Dear Einstein, Do Scientists Pray?

'Dear Einstein, Do Scientists Pray?' Asks Sixth Grader -- See His Amazing Response

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

German-born mathematician and physicist Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) outside his home at Princeton, New Jersey. | Ernst Haas via Getty Images

 

                            

"Do scientists pray?"

That's the question that occupied the thoughts of a sixth-grade Sunday school class at The Riverside Church, and who better to pose it to than one of the best scientific minds of our time, Albert Einstein?
A young girl named Phyllis penned a polite and inquisitive note to the great physicist, and she was probably surprised to receive a considerate reply. The exchange was published in the book "Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children," edited by Alice Calaprice.
She wrote:

January 19, 1936
My dear Dr. Einstein,  

We have brought up the question: Do scientists pray? in our Sunday school class. It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion. We are writing to scientists and other important men to try and have our own question answered.
We will feel greatly honored if you will answer our question: Do scientists pray, and what do they pray for? 

We are in the sixth grade, Miss Ellis's class.
Respectfully yours,
Phyllis

He replied a mere five days later, sharing with her his thoughts on faith and science:

January 24, 1936Dear Phyllis,  

I will attempt to reply to your question as simply as I can. Here is my answer: 

Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish. 

However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.  

But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive. 

With cordial greetings,
your A. Einstein

While the letter doesn't reveal much about Einstein's own personal views on religion, he brilliantly manages to capture the the sublime sense of wonder that science can evoke in a way that it's possible to describe as "religious."

Josh Jones of Open Culture commented, "I think it’s a moving exchange between two people who couldn’t be further apart in their understanding of the world, but who just may have found some small common ground in considering each other’s positions for a moment."

Fundamental laws - Astronomical reach

Posted Jan 31, 2014By Catherine Zandonella, Office of the Dean for Research

Jeremiah Ostriker directs his efforts toward theories of dark matter and dark energy, galaxy formation, and other fundamental questions. He served as provost of Princeton University from 1995 to 2001. His recent book is Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe (with science writer Simon Mitton, Princeton University Press, 2013). Photo by Denise Applewhite

 

We live in a world of very small things (atoms) and very large things (stars, galaxies). How can the same laws of nature describe such different objects? Two people who have given the matter some thought are Adam Burrows and Jeremiah Ostriker, both professors of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University.

Their new paper, "Astronomical reach of fundamental physics," published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explains how fundamental physical laws can describe objects that are as small as an atom or as massive as a galaxy. This exercise illustrates the unifying power of physics and the profound connections between the small and the large in the cosmos we inhabit. The fundamental laws of nature, the researchers say, have amazing consequences.

Professors Ostriker and Burrows spoke with interviewer Catherine Zandonella of the Office of the Dean for Research at Princeton University.

 

List to the interview in this podcast or read the transcript below.

Download the podcast (.mp3) for later listening.

 

What made you decide to look at the astronomical reach of fundamental physics?

Adam Burrows' interests range from the theory of supernova explosions to the atmospheres of extra solar planets, brown dwarfs, and high-energy astrophysics. (Photo by Keren Fedida)

 

Adam Burrows: One of the things you notice when you are doing general physics is that things are connected in ways that people don't always recognize. You study quantum mechanics or relativity; you are focused on various aspects of the small or the fast, etc.

But when you do astrophysics, you look at these things fairly broadly, and you incorporate the disparate realms of physics that you find in the laboratory, and apply it, in as many ways as you can, in the large.

 

What you find is that those things involved with the very small — such as quantum mechanics and atoms and molecules and nuclei — and those that deal with the very large things, and even those with which we are familiar, having to do with gravity and the gravitational attractions, when combined together, actually can inform just about everything in the Universe.

 

This particular paper was motivated by many things, but one thing at least in my mind was to bring together the simple arguments that show that there's a unity to science, and that the things that the people in the physics department might study — whether involved with Planck's constant or the speed of light, or the charge of the electron, things that involve fairly small objects — actually can explain in some detail the largest things in the Universe: stars in particular, but also galaxies, clusters of galaxies.

 

Life itself in principle can be explained in simpler terms, and it is that simplicity that underlies the complexity around us that we wanted to articulate as best we could.

 

Jeremiah Ostriker: I agree with all of that but would give quite a different answer.

If you take books that were written in the first half of the 20^th century, about science, they often gave back-of the envelope arguments — simple arguments to explain how many atoms there were in a star, how many atoms there would be in the Universe. And people were used to thinking in very simple order-of-magnitude ways, and that informed physics, and that informed science. (Enrico) Fermi was famous for asking questions of his students, so they could give really simple answers.

It has gone out of fashion. Right now the students think that the answers only come out of gigantic calculations on supercomputers.

 

The details may come from that, but the essential elements have to be simple. All masses have to be related to one other: they have to be so many protons, or so many electrons.

And so we thought it would be useful to go over again the early work that people have done on how you can understand things in a very, very simple way, and also to update it with new things that have been discovered.

 

So, why are most galaxies between here and here, there are none bigger than this, and none smaller than that? There must be some good reason for that, and if you think about it, there are good reasons for it.

 

Burrows: I like that answer, too.

 

What made the two of you decide to look at this together?

Ostriker: We have both done calculations in the past. I'm not sure either of us has published them.

 

Burrows: No, that is true.

 

Ostriker: So we talked about it, and then we thought it would be fun to write a paper together.

Burrows:  These sorts of questions having to do with astronomical objects and the basic physical underpinnings can be addressed, and there is a whole tradition of making this connection.

And in this paper we wanted to bring together many of these arguments, update them, and provide them to the cognizant audience that might be interested in them. In fact, we found quite a bit of interest.

 

Ostriker: It is interesting that stars can only exist in a certain range. They cannot be less than this or more than that. Planets, ditto: if you make a planet bigger it starts to burn and becomes a star — it is not a planet anymore. If you take a galaxy and try to make it bigger, it becomes a cluster of galaxies, not a galaxy. If you try to make it smaller than that, it seems to blow itself apart.

 

To understand why things are as they are, is what the Greeks understood as science and what we still do, and to bring these arguments together seemed valuable.

 

What does it tell us about what the Universe is? What reality is? What we are?

Burrows: One of the things that it tells us is that in fact the Universe is quantifiable. There are natural laws that apply in the small and the large. There is a detailed understanding of the mechanism of the Universe.

 

That sounds a little grand, but everywhere we look we can explain with physical principles. Whether they are applied to small objects or large objects, we can apply these principles to determine many of their properties and understand them in great detail.

 

The Universe and the world follow natural laws and are explainable and are quantifiable on all scales.

 

Ostriker: So, if you go out at night with your child or grandchild and you see the stars, and your child asks why are they that brightness? Why are they bright enough for us to see? Why aren't they so bright that they burn out our eyes? Why isn't the Earth 100 times bigger in size? These are the questions that bright kids might ask.

 

Burrows: I hope that bright kids will eventually read these articles, because there is a whole tradition of doing these simple studies to connect things. And it is "connection" that is the important word in all of this.

 

People sometimes have lost the connectivity of the various sciences. They stovepipe things into chemistry, and biology, and aspects of physics, but what an astrophysicist does and should attempt to do at all times is to integrate these different disciplines to solve the problems that he or she encounters.

 

And you can do so. You can bring the statistical physics and quantum mechanics and relativity and gravitational physics together, as the Universe does effortlessly, to explain things that wouldn't have otherwise been explained, but with simple arguments.

 

It is the simplicity of the basic arguments that underlie many of these objects that we wanted to articulate and communicate.

 

Ostriker: (Subrahmanyan) Chandrasekar, who was my teacher, said there is a maximum mass for a white dwarf, a type of star. Well, nobody has ever found one higher than that mass, so he was right, there is a simple argument for it.

 

So, in many of these cases, the understanding was sufficiently good that people were able to make predictions, and then, all the coincidences that the observer would notice, you could understand them.

And that's the magic.

 

Burrows: The "Chandrasekar mass" to which Jerry is referring can be derived in terms of Avogadro's number, which we associate with chemistry; Planck's constant, which we associate with quantum mechanics and the systematics of the small; the speed of light; and Newton's gravitational constant.

 

You bring these things together, you shake appropriately, and you can explain this particular phenomenon, and see that Chandrasekar was perfectly right. But you can see where it comes from, fundamentally, at the nexus of many of the great tributaries of physics over the last 100 years.

 

Do you think it will be possible to explain different aspects of life?

Ostriker: Biology has tended to be an observational science and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past but I hate to predict the future on that.

 

Burrows: It may well be that we have enough physical knowledge, but biology is so complex, and we have to unravel the complexity.

 

Think of all the progress that has been made on the genome and the connectome and all of the big data, bioinformatic revolutions that people hear about. This is an indication that people are starting to come to grips with the complexity that is inherent in life.

 

What do you think these findings mean for the average person?

Ostriker: If we had wanted to write this for high school students, I think we could have. You can do it all with high-school math. You need elementary math but not more.

 

Burrows: This is a way of reaching across what has been a divide, to encourage the view that science is an integrated and broad enterprise, and everyone contributes.

 

The paper, "Astronomical reach of fundamental physics," by Adam S. Burrows and Jeremiah P.

Ostriker, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition) on January 29, 2014. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1318003111. PubMed ID24477692.

The Wisdom of Socrates

Keep this in mind the next time you are about to repeat a rumour or spread gossip.

In ancient Greece (469 - 399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom.

One day an acquaintance ran up to him excitedly and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about Diogenes?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied, "Before you tell me I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test."

'Triple filter?" asked the acquaintance.

"That's right," Socrates continued, "Before you talk to me about Diogenes let's take a moment to filter what you're going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"

"No," the man said. "Actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates, "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about Diogenes something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates continued, "You want to tell me something about Diogenes that may be bad, even though you're not certain it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued: "You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter, the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about Diogenes going to be useful to me?

"No, not really."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "If what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even useful, why tell it to me or anyone at all?"

The man was bewildered and ashamed.

This is an example of why Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.

It also explains why Socrates never found out that Diogenes was shagging his wife.

More About Australia's Possible Endangering the Great Barrier Reef

Daniel Osterkamp via Getty Images

     

                            

SYDNEY (AP) — The government agency that oversees Australia's Great Barrier Reef on Friday approved a plan to dump vast swathes of sediment on the reef as part of a major coal port expansion — a decision that environmentalists say will endanger one of the world's most fragile ecosystems.

The federal government in December approved the expansion of the Abbot Point coal port in northern Queensland, which requires a massive dredging operation to make way for ships entering and exiting the port. About 3 million cubic meters (106 million cubic feet) of dredged mud will be dumped within the marine park under the plan.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt has vowed that "some of the strictest conditions in Australian history" will be in place to protect the reef from harm, including water quality measures and safeguards for the reef's plants and animals.

But outraged conservationists say the already fragile reef will be gravely threatened by the dredging, which will occur over a 184-hectare (455-acre) area[that is 0.7 squares miles, or a mere 0.0005% of the total Reef area]. Apart from the risk that the sediment will smother coral and seagrass, the increased shipping traffic will boost the risk of accidents, such as oil spills[I thought they were shipping coal which presents very little risk, even if there is an accident]and collisions with delicate coral beds, environment groups argue.

On Friday, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority — the government manager of the 345,400 square kilometer (133,360 square mile) protected marine zone — approved an application by the state-owned North Queensland Bulk Ports Corp. for a permit to dump the sediment within the marine park in a location that does not contain any coral or seagrass beds.

Bruce Elliot, general manager for the marine authority's biodiversity, conservation and sustainable use division, said in a statement that strict conditions would be placed on the sediment disposal, including a water quality monitoring plan that will remain in place five years after the dumping is complete.

"By granting this permit application with rigorous safeguards, we believe we are able to provide certainty to both the community and the proponent while seeking to ensure transparent and best practice environmental management of the project," Elliot said.

The ports corporation's CEO Brad Fish has argued that the sediment has been extensively tested for contaminants and was found to be clean.

"This is natural sand and seabed materials ... it's what's already there," Fish said in an interview last month. "We're just relocating it from one spot to another spot, in a like-per-like situation."

Rachel Campbell, spokeswoman for the ports corporation, said the group didn't anticipate the conditions would cause any delays to the dredging plans.

Australia is home to vast mineral deposits and a mining boom fueled by demand from China kept Australia's economy strong during the global financial crisis. Though the boom is now cooling as demand from China slows, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his conservative government have vowed to focus their efforts on reviving the industry.

In a report released in 2012, UNESCO expressed concern about development along the reef, including ports, and warned that the marine park was at risk of being listed as a World Heritage site in danger.

In response, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said his government would protect the environment — but not at the expense of the state's economy.

"We are in the coal business," he said at the time. "If you want decent hospitals, schools and police on the beat we all need to understand that."

Environmentalists were infuriated by Friday's decision, saying that the reef is already vulnerable, having lost huge amounts of coral in recent decades to storm damage and coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.

"We are devastated. I think any Australian or anyone around the world who cares about the future of the reef is also devastated by this decision," said Richard Leck, reef campaign leader for international conservation group WWF. "Exactly the wrong thing that you want to do when an ecosystem is suffering ... is introduce another major threat to it — and that's what the marine park authority has allowed to happen today."

Shale Gas: The Northeast Game Changer

Olga Gorstenko
posted 2 days ago K

 

Over the past few years, natural gas has taken the energy sector by storm in the United States. The newly discovered technology allowing for efficient extraction and production of shale gas has rejuvenated the energy sector in the U.S., putting the country in a leading position in the global energy market. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. natural gas production–which was 23.0 trillion cubic feet in 2011–is projected to surge by 44% to 33.1 trillion cubic feet by 2040. This substantial increase in U.S. domestic production is largely due to a massive rise in shale gas production in particular. The improved extraction technology of shale gas in recent years has enabled the U.S. to produce more natural gas than it consumes and to rely almost wholly upon its own domestic supply.

The Shale Evolution
Shale gas refers to natural gas that is trapped within shale formations–fine-grained sedimentary rocks which can be abundant sources of petroleum and natural gas. In the past, releasing this gas from shale was a problematic process—one that was both costly and technically challenging. However, new advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing over the past ten years have made it possible to access large volumes of shale gas. Previously, accessing this gas would have been economically infeasible. Now, U.S. shale gas production comprises about 40% of the country’s total dry production; moreover, shale gas production is projected to rise by a staggering 44% by 2040 (Figure 1).1

Figure 1: Changes in U.S. Dry Natural Gas Production | Data Source: EIA

Increased Northeast Production
From 2008 to 2013, natural gas production in the northeastern United States has increased more than five times, from 2.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) to 12.3 Bcf/d.2 This additional supply has supported greater use of natural gas in the Northeast (especially for commercial users like power generation stations) while reducing the net inflows of natural gas from other regions such as the Gulf of Mexico, the Midwest, and eastern Canada.
Figure 2: Northeast Production vs. Nat Gas inflow | Data Source: EIA

Although there are six regions that produce the majority of shale gas (plays) in the U.S. (Bakken, Niobrara, Permian, Marcellus, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville), the Marcellus region alone accounted for about 75% of natural gas production growth among all regions. In December 2013, the Marcellus region, located in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, is expected to provide 18% of total U.S. natural gas production.3Although vast shale plays in the Marcellus region have a major role in the rapid development of U.S. natural gas production, the improved efficiency of new wells has also played a significant role in increasing production volumes. Despite the declining number of drilling rigs in the region since 2012, production from wells has continued to grow. Marcellus wells have begun producing higher volumes due to the removal of resource constraints in the takeaway capacity as a result of the discovery of abundant shale plays, along with recent infrastructure upgrades in West Virginia and Pennsylvania (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Marcellus Rig Count vs. Production | Data Source: EIA

Since 2012, production growth in the northeast region has driven the future prices of natural gas at the Columbia Gas Transmission Appalachia hub below Louisiana’s Henry Hub prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). The graph below (created in ZEMA with data from NYMEX) shows the drop in futures prices for the Columbia Gas Transmission Appalachia hub in the Northeast region compared to Henry Hub futures. This drop is most notable since January 2012 (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Henry Hub Natural Gas vs. Columbia Gas Appalachia Futures | Data Source: NYMEX

Shale Gas and the Global Landscape
In June 2013, a joint EIA/Advanced Resources International study reported that China is the only country outside of North America that has registered commercially viable production of shale gas, although China’s commercially viable volumes contribute less than 1% of the total natural gas production of the country.4This means that the U.S. and Canada are the largest producers of natural gas from shale formations in the world. In 2012, U.S. shale gas production (25.7 Bcf/d) as a share of total natural gas production (65.7 Bcf/d) was 39.1%, whereas this number for Canada was 14.3% (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Shale gas as share of total dry natural gas production | Data Source: EIA

In 2012, Canadian shale gas production from two major shale plays—Horn River and Montney— averaged 2.0 Bcf/d, whereas the total Canadian production averaged 14.0 Bcf/d. Gross withdrawals from Horn River and Montney averaged above 2.5 Bcf/d in 2013, but higher production levels are currently constrained by limited pipeline infrastructure (Figure 6). Comparing the two major shale plays of Canada and the Marcellus region, the production from the Marcellus shale plays is expected to reach above 6.0 Bcf/d by the end of 2013 (Figure 3), whereas Canadian production is less than half of that level.
Figure 6: Gross Withdrawals from select shale plays in Canada (Jan 2005 - May 2013) | Data Source: EIA

Shale Gas Production and Environmental Concerns
The combustion of natural gas emits significantly lower levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and sulfur dioxide than does the combustion of coal or oil. Furthermore, natural gas combustion can emit less than half as much CO2 as coal combustion (per unit of electricity output) when used in efficient combined-cycle power plants. Hence, natural gas is cleaner fuel than coal or oil, although it is far from being environmentally friendly!

Natural gas is not wholly environmentally friendly for several reasons. First of all, a large amount of
water is needed for the fracturing of wells in shale gas production, which affects the availability of water in surrounding areas for other uses while negatively affecting native aquatic habitats. Secondly, water, toxic chemicals, and sand used in hydraulic fracturing fluids can contaminate surrounding areas if managed poorly—that is, if spilled or leaked due to human error, or discharged as a result of faulty well construction. Additionally, the water waste that occurs as a byproduct of fracturing requires a lot of care when treated and disposed, as it is extremely toxic. Finally, according to the United States’ Geological Survey, hydraulic fracturing occasionally causes small earthquakes that are not a safety concern. If wastewater from the fracturing process is injected into deep wells in the subsurface of the earth, though, larger earthquakes that are a safety threat may occur.

Final Words
Although shale gas production has entered a new phase in North America since 2010, the Northeastern United States has the largest growth in natural gas production due to its massive shale reservoirs. The Marcellus plays (in the Northeast between Pennsylvania and West Virginia) are awash with shale reserves that have changed market dynamics. Historically, natural gas prices in the Northeast were high because of the high demand of the region. However, increased production due to the abundant shale plays and infrastructure upgrades in the Marcellus region have pushed down domestic natural gas prices in the U.S. and have reduced imports from other regions. Plus, natural gas is a cleaner fuel to consume when compared to oil and coal, which makes it more desirable for power plant operators in the Northeast region. Typically, cold temperatures and a high population density in this region have exerted upward pressure on electricity prices; however, the boom in Northeastern natural gas resources may lower electricity prices in this region. Nevertheless, the hydro fracturing procedures used in the production of shale gas would not make shale gas less environmentally damaging than any other fossil fuel.

In brief, the Northeast is sitting on a wealth of shale gas reserves that have changed energy trading for the region and the U.S. as a whole. The shale gas boom has even caused oil producers in the Middle East to carefully follow the rise of shale gas production in the U.S., as the country’s appetite for petroleum could be seriously affected by this phenomenon. It is interesting to speculate as to whether the shale gas boom in the U.S. may be the silver bullet for the Land of the Free in its present economic situation!

At ZE, we collect, analyze, and integrate data from all global natural gas hubs. Our award winning software, the ZEMA Suite, is an end-to-end enterprise data management solution for energy, commodity, and financial market participants that helps organizations manage data efficiently.
Please contact us to suggest a topic for analysis or book a complimentary demo of the ZEMA Suite software.

-Ryan Arian, ZE Perspective

About That Tainted Seafood from Texas

•  Edit

I’ve been thinking about spring. It’s just been that kind of winter, described by a Wisconsin native in our local paper as “a cold spell,” which is definitely one way to talk about a week when the windchill dropped to -50 Fahrenheit.

When I look out the window – it’s just been that kind of winter – I try to look past the drifts of snow and see trees leafing into green, a bright chorus of birds in the branches, backyard cookouts, spring evenings with steamed shrimp and cold wine. One of harbingers of warm weather here in Madison is the arrival of trucks packed with seafood from Galveston, Texas. The fishermen park alongside a gourmet wine shop, hoist a banner proclaiming “Never Been Frozen” – which is, yes, slightly ironic here on the Midwestern tundra – and simply wait for customers to cue up.

Imagine me in that cue, as I have been for many years, breathing the balmy spring air and loading up on seafood from the famous bay. And imagine how dismayed I was when I discovered, while doing some background reading on dioxins, that the state of Texas has been allowing that and other notable industrial compounds – to seep into those waters – and, of course, into the fish that live there. The dioxins, in particular, have been directly traced from waste pits on the edge of the San Jacinto River as it rambles from Lake Houston and into this, one of our country’s great estuaries.

“Most people just aren’t aware of this,” Jackie Young, an environmental activist with Texans Together, tells me ruefully. She adds with some cynicism: “The state hasn’t been in a hurry to let people know. There’s a lot of Galveston Bay seafood sold on the open market and there’s a lot of revenue involved.”

Of course, I’m obsessing on seafood and, as Young reminds me, the real story – and the more important one- is that of an environmental disaster years in the making. The San Jacinto waste pits have tainted the soil, the  river, the private wells of nearby communities as well as the bay. In 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the disposal site as a Superfund clean up project.

The agency has scheduled a community meeting tonight, in fact, to discuss further options in managing the slow spill of poisonous materials into the waterways.

But to start at the beginning. In the mid-1960s, the Champion Paper company decided to create a disposal site for the chemical wastes from its mill in Pasadena, Texas. It chose a sandy region along the main channel of San Jacinto, east of Houston, so that it could move the waste by barge. No permit was required. By 1966, the waste pits covered 14 acres and over the following decades they were loaded with a toxic stew of compounds. The EPA lists the worst of them as polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, polychlorinated furans (dioxins and furans), and some metals. By “some” metals, the agency means lead and mercury, in particular. None of this is what you might call friendly chemistry. The agency classifies dioxins and furans as suspected human carcinogens, and notes that they are also known to be immunosuppressive and implicated in birth defects. Lead and mercury are famously neurotoxic. And they, as well as dioxins, bioaccumulate, meaning that they tend to be stored in the body.

In retrospect, it’s easy to argue that dumping them near a major waterway, that lead into a major fishing resource, was not a brilliant idea. Because, of course, those “safely” stored chemical wastes leaked into the river. (Not an isolated problem, as we all know from recent events in West Virginia).
But not one either that has gotten the same degree of national attention, even though, as Young points out, wells used for drinking water in that area are now measurably contaminated.

In fact, her family lives in one of the at-risk areas, a tidy blue-collar community called Highlands, which (with the Houston area’s famous disregard for zoning), is situated near the waste pits. “It might look like an industrial area but it is surrounded by residential properties,” Young says. After her father unexpectedly developed a festering acne-like skin condition – one of the classic signs of dioxin exposure – she and her mother did a door-to-door health survey, finding what they considered dismaying rates of autoimmune and other diseases. “We found eight cases of lupus on one street.”

Young turned her analysis over to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which concluded that although the community well was just over a mile from the disposal site, it did not believe that tainted ground water should be a health issue. A full copy of that report is archived here.

It was at that point that Young became a dedicated environmental activist. And it wasn’t sick people that brought the issue to forefront; the state has not conducted a full epidemiology assessment. What happened as that dioxin levels started mysteriously rising in Galveston Bay. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality started back-tracking up the San Jacinto and eventually found that the sandy soils around the old waste pits were startlingly high in dioxin levels. A form of analysis called chemical fingerprinting established that the toxic compounds had traveled both into the Houston shipping channel and into the Galveston Bay fisheries. The toxicity levels had not decreased in any meaningful way over the past decade.


As it turned out, the waste pits tucked into unstable sand were simply subsiding into the river. The companies now responsible for the waste pits – International Paper and Waste Management – rather than going through an expensive removal process decided to simply cap the pits and stop the seep.
But so far, that method has not proved entirely successful; due to continued subsidence, the cap itself has started to fail. The corporations are moving to reseal the waste pits but the contamination is now considered so severe that Harris County, where Houston is located, has filed a $100 million lawsuit against them for mismanagement. And tonight’s community meeting is designed to let the EPA get citizen input on whether it should require a complete cleanup of the waste pits, moving the compounds to a disposal site where massive water pollution is not an issue.

Which, of course, brings me back to the issue of tainted seafood. If you go to the website of the Galveston Bay Foundation, you’ll find a detailed page on the health risks associated with eating fish out of these waters. There are four main areas of the bay where even the state of Texas recommends against seafood consumption, three of those are contaminated with dioxins. The highest risks, according to these advisories, are catfish, sea trout, and blue crab. But there are parts of the bay, where the toxicity levels are so high and so wide spread that the recommendation is against eating any species at all.

And there’s this too, which I’ve pasted in as a direct quote:

Women of childbearing age and children under the age of 12 – DO NOT EAT ANY AMOUNT OF THE SPECIES LISTED!

Women past childbearing age and adult men – DO NOT EAT MORE THAN 8 OUNCES PER MONTH OF THE SPECIES LISTED!

And my point here – as I look out the window and dream of greener days –  is that pollution is is never really just someone else’s problem, that the poisons never just stay in some else’s back yard. That’s a fiction we need to let go by, along with that 1960s attitude that we could trust companies like this to do it right. Yes, the risks here are much higher for close by communities. But we share in it.
 And it makes no sense to  step back while this sludge from our unregulated past seeps into water supplies, taints a river,  poisons a fishery, and contaminates  not only local residents but people across the country.

I hope that Texans Together makes a lot of noise, that  community members pack that EPA meeting tonight, angry and determined and demanding a real clean up. And I hope they get it.
We all deserve, as Rachel Carson said far too long ago, a much better spring.

Images: Courtesy of Texans Together

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-seller, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She writes for a range of publications including Time, Scientific American, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times (and even the literary journal, Tin House). She is currently working on a sixth book about poisonous food.

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Meet Borophene, a Two-Dimensional Nanomaterial that Could Rival Graphene

By Victoria Turk

Borophene is made of boron atoms, arranged in a flat disk with a hexagonal hole. Image via Wang Lab/Brown University

After all the hubbub around graphene, the race is on to find more wonder materials—ones that might be even more promising than the Nobel Prize-honoured, 2D carbon lattice.

Earlier this month we reported on a type of sodium bismuthate that had earned itself the nickname “3D graphene” and pointed toward a future of hard drives with ten times their current capacity. Now, another long-theorized nanomaterial looks set to take on graphene on the 2D plane: borophene.

To be clear, borophene hasn’t actually been made yet. But physical chemists at Brown University have made one unit of a boron cluster, called B36, and detailed its interesting structure on a supercomputer. The university claims this demonstrates “that a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility.”

Boron is next to carbon (which graphene is made of) in the periodic table, but no one has previously demonstrated experimentally how it could be arranged in a similar one-atom-thick sheet.
Professor Lai-Sheng Wang and lead author Zachary Piazza headed up a team that assembled experimental evidence of how borophene might work, and published their findings in Nature Communications.

Graphene is well-known for its honeycomb, or “chicken wire” structure. “However, boron cannot form graphene-like structures with a honeycomb hexagonal framework because of its electron deficiency,” the researchers explained. “Computational studies suggest that extended boron sheets with partially filled hexagonal holes are stable; however, there has been no experimental evidence for such atom-thin boron nanostructures.”

Until now; they showed a two-dimensional boron lattice can be made out of a triangular pattern with hexagonal holes. Their results, they wrote, present “the first experimental evidence that single-atom layer boron sheets with hexagonal vacancies are potentially viable.”

So what does it mean? They only physically made one of the symmetrical 36-boron-atom clusters, not yet a whole graphene-like sheet. But if this precursor structure could be extended into borophene, it’s expected to be a material to rival graphene in terms of the qualities it will possess. It would be strong and two-dimensional, and possibly even more conductive than graphene. As CleanTech reports, “That quality means that borophene could find itself being of more use, in some regards, than graphene.”

Before it can steal graphene’s crown, of course, it actually has to get made. But thanks to this research, that prospect is looking ever more feasible.

By Victoria Turk