Short Takes – 1-30-24

OSHA Issues Major Chemical Safety Enforcement Guide Changes. BloombergLaw.com article. Pull quote: “The new guidance removes instructions from the 1994 directive that guided inspectors on how to conduct inspections. Instead, it tells inspectors to follow a separate directive, the 2017 national emphasis program for process safety released during the final week of the Obama administration.” Guidance document link.

Mix-Up Preceded Deadly Drone Strike in Jordan, U.S. Officials Say. NYTimes.com article. Pull quote: “One theory military officials are examining is that the militants studied the patterns of U.S. drone flights and deliberately positioned their attack drone near the returning American drone to make it harder to spot. Militia planners could have used Google Earth images of the base to guide the explosives-laden drone to the center of a mass target like the living quarters.”

It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew. ArsTechnica.com article. Pull quote: “The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn't fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn't destroy the battery's storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.”

CFATS Expiration: Leaving Open an Opportunity for Disaster. HSToday.us article. Pull quote: “We know the threat of chemical terrorism did not go away simply because the CFATS program expired. We know the best practices to protect dangerous chemicals against terrorist exploitation still work, and we continue to strive to share that knowledge with the chemical industry via the ChemLock program on a voluntary basis. We must face the fact that the absence of the CFATS program is a national security gap too great to ignore. As we call on the American people to examine the resiliency plans for the critical infrastructure that supports our everyday lives, we at CISA also call on Congress to reauthorize CFATS as a pillar of security and resilience for the nation’s chemical sector.” Associate Director Kelly continues here PR campaign.

U.S. Oil Drillers Are Going Electric—if They Can Get the Electricity. WSJ.com article. Pull quote: “The oil field is both growing and trying to electrify while oil-field communities and other industries like data centers are also growing, said Adrian Rodriguez, Southwestern Public Service’s president. Across both states, the utility estimates it needs to build 5 to 10 gigawatts of new power generation in the coming years to meet growing demand and replace some older power plants.”

E. coli rewired to shift carbon flow towards C4 chemicals. ChemistryWorld.com article. More than a little chem-geeky. Pull quote: “Chang and her team used techniques including natural adaptive evolution, gene knockout, enzyme screening, metabolomics and genetic selection to improve the yields of n-butanol, 1,3-butanediol, and 4-hydroxy-2-butanone from 11–20% to near quantitative yields in E. coli. These three industrially relevant C4 chemicals can be further dehydrated to produce 1-butene, 1,3-butadiene and methyl vinyl ketone, respectively.”