189: Stargate Printer

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Give a damn

Very pleased to introduce our newest charity partner, the Rural Communities Empowerment Centre in eastern Ghana. They transform underprivileged communities with the gift of education, empowerment skills and computer literacy. We love what they do - they fly under radar, but make a real difference through everything from menstrual hygiene education to setting up libraries in places that have none.

Their main focus however, is on training grade 4-12 students, teachers and other adults how to use computers and get online, breaking their sense of isolation and equipping them with the skills required to succeed in the 21st century. To date, they've given ICT classes to over 2,400 schoolchildren, and taught more than 3,000 people to use the internet.

We're sending them US$3,000, which they're going to use to buy five laptops. That should help with their biggest bottleneck, allowing them to provide larger classes, and get more people through their programs. A big thank you to all of you for helping make this possible. If you'd like to find out more about the organisation, this is their website, and they're also on Instagram and Facebook.

Good news you probably didn't hear about

Pakistan is making significant progress on tuberculosis. It has the fifth greatest TB burden in the world, but thanks to a concerted government strategy to find and treat hidden patients all over the country, the annual number of cases has fallen from 500,000 before the pandemic, to 340,000 in 2021. Gavi

In late 2020, Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province launched a universal health care scheme for all 30 million of its residents. It's been a huge success - millions of families are enrolled, public hospital utilization rates have increased ten fold, and similar efforts to expand universal coverage are now being rolled out in other provinces. Lancet

Liberia's community health worker scheme is working. There are now over 4,000 health workers, providing care for 80% of the country's rural population. Since the scheme's launch in 2016, the proportion of malaria cases treated in less than 24 hours has risen from 47% to 71%, and the number of detected pneumonia cases has nearly trebled. BBC

The development of COVID-19 vaccines was a scientific and humanitarian triumph. Researchers at Imperial College London have revealed they saved an estimated 20 million lives in their first year - and helped rich and poor alike. Nearly as many deaths were prevented in countries supported by the COVAX scheme as in rich ones. Economist

Pandemic silver linings in Senegal, where improved access to oxygen is now helping pneumonia patients across the country. Paediatricians say there's been a notable increase in the availability of oxygen at health facilities, and are reporting that pneumonia deaths in children have declined over the past two years. Undark

Canada is planning a massive increase in immigration levels, with a goal of bringing in 500,000 people in 2025. It's a significant increase from the 405,000 immigrants that arrived last year, and comes after a recent census revealed the country is more diverse than ever - foreign born residents now account for 23% of the population, an all-time high. CBC

California has achieved extraordinary success in combating child poverty. The estimated share of children in poverty fell from 17.6% in 2019 to 9.0% in 2021, translating to about 770,000 fewer children in poverty. Even more striking was that safety net programs have moved nearly one in five, or 1.7 million children out of poverty. PPIC

The share of disabled adults working in the US has soared in the past two years, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels. People with disabilities report they are getting not only more job offers, but better ones, with higher pay, more flexibility and more openness to providing accommodations. “The new world we live in has opened the door a little bit more.” NYT

The last few years have been the most economically prosperous for America's bottom 50% in three decades. That’s not to say their lives are easy — they're not. But it's an improvement on the past: the net worth of the poorest half has doubled since Q1 2020 and is now higher than at any point in history, inflation notwithstanding. Intercept

Europe's improved air quality has saved millions of lives in the last few decades. In the early 1990s, nearly a million premature deaths a year were caused by fine particulate pollution. By 2005, that number had been more than halved to 450,000, and in 2021 dropped to around 300,000. Still far too many - but another marked improvement on the past. Euro News

Pakistan's Senate has passed four human rights bills, including one that, for the first time, outlaws torture by security forces and police. While the country's Constitution prohibits the use of torture 'for extracting evidence' no domestic law until now has made it a criminal offense. Dawn

Ireland has passed new laws criminalizing incitement to hatred against transgender people and those with a disability. The laws were passed after a public consultation process which drew over 4,000 responses, and follow international best practice to enshrine protections for groups of people targeted for hate crime. Irish Times

The Mexican states of Gueterro and Tamaulipas have become the last two in the country to legalize same-sex marriage, meaning that for the first time, love is now legal everywhere in the 10th most populated nation in the world. “The whole of Mexico shines with a huge rainbow. Live the dignity and rights of all people. Love is love.” Mexico News Daily

Only Home - Special Cities Edition

Oslo will become the world's first capital city to have an all-electric public transport system by the end of 2023. In the city's most recent tender, electric buses came in at 5% cheaper than diesel equivalents. "The maintenance is cheaper, it's also cheaper for the operators of the electric buses. All in all, this is a win-win situation." Reuters

Cities around the world are ‘daylighting’ subterranean waterways that were built over during the 19th century, to mitigate rising temperatures and flooding. One of the biggest recovery projects, the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, revitalised an entire neighbourhood. Paris, Madrid, Manchester, and New York all have similar projects underway. Timeout

Paris has pledged to make the Seine swimmable by the 2024 Summer Olympics, investing in a $1.6 billion stormwater holding tank to curb sewage pollution. The tank has a capacity a of 46,000 m² and will be entirely invisible at surface level. It’s part of a decade long mission to clean up a river that was declared biologically dead in the 1960s. Resilience

Taiwan is turning vacant metro spaces into underground vertical farms to grow sustainable, clean, and organic food. These smart farms use high-tech equipment to regulate light, temperature and nutrients. It’s an ingenious way to tackle food security in a country with a population of 23.57 million people and a surface area of only 36,197 km². Euro News

Monterrey, the second largest city in Mexico, is kicking off its ambitious Green Corridors plan with the Parque Lago project, which will add eight hectares of green public space. 18 other projects are planned, totalling 94 hectares of rehabilitated parks, with 73 kilometers of corridors and 20,000 native tree specimens. Fortune

Amsterdam’s rise to bicycle capital of the world didn’t happen by accident. It was a decades-long plan that began in the 1970s as a campaign against increasing traffic fatalities. At the heart of the city’s transformation is the idea that humans are "innately error-prone, so road design must be forgiving, minimizing the ill effects of mistakes.” Bloomberg

Melbourne has successfully enticed butterflies and bees back to its CBD, simply by working out which plants are most beneficial to wildlife and well, planting more of them. Over the last five years, native shrubs and perennial herbs with high yields of nectar and pollen have been planted along city streets resulting in a significant increase in the number of bee species and an abundance of butterflies. The Age

Seville is digging sustainable cooling - literally, building subterranean canals powered by renewable energy to help cool part of the city above. The Cartuja Qanat project brings technology that was used in ancient Persia to modern-day Spain. Vertical shafts pierced along the canals allow the cooler air to escape, reducing the increasingly sweltering air temperature above the surface.

Heard of sponge cities yet? If not, you soon will. By deploying thirsty green spaces and digging huge dirt bowls where water can gather and percolate into underlying aquifers, you can make rain something to be exploited instead of expelled. "Before, the city would see stormwater as a liability, but 11, 12 years ago, we kind of had a paradigm shift, and we started looking more at it as an asset.” Wired

A new parking bill in California has lifted parking requirements on new developments that are close to public transport, and it’s good news for housing and the climate crisis. Research and market data show eliminating parking mandates help create walkable, affordable neighbourhoods and climate-resilient communities. Bloomberg

A new buoy-to-satellite system has been switched on in San Francisco Bay to alert ships to whales in the area, allowing them to avoid fatal collisions. The Whale Safe system has already been a success in the Santa Barbara Channel, where there have been no incidents of ships striking whales since it was installed a year ago. RTBC

Rio de Janeiro is creating the world’s largest community garden, “Hortas Cariocas” which will span several favelas, connected by a green strip of land and eventually end up the size of 15 soccer fields. It’s estimated over 100,000 families will benefit from the project every month, which aims to make organic food more affordable and accessible. Bloomberg

Vancouver is giving the Squamish Nation 11.7 acres in the middle of the city to do whatever they want. They are not required to follow municipal regulations, development processes, or seek municipal approval, because the land is within their jurisdiction, not the City of Vancouver. And what the Squamish Nation wants to do is to build a whole lot of really kickass, dense solarpunk-style housing.

Presented without comment

Bret Stephens: "I arrived in Greenland thinking about Robert Frost’s Desert Places. When I left, the verses I had in mind were from God’s Grandeur, a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that my father had me memorize as a boy."

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it

Amidst all the corporate greenwashing at COP27, don't forget the counter-narrative: Brazil has joined Australia in ousting a climate denialist government this year, the US has passed a once in a generation climate act, all the world's major economies are ramping up clean tech, and democracies are mobilizing to beat back the nexus of populist authoritarianism and climate inaction. WaPo

Meanwhile, everyone keeps on underestimating clean energy.

Exhibit A: in its annual outlook, the IEA says that after more than a century, the world will decouple GDP growth from carbon emissions by 2027. Other highlights - the energy transition has been turbocharged by Putin, the 'golden age of gas' is over, and if all countries meet their pledges we can limit temperature increases to 1.7°C. Carbon Brief

Exhibit B: as 2022 draws to a close, the global energy crisis appears to be abating. Coal use has risen, but not as much as feared, and renewables have largely offset increased emissions. 19 EU countries have set records for wind and solar since Russia's invasion, and the continent appears to be in a position to handle this winter's energy demands (although Adam Tooze disagrees). Ars Technica

Exhibit C: the world installed 174GW of solar PV in 2021, the highest amount ever recorded and a 20% jump on 2020. Despite the global energy crisis and major supply chain disruptions, we are on track for an even bigger jump in 2022, with the IEA predicting at least 260GW of installations this year. PV Tech

Exhibit D: from a new report by McKinsey - "By 2035, renewables will generate 60% of the world’s electricity. But even these projections might be too low. Three years ago, we looked at advances made by renewable energy and asked, “How much faster can they grow?” The answer is: faster than you think they can."

Exhibit E: for over a decade, coal met Chile's growing electricity demand. Between 2018 and 2021 however, solar and wind generation doubled from 9 TWh (12%) to 18 TWh (22%) - and in the last 12 months, reached 27.5%, generating more of Chile’s electricity than coal. Ember

Exhibit F: onshore wind power is on track to provide at least 10% of US electricity in 2022. The last time a single renewable energy resource claimed at least 10% of the nation's power mix was hydropower in the late 1980s. That's about to become a reality again in 2022, except this time its wind, not water. The Street

Exhibit G: check out the UK's national electricity grid on Wednesday earlier this week. Wind produced 54.9% of the country's electricity followed by gas at 20.6%, nuclear at 14.1%, imports, biomass, hydro and solar accounted for 10.3%, and coal a whopping 0.1%.

The Philippines just issued 40 offshore wind service contracts to 20 different developers, with 30 GW of potential capacity. That's three to four times more than all the country's current renewables capacity - and reflects the government's ambitions to become an offshore wind superpower in the next two decades. Renews

Hats off to $35 billion Danish energy giant Ørsted, who have just announced a five year partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature to take action aimed at making offshore wind a biodiversity net-positive. The partnership will start with a joint marine ecosystem restoration project in the North Sea. WWF

For the first time ever, a fully electric vehicle was Europe’s best-selling car in September, zipping past some of the continent's most popular combustion-engines models as electron-powered vehicles continue to gain traction. No prizes for guessing which car company was responsible. Bloomberg

Mercedez-Benz says that the 2023 E-Class will be its last new model on an internal combustion engine platform. All subsequent new model series in the future will be based on architectures that the company is developing specifically for electric vehicles. Clean Technica

Volkswagen has brought forward its phase out date for combustion engine vehicles in Europe by two years, to 2033. That means the world's largest carmaker will only be making electric vehicles in Europe within the next ten years. Bloomberg

Hertz, the world's second largest car rental company outside China, says that a quarter of its global fleet will be electric by the end of 2024. They're not doing it out of the good of their hearts - the company says that EVs are 50% cheaper to maintain than similar petrol or diesel vehicles. The Driven

Indistinguishable from magic

"We've never seen anything like this before." Astronomers have spotted a black hole 'burping up' stellar remains, years after it shredded and consumed the star. The original star was observed being spaghettified in 2018, but three years later, the black hole started ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light. Harvard

Move over SpaceX. A new arrival, Relativity Space, is preparing for the inaugural flight of its 3D-printed Terran 1 rocket. About 85% of its mass is additively manufactured, and the rocket will be lifting a metric tonne into low-Earth orbit. "In many ways Terran 1 is about proving the hypothesis that 3D-printing a rocket is viable." Ars Technica

Researchers at DeepMind have unveiled AlphaTensor, the first AI system for discovering new, efficient and 'provably correct' algorithms. AI - for AI. It's already working. One algorithm the system discovered, optimized for hardware such as Nvidia’s V100 GPU, is 10% to 20% faster than commonly used algorithms on the same hardware.

Steampunk heaven. US and Dutch researchers have created the first mechanical neural network and it looks incredible. Built with voice coils, strain gauges and flexures, the device learns like a digital neural network, and the team hopes it will lead to a new class of materials and structures that can adapt, like aircraft wings that morph in response to wind patterns to boost efficiency. Hackster

Cancer scientists in the UK have uncovered a new level of control of cancer gene activity within tumours, termed cancer's 'dark matter,' showing that epigenetics plays a crucial role. It's a big breakthrough, because cancer testing usually relies on DNA mutations alone. According to a statement by ICR, the papers represent a 'fundamental advance' in humanity's understanding of cancer. IE

The idea of reversing ageing is not science fiction anymore. Many labs and biotech companies are working on the problem. One of the most prominent is Altos Labs which has $3 billion in seed funding and is pursuing cellular reprogramming - resetting old cells to their youthful state, a technique that has already been proven to work in lab mice. MIT Tech Review

Taking inspiration from H̶a̶l̶f̶-̶L̶i̶f̶e̶  the natural world, engineers from Harvard have designed a new type of soft, robotic gripper that uses a collection of tentacles to entangle and ensnare objects, similar to how jellyfish collect stunned prey. Essentially, you move the gripper in the general direction of the object you want to pick up, inflate the tentacles, and it grabs on as best as it can. The Verge

Humankind

Wikiphysics

Meet Jess Wade, a 34 year old experimental physicist in London who has created 1,750 Wikipedia bios (and counting) for unknown female and minority scientists, as part of her mission to encourage more diversity in STEM.

As the daughter of two physicians, science was the backdrop of Jess’s childhood. Her aptitude for physics was encouraged by her private school teachers, and she encountered few barriers to entering an undergraduate degree. Although Jess knew most girls were not as lucky, it wasn’t until her PhD that she fully grasped how being a minority in a male-dominated industry was shaping her day-to-day experiences. Not one to stand idly by, Jess started giving talks at schools to encourage more girls to take up science.

In 2017, Jess attended a science event where she met American climatologist Kim Cobb. “Massively impressed” by Kim’s achievements, Jess raced home to find out more about her newfound hero. After a quick search online, Jess was stunned to discover there was no Wikipedia profile on Kim, and a few rabbit holes later, realised how many successful female and minority scientists were also unaccounted for. Humanity’s largest-ever encyclopedia was suffering from a lack of diversity, and Jess decided to do something about it.

Over the past five years, in addition to her day job as a materials scientist designing sustainable technologies for the future, Jess has researched and written biographies for pioneering women in science like Magdalena Skipper, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the journal Nature, and Jo Dunkley, an astrophysicist and science communicator at Princeton University, who could otherwise be lost to the internet.

In the past three years, female biographies on English Wikipedia have increased from 15% to 19%, thanks in part to Jess writing them and, also because she empowers other people to join her mission through her workshops and 'editathons' at conferences and schools.

Jess hopes that increasing the representation of female and minority scientists on a crowd-sourced platform like Wikipedia will start to chip away at ingrained gender bias in STEM and inspire more young girls to follow their lead.

Not only do we not have enough women in science, but we aren’t doing enough to celebrate the ones we have. Our science can only benefit the whole of society if it’s done by the whole of society.

That's all, thanks for reading. You might have noticed there was no information superhighway this week, because well, we ran out of space. It'll be back next week though, don't worry :) We'll see you then.

Much love,

Gus, Amy and the rest of the team