“
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”
The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.
The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”
The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.
The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”
But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”
My bones said, “Write the poems.
”
”
Andrea Gibson (The Madness Vase)
“
It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.
”
”
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
“
The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride non-rechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had “LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG” written on it.
”
”
Andy Weir (The Martian)
“
When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when its gone, its like it was never there at all.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together- the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night- can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out. But that was long ago.
”
”
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
“
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
”
”
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
“
Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.
”
”
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
“
You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons," they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman
“
I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.
”
”
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
“
Diazapam (that's valium), temazepam, lithium, ECT, HRT - how long must I stay on this stuff? Don't give me anymore!
”
”
Morrissey
“
When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias.
But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
“
I occasionally laugh and tell him that his imperturbability is worth three hundred milligrams of lithium a day to me, and it is probably true.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
“
People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the available ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now that’s scarcity, friend.
”
”
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4))
“
Half the time he seems autistic, the rest of the time he's like a lizard jacked full of lithium and speed. These things do not promote love in most of us.
”
”
Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard)
“
Overhead announcement at psychiatric hospital: Lithium is no longer available on credit.
”
”
Earl Mac Rauch (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension)
“
Patient sees [lithium] medication as a promise of a cure, and a means of suicide if it doesn’t work. She fears that by taking it she will risk her last resort
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
“
They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison
“
Like diabetes, she referred to it. Diabetics take insulin. In the same way, people with bipolar disorders took lithium, and alcoholics went to AA. Diabetes is the all-purpose analogy in my culture. Everybody has some form of it that needs to be tended on a maintenance basis. No one is ever cured, no one gets all the way well.
”
”
Emily Carter (Glory Goes and Gets Some)
“
I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I've been on these goddamn pills for years.
”
”
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
“
Nicola Yoon
“When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen -7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesmally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it's gone, it's like it was never there at all.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
The young woman's perfect breast didn't yield beneath the gentle pressure of two latexed fingers.
"What're you doing?" Professor Robert 'Lithium Bob' Beck frowned at me.
"I don't know. It's what I did when I first saw her…"
"Why?" asked Doc Donald, about to assist with the post mortem.
"She seemed so… pink. Maybe to see if she was alive…" I saw the Prof and the Doc exchange a look. It was an unconventional - no, plain weird - place to touch her.
”
”
Morana Blue (Gatsby's Smile)
“
Courtney,” I warn, getting furious, “if you just said what I think you said: that your lithium is in a carton in the freezer next to the Frusen Glädjé and is a sorbet”—I’m screaming this—“if this is really what you said then I will kill you. Is it a sorbet? Is your lithium really a sorbet?
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries))
“
And so once again peace reigned in his kitchen cabinet. The voices he'd been hearing as he lie in bed stopped. His doctor took him off the Lithium. Tho every now and again he'd hear what seemed to be the sounds of love making emanating from the kitchen . . . and the muffled sobs of a can of refried beans. Probably just the Mexican couple in the apartment upstairs. (From "Kitchen Cabinet Confidential")
”
”
Quentin R. Bufogle
“
June sent Jean to Southeast Louisiana Hospital, a by-all-accounts horrible asylum in Mandeville, where she was put on lithium. In 1966, when she was thirty-one, my grandmother Jean shot herself with a shotgun on her infant son’s grave, just over eight years after his death. I can’t imagine the grief that she must have felt.
”
”
Britney Spears (The Woman in Me)
“
Mary Karr once wrote, “In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times.
”
”
Jaime Lowe (Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind)
“
I'm not sure if i believe in love at first sight or any of that shit. But i know that sitting there in a room with half-retarded motherfuckers drooling from their lithium and Trazodone, whatever I felt, it was close. Like I had this need to hold her, protect her bones from her parents or drugs or whatever wouldn't let her sleep and night, and i wanted her to think i was funny and sexy and smart and beautiful, just fucking beautiful. Sitting there while the tech introduced us to her, I wanted to be better than I was, not just to fuck this girl, but to be better for her. Guess that's a good enough definition of love.
”
”
Peter Stenson (Fiend)
“
A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity.
”
”
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.
”
”
Stephen Fry
“
for now, lithium and cobalt are all we have. To date they are the only materials we have sufficiently decoded to make rechargeable batteries out of at scale. We know that the “green” path we are on is unsustainable. We just don’t have a better one to consider until our materials science improves.
”
”
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. My mother heard noises upstairs and found me she said down on my side chewing the rug in my room. My room’s shag-carpeted. She said I was on the floor flushed red and all wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a newborn again. On my side all red and wet.'
'A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to have killed you. Sertraline in combination with an MAOI2828 will kill you, in enough quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides, I'd say you're pretty lucky to be here right now.’
'My mother sometimes thinks she's hallucinating.’
'Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when changing medications.’
'She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
What I mean is this: Prozac has rather minimal side effects, the lithium has a few more, but basically the pair keep me functioning as a sane human being, at least most of the time. And I can’t help feeling that anything that works so effectively, that’s so transformative, has got to be hurting me at another end, maybe sometime further down the road. I can just hear the words inoperable brain cancer being whispered to me by some physician twenty years from now.
”
”
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
“
As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
“
As the cosmos continues to cool—dropping below a hundred million degrees—protons fuse with protons as well as with neutrons, forming atomic nuclei and hatching a universe in which ninety percent of these nuclei are hydrogen and ten percent are helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium (“heavy” hydrogen), tritium (even heavier hydrogen), and lithium.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
“
Lithium isn’t for people who have bad moods. Lithium is for lifers.
”
”
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
“
Mogens Schou, a Danish psychiatrist who, more than anyone, is responsible for the introduction of lithium as a treatment for manic-depressive illness,
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
John Cade’s article about the use of lithium in acute mania first appeared in 1949, in an obscure Australian medical journal,
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
Legend among crematory workers holds that the lithium batteries inside pacemakers explode in the cremation chamber if not removed.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory)
“
high altitude coupled with rigorous exercise can raise lithium levels. I became completely disoriented and totally incapable of navigating my way down the mountain.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
Vomited. Damn it. I just threw up a shitload of lithium. There were
”
”
Edwin S. Shneidman (Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind)
“
Nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it's gone, its like it was never there at all.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
The humor, however, was a bit more in the recounting than in the actual living through it. Unfortunately, this resistance to taking lithium is played out in the lives of tens of thousands of patients every year.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
Apple will probably use a version of cobalt oxide operating at 4.35 volts and delivering about 165 milliampere hours per gram, a 22% improvement on the best lithium-ion cobalt-oxide batteries delivered in recent years.
”
”
Anonymous
“
The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride non-rechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had "LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG" written on it.
”
”
Andy Weir (The Martian)
“
Possible Scandinavian-psychodrama parody, a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
It turns out we haven't seen the show but I don't want to be tacky enough to bring up the fact I own one, so I lightly kick Courtney under the table. This raises her out of the lithium induced stupor and she says robotically, 'Patrick owns an Onica. He really does.
”
”
Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)
“
Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.
”
”
Kate Braverman (Lithium for Medea)
“
Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving.
”
”
Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
“
In love, it’s the amount of time it takes for lovers to feel half of what they once did. When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it’s gone, it’s like it was never there at all.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be.
”
”
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
They’ve cranked up the lithium so high, I can hardly see straight. I feel like a robot, my feelings have completely evaporated and I couldn’t even say boo to a goose. I’m no danger to anyone.”
“I’m not thinking you’re a danger to anyone.”
“I’m no danger to myself, then.”
Rami stops, spaghetti-laden fork halfway to his mouth. There is a long pause. “Are you sure about that?
”
”
Tabitha Suzuma (A Voice in the Distance (Flynn Laukonen, #2))
“
The half-life of a substance is the time it takes for it to lose one half of its initial value. In nuclear physics, it’s the time it takes for unstable atoms to lose energy by emitting radiation. In biology, it usually refers to the time it takes to eliminate half of a substance (water, alcohol, pharmaceuticals) from the body. In chemistry, it is the time required to convert one half or a reactant (hydrogen or oxygen, for example) to product (water). In love, it’s the amount of time it takes for lovers to feel half of what they once did.
When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it’s gone, it’s like it was never there at all.
”
”
Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star)
“
I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn’t work for me, the answer would be a simple no—and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I suppose I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It’s complicated.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets. 5. The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia. 6. The lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook
”
”
Chris Anderson (Makers: The New Industrial Revolution)
“
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”
The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.
The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”
The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.
The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”
But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”
My bones said, “Write the poems.
”
”
Andrea Gibson (The Madness Vase)
“
In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
Incidentally, when it comes to 'unworkably quirky names for your baby', I believe that the greatest possible argument against teenagers becoming pregnant is that the baby names you like when you're, say, fifteen, single-handedly prove you're not ready for motherhood yet. My teenage diary records that, had I had a child in 1988, I would have called them either 'Kitten Lithium', 'K. T. Blue', 'Tatty Apple' or 'Aloyious Jonst'. Thank God my access to sperm was severely limited, to the amount of 'none'.
”
”
Caitlin Moran (More Than a Woman)
“
the universe began fourteen billion years ago with the emergence of elementary particles in the form of primordial plasma, which quickly morphed into atoms of hydrogen, helium, and lithium; a hundred million years later, galaxies began to appear, and in one of these, the Milky Way, minerals arranged themselves into living cells that constructed advanced life, including evergreen trees, coral reefs, and the vertebrate nervous systems that humans used to discover this entire sequence of universe development.
”
”
Brian Thomas Swimme (Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe)
“
Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.
”
”
Kate Braverman (Lithium for Medea)
“
But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
“
Soranus of Ephesus (AD 98–138) seems to have discovered lithium as a cure for manic depression by recommending that severely disturbed patients be treated with the alkaline waters of the town, which contained high levels of lithium salts. A more radical approach consisted of a pioneering form of electric shock treatment: the Greeks used the ‘electric torpedo’, or eels, as a cure for headaches, believing that ‘the touch of a living torpedo stupefied or blunted the acute sense of pain’. An oil was prepared from the dead fish for use when no live ones were available.
”
”
Catharine Arnold (Bedlam: London and Its Mad)
“
As his psychotherapist for years, I had been privy to his dreams and fears, hopeful and then ruined relationships, grandiose and then shattered plans for the future. I had seen his remarkable resilience, personal courage, and wit; I liked and respected him enormously. But I also had been increasingly frustrated by his repeated refusals to take medication. I could, from my own experience, understand his concerns about taking lithium, but only up to a point; past that point, I was finding it very difficult to watch him go through such predictable, painful, and unnecessary recurrences of his illness.
”
”
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
“
Something like that,” I said. “One of my mom’s boyfriends did yoga, and, god, it was so stupid-looking and irritating because we all had to be quiet while he did it, but he was the calmest motherfucker I’ve ever met in my life. Nothing my mom did would even faze him for a second. She ended up leaving him because he was too calm. She said—” “That’s fine, Lillian,” Carl said, cutting me off. “Anyway, we do yoga every morning. We teach them, I don’t know, like a mantra or something so they can calm themselves down.” “Why not just give them a ton of medication, lithium or something? Keep them at an enforced level?
”
”
Kevin Wilson (Nothing to See Here)
“
Once I started seeing the college clinic psychiatrist, he pulled out my blood and showed me what was really in it, glanced at each trace mineral in the lab results, each lurking marker, but his eyes were focused on the good stuff, the chemicals he'd put there. I don't know if I believe in "Indian blood," but at times, I have wished I could test positive for it when the phlebotomist pulled my blood every month, checking to make sure my lithium levels aren't high enough to pickle my kidneys. Instead, the doctor only ever reads off results that sound like the bottom of a deep quarry, as though my body collects stones.
”
”
Elissa Washuta (My Body Is a Book of Rules)
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Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.
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Kate Braverman (Lithium for Medea)
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I’ve always lived here, by the sea. I was a beach brat. I was born riding the peak of a crest of a wave. I was born with salt in my eyes. No, I mean it. I was conceived right down there on that beach. Six years old and surfing. It’s all that sea in me. That’s what makes my eyes change color. I’ve got waves inside. The ocean runs through me, man.
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Kate Braverman (Lithium for Medea: A Novel)
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Moon. Big white moon. White as milk moon. You’re all I can see from my window, here in the dark. Your light falls silver and white across the walls of my cell. The night-tide surges strong in me. So strong I can feel the grip of their drugs loosen. They fancy themselves high priests. Their gods have names like Thorazine and Lithium and Shock Therapy. But their gods are new and weak and cannot hope to contain me much longer. For I am the handiwork of far more powerful, far more ancient deities. Very soon my blood will learn the secret of the inhibiting factors the white-coated shamans pump into my veins. And then things will be very different, my beautiful moon. My white big moon. White as milk moon. Red as blood
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Nancy A. Collins (Sunglasses After Dark (Sonja Blue, #1))
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I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed. Why was I so unwilling? Why did it take having to go through more episodes of mania, followed by long suicidal depressions, before I would take lithium in a medically sensible way? Some of my reluctance, no doubt, stemmed from a fundamental denial that what I had was a real disease. This is a common reaction that follows, rather counter-intuitively, in the wake of early episodes of manic-depressive illness. Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one’s notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
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In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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The neutrons, as we have said and as their name suggests, carry no electrical charge. The protons have a positive charge and the electrons an equal negative charge. The attraction between the unlike charges of electrons and protons is what holds the atom together. Since each atom is electrically neutral, the number of protons in the nucleus must exactly equal the number of electrons in the electron cloud. The chemistry of an atom depends only on the number of electrons, which equals the number of protons, and which is called the atomic number. Chemistry is simply numbers, an idea Pythagoras would have liked. If you are an atom with one proton, you are hydrogen; two, helium; three, lithium; four, beryllium; five, boron; six, carbon; seven, nitrogen; eight, oxygen; and so on, up to 92 protons, in which case your name is uranium.
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Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
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There are only two states of polarization available to electrons, so in an atom with three protons in the nucleus exchanging photons with three electrons-a condition called a lithium atom-the third electron is farther away from the nucleus than the other two (which have used up the nearest available space), and exchanges fewer photons. This causes the electron to easily break away from its own nucleus under the influence of photons from other atoms. A large number of such atoms close together easily lose their individual third electrons to form a sea of electrons swimming around from atom to atom. This sea of electrons reacts to any small electrical force (photons), generating a current of electrons-I am describing lithium metal conducting electricity. Hydrogen and helium atoms do not lose their electrons to other atoms. They are "insulators."
All the atoms-more than one hundred different kinds-are made up of a certain number of protons exchanging photons with the same number of electrons. The patterns in which they gather are complicated and offer an enormous variety of properties: some are metals, some are insulators, some are gases, others are crystals; there are soft things, hard things, colored things, and transparent things-a terrific cornucopia of variety and excitement that comes from the exclusion principle and the repetition again and again and again of the three very simple actions P(A to B), E(A to B), and j. (If the electrons in the world were unpolarized, all the atoms would have very similar properties: the electrons would all cluster together, close to the nucleus of their own atom, and would not be easily attracted to other atoms to make chemical reactions.)
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Richard P. Feynman (QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter)
“
A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be. Most cars—EVs included—are driven during the day. That means they charge at night, when solar-generated electricity cannot be part of the fuel mix.*
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
“
He seems so drugged up and slow. I miss his laughter, his impulsiveness, his wacky sense of humour, even his obsessive practicing. It makes me wonder who he actually is. If the old Flynn was ill – courtesy of a chemical imbalance in the brain – is this lithiumed Flynn the real MyCoy? Or perhaps both characters are just facets of a hidden, deeper soul that I have yet to meet. I just don’t know. Sometimes I fear that the drug-free Flynn searingly manic, then catastrophically depressed – is who he really is. But because in that form he is not acceptable to conventional society, he has to be drugged so that his emotions are tempered and his behavior controlled. Perhaps we are blindly living in an Orwellian society where individualism is feared and the biggest pressure is the one to conform. Perhaps Flynn is sane and the rest of the world is mad. The thoughts go round and round in my head.
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Tabitha Suzuma (A Voice in the Distance (Flynn Laukonen, #2))
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Theta programming, Phillips said, "involved the surgical implantation of sodium/lithium powered high frequency receiver/transducers coupled to a multi-range discharge capacitor that , when signaled by remote control would electronically stimulate designated parts of the brain to signal the victim to respond according to his or her hypnotic program.
"These "Delgado" experiments were only partially successful," Phillips said, "with a high mortality and paralysis rate. However, the technical mind control equipment evolution has advanced to levels well beyond the grasp of most people. Non-implanted, non-programmed victims will hold the largest majority since, in the 1990's breakthroughs were made which allow mind control without either implant or trauma base".
The new Theta programming," Phillips said, "operates by computer driven satellite directed energy. Now, anybody can become a target of the new technology.
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Walter H Bowart (Operation Mind Control (the Complete Edition))
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My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem.
"I want to go home now," I tell my father.
He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says.
Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K."
And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.
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Kate Braverman (Lithium for Medea)
“
The way we define their problems, our diagnosis, will determine how we approach their care. Such patients typically receive five or six different unrelated diagnoses in the course of their psychiatric treatment. If their doctors focus on their mood swings, they will be defined as bipolar and prescribed lithium or valproate. If the professionals are most impressed with their despair, they will be told they are suffering from major depression and given antidepressants. If the doctors focus on their restlessness and lack of attention, they may be categorized as ADHD and treated with Ritalin or other stimulants. And if the clinic staff happens to take a trauma history, and the patient actually volunteers the relevant information, he or she might receive the diagnosis of PTSD. None of the diagnoses will be completely off the mark, and none of them will begin to meaningfully describe who these patients are and what they suffer from.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word "real." But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty, and I don't see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away from me. So unobtainable in so many ways. the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. Even though I was a clinician and a scientist, and even though I could read the research literature and see the inevitable, bleak consequences of not taking lithium, I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed." An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison Pages 90 - 91, 2nd paragraph.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again. The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg.
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Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
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...even though [my psychiatrist] understood mor than anyone how much I felt I was losing--in energy, vivacity, and originality--by taking medication, he never was seduced into losing sight of the overall perspective of how costly, damaging, and life threatening my illness was. He was at ease with ambiguity, had a comfort with complexity, and was able to be decisive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. He treated me with respect, a decisive professionalism, wit, and an unshakable belief in my ability to get well, compete, and make a difference.
Although I went to him to be treated for an illness, he taught me, by example, for my own patients, the total beholdenness of brain to mind and mind to brain. My temperament, moods, and illness clearly, and deeply, affected the relationships I had with others in the fabric of my work. But my moods were themselves powerfully shaped by the same relationships and work. The challenge was learning to understand the complexity of this mutual beholdenness and in learning to distinguish the roles of lithium, will, and insight in getting well and leading a meaningful life. It was the task and gift of psychotherapy.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach....During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony.....
But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
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Let us pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now. Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge. Protons and neutrons are packed into the nucleus, while electrons spin around outside. The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity. An atom with one proton is an atom of hydrogen, one with two protons is helium, with three protons is lithium, and so on up the scale. Each time you add a proton you get a new element. (Because the number of protons in an atom is always balanced by an equal number of electrons, you will sometimes see it written that it is the number of electrons that defines an element; it comes to the same thing. The way it was explained to me is that protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.) Neutrons don't influence an atom's identity, but they do add to its mass. The number of neutrons is generally about the same as the number of protons, but they can vary up and down slightly. Add a neutron or two and you get an isotope. The terms you hear in reference to dating techniques in archeology refer to isotopes—carbon-14, for instance, which is an atom of carbon with six protons and eight neutrons (the fourteen being the sum of the two). Neutrons and protons occupy the atom's nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is tiny—only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom—but fantastically dense, since it contains virtually all the atom's mass. As Cropper has put it, if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly—but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral. It was this spaciousness—this resounding, unexpected roominess—that had Rutherford scratching his head in 1910. It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. “Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.” When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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The weightless rhetoric of digital technology masks a refusal to acknowledge the people and resources on which these systems depend: lithium and coltan mines, energy-guzzling data centers and server farms, suicidal workers at Apple’s Foxconn factories, and women and children in developing countries and incarcerated Americans up to their necks in toxic electronic waste.2 The swelling demand for precious metals, used in everything from video-game consoles to USB cables to batteries, has increased political instability in some regions, led to unsafe, unhealthy, and inhumane working conditions, opened up new markets for child and forced labor, and encouraged environmentally destructive extraction techniques.3 It is estimated that mining the gold necessary to produce a single cell phone—only one mineral of many required for the finished product—produces upward of 220 pounds of waste.4
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Astra Taylor (The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age)
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I’m concerned that the doctor wants to force me to take lithium. I told him that if lithium was something that came in an over-the-counter multivitamin, I’d be glad to take it. Since I refused to take it, they forced me to come to court. I’ve never taken any drugs in my life except antibiotics. I feel like lithium is being forced on me.
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Ken Dickson (Detour from Normal)
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Researchers, for instance, have measured the amount of naturally occurring lithium in tap water in twenty-seven counties in Texas and found a negative association between lithium levels in the water and suicide rates, meaning the higher the level of lithium in the water, the lower the suicide rate. Similar studies have been carried out elsewhere, such as in Japan, where researchers studied the tap water of eighteen municipalities of the Ōita Prefecture and noted that even very low levels of lithium in the water supply may be protective against suicide, and, by extension, against depression as well. Until 1948, the popular soft drink 7Up contained lithium citrate, a little boost contained in a can.
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Lauren Slater (Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds)
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reveals the extent to which psychiatry is tightly tied to capitalistic corporate interests, how closely allied the field is with the major pharmaceutical houses, where millions, even billions, of dollars are made in mere months. This is why, although lithium had worked so well for so many people, drug developers set about discovering new mood stabilizers that had patent and profit possibilities, whipping up in their high-tech cauldrons scores of new pharmaceuticals to treat bipolar disorder or, better yet, converting already existing medications—drugs, say, for epilepsy—into treatments.
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Lauren Slater (Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds)
“
I thought the submarine environment would be a useful analogy for the space station in a number of ways, and I especially wanted my colleagues to get an up-close look at how the Navy deals with CO2. What we learned on that trip was illuminating: the Navy has their submarines turn on their air scrubbers when the CO2 concentration rises above two millimeters of mercury, even though the scrubbers are noisy and risk giving away the submarine’s location. By comparison, the international agreement on ISS says the CO2 is acceptable up to six millimeters of mercury! The submarine’s chief engineering officer explained to us that the symptoms of high CO2 posed a threat to their work, so keeping that level low was a priority. I felt that NASA should be thinking of it the same way. When I prepared for my first flight on the ISS, I got acquainted with a new carbon dioxide removal system. The lithium hydroxide cartridges were foolproof and reliable, but that system depended on cartridges that were to be thrown away after use—not very practical, since hundreds of cartridges would be required to get through a single six-month mission. So instead we now have a device called the carbon dioxide removal assembly, or CDRA, pronounced “seedra,” and it has become the bane of my existence. There are two of them—one in the U.S. lab and one in Node 3. Each weighs about five hundred pounds and looks something like a car engine. Covered in greenish brown insulation, the Seedra is a collection of electronic boxes, sensors, heaters, valves, fans, and absorbent beds. The absorbent beds use a zeolite crystal to separate the CO2 from the air, after which the lab Seedra dumps the CO2 out into space through a vacuum valve, while the Node 3 Seedra combines oxygen drawn from the CO2 with leftover hydrogen from our oxygen-generating system in a device called Sabatier. The result is water—which we drink—and methane, which is also vented overboard.
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Scott Kelly (Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery)
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In the early twentieth century, for instance, opiates were widely used for all sorts of ills, even sold in syrup to calm colicky babies. Lithium baths prospered—vats of cool bubbling water said to soothe the troubled soul. Extract of conium, either on its own or coupled with iron, quinine, or Fowler’s solution, was used to treat depression, as was the plant extract nux vomica. Hyoscyamus, from the passionflower, was used to diminish sleeplessness or extreme excitement. There were tinctures of veratrine and belladonna and stimulants such as ammonia, lytta, and all kinds of aromatics in small amber jars you held just below the nostrils, sniffing in comforting drafts of lavender, rosemary, or cinnamon. So prevalent were and are attempts at biological cures, and so available for such a great span of time, that nonphysical therapies, such as psychoanalysis and other “talking cures,” are in fact the real oddity, a brief blip in what has otherwise been a mostly somatic approach to the treatment of human suffering in all its manifestations.
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Lauren Slater (Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds)
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it was the tzero that ultimately caught their imagination, like it did for Musk. Eberhard, who was growing increasingly worried about global warming, saw potential for commercialization and a chance to show that gasoline wasn’t the only answer for motor vehicles. At the same time, he and Tarpenning had noticed that lithium-ion batteries had been improving at a rapid rate and were getting cheaper, thanks largely to their use in laptop computers. The auto industry, too, no longer seemed as impenetrable as it once was. Since the 1990s, automakers had been outsourcing many aspects of vehicle production, including the sourcing of components and in some cases even assembly. The men figured it would be possible for a start-up to design and build at least a prototype, with the hope of later raising more money to advance their ambitions. If things went well, a low-volume electric sports car with kick-ass acceleration might
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
The average efficiency of an internal combustion engine in converting fuel into a car’s forward energy ranges from about 14 to 30 percent. For the electric car, it’s about 90 percent. But the real difficulty for anyone arguing the case for gasoline cars is found in the economics. We are fast approaching a time when gasoline cars will no longer be able to compete with electric cars on price. To date, the number one factor holding Tesla back from offering cheaper cars has been the energy cost per unit of its lithium-ion battery packs, which is why it started by selling only high-end vehicles in which the cost of the battery could be absorbed by the premium price point. Tesla has never revealed exactly how much of its cars’ costs can be attributed to the battery pack, but in 2013, chief technology officer JB Straubel told the MIT Technology Review that it accounts for less than a quarter of the cost of each vehicle—which for the eighty-five kilowatt-hour Model S, at that time, would have put the battery pack somewhere in the $18,000 to $25,000 range (assuming Straubel was factoring feature-rich versions of the car into his calculations). That would have put the cost per kilowatt-hour of the battery pack at anywhere between $210 and $300.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
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battery prices will fall to $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2023 just by following the 16 percent per year cost improvement that the world saw between 2010 and 2016. And that’s probably a conservative estimate. GM has predicted that its lithium-ion cell costs will hit $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2021. Keep in mind that these cost reductions require no breakthrough in battery technology, and they don’t take into account improvements likely to arise from increased competition, consolidation, scale, and innovation as automakers and utilities push further into the market. The effect will be dramatic.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
By 1900, electric delivery wagons, trucks, buses, ambulances, and taxis were roaming city streets across the country.
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Seth Fletcher (Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy)
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The other major domain of cultural learning is food. Animals learn from each other what to eat, and what not. Parent crows that fly daily with their offspring to the local garbage dump to look for tasty morsels instill in them a life-long preference for such sites, whereas the crow family that survives on natural foods will have offspring that carry on the same tradition when they get older. Food aversion is similarly transmitted. This was first noticed by a German rodent-control officer who set out poisoned bait, killing wild rats in large numbers. After a while, however, the remaining rats began to avoid the bait, and their offspring would do the same. Without any direct experience with the bait, young rats would eat only safe foods.
An experimental psychologist, Bennett Galef, tested this in his laboratory by feeding rats two diets of different texture, taste, and smell. He then laced one of the diets with lithium chloride, which makes rats sick. This procedure led the animals to avoid the contaminated diet. The question now was how the rats' offspring would react after removal of the contamination. Both diets were again perfectly okay to eat, but adults fed exclusively on only one diet due to their bad experience with the other. It turned out that the pups acted like their parents. Of 240 pups given a choice of both diets, only one ate any of the food that adults in its colony had learned to avoid.
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Frans de Waal (The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist)
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one of the dirty little secrets of the green revolution is that it requires some very grubby mineral extraction. Rare earth metals, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals are essential to batteries, magnets, and other advanced industrial applications. If the future of tech is green, it’s also red.
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Scott Galloway (Adrift: America in 100 Charts)
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A true shift to a carbon-neutral power system would require the capacity to camel not hours, but months of electricity for the seasons that are not as windy or sunny. We don’t know everything about the world of energy, but we know for certain that there is not enough lithium ore on the entire planet to enable a rich country like the United States to achieve such a goal, much less the world writ large.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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The Keeling Curve is a useful reality check, one that cuts through all the noise and confusion of the climate and energy debates. Unlike the slopes of the huge volcano on which it is measured, the initially gentle upward curve gets steeper the higher you go. That means that the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, from roughly 1 ppm in the early years to about 2 ppm annually today. There is no visible slowdown, no sudden downwards blip, to mark the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, still less 2009’s Copenhagen ‘two degrees’ commitment or the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. All those smiling heads of state shaking hands, the diplomats hugging on the podium after marathon sessions of all-night negotiating – none of that actually made any identifiable difference to the Keeling Curve, which is the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature. All our solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries, LED lightbulbs, nuclear plants, biogas digesters, press conferences, declarations, pieces of paper; all our shouting and arguing, weeping and marching, reporting and ignoring, decrying and denying; all our speeches, movies, websites, lectures and books; our announcements, carbon-neutral targets, moments of joy and despair; none of these to date have so much as made the slightest dent in the steepening upward slope of the Keeling Curve.
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Mark Lynas (Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency)
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Lithium ion anodes have been developed that use lithiated carbons to temper the reactivity of lithium metal
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Kirby W. Beard (Linden's Handbook of Batteries)
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When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)