Fish Skin Wound Healing
UnConference Invite. Colleague retires. Circular economy and Fish Skin. Industrial Heat. Travels with our son. Neurodiverse family.
Lisa: You can not retire from being fabulous
UnConference: You are invited, do come
Wound healing: fish skin and circular economy
Industrial heating: thermal bricks for industrial heating
Travels with our son. Neurodiverse family, Anoushka’s blog
Links: coral reefs, transit costs: china political/economic strategy
Do you have ideas to solve some of the biggest long-term challenges? Are you underwhelmed by traditional conferences? Are you seeking a forum for participatory ideas and discussion? Come to this UnConference event.
My next co-hosted event is the Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator UnConference 2023 on Sep 15 in London, with the title:
How can we accelerate towards a fair and sustainable future?
Invite is here. Do register. Previous notes on the UnConference section on Civic Future’s Progress summit are here.
Date: Friday, 15 September | Approx 9am to 5pm
Venue: Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE
Do Come: link to register here.
You should treat all your colleagues well. I think how you treat, for instance, waiters, or support staff offers a real insight into a person. Beware teams who have undervalued assistants. Here’s my letter to our team assistant on her retirement this week.
Dear Lisa - The joke goes “you can not retire from being fabulous”. That is true for you. What is a lie… is your official title: “assistant”. There is not a single word, not an essay or a book that encompasses what you mean for our team. The closest three that come to mind are: heart, soul and brain.
In my 20 over years of corporate life, I’ve too often seen the so-called assistant treated like a tiny cog in the machine. Under valued for all that they bring.
When we started out in this chapter of our lives 10 years ago we moved together as an entire team. We knew in our souls, in our hearts, in our brains we would not work without you. We would not be whole. We would not serve our stakeholders to our full potential without. We would not fully fulfill our purpose.
We’ve been more successful in our purpose of responsible long-term investing than we ever dreamed. In case, you are in any doubt, you should know that you’ve been integral to our success.
Behind, amidst and among all successful teams are the people who enable those teams. They perform the necessary tangible and intangible tasks of a team. They are often the interpersonal social and relationship asset that allows a team to be greater than their parts. They are the souls of teams, the hearts and brains too.
In one way “assistant” is correctly named for you assist in everything, but in another way “lynchpin” is better because without you, we fall apart.
Every chapter closes so that a new one can begin. You’ve given us your life force. You deserve the time and opportunity to travel and craft and do all the things that retirement can enable.
You’ve left us a piece of your soul. What you’ve helped build lives on in us. Life is reciprocal. You take a piece of us with you. May you continue to flourish.
Wound care and circular economy. I met the CEO of a medical technology company which has just pledged $1billion dollars (approx 10x sales 2023e for those who care) to buy a wound care company whose main product is made from fish skin. The story is amazing on a few levels.
The product can heal chronic wounds that have failed to heal otherwise. Patients have been saved from amputation. Fish skin is similar to human skin, with no risk of disease transmission - seemingly cold fish → to human transmission has never happened.
“The fish are caught in the pristine waters of North Atlantic Ocean off the township of Isafjordur, on the northwest coast of Iceland.” This is where the founder grew up. It is a waste product of the fishing industry in this small Icelandic town. So the whole business is “circular” - it’s a sustainable business on many levels. The fish skin is (at least until recently, though I suspect it is still) scraped by hand (see picture from the film below).
The company almost failed when the FDA asked for more data after the first submission in 2011. The company was seeded by Iceland government venture money in 2009/10. Approval came in 2014. 2016 had first years of sales of $1m. 2022 the company reaches profit (on $85m in sales).
In terms of origin story, a few intriguing points. The founder worked at a prosthetic company first (this is an Iceland success story and globally competitive med tech company). He became aware of the wound care problem there. He knew about the possibilities of fish skin. He gained grants and then funding from Iceland government as venture at seed.
The Chief Technology Officer of Amazon made a trip to iceland to make a documentary on the company which, if this peaks your interest, you can watch here or on Amazon Prime.
Net Zero industrial heating. I was reading about industrial heating this week. Overall industrial heat is c. 20% of global energy demand.
“Although deployment of TES today is negligible—less than 1 percent of global energy storage in 2019 was thermal —its potential is very significant. TES solutions can be applied across industrial, commercial, and residential applications, support a wide range of discharge temperatures (from cooling to high temperature heating of >1000 ˚C) and store heat for durations ranging from days to multiple months. Counterintuitively, thermal storage (power-to-heat) efficiencies exceed 90 percent.”
Additionally, given that most TES technologies are based on simple and readily accessible materials such as sand and thermal bricks, they have a low cost, adding only a few incremental dollars for each MWh of heat stored.
And MIT Review has this:
A handful of startups think bricks that hold heat could be the key to bringing renewable energy to some of the world’s biggest polluters.
Industries that make products ranging from steel to baby food require a lot of heat—most of which is currently generated by burning fossil fuels like natural gas. Heavy industry makes up about a quarter of worldwide emissions, and alternative power sources that produce fewer greenhouse gases (like wind and solar) can’t consistently generate the heat that factories need to manufacture their wares.
Enter heat batteries. A growing number of companies are working to deploy systems that can capture heat generated by clean electricity and store it for later in stacks of bricks. Many of these systems use simple designs and commercially available materials, and they could be built quickly, anywhere they’re needed. One demonstration in California started up earlier this year, and other test systems are following close behind. They’re still in early stages, but heat storage systems have the potential to help wean industries off fossil fuels.
The toaster of the future… (image above, Brick toaster)One key to heat batteries’ potential success is their simplicity. “If you want to make it to giant scale, everybody ought to agree that it’s boring and reliable,” says John O’Donnell, CEO of California-based heat storage startup Rondo Energy.
The startup deployed its first commercial pilot in March at an ethanol plant in California. It’s basically a carefully designed stack of bricks.
In Rondo’s system, electricity travels through a heating element, where it’s transformed into heat. It’s the same mechanism that a toaster uses, O’Donnell says—just a lot bigger and hotter. The heat then radiates through the stack of bricks, warming them up to temperatures that can reach over 1,500 °C (2,700 °F).
The insulated steel container housing the bricks can keep them hot for hours or even days. When it’s time to use the trapped heat, fans blow air through the bricks. The air can reach temperatures of up to 1,000 °C (1,800 °F) as it travels through the gaps.
Seems to me, a decent chunk of the industrial heating challenge should be doable via these type of methods, and at similar cost. There are scale up and work flow challenges, and the technology is still in pilot trials but unlike eg. the cement chemical reaction, there is not a whole new discovery to make.
Travels with our son. Neurodiverse family. Fom Anoushka:
“Spike's first taste of international travel was to Morocco on the occasion of our honeymoon. He was a year old.
A memory persists.
I am walking through a souk with Spike in my arms and he is livid and inconsolable. We move past crowded alcoves arrayed with a disorderly rainbow of babouches, glinting lanterns, tagines, carpets, leather bags, local fruits and vegetables and heaping piles of earthy spices. The heat is pressing in on us; a solid, slippery thing. I feel like I could cut it with a butter knife. The noise, rich smells and visual abundance of the souk have blurred into irrelevance because I am wholly focused on Spike and his distress. I become aware of the rise and fall of arms reaching out to us as we pass by. Compassionate local women with sympathetic smiles hold out their hands, offering to help settle my disconsolate boy. The collective effect of their gestures resembles some kind of well-meaning maternal honour guard. I am both touched, and distraught at my obvious inability to console my own child.”
And
“Spike dealt with the challenging nature of staying overnight away from home by mentally moving house and adopting our temporary accommodation as his home. These mental gymnastics meant he was often as troubled to leave our rental as he was to go on holiday in the first place. This time, his coping strategies were a little different. For the first day or two, Spike manipulated the calendars on our devices so that they remained on the date of our departure: a neat digital workaround designed to circumvent his self-imposed ‘no staying overnight away from home’ rule. It seemed to help and, a few days in, he was comfortable enough to abandon the trick. However, as we moved into the last couple of days of our holiday, Spike began to feel sad about leaving Brussels and petitioned us intensely to return immediately.”
More blog here: https://spitting-yarn.com/blog/2023/8/21/comfort-zone
From the podcast archive:
I still think on this podcast with improv master Lee Simpson, as I think about performance but also interacting in the world. We discuss the infrastructure (or lack of) behind improv and theatre and techniques on listening to the audience and feedback loops in performing.
We sketch out ideas on structure and story form, on being human and Lee explains status structure as a technique.
We chat about how humans understand the world and how we view our lives as story that changes through time.
Lee reflects on being part of a comedy group for a long time.
Links:
NEW: we need to talk about the dire state of British transport infrastructure. Of the 52 UK cities with 250k+ people, only 8 (15%) have a tram or metro. In France & Germany it’s 80%, Poland is on 60%. Even *American* cities are better served, and the US hates public transit!
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1695034745871032609?s=20
"On the central and northern regions, hard coral cover reached 33% and 36% this year, respectively, the highest level recorded in the past 36 years of monitoring, the report said." https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/04/great-barrier-reef-areas-show-highest-coral-cover-seen-in-36-years.html
FT (James Kynge): China’s economy is slowing but its ambitions to lead an alternative world order are burgeoning. This piece took many weeks to research.
https://www.ft.com/content/8ac52fe7-e9db-48a8-b2f0-7305ab53f4c3