President Musk

 

Here's your library card

 By Rob Rogers

Vaccines cause autism!!!!

 From Pat Bagley.

RFK junior is a noted anti-vaxxer, as well as being the new Secretary for Health.  He also has admitted to having a brain-worm.

World econ strengthens in December

The big 5 PMI rose sharply in December, mostly because of a jump in the USA's services component, but the other components also ticked up.  Remember, these are "flash" estimates, and could be revised.  The big 5 PMI covers economies representing just over 50% of world GDP, and is a GDP-weighted average of the USA, the Euro zone (EA), UK, Japan and India.   "Flash" estimates for China, Brazil and Russia are not released.  As usual, to calculate the big 5 totals, each country's PMI for manufacturing and for services is extreme-adjusted, and then weighted by that country's GDP, before being added up.  The total (i.e., average) PMI for the big 5 correlates well with GDP for the these countries.  If the index is above 50%, GDP is expanding, and the higher it is above 50%, the faster it is expanding.  

Assad granted asylum by Putin

By Adam Zyglis 

The gun problem

 By Dave Whamond

A new powder which captures CO2

The carbon-capturing powder, pictured on Berkeley's campus. Photograph: Zihui Zhou/University of California, Berkeley

From The Guardian

An innocuous yellow powder, created in a lab, could be a new way to combat the climate crisis by absorbing carbon from the air.

Just half a pound of the stuff may remove as much carbon dioxide as a tree can, according to early tests. [Over the tree's life? Over a week?]Once the carbon is absorbed by the powder, it can be released into safe storage or be used in industrial processes, like carbonizing drinks. [Aerating drinks doesn't permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere, since the gas is released when the bottle or can is opened.]

“This really addresses a major problem in the tech field, and it gives an opportunity now for us to scale it up and start using it,” says Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s not the first material to absorb carbon, but “it’s a quantum leap ahead [of other compounds] in terms of the durability of the material”.

The powder is known as a covalent organic framework, with strong chemical bonds that pull gases out of the air. The material is both durable and porous, and can be used hundreds of times, making it superior to other materials used for carbon capture.

Yaghi has been working on similar materials for decades. It’s part of a broader push to collect tiny amounts of carbon from the air – either from power plants or from air around cities. Yaghi’s research with Zihui Zhou, a graduate student in his lab, and others was published in the journal Nature last month.

In the lab, Yaghi’s team tested the new powder and found that it could successfully absorb and release carbon more than 100 times. It fills up with carbon in about two hours, and then must be heated to release the gas before starting the process over again. It only requires a temperature of about 120F to release the carbon; that makes it an improvement over other methods, which require a much higher temperature.

That feature means places that already produce extra heat – such as factories or power plants – could use it to release the gas and start the cycle again. The material could be incorporated into existing carbon capture systems or future technology.

Yaghi says he could imagine a future in which people build large plants using the material in every city of 1 million people or more around the world. He has plans to scale the use of this type of carbon capture with his Irvine, California-based company, Atoco, and believes the powder can be manufactured in multi-ton quantities in less than a year.

Shengqian Ma, a chemist at the University of North Texas who was not involved in the new work, says this technology could be gamechanging. “One longstanding challenge for direct air capture lies in the high regeneration temperatures,” he says, adding that the new material can substantially reduce the energy needed to use direct air capture, making it “very novel” and “very promising”.

“We need to reduce our greenhouse emissions, and we need to do it fast,” says Farzan Kazemifar, an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at San Jose State University who was not involved in the new study. “In the short term, replacing large emitters of carbon dioxide – like coal power plants – with renewable electricity offers the fastest reduction in emissions. However, in the long term, in case the emissions don’t go down at the desired pace, or if global warming effects intensify, we may need to rely on technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and direct air capture is one of those technologies.”

Still, removing carbon from the air remains difficult, and as with all early-stage lab-scale studies, the challenge is scaling up the system for pilot studies. The concentration of carbon dioxide, though it is increasing, now stands at about 400 parts per million, or 0.04%. That means that any technology to capture the gas from the air requires moving huge volumes of air – and that requires large electricity consumption for running fans, says Kazemifar. “I believe the high energy intensity of the process is the main challenge with all [direct air capture] technologies.”

Having to heat this material to just 120 F (49 C) means it will use far less energy than other substances/techniques.  That amount of heat can be produced simply by sunshine with the help of mirrors or lenses.  The air in a sealed car will reach 120F in half an hour when the air outside is just 80F.  The stuff can be reused at least 100 times.  In other words, direct air capture (DAC) will become much, much cheaper.   The second half of "carbon capture and storage" is the storage.  In this piece, which I wrote in 2016, I discuss converting CO2 to rock, by dissolving it in water and injecting it into 
basaltic rock, which is full of air holes.  Within 2 years, the holes fill with a stable chalky rock, which has been made from the CO2.  Basalt is fairly widespread across the globe.  In other words, as soon as this product is commercialised, we will be able to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and safely store it underground at low cost.  In fact, with luck, the European price on carbon, currently about US$70/tonne, might be enough to cover the costs.

Something to be hopeful about.