Richard Zurawski

At the risk of sounding like an old pessimist, I have to say that I am less than impressed with the new law that says old junked monitors, computers and televisions cannot be thrown out into the garbage anymore. They now have to be sent off to disposal centres at a cost. Its not that I object to the fact that we are not throwing them into the general garbage stream or the cost of sending them off to the disposal sites where they supposedly will not find their way into the environment, with the attendant pollution. But rather, I object to the “feel goodness” of it all. The real problem is our consumption and population that is burdening the planet beyond its means to recover. And now we are implementing yet another law that supposedly says we are “going green”, while deftly avoiding any real action that might stifle industry and consumption.

In fact, I think its even worse that doing nothing because the problem still exists after the supposed efforts, and we sidestep the obsolescence, production and consumption of the products of our industry which is the heart of the problem. Once the monitor or the TV or the computer is set to be junked it has already taxed the environment way past its abilities to absorb it on a per capita basis. Making a TV or computer have a smaller impact on the environment at the end of its life cycle is going to make very little if any difference.

By way of illustrating this conundrum, I point to the recycling charge that we have on tires for our cars. Each and every year in the Maritimes we throw away a couple of million tires, which are sent off to disposal centres. There is a charge for that when you buy the tires in the first place. Supposedly it helps the environment. But here comes the conundrum. The tires wind up being stored in vast sites, where they sit and sit and sit. A small percentage are recycled as pavement or as shoes or some other consumer item, but the vast majority don’t make it even that far and might as well be thrown into the dump for all the difference it makes. Other than the charge, nothing is different from from just throwing the tires into garbage dumps. We label it a “recycling charge” yet the tires wind up in pretty much the same place, the environment, and someone makes out like a bandit, while the rhetoric says we are do something “greener”. After it is all said and done most of us never have a further thought about the tires and believe that the world can breathe just a bit easier because we recycle.

Now we are charging for TVs et al to be “recycled”. We will have the nice fuzzy feelings that go with idea that we are doing something a bit better and the Earth will be saved from another blight. But we are still really not doing anything. The real problem that we are not tackling is our consumption, our way of life and our huge global population.

If you think this charge is going to do anything to slow human induced climate change, lower pollution and stem the tide of the vast melts in the Arctic and Antarctic, get a grip. Its something that we have concocted to make ourselves feel better, because we know deep down that we really aren’t doing anything about making a dramatic cut to climate change gases.

I don’t know if you have been following the space satellite named Messenger, but this robotic space voyageur has been doing some pretty spectacular stuff. For starters, where most other space ships head off for the deepest, darkest, nether regions of outer space, this probe is headed in the opposite direction, towards the one of the hottest planets in the solar system, Mercury. Mercury is the planet closest to the sun and because it is so close to the sun, not many people have actually ever seen it, because it gets lost in the overwhelming glare of the sun.

Unlike Venus, the only other planet in the solar system closer to the sun and the Earth and whose surface is actually hotter by virtue of the fact it is shrouded by a brilliant white clouds which make it the brightest celestial object in the sky other than the sun or the moon, Mercury has no atmosphere and is barely more than a rock.

And why are we interested in a chunk of rock circling the sun at a distance only 40 times   the sun’s diameter in the first place? Basically, it is because we don’t know much about Mercury because we don’t see it much. Mercury is so close to the sun that it can be seen only just before sunrise or after sunset, and then it is a only faint point of light.

For the longest time we thought that Mercury was locked in a synchronous orbit around the sun, always having one face permanently facing the sun. We learned otherwise from the last time we sent a probe to Mercury 30 years ago. What we learned was that while Mercury orbits the sun every 88 days, it’s day is 58 days, locked in a resonance giving three days for every two years.

It is the surface of the planet that is of so much interest. It appears that Mercury has giant ridges on its surface which seem to indicate that the planet is shrinking because its interior is cooling and becoming smaller while the outer layers remain the same size. The outer layers are like having too much skin. This outer layer or skin then sags, as the inside shrink, creating craggy ridges as gravity pulls the loose folds inwards.

What other mysteries will be solved and what new questions and conundrums come to being remain to be seen. Did Mercury ever have an atmosphere, perhaps when the solar system was just being born, when the sun was much dimmer? What about plate tectonics? Was its interior ever molten enough to cause the drifting, pushing and pulling on its crust that has made the Earth so dynamic?

This amazing Robotic spacecraft is the wave of the future. Smarter and smarter spaceships are being created and launched at a fraction of the cost of people carrying ships. In a couple of decades spaceships with near human capacity will allow us to be Earth bound voyeurs and maybe even cyber voyageurs if we can get establish the links.

This past four weeks you may have noticed a dearth of my science blogs gracing the web site. Between the holidays and being afflicted with two nasty cold bugs, my writing production has fallen to zero. The latter of the two colds was by far the worst and kept my energy levels so low that the last thing I wanted to do was write. Obviously I have recovered enough so that I can now again resume wordsmithing about my perspectives on the common cold.

I have to say that when I am sick, I feel that my life is being sucked out of me and nothing except time, sleep and whining seem to make any difference at all to the business of getting better. It is at these times that inwardly, I rail against the lack of progress that science has made in abating the effects of these nasty viruses. In fact it now appears that most of the over the counter remedies that are touted in TV ads as providing miraculous relief are right up there with snake oil and are probably detrimental to your health rather than providing a balm against the sniffles. It has definitely been established that no child should be given cold remedies and cough syrups, because not only are they useless, but they can even be deadly. There have been a number of child deaths associated with these over the counter remedies.

But not being a child, at least not physically, this does not apply to me. So I have tried all the over the counter remedies and have found, strictly anecdotally, that nothing seems to provide relief. And there have been occasions when it seems to have prolonged the effects of the cold!

I have also tried the herbal, hand me down, remedies. Echinacha, vitamin C, garlic, zinc, saunas, stiff drinks and other so called quick remedies just don’t work either! They don’t prevent, ameliorate or lessen the impacts of the common cold in the least, though perhaps a stiff drink will dull your senses and sensibilities enough to make you think you feel better. And if you have enough of them, the effects of the hangover might supersede the cold symptoms, and make you forget about being sick because you’re too hung over. But generally these so-called cures are just anecdotal and never live up to their hype and even worse, just don’t work.

The upshot is that we just have to suffer through the winter months and suffer through the inevitable colds.

The truth is that science can inoculate you against a specific cold, but from what I have read, there are hundreds of cold viruses out there. And that would mean becoming a human pin cushion! Because getting one doesn’t protect you from getting another, though as soon as you get one you will never get it again. But with hundreds of others waiting in the wings to afflict you it would be quite a chore to be inoculated against them all.

It sure would be nice if science could invent, discover or conjure a cure for all the colds out there with a simple pill…Until then sniff…cough…..hack…whine….