Editor's pick: Storing carbon dioxide under the sea
Michael Marshall asks whether we can store carbon forever in a deep-sea trench (23 September, p 9). The International Energy Agency's Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme looked into this in the 1990s and its work is summarised in the 2002 report . This concluded: “Global ocean modelling studies have predicted that CO2, injected into the ocean at selected locations and at depths greater than 1000 metres, will be isolated from the atmosphere for up to 1000 years. This would contribute to the alleviation of the expected peak in atmospheric CO2 concentrations resulting from the continuing use of fossil fuels.”
The question was also extensively covered in chapter 6 of the 2005 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, , which said: “Deep ocean storage could help reduce the impact of CO2 emissions on surface ocean biology but at the expense of effects on deep-ocean biology.”
Both reports mention interesting questions in international law.
How electric vehicles could have been
Mick Hamer recalls the battery-powered electric buses on London's streets a century ago (9 September, p 35). When their batteries ran low, they went to a station where they could swap the depleted batteries for charged ones. Electric cars were also around, but had a short range.
Can a similar scheme not be adopted for electric cars now? Some standardisation would be needed. Mechanically, batteries have to fit and electrically, their charging method has to be the same. These are minor details…
First class post
We mess about on social media to fill a void, smoking, trying to connect in <140 characte…
the food waster about the health impact of feeling lonely being equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (22 July, p 30)
How electric vehicles could have been
I was taken aback by Hamer’s report of electric buses. I have spent most of my life thinking electric transport was a joke. Now I wonder where it would be today if the money spent on oil exploration and developing internal combustion engines had gone on battery development.
By now would we have had electric transport that surpasses current systems? How much was battery technology constrained by scientific knowledge and how much of a part did oil interests play? How angry should we be?
The real, grim criteria for execution drugs
So executioners in Florida experiment on condemned prisoners with untried cocktails of drugs because pharmaceutical companies deny them their tried and trusted ingredients (2 September, p 4). Presumably they ignore the reliable and readily available alternative, morphine, for fear that the condemned prisoner's last moments might be pleasurable.
The complex causes of forest fires
Mika McKinnon says the forest industry in Canada has “transformed native woodland into denser, more homogeneous stands of trees by suppressing fires and replanting” (19 August, p 12). It isn't just the timber industry that wants fires suppressed, but pretty much everyone who lives in the paths of wildfires or whose power lines, roads or dams are at risk – hence current efforts to do so.
In terms of the lodgepole pine, though, bark beetles prefer old trees. They are old because they didn't burn up in forest fires. The trees currently impacted by the beetle are too old to have been planted by the timber industry.
Trees in parts of the US with the same kinds of lodgepole forests – those with no active timber management – have similarly been killed by bark beetles. In Canada and northern parts of the US, there is a climate change component to the beetles' success.
The solution is to introduce more prescribed fire into the landscape, but that comes with its own problems.
The editor writes:
• Bark beetles are causing problems for forests across North America, exacerbated by climate change. But British Columbia's vast, homogenous forests of lodgepole present a distinct challenge, with the beetle outbreak creating a massive, province-wide stockpile of dead, dry trees that feed wildfires. And surveys show these beetles are attacking and killing much younger planted trees too.
Searching for 'dark matter' life for Mars
I read with interest your article on the detection of life's “dark matter” (16 September, p 6). I wonder whether anyone has done a similar search for the DNA of soil microorganisms in cold climates, in places such as Antarctica, Iceland and Svalbard?
With climate change, these species may disappear. But they could be very important as a part of a programme to terraform Mars for human habitation.
Horror at being trapped in a paralysed body
Julia Brown's report of the efforts of neuroscientist Adrian Owen to detect cognition in people in vegetative states alarms me (16 September, p 44).
The most feared punishment in the Moreton Bay penal settlement on (off what is now Brisbane) wasn't a beating or even hanging – but sensory deprivation. Convicts were held in a small, underground cell with a piece of sugar cane tied in their mouth. There was no light or sound. If they uttered a noise in the hot, humid cell, their sentence was extended.
It is said that almost all were rendered insane after a few days and the terror in their eyes was a deterrent to other inmates. Similar feelings are described by patients who become aware while paralysed during surgery.
Were I to end up trapped in a paralysed body, unawareness would be a blessing. The insight that there are thousands of people in a “vegetative” state who are actually aware is not at all comforting.
The editor writes:
• People in vegetative states aren't entirely sensorily deprived. And at least one study found that most people in a locked-in state – who can voluntarily blink their eyes, so are known to be aware – are happy (5 March 2011, p 14).
Can we be sure we've seen evolution in action?
You report that a study by Joseph Pickrell's group on genes related to Alzheimer's disease and smoking suggests humans are still evolving (9 September, p 11). But can we be sure that the effect measured is actually a decrease in gene frequency at birth, and hence evidence of evolution?
A variant of the CHRNA3 gene is linked to excessive smoking rates. But heavy smoking is known to cause premature deaths, many of which must be among those in their 60s and 70s.
It seems plausible that the increased death rate from excessive smoking would produce at least a 1 per cent drop in the number of people between age 60 and age 80 who have the variant and survive to be detected.
This study didn't look at people under 40. A more conclusive one would compare the frequency of the gene variant in those aged 5 and those aged 25.
Salt may pose dangers to surprising groups
Anthony Warner assures us that the conventional advice to limit salt intake to 6 grams a day is still valid (23 September, p 24). But 快猫短视频 has told us of a study involving 130,000 people that found that consuming less than about 7.5 grams a day was linked to higher mortality (28 May 2016, p 7). It found that high salt intake was only harmful for those with hypertension (The Lancet, ). This certainly goes against the conventional wisdom.
We corrected the salt intake below which deleterious effects were observed.
Precision going to waste on household food
Alongside your article on real clean food, you say that 112.6 kilograms of household food per person is wasted each year in the UK (23 September, p 35). That is an incredibly precise figure: 308.5 grams per day (except in leap years). Do the two of us in our household throw away more than 600 grams of food each day? No way.
We aren't in the UK. Does this make a difference?
It's worth exploring the benefits of vitamins
I read with interest the report that taking very high doses of vitamin C slows the progression of leukaemia in mice (26 August, p 18). Fifteen years ago, part of my treatment for acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL) was a very high dose of all-trans retinoic acid. As I understand it, this is a metabolite of vitamin A and causes APL cells to differentiate and die.
I wonder whether it is worthwhile considering a possible role for other vitamins in cancer therapy and whether combinations of different vitamins may be more effective than high doses of single ones?
That sounds fishy – is sonic computing a thing?
You claim that although sound waves are slower than light, they are “still faster than traditional electronics” (23 September, p 7). Does this mean that investment to date on circuit integration has been for nothing? Should we have been listening instead of micro-sizing all along?
The editor writes:
• We could have put that better. The point of the research was to use sound waves to slow down data to make computer processing more effective.
For the record
• The observation that blockchain-based identity would preserve forever typos made when you were born came from privacy analyst of consultants Constellation Research (30 September, p 10).