SIMPLE CHEMISTRY OF LIFE

From Worldometer,  COVID-19 new deaths:

           DAY USA   WORLD   Brazil   India   South Africa

June      9     1093    4732         1185      246         82

           10       982    5163         1300      388         48
           11       904    4951         1261      394         74
           12       791    4603           843      389         70
           13       702    4229           890      309         69
           14       331    3263           598      321         57
           15       425    3415           729      395         88
           16       849    6592         1338        ?           57
           17       809    5264         1209      341         49
           18       747    5123         1204      342         63
           19       719    5066         1221      366         94
           20       573    4428           968      307         46
           21       267    3338           601      426         53
           22       363    3880           748      312         61
           23       863    5465         1364      468        111
           24       808    6071         1103      424        103
           25       649    5179         1180      401          87
           26       663    4893         1055      381         48
           27       512    4547           994      414         73
           28       285    3463           555      384         43
           29       346    3415           727      417         73
           30       764    5072         1271      506       128
July       1       676    4857        1057      438         92
             2       687    5155         1277      377         95
             3       616    5170         1264      444       108
             4       254    4494         1111       610         74
             5       251    3572          535       421       173
             6       378    3573          656       474       111
             7       993    5504        1312       479       192
             8       890    5507        1187       491       100
             9       960    5411        1199       479       118
           10       849    5416        1270       521       140
           11       731    4995          968       543       111
           12       380    4118          659       500       108
           13       465    3729          770       540         93
           14       935    5414        1341       586       174
           15     1001    5760        1261       614       107

Summary:

• On June 9, the USA had 1093 deaths.  Yesterday, we had 1001.
• Worse, we broke our all time high, with 71,750 new cases.
• We will thus mostly be seeing a thousand new deaths/day for the next few weeks.
• And President Donald Trump will continue insisting that we need to open up schools next month.

About my posting yesterday on face shields, here is a fusion to also protect your eyes.  Not as cumbersome as a face shield, but nevertheless still not made for comfortable breathing.  I tend to wear glasses with face mask when I go out, even though I also own a face shield.

I was prepared to post this article yesterday, Wednesday, my science day, but with the coronavirus and significance of the next determining decision--opening of schools--I thought the world just had to learn more about a simple solution:  face shields.  And yes, the readership zoomed up over the past 24 hours.

Today, something simpler, but more complexed and even spiritual.  Who can honestly envision the beginning of time, the Big Bang, an event that occurred 13.8 billion years ago?  Or, even more astounding, how the simplest element of all, hydrogen, could come together in such a way that a star could be born?

The next section could get a bit tedious and too scientific, so if you want simplicity, skip it and go straight to the blue section at the end.

Our Sun is 75% hydrogen and 25% helium.  Well not quite, for 0.1% are various other elements.  It is 27 million degrees F at the center.  From this almost vacuum called space, gravity attracted some of these H and He molecules into the shape of a pancake, where, over a period of around 50 million years  a star was born. Then, rotation and further attraction formed the planets.  All this began to occur a little more than 4.5 billion years ago.  Our Sun is good for another 5.5 billion years. 

Today, if you had to measure the dominant elements, you would find that hydrogen is 74% the mass of the entire Universe, while an inert gas, helium, takes up 24%.  Only 2% happen to be oxygen, silicon, uranium and everything else.  Then again, another almost spiritual phenomenon.  About all these atoms that we can see and measure, scientists think that group only represents 4.6% of what is there.

Yes, scientist are serious in saying that Planet Earth is 4.543 billion years old.  Take it from them that oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago.  But where did all that water come from?  There is water throughout space, and asteroids crashing into our planet brought them.  Then life, perhaps 4.29 BYA.  We were lucky, as this spherical piece of rock was just so far away from the Sun for life to be created.  I can explain how this lucky fluke occurred, or you can try to understand from the following:

You can ignore the above, but if you really want to read the words, click on that link.  To continue, two parts hydrogen and one of oxygen combine to form water.  First life was probably some archaea or bacterium.  Was there an intermediary, like a virus, or did a virus evolve from these single-cell forms of life?  Cosmos says no, but National Geographic says maybe.  The coronavirus today causing this pandemic is a virus, which, incredibly enough, is not really alive.

How do we fit into all this?  There are three domains of life:  bacteria, archaea and eucaryotes.  We are in in the latter group with mold, elephants and other living forms not uni-cellular.  Over time, plants have come to dominate the existing mass at 450 gigatons of carbon, with bacteria #2 at 70 gtc.  Humans?  0.06 gtc.  Like a tiny virus killing us, we insignificant Homo sapiens are assassinating Planet Earth.

A world of a thousand times more bacteria than humans?  Not numbers but mass.  Then again, there are ten times more VIRUSES than bacteria.  Remember the Andromeda Strain?  About viruses:

First, their total number is staggering. It is estimated that there are 10 viruses for every bacterium on Earth. Curtis Suttle from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver compared the number of viruses in the oceans alone to the number of stars in the Universe, which is estimated to be 1023. Viruses outnumber stars by a factor of 10 million. If you lined them all up, that line would be 10 million light years long! To put it on a more conceivable scale, it’s been estimated that each day, more than 700 million viruses, mainly of marine origin, are deposited from Earth’s atmosphere onto every square meter of our planet’s surface.

The ocean is a different kind of ecosystem, for while the global biomass is around 550 gtc, in the ocean there are only 5-10 gtc.  Further, unlike on land, animal biomass is 30 times more than plant life.  However, there are 15 times more biomass from viruses than bacteria and archaea.  Thus, when you think germs, appreciate that viruses dominate that domain.  They are there to bedevil bacteria and archaea...and humans, although many of beneficial too.

So from all that complexity, it gets simple for life around us.  Water is just hydrogen and oxygen.  Coal is mostly carbon.  Diamond is all carbon, of a different structure.  Burn coal and you get carbon dioxide, the bane of global climate warming.  

The next most complicated fossil fuel is methane, hydrogen with four hydrogen atoms.  Natural gas is mostly methane.  When it burns, you get carbon dioxide and water.  You also produce other compounds, but ignore them for now, as simplicity is the goal right now.  Methane in the atmosphere has a half life of around ten years, before it oxidizes and turns to water vapor and carbon dioxide.  Tomorrow I will delve into The Venus Syndrome and enter a realm that makes what seems like a "nice" fossil fuel, methane, the most dangerous gas of all, worse than carbon dioxide.

This has no non-Hawaii interest, but the Honolulu Zoo unveiled its two new baby lemurs, and named them Frank De Lemur and Mike.  Frank De Lima was pleased.  You can expect a new song coming soon.  Here is his video on how to stay healthy during this pandemic.  Mel is in honor of the late Mel Cabang.  Both are comedians.

The 30-year mortgage rate dropped below 3% for the first time in half a century!!!

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