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.
Hi everyone, Gus here. We're very pleased (and a little nervous) to announce a new tier for subscribers who'd like to increase their support for this newsletter. It's in response to a number of requests we've had from people wanting to bump up their contribution, and also because we'd love to make things here at FC HQ a little more financially stable.
The price of the new supporters tier is US$100 a year, which is double the standard membership fee. As with standard memberships, one third goes to charity. We're working on a little gift for anyone who signs up (more on that down the line), and we're also hoping to launch some supporter-only benefits if we can get enough people onboard, but of course, that isn't really the point. It's purely optional, and most just there as a way for those who value our work to help us keep on doing it!
If you're interested, you can upgrade from your account settings anytime. If you do decide to upgrade, you'll receive a partial credit for any unused time on your current membership, which will then be applied to your new, Future Crunch Supporter membership. If you have any questions, just hit reply to this email. Thanks in advance to anyone considering it.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
In the past three years, the number of cancer survivors in the United States has increased by a million, reaching over 18 million people as of 2022. This is mostly due to progress against lung, colorectal, and breast cancer, whose age-adjusted death rates have decreased by 44%, 42%, and 53% respectively since the 1970s. AACR
The Serum Institute of India, the world's biggest vaccine maker, has developed a cervical cancer vaccine that costs less than $5, and is aiming for 200 million doses by 2024. Big news. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer among women globally, causing an estimated 342,000 deaths a year, almost all in low and middle income countries. Reuters
Family planning is an unsung hero in the story of human progress. The number of women and girls using modern contraception in low and lower-middle income countries now stands at 357 million. In the last year alone, their use has averted 135 million unintended pregnancies, 28 million unsafe abortions, and 140,000 maternal deaths. UNFPA
Malawi has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, the first country in southern Africa to do so, and the fourth country in Africa after Ghana, Gambia and Togo. In 2015, there were 7.6 million people at risk of infection. In just seven years, that number has fallen to zero. WHO
Vanuata has also eliminated trachoma, the first Pacific nation to reach this milestone. Eight years ago, 12% of children were infected, prompting the launch of a national programme. Trachoma is the second non-tropical disease to be eliminated from the 83 island nation, after lymphatic filariasis in 2016. WHO
To understand the magnitude of this feat, just imagine what it must take to reach people across all of Vanuatu’s inhabited islands – taking boats across open ocean and walking for hours through creeks and over hills in all kinds of weather.
Dr Takeshi Kasai, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific
Nigeria has recorded a significant decrease in child marriage, with the proportion of girls married before their 18th birthday falling from 44% in 2016 to 30% in 2021. There has also been considerable progress in child mortality, which has decreased from one in eight children dying before their fifth birthday in 2016, to one in ten in 2021. UNICEF
Poland has welcomed over two million Ukrainian refugees with open arms. Private citizens have spent $2.1 billion on aid, the government has spent $3.4 billion, and 1.2 million Ukrainians have been granted access to health care, education, and social benefits. Attitudes are changing too. 80% of the population now supports taking in refugees fleeing violence and war, up from 49% in 2018. Bloomberg
The world's biggest trial of a four day work week, involving 70 firms giving 3,300 employees full pay for 80% of their normal hours, just reached its halfway point. 46% of firms say overall productivity has actually improved, and more than eight in ten say it's working so well they're going to keep on going once the trial ends. Gizmodo
Cubans have overwhelmingly approved gay marriage and adoption in a government-backed referendum that also boosts rights for women. 66.9% of voters said yes to a new family code that legalizes same-sex marriage and civil unions, allows same-sex couples to adopt children, and promotes equal sharing of domestic rights and responsibilities between men and women. Reuters
The only home we've ever known
European populations of mammals and birds are bouncing back following decades of successful conservation initiatives. Most of the 50 species tracked for a new report, including bison, lynx, wolves, beavers and bears, are increasing in numbers and spreading to new areas across the continent. “It shows that, if you take measures, wild animals can recover.” Bloomberg
Multiple Indigenous nations across Canada are declaring protected areas based on their own sovereignty. The idea took off in 2018, following the publication of a report showing Indigenous-led conservation could help Canada reach its commitments on climate change and conservation. Half a million square kilometres of protected areas across the country have now been proposed. Narwhal
As of Tuesday this week, plastic shopping bags are not allowed in Montreal. The regulations apply to all retail businesses and restaurants, the first of a series of moves designed to make Canada's second largest city zero waste by 2030. Next thing to go is single use plastic in restaurants, starting in March 2023. TVA Nouvelles
Poaching is less of a threat to sea turtles than it used to be, with a new analysis showing illegal poaching has dropped sharply around the world in the last decade. The numbers are reflected in anecdotal reports from conservationists too. In Lousiana, for example, hatchlings have been spotted on the uninhabited Chandeleur Islands for the first time in over 75 years. PBS
A regenerative ranching and agriculture project by the Nature Conservancy managed to restore five million hectares of degraded soil and capture 550 million tons of carbon in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia between 2018 and 2020. Lessons from the project are now being rolled out as part of a series of broader initiatives across Latin America.
Paris is winning its war on cars. Since 1990, the proportion of car journeys has dropped by 45%, public transport use has risen by 30%, and cycling has increased tenfold. Next up: a new citywide speed limit of 30 km/h, car-free zones outside schools, and 'peaceful zones,' that make it illegal to drive through the city centre without stopping. RTBC
Europe has closed 87 sensitives zones to bottom trawling in the Atlantic, putting 16,419 km2 of waters below 400 metres off limits. This comes after a ban four years ago on bottom trawling below 800 metres, providing further protection for vulnerable marine ecosystems such as cold water reefs, sea mounts and sea pens. EC
If you're looking for a definition of 'regenerative' how about this? As America’s coal industry recedes, it's leaving behind barren, acidified sites across Appalachia. Chestnut seedlings however, thrive in those soils, and conservationists are now planting tens of thousands of them on former mines across the region. NYT
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
Despite record fossil gas prices and a worldwide energy crisis, global coal-powered generation fell by 1.2% in the first half of this year. By comparison, power from renewables increased by 17%. The combined effect meant that global emissions in the first six months of 2022 decreased year on year, despite a 2.5% increase in global power demand. WSJ
Much of this is because of China. Although overall power generation increased by 3.7% in H1 2022, the share of energy from coal fell by 2.6%, while renewables produced 20.3% more than a year ago. New coal mines and plants are still being approved yes, but financial reality is starting to bite: 80% of state-owned coal power producers lost money in 2021. WSJ
What if the the US Senate passed an international climate treaty so powerful it could avert nearly 1 °F of global warming, and nobody noticed? That's pretty much what happened last week. Fortunately, Robinson Meyer has it covered over at the Atlantic.
A recent report from the IEA says that to meet global climate goals, the world needs to mobilize $90 billion in public funding for commercial-scale demonstration projects by 2026. Never going to happen right? Except it already has. Last week, 16 countries delivered $94 billion in funding, exceeding and achieving the goal four years early. Department of Energy
Loy Yang, Australia's most polluting power plant, is going to be shut ten years earlier than planned. Fantastic news! The giant brown coal station generates about 30% of the state of Victoria's power every year, and emits twice the amount of CO₂ as every gas power generator in the national electricity marker combined. SMH
It's been a good week for the clean energy transition down under. Victoria announced a target of 6.3 GW of storage by 2035, enough to power half the state's homes at peak energy use, and Queensland, the heartland of Australia's coal industry, announced a plan to get 80% of its energy from renewables by 2035.
Beginning in April 2025, Tokyo the largest city in the world, will require all newly constructed homes to have solar panels. The regulation will make it the first prefecture in Japan to have such a requirement, and will affect a hefty percentage of all new buildings. ZME
In China, electric cars aren't the future. They're the present. Plugin vehicles hit 30% market share in August, and there are now over 300 manufacturers and four million charging units around the country. “We have reached a point where we’re competing on price, we’re competing on features. It’s not a subsidy thing. The market is taking over.” NYT
In Germany, electric cars aren't the future. They're the present. Plugin vehicles hit 28% market share in August, and Tesla isn't even in the top five brands by overall sales. The most registered passenger electric car in Germany so far this year? The Fiat 500 electric. Clean Technica
Another week, another electric plane. Or how about two? Swedish company Heart Aerospace has unveiled its ES-30, a regional hybrid-electric plane with a capacity of 30 passengers, and in Washington, US startup Eviation has completed the first test flight of its nine passenger prototype. “It’s an opportunity to build the future of aviation. It’s revolutionary.”
Indistinguishable from magic
Humanity just attempted to change the orbit of a solar system body for the first time by smashing a van-sized satellite at 22,530 km/h into a stadium-sized asteroid 11 million kilometers from Earth. Welcome to the beginning of a new era of planetary defence options. Here's a great video of the collision from the ground-based ATLAS asteroid early warning system.
China has retrieved a moon crystal made of a brand new mineral called Changesite, named after the Moon goddess, Chang’e. It's the sixth new mineral to be identified in Moon samples, and the first discovered by China. The lunar samples also contain helium-3, a version of the element that should be very familiar to all you science fiction fans out there. Vice
Chinese EV manufacturer Xpeng has launched a driver assistance system similar to Tesla’s, the country's first full-stack, self-developed autonomous driving technology. In London, a startup called Wayve, part of a new generation of driverless car companies collectively known as AV2.0, has unveiled the first AI system capable of driving multiple vehicles - a passenger car and a delivery van.
Say hello to the 25th cloned animal species, an Arctic wolf. In 2020, scientists took skin cells from a wolf named Maya, created embryos using female dog eggs, and then transferred 85 into seven beagle surrogates. In July 2022, one of those beagles gave birth to a healthy Arctic wolf with exactly the same DNA, also named Maya. Freethink
Significant breakthrough in the quest to create lab-grown kidneys. Harvard scientists have figured out a way to produce something known as the ureteric bud, a key building block that grows into an adult kidney collecting system. They have also, for the first time, created principal and intercalated cell lines, the two cell lines that comprise the kidney’s final urine processing component. Sci-Tech
Image prompts are getting all the attention right now, but LLMs, the technology responsible for them, are capable of so much more. For example, research into multilingual systems has accelerated substantially in the last few months; check out Google's new PaLI system, which can perform image captioning, object detection and optical character recognition in 109 languages.
The information highway is still super
The winners of the 2022 Astronomy Photographer of the Year have been announced, and they're incredible. In addition to the overall winner, which we posted at the top of this edition, there were 11 different category prizes up for grabs this year, from glittering galaxies and shimmering aurorae to out-of-this-world skyscapes. RMG
When Roger Federer retired, we searched high and low for an appropriate piece, but none of the major news outlets seemed to be able to do his career justice. We were about to write it off as a lost cause, until we stumbled upon this long read from Indian journalist Eashan Gosh, and it's everything we hoped for, and more. Was, and always will be, the greatest of all time. Medium
On a similar track, when the Queen died, it seemed like every journalist in the world wrote about it, yet none of them had anything to say. Once again, we searched in in vain for someone to strike the right tone. Imagine our delight when none other than long-time FC favourite Laurie Pennie rode to our rescue. She stood in The Queue for 14 hours, and has a story to tell. GQ
It's one of the oldest dualities in the book. Nature? Or nurture? Turns out there's a third leg of the stool we hardly ever talk about, the "dark matter of our personal origin stories." Luck. Science journalist Clare Wilson explains why chance events in the womb may influence who you become as much as your genetics, and perhaps even more than the effect of parenting. New Scientist
During the pandemic, author, poet and wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham developed a new appreciation for his backyard. This essay is so beautifully written, more like poetry than prose. "The wild must extend from those soaring mountain tops all the way to small, fenced-in yards; from our idealized imagining of it all the way to that which we cultivate and create with our own hands." Emergence
And finally, just gonna go and leave this one here (click on the image for a larger version)
Humankind
Resurgence
Meet Christine M’Lot, an Anishinaabe woman and high school teacher in Winnipeg who is indigenizing education across Canada to connect students with lost narratives, while helping them reimagine Indigenous communities as agents of change.
Although her family is from Swan Lake First Nation, Christine and her sister were born and raised in the suburbs of inner-city Winnipeg. At five years old, Christine announced she was going to become a teacher and spent hours practicing in front of a chalkboard given to her by her father.
When Christine was in high school, her grandmother testified before a commission about her experience as an Indigenous student in a residential school. Christine’s family refused to discuss the matter, but the unspoken trauma of her grandmother’s school years had planted a seed.
Growing up in public school system, Christine realised her culture was invisible in the classroom. It wasn’t until she studied teaching at university that she encountered her first Indigenous teacher who unlocked questions Christine didn’t realise she had, and her search for answers set her on a path to transform education.
Over the last 12 years Christine has worked on teaching and creating curriculums for schools that introduce Indigenous culture via math, coding, architecture, and creative writing. Although Canadian education has taken strides since 2015 to include Indigenous histories, Christine noticed that most of the learning focused on the pain of the past. The missing link in the curriculum was hope, so she decided to do something about it.
This year Canadian students gained a new textbook called Resurgence. Co-edited by Christine, it features a collection of works by Indigenous artists to help expand classroom conversation from solely focusing on Indigenous trauma to celebrating the brilliance of Indigenous communities who overcame these hardships. Christine has also joined forces with Amazon to create Your Voice is Power, a national competition for middle and high school students combining coding and hip-hop music to drive action for social equality and to raise Indigenous voices.
I’d like this not to be Indigenous education, but just education. Learning about Indigenous topics in an Indigenous way can facilitate reconciliation, because when you gain empathy for people it’s really hard to discriminate against them.
That's it for this edition, thanks for reading! Remember, you can leave comments on these posts now. We'd love to hear from you.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the team
