Dr. Marie Maynard Daly…

Image source: Link below

Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Chemistry, Civil Rights, Diversity in Science, Education, Women in Science

Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias, Marie Maynard Daly (1921–2003) conducted influential studies on proteins, sugars, and cholesterol. In 1947 she became the first Black woman to receive a PhD in chemistry in the United States. In addition to her research, she was committed to developing programs to increase the participation of minority students in medical schools and graduate science programs. Daly’s biography helps us understand how individual curiosity, social support, historical circumstances, and professional dedication can foster social and scientific breakthroughs.

Daly was born in Queens, New York, on April 16, 1921. Her mother, Helen Page, encouraged her children’s academic interests early on, reading at length to Daly and her younger twin brothers. Daly was fascinated, in particular, by Paul De Kruif’s popular 1926 book, Microbe Hunters, a collection of “high adventure” stories about scientists who discovered a “new world under the microscope.”

She was also inspired by her father, Ivan C. Daly, who loved science. Though he had received a scholarship to study chemistry at Cornell University, he could not afford to finish the program.

Daly went to Hunter College High School, an all-women’s institution that selectively admitted students based on merit alone. Here, women teachers were positive role models: they supported and encouraged her ambition to become a chemist. After her brothers enlisted to fight in World War II, she enrolled at Queens College in Flushing, New York, which opened in 1937 and was free of charge to students from the community.

Like other schools, Queens College was adjusting to wartime conditions: roughly 1,200 students from the college enlisted in the U.S. military during World War II, which created new openings for women and minorities. Daly graduated in 1942 with numerous honors and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.

World War II motivated U.S. governmental interest in science and technology, which was crucial to the war effort and revitalized the national economy. It also spurred new workforce initiatives that opened doors for women chemists like Daly. But women and minority scientists were often seen as “reservists” who were merely expected to provide temporary and relatively low-ranking support. Daly’s 1942 yearbook profile reflects this understanding, where she is described as having chosen a career as a “laboratory technician.”

Daly did not have to wait long to step into this role: the chemistry department at Queens offered her a job as a part-time laboratory assistant upon her graduation. But rather than stop there, she used the income from this position, along with a series of fellowships, to continue her graduate education. She completed her master’s degree at New York University in just one year, followed by a PhD at Columbia University in 1947.

World War II was ending when Daly entered Columbia. By this time, she was one of several women studying graduate-level chemistry there, many of whom were working with Mary L. Caldwell. Caldwell had developed a strong research profile in the biochemistry of nutrition. This was a prominent arena for women scientists during the first half of the 20th century, an essential part of the war effort, and something widely supported by grants from the business world. Under Caldwell, who was well known for her work on the digestive enzyme amylase, Daly researched how compounds produced in the body participate in digestion.

The title of Daly’s dissertation was “A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch.” In her acknowledgments, she indicates that she benefitted from a strong network of women researchers who provided mutual intellectual support. She was awarded her doctoral degree just three years after enrolling in the program.

Science History Institute Museum & Library: Dr. Marie Maynard Daly, Judith Kaplan

Eugenics, Razors, and Valleys…

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democratic Republic, Existentialism, Fascism

Eugenics is an immoral and pseudoscientific theory that claims it is possible to perfect people and groups through genetics and the scientific laws of inheritance. Eugenicists used an incorrect and prejudiced understanding of the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to support the idea of “racial improvement.”

In their quest for a perfect society, eugenicists labeled many people as “unfit,” including ethnic and religious minorities, people with disabilities, the urban poor, and LGBTQ individuals. Discussions of eugenics began in the late 19th century in England and then spread to other countries, including the United States. Most industrialized countries had organizations devoted to promoting eugenics by the end of World War I.

Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 – Present), National Human Genome Research Institute

Occam’s razor, principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle precedes simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”

Encyclopedia Britannica Online: Occam’s razor

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: ‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Did Mark Zuckerberg Say, ‘Move Fast And Break Things’? Jordan Liles, Snopes (yup)

The callousness of the wrecking ball that is pulverizing USAID, threatening the lives of children in Sudan, and AIDS vaccination protocols that will keep the virus from metastasizing into something worse, but it doesn’t matter when you don’t think that Sudanese children are humans and that the United States Agency for International Development is the extension of soft power. The agency was created in 1961 under the Kennedy administration to counteract the spread of communism (when the Republican Party cared about that sort of thing). Particularly, Ketamine DOGE and the six Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might have something against the agency aiding in the dismantling of Apartheid. I can see his sensitivity in this area could send him into “full demon mode.” Minus one MNT because of racist posts online (I thought that was a qualifier for the job).

I also thought we were afraid of TikTok and the Chinese government stealing our information? We’re apparently cool with man-sized (not sure of their genitalia) mutant-shelled reptiles with grandma’s social security number. After “saving” it for Gen Alpha (who will be eighteen in 2028), it’s suddenly unavailable in at least the Apple App Stores.

Seizing our social security numbers could be valuable for feeding into a social media AI shredder. Think of an online world where you exhaustively have to question reality.

But in full demon mode, why would you care when your beliefs stem from the belief that resources are only due to a select few, and the undeserving “others,” the aliens, and the “feebleminded” should be “pruned” out of the human family. That is eugenics.

“Move fast and break things” is a phrase that comes from privilege. It became a Silicon Valley idiom the moments after Zuckerberg uttered the phrase. It means that you’re comfortable flying by the seat of your pants, with a minimal or zero business plan, because you have relatives (usually, a deep-pocketed “daddy”) who can clean up your screw-ups. Be the “bull in the China shop” – smash things galore. The well-heeled “clean up on aisle five” also connects with traditional media, giving you favorable coverage in print, cable, and Internet media. Or, just own a platform or two. Thus, you’re not an emotionally cold sociopath, you’re a titan of industry, a genius.

You become famous for cooking up a cockamamie scheme to place a billion people on Mars: a planet with no oxygen, two years travel at current rocket speeds, if you survive the small asteroids or meteors colliding with your spaceship, or the radiation shielding, or the stir-craziness of floating for two years straight. Mars is 38% of Earth’s gravity, thus the new Martians could never come back home and stand up on whatever is LEFT of Mother Earth. After a generation of deadly radiation that if they survive it, will change their DNA to something truly alien, so a Martian and an Earthling could not plan a family. Lastly, sandstorms and Mars quakes. This great exodus idea had to be after the ketamine kicked in.

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” Of two competing theories, the simplest one is preferable.

Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Benjamin Franklin’s reply: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Perhaps, in this case, the simplest explanation is not preferable.

National Park Service, September 17, 1787: A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Dr. Mark Dean…

Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Computer Science, Diversity in Science, Electrical Engineering

Peripherals

U.S. Patent No. 4,528,626

Inducted in 1997

Born March 2, 1957

Mark Dean and his co-inventor Dennis Moeller created a microcomputer system with bus control means for peripheral processing devices. Their invention paved the way for the growth in the Information Technology industry by allowing the use of plug-in subsystems and peripherals like disk drives, video gear, speakers, and scanners.

Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, Dean received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee, his master’s in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Early in his career at IBM, Dean was chief engineer working with IBM personal computers. The IBM PS/2 Models 70 and 80 and the Color Graphics Adapter are among his early work; he holds three of IBM’s original nine PC patents.

National Inventors Hall of Fame: Dr. Mark Dean

Dr. George Washington Carver…

Image source: Tuskegee University (link below), and The Jessup Wagon: Rooted in History, Still Used Today, Alabama A&M & Auburn Universities, Wendi Williams

Topics: African Americans, Agriculture, Black History Month, Botany, Civics, Civil Rights, Diaspora, Diversity in Science

As a botany and agriculture teacher to the children of ex-slaves, Dr. George Washington Carver wanted to improve the lot of “the man farthest down,” the poor, one-horse farmer at the mercy of the market and chained to land exhausted by cotton.

Unlike other agricultural researchers of his time, Dr. Carver saw the need to devise practical farming methods for this kind of farmer. He wanted to coax them away from cotton to such soil-enhancing, protein-rich crops as soybeans and peanuts and to teach them self-sufficiency and conservation. 

Dr. Carver achieved this through an innovative series of free, simply-written brochures that included crop information, cultivation techniques, and recipes for nutritious meals. He also urged the farmers to submit soil and water samples for analysis and taught them livestock care and food preservation techniques.

In 1906, he designed the Jessup Wagon, a demonstration laboratory on wheels, which he believed to be his most significant contribution toward educating farmers. 

Dr. Carver’s practical and benevolent approach to science was based on a profound religious faith to which he attributed all his accomplishments. He always believed that faith and inquiry were not only compatible paths to knowledge, but that their interaction was essential if truth in all its manifold complexity was to be approximated. 

Always modest about his success, he saw himself as a vehicle through which nature, God, and the natural bounty of the land could be better understood and appreciated for the good of all people.

Dr. Carver took a holistic approach to knowledge, which embraced faith and inquiry in a unified quest for truth. Carver also believed that commitment to a Larger Reality is necessary if science and technology are to serve human needs rather than the egos of the powerful.  His belief in service was a direct outgrowth and expression of his wedding of inquiry and commitment.  One of his favorite sayings was:

“It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.”

The Legacy of Dr. George Washington Carver, Tuskegee University

Dr. Alexa Irene Canady…

Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Civics, Civil Rights, Diaspora, Diversity in Science, Women in Science

Dr. Alexa Canady was the first African American woman in the United States to become a neurosurgeon.

I attended a summer program for minority students at the University of Michigan after my junior year. I worked in Dr. Bloom’s lab in genetics and attended a genetic counseling clinic. I fell in love with medicine.

Alexa Irene Canady had almost dropped out of college as an undergraduate, but after recovering her self-confidence she went on to qualify as the first African American woman neurosurgeon in the United States.

Alexa Canady earned a B.S. degree in zoology from the University of Michigan in 1971, and graduated from the medical school there in 1975. “The summer after my junior year,” she explains, “I worked in Dr. Bloom’s lab in genetics and attended a genetic counseling clinic. I fell in love with medicine.” In her work as a neurosurgeon, she saw young patients facing life-threatening illnesses, gunshot wounds, head trauma, hydrocephaly, and other brain injuries or diseases. Throughout her twenty-year career in pediatric neurosurgery, Dr. Canady has helped thousands of patients, most of them age ten or younger.

Her career began tentatively. She almost dropped out of college while a mathematics major, because “I had a crisis of confidence,” she has said. When she heard of a chance to win a minority scholarship in medicine, “it was an instant connection.” Her additional skills in writing and debate helped her earn a place at the University of Michigan Medical School, and she graduated cum laude in 1975.

Such credentials still could not shield her from prejudice and dismissive comments. As a young black woman completing her surgical internship at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1975, on her first day of residency, she was tending to her patients when one of the hospital’s top administrators passed through the ward. As he went by, she heard him say, “Oh, you must be our new equal-opportunity package.” Just a few years later, while working as a neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia from 1981 to 1982, her fellow physicians voted her one of the top residents.

Dr. Canady was chief of neurosurgery at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan from 1987 until her retirement in June 2001. She holds two honorary degrees: a doctorate of humane letters from the University of Detroit-Mercy, awarded in 1997, and a doctor of science degree from the University of Southern Connecticut, awarded in 1999. She received the Children’s Hospital of Michigan’s Teacher of the Year award in 1984 and was inducted into the Michigan Woman’s Hall of Fame in 1989. In 1993, she received the American Medical Women’s Association President’s Award and in 1994 the Distinguished Service Award from Wayne State University Medical School. In 2002, the Detroit News named Dr. Canady Michigander of the Year.

Changing the face of medicine: Dr. Alexa Irene Canady, the National Institutes of Health

Dr. George Carruthers…

Dr. George Carruthers, [right], and William Conway, a project manager at the Naval Research Institute, examine the gold-plated ultraviolet camera/spectrograph, the first Moon-based observatory Carruthers developed for the Apollo 16 mission. Apollo 16 astronauts placed the observatory on the moon in April 1972.

Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Diversity in Science, Instrumentation, NASA

Dr. George Carruthers, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, stands to the right of his invention, the gold-plated ultraviolet camera/spectrograph. The first Moon-based observatory, Carruthers developed it for the Apollo 16 mission. He stands beside his colleague William Conway. Working for the Naval Research Laboratory, Carruthers had three years earlier received a patent for a Far Ultraviolet Electrographic Camera, which obtained images of electromagnetic radiation in short wavelengths.

Apollo 16 astronauts placed the observatory on the Moon in April 1972, where it sits today on the Moon’s Descartes highland region, in the shadow of the lunar module Orion. Asked to explain highlights of the instrument’s findings for a general audience, Dr. Carruthers said “The most immediately obvious and spectacular results were really for the Earth observations because this was the first time that the Earth had been photographed from a distance in ultraviolet (UV) light so that you could see the full extent of the hydrogen atmosphere, the polar auroras and what we call the tropical airglow belt.”

Dr. Carruthers made the first detection of molecular hydrogen in space, in 1970, using a sounding rocket. He developed a rocket instrument that obtained a UV image of Comet Halley, and an instrument with two cameras, with different far-UV wavelength sensitivities, used on the STS-39 space shuttle mission in 1991. He also worked on UV imaging of Earth’s polar auroras and of the faint photochemical luminescence found in the upper atmosphere, with an instrument, Global Imaging Monitor of the Ionosphere (GIMI), on a Department of Defense satellite, the Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite (ARGOS), launched in 1999. In 2012, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technology achievement. Dr. Carruthers extended his work beyond his scientific endeavors; in the 1980s, he helped launch a program called the Science and Engineers Apprentice Program, allowing high school students to do research at the Naval Research Laboratory. He also taught science classes at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Carruthers passed away on Dec. 26, 2020, and is remembered for his contributions to physics, astronomy, and education.

Image Credit: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Dr. Patricia Bath…

Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Civics, Civil Rights, Diaspora, Diversity in Science, Women in Science

Patricia Bath
Laserphaco Cataract Surgery

U.S. Patent No. 4,744,360
Inducted in 2022
Born Nov. 4, 1942 – Died May 30, 2019
Dr. Patricia Bath invented Laserphaco, a new device and technique for removing cataracts. It performed all the steps of cataract removal: making the incision, destroying the lens, and vacuuming out the fractured pieces. Bath is recognized as the first Black woman physician to receive a medical patent.

After completing an ophthalmology residency at New York University, Bath completed a corneal transplant surgery fellowship at Columbia University. While a fellow, she was recruited by UCLA Medical Center and Charles R. Drew University to co-found an ophthalmology residency program at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital. She then began her career at UCLA, becoming the first woman ophthalmologist on the faculty of its prestigious Jules Stein Eye Institute. She was appointed assistant chief of the King-Drew-UCLA Ophthalmology Residency Program in 1974 and chief in 1983. Bath conceived her Laserphaco device in 1981, published her first paper in 1987, and had her first U.S. patent issued in 1988. Her minimally invasive device was used in Europe and Asia by 2000.

National Inventors Hall of Fame: Dr. Patricia Bath

Green Books, Boycotts, and Caveats…

Topics: African Americans, African Studies, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization

The ‘Green Book’ Was a Travel Guide Just for Black Motorists, Danielle Moodie-Mills, NBCBLK, October 11, 2016

The meaning of SANKOFA, Sankofa.org/about

Happy Black History Month (tomorrow), for what it’s worth at the moment.

The Green Book: Guide to Freedom is a documentary about the emergence of the Black middle class in the 1940s and 1950s. The documentary explores the dangerous journeys Black people took outside their cities and the book that helped guide them.

The book, The Negro Motorist Green Book, was a guide for Black people to find places to eat, drink, shop, and stay overnight. The book was no longer needed after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed the racial discrimination that made it necessary. Google AI

The Google AI stated that it’s “not available on Hulu,” which was news to me, as I had just watched it on Hulu (probably because I saved it in my “favorites” and the Hulu streaming gods left me alone – they get paid monthly).

The Negro Motorist Green Book, popularly known as the Green Book, was a travel guide intended to help African American motorists avoid social obstacles prevalent during the period of racial segregation, commonly referred to as Jim Crow.  The Green Book listed businesses that would accept African American customers.

The book was the vision of Victor Green, an African American US postal employee from Harlem, New York.  The first guide focused on Metropolitan New York.  The next year, in 1937, Green expanded listings to other locations.  His book would eventually include every state and several international destinations before ceasing publication in 1964.  Before its demise, the book was the most popular of several tourist guides created specifically for an African American audience.

These types of travel guides were necessary during the Jim Crow era because African Americans were subject to acts of discrimination and occasional intimidation as many businesses refused to accept them as customers.  African American motorists, for example, were warned to avoid sundown towns which required minorities to be outside the city limits before sundown, hence the name.  African American travel could be fraught with risk and guides like the Green Book were an important resource. 

Black Past dot org: The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936 – 1964)

One of the unintended consequences of the success of the Civil Rights Movement is a lot of businesses that sprang up in reaction to segregation now had to compete with larger corporations during “integration” that could offer more services. Many businesses that advertised in the Green Book no longer exist, boarded up, and condemned, many are not even memorialized with a historical designation in the cities they were located. The FW Woolworth International Civil Rights Museum is a noted exception and the Magnolia House (listed in The Green Book), both in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Tabitha Brown and Melissa Butler have sounded the alarm on the unintended consequences of boycotting businesses that have removed their DEI initiatives. Like the black-owned businesses post-Green Book, they might not survive, and it took years to get their products placed in the “big box” stores. Their sales dropping would mean they would be removed from the shelves they fought so long to occupy, in favor of the products the corporation would promote over theirs. Again, going into spaces that took considerable effort to sell products in gives our (as of 2019) 910 billion dollars, projected to be 1.7 trillion in 2030 consumer impact, it would seem that we lack both focus and vision: that buying power impacts Target and similar businesses giving our dollars on the altar of corporate indifference. We seem to justify finding our own backdoors.

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
― Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

“Who taught you to hate yourself? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? To such an extent you bleach, to get like the white man. Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to so much so that you don’t want to be around each other?”

Who Taught You to Hate Yourself? Malcolm X, May 5, 1962, Genius dot com

Sixty-three years ago, Malcolm called the motives of the Antioch High School shooter. He posted anti-black, antisemitic tropes online. Who taught him to hate himself?

Boycotts are the knee-jerk, go-to tactic we gravitate to without an understanding of the mathematics of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: 30,000 – 40,000 African Americans participated, 90% of the black residents participated, and they comprised 75% of the bus company’s customers. Therefore, unless the clientele of Target and Walmart match Montgomery’s numbers, any thought of a boycott will only hurt these black businesses.

The irony of these dark times is this blatant white supremacy should drive us closer together. In our 0.9 to 1.7 trillion dollar demographic, only two cents gets to the African American community:

An NAACP study found that a dollar circulates in Asian communities for 30 days, as opposed to six hours in Black communities. It found that only two cents of every dollar African Americans spend goes to Black-owned businesses. One researcher estimated that if Black consumers spent at least one dollar out of every ten with Black businesses, it could generate one million jobs for African Americans. Minority buying power can do far more than purchase; it can become an investment in stronger, local communities.

The Color of Money: Reaping the Dividends of Entrepreneurship [March 2, 2016], National Urban League

One dollar out of every ten is ten cents per dollar of the 0.9 to eventually 1.7 trillion dollars we freely give to this economy for continued disrespect, disheartening policy decisions, and abject hatred of our contributions to this nation. A tithe, and we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do so. This cooperation is beyond reflexive boycotts without clear goals and the will to be uncomfortable for long terms: the Montgomery boycott lasted over a year.

Wakanda and its superhero ruler, T’Challa/The Black Panther, is a fantasy comic book product (the first black superhero) developed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, for Marvel.

Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire, and unlike the fictional wealth of the nonexistent element, Vibranium, his wealth was from the conventional element of gold and the mineral salt. He was said to have been the richest person who has ever lived.

This present darkness may be the thing we need to come together again. Ten cents won’t get us the Mali Empire, or Wakanda, but it might get us independence, freedom, a sense of control of our own destinies, and peace of mind. It will be as long, or longer than a boycott, but we would have to work together towards a common goal. It would be the last thing they would expect us to do. The dominant society is counting on it that we won’t. We will also have to be willing to literally fight for it because as history has shown in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida, success attracts the jealousy of psychopaths.

Sankofa.

Carbon Storage…

Keeping the carbon: Biochar can be added to cement to sequester carbon within concrete. (Courtesy: Sabbie Miller)

Topics: Biomass, Civil Engineering, Environment, Global Warming, Green Tech

Replacing conventional building materials with alternatives that sequester carbon dioxide could allow the world to lock away up to half the CO2 generated by humans each year – about 16 billion tons. This is the finding of researchers at the University of California Davis and Stanford University, both in the US, who studied the sequestration potential of materials such as carbonate-based aggregates and biomass fiber in brick.

Despite efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by decarbonizing industry and switching to renewable energy sources, humans will likely continue to produce significant amounts of CO2 beyond the target “net zero” date of 2050. Carbon storage and sequestration – at source or directly from the atmosphere – are therefore worth exploring as an additional route towards this goal. Researchers have proposed several possible ways of doing this, including injecting carbon underground or deep under the ocean. However, all these scenarios are challenging to implement practically and pose their own environmental risks.

Modifying common building materials

In the present work, a team of civil engineers and earth systems scientists led by Elisabeth van Roijen (then a PhD student at UC Davis) calculated how much carbon could be stored in modified versions of several common building materials. These include concrete (cement) and asphalt containing carbonate-based aggregates; bio-based plastics; wood; biomass-fiber bricks (from waste biomass); and biochar filler in cement.

The researchers obtained the “16 billion tons of CO2” figure by assuming all aggregates currently employed in concrete would be replaced with carbonate-based versions. They also supplemented 15% of cement with biochar and the remainder with carbonatable cement; increased the amount of wood used in all new construction by 20%; and supplemented 15% of bricks with biomass and the remainder with carbonatable calcium hydroxide. A final element in their calculation was to replace all plastics used in construction today with bio-based plastics and all bitumen with bio-oil in asphalt.

“We calculated the carbon storage potential of each material based on the mass ratio of carbon in each material,” explains van Roijen. “These values were then scaled up based on 2016 consumption values for each material.”

“The sheer magnitude of carbon storage is pretty impressive”

While the production of some replacement materials would need to increase to meet the resulting demand, van Roijen and colleagues found that resources readily available today – for example, mineral-rich waste streams – would already let us replace 10% of conventional aggregates with carbonate-based ones. “These alone could store 1 billion tonnes of CO2,” she says. “The sheer magnitude of carbon storage is pretty impressive, especially when you put it in context of the level of carbon dioxide removal needed to stay below the 1.5 and 2 °C targets set by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Indeed, even if the world doesn’t implement these technologies until 2075, we could still store enough carbon between 2075 and 2100 to stay below these targets, she tells Physics World. “This is assuming, of course, that all other decarbonization efforts outlined in the IPCC reports are also implemented to achieve net-zero emissions,” she says.

Alternative building materials could store massive amounts of carbon dioxide, Isabelle Dumé, Physics World

89 Seconds…

Topics: Applied Physics, Chemistry, Entropy, Environment, Existentialism

Humans tend to chronicle worst-case scenarios, such as Armageddon (Judao-Christian), Pralaya (Hindu), and Ragnarok (Norse). If you follow the scripts for each, there is a “hack”: a insisted upon “happy ending” where everything is reborn anew, and those bothersome “others” that you couldn’t legislate or exterminate are killed off in the melee.

There have never been once concluded two possibilities: 1) we can try to avoid Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D., the actual nuclear “strategy,” and 2) happy endings only work for fairy tales, and physics is kind of unforgiving.

WASHINGTON, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Atomic scientists on Tuesday moved their “Doomsday Clock” closer to midnight than ever before, citing Russian nuclear threats amid its invasion of Ukraine, tensions in other world hot spots, military applications of artificial intelligence and climate change as factors underlying the risks of global catastrophe.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the clock to 89 seconds before midnight – the theoretical point of annihilation. That is one second closer than it was set last year. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War Two to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.

Atomic scientists adjust ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer than ever to midnight, Will Dunham, Reuters