It’s starting to seem like pre-pandemic times here on the ol’ homestead. I have a rehearsal later today with Kevin Pakulis as dates are starting to be booked (tomorrow night at Tubac Jacks and the Sunday Sessions are going to start back up June 20th). I have two recording sessions (on drums) coming up at two different locations, and just finished adding drums on a project that Karl Hoffmann is helping to produce.
And that’s just the music side of things. I just mailed off one of my wire sculpture works to a gallery in Hermosa Beach. On a lark I sent off a couple images for an upcoming show at the ShockBoxx Gallery and lo and behold they chose one of my pieces out of 900 works submitted. Dang. I’ll post more about this as it unfolds.
On to the stories that caught my eye this past week…
1.
The Wandering Meatloaf! From the New York Times: “The gumboot chiton is not a glamorous creature. The large, lumpy mollusk creeps along the waters of the Pacific coast, pulling its reddish-brown body up and down the shoreline. It is sometimes known, not unreasonably, as ‘the wandering meatloaf.’ But the chiton’s unassuming body hides an array of tiny but formidable teeth. These teeth, which the creature uses to scrape algae from rocks, are among the hardest materials known to exist in a living organism.”
Just thought you should know.
2.
Electrical everything, according to Australian Inventor Saul Griffith.
The Washington Post writes, “Griffith’s vision for addressing the devastating impact of climate change bucks tradition. Instead of just focusing on shutting down coal and gas-fired power plants and polluting industries and switching to renewable power generators, he wants to also focus on suburban life.
Switching to more renewable energy sources, such as wind power, and solar are important, he said. But there is little use in having wind or solar power if your stovetop, furnace and water heater are powered by gas.”
Check out his Ted Talk below.
3.
Trouble with that nasty summer flu? We got your remedy right here!
4.
Basri Marzuki/NurPhoto, via Getty Images
130 million tons a year of single use plastic at last count…and a small group of giant manufacturers and investors are at the heart of the global industry. A report by Australia's Minderoo Foundation reveals who is behind the manufacturing of this single use plastic which include two U.S. companies, Exxon Mobil and Dow, as well as Sinopec, a Chinese-owned petrochemicals giant, and Indorama Ventures, which is based in Bangkok.
According to NPR, “Solving the issue will require drastic changes from producers, investors and banks, the authors wrote. The report said that producers of polymers — known as the building blocks of plastics — should begin disclosing their single-use plastic waste ‘footprint,’ while banks and investors should move to ‘phase out entirely’ any financing that goes toward the production of single-use plastics.”
It seems the only way to upset this cart is to pressure the corporations, grocery store chains, and restaurants that use these products to switch to more bio-friendly solutions. Again, hemp is an extremely efficient crop for these sustainable plastics known as 'bioplastics'. They are lightweight, biodegradable and can replace many petrochemical plastics.
5.
About 71% of the Earth’s surface is water-covered and that got me to wondering, naively, why has there not been more effort put into the desalination process. Hey, how about water pipelines across the country instead of oil? We could use a gallon or two in Tucson, and don’t get me started on Phoenix.
In doing a bit of digging, desalination is a hot topic and more than 300 million people globally rely on it for daily water needs. Currently more than 20,000 desalination plants operate in 150 countries. Although effective, it is complex, energy-intensive, and expensive.
Most current desalination efforts involve either a reverse osmosis method or a thermal method which separates pure water from salt and other impurities. At this point in time the concentrated waste, the salt and chemicals used in the process, pose a disposal problem. Also, the total costs of desalination are extremely high, especially the energy component, compared to conservation and recycling programs. And there’s the environmental impact to sea life that can get sucked into the equipment, upsetting the ocean’s food chain. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers posted an article last year on the challenges facing the industry.
MIT has a Water Innovation Prize each year and last month the winner was Bloom Alert, a company seeking to improve desalination plant operations with a new kind of data monitoring platform. The platform tracks ocean and desalination plant activity and provides early warnings about events that could interrupt clean water production or lead to coastal pollution. At the heart of their solution are models that crunch satellite data in real time to understand what’s going on in the ocean near the plants.
And in February this year, Eureka Alert posted that physicists have developed new material for the desalination process. An international research team with representatives from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), ITMO University, and the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published an article in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces stating that titanium dioxide nanoparticles decorated by gold absorb about 96% of the solar spectrum, turning it into heat, and can accelerate the evaporation in desalination plants up to 2.5 times and can track hazardous molecules and compounds.
One more person I came across is Nikolay Voutchkov, who has over 25 years of experience in the field of desalination and water reuse, and currently works as an independent technical advisor to public utilities implementing large desalination projects in Australia, USA, and the Middle East; and to private companies and investors involved in the development of advanced membrane technologies.
He and Dr. Valentina Lazarova, an international expert with over 30 years of research and practical experience in the field of environmental engineering particularly in water reuse and wastewater treatment, head up an LLC called Water Globe Consultants. They specialize in providing services in the field of seawater desalination and water reuse.
If you’re still awake, the gist of the story is there’s a lot of money and research going toward solutions for improving the process and making seawater potable. Just don’t eat the yellow snow.
And now, it’s time to get your didion…
Congrats on getting your art pieces picked up. No surprise there! Oh, and on those flu remedy, I SWEby the sweaty sock around the neck! Always works for me!! Cheerio!