FC119: Sistine Chapel of the Ancients

Plus, garbage language, a mind-blowing map of the Milky Way, smartphone DNA sequencing, and good news on fossil fuel divestment, e-waste in America, wildlife consumption in China, and global pneumonia and stunting rates.

A weekly roundup of science, technology and intelligent optimism (not necessarily in that order). You're subscribed to the premium edition. One third of your subscription fee goes to charity.

Before we get into it, a bit of an update on what you can expect as we approach the end of the year. Next week, we're going to be sending out two pieces of content: one of them exclusive to you, our paid subscribers, and the other to the general public.

On Tuesday 15th December we'll be publishing our 2020 Information Diet, a comprehensive list of all of the newsletters, books, websites and people that we loved this year. If you haven't heard of the concept of an information diet before, it's about changing your relationship with the internet - prioritizing information that makes you healthy, and cutting out the stuff that make you ill (i.e. news and social media). Our hope is that by showing you exactly what's in our food groups, you can create or update your own. This will only be available to paid subscribers.

On Friday 18th December we'll be sending out our annual 99 Good News Stories, a list we feel we need this year more than ever. That will be available to the general public. If you're not sure what this is, here's last year's edition. It's always one of the biggest punctuation marks in our calendar, and we usually go into hibernation for a few weeks afterwards. When we do we'll make sure to pause subscriptions so you're not paying for the newsletter while we're on a break!

Alright. Enough housekeeping. Time for the news.

Good news

After an eight year fight, New York has announced it is getting rid of all oil and gas stocks from its $226 billion financial portfolio. It's the first US state to do so, and the largest pension fund to dump fossil fuel investments ― ever, in the entire world. It's a substantive victory for divestment campaigners and a very, very big market signal. NYT

Speaking of market signals, the number of major global companies who’ve disclosed their environmental impact and aggressively committed to reducing it has increased by 46% in the last twelve months. For those who have, the commitment to sustainability is paying off - their average annual return has been 5.3% higher than competitors over the past seven years. Bloomberg

Here's another one. In 2012, Exxon was the most valuable company in the world, an unassailable colossus at the height of its power. Eight years later it's been booted off the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and last month it wrote off $17bn-$20bn worth of its natural gas assets, the biggest write-down in the company's history. FT

One more, just for luck. Denmark, Europe's biggest oil producer, has announced it will end all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea as part of its broader plan to phase out fossil fuel extraction by 2050. It’s the first major oil-producing country to take such a big step, another body blow to the global oil industry. “It’s a tough decision, it’s an expensive decision, but it’s the right decision." Vox

What's the biggest threat to children around the world? It's not malaria or AIDS. It's pneumonia, and a newly released report shows that we're making incredible progress. In 2011 the disease claimed the lives of 1.3 million children before their fifth birthday, 18% of all child deaths around the world. In 2019 that number dropped to 672,000, a fall of almost 50% in less than a decade. Stop Pneumonia

We're also making progress on stunting. In 2019 more than one in five children under 5 had stunted growth due to malnourishment. While that's still shockingly high, it's far better than it used to be. Between 2000 and 2019 stunting prevalence globally declined from 32.4% to 21.3%, and the number of children affected fell from 199 million to 144 million. UNICEF

A universal flu vaccine has passed the first stage of human trials, a crucial step towards pandemic-proofing the planet. The vaccine, designed to work against influenza even if the virus mutates, was found to create a “broad, strong, durable and functional immune response." If successful it could replace the annual flu jab and protect against dangerous strains that have yet to appear. ABC

Indonesia, the fourth most populated country in the world, has reported a significant decline in its number of illiterate people, from 4.63% of the population in 2011 to 1.78% in 2019. That means that almost 8 million adults there have gained the ability to read and write in the last decade. Jakarta Post

Attitudes in China towards the eating of wild animals have changed drastically in the wake of the pandemic. Up to 90% of the public now supports strict bans on the trade and consumption of wildlife, and it's being backed by regulation. This year, China has already prosecuted more than 15,000 people for wildlife-related crimes, a 66% increase from 2019. Mongabay

The United Kingdom has announced plans to ban the export of live animals for slaughter and fattening, the first country in Europe to end this practice. It's a big win for animal rights groups - the RSPCA has been campaigning on the issue for more than 50 years. Guardian

A new study from Yale has revealed that the mass of electronic waste generated by Americans has been declining since 2015. The biggest contributor is the disappearance of large, bulky cathode-ray tube TVs and computer monitors. The total number of electronic devices entering the waste stream is also levelling off, due to 'convergence' e.g. smartphones doubling up as cameras.

Indistinguishable from magic

A massive collection of paintings dating back to the last ice age has been discovered on a cliff face, deep in the Colombian Amazon. Dubbed The Sistine Chapel of the Ancients, it consists of tens of thousands of figures created up to 12,500 years ago, including depictions of extinct ice age megafauna and people dancing and wearing masks. Design Boom

One of the best robots in existence, Hayabusa-2, has dropped off a capsule in the Australian Outback after an epic 6 billion km round trip to asteroid Ryugu. The capsule contains 0.1 grams of carbon-rich space rock, by far the largest asteroid sample ever retrieved. Scientists hope it will contain insights into the origin of the solar system, and potentially life itself. Science

The European Space Agency has released the most detailed maps ever made of our home, the Milky Way. It's a treasure trove of space nerd goodness, and includes one of the most mind-blowing scientific animations we've ever seen: the projected orbit, for the next 500 million years, of all the stars within 100 parsecs (326 light years) of our Sun.

Quantum supremacy has been achieved for the second time ever, by a team of scientists from Shanghai. Their computer, named Jiŭzhāng, was able to detect 76 photons in a process called Gaussian boson sampling, making it 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers and 10 billion times faster than the first computer to achieve supremacy, Google's 2019 Sycamore machine. SA

After being burned too many times we usually avoid battery stories, but this one looks like the real deal. After ten years and $300 million, a company from San Jose, has achieved one of the holy grails of clean energy: a commercially viable solid-state lithium-metal battery. 80% charge in 15 mins, 80% capacity after 800 cycles, 2x energy density of commercial cells. Game changer. Wired

Scientists in New York have developed the world's first mobile genome sequence analyzer. By pairing a smartphone with a handheld DNA sequencer it creates a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the Star Trek 'tricorder.' Meanwhile, over at Johns Hopkins, researchers have written new open source software that shrinks the time for profiling gene mutations from 15 days to just three.

And while we're on genes, 17 months into the first serious clinical trials of CRISPR for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, all patients are free from symptoms and have not needed blood transfusions. “We have made the pivot that we’ve been waiting for. There shouldn’t be any question at all that we now have the ability to offer people long-term disease control using genetic tools.” STAT

Information superhighway

We've got an apology to make. A few issues back, we shared a piece by Dianna Fleischman called "Uncanny Vulvas." We shouldn't have. It's horrendously misogynistic and repeats some horrible myths about rape. If you want to know why, you can find out more here. We should have read it more carefully before recommending it to thousands of people. We're sorry.

A few months old, but it's so good we have to include it. Molly Young takes on the curse of business buzzwords, which she calls 'garbage language.' We know there's an entire genre of this kind of criticism, but trust us, you've never seen someone do it so well. "It is obvious that the point of these words is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide." Vulture

Cai Xia, a former Professor at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, recently defected to the United States. Her op-ed in Foreign Affairs is one of the most eye-opening things we've seen in 2020, a rare glimpse from a genuine insider into the CCP's inner workings. Reading this, we can't help but wonder how much longer a regime built on so much brutality and ideological rigidity can last.

If you're not already, it's time to start paying very close attention to GPT-3, the AI-powered general purpose writing tool. After recently gaining access an experienced tech CEO says it's the most important technical advance he's seen since the internet, simultaneously "totally new, deeply terrifying, and completely electrifying." One Zero

The always excellent John Lanchester takes a look at the most recent findings from human palaeontology, and concludes that something extraordinary happened to our species around 70,000 years ago. Highly recommended, especially if it's been a while since you updated your knowledge on all things H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. LRB

Another stunner from Granta, a favourite new publication. It's an essay/memoir by Scottish farmer, Derek Gow, about a life spent working the land and his dawning realization of the damage that traditional farming has wrought on the natural world. Beautifully written, heartbreaking, but with a glimmer of hope at the end. Feels like the entire story of human civilization right now. Whew.

Check out this masterclass in science communication from Maryam Tsegaye, a 17 year old teenager from Alberta, Canada. In three minutes, she brilliantly explains the phenomenon of quantum tunneling, whereby electrons pass through barriers they shouldn't be able to from the perspective of classical physics. It's funny, smart, and it'll remind you that the next generation is awesome. Science Alert

Humankind

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Meet Felicia Rangel-Samponaro (44) a housewife from Texas who founded a pop up school on the US/Mexico border to teach reading, writing, math and art to children while their families wait for asylum.

For years Felicia worked with a local church group in Texas, crossing the border to provide food and books to asylum seekers but when the migration laws changed, leaving many families stranded in limbo, she decided to move to Mexico and set up the Sidewalk School for Children Asylum Seekers for the kids inside camps.

The school started as a series of sidewalk classes, taught by other asylum seekers, many of whom had advanced degrees and backgrounds in education. Rather than fold under the pressures of the pandemic, the school has flourished into an online network of 20 teachers who give Zoom classes to children inside the camp and to various shelters around Mexico via tablets. To raise the funds for the technology, Felicia used her own money and a GoFundMe campaign.

The classes have given the children not only an opportunity to resume their education but a reprieve from the long days of boredom inside the camp. “To go to school in that situation,” Felicia said, “I couldn’t do it. And they keep turning in work and showing up day after day. That’s a strength a lot of people don’t have. They are still thriving, wanting to learn.” Al Jazeera

Give a damn

A few months ago, we sent $4,000 to the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people of Rondonia, Brazil, for the purchase of a drone to monitor deforestation. We've just received an update, and we're afraid it's bad news. In the interests of full transparency, we wanted to share this, as it was your subscription fees that paid for the equipment.

Hello Future Crunch,

Good and awful news. It took a few weeks because we're deep in the Brazilian Amazon but the equipment arrived here. Here are the receipts from the purchase. That's the good thing. The negative part is that when the indigenous guys were travelling back to the village to bring the stuff they were kidnapped and everything they had was stolen. They were driving a brand new pickup truck that was recently donated and we think the vehicle was one of the main reasons this crime happened - besides the fact that they were all members of the drone surveillance team. Their leader, Bitaté had a pistol pointed at his head for hours. We brought him to the city in order to recover a little bit from the trauma but unfortunately we don't think the police will recover their stuff. We're still shocked because of this sad event and we would like to thank you very much for your help and apologize for the loss of the equipment.

Gabriel Uchida
Association of Ethno-Environmental Defense

Obviously this is really upsetting news, and a real and sobering reminder of the challenges being faced by indigenous people in the Amazon right now. Progress doesn't happen by magic - it happens because people take risks and put their lives and livelihoods on the line. We're thinking about other ways we might be able to support our friends out there right now. We'll keep you updated. If anyone would like to help, let us know and we'll send you to the right place.

Our apologies for ending on such a disappointing note, but we thought it was important to be open and real about what's happening out there. Intelligent optimism isn't about ignoring the challenges. It's about staring straight into the darkness and saying "we can do better." The fight continues.

Thanks as always for reading, and for all your generous support. We'll see you next week - twice!

With love,

FC HQ