mental image Elon is in drag as Dorothy, obviously.)
Liz Cheney is getting one for her work on the House January 6 Select Committee, and all the ways she’s stood up to defend democracy the last couple years, so that’ll piss Trump the fuck off.
Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who co-chaired the January 6 Committee with Cheney, will also receive the medal.
We are sure Trump will have some sort of hallucinatory conniption about how they deleted all the evidence that TOTALLY EXONERATES him, because once Trump gets an incorrect conspiracy theory mangled up inside that big ugly head of his, he never gets free of it.
On top of those types of folks, there’s Mary Bonauto, who argued Obergefell v. Hodges, AKA the marriage equality case, before the Supreme Court. Plus Evan Wolfson, perhaps the single most important activist over the decades of that fight.
You can check out the whole list here.On top of a number of former politicians like Bill Bradley and Chris Dodd, it’s full of people with bios that read like that of Diane Carlson Evans, who “founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation to ensure female service members received the recognition they deserve.” Plus civil rights leaders and more women’s rights leaders, and so on and so forth.
And this posthumous award, which seems to contain a pre-emptive rebuke for the incoming Hitler wannabe administration:
Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi
In a shameful chapter in our Nation’s history, Mitsuye Endo was incarcerated alongside more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. Undaunted, she challenged the injustice and reached the Supreme Court. Her resolve allowed thousands of Japanese Americans to return home and rebuild their lives, reminding us that we are a Nation that stands for freedom for all.
The entire list is a rebuke of Trump, really. American heroes, all.
But yeah, the Liz Cheney part is the part that’s gonna stick up Trump’s ass and give him sideways bowel movements. Bet those sting REAL bad. (snip-comments on the page)
A novel approach to make seawater evaporate faster than freshwater has been hailed as a significant breakthrough in desalination technology that will benefit billions of people worldwide.
Scottie's Playtime 