Environmental News

Group here has char as a byproduct from a pyrolysis reaction for oil from forestry waste.

"The mix was then cooked with highly compressed hot water, a process known as hydrothermal carbonization."
There was a company turning turkey waste in a syn crude with a similar process. Even proved it was possible to do the same with all the unrecylcable plastic from scrapped cars. They went under during the Great Recession.

 

Maybe not old old masons, but masons of the last sixty-ish years (a number I'm grabbing without looking it up), voluminously.

 

The pulled out microscopes and developed other imaging techniques to study it? That is probably the main thrust of the actual paper for this news item.

Googling earlier, came across a 2011 paper on a microscopy study of lime concrete and mortar. From the abstract, it sounded like the exact mechanism of how the self repairing works was still unknown. We understand the basic chemistry, and surmise it must be uncured lime moving up through cracks, but exactly how isn't understood. It looks like the lime clasts in the hot cured concrete are of a structure that facilitate faster break down of the material for movement when the cracking occurs from the report.

 

So I believe, but this is where all the stuff I've read over the years kind of blends together, because I was reading to answer other questions than "what's the earliest of these sources that used microscopy and crystallography to look at the role of lime?".

Reading just from the standpoint of a homeowner with plastered walls and mortared bricks wondering "how do I learn how this stuff is done?", all I can say is some of my reading was even in used books that were not super new, and it seems like the role of the lime and its migration to the sites of damage seemed to be treated as basic uncontroversial background, and some of it even got into the different crystal properties of slaked quicklime versus soaked hydrated lime and of calcitic versus dolomitic limes.

 

The paper I stumbled upon.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241886678_Self-healing_of_lime_based_mortars_Microscopy_observations_on_case_studies
"The spontaneous occurrence of self-healing in lime-based mortars is a well known phenomenon; to date, however, little research has been done on its occurrence in the practice."
"Question regarding the factors affecting self-healing and the time-span at which it occurs are still subject of discussion."

 

Ok, so that paper's only a dozen years old, and may have been the first to use the techniques it describes.

At the same time, its first reference, Anderegg, F.O. (1942). Autogeneous healing in mortars containing lime, ASTM Bulletin, 16: 22 , is about eighty years old, which kind of aligns with the sense I had that at least the phenomenon had been a subject of study for at least that long, but maybe with earlier techniques.

 

I wasn't discounting it not being known. Just that the specifics of how the process works weren't truly understood. That paper mentions a similar process in natural rock formations being studied. The artificial ones likely work in a similar manner, but you can't claim that until the experiment is run.

It's like bumble bees flying and the sun shining. We know these things happen, since we see it, but the how wasn't known at first. The math, under reasonable assumptions, actual says they shouldn't work. But we eventually figured out there were forces in play unaccounted for.
The Sun Only Shines Because Of Quantum Physics

 

Sure, and I wasn't discounting that more recent work added to the accumulation of knowledge about it. Just saying the accumulation had been going on for a long time, not only as shop talk among masons, but also as focused experimentation.

 

The researchers behind the recent discovery were likely aware of such work. Roman concrete is lime concrete after all. How a news article presented the info wasn't indicative of their exact knowledge.

 

another disaster being created:

Developers are trying to build hundreds of thousands of homes in Arizona. New report warns there isn't enough water.

 

Part of the problem here is that Arizona never enforced their water right over the Colorado river and allowed LA to take more than their share for decades. They are currently in federal court, trying to iron it out. It may become a moot point, since more water is being siphoned-off upstream - leaving downstream people to fight over the remaining scraps.

 

Like Florida beach front property or swamp lots:


Bob Wilson

 

when i was in vegas in the 80's the housing boom went as far as the eye could see in the desert.

until the crash. i'm sure it's is all back again. makes no sense to me, but i do realize developers and legislators work closely together

 

The developers are in the legislators' pocket. I've seen flood plains reclassified to 200 years. Multiple housing subdivisions sprout up. Once built out, it gets reclassified back to a 50 year flood plain - leaving homeowners holding the bag. This increases the their monthly mortgage payments by hundreds of dollars - because of the flood insurance requirements.

Buyer beware....

 

⟲ ?

 

didn't finish my morning coffee yet

 

Since those agreements were based on more water than the Colorado flows, getting their share wouldn't make much of a difference with the end result.

 

Do remember that people upstream can't legally just pump out whatever water they want, shortchanging those downstream. The legal battles over water rights affect everyone within the river drainage system.