Maria Sklowdowska, better known to the world as Marie Curie, discovered the element Radium with the help of her husband Pierre. It was her research—Pierre was smart enough to recognize his wife’s genius— and he abandoned his work in favor of hers. The original power couple (along with Henri Becquerel) were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity. She coined the term.

Radium is a daughter product. Naturally-occurring uranium decays and radium is the result. Curie was also awarded another Nobel, this time for chemistry, in 1911. She was a widow by then, Pierre having been killed in a road accident in 1906. Speaking of daughters, their daughter Irene was awarded the Chemistry Nobel in 1935 (along with her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie).

Marie Curie was active in WWI setting up X-ray units in field hospitals. It is likely that those exposures led to her death in 1934 at age 66 from anemia. Although she and her husband were both exposed to lots of ionizing radiation in their laboratory work, and their papers are still too “hot” for researchers to handle, they likely would not have been sickened by radium without ingesting it.

That leads me to the infamous and tragic story of the Radium Girls of the U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company. These young women workers in the 1920s painted things with glow-in-the-dark paint. It contained radium. While these salts are only mildly radioactive, the ladies were told to lick the brushes to get a fine tip. Thus they ingested the stuff and were poisoned. Hundreds were sickened, dozens died. The companies finally had to pay up a decade later.

Here’s the thing—the executives knew radium was toxic but kept quiet about it, then claimed ignorance when confronted later with their perfidy. Sadly, scheming corporate scumbags who put profit over people are still with us.

Check out Kate Moore’s 2017 The Radium Girls or Claudia Clark’s 2000 Radium Girls (UNC Press).

I read a lot of books. Mostly novels, both contemporary and vintage. Sometimes a book really stands out. This novel, Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde, is one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

It’s science fiction, or more precisely “cli-fi” or climate fiction. This is a big topic these days as you can imagine. These novels are usually called “dystopian” and you could say that about Eleutheria but it is also hopeful, and surprisingly upbeat. You can also read it as a coming-of-age tale.

The ending might be the best part. It has many possibilities, but it’s also a resolution for our unique protagonist. Eleutheria checks in at a relatively economical 322 pages which is a relief from the flood of overlong modern books. I feel like I could chop 100 pages off of most of today’s novels (and half an hour off most of today’s movies!) without hurting them. Not so this book. Hyde doesn’t waste words and doesn’t waste your time with diversions and self-indulgent blather.

I think you should go out and get this book and give it a read and then tell your friends to do the same. By the way, “Eleutheria” is an island in the Bahamas and is pronounced “Eh-LOO-thuh-ruh.” It’s also the name of a play by Samuel Beckett. It’s a Greek word (ἐλευθερία) that means “liberty.”

There’s a big push to electrify our vehicle fleet. That’s going to require a lot of copper. The folks over at the IEF (International Energy Forum) took a look at this problem. Here’s what they came up with:

The researchers found that between 2018 and 2050, the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all human history until 2018 just to meet “business as usual.” This would meet our current copper needs and support the developing world without considering the green energy transition. (from mining.com)

The IEF report went on to say:

To meet the copper needs of electrifying the global vehicle fleet, as many as six new large copper mines must be brought online annually over the next several decades. (from mining.com)

“Annually” means every year. Six new copper mines PER YEAR! Right now it takes about twenty years to bring a copper mine on-line.

The study suggests that hybrid vehicles are a better policy choice than EVs. Copper is too important elswhere:

The researcher (Adam Simon, co-author*) also points out that copper will be needed for developing countries to build infrastructure, such as building an electric grid for the approximately 1 billion people who don’t yet have access to electricity; to provide clean water drinking facilities for the approximately 2 billion people who don’t have access to clean water; and wastewater treatment for the 4 billion people who don’t have access to sanitation facilities.

That’s a lot of people who have very basic needs that we take for granted. Here’s a couple of graphs that illustrate the point:

Every choice is a trade-off. Electrifying our vehicle fleet AND raising the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people probably isn’t possible. My next car is going to be a hybrid.

*https://lsa.umich.edu/earth/people/faculty/simonac.html

The folks who study this stuff tell us that the element Helium makes up about one-fourth of the universe. Helium is produced in the sun and other stars as a product of nuclear fusion, hence its abundance. Funny thing, it’s scarce here on the home planet.

Terrestrial helium is a product of nuclear decay. Naturally-occurring uranium emits alpha particles which are helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons).

The alpha particles pick up stray electrons from the environment and the stable helium atoms formed are trapped in rocks underground along with other naturally-occurring gases like hydrocarbons. Much of this helium, if it escapes to the atmosphere, is lost to space. Its heavier sister element, the noble gas Neon, is about three times more abundant (18.18 ppm to 5.24 ppm) in the atmosphere. The earth’s magnetic field is responsible for trapping our life-giving gases (nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor) at the surface.

Helium is very important commercially. Here’s a breakdown of its uses:

The federal government used to stockpile helium as a strategic material. They got out of that business. Helium is extracted from natural gas and thus its production is dependent on that industry. That’s put a dent in supply and raised prices. Laboratories have been hit the hardest. Most of us know something about inert-gas welding, but few of us think about medical applications like MRIs.

It might not be a bad idea for the government to think about stockpiling a strategic reserve again. It doesn’t seem smart to rely on the ups-and-down of a poorly-established and constrained market for such a rare but critical industrial material. A non-renewable resource, I should add. I suppose privatization is the politico-cultural zeitgeist, and I’m stuck in an out-dated interventionist mind-set, but here we are. Regardless, stop buying those stupid helium balloons.

Tesla has shown off some interesting technology these last few years. It’s too bad the outfit is run by an adolescent. Putting aside the hype and the cult/fanboy crap—I know it’s hard to do—they actually create some good stuff there. I wouldn’t give ’em a nickel of my money but there’s no doubt Tesla has a lot of smart, accomplished folks working for them.

Some of them left to do other things. One notable is JB Straubel. Here’s the depth chart at Redwood Materials:

Redwood Materials is all-in on battery recycling. They see the future in scrap. They’ve developed some new schemes for converting e-wastes into e-resources that cut both the carbon footprint and the water bill. Water is an issue everywhere, but especially so in the West (Redwood is in Nevada).

Batteries are in big demand. And the demand is growing. All the materials needed to make batteries are imported. Here’s a note on China (from mining.com):

The world’s second-biggest economy controls 70% of the planet’s lithium refining capacity and as much as 95% of production for other crucial materials needed to make EVs, according to BloombergNEF. Redwood is attempting to break that stranglehold by creating a domestic loop using recycled critical metals.

We throw enough stuff away every day to supply a few emerging economies. The whole notion of waste is an archaic one. Goods and materials should be re-used, re-purposed, and re-cycled until the Laws of Thermodynamics make it impossible to continue. Capitalism is voracious—it continually needs fresh supplies. We can dig up the ground (or the seafloor) to get more, or we can look in our trash cans.

Or we can use less. The Three R’s are really REDUCE, re-use, and re-cycle! But that’s not the American Way. So we’d better get going on the re-cycling thing. I wish ’em luck over there at Redwood.

We know more about Mars than we do about our own oceans.

From phys.org*:

An international group of scientists, co-led by researcher Ariadna Mechó of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center—Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), observed 160 species on seamounts off the coast of Chile that had not yet been known to live in the region and suspect that at least 50 of these species are new to science.

This illustrates the folly of deep-sea resource extraction. We barely know what we are getting into. Terrestrial mining is a well-understood, long-practiced human endeavor. If we are going to mine for the things we need, we ought to do it in a way that we understand. The ocean is the source of all life on earth Recklessly digging it up is foolish. We have too much to learn first.

The seamounts are part of the Salas y Gómez Ridge which is an underwater mountain range extending from Chile to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Here’s more:

This ridge hosts one of the most unique and biodiverse seascapes on Earth, with an extremely high rate of endemism, critical habitats for benthic organisms, essential migration corridors for highly mobile species, and the presence of over 80 threatened or endangered species.

Here’s a dragon fish that lives there:

Instead of searching for aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence maybe we should learn more about the vast seas that nurture our lives. Unlike space, they are filled with life. We don’t have to go far to find amazing and exotic creatures and ecosystems that are far more interesting that we can imagine.

*”Research team discovers more than 50 potentially new deep-seas species in one of the most unexplored areas of the planet” (April 12, 2024 by Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

Bruce Schneier over at Schneier on Security writes:

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection.

But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.

The internet let us all become creators. Writers. Artists. Publishers. You Name It. Content was no longer the province of gate-keeping institutions like book and music publishers, movie studios, art galleries, or libraries. Anyone and everyone had a voice. Naturally, it got a little loud.

So the folks at Google came up with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. These were things you could do to amplify your voice. The idea was that SEO would help the user to better find what they wanted. Of course the scammers were all over that and had counter-measures for everything else (like PageRank) that came their way. The result is that there is no way to know if the hits you get on your search are legit. I think we’ve all seen the shrinking range of search results over the years. And who hasn’t been frustrated by the long list of links that reference the same source? Cory Doctorow calls this degradation of quality enshittification and I think it’s a perfect word.

On the scene these days are ginormous computer programs called LLMs or Large Language Models. ChatGPT is an example of such a thing. All this stuff gets lumped under the umbrella term AI.

LLMs are fed all the data they can handle. ChatGPT is so voracious there’s talk it will run out of material to consume in a few years. Everything produced by all of us will some day be absorbed by these machines and reduced to impersonal bits.

I love a classic BLT. Bacon. Lettuce. Tomato. Toasted bread, some mustard and mayo. Yumm. But put it in a blender and turn it into a BLT Smoothie? Yeeucch.

That’s what our friends over at AI, Inc. want. They think chatbots will do a better job of managing all that information out there. And that is certainly possible if all we care about is INFORMATION. You add SEO, that, is “optimization” to LLMs, and you’ll get LLMOs. These unholy constructs will hoover up all the information in the world and customize it into any number of flavored potions. As Schneier says:

If you want to know about climate change, or immigration policy or any other contested issue, there are people, corporations, and lobby groups with strong vested interests in shaping what you believe. They’ll hire LLMOs to ensure that LLM outputs present their preferred slant, their handpicked facts, their favored conclusions.

The internet was like a flea market in the early days. Then it evolved to more like a suburban mall and soon it will be more like a cable-TV subscription. Lots of channels but not much choice. Search engines, in the early days, made it possible for people to connect with other people. Now we have AI-synthesized answers that cut people out of the equation.

That makes the internet a sterile place. Perhaps people will discover what they are missing and begin to demand (and create) an alternative.

The ancients were able to predict eclipses. That’s because they aren’t random. Rather, they are periodic. They occur in cycles.

The current eclipse is part of Saros Series 139. A saros is 6585.3 days long which is 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours. Eclipses separated by one saros have a similar geometry. A series will typically last 12 to 13 centuries and contain 70 to 80 eclipses. This particular series began on May 17th in 1501 and will end on July 3rd in 2753. Saros Series 139 is 1262.11 years long.

Saros was a Greek word chosen by Edmund Halley to represent 222 lunar months (another way to express 6585.3 days).

Here at home it was just a wee bite. You had to travel to see the total eclipse. I hope the eclipse-chasers got to experience totality, wherever they were.

Otherwise known as “five hundred billion” dollars or $500,000,000,000. Does calling it “half a trillion” make it seem like more?

Regardless, it is a lot of money. For comparison, California’s annual state budget is about three hundred billion dollars ($300,000,000,000).

The folks over at Planet Tracker have this piece about the consequences of seafloor mining. I’ve written about this stuff before. I stumbled here because I read the article Deep Sea Mining could cost $500 billion in lost value study says on mining.com (a good site for those interested in natural resources).

If you can’t grow it then you have to mine it. We’ve all seen what mining does to terrestrial landscapes. Can you imagine what it would do to the seafloor?

Environmental damage and ecological disruption are costly. In actual dollars. If capitalism is to be dissuaded from its lust for short-term profits—which results in the degradation of the quality of life for all—it has to be dissuaded on its own terms. Making a mess has to be bad for business. It has to hurt the bottom line. Only then will our corporate overlords take the time to do things properly.

We don’t have to mine the seafloor. We can get what we need up here. And we can reduce, reuse, and recycle. The innovations we develop to exploit an exotic new landscape like the seafloor could just as well be used topside, too. I say we need to tackle the e-waste problem. Imagine the heaping piles of old TVs, computers, and phones we’ve thrown away in just the last few years. It’s a treasure trove. An unexploited resource. Let’s climb that mountain instead of the ones on bottom of the ocean.

Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the existence of Gallium when he created his first periodic table. He expected to find an element similar to aluminum (and in the same column, group 13). Mendeleev called the element eka-aluminum, meaning “beyond” aluminum, and his prediction was confirmed by a French scientist in 1875. Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran named the new metal after his native country (Gallia is Latin for France).

Gallium is surprisingly abundant in the earth’s crust but it is too reactive to exist in its native state and it forms no significant minerals by itself. It is obtained as a by-product from the processing of aluminum and zinc ores. China and Russia have the largest reserves.

Only a few hundred tonnes of gallium are produced worldwide but it is nonetheless an essential material in the semiconductor industry. Gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, and indium gallium phosphide compounds are critical parts of integrated circuits, logic chips, diodes, pre-amplifiers, lasers, and solar cells.

If you had a chunk of gallium it would melt in your hand (much like chocolate!). Gallium has no known biological role but clearly we can’t live without the stuff.