Now I’m no expert on the subject and there are people far more knowledgeable than I’ll ever be who have written some comprehensive reports on the subject. As for me, apart from an understanding that we should clearly limit our plane travel, try to eat a lot less meat, buy less stuff and walk whenever possible instead of using a car, I feel a little overwhelmed with what we can and should do. A widely shared feeling as far as I can tell. All we can really do is take care of our own local impact and try to push our politicians to act for a more sustainable future. They hold the key to a large part of this with the rules and standards that they can enact and enforce.

Recently, though, through all of this, I’ve been wondering how we define sustainability. This question popped up in my air-fried brain while I was doing some literature review of scientific articles on the subject of PFAS and, more particularly, their destruction. Now, PFAS, if you haven’t heard from movies, press articles, court cases, discussions with your friends, your socials or from random strangers on the street, are compounds that have been engineered to be extremely durable and have found their way into our environment, water resources, trees, livers, brains, cute puppies, ugly ducklings… probably even your favorite food. Which proves to be a problem for a wide-range of health issues.

Yes, homer, even donuts aren’t safe!

Because this is such a pressing issue, there is a massive amount of scientific work being done and journalistic reporting covering it all. And trying to navigate through what seems like a daily sea worth of information is a bit of a struggle. To the point where I wonder if even an AI would manage to wade through the morass.

On the topic of destruction of PFAS, one element I have found in several papers recently is the claim that a proposed process offers either a sustainable or a sustainable pathway towards a solution. Now there are differences between the proposed processes. Some do try to destroy the compounds through the use of solar light exposition or microbial degradation which can rightly be characterized as sustainable in that they minimize resource usage. But results for these approaches are rather underwhelming in terms of the time in takes to destroy the compounds. And since we are at a loss for time, space and money, I expect that these are unlikely to be put in place until they improve significantly.

The processes that are leading the way in PFAS destruction require large amounts of energy, whether chemical, physical or electrical. And just the fact that we have to destroy something that we have created is very unlikely to balance out as a sustainable approach. Some studies have been trying to recycle the PFAS into raw reusable form, which is quite commendable and should be explored, but however much better this is than the alternative of just getting rid of them, is this enough to be considered sustainable?

The definition of sustainability as proposed by the United Nations is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. And the question is therefore, are we managing to do such a thing? Every parameter used to measure this tends towards a no. As it stands, the real question seems not to be if future generations will be able to meet their needs but how many more will be able to do so. Though,, admittedy, it is hard to focus on the future when there are millions of people whose needs still are not met today. It might be worth it to define these needs and put a cap on the lengths one person is allowed to go to to use up our planetary allocations. Just a thought.

Different organizations have tried to evaluate whether we, humans as a whole, are going over our budget in terms of sustainable use of available resources. You have probably heard of the nine planetary boundaries concept, seven of which have been breached. Another concept is “Earth Overshoot Day” which is calculated as the day when humanity has consumed all that our planet can sustainably produce in a year. This year it will fall on July 30^th. A pretty bleak result.

I’ve always had trouble with Earth Overshoot Day. If what it portends to represent was exact, shouldn’t we be in incredibly dire conditions? And since we are at around the halfway mark, shouldn’t the date drop quite drastically, pretty much by half, every year now? I still think there is value in having such an indicator but I’m not sure if it’s accurately depicting what it claims to. Of course, the calculations are complex. One good example is our oil usage rate which far exceeds the time it takes for the planet to produce (millions of years!). We just have massive amounts of it and it takes time to use it all up. Though we are definitely making a great effort of it!

Sustainability of nature is itself interesting to dig into. After all, over the eons it took our planet to get to where it is, it has changed drastically. A hot mess, a cold mess, one big continent, dinosaurs… It is simply that our lifetimes do not match with geological time that we don’t realize how much change there is going on. And lest we forget, the whole universe is, as far as our brightest minds have figured out, slowly decaying away. Though we shouldn’t have to worry about something that will happen a mere 10⁷⁸ years in the future.

I remember quite well a biology class I attended and a talk on ecosystems and the predator-prey relationships. If one year there was a lot of prey, then the predators would have lots to eat and reproduce effectively. The following year, too many predators present would eat too many prey and their stock would dwindle. Meaning that predators themselves would not have enough food and would eventually die. The following year, fewer predators in the wild meant better times for the prey who would be safer and more effectively reproduce and so the cycle kept on going. The cycle itself is sustainable over time, but at any given moment it is pretty brutal for one or the other of prey or predator. Hopefully we don’t have to go through such a dreadful cycle to achieve our own human brand of sustainability…

I don’t really know where I’m going with what has turned out to be a somewhat bleak note. I don’t have a specific conclusion or moral to hand out. I know that I, personally, could do much better to limit my environmental footprint and I don’t think I have the moral high ground over anyone. I just think that scientists in general should be very careful when waving the sustainability argument around their solutions. Being explicit and cautious is much more likely to lead to proper decisions than trying to greenwash our results. Something we should leave to marketing professionals while we go back to figuring out how to adapt to the heat coming our way.

France over the past ten days

Something, I imagine, you have heard about. Unless you are a scientist, have spent too much time stuck in the lab over the past few months and are arriving to the party a bit late. Now, you want to partake in the fun and need to find a team to root for? The simple choice is to root for your home team, but, perhaps, for some romantic reason you might want to support a team that isn’t from your own country (or, perhaps, because your country never made it through qualifiers…). Well here is a little guide I have put together to help you choose the right team for you based on your favorite research subject!

The scientist leaves his den and sees his shadow. Tries not to freak out

Zoologist, wildlife biologist

If you are into the study of animals, you are in massive luck, the panel of options is quite varied, though, of course, the lion’s share goes to, well, Lions. With England having a whopping three of them. But if you want to forego quantity for a more subtle approach, you can combine your love of Lions with your love of mountaineering (The Moroccan Atlas lions), your appreciation for hospitality (The Senegalese Teranga Lions) or the history of human civilization (The Mesopotamia Lions of Iraq). While felines and canines tend to be particularly represented (the Algerian Fennecs, the Congolese Leopards, the White Wolves of Uzbekistan), there are a couple high flying birds (the Saudi Arabian Green Falcons and the Tunisian Eagles of Carthage) and, of course, the always impressive Ivory Coast Elephants.

Photonics and optics

Another promising venue for choosing a team to root for is color scheme. Just like your favorite prism, you can select among a wide spectra of colors. So make your pick among the white and blue sky Albiceleste (Argentina), les Bleus (France), les Rouges (Canada), la Tri (Ecuador; yellow, blue and red), El Tri (Mexico; green, white and red), the Orange (Netherlands), the All Whites (New-Zealand), The Maroons (Qatar), the Red (Spain), the Blue and Yellow (Sweden), the Sky Blue (Uruguay).

Of course, if you ask me, you can’t go wrong with that deep royal blue.

Allez les bleus, on est tous ensemble !

Oceanography

If your love of ocean current modeling is something you hold dear to your heart, you cannot go wrong with the Curaçao Blue Waves. Also doesn’t hurt if you like rooting for massive underdogs and dancing!

Mythology, theology

I expected more options here, but if you are into mythological creatures you can be well served by donning the jersey of either the Belgian Red Devils or the Bosnian Dragons. I’d expect nerdy, hobbit-loving scientists to flock to those fire-breathing beasts. I’ll throw in the Taegeuk Warriors of South Korea, who, while not being mythological are definitely in the realm of the supernatural for their association with the South Korean symbol for duality that is the Taegeuk.

Social sciences and humanities

You are interested in how we humans build a live for ourselves, how we toil and create conditions for improvement? You are in luck, some very compelling teams are present including the always impressive Colombian Cafeteros (Colombia). Accompanying them are the Panaman Canaleros and The Guarani people of Paraguay. An all South-American group, which makes sense as a hotbed for social reform and justice.

History

History buffs are in for a treat in this world cup as you can choose between three strong teams. First off, the Egyptian Pharaohs. Led by one of the most respected forwards of recent years and with such a cool nickname, a great choice. But don’t sleep on the Japanese Blue Samurai who have been highlighted by pundits as the strongest outsider in the cup. Bonus points to their always beautiful kits, which will be sure to earn you some sweet comments on your outstanding taste in fashion. A rare feat in scientific social circles. And finally, if you are into the warrior mindset, why not give some support to the Haitian Grenadiers?

Astronomy

The study of the universe and its components has some nice representatives in this world cup cycle. If reaching for the heavens is your thing, make your pick amongst the Ghanaian Black Stars, the Turkish Crescent Stars or one of the three host countries: the Stars and Stripes of USA.

Too bad no one has gone for anything else than the stars. The moon or sun would be nice, but I would root for any team going as the black holes or the supernovae. To make up for the lack of variety, I’ll allow the Astronomy geeks to root for the perennial hard-nosed outsider that are the Croatian Fiery Ones.

Accounting, business

As we all know, creative accounting is particularly frowned upon. So, if you are part of the no-nonsense team, I have good news for you: you are not alone! Pick your favorite among this long list that includes quite a few heavyweights: The National Team (Austria), the Selection (Brazil), the Representatives (Czechia), The Team (Germany), the National Team (Iran), The National Team (Norway), the National Football Team (Scotland), the Nati (Switzerland).

Art history, litterature

If, on the contrary, you are more of a creative type and like standing out, there are a couple interesting options out there for you. If you are into the light and humoristic side of things, why not cheer on the Australian socceroos? Yes, that is a portmanteau of Soccer and Kangaroo that only our friends from down-under could pull off. In a similar joyful approach to the game, you could root for the South African Bafana Bafana (the Boys) known for their raucous crowd. One of the favorites, Portugal, allows you to root for the Selection of the Shields, which sounds quite daring and knightly. Though if that’s what you are after, why not consider the Noble and Chivalrous men of Jordan?

Of course, it is not necessary to have a team in the running to enjoy the world cup. But it helps. And rooting for a team that is not from your home country also has the great benefit of fighting back agains the gloom and doom vibes that surround this event a bit more every four years. The over-commercialization of the sport, the lack of empathy for immigrants, the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not great prospects and make for a sad time in human history. And it might not seem like much, but I like to believe that wearing another country’s colors and rooting for them is a nice little stepping stone in the right direction. That’s the magic of the most popular sporting event in the world, a reminder that we are at our collective best when we cheer each other on and share in our respective pains and joy.

The beautiful game!

This was a stark reminder to me that I am a couple years from reaching what comic Bill Burr calls men’s drop dead years. A pretty brutal but fair description of what can happen, and a memento mori of life’s ephemeral reality. If you are not inclined towards hypochondria and love data, a quick bit of internet research will tell you that somewhere around 55-60 million people die every year and that the leading cause of death is, by far, heart diseases for about 1 in 3 people.

I’m not a huge fan of absolutes in general, but there is no denying that death is a pretty final proposition that begets no ranking of pains or despair or fairness. However, it is reasonable to want to stave off the inevitable and live a quiet healthy life for as long as possible. In the case of natural deaths, all we can control is what we do to keep ourselves healthy: eat well, exercise, try and take a break from time to time. There is no crazy secret really.

But there are plenty of other moments in life that come with their amount of risk. From crossing a street, to diving with sharks, to the simple and daily act of going to work. According to the International Labour Organization, around 2 million people die every year from a work-related accident or disease, or a non-significant 3% of yearly deaths. Of course, some jobs are riskier than others, with the same source highlighting that a construction worker dies every ten minutes on the job. So, choose your job wisely I guess.

I got my first taste of workplace health and safety during a summer job, working at a food industry site producing sliced ham. I was given extensive rules about how to prepare myself for work every day, making sure I wore the proper sterilized attire, the health of the customer being just as important as mine. I worked on a production unit with 5 other guys from 6am to 2pm in a giant fridge at 4°C. The first day there, I went down with the team and we arrived in front of the equipment where a sheet of paper taped to it indicated the expected workload for the day. The paper read “14 tons”.

I couldn’t fully wrap my head around the number, but it seemed to me like 14 TONS was a whole freaking lot. The other guys reacted like it was an average day and we all just went about standing up for 8 hours and moving around 14 tons of ham. At the end of the week I was exhausted. I had no idea how I was going to keep on doing this work but it turns out that the human body can adjust quite a bit and I spent the rest of the summer bemoaning the early alarm-clock but making it through.

Throughout my time there I was impressed by the load management of the team. If we were ahead of schedule, we would take on a little extra for the afternoon colleagues. But only if the amounts we had done were not already more than average. In that way we maintained an equilibrium and did not overexert ourselves. It wasn’t too bad but you could tell that this was not a job you wanted to do your whole life or above a certain age.

The guy who was at the end of the line was a tall, young, sturdy man whose job it was to put the hams we had processed into vacuum-sealed bags. Over and over again for 8 hours. He told me that the machines he had to work with were designed for someone of average height and he, therefore, had to continuously work bent over ever so much. Because of that he had back problems, which was concerning for someone who was pretty young. He had asked for them to be changed but it apparently wasn’t possible, and unfortunately the system did not have a height adjustment setting. This was over twenty years ago, but it still resonates with me and I think it would be a valuable experience for anyone to have to live through these types of jobs and get a better understanding of what we call in France “la pénibilité du travail” (the harshness of working conditions).

While a part of a worker’s health and safety is in his/her hands, there is also the responsibility of the people in charge in ensuring that the risks of the work environment are managed as best as possible. A few years after that first experience, I was doing lab work for my graduate studies. It’s easy to imagine lab work as a much more relaxed environment, but just like any other work setting, there are risks that need to be considered. There is a reason the image of a scientist we all conjure up is one of a person wearing a labcoat, some gloves and some type of protective eyewear.

2 million repetitions later, she will have a PhD and lifelong tendinitis

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve had a couple iffy moments in the lab, though nothing very serious. But during my days on campus, a student in another lab had a catastrophic accident that resulted in her death. Safety protocols were not properly observed and likely not as stringent as they should have been. I never had to deal with very dangerous chemicals, but any science project comes with its safety risks. After all, we all have electricity all over the place, and that, in itself, is enough cause for concern. The goal being to manage the danger (what can cause an accident) so as to limit the risk (the probability that the danger turns into an accident).

Every company has to put the health and safety of its employees first and foremost. If your company doesn’t, bring it up. And the only acceptable goal is to have zero deaths and serious injuries. I am not sure it is a fully attainable goal, so much of the things we would like to control are out of our reach, but it is the only acceptable one and, I expect, one we can only reach by working together. And the people who take on the mantle of health and safety officers have to be commended because it’s not a fun job having to remind everyone of the risks, of being careful, of wearing their protective gear and so on and so forth. So if you don’t feel like giving them a thank you hug, at least respect them.

To finish this rather dire post, here is a little fact that I learned when writing this: some people have calculated that, as of 2022, an estimated total of almost 110 billion humans have died, or roughly 94% of all humans to have ever lived. So, if you are reading this, take hope and pride in the fact that you are among the surviving 6% of ALL OF HUMANITY.

And to maintain that wonderful record, remember to wear your helmet, put on that labcoat, go get your yearly medical check-up and cherish your loved ones.

As he goes on about looking for work he realizes there are very few jobs that correspond to his CV and that there are a few other people who can also fit the bill: experienced paper manufacturing employees who were let go and are looking for the same jobs. After a couple years of unsuccessfully working odd jobs and feeling inadequate and demoted, he decides that his only chance is to get rid of these rivals before they can apply to the same jobs as him. Here starts the dark comedy.

Both the French and Korean movies are good, and I recommend either one. Aside from the plot, the stories are quite accurate about depicting the relationship we can build with our professional lives. I’ve now spent, say, twenty years in the field of drinking water, and it can be hard to imagine doing something else. Even though there is no reason why I couldn’t learn or be able to do something else. But, more than that, after working for so long on a certain subject you realize that, consciously or not, you absorb and accumulate knowledge about the area you work in. It becomes a part of you to a certain extent. That’s something that also stands out in the series “The Office”. Another show featuring the paper industry, incidentally. Maybe there is something in the cellulose.

When I tell people what I do for work, there is always a very positive response. People see treating and managing water as a very valuable endeavor, and something humanity will always need. Sometimes the conversation will go into more detail about either what I actually do or some questions the other person has about drinking water. Though in 90% of the cases I’ll be asked whether it is safe to drink water from the tap. Which, since I live in France, it is. If people want to engage with me on the subject of water, I’ll be more than happy to share my thoughts. And, generally speaking, that’s the case for anyone if you have the curiosity to ask them what they do for a living.

One thing that you can often hear when discussing work, is some form of “do what you love for a living, and you’ll never work for a day”. Another thing you hear is the passion some people have for their work. Something that is often referred to when discussing jobs that are either precarious (think artists) or critical but exhausting (think nurses, teachers). I have no doubt that people who decide to work in those fields really like their jobs and find fulfillment, you don’t choose these careers without a certain amount of desire to share or nurture. But describing a job as a passion can easily be a way of covering over the difficulties of a job. Why would you want a raise if you are doing something you are so passionate about? Isn’t the job reward enough? And so on.

I’ve always associated the idea of passion with a very strong emotion. Something that is ineluctable. A calling more than a job. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt that strongly about much of anything. And that is something that has bothered me. But, I realize now, that it’s not that I lack a driving force but that it’s this use and definition of the word passion that can be quite lacking for me in this context. Passion is a brief, irrepressible desire to do something, it is a momentary burning of our inner self. It is not sustainable over time. Not feeling that daily push but keeping steadily at it without fail is, I’d like to think, just as valuable an approach. And one I fit much better into.

Work is an important part of our life. We humans seem to need to do something and find a sense of self-worth through making things, having ideas, sharing with others… But there are many different ways of doing that, and it’s important to find our own way and accept that ours and that of others are, or can be, different.

A few years ago I remember reading an interview of the band AC/DC. Decades of putting out rock music, circumnavigating the world to play concerts, you’d imagine that they would represent an ideal of what passion is. But in the interview, lead guitarist Angus Young mentioned that he approached the band as a regular 9-to-5 job. He checked in in the morning, played, rehearsed, and then at 5pm would go home. I imagine to a beer and barbecue as Australians are wont to do.

Well, if that’s good enough for Angus Young, I think that’s good enough for me.

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living!

Perhaps rhis recent decision was based on a desire to be number one again? The USA’s favorite spot whatever the competition apparently. This decision is pretty discouraging for anyone who believes climate change should be taken seriously or who, quite simply, cares about science. I don’t know what the short-term consequences for Americans might be, though I imagine the rich getting richer wouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s the long term vision that is dispiriting.

As per the endangerment finding, increasing air pollution will cause increased health issues and increased greenhouse emissions will lead to increased environmental catastrophes. Which, if you live in Washington might not such bad news aside from more brutal and frequent thunderstorms and longer heatwaves, but if you live in Florida, you might want to eventually grow gills if you want to keep on partaking in your favorite land-based pastime. Though, to be fair, the people making these decisions will be dead and buried in soggy soil by the time the issues fully threaten human survival. Good luck to their kids and grandkids though.

Surprisingly, or not, this is not the most inhumane decision this government has made in the name of economics, since that would go, in my opinion, to the disabling of USAid. While the actions of ICE are despicable in innumerable ways and giving up on environmental action is at the very least sad, stopping the funding of USAid has been estimated to cause the unneeded deaths of up to several million people over the next years. Way to go America.

Legislation is often seen as a barrier to progress, because it’s almost always some amount of restriction to the way things are being done. You can’t drive your car as fast as you want. However much you want it, you can’t hit someone for having their phone on loudspeaker on the subway. You have to pay taxes… But all these decisions are, or at least should be, taken to ensure that we manage to live as a common collective. And while I’m pretty sure we all agree that killing one another should be a crime, without putting pen to paper to confirm this as an agreement, this consensus remains pretty moot.

The field of the environment, and water in particular, is a very good example of the benefits of legislation. For the past couple year I’ve had the opportunity to give a talk to engineering students in which I include an overview of the history of drinking water legislation. It is likely a bit wanting in historical accuracy as I’m no historian, but it is interesting to see how our approach to this subject has evolved over the years.

I have no doubt that there were rules on access throughout various countries, for centuries. And a lot that I missed out on since I’m limited to documents in french or english. Potential occidental bias aside, as far as I could find, the first legislation that formalized standards for water quality and distribution was the Metropolis Water act, enacted in 1852 in the UK. Quite a bit in advance compared to the rest of the world: the USA enacted a rule in 1914 concerning bacteriological quality of water and France waited until 1964 for its first water pollution law.

It’s not surprising that a lot of rules and regulations came to be in the 70’s and early 80’s. We might look back at the 60’s as an era of drug-induced psychedelia but you have to hand it to the hippies and their ability to mark the start of environmental consciousness. Though Rachel Carson, famed marine biologist author of Silent Spring, the seminal book on environmental issues, was just as impactful on these developments.

The World Health Organization itself only defined its first set of guidelines for drinking water in 1984. It feels a bit weird for me to think that I’m actually older than they are!

An approximative chronology of drinking water legislation

With all these legislations coming up in what is very recent human history, it is worth thinking about what it means to roll back on their application. After all, while the law is a set of rules society agrees upon, humans seem to have a fondness for the bad boys who go on breaking the law. However, there is a fine line between being a rebel and being a jerk, and it might be worth trying to define which is which.

When discussing the potential for breaking the law, my suggested approach is to (1) turn the volume up to 11 and (2) look up what respected luminaries have had to say on the subject. And when it comes to legislation and whether or not to uphold it, I have to believe that Martin Luther King Jr was in a pretty good position to be able to discuss what makes a law acceptable or not.

In an oft-reference account of his, he defines a just law as “a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself”. He also added that “there are some instances when a law is just on its face but unjust in its application”. It feels like we can all agree with this definition (but make up your mind by reading these excerpts from the original text).

Now, how to define when you are being a rebel or a jerk? That, I think, gets trickier, in part because there are lot of grey areas in law but also because I don’t have neither Dr. King’s intellect nor his background. But let’s give it a shot. I’ve often found that using examples, especially ones that sit at opposite extremes, is a good way of helping define boundaries.

Let’s take the simple law that says you should cross a street at the marked crossings. As a French person, that is something we don’t really care much for unless the road is a highway. Cross a street anywhere and no one cares, you’re a (rather tepid) bad boy. That is, unless in doing so you endanger someone: let’s say you cross the street right in front of incoming traffic having to swerve to keep from missing you. You’ve just crossed the threshold to being a (rather insensitive) jerk. Crossing a street where you are supposed to is a just law, we all agree with it, but a huge majority of people feel fine breaking it because we have a sense that it doesn’t do much harm.

Now let’s study the case of a much more serious offense: killing someone. We can all agree killing someone is bad and we are quite happy with the notion that someone who has committed this particular brand of action should be severely punished. Break that law and you are a psychopathic jerk. But can you be a rebel by going around and taking people’s lives? Well, according to the number of medals you can see pinned on army uniforms, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. But outside of general warfare, justice does allow for mitigating circumstances to the killing of someone. If the person you killed was clearly attempting to inflict physical, lethal harm on you, you will be pleading self-defense. But that is, or at the very least should be, a very narrow window of options. French law, for example, states that you cannot kill if someone is stealing something from you and not attempting on your life. It’s about proportionality.

Before going any further, I would like to take a moment to point out that I, personally, never condone the taking of a human life.

Anyway, with these two examples in mind, let’s review the decision to repeal the USEPA regulation. My takeaway from all this is that while laws ensure that our liberties do not infringe upon those of others, the flexibility we have in their application is centered around protecting us from causing or being the victim of threatening actions or situations. There is an argument that can be made that removing this law is just according to Dr. King’s definition, there might be a majority of people willing to live with excessive emissions. But is this decision just in its application? Well, according to the people who have spent their lives studying public health, atmospheric chemistry, toxicology and so on… the EPA regulation was set to protect people’s health as well as protect them from potential increases in environmental catastrophes. You can argue that we are all responsible for this issue to some extent, and that is absolutely true. But setting up a regulatory framework is what allows us to match our behavior to society’s needs. And removing this framework has put the health and life of thousands upon thousands at risk.

So yeah, repealing the endangerment act? A definite loser move.

It’s not perfect of course: players fake injuries, fake fouls, and yell after the referee for any imagined slight against them. The first two, we can chalk up to the theatrics of the game and just accept. The third one is mostly inexcusable. But, after more in-depth consideration, I think the real culprit behind all this is simply that football has become too entangled in its own success.

Any error has become viewed as a major issue because winning has become the only thing of importance. The amount of money that goes into what is a simple sport has not ruined the joy of people who enjoy the game. But it definitely has led to some major issues in how it’s being reported and marketed. One thing that I have a hard time with is how every little event is given such extreme importance. To the point where I’ve heard the phrase “we’ve made history” more times than I could ever have imagined for a game where 22 people run around a field kicking a leather ball.

To be fair, sometimes the occasion is momentous enough that we, at least the fans concerned, will remember it for a lifetime. The Leicester city fans who saw their team win the premier league, any French person older than 5 in 1998 who lived through the world cup win… But it’s history with a small h, in France 1998 is no 1789.

Football, as the most popular sport, is, much like art, a mirror of the times. And, these days, the way information and entertainment are shared, the way we define success, has turned everything into a battle of narrative story-telling. And this over-the-top approach has spilled over into every aspect of society.

First off, it seems that now you cannot exist as a successful person without calling yourself out as such. You can always count on finding professional bios containing words from the following semantic field : disruptive, bold, philanthrope, pioneer, icon, maverick, king, queen… Which is not to say that those people aren’t any of those things, but I’d venture that any of these monikers are like a knighthood, you don’t get to bestow them unto yourself, someone else has to do it for you.

This story-telling does not end with people of course, it is also visible in the way companies market and brand themselves. It’s not clothing you are buying, it’s a lifestyle. It’s not food you’re eating, it’s an experience. And this need for a narrative can also be found in technology and industry. I recently read an article that went: “This was not a laboratory demonstration, nor a pilot-scale theoretical exercise. It was a fully operational treatment train designed to run under real environmental conditions, treating real contamination”. I mean, good for you, but do we have to make it sound like such an overachievement? Lots of such experiments occur all the time.

The vernacular has also seeped into one of the most representative of items of contemporary society: the e-mail spam. I get a lot of spam, both on my personal and professional accounts. While my personal emails have shifted from the Nigerian prince and penile enhancement traditional fare to government and public institution usurpation, it is my work spam that has moved into the spectrum of the grandiose. Though it also makes spam easy to spot. One email told me I was “at the forefront of the change to meet decarbonization targets”. Another that I was invited to a “prestigious summit which will bring together leading experts to discuss innovative solutions to the world’s energy challenges”. And so many other daily examples asking me to participate in conferences or publish in journals I have never heard of before. If only they would sing my praise directly to my hierarchy. Especially to acclaim my polyvalence in so many fields I have never worked in…

A researcher as seen by predatory journal editors and conference organizers, a metaphor.

Everything is a first, a premiere, a reveal… Everything is disruptive…

Everything feels exhausting.

I don’t blame anyone or any company who communicates this way. I think it’s often an obligation due to having to stand out and potentially survive in a very competitive and dense field. But it would be nice if we started rewarding the boring and functional as well as the ecstatic and the potential. The exceptional, which should be inspirational, has simply become too much to bear in its ubiquity.

But hey, it’s not all that bad. And at least when I don’t want to feel like I’m a complete loser compared to the apparent success of everyone else, I can always turn off the spam filter on my emails and be rewarded with the incredible opinions of so many people trying to scam me into forking money their way!

While some of us swear by sunsets or sunrises, others will claim their undying love for the elusive aurora borealis. But, come on, we all know that its cold, haunting, willowy presence is meant only to keep us at bay. An evanescent memento mori of our ephemeral and passing moment in time here on this space-rock in the middle of nowhere. But I’d venture that the real optical phenomenon that transcends all humankind is the opposite of the aurora: the rainbow. For it is joy, it is welcoming, it is fortune in the shape of a pot of gold!

And how does this optical wonder come to be? Through the interaction of a ray of light and a water droplet, the former bouncing around the latter until it splits in its multitude of colored components. The rainbow is the physical embodiment of showing the beauty of the many in the singular. It is also about trust, about finding the strength of leaving the sun at your back and facing the bad weather ahead. A glorious ode to humanity’s ability to forge forward.

But mostly, it’s just really pretty.

A double rainbow! Joy squared!

Aside from providing us these lovely sights, optical characteristics are important in the field of water treatment where light-based methods are a mainstay in water quality analysis. Not being a water historian, I’d be hard pressed to stay that this has always been the case, but I can imagine that even a couple millennia ago, people would figure that transparent water was better than the alternative. As far as I can tell, the first water clarity measurement method was the Secchi Disk, a simple system where you measure the depth at which you stop being able to properly distinguish the pattern on this object’s surface. Dating back to 1865, it’s still in use for studying lakes and seas. In drinking water, the analysis of water clarity (termed turbidity) is done through the measurement of the scattering of light due to particles present in the water using a slightly more complex piece of equipment.

While clear water is a good first indicator of limiting your risk of getting sick from consuming water, it is not a foolproof guarantee. Water scientists have an array of methods using optical characteristics to study water quality. Send light through a liquid at a wavelength of 455 nanometers and you can evaluate its color. Do the same at 254 nm and you are given its aromatic content. Maybe you prefer nitrates at 210 nm? Or you think 272nm is better because you prefer predicting disinfection by-product formation? Feeling nerdy, just take a bunch of them and calculate slopes or other ratios. And that’s not even counting all the colored reactions produced by the addition of reagents to evaluate a range of parameters. The whole light spectrum is the playing field of the analytical chemist.

But it’s not only the optical physicist or the lab chemist who has been taken by this full-range approach. While the idea of spectrum likely started with light and optics, it has been used as a descriptive tool beyond these considerations. In recent years, for example, “being on the spectrum” has been a way of saying that someone displays more or less autistic behavior. But that’s a very odd thing to say since, technically, the idea of spectrum encompasses all. We are all on the spectrum, just to certain degrees.

A few years ago (21 to be exact, sheesh…), I went to see the movie Kinsey which relates the story of Alfred Kinsey, one of the first researchers to study human sexual behavior. I found the movie to be quite interesting. Its main take-away to me was the Kinsey scale, which shows that human sexuality can also be seen a spectrum with some of us attracted to the opposite sex, some to the same, others to none and yet others anywhere in between. I’d like to hope it makes sense to all that there are all these variants to human sexuality, and that all are fine, but clearly not everyone seems to want to hear about this, however robust the science is.

This idea of a spectrum for describing us humans works very well. Lifestyle? Some of us live for total control, others live for complete surrender. Physical features? Skin colors range from nordic pale to melatonin overload, body shapes go from thin to thick, small to tall… Political opinions? Spiritual beliefs? Food spice level preferences? Everything can, and should, be viewed as a fluid, continuous state of being. So much so, because we even have the ability to move from one side to another of many of these characteristics throughout our lives, changing consciously or not. And much like when light splits into its spectral components, humanity is at its strongest together and at its most beautiful when our differences shine.

The rainbow is many and it is beaufitul.

This might definitely sound like wishful thinking, especially considering this new year is only a week old and already replete with disasters. However, while it’s rather unreasonable to expect being able to affect change at a large enough scale to make a significant difference within the timeframe of 365 days, I have a feeling that we don’t have to go very far to find sound resources for this purpose. Greek philosophers were tackling human behavior way before we modern day beings even coalesced into a formidably complex fabric of entangled atoms so I’m pretty sure we have enough of a body of work to rely on all the way from Socrates to the ungodly number of self-help books being published today.

Outside of being a fellow human being, I am in no way qualified to dispense advice as for improved living. I don’t do the miracle morning routine, I go to bed a little too late, am mostly a bit grumpy and will once again start a new year hoping to shed what is around 7 extra kilograms. One positive thing I do is read. Not as much as I’d like to, but still. And I like to think that reading is our second-best tool for improving our understanding of one another. The first being actually interacting as humans, but it’s easier to read a book than go up to a stranger and ask them about their deep inner thoughts.

Now, reading anything is fine but I have to imagine that there are some ground rules about what makes for acceptable reading material, or else this would be akin to recommending Mein Kampf. I personally prefer novels of the fiction persuasion, and I am quite wary of autobiographies in general, much like I am of people whose social networks are only pictures of themselves. But there are good books in every category, just ask for advice from your local professional, a.k.a. librarian.

I think the best bet is to stick to a category of books you like (science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, non-fiction) but try to find books from authors who will have a different perspective than yours (different gender, different country…). If you are looking for recommendations you can find some here, or if you’d like here are some from my 2025 read pile: On Connection by Kae Tempest (art helps us interact), Rosewater by Tade Thompson (an alien lives in Nigeria!), The murderbot diaries by Martha Wells (a sentient killer cyborg anxiously deals with its humanity).

Hope you have a nice, moderate, 2026!

First of all, I learned that Clearwater was home to the very first hooters restaurant. Now that’s a claim to American historical fame! I did not end up going there, it would have made for a weird expense report, but it does make for a fun piece of trivia. I also learned that it was home to another American icon: Terry Eugene Bollea, who both lived and passed away there. I wonder if Terry had any thoughts about water treatment. Finally, I also discovered that Tampa is also known as the capital of death metal due to a large number of homegrown and adoptive local death metal bands. Who said dark clad rockers didn’t enjoy the sun? Sadly, that did not translate to the music selection I heard emanating from the local restaurants which were more Jimmy Buffet than Jimmy Page.

“Water treatment? Hell yeah!!” - Terry E. Bollea

Outside of scoring myself some potential extra points at the next family trivial pursuit game night, the conference itself was quite fruitful, particularly to get a grasp on the short-term development focus of the field of membrane desalination. One thing that struck me is that almost none of the talks discussed seawater desalination, something that must have been a staple for the past decades. It certainly feels as if the membrane community acknowledges that innovations in that specific application are likely to be limited when it comes to the main process line itself, where energy requirements have dropped drastically over the past 30 years. Improvements will now likely be incremental, trying to optimize operations, maintenance as well as construction/engineering, more than developing new treatment solutions.

So where has the focus shifted to? Well, first, towards the recycling and mining of the concentrates that are produced by these desalination plants and, second, towards industrial and wastewater reuse. In the first case, the goal is to recuperate the salts (Calcium, Magnesium…) and trace compounds (Lithium…) that have been concentrated from seawater and bring them to market. While several companies and academics have developed technologies that can do that, it is still very unclear whether the market opportunities will actually come true. There is potential, certainly, but being overoptimistic about it sounds a bit too much like trying to manifest a resolution out of thin air. I’m not sure what will come out of this, but it feels like application will be very site-specific and driven first by local legislation and second by potential innovations that still remain to be developed.

The second case has a more definitive answer. Legislation and overall water sobriety needs are either forcing or will force industrial sites to implement water recycling solutions. These can be targeted towards the production of reusable water as on-site stand-alone solutions or be combined with recovery of value-added products, if economically feasible. There is a wide-range of treatment solutions available for such purposes and an even wider range of effluent types to apply them to. But defining which will fit where is not that straightforward and, as usual, will likely come down to selecting the one which limits costs for the given location. All solutions will likely find their little specific niche in which they work better than their competitors. While we all know that money is the big decider, I was a bit disappointed that very few of the talks discussed the environmental/carbon footprint of their solutions.

Why is this important? Well, dear reader, unless you’ve been living under a rock, we, humans, have had an impact on our environment through our development of energy-based technologies. And while we have much to be grateful for from such a development, it is rather obvious that we have to be better at limiting our impact now that we are pretty clear about it. And, while technological solutions are always fun to develop, we need to have a handle on their requirements (energy, chemicals…). Industrial or waste stream treatment and valorization require complex and energy-intensive treatment lines. And while it sounds great to decrease our water requirements, we have to make sure that what we propose is not creating or compounding some other issue. Carbon footprint evaluation is quite complicated but at this point I think the research and development community needs to implement it as a complement to the usual, and necessary, considerations of performance and capital and operational expenditure.

Carbon footprint, get it?

A few other things that stood out to me before wrapping things up. English remains the international language for scientific exchange. And I think it’s fine, but we should acknowledge that it’s not that straightforward for everyone. It’s often easy to dismiss someone’s work simply due to communication issues, and that’s a shame. I’m sure it’s pretty expensive to pay for translators, especially for small conferences, but maybe some compromise could be found (or, dreaded thought, maybe IA can help…). Keeping time is also complicated between the presentations and Q&A, to ensure the talks keep rolling on time. Perhaps conferences could consider thinking about implementing the dreaded Oscar music or go for the more in-your-face approach of the ig-Nobels. In terms of relating to work in general, two talks stood out for me, one reminding us that it is important to acknowledge what works and that sometimes the best solution is already available, and the second that it’s hard to sustain optimism that what you are developing will someday turn into something real. Most of what I’ve worked on in my career has not been applied, and it can be hard to maintain enthusiasm over the years when that is the case. But that’s research for you, it’s important not to get too overwhelmed by the end result and focus on producing solid work in simply trying to get there. That will always produce incremental and important new knowledge.

In the last couple days of my stay I got to visit a nature reserve, see some alligators, turtles and loads of birds as well as go kayak a clear, natural spring river. Between that and the sea you can easily see how incredible the biodiversity is in Florida. It can make you wonder why such a place also fosters a lot of resentment against climate science and ecology in general which aims at protecting it. I think it’s because when you are in the middle of so much natural life it’s hard to see the impact our society is having. My personal marker for loss of biodiversity is the memory of all the insects splattered on the windshield and front bumper of my parents’ car when we were travelling when I was a kid. That never happens now anywhere. But, without that reminder, I don’t think I’d be very aware that a lot of our natural environment is declining. Which does also make me wonder how overwhelming Florida’s ecosystems must have been a few decades ago.

On my last day in Florida I had a couple hours before my flight and decided to head to Tampa’s manatee viewing center. Manatees are a symbol of Florida alongside alligators, and I wanted to see one. To reach the viewing center you first have to drive through a large industrial zone before finding it, located right opposite Tampa’s main power plant. Manatees congregate there to bask in the plant’s warm discharge waters in winter. The viewing center is quite nice and I got to see some small sharks and a few manatees, but it still made for an odd sight having the manatees swimming with such a large industrial plant looming in the background.

Quite a few of the volunteers at the viewing center are retired personnel from the power plant and they talked about how two of the plant’s three stacks had recently been removed. This was due to the plant shifting two-thirds of its production from coal to natural gas and solar power. Whatever the reasons (financial, ecological, both…) I found it a rather reassuring development that manatees bathing in hot industrial discharge waters can be seen as a sign of optimism if you squint hard enough.

Can you spot the manatee?

Growing old is a, say, interesting feeling. It just happens and you don’t really see it coming. Like that first time your family doctor recommends you get your prostate checked (male perspective here). Talk about a wake-up call. And much like that first serious medical appointment comes for us all, life is littered with small moments that make us realize, in spite of what we think of ourselves, that we are growing older.

The first such moment that occurred to me was when I was a teen. It was summer, at a public pool, and a ball happened to bounce in front of me. A kid in the pool was looking up at me and asked me very politely “Sir, could you send us the ball back?” Of course, I did send the ball back, but what has kept this moment vivid for me 30 years later is the shock I felt at being called “sir” by someone I considered to be in my age group.

My second reality check came a few years later, somewhere around my mid-twenties. I had gone in to get my hair cut, as one does. At the end of the session, the hairdresser turned to me and asked me, in a very casual manner, if I wanted her to “trim my eyebrows.” I suddenly felt quite decrepit. And very aware of the two bushy features riding the waves of my forehead like dueling fuzzy caterpillars. I said no, because I wasn’t going to admit that there was anything wrong with my beautifully lush eyebrows, went home, stared at a mirror and nipped some stray hairs there for the first time in my life.

Growing old is a natural process, but it also happens to man-made products and processes. A big part of the design and economic reliability of industrial systems is based on how well we can control and manage their wear and tear. A system that ages too fast and breaks down at an excessive rate costs money, and being able to extend equipment lifetime has a significant impact both financially and environmentally. We probably all have experienced a computer crashing or a car breaking down at an unfortunate moment and realized that, had we been more careful with preventative maintenance, we would still be rolling smoothly along the highway, whether of the information or asphalt persuasion.

To understand whether a system, human or otherwise, is in good shape is not easy. In one of my first jobs, I was part of a team that had to oversee maintenance for building equipment such as HVAC systems. Since I was starting out, one of my senior colleagues took me with him to visit one of the technical areas we were in charge of. We entered this huge room with a massive HVAC system in it. I had never seen anything like it before. My colleague, who clearly thought I knew something about this stuff since I’d been hired for this purpose, looked at me and said “they haven’t been doing a great job with the maintenance, right?”. I answered yeah, sure. But I had no idea what made him say that and what was wrong with any of the pipes, fans and other elements that were surrounding me.

In my line of work today, I know a bit more about how to figure out whether a treatment unit is nearing the time it should be cleaned or renewed. But understanding when we should be performing the preventive maintenance required to keep equipment running smoothly is not always that straightforward. We have to know what the appropriate parameters are, be able to measure them and understand whether the change occurring is significant or not. Filter units in water treatment for example are often monitored through the loss of pressure across the unit, indicative of accumulating material at their surface clogging them up. When that pressure loss hits a certain target you can run a cleaning cycle. But if you haven’t defined the target properly, you might have gone past a threshold that renders your cleaning cycle less efficient and thus cause your filter to lose potential lifetime.

As humans, we have the same problem. Though some people are desperately trying to avoid the fate that bewaits us all, and while I too would love to miss out on the experience, we have to come to terms with the fact that we, humans and machines alike, will eventually hit our programmed obsolescence date. All I can say is make sure you keep your maintenance schedule on point to optimize your durability: do your yearly check-ups, ensure that your vitals are where they should be and so on. Of course, it can all be a bit unnerving, but in the words of the late Warren Zevon, it’s better than realizing too late you should have gone to see a doctor all those years.

Growing old, a metaphor.

All kidding aside, nature-based solutions are an interesting development, in particular for technology. But it’s hard to figure out exactly what these solutions are. For one, there is a definite possibility of hollow marketing behind such a headline on a beauty cream or health boosting snacks. And, without being a cynic, what isn’t a nature-based solution? Plastics, something that we all know we use too much of and ends up choking turtles to death miles from where they were used, are made from oil, a distinctly nature-based raw material. Of course, there is a, significant, difference between being made from natural material and being natural.

From what I can tell, there is a distinction made between “nature-based solutions” and “nature-inspired solutions”. The first one seems rather straightforward: protect ecosystems and reap the benefit of having nature do what it does on its own (carbon capture, giving shade for cooling, birds singing songs that keep us from freaking out about the state of the world…). The nature-inspired moniker aligns more with what scientific researchers and companies try to develop. You try to find ideas from what nature manages to do and turn it into a technology.

It turns out, it’s quite easy to look around nature and find ideas! One of the first stories I remember hearing about in this context concerned the investigation into how gecko lizards can walk all over walls without any trouble. Turns out geckos’ feet are covered with thousands upon thousands of thin hair-like filaments that end in small spatulae that allow the cute little beasts to adhere to any surface through intermolecular forces. Scientists who have studied this phenomenon have been able to design new, non-toxic, residue free, reusable adhesive tape. Pretty neat. Other examples abound.

In water treatment, we could imagine finding seawater desalination inspiration from saltwater fish who handle excess salts from entering their body by excreting it through specialized cells in their gills. Some companies have found inspiration in proteins contained in biological cell membranes, called aquaporins, that allow water to pass through at very high rates, and have tried replicating this process in water filtration equipment. Researchers at Yale university, have found inspiration in mangrove trees that are able to turn seawater into freshwater. All fascinating stuff! So, what is keeping all of this from reaching the market and flooding us with all their benefits?

I think a good way to put things into perspective is to go back and ponder how nature goes around producing stuff. Let’s take a tree for example. Let’s say a magnificent specimen of redwood sequoia. These trees grow to a height of 20 meters in 20 years. When you think about it, that’s pretty slow when we humans have been able to put together a 828m tower together in 6 years. Both are impressive of course, but it should be noted that one is a self-made structure that came from nothing but a small seed, grown on rainwater, air and nutrients slowly sucked out of the earth through tentacular root systems and the other requires 36MWh of energy at peak times to function and whose construction was marred with labour issues.

And this sort of sets up the stakes in our trying to mimic nature. Nature is a very efficient system, able to build impressive, complex structures from almost nothing and time. Lots of time. We, us humans, survive on something like 2500 kcalories a day (around 5 big macs. Reminder: this is not a dietary advice column). According to some quick calculations, that is the same as a working man-made 100 watt lightbulb. So, how much more complex are we than a 100 watt lightbulb? While we have our days of feeling pretty dumb, there is no denying that a brain that is able to do even simple mathematical calculations and a self-healing body (I mean, don’t push it, but still) is a tad bit more impressive than a light-bulb. And all this from a female and male gamete meeting up and spending nine months in a womb. Then a few years to learn how to walk and talk and grow a little bit. A few more years for extra growth and to start building up skills. Then add on another few very confusing years to reach and go through sexual maturity. An extra few more to learn a job, maybe try and find yourself before diving into the harsh world of adulthood with its taxes, bills and declining health.

Any parent reading this is moaning at the time it takes to make a full independent adult human. But still, a miraculous feat.

So what does this say? Well, you can make incredible things from very little if you have patience. A lot of patience. And that is something that we humans have very little of in store. People walking slower than us, an internet page not loading, being in traffic because of an accident, someone not answering our text message despite our phone indicating that they have read it. But it’s not just about our day-to-day lives. In technology we also want a solution that works fast. And ideally, that costs less and doesn’t take up too much space. And we have been very good at creating such solutions.

We have nuclear plants that can produce orders of magnitudes more energy per surface area than what the sun can provide us with. We have been able to create agricultural conditions that have improved the yield per surface area. We have built cities and infrastructure. But we have done all this at a cost to biodiversity and ourselves that should, at least, make us review our approach. And how have we achieved these results? Well, to some extent we have streamlined processes and increased energy input.

To take a water treatment example, natural processes require several weeks to several years to produce what we would consider drinking water. It takes around 9 weeks for a drop of water evaporated into the atmosphere to reach earth’s surface, if it doesn’t simply drop back into the ocean (90% chance of that happening). Then, if it filters through soil and rocks to go into an aquifer, that’s around 2 years of added time. Treating water to that level only takes a couple hours in a modern drinking water treatment plant. How do we do it? Well, we have massive pumps to capture the water and push it through the plant, we add chemicals and mix them using more energy, we run the water through filters mimicking what happens to water going through the ground but at a much faster rate, add a few more chemicals to oxidize and disinfect and voilà! Chemically- and energy-enhanced perhaps, but faster and more compact than nature.

So, can nature-inspired solutions help us develop the next generation of technology, making them more sustainable? Likely, and hopefully, yes. What are these new solutions? Hard to say. When will they be available? Harder to say. There is a branch of science-fiction called biopunk that imagines the development of biologically-based technology. Systems that could be grown, fed and self-repair. Of course, much like us, these systems could die off. So perhaps going through space in an organic spaceship won’t sound like a great idea… But whether or not we ever manage to control biology at that level, we should at least remind ourselves of the incredible ecosystems and creatures that surround us already and that nature produces year in and year out.

One such creature being ourselves. Working on basically a couple pizzas, a piece of cake and a large drink of water a day.

Second reminder that this is NOT a nutrition advice column.

I started hearing about patents in one of my first jobs, when the company that had hired me as an outside consultant on water treatment asked me if I thought I could develop a treatment system that could be patented, as a tool for the company to get a leg up on their competition when bidding on contracts. I was pretty sure I couldn’t, since I didn’t see what new treatment I could come up with that didn’t already exist.

This reflection actually showed my limited understanding of what a patent is and what can actually be patented. First off, a patent is a document that awards its recipient the exclusive use of the invention described within. This protection generally lasts around 25 years and is awarded for a given region. For example, you can apply for a patent in France alone or for the whole of Europe. Your patent can also be granted in a country but not in another, the local patent-granting instances being independent.

It costs money to apply for a patent. More money for the more places you apply for. It is therefore standard for inventors or companies to have a specific strategy, taking into consideration, for example, that the market they are targeting is limited to specific countries. Which means, that if you find a patent you are interested in, and it does not cover the country you are in , then you are free to use it (also works in space!). The lifting of such local protection for industrial property (IP) has actually been used as a tool for geopolitical power struggles.

Applying for a patent pretty much means writing out a patent and sending it to the offices that represent the countries you are applying for. The document has to describe the invention clearly enough for the patent office employee to understand what it does and, crucially, to figure out whether prior patents already do what you claim. Researching this takes time, and when you apply for a patent there generally is an 18 month period when your document is maintained confidential. After about a year you should have a first response from the patent office, based on which you might need to make changes to your document for it to have a chance to be granted. After 18 months, your application is made public and anyone can access it though the patent is still being examined and your status remains under “patent pending”. Eventually, the patent office has finished its work, at which point, if all goes well, you are granted a patent. The start date of exclusivity being the initial date of application.

While I didn’t know much about this process, what I really didn’t have a feeling for was what actually can be or is patented. When I started out my scientific career, I might have considered that I could get some articles published eventually. But I never really thought that I could get a patent. To me, a patent was representative of creating a new device that would be of societal use, and I didn’t feel any confidence that I could do that. I didn’t have any real knowledge of the world of the industry and if you were to ask me about patents I would have probably imagined something like Thomas Edison creating the light bulb or Graham Bell and the telephone. No way I was getting to that level. And to be fair, still no way I’m getting there today.

But, it turns out, you don’t have to be an era defining genius to have a patent. All you need is to produce something new. And nothing that crazy. One example is this patent for a system that divides frying baskets into compartments. I don’t know anything about frying materials, but this doesn’t seem that far-fetched an idea. And yet it was deemed sufficiently novel to be granted a patent. And only ten years ago! If you had asked me, I would have imagined that something like this had been around for decades. And it has been cited by 18 other patents since then with titles ranging from “Deep frying basket oil shield” to “Automated kitchen system for assisting human worker prepare food”. Looking at this last one’s schematics (see below), definitely has me thinking the inventor is gearing up for a world where the food industry replaces cooks with IA and a robot. This would make for a very different movie…

That cook knows his company is slowly “transitioning him out”

Apart from highlighting the surprisingly exciting world of the fry-cooking apparatus industry, this shows that a lot of things can be patented. And nothing showcases this better than the huge number of categories of patents you can apply under. When you navigate through these classifications, you can find out that magic can be patented. Houdini himself did so, thus giving away some trade secrets for who knows where to look for them. But you can also find a whole slew of patents for astrology, including this one that allows you to determine zodiac signs. The patent expired in 2018, so feel free to use this invention.

Outside of these fun little areas of IP, I also found out that you can actually apply for a patent for the novel application of a previously established invention. It was therefore possible that the company I worked for could apply for a patent for a treatment line that included known technology but applied to a new problem (their very specific type of liquid effluent).

The company didn’t pursue the idea of patenting a treatment system anyway. Despite having a R&D team dedicated to developing tools for their use, their industrial strategy had always been to retain all expertise in-house. Describing their proprietary tools and knowledge in patents was seen as too risky as it would give their competitors information about how they do their work and allow them to find loopholes or tactics to circumvent their approaches.

Because that’s one of the big risks of patents. It gives you protection, to the extent of around 25 years and the countries to which you applied, but it also forces you to share a lot of details about your invention. This has led to one of the most obnoxious parts of patents: the way they are written (some people have tried to call it patentese, but it doesn’t seem to have taken off quite like legalese has).

I’m not sure if patents were always difficult to decipher. But they are some of the worse documents to read. I have to wonder how the people of the patent offices figure out if some of these inventions are worthy of being granted a patent or not. There is a very specific way patents are written out, and, if you are not used to it, it’s brutal. Good thing they have schematics, or you’d get lost. And some inventors try and drown key elements in an ocean of details to keep the reader from figuring too much out (e.g. making a list of hundreds of possible families of compounds to be used when only one very specific element is required). At any rate, if you’ve never written such a document, get in touch with someone who has (a patent engineer for example), because it’s not straightforward, to say the least.

The world of patents can be interesting to delve into, either for the simple fun of looking for odd patents or to try and figure out a way of short-circuiting your competitor’s protected advantage. But another benefit of patents is that, if you ever find yourself having difficulties sleeping, you simply have to go on one of the referencing websites, look for random patents and start reading their claims. Because I am quite certain that would put anyone to sleep.

And maybe that could be worth a patent itself?

A process for sleep enhancement comprising several sheets of mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres

First let’s take a look at costs. In general, water costs include drinking water treatment and distribution as well as wastewater treatment and disposal. For the sake of simplicity I won’t make that distinction since, as bill-paying consumers, we are interested in the total anyway.

In France in 2023, tap water price averaged around 3,9 $/m³. One cubic meter (m³) is, for those of you not used to the units, equal to 1000 Litres. So, using quick mental calculations and a certain knowledge of how currency works, we can figure out that this translates to a cost of 0,39 c$/L. In France, mineral bottled water costs around 40 c$/L, a 100-fold increase. For comparison sake, a Starbucks espresso in the city of light costs 2 € for 40 mL. Or something around 117640 c$/L if we want to keep our units straight for proper comparison. Who said you couldn’t put a price on pleasure? At any rate, water is a more critical resource than coffee for our survival, so whatever meaning we can have fun sussing out of these numbers doesn’t really matter since the important thing is that it remain affordable for all.

Some people would disagree with my placing coffee below water in the necessities rankings.

When we look at the price of water worldwide, there is a wide range of prices consumers have to pay. From an absolute low of 0 c$/L (yes, zero) in Ireland, to a maximum of 0,88 c$/L in the Cayman Islands. These two extremes make for interesting case studies. First off, Ireland apparently has a no charge policy in place, meaning that, to simplify things, domestic users are not billed for their water usage (I say apparently because my casual research through the dedicated Wikipedia page highlights the complexities of the policy’s history). We can commend the Irish deciders for supportting the idea that water should be a free commodity. At the very least, this allows respite to poorer families which has to go into the positive column. But, while the consumer doesn’t pay directly for his water usage, water treatment and distribution still require funding and that comes in the form of taxation. In the end, the Irish pay for their water, they simply do so indirectly and in what can be seen as perhaps a more equalitarian approach.

The Irish example is interesting as there is no debate about who should pay and how much. Generally, the easiest way to bill for water is to apply a flat rate for usage in such a way that a consumer pays for how much he uses. But there are debates about the social equality of such a measure and the fact that water bills will represent varying relative amounts for different customers. A poor family of six living in an apartment might use as much as one rich person living alone in his house with a garden and a pool (I don’t have numbers, this is just an example). But the burden the cost represents on the family is much higher. So, water companies have been trying to figure a way of spreading this cost in a more equitable manner, and solving that equation is not as straightforward as you’d anticipate. Having no bill solves that conundrum but then leaves the question open about the responsibility of fair use of water and our ability to self-regulate our consumption.

The case of the Cayman Islands is quite different. Known for being a tax haven and for its lovely beaches, it seems surprising that a fairly small place surrounded by water would have any issues with resources. Well, while “tax optimization” is a local skill, it is difficult to legislate physical water availability. The Cayman Islands rely exclusively on desalinating seawater to produce their drinking water which is more energy-intensive than treatments required for the potabilization of rivers, lakes or wells and that explains why their water cost is that high.

The example of the Cayman Islands highlights that the cost of water is very dependent on your resource, which dictates the type of treatment you have to apply. Treating seawater will always include removing salts, something wells, rivers or lakes do not have to deal with. But these latter resources can degrade due to human activity leading to the presence of contaminants (pesticides, pharmaceutical compounds…) which require high-end and costly processes as well (oxidation, activated carbon adsorption, membrane fitlration…). And while the water industry works on decreasing energy requirements for such treatment options, the best and cheapest way to maintain a lower water bill is simply to protect our resources and limit or exclude any contaminants.

In French this is fittingly called a “tax heaven”, what a difference a simple letter makes.

Water costs are of course of the utmost importance in developing countries where a couple billion people lack safely managed drinking water according to the United Nations SDG 6 target. In such a case, it is interesting to look at the cost of water based on water supply options. Researchers that have studied this subject, and as can be seen below, have shown that there is quite a range in cost of water depending on location and supply origin. What this graph shows is that large-scale water utilities represent the lowest price of water for the consumer. This is important, and likely in large-part due to economy of scale: treating and distributing high volumes of water in a single location, as it shows that while initial investment in such an infrastructure is likely orders of magnitude higher, it is the best answer for providing affordable water.

Overall, while drinking water should be affordable, it is definitely not free. Unless you are comfortable taking the risk of drinking untreated water and facing the Grim Reaper much sooner than you’d like. Death and taxes, baby!

So what did the summer of 2025 bring us? Well, here in Europe, it brought us several heat waves (reaching 50°C in parts of Turkey!) and some pretty daunting forest fires. In other parts of the world, we got deadly monsoon floods and landslides in Pakistan and a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in Afghanistan. A volcano erupted in Southern Japan a few days ago. While it’s pretty evident that certain natural disasters are getting increasingly more likely and powerful due to climate change, I am not an expert in the field to figure out if the earthquakes and volcanos are upping their frequency. But, it’s hard not to feel like our planet is trying to get rid of us, or at least send us some kind of warning.

In another bit of news, SpaceX managed to finally launch its starship rocket and not have it blow up (as far as my understanding of all their trials goes). This has spurted renewed coverage of the desire to leave Earth and colonize the Moon and Mars. There are many ways to look at this, of course, as opinions are famously as diverse and unique as each being on this planet. Scientific achievement, the future of mankind, waste of precious resources and funds… You name it.

I’m not sure what the real motive is behind this desire to colonize a planet so notoriously hostile it hasn’t even had the decency to set-up a breathable atmosphere for our benefit and has for distinct advantage of being the closest to us (granted, the other, further away options, are not any more hospitable). But the combination of the recent wave of natural disasters and the ever-closer sending of astronauts out to Mars has made me ponder a question that cycles back in my mind every so often: should we be living here?

First off, let’s get one thing out of the way, if we define “here” as the Earth, then the answer is a resounding YES! There is actually no other spot we know of in the entire universe where we could survive (well, at least for now). This is our only option, and if we are so bad at taking care of it that we need to consider terraforming planets, then perhaps we should be reconsidering our approach to this whole thing.

Who cares if it’s flat? It’s home!

Now let’s reconsider this at the more usual local level of a city. I had never really considered the question of whether it was worth living somewhere in terms of nature’s life-threatening abilities until moving to Los Angeles for my studies. From an outsider’s point of view, LA can be summed up by two things: (1) Hollywood glamour and (2) the looming threat of the Big One. The Big One being the possible/probable earthquake that will tear the city down and apart in an unpredictable nearish future. Being a fan of movies and of staying alive, I was both excited and in panic at the idea of living there.

Once there, I only lived through the lens of being enthusiastic about California and Los Angeles. I knew there was a chance that at any moment the ground could start rumbling, but I guess human nature is such that you either bury that away to deal with when the moment comes or just get so paranoid that you live somewhere else. I did get to experience a few quakes, and it is a very anxious moment when you realize in quick succession what is going on and that this could be the start of something terrible. Luckily for me, the worse I got to feel registered in the 4 to 5 range on the Richter scale, which is considered “light” and was enough to shake the 8-story building I was in… It didn’t stop me from living there, though, admittedly, the day all hell breaks loose, the survivors might reconsider their commitment to the Southern California lifestyle.

I was also in the USA when hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans. I was far away from that city, but I remember the newsfeed and the images of destruction. I would later learn in one of my classes that the hurricane wrought so much damage because the coastal mangroves had been taken out for urban development. Those mangroves, outside of providing a very vibrant ecosystem, also create a coastal buffer zone through which hurricanes lose energy. No buffer zone, no loss of energy, total mayhem. The cost in damages ($125 billion!), without even saying a word of the death toll (1392 lost souls), gives a good idea of how much we should value our environment. But I don’t think that is ever taken into consideration in business decisions.

But what has really stayed with me, were interviews of the people who lived in the destroyed neighborhoods and who were adamant about rebuilding their homes and coming back to live there. Before those interviews, I had a hard time fathoming why you would want to go back. It was clear that eventually, some day, another hurricane would come and destroy things again. But in hearing them talk it also made a lot of sense that this was their place in the world and it can be very hard if not impossible to uproot yourself from your home.

While climate change is going to cause more extreme and frequent weather events, it will also change, wait for it… the climate. One map I’ve seen showed the areas of the world where the combined heat and humidity will be so strong as to render those locations unlivable. Literally unlivable, as in the human body would not be able to survive those conditions. No big surprise, this will start around the equator. In this case, there will be no discussion about whether or not to stay there and people will leave. And if people changing countries is a difficult proposition to you today, I would suggest you consider making an effort, turning off the AC, taking your bike to work or something. Maybe ecology is an answer to some of the far-right sentiment out there?

That top-left icon is pretty self-explanatory

The stories of places flooding, being caught in a landslide, burnt to ashes and so on are yearly occurrences. Today, we know quite a lot about how these things happen and where they are most likely to occur. And yet, it always seems to come as a surprise that disaster struck. Of course, there is no risk zero in life, but we definitely need to understand what the actual risks are and the consequences.

So in a few decades, when one of the 300 or so yearly Martian meteoroids hits the air supply system of the brand new first colony, taking with it the lives of 100 brave explorers, maybe the survivors, if there are any, will ask themselves: should we be living here?

Summer is often associated with reading recommendations and, since I’m also going to take a break from my self-imposed rhythm of one post every other week, I thought I might use this as an excuse to sneak in a quick last post to wish the few of you reading this a nice summer vacation!

There are too many books in existence and not enough of a lifetime to read them all, so I decided to limit myself to one detailed recommendation for a couple genre and a list of quick hits. Hopefully you find inspiration in some of these!

Science-fiction:

Science-fiction and fantasy have always been my preferred literary genres. I can’t exactly say why, but it’s been that way ever since I started reading books. There are way too many good books to choose among but considering the geopolitical context of the day, when bombing each other seems like a fair idea, I think it’s worth reading the anti-war masterpiece that is Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. The writing is humorous and wry and hammers home the traumatism that comes from humans killing each other. It also includes a two page description of the bombing of Dresden as seen in reverse that is, to me, the most incredible piece of literature I was given to read.

Quick hits: The hitchiker’s guide to the Galaxy (Life has no meaning so enjoy the ride!), L’anomalie (French!), A canticle for Leibowitz (Reeducating society from post-apocalyptic scraps!), The three-body problem (The forced and realistic evolution of society in the face of its greatest threat!), The city we became (Cthulhu visits NYC!), Flowers for Algernon (We learn, we live, we lose everything).

Non-fiction:

I almost never read non-fiction. When I have done so, it usually came from a friend’s recommendation. That is how I was put in the path of James Baldwin through his novel “If Beale Street could Talk”, which is already well worth reading. I read up on James Baldwin’s life after that first book and was in awe at what he went through and how he turned it into a powerful tool for change and understanding and so turned to The Fire Next Time. While the book was written at the time of the American civil rights movement and segregation, there is no denying that it still resonates powerfully today. I’m not sure this would fall into the category of summer reading, but there is no better time than right now to open yourself to others.

Quick hit: The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks (see here)

Comics:

For me, in comics, there is one title that stands above and beyond all others by a mile: Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. The books have everything: humor, feeling, societal critique, beautiful art. It should be an indispensable part of anyone’s lecture at some point. It teaches you empathy, reminds you to enjoy both the summer and winter days, remarks on our difficulty in removing ourselves from in front of a screen, and is as relevant today as it was when it came out. And it contains this gem of a panel that has stayed with me ever since I came across it:

Quick hits: Midnight diner (The world is small and full of great food!), The books of Derf Backderf, in particular My friend Dahmer and Kent State: Four dead in Ohio (Dark, human)

See you in September!

Checking your units can be critical, and even rocket scientists can mess it up. But even without talking about million-dollar mistakes, if you are not using the right units or mixing them up, you end up with the wrong result. To check those units you have to know what they mean and represent. Some units are quite well-known, we all learn, as we grow up, to understand the difference between someone suggesting to go on a 100 meter sprint (why not) or a 100 kilometer trail run (no thank you señor Jornet). We all have an understanding of distance, time (minutes, seconds, years), weight, speed… as long as it pertains to us on a daily basis.

But units can become quite vague when they are applied to aspects of our lives that we don’t encounter regularly or at all. When astronomers discuss the sense of scale of the universe, or even simply the distance between the Earth and other planets, it’s hard to wrap our heads around how much further million of kilometers are than say a thousand. We know it’s more, much, much more, but we have a hard time grasping just how much more it is. The same goes for many other things. It’s hard to fathom, for example, how much larger a billionaire’s fortune is compared to basic wealth.

Sometimes data visualization or illustrations are the best tools we have to give us that sense of scale. In the field of water, the following graph from the USGS, representing the overall amount of water on Earth compared to the amount of liquid fresh water (rivers, lakes, groundwater) and readily available fresh water (no groundwater), is quite famous. It’s very explicit: our planet might be covered in water, but if you pool it all together, there is not that much of it compared to the planet’s size. And, furthermore, most of it is in a form that either requires extensive treatment to make it potable (oceans) or is not easy to get to (ice caps, groundwater…). It’s easy to see here that taking care of such a precious resource is critical, because getting it completely polluted might not be as difficult as we might think. For data visualization of money, I highly recommend this xkcd comic.

Hard to make a more USA-centric water map than this…

Knowing certain units and their scale is also representative of an expertise. Mechanics know horsepower, torque. Electricians understand watts, amps, resistance. Photographers understand shutter speed, exposure, aperture. If you’re an American hydrologist you use acre-feet and gallons-per-second because you love using your own units and feeling special. And so on. An easy way to spot someone who is talking about something they don’t know much about is when they use numbers that are outside the normal range they should be in.

The question that follows, of course, is how do we know what are the correct scales for the parameters we are interested in? Well, this is a massive part of what science does: measure things. Distances, concentrations, people… It sounds simple, but measuring things is actually a very difficult affair. There is a whole specialty dedicated to the science of measurement called metrology and people can become experts in the analysis of very specific elements.

Meet Alan. Alan is an elephant who is worried about being overweight and the consequences it might have on his health. Alan needs your help figuring out his weight in kilograms so he can make informed decisions about his life. First, we need to define what a kilogram actually is. It sounds pretty basic today, but defining the kilogram (done during the French Revolution in between separating heads from bodies) is critical. Once that is defined, you can create standard weights that you can use to compare the weight of your object of study (Alan) to. But how do we make that comparison? Well, we need an instrument. In this case a scale. A scale can be a rig on which you set on one side Alan and on the other a bunch of standard weights until both sides are at equilibrium. When that is done, you add all your standards and get Alan’s weight.

Of course, in this case, Alan’s weight is obvious to anyone who observes the experiment. Alan is a bit shy and can be prone to anger-issues, so you decide to develop a second type of scale. Here you define a different system, you take a spring that extends to various lengths depending on the weight that you apply to it. Now you need to calibrate your system, meaning that you need to measure the extension of your spring for a wide number of weights to get a relationship between both. You need to do this without any weights: this is your baseline. And you need to do this for a range of weights that encompasses anything you measure. The baseline is critical because it might change, your spring can lose strength. And getting the range right is critical because, if you measure outside of your range, you cannot be 100% certain the relationship you have gotten is still correct.

Alan’s last trip to see his nutritionist did not go as planned.

Once your equipment is calibrated and ready for analysis, you get Alan to apply his weight to the spring, measure the extension, and, thanks to the relationship you established between spring extension and weight, you get his weight which you then murmur discreetly into his ear.

What have we learned from Alan? Well, that it is not all that easy to measure things. And this is not even taking into account considerations of accuracy, variability of measurement... But it is important that we measure the parameters we are interested in if we really want to understand what is going on. One relevant example from the field of water quality is the need to analyze the concentration of various compounds (metals, micropollutants…) to make sure they are in line with drinking water guidelines. If you don’t measure the parameters then you don’t know whether you are at risk of drinking non-potable water. And you also cannot keep the people in charge of the water accountable for not treating it up to standards.

When you do not, or cannot, measure something, you are ensuring that you cannot develop knowledge on a subject and make informed decisions. In the USA today, the government has started banning research on various subjects. From hard (climate…) to social (gender…) sciences. This decision is made with the argument that these are all non-issues. And one way to make sure that they are non-issues, is to stop analyzing and measuring them. It won’t make these issues go away only harder to solve, but it will keep the people in charge from being held accountable. Of course, this isn’t specific to the USA, France has recently promoted a law that goes against scientific knowledge on health and pesticides, and many countries with authoritarian rulers have no interest in anyone taking an honest look at human rights, corruption and other societal matters.

We should all wish the people in charge be more like Alan, willing to measure things and be held accountable.

A few years ago, one of my closest friends told me of a variant to this sentence that he traced back to Jean-Luc Godard, another French luminary, who stated “hell is other people’s rhythm”. I found that simple addition to be incredibly astute and it resonated with me profoundly. First because I think we can all relate to this statement. And second because it steers the focus away from the overall human, who is, we hope, not all bad and allows us to concentrate on something we can control: our pace.

I’m sure we’ve all had the opportunity to experience the mounting frustration of being stuck walking behind someone who is seemingly inching forward while you have somewhere important to get to. Or the fear brought on by a driver restlessly nibbling at your backside bumper while you are overtaking a truck on the left lane, already toying with the speed limit. But it’s not just us humans that go around at our own pace, moving to the beat of our individual inner clock. Nature has its own agenda. And so has science.

I recently had a talk with a very enthusiastic doctoral student working on developing new chemicals. As we exchanged about research, he mentioned that he found it hard to manage the time it took for a new product/technology/idea to make it into an actual real-world application. I think his frustration is something most everyone dealing with research and innovation can relate to.

I’m not sure if this frustration is something that is recent or not, but I think that the exponential increase in scientific advances of the past few decades have not helped in managing expectations. There is probably a minimum of 5 years of development from an idea to its market when it comes to technology. You have to show your system works at a small-scale, make modifications and optimizations, then prove it all-over again at an industrial-scale. And, this applies only if your concept is based on existing technologies or known physical or chemical processes. If you are working on something that is really brand new, theoretical research, then that time to develop a real-world application is that much longer.

One part of this is due to the time it takes to prove your system works and the even longer time to check all the risks and range of operational conditions that apply. But another part is also getting the timing right to meet a market. This is probably the hardest to evaluate, is there a need and if not now then when? One simple example are solar panels. The discovery of the ability of materials to produce electricity from light was made in 1839 by Edmond Becquerel. It then took 40 years of materials development for an American inventor, Charles Fritts, to create the first solar panel. And another 70 to create the first commercially viable product. And only in the past ten years or so has the technology really found its market, because the timing was finally right: an alternative to fossil fuels is necessary because they will run out at some point (if anyone says otherwise, please…), because we need to decrease our carbon footprint (again, if anyone says otherwise, come on…) and because their combination of efficiency and cost rival other energy production means.

I think it’s the way things have been presented in recent years that have skewed expectations. When Steve Jobs famously stated that the iPhone was a revolution at its unveiling, it seemed to imply that the engineers and technicians at Apple had just come up with a solution no one had thought of before. But the technology in the iPhone is based on concepts and the continued development of other products that had been around for a long time. Of course, the product was impressive and different than what was available but it wasn’t “disruptive” scientifically, it was the continuous development of years and years of innovations. The same goes for IA, or any other solutions that are dubbed “disruptive”. They, no doubt, are impressive feats, but like nuclear fusion, if or when it is ever mastered, will be disruptive to energy production, they certainly are not overnight successes.

Of course, there are ways of getting things done more or less rapidly, but scientific development takes time, and once we integrate that, it is not as frustrating. Call it the Theory of the Vulture, because patience pays off.

A couple scientists working on a project.

Medical science is one of two fields, along with physics/astronomy, that tend to completely overwhelm me when I read anything related to their study. It’s easy to see how we can get lost in physics. A lot of the elements that are being studied are invisible to us and we do not register their impact on the universe at large. It’s at the very least difficult to try and imagine what a black hole is like outside of figuring that its gravity is so strong that you would get crushed. And while, as far as I understand from a quick internet search, a black hole of the mass of the sun would only be 3km wide, I have a hard time figuring out how to crush the sun down to that size.

Other elements such as particles, gravitational or otherwise, light or sound waves, often feel like concepts more than they do physical entities. The scientists who study these ideas have to have a very healthy amount of creativity and imagination to project themselves into their field of study. Notwithstanding any criticism of the movie itself, there is a scene in Oppenheimer where they show the protagonist trying to project the realm of the infinitesimally small in his mind, and I think it is representative of something people in this field have to do to get a sense of what they are looking for. Advanced mathematics also provide a good playground for the poetic-minded.

The field of medical science adds a whole other layer to these considerations. DNA, enzymes, interactions, mutations, cancer, transfer of molecules across biological boundaries… All these very complex processes are what is keeping us alive. It might feel as easy as breathing in and out, eating food, drinking water and having a good night’s sleep, but whatever is going on inside each and everyone of us is a bit mind-boggling. After all, our bones and our wounds can heal over time, our muscles can improve in strength and flexibility, our brain can be trained and stores huge amounts of memories and knowledge.

Even more insane to me, though, is how scientists manage to measure and evaluate how these processes function and how they can be modified or improved. Every time I click on an article about some new medical discovery, I am always a bit at a loss. One part of it is because I do not have the expertise in the lab-work and methods used. But there is something else, which I have a hard time defining, some inability to project into such a small-scale, that keeps me fascinated by the work produced.

There are teams of scientists who have been able to reprogram cells in a diabetic person to allow them to produce the insulin which was lacking. Others have been able to restore vision in patients using stem cells. Easy to understand when reading these one-line summaries, but good-luck understanding the actual study papers (“Induced pluripotent stem-cell-derived corneal epithelium for transplant surgery: a single-arm, open-label, first-in-human interventional study in Japan”, anyone?). Of course, medical studies are always sensitive due to ethical concerns and can also sometimes bend towards the freakish.

One of the best books I’ve read on medical studies, is an investigation of the story of an African-American woman whose life and illness changed the face of medical studies. This woman, Henrietta Lacks, developed cervical cancer, which she died of. Her cancer cells were sampled without her knowledge during her treatment and became the first cells that scientists managed to cultivate in their labs. This allowed for incredible progress in scientific knowledge. The book is fascinating both in the good that came out of the science and the bad of how this woman and her family were treated. It is definitely worth reading.

One aspect that is discussed in the book that also stuck with me, is a section that mentions several other people whose bodies produce unusual or rare types of biological compounds that can prove priceless. One very recent such discovery is of a French woman from the island of Guadeloupe who is the only known person with her specific blood type. Quite extraordinary, but also unfortunate as she is the only person who is compatible with herself for blood transfusions. On the other end of the spectrum is an Australian man whose blood helped save an estimated 2.4 million babies in Australia. Quite an amazing feat!

Now, it so happens, that we all have the potential to have such a positive an impact on society. Giving blood is something that is a routine procedure now, and blood banks have been developed to provide for the injured and needy. But the stocks of these institutions depend on us to be maintained. So, if you meet the requirements I highly recommend that you go and give blood.

Every blood donation is about 500 mL, or something close to 10% of your body’s content, and takes 10 to 15 minutes. Granted, the needle they use looks a little big, but if women close to giving birth can handle an epidural, what’s the excuse? The French blood institute states that every donation helps save three lives. I once asked exactly how that was calculated since I wasn’t sure 500mL would be enough for three people. They told me that the blood was separated into three different streams depending on the needs, meaning that each donation would go to three different people accordingly. If you ever go, there is often some type of poster or placemat that highlights patients that have been given a life-saving transfusion. You’ll never know if you’ve helped save a jerk who lost control of his vehicle speeding on the highway or an auto-immune innocent 5-year old who needs monthly transfusions. But that’s the beauty of the donation, it’s selfless and equalitarian.

I have given blood for a while now. I only went once when I was living in the USA, but I got rejected for coming from Europe (travels are a big issue for the requirements). In a very American move, I was given a cute sticker that stated “Be nice to me, I tried to give blood today”. I still go of course, because I think it’s probably the most impactful thing I can do at my level. I also go because I am type-O negative, universal donor, and as we all know with great power comes great responsibility. It also comes with a snack afterwards and prohibited physical activity for 24 hours, a great excuse for lazying it up while beaming with pride. So, what are you waiting for?

O-negative you say?

Which conference to attend

Choosing conferences can be a bit destabilizing as there are hundreds of them and a lot share overlapping subjects. Much like peer-reviewed journals, it is best to make a list of the 5 to 8 conferences that are really important to your field. It is quite unlikely there are any more than that.

Among these you’ll have one or two really big conferences that correspond to your field of study at large. These tend to stray on the more business side of things, and the presentations will either be about commercial practical cases or innovative processes that are promising but far from industry-ready. These are worth attending because they bring together a lot of people (often several thousands) with different responsibilities (salespeople, PR representatives, CEOs… and yes, scientists). There is also generally a big event hall with stands from various firms which will be giving out goodies.

Pretty acurate rendering

The second set of conferences are specialty conferences, focused on your area of research. These are much smaller, with an attendance of a couple hundred people at most which allows for easier interactions between attendees. They are also much more technically oriented and you’ll find the talks more interesting in terms of science. Generally, they are a bit more fun because the people attending know each other.

If you are lucky, the conference you attend will have you travel to a new and exciting location. But, even without taking into account the issue of carbon footprint, that should not be the main criteria for attending. My first conference at the end of my Masters literally took place across the street from my University. My favorite memory of that first conference was getting a question from one of the leading experts in my field and sharing in a bit of giddiness afterwards with my thesis advisor!

Preparing your abstract and presenting your work

If you want to attend a conference as a presenter you have to submit an abstract, generally a one- or two-page summary of the work you want to present. Preparing an abstract is a very good exercise in writing as it requires you to whittle your whole project down to its main essence. Giving a bit of context, a description of your methods and, critically, the novelty of your work in what is often a maximum of 300 words is not that easy. Write a first draft and then cut out everything that is not essential to its understanding and keep as much space as you can to highlight your results. Make sure to properly go over the guidelines as they can vary from conference to conference, some allowing you to present graphics, others requesting that you do not include references… Also make sure to be clear about and not miss the deadline for submission, even if they are almost always going to be moved back to allow for more time. And, if you do miss the date, just contact the organizers and nicely explain why you’re handing it in late, they are generally reasonably flexible.

There are two options when an abstract is accepted: you can be asked to present your work in the format of a poster or as an oral presentation. The latter, generally being considered more illustrious (but true glory lies is in being invited as a plenary speaker, science rock star status). If you get approval for an oral presentation, bravo! Now is the time to prepare a carefully curated powerpoint to highlight all the great results you have produced. Presenting to an audience can be a bit nerve wracking, especially if you haven’t done it before. All I can say is make sure to rehearse your talk several times and several days ahead. This helps in figuring out how to manage to say everything you want within the allotted time and helps in calming down the nerves once you get started.

Once you’re done presenting, you’ll hopefully get a few questions to exchange with your audience. If you don’t have an answer, just say so. Not getting questions is a bit awkward, so if you are in the audience and the presenter isn’t getting any, try to find one to get things started. There is always something you can ask (What are the next steps? What limitation are there to the results?) and always remember to thank the presenter for their work. I like to give my name and company when I ask a question so the person giving the talk knows who they are addressing. Not necessary but I think it’s courteous. And gives an opportunity for further discussion later on.

I’ve found poster sessions to actually be quite interesting despite their being oddly considered lower on the scale of recognition. They are often presented by students who are really eager to share. Rules for preparing a poster are similar to preparing an abstract but with an added visual element, the main point being to limit cluttering for clarity’s sake. It should be easy for someone who sees your poster to understand what it’s about without you being there to explain it. Don’t put too much text, make sure you are down to only the essential graphics or photos. During poster sessions, people will stand next to their work to present it to you so there is a more direct interaction with the scientist which is nice. If you are a poster presenter nothing is more dispiriting than having no one come by, so, if you are attending a conference, make an effort to go see the posters, select a few and engage with the author. They’ll be enthusiastic and grateful, and you’ll get the most satisfying interaction you’ll have all week.

Check the conference’s detailed program

Before you head out to the conference, make sure to go over the detailed program. Most conferences have several sessions running in parallel, and you’ll want to be prepared if you don’t want to miss any of the talks you are interested in. Ideally, you’ll be attenting the conference with some colleagues. This makes it both more fun but also easier in terms of organization since each person can attend a different session and report to the others. If not, it’s ok to switch sessions between talks. If the event is well run it should be timed for talks to happen at the same time and make moving between sessions optimal. Though the rooms can be far apart in the conference hall, so work on your cardio if you expect to be moving during the conference. To be fair, according to medical doctors, you should work on your cardio anyway.

A scientist who had to run up three floors to attend a talk

Attend the gala dinner and technical visits

My last advice when attending a conference is to take part in the social events. At the very least attend the gala dinner and one or the other technical visit that might be planned. A gala dinner sounds very official and perhaps even a little pompous, but they usually turn out to be quite fun. One of my favorite conference memories was the gala dinner of a Swedish conference where the organizers had hired a local ABBA cover band and we all got to enjoy a great concert followed by all attendees joining the dancefloor.

Another great memory was doing karaoke in Tokyo with a group of Scandinavian professors, their students and one local Japanese student nice enough to help us navigate how to order food and drinks while choosing songs. Few things beat singing the sex pistols’ version of “my way” with a Finnish professor to build a larger scientific network!

Technical visits are often integrated into conferences as a way to lend a pragmatic facet to the proceedings. They are often worthy to attend as they bring an interesting perspective to the application of the science being discussed. At that same conference I ended up doing karaoke, I also got to visit an industrial drinking water plant east of Tokyo. The plant was pretty incredible in and of itself with a different philosophy to water treatment than I was used to. What made it even more memorable is the little experiment the plant operators had planned for us visitors. The plant treats water from a lake which can often be the site of algal blooms which produce taste and odor issues. A flask was waiting for us in a room, filled with clear distilled water dosed with a massive amount of MIB (methylisoborneol), the odor-causing compound. They either underestimated our sense of smell or really wanted to make sure we got the full experience of what they had to deal with. The whole thing was a bit rough but we had fun watching each others make faces when handling the flask.

Overall, conferences are about science, about meeting people, about trading ideas and perhaps even being inspired. But conferences can also be about realizing that however cartesian scientists are, no one is completely immune to disco tunes, and that’s just as powerful a reason to attend!

I’m sure you’ve all heard of AI by now. If not, I don’t know if I should be impressed by your ability to steer away from current trends and stay disconnected from all social networks and media or worry that we should call out an emergency search party for you. In either case, unless you are a computer science geek, you’re probably like me, very unclear as to how the whole thing functions.

From my very basic understanding, AI is simply a complex computer code which is designed to mimic human learning by feeding it a large quantity of data (the training set) that it will absorb and be able to lean into to give its user answers. It’s different than conventional software in its wide range of abilities while software is designed and limited to a given skill (e.g. simulating incoming weather based on a given set of data), and the fact that all it requires is a simple query to produce an answer in the form of text, image, video… where conventional software users still have to do things themselves (e.g edit a video, create a music beat…).

The main code, the meat and bones of AI, or brain depending on your preferred metaphor, varies depending on the companies and goals. Text-based generative AI, the ones that have been the more successful at least, are based on models that use probabilities to write out sentences. When you ask a question, it will go through its training set and find you the most probable answer, which it defines by figuring out the probability of each word coming one after the other. An example would be if you asked an AI to produce some lines of dialog for a movie and it had only been trained on the script from The Big Lebowski (a must-see!). It would then be very likely one of its suggested lines of dialog would start with the word “F**k” which could be followed up by either “!” (60% probability), “it” (25% probability) or “-ing A” (10% probability). AI that generate images are more complex and I found this post to be quite clear about how they work.

Call me a nihilist, but I like to think AI could not create such a fine cultural product.

As this slightly extreme example shows, just like any of us and our inartificial intelligences, AI is limited to learning what its training set contains. And while this training is crucial, this is where AI companies, today, are getting away with literal robbery. Every AI that is available for use has been trained on data that falls under some type of copyright or protection law. Because it would cost the developers massive amounts of money to pay for those rights. I haven’t seen much in terms of how this is going to be figured out, but for now it feels like this is being swept under a (multi-million dollar) rug.

Outside of that pretty massive issue, the dataset is also critical because you have to be certain of what it contains. People were quick to show that AI chatbots had racial and sexist biases. Not a surprise when vast swaths of the internet were used for training due to their public nature, and well… the internet is not the most carefully curated space.

Once the AI is trained, it can be used to do a lot of things. It can create a novel for you to read, it can create illustrations for the novel, it can read you the novel it wrote for you, it can organize the schedule of your bookclub to discuss the novel and order take-out, it can give you notes debating the merits of the novel for your bookclub, it can record your bookclub conversation and summarize its minutes and send it out as an email to everyone, it can create a weekly podcast about your experience hosting an all-AI bookclub, it can open an Instagram account for your budding niche influencer career, it can create and curate all the content of your account, it can boost your SEO and growth, it can find partnerships and sponsorships, make deals for you, invest your money in optimally selected funds, organize a party for your first million, and so on.

And all you have to do was ask the AI a simple question or give it a simple cue, rarely more than one or two sentences. What AI developers call a prompt. Don’t get me started on “prompt engineering”, there are subtleties about how to interrogate AI but I think we can all learn how to ask a question or adjust a cue.

If we steer away from this tech-bro wet dream, I remain a bit curious about why I haven’t found any recurrent use for AI myself. I’m not averse to technology, though I, like a lot of people, do feel like I need a break from the constant connectivity. To some extent, I just don’t see the point when it comes to writing my emails or other mundane work activities. My job is not that intense that I need help writing my 5 to 10 daily emails and I actually find some odd form of satisfaction in taking the time to write them myself. I think the main reason I am not partaking in the fuss for now is that I am a little suspicious about the final value it bring us humans.

While there are a lot of potential great applications to AI, an equal and opposite negative example seems to pop up for each and every one of them. Call it AI’s third law of motion, if you will. You can point at stories about people finding solace in AI such as this moving story about a young man trying to get over the death of his girlfriend or funny anecdotes about people dating AI. But you can also be very worried about the rise and ease of creation of deepfakes, which should be enough to push legislators to discuss what limits seem reasonable to this technology’s applications.

“Hell is other people’s AI applications” - JP Sartre 2.0

Going over all of this, I’ve found that I resist AI when it feels like it is becoming a replacement tool for personal growth for lack of better wording. I don’t want to use AI to write something out for me because when I do so, whether these notes or my work reports, I am delegating an act that, while difficult and sometimes frustrating, also forces me to improve. The same goes for artistic endeavors. I cannot imagine myself asking AI to produce a drawing or some music and call it my own. I haven’t done anything apart from giving it a prompt and it does absolutely nothing to my feeling of worth as a person. I wouldn’t want to have an AI play sports for me, do gardening or any other hobby or social interaction, however complicated.

I have no doubt AI will find tons of useful applications, especially for industrial and scientific purposes and quite likely as some for of powerful assistant. I am more circumspect when it comes to artistic endeavors. You can of course listen to the music it produces, watch the videos or appreciate the digital paintings, because it is undeniably impressive that it can do any of this. But I don’t think we’ll lose interest or awe in seeing live musicians, watching athletes perform, reading books from actual human beings or physically interacting with each other. It is possible that AI will force us to into seeking more human interactions or develop labels for AI-free content. Because whatever it may end up producing , the true worth of AI is in the human-made training set it used to learn.

However perfectly worded your prompt might be.