Energy from Nuclear Waste: A last Hurrah for American Science?

The news that a team of scientists at America’s prestigious Ohio State University have created a remarkable new battery that captures energy from nuclear waste might once have passed almost unremarked. Our link from Andrew Cuthbertson of the Independent[1] details how the remarkable Professor Cao and his team have taken spent nuclear fuel from reactors and converted the gamma rays into light, which can then power photovoltaic cells. We’ve put in a couple more links if you want to know more[2] [3] But for us, today, our interest lies in a slightly different direction. We suspect that astute readers my guess where.

For this kind of breakthrough used to be commonplace in the American Heartland. Starting after 1865 a vast ecology of Universities, Research Institutes and hopeful start-up companies grew. It gave the USA the economic power to surpass and then destroy the British Empire and to defeat Germany and the USSR in both armed and commercial conflicts. sitting at the centre of it was a belief in Science, at least among a sufficient mass of the population to count.

The current President of the United States looks hell bent to destroy all that. [4] as this link to a Nature main article shows. And look again at Anthony’s article. Which other country gets a mention? China, of course. Slowly ,steadily and with much less noise they steal a march on poor old Uncle Sam and its hapless, impulsive leader. Americans should ask themselves this question: is all this really worth it just to appease the prejudices of 20 million or so voters? Will any of you actually be voting in 2035, anyway?

_{with thanks to P Seymour}

[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/nuclear-battery-atomic-waste-electricity-b2704893.html

[2]https://news.osu.edu/scientists-design-novel-battery-that-runs-on-atomic-waste/

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

[4]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00562-w?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=bf0c0e5f06-nature-briefing-daily-20250226&utm_medium=email&utm_te

#nuclear energy #china #usa #economics #science #technology

Go Back to where you came from: if this isn’t the best TV in ten years, we don’t know what is

“But why do they all come here?” is the agonised cry of Dave Watford and his mates in every pub from Truro to Thurso. Dunno, Dave. The English language? Because of our free market, low regulation economy, where the reward is for taking risks? Because we’re still relatively prosperous? But Dave and the boys are right: Immigration and its discontents are the number one driving force in all our lives here in the third decade of what may prove to be our very last century.

Or are there deeper forces at work? People have always moved from bad conditions to try to find better ones. Such movements are always deeply resented by the native populations in the host lands. It is the achievement of Channel 4‘s Go Back to Where you Came From [1] to cast the question in terms of the way people really are, not the way they ought to be. Six ordinary, but essentially decent British people complete a typical migrant’s journey from the ravaged lands of their origin to their final landing under the White Cliffs of Dover. The producers chose Syria and Sudan as the “GO” points. Wow. We get it.

And we stress: ordinary, decent people. So the producers deliberately chose the reality show format to highlight their odyssey; for no one in 2025 would have watched a documentary. And what an odyssey for the 21st century it is! They run the gauntlet of squalid refugee camps, freezing and burning temperatures, lousy food, unmentionable lavatory facilities, major league armed criminals and deadly waters in the course of their journeys. All the while in dialogue themselves, and with the locals. All six displayed levels of courage and endurance which we could ever endure, we confess.

Like the heroes of any epic road movie, they are transformed, so that they are not the same people they were when they started it. One man in particular stood out: a haulage contractor from Yorkshire who though sheer hard work has built up a small lorry business. It lets him feed his family, of whom he is fiercely protective, with out any help from the state. And get this: if you are fined £10 000 every time an illegal immigrant jumps on your lorry, wouldn’t you be just a little resentful? But it is to the immense credit of this man, and the film makers, that they slowly uncover the causes of his plight. War; ecological collapse; deep inequality and the paid apologists who defend it at every turn. He comes, he sees, he thinks, he changes. His deep reserves of emotional intelligence finally process the better angels of his nature.

Yet we at LSS do not advocate opening England’s doors to every migrant, however desperate their plight. Emotion and pity are bad guides to policy. A Nation state is not the same thing as the Social Services department of a London Borough. But the lesson is clear: a substantial, though not crippling transfer of funds from richer to poorer countries would eliminate most human migration quite quickly.

Go Back to Where you came from at last shows the true causes of this problem, And most people learned the lesson. That is a mighty achievement indeed.

[1]https://www.channel4.com/programmes/go-back-to-where-you-came-from#:~:text=Six%20opinionated%20Brits%20experience%20refugee%20life%20up%20close

#go back to where you came from #immigration #migration #emigration #climate change #war #poverty #inequality

At last, another antibiotics story….but it’s not all good news

Yes, gentle readers, back to our Core Mission Values, our raison d’etre, our philosophical DNA (stop there-ed) We just wish it could be better news. For Andrew Gregory, that accomplished science journalist of The Guardian has just written up a magisterial survey of the UK’s efforts to contend with antimicrobial resistance by the National Audit Office(NAO). [2]”Could do better” is the verdict.

First the good news: UK Governments have recognised the problem and are” taking measures,” as the old saying goes. Good! We’ve been on this one for ten years now, and compared to then, the general awareness is indeed very high. Now for the bad: according to Andrew:

Of five domestic targets set in 2019, only one – reducing antibiotic use in food-producing animals – was met. Drug-resistant infections in humans have increased by 13% since 2018, despite a target to reduce them by 10%, the NAO said

There’s lots more good stuff in here, including some killer statistics about where we will be in 2050 if nothing is done. If you haven’t got time for the report, at least read Andrew’s piece.

The reason we take all this seriously is where it comes from. If there is one thing that still marks out a little of the old British excellence it lies in objective institutions like the Civil Service and the BBC, whose cool objectivity have long been the admiration of our overseas friends(we know this from personal experience) The reports assiduously collected facts and judicious observations are a model of intellectual clarity. Britain may not be great anymore, but it is still a pretty representative country. We suspect that much in this report may apply to where you live too, gentle reader. If so, our collective efforts still need to be stepped up. By a lot.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/26/uk-falling-short-in-fight-against-rise-of-superbugs-resistant-to-antibiotics

[2]https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/investigation-into-how-government-is-addressing-antimicrobial-resistance/#:~:text=This%20report%20sets%20out%20information%20on

#amr #antibiotic resistance #microbiology #public health #NAO #medicine #hospitals

Thanks for the Comments and Likes (but it won’t let us acknowledge them)

Many thanks for all the comments and likes today, mostly on our last post about pollution and the health of children.

We would have loved to have acknowledged them formally. But the gremlins have got into the system and this is one of those days where nothing we can do will lets us acknowledge them Some days we can, most days it won’t let us. So we hope this little extra blog will let all you readers know how much we appreciate your likes and comments.

We will make the world a cleaner, safer place.

THE EDITORIAL BOARD

#clean air #pollution #chidrens health #low traffic zones

Let’s put children ahead of cars

An epidemic of childhood obesity. Lonely, de-socialised children spending endless hours on their phones and computers. Anxiety, depression, anorexia…….it’s every parent’s nightmare scenario and for once everyone agrees it’s true. The solution seems obvious. Let them out to play! To have real fun, burn off a few calories and above all learn the social skills which will last them for life. Sadly it’s not that simple, as every responsible mum knows. Leave aside all the perverts and gangsters( we’ll come to those another day). There is another more terrible monster out there. It’s far more common, far more dangerous and it hasn’t even got the decency to hide in plain sight. It’s called The Car. It runs down children, maiming or killing them. It fills the air with toxic gases and noxious particles both of which represent colossal hazards to childrens’ health and mental development.

Now an exciting new movement called Playing Out [1] has taken the initiative. Incredibly, they hope to reclaim the streets as safe spaces for children to play in Read their mission satement here

Our aim is for playing out near home to be a normal, everyday part of life for all children, as it once was. This means safer, less traffic-dominated streets and more connected communities. It means children having clear permission to play out in the spaces around their homes. It means no ‘No Ball Games’ signs. It means putting children first and protecting their right to play.

It’s already being tried in Leeds, a City in the north of England, and you can read about it here [2]

It is comforting to imagine that children of the future might be saner and healthier than they are now. But it’s also rather hopeful. You see, gentle readers, we at LSS get a bit melancholy about the fact that people are losing faith in their ability to shape their own lives. Which is why they turn from rational progressive parties to charlatans out on the fringes. Yet this movement is not only grass roots, it directly addresses a major issue in everyday lives. Above all it offers agency again, that magic elixir of hope that is essential to a sustainable society. Now, the stories we’ve retold today are about places in England. That’s because we’re based there. But hope can travel. What if you went out and tried something like this for your kids?

[1]https://playingout.net/about/

[2]https://cfl.leeds.gov.uk/play/play-streets

#childhood obesity #chidrens health #cars #pollution #particulates

New Fusion Record: hope amid the Brightness?

The real problem assailing our world is Climate Change, caused by uncontrolled greed for fossil fuels. OK, we at LSS obsess about lack of new anti microbial drugs, and there are lots of wars and things. But, quite simply, climate change will finish with us in the next couple of decades. or at least reduce the survivors to the most pitiable levels of existence. Renewables are making some progress, and nuclear fission is always there, although it’s a fearsome option. But the essential problem for the educated remains. How to provide a cheap clean source of energy so that the ignorant and greedy mass of mankind don’t mind being saved from themselves?

Nuclear fusion has been the dream for decades. Until very recently progress has been nugatory, as we used to report in this blog (LSS passim) This year, however, we are happy to report real progress. In January the magnificent Chinese achieved a world record burn of 1066 seconds(LSS 25 1 25) Now an ingenious team at the WEST reactor in France has smashed that, by achieving 1337 seconds. This link to Victoria Allen of the Mail will give you plenty of keywords to search further if you wish.[1]

It’s all like the world of early aviation around the 1900s isn’t it? When, after the Wright brothers’ breakthrough, people rapidly competed to smash records This time the prize is greater. Non-polluting, non-toxic limitless energy, available to every country. But to push the aviation metaphor further, although it was some years before safe, practicable powered aeroplanes became possible, the best minds got there. Maybe they will do so again.

[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14413863/Nuclear-fusion-Artificial-sun-world-record.html

#climate change #global warming #nuclear fusion #clean energy

Declining Life Expectancy: a sure sign of a declining civilisation

You , your children and your grandchildren are going to live a lot less than you should have done. That’s the stark message from Andrew Gregory of the Guardian,[1] who has been busy reviewing a major study of life expectancies across 20 European nations. It’s a topic which has concerned us before here(LSS 21 12 21) and not only is it not going away but we think it is a sign of something deeply general going wrong.

The first signs that the old Soviet Union was in real trouble came in the 1970s when astute researches suddenly realised they weren’t returning their annual health figures to the WHO and other bodies. Their economy was no longer delivering, people were going hungry: and you just can’t spin health statistics over the long term. Within a few years the system had fallen in on itself. According to a study by the University of East Anglia the long rise in life expectancy which we have taken for granted for centuries has now stalled. Worried? You should be.

Greece(lashed by cataclysmic economic woes 15 years ago) is second worse. But it is the countries of the UK, one of the most unequal societies in the western world, which are doing worst of all. And we think we know why. Our old friends Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett [2] long pointed to inequality as the root causes of many evils such as obesity poor health bad diets over work and chronic illness[2] And -surprise, surprise! These are exactly the factors which the authors cite to be dragging UK statistics so drastically backwards. But can you forgive us one more observation, gentle readers? One country bucking the trend is Norway. Which some readers will recall set up a sovereign wealth fund with their share of North Sea Oil back in the 1980s of the last century.(LSS 6 7 20) While the British in the same years splurged theirs on new cars, shopping, time share villas and an utterly botched programme of de-industrialisation. Here are the consequences.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/european-countries-experience-life-expectancy-slowdown-research-shows

[2] R Wilkinson K Pickett The Spirit Level Penguin 2010

#inequality #life expectancy #sovereign wealth fund #public health

EDX Medical Prostate Cancer Test -progress amid the gloom?

News that Cambridge-based Life Sciences group EDX Medical has launched very hopeful new test for the terrible scourge of prostate cancer would normally have us gushing for our three full paragraphs. [1] What’s not to like? It’s a marvellous new combination of multi-diagnostic parameters, now carefully integrated by the latest AI technologies. There will be large tests and scrupulous surveys. It’s some of the finest minds we have, putting their talents to the service of humankind, with potentially enormous capacity to improve the quality of life. And yet, tonight, we remain gloomy. Why?

A friend once went on one of those cruise holidays on a huge luxury ship of the sort you see tied up in places like Mallorca or Florida.* This one was indeed sailing west, to Florida from Southampton. At more than twenty five knots. And one morning he saw a child with its toy boat in the swimming pool. The kid was blowing and pushing quite hard and eventually got the little yacht to sail in the direction of the stern of the cruise line. (backwards to us landlubbers) And it occurred to him that, however hard the child pushed, the little yacht was still moving inexorably westwards, carried by the bigger boat it rested on.

There are some extremely intelligent, hard working and good people both at EDX and all over the world. In Universities, in research institutes and in marvellous little start up companies. But they are terribly few in number overall. Because as the world moves into hostile camps, competing now in trade, later in war, the overall course we follow is very different indeed. It seems that the worst elements of mankind- the angry, the stupid, the ignorant- far our number and outgun the EDX types. Write to us if you will dear readers and tell us we may be wrong. But we shall close with these lines from Matthew Arnold, available from the marvellous Poetry Foundation click [2] for full quote:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

way out of our league financially! Plus we get sea sick

[1]https://pressreleasehub.pa.media/article/new-super-test-for-prostate-cancer-developed-in-the-uk-by-edx-medical-38471.html

[2]https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach

#edx medical #prostate cancer #medicine #health #matthew arnold #trump #putin #tariffs #poetry foundation

Defence and Security: Keir gets it right again

No, we are not talking about Keir Starmer. Nor Keir Shave, that well-groomed star of the popular BBC 1 television series The Apprentice. Nor Kier construction, because it’s spelt differently. We are of course referring to Keir Giles the eminent thinker and writer based at London’s Chatham House security institute. [1] By the way, that’s a helluva first name, fella!

We have been following Keir and his thoughts here for some years. Long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The link we have posted today is an article in The Financial Times which is a summary of his eponymous book. [2] Yet written in light of recent decisions by the Trump administration, with which we assume our readers are too gloomily familiar. Of course it’s worth a read. Biut essentially it boils down to this. For far too long the Comfortable Classes of Europe have depended on a security guarantee funded by the American taxpayer. Now that taxpayer is growing understandably tired of this, it is time for those nations to look to their own security . And to do this in a timely manner in the face of an expansive, predatory nuclear power with no seeming limit to its ambitions. But further west there is still much foot dragging. One thing is certain. Comfortable life styles based on the constant acquisition of Bright Shiny New Things (BSNT) will have to stop. Or at least get reigned in until people start to learn to live like adults once more. Perhaps that will brake the endless accumulation of rubbish that is poisoning the land and sea. Perhaps the higher taxes we will all have to pay will address some of the hideous inequalities which disfigure our societies. If these things start to make us better people, a little less spoilt, a little less selfish it may even be worth it.

our link to the FT app [2]not only seems to open keir’s article for free you seem to get access to more FT articles. If so, do it: we cannot recommend this essentially intelligent media outlet strongly enough

[1] Keir Giles Who Will Defend Europe? Hurst 2024

[2]https://www.ft.com/content/f268359a-7347-4285-b646-4353f7d6a865

#putin #trump #russia #ukraine #europe #security #chatham house

Welcome to our Friday Night Feast of Fun

A few years ago we used to run a series called Friday Night Cocktails. Some said it was frivolous, and only encouraged people in dissipation and debauchery. Yet others liked it. They welcomed it as a lighter distraction form the exhausting work at the cutting edge of Science, Technology, Economics and all the other things, large and small , which is the lot of the LSS Reader.

Sadly, the feature flickered and died. This was not due to unpopularity. Frankly we just ran out of ideas. Even Shakespeare had days when he could not write another line. Even the Spice Girls, titans of intellect that they were, must have had the odd days when the wells of creative genius ran dry. But he have always missed that very special, bon viveur ambience of Friday evening when, after another week of intense labour at the forefront of progress, the urge came to kick over the traces, put on a little light music, and just relax. And so we have decided, on the advice of old friends, tom revive the old spirit in a slightly modified form.

The new feature, FRIDAY NIGHT FEAST OF FUN, will look at all aspects of life from the point of view of the gourmand. What are the best foods to eat? What drinks best partner them? For example would a KFC sharing bucket go better with a 2005 Chateau Lafitte Rothschild or a can of Red Stripe? Who really does make the best pork scratchings? Whatever happened to Newcastle Brown Ale? Of course there will still be cocktails, when these are appropriate. But we believe we have opened the door to a vast new world of experience. It will be like the change from black and white to colour TV. From the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. From referees to VAR From (that’s enough metaphors-ed)

We hope you will enjoy it too.

with sincere thanks to Ms Alison Reboul

#cocktails #food #drink #restauarant #wine #beer