> We never wanted to take credit for something as amazing as that,” Capaldi said on Sunday as the Nubian Jak Community Trust, an organization in England known for recognizing Black history, unveiled the very first of its famous Blue Plaques in the United States at the church.

I think there might have been a lost in "translation" moment here. Blue plaques are famous/well-known in the UK. However, they were not created by Nubian Jak Community Trust. They were first created about 150 years ago. The official scheme is now administered by the charity English Heritage. Today, plenty of other organizations can and do place their own blue plaques.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_plaque

Plenty of reasons this is not a good idea.

There are no where near enough rapists and pedophiles to conduct enough clinical studies on. The US prison population is 2.3 million, of which a small fraction will be convicted rapists or pedophiles. By contrast, 111 million mice and rats are killed in US laboratories every year. So before long you'd get pressure to expand which prisoners can experimented upon and then which crimes result in a custodial sentence.

Second, for many drug trials you need to inflict a condition to see how the drug effects that condition. That is, every year loads of mice are given cancer to see if a drug is effective at treating that cancer. Not that many rapists in jail with lung cancer.

Thirdly, when testing drugs you need to properly test on a representative sample of the population. Otherwise you get skewed results. This is already a problem for women, especially pregnant women. Very little testing has done on them, so out knowledge of how drugs effect women is much more limited and can often lead to adverse health outcomes for women. Using prisoners, who are mostly male, would only exacerbate this problem.

Overall it's a terrible idea that is focused primarily on punishment of prisoners, not on rigorous clinical trials and good science.

You said it yourself. This 2.2 million is a tiny part of the Ugandan budget. And that the Ugandan economy is growing quickly. I think they can afford to spend a small amount on science and technology. Especially as it will help to drive education and economic growth, which leads to more tax receipts, which in turn can lead to more spending on key infrastructure (like sanitation).

Developed countries have their own problems with health, education and poverty. It'd be hypocritical not to suggest that they could ill afford to spend money on science and technology too.

One in six people in the US received food assistance from the charitable food sector in 2021. Maybe the USA can't afford to spend $25 billion on NASA?

Nitrogen gas really likes being a gas. You have to put a lot of energy into breaking it apart. Like lightning strike levels of energy. Indeed lightning strikes are responsible for turning a significant amount of nitrogen into ammonia. But, lightning is not the main source of usable nitrogen. Aside from human production of ammonia for fertilizer, bacteria are main fixers of nitrogen.

There are a family of enzymes (Nitrogenase) that can be used to reduce the amount of energy required to turn nitrogen gas into something useable by plants. However, this enzyme breaks down in the presence of oxygen. Unlike nitrogen, oxygen gas isn't particularly happy being a gas all itself and will react with nitrogen compounds quite readily (fertilizer is known for being explosive, and the N in TNT stands for nitrogen). Plants are heavily involved with oxygen, either producing it during the day or consuming it at night. If plants tried to produce this enzyme for themselves it would rapidly break down in the presence of the oxygen being produced by photosynthesis.

As such, nitrogen fixation is left to the bacterial specialists.

So it's like an arrabiata, but with added vodka and cream? How would you compare the two?