Ranking negative emissions technologies under uncertainty.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020325731
"the great majority of [SARS-CoV2] clinical trials are focused on a small number of candidate drugs including, hydroxychloroquine, ritonavir, azithromycin, tocilizumab, lopinavir chloroquine and ivermectin (12), while potentially and more promising ones are less considered. For example, host-directed therapies such as those based on inhibitors of the human serine protease TMPRSS2 (bromhexine, camostat, and nafamostat) are considerably less explored. " https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00497/full
'High-power Mg batteries enabled by heterogeneous enolization redox chemistry and weakly coordinating electrolytes'
#Mgbattery
Magnesium batteries have long been pursued as potentially low-cost, high-energy and safe alternatives to Li-ion batteries. However, Mg2+ interacts strongly with electrolyte solutions and cathode materials, leading to sluggish ion dissociation and diffusion, and consequently low power output. Here we report a heterogeneous enolization chemistry involving carbonyl reduction (C=O↔C–O−), which bypasses the dissociation and diffusion difficulties, enabling fast and reversible redox processes. This kinetically favoured cathode is coupled with a tailored, weakly coordinating boron cluster-based electrolyte that allows for dendrite-free Mg plating/stripping at a current density of 20 mA cm−2. The combination affords a Mg battery that delivers a specific power of up to 30.4 kW kg−1, nearly two orders of magnitude higher than that of state-of-the-art Mg batteries. The cathode and electrolyte chemistries elucidated here propel the development of magnesium batteries and would accelerate the adoption of this low-cost and safe battery technology.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-00734-0
Empirical evidence for a global atmospheric temperature control system: physical structure - Abstract There is evidence that a natural control system influences global atmospheric surface temperature (Leggett and Ball, 2020). The present paper sets up and tests a hypothesis concerning the physical makeup of the sequential elements of the control system and its outcomes. The final outcome the control system influences is defined as global atmospheric surface temperature. The terms used for the control system element types in the hypothesis are, in sequence: leading element, controller and actuator. Actuators are hypothesised to affect, in turn, the final outcome: either directly, or via penultimate outcomes. The existence of the control system is evidenced by demonstration of statistically significant one-way Granger causality across each step of the hypothesised control system sequence. Evidence is presented that the leading element of the control system, represented by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, is the global biosphere. The biosphere as a control system has previously been referred to as Gaia (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974). A fourth, second-derivative, term is found to enhance the Proportional, Integral and Derivative process terms of the control system shown in Leggett and Ball (2020). The main actuators of the control system found are shown to be wind speed and cloud cover. Cloud cover is shown to influence the final outcome, global surface temperature, directly. It and wind speed also influence the penultimate outcomes found, those of enhanced ocean heat uptake and enhanced outgoing longwave radiation. These together lead to control system output to the final outcome, global atmospheric temperature. Overall, evidence for the activity of the control system is present across many major physical dimensions of the Earth’s atmosphere.
'Highly Reversible Cuprous Mediated Cathode Chemistry for Magnesium Batteries' https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.202002177
One thing I'll note about this: it's easy to think that I'm just talking about political news, but this 100% applies to "science journalism" as well. The scientific news cycle is so horribly broken (which I see as a major contributor to stuff like the reproducibility crisis), and I think a big part of the reason is that people have taken to following science happening "up to the minute", and as a result the only things that get covered as news are early-phase research papers — and ones that give surprising results!
Both of these things make it much more likely that any conclusions drawn from them would be spurious!
I would really love it if there were a cultural norm that science journalism aimed at the general public would not publish stories about anything until it's accepted widely enough to be included in textbooks.
Instead, no one reads textbooks but they read the science section of the newspaper, which spouts out nonsense (and contradictory nonsense) that never gets any further scrutiny or coverage, and the public gets a horrible misunderstanding about both the nature of science and the nature of the universe. ☹
#johnson #wales #scotland #NI #devolution #UK #politics #democracy
Welsh government calls PM's devolution remarks 'shocking'
‘Empirical evidence for a global atmospheric temperature control system: physical structure’: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2011/2011.06708.pdf
Abstract There is evidence that a natural control system influences global atmospheric surface temperature (Leggett and Ball, 2020). The present paper sets up and tests a hypothesis concerning the physical makeup of the sequential elements of the control system and its outcomes. The final outcome the control system influences is defined as global atmospheric surface temperature. The terms used for the control system element types in the hypothesis are, in sequence: leading element, controller and actuator. Actuators are hypothesised to affect, in turn, the final outcome: either directly, or via penultimate outcomes. The existence of the control system is evidenced by demonstration of statistically significant one-way Granger causality across each step of the hypothesised control system sequence. Evidence is presented that the leading element of the control system, represented by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, is the global biosphere. The biosphere as a control system has previously been referred to as Gaia (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974). A fourth, second-derivative, term is found to enhance the Proportional, Integral and Derivative process terms of the control system shown in Leggett and Ball (2020). The main actuators of the control system found are shown to be wind speed and cloud cover. Cloud cover is shown to influence the final outcome, global surface temperature, directly. It and wind speed also influence the penultimate outcomes found, those of enhanced ocean heat uptake and enhanced outgoing longwave radiation. These together lead to control system output to the final outcome, global atmospheric temperature. Overall, evidence for the activity of the control system is present across many major physical dimensions of the Earth’s atmosphere.
If I can chip my humble 50 satoshis on this, African people have way higher genetic diversity than the rest of humankind, not having experienced the bottleneck from getting out of Africa.
It's easier, therefore, to find higher diversity of problems too, and the sampling can wildly affect the results of any research. Talking about "black people" or Africans is really like putting together all the rest of humankind, papuasians, native americans, latins, australian aborigenal people etc, and say "see, they have this and that".
My main point is, we can't talk about "African people" as a group and pretend it makes sense.
This is something that until more recent genetic discovery was not well known, so a lot of studies even from a recent past have a huge bias in that sense