Happy Tuesday fellow Frivolous,
2021 is coming to a close fast, and with it I've been inundated with the "Best of" lists. It struck me that there are so many books that are part of a series, that it's overwhelming to think about starting a new book, lest I have to read the prequels. To that end, next week's post, I'm going to send you all FC's pick of standalone books of the year, so keep an eye out for that.
On to this week's list!
Disney and Dali
I'm late to the game, but apparently Walt Disney (of Disney fame, yes) was close friends with Salvador Dali, so much so that there was an exhibit several years ago celebrating their friendship. They'd even collaborated on a short film, Destino, which wasn't released until 2003 because of financial challenges during the World War II era.
I can't stop thinking about what Disney animation would look like if the two had collaborated even more.
No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull
Stories about secret societies are fun enough, but Turnbull treats this completely differently, which is what caught my eye. Rather than making the secret societies the focus of his story, Turnbull never sways from the characters' lives and needs. There are inexplicable things happening around them; there are people who knew all along; and the result of widespread discovery is changing the social fabric around the characters. And yet, the characters have their own challenges to face.
Stories which center around the debris of big-world events are of keen interest to me and this fits like a glove.
Extracting uranium from the ocean
In the search for clean energy, nuclear fission tends to hit the top of the list. The challenge is that terrestrial uranium is pretty costly to mine and there's a limited amount. Especially when compared to the amount of uranium in our oceans, which is estimated to be about 500 times more abundant.
The effort isn't new; it's just that finding a cost-efficient way to collect that uranium hadn't been found...until now. As the New Scientist article describes, researchers in China have created a material that's able to collect 20 times as much uranium from seawater as previous attempts.
While definitely a positive, we should be wondering what all that uranium in the oceans is supporting before we start ridding the waters of this. There seems to be very little direct research on the environmental/biological purpose of uranium in the oceans, so there's more work to be done.
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As always thanks for reading and hit me up with what caught your eye, what you'd like to see mentioned.