Food dyes are everywhere: A surprising amount of the food we consume contains various compounds to add color. Marshmallows look white, but they contain blue coloring (to keep them from growing less bright as they sit on shelves). Starbucks uses food coloring in its strawberry drinks. And frozen meat, like fish and crab meat, contains red food coloring to make it more appealing . Red dyes, in particular, have had a colorful history. The Aztecs crushed an insect, the cochineal, which produces a nasty-tasting compound called carminic acid, which can make up as much as 24% the body weight, dunked the product into an acific solution, mixed it with salts, and produced  carmine dye , which is a vibrant red color. Then there is Red Dye #3 In 1856, William Henry Perkin, at the age of 18 in Germany, was the first to synthesize a a dye.  Experimenting with derivatives of coal tar, he produced mauveine, a purple dye. In 1876, Swiss chemist Karl Kussmaul of Switzerland created erythr...

We departed Muscat and are sailing to Mumbai, India.  The   Arabian Peninsula  is a largely ignored part of the world by most visitors.  Under 1.25 million square miles are most of the world's oil.  It is relatively small compared to the USA, which has 3.8 msm and 335 million people.  The AP has a population of 86 million. Saudi Arabia  36.5 million Yeman  33.7 million UAE  9.4 million Oman  4.6 million Kuwait  4.3 million Qatar  2.7 million Bahrain  1.5 million The cities with the two largest population are in Saudi Arabia:  Riyadh 7.5 million and Jeddah 4.8 million. However, in 1950 the population was only 9.5 million, mostly Bedouins in the desert.  Then oil was discovered,  first in Iran in 1908  by the British.  But the story of oil goes back to 600 BC, when the Chinese first found this liquid.  More recently, there was Colonel Edwin Drake's 1859 oil well in Pennsylvania, and within a dec...

For Wednesday science-technology day I return to the  latest issue of  Energy Matters , compiled by the American Energy Society. India is not buying crude oil from Russia.  Politics?  No, cost. When the Ukraine War started, the West reduced imports from Russia, so  India became the second largest purchaser, next to China .  Then this sudden drop. One reason is that freight costs have risen, plus petroleum is now cheaper from places like the UAE. 91% of the global economy has pledged to cut emissions to zero.  However, a  lot of promises, but no action . That net zero pledge is supposedly for 2050.  Air travel will cripple that attempt. To begin, the U.N. climate science panel has said that man-made carbon dioxide emissions need to fall by about 45% by 2030 to limit warming to only 1.5 C ( 2.7 F ). Some say planting more trees can help.   I say planting more trees will hurt .  Most analysts don't consider methane in their calcul...