156: Immortality on the Neck of a Giraffe
This is the members only edition of Future Crunch, a weekly roundup of good news, mindblowing science, and the best bits of the internet (not necessarily in that order). One third of your subscription fee goes to charity.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
Cancer mortality rates in the United States have dropped by a third since the 90s due to 'major progress' in early detection and treatment for lung cancer. Lung cancer mortality decreased by 5% each year between 2015 and 2019 and is attributed to annual screenings and smoking prevention programs. CNN
I'm an oncologist, so I'm an inveterate optimist. But I think the key message for the public is that there's room for optimism across all types of cancer.
Dr. Deb Schrag, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre
Last weekend, Uganda conducted a door to door vaccination program to immunise eight million children against polio - in just three days. Uganda has achieved incredible results in childhood health over the past 20 years, with the mortality rate for under fives dropping by more than half. East African
A ground-breaking change to health regulations in Canada will allow patients suffering from serious mental health illnesses to access psychedelic therapies, including psilocybin and MDMA. The amendment represents a 'seismic shift' towards the legalization of psychedelics, which can be effective in treating PTSD and depression. Calgary Herald
Fatal police shootings in America dropped by 13% between 2020 and 2021, reaching the lowest annual number on record. Biggest drop? Florida. Increased public accountability and initiatives replacing armed officers with healthcare and social workers for mental-health related 911 calls contributed to the decline. ABC
The Kenyan government has made a historic commitment to the rights of women and girls, vowing to end gender-based violence by 2026. $23 million has been allocated to prevention and response services, research, and the establishment of a survivors’ fund. The achievement comes after decades of tireless advocacy. Gates Foundation
Landmark legislation in the Philippines has banned child marriage, constituting the practice as child abuse. This is a big, big moment for the country with one of the world's highest rates of child marriage. Bravo to the activists who made this happen. SCMP
Technology, education, and community efforts have helped Bangladesh reduce cyclone-related deaths more than 100-fold since 1970. The country’s multi-layered approach is leading the way for other developing countries to better manage the risks of climate disasters. New Humanitarian
Our parents did not learn about disasters when they were young, but we do. Climate change will bring bigger disasters in the future, but we know we can prepare for them. We are not afraid.
Purnima Sadhu, 16-year-old student in Bangladesh
The only home we've ever known
Ecuador has expanded its protected waters by 60,000 km2, building upon the existing Galapagos Marine Reserve, which already protects 138,000 km2 of ocean from extractive activities. Together, Costa Rica and Ecuador have now connected some of our ocean's most important migration pathways, and two of its most biologically significant and productive habitats. DW
These islands teach us something about ourselves.
What if we didn't set ourselves up as masters over this Earth, but as its protectors?
Guillermo Lasso, President of Ecuador
Over a thousand fin whales were seen swimming last week in the seas off Antarctica, the same ocean they were driven to near-extinction last century. Conor Ryan, the @whale_nerd that spotted them, said that in 20 years at sea he's never seen anything like it. “Words fail me. I've seen maybe 100 fins here before in previous years."
A new National Estuarine Research Reserve will be established in Connecticut, spanning 211 km2 along the south-eastern coast. The project will protect coastal forests, grasslands, marshes, beaches, and seagrass meadows, including 36% of the critically important Long Island Sound eelgrass ecosystem. The Day
A new survey in India has found forest and tree cover has increased by 2,261 km2 since 2019, and now covers almost a quarter of the geographical area of the country. While the government will continue conservation efforts, its focus will also turn to enriching the quality of these existing areas. Live Mint
For the first time this century, Beijing’s air quality met China’s national standards in 2021. The biggest achievement was the reduction of PM2.5, the most dangerous pollutant, which fell 13% last year, with levels down to a third of what they were a decade ago. CREA
Organisations in New York that throw out more than two tonnes of food each week will be required to donate or compost the waste under new legislation. The law will help the 2.2 million people struggling with food insecurity and cut emissions from the millions of tonnes of food waste produced each year. Eco Watch
Giraffe populations across Africa have rebounded by 20% since 2015. Targeted conservation measures, relocation programs and field research have contributed to the rise. Scientists also recently uncovered genetic evidence that there may be four species of giraffe rather than one, three of which have considerably increased in population. NatGeo
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
Slovenia says it will stop using coal for generating electricity by 2033, one of the last EU countries to announce a coal phaseout, South East Asia’s largest coal miner just announced it's divesting its entire coal business, and India's richest person is investing $80 billion in clean energy in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Wind became the main source of electricity generation in Spain last year, registering 23% of total production. Overall, renewables produced 46% of the country's electricity in 2021, an increase of almost 10% compared to 2020 (a decade ago, renewables' share was less than 15%). Windpower Monthly
Good news here down under. Australian homes and businesses installed just over 3GW of rooftop solar in 2021, a new annual record. There's now about 17GW of solar on the country's roofs, not because Australians think it's the right thing to do, but because they think it's the cheaper thing to do. Oh, and the state of South Australia just ran for one week on wind and sunshine alone.
Better move those goalposts, baseload’ologists.
Scotland has just finished leasing a mind-boggling 25GW of offshore wind. Even more amazing, almost 60% will be floating turbines, the first time this technology will be deployed commercially at scale. That has huge global significance; it means that offshore wind can be built in places with deeper coastlines, like Japan and Taiwan. FT
The diesel death march is picking up pace. Sales of EVs in Europe overtook diesel models for the first time ever in December. That's a big milestone! More than a fifth of new cars sold across 18 European markets, including the UK, were powered exclusively by batteries, while diesel, once the most popular engine option, accounted for less than 19% of sales. FT
(also, the all-electric Porsche Taycan is now outselling the 911).
For a view of where things are heading, Norway's experience is instructive. Only 8% of new cars sold there last year ran purely on gasoline or diesel, while two thirds were electric, and most of the rest were hybrids. The view of Norwegians as environmental diehards is wrong too - they started with exactly the same EV skepticism we're seeing in other parts of the world right now. NYT
BP says its fast electric vehicle chargers are on the cusp of becoming more profitable than filling up a petrol car. "If we compare a tank of fuel versus a fast charge, we are nearing a place where the business fundamentals on the fast charge are better than they are on the fuel." Reuters
Indistinguishable from magic
Chinese researchers have developed the world’s first lightweight, flexible body armour capable of protecting soldiers from tank-piercing weapons. Inspired by the shape of fish scales, and built out of silicon carbide, the armour can stop 7.62mm bullets fired at point-blank from penetrating its composite materials (nothing new under the sun?) SCMP
Dutch engineers have invented a super sensitive infra-red sensor that's cheap and easy to make, small enough to fit in a smartphone, and ready for immediate use in industrial monitoring and agriculture. The sensor is capable of analysing, for example, the nutritional content of milk or classifying different kinds of plastics. Sci Tech Daily
In news that should strike fear into the hearts of Tesla fanboys around the world, German engineers are starting to get serious about electric motors. BMW's fifth generation EV engine doesn't require any rare earth metals or magnets, allowing for higher RPM, more torque, and even more power. Motor Trend
Scientists at Stanford have developed an ultra-rapid genome sequencing technique that allows them to diagnose rare genetic diseases in an average of eight hours — a feat unheard of in standard clinical care. They now plan to offer sub-ten hour turnarounds to ICU patients at Stanford Hospital and the Children’s Hospital and, eventually, to other hospitals around the world.
Biogeochemists (yes, that's a thing) from the Max-Planck-Institute in Germany have used data from satellites and hundreds of carbon-monitoring stations worldwide to create an animation of the Earth 'breathing' as carbon is taken up and released as the seasons change. Hard to look at this and not think of James Lovelock.
Off the beaten track on the information highway
Don't know if Harpers has recently had a change of editorial leadership or something, but whatever they're doing it's working. Jessica Camille Aguirre's account of her time spent in a biosphere in Arizona with an eccentric inventor is fantastic, and should be required reading for anyone with dreams of living on another planet (soft paywall).
William H Janeway, author of the indespensible Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, has a timely op-ed in Project Syndicate. He warns that years of low interest rates and high liquidity have cemented the idea of 'capital as strategy.' The problem, of course, is that capital is not a strategy; rather, it's a resource whose supply and cost are highly variable historically.
Really enjoying Rachael Maddux's newsletter, Vanitas, "about life, death and other dumb stuff." Quite personal, and very writerly, so stay away if that's not your thing.
There's grumpy old men... and then there's grumpy old men. Charlie Stross belongs firmly in the latter category, but we're willingly to forgive him because he's unfailingly smart and entertaining. Here's his latest tirade against the forces of darkness. "It is now early 2022 and I clearly wasn't pessimistic enough." Antipope
Sci-fi demigod Neal Stephenson grants a rare interview to the NYT, in which he touches on storytelling, climate fiction, the Enlightenment, geoengineering, and what just might be the best ever explanation for why dystopias are so much more prevalent in popular culture than utopias.
Nice intro here to the work of Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian political theorist and one of Africa’s leading public intellectuals. His area of interest is planetary politics, and what sets him apart in this field is his ability to draw on the animist metaphysics of precolonial Africa, with its emphasis on 'the precariousness of life.' Neoma
Humankind
Mr Borboroglu’s Penguins
Meet Pablo Garcia Borboroglu, a 52-year old biologist in Patagonia who has dedicated his life to studying and protecting the world’s penguin populations. His global conservation effort has saved over 1.6 million penguins and created 32 million acres of protected ocean and coastal habitat.
Pablo’s passion for penguins was inspired by his grandmother. As a young boy Pablo was captivated by her bedtime stories about travelling by horse and cart in the 1920s across Argentina to the Atlantic coast to see the penguin colonies. Pablo chose to study law at university and pursue a career as an ambassador, but never forgot his grandmother’s stories.
In the late 1980s, Pablo took a sabbatical from his studies to join volunteers in southern Argentina who were saving penguins from oil spills that were killing 40,000 birds a year. Although Pablo helped save thousands of birds, washing each one with soap and water, he knew a bigger change was needed. “When I released the first one back into the wild, it clicked – I realized that one individual action can have a big impact, so I started to scale up.”
By raising public awareness around the issue, Pablo forced the Argentinian government to create new tanker routes and prompted oil companies to change their practices. Pablo returned to university to earn a PhD. in biology and spent the next three decades researching penguins and working with governments around the world to make informed decisions about conservation.
In 2009, Pablo established the Global Penguin Society with a mission to protect the 18 different species of penguins through scientific research, the management of habitats and public education. The organisation has established numerous protected areas to safeguard nesting and feeding areas and has involved more than 7,000 children in education programs because Pablo believes “change begins with them.”
“The only way to be healthy is to be connected to wildlife. When we benefit penguins, we benefit the oceans, and we also benefit people.”
We are all done! Thanks for indulging us with the giraffes, this entire edition was basically an excuse to work in one of our favourite quotes of all time.
Keep an eye out next week for the announcement of a new charity partner, plus some updates about previous donations. As always, we are so grateful for your attention, and your support.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC crew