Short Takes – 8-17-24

Pipeline Safety: Cost Recovery for Siting Reviews for LNG Facilities. Federal Register PHMSA notice of proposed rulemaking. Summary: “PHMSA is proposing a new fee for cost recovery for siting reviews of liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility project applications where the design and construction costs total $2.5 billion or more. This proposed rule is necessary to implement section 103 of the Protecting our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2020 (PIPES Act of 2020), and to help provide adequate resources for siting reviews to promote the public safety and environmental protection objectives of the Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS). This proposed rule also revises current regulations authorizing PHMSA's cost recovery for design safety reviews of gas, hazardous liquid, and carbon dioxide pipeline facilities to improve the clarity of the regulations and reduce unnecessary administrative burdens.” Comments due: October 18^th, 2024.

Astronauts actually get stuck in space all the time. ScienceNews.org article. Pull quote: ““Given the choice of a six-month mission or a one-year mission, I would prefer a one-year mission,” Pettit said in his interview with White. “People think I’m joking, but I am serious when I say that if we had the technology, I would load my family and myself on the next rocket and we would immigrate into space and never come back to planet Earth.””

One-quarter of unresponsive people with brain injuries are conscious. Nature.com article. Pull quote: “The results mean that a substantial number of people with brain injuries who seem unresponsive can hear things going on around them and might even be able to use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) to communicate, says study leader Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. BCIs are devices implanted into a person’s head that capture brain activity, decode it and translate it into commands that can, for instance, move a computer cursor. “We should be allocating resources to go out and find these people and help them,” Schiff says. The work was published today [link added] in The New England Journal of Medicine.”