178: The Dawn of Everything

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

Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi will expand their rollout of a malaria vaccine for children, thanks to newly announced international funding of nearly US$160 million. The three countries were part of a pilot in 2019 that saw 1.3 million children protected, resulting in a substantial drop in hospitalization and child deaths. WHO

Despite COVID disruptions, Chad has increased its vaccination coverage, with the number of children receiving vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis increasing from 50% in 2019 to 58% in 2021. It’s an incredible feat, considering in 2017 Chad had one of the lowest levels of vaccination in the region. Gavi

Cambodia’s poverty rate has plummeted over the past two decades from nearly 40% in 2009 to 17.8% in 2020, driven by rising wages and earnings. The country’s COVID-19 cash transfer programme also helped, assisting 2.8 million people from poor and vulnerable households. Vietnam Plus

OK you probably did hear about this one. A huge win for womens rights in Kansas with the state voting to protect abortion in this week’s referendum. Kansas is the first state to put abortion rights to a vote since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and will now remain a safe haven for abortion in the Midwest. Guardian

After decades of advocacy, a big victory for LGBTQ+ rights in Michigan! The state has amended its civil rights legislation to ban discrimination in housing, employment, education, and public accommodation against people because of their sexual orientation.

For too long, LGBTQ+ Michiganders had been left out of our state’s civil rights protections. No longer. Because of this ruling, nobody can legally be fired from their job or evicted from their home because of who they love.
Gretchen Whitmer - Governor, Michigan

The number of Americans living without health insurance has hit a record low of 8%. Since 2020, 5.2 million more people have received coverage, with the biggest uptake by people below the federal poverty line. The welcome news is thanks to extra federal funding during the pandemic and efforts to expand the Affordable Healthcare act. Fierce Healthcare

After a decade of debate, Brazil’s Drink-Driving Law is fully constitutional, and all drivers must now have a blood-alcohol content of zero. Alcohol has been attributed to nearly 10% of all road deaths, which are the leading killer of children aged 5 and 14. This legislation will make a big difference. WHO

Numerous European countries are experimenting with free public transport. Spain, Germany, Estonia, and Luxembourg are already on the bandwagon while Ireland, Italy and Austria have reduced fares or introduced vouchers for lower-income workers. It’s an interesting idea - one day public transport could be a basic human right. Wired

Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it

Global coal plant construction peaked in 2015 at 107 GW. By last year, it had dropped to 45 GW, and in the first six months of 2021 only 13.8 GW has been built. 11.4 GW has been retired during the same period, meaning the world has only added 2.4 GW of coal capacity this year. On current trends, humanity will start reducing total coal-fired capacity in 2023. Global Coal Plant Tracker

Australian PM Anthony Albanese is on the brink of a major policy victory after securing parliamentary support to strengthen the carbon emissions cuts. After more than a decade of madness, the climate wars are almost over. As Katherine Murphy says, it's the start of something, not the end of something. Guardian

Solar in Germany generated a new record in July 2022, accounting for roughly a fifth of the country’s electricity generation and also marking the third record month in a row. Only coal plants now generate more electricity, accounting for 21.9%. Total renewables share reached 50.6% in July. Clean Energy Wire

Somewhere in the North Sea, the world's first commercial installation of a wind turbine with recyclable blades has just been completed. The 81 metre long blades are made by Siemens, and will also be available in 108 metre and 115 metre versions.

We’ve brought the technology to market in only ten months: from launch in September 2021 to installation at RWE’s Kaskasi project in July 2022.
Marc Becker, CEO, Siemens Gamesa Offshore Business Unit

China built nearly 31 GW of new solar power capacity in the first half of this year, up 137% from a year earlier, with full-year installations on course to smash all previous records. The country's total solar power capacity is now 340 GW, up by a quarter compared to last year. Reuters

Big news on industrial emissions in China. Companies in seven key sectors with annual revenues over $2.9 million have been ordered to reduce energy consumption by 13.5% by 2025 compared to 2020 levels. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen for at least another decade - until very recently industrial emissions were considered 'the hard stuff'. SCMP

It gets better. China’s new emissions trading system is already the world’s largest carbon market, three times bigger than Europe's. It's about to grow another 70% under plans to add heavy industry, making it the single largest global climate policy, covering more emissions than the rest of the world's carbon markets put together. Forbes

Wouldn't it be great if India did something like that as well?! Oh, would you look at that. It appears an announcement is imminent on an ETS for major emitters in the country's energy, steel and cement industries. That would mean carbon markets in three out of four of the world's four largest carbon culprits. Bloomberg

There was no shortage of newspaper headlines when petrol prices were rising. Interesting to note that the media has suddenly gone very quiet, despite pump prices in places like the United States having fallen every day for the last 50 days, the fastest rate in over a decade. Surprise, surprise. Car & Driver

And finally, the big oil majors might be making obscene profits right now, but what are they going to do when nobody wants to work for them any more?

The only home we've ever known

A conservation program in Cambodia is bringing gibbons back to the iconic Angkor Wat temple, decades after poachers destroyed populations. Since 2013, four different pairs of gibbons have returned to breed, along with 40 other animals including silvered langurs, muntjac deers, smooth-coated otters, leopard cats, civets, wreathed hornbills, and green peafowl. Taipei Times

Farmers and scientists in Mexico City are working together to save 6,000 acres of Indigenous agricultural wetlands that are a source of local food production and home to the critically endangered axolotl. The waterways of Mexico are the only natural habitat of the axolotl, whose extraordinary regenerative abilities to grow new limbs could hold the biological secrets to renewing human tissue. Undark

After 22 years of restoration, a 1,600 acre glen in southern Scotland called Carrifran has transformed a once overgrazed barren landscape into a thriving ecosystem with the return of foxes, badgers and otters and tree species that existed in the area thousands of years ago. Independent

The stunning and ongoing transformation of the landscape at Carrifran Wildwood really is a beacon of hope. It’s an inspiring illustration of nature can bounce back if we give it the chance.
Richard Bunting, Rewilding Britain

Bighorn sheep have returned to Nebraska’s high plains a century after they were wiped out by overhunting and disease. Scientists and conservationists started reintroducing bighorn in 1981 and the 40 year program has resulted in a flourishing population of 320 sheep today. Yale360

The US government will plant one billion trees over the next decade to revitalize millions of acres of burned and damaged forests across the American West. Wildfires have devastated woodlands in recent years creating a reforestation backlog of 4.1 million acres. Over the next few years planting will increase from 60,000 to 400,000 acres of trees each year. Smithsonian

Central California will halt new oil and gas leases across more than one million acres of public lands until the potential health and environmental risks are assessed. The moratorium comes after several years of legal challenges from environmental groups and local communities.

Central Valley residents and grassroots activists work every day to make their communities healthy, and today they got a win in the fight against air and groundwater pollution from oil and gas development.
Daniel Rossman, The Wilderness Society

Proving that religion and conservation can go hand in hand, India's temples are playing a critical role in protecting the country's fauna and flora, with an estimated 100,000-150,000 sacred groves across the country, preserving biodiversity and the habitats of endangered species. BBC

Iguanas are reproducing on Santiago, one of the Galapagos islands, more than a century after they disappeared. In 2019, 3,000 iguanas were reintroduced from a nearby island to restore the island’s ecosystem and they have been hard at work since: removing soil, dispersing seeds and even providing food for other animals. ABC

New Zealand’s Miramar Peninsula in Wellington is in full flight, with the populations of native birds increasing by a whopping 51%. The increase is thanks to the elimination of possums and a species of rat along with the hard work of conversationists and volunteers. RNZ

Indistinguishable from magic

What is artificial intelligence actually good for? How about sepsis, the leading cause of hospital death in the United States? Two years after being incorporated into the record systems of 2,000 health care providers associated with Johns Hopkins, machine learning has cut hospital mortality rates by 18%. Scientific American

Ethereum, the main programmable blockchain (i.e one that can actually run simple software) is weeks away from abandoning its old, energy intensive model of approving transactions, to a new one that increases system capacity from 10-20 transactions per second to 100,000 per second, and doesn't cost the earth. Buckle up. Coinbase

The United States has constructed the first ever supercomputer capable of an exaflop per second — a billion billion operations. The $600 million machine was built by 100 people following a decade of collaboration among national laboratories, academia and private industry, and sits on the leafy campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

We didn't know this, but apparently Alzheimer's arises 15-20 years before clinical symptoms appear. German researchers say they've developed an infrared sensor that can identify the misfolding of the amyloid-beta protein - a biomarker of the disease - up to 17 years in advance. Amazing achievement. Next up, commercialization. Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Our goal is to determine the risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia at a later stage with a simple blood test even before the toxic plaques can form in the brain, in order to ensure that a therapy can be initiated in time.
Professor Klaus Gerwert, Director, PRODI, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Israeli scientists have created the world’s first synthetic mice embryos, developed inside a bioreactor and made up entirely of stem cells cultured in a Petri dish, bypassing the need for sperm, eggs and fertilization. The researchers hope the work will reduce animal experimentation and pave the way for new sources of cells and tissues for human transplantation. STAT

What is virtual reality actually good for? How about allowing a surgeon in the United Kingdom help conduct a 33 hour operation to separate conjoined twins in Brazil, despite being almost 9,600 km apart? "It’s just wonderful, it’s really great to see the anatomy and do the surgery before you actually put the children at any risk." The Times

Information superhighway

Ahead of the release of the television adaptation of Sandman, here's a lovely interview with everyone's favourite creator of fictions, Neil Gaiman. Opens with a nice dig at corporate 'storytelling' and gets better from there. Content warning: contains thoughtful and nuanced opinions on controversial topics like free speech, cancel culture and gender representation.

We kinda missed it when it was released, but thankfully Virginia Heffernan hung out with co-author of Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow, and reminded us to read it. "The book supplies hundreds of rich examples of early societies that didn’t conform to evolutionary stages. The imperative to act on our humanness - to refuse to sleepwalk, to refuse to get stuck - grows out of the scholarship."

Great essay on the paradoxes of technology. You'll need to get past the Talmudic interludes, but it's well worth it. Precisely when we seem most connected, we are most distant; precisely when we have all the tools to free ourselves and gain exposure to the wider world, we find ourselves imprisoned and disconnected. The author has some useful ideas for a healthier technological culture. Sources

As a Future Crunch reader, you already know how quickly electric vehicles are coming. Interesting deep dive here on one of the more interesting implications: what are they going to sound like? Apparently the electric Hummer’s forward-motion alert sounds like a church organist launching into the next hymn, while the back-up sound is 'something like its dystopian twin.' New Yorker

Amazing interactive on the magic of fungi, containing the following tantalizing promise: climate correspondent Somini Sengupta and photographer Tomás Munita report from Chile on scientists building a global atlas of underground fungal networks. The Sheldrake brothers make an appearance too. I mean, how can you resist? NYT

Humankind

A vision for sight

Meet Agatha Aboe, a doctor in Ghana who helped her country eliminate trachoma, one of the world’s oldest diseases and its leading cause of preventable blindness. Agatha’s door-to-door mission is the story of her unwavering commitment to leave no person untreated.

Agatha had a passion for eye health from a young age. Her parents encouraged her to become a doctor and use her intellect to help as many people as possible. After graduating medical school with a specialty in ophthalmology, Agatha worked in community health, where her credentials were often ignored by patients. “No matter how many times I introduced myself as a doctor, the response would be “ooh, you are a nurse.”

Two decades ago, Agatha visited communities in Northern Ghana where trachoma was endemic and was shocked by far-reaching impact of the disease. The eye pain and sensitivity to light meant children were unable to play outdoors or attend schoo. Women were struggling with daily tasks, and many were on the cusp of blindness. Agatha knew trachoma was preventable, but treatment and education were failing to reach enough people, especially women.

So, she decided to do something about it.

Agatha’s mission was daunting: 1 million Ghanaians needed trachoma treatment, but she refused to be intimidated. In 2002, she led a project within international non-profit SightSavers to eliminate trachoma. Under her leadership, health teams went from house to house across every city and village, often travelling great distances on foot or motorbike and even canoe. Thousands of local health workers and volunteers were trained to run eye screening clinics, antibiotics were distributed and when necessary, surgery was performed.

With four times more women suffering trachoma-related blindness than men, Agatha focused on empowering women to improve their family’s hygiene and worked to dispel the local myths preventing them from seeking treatment. Over fifteen years, mothers helped drive Agatha’s vision- conducting radio learning classes, discussing hygiene strategies, and approaching NGOs to improve water access in their communities.

In 2018 Ghana was validated by the World Health Organisation as eliminating trachoma and today Agatha is helping other countries do the same. She remains committed to leaving no one behind in fight to end the disease and is passionate about creating more opportunities for women in healthcare.

“My passion is saving the sight of people and ensuring people don’t fall into the cycle of poverty due to an avoidable blinding disease. To solve an issue that affects more women than men, women need to be at the fore front of this fight locally, nationally, and globally.”

That's it for this week, thanks as always for reading. It feels like there's a bit of a mood shift happening right now. Can you feel it? Or is that just us? Maybe it's just us. Regardless, we'll see you in seven days.

Much love,

Gus, Amy and the rest of the team