Adding green space to nursing homes might be a good idea
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President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio expressed their support in protecting areas of the Pacific Ocean from overfishing and environmental damage. More here: U.S. on Protecting Pacific Ocean Areas ; ;Related ArticlesHurricane Cristina Just Set A Scary RecordWhy David Brat is Completely Wrong About Climate ScienceThis Is How Much America Spends Putting Out Wildfires ;
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Mother Jones
A while back, I wrote about the US regulatory system’s strange attitude toward nanotechnology and food.
On the one hand, the Food and Drug Administration is on record stating that nanoparticles—which are microscopically tiny pieces of common materials like silver and clay—pose unique safety concerns. The particles, which measure in at a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair, “can have significantly altered bioavailability and may, therefore, raise new safety issues that have not been seen in their traditionally manufactured counterparts,” the FDA wrote in a 2012 draft proposal for regulating nanoparticles in food. On the other hand, its solution—that the food industry conduct safety testing that is “as rigorous as possible” and geared specifically to nano-materials before releasing nano-containing products onto the market—will be voluntary.
But what about packaging—the wrappers and bags and whatnot that hold food to keep it fresh? Nano-sized silver has powerful antimicrobial properties and can be embedded in plastic to keep food fresh longer; and nanoparticles of clay can help bottles and other packaging block out air and moisture from penetrating, preventing spoilage. Yet research has suggested (see here and here) that nanoparticles can migrate from packaging to food, potentially exposing consumers.
So how widely is nanotech used in the containers that contact our food? Back in 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency released a “State of the Science Literature Review” on nanosilver (PDF; warning: 221 pages). The report confirms that nano-materials, including silver, are being used in food packaging, but shows why it’s hard to get a grip on how just widely. “Current labeling regulations do not require that the nanomaterial be listed as an ingredient,” neither in food or in food packaging, the EPA report states. And “manufacture of nanosilver-containing products is shifting to the Far East, especially China, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam,” making it even harder to track nano-containing products that come in from abroad.
The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN)—a joint venture of Virginia Tech and the Wilson Center—keeps a running inventory of “nanotechnology-based consumer products introduced on the market.” A PEN spokesperson stressed to me that its list isn’t comprehensive—it by no means captures every nano-associated item, and some products on the list may no longer contain nanotech. That said, the database includes 20 products in the “food and beverage storage” category, including a couple of beer bottles, aluminum foil, sandwich bags, and even a salad bowl.
Meanwhile, environmental watchdog groups warn that nanotech-imbued packaging will soon become ubiquitous. “Major food companies are investing billions in nanofood and nanopackaging,” Friends of the Earth stated in a 2014 report. Tom Neltner, a food additives researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me in an email that, “we believe nano-engineered particles are being extensively used in food packaging.”
When I asked Neltner for specifics, he sent me to Joseph Hotchkiss, director of the School of Packaging and Center for Packaging Innovation and Sustainability at Michigan State University, and a close watcher of the food-packaging industry. Hotchkiss told me that while nano-materials are quite attractive to the food industry as a way to cheaply prolong the shelf life of packaged foods, they currently “aren’t widely used” because “no one knows for sure what kinds of risks from ingesting exquisitely tiny amounts of nano-materials may or not represent.” As a result, the food industry is “waiting on the sidelines” until more safety research emerges.
Indeed, the above-noted EPA report reveals significant health concerns around nanoparticles. They “can pass through biological membranes,” the report states, including the blood-brain barrier. And they’re “small enough to penetrate even very small capillaries throughout the body.”
What harm nanoparticles cause when they move about our bodies remains murky, though. “There are very limited well controlled human studies on the potential toxicities of nanosilver,” the EPA states; but animal studies have shown potential toxicity for the liver, kidneys, and the immune system.
Back in March, the EPA moved to block a company called Pathway Investment from marketing plastic food storage containers laced with nano-silver to the public. But what ran the company afoul with the EPA wasn’t its use of nano-silver per se; rather, it was the claim that its product would kill microbiota in stored food. “Claims that mold, fungus or bacteria are controlled or destroyed by a particular product must be backed up with testing so that consumers know that the products do what the labels say,” the EPA’s press release states.
Meanwhile, no one seems to know for sure how widely nanotech is being used in packaging, or what the health consequences are. And that’s potentially a big problem stemming from some very small stuff.
Originally from –
Mother Jones
Jim Pethokoukis highlights an interesting chart today from a Brookings report. The authors are concerned about a declining rate of entrepreneurship in the United States:
Business dynamism is inherently disruptive; but it is also critical to long-run economic growth. Research has established that this process of “creative destruction” is essential to productivity gains by which more productive firms drive out less productive ones, new entrants disrupt incumbents, and workers are better matched with firms. In other words, a dynamic economy constantly forces labor and capital to be put to better uses. But recent evidence points to a U.S. economy that has steadily become less dynamic over time. Two measures used to gauge business dynamism are firm entry and job reallocation. As Figure 1 shows, the firm entry rate—or firms less than one year old as a share of all firms—fell by nearly half in the thirty-plus years between 1978 and 2011.
So fewer people are starting up new businesses, and this trend has been evident for several decades. Pethokoukis speculates that the problem might be too little uncertainty in the economy: “Maybe the U.S. private sector has become too conservative and cautious….The U.S. still generates lots of innovation overall, but maybe too much is of the job-killing sort rather than job-creating kind that marks a dynamic economy.”
Maybe. But I’d really like to see a breakdown of what kinds of business creation have declined. My first guess here is that the decline hasn’t been among the sort of Silicon Valley firms that drive innovation, but among more prosaic small firms: restaurants, dry cleaners, hardware stores, and so forth. The last few decades have seen an explosion among national chains and big box retailers, and it only makes sense that this has driven down the number of new entrants in these sectors. When there’s a McDonald’s and a Burger King on every corner, there’s just less room for people to open up their own lunch spots. But if there’s been a decline in the number of new small retailers, that may or may not say anything about the dynamism of the American economy. It just tells us what we already know: national chains, with their marketing efficiencies and highly efficient logistics, have taken over the retail sector. Amazon and other internet retailers are only hastening this trend.
But is this what’s really driving the downward trend in new business creation? The Brookings report doesn’t give us any clues. But it sure seems like this is the absolute minimum we need to know in order to draw any serious conclusions about what’s really going on here.
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Posted 12 March 2014 in
There’s a great story to be told in America today and it has to do with the cellulosic ethanol industry. Three major commercial scale cellulosic facilities are coming online this year, the product of years of innovation and hard work, buttressed by the Renewable Fuel Standard.
DuPont, POET/DSM, and Abengoa will take agricultural waste and turn it into low-emission, sustainable ethanol. That ethanol will be blended into your fuel, helping to reduce our dependence on oil and to make our air cleaner.
Cellulosic ethanol’s coming out story goes beyond the benefits of the fuel itself. The burgeoning sector is being made possible by inventive Americans and is creating a new sector within our economy.
This American Land, a television series that airs on public television stations nationwide and looks at the stories and “issues affecting America’s natural landscapes, waters and wildlife,” took interest in the story of cellulosic ethanol, the positive impact it could have on our environment, and the people who are driving that change.
Focusing on POET/DSM’s joint venture, dubbed “Project Liberty,” This American Land featured both an ex- NFL player who started a corn-stover bailing business in Iowa that is supplying the feedstock for POET/DSM’s plant and an innovator who invented the tool used to make gathering agricultural residue economically viable.
See more from This American Land.
Fuels
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The Mississippi River in New Orleans.
The oil industry is a champion of innovation. When it comes to finding new ways of sullying the environment, its resourcefulness knows no bounds.
An oil-hauling barge collided with a vessel pushing grain in the Mississippi River on Saturday, causing an estimated 31,500 gallons of crude to leak through a tear in its hull. The accident closed 65 miles of the already disgustingly polluted waterway upstream from the Port of New Orleans for two days while workers tried to contain and suck up the spilled oil.
The accident highlighted a little-noted side effect of the continent’s oil boom. Not only is crude being ferried from drilling operations to refineries in leaky pipelines and explosion-prone trains — it’s also being moved over water bodies with growing frequency. Bloomberg reports:
“We’re facing the imminent risk of a barge disaster or a rail disaster” as more oil is shipped to the Gulf of Mexico for refining, Jonathan Henderson, a spokesman for the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, said by phone after attending a meeting with U.S. Coast Guard officials. …
Barge and tanker shipments of crude from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast jumped from virtually nothing in 2005 to 21.5 million barrels in 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. Gulf received a record 4.9 million barrels of crude from the Midwest in October.
And if the Coast Guard gets its way and lets frackers ship their wastewater on barges, next up could be spills of radioactive liquid waste containing undisclosed chemicals.
Source
Mississippi Oil Spill Highlights Risk of U.S. Oil Boom, Bloomberg
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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A simple device turns old credit cards and other stray plastic into guitar picks. See original article: Dot Earth Blog: A Gift That Keeps on Giving – to Strumming Musicians Related Articles A Gift That Keeps on Giving – to Strumming Musicians Dot Earth Blog: Climate Scientists, Then and Now, Espousing ‘Responsible Advocacy’ Focus on Ocean’s Health as Dolphin Deaths Soar
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Dot Earth Blog: A Gift That Keeps on Giving – to Strumming Musicians
Mother Jones
I know there are more important things going on in the world, but I really had to stifle a giggle at the latest attempt to blame Jimmy Carter for every conceivable ill of the pre-Reagan world. Here is Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal today:
Jimmy Carter’s Costly Patent Mistake
Today’s patent mess can be traced to a miscalculation by Jimmy Carter, who thought granting more patents would help overcome economic stagnation. In 1979, his Domestic Policy Review on Industrial Innovation proposed a new Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which Congress created in 1982. Its first judge explained: “The court was formed for one need, to recover the value of the patent system as an incentive to industry.” The country got more patents—at what has turned out to be a huge cost. The number of patents has quadrupled, to more than 275,000 a year.
Jeebus. Legal scholars spent the entire decade of the 70s arguing about this. Under the old system, different appellate circuit issued different rulings on patents, and it was the business community that was mostly unhappy about this. Several commissions recommended plans for a more uniform and efficient system, including one drafted by Carter’s Department of Justice. It never went anywhere, but business leaders kept pressing, and Congress reintroduced court reform legislation in 1981, which was signed by Ronald Reagan a year later. It’s absurd to give Carter more than a footnote in this history.
However, Crovitz gets this part right:
The new Federal Circuit approved patents for software, which now account for most of the patents granted in the U.S.—and for most of the litigation….Until the court changed the rules, there hadn’t been patents for algorithms and software. Ideas alone aren’t supposed to be patentable. In a case last year involving medical tests, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that neither Archimedes nor Einstein could have patented their theories.
Actually, to give them their due, the new court held out against software patents for quite a while. Eventually, though, contradictions kept piling up, and in the mid-90s they essentially threw in the towel and approved the granting of pure software patents. This is hardly the whole story, though. The Supreme Court could have overruled them. The patent office could have fought back. The president could have offered new legislation. Congress could have acted.
None of them did. The software industry wanted software patents, and they got them. Big business won the day, as they usually do. But I guess that’s not a headline the Journal editorial page is interested in.
Hidden in this story, however, is the key fact that demolishes the argument in favor of software patents: “the mid-90s.” Before that, software patents were rare or nonexistent. And guess what: The era from 1950 through 1995 featured one of the most innovative and fruitful tech explosions in history. Billions of lines of software were produced, the world was transformed, and it was all done without patent protection.
So why do we need them now?
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