Short Takes – 9-3-24

America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny. NYTimes.com article. Pull quote: “Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.”

What to Know about Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus Spread by Mosquitoes. ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “Even in extreme years, however, the number of mosquitoes that are infected [with these viruses] is relatively low—so low that detecting virus in a single mosquito is very unlikely. And when someone is bitten by an infected mosquito, they may or may not be infected. Among those people who are infected, only 4 to 5 percent will develop any kind of disease. Among the 4 to 5 percent who have some kind of disease, about one third are the serious, life-threatening encephalitis version.”

How Deadly Is Mpox, What Vaccines are Effective, and Other Questions Answered. ScientificAmerican.com article. Pull quote: “But Liesenborghs says that the mutations and clades might not be the most important factor in understanding how the monkeypox virus spreads. Although distinguishing Ia from Ib is useful in tracking the disease, he says, severity and transmissibility of disease could be more affected by the region where the virus is circulating and the people there. Clade Ia, for instance, seems to be more common in sparsely populated rural regions where it is less likely to spread far. Clade Ib is cropping up in densely populated areas and spreading more readily.”

How the 14th Amendment prevents state legislatures from subverting popular presidential elections. TheConversation.com commentary. Pull quote: “If all of a state’s voters have their right to vote taken away, Section 2 requires that the state’s House representation immediately and automatically be reduced to zero. The Constitution elsewhere specifies that each state’s representation in the Electoral College is the sum of the state’s House and Senate delegations.”

Logistics: Russian Railroads Ruined. StrategyPage.com article. Pull quote: “Ukraine plans to build some European Gauge rail lines to major transportation centers in several Ukrainian cities. Eventually Ukraine wants to convert all its major rail lines to Standard gauge. This will make it easier to handle trade with Europe and, if there’s another war with Russia, the Russians will not have all those Russian gauge rail lines available to quickly move troops and supplies into Ukraine on Russian gauge railroads. Instead, the Russians will have to use roads or capture Ukrainian railroad engines along with passenger, cargo, and flatcars so they can use Ukrainian European Standard gauge railroads.”

World's biggest battery coming to Maine — and it could store 130 million times more energy than your laptop. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “But there's no chance of iron-air batteries replacing lLi-ion batteries in consumer electronics, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). Although iron-air batteries are useful for large-scale storage, they charge and discharge energy much slower than Li-ion cells, which isn't ideal for smartphones or electric cars. It's also tough for researchers to shrink the batteries down small enough to fit inside these everyday devices.”