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“Going green will cost too much” wail the deniers, in their increasingly desperate attempts to prevent us cleaning up the world. Not if you could turn the mess into something valuable-like diamonds maybe? And Daan Roosengarde is not only sucking the air clean, he is -amazingly- turning the dirt he collects into beautiful diamonds.

One day Daan was in Beijing and when he looked out of his hotel window he realised that he couldn’t see to the other side of the windowsill, or something like that. So he came up with a tower which sucked all the particles out of the air (don’t worry, it’s solar powered) thus cleaning things up considerably. But what to do with all the filth he had thereby collected? We’ll let Hailey Reissman tell the story for TED [1] But as an extra bonus she has included a TED talk by Daan in which he explains his accomplishments.

Daan is hoping to roll out his magic towers across the world. We wish him well. And get this-if you believe in the nuclear family, then the price of engagement rings just got a whole lot cheaper.

This tower sucks up smog and turns it into diamonds

If you want more intelligent explanations about every aspect of the world we live in, you should try TED talks

https://www.ted.com/talks

#pollution #globalwarming #climatechange #TED #recycle

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Ever wanted to spend your hard earned leisure hours battling a tide of warm, untreated sewage? That’s what thousands of surfers, swimmers, divers and boatspersons have to do every week in UK waters. To say nothing of what mum and dad have to wade through as they take little Chesney and Skywalk for a paddle on one of our filthy beaches.

It’s all creating a stink here in the UK as Helen Horton explains in the Guardian. [1] To summarise: last year we had 403, 171 sewage spills in the UK, adding up to a massive 3.1 million hours of raw sewage being dumped into our waters. If it weren’t for the efforts of tireless campaigners, no one would have held the Government and water companies to account for this disgusting pollution.

Many worthy people have fought back this week, but here, today, we’re going to highlight just one of them: Surfers Against Sewage. [2]There’s a tendency, unjust no doubt, to think of surfers from Cornwall to La Jolla as rather laid back people enjoying a few harmless hours on the beach while the rest of the world gets on with it. Not this lot! They have a huge pleasing website anchoring their relentless campaigns on all things marine and aquatic-water quality. plastics, pollution, health risks and climate change- you name it. It’s a sure sign of a healthy society when progress comes from spontaneous, voluntary organisations. All Surfers Against Sewage want to do is make the oceans healthy once more so that that they and their fellow citizens can enjoy a little bit of life free of gastro enteritis and hepatitis. No small ambition.

Clean seas mean clean leisure, healthy fisheries and less carbon dioxide. But these people can’t do it on their own. So, if you visit their site-please,please, could you at least think about clicking to the donate section and maybe handing over a little of your hard-earned money? Because it’s all our futures.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/26/uk-government-u-turns-on-sewage-after-tory-mps-threaten-rebellion

[2] https://www.sas.org.uk/

#Endsewagepollution #water quality #swimming #surfing #fishing #leisure #health

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Have you ever suffered from Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic fever? Thought not, or the chances are you wouldn’t be reading this. It’s a viral disease carried by a tick of the genus Hyalomma, and it’s nasty. It starts with a a headache, fever and muscle pains. Gradually vomiting and diarrhoea take over, followed by intense bleeding under the skin. Death, which usually occurs in between 20-40% of cases, finally occurs by catastrophic liver failure.

All very well, you might say; but I live north of the 50 degree parallel, where the tick cannot exist, so I am safe, right? Wrong. According to Esther Sanchez of El Pais, [1]the tick has now been found in countries as far north as the United Kingdom and Norway. Summers are longer and warmer, winters shorter thanks to global warming and the deadly disease, called CCHF for short, is taking its chance.

And so tick borne diseases take their place in the infamous roll of illnesses that are extending their reach as the climate changes for the worse. Malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and West Nile virus are the brand leaders right now; but there will be others. Which leads us to a subversive thought. It is hard to bring class actions for very broad, diffuse problems like global warming. But if we could link individual deaths to aspects of climate change, such as these diseases, might it at last be possible to bring some lawsuits against certain climate change deniers and those who may be funding them?

be advised; our link today is in Spanish

[1] https://elpais.com/clima-y-medio-ambiente/2021-10-23/la-garrapata-del-virus-crimea-congo-se-desplaza-hacia-el-norte-de-espana-y-europa-por-el-cambio-climatico.html

#tick disease #global warming #climate change #virus #cchf

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stories which will last for more than one week

Fight on the Beaches The inexorable rise of sea levels caused by global warming is starting to sweep away profitable areas of the tourism industry. British company CCell is looking at a range of solutions including artificial coral reefs, no less. Great export potential.

https://www.ccell.co.uk/home#

we thank Mr Lindsay Charlton of Kent for this story

Evolution in Action-quickly How quickly are inherited traits selected for? It’s always been the great unknown in evolutionary theory. Now a study of African Elephants suggest that population genetics can change vary rapidly in response to selection pressure. Nature explains how Hunting led to Tuskless elephants

In Mozambique, the selective poaching of elephants with tusks has led to a higher number of females being born without them. During the country’s civil war, from the late 1970s to early 1990s, hunting annihilated the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) population in Gorongosa National Park. Before the war, about 18.5% of females born there were naturally tuskless — a trait that made them undesirable to poachers. Among the 91 female elephants that have been born since the war, that fraction has risen to 33%.Nature | 4 min read

Cold Comfort Everyone will give you advice about how to cure a cold-but do folk remedies work? Duane Mellor and James Brown (No, not the singer) check out a few for The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/six-popular-beliefs-about-colds-experts-explain-the-facts-170059?

CRISPR explained Several readers have complained that although we have been singing the praises of CRISPR for years, we have haven’t done a very good job of explaining what it actually is. So we point you all to this excellent explanation from the Live Science website-and hope to make you all visit them more often.

https://www.livescience.com/58790-crispr-explained.html

The High Life How high can you go and still get a decent night’s sleep and a good breakfast in the morning? Here’s a list of the world’s highest places to stay. You’ll be gasping when you read the altitude of No.1-and that’s before you get there. Take it away, thrill list

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/high-altitude-hotels-inns-at-high-elevations

Anyone for Bournemouth? See you next week.

#crispr #exotic holidays #evolution #elephants #globalwarming #green technologies

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Gentle readers, remember how several times we at LSS have alluded to both Champagne and the old art deco ocean Liners as the ne plus ultra of the cocktail experience? How we ourselves had sipped more than one in the First Class Bar of the old Queen Mary? (which, mercifully, was firmly anchored in Long Beach) Consult our archives if you wish-they are full of good stuff.

Well for your further pleasure this Friday evening we humbly present the work of the excellent Ted Thornhill, Travel Editor of the Mail, no less, with his riff on the great ships and the old bubbly, or posh peoples’ lager, as it’s sometimes known. We won’t steal Ted’s thunder- but it’s full of eye-watering figures, grave preparations for War, marvellous photos, and intriguing menus, a bit like the one we showed you in an earlier blog on this site. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is at once your inspiration and your homework. Enjoy, with a glass or two of your own. Be alert and ready for Round Up tomorrow.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-10112417/Cunard-reveals-vital-CHAMPAGNE-operations-began-1840.html

#cunard #oceanliners #champagne #cocktail

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An intelligent, long-term friend of this blog has often deplored the tendency of “The Left” to endlessly split into tiny grouplets, all with remarkably similar names and all warring endlessly with each other. It was a tendency satirised in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian which lampooned the quarrels of organisations like the Peoples Front for the Liberation of Judea with the Judean Popular Front, among many other rivals.

It’s true-but why?

One possible explanation runs like this. You don’t join a reforming movement for fun. All the bounders and cads, mainly in it for the money and the girls, go to the Right, or so the argument goes. No, you join The Reform because your values are decency, self-sacrifice and above all, virtue. One thing the early Christians, Mohammedans, Cromwell’s Puritans and Communists all had in common was their Austere Righteousness. They preferred The Party to Parties, if you get what we mean.

Being Righteous may feel good, and may actually be so. But it quickly morphs into Self-Righteousness, for obvious reasons. And the trouble with Self-Righteous persons is that they find it very difficult to be wrong. About anything, in our experience. Thus tiny misapprehensions or disagreements can never be truly resolved. The Self righteous can never work with anyone for long.

Thus The Left has doomed itself to endless factional wars and quarrels long before it sees a glimpse of its real enemy. It’s true that occasionally someone like Stalin or Mao occasionally comes along to knock them into shape long enough to achieve power. But the cost in human lives and long-term PR is so great that it outweighs any immediate political advantage thereby attained. The Left sees itself as the Party of the Intelligent, but it’s really the Party of the Good. And those are two very different things. Consider the experience of Jeremy Corbyn if you don’t believe us.

Somehow, from somewhere we must found a Party for the Intelligent, combining the best elements of the Left with the practical, wordly-wise experience of the Right. And what that shall be like we have no idea yet.

#Left #Right #The Life of Brian #politics #political philosophy #jeremy corbyn #mao tse tung #stalin #communism #islaam #christianity

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beyond the ephemera of the 24 hour cycle

Why success can turn to failure It’s funny how thriving all powerful organisations can suddenly dwindle. Why? Rasmus Andersen thinks he knows why. They think lazily instead of following the cold logic of the gambler. Here’s his acerbic TED talk-you’ll leardn a lot about life in general

https://m.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR17s9CHrIm30CmnOQmmWk3O4gKCLYJbF1YqIAA71sRhK5_FUqtUo5-kRO0&v=Sy2vc9lW5r0&feature=youtu.be

_{we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this link}

Superimmunity Why does a vaccine seem to boost your immunity more than a natural infection? It seems counter-intuitive. Nature tries to understand why:

People who have previously recovered from COVID-19 have a stronger immune response after being vaccinated than do those who have never been infected. As the world watches out for new coronavirus variants, the basis of such ‘super-immunity’ has become one of the pandemic’s great mysteries. Researchers hope that, by mapping the differences between the immune protection that comes from infection compared with that from vaccination, they can chart a safer path to this higher level of protection.Nature | 9 min read

Dropping Hints at Ancient diets

According to The Guardian, Bronze age miners enjoyed a rich diet of beer and blue cheese. How researchers found this is a compliment to their disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Yeecchh!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/14/sophisticated-ancient-faeces-shows-humans-enjoyed-beer-and-blue-cheese-2700-years-ago

Roman Music-What did it sound like?

It’s fascinating to think that someone has attempted to recreate the lost sounds of 2000 years ago. Nature want you to hear them too, as their Editor explains

“Today, I’m raising my goblet to the ancient Roman tunes composed by researcher Mary Ann Tedstone Glover. But not that fancy stuff from the emperor’s court — this is the music of the streets, says Tedstone Glover.”

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

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The great thing about Google Earth is that it’s democratic. Everyone’s on it. My house is on it. Your house is on it. So are the houses of the richest and most powerful people in the world. So is the village of Babawayil, nestled in the Himalayan foothills in Indian-administered Kashmir. Go there, with your google, and visit it. Have a good look in all humility. Because the residents are doing something very special indeed. They’ve abolished marriage dowries.

The whys and the hows are beautifully explained by Aakash Hassan in The Guardian,[1] and there’s no way that we can improve on this beautifully heartening piece of writing. Suffice it to say that the reform has reduced the sufferings of women enormously. A good, hard headed, practical action, obtained through the carefully-obtained consent of the people concerned. Let’s hope the idea spreads.

Let’s hope too that the same moral courage and initiatives are shown as the world’s leaders gather in Glasgow for the COP26 Summit next month. Do we, gentle readers, imagine them to be the equals of the villagers of Babawayil? Are we?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/oct/12/evil-customs-why-a-kashmiri-village-abandoned-dowries

#COP26 #climatechange #globalwarming #humanrights #Kashmir

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What have atoms, neurons, genes, proteins, species, agents, the climate and flocks of starlings all got in common? They are examples of complex systems. And until very recently the human response to how they all worked together was to hold our heads in our hands and and cry “we don’t know!”

Now Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi has changed all that. His work, together with that of Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselman has been so profound that all have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics. We’ll let the Nobel Foundation [1] and Nature [2] do the heavy lifting for those who may be interested. Suffice it to say that when some airhead claims that models of climate change are flawed, you now know they are only demonstrating their own ignorance.

For us at LSS, Parisi stands in the great tradition of Italian science and learning. The achievements of late Middle Ages with thinkers like Pacioli and Fibonnacci grew into the Renaissance, the true fons et origio of the scientific tradition. Yes we will cite Galileo and Leonardo-but did you know that painters like Uccello and della Francesca were more than journeymen mathematicians as well? We could go on, but as the tradition carried in into modern times, we’ll end where we started with Parisi, a worthy link indeed in this great chain. Thank you, Signore Parisi for deepening our understanding of the world around us. Grazie, Chiarissimo Professore for such interesting insights. And above all for creating another defiant spark of light in the darkness of dense ignorance and stupidity that surrounds us all.

[1]https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/press-release/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d43978-021-00122-6

#parisi #complex systems #global warming #climate change #physics

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Well, not in so many words, but by his actions clearly. Despite the imminence of the fuel crisis, the supermarket crisis, the energy crisis, rising inflation, government borrowing constraints, clashes between Ministers, acute problems with his old allies in the EU, and growing threats to his new allies in the Pacific, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has taken his latest wife and child off to a well-earned break in Marbella. This is not Lefty propaganda, the story is taken from the impeccably right wing Daily Mail, his staunchest supporters.[1]

In a story called I’M WORKING FROM HOME IN MY £25000 A WEEK VILLA, a whole platoon of Mail writers explain how the Prime Minister has got the work-life balance just right. It’s not that he isn’t working, he’s just doing it from a warm sun lounger in one of Europe’s sunnier locales. He can be on the phone or looking at the villa fax within minutes of something happening. Or read about it in good old fashioned newspapers like the Daily Express, which are still delivered as paper copies along the Costas (although in our experience they can be a day late!)

And that’s what we at LSS like to see. Our thoughts on slowing down, chilling out and working less hours, made flesh, however pressing the problems seem. One day they’ll go away. Like Boris Johnson-from the villa, you understand.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10079721/No10-quiet-paying-PMs-stay-25-000-week-Marbella-estate-owned-minister.html

#boris johnson #fuel crisis# #supermarket crisis #work life balance #long hours cultures