This news about the cause of most ovarian cancers, and therefore a way to prevent them, should be widely known. So here it is with a gift link.
Tell your friends with ovaries and fallopian tubes!
As we get older and/or don't want to have children / more children, and especially if we are having some kind of abdominal surgery, removing the fallopian tubes can be added to many kinds of surgery and prevent this deadly cancer.
Have you heard about SpudCells?
This article in the Star Tribune (gift link) almost a week ago was the first thing I saw, but it had been written up in the New York Times as well.
Bioengineering researcher Kate Adamala and her team have created the first "synthetic cells capable of growing, dividing and self-sustaining." They've made their findings open-source, and created a nonprofit organization called Biotic to "raise funds to perpetuate the communal, global research" that is needed to carry the research forward to the point where the technology can be used to produce plastics or fuels without petrochemicals, or novel drugs. The New York Times story listed another possibility: the cells could draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The Star Tribune article is mostly an interview with Adamala, while the Times article (also a gift link) is more of an explainer.
Here's a toast to basic science research, the kind of thing that is being defunded, along with all the other things the Trump regime doesn't see a value in.
If you put the word "solar" into the search engine on Daughter Number Three, you get a whole lot of results. So much has changed in the world of solar since I started this blog, though, it means posts from 10 or more years ago are probably pretty out-dated.
Here's one from February and another from December 2025, both still relevant.
I bring this up because I just read a Financial Times article about how China's solar product has now exceeded demand, leading to a surplus of solar panels and therefore industry fallout.
That may sound bad, but get this quote:
Clean power, on a scale that would have seemed utopian at the time of the Paris climate treaty in 2015, is now within reach. The price of solar panels has fallen to rock bottom.
And:
The real surprise... is that it cost China less than $18 billion in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.
As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò pointed out on BlueSky,
conservatively, the United States spent two-thirds of that figure in the *first week* of the war on Iran. it's genuinely difficult to overstate how many world-historical own goals US politics has accumulated over the past few decades
How does it feel to be part of a country led by the stupidest, vilest people imaginable while we are in the midst of a civilization-threatening climate crisis?
Pretty bad. Pretty bad.
I learned from Yonah Freemark, principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, that today is the semi-centennial of the Washington, D.C. Metro system.
Happy birthday to the Washington Metro, which opened 50 years ago today with service on 4.6 miles of Red Line between Rhode Is. Ave and Farragut N. System now serves 130 miles.
The DC Metro shows that, with good planning and enough investment, the public sector can succeed and build something extraordinary.
I can't imagine the time I lived in Washington without the Metro, even though I didn't even live particularly close to it — and the system was probably half that size at the time.
This reminds me of one of my favorite (well, unfavorite) facts I've learned recently: When the U.S. interstate system was built, only 10% of its miles were within cities, but that 10% cost half of the money spent. As Eisenhower envisioned the system, it would not have gone into the cities, but instead would have only connected to the edges.
If the money spent on urban freeways had instead been spent on subways, it could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metro systems.
That startling fact comes from a new report (summarized here on Bloomberg) that "offers a wealth of original data on the economic toll of downtown freeways, and the economic potential of tearing them down."
Thanks to a retro post on kottke.org, I watched this video about how aluminum cans are made.
It's only 11 minutes long, and as Jason Kottke says, it's not boring for even a second.
Most of what it describes about the process didn't surprise me, but I didn't know that cans are ironed to reach their final height, or that the properties of the liquid inside the can are essential to maintaining the cans' pressure and overall strength.
A separate thing that fascinates me about a topic like this, which isn't covered in the video, is how it illustrates the complexity of modern society. So many unmentioned factors underlie the existence of a factory that can produce something like aluminum cans, plus a society with a system to distribute them and carry out reliable financial exchange, not to mention a country or world with a market of people large enough to buy that number of products on a daily basis.
If I let myself think about it, it overshadows the wow factor of the can production itself, as dazzling as that is.
I'm still beyond sad and bewildered, and most of the time angry.
Today a friend gave me this:
She made it with her 3D printer. It's to be hung on the zipper pull of your winter coat.
That's the rebel loon, for those of you not from Minnesota. People have been putting it on buttons, embroidered patches, stickers, and all other manner of wearables. And on flags! Now I have one, too.
The loon is our state bird, and someone glommed it together with the Star Wars rebellion symbol somewhere along the line. Daughter Number Three-Point-One tells me other state birds are being used similarly.
Whistles were the first big news in 3D printing for the resistance, and those are still being made.
Be ready with your whistles and your rebel birds if and when the fascists come for your state.
Several weeks ago, kottke.org linked to a video by a YouTuber whose channel is called Technology Connections. The video is called You are being misled about renewable energy technology.
I watched about half of it at the time, took some notes, and meant to post about it, but you know... there has been a lot else happening lately. There still is! But today, I saw this jaw-dropping headline in the Star Tribune that finally has me getting off my butt to post:
It's not news to me that ethanol is not a good way to generate energy, and that it's a political football in the Midwest. I knew the amount of energy that goes into making a gallon of ethanol is more than the amount of energy that comes out of it. Which is stupid, and that ethanol should be stopped.
But until I watched this Technology Connections video, I didn't understand how bad of an energy investment it is.
The TC guy explains in (possibly too much) detail why.
Around minute 33, he describes a specific 120-acre corn field in Illinois, and gives a very conservative analysis of how many miles of driving that one field can fuel with ethanol and E85 vs. solar and electric vehicles:
Then he goes on to say, there are about 96 million acres planted in corn in the U.S. Of that, 25–40% is used for ethanol. If a quarter of that (25 million acres) were converted to solar, it would generate almost 8 billion megawatt hours. (He does the math for this, of course.)
That's 84% more than the total amount the U.S. grid currently carries.
And this is the money quote (around minute 38):
Even with our mediocre latitudes and weather patterns, all the land we need to generate electricity with solar power alone can be freed up if we just stop growing corn to feed to cars.
He then goes on to talk about wind, and I haven't even listened to the rest of it, so who knows what else is in there! I have to get back to it.
So seeing this incredibly dumbfounding headline in the newspaper is just too much to take in the midst of all the other outrages we're living with. The answer is right in front of our faces. Just do it.
From kottke.org, shared there by a UK reader...
A Line in a Tom Stoppard Play Inspired a New Breast Cancer Treatment
In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pioneer which greatly increased the survivability of breast cancer.Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCLCertainly drives home the value of a robust and diverse culture of humanities in contradiction to the current backlash.
As I said back in April this year, cancer research — particularly the Trump regime's recent funding cuts to it — have become more personal to me.
This doctor's letter sheds some light on the improvement in breast cancer survival rates after 1990 that were mentioned in my April post.
For those who don't know, adjuvant chemotherapy (or neoadjuvant, which is administered before surgery) — which are most of the chemotherapies people undergo if they are in earlier stages of breast cancer — are meant to eliminate cancer cells that may have escaped the main tumor site, but are not detectable yet. I had never heard the term before I had cancer.
Its purpose is not to eliminate or even shrink the known tumor, though it also often has that effect. And how much it shrinks the tumor is considered to be an indication of how effective the treatment is on a particular patient's cancer cells generally.
Thanks to Dr. Baum for the Damascene conversion, as much as he thanks Tom Stoppard.
We bought our vacuum cleaner in 1988 or maybe 1989. It's a Sears Kenmore with a HEPA filter. It still works great.
We bought it from the giant Sears Roebuck store that was on Lake Street in South Minneapolis. The building's tower is now condos, and the first floor is partly AllinaHealth and partly the Midtown Global Market.
I wonder if any consumer-priced vacuum cleaner you could buy today would still be in good shape after 36 or 37 years of use.
I love you, vacuum cleaner, even though I have an inherent dread of using you. That's not your fault. You do your job.
Please don't quit us.
There's so much bad news, I was ignoring this story I kept seeing in my BlueSky feed: "Did U.S. bully tactics kill climate measure?" It was a gift-linked story, which sometimes are wonky when viewed on my phone, and I thought, What's one more climate bad news story from the Trump regime? They're all bad, I know enough, so I didn't click on it.
But then it showed up as a reprint in today's Star Tribune so I read it. (Here's a gift link to the New York Times.)
The climate measure in question was, in effect, the first global carbon tax, and it was all agreed upon except the final vote. It would have fined the worst-polluting cargo ships, heading off the increases anticipated in their output by 2050.
The Trump regime, of course, wants more pollution. None of us are surprised by that at this point, but it's the tactics they used in this case that are notable.
They threatened primarily poorer and smaller countries — all of which had previously planned to vote for the fines — with revocation of port access for their ships and sailors, financial penalties, blacklisting of diplomats, and revocation of personal visas. Marco Rubio personally called people in several of the countries.
And now, of course, the regime denies the strong-arm tactics they used. Lying cat says...
Here are a couple of choice quotes from the article:
Separately... but possibly of use in this fight, a group called Oilfield Witness has developed cameras that can see emissions that are invisible to the human eye. Their optical gas imaging (OGI) camera is calibrated to detect hydrocarbons:
I wonder if such a camera, trained on these cargo ships, would help in the future fight to reinvigorate this carbon tax. As well as in fighting the natural gas fracking fields Oilfield Witness intends them for.
Stanford's expert on renewable energy, Mark Jacobson, had a series of posts yesterday on BlueSky about the benefits of water, wind, and solar:
Just a reminder: 10 of the 11 states with the most Wind Water Solar as a percent of electricity demand have electricity prices 2 cents per kWh or more below the U.S. average. Wind is the greatest electricity source in 7 of those 11 states.
And another reminder that a transition of the U.S. to 100% Wind Water Solar across all energy sectors reduces private annual energy costs to Americans by 63% (giving an energy-cost payback time of less than 6 years) and total social energy costs by 86% (payback time less than 1 year):
And a 3rd reminder that a transition to 100% Wind Water Solar across the US reduces land use due to energy from 2.4% of US land (1.16% occupied by the fossil-fuel industry and 1.24% occupied by the corn-ethanol industry) to ~0.85% of U.S. land, with most of this being open space between wind turbines:
And a 4th reminder that a transition to 100% Wind Water Solar reduces the annual total tonnes of mining in the world by greater than 84%, despite the need for precious metals, which are a trivial component of total mining tonnage:
All that for today, which was Sun Day — an event organized by Third Act, Bill McKibben's relatively new group for elders committed to climate action, in coordination with just about every other climate organization in the U.S.
The Minneapolis Sun Day event was at the new Graco Park along the Mississippi River. Here are some photos, since we all need something positive to look at these days.
I got there an hour before it started because I got the time wrong, so people were still setting up:
I liked a lot of shirts I saw, including the back of this shirt:
A woman at one of the tables had a pair of warming stripes sneakers. I discussed with her and her fellow tablers how it seems so many people are not familiar with the stripes:
There were a lot of nice hand-painted or hand-crafted signs. The latter two of these were at the Indivisible table:
After the official start, there were quite a lot of people there. Music, dance, plus educational sessions on legislation in Minnesota and how to electrify your home and still take advantage of the tax credits available from the Biden administration.
This is the Third Act table:
And a couple of the other tables with people ready to talk solar and climate in general:
Great event, and I hope they do it again.
If you have MAGA relatives like I do, who like to assail clean energy for gobbling up farmland for solar farms or who echo Trump's hatred for wind turbines, here's a good chart to keep handy in your filing cabinet when they make the fake claim that the turbines kill a significant number of birds:
Note the source on that chart: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The total number of bird deaths shown on the chart is 3,316,834,012 — a number that, I note, does not include deaths resulting from habitat loss and/or climate change.
A bit of arithmetic gives us these percentages for the cited sources:
So that's... four? orders of magnitude difference between killer cats and wind turbines. If MAGA folks were really worried about infrastructure, they'd advocate removing windows, cars, and electrical lines.
Seems like a misplaced bit of worrying, or more properly, an intentionally malicious and motivated accusation. Gee whiz, they never do that.
Everyone keeps saying that when calling a Congress members we should tell them personal stories of how the DOGE/Trump cuts will affect us.
As a person insulated by a lot of privileges, I never feel as though I have anything personal to say. But then I saw this*:
I haven't mentioned this on the blog because I don't talk about my personal life here, but I was diagnosed with breast cancer last summer, and have been in various kinds of treatment since then, and going forward. I won't go into the details but I know that without the research that's been done over the past decades, it's unlikely I would be one of the ones who survives.
It's still possible I might not be one of the ones who survives long-term, but I like my odds much better, given all of the research that was done. Even since 1990, major improvements have been made in survival rates — and I also know improvements have been made in decreasing the side effects of treatment.
And cuts are also pending to Medicaid (and Medicare?) coverage, and probably the ACA as well, which means that even if treatments exist, people won't be able to afford them, and they'll die when they should have survived.
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* There are no sources provided for that graphic, so I tried to track them down.
Overall, the percentages appear to be five-year survival rates. The 1920 and 1960 numbers are verified on PubMed here.
I couldn't find a site that provided that specific range of 64–80% for 1990, but I did find a number of sites that said there were significant improvements in survival rates between the 1960s and 1990 (including the widespread introduction of radiation as a treatment), and then another big improvement after 1990, leading to the current survival rate.
The current 91% figure is given by the American Cancer Society here, and on a number of other sites.
Do you know about warming stripes? This is the image that's usually shown:
It's a visual representation of the increase in global average temperature. And here's the image mapped onto a German bus:
I thought the stripes were pretty well-known, especially among people who are aware of the climate crisis and are doing any kind of climate activism. But lately I've talked to a few different people at climate-related events who didn't know what the stripes mean, or had never even seen them.
So I'm doing my part here to further awareness.
Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading created the stripes, and then he create a website (linked above) that has versions based on data for various locations around the world. Each stripe represents a year, starting on the left side (as early as 1850, depending on location) and so far ending on the right in 2024.
The colors represent the annual variation from 0 to 0.9 degrees Celsius above (red) or below (blue) the 1961–2010 average temperature in each year. (In other words... the colors are already weighted toward the higher average baseline of the recent past.)
Hawkins' site doesn't have data for Minneapolis/Saint Paul. The closest city was Milwaukee, so here's that:
Check out your own location, or look at other places around the world. It's enlightening.
I've been reflecting on vaccines a lot lately.
At first, I was thinking I grew up in a golden age of public health, and in a relative sense, I did — mostly after the polio vaccine (kindergarten sugar cubes...I think, then later, that scarring shot in the arm). Rubella shots. Later for tetanus.
But I did have the measles before all that, and I think that was after the vaccine was available in my state. My mother was afraid my little sister, about 2, was going to die. At least one of my older sisters also had mumps, though I think we youngers avoided catching it. And of course, all of us had chicken pox.
One of my grad school friends, and her younger sister, were hospitalized and nearly died at early school-age from post-chicken-pox complications.
I had HPV for decades. It complicated my health care for a long time and officially cleared up on its own only five or 10 years ago. Until 2009, I did not get flu shots (and I never had the flu... self-reinforcing). H1N1 that year pushed me toward action. And then there has been our series of covid vaccines. And the shingles vaccine — I'm grateful for that, even though the second shot reaction was not fun for a day and a half or so. Better than having shingles by far!
Daughter Number Three-Point-One is just old enough to have caught chicken pox before the vaccine was released, but she has been able to benefit from every other vaccine that came out before and after that point. I made sure she had every HPV vaccine shot in the regimen also, and I'm now extra happy she did.
A post of mine from 2009 has some still-good information on vaccine risks (which are infinitesimal) vs. the odds of dying of the targeted disease or other causes of death in young people.
This image from Edward Tufte, the OG of information graphics, has been making the rounds at BlueSky:
(Click to enlarge for readability.)
As has this image for some reason:
I saw it from George Takei, who said, "Who made this? Ahahaha."
If you wanted a small pickup truck 20 or 25 years ago, you had several choices: the Ford Ranger, the Chevy S10, and several from Japanese car companies whose particular models I don't remember. There may have been others.
Now there are none in the U.S. There are humongous trucks, gigantic trucks, and "small" trucks that are the size of the large trucks of 25 years ago. A few of those are EVs... score!
My favorite example of this the recent models of the Ford Ranger, compared to the compact Ford Rangers that were made here in Saint Paul, or even the somewhat compact Ford Mavericks (which are available as EVs). I've been watching for a chance to get a photo of a Maverick next to an old-model Ranger, but have not had that opportunity.
Today while stopped at a red light in my car I was following a Maverick and realized the top of its back bed was taller than the top of my car.
So I thought it was time to write about this, despite not having a side-by-side photo from the street.
Here's a photo of the 2024 Maverick (left) and Ranger (right):
Here's a 2000 Ranger, found from a used car site:
It's hard to get a sense of how that white, 2000 truck compares to the size of those two 2024 trucks, though. So here are some of the relevant specs:
2024 models
Only available as Supercrew (four seats, with a shorter bed)
Maverick
69" high (roof)
Front end is higher than the 2000 Ranger (that dimension is not listed in the past or present)
Base weight 3,600 pounds (this is the internal combustion model)
Ranger
74" (roof)
Front end is even higher than Maverick or the 2000 Ranger (that dimension is not listed in the past or present)
Base weight 4,200 pounds
2000 Ranger - standard cab (front seat only)
65" high (roof)
Front end is lowest (that dimension is not listed in the past or present)
Base weight 3,100 pounds
Heavier vehicles are more dangerous to everyone outside the vehicle, and the increase in danger is not an arithmetic progression. Taller vehicles, especially in the front end (which is also designed as a blunt object in new trucks), are more dangerous to everyone outside the vehicle.
The car industry says larger trucks are what people want, and I'm sure that's true for some people, but a range of options seems like a fair ask, and it used to exist across the industry. The higher profit margin on larger trucks has accompanied the creeping corporate greed of recent decades.
Personally, if I ever ditch my now-hated EV and get another one*, it will be for a small EV truck. At this moment I like the Telo Mini Truck 1, which is not available in the U.S. at this point, though they have a link for reservations.
It's 66" tall and the driver doesn't have a huge front-end blocking their view. Their general copy says it has "Toyota Tacoma capability, Tesla-like range and efficiency, in the footprint of a MINI Cooper." It's length is less than a Prius.
I couldn't find a base weight for the Telo. It's possible they don't have one yet, since it's not in production. It's likely to be heavier than it looks, and probably heavier than even the larger 2024 Ranger, given that it's battery-powered.
What about that lack of a protruding front-end? Isn't that a safety risk to the Telo's occupants? According to Motortrend, the design has 18" of mechanical crumple zone. Plus lots of collision-preventing sensors. And I would say... maybe if a driver feels a bit more exposed (even if they are just as safe in reality) maybe they will drive a bit more cautiously and be less likely to have a crash.
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*The other possibilities in that "if" are a choice between not getting rid of the embodied carbon of an existing vehicle (therefore keeping what I have) and getting rid of it without replacing it with a personal EV at all.
I do long for access to a small pickup truck. But there we have car (and truck) sharing here. We'll see.
My mother was born in 1932, and she had twin brothers who were born about two years later. While the youngest boys were still infants, their next-older brother, who was in kindergarten, came home from school with whooping cough (pertussis).
The kindergartner missed half a year of school and had to repeat the grade, but one of the twins died.
This was right around the time the pertussis vaccine were just starting field trials in Michigan, nowhere near my grandparents' home in upstate New York. According to the linked History channel article, in the early 1930s, "6,000 kids in the United States were dying from whooping cough...each year—more than from diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis or polio."
Whooping cough is no joke, and to this day infants still rely on others to be vaccinated because they can't be fully vaccinated themselves before 12 months.
If you're older than 55 or 60, what apples were around for sale when you were growing up?
I'm from Upstate New York, so I guess I was spoiled, because I lived relatively near Cornell University, which has been working on apple varieties for a long time. I thought it was normal to have more kinds of apples available for at least part of the year than just the Red Delicious we saw during the winter months.
This nifty article from Scientific America, We Are Living in the Golden Age of Apples, is full of facts I never knew, and now I live almost on top of the University of Minnesota's agricultural campus, which is Cornell's Midwestern twin when it comes to cold-climate apple-breeding.
First of all, apples originated in Central Asia: Malus domestica, descendent of the wild Malus seiversii of Kazakhstan. That was crossed with another wild species, Malus sylvestris (which I assume was a bit more shade-tolerant, since sylvestris in plant names usually means woodland). The Romans are said to have developed the practice of grafting to propagate particular good-tasting fruit onto useful rootstocks.
What I didn't know in my rural part of New York was that the varieties we saw each year were available near us because they were developed in New York and grown in local orchards only: Macintosh and Cortland are two I remember particularly. The only ones you could get all year, nationally, up through the 1980s sometime, the article says*, were Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and Yellow Delicious. (We always got a Red Delicious and an orange in stockings at Christmas.)
Commercial apple breeding is bifurcated, says Scientific American, into before Honecrisp and after it. The 1980s University of Minnesota introduction — at first only available in U-Pick operations — has a disruptive genetic trait that makes it a "high-acidity, high-sugar apple." Before that, apple textures were categorized as either soft and mealy, or firm and dense. They had to make a new category called "crisp" for Honeycrisp.
The article explains in pretty good detail how apple breeding works today. It ends with info on what kinds of traits they're working on in today's crowded marketplace:
One of the biggest challenges to developing new varieties is that the ones we have now are so good. “The bar has risen so much,” Bedford says. Any new apple variety must be better than what already exists to justify developing it and bringing it to market. “We are some of our biggest competition"...
I particularly like that they are trying to breed apples that only grow to a size that would fit well into a child's hand. That was one thing we wished for when Daughter Number Three-Point-One was small.
As David Perry (lollardfish) said on BlueSky last month,
Do you ever have that moment where you’re eating a delicious Honeycrisp apple and you think: “fuck yes, a public university made this!!!” Or is that just me?
That guy Perry is referring to, Jim Luby, just retired from the University of Minnesota. There are people at Cornell's ag school (which is part of the SUNY system, not the private part of Cornell) doing just the same.
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* The article says 1980s, but though the Honeycrisp patent is from 1988, the plant was released in 1991. Pepin Heights Orchards in Lake City, Minn., delivered the first Honeycrisp apples to grocery stores in 1997.
Here's a fact about the renewable energy transition that doesn't get enough attention. In addition to electric versions of tools/vehicles/heaters being vastly more efficient in use (and so needing less energy to do the same work), the mining needed to create the infrastructure is much less than is needed for our current fossil fuel use.
I've seen several people explain this, but this recent Twitter thread by Rebecca Solnit is a good brief summary:
A common response to mention of renewables is a denunciation of mining for battery materials by people who don't seem to notice that fossil fuel is also mined/extracted — on a scale that dwarfs everything else. This pits them against the energy transition.
The attitude that somehow renewables are problematic while ignoring altogether the colonial / environmental / human rights impact of fossil fuels and other fossil fuels impacts such as climate chaos seems like a real transition obstacle.
This is of course in part because (with industry help) the mainstream has normalized the horrific poisonousness and destructiveness of fossil fuels. But I wonder how much industry propaganda has sown this widespread sense that it's renewables that are problematic.
Obviously cobalt and lithium are very different materials in their distribution and human rights implications. Less obvious to the people piping up with objections is that research on better battery materials is speeding along.
Lots of people here are more expert than me on many aspects of this. I'm just dismayed by people who are more interested in denouncing the solutions than understanding them or addressing the problems, because I see that reflexive response constantly. And curious why....
Status quo bias, on top of oil company propaganda, probably explains most of it. We have to tell this story every chance we get.
Yet another breakthrough on the horizon in the efforts to decarbonize concrete. (Here's an earlier post about one method that's further along.)
The latest news is about a way of recycling concrete debris while making steel.
Reading stories like this makes me realize how much I don't understand about industrial processes, and also how many opportunities there appear to be within them for substantial systems change.
