Environmental News

"two low-albedo "DEI" days"

Fascinating use of "albedo" ... how does this reflect upon us?

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I have returned from brief travels, finding PriusChat still here. And itself.

 

Kei cars (and vanlets) are cute Nihon vehicles with no front crumple zones. They might get built in USA by Presidential edict/suggestion.

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Five offshore wind energy projects NY coastal and points north have been suspended by Presidential edict/suggestion.

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In other news, compressing and expanding CO2 is being used as an electricity storage system:
CO2 Batteries That Store Grid Energy Take Off Globally - IEEE Spectrum

I would have thought that overall efficiency of this is low. Apparently I'd be wrong.

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I saw many Kei cars in Japan in Sept. Dun no how many legs are getting crushed there.

 

Dinosaur top ten of the year:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-top-ten-dinosaur-discoveries-of-2025-from-preserved-blood-vessels-to-the-return-of-a-short-king-180987925/

From about 220 to 65 million years ago, Earth was not a human-friendly planet, and particularly unfriendly right at the end. Time travel with care, my friends.

 

I hope readers enjoy:

Inside the Daily Life of a Doomsday Asteroid Hunter

Mt.Lemmon AZ is not the only place where such observations are being made. Sun limits our view of some items that may come. Beyond those niggles, this is pure joy.

 

@bisco have you seen the movie Don't look up?

 

A link on which to think:

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/01/new-research-takes-another-step-towards-self-sustaining-crops/

Title is “self-fertilizing” which provides initial confusion. In botany, fertilizing refers to both ‘the pollen thing’ and supply of nutrients to roots. The second is meant here.

Crops in the family Fabaceae form root nodules where nitrogen-fixing bacteria reside. That nitrogen is nutrient supply to roots. Barley was studied here, a grass (in family Poaceae), that would not otherwise form nodules. To make it happen, researchers partially disable plant immune system so those bacteria can infect.

Adding nitrogen-fixing capacity to crops in general has long been a goal. As we read here, buying nitrogen fertilizer in bags is expensive and has negative effects ‘downstream’.

Immune barrier may be the largest, but there are others. Crucial enzyme doing this is unsurprisingly named nitrogenase. It is somewhat kludgy and fails to function if oxygen is present. So the root-nodule must have oxygen excluded and that is done by an enzyme called leghemoglobin. It is red like our hemoglobin but functions very differently. Thus, any other plants where N-fixing is desired will need to develop additional infrastructure. Silencing part of immune system is not enough.

I mention another crop where N-fixing is studied; rice, also a grass. It typically grows in water-logged soils that already lack oxygen. Rice has additional structures to get oxygen down to root cells because they require it. So perhaps by a bit of subtraction, rice roots could provide homes for N-fixing bacteria. Other researchers look at that.

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TL;DR readers have already left but this is really fun stuff! Another dominant crop of the grass family is corn/maize. It can form an association/symbiosis with different N-fixing bacteria that make their own oxygen-free structures. Other researchers look at that.

Finally, back to the ‘bean’ plants of Fabaceae. It is a remarkably diverse family with crops, ‘weeds’ and even some proper trees. All or most do this one weird N-fixing trick. It has not spread to other plant families during evolution’s long opportunities despite some obvious advantages. It might be that making root nodules is a tall barrier.

 

Speaking to a subset of readers about nitrogenase. It is so kludgy that it will convert acetylene to ethylene in its active center. Hot pocket. A case of molecular mistaken identity.

That has long allowed researchers including yrs trly to measure nitrogenase activity by injecting acetylene and later measuring both acetylene and ethylene. This is an easy thing to do by gas chromatography. Generating acetylene from calcium carbide is well known to explosion fans (Bangsite TM) and can be done way out yonder in remote locations. It's better than using a acetylene 'welding gas' tank because that is contaminated with ethylene. They make it wrong