Have we not had a 2024 news topic? I can’t find one. So here is a late opener.
I think the photograph is supposed to demonstrate positive action, but planting trees in unimproved grassland pushes me deeper into the pit of despair.
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“When you meet others who share your values and concerns, those relationships can become sources of resilience”
So here is iSpot - DON’T DISPAIR
There are lots of people who just don’t make a lot of noise about what they are doing.
We watch the traffic on the Thames and see how shipping is changing for the better.
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News in 2024 just carried on in the 2023 Forum post.
Shall we make a note to start a new year of news in 4 weeks time… or just continue to use this new forum page.
Yes, I thought I’d seen other stories - could we start a blank one in advance - there’s bound to be one - good or bad news.
Yes, that pretty much sums up how we both feel - lack of birds, vast acreages of of arable crops sprayed with pesticide leading to a catastrophic drop in insect numbers, watching the new Sahara and Gobi deserts being created, glaciers melting, inland seas drying up, islands of plastic waste filling the sea, and listening to the heartbreaking news of completely unchecked, uncontrollable genocide overseas, it is difficult not to fall into despair. Random acts of kindness usually lifts our spirits as do watching Kingfishers who, despite the polluted river, are still somehow managing to survive.
The sponge is made from chitin extracted from squid bone and cotton cellulose,…. large-scale production of the new material is possible because it is cheap, and raw materials are *easy to obtain, the authors say.
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Easy to obtain, maybe but, in the case of ‘squid bone’ hardly good news for this marine animal.
Wikipedia tells me that chitin is commercially obtained from the shells of crustaceans (crabs, shrimps and lobsters), as a byproduct of seafood production. (It also says shellfish, but bivalve shells are formed from calcite plus or minus aragonite, so I’m not sure what it meant here.) Chitin forms the exoskeletons of insects, so perhaps it could be separated out when mealworms are produced as a feedstock. It’s also produced by fungi, though I’m not sure that the yield would be commercially viable; naively insects and crustaceans have a higher proportion of chitin by body mass than fungi.
I followed up on chitin production after reading your response.
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This paper outlines the applications, the chemical process of production and says biological processes ( e.g fermentation by Lactobacillus) are important to get the purity needed for pharmaceutical products. It seems chitin production from fishing reject is big business, not something that I knew before. And the cuttlefish are probably not especially threatened.
That link isn’t working. (I’m getting a XML file with text “access denied”.) Is it Luciano Pighinelli et al, Methods of Chitin Production a Short Review, American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research 3(4):307-314 (2019)?
$220 per kg is quite expensive, though I expect that price depends on grade/purity, and that water filtration doesn’t require the highest grades.
If this application increases the demand, then I speculate about the possibility of bioengineering yeast to overproduce chitin.
This is interesting, but I wonder how long it will be before the microplastics get back into the environment. I imagine they will outlast the absorbents?
I found it using google scholar. My Search phrase was « commercial chitin production »
Interestingly I can’t directly open the link here on the ispot forum, but Google Scholar gave me access.
I found a copy at ResearchGate using the hints given in the URL. I can also access the Academia.edu copy via Google Scholar. I’ve now also found the copy at the journal website, which seems to be the only version with correct authorship information.
One answer would be to use the spent filters as feedstock in an incinerator/biomass power generation. I’d expect that would dispose of the microplastics as well as the cellulose and chitin. (I have no idea as to the economic viability.)
I too noticed the same article seemed to appear in different places with different authors…
Ah well, ours not to reason why.
Biomass incinerator route seems a good one. Who’d 'a thought, ,back in the day when plastic seemed THE solution that it would become THE problem.
I have been pondering over the massive quantity of disposable ball point pens that have been consumed by bored office workers over the years since they were introduced.
Being news rated the quantity would have to be measured in olympic swimming pools full.
We then need to discover how many office workers genuinely have been harmed by swallowing bits of ball point pens that are under a couple of mm in size.
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Unwelcome news.
This was one of the reasons that we introduced the obfuscated locations option on ispot.
Just happened across this link from Day-2 of my Nama experience
Tags are by the date of the observation.
Fortunately I have no sense of direction so locations are not accurate -
For me it was a trip of a lifetime, spanning locations that some folk never get to -
The Project My Namaqualand Experience - 2012 | Project | Southern Africa | iSpot Nature,
My Namaqualand Experience - 2012 | Project | Southern Africa | iSpot Nature
I still have many photos to share - but time is running out.
I read “ Meta to get rid of factcheckers“. I hope iSpot is not considering doing the same…. Checking is where the fun is for me.
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Well, my truth is true - and in the name of free speech I am going to tell it, even if it is totally irrational and contrary to proven facts. And if some people die because of it (e.g. believe me when I say that the Covid vaccine is implanting a chip into your arm) then that is because ‘the blob’ is out to get you.