Scientists got one step closer to solving a major problem of hydrogen energy

FAR EASTERN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: FE-NI-MO-B METALLIC GLASS, GRAPHICALL ABSTRACT view more 

CREDIT: FEFU PRESS OFFICE

A team of scientists from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) together with their colleagues from Austria, Turkey, Slovakia, Russia (MISIS, MSU), and the UK found a way to hydrogenate thin metallic glass layers at room temperature. This technology can considerably expand the range of cheap, energy-efficient, and high-performance materials and methods that can be used in the field of hydrogen energy. An article about the study was published in the Journal of Power Sources.

The team developed an amorphous nanostructure (FeNi-based metallic glass) that can be used in the field of hydrogen energy to accumulate and store hydrogen, in particular, as a replacement for Li-ion batteries in small-sized systems.

Metallic glass has the potential to replace palladium, an expensive element that is currently used in hydrogen systems. The lack of economically feasible energy storage systems is the main hindrance preventing hydrogen energy from scaling up to the industrial level. With the new development, the team came one step closer to solving this problem.

"Hydrogen is the most common chemical element in the Universe, a source of clean renewable energy that has the potential to replace all types of fuel used today. However, its storage poses a major technological problem. One of the key materials used to store and catalyze hydrogen is palladium. However, it is very expensive and has a low affinity to oxidizing or reducing environments under extreme conditions. These factors prevent hydrogen energy from being used on the industrial level. The problem can be solved with metallic glasses. They are amorphous metals and lack long range atomic order. Compared to crystalline palladium, metallic glasses are much cheaper and more resistant to aggressive environments. Moreover, due to the so-called atomic free volume (i.e. space between atoms), such glasses can 'soak up' hydrogen more effectively than any other materials with crystalline structure," said Yurii Ivanov, an assistant professor of the Department of Computer Systems at the School of Natural Sciences, FEFU.

According to the researcher, metallic glass has enormous potential in the energy industry thanks to its amorphous structure, lack of certain defects that are typical for polycrystalline metals (such as grain boundaries), and high resistance to oxidation and corrosion.

What makes this work unique is the fact that electrochemical methods were used both to hydrogenate metallic glasses and to study their ability to absorb hydrogen. Standard hydrogenation methods (such as gas adsorption) require high temperature and pressure which has a negative effect on the properties of metallic glasses and narrows the range of materials that can be used in the study. Unlike gas adsorption, electrochemical hydrogenation causes hydrogen to react with the surface of an electrode (made of FeNi metallic glass) at room temperature, just like in the case with palladium.

The new method can work as an alternative to the common gas-solid reaction for alloys with low capacity or hydrogen absorption/release speed.

The team also suggested a new concept of 'effective volume' that can be used to analyze the efficiency of hydrogen absorption and release by metallic glasses. To do so, the thickness and composition of the glass-hydrogen reaction area are measured using high-resolution electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

In the future, the team plans to develop and optimize new metallic glass compositions for practical energy applications.

Earlier a team of material scientists from FEFU, Cambridge (UK), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences had developed a method of 'rejuvenation' of 3D metallic glasses that are the most promising for practical use. The glasses had been made more moldable and resistant to above-critical loads. The improved metallic glasses can be used in many fields, from plastic electronics to various sensors and transformer cores, medical implants, and protective coatings of satellites.

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Earthquake lightning: Mysterious luminescence phenomena

SHINSHU UNIVERSITY

Research News

CREDIT: TSUNEAKI YAMABE, FACULTY OF TEXTILE SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING TECHNICAL STAFF. LABORATORY INVESTIGATION OF EARTHQUAKE LIGHTNING DUE TO LANDSLIDE, EARTH, PLANETS AND SPACE (2020) https://www.shinshu-u.ac.jp/english/

Were you aware that earthquakes are sometimes associated with luminescence, called earthquake lightning? This phenomenon had been documented throughout history, such as between 1965 and 1967, the Matsushiro earthquake swarm caused the surrounding mountain to flicker with light multiple times. In 1993 when an earthquake caused a tsunami off the coast in Southwest Hokkaido which caused 5 boats resting at shore to instantly ignite and burn. Various models have been proposed to explain earthquake lightnings, and it seems as though various factors contribute to such light emissions. Professor Emeritus Yuji Enomoto of Shinshu University, first author of the study Laboratory investigation of earthquake lightning due to landslide does not think these incidents can be explained in a unified way using a single model.

           SUPPOSED UFO IS IN FACT VOLCANIC LUMINESCENCE

Therefore, the study focused on luminescence phenomenon caused by landslides. The team picked out various types of rock that form mountains representative of land across Japan; granite, pyroclastic rocks, rhyolite, limestone and serpentinite. What he found was that different rocks have different reasons for luminescence and some rocks such as serpentinite does not emit light at all.

Granite is known to exhibit remarkable photoemission due to the piezo-induced effect of the quartz within. There have been witness accounts of earthquake lightning in areas without granite. The researchers looked at descriptions of earthquake lightning in the Japan Historical Earthquake Archives. At least 5 of the 55 accounts of earthquake lightnings were due to landslides since 869 A.D.

You can probably imagine how light can be emitted when rocks collide violently. However, the luminescence of rocks is instantaneous and faint. For this reason, ultra-sensitive, high-speed, high resolution cameras and spectroscopes were required for the study. Fortunately, excellent cameras with an ISO sensitivity of 25,600 was available in the market at relatively low prices. For ultra-sensitive spectrum analysis, a device suitable for the purpose was commercially available but too expensive. Fortunately, the research team was able to borrow one from Konica Minolta, and the difficulty of continuing research was solved. Please view the attached video to see the method of the experiment, and different visual observations of the types of light emitted.

There are many cases in which electromagnetic anomalies associated with earthquakes have been documented while the cause remains a mystery. Even though it is a rare phenomenon, Professor Emeritus Enomoto feels an obligation as a Geo-tribologist to elucidate such phenomena. He hopes understanding such phenomena will lead to the advancement of earthquake prediction and promote active disaster prevention.

During the 2011 magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake, the number of electrons in the ionosphere suddenly increased above the epicenter of the earthquake about 10 minutes after the earthquake struck. Professor Emeritus Enomoto has studied this incident and proposed the lithosphere-hydrosphere-atmosphere-ionosphere coupling model in terms of current generation of charged mists. He is currently working to elucidate why in 1995, during the Hyogo-ken Nanbu Earthquake, the sky in the West which ordinarily remains dark became brighter than usual, and the color changed from bluish purple, white, then red. This is a difficult task. Professor Enomoto hopes to put together a research-outreach book that explains these incidents so that they can be understood by a wider audience.

CRIMINAL CAPITALISM

 The secretive networks used to move money offshore

Researchers have uncovered a highly unusual network pattern within the Panama Papers, showing how fortunes can be easily hidden in secretive offshore shell corporations, and how these remain difficult to trace and take down

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Research News

 

In 2016, the world's largest ever data leak dubbed "The Panama Papers" exposed a scandal, uncovering a vast global network of people--including celebrities and world leaders, who used offshore tax havens, anonymous transactions through intermediaries and shell corporations to hide their wealth, grow their fortunes and avoid taxes.

Researchers at USC Viterbi School of Engineering have now conducted a deep analysis of the entities and their interrelationships that were originally revealed in the 11.5 million files leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The academic researchers have made some discoveries about how this network and transactions operate, uncovering uniquely fragmented network behavior, vastly different from more traditional social or organizational networks, demonstrating why these systems of transactions and associations are so robust and difficult to infiltrate or take down. The work has been published in Applied Network Science.

Lead author Mayank Kejriwal is an assistant professor working in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and USC's Information Sciences Institute who studies complex (typically, social) systems like online trafficking markets using computational methods and network science. He said the research team's aim was to study the Panama Papers network as a whole, in the same way you might study a social network like Facebook, to try to understand what the network behavior can tell us about how money can be moved.

"In general, in any social network like LinkedIn or Facebook, there is something called 'Small World Phenomenon', which means that you're only ever around six people away from anyone in the world," Kejriwal said.

"For instance, if you want get from yourself to Bill Gates, on average you would be around six connections away," he said.

However the team discovered that the Panama Papers network was about as far removed from this traditional social or organizational network behavior as it could possibly be. Instead of a network of highly integrated connections, the researchers discovered a series of secretive disconnected fragments, with entities, intermediaries and individuals involved in transactions and corporations exhibiting very few connections with other entities in the system.

"It was really unusual. The degree of fragmentation is something I have never seen before," said Kejriwal. "I'm not aware of any other network that has this kind of fragmentation."

"So (without any documentation or leak), if you wanted to find the chain between one organization and another organization, you would not be able to find it, because the chances are that that there is no chain - it's completely disconnected," Kejriwal said.

Most social, friendship or organizational networks contain a series of triangular structures in a system known as the 'friend of a friend phenomenon."

"The simple notion is that a friend of a friend is also a friend," Kejriwal said. "And we can measure that by counting the number of triangles in the network."

However, the team discovered that this triangular structure was not a feature of the Panama Papers network.

"It turns out that not only is it not prevalent, but it's far less than prevalent than even for a random network," Kejriwal said. "If you literally randomly connect things, in a haphazard fashion and then you count the triangles in that network, this network is even sparser than that." He added, "Compared to a random network, in this type of network, links between financial entities are scrambled until they are essentially meaningless (so that anyone can be transacting with anyone else)."

It is precisely this disconnectedness that makes the system of secret global financial dealings so robust. Because there was no way to trace relationships between entities, the network could not be easily compromised.

"So what this suggests is that secrecy is built into the system and you cannot penetrate it," Kejriwal said.

"In an interconnected world, we don't expect anyone to be impenetrable. Everyone has a weak link," Kejriwal said. "But not in this network. The fact it is so fragmented actually protects them."

Kejriwal said the network behavior demonstrates that those involved in the Panama Papers network of offshore entities and transactions were very sophisticated, knowing exactly how to move money around in a way that it becomes untraceable and they are not vulnerable through their connections to others in the system. Because it is a global network, there are few options for national or international bodies to intervene in order to recoup taxes and investigate corruption and money laundering.

"I don't know how anyone would try to bring this down, and I'm not sure that they would be able to. The system seems unattackable," Kejriwal said.

Puzzled scientists seek reasons behind Africa's low fatality rates from pandemic


By Alexander Winning

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Africa’s overburdened public health systems, dearth of testing facilities and overcrowded slums had experts predicting a disaster when COVID-19 hit the continent in February.

FILE PHOTO: A health worker walks between beds at a temporary field hospital set up by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Khayelitsha township near Cape Town, South Africa, July 21, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings

The new coronavirus was already wreaking havoc in wealthy Asian and European nations, and a United Nations agency said in April that, even with social-distancing measures, the virus could kill 300,000 Africans this year.

In May the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that 190,000 people on the continent could die if containment measures failed. Yet as the world marks 1 million COVID-19 deaths, Africa is doing much better than expected, with a lower percentage of deaths than other continents.

The continent’s case fatality count stands at 2.4%, with roughly 35,000 deaths among the more than 1.4 million people reported infected with COVID-19, according to Reuters data as at late Monday. In North America, it is 2.9% and in Europe 4.5%

Hard-hit countries such as Italy and Britain have recorded fatality counts of 11.6% and 9.0% respectively, compared to 1.6% for Ethiopia, 1.9% for Nigeria and 2.4% for South Africa, the continent’s worst affected country.

Hospitals in many African countries say COVID-19 admission rates are falling.

“Based on what we have seen so far it is unlikely that we are going to see anything at the scale that we are seeing in Europe - both in terms of infections and mortality,” said Rashida Ferrand, a London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine professor working at the Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals in the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

Experts say that some COVID-19 deaths in Africa probably are being missed. Testing rates in the continent of about 1.3 billion people are among the lowest in the world, and many deaths of all types go unrecorded.

South Africa saw some 17,000 extra deaths from natural causes between early May and mid-July, 59% more than would normally be expected, according to a July report from the South African Medical Research Council. That suggests the death toll from COVID-19 could be significantly higher than the official figure, currently over 16,000, researchers say. Even so, there is wide agreement that COVID-19 fatality rates have not so far been as bad as predicted.

Why? Scientists and public health experts cite a number of possible factors, including the continent’s youthful population and lessons learned from previous disease outbreaks. African governments also had precious time to prepare due to the relative isolation of many of their citizens from airports and other places where they could come into contact with global travellers.

Some scientists also are exploring the possibility that a tuberculosis vaccine routinely given to children in many African countries might be helping reduce deaths from COVID-19.

Another theory being considered is whether prior exposure to other coronaviruses including those that cause the common cold has provided a degree of resistance in some of the very communities once thought to be most vulnerable.

“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Salim Abdool Karim, a South African infectious disease specialist who has advised the government on COVID-19, told Reuters, “but there is no smoking gun.”
LESSONS LEARNED

The virus hit Africa later than other continents, giving medical personnel time to set up field hospitals, source oxygen and ventilators, and learn from improvements in treatment elsewhere.

“We got the gift of time,” said Thumbi Mwangi, senior research fellow at the University of Nairobi’s Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases. “We had an amount of preparation that others did not.”

One reason could be that international travel is limited in many African countries, and travelling domestically can be more difficult than on other continents, Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, told a news conference on Thursday.

The continent’s governments have also battled deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa in 2013-16. So officials took notice when the new coronavirus started spreading around the globe rapidly early this year.

Many African countries were quick to introduce screening at airports, suspend flights from heavily affected nations and enforce social distancing measures and mask wearing.

Within a week of Kenya reporting its first case, schools were shut, incoming travellers had to undergo a mandatory quarantine and large gatherings were banned. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, imposed a ban on interstate travel and a curfew. Many of its land borders had already been closed since August 2019 to cut down on smuggling, which helped fight the pandemic too.

South Africa introduced one of the world’s toughest lockdowns in late March, when the country had confirmed just 400 cases.

“Africa brought down the hammer earlier in terms of coronavirus lockdowns,” said Tim Bromfield, regional director for East and Southern Africa at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a U.K.-based think tank.

Experts also point to the continent’s demographics.

Research has found that the risk of developing severe COVID-19 increases with age.

A 2019 United Nations report said 62% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population was under 25 and just 3% 65 or over. In the U.N.’s Europe and North America region, 28% were under 25 while 18% were age 65 and up.

Chikwe Ihekweazu, director general of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, attributed his country’s relatively low case mortality rate in part to the fact that the majority of patients were between the ages of 31 and 40.

CROSS-PROTECTION?

Scientists in several countries including South Africa are testing whether the century-old Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, widely used on the continent against tuberculosis, provides a degree of cross-protection.

BCG vaccines have been shown to protect against other viral respiratory illnesses, and a study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July found that countries with higher vaccination rates for tuberculosis had lower peak mortality rates from COVID-19.

Studies have also started in South Africa and Zimbabwe to assess the impact of past exposure to other coronaviruses.

More than half of Africa’s urban population is concentrated in slums, where access to water for hand washing is scarce, and physical distancing is near-impossible.

Diseases spread rapidly under such conditions, but some scientists wonder whether that may have been an unexpected boon in this case. There is some evidence that T cells developed by the body’s immune system after exposure to other common cold coronaviruses could help fight off COVID-19.

“I would say that is at least a plausible explanation as to why there are different levels of resistance to the virus in different populations,” said Thomas Scriba, an immunologist and deputy director of the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative.

Others are more sceptical.

“All other regions have been exposed to coronaviruses, have poor people and slums and have received BCG vaccination,” said Humphrey Karamagi, team leader for data and analytics at the WHO’s Africa office. “We are most probably looking at a mix of multiple factors working together - and not a single magic bullet.”

For Sam Agatre Okuonzi, from the Arua Regional Referral Hospital in Uganda, the doomsday predictions were informed by entrenched prejudices, including that the continent is prone to disease.

“COVID-19 has shattered a lot of biases about disease in general but also about Africa,” he told Thursday’s briefing. “The severity of the pandemic has not played out in line with the outrageous predictions.”

Additional reporting by Wendell Roelf in Cape Town and Tim Cocks in Johannesburg, MacDonald Dzirutwe in Harare, Ed McAllister in Dakar, Alexis Akwagyiram in Lagos, Katharine Houreld in Nairobi and Giulia Paravicini in Addis Ababa; Editing by Alexandra Zavis and David Gregorio

U.S. astronaut crew on SpaceX's Crew Dragon to cast ballots from space

WILL TRUMP ATTACK EMAIL VOTING?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three NASA astronauts launching next month on SpaceX’s first operational Crew Dragon mission plan to vote in the upcoming presidential election from the International Space Station, the crew said Tuesday as they named the spacecraft “Resilience.”

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience capsule will carry NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to the space station Oct. 31 as the company’s first non-test mission after completing a successful two-man preliminary mission last summer.

“All of us are planning on voting from space,” Walker told a news conference, explaining that the three U.S. astronauts will fill out an electronic PDF file aboard the station some 250 miles above Earth and email it to elections officials.

The crew’s more than six month mission in space, enabled by SpaceX’s new gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon space capsule, comes as NASA regains its capability of sending astronauts to space after nearly a decade-long dependence on Russia’s Soyuz vehicles.

Following tradition from SpaceX’s last crewed mission named “Endeavor,” which ended in August with a successful splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, Hopkins said the crew chose the name “Resilience” as a tribute to a “challenging” 2020.

“I think all of us can agree that 2020 has certainly been a challenging year,” Hopkins said, adding that SpaceX and NASA have pressed on with launch plans despite a slew of events like the “global pandemic, economic hardships, civil unrest, isolation” that have punctuated this year.

SpaceX made a few tweaks to Crew Dragon’s heat shield and altitude sensors after analyzing data from the summer test flight carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the company’s Crew Dragon chief Benji Reed said during a separate press conference on Tuesday.

Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Eric M. Johnson and David Gregorio

Ann Arbor, Michigan, Decriminalizes Magic Mushrooms, Psychedelic Plants
Authorities won’t investigate and arrest anyone for planting, cultivating, buying, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with or possessing the plants.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — The city of Ann Arbor has decriminalized psychedelic plants and fungi, including magic mushrooms, and police officers will no longer make them an enforcement focus.

City Council voted unanimously Sept. 21 in favor of a resolution declaring it the city’s lowest law enforcement priority, MLive.com reported. It means that authorities won’t investigate and arrest anyone for planting, cultivating, buying, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with or possessing “entheogenic plants” or plant compounds.

The resolution defines entheogenic plants as plants and fungi that contain indole amines, tryptamines and phenethylamines “that can benefit psychological and physical wellness, support and enhance religious and spiritual practices, and can reestablish human’s inalienable and direct relationship to nature.”

The move applies to ayahuasca, ibogaine, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and other substances with hallucinogenic properties considered illegal under state and federal law.

 

Generating renewable hydrogen fuel from the sea

Researchers use membranes that remove salt from water to help 'split' sea water into fuel

PENN STATE

Research News

 

IMAGE: HERE IS A VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF HOW ION MOVEMENT IS AFFECTED BY A REVERSE OSMOSIS (RO) MEMBRANE VERSUS A CATION-EXCHANGE MEMBRANE. CHLORIDE IONS FROM THE SEAWATER ARE NOT ABLE TO... view more 

CREDIT: LOGAN RESEARCH GROUP

The power of the sun, wind and sea may soon combine to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel, according to a team of Penn State researchers. The team integrated water purification technology into a new proof-of-concept design for a sea water electrolyzer, which uses an electric current to split apart the hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules.

This new method for "sea water splitting" could make it easier to turn wind and solar energy into a storable and portable fuel, according to Bruce Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering and Evan Pugh University Professor.

"Hydrogen is a great fuel, but you have to make it," Logan said. "The only sustainable way to do that is to use renewable energy and produce it from water. You also need to use water that people do not want to use for other things, and that would be sea water. So, the holy grail of producing hydrogen would be to combine the sea water and the wind and solar energy found in coastal and offshore environments."

Despite the abundance of sea water, it is not commonly used for water splitting. Unless the water is desalinated prior to entering the electrolyzer -- an expensive extra step -- the chloride ions in sea water turn into toxic chlorine gas, which degrades the equipment and seeps into the environment.

To prevent this, the researchers inserted a thin, semipermeable membrane, originally developed for purifying water in the reverse osmosis (RO) treatment process. The RO membrane replaced the ion-exchange membrane commonly used in electrolyzers.

"The idea behind RO is that you put a really high pressure on the water and push it through the membrane and keep the chloride ions behind," Logan said.

In an electrolyzer, sea water would no longer be pushed through the RO membrane, but contained by it. A membrane is used to help separate the reactions that occur near two submerged electrodes -- a positively charged anode and a negatively charged cathode -- connected by an external power source. When the power is turned on, water molecules start splitting at the anode, releasing tiny hydrogen ions called protons and creating oxygen gas. The protons then pass through the membrane and combine with electrons at the cathode to form hydrogen gas.

With the RO membrane inserted, seawater is kept on the cathode side, and the chloride ions are too big to pass through the membrane and reach the anode, averting the production of chlorine gas.

But in water splitting, Logan noted, other salts are intentionally dissolved in the water to help made it conductive. The ion-exchange membrane, which filters ions by electrical charge, allows salt ions to pass through. The RO membrane does not.

"RO membranes inhibit salt motion, but the only way you generate current in a circuit is because charged ions in the water move between two electrodes," Logan said.

With the movement from the bigger ions restricted by the RO membrane, the researchers needed to see if there were enough tiny protons moving through the pores to keep a high electrical current.

"Basically, we had to show that what looked like a dirt road could be an interstate," Logan said. "We had to prove that we could get a high amount of current through two electrodes when there was a membrane between them that would not allow salt ions to move back and forth."

Through a series of experiments recently published in Energy & Environmental Science, the researchers tested two commercially available RO membranes and two cation-exchange membranes, a type of ion-exchange membrane that allows the movement of all positively charged ions in the system.

Each were tested for membrane resistance to ion movement, the amount of energy needed to complete reactions, hydrogen and oxygen gas production, interaction with chloride ions and membrane deterioration.

Logan explained that while one RO membrane turned out to be a "dirt road," the other performed well in comparison to the cation-exchange membranes. The researchers are still investigating why there was such a difference between the two RO membranes.

"The idea can work," he said. "We do not know exactly why these two membranes have been functioning so differently, but that is something we are going to figure out."

Recently, the researchers received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue investigating sea water electrolysis. Logan hopes their research will play a critical role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions around the world.

"The world is looking for renewable hydrogen," he said. "For example, Saudi Arabia has planned to build a $5 billion hydrogen facility that is going to use sea water. Right now, they have to desalinate the water. Maybe they can use this method instead."

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Penn State researchers Le Shi, postdoctoral researcher in environmental engineering, Ruggero Rossi, postdoctoral researcher in environmental engineering, Derek Hall, assistant professor of energy engineering, Michael Hickner, professor of materials science and engineering and chemical engineering, and Christopher Gorski, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, also contributed to the project.

The research was supported by the Stan and Flora Kappe Endowment in the Penn State Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the NSF, the United States Agency for International Development and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as additional funding from Penn State.

Guest Post: R0 and Herd Immunity

Beyond the Curve: Dr. Peter Lurie's COVID-19 Blog

September 12, 2020



This is a guest post by CSPI senior policy associate Ashley Hickson. See all Beyond the Curve posts.

A salutary benefit of the coronavirus pandemic is how it underscores that we’re all in this sticky predicament together. In order to “flatten the curve,” we all have to act in concert by wearing masks, washing hands, respecting social distancing recommendations, and generally minimizing contact with others. In epidemiology, this notion of interdependence is encapsulated in the concept of “herd immunity.” When most of a population is immune to an infectious disease, this provides indirect protection—or herd immunity—even to those who are not immune to the disease. In essence, once population immunity reaches a certain level, your chances of encountering someone who is infectious decline significantly. Depending on how infectious a disease is, usually 70% to 90% of a population needs to be immune for herd immunity to be established. But antibody levels, which measure prior exposure to the virus, are only around 25% in New York City, and considerably lower almost everywhere else. And this assumes that having antibodies assures immunity – something that has not yet been proved. Thus, the majority of the population remains susceptible to infection.

Given the high proportion of still-susceptible individuals, it’s unsurprising that COVID-19 outbreaks are persisting in cities such as Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and Phoenix. These dismal events paint a picture of an outbreak that is not contained and is still spreading rapidly.

How do epidemiologists portray the potential for spread of an infectious disease? Here, we turn to a technical term you may have heard about (and certainly will): the basic reproduction number, denoted as R0 (pronounced "R naught"). This measure describes the likely impact of a single infection—the number of people to whom an infected person will likely transmit the disease if no one is immune. It is one of the most fundamental metrics in the study of infectious disease outbreaks. So, if each person spreads the infection to two people and each cycle of infection takes a week, after about a month 16 people have been infected (of course, in that period, some of the 16 will have recovered).

To understand, from a theoretical standpoint, how R0 is calculated, consider a single infected person who contracts a disease at the beginning of an outbreak when no one is immune. To calculate how many people that person will infect, we must first figure out how long the person is infectious (2 to 14 days for COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and multiply that by the number of people they encounter per day. The number of contacts encountered can be calculated either at the individual- (via contact tracing) or population-level. Finally, we multiply that by the likelihood of infection for each encounter because, thankfully, the great majority of encounters do not lead to infection. That gives us the number of people who were infected by the first person. Presto! It’s R0 itself. (In practice, R0 is calculated using complex mathematical modeling with several additional inputs, but this illustrates the concepts behind the measure).

To help contextualize R0, the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide had an R0 that was estimated at between 1.4 and 2.8. The seasonal flu is estimated to have a R0 of approximately 1.3. Although estimates of R0 for COVID-19 vary, a range of 2 to 3 is often cited.

But, typically, shortly after an outbreak begins, some people become immune, so R can vary over time. This is where the effective reproductive number, or Rt, comes in (t stands for time). This number describes whether outbreaks are growing, remaining steady, or decreasing. An Rt value greater than 1 indicates that the epidemic is continuing to grow, an Rt value of 1 indicates that the outbreak is stable (with each case spreading the disease to one person), and an Rt less than 1 means the outbreak is on the wane and, all things being equal, will extinguish itself.

In addition to R0 and Rt, the dispersion factor, or “k” is also important in assessing an outbreak. K captures the idea that some people will spread the infection to many people, while others won’t spread it to anyone else, depending on social distancing and a host of other mitigating factors like mask wearing. For example, research is showing that people infected with COVID-19 are most infectious for a brief period of time; if an infected person enters a high-risk setting during this period, a super-spreading event could occur. Other interactions, even by the same individual, will confer lower risk. So k captures a level of complexity not contained in R0 or Rt: all exposures are not created equal. In general, the distribution of infectiousness depends upon the virus, characteristics of the potential spreader, and the circumstances in which infections are spread, including efforts to mitigate transmission.

We have examples of this domestically from outbreaks associated with small social events. These gatherings, such as bible study groups or birthday parties, are often more likely to take place indoors, creating an environment where the virus is able to spread easily from person to person. In Texas, a family hosted a birthday party for a total of 25 guests on May 30th. A single relative, unknowingly infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, spread the disease to seven family members (much greater than the typical value for R0); from this encounter, ten relatives who did not attend the party were infected. Across the nation, Greek fraternity and sorority houses, along with residence halls, have become the site of COVID-19 outbreaks at universities including Oklahoma State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An outbreak at a sleep-away camp in Georgia last month resulted in 260 children and staffers contracting the virus less than a week after spending time together in close quarters. This example is the largest documented super-spreading event among children domestically, and gives pause for concern around the upcoming school year.

Unlike R0, the calculation for k is a bit too involved to discuss here. Suffice it to say, it captures the heterogeneity in likelihood of transmission in a given population. If a small number of individuals are responsible for a large number of transmissions, the value of k will be close to zero. As we continue to evaluate how this disease spreads, k will be a critical measure to consider when making decisions about reopening schools and businesses.

A research study modeling COVID-19 outbreaks across different countries discovered that k is around 0.1, implying that as few as 10% of infected individuals may be associated with 80% of transmissions. This provides a ray of hope: if we focus on potential super-spreading events like, ahem, indoor political rallies, we can have a disproportionate impact upon the course of the pandemic.



Ashley Hickson is a Senior Policy Associate focusing on healthy retail campaign initiatives. Prior to joining CSPI, she served as Director of Community Impact at the American Heart Association where she led her market’s food access strategies. Ashley is a Doctor of Public Health student at Johns Hopkins with a concentration in Health Equity and Social Justice. She has a passion for food justice and is a Bloomberg American Health Initiative Fellow in the obesity and food system focus area. She holds an MPH from the University of Texas Health Science Center

Leaving no Health Agency Unburned
Beyond the Curve: Dr. Peter Lurie's COVID-19 Blog
September 29, 2020 SCIENCE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST SCPI

HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Photo: Joshua Qualls.

Every tragedy has its noteworthy themes, even if they can sometimes be difficult to discern in the chaos that is the administration’s maladroit response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, once in a while, the administration’s capricious actions seem to coalesce into a single resounding leitmotif. And in the last couple of weeks, that sound and fury you’ve heard emanating from Washington has been the clarion call of hostility to federal health agencies.

This should surprise no one, as President Trump has been voicing antipathy to regulations ever since he descended the golden staircase. “We’re going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us,” he declared on the campaign trail, “You can’t breathe. You cannot breathe.” (Perhaps he was referring to the various emissions standards he went on to gut.)

But the last couple of weeks have cast into full view his administration’s malice toward the federal agencies charged with protecting our health and safety, and even toward the committed individuals who staff those agencies. We’ll confine ourselves here to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its constituent agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The CDC has long been regarded as possibly the premier disease tracking and response agency in the world. With the viral testing fiasco of the early pandemic now receding in the rear-view mirror of a pandemic that offers new plot twists daily, the agency has set about restoring its tattered credibility. But it’s getting no help from Washington. (Or from its hapless Director, Robert Redfield, who often seems congenitally incapable of defending its scientists or, for that matter, science in general.)

Back in August, CDC suddenly published a guideline that seemed to run contrary to the agency’s own advice, to say nothing of common sense. Despite estimates that about 40% of infections emanate from asymptomatic carriers, the agency announced that people with known exposure to SARS-CoV-2 but who were still asymptomatic “do not necessarily need a test.” (The agency had previously stated unequivocally that, “testing is recommended for all close contacts.”) Howls of protest from reputable scientists and the Infectious Diseases Society of America ensued, to say nothing of a New York Times report documenting how the guideline had been commandeered by HHS and the White House Coronavirus Task Force and “dropped in” to the CDC website. The administration was forced to jettison the new language in an embarrassing retreat.

But the HHS was not yet done with CDC. As it turns out, for months the communications chief at HHS, Michael Caputo, an acolyte of convicted felon Roger Stone with a previous stint burnishing the public image of one Vladimir Putin (good luck with that!), had combined forces with Paul Alexander, a formerly obscure physician at McMaster University in Canada, to attack perhaps the most sacrosanct edifice at CDC: the innocuous-sounding Morbidity and Morbidity Weekly Report, which the agency uses to publish disease tracking reports and other studies. It’s a publication known for its rigor and restraint. I know, because I’ve made it through the scrupulous peer review process there.

Apparently the dynamic duo of Caputo, who has no scientific background, and Alexander knew better. They began insisting on critical line edits to downplay the virus’s threat to Trumpian levels and even sought delays in publication for an article about the President’s ineffective pet drug hydroxychloroquine. Alexander smelled a rat: “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration,” he claimed ominously. Caputo indicated that he believed there were “ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC.” Separately, Alexander said of the most senior non-political appointee at CDC, the highly respected Anne Schuchat, “Her aim is to embarrass the president,” accusing her of being “duplicitous.”

A few days later, Caputo took this line of thinking a step further. In a 26-minute video posted on his Facebook page, he asserted that C.D.C. scientists “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” in which they plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.” It actually got worse from there. He further accused CDC scientists of “sedition” and suggested that Joe Biden wouldn’t concede if he lost the election (wait, Joe Biden is threatening this?). He went on to predict that, “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin.” And, if possible, more worrying still: “I don’t like being alone in Washington,” he said, going on to describe “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.”

Within a few days Caputo was taking a leave of absence for a “lymphatic issue”, McMaster was furiously trying to distance itself from Alexander, and Alexander himself had left the department, perhaps to endure a Canadian quarantine reflecting the disparity in COVID-19 rates between his home country and the US the administration had failed to prevent.

Compared to this, the NIH has gotten off lightly. Sure, it’s been widely reported that the administration was frustrated with the NIH after it insisted there was insufficient evidence of the effectiveness of convalescent plasma for FDA to issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). And, yes, the administration has been all-too-effective in keeping Anthony Fauci from the news cameras. But who would have thought that criticism of the agency would actually emanate from within the agency itself?

Turns out that William Crews, a public affairs specialist at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had a side gig moonlighting as the managing editor of the conservative news website RedState. There he assailed his boss, the aforementioned Anthony Fauci, as a “mask nazi” and declared that, “If there were justice, we’d send and [sic] few dozen of these fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until they fall apart.” You can’t make this stuff up. If nothing else, this little escapade puts a hefty dent in the claim that the so-called “deep state” is all blue.

Further down the Beltway, the FDA was also the focus of administration ire. Reporting by Politico revealed that the wholesale deregulation of so-called laboratory-developed tests (send-out tests, including those related to the pandemic) that we discussed in a prior blog, was unilaterally imposed on FDA by HHS following a screaming match in which FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn insisted FDA still had jurisdiction over such tests. HHS Secretary Azar did this even though FDA had data – published a few days later in the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine – showing that 82 of 125 EUA requests for COVID-19 LDTs suffered from design or validation problems.

Then, later in the week, there came a further curious development. HHS issued a 66-word memo proclaiming that henceforth all FDA regulations would be signed by Secretary Azar himself, a move I told the New York Times was a “power grab.” Viewed in a narrow perspective, it’s not clear what the memo accomplishes, other than adding a layer of inefficiency to the process. (I know, because, when I was at FDA, I was the kind of “inferior officer” who typically signs these regulations.) And it is inconceivable that any significant regulatory decision would not be run up the bureaucratic chain anyway. Moreover, the action had no clear relationship to the pandemic, as product approvals, the focus of much recent attention, are not regulatory actions (they belong to a lesser form of government actions sometimes called an administrative order). But the overall intent seemed clear. On the one hand, FDA was on notice that HHS was watching it. On the other, the order served as yet another declaration of cabinet member fealty to the President.

Moreover, the President kept linking vaccine approval to a hitherto unrecognized yardstick for product review: the upcoming election. And then he declared that he, not the FDA, holds the final authority for vaccine approval. That’s not quite right: product approval is the province of the HHS Secretary (a Presidential appointee, of course), who has delegated that authority to the FDA Commissioner, and HHS Secretaries almost never get involved in product approvals. (One of perhaps two exceptions was Plan B in 2011). But after Azar’s shenanigans with delegated power and his general desire to keep in the President’s good graces, can we rely on him to protect the scientific integrity of the approval process?

Let’s be clear. This is not some inside-the-Beltway intrigue of interest only to the cognoscenti. Rather, it is just the latest installment in our deepening national tragedy – one in which the agencies with relevant expertise to manage a pandemic were sidelined by an incompetent administration, leading to a death toll that is still higher than in any other country.




Peter Lurie, M.D., M.P.H. is President of CSPI. Previously, Lurie was the Associate Commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis at the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on antimicrobial resistance, transparency, caffeinated beverages, arsenic in rice, fish consumption by pregnant and nursing women, expanded access to investigational drugs, and prescription drug abuse. Prior to that, he was Deputy Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, where he addressed drug and device issues, coauthored the organization’s Worst Pills, Best Pills consumer guide to medications, and led efforts to reduce worker exposure to hexavalent chromium and beryllium. Earlier, as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Michigan, he studied needle exchange programs, ethical aspects of mother-to-infant HIV transmission studies, and other HIV policy issues domestically and abroad.

Coronavirus latest: Study of cats and dogs infected with SARS-CoV-2 may offer vaccine hope, say researchers

The immune response by cats revealed they may be ‘a good model for vaccine development’

By Sally Guyoncourt
September 29, 2020 

Researchers claim cats immune response to the virus SARS-CoV-2 may help with vaccine development (Photo: Ian Forsyth/Getty)

Cats and dogs infected with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 showed no signs of developing disease, offering hope for vaccine development, researchers have revealed.

A study at Colorado State University in the United States looked at the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on seven domestic cats and three dogs.

The virus can lead to the disease Covid-19 in humans but in this study none of the animals developed a clinical disease.

The report’s authors stated: “These studies have important implications for animal health and suggest that cats may be a good model for vaccine development.”
Hope for vaccine development

According to researchers, there have been several previous cases of pets becoming infected by SARS-CoV-2 following exposure to infected humans in New York, Hong Kong, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, and Russia.


And in several of these cases, including non-domestic cats at the Bronx Zoo and pet cats in New York and Europe, animals displayed signs of respiratory disease and/or conjunctivitis.

However, in this study the cats and dogs were observed twice daily for the first seven days and then at least once a day for the duration of the study and displayed no signs of disease at any point.

The findings, published in the journal PNAS, showed the dogs did not shed the virus once infected and have an antibody response.

While the infected cats shed infectious virus both orally and nasally for five days after infection.

But when the infected cats were re-exposed to the virus at a later date they had an effective immune response and could not be re-infected.


Researchers concluded: “Cats develop significant neutralizing antibody titers and are resistant to reinfection, although the duration of immunity is not currently known.

“This could prove a useful measurement for subsequent vaccine trials for both human and animal vaccine candidates.”

FOX NEWS SAYS STUDY PROVES TRUMP WAS POWERLESS Coronavirus was even more contagious at beginning of pandemic than experts thought, study finds

World leaders had an even narrower window in controlling virus spread

By Madeline Farber | Fox News

Dr. Nicole Saphier, author of 'Make America Healthy Again;' Dr. Dyan Hes, pediatrician; and Dr. Kathleen Berchelmann, pediatrician, join 'Fox and Friends.'

The novel coronavirus was more than twice as contagious at the start of the pandemic than first thought, according to a new study from Duke University.

Researchers in the peer-reviewed study, which was published last week in the journal PLOSOne, found that the average number of new COVID-19 cases caused by an infected patient — known as the reproduction number (R0) — was 4.5, “or more than twice as many as the initial 2.2 rate estimated by the World Health Organization at the time,” per a news release.

The novel coronavirus was more than twice as contagious at the start of the pandemic than first thought, according to a new study from Duke University. (iStock)

The researchers in the study — which analyzed 57 countries, including the U.S., U.K., and Canada, among others — argue their findings demonstrate that world leaders had an even narrower window in controlling virus spread, with just 20 days from the first reported cases “to implement non-pharmaceutical interventions stringent enough to reduce the transmission rate to below 1.1 and prevent widespread infections and deaths,” per the release.

Any interventions not made within this time were “unlikely to be effective,” they said, noting this was the case for many of the countries studied because the reproduction number remained above 2.7 for at least 44 days.

For the study, researchers used a conventional mathematical model — “susceptible-infectious-removed” (SIR) — to look at confirmed cases of the virus in 57 countries between January and March.

“They also used the model to analyze mortalities based on the so-called Infection Fatality Rate that accommodates both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases,” according to the release, noting that the model includes people considered susceptible to the virus, meaning they have not yet contracted it, as well as those infected with it, or recovered from it “and thus removed from the general pool,” because of assumed immunity, researchers said.

The model helped the scientists to “chart the disease’s early-phase transmission rate under different conditions and intervention scenarios; identify changes in those rates over time; and project how many cases and deaths ultimately might occur under different intervention scenarios until herd immunity is achieved.”

So-called super spreaders, or infected individuals who subsequently infect many others, did cause short-term spikes, but their impact was “found to even out over time,” the researchers said.

“Despite some short-term spikes caused by super-spreaders or other factors such as ramp-ups in testing, inferred local rates of transmissions all converged over time to a global average of about 4.5 new cases per infected individual where early-phase intervention was insufficient or nonexistent,” per the release.

The model also helped researchers to understand how certain intervention methods could have been better applied to stop the spread of the virus earlier on, findings that could be useful during a second wave of the virus or in a future pandemic.

“Being able to estimate transmission rates at different phases of a disease’s spread and under different conditions helps identify the timing and type of interventions that may work best, the hospital capacity we’ll need, and other critical considerations,” said lead study author Gabriel Katul, in a statement.

“In the end, it all comes down to timely, effective intervention,” he added. “The best defense against uncontrolled future outbreaks is to put stringent safety protocols in place at the first sign of an outbreak and make use of the tools science has provided us.”

Madeline Farber is a Reporter for Fox News. You can follow her on Twitter @MaddieFarberUDK.

Gas explosions keep killing people, and the US government won’t step in

IS IT INFRATRUCTURE WEEK YET?

OH WAIT THIS IS A TALE OF WOE; DEREGULATION-CUTTING RED TAPE

A decade ago, Congress set out to make pipelines safer. But regulators are still seeing dozens of accidents in homes each year, with little recourse for utility companies.

By Jeremy Deaton/Nexus Media 

A home destroyed by the Merrimack Valley gas explosions in northern Massachusetts. National Transportation Safety Board

Pipelines exploded with the force of bombs, setting homes ablaze in Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts, on the evening of September 13, 2018. Columbia Gas, the local gas utility, had allowed too much pressure to build up in its aging cast-iron pipes until finally, they erupted in a series of blasts that injured more than 20 people and killed one, Leonol Rondon, an 18-year-old who had just passed his driving test. He had pulled up to a friend’s driveway to share the good news when an explosion under the house toppled the chimney, which crushed him in the driver’s seat.

“It looked like a war zone,” says Walter Mena, a Merrimack Valley resident. “I come from El Salvador, where we were at war in the 1980s. It reminded me of that.”

For weeks after, homeowners living near the blasts were relegated to hotels or camping trailers paid for by Columbia Gas. Others, including Mena, were able to stay in their homes, but without gas. Mena had to boil a pot of water on an electric stove every time he wanted to bathe. Even today, some locals are still recovering from the explosions, anxious at the smell of gas or the gurgle of a water heater.

The Merrimack Valley disaster is remarkable, not just for its scale, but its timing. It came near the end of a decade in which officials set out to make natural gas pipelines safer. But incidents like the one in Merrimack Valley have actually grown more numerous since 2010, according to data from pipeline regulators. While the number of accidents on transmission lines — those that carry gas from region to region — has declined, the number of accidents on distribution lines — those that carry gas to residential neighborhoods — has crept upwards. The trend was outlined in a recent report from the Pipeline Safety Trust, a pipeline watchdog group.

“We haven’t made big advances in making us safer from pipeline accidents,” says Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, which was created by order of a federal judge after a 1999 pipeline explosion killed two 10-year-olds in Bellingham, Washington.

Over the last decade, firms have built new pipelines while continuing to make use of older ones. This added infrastructure creates more opportunities for accidents, and aging pipes are at greater risk of failure. At the same time, pipeline operators, regulators and lawmakers have failed to apply lessons from past mistakes, Caram says.


 

The number of significant incidents on gas distribution pipelines has trended up over the last decade. That includes explosions where a person is hospitalized or killed, of the cost of damage is $50,000 or more, measured in 1984 dollars.Pipeline Safety Trust


2010 was supposed to mark a turning point in the regulation of pipelines, as lawmakers sought to improve pipeline safety after several major disasters. That summer, ruptured oil pipelines emptied thousands of barrels of murky goo into Red Butte Creek in Utah, Yellowstone River in Montana and Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Then, in September, a gas pipeline in San Bruno, California exploded. The blast destroyed dozens of homes and left a crater the size of a tennis court. It also killed eight people, among them Jacqueline Greig, an advocate for utility customers, and her 13-year-old daughter, Janessa, who was student body president at St. Cecilia School.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigated these failures and made a series of recommendations, like pressure tests for older gas pipelines and automatic shutoff valves on pipelines running through populated areas. In 2011, Congress wrote a number of these recommendations into law. But, while the “Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011” required new rules on pipelines, it left in place legal hurdles that would make it nearly impossible for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to enact those rules.

“The intention of all those recommendations and mandates was to make sure that an incident like San Bruno would never happen again. I don’t think that’s the case,” Caram says. “It’s not PHMSA’s fault. It’s their authority. They have not been able to implement these changes.”

The challenge, Caram adds, is that PHMSA is limited in its ability to regulate existing pipelines, which means that older pipelines, which carry a higher risk of failure, aren’t covered by new regulations.

PHMSA is also required to undertake a stringent cost-benefit analysis on every proposed rule. Should regulators determine that the cost of compliance exceeds the value of protecting nature or saving a human life, the rule is effectively dead — even if the public disagrees, say, with the value the agency places on human life, Caram says. While some rules eventually pass this test, the process is time-intensive and only one step in a very long road.

In 2011, Congress directed PHMSA to mandate automatic shutoff valves. In 2013, Jeffrey Wiese, then head of PHMSA, complained of how agonizingly long it took to craft new pipeline regulations, telling compliance officers, “Getting any change through regulation, which used to be a viable tool, is no longer viable.” It wasn’t until February 2020 that PHMSA finally proposed a new rule requiring automatic shutoff valves. Natural gas trade groups were quick to argue that the measure would prove too costly as written.

“PHMSA has been very slow to address those recommendations and these mandates,” Caram says. “Here we are 10 years later, and they have not even gotten to all of them, and the ones they have gotten to, the industry has fought tooth and nail.”
 

Wreckage from the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion.Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia


Congress is currently considering several bills that would reauthorize the pipeline safety program, including one bill championed by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) that is named for Leonol Rondon, the sole death in the Merrimack Valley disaster. But none of these bills deal with the grandfather clause, which limits regulations on existing pipelines, and only one would eliminate the cost-benefit requirement. That bill is unlikely to survive in its current form, Caram says.

Faced with the persistent dangers of natural gas and the federal government’s glacial pace in tackling those dangers, some Americans are taking matters into their own hands by going all-electric.

Last year, Jackson Wilkinson lost his father to a gas explosion at his home in Warrington, Pennsylvania. Wilkinson says his father, Mike, was tough, an Army veteran and onetime amateur boxer who had helmed a company that made airplane-refueling trucks. His father was also a skilled mechanic and rigidly disciplined about safety — the kind of dad who would never forget to turn off a propane BBQ. He was, by any measure, an unlikely victim of a gas accident.

Wilkinson says that his dad was mowing the lawn when his basement door exploded outward, killing the 73-year-old. The fire inspectors did not officially determine the exact cause of the explosion, but they sad it was most likely an issue with the gas infrastructure inside his home.

Shaken by his father’s death, Wilkinson has been retrofitting his house in Newton, Massachusetts, replacing his water heater and furnace with an electric heat pump powered by rooftop solar panels. He is aiming to replace his dryer and stove next. Wilkinson’s mother, who has been living in a temporary home since the accident, is now moving to a newly built townhouse where the heat, hot water, dryer, and stove will be all-electric. Wilkinson says that while his father might have been skeptical of electric appliances when he was alive, he would probably feel different today.

“I think my dad would say, ‘Why do you want pipes of this stuff running through your house? Look at what it did to me,’” he says. “He never wanted to make the same mistake twice.”

'Blue Planet II' may not have caused a change in plastic preference

by Hayley Dunning, Imperial College London

Plastic pollution in Ghana. Credit: Muntaka Chasant/Wikimedia Commons

The BBC documentary "Blue Planet II" raised environmental awareness, but may not have discouraged people from choosing plastic, says new research.


Blue Planet II, broadcast in 2017, included messages about the human impact on the oceans, including the growing problem of plastic pollution. This was credited with creating a "Blue Planet effect," which included people choosing to consume less plastic, for example by opting for reusable items like water bottles instead of single-use versions.

Now, an experiment by Imperial College London and the University of Oxford shows that while watching the documentary increased environmental awareness in a group of volunteers, this did not translate into choosing to use fewer single-use plastics. The results are published in Conservation Science and Practice.

First author Matilda Dunn, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial, said: "The findings from our experiment are counter to the popular idea that 'Blue Planet II' reduced viewers' preference for plastic, instead demonstrating that human behaviors are complex and determined by more than just knowledge.

"However, 'Blue Planet II' may have had a wider impact by increasing conversations around ocean plastic pollution, allowing the topic to become more politically palatable."

Choice experiment

To find out whether "Blue Planet II" changed people's plastic-choice behavior, the team conducted an experiment with 150 people split into two groups. Both groups completed a questionnaire that measured their understanding of and attitudes towards marine conservation issues.

One group was then shown the original The Blue Planet documentary, which aired in 2001 and contained no plastic or ocean conservation messages. The other group was shown "Blue Planet II." After the viewings, both groups filled in the same questionnaire.

Before and after both showings, participants were also offered a choice of drinks and snacks, either in paper or plastic packaging, and noted which participants chose. The team controlled for any other differences between the options, such as flavors or sizes of the snacks, for example by offering the same soft drinks in both plastic and paper cups.

Increased understanding, same choice

While watching "Blue Planet II" greatly increased understanding of marine conservations issues as revealed by the questionnaires, there was no significant difference in the choices people made between plastic and paper-packaged snacks.

Co-author Dr. Morena Mills, from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial, said: "Many previous studies of people's preference for plastic rely on individuals reporting their own preference, which can be unreliable. We are the first to use this type of experimental design along with measuring observed behaviors to test the hypothesis."

The researchers are planning to use this evaluation method to test the effectiveness of other conservation-related mass media interventions on changing individual behaviors.

"Evaluating the impact of the documentary series Blue Planet II on viewers' plastic consumption behaviors," by Matilda Eve Dunn, Morena Mills and Diogo Veríssimo, is published in Conservation Science and Practice.


Explore further British public doesn't know what microplastics are

More information: Matilda Eve Dunn et al. Evaluating the impact of the documentary series Blue Planet II on viewers' plastic consumption behaviors, Conservation Science and Practice (2020). DOI: 10.1111/csp2.280

Provided by Imperial College London

Trump’s $73M tax refund stuck with 

little-known panel

By Mike Dorning September 29, 2020, 9




The details published about Donald Trump’s tax returns were a revelation to the public but not to a small group of attorneys who work for a little-known congressional panel.

Trump has been in the middle of a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a 2010 claim of a $72.9 million tax refund, according to the New York Times, which obtained more than 20 years of the president’s tax data. The size of the refund claim brought it before the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Whenever there is a proposed refund of more than $2 million for individuals and $5 million for corporations proposed, the committee staff reviews it before payment by the IRS. Part of the rationale for such reviews is to make sure tax laws are working the way Congress intended.

In Trump’s case, the IRS initially sent an audit of the refund to the joint committee in 2011 and an agreement was reached in 2014. But an expanding audit meant that the IRS resubmitted the refund documentation for review in 2016, where it has sat unresolved since then, the Times reported.

Trump received what tax professionals refer to as a “quickie refund,” a check processed in 90 days on a tentative basis, pending an audit by the IRS, the Times reported.

The committee staff reviewed between 470 and 370 proposed refunds per year from 2015 to 2018, according to a congressional aide.

Most of the proposed refunds involved net operating loss carry-back provisions, in which a business uses losses in one year to offset profits in another, sometimes resulting in refunds of “hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Kenneth Kies, who was chief of staff for the panel from 1994 to 1998.

Thomas A. Barthold, current chief of staff for the joint committee, said the staff “does not comment on the receipt of any review case, nor comment on when any review case’s review has been completed.”

Occasionally, the staff disagrees with the IRS and the tax agency usually wouldn’t proceed with a refund over the objections of the committee, Kies said, though the law doesn’t compel the IRS to accept the panel’s determination.

Much of the review work is done by lawyers from the committee who work onsite at the IRS, added Kies, now managing director of the Federal Policy Group, which provides advice to clients on tax policy matters.

The joint committee’s role reviewing tax refunds goes back to 1927, one year after the committee was formed, said George Yin, another former chief of staff and a retired University of Virginia law professor. The panel took up the task after there were accusations of favoritism over large refunds made during the 1920s under Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

Differences over the proposed amount of a refund were usually worked out between committee staff and IRS personnel, Yin said. Yin said lower-level staff only “very infrequently” were unable to resolve differences with the IRS during his tenure from 2003-2005.

There are 10 members of Congress, five from the House and five from the Senate with bipartisan representation on the joint committee. Their role is largely symbolic, and they aren’t involved in reviewing confidential taxpayer returns.

No member of Congress ever became involved in a refund review or saw tax documents from such a review while he was chief of staff, Yin said.

David Noren, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery who worked for the panel from 2001-2006, said it generally took the committee about three weeks to complete a refund review, but it wasn’t unusual for the process to last much longer if there were complex issues identified to review with the IRS.

“Any case involving a sitting president would not be run of the mill,” Noren said. “This situation with a sitting president is a completely extraordinary set of circumstances.”

If the IRS formally denies the refund, the disappointed taxpayer can sue in U.S. District Court where he or she lives or in the Federal Court of Claims.

— With assistance from Bob Van Voris and Laura Davison

Mike Dorning

Bloomberg News