Plus, ice-dreaming, Ethereum 2.0, a 'gargantuan leap' for biology, and good news on drilling in the Arctic, global malaria deaths, and cannabis declassification by the United Nations.
A weekly roundup of science, technology and intelligent optimism (not necessarily in that order). You're signed up to the premium edition. One third of your subscription revenues go to charity.
It's official. The UK has become the first Western nation to grant authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine. Starting next week, around 50 hospitals will begin offering the Pfizer BioNtech vaccine to people over the age of 80, and to staff in care homes. After that, around 1,000 doctors' offices across the country will start offering vaccinations to vulnerable patients. This is just the beginning, we can expect a wave of similar announcements by other countries in the next few weeks.
The world's scientists should take a bow. They've gotten us out of a very big mess. Let's all take a moment to appreciate what they've pulled off here. While politicians, conspiracy theorists, bigots and 'freedom-loving' patriots have demonstrated some of the worst qualities of human nature this year, our scientists and healthcare workers have demonstrated some of the best. Back in March, we shared these words from journalist Farhad Manjoo. They're worth sharing again.
Let us pray, now, for science. Pray for empiricism and for epidemiology and for vaccines. Pray for peer review and controlled double-blinds. For flu shots, and washing your hands. Pray for reason, rigour and expertise. Pray for the precautionary principle. Pray for the NIH and the CDC. Pray for the WHO. And pray not just for science, but for scientists, too, as well as their colleagues in the application of science — the tireless health care workers, the whistle-blowing first responders, the rumpled, righteous public servants whose long-ignored warnings we will learn about only when the 12-part coronavirus docu-disaster series drops on Netflix. Wish them all well in the fights ahead. Their weapons, the weapons of science, are all we have left — perhaps the only true weapons our kind has ever marshalled against encroaching oblivion.
Sure enough, while most of the human family has been arguing with itself about whose fault this is, a small handful have been trying to figure out what to actually do about it. It's been an awful year, but thanks to their efforts millions of lives have been saved and deliverance is now at hand. Not only are these the quickest vaccines ever created, two of them, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, employ a brand new approach using a piece of genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA.
If you think of DNA as a book full of billions of recipes for how to make a human, then mRNA is like one of those recipes, but transcribed onto a card with vanishing ink. These vaccines work by flashing one of those recipe cards at your body, telling it to produce the SARS-COV-2 spike protein. Your immune cells then kick into action because they recognize this as something new and foreign. The RNA is gone in a few hours - but the immune response remains.
The beauty of this approach is that unlike more traditional vaccines that use a killed or weakened form of a virus to prompt an antibody response, at no point is there ever actually a virus inside your body.
It's an ingenious solution, built on the shoulders of generations of giants, and the result of an unprecedented 11 month collaborative effort by scientists from every corner of the planet. Of course, there's still a long way to go. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are still surging around the world. Tragically, for hundreds of thousands of people, the vaccines are not going to arrive in time. We shouldn't expect smooth sailing; inevitably, there will be more political cynicism, supply chain issues, and anti-vaxxer nonsense. Nothing's guaranteed.
That light at the end of the tunnel sure is shining a lot brighter though. So thanks, science. You're amazing.
Good news
Despite the best efforts of the Trump administration to salt the earth on their way out, all six major US banks have now ruled out financing for oil and gas development in the Arctic. This is the best kind of 'f*** you' - the result of years of pressure from the Gwich'in and Iñupiat peoples, activist shareholders, and hundreds of thousands of phone calls from conservation groups. Sierra Club
The WHO says that malaria deaths fell to the lowest level ever recorded last year. The mortality rate has dropped by almost 60% in the last two decades, from 24.7 per 100,000 people in 2000 to 10.1 per 100,000 in 2019. Take a moment to appreciate this: 1.5 billion malaria cases and 7.6 million malaria deaths have been averted globally in the period between 2000 and 2019.
The United Nations has removed cannabis for medicinal purposes from a category of the world’s most dangerous drugs. It's a big moment; a highly anticipated and long-delayed decision that will clear the way for a global expansion of marijuana research and medical use, and bolster legalization efforts around the world. The New York Times
Child poverty in the United States plummeted in the last decade. In 2019, 14%, or 10.5 million children, were living in poverty, down from 22%, or 16.3 million, in 2010. All major racial and ethnic groups have seen declines, with the greatest gains coming for Black and Hispanic children. The pandemic is likely to reverse some of that progress - but shouldn't take away from the achievement. Pew
The world's largest diamond company, De Beers, has committed to a major ethical overhaul in the next decade. It goals now include reaching carbon-neutrality across all global operations, full traceability of all diamonds, achieving gender parity in its workforce, supporting 10,000 female entrepreneurs, engaging 10,000 girls in STEM, and halving its water footprint by 2030. Reuters
China's island province of Hainan has banned disposable plastic bags, packaging, meal boxes, bowls, cutlery, drink cups and straws, effective as of the 1st December 2020. Hainan has also been developing eco-friendly substitutes, and expects to spin up a complete industrial chain of fully biodegradable materials and products by 2023. The Star
14 countries, responsible for 40% of the world’s coastlines, have signed a new pledge to end overfishing, restore fish populations and stop the flow of ocean plastic in the next 10 years. Each of the countries has also committed to making sure all oceans within their national jurisdictions, a combined area roughly the size of Africa, are managed sustainably by 2025. Guardian
Nodding blue harebells, clusters of yellow kidney vetch and flashes of bird’s-foot-trefoil will line the verges of all new large-scale road projects in England. Contractors are now obliged to create conditions for native wildflower meadows to thrive on all new verges. “It’s potentially hundreds of miles, providing ecological connectivity across the network.” Guardian
After ten years of restoration, Monserrate Hill, on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia, has been transformed from a deforested eyesore to a bird sanctuary. It now offers an oasis of calm amidst the city of 8 million people, and is home to over 115 species of birds, including 18 types of hummingbirds. Awara Musafir
Indistinguishable from magic
Deepmind has figured out how to determine a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. This is a massive, massive discovery; if not for COVID-19, easily the biggest biology story of 2020. It's going to vastly accelerate our understanding of the building blocks of life and enable far quicker and more advanced drug discovery. “It’s a breakthrough of the first order, certainly one of the most significant scientific results of my lifetime.” Nature
Chinese engineers have made a major breakthrough in jet engine design, with the invention of the 'standing oblique detonation ramjet engine' or sodramjet. Testing in a wind tunnel has reached nine times the speed of sound, with the mouth of the combustion chamber "glowing like a Star Wars spaceship." It offers the biggest hope so far for commercial flights to reach hypersonic speeds. Popular Mechanics
It’s been a long time coming, but Ethereum 2.0 is finally up and running. The upgrade paves the way for proof of stake, which makes validation far more energy efficient, and sharding, which should scale the network to 100,000 transactions per second, allowing the world's second biggest blockchain to compete with the likes of Visa. Watch this space. Decrypt
Singapore has become the first country in the world to give the go-ahead to meat created without slaughtering any animals, after approving the sale of lab-grown chicken nuggets. The city state's embrace of alternative proteins isn’t limited to cultivated meat either; it's also moving swiftly to support non-animal proteins produced from plants, algae, and fungi. Straits Times
This is Molly Gibson. She was born in October 2020, 27 years after her embryo was frozen in October 1992, and stayed that way until February 2020, when Tina and Ben Gibson of Tennessee adopted her, and Tina brought her to conception. There are an estimated one million frozen human embryos stored in the US alone right now. Molly is the oldest to have resulted in a birth. BBC
The information superhighway
It must be December, because suddenly the internet is full of lists. Our favourite so far comes from Pocket, an app that people use to save articles for reading later. They've compiled their most popular stories of 2020, and there so many good ones: the real Lord of the Flies, the quantum internet, the dark side of parenting on Youtube, bank heists in Buenos Aires, and the hacker who saved the internet.
Love this typology for different robots. Alexis Lloyd says there are three archetypes that describe different approaches to designing machine intelligences: C3PO (humanoid robot, incapable of crossing the uncanny valley), Iron Man (the machine as a prosthesis, augmenting human abilities with mechanical ones) and R2D2 (collaborative, but with its own shape, language and individual agency).
This is for anyone who's ever felt guilty for not taking advantage of all those online courses advertised in your feed. Irina Dumitrescu, a professor of medieval English, embarked on a six-month binge of Masterclass during lockdown. She learned something, but it went to her heart and her hands, not to her head. Long Reads
In September this year, British oil giant BP made an extraordinary call: humanity’s thirst for oil may never again return to prior levels, making 2019 the year of peak oil. You've heard the claim, but it can't be true can it? Energy analysts Tom Randall and Hayley Warren investigate. Their conclusion - ‘The writing is all over the bloody wall.' Bloomberg
When we say we value indigenous knowledge, do we really mean it, or are we paying lip service to an ideal? This extraordinary set of notes by regenerative agriculture pioneer Charles Massey might answer the question. They're from his conversations about land and fire with Aboriginal Ngarigo elder, Rod Mason, also known as Ibai Wumburra. "My people are the icemakers and rainmakers, we came out of the big drought of the ice ages. We are from the ice dreaming." Granta
Humankind
Meet Dominique Rousselle, a 70 year old retired schoolteacher devoting his golden years to rescuing stray dogs from Thailand and Egypt and relocating them into loving homes in Canada, where he lives.
Dominique is the cofounder of ‘Dogs without Collars’ an animal rescue on a mission to find loving forever homes for healthy, homeless dogs from parts of the world where there is no possibility of them being rehomed. He’s flown over fifty lucky street pups from Thailand to Toronto at his own expense and has kept his international rescue operation going through COVID-19 with the help of social media and crowdfunding.
For over fifteen years Dominique has been rescuing homeless dogs, starting as a volunteer dog walker for the Toronto Humane Society and then travelling to Thailand every year, where he spends a month riding a bicycle around the streets to care for stray dogs, feeding them and treating them for parasites and infection, often paying their veterinary bills out of this own pocket. On a typical day he’d care for 40 dogs and pay to have 10 dogs spayed or neutered weekly to reduce the number of strays wandering the villages of Thailand.
''If one day I get too old to go around on the bike to help these dogs, I still want to take care of them, even if it is only one or two. At least I get to help them."
That's it for this edition, thanks for reading.
We'll see you next week :)
With love,
FC HQ
