More Mix and Swirl

   What???  Another mish mash of stuff?  Let's jump right into the water, a subject running dry as resources begin to dissipate.  My state alone uses 82% of its fresh water for agriculture, and it is far from alone, even worldwide.  We need water to grow crops.  But as pollution and other uses such as bottling water or injecting water into fracking and mining sites continues, the search for more of this finite resource grows a bit more difficult.  One or two dry years and people begin to worry; one or two decades of drought and people begin to move (one theory of ancient cultures such as the Anasazi).  Fertile forest such as the Sahara turn into deserts which sometimes causes entire populations go to war.  The belief that WWIII would be over the control of water begin appearing four years ago in all sorts of media, and hasn't stopped.  But this brief history of the earlier centuries-old fighting over water (which appeared in Popular Science) proved short and sweet, perhaps reflecting what our comfort level will be as our current water situation causes fresh water to be more expensive or more difficult to obtain.

   Of course there are many industries besides agriculture fighting for water (drinking water for us appears to be low on the priority list), from manufacturers of our silicon chips (which still use between 1.5-4.5 million gallons of water per day although the industry is working on curtailing the runoff of the toxic waste that results and which once flowed quite freely back into the aquifers) and our cattle which use an estimate 10% of water (multiply that by the world's 1.5 billion cows, 1.2 billion sheep, 1 billion goats and nearly 200 million buffalo being commercially raised and you get the picture). Even the heavy-water-usage paper industry, reportedly fading into the sunset because of the decline in newspapers and such, is turning to what is termed fluff, that absorbent fibrous material that is so commonly used in diapers...ahem, now primarily adult diapers (one Canadian copy paper manufacturer has already converted one of its factories in Alabama to such products says the Financial Times).  Of course some cities will have the opposite problem of getting too much water, Miami being one of them.  One small problem is that it likely won't be fresh water (the invasion of sea water into their aquifers is pretty much just around the corner said a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek).

   But I enjoy those conversion stories, those of seeing problems and solutions from a different angle.  Dashka Slater of Sierra continues to provide updates in her column but I found these three ideas she had presented earlier quite hopeful: People have been trying to come up with clever uses for sawdust ever since Henry Ford famously popularized the charcoal briquette as a way to use up shavings from the wooden parts of his Model Ts.  Now researchers at the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis at Belgium's University of Leuven have done him one better, successfully transforming sawdust into the building blocks of a fuel that could have powered said motorcars.  In fewer than six hours, they can refine the long carbon chains found in cellulose into hydrocarbons that can be mixed with traditional gasoline, or used to make plastic, rubber, insulation, nylon, or other materials traditionally derived from nasty petrochemicals. Or this: Produced by sewage, landfills, and livestock, methane is a greenhouse gas 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. But a San Francisco company called Mango Materials has found something useful to do with the stuff: turn it into plastic.  The company uses methane vented from sewage plants, landfills, farms, and factories to feed naturally occurring bacteria that produce a biopolymer called PHB inside their cell walls.  Similar to polypropylene, PHB can be used in food packaging, shampoo bottles, and toys.  The technology is still in the early stages, but Mango Materials CEO Molly Morse says that because methane is so inexpensive and plentiful ("Wherever there are people, is methane," she told Plastics Today), the biopolymer can be cost-competitive with conventional, petroleum-based plastic.  And when the methane-derived variety finally gets tossed in the trash—as plastic inevitably does—it can be converted back into methane and used again.  And finally this: Each year, the Alaska seafood industry produces 2 billion pounds of waste.  Fishing captain Craig Kasberg of Tidal Vision wants to use that waste to manufacture chitosan, a polymer (produced from shrimp and crab shells) that can be made into naturally antibacterial workout gear, T-shirts, boxers, and socks.  "It sounds counterintuitive -- when you think of a crab shell, you think of this really rough, hard surface," he admits.  But once ground up and processed in an ionic solution, an Alaskan king crab shell yields as much as 82 percent of its weight in chitin, the raw material for chitosan.  Not only does it lose its fishy smell, but its natural antimicrobial properties yield odorless clothing.  Kasberg hopes to eventually install modular processing facilities next to crabbing and shrimping operations.

   But then again it all boils down to chemistry, doesn't it?*  Even our bodies break down to little more than oxygen (65%), carbon (18.5%), hydrogen (9.5%) and nitrogen (3.3%) with the remaining trace elements such as potassium, chlorine, iodine and such coming in at just tenths of a percent.  But jump to plants and it can get a bit more dangerous, said a sponsored piece in Scientific American: The world’s plants produce tens of thousands of different chemicals, many to defend against animals and insects that want to eat them.  “Plants produce natural mixes of secondary metabolites that are insecticidal...For example, many plants --including foods from apples to almonds-- contain a compound that can produce cyanide to ward off chomping insects.  “Cyanide is incredibly toxic to anything that breathes,” Dyer points out (Lee Dyer, a professor of biology and director of the ecology, evolution and conservation biology graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno) . But, plants store cyanide with a sugar attached to it, which makes it safe.  Some of these plants also store a protein that can cut off the sugar from the cyanide, which makes it dangerous.  When an herbivore starts chomping leaves, the cyanide-sugar component is mixed with the enzyme, breaking it off from the sugar molecule, and releasing pure cyanide.  The pharmaceutical companies know this and are always looking for the next breakthrough; but with the current opioid crisis in the U.S., one has to be reminded of the potency of our own lab-created drugs, from heroin (less than 1/10 of an gram can prove fatal) to fentanyl (2/1000th of a gram can prove the same), carfentanil (2/100,0000th of a gram, too small to see, proves fatal) and now come all the derivatives, said a piece in Science.  But just as history repeats itself, so it seems with this current opioid addiction, said Smithsonian; the U.S. went through a nearly identical crisis nearly a century ago.

   Had enough?  Me too!  So let me end with a variety of tidbits.  I have jostled my listening time to different podcasts and came across one titled Something You Should Know; one particular episode featured an interview with Dr. Kelly Brogan and her new book about depression, A Mind of Your Own.  What was surprising was her assertion that "In six decades, not a single study has proven that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain."  In other words, anti-depressants don't work (what??) to which host Mike Carruthers replied that he wasn't sure if he believed her.  It's an interesting give and take, both the podcast and the book.  On another note, I listened to a podcast update on recycling (these guys can chatter but do present some interesting information in between their ads and yakking) and discovered that today's recyclers (check with yours) want you to leave your plastic bottle caps ON when disposing of those plastic bottles.  Yes, the materials are still different plastics (the bottle itself and the cap) but the newer machines separate, sort and melt through all of that and in today's world, separated caps are simply destined to the landfill (the conveyor belts move too fast for separation).  They also noted that lead batteries have taken over the number one spot as the most recycled category of goods (with corrugated paper now second), and the U.S. has fallen (or perhaps risen) to number five in the world in its recycling efforts.  And finally, National Geographic defined Latinidad as: a term that strives to encompass the shared cultural identity of millions of Latinos who are of different races and national origins and who live in the United States.  According to the U.S. census, the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" represent the 57.4 million who hail from a host of countries south of the U.S. border and in the Caribbean, as well as Spain..  Latinos officially became the last U.S. minority in 2000...Many Latinos prefer to identify with the place of their family's origin, rather than terms such as "Latino" or "Hispanic."   Imagine a geographic part of the world defining you in a lump sum,  someone talking to you in France and you say, oh you're a Caucasian (or whatever).  No, I'm French (or whatever), they reply.  Throwing a catchall phrase onto a group of people as a stereotype would likely irk most of us...no matter your population numbers, if religion, race, culture or language defined you to the rest of the world, it would seem that you would slowly lose or diminish your individual identity.  Sort of like being called a hippy or something (although even they are being kicked out of a remote part of Kauai).

   After all of that, go have yourself a nice lobster dinner...or perhaps not before reading the decade-old piece in Gourmet which talked about them: Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.  One reason for their low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England.  "Unbelievable abundance" is how one source describes the situation, including accounts of Plymouth pilgrims wading out and capturing all they wanted by hand, and of early Boston's seashore being littered with lobsters after hard storms -- these latter were treated as a smelly nuisance and ground up for fertilizer.  Gulp.  Well at least you can sit back and just browse the Web or stream that movie...or you might want to read about the 428 undersea data cables that carry 97% of all transmissions, yours included and how they may be more vulnerable than you would have thought (said a piece in WIRED, a cable is repaired or ruptured nearly every other day).  Okay, okay, forget all of that and just try to be happy...maybe even take the short course being taught at Yale.  Wrote Adam Sternbergh in New York: Try this: Make a short list of things that you think would make you happier.  They can be big things (a raise, moving to a new city, a new partner) or small (whatever looks good right now in the vending machine).  OK -- have you finished your list?  Let's have a look.  I have my red pen ready.  Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  Good grief.  Sigh.  Hey, how 'bout that stock market?  At least a small chunk of my slurry pile is now in the trash...


*No need to worry about me being pompous or any of that regarding the chemical charts because I never took nor understood chemistry, something I can partially blame my mild affliction with color blindness.  Each year in school the chem teacher would attempt to explain to me to be careful in that when the light green solution started to turn turquoise that it was becoming extremely explosive, to which I would reply (quite honestly, I will admit), "What light green solution?"  End of that class...