Aligning Executive Incentives Global Public Health Goals

International audienceIntroduction: The World Health Organization (WHO)estimates that together tobacco and alcohol kill about 9 million people annually despite aggressive and widespread public health controls. These legal industries persist because of the demand for their products and their substantial economic influence, which is magnified by the concentration of wealth in the executives of leading corporations that profit from increased legal drug sales.Materials and methods: This preliminary study quantifies the link between global premature deaths from these legal addictive drugs as a function of executive compensation in order to provide the necessary data to make more effective policy recommendations for preventing legal drug-related deaths.Results: The results indicate a need to incentivize chief executive officers(CEOs), such that they have a constant marginal utility per life saved.Conclusions: An executive compensation incentive that moves to eliminate tobacco use is achieved by a pay structure that increases exponentially with the number of lives saved

Alternative Foods as a Solution to Global Food Supply Catastrophes

International audienceAnalysis of future food security typically focuses on managing gradual trends such as population growth, natural resource depletion, and environmental degradation. However, several risks threaten to cause large and abrupt declines in food security. For example, nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, and asteroid impact events can block sunlight, causing abrupt global cooling. In extreme but entirely possible cases, these events could make agriculture infeasible worldwide for several years, creating a food supply catastrophe of historic proportions. This paper describes alternative foods that use non-solar energy inputs as a solution for these catastrophes. For example, trees can be used to grow mushrooms; natural gas can feed certain edible bacteria. Alternative foods are already in production today, but would need to be dramatically scaled up to become the primary food source during a global food supply catastrophe. Scale-up would require extensive depletion of natural resources and difficult social coordination. For these reasons, large-scale use of alternative foods should be considered only for desperate circumstances of food supply catastrophes. During a catastrophe, alternative foods may be the only solution capable of preventing massive famine and maintaining human civilization. Furthermore, elements of alternative foods may be applicable to non-catastrophe times, such growing mushrooms on logging residues. Society should include alternative foods as part of its contingency planning for food supply catastrophes and possibly during normal times as well

Expanded microchannel heat exchanger: design, fabrication and preliminary experimental test

This paper first reviews non-traditional heat exchanger geometry, laser welding, practical issues with microchannel heat exchangers, and high effectiveness heat exchangers. Existing microchannel heat exchangers have low material costs, but high manufacturing costs. This paper presents a new expanded microchannel heat exchanger design and accompanying continuous manufacturing technique for potential low-cost production. Polymer heat exchangers have the potential for high effectiveness. The paper discusses one possible joining method - a new type of laser welding named "forward conduction welding," used to fabricate the prototype. The expanded heat exchanger has the potential to have counter-flow, cross-flow, or parallel-flow configurations, be used for all types of fluids, and be made of polymers, metals, or polymer-ceramic precursors. The cost and ineffectiveness reduction may be an order of magnitude or more, saving a large fraction of primary energy. The measured effectiveness of the prototype with 28 micron thick black low density polyethylene walls and counterflow, water-to-water heat transfer in 2 mm channels was 72%, but multiple low-cost stages could realize the potential of higher effectiveness

Preliminary automated determination of edibility of alternative foods: Non-targeted screening for toxins in red maple leaf concentrate

Alternative food supplies could maintain humanity despite sun-blocking global catastrophic risks (GCRs) that eliminate conventional agriculture. A promising alternative food is making leaf concentrate. However, the edibility of tree leaves is largely uncertain. To overcome this challenge, this study provides the methods for obtaining rapid toxics screening of common leaf concentrates. The investigation begins with a non-targeted approach using an ultra-high-resolution hybrid ion trap orbitrap mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization (ESI) coupled to an ultra-high pressure two-dimensional liquid chromatograph system on the most common North American leaf: the red maple. Identified chemicals from this non-targeted approach are then cross-referenced with the OpenFoodTox database to identify toxic chemicals. Identified toxins are then screened for formula validation and evaluated for risk as a food. The results after screening show that red maple leaf concentrate contains at least eight toxic chemicals, which upon analysis do not present substantial risks unless consumed in abundance. This indicates that red maple leaf is still a potential alternative food. The results are discussed in the context of expanding the analysis with open science and using leaf extract from other plants that are not traditionally used as foods to offset current global hunger challenges, and move to a more sustainable food system while also preparing for GCRs

Expanded microchannel heat exchanger: Non-destructive evaluation

International audienceRecent theoretical developments in expanded microchannel polymer-based heat exchangers were promising, but the initial experiments underperformed simple theory. In order to understand this discrepancy, this paper introduces a nondestructive methodology for characterizing polymer heat exchangers. A computerized tomography (X-ray) scan was performed to diagnose the problem. The method was tested on the expanded microchannel polymer heat exchanger to determine the variations in geometry between the theoretical and experimental heat exchanger. Channels were found to have variable heights causing flow maldistribution. The results are discussed to guide further technological development of this approach to heat exchanger design and fabrication and lays the groundwork for an advanced discretized modeling

Food without sun: Price and life-saving potential

International audienceThe sun could be blocked by an asteroid impact, supervolcanic eruption, or nuclear winter caused by burning of cities during nuclear war. The primary problem in these scenarios is loss of food production. Previous work has shown that alternate foods not dependent on sunlight, such as bacteria grown on natural gas, calories extracted from killed leaves, and cellulose turned into sugar enzymatically, could feed everyone in these catastrophes and preparation for these foods would save lives highly cost-effectively. This study estimates the price of alternate foods during a catastrophe scenario with global trade and information sharing, but no migration, loans, aid or conflict. Without alternate foods, for a five year winter, only ~10% of the population would survive. The price of dry food would rise to ~$100/kg, and the expenditure on this food would be ~$100 trillion over five years. If alternate food were $8/kg, the surviving global population increases to ~70%, saving >4 billion lives. The probability of a loss of civilization and its impact on many future generations would be much lower in this scenario and the total expenditure on food would be halved. Preparation for alternate foods would be a good investment even for wealthy people who would survive without alternate foods. A non-governmental mechanism of coordinating the investments of these rich people may be possible. Identifying companies whose interests align with alternate food preparations may save lives at a negative cost

Effect of CuO, MoO3 and ZnO nanomaterial coated absorbers for clean water production

Solar energy is one of the most powerful sources for many sustainable applications. Recently, efficient water distillation has attracted significant attention. The fresh water productivity depends on how efficiently the system harvests the incoming solar energy and converts it into useful heat. In the present work, nano-coated absorber plates (NCAPs) were examined in the single slope solar still (SSSS) for clean water production. The NCAPs were CuO, MoO3 and ZnO, respectively. The CuO-NCAP was fabricated with the thermal evaporation method while the radio-frequency Magnetron Sputtering technique was used to fabricate the MoO3 and ZnO NCAPs. The attained particle size of the CuO, MoO3 and ZnO are 30–34 nm, 25–30 nm and 30–35 nm, respectively. The sphere (CuO), plate (MoO3), and wedge (ZnO) like morphologies are identified with field emission-scanning electron microscope. All the NCAPs and reference solar still were tested under the same environmental conditions. The climatic parameters (solar influx, ambient temperature and wind) and SSSS's temperatures including water temperature (Tw), internal air temperature (Tint-air), inner cover (Tic), outer cover (Toc), and absorber plate temperature (TNCAP) were measured at 30 min intervals with the help of Type-J thermocouples. Herein, we present an evaporative heat transfer (hew), efficiency, and cost analysis of the SSSS with CuO, MoO3 and ZnO-NCAPs. Three different feed waters fetched from the surface well water, hill side well water and hill side pond water were used in this work for evaporation. The result reveals that the evaporation of conventional single slope solar still, CuO, MoO3 and ZnO NCAPs were 2.1 l/m2 day, 2.9 l/m2 day, 2.7 l/m2 day and 2.6 l/m2 day, respectively