Will the Millwall Molecule finally give us clean energy?

“Nobody likes us, we don’t care!” UK football fans will recognise the chant as the calling card of the fans of Millwall FC, who rejoice in their reputation as the hardest of hard nuts, feared by the followers of all other clubs. Which is a funny way to start a blog on nuclear fusion, most of whose exponents tend to be, to put it politely- in a very different place on the intellectual spectrum. But read on, gentle reader, read on.

LSS has always had a thing about nuclear fusion, that process whereby clashing hydrogen atoms should mimic the processes in the heart of the Sun, and thereby afford limitless supplies of clean, cheap energy. And recently, our early suspicions of all the money and effort thrown in over the last 70 years have been tempered by genuine reports of progress in the shape of short ignitions (LSS passim) OK, you’ve got the plasma nice and hot. But how do you hold there long enough to be any use. According to Darren Orf of Popular Mechanics, the answer is to use Tungsten. The South Korean KSTAR team have thrown away the carbon in their containment vessels and replaced it with this toughest, hardest of metals, normally used in things like light bulb filaments and the best knives. Now it will take its place at the cutting edge (another joke like that and you’re fired-ed) of what could be the most important research and development project on our planet this century.

Alright, Tungsten is an atom, not a molecule. Technically. But it’s hard, mate, as they say in South London. And thanks to it, we are ready to cast aside our earlier reservations and for the first time since about 1973, embrace hope.

_{thanks to P Seymour for this story}

[1]https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a46278296/south-korea-artificial-sun-fusion/

#tungsten #wolfram #nuclear fusion #plasma

Three good news stories: where there is reason , there is hope

Reason is the tool we use to turn facts into knowledge. Societies which use reason will have better lives, on the whole, than societies based on belief. Here are three stories which illustrate the practice of reason, by scientific research, demonstrate exactly that.

Cohort Studies of Cancer It’s nice when wet chemistry work in a lab, all white coats and benches, is combined with data analyses and number crunching- both sides get more out of their skills. Here, Cancer Research report on their programme TRACERxEVO which looks at the long term evolution of lung cancer in a group of patients, It’s already throwing up findings like molecular markers which might indicate when a tumour could return, helping treatment patterns and diagnoses in all kinds of ways. That has to be better than applying crystals, right?

https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2022/11/09/tracerx-evo-a-new-programme-to-transform-lung-cancer-research/?urn=765570556&utm_medium=email&utm_sou

Zapping the the Zombies to stay young The Science desk at the Mail never sleeps, not even over Christmas Here’s one about a new protein called HKCD1 which seems to work at the level of mitochondria and lysosomes, thereby removing tired old cells from the body’s metabolism and allowing fresher, younger ones to come on through, as t’were. Has to be more value long term than all those extravagantly priced creams you see advertised in all those glossy magazines!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12918377/protein-removes-zombie-cells-cancer-alzheimers-disease.html

INTERLACE-reducing the fear of Cervical Cancer We’ll let Cancer Research speak for themselves here, and just embed a link for the hyper-interested:

Over the last decade, the number of deaths from cervical cancer has decreased by around a sixth (18%) in females in the UK (2017-2019). Thanks to INTERLACE, a clinical trial we funded, that rate could decrease even further. INTERLACE showed that giving people six weeks of chemotherapy before standard cervical cancer treatment of chemoradiation (CRT) could cut the risk of death or of the disease progressing by 35% when compared to CRT alone.“This is the biggest improvement in outcomes in this disease in over 20 years,” said Dr Mary McCormack, the lead investigator of the trial.

Surely this is better than just praying?

For over twenty years now, we have made a small but steady donation to Cancer Research UK The individual monthly sums are tiny. But their steady accumulation, above all as a stream that CRUK can rely on, makes a tangible difference. If everyone did it, it would pay for no end of new scientists and techniques like the ones above. And, as have said before on these blog pages, discoveries in one area have a happy way of spilling over into others. And so our last link is to their donations page Go on, give them a go. Even £2.00 a month will slowly build, and you won’t know you’re doing it.

Overseas readers-is there something like this in your country?

https://donate.cancerresearchuk.org/donate

#ageing #protein #rationalism #cancer

Immigration: Intriguing new research suggests this blog got it wrong

“When facts change, then I change my mind.” So said the great economist JM Keynes. It should be the guiding principle for every scientist and scholar. Now, some readers will recall several blogs we have made on immigration ( LSS June/July ’22;Nov ’22). We still think we were right to raise this issue. Because it seems to be of neuralgic importance. But we ascribed the basic cause to the movement of people from poor economies to richer ones. We have now seen good evidence that this belief, although not entirely wrong, is so simple as to be almost misleading. And we are now going to present you with that evidence, so you can judge for yourselves.

Of course immigration does indeed flow from poorer societies to richer ones, But not from the absolute dirt-poor countries. The bulk of immigration comes from middle income countries. According Hein de Haas. a Professor of Sociology who writes in the Guardian, anyway. [1] And why do they do it? To fill jobs in short contract, essentially unregulated labour markets in the host countries. The second link, from Nature Briefings, should allow you to drill down more into Professor Haas’ work (we hope the link works!) It’s called Prejudice Colours our View on Immigration, a title that says much:

Many of us have opinions about immigration, but most of us don’t fully understand it, suggests sociologist Hein de Haas in his impressively wide-ranging book How Migration Really Works. By busting myths that surround human mobility, de Haas provides a welcome corrective to common misconceptions, writes reviewer and migration scholar Alan Gamlen. “But with migration patterns shifting as the world rocks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s unclear for how long his conclusions will hold true,” writes Gamlen.Nature | 7 min read

There’s a lot of humility to go around for all of us here, not just LSS. Like, even when you think you have the answer, it may turn out to be only part of it. That sudden sweeping generalisations can be utterly wrong. Yet there remains one small observation in which we were right, You get very little immigration from richer countries(e.g. Switzerland, Denmark) to poorer ones(e.g UK) And we still think that, in there somewhere. lies the answer to all this angst.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/politicians-immigration-wrong-cheap-labour?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#migration #immigration #emigration #inequality #economics