15,000 Minnesota Nurses Launch Historic Strike to Put 'Patients Before Profits'

"We feel like this is the only thing we can do," said one nurse. "Hospitals tell us it's our fault, but we've been actively involved and getting nowhere."


Nurses at Children's Minnesota and United Hospital in St. Paul were among some 15,000 nurses in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports who walked off the job on September 12, 2022 for a three-day strike. 

(Photo: John Autey/MediaNews Group/St. Paul Pioneer Press via Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT

September 12, 2022

About 15,000 nurses in Minnesota walked off the job on Monday for a historic three-day strike after months of failed contract negotiations during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"I can't give my patients the care they deserve."

Members of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) last month voted overwhelmingly in support of what the union says is the "largest private sector nurses strike in U.S. history."

Nurses with MNA argue that hospital executives who make millions of dollars per year "refuse solutions to short-staffing, retention, and better patient care."

Strikers carried signs highlighting their frustration. Messages included: "Patients before profits," "Put an end to corporate healthcare," and "The frontline is fed up with excuses!"

Chris Rubesch, MNA vice president and a nurse at Essentia Health in Duluth, told The Washington Post that "I can't give my patients the care they deserve."

"Call lights go unanswered. Patients should only be waiting for a few seconds or minutes if they've soiled themselves or their oxygen came unplugged or they need to go to the bathroom, but that can take 10 minutes or more," he explained. "Those are things that can't wait."


Minnesota Reformer reports that in addition to demanding staffing fixes and more paid sick and parental leave, nurses seek a "30% wage increases over the next three years. Hospitals have countered with around 10% increases over three years and say they can't afford to go any higher."

The outlet noted that "nurses at Essentia Health's Moose Lake Clinic, who have been negotiating a first contract for two years, were also set to strike but decided on Sunday night to hold an informational picket instead."

At the 15 hospitals in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports where nurses did strike on Monday, participants and supporters shared updates on social media.

Along with various local and state-level officials, including Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, national political figures also expressed solidarity with the striking nurses—whose action comes amid resurgence of the U.S. labor movement.

"I'll be out standing in solidarity with our nurses at Abbott, Children's, and Fairview today!" said Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents metropolitan Minneapolis. "Come join us and show your support."

Backing their fight for "safer care, fair scheduling, and higher wages," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). tweeted that "nurses are the backbone of our healthcare system. They understand what's best for their patients."

Spokespeople for Allina Health and Twin Cities Hospital Group, two of the systems where workers walked out, blamed the nurses for the impacts of the strike, pointing out to the Post that they have refused to go to mediation. But striking nurses say the walkout was forced by intractable management.

"We're really sad and disappointed that it has come to a strike," Brianna Hnath, a nurse at North Memorial in Robbinsdale, told the newspaper. "But we feel like this is the only thing we can do to show administration how incredibly important a strong nursing core is to a hospital. Hospitals tell us it's our fault, but we've been actively involved and getting nowhere."

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Mixed feelings in Kenya around Queen's death

Sat, September 10, 2022 a

STORY: As condolences pour in, there are mixed feelings in Kenya - and among some other Africans - about the late Queen Elizabeth and her country's colonial legacy.

Britain once ruled more than half of Africa. Many have fond memories of its longest serving monarch, who smiled and waved at crowds in 20 countries across the continent during her 70-year reign.

But others remember colonial times. Like the brutal 1950s crushing of Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion as the sun set on Britain's empire.

Ninety-eight-year-old Kenyan Gitu Wa Kahengeri was 17 when he joined the rebellion against British rule.

He says he mourns Elizabeth as a human being but won't forget being detained in a camp by British forces, beaten and denied food.

"They occupied my land, my birthright," he says.

"I am not a believer of forgetting, therefore we will say okay you did what you did, you have written a regret letter, if you want to apologize in the future you can do so. But we will not forget, I personally will not forget that I was incarcerated for seven years, I cannot forget, I was put together with my father, I cannot forget I left my children for seven years without food, without education, that I will never forget."

Elizabeth was on a visit to Kenya aged 25 with her husband Philip when she learned of the death of her father King George VI and her accession to the throne in 1952.

She was to return many times to Africa as queen.

Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara encouraged people not to forget Britain's colonial past.

""There is a tendency by some to sort of say well that past is the past, just ignore it, it's a nice old lady who has passed, but I am also encouraged by the fact that there is - especially online - quite a vocal number of people who are refusing to be taken in by this, we are insisting that, no - the history has to be told as it is, we've got to remember it as it is and especially now when all these tributes are flowing, when the fundamentals of that history are being laid down that we don't accept to be erased any longer, our stories have to be included the good and along with the bad."

King Charles's accession to the throne has also stirred renewed calls from politicians and activists in former colonies in the Caribbean to remove the monarch as their head of state - and for Britain to pay reparations for slavery.

Mixed feelings among some in Africa for Queen Elizabeth



Fri, September 9, 2022 
By Tim Cocks and Ayenat Mersie

JOHANNESBURG/THIKA, Kenya (Reuters) -As condolences poured in from around the world after Queen Elizabeth's death, there were mixed feelings among some Africans about the monarch and her country's colonial legacy on a continent where Britain once ruled more than half the territory.

Some had fond memories of Britain's longest serving monarch -- who came to smile and wave at crowds in 20 countries across the continent during her 70-year reign.

Others however have retained anger at British colonial times and recalled things like the brutal 1950s crushing of Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion as the sun set on Britain's empire, and a huge diamond the British royal family acquired from colonial South Africa in 1905, which the queen never returned despite calls to do so.

Elizabeth was just 25 and on a visit to Kenya with her husband Philip when she learned of her father King George VI's death and her accession to the throne on Feb. 6, 1952.

She was to return many times to Africa as queen.

"When the queen visited Uganda in 1954, I was a young boy in primary school. She was a young and small woman who looked very humble. She was very admirable and smiling," Vincent Rwosire, an 84-year-old retired postal worker, told Reuters.

"We could not believe that such a young woman could have so much power," he said by phone from Mbarara, western Uganda.

Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo, whose country the queen visited in 1961, four years after it became one of the first African countries to get independence, lowered flags and said Ghana was proud to be part of the Commonwealth of nations.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose first name means freedom in Swahili and whose country gained independence in 1963, called her "a towering icon of selfless service".

'THEY OCCUPIED MY LAND'

Many were less enthusiastic about celebrating the life of a monarch whose country has a chequered history in Africa -- like 98-year-old Kenyan Gitu Wa Kahengeri, who was 17 when he joined the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule.

"They occupied my land; my birthright," he said, twirling a black cane at his home in Thika as he recalled being detained in a camp by British forces, beaten and denied food.

"But we are mourning (the) queen because (she) is a person. A human being," he said. "We are sorry for people to die."

South Africa's Marxist opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, said: "We do not mourn the death of Elizabeth".

"Our interaction with Britain has been one of pain, ... death and dispossession, and of the dehumanisation of the African people," it said, listing atrocities committed by British forces in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Despite this view of her, Elizabeth forged a close relationship with late South African leader Nelson Mandela, the first post-apartheid president, and visited South Africa twice after the end of white minority rule.

She was an enthusiastic advocate for the Commonwealth of 56 nations, most of them former British colonies.

Some Nigerians recalled Britain's support in the 1960s for a military dictatorship that crushed the Biafra rebellion in the east of the country. Igbo officers launched the rebellion in 1967, triggering a three-year civil war that killed more than 1 million people, mostly from famine.

Uju Anya, an Igbo professor who is now living in the United States, sparked controversy when she wrote on Twitter late on Thursday of her "disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome".

Her comments were "liked" 67,000 times, but her Carnegie Mellon University distanced itself from her messages, which the university called in a statement "offensive and objectionable".

Britain's monarchy plays a largely figurehead role, so while the queen formally appointed prime ministers and held regular meetings with them, she did not make policy.

Meanwhile, the accession of King Charles to the throne has stirred renewed calls from politicians and activists for former colonies in the Caribbean to remove the monarch as their head of state and for Britain to pay slavery reparations.

(Additional reporting by Elias Biryabarema in KampalaEditing by Frances Kerry)

How sunlight could turn seawater into freshwater for coastal communities


By Nell Lewis, CNN
Mon September 12, 2022

Photos: How desalination is being is used to tackle water scarcity
Desalination – According to World Bank calculations, MENA accounts for nearly half of the world's desalination capacity, making it the largest desalination market in the world. Desalination is widely practiced in the oil-rich nations of the Gulf, at plants like this one in Qatar.

Water scarcity is a growing problem in many parts of the world. One solution is to remove salt from seawater in a process called desalination. Abu Dhabi-based startup Manhat has created a floating device that captures water evaporated from the ocean's surface and condenses and collects it as freshwater. Manhat envisages the devices eventually being used to irrigate floating farms, as shown in this rendering.


Groundwater – The Middle East and North Africa is home to just 1% of the world's freshwater resources. Countries in the region are withdrawing water from underground reservoirs faster than it can be replenished. This is mainly to irrigate farmland: agriculture accounts for nearly 80% of water usage in MENA, according to a report from the World Bank. Pictured here: Crop circles in Saudi Arabia draw on groundwater for irrigation.


Desalination – To overcome water scarcity and meet increasing demand, MENA countries have long been producing their own water, using large-scale desalination plants -- such as this one in in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Desalination – According to World Bank calculations, MENA accounts for nearly half of the world's desalination capacity, making it the largest desalination market in the world. Desalination is widely practiced in the oil-rich nations of the Gulf, at plants like this one in Qatar.

Desalination – But desalination in the Middle East has a significant environmental cost because it relies on energy-intensive thermal desalination plants. Waste left over from the process is often discharged into the sea and can damage marine ecosystems. Here, discharge from a plant in Kuwait flows into the Persian Gulf.


Cloud seeding – The United Arab Emirates has invested in another solution to tackle the water problem -- rainfall-enhancing technology called cloud seeding. During cloud seeding missions, aircraft eject salt crystals from flares mounted on their wings to stimulate condensation and the growth of water droplets.


Rainwater harvesting – Rainwater harvesting is another low-cost solution in the region whereby rainwater runoff is collected, filtered and stored for use. Such measures have been used for millenia in the region, according to the World Bank. Tanks and cisterns -- such as this one in Yemen -- provide important supply sources for many rural and urban communities.

(CNN)A summer of extreme heat and drought around the world has been a reminder that water scarcity is a pressing issue and one that will only get worse with climate change. Already, more than two billion people worldwide lack easy access to clean water, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

For some countries, desalination plants offer a solution -- removing salt from seawater to satisfy their freshwater needs. The Middle East has the highest concentration of these in the world. But such plants, still mostly powered by fossil fuels, are energy-intensive and the process creates an extremely salty wastewater known as brine, which can damage marine ecosystems and animals when it's pumped back into the sea.

That's why some startups and researchers are updating centuries-old solar still technology, which uses only sunlight to purify water. While the technology is still a long way off from producing the volume of freshwater generated by desalination plants, it could prove valuable for off-grid or coastal communities.

Manhat, an Abu Dhabi startup, is developing a floating desalination device.

Floating solar stills

Abu Dhabi-based startup Manhat, founded in 2019, is developing a floating device that distills water without requiring electricity or creating brine. It consists of a greenhouse structure that floats on the surface of the ocean: sunlight heats and evaporates water underneath the structure -- separating it from the salt crystals which, are left behind in the sea -- and as temperatures cool, the water condenses into freshwater and is collected inside.

Manhat wants to use its desalination devices for agriculture, creating floating farms surrounded by multiple devices for on-the-spot irrigation, as shown in this rendering. Credit: Manhat

"It's really similar to the natural water cycle," says Dr. Saeed Alhassan Alkhazraji, the company's founder and associate professor at Abu Dhabi's Khalifa University. He says solar evaporation has long been used for this purpose, but typically it involves putting water in a basin where, once the water has evaporated, salt is left behind.

Unlike traditional solar stills, Manhat's device floats in the ocean, drawing water directly from the sea. Salt does not accumulate in the device and the angle of the collection cylinder prevents water droplets evaporating back to the sea, says Alhassan.

Earlier this year, Manhat's patented technology won the Water Europe Innovation award for small and medium enterprises with breakthrough solutions in the water sector, commended for its ability to produce freshwater with "zero carbon footprint and zero brine rejection."
The startup plans to harness its technology in floating farms, which would use its desalination devices to provide freshwater irrigation for crops without the need for water transportation and its associated emissions.

This would benefit arid coastal areas where land is intensively farmed, says Alhassan. "If you produce (fresh) water on the sea's surface and use it for farming, you can effectively allow arable land to be rejuvenated," he says, adding that the technology could work well for countries like the Maldives that have little land available for desalination plants.

Manhat wants to use its desalination devices for agriculture, creating floating farms surrounded by multiple devices for on-the-spot irrigation, as shown in this rendering. Credit: Manhat
Others have also been innovating with solar stills. In 2020, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a free-floating desalination unit consisting of a multilayer evaporator that recycles the heat generated when the water vapor condenses, boosting its overall efficiency.
While field tests are ongoing, it was touted as a technology that could "potentially serve off-grid arid coastal areas to provide an efficient, low-cost water source." Researchers suggested it could be configured as a floating panel on the sea, delivering freshwater through pipes to the shore, or it could be designed to serve a single household, using it atop a tank of seawater.

Scaling up

Geoff Townsend, who works on innovations in water scarcity for water treatment and hygiene company Ecolab, believes that while solar still innovations are unlikely to replace conventional desalination, they could "supplement existing technology, reducing the overall carbon footprint of desalination."
But he cautions that "desalination typically needs to provide a very predictable supply of water," and that "there will be potential concerns on the extent to which diurnal (daily) and seasonal changes in performance could impact the ability to achieve the minimal production requirement."
An even bigger challenge for this kind of technology is scale. "A drawback is their intrinsic low efficiency," says Townsend, adding that they tend to take up a lot of space for the small amount of water they produce.

Abu Dhabi Fossil Dunes: A beautiful frozen landscape created by climate change

MIT's device was found to produce around five liters of freshwater per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area. Manhat's current floating prototype, which covers 2.25 square meters but only has one square meter open to water, produces 1.5 liters of freshwater per day -- a drop in the ocean, considering the World Health Organization estimates that an average person needs at least 50 to 100 liters a day to be healthy

Alhassan says Manhat is working to increase this volume to five liters by optimizing materials and design, with the long-term goal of reaching at least 20 liters. The startup has raised $130,000 in funding so far, predominantly via a collaboration with Abu Dhabi Ports, but with increased investment he is confident these targets can be met.

A pilot of the floating farm concept will begin next year. By linking up multiple modular devices in a grid formation, Manhat believes that its current technology could provide enough desalination to grow less water-intensive crops, such as mushrooms, and as the devices improve they could start targeting other crops such as lettuce or tomatoes.

Despite the challenges, Alhassan believes solar stills will one day become an important source of freshwater. "We have to accept the fact that seawater should be a key player in providing freshwater," he says. "But we need to have a solution that will minimize CO2 emissions and eliminate brine altogether."

Offshore wind is Louisiana's green hydrogen secret super power.

Build Back Better Lives Again, Now With Green Hydrogen

Louisiana will get a chance to flex its offshore wind muscles, through a new green hydrogen hub funded by the Build Back Better Regional Challenge.

ByTina Casey

President Biden’s signature Build Back Better bill fell into the dustbin of history last summer, but apparently the US Department of Commerce did not get the memo. The agency has just put up $50 million for a green hydrogen hub in the New Orleans region under a new program called the Build Back Better Regional Challenge. That’s going to be a tough row to hoe, considering the grip of fossil fuel stakeholders on the Pelican State. However, Build Back Better is all about transformation, right?
What Is The Build Back Better Challenge?

For those of you new to the topic, the Build Back Better bill was supposed to transform the US economy. It combined economic growth provisions with climate action, equity, and environmental justice.

Exactly zero Senate Republicans agreed to vote for the bill, so it needed support from all 50 Democratic Senators. The Democratic Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, held out until the rest of his caucus agreed to tamp down on that transformational thing. A watered-down version finally passed last month under the title “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

Although the IRA is no BBB, climate advocates are generally satisfied that it will spur significant progress on decarbonization.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department has been plowing ahead with a test of the equity and environmental justice aims of BBB, in miniature. The agency launched the new Build Back Better Regional Challenge last year, deploying Covid-19 emergency funds from the American Rescue Plan.

As described by Commerce, the BBBRC aims to “transform regional economies” through a holistic, equity-driven approach governed by a “singular vision,” leading to the growth of new industries and the scaling-up of existing ones.

The Brookings Institution, for one, caught on to the idea that the BBBRC is a stealth mode version of the Build Back Better bill. Last week the Commerce Department announced a cohort of the New Orleans region and 20 other BBBRC awardees last week for a total of $1 billion in funding, and Brookings had this to say:

“…the BBBRC represents a critical test for key assumptions of the broader Biden administration economic framework: that major public investment can catalyze new markets and technologies; that growth and equity can be mutually reinforcing drivers of shared prosperity; and that federal agencies can unleash state and local innovation while requiring effective, on-the-ground implementation at the same time.”

Louisiana Already Front & Center In Green Hydrogen Race

Louisiana’s green hydrogen ambitions will put these key assumptions to the test. The global green hydrogen market is beginning to take off like a rocket, and renewable energy stakeholders in the Pelican State aim to go along for the ride.

Among other advantages, Louisiana can lay claim to offshore wind power in the Gulf of Mexico. Wind speeds in the Gulf are not optimal compared to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but last year the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory laid out the economic case for an offshore wind industry in Louisiana.

Offshore wind can provide the clean kilowatts to power electrolyzer systems, which push hydrogen gas from water. Natural gas is currently the feedstock of choice for hydrogen production alongside other fossil sources, but water electrolysis has the potential to push natural gas off the map as costs come down and the electrolyzer industry scales up.

Louisiana’s ammonia industry will also come into play. Ammonia (NH3) is another sector that leans heavily on natural gas, but with green hydrogen in hand the ammonia industry is already beginning to pivot into a more sustainable model.
How To Win The Build Back Better Challenge

The $50 million Louisiana grant goes specifically to the South Louisiana region, under the umbrella of the “H2theFuture” initiative of the Greater New Orleans Development Foundation.

H2theFuture is tasked with cutting the cost of sustainable H2 and bringing it to parity with fossil-sourced hydrogen, while also adhering to the tenets of BBBRC.

“The need for systemic economic diversification in Louisiana is urgent. In the last decade, the region lost more than 22,000 good-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry, leaving it with legacy energy infrastructure, workforce, and a demand-base primed for transition,” explains the The Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration.

Projects to be funded by the grant include cost-cutting test beds, hydrogen fuel for ships, and a hydrogen fueling barge at the Port of South Louisiana.

BBBRC is a justice program as well as an industry-supporting one, so H2theFuture also had to demonstrate the importance of transitioning to a fossil-free economy, in order to win funding.

“There is a strong and multifaceted equity argument for South Louisiana to make this transition to clean hydrogen – decades of structural inequities have affected the region, which are reflected in current statistics,” H2theFuture explains.

“In the energy industry, while jobs are well-paying, only 29% are held by minorities, compared to over 50% in the lower- wage hospitality sector (Emsi); average wages are $62,000 for whites compared to $33,000 for African Americans (ACS 5-Year Estimates),” they add.

“…air and soil pollution disproportionately affect communities living close to industry,” H2thFuture also notes. “According to the EPA, of the top 15 census tracts with the highest cancer risk in the nation, 7 are majority-black population tracts in South Louisiana.”

Among the equity provisions planned for the new hydrogen hub are:

— an inclusive entrepreneurship program

— an HBCU New Energy Specialization to position students from the region’s four Historically Black Colleges and Universities as hydrogen industry leaders in business, public policy, and law

— a workforce training and apprenticeship program

Follow The Money To Green Hydrogen

In an interesting twist, South Louisiana’s BBBRC grant dovetails with the Energy Department’s $8 billion plan to create a network of regional “Clean Hydrogen Hubs” throughout the US. The plan is funded through last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The new grant could give H2theFuture a leg up on the sustainable H2 competition. They’ll need all they help they can get. Also competing for a share of the $8 billion pot is a powerful alliance of six northeast coastal states that are primed and ready to tap into their offshore wind resources. That group initially launched with Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Maine and Rhode Island have also hopped on board.

In another interesting twist, the Energy Department’s $8 billion hydrogen hub competition places an emphasis on principles that support the BBBRC.

“Principles of equity and justice will guide [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] implementation, consistent with the Biden Administration’s commitments to ensure that overburdened, underserved, and underrepresented individuals and communities have access to federal resources,” the Energy Department explains.

If you’re wondering why the Energy Department is focusing on the word “clean” for its hydrogen hub competition, that’s a good question. As a creature of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the hydrogen hub program is designed to draw on multiple resources for hydrogen supply, and not all of them are renewable.

Specifically, the law provides for at least one hub has to incorporate nuclear energy for water electrolysis. That could work in H2theFuture’s advantage, though the northeast coalition could also call upon its remaining nuclear fleet.

The law also provides for the incorporation of natural gas with carbon capture. That could be another advantage to H2theFuture, considering Louisiana’s gas industry. However, a coalition of Appalachian states comprised of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia already seems to have a lock on that angle. They have already announced a focus on natural gas with carbon capture.

Good luck with that. Manufacturers are scurrying to decarbonize their operations and clean up their supply chains including energy, materials, and parts. Hydrogen from natural gas is going to be a tough sell in the sparkling green economy of the future.

Follow me on Twitter @TinaMCasey.
Image: Green hydrogen with offshore wind power courtesy of H2theFuture.

The clean hydrogen energy economy was a dream. The climate bill could make it a reality this decade

FRI, SEP 9 2022

Catherine Clifford@IN/CATCLIFFORD/@CATCLIFFORD

KEY POINTS
Hydrogen could help decarbonize some very large sectors of the economy that are otherwise a real challenge, like long haul trucking and making iron and steel.

But hydrogen has to be synthesized with zero carbon emissions, otherwise it’s not a clean energy source.

A tax credit tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act gives the maximum tax credit, $3 per kilogram, to hydrogen produced with renewable energy and nuclear energy.


A sign for a hydrogen fuel pump at a train refueling station in Germany. 

Hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be used in a number of industries.
Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A tax credit tucked into Inflation Reduction Act could turbocharge the nascent clean hydrogen industry and turn it into a multitrillion-dollar business in the coming decades.

The tax credit will spur hydrogen producers to develop cleaner ways to synthesize hydrogen, which is used to make fertilizer and in other industrial processes. But it could also catalyze a whole new category of companies looking to use clean hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels in areas such as shipping, aviation, heavy industry, and as a way to store and transport energy.

Currently, 98 percent of hydrogen is made in a way that uses fossil fuels, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. But “all the current hydrogen producers are looking to produce clean hydrogen,” explained Elina Teplinsky, a lawyer who serves as the spokesperson for the Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative, a group working to advance the development of the nuclear hydrogen industry.

The law will make it more economically feasible to use carbon capture and storage technology to reduce the carbon emissions from hydrogen creation. It will also open the door to a whole range of companies looking for cleaner ways to make hydrogen, and to use hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels in certain areas.

By 2050, between 60 and 80 percent of hydrogen production will be powered by renewables, according to a November report on the industry published by the Hydrogen Council, an industry group, in collaboration with McKinsey & Co. (This prediction was published before the tax credit was passed.)

This kind of industry transition will require a lot of investment — as much as $7 trillion to $8 trillion through 2050. But on the plus side, by that date the hydrogen economy could generate about $3 trillion in annual revenue, according to the Hydrogen Council and McKinsey report.
What is hydrogen used for today, and how could it fight climate change?

Currently, roughly half of the hydrogen produced is used to make fertilizer and ammonia, with the balance used in petrochemical refineries or production, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy. The push for clean hydrogen is motivated both by a need to decarbonize current processes and because the use cases for hydrogen are expanding.

Industrial applications, which make up nearly all the demand for hydrogen today, will represent only 15% of total hydrogen demand by 2050, according to the Hydrogen Council/McKinsey report.

Hydrogen has the highest energy per mass of any fuel and does not release any carbon emissions when it is burned or turned to electricity in a fuel cell. Entrepreneurs and advocates believe hydrogen could be useful to decarbonize some very large sectors of the economy like long-haul trucking and industrial processes including making iron and steel, maritime cargo shipping, and aviation.

“If it weren’t for climate change, we probably wouldn’t be expanding into all of these new use cases” for hydrogen, Emily Kent, the U.S. director of zero-carbon fuels at Clean Air Task Force, a global climate nonprofit, told CNBC.

The largest end use for hydrogen by 2050 is expected to be mobility, including heavy trucking, long-range flights and container ships, according to the Hydrogen Council/McKinsey report. In these cases, hydrogen would produce electricity through a fuel cell, in which hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms are combined in an electrochemical reaction to generate electricity, heat and water.

Current electric battery-powered vehicles can’t meet this need because batteries that could store enough energy for long-haul journeys would be too heavy and would take too long to recharge, Kent explained. A hydrogen tank and fuel cell would weigh less, take up less space and have the refueling time similar to gas or diesel.

“It’s possible that there’ll be huge breakthroughs and batteries or something else that would change things. But as it stands today, there aren’t great solutions,” Kent told CNBC.

Digital generated image of wind turbines, solar panels and Hydrogen

 containers standing on landscape against blue sky.
Andriy Onufriyenko | Moment | Getty Images

Hydrogen can also be burned to produce electricity in a turbine, similar to natural gas. Currently, up to 20% hydrogen can be blended with natural gas burned in conventional natural gas turbines without needing to do any infrastructure changes, according to Kent.

“For higher blends of hydrogen or pure hydrogen, we’ll likely need adjustments to the turbines and infrastructure,” Kent told CNBC. “There are companies working on 100% hydrogen-ready infrastructure where pure hydrogen can be burned in a turbine to produce electricity.”

Hydrogen can be a way to store energy, which is going to be critical as renewable energy like wind and solar are ramped up and deployed across the country. Wind and solar energy don’t work when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, and so energy has to be stored somehow to be able to provide continuous, reliable energy. Meanwhile, battery technology is being ramped up, but batteries are not yet at the point in their development where they can store enough energy for long enough to make them sufficient backup for a fully renewable grid.

“If you produce a ton of solar in the summer, and you want to store a bunch of it away for the winter, hydrogen can be stored for sort of that many monthslong seasonal periods, and provide electricity back to the system when it’s needed,” Kent said.

Cleanly produced hydrogen is also being considered as a replacement for coking coal in a key part of the process in producing steel, a heavy-emissions industry which is considered a real challenge to decarbonize. And clean hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes that require especially high-grade heat, temperatures above 752 degrees Fahrenheit, like cement plants, glassmaking, and aluminum remelting, according to the Hydrogen Council/McKinsey report.

What is clean hydrogen?

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but here on Earth, it only exists in compound forms with other elements — particularly with oxygen as part of water. Separating the hydrogen from the other atoms requires industrial processes and energy.

Currently, China is the largest producer of hydrogen, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization. Of the hydrogen that China makes, 60 percent is made using coal and about 25 percent comes from using natural gas, according to CSIS. Outside of China, the largest hydrogen producers are industrial gas companies like Linde and AirProducts, according to Teplinsky.

Seventy-six percent of hydrogen produced globally and 95% in the U.S. is produced with a process called steam methane reforming, in which a source of methane, like natural gas, reacts with steam at very high temperatures, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy. Natural gas releases greenhouse gas emissions when burned, and also from so-called fugitive methane leaks as it’s extracted and transported.

Globally, 22% (and 4% in the U.S.) is made with a process called coal gasification, where coal reacts with oxygen and steam in hot temperature and high pressure.

19 August 2021, Schleswig-Holstein, Geesthacht: Notes on the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen can be seen in a laboratory at the Helmholtz Centre hereon in Geesthacht. The Cluster Agency Renewable Energies Hamburg (EEHH) provided information on current developments in the topic as part of a media trip.

 Photo: Christian Charisius/dpa

Some companies are working to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from these processes and store it in tanks underground. Hydrogen made this way is sometimes called “blue hydrogen.”

More promisingly from an emissions perspective, an electrolyzer can be used to split a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen, and it can be powered with almost any energy source — including zero-emissions sources like solar or wind, creating what is known as “green hydrogen.”

Today, two percent of the hydrogen made globally and 1 percent in the U.S. is made with an electrolyzer.

Nuclear energy can also be used to power hydrogen synthesis with almost no additional CO2 emissions (this is sometimes called “pink hydrogen,” but the nomenclature varies). As a bonus, the steam and heat produced as byproducts of nuclear energy can be used in a high temperature electrolysis process, which is much more efficient. And with the advanced nuclear reactors in development that run at even hotter temperatures than conventional nuclear reactors, hydrogen can be produced in a thermo-chemical water-splitting process that doesn’t use an electrolyzer at all.

Because the majority of the cost of producing hydrogen with electrolysis is the cost of the electricity that goes into it, making hydrogen with nuclear energy and steam “really could have a tremendous contribution on lowering the costs of clean hydrogen production,” Teplinsky told CNBC.

The cost of producing hydrogen with these different methods varies tremendously and swings based on input costs, like natural gas and the source of power. Because of the Russian war in Ukraine and climate change, these input costs have themselves been swinging. A report published by nonpartisan nonprofit Resources for the Future in December 2020 said a kilogram of hydrogen made with steam methane reforming cost between $1 and $2 (including the costs of some carbon capture). Hydrogen made with electrolysis powered by wind and solar ranged from between $3 and $7 per kilogram.

That’s where the tax credit comes in.

How does the new bill help?

The tax credit in the IRA is available for 10 years and scales depending on how clean the hydrogen production is. If hydrogen is produced without releasing any carbon emissions, the tax credit is maxed out at $3 per kilogram of hydrogen produced. It then scales down proportionally based on the amount of emissions released, as long as it’s less than current production techniques.

If hydrogen is produced with some carbon emissions, but fewer than are emitted in current production techniques, the tax credit is incrementally smaller, proportional to the emissions reductions.

The tax credit is “an absolute game-changer,” Akshay Honnatti, the leader of EY’s sustainability tax division for the United States, told CNBC. “There was no incentive to have hydrogen be cleaner. It costs to get hydrogen to be cleaner,” Honnatti added. “Now there’s a credit available for someone to make that additional level of investment and be able to justify that level of investment to their stakeholders and shareholders.”

The $3 per kilogram credit makes nuclear hydrogen highly competitive with fossil fuel produced hydrogen, Teplinsky said. The U.S. Department of Energy has as a goal, one of its Energy Earthshots Initiatives, to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen to $1 per kilogram in a decade.

For many of these burgeoning use cases for clean hydrogen, the tax credit included in the climate bill is going to give companies the chance to enter the market for making clean hydrogen without losing money. “They could go back to their shareholders, and they can say, ‘Look, we can we can do this economically — today. We don’t have to project a loss for the next five years to enter this market. We can actually enter this and have it be economic, or at least a breakeven project in the near future,’” Teplinsky said.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in November also included $8 billion to develop regional clean hydrogen hubs in the U.S. Between the two laws, the U.S. should be able to develop a clean hydrogen economy in seven to eight years, Teplinsky said.

Science Fiction Explores the Interconnectedness Revealed by the Coronavirus Pandemic

By Mayurika Chakravorty
August 9, 2020

THE CONVERSATION


In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, a theory widely shared on social media suggested that a science fiction text, Dean Koontz’s 1981 science fiction novel, The Eyes of Darkness, had predicted the coronavirus pandemic with uncanny precision. Covid-19 has held the entire world hostage, producing a resemblance to the post-apocalyptic world depicted in many science fiction texts.

Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s classic 2003 novel Oryx and Crake refers to a time when “there was a lot of dismay out there, and not enough ambulances”—a prediction of our current predicament.

However, the connection between science fiction and pandemics runs deeper. They are linked by a perception of globality, what sociologist Roland Robertson defines as “the consciousness of the world as a whole.”

Globality in Science Fiction

In his 1992 survey of the history of telecommunications, How the World Was One, Arthur C. Clarke alludes to the famed historian Alfred Toynbee’s lecture entitled “The Unification of the World.” Delivered at the University of London in 1947, Toynbee envisions a “single planetary society” and notes how “despite all the linguistic, religious and cultural barriers that still sunder nations and divide them into yet smaller tribes, the unification of the world has passed the point of no return.”

Science fiction writers have, indeed, always embraced globality. In interplanetary texts, humans of all nations, races, and genders have to come together as one people in the face of alien invasions. Facing an interplanetary encounter, bellicose nations have to reluctantly eschew political rivalries and collaborate on a global scale, as in Denis Villeneuve’s 2018 film, Arrival.

Globality is central to science fiction. To be identified as an Earthling, one has to transcend the local and the national, and sometimes, even the global, by embracing a larger planetary consciousness.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin conceptualizes the Ekumen, which comprises 83 habitable planets. The idea of the Ekumen was borrowed from Le Guin’s father, the noted cultural anthropologist Arthur L. Kroeber. Kroeber had, in a 1945 paper, introduced the concept (from Greek oikoumene) to represent a “historic culture aggregate.” Originally, Kroeber used oikoumene to refer to the “entire inhabited world,” as he traced back human culture to one single people. Le Guin then adopted this idea of a common origin of shared humanity in her novel.

Globality of the Pandemic

Many medical science fiction texts depict diseases afflicting all of humanity which must put up a unified front or perish. These narratives underscore the fluid and transnational histories of diseases, their impact and possible cure. In Amitav Ghosh’s 1995 novel, The Calcutta Chromosome, he weaves an interconnected history of malaria that spans continents over a century, while challenging Eurocentricism and foregrounding the subversive role of Indigenous knowledge in malaria research.

The epigraph quotes a poem by Sir Ronald Ross, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist credited with the discovery of the mosquito as the malaria vector:

“Seeking His secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.”

Pandemics are by definition global. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, noting that “[p]andemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”

Covid-19 has forced billions into social isolation and continues to wreak havoc on an unprecedented global scale. Eerily similar photographs of masked faces, PPE-clad front-line workers and deserted downtowns emerged from every corner of the world.

However, a pandemic is not global merely in its spread—one needs to harness its globality to counter and eventually defeat it. As Israeli historian Yuval Harari notes, in the choice between national isolationism and global solidarity, we must choose the latter and adopt a “spirit of global co-operation and trust”:

“What an Italian doctor discovers in Milan in the early morning might well save lives in Tehran by evening. When the UK government hesitates between several policies, it can get advice from the Koreans who have already faced a similar dilemma a month ago.”

Regarding Canada’s response to the crisis, researchers have noted both the immorality and futility of a nationalistic “Canada First” approach.

Clearly, a nation cannot insulate itself from the deleterious effects of the pandemic by closing its hearts and borders. Tightening immigration can temporarily stanch the flow of people, but the virus, like the “million-murdering death,” is treacherous in its border-defying agility. Presently, as many nations experience a resurgence of nationalism and exclusionary policies of walls and borders, the pandemic is a harsh reminder of the lived reality of our transnational interconnectedness.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image credit: NASA

Breakthrough Shows Humans Were Already Standing on Their Own Two Feet 7 Million Years Ago


By Jean-Renaud Boisserie
September 1, 2022
THE CONVERSATION



The study of present-day species has delivered a clear verdict on humanity’s place in the living world: right alongside chimpanzees and bonobos. However, this does not tell us much about our earliest human representatives, their biology or geographical distribution—in short, how we became human. For this, we mainly have to rely on the morphology of frustratingly rare fossils, given paleogenetic information is only preserved for recent periods —and even then, in rather cool climates.

Since the 1960s and the identification of the very early age of Australopithecus—including the famous Lucy aged 3.18 Ma (million years ago), discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia—the acquisition of bipedalism has been regarded as a decisive step in human evolution. Indeed, it is an essential feature that marks the transition from non-human to human long before the significant increase in the size of our brain.

There has been much anticipation of our study, published on 24 August in Nature, on the skeleton of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, who is a candidate for the oldest-known representative of humanity.

So, was our distant ancestor a biped or not—i.e., human or not human? In reality, asking the question in these terms borders on circular reasoning. Given we have yet to discover the last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, we do not know the initial state of human locomotion, bipedal or otherwise.
Were the First Representatives of Humanity Bipeds?

Until now, the earliest data available to us were the limb bones of Orrorin (6 Ma, Kenya) and Ardipithecus (5.8 Ma–4.2 Ma, Ethiopia), which practiced a different type of bipedalism from that of more recent species. It turns out bipedalism is not an invariable feature of humanity and has its own history within our history. The right question is therefore: were the first representatives of humanity bipedal, and if so, to what extent and how? This is the question that our Franco-Chadian team sought to answer by studying the much older remains (about 7 Ma) of Sahelanthropus.

The existence of Sahelanthropus was initially deduced in 2002 from a distorted but otherwise well-preserved cranium (nicknamed Toumaï) and a few other cranio-dental specimens discovered by the Franco-Chadian palaeoanthropological mission (founded and directed by Michel Brunet) at Toros-Menalla in the Djourab Desert in Chad, representing at least three individuals. The study is primarily based on the morphology of the teeth, face, and braincase that this species has been compared with more recent human fossils.

The limb bones described in our article include a partial left femur (thigh bone) and two left and right ulnae (together with the radius, the ulna is one of the two bones in the forearm that form our elbow). These bones were found in the same locality and year as the cranium, but were identified later in 2004. They most likely belong to the same species as the cranium, as only one large primate was identified out of nearly 13,800 fossils representing about 100 different vertebrates across 400 localities in Toros-Menalla. However, it is not known whether this femur, ulnae, and cranium belong to the same individual, as at least three different individuals were found onsite.

3D digitized models of the three limb bones of TM 266 attributed to Sahelanthropus tchadensis (left, femur in posterior and medial views; right, the two ulnae in anterior and lateral views). Image Credit: Franck Guy/CNRS/Université de Poitiers/MPFT

A number of factors slowed down our research, which began in 2004. For example, we were required to prioritize field research of other postcranial remains, while we struggled to analyze fragmentary material. We eventually relaunched the project in 2017 and concluded it five years later.
Bones Studied From Every Angle

Given the poor preservation of these long bones (the femur, for example, has lost both ends), brief analyses cannot provide reliable interpretations. We therefore studied them from all angles, both in terms of their external morphology and internal structures.

To reduce uncertainty, we employed an extensive set of methods, including direct observations and biometric measurements, 3D image analysis, shape analysis, (morphometrics) and biomechanical indicators. We compared the Chadian material with present-day and fossil specimens through the prism of 23 criteria. Taken separately, none can be used to propose a categorical interpretation of the material—indeed, there are no “magic” traits in paleoanthropology, and all will be subject to discussion within the scientific community.

Taken together, however, these traits result in an interpretation of these fossils that is far more parsimonious than any alternative hypothesis. This combination therefore indicates that Sahelanthropus practiced habitual bipedalism—i.e., that is as a regular means of locomotion. In this case, bipedalism was probably used for movement on the ground as well as in trees. In the latter case, it was most likely accompanied by a quadrupedal gait accompanied by the grasping of branches, in contrast from the quadrupedal gait practiced by gorillas and chimpanzees, known as “knuckle walking,” in which weight is supported by the backs of the phalanges.

Relationships between humans, gorillas and chimpanzees. Bipedalism gradually became the means of locomotion within the human branch from a combination of bipedalism and tree climbing, as documented by Sahelanthropus.

 Image Credit: Franck Guy/CNRS/Université de Poitiers/MPFT

The results are consistent with observations made on Orrorin and Ardipithecus, and have several implications. First, they reinforce the concept of a very early form of bipedalism in human history coexisting with other modes of locomotion. Thus there was no “sudden” appearance of a characteristic unique to humanity right from the start, but a long, slow transition spanning millions of years.

This phase of human evolution thus took place in ways that are quite common throughout the history of life and the globe, and it reminds us that our species is but a fragment of biodiversity. This fact alone should lead us to rethink our attitude toward the living world and the parameters that govern the hospitality of our planet.

Second, the characteristics of Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, and Ardipithecus suggest the ancestor we share with chimpanzees was neither chimpanzee-like nor the exclusive biped we have become. Contrary to the hypothesis that chimpanzees and bonobos retained their ancestral morphology, their particular combination of vertical climbing and “knuckle walking” more likely evolved well after our divergence.

Finally, if Sahelanthropus tchadensis is a witness of human diversity among others, it is, to this day, the only known habitual bipedal species of that age. Considering the whole, weakly diversified, hominoid fossil record of Africa and Eurasia at the end of the Miocene (after 10 Ma), the acquisition of bipedalism by the human branch on the African continent remains the only well-documented hypothesis to date. At this stage, the bipedalism appears to be part of an opportunistic locomotor repertoire—flexible, able to take advantage of different environments—that corresponds well to the diversified paleoenvironment of Toros-Menalla as reconstructed by the geologists, paleobotanists, and paleontologists of our team.

This work was developed through a strong North-South scientific collaboration in palaeoanthropology, namely between the PALEVOPRIM laboratory, the palaeontology department of the University of N’Djaména, and the Centre National de Recherche pour le Développement. These three bones belong to the Chadian heritage and will soon return to their country. At the same time, our fruitful collaboration will continue through new studies of the material as well as new field research that follows in the footsteps of the much-missed Yves Coppens, pioneer of paleontological research in Chad.

This article was co-authored by Abderamane Moussa (University of N’Djaména, Chad).

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Sabine Riffaut, Guillaume Daver, Franck Guy / Palevoprim / CNRS – Université de Poitiers / MPFT

CRISPR CRITTERS

Normally Taking a Million Years: Scientists Successfully Fuse Chromosomes in Mammals

By CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

The study reveals that chromosome-level engineering can be achieved in mammals

Researchers engineer the first sustainable chromosomal alterations in mice.

In nature, evolutionary chromosomal changes may take a million years, but scientists have recently reported a novel technique for programmable chromosome fusion that has successfully created mice with genetic changes that occur on a million-year evolutionary scale in the laboratory. The findings might shed light on how chromosomal rearrangements – the neat bundles of structured genes provided in equal numbers by each parent, which align and trade or mix characteristics to produce offspring – impact evolution.

In a study published in the journal Science, the researchers show that chromosome level engineering is possible in mammals. They successfully created a laboratory house mouse with a novel and sustainable karyotype, offering crucial insight into how chromosome rearrangements may influence evolution.

“The laboratory house mouse has maintained a standard 40-chromosome karyotype — or the full picture of an organism’s chromosomes — after more than 100 years of artificial breeding,” said co-first author Li Zhikun, researcher in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Zoology and the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology. “Over longer time scales, however, karyotype changes caused by chromosome rearrangements are common. Rodents have 3.2 to 3.5 rearrangements per million years, whereas primates have 1.6.”

By fusing two medium-sized chromosomes, researchers produced the first sustainable engineered karyotype for lab mice. This mouse carries two chromosomes fused together. Credit: Wang Qiang

According to Li, even little changes can have a massive impact. In primates, the 1.6 changes are the difference between humans and gorillas. Gorillas have two distinct chromosomes, while humans have two merged chromosomes, and a translocation between ancestral human chromosomes resulted in two different chromosomes in gorillas. Individually, fusions or translocations may result in missing or additional chromosomes, as well as diseases such as childhood leukemia

While the chromosomes’ consistent reliability is useful for learning how things operate on a short time scale, Li believes that the capacity to engineer modifications might enrich genetic understanding throughout millennia, including how to correct misaligned or malformed chromosomes. Other scientists have successfully altered chromosomes in yeast, but efforts to transfer the technology to mammals have failed.

The challenge, according to co-first author Wang Libin of CAS and the Beijing Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, is that the process entails extracting stem cells from unfertilized mouse embryos, which means the cells only have one pair of chromosomes.

There are two sets of chromosomes in diploid cells that align and negotiate the genetics of the resulting organism. This is known as genomic imprinting, and it occurs when a dominant gene is marked active while a recessive gene is marked inactive. The process can be scientifically manipulated, but the information has not stuck in previous attempts in mammal cells.

“Genomic imprinting is frequently lost, meaning the information about which genes should be active disappears, in haploid embryonic stem cells, limiting their pluripotency and genetic engineering,” Wang said. “We recently discovered that by deleting three imprinted regions, we could establish a stable sperm-like imprinting pattern in the cells.”

Without the three naturally imprinted regions, the researchers’ engineered imprinting pattern could take hold, allowing them to fuse specific chromosomes. They tested it by fusing two medium-sized chromosomes — 4 and 5 — head to tail and the two largest chromosomes — 1 and 2 — in two orientations, resulting in karyotypes with three different arrangements.

“The initial formations and stem cell differentiation were minimally affected; however, karyotypes with fused 1 and 2 chromosomes resulted in arrested development,” Wang said. “The smaller fused chromosome composed of chromosomes 4 and 5 was successfully passed to offspring.”

The karyotypes with chromosome 2 fused to the top of chromosome 1 did not lead to any full-term mouse pups, while the opposite arrangement produced pups that grew into larger, more anxious, and physically slower adults, compared to the mice with fused 4 and 5 chromosomes. Only the mice with fused 4 and 5 chromosomes were able to produce offspring with wild-type mice, but at a much lower rate than standard lab mice.

The researchers found that the weakened fertility resulted from an abnormality in how chromosomes separated after alignment, Wang said. He explained that this finding demonstrated the importance of chromosomal rearrangement in establishing reproductive isolation, which is a key evolutionary sign of the emergence of a new species.

“Some engineering mice showed abnormal behavior and postnatal overgrowth, whereas others exhibited decreased fecundity, suggesting that although the change of genetic information was limited, fusion of animal chromosomes could have profound effects,” LI said. “Using an imprint fixed haploid embryonic stem cell platform and gene editing in a laboratory mouse model, we experimentally demonstrated that the chromosomal rearrangement event is the driving force behind species evolution and important for reproductive isolation, providing a potential route for large-scale engineering of DNA in mammals.”

Reference: “A sustainable mouse karyotype created by programmed chromosome fusion” by Li-Bin Wang, Zhi-Kun Li, Le-Yun Wang, Kai Xu, Tian-Tian Ji, Yi-Huan Mao, Si-Nan Ma, Tao Liu, Cheng-Fang Tu, Qian Zhao, Xu-Ning Fan, Chao Liu, Li-Ying Wang, You-Jia Shu, Ning Yang, Qi Zhou and Wei Li, 25 August 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abm1964

The study was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. 

Scientists think they have found a solution to one of the oldest problems in the universe

Jon Kelvey 

Sun, September 11, 2022 

It’s one of the oldest problems in the universe: Since matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, and both forms of matter existed at the moment of the big bang, why is there a universe made primarily of matter rather than nothing at all? Where did all the antimatter go?

“The fact that our current-day universe is dominated by matter remains among the most perplexing, longstanding mysteries in modern physics,” University of California, Riverside professor of physics and astronomy Yanou Cui said in a statement shared this week. “A subtle imbalance or asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the early universe is required to achieve today’s matter dominance but cannot be realized within the known framework of fundamental physics.”

There are theories that might answer that question, but they are extremely to difficult to test using laboratory experiments. Now, in a new paper published Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters, Dr Cui and her co-author, Zhong-Zhi Xianyu, assistant professor of physics at Tsinghua University, China, explain they may have found a work around using the afterglow of the big bang itself to run the experiment.

The theory Drs Cui and Zhong-Zh wanted to explore is known as leptogenesis, a process involving particle decay that could have led to the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the early universe. An asymmetry in certain types of elementary particles in the very earliest moments of the cosmos, in other words, could have grown over time and through further particle interactions into the asymmetry between matter and antimatter that made the universe as we know it — and life — possible.

“Leptogenesis is among the most compelling mechanisms generating the matter-antimatter asymmetry,” Dr Cui said in a statement. “It involves a new fundamental particle, the right-handed neutrino.”

But, Dr Cui added, generating a right-handed neutrino would require vastly more energy than can be generated in particle colliders on Earth.

“Testing leptogenesis is next to impossible because the mass of the right-handed neutrino is typically many orders of magnitudes beyond the reach of the highest energy collider ever built, the Large Hadron Collider,” she said.

Dr Cui’s and her co-authors insight was that scientists may not need to build a more powerful particle collider, because the very conditions they would like to create in such an experiment already existed in some parts of the early universe. The inflationary period, an epoch of exponential expansion of time and space itself that lasted for just fractions of a second after the big bang, ....

“Cosmic inflation provided a highly energetic environment, enabling the production of heavy new particles as well as their interactions,” Dr Cui said. “The inflationary universe behaved just like a cosmological collider, except that the energy was up to 10 billion times larger than any human-made collider.”

Moreover, the results of those natural cosmological collider experiments may be preserved today in the distribution of galaxies, as well as the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang from which astrophysicists have derived much of their present understanding of the evolution of the cosmos.

“Specifically, we demonstrate that essential conditions for the asymmetry generation, including the interactions and masses of the right-handed neutrino, which is the key player here, can leave distinctive fingerprints in the statistics of the spatial distribution of galaxies or cosmic microwave background and can be precisely measured,” Dr Cui said, though making those measurements, she added, remains to be done. “The astrophysical observations anticipated in the coming years can potentially detect such signals and unravel the cosmic origin of matter.