Liquid mercury mirror telescope opens in India

Amazing stuff! What about toxicity?

"A unique telescope that focuses light with a slowly spinning bowl of liquid mercury instead of a solid mirror has opened its eye to the skies above India. Such telescopes have been built before, but the 4-meter-wide International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the first large one to be purpose-built for astronomy, at the kind of high-altitude site observers prize—the 2450-meter Devasthal Observatory in the Himalayas.

Although astronomers must satisfy themselves with only looking straight up, the $2 million instrument, built by a consortium from Belgium, Canada, and India, is much cheaper than telescopes with glass mirrors. A stone’s throw from ILMT is the 3.6-meter, steerable Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT)—built by the same Belgian company at the same time—but for $18 million. ...

Some astronomers say liquid mirrors are the perfect technology for a giant telescope on the Moon that could see back to the time of the universe’s very first stars.

When a bowl of reflective liquid mercury is rotated, the combination of gravity and centrifugal force pushes the liquid into a perfect parabolic shape, exactly like a conventional telescope mirror ..."

Liquid mirror telescope opens in India | Science | AAAS Inexpensive technology could be used to build giant telescope on the Moon

The International Liquid Mirror Telescope relies on a spinning dish containing 50 liters of mercury [that is a lot of mercury

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Save the Oceans, Save Ourselves

This school is just unhinged with hysteria and scaremongering! Lot's of fake data! Their demands are so unrealistic and dumm!

"Petroleum, mercury, microplastics and other pollutants are taking a massive toll on human health, according to a new report in the Annals of Global Health.

Coal factories, for example, send mercury into the atmosphere that ends up in the ocean and accumulates in fish. Their consumption by pregnant women leads to thousands of babies born with brain injuries each year in the US alone. ...

The authors urge the elimination of coal combustion, single-use plastic, and other measures. ..."

The mercury scare has been repeated many times for decades at least ever since the Japanese Minimata disease of 1956. Had their been thousands of babies born with brain injury each year due to mercury poisoning there would be Congressional hearings and civil unrest!

What are the alternatives to combustion energy supply? Solar power, wind energy, electric vehicles? All of them are extremely environmentally unfriendly and unhealthy as well!

Plastophobia is a serious disease (see my blog here)

Global Health NOW: Save the Oceans, Save Ourselves; Africa’s First Major Treatment Trial; and Emails Roasting on a Dumpster Fire

Platinum catalyst makes PVC production greener and cheaper

Good news!

"‘More than half of the mercury produced worldwide is used as a catalyst in vinyl chloride production,’ ... ‘A great deal of it, around 40 tons annually, evaporates and ends up contaminating the atmosphere"

"The preparation of the catalyst is straightforward. ‘We deposit the platinum impregnating activated carbon in an aqueous solution of chloroplatinic acid,’ ... Platinum atoms stay anchored to the carbon’s pores, and the catalyst was then activated by heating it. ... ‘To my knowledge, this is the first report of a highly active and stable platinum catalyst used for the synthesis of vinyl chloride"
Apparently, this catalytic process is not simple or easy!

Platinum makes PVC production greener and cheaper | Research | Chemistry World: A new single-atom catalyst could replace toxic mercury in the manufacture of vinyl chloride

Mercury emissions total 1.5 million tonnes over last 500 years (scaremongering & demagoguery)

If it was so bad as the headline suggests, we would be all dead by now! Very revealing, the article names only one mercury poison scandal, i.e. Minimata that happened 60 years ago! "Infamously, due to the release of methylmercury in industrial wastewater from a chemical factory of the Chisso Corporation from the 1930s to the 1960s, thousands of people who ate fish and shellfish in the region of Minamata, Japan, contracted severe mercury poisoning."

Then we have had the lead paint scare, the lead additive in gasoline scare ...

Mercury emissions total 1.5 million tonnes over last 500 years – Physics World: "In no way do we just need to worry about how much we release today," says researcher

Rising Mercury In Fish Alarmism

Posted: 8/9/2019

This week an alarming sounding research article was spread in the usual media (news and science outlets) and on Facebook! As usual, the gullible authors totally uncritically regurgitated the news.

We are inundated with such scary introductions like “Add another item to the ever-growing list of the dangerous impacts of global climate change: ” (S4)

These articles are huge baloney. The underlying scientific article (S3) is most likely junk science or deeply flawed science:
Articles like S1, S2, and S4 do not mention the amount of HG found in the sampled fish, they only talk about percentage increases. Using percentage increases is a very old technique of statistical manipulation!
One of the articles (S2) at least reproduces a chart from the underlying scientific article (S3) showing an increase in methylmercury (MeHG) from roughly 750 to 1000 nanogram per gram. The preview of S3 displays two charts showing tissue methylmercury of roughly between 70 and 150 nanogram per gram for one fish species and between 0 and 130 nanograms per gram
None of the articles (cannot confirm S3) mentions whether the minuscule nanogram amounts found in sampled fish is even hazardous for human consumption or the food chain
The underlying scientific article (S3) heavily relies on model simulations not on hard facts and measurements. We know how easily such models are manipulated for fame and money. My impression is that these model simulations are based on correlations, most likely without proving causation.
One of the hypotheses the researchers offered why the mercury in these fish were increasing is that due to the warming ocean these fish would consume more calories (food) like “Michael Phelps”. I am not kidding! If this is not junk science, what is! (S1)
None of the blaring, alarming headlines mentions that the study had an extremely narrow focus, which basically prohibits any generalization! “The researchers analyzed 30 years of ecosystem data from the Gulf of Maine, including an extensive analysis of the stomach contents of two marine predators, Atlantic cod and spiny dogfish, from the 1970s to 2000s.” (S1)

What are the affiliations of these researchers: “Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University; Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University; … ; Fisheries and Oceans Canada, St Andrews Biological Station”

Sources (S):

1. Mercury levels in fish are on the rise (8/7/2019; Harvard Gazette)
2. Mercury levels in fish are rising despite reduced emissions (8/7/2019)
3. Climate change and overfishing increase neurotoxicant in marine predators (8/7/2019; original article in Nature; preview only, behind paywall)

Climate change likely to increase human exposure to toxic methylmercury Environmental factors, such as rising sea temperatures and over-fishing, impact levels of mercury in fish (8/7/2019)