NNadir
NNadir's Journal'bout time: 50% of the highest scientific awards given by the ASMS were to women.
American Society for Mass Spectrometry Congratulations to the 2023 Award RecipientsThat includes the highest award, the Fenn Award.
I've heard Stacy Malaker speak on mucin (highly glycosylated proteins). She comes out of the lab of a recent Nobel Laureate, Carolyn Bertozzi
JAMA Psychiatry: Mass Violence and the Complex Spectrum of Mental Illness and Mental Functioning
I sort of stumbled upon this article in my JAMA newsfeed: Knoll J 4th, Dietz P. Mass Violence and the Complex Spectrum of Mental Illness and Mental Functioning. JAMA Psychiatry. 2023 Feb 1;80(2):186-188
The spate of mass killings, almost all related to the ready availability of guns is disturbing, and I'm personally trying not to think so much about the perpetrators, thinking they get off on the fame, but rather the victims.
Nevertheless, I wonder how it is that people come to doing this.
Without much comment, some excerpts from the article:
With respect to definitions, researchers, journalists, and other commentators have inconsistent quantitative and qualitative thresholds for declaring an event mass violence, mass murder, or a mass shooting. These basic definitional issues determine whether such events appear more common (by including nonfatal injuries and fewer people who are killed) or less common (by only including fatal injuries and more people who are killed). There are also inconsistencies in whether writers are excluding events within families, gang-related events, events in certain settings, or events in which certain weapons were used. Such inconsistencies make it difficult to compare data among studies of similar, but not identical, events and may be strongly associated with the number of events encompassed, the characteristics and motives discerned for the violent actors, and the opportunity to detect root causes of the behavior.
To our knowledge, no study has ever found that most of those engaging in mass violence of any kind have a psychotic mental illness or are taking psychotropic medications,1,2 and this is what psychiatrists usually have in mind when they dismiss the assertion that mental illness or psychotropic medications are the primary cause of mass violence. For example, 2 publications based on a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) study of active shooters from 2000 to 20133,4 found that only 25% of perpetrators had ever received a diagnosis of mental illness and concluded, “[A]bsent specific evidence, careful consideration should be given to social and contextual factors that might interact with any mental health issue before concluding that an active shooting was ‘caused’ by mental illness. In short, declarations that all active shooters must simply be mentally ill are misleading and unhelpful.” Likewise, Hall et al1 reviewed available information regarding individuals involved in educational institution shootings per the FBI publications on active shooters from 2000 to 2017 and found that most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications and concluded that “by either the primary measure of documented psychotropic treatment at any time prior to the event, or the secondary measure of a successful NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity) defense, it does not appear that most school shooters had been prescribed psychotropic medications prior to the shooting or were negatively impacted by the medications.”
Psychiatrists, and particularly forensic psychiatrists, understand that acts of violence are often committed for reasons other than mental illness. During their training, forensic psychiatrists quickly learn what a mistake it is to assume a crime was associated with a mental illness simply because it was horrific, deviant, or bizarre. When a serial murderer is apprehended after sexually assaulting and killing a dozen people and keeping body parts in their home, it is impossible to argue that this is normal or rational behavior. Is their pattern of luring people into their home, binding them, torturing them, and retaining their body parts prima facie evidence of a serious mental illness? It would almost always be incorrect to assume so, but the pull is strong. It is more comforting to believe that a disease of the mind overtook them and caused these unspeakable acts. There is nothing reassuring about the notion that the individuals’ lives were less important to them than their own sexual gratification. However, to comfort themselves, the public wants to believe that outside forces cause unspeakable acts; hence, the legends of vampires and werewolves, the fascination with transformations of Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde and Dr Bruce Banner into the Hulk, and the impulse to assume that mass murder arises from mental illness...
...researchers have begun to investigate a higher-order classification system based on a spectrum, or dimensional approach, which is now receiving robust attention.6 There has been substantial research around dimensionality and mental illness, leading some to assert it may be superior for future scientific study.7,8 Dimensional approaches vary, but one approach aggregates psychiatric symptoms into 3 domains of psychopathology: (1) internalizing, (2) externalizing, and (3) psychotic experience. This tripartite dimensional approach has practical clinical use and research support...
... This approach may also help clarify misconceptions about the rate of psychosis in mass violence perpetrators, as well as which parts of the spectrum of mental functioning are most associated with perpetrators. For example, a testable hypothesis might be that most mass violence offenders are externalizing, given their personality structure, absence of clear psychotic symptoms, and inability to process intrapsychic conflicts in a prosocial manner. Several may have co-occurring externalizing/internalizing problems, while some may have psychosis. There is now a large body of research suggesting that internalizing and externalizing problems often co-occur.9 This externalizing spectrum hypothesis seems reasonable, given that there is now much evidence of an association between emotion dysregulation/impulsiveness, psychopathy, narcissism, and antisocial spectrum pathology and increased risk of violence.10 Approximately half (45.6%) of mass school shootings ended with the perpetrator's suicide...11
...Personality and personality disorder are concepts referring to the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of an individual that are consistent over time and contexts. The reason to be somewhat optimistic about studying mass violence in terms of the externalizing and internalizing personality dimensions is that such psychopathology might be observed and mitigated by early childhood and other treatment interventions. Personality can be partially viewed as an adaptation strategy that is associated in some degree with the environment and social changes. Can early interventions be made in children’s psychosocial environments that will produce more prosocial outcomes? Research already suggests that personality traits associated with empathy and attunement to others’ emotions are associated with an aversion to harming others and a tendency to benefit others.13 In contrast, personality styles associated with decreased empathy and emotional callousness are more likely to be associated with strained interpersonal relationships and various forms of psychopathology...
... In sum, psychiatry has struggled to clarify the type of mental turmoil that is associated with mass violence for the following reasons: (1) the behavior of most perpetrators does not appear to be associated with psychotic mental illness; (2) psychiatrists typically wish to protect vulnerable patient populations who are experiencing serious mental disorders, most of whom are nonviolent, from the stigma attached to mass violence; and (3) most in-depth analyses of mass violence offenders suggest that they function in the externalizing and internalizing personality disorder domains...
I don't know what to say about any of this, and am hardly competent to do so, but it struck me as interesting. I worried about this when my kids were in high school, particularly since there were some "edgy" kids there, and I still worry about it with a son still at a university.
It sucks.
At This Moment, West Denmark's Wind Turbines Are Running at Less Than 1% Capacity Utilization.
From the Electricity Map (Accessed 03/01/23, 7:48 Copenhagen time, 1:49 A US EST)
At 321 g CO2/kwh, they're "only" 221% higher (in "percent talk" ) than France's 145 g CO2/kwh, but less than Germany's 677 g CO2/kWh, Germany's carbon intensity being the second highest in Europe, being "only" 460% worse than France in "percent talk."
The Danes are burning biomass this morning because the wind isn't blowing. Biomass related air pollution is responsible for slightly less than half of the roughly 7 million air pollution deaths that occur each year. Biomass is described as "renewable energy."
Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).
Heckuva job!
Brexit Comes Home to Rot: Fruit and Vegetable Shortages Strike the UK.
Supermarket food shortages: Europeans mock UK shoppers with pictures of shelves full of fruit and vegetables.British supermarkets have been hit with shortages since the weekend due to adverse weather, transport problems and other factors, with Morrisons admitting to a lack of tomatoes and shoppers reporting difficulties sourcing fresh vegetables in other supermarkets.
Asda announced it will be limiting customers to a maximum of three items such as tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and broccoli in response to the problem.
Aldi confirmed it has also begun rationining fresh produce, a spokesperson.
Meanwhile, Morrisons will also start a ban of more than two items tomorrow, limiting purchases of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and peppers...
https://twitter.com/ianpwriter/status/1628109921429639170/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1628109921429639170%7Ctwgr%5Eed6b5a37f4a419bff40ac106c8f0a8b5fb93b4ee%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-4198738061068205497.ampproject.net%2F2302031721000%2Fframe.html
Hikes in the price of fertilizer because ammonia is made from hydrogen generated by reformation of natural gas, general hikes in energy costs and the failure of the "free market" Conservative government to consider subsidies to farmers has led to this result.
"Politicians arguing about how many children we would give safe passage to..."
For Christmas, I bought my wife and son, both of whom are into "class warfare," resentment of the entitled wealthy, although in truth we are ourselves indecently comfortable, tickets to see the play "Wuthering Heights" at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ.
Wise Children’s Wuthering Heights
We saw the play yesterday.
It turned out, my sarcasm connected with their rantings about inequality, which I share, but hardly at their level, that there was something in it for me.
It was one of the most spectacular and creative theater productions I've ever seen, unbelievably excellent, albeit in a stripped down, almost economical way. I mean everything was exceptional, even the spare set, and the use of the actors and actresses.
(The production would be illegal now in Tennessee, because one of the actresses plays both a woman and a boy in different parts of the play.)
I was so moved that I went to the website again today, where I came across an interview with the director and adaptor, Emma Rice.
Here it is, featuring the quote that titles the OP:
The playbill, which I read during the intermission, gave context to the origins of Bronte's character Heathcliff in the original novel (which I have not read; I no longer read novels). Apparently the novel is set at the dawn of the 19th century, when Liverpool was a center of the European slave trade, often with the United States, and where sometimes homeless people from the Middle East, India, and China, who had recruited or forced to work on ships and then been cast off in England, an original ethnic underworld of pain and suffering. Heathcliff is a small child abandoned in that world when he is discovered by a benefactor, and brought to Wuthering Heights, an estate.
Really, it was very moving, and the director, Emma Rice is one of those most remarkable creatures, a human being, a real human being, the kind of human being we should aspire to be.
I have never seen a bad performance at the McCarter, and I've seen many, but this, by far, was the best, and that's saying a lot.
Levelized SYSTEM costs of Electrical Energy.
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity Robert Idel, Energy, Volume 259, 2022, 124905, and refer to references therein.
Dr. Idel, out of Rice University, is an early career researcher in a field in which I only have very limited expertise.
Here's some of what I do know:
As we surge, uninterrupted, toward 450 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere at an accelerating rate, we hear all the time, as if it matters, that the "cost" of solar and wind energy keeps falling.
On the other hand, the showcase countries for so called "renewable energy," Denmark and Germany have respectively, the highest and second highest electricity prices in the OECD.
Nevertheless, their bourgeois conceit that the only thing that matters is money, and that the reason to embrace their eagerness to trash wilderness is all about price, actually has an "emperor's new clothes" aspect to it. The coal burning hellhole in Germany which used to fund Putin by being a gas burning hellhole, and the offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole in Denmark have expensive electricity.
It is alleged, with very little connection to reality, that solar and wind energy are "green," that they are clean, adequate and sustainable.
The more we hear this bit of benighted rhetoric, the faster the rate of degradation of the planetary atmosphere becomes. The rate of degradation, which, utilizing the weekly data from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, was about 1.5 ppm/year increases in January of 2000. In February of 2023, decades into hearing how wonderful solar and wind are, how "cheap" they are (even though they've been enormously expensive to build and produce very little energy), it is now around 2.4 ppm/year. There is nothing "green" in allowing climate change to accelerate. If one monitors the Electricity Map regularly, as I do, one would be hard pressed to find a case where the carbon intensity of German electricity is not at least 300% higher in percent talk, even when the wind is blowing, than that of nuclear powered France, even though even France made unfortunate, and thankfully tentative, steps to drink the German anti-nuke Koolaid and failed to maintain its nuclear plants as well as it should have done.
This is a fact. Facts matter.
It is pretty clear to me why that coal burning hellhole of Germany features the second highest cost of electricity in the OECD, after that offshore oil and drilling hellhole Denmark, something about which I was enlightened by reading the work of Charles Forsberg of MIT. (Dr. Forsberg is not, as I am, a firm opponent of solar and wind energy, but he is also a prolific writer on the environmental and economic benefits of nuclear energy.)
The reason is that there is a cost, a very high cost, and, I would argue, a huge and unacceptable environmental cost of the lack of reliability of solar and wind, in the latter case, a totally random and largely unpredictable long term ability to predict output, of the system in such a way that energy is produced when it is needed.
The big stupid band aid, put forth by people I personally find to be exceedingly stupid and contemptuous of environmental realities, here and elsewhere, is that energy storage will address the unreliability of solar and wind energy, generally by two very, very, very, very bad ideas, batteries and hydrogen, the latter even worse than the first, the first being environmentally and morally unacceptable already. This interminable bullshit has been going on for years; in reality, as the German environmental nightmare illustrates graphically, is that the backup for solar and wind is nothing more than the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels with the waste, including but hardly limited to carbon dioxide, dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere, killing it by degrees.
In general, we hear a lot of whining from anti-nukes about the cost of building nuclear plants, although they obviously and clearly have no inclination to consider the cost of climate change. Nor do they consider the fact that any nuclear plant constructed today is likely to be operating sixty years after all the wind turbines that have rendered vast areas of wilderness into greasy industrial parks will be landfill for sixty years when a nuclear plant built today will finally reach the end of its life, if, there is, in fact a true end of life for nuclear reactors. (Darlington and Pickering, in Canada are being refurbished, and the refurbishing on nuclear plants is rapidly becoming a "thing."
Thus the capital cost of wind junk should probably be tripled, since this unreliable junk is subject is not all that durable.
It is thus refreshing that people like Dr. Idel, and people he references in the paper under discussion, have begun to embrace the idea of "system costs," the economic cost of energy in a whole system.
One important thing he does not deign to address is the external costs of energy, the health and environmental costs of anti-nuke hellholes like Germany burning coal when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
After reviewing the "Renewable Energy is cheap" rhetoric one hears endlessly as the world burns, Dr. Idel in the introduction to his paper asks the question I have put in bold, the question never asked by "renewables will save us" advocates:
(Of course, the excuse, as obviated by California's recent plan to build 5 new gas power plants is that they're "temporary." "Temporary" power plants do not recover the money spent to build them; they are white elephants and thus waste money. But let's get serious, the plants aren't "temporary" at all. They are examples of the anti-nuke willingness to drive climate change because they have very stupid ideas about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which destroyed three nuclear reactors and also killed about 20,000 people with seawater, and very few, if any, people from radiation exposure. I never hear anti-nukes call for the phase out of coastal cities.)
Dr. Idel continues about hidden subsidies on so called "renewable energy:
The drive of his paper is to consider the economic (but again, not the environmental) implications of energy storage, the new fantasy band aid proposed now as we scrape 420 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to do a damned thing about climate change.
In this he considers the case of two electrical grid systems with large intermittent energy sources, so called "renewable energy," Texas and Germany.
He writes:
I added the bold. Again, the environmental costs are ignored in this statement; it only addresses the bourgeois conceits of anti-nuke "renewable energy will save us" types, money, which is fine I guess, for their purposes, because they clearly couldn't care less about climate change while they carry on stupidly about low level tritiated water being released at Fukushima or at Indian Point, implying alternately that this release will somehow kill the entire Pacific Ocean and/or wipe out New York City, largely because they have no experience with opening science books or scientific papers. Rather than do that, they'd rather invest time in screaming loudly about their radiation paranoia that is highly reminiscent, to my mind, of anti-vax mRNA injection paranoia. (The latter has not killed as many people as the former; it's not even close.)
In my biases, I don't necessarily consider the "social sciences" to be the equivalent of physical sciences. They are poor at making predictions in general, but I will give credit to the "science" of economics for having some mathematical underpinnings.
Dr. Idel throws a considerable number of equations in his analysis, none of which I'm going to study in any detail. For flavor, some are below as graphics objects:
After this he comes to defining LSCOE, the levelized system costs of energy:
After running through his calculations, Dr. Idel produces the following table of system costs, which should reflect or follow costs at the outlet, and at least explains why Germany and Denmark with all their putative "cheap" so called "renewable energy" have such high prices for electricity:
Now, let's be clear about what is not in these numbers. While it may seem that dangerous natural gas, both in the combined cycle (NGCC) and combustion turbine (NGCT) are the "cheapest" sources of energy, the cost of climate change is not included, nor is the cost of permanently damaged ground water supplies connected with fracking (nor - gasp - the NORM, naturally occurring radioactive materials, released by fracking). Both the most serious costs, climate change and groundwater are being dumped on all future generations in an expression of our dismissive contempt for them. This is a signature of antinukes whining about costs, dismissive contempt for future generations, as every nuclear plant built is a gift to future generations. (The Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant was a gift to my generation by my father's generation; poorly appreciated by my heads up the ass generation, but a gift all the same.)
In the case of Germany, the moral and economic cost of funding Vladimir Putin by purchasing gas from Russia, this so they could pretend to be "green," now playing out in vast destruction of human lives and infrastructure in Ukraine, is also not included.
Also not included in these costs are the costs of mining to support the unsupportable so called "renewable energy will save us" fantasies. The mass intensity of so called "renewable energy" is finally rising to the top of considerations, albeit probably way too late.
Nor does it seem to recognize that the capital costs for solar and wind energy will need to be "reinvested" - if "invest" is the right term to evoke this junk - roughly three times in the lifetime of a nuclear plant. Nor does in include the cost of cleaning up the solar and wind industrial parks every 20 to 25 years, hauling away all of that shit and finding a way to deal with it.
Nor is the cost of changes to land use of so called "renewable energy" included. When giggling fools post pictures of vast wind plants, or huge areas of land covered by solar cells, expecting them to elicit admiration, I personally want to gag with nausea.
The fact is this: In this country, my generation and the generation immediately following were allowed, again with absolute contempt for the future, to shut perfectly operable nuclear power plants on the theory that it was OK to burn dangerous natural gas so people could pretend that solar energy and wind energy were really fueling their stupid electric cars, whereas they were funding the destruction of future generations.
Dispatchable energy systems according to Dr. Idel are the cheapest in terms of dollars and cents paid at the outlet, but only one is affordable if one considers the costs to the future of humanity and the planet. It's nuclear energy. All the dumbells hyping hydrogen and whining about tritium in the Hudson River or the Pacific ocean, all the coal, oil and gas burned to run computers to whine about Fukushima or Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, all the soothsaying about batteries, do not change this fact.
Facts matter.
Nevertheless, we have yet to change our minds.
These types of calculations are not new, but one might hope that they will in the future garner more attention than they have.
Indeed, there are German researchers who have advanced this fact.
One of the references in Dr. Idel's paper is this one:
Falko Ueckerdt, Lion Hirth, Gunnar Luderer, Ottmar Edenhofer, System LCOE: What are the costs of variable renewables?, Energy, Volume 63, 2013, Pages 61-75.
It was written by researchers at German institutions, three of which were institutes for studying climate, one from a power company.
I especially liked this graphic in that paper:
The caption:
This graphic suggests the point of which I first became aware while reading the work of Dr. Charles Forsberg at MIT. Yet another subsidy for so called "renewable energy" is those moments, albeit rare as they are, when so called "renewable energy" drives the wholesale price of electricity toward and even under zero, the moments of overproduction where electricity essentially becomes worthless. When this happens the overall system costs are increased, since all of the existing infrastructure, not only reliable plants on which we all depend to keep our refrigerators running and our air conditioning or heaters running and the lights on, but also transmission lines, distribution hubs and salaries, still have to pay O&M costs despite their product being worthless. Over the long term, this raises prices.
Despite these realities, we have yet to change our course, but continue to operate on autopilot, believing the lies we tell ourselves for which we will ultimately be remembered.
As I often say: History will not forgive us; nor should it.
Have a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
An Oak Ridge Video of 3D Printing Parts for Nuclear Reactors.
TVA Installs 3D Printed Parts.My son is involved in characterization of these types of products (TEM and SEM) in his first year of his Ph.D. program.
The future ain't dead yet!
Browns Ferry 2 Nuclear Reactor, Set a Record for Reliable Operation With 3D Printed Parts.
The Brown's Ferry #2 Nuclear Reactor is a 1,259 MWe Nuclear Reactor in Athens, Alabama run by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was licensed to operate in 1976; its current license runs to 2034; TVA has requested a 20 year extension, allowing it to run until 2054.
The reactor was shut between 1986 and returned to service in 1991.
It is the first US reactor to operate with printed parts; it recently operated for 665 days at full power, producing 20 billion kWh of electricity (72 Petajoules of electrical energy). This means that the average continuous power of the reactor was 1,253 MW. At the reactor is rated at 1259 MWe, this suggests that the capacity utilization was 99.53%
The Electricity Map rates coal at 1152 g CO2/kwh. Other figures I've seen in the literature are in this general area. If, as the Germans have done, TVA had replaced this nuclear plant with coal powered generation, about 23,000,000 tons of CO2, not to mention other wastes, including carcinogenic polynuclear carbon compounds and heavy metals, would have been released to the environment.
An ANS news report is here: TVA unit begins outage after record run.
An excerpt of the brief article:
According to the utility, the unit established a new record for itself with 665 days of continuous operation, producing more than 20 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.
“A breaker-to-breaker run is a prize every nuclear professional wants to claim and is a testament to both the hard work and commitment of Browns Ferry employees and TVA’s continued investment to keep our plants running safely and reliably,” site vice president Manu Sivaraman said. “With new fuel, equipment upgrades, priority maintenance, inspections, and testing, outages like this one thoroughly prepare our units for long operational runs, safely generating the carbon-free energy needed by homes and businesses throughout the Tennessee Valley.”
The outage: To prepare for the next two years of power generation at Browns Ferry-2, the outage team will perform more than 10,800 work activities, including the replacement of the unit’s 414,000-pound main generator rotor and the installation of 328 fuel assemblies, TVA said. More than 800 contactors and shared-resource employees from TVA’s other nuclear plants will assist in completing the outage, the utility added.
Browns Ferry-2’s most recent outage, in March 2021, included the largest scope of turbine deck work ever performed at the unit, as well as the loading of four new 3D-printed fuel assembly brackets. Those brackets, manufactured at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, became the first of their kind to be loaded into a commercial reactor...
The reactor has operated on "wastes" isolated from weapons plants in the past, some of which contained U-236, an isotope not found in natural uranium. This suggests that some of the used fuel contains neptunium, a valuable element which should prove extremely useful in future fuel cycles, as it is the precursor to plutonium-238.
An Interesting Discussion on the Origins of Chemical Chirality via the Asymmetry of the Weak...
...Nuclear Force.
Chirality is the property most easily demonstrable by one's hands. If one puts one's hands together as people who pray do, one can see that they are mirror images of one another, more or less, but they cannot be superimposed upon one another.
This property is found in most of the molecules responsible for biology, i.e. molecular biology.
In a laboratory if one wishes to make a chiral molecule, one must put chiral molecules somewhere in the reaction mixture; a very common approach is to use chiral catalysts. If one does not include chirality in the reaction mixture, one will get a racemic mixture, an exact 50:50 mixture of both "hands."
Living systems are quite capable of producing chiral molecules, usually catalyzed by enzymes, all of which are chiral since they are made of amino acids. Of the 20 "normal" amino acids, 19 are chiral; one, glycine, the simplest amino acid, is not.
One of the great mysteries in science is the question of how chirality first arose. It is known from things like the Murchinson meteorite that chirality exists in space, so living systems are not required to produce it.
I've been pondering this question most of my adult life; but I do not expect an absolutely definitive mechanism to be shown in my life time. On the other hand, maybe some progress is being made.
There is one chiral nuclear reaction, associated with the weak nuclear force, the force responsible for beta decay. It has always seemed to me that this might be a key.
I came across a paper today, directed by a news feed, that touches on the subject in support of the thesis that asymmetric nuclear decay is responsible for the origins of chirality.
It's this one: Origin of Chirality in the Molecules of Life, J. A. Cowan and R. J. Furnstahl, ACS Earth and Space Chemistry 2022 6 (11), 2575-2581.
The introduction to the paper:
Nature often demonstrates a preference for specific symmetries, at least at the most fundamental level of molecular symmetry reflected by the building blocks of life (D-isomers for nucleic acids and L-isomers for amino acids). (1) Once an inherent preference for one chiral form over another has been established, it is not difficult to understand, from the chemical principles of chiral induction and diastereomeric selection, how that chirality is propagated to downstream molecular products (including lipids and other important metabolites) resulting from complex biosynthetic pathways, (3?6) often involving natural protein- or RNA-based catalysts with their own enantiomeric preferences. Consequently, the more fundamental question can be stated as, “how did an intrinsic preference for one chiral form initially arise?”.
Prior work on this problem has been well detailed by Guijarro and Yus, (1) which provides a valuable overview of the primary mechanisms by which chirality in life molecules has been proposed. Both spontaneous symmetry breaking during crystallization (7) and seeding mechanisms from extraterrestrial meteorites and comets (8?10) are possible pathways for initiation of chiral selectivity, but in all of these cases, prior establishment of a specific enantiomeric form is required. Over the past decade, the major research emphasis has focused on the mechanisms and pathways that could promote amplification or selection of selected enantiomers by kinetic criteria. (11?17) The molecules under investigation include both natural biomolecules, (15,18) especially amino acids, and regular organic compounds. (4,6,12,13,16,19?22)
Experimentally, there are a number of principle kinetic factors that sustain autocatalytic generation of a selected enantiomer. (23?26) Primarily, these depend on the difference in activation energies for a reaction that proceeds through a nominal “diastereomeric” transition state to produce one or other of the two possible enantiomeric products (Figure S4). In contrast to normal mechanisms of chiral induction, where a chiral catalyst leads to the “diastereomeric” transition state, in this case, it is the influence of the intrinsically chiral weak nuclear force that distinguishes the two possible transition states and enantiomeric preference...
Unfortunately, I'm very stressed for time, and can't spend a lot of time going over the paper, but apparently - I didn't know this - the presence of heavy elements can enhance energy differences in the transition states between prochiral intermediates, and the authors propose that an interaction with asymmetric radiation in reactions catalyzed by divalent group 2 elements, Ca+2, Sr+2, and Ba+2, which are known catalysts in a class of reactions known as aldol condensations.
Another brief excerpt:
These enhancements notwithstanding, the aim of this work was to re-establish the relevance of parity violation as a likely mechanism for the origin of molecular chirality in the molecules of life. Such a view has been criticized based on the magnitude of the effect and the lack of viable mechanisms for chiral discrimination to be manifested. (31,60) In this paper, we have addressed both of these concerns and demonstrated that a combination of metal-promoted catalysis and viable chemical pathways can readily account for chiral selectivity in the context of the RNA world model over evolutionary time frames.
Although Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, it is unreasonable to take that entire time frame over which to establish a chiral preference. Estimates of when life first appeared on earth vary, but evidence suggests that the appearance of simple bacteria most likely occurred ?3.5–4.0 billion years ago, providing a time window of 0.5–1.0 billion years for chirality to emerge in the fundamental building blocks of life. Given the aforementioned kinetic criteria and time frames, an energy difference exceeding 10–19 au is desirable. Although this places Ca2+ at the edge of the limit for a chirality-selecting catalytic cofactor, both Sr2+ and Ba2+ lie very much within the realm of feasibility. Because conservative estimates have been used in all calculations, and considering the sensitivity of chiral selectivity to rate constants and especially calculations of ?EPNC, it would be unwise to completely discount a possible role of Ca2+ in chiral discrimination.
Aldol reactions involving formaldehyde, a common compound in the universe, give rise to simple sugars and it is sugars that are responsible for the chirality of RNA. RNA is thought by many researchers to be the primordial molecule, the "RNA World" thesis, since it was discovered that RNA not only is an information molecule, but it also can play a role in catalysis.
Interesting, I think.
Have a happy Friday.
Contracts Signed With Westinghouse for Poland's First Nuclear Plant
Poland generally has the worst carbon intensity for electricity in Europe, worse even than antinuke heaven, Germany, both nations being highly dependent on coal whenever they wait for the wind to blow.
As of this writing 02/23/23 8:47 Warsaw time (2:51AM EST US), the carbon intensity of Poland is 789 g CO2/kwh, the worst in Europe, followed by that of Germany 710 g CO2/kwh, the second worst in Europe.
Electricity Map, Poland
The two countries are moving in opposite directions in terms of climate change. Germany has nearly completed its abandonment, driven by fear and ignorance, of clean nuclear energy, replacing it with coal since the Putin controlled Russians have behaved badly with respect to using all the money Germany sent them to run on gas in this century. (As is the case with most antinuke rhetoric and practice, Germany announced that its antinuke policies would be "green," but as is usual, this is just a front for increasing reliance on dangerous fossil fuels to drive climate change.)
On the other hand, there has been much talk in Poland about refitting Polish coal powered plants to run on nuclear powered steam generators. Although this is certainly conceivable, and design work is being initiated both in Poland and the US (by Holtec), whether this will happen remains speculative at best.
Poland also plans to build traditional large light water reactors, and has signed a contract initiating work on the first.
Contract signed for pre-design work for first Polish plant
An excerpt:
In November 2022, the Polish government selected Westinghouse for the country's first nuclear power plant, as it sets out on an ambitious plan to embrace nuclear energy in the country.
The following month, the companies signed an agreement setting out next steps, including site-layout, licensing and permitting support, engineering services contracts and procurement and construction planning services.
PEJ and Westinghouse have now signed a Bridge Contract, which covers works in ten main areas, including: development of a detailed delivery model; preparation of a security assessment and a quality programme; and also identification of potential suppliers with a focus on Polish companies. Westinghouse will prepare a list of requirements necessary for the execution of the investment, including adjusting the AP1000 technology to meet all the local regulations. The contract also assumes the preparation of the principles of external financing for the project.
"The signed contract makes it possible to commence the first works preceding the design before the conclusion of the very time-consuming process of agreeing the execution contract," PEJ said. "This type of solution is a result of lessons learned from other nuclear projects around the world. This will makes it possible for the pace and schedule of activities to be maintained."
"The contract that we are signing is another important milestone of our investment," said PEJ President Tomasz Stępień. "Thanks to the contract, together with our American partner, we can already start the first engineering works on the power plant, which will be built in Pomerania."
Westinghouse President and CEO Patrick Fragman added: "Today's agreement is a major step by PEJ that brings Poland closer to implementing the most advanced nuclear technology to ensure energy security and a stable supply of emission-free and affordable electricity. We are all working hard to successively work out more agreements that are so important for Poland and for Poles."
In September 2021, it was announced that six large pressurised water reactors with a combined installed capacity of 6-9 GWe could be built by 2040 as part of Poland's plan to reduce its reliance on coal...
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