161: Moon Trees

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Good news you probably didn't hear about

The surly drums of war are beating loudly in Eastern Europe, and the world's media is focused intensely on events in Russia and Ukraine, a vivid reminder of the darker side of human nature. It's a scary moment, representing the possible dissolution of the post-war order and with it, perhaps the end of the 77 year Long Peace. Coming off the back of a two year global pandemic, and amidst rising economic inequality and an ever-worsening climate crisis, the future feels more uncertain than ever.

We thought this might be a good time then, to remind you of our better angels. Specifically, an angle to the COVID-19 story that remains glaringly absent from our screens. In the 25 months since scientists first shared news of the virus over half the world’s population has been fully vaccinated. We've given out 10.6 billion shots so far, and just crossed the point at which supply to developing countries started oustripping demand. In other words, we've now got all the available supply we need for all the countries in the world.

Tragically we've lost millions during this pandemic, but we've saved millions too thanks to those vaccines, which are a freaking miracle. Medical science has been changed forever; the research invested into combatting the virus has already ushered in significant progress with other diseases. Studies into long Covid are now shining a light into previously neglected areas like blood-clotting and chronic fatigue syndrome, scientists are looking at how Covid treatments can help dengue, Zika and Ebola, and have their sights set on using mRNA technology to treat HIV, skin, breast and colon cancer, and ultimately end malaria.

This is just one of the many stories out there that isn't about Vladimir Putin, if you're willing to look. There are others. For example:

Colombia has decriminalized abortion procedures up to 24 weeks of gestation. The progress is thanks to the feminist 'green wave' sweeping Latin America with pro-choice advocates sporting green bandanas. Abortion was recently decriminalized in Argentina and Mexico, and Ecuador has decriminalized the procedure in cases of rape. Al Jazeera

Japan’s ten year cancer survival rate has increased to 58.9%. This is a disease that was once said to be incurable, but the survival rate has steadily increased alongside medical advances. Prostate cancer in Japan now has the highest survival rate at 99.2%, followed by female breast cancer at 87.5%, colorectal cancer at 69.7% and stomach cancer at 67.3%. Nippon

More good news from Japan, with crime hitting a new post-war low for the seventh consecutive year. The number of criminal offenses peaked in 2002 at 2.85 million, but have steadily declined since. In 2021, 568,148 offences were recorded. Nippon

A landmark ruling for human rights in the Middle East, with a court in Kuwait overturning legislation used to prosecute transgender people. The 2007 law, allowed authorities to arrest people whose appearance did not match the gender on their ID card. It's a rare advance in a region where being gay or transgender, if not expressly against the law, is usually treated as such. Irish Times

Israel and India have taken their first formal steps towards outlawing conversion therapy, banning medical professionals from providing the therapy. Doctors now face severe disciplinary action including potential revocation of their license.

The only home we've ever known *

Without much fuss and even less public attention, America is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar shift to cage-free eggs in response to new laws and demands from restaurants. Cage-free housing has soared from 4% in 2010 to 28% in 2020, and is expected to reach 70% by 2025. The change marks one of the animal welfare movement’s biggest successes after years of battles with the food industry. AP

The Tequila fish has successfully been reintroduced the into the wild in Mexico, 18 years after it was declared extinct. In 1998, five pairs of fish were sent from a UK zoo to Michoacana University, where the population was protected and expanded. 1,500 fish were recently released into the river in Jalisco and the local community are playing a key role in monitoring the progress. BBC

Conservationists and ranchers in America are turning to an unusually hairy solution to restore the country’s lost prairie: bison! Prairies co-evolved with bison - the ecosystem depends on their grazing disturbance. In 1993, the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma reintroduced bison and today it’s the largest protected piece of tallgrass prairie on earth, spanning 39,650 acres. PBS Terra

The global bike boom is ramping up with families from Barcelona to San Francisco forming bike-trains to get kids to school safely - adult chaperones (sometimes dressed in superhero costumes) riding along a predetermined route, picking up kids along the way. Within the next 15 years, Milan will boast one of the most comprehensive bike lanes networks in Europe with 750km of bike paths connecting 80% of residences and essential services, and Berlin’s city centre could soon become the world’s largest car-free urban area under proposals being considered by the city government, after three friends in a bar hatched a radical idea that was signed by 50,000 citizens, calling for a blanket ban on privately-owned cars.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic just received seed donations from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany, and Lebanon. The vault is located halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and holds over 1.1 million seeds from nearly 6,000 plant species. It was created in 2008 to preserve the diversity of the world’s crops from war, disease, and environmental threats.

Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it

Power companies in the United States have shut down 71 GW worth of coal plants since 2015, and a further 84 GW are scheduled for closure by the end of 2028. The bloodbath is thanks to falling renewables costs, and the EPA's Effluent Limitation Guidelines, which regulate coal ash and toxic metals to protect drinking water supplies. S&P Global

Nordea, the biggest bank in the Nordic region, has announced it will cease all lending to offshore oil and gas (it currently has a €1 billion portfolio of assets in the sector). The bank also says it expects to devote more of its financing to the energy transition, with a fourfold increase in lending between now and 2025. Nordea

British bank Natwest cut lending to oil and gas clients by 21% last year, and just announced it will ditch coal companies that don’t have credible decarbonisation plans. French insurer CNP Assurances will no longer finance new oil and gas, and Dutch pension fund PFZW will disinvest from any fossil fuel company that doesn't have a 'convincing and verifiable' strategy to meet the Paris agreement.

The United States electricity sector has passed a massive milestone in the energy transition: the amount of gas used for power generation has likely peaked and begun a long-term decline. It's a critical turning point. The days of gas growing and gaining market share are over, and the beginning of a long, structural decline is now underway. IEEFA

The flipside is the gold rush into clean energy. As we put the finishing touches on this newsletter, the biggest auction of offshore wind leases in US history was still going strong after 21 rounds, with 13 companies still competing, some $1.5 billion in high bids and a per-acre price that's already reached $3,144 - more than triple the previous record ($1,043). Bloomberg

Seriously, gold rush. Australia now boasts a pipeline of $830 billion of renewable projects, encompassing onshore and offshore wind, solar, hydrogen and storage. Nearly 1,300 projects have been put forward by around 600 companies amounting to ~400 GW of new capacity, more than enough to supply the country's power needs several times over. RE

Or maybe a new oil rush? Texas now has 106 GW of solar in its proposed pipeline. The motivation is clear: the Lone Star state boasts the fastest growth in power demand in the US, cheap land and abundant sunshine. “No one is sitting around saying ‘Are new solar additions going to slow down or collapse?' The only question seems to be ‘How high is this going to go?'" Bloomberg

The US government has launched a $9.5 billion investment program to reduce industrial emissions. The plan, funded by last year's bipartisan infrastructure law, will establish green hydrogen hubs across the country, procure low-carbon materials for federal construction projects, and establish carbon trading policies to reward clean American industrial materials. White House

Moar hydrogen. A new project has been announced in Spain that will use 9.5GW of solar energy to supply 7.4GW of green hydrogen to supply steelmaker ArcelorMittal and fertiliser producer Fertiberia. “We bring a historic message to all energy users: green hydrogen is now a full-fledged commodity, able to compete with coal, oil and natural gas in both costs and volumes." Recharge

See if this story sounds familiar: a few years ago, experts were skeptical that heavy vehicles could ever be electrified. Now, a detailed new study has found that transit and school buses, shuttle and delivery vehicles and garbage trucks will be cheaper than their diesel alternatives by 2027 (that's five years away). EDF

Wind turbines generated almost half of the UK's electricity at one point last Friday, as gale force winds from Storm Eunice swept through the country. At 5:30am turbines were meeting 48.5% of electricity needs, and over the course of the day wind contributed around 39% to the overall energy mix.

Indistinguishable from magic

A whole lot of mind-blowing astronomy news this week. In no particular order: the largest and most accurate simulation of the universe ever created, the discovery of the first ever rogue black hole, a 5 megaparsec galaxy (so large it will 'break your brain') and a map of the Milky Way's dramatic history of violence.

DeepMind’s streak of applying AI to hard science continues. Their deep reinforcement learning algorithm has been trained to adjust magnetic fields inside a tokamak, controlling the superheated soup of matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor, and the company has also collaborated with mathematicians to bridge two areas of knot theory long thought to be related.

A new system for flapping robot wings called electromechanical zipping has been developed by engineers in Bristol, a technique inspired by bees and other flying insects that does away with motors and gears. The 'liquid-amplified zipping actuators' provide more power than insect muscle of the same weight, and can fly a robot across a room at 18 body lengths per second. Inside Unmanned Systems

Hello to a new scientific field. Soil bioacoustics is the practice of listening to underground sounds to reveal what life forms reside below our feet, and how they eat or hunt, how they slither past each other unnoticed, or drum, tap and sing to get one another’s attention. "Life underground is a black box. As we open it, we realize how little we know.” Knowable

A team of doctors at UCLA have cured the third person ever, and the first woman, of HIV, using a new transplant method involving umbilical cord blood. Why does this matter? Because cord blood is more available than the stem cells used in the bone marrow transplants that cured the previous two patients, and does not need to be matched as closely to the recipient. NYT

The first-ever gene therapy for Tay-Sachs disease has been successfully given to two babies. The first child received the treatment at the age of 2 ½ and today, aged 5, is healthy and seizure-free. A second child treated at 7 months remains seizure-free today at the age of 2. To put this into context, here's a description of Tay-Sachs by one of its discoverers, neurologist Bernard Sachs, in 1887:

An absolutely horrifying disease, that's been with us for centuries, and for which we've never had a cure. Until now.

Thanks science.

Information superhighway

Ever heard of the Moon Trees? In 1971 Stuart Roosa, one of the Apollo 14 astronauts, took a small bag of tree seeds with him on a journey round the moon. A few years later, some of the seeds — sycamores, redwoods, pines, firs, and sweetgums — were planted across the United States, to see how they would grow. At least 100 are still alive today. TreeHugger

What an amazing essay by Devin Kelly. On the surface, it's about a unique endurance event, a 3,100 mile running race around a single city block in Queens. Underneath, it's so much more, a tribute to the joy of the struggle, the distinction between attention and information and how gentleness, grace and care can be found in the most unlikely of places. Longreads

Ever been distracted in a virtual meeting and started shopping online? Or frantically tried to fix the webcam for your child's online class while on the phone with a client? This one's for you. If you’re one of the millions who’s ridden out the pandemic working remotely, you’ll know the feeling of The Great Smushing: the accelerated erosion of the work/home/leisure boundaries in our lives.

Emma Thompson (yes, that Emma Thompson) with a simple and beautiful meditation on what it's like when three generations of women are together. "We are constantly exchanging ever-altering resonances, and balance occurs. Instead of grieving my mother’s ageing, instead of envying my daughter’s youth, I find I am buoyed up and calmed down by turn."

Time to get your reapolitik on. This op-ed in Foreign Affairs argues that Xi’s growing alignment with Moscow presents a catch-22 for China. As it competes with the West over global order, Russia becomes a more attractive security partner. But by elevating the relationship with Russia - and doing so in the middle of a Putin-provoked crisis - Beijing is inviting pushback it can't afford.

Genevieve Bell is in excellent form here on the Metaverse. What sets this apart from a million other articles on the same subject is her curiousity about the historical roots of the idea, which go way beyond Snow Crash, and into the long and complicated human practice of inventing worlds. MIT Tech Review

RIP Paul Farmer, one of the best human beings to grace the planet in our lifetimes. “There are so many people that are alive today because of that man.” NYT

Humankind

The Man with the Golden Arm

Meet James Harrison, an 85 year old retired railway administrator from New South Wales, Australia who donated blood for six decades and saved 2.4 million babies.

In 1951, 14-year-old James underwent major chest surgery and received a transfusion of 13 units of blood. During his three month hospital stay, James’ father reminded him that he owed his life to the anonymous donors and although James was too young to give blood at the time, he vowed to become a donor. True to his word, two days after his 18th birthday James made his first blood donation and continued donating over the next decade, even though he hated needles.

Around the same time, thousands of Australian babies were dying each year from haemolytic disease of the newborn, or HDN, a condition caused by a blood incompatibility between the mother and foetus. Thanks to a breakthrough in the mid 1960s, doctors realised they could prevent HDN by injecting a pregnant woman with a rare antibody from donated plasma. When researchers scoured the blood banks only one name was a match: James Harrison.

A regular donor by this point, James didn’t hesitate when scientists reached out to him. His plasma was used to develop an injection called Anti-D and in 1967 the first dose was given to a pregnant woman. Over six decades James’ blood created millions of Anti-D injections and it’s estimated he saved 2.4 million babies across the country, including two of his grandchildren. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why James’ body produced the rare antibody, but they believe it’s because of the blood transfusions he received as a teenager.

James made his final trip to the donation centre in 2018, at 81 years old. He’d given 500-800ml of plasma almost weekly, with only 10 donations from his left arm and 1,162 from his right “golden arm.” Even at his last round, he averted his eyes when the needle was inserted into his arm. Although every ampul of Anti-D ever made in Australia has James in it, he doesn’t consider his contribution anything out of the ordinary.

"Some people say 'Oh, you're a hero.’ But I was in a safe room, donating blood. They gave me a cup of coffee and something to nibble on and then I just went on my way. No problem, no hardship."

Whew! A slightly longer issue than normal but that feels appropriate given world news right now.

Hope you're doing okay out there and hang in, because it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. We'll be along for the ride with you.

Much love,

Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team