Hi everyone,
We know we said we were going to give you an update on what's coming after the Humankind project, but we're not quite ready yet. Keep an eye out on your inbox over the next few days, where we'll be exploring some of the lessons we learned, and for the next edition, where we'll be unveiling the new project (we promise). We've been working on it for a while, but things really kicked into a new gear this week, and we're so excited to share it with you. Thanks as always for your support and understanding. Enough excuses! Time for some...
Good news you probably didn't hear about
Bangladesh has just pulled off one of the most successful disease elimination efforts of all time. In 2001, lymphatic filariasis, a crippling and disfiguring neglected tropical disease, was endemic in 19 of the country's 64 districts, with an estimated 70 million people at risk. Earlier this week, the WHO confirmed that the disease has been completely eliminated.
Good news on malaria–Ghana has reduced its prevalence in children by more than a third in the last eight years, from 26.7% in 2014 to 8.6% in 2022, and health officials in India are reporting an 85.1% decline in malaria cases and an 83.36% decline in deaths between 2015 and 2022.
"While it may feel like the world is crumbling into a war-torn, authoritarian shit show ravaged by rising temperatures and politicians who stand idly by, we can take solace in knowing that we’ve become better at preventing suicides." Specifically, did you know that in the past two decades, global suicide prevention efforts have reduced deaths by a third? Wired
Nepal has achieved remarkable progress in healthcare in recent decades, thanks in large part to its 51,000 female community health volunteers. Between 1996 and 2022, maternal and child mortality fell by half, contraceptive use rose from 26% to 43%, the prevalence of childhood stunting more than halved, and the percentage of fully vaccinated children doubled. My Republica
Benin and Mali have eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, the fifth and sixth countries in Africa to achieve this significant milestone. The number of people requiring antibiotic treatment for trachoma in the WHO African Region has fallen from 189 million in 2014 to 105 million as of June 2022. WHO
Some news from China, courtesy of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations.
- The maternal mortality rate declined from 18.3 per 100,000 in 2018 to 15.7 in 2022, and 44.16 million rural women have been brought out of poverty during this period.
- 180 million cervical cancer screenings and nearly 100 million breast cancer screenings have been provided free of charge for rural women and women with low incomes.
- The primary-school enrollment rate for girls has been over 99% since 2015, more than 50% of female students with disabilities attend ordinary school, and female students now outnumber male students in secondary, undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
- Between 2013 and 2022, 18,000 cases of trafficking in women and children were solved, and cases in the past ten years have been reduced by 86.2%.
- China has now put in place a complete legal system comprised of over 100 laws and regulations which protect women’s rights and interests.
Two wins for LGBTQI rights. Taiwan just amended its laws to allow same-sex couples to adopt children they are not biologically related to, and Namibia's Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriages conducted outside the country must be recognised by the government, expanding the interpretation of the term 'spouse' in its immigration laws.
Lula just signed a law guaranteeing a substantial increase in nursing salaries. $7.3 billion has been budgeted to ensure that the country's 2.8 million nurses and midwives receive fair compensation. 'The approval of this law is the result of more than 30 years of struggle by healthcare workers’ organisations.' Agencia Brasil
Two new laws in the United States have given mothers a long-awaited victory. These laws, the PUMP Act and the PWFA, change the health and economic trajectory for millions of women and families, providing greater economic security and workplace rights and protecting them against discrimination. MSNBC
Murder rates in the United States are down by 12.5% in the 75 cities with available data for 2023 so far. It's still pretty early, but this suggests we are going to see a significant drop this year. Overall, American cities are far safer and less violent today than they were two years ago. But, of course, everyone knows this already because it's been so extensively covered by American media. VOA
Crime continues to plummet in the United Kingdom. The number of offenses in 2022 fell by 12% compared to the year leading up the pandemic, with dramatic declines in homicide, robberies, and knife crime. But, of course, everyone knows this already because it's been so extensively covered by British media. ONS
The only home we've ever known
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest fell 68% in April compared to last year, the first monthly drop under the watch of Lula, and an indication that after a slow start, efforts are starting to pay off. Land clearing is down 40% this year so far–news that comes off the back of the recent ban on mining and commercial farming on 620,000 hectares of Indigenous reserves. Reuters
Forest guardians across the Amazon are finding increasing success in protecting their lands from deforestation and mining, using drones, camera traps, georeferencing and solar panels. 'While technological tools have been helpful, the real defenders of the environment are the Indigenous communities themselves.' RTBC
Have you heard of the Loess Plateau? It's one of the greatest regeneration stories of all time. In 1994, China and the World Bank got together to restore nearly four million acres of over-grazed, over-harvested lands in north-central China. In less than 20 years, it was transformed into green valleys and productive farmland, and it is now greener and wetter than at any other point in the last two centuries.
The Osa Peninsula on Costa Rica’s west coast occupies just 0.001% of the planet’s surface area, yet it is home to an estimated 2.5% of all the biodiversity in the world. Local communities are now being paid to conserve it, using money that is 92% funded from a sales tax on fossil fuels. Regenerative. RTBC
Lawmakers in the Caribbean island of Aruba have taken the first steps toward amending its constitution to include a recognition that nature possesses inherent legal rights to exist and regenerate. If the process is successful, Aruba will become the world’s second country, after Ecuador, to constitutionally recognize the rights of nature. ICN
After nearly a year of wrestling over the fate of their water supply, California, Arizona and Nevada have coalesced around a plan to conserve a major portion of their water from the Colorado River in exchange for more than $1 billion in federal funds. 'The enemy is not any organization, agency or part of the basin. The enemy is the old way.' WaPo
Paris is getting close to the end of a $1.5-billion-dollar effort to clean up the Seine, meaning people will be able to swim in it again for the first time in a century; in London, 40 different restoration projects are bringing buried rivers to light and re-wilding many of the city's waterways; and in Washington, the Potomac is about to become safe for swimming again, too.
In 2021, the US Environmental Protection Agency implemented a new set of rules on lead and copper in drinking water. A study has now revealed that the regulations cost $335 million a year to implement while generating $9 billion in health benefits annually. 'We thought the benefits might exceed costs by an order of magnitude, but they were many times that.' Harvard
Malaysia, one of the ten biggest plastic polluters in the world, is ramping up its campaign to ban the use of all plastic bags. After starting with fixed business locations like supermarkets and shops, the ban will now expand to roadside stalls, and by 2025, will be extended to all physical outlets in the country. Straits Times
Australia's largest supermarket, Coles, will stop selling soft-plastic shopping bags by the end of next month, a move that will remove 230 million plastic bags from circulation in the space of a year. Guardian
The platypus has been reintroduced into Australia's oldest national park after disappearing from it in the 1970s. Last week, wildlife officials released four females inside the Royal National Park south of Sydney and plan to introduce two more females and four males in the near future. Smithsonian
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
A reminder: it looks like 2022 was the year that carbon emissions from the global electricity sector peaked for good. This is epochal: electricity is the world's single biggest source of energy-related emissions. The reason for the change? Wind and solar, which now generate more electricity than nuclear. 'What was unfamiliar and cutting-edge has become mainstream; a bit boring, even.' Bloomberg
Carbon emissions in the European Union declined by 4% in the final three months of 2022, while GDP increased by 1.5%. This is a major milestone in proving that economic growth can be balanced with an aggressive transition to renewables. Emissions fell in 23 of the 27 EU member states and across all industry categories except services, mining, and transportation. Quartz
BNP Paribas, France's largest lender, will no longer provide financing for the development of new oil and gas fields, and has reiterated its target of an 80% cut of oil exploration financing by 2030. The new commitments also include a complete phasing out of all financing to non-diversified oil companies. Reuters
The share of fossil gas in electricity generation in Australia fell by 47% between 2012 and 2022 and is expected to fall to just 4% on the east coast of the country by 2030. We're not experts, but we think the technical term for this in energy markets is 'unequivocal ballet of carnage.' IEEFA
One of the world's leading proponents of decarbonization, Jigar Shah, is now in charge of one of the biggest chequebooks in US history, a $400-billion fund to reduce emissions and make energy cleaner, and he's not afraid to use it. The US government also just opened up $11 billion of grants for clean energy projects in rural areas.
Manufacturing is back in the United States, except now it's clean. The country's largest solar factory, capable of making 5 GW of panels a year, is going to be built in Ohio. Not to be outdone, China has announced a factory that's four times bigger, and one of its leading producers just revealed a major breakthrough in solar cell technology. Learning curves FTW.
A shocking story from the South China Sea. Nope, not that kind of story. Orsted, the world's biggest offshore wind company, is building a massive wind farm in the Taiwan Strait to supply 100% clean power to TSMC, the world's largest chipmaker. 'Obviously, the project is here for the long term.' Reuters
A whopping 23% of California’s new car sales in the first three months of 2023 were electric. Things are moving faster and faster–less than six months ago, the share of new cars that are powered by a battery was 20%. Where California leads, others will follow.
Hertz, one of the three largest car rental companies in the world, obviously hasn't, because it's going all in on electric vehicles. It's forecasting nearly two million EV rentals in 2023, approximately five times more than in 2022, and says that a quarter of all the cars in its fleet will be electric by 2024. CNBC
It looks like gasoline usage has peaked in the United States, thanks to reduced driving, remote work and most importantly, the rise of electric vehicles. EIA
After selling over a million units of its all-electric, $4,800 Wuling Mini in less than three years in China, the company that makes it just released a new pricing plan that allows customers to buy it for $2,838, and then pay $28 per month for five years. That's cheaper than most motorbikes in developing countries. Clean Technica
BUTWHATABOUT ALL OF THE FIREZ? Don't people know how dangerous electric vehicles are?
Indistinguishable from magic
You know, I’ve written about the physics revolution that dominated the first half of the 20th century. And then of course I was deeply immersed in the digital revolution, which was the second half of the 20th century. But what happened in the past few years is we’ve found easy to reprogram tools that will allow us to edit our genes. Man, that’s going to be ten times more impactful than the digital revolution was.
- Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson is the renowned biographer of Einstein and Steve Jobs, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, a former chairman of CNN and former managing editor of TIME magazine. He says forget artificial intelligence–gene editing is our most powerful (and dangerous) technology. Big Think
China just approved a gene-edited soybean, its first approval of the technology in a crop; in the Philippines, a gene-edited banana that stays fresh for longer has been cleared for production; and the first gene-edited food to hit the market in the United States will be mustard greens engineered to be less bitter.
What do you get when you cross Michelangelo with Auguste Rodin, Käthe Kollwitz, Takamura Kotaro and Augusta Savage? An ‘Impossible Statue.’ Specifically, a five-foot, 500-kg stainless steel figure housed in the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm, made by generative artificial intelligence, trained in the styles of five of the greatest sculptors of all time. Fast Company
Designers in Seoul have created a 3D-printed, 10-metre-tall tree made from a biodegradable polymer grown from micro algae. 40 glass photobioreactors are embedded within the trunk and around the base, containing 500 litres of algae cultures that are actively carrying out photosynthesis, equivalent to 12 mature trees. Dezeen
What drives life is thus a little electric current, kept up by the sunshine. All the complexities of intermediary metabolism are but the lacework around this basic fact.
Albert Szent-Gyoörgyi, Hungarian-American biochemist
Archeologists in Jordan and Saudi Arabia have discovered ancient stone monoliths with precise depictions of nearby 'desert kites'–massive structures designed to trap and kill wild animal herds. Engraved between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, these are by far the oldest known to-scale architectural plans recorded in human history. NYT
A startup in Florida that says it has the technology to map the surface of the Earth with LIDAR has emerged from stealth. Until now, this has been impossible because the equipment is so heavy, but advances in the last five years have made it feasible. A full 3D model of the surface of the entire planet. Whew. OK. Tech Crunch
Inspired by the catgut sutures first used by the ancient Romans, engineers at MIT have designed sutures derived from animal tissue that can not only hold tissue in place, but are also coated with hydrogels that can be embedded with sensors to detect inflammation, drugs, or even cells that release therapeutic molecules.
A deepwater seabed mapping company (how's that for a job description) has produced a 16-terabyte digital twin of the Titanic, showing the wreckage with a level of detail that has never been shown before. The visuals were captured in a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 4,000 metres below the surface of the North Atlantic. BBC
The information highway is still super
Annalee Newitz (whom God preserve) on why dystopias are lame and counterproductive, and why we need more "topias"–stories set in places where neither good nor evil rules supreme, and where people struggle with ambiguity the way we do everyday. 'If we can acknowledge that nothing will ever be perfect, it puts us in the right frame of mind to face the future.'
A synesthete (someone who experiences synesthesia) and a neuroscientist argue that synesthesia is not just a different way of perceiving the world, but a different way of remembering and recording the world. Synesthesia provides a window into the human mind by bringing unconscious associations to the surface, many of which are rooted in aspects of our 'cultural amber' that we are so inured to, we no longer notice them. Open Mind
Noah Smith interviews Dan Wang. If you're a fan of Dan's end-of-year China letter (we obviously are) then you should really enjoy this. Goes well beyond the usual, superficial China analysis we get in Western media and gives you a far more complex picture. Highly recommended.
A thought-provoking essay on global fertility and depopulation. Despite the slightly weird undertone of natalism, there are a few ideas here that we hadn't previously considered. 'Consider your personal social group. If you are like most in the developed world, around a third of your peers will have no kids and about a third will have two kids. If that group is to hover just above the repopulation rate, the final third must have over four kids each.' Palladium
We couldn't resist. What happens when you cross two of the best things in the world–open source software and sourdough? Github
That's all for this edition, thanks for reading. Watch out for our editorial on the Humankind Project, it's dropping around the middle of next week, and then we'll see you again here in the newsletter, as always, at the end of the week.
With love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team
