Environmental News

Ya know what's good? Decapitate a head of garlic, add olive oil and roast the thing until you can smell it. Squeeze out the cloves - they don't fight back. Umami made accessible. Raw garlic is but a regional treat tasting completely different.

 

A vampire outs self

 

On subject of human excreta, I recently saw this:

Joseph Leconte, 1823-1901. Instructions for the Manufacture of Saltpetre

A few years before US Civil War, Southerners were advised to get started making potassium nitrate as a cottage industry. Interesting history of this having been done in Europe.

Interesting to read about times when microbiology was completely empirical.

 

Here are a few more links to history of this explosive subject:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00732753211033159
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312372347_Saltpeter_A_Concise_History_and_the_Discovery_of_Dr_Ed_Polenske
Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder | Reviews in History
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-14508-2_5

Last two may require a trip to library. More than the usual copyright bypassing seems to be required

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In biogeochemistry, carbon gets most of the glory, but both nitrogen and phosphorous have particular charms.

 

Carbon Capture and Storage

“how long will it take to develop and get approvals to create and begin operating a carbon dioxide disposal well?” [In the US]

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307984120

TL;DR: A long time.

 

Sea goes up and land goes down

Study: From NYC to DC and beyond, cities on t | EurekAlert!

 

Tokyo Haneda airport. A Japan Coast Guard Dash-8 may have overstepped its clearance and taxied onto runway. It was struck by a landing Airbus 350. Five CG personnel died. All pax and crew (N~400) on the other evacuated alive, with a few injuries. Videos of burning Airbus are plentiful.

Until investigation is complete, discussions at pprune can be viewed.

BTW Japan had a strong earthquake not so far away, and CG may have been in a hurry to deliver relief supplies.

 

How to obtain meat taste and texture with fewer cows, pigs and other livestock with large environmental hoofprints?

Meat proteins and fats can be grown in cell culture (still seems expensive and resistant to scaleup). Plant proteins and fats can be mixed from existing plant sources (vegeburgers and the like). Insects produce lots of proteins and fats, but their desirability as food sources are growing only slowly.

Another way is to insert animal genes for proteins and fats into crop plant genomes. See for example:
Moolec :: Science in food ingredients

Other companies do this also. A current impediment is that grafting genomes of two unrelated (very distantly related) organisms makes a chimera, and that presents legislative hurdles. Also can be turned to public disfavor, see Island of Dr. Moreau.

There are valid concerns about putting novel genomes 'out there', and they are being explored. Pollinators move things around and bacteria and viruses can do horizontal gene transfer. These could be described as vertical and horizontal sex, respectively. But I digress.

One invalid concern is that eating gen-engineered whatever can modify a person's genome. For historical evidence, note that humans have been eating rice, wheat, carrots, chickens etc. for a very long time. Note that humans have not transformed into those things by consuming such DNA. Before agriculture, humans ate 'who knows?' what DNA and did not transform either. So, whatever Frankenburger you might eat won't Franken you up. It just doesn't happen. In fact humans consume only other species' DNA after weaning. Before which we are cannibals strictly speaking. But I digress.

Now, moolecscience is working mainly with soy which is a sensible choice because its roots buddy up with particular bacteria to obtain nitrogen from the atmosphere. Getting this buddy system into other crops is a whole 'nother research objective, but that makes chimeras also. Back to Dr. Moreau's Island. (If you have not seen the movie, put it far down your watch list. Not a winner.) But I digress.

The big picture is 8 billions we are, and 1 billion are not well nourished, and we need to do something about that.

Conventional plant breeding continues. It is less comprehensive and much slower than genomic engineering, but at least it's not opposed (by anyone I can think of). Not enough oomph though I think.

Tell carnivores to reduce meat intake by 90%? Go ahead, tell, and see how it goes. You won't be the first.

OTOH, offer carnivores a good-enough alternative well-enough priced, and they will go sustainable by choice. Maybe get all cutesy like piggysoy, but I don't see it pushing the process along. I mean, sheesh.

So, all you fine old cannibals, what's it gon na be?

 

Beyond is mostly peas yes? Along with black beans, soy and peanuts, they are legumes. Leguminosae. All with N-fixing buddies. All sensible crops for plant source protein with or without porcine genes slotted in.

Fell like I lectured on N fixation before. Legume roots make little chambers for pet bacteria. The N-fixing enzyme fails in presence of oxygen so plant roots also make a heme protein down there to transport oxygen away. It is suspiciously similar to heme protein animals use to carry oxygen around. I'm not saying horizontal gene transfer, but ...

Legumes thus have high nitrogen in leaves and seeds; attractive to herbivores. So they also make distasteful (unto toxic) chemicals, which we must cook out.

This is all so much fun! cooking over wood fires really changed things, way back when. When there were about 10 million humans, I'm sayin'