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.
Give a damn
The 3D Programme by Medicins San Frontiers is a tiny project in Haiti being run by Pierre Moreau, a clinical coordinator, and Elise Tauveron, a physiotherapist. Based in Port-au-Prince, at the only burns care facility in the country, they're using a 3D scanner to scan burn victims' faces, and then 3D-print transparent, plastic masks to speed up their healing and prevent scarring. The technique is much less painful and can be performed earlier in the healing process. It's already been successfully trialed in Gaza and Jordan.
We're sending them US$5,000 to help purchase extra equipment and supplies. The money will go towards computer supplies, an extra 3D printer and more plastic feed for the masks, allowing the team to reach substantially more burn victims. The equipment will also be left behind at the hospital when they leave, ensuring local doctors trained by the MSF team can continue using it for future patients. Thank you to all of you for making this happen - it's a small project, but with a life-changing impact.
We've also received a great update from one of our other partners, MiracleFeet. In October last year you helped us buy them 250 braces for children with clubfoot in the Phillipines. They recently wrote to us and said they've got 138 new kids in the program so far this year, bringing their all-time enrollment in the country to nearly 3,800.
The team has been delivering the new braces via bicycle to patients who had outgrown their previous ones and were unable to travel to the clinics due to COVID outbreaks. You can see some of the children in the pictures below. Included are two pictures of a doctor who loading up his backpack with clubfoot braces to deliver to children in the remote Cordillera region. Thank you for your part in making this happen!
Good news you probably didn't hear about
Remember COVID-19? We’ve come a long way… as of the 20th of April 2022, we're down to 0.38 deaths per 1 million people worldwide, a level last reached on March 29, 2020. Although new variants are increasing the number of cases, vaccination efforts are helping to reduce hospitalisations as well as fatalities. San Francisco Chronicle
While we’re seeing an increase in cases, we’re just not seeing people get sick at the same degree because there’s just so much immunity. The entire point of COVID vaccines was to prevent people from going to the hospital and from dying. I think about this point two years ago, when we had zero immunity.
Professor Monica Gandhi, School of Medicine, UCSF
Bangladesh and Canada have both recorded declines in poverty in the past two years. Poverty in Bangladesh decreased from 12.5% in 2020 to 11.9% in 2021, making the country a role model for poverty reduction in the developing world. Meanwhile 1.4 million people in Canada were lifted out of poverty in 2020 thanks to substantial government supports during the pandemic.
A huge victory for LGBTQI+ rights in South Korea with a landmark judgement reversing the conviction of two soldiers who were jailed for consensual same-sex sexual acts while off duty. The military has a long history of violating same-sex rights and the ruling will hopefully pave the way for military personnel to live and love without the threat of prosecution. Amnesty
A new global study on type 2 diabetes has shown disease management and education programs and are working, with a decline in death rates across 16 high-income countries. "There is still a long way to go to control the many risks, but these findings provide promising evidence that we are moving in the right direction." Medical Xpress
The fight against diabetes continues in Mexico, where the implementation of a soda tax has helped decrease consumption of soft drinks. Diabetes used to be the country's leading cause of death between 2000-2006, but a group of advocates and politicians challenged the industry and passed a federal soda tax there in 2013. Fewer Mexicans are drinking less soda as a result. Civil Eats
Over one million children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi have now received one or more doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine. The rollout began as a pilot program in Malawi in 2019 and once widely deployed, could save the lives of up to an additional 80 000 children each year. WHO
“This vaccine is not just a scientific breakthrough, it’s life-changing for families across Africa. It demonstrates the power of science and innovation for health.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, WHO
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
After years of dithering, American utilities are finally getting with the program. In the next two years they will spend $280 billion on upgrading the country's ageing grids. It's the largest overhaul of energy infrastructure since the 1970s, and will make the transition to renewable energy possible, and prepare the influx of electric vehicles. WSJ
Just in time too. The pipeline of solar, wind, and storage projects in interconnection queues across the United States has soared to a record 1,300GW. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable.” By contrast, there's only 75GW of fossil gas is in the queue, and less than 1GW of coal. Berkeley Lab
Hello energy transition!
California just got a glimpse of the future, after its grid ran on 97% of renewables energy earlier this month. It's a temporary high - there's still a lot of work to do to solve intermittency, but that's happening faster than anyone predicted. The state now has over 2.1 GW in battery capacity, an eight fold increase over 2019, and a stack of clean energy bills are working their way through the legislature.
Victoria got a glimpse too. On the afternoon of Easter Sunday, renewables reached a peak of 83.8% of state demand. That beats the previous record of 79.6% reached in October last year, and came as South Australia set a new record of 136.6% instantaneous renewables earlier in the day.
According to Bloomberg, China is on track to install 140GW of wind and solar power this year. That's more than the entire world installed in 2020. Oh, and and IRENA just reported that in 2021, 81% of all new energy generation capacity added around the world was renewable - 88% of that from wind and solar.
How's this for a sign of the times. More than a decade after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima rendered large swaths of farmland unusable, some of those fields are now home to sprawling solar arrays. Around 40% of the prefecture's power now comes from renewables, with plans underway to spend $2.75 billion to get to 100% by 2040. France24
BlackRock, the world's largest private equity firm, and still the largest investor in coal developers, is now projecting that by 2030, three quarters of the investments in its portfolio will be tied to a requirement to cut net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, up from 25% currently. Reuters
Quebec has become the first jurisdiction in the world to explicitly ban oil and gas development in its territory, following decades of environmental and grassroots campaigning. It's a pretty radical move - Canada is among the top five oil producers worldwide; the new law ends all petroleum exploration and production as well as the public financing of those activities in Quebec. National Observer
Suddenly, then all at once. Carbon dioxide removal has been on the fringe for years, but in the last few weeks, almost $2 billion of funding and government has been announced, indicating the start of a new era.
- Climeworks has raised $600 million in the biggest carbon removal startup deal ever.
- Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey have teamed up to launch Frontier Climate and catalyze the carbon removals market with nearly $1 billion of advanced commitments.
- Lowercarbon Capital has pulled the wraps off a $350 million in new CDR-exclusive venture fund.
- The US Department of Energy is investing $14 million in pilot projects to scale up direct air capture and storage technologies.
The only home we've ever known *
The 2022 Our Ocean Conference has just finished, and secured 410 new commitments worth over $16 billion for improving the health, productivity and protection of the world’s oceans. This includes $700 million to protect the Great Barrier Reef. To date, the event has protected at least 13 million km2 of ocean. Mongabay
The NOAA has designated a large swathe of Alaskan coastline, roughly the size of Texas, as critical habitat for nayiit and makliit (ringed and bearded seals). It’s a preventative measure to protect populations in the wake of melting sea ice. and new restrictions on oil missions, commercial fishing, and federal military activities have also been enforced. Kyuk
The Magpie River in Quebec has been granted legal personhood as the ‘rights of nature movement’ gains global momentum. The rights were advocated by the Innu First Nation people to combat the impact of dams, and include the right to flow, maintain biodiversity, be pollution-free, and to sue. Many of the world’s rivers have now been granted legal rights, most notably the Amazon in 2018. Nat Geo
We need to see that as humans we are not above the water or the animals. We are part of a whole. When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves, too.
Uapukun Mestokosho, a member of the Mutehekau Shipu Alliance
California’s coastal kelp forests are making a comeback, with the area of several sites now increasing. The forests had receded by more than 95% due to global warming and an explosion in purple sea urchins that local conservatists removed by hand. Kelp forests play a crucial role as carbon sinks, sequestering three to five times more carbon than similar size tropical forests. Discovery
A rewilding project in Dorset is close to establishing a breeding population of ospreys in the British Isles for the first time since the Middle Ages. The project began in 2017 with the transfer of six week-old chicks from Scotland and recently a male and female returned safely from their migration to Africa. Conservationists have their fingers crossed for the pitter-patter of osprey claws. BBC
Researchers in Greece are experimenting with farming metal from shrubs. The plants, known as 'hyperaccumulators' thrive in toxic metal-rich soils by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems. As well as providing a source for rare metals like nickel, zinc, aluminium and even gold, these plants sequester carbon in their roots, regenerating the soil for other crops. Guardian
Humans have sought out deposits of rare metals for thousands of years and developed ever-more violent ways of accessing them, but these plants have found more equitable and regenerative ways of doing much the same thing. Perhaps we have something to learn from them.
James Bridle, Author of Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
Indistinguishable from magic
A fossil from north-eastern Brazil has revealed the existence of pterosaur feathers from 113 million years ago. The remarkably well-preserved tissues suggest they were true feathers, with plumage rivalling that of a tucan. "This mode of branching is directly comparable to that in stage IIIA feathers of extant birds, that is, with barbs branching from a central rachis. We didn't expect to see this at all." SA
The Philadelphia Orchestra is now sharing the stage with a giant, 12 metre tall white monolith, whose digital screen has 8.2 million pixels, each controlled by artificial intelligence. As the orchestra plays Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the screen responds with swirls and cascades of color. At times it looks like a melting cathedral; other times it appears to be an exploding woven rug. Whyy
Is the world ready for electric airplanes that can take off like helicopters, and quietly hop from charging station to charging station, like large drones? It might just have to be. A company based in Vermont has $400 million of funding, pre-orders from the military and Amazon, and is currently testing a battery-powered plane called the Alia with a range of over 400 km. NYT
Researchers have successfully concluded Phase 1 human trials of a new treatment for solid cancer tumours. It combines CAR-T therapy, which harvests a patient’s immune T-cells and reprograms them to target the cancer, with mRNA therapy, which helps the engineered T-cells proliferate. Of the 14 patients in the trial, six showed significant decreases in tumour sizes. New Atlas
Scientists from the UK and China have revealed how the human brain removes bad memories. By imaging the brains of 24 people, they showed that as unwanted thoughts emerge, a region called the anterior cingulate signals a rapid top-down inhibition of neuronal circuits in the hippocampus, suppressing the memory in the moment and helping forget it completely in the long run. Journal of Neuroscience
Researchers at Oxford have developed an artificial nerve composed of synthetic, bio-inspired neurons made from hydrogel fibers, fats, and watery nanodrops. The team created electrical signals with light-driven proton pumps and propagated the impulses down a centimeter of artificial axon, successfully triggering the release of neurotransmitters at its terminal. Nature Chemistry
And, finally, not to freak you out or anything, but half of these faces are humans, and half were created by an algorithm known as a generative adversarial network. Can you guess which ones are real and which ones are synthetic? Answers here.
Information superhighway
Time to update what you learned in school about evolution. It isn't a tree of life - it's a fuzzy network, whose branches are far more complicated and twisty than we believed a generation ago. Species aren't isolated on the ends of branches, but instead combine and recombine in an endless pattern of genetic hybridization. Aeon
A trio of great pieces from the war in Ukraine. The first is from the former commander of the US Army in Europe, explaining the vast difference in the professionalism of soldiers on each side. The second reveals how Kyiv was saved thanks to Ukrainian ingenuity and Russian incompetence (you'll never take foam mats for granted again) and finally, tracking the Russians with Find My Airpods.
Gideon Rachman makes a convincing argument that the upcoming French election between Macron and Le Pen perfectly encapsulates the new binary in politics: not the left and the right, but the globalists and the patriots. This election really makes it feel like this distinction has well and truly arrived on the battlefield of ideas. FT
As electric vehicles arrive, what happens to the petrol station? Thought-provoking article on the second and third order effects of electrification. In the same way that cars brought about the end of the horse-drawn carriage industry and the repurposing of stables, EVs will transform, or perhaps even relegate the humble pitstop to history. Recode
Last week we said we thought Jonathan Haidt's recent essay on social media was overwrought. We weren't alone.
GQ and Rolling Stone journalist Zack Graham fell by accident into the world of underground warehouse raves, forest parties, and Freetekno, and emerged a changed man. "We cheered and hugged and kissed. The music came back on. The DJ dropped a fragment of insanity. The people around me bowed their heads, dutifully waiting for the melody. When it came, they were one, moving together, making an instrument out of the dark, cold world." Astra
Humankind
The violinist who created a biosphere
Meet Martha Isabel Ruíz Corzo, a 69 year old music teacher turned eco-warrior in Mexico who pioneered a radical approach to conservation, tackling climate change and poverty simultaneously and driving the creation of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve.
Better known as ‘Pati’, she spent the first part of her life as a professional violinist and music teacher in Mexico City. In the early 1980s Pati and her husband abandoned their middle-class life and relocated to the region of Sierra Gorda where, despite a lack of electricity and modern comforts, their family revelled in the simple pleasures of rural, mountain life.
It didn’t take long for Pati to realise her new home was facing serious environmental threats. Local families were trapped in a cycle of poverty as rampant deforestation and poor sanitation impacted the environment, reducing agricultural yields and incomes. Not one to sit back, Pati started a tree planting project, eventually escalating into full scale environmental education programs.
For over a decade she led a grassroots campaign against the government and mining companies to save the region from unregulated development. In 1997 Sierra Gorda was named as a biosphere reserve, saving 385,000 hectares of biodiverse land and wildlife. The victory marked the beginning of Pati’s next mission - to create a better economic future for 120,000 people who lived there.
Pati created a unique public-private management model, where eco-tourism, waste management, and conservation projects provide income for locals. She also helped pioneer ‘natural capital’ from which hundreds of families in Sierra Gorda receive $2 million a year from the sale of carbon credits. The model inspired the neighboring state of Guanajuato to add 263,000 hectares of their own protected land.
After four decades, Pati continues to be a force in conservation, holding workshops around the world and often finishing speeches with a song as a nod to her former career. As she approaches 70, she’s showing no signs of slowing down.
I want a total revolution! A change of values where we seek full abundance for everyone and learn to treat nature with respect and care. Once you know the true value of what is sacred, you'll have the energy to make those changes.
Thanks for reading, we'll see you next week.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the team
