In this edition of Saturday Science:
- California achieves 100% renewable energy for a few minutes
- Maya tamales and indoor toilets
- Injectable hydrogel treats damaged discs.
- Small drug trial results in all subjects cancer-free after six months.
- Student resolves a well-known conjecture about prime numbers.
- MIT invents $4 desalinization device
- Lithium solid state battery charges 80% in just 15 minutes.
- Portable heat pump seminar June 22, 2022
- MIT’s heat engine beats a steam turbine in efficiency.
- 50th anniversary of the Tuskegee syphilis study
- What happened to the Mary Celeste?
- Pregnancy is more dangerous than abortion.
- Turmeric’s health benefits?
- Tomb unearthed of man who handled his Pharaoh’s secret documents.
Details and links below the fold…
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Climate Action
California breaks record by achieving 100% renewable energy for the first time
by Evan Raskin
As Earth Month drew to a close, the state of California was recently able to produce virtually all of their energy needs from renewable sources for the first time ever.
In early April, the state achieved a new record at 97.6% renewable power, and on May 2 they were able to reach 99.9%. On May 8 the record was broken yet again, with 103% of the state’s power needs being met by renewables for a few hours.
This landmark moment highlights the viability of renewable energy on a large scale, proving that governments of all sizes have the capability to Invest in Our Planet. If it were an independent nation, California’s $3.14 trillion economy would be the fifth largest in the world.
While state leadership played a significant role in this accomplishment, local governments made important contributions that led to California’s success this spring. City leadership on renewable energy hit an all time high in the last year, having more than doubled the amount of clean power deals made in the previous year.
To set our sights on a fully carbon-free future, however, there is still work to be done to ensure that clean power is available at all times; when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, California must still rely on fossil fuels to meet its energy demands.
Futurity.org
Ancient pits shed light on Maya tamales and indoor toilets
by Boston University
Two small circular pits dug into the corner of a Guatemalan home a millennium ago offer clues to how the Maya people turned maize into tamales and what they used to flush indoor toilets, a new study shows.
Ancient toilets and trash pits are like heaven to archaeologists. They might not have the glamor of a gleaming medieval jewel or intricate Roman mosaic, but they brim with clues about the everyday life of bygone civilizations: the detritus—and discharges—of our ancestors telling rich stories of what the past was like for those without palaces or chests of gold.
From the mundane and the messy, archaeologists can spin tales of what people used to eat, how they kept clean (or not), what illnesses they had, and what they treasured (and what they didn’t).
Also in the pits, researchers found parasites that may have left the Maya plagued by bouts of nausea, weakness, and diarrhea.
The study in the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals how the pits were full of maize starch spherulites, a microscopic byproduct of nixtamalization—a food preparation process essential to making tamales and tortillas, where corn kernels are soaked and washed in an alkaline solution of water and lime.
Because the pits were also dotted with parasitic worm eggs from human feces, the archaeologists think the Maya were using the pits as latrines, flushing their toilets with lime water leftover from making tamales.
“We have both the earliest documented evidence for nixtamalization and the earliest evidence for toilets in the Maya world,” says John M. Marston, associate professor of archaeology and anthropology at Boston University.
New Atlas
Injectable hydrogel treats back pain from damaged discs in human trial
by Michael Irving
Human trials have shown that hydrogel injections are a promising, effective treatment for chronic lower back pain caused by degenerative disc disease (DDD). The treatment is far less invasive than other surgeries, and has been given FDA approval.
Spinal discs play an important role in cushioning the vertebrae, but as with many parts of the body they begin to wear out with age. In many people, the fluid filling of the discs can dry up or leak out, causing pain and affecting mobility. Unfortunately, treatments are largely limited to care like rest, physical therapy and painkillers, or in more severe cases, surgery where discs are removed or replaced with prosthetics.
But recently, scientists have developed a new option – a hydrogel that can be injected into the spine where it fills in cracks and tears in the affected disc, restoring some of its cushioning to alleviate pain. Developed by the medical company ReGelTec, the gel is known as Hydrafil, and in 2020 it received a Breakthrough Device designation from the US FDA. And now the results of the first human trials are in.
Gizmodo
Remarkable Drug Trial Ends with All 18 Patients Cancer-Free
by Ed Cara
A cancer treatment has shown astounding results in a small clinical trial. All of the treated patients, who had a specific form of mid-stage rectal cancer, have since experienced complete remission. Though the findings are based on a sample size of just 18 people, they could hold important implications for treating these particular cancers.
The results of the Phase II trial were published over the weekend in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study involved researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as well as Yale University, and it was sponsored by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.
The trial enrolled volunteers diagnosed with stage II or III rectal cancer, meaning their tumors had begun to grow larger and spread to nearby parts of the body. Their cancer was also determined to be caused by a particular mechanism known as a deficiency in mismatch repair.
I’m a writer, not a mathematician, so this is beyond my comprehension, but I thought someone might like it!
Quanta
Graduate Student's Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture
by Jordana Cepelewicz
As the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Oxford, has resolved a well-known conjecture, establishing another facet of what makes the primes special — and, in some sense, even optimal. “It gives you a larger context to see in what ways the primes are unique, and in what ways they relate to the larger universe of sets of numbers,” he said.
The conjecture deals with primitive sets — sequences in which no number divides any other. Since each prime number can only be divided by 1 and itself, the set of all prime numbers is one example of a primitive set. So is the set of all numbers that have exactly two or three or 100 prime factors.
Primitive sets were introduced by the mathematician Paul Erdős in the 1930s. At the time, they were simply a tool that made it easier for him to prove something about a certain class of numbers (called perfect numbers) with roots in ancient Greece. But they quickly became objects of interest in their own right — ones that Erdős would return to time and again throughout his career.
Big Think
MIT invents $4 Desalinization Device
by Kristin Houser
Researchers from MIT and China have developed a solar desalination device that could provide a family of four with all the drinking water it needs — and it can be made from just $4 worth of materials.
Solar desalination: Water covers more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, but 97% of it is saltwater. The salt concentration in that water is far too high for our bodies to process — if you drank too much of it, you’d actually become dehydrated and die.
What we need is freshwater, meaning a salt concentration of less than 1%, and since this water isn’t as abundant, humans have come up with lots of ways to remove enough salt from saltwater to make it drinkable.
Brighter Side
Global First: Lithium Metal Solid State Battery Charges to 80% in Just 15 Minutes
by Nicolas Caballero
QuantumScape has announced impressive performance figures for what may be the first commercially viable lithium metal solid state battery. They claim that they can increase the autonomy of an electric car by up to 80%, and it that it can charge from 0 to 80% in just 15 minutes.
By using a solid electrolyte instead of the typical liquid solution, solid-state batteries can store considerably more energy by weight and volume than lithium-ion batteries; but yet, making a battery that is reliable and has a useful life appropriate to any driver's needs - high charge and discharge rates, long service life, and without any temperature or safety concerns - has proven difficult up to now.
Here’s a seminar I’m planning to attend on June 22. Since my solar panels are working, it seems like a good option for supplemental heating that heals the climate.
Daily Kos
Energy (and Other) Events - June 2022
by gmoke
Portable Heat Pumps - Low Cost Supplemental Heating and Cooling
Wednesday, June 22
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT
RSVP at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/portable-heat-pumps-low-cost-supplemental-heating-and-cooling-tickets-335311213867
Portable heat pumps are a way to lower utility bills by efficiently warming or cooling a single room - a great solution for renters.
Portable heat pumps can heat or cool your home just like a regular heat pump, but with the additional advantage of being transportable. They come in window mounted options or roller options which are easier to move from room to room. They are a great solution for supplemental heat to reduce your reliance on gas or electric baseboard heating, and since they are portable, they are a great solution for renters.
These units are often used to heat or cool highly used spaces like kitchens or living rooms or to cool a bedroom for sleeping, and a single unit can heat and cool a small apartment. They offer the efficiency of a heat pump without the cost of whole house or ductless heat pumps.
Join the Electrify Coalition as we investigate portable and window heat pumps just in time for summer in the northern hemisphere. We will answer questions like:
How much do portable and window heat pumps costs?
What are some of the top brands?
How do you install and use them?
Do they really work?
What are things to consider when purchasing one?
What are their advantages over ductless and whole house heat pumps?
Where do I buy them?
Panelist
Sean Armstrong is a leading Electrification expert in North America and has co-authored five user-friendly guides to building electrification, both new construction and retrofits. His firm, Redwood Energy, has led the nation in residential ZNE design since 2011 with more than 5,000 100% solar powered homes.
Big Think
MIT's new heat engine beats a steam turbine in efficiency
by Kristin Houser
Since the Industrial Revolution, steam power has been a mainstay of the modern world. Even today, most of the electricity in the world is produced by steam turbines at coal, gas, and nuclear power plants.
But now, a different kind of heat engine — developed by researchers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) — is overtaking the efficiency of the steam turbine, potentially unlocking a transformation of how we make and store energy.
The challenge: The cost of producing renewable energy sources has fallen dramatically over the past decade, and in 2020, the International Energy Agency reported that solar had become the cheapest electricity source in history.
Heat engines are devices that convert heat into electricity — steam turbines are the most common example.
Renewables are better for the environment than fossil fuels, too, yet we still rely on coal, oil, and natural gas to produce two-thirds of our electricity, largely because they’re more reliable — we can always burn more fuel, but we can’t make the sun shine or the wind blow.
We can temporarily store excess renewable power in batteries, but because batteries lose charge over time, the storage only lasts days or weeks. That means we can’t bank a ton of solar power from the summer to use in the overcast winter.
Hot topic:
Electrical batteries that don’t lose their charge so quickly are in development, but there is another option that could make a renewable grid more reliable: thermal battery systems.
More than 90% of the world’s electricity is generated from heat, in one way or another, and heat engines are the devices that handle the conversion process.
Steam turbines are the most common example — we create heat (usually by burning coal or gas), boil water into steam that spins a turbine, and that mechanical energy is converted into electricity.
3 Quarks Daily
50th Anniversary of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
by Allen Hornblum
Fifty years ago this July, newspaper headlines shocked the conscience of the nation with a disturbing story of racial bias and medical mistreatment in one of America’s most honored institutions. The alarming Associated Press story first appeared on July 25, 1972 in the Washington Star. The front page headline, “Syphilis Patients Died Untreated,” caught readers attention. They’d go on to read that the goal of a strange, non-therapeutic experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) was not to treat the sick or save lives, but “determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”
The next day every newspaper in the country covered the story. The New York Times front-page headline “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated For 40 Years,” informed readers that hundreds of illiterate Black sharecroppers with syphilis in Alabama were denied treatment due to their participation in a scientific study. The alarming revelation not only provoked outrage and embarrassment, but caused Americans to look with a more discerning eye at what was occurring in the hospitals, orphanages, and prisons in their communities. It would also spark a long-overdue re-evaluation of the medical community’s cavalier practice of using vulnerable populations as raw material for experimentation.
IFLSCIENCE
by James Felton
On December 5 1872, the British ship Dei Gratia was about 644 kilometers (400 miles) east of the Azores when they came across the Mary Celeste, dreaming aimlessly and completely un-crewed.
The commander of Dei Gratia – David Morehouse – knew that the ship had set sail for Italy eight days before him, and should have already arrived. He diverted course in order to help and sent his crew aboard. What they found deepened the mystery. The ship had been abandoned, but the crew's belongings remained on board. The ship had at least a six-month supply of food and water and 1,701 gallons of industrial alcohol aboard, but the crew had seemingly abandoned ship, taking the lifeboat and risking the open seas rather than remaining on board.
The few clues available, and the fact that the crew did not later show up, turned the Mary Celeste into an enduring mystery rife for speculation. Explanations range from foul play to natural phenomena, with a few massive sea monsters thrown in for good measure.
Scientific American
Pregnancy is far more dangerous than abortion
by Adebayo Adesomo
In my medical practice, where I treat people with high-risk pregnancies, I recently treated a young woman with pulmonary hypertension. Unfortunately, this diagnosis was made late into her second trimester, well after most states allow pregnancy termination. We had to have the difficult conversation that, despite all modern medical advances, as many as one in three women with this condition will die during pregnancy. Based on that information, who should decide what level of pregnancy risk is acceptable for her? Should she? Should her government? Her case illustrates some of what’s at stake, should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade.
The risk any person accepts in continuing a pregnancy to term exceeds that of an early safe abortion by literally an order of magnitude. If women like my patient have no other option than to carry a pregnancy to term, the United States, which already ranks last out of all developed nations in maternal health, will only deepen its ongoing maternal mortality crisis.
Forcing people to undertake these risks against their will is a fundamental violation of bodily autonomy and human rights, yet multiple states stand poised to ban almost all abortions as soon as the court revokes this right to terminate a pregancy [sic]. As noted in a recent editorial in the Lancet, a leading medical journal, the Supreme Court justices and their supporters who seek to abolish abortion will have “blood on their hands.”
When I remember to I sprinkle a little turmeric on my veggies, I am pain free for about 24 hours.
The Guardian.com
Does turmeric's reputation translate into real health benefits?
by David Cox
While Kamal Patel was probing through the reams of user data on examine.com – a website that calls itself “the internet’s largest database of nutrition and supplement research” – before a planned revamp later this year, he discovered that the most searched-for supplement on the website was curcumin, a distinctive yellow-orange chemical that is extracted from the rhizomes of turmeric, a tall plant in the ginger family, native to Asia.
Patel concluded that this was probably because of curcumin’s purported anti-inflammatory properties. “An astounding number of people experience inflammation or have inflammation-related health conditions, and curcumin and fish oil are two of the most researched supplements that can sometimes help,” he says.
This consumer interest in curcumin hasn’t gone unnoticed by the “wellness” industry. Besides its use in pill supplements, curcumin is increasingly being incorporated into cosmetic products that claim to help treat acne and eczema, prevent dry skin, and even slow down the ageing process.
Some reports predict that the global curcumin market size could reach $191m (£156m) by 2028.
The doses of curcumin required to give benefit are very high – typically about 1,000mg a day
The ground rhizomes of the turmeric plant are commonly found in curry powder, but turmeric has also been part of Ayurvedic medicine – a traditional Indian system of treatment – for centuries, and at some point in the last decade turmeric worked its way out of the spice cupboard and took its place at the forefront of the western wellness industry. “As part of the general concept of Ayurvedic medicine and wellness, it’s increased in popularity in lockstep with yoga and meditation,” says Patel.
Turmeric has become the wellness industry’s new cure-all. It has been subject to all kinds of wild and wonderful health claims, including the ability to relieve allergies, prevent cancer, improve heart health, reverse cognitive decline, cure depression and increase longevity.
As with any dietary supplement, separating the hype and the truth is not straightforward, since not all the claims about turmeric are complete hyperbole. Most are based on the curcumin turmeric contains, which has been shown to be a potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant.
Smithsonian Magazine
Archaeologists in Egypt unearth 4,300-year-old tomb of man who handled his pharaoh's secret documents
by Sara Kuta
Roughly 4,300 years ago, an ancient Egyptian dignitary who handled secret documents for the pharaoh died unexpectedly. Crews hastily tried to decorate his burial site, but stopped short of carving the decorative reliefs of sacrificial animals on the façade—they simply ran out of time.
That’s what archaeologists believe happened at a tomb recently discovered in the ancient Egyptian necropolis Saqqara.
Researchers at the University of Warsaw’s Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology say it belonged to a man named Mehtjetju. Heiroglyphics on the tomb indicate that he handled royal, sealed documents, and also served as a priest and an inspector of the royal estate, per a statement from the expedition team.
They date the find, which was discovered at the Step Pyramid of King Djoser, to the reign of the first pharaohs of the Sixth Dynasty, around 2300 B.C.E.
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