Good Morning! 🌞 

We have some results from yesterday’s poll:

- 47% of you all said you will be watching at least some of the Olympics.
- 53% of you all said that you will not be watching the Olympics.

I will definitely we watching highlight clips at the least. Though I am not sure yet if I will decide to stream any of it. I do very much enjoy gymnastics, so I might have to watch some of that.

Innovation

Dairy Helps Extracts Gold from E-Waste

Scientists have developed a cost-effective method to recycle certain electronic waste using whey protein. This approach allows for easy gold recovery from circuit boards, costing 50 times less than the value of the recovered gold—figures that appeal to large-scale businesses. Traditional e-waste recycling methods can't match these savings, making this method potentially scalable.

Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from ETH Zurich discovered that whey protein, a byproduct of dairy manufacturing, can create sponges that attract ionized gold. Electronic waste contains valuable metals like copper, cobalt, and gold, used extensively in electronics for their conductive properties.

Mohammad Peydayesh, Mezzenga's colleague, first denatured whey proteins under acidic conditions and high temperatures, forming protein nanofibrils in a gel. After drying the gel, they created a sponge from these fibrils. To extract gold, they soaked 20 salvaged motherboards in an acid bath until the metals dissolved into ionized compounds. The sponge then attracted these ions, and a heat treatment aggregated the gold into 22-carat flakes for easy removal.

They extracted 450 milligrams of gold, worth about $38.70 at current market value, though the nuggets contained around 9% copper. Further smelting could purify the gold, reducing its weight slightly.

The true financial value lies in the bottom line—50 times the cost of energy and materials. The scientists plan to market this technology quickly and explore if other food waste byproducts can be used to make the protein fibril sponge.

E-waste is a growing global problem, requiring energy-intensive machinery for recycling. The benefits of recycling these materials include preventing long-term landfill waste, the loss of the precious metals to said landfills, and reducing the demand for new mining operations.

Entertainment

Playing His Heart Out!

One of our readers shared a fantastic video with us the other day. It is of a 9-year-old boy, named Junxi Lu, playing his heart out while playing the blues.

Maituo, the name he is most know by, is certainly a guitar prodigy. He began his musical journey with the classical guitar in 2020 at the age of 5. He then added the electric guitar to his repertoire in 2021.

Maituo's musical portfolio is both expansive and impressive. He likes to play blues songs, hard rock and metal tracks, and recently joining a performance in Thailand to play the iconic solo in "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses. Remarkably, he performs all these songs on a full-size adult guitar.

Maituo isn't the only musician in his family. His father is also a guitarist, and serves as his tutor. Maituo's 7-year-old sister is equally gifted on the drums and is quite capable of playing numerous songs with her eyes closed. The siblings often rock out together in their home studio, with their father recording and uploading their performances to social media.

Here is the video of Maituo:

Environment

HIV Drug Reduces Carbon Emissions

A groundbreaking report has revealed that changing the ingredients or manufacturing methods of widely used medications can significantly reduce carbon emissions.

The study found a reduction of 26 million tons of CO2, equivalent to the entire carbon footprint of Geneva for ten years. This reduction has already been achieved.

The HIV treatment dolutegravir (DTG) is used by 24 million people worldwide. Over 110 low and middle-income countries have adopted DTG as the preferred treatment option. Rapid voluntary licensing of the medicine, including its pediatric version, to over a dozen generic manufacturers, has significantly reduced prices. It's estimated that 1.1 million lives will be saved from HIV/AIDS-related deaths by 2027.

DTG's predecessor, efavirenz, contained 1200 milligrams of active ingredients, while DTG contains 650 milligrams of just one compound. This small difference was enough to reduce the medication's carbon footprint by a factor of 2.6.

Unitaid, a global public-private partnership that invests in new health products for low and middle-income countries, published the report "Milligrams to Megatons." It is the first research to compare carbon footprints between commonly used medications. The authors noted that the reduction in carbon footprint surpasses many climate mitigation achievements in health and other sectors.

Since DTG entered production in 2017, 2.6 million fewer tons of CO2 have entered the atmosphere each year compared to if efavirenz was still the standard treatment. The global medical sector’s carbon emissions are about 5% of the global total, larger than the emissions of many big countries and 2.5 times as much as aviation.

“This report shows that we can achieve significant health improvements while also reducing carbon emissions. By adopting innovative practices and prioritizing sustainability, we can ensure that medicines like DTG are effective and environmentally responsible,” Vincent Bretin, Director of Unitaid’s Results and Climate Team, told Health Policy Watch.

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Mind Stretchers

⁉️ 

How many times does the long hand of the clock pass the short hand between midnight one day and midnight the next?

Answers to yesterday’s Mind Stretchers:
You have a sequence of numbers: 2, 6, 12, 20, 30, 42, 56, ... What is the 10th number in this sequence?
The 10th number in the sequence is 110.

Gerry Moore got the correct answer first!

Be the first to send us the correct answer for today’s mind stretcher for a shout-out with the answer tomorrow. Just send us the answer and your name to [email protected] or reply to the email.

If you have any uplifting stories and experience you might want to share, send those over to [email protected] for the chance to be featured.