Short Takes – 7-25-25

Electrochemistry cleans up nitrate-contaminated water without costly, toxic metals. ChemistryWorld.com article. Pull quote: “Chemical engineer Ke Xie at Northwestern University in Illinois is impressed by the results – although he says the researchers’ mechanistic conclusions are undermined by the fact that the membrane pores in the simulations are approximately 30 times smaller than the pores in the actual material. ‘I think it’s probably a limitation of their computational capacity, because these kinds of simulations normally can’t describe tens of nanometre scales,’ he says. He is sceptical, however, that the method will be a viable source of ammonia. ‘What you get here is 100ppm ammonium, and it would take a lot of effort to take out this in a form in which it can be used,’ he says. ‘If I wanted better performance, I’d pursue a catalyst that didn’t produce any ammonium but just produced nitrogen, which escapes.’’

New York Proposes Cybersecurity Regulations for Water Systems. InfoSecurity-Magazine.com article. Pull quote: “Governor Kathy announced the proposals in a public release on July 22, which contain separate operational technology (OT) security requirements for water management firms from the New York State Department of Health (DOH) and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).”

White House mulling a rare tool to block spending without Congress: What to know. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: ““If Congress cares about its power of the purse, it needs to find ways to actually assert itself and control the flow of spending, and not just let the Office of Management and Budget decide what’s actually going to get spent, and it seems like that might require joining this fight in a fairly open confrontation,” said Philip Wallach, a senior fellow focused on the “separation of powers” at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI).”

Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Review and Approval; Comment Request; Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). Federal Register DOC 30-day ICR notice. Summary: “This is a request for a new collection of information. The Office of Space Commerce (OSC) is developing the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) to provide space situational awareness (SSA) data, information, and services that support global spaceflight safety, space sustainability, and international coordination. In order to provide these services, TraCSS will enable spacecraft operators and national governments to register for the system. This will require the provision of information by these users as part of the registration process. Spacecraft operators are also asked to provide relevant operational information on an ongoing basis to facilitate provision of safety services.”

EO 14317 - Creating Schedule G in the Excepted Service. Federal Register.