No 152: Space Tacos
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.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
One of the four major flu viruses that circulate in humans might have gone extinct thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Yamagata virus has not been detected since April 2020 anywhere in the world. Together with the Victoria virus, it was responsible for somewhere between 290,000 and 650,000 global deaths every year. ABC
Rwanda managed to reduce its annual malaria cases from 4.8 million in 2016 to 1.8 million in 2020, and severe cases from 18,000 to 3,000 during the same period. The overall death rate during that time has plummeted by almost 70%, and the government is now trialling drones that spray anti-mosquito insecticides. RBC
Stroke is a hidden killer - the second-leading cause of death worldwide, and the third-leading cause of death and disability combined. A new report in The Lancet suggests that quietly and largely uncelebrated, we're making progress. Between 1990 and 2019, the age-standardised incidence of strokes has decreased by 17%, and deaths by 36%.
The proportion of Brazil's population with access to sewerage facilities has increased from 45% to 54% in the last decade. During that time, hospitalisations due to waterborne diseases decreased by over 50%, from 603,623 to 273,403. Among children under four the reduction in hospitalisations has been even more pronounced, at almost 60%. Trata Institute
The data make it clear that any improvement in the public’s access to drinking water, collection and treatment of wastewater results in great benefits to public health.
Édison Carlos, President of the Trata Institute
The residents of Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest slums, now have access to safe, cheap, and clean drinking water thanks to the rollout of water vending machines. Cartels used to force residents to buy polluted water at exorbitant prices; the new machines allow them to buy water with rechargeable tokens. Reuters
Tamil Nadu has become the second Indian state to grant workers the 'right to sit.' For centuries, salespeople in India have been forced to work on their feet without access to a chair. The new law is a victory for labour rights activists, and will require store owners to provide seating and allow employees to sit down whenever possible. Reuters
A significant majority of people in wealthy countries believe having people of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds improves society. In the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan, 8 out of 10 people believe greater diversity is a benefit, and even in relatively culturally homogenous countries like Japan and Greece, the share has increased by double digits since the question was last asked four years ago. Pew
The only home we've ever known
New York is vying for the title of 'the greenest big city on earth' with the return of whales off the coast of Staten Island, endangered butterflies, rare native bees, coyotes in Central Park and exotic insects not seen for decades in Brooklyn. It’s down to a 40-year conservation effort of tree planting, pesticide bans, and the conversion of former landfills into nature sanctuaries. NYT
An endangered Saharan antelope, known as the mhorr, or Dama gazelle, is on the road to recovery thanks to a rescue mission by an army captain from Spain 50 years ago. The descendants of the rescued gazelles given refuge in the Doñana Park in southern Spain now number 4,000 and have been reintroduced in Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal. El Pais
Mexico has banned cosmetic testing on animals after Save Ralph, an animated film about a rabbit cosmetic tester, spurred 1.3 million people to petition for new legislation. Mexico is the first country in North America and 41st country in the world to enact the ban. Tree Hugger
Finally, we’re going to save Ralph and all the other animals, because today we are approving a historic reform: the prohibition to use them as experiments for beauty products.
Senator Ricardo Monreal
Nova Scotia is creating the world's first wild refuge for ex-marine park whales. The 40-hectare coastal sanctuary will be 300 times larger than the biggest tank in any marine park and designed to accommodate up to eight beluga whales. The refuge plans to welcome its first whales early 2023. Globe & Mail
Panama, Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica just announced the creation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor, a fishing-free zone covering more than 500,000 km2 in one of the world’s most important migratory routes for turtles, whales, sharks and rays. The new interconnected area contains some of the richest pockets of ocean biodiversity on the planet, including the Galápagos Islands. Guardian
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
We’re at the halfway mark for COP26 and whisper it, but things appear to be going better than almost anyone expected at this point. The heads of state have come, done their honey dances and gone, and now the real work is underway, with negotiators deep into the Blue and Green Zone madness. Usually at this stage you start hearing about logjams but for some reason they don’t seem to be as prominent this year.
Instead, in the space of one week we’ve had historic commitments on forests, coal, methane, indigenous rights, steel, development and finance, plus some very big individual country pledges, most noticeably India’s. Despite terrible political reporting giving the opposite impression, their commitment to a 2070 net zero target is absolutely massive, and would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Credible projections from the IEA now suggest that if all the new pledges are fully funded and met, global warming could be limited to to 1.8℃ this century. If you listen closely, you can almost hear that ratchet clicking.
None of it is perfect. We've seen lofty ambitions on forests before, a lot of the heavy lifting on net zero is being punted to after 2030, the coal phaseouts don’t include the US, China, India or Russia (and Poland and Indonesia already seem to be getting cold feet) and although the financial industry is talking breathlessly about trillion dollar opportunities and showing off fancy new net zero alliances, many signatories remain among the world’s top backers of fossil fuels. Greta and the activists are justified in saying there's way too much greenwashing and not enough action.
And yet... for those of us who have been following this for long enough, there's an air of inevitability hanging over these proceedings that feels very, very new. In the spirit of its surroundings, COP26 is best thought of as being in a pub. We've all got that friend who is slow to get the drinks in. How do you deal with that? You put pressure on them. You tease them, you tell them it's their round, remind the prices are cheap, gently suggest you might not invite them out again. In many ways, that's why climate negotiations exist. To build the pressure on everyone to do their bit, where they can.
Are the commitments enough compared to the size of the challenge? Of course not. But anyone whose theory of change is that a problem of the magnitude and complexity of climate is going to be solved by a load of over-tired, over-caffeinated diplomats under LED lights in Scottish conference centre is making a category error. International diplomacy's job is to challenge the free-riders, but more importantly to provide a context and direction for engineers, scientists, financiers and entrepreneurs to put their minds to solving this problem. It's their efforts that cracked this thing open in the first place, and it's their efforts that may eventually make it all possible in the end.
Indistinguishable from magic
Astronauts on the ISS have successfully grown chillis in space. The crop, part of the Plant Habitat-04 study, should add some much needed flavour to crew diets, and is part of a renewed focus by NASA on the future of growing food in microgravity. Peppers are great space food: dense with nutrients, low microbial levels, self-pollinating and easy to grow. NASA
Scientists have discovered an unknown ghost ancestor in Eurasian DNA. On their way out Africa, the ancestors of most of humanity bred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010. Using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference, researchers have now found evidence of a 'third introgression'. Science Alert
Engineers in Zurich have built a machine made of mirrors, reaction chambers and filters that converts sunlight and air into fuel. On a sunny day, it produces around 32 milliliters of synthetic, pollutant free kerosene. It's not commercially viable, but we don't care: the technical ingenuity is amazing (fuel from sunlight WTF). Ars Technica
This is a pretty big one. Doctors in Cleveland have launched the first ever human trials of a vaccine for the most aggressive form of breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer kills nearly a quarter of patients within five years of diagnosis, and can only be prevented by masectomy. If successful, this vaccine will be a gamechanger for millions of women around the world. BI
Arguably the most impressive thing we've ever seen in computer vision: smooth 3D models compiled by neural networks from just a few camera shots. They're using one-pixel point rasterization (the process by which electronic data is turned into video), which allows them to display scenes with over 100 million points i.e. they're down to the lowest layers of visual reality now. Absolutely incredible.
CORRECTION
Last week we casually threw in a reference to solar sails while talking about the James Webb telescope. Little did we know, someone at NASA was listening. We're republishing the message in full because it's important to acknowledge our mistakes, and also, because we got an unofficial email from NASA.
Hey Future Crunch team!
I'm going to risk being 'that guy' and note a correction/point of interest on your bit about the James Webb Space Telescope. I noticed you referred to the spacecraft as having a solar sail, presumably referring to the large multi-layered deployable membrane. That device is actually not a sail, but a shield against the sun. I hear the term 'photon shield' which I particularly enjoy! Anyway, most space telescopes, particularly those that look in the infrared wavelength, like to be really cold since that means less thermal noise in your detector and higher sensitivity. There are parts of James Webb that need to be cooled all the way down to 7 degrees Kelvin to work right.
Unfortunately, anything in space is also required to be exposed to the sun which is really, really hot. The point of the photon shield is to reflect all that light and heat energy away from the telescope. That way, the telescope itself is only exposed to deep space which has an average temperature of about 3K. You can then then radiate away all your heat energy to that giant cold sink in the sky known as the infinite universe. If you are clever about your design, you can get down into the tens of degrees Kelvin just by radiating heat and using some thermally insulating hardware. Webb then has coolers to get specific components colder than that.
If you’re curious, I work at NASA/JPL and have worked a fair bit on deployable systems (not on James Webb though). Most recently, I’ve been working on hardware for a smaller telescope called SPHEREx which also has photon shields to achieve a similar goal but for a very different mission.
Anyway, thought you might enjoy that information or at least find it interesting. Thanks for all your work, I’m a huge fan of the newsletter and enjoy seeing it in my inbox every week!
Evan Hilgemann
Mechanical Engineer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
P.S. Evan's got a newsletter called Explore and Observe which features stories about the modern day exploration of earth and space and it's pretty awesome.
Information superhighway
Parenting advice from ancient Chinese philosophers, who believed that a life well lived was one in which a person is happy, fulfilled, and finds meaning in what they do and who they are. This comes not from participating in the ‘right’ activities or attending prestigious schools, but from loving and being loved, and understanding how your identity is bound up with the lives of those who have gone before.
We've been waiting for someone to write something worth sharing on the Metaverse - 99% of what's been said so far shows exactly why tech journalism is such a mess these days. Fortunately Ethan Zuckerman has ridden to our rescue, with a perfectly penned hatchet job on everything that's wrong with this stupid (and boring) idea. Atlantic
Nicholas P Money reminds us that outside the human realms of perception lie extraordinary worlds of richness, from dragonflies rowing air on stained-glass wings to the ten thousand year lifespans of aspen stem colonies and beyond, to where, in the words of William Blake, if the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. Psyche
Melbourne writer Briohny Doyle with a beautiful essay on the aftermath of disaster. We're so intent on the rise from the ashes, on the stories of recovery, that we forget that for some the disaster never ends. "We want to go back. We want the simplicity of distance. But we have to sit here, in these forests, growing from and towards fire." Griffith Review
Still can't quite believe this is happening. Not only is Amazon turning one of the greatest fantasy series of all time into a TV series, they're throwing buckets of cash at it in an attempt to recreate the success of GoT. This is going to be one of the most expensive shows ever made, and we couldn't be more thrilled. Be still, our nerdy little hearts. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time! GQ
Till Shade is gone, till water is gone, into the Shadow with teeth bared, screaming defiance with the last breath, to spit in Sightblinder's eye on the Last Day. By my honor and the Light, my life will be a dagger for Sightblinder's heart.
Humankind
Moving Mountains
Meet Ang Phurba Sherpa, a trekking guide in Nepal who sacrificed his life savings to buy food and supplies for unemployed colleagues after the pandemic wreaked havoc on Nepal's tourism industry.
The Himalayas usually draw an average of 171,000 tourists to Nepal each year, creating employment for trekking guides, hospitality workers and local retail. However, in 2020 the number of tourists plummeted to less than a few hundred and stayed at those levels with this year's continued lockdowns.
With limited employment opportunities, most trekking guides have endured two years without work or income and struggled to put food on the table for their families. Although Ang has been in the same situation, he decided to dig into his savings and help his fellow guides. Throughout the pandemic Ang has bought sacks of rice, lentils, cooking oil and other staples which he loads onto his truck and delivers to dozens of families around Kathmandu.
A single delivery from Ang keeps most of the families fed for a month.
For the past three months, Ang has also been delivering rations to a local shelter that cares for 57 disabled children. The shelter operator is a fellow guide who is struggling to keep the charity afloat without an income. Thanks to Ang’s deliveries they're now able to feed the children.
Ang’s story is a potent reminder about the power of kindness and our responsibility to take care of each other through times of crisis. He’s hoping his actions inspire others to do the same.
“The guides are facing lots of trouble and they are in they are in pain, and I can feel the suffering. I am in a difficult situation, but I want to help fellow guides and hope they too will come out to help each other too.”
We're out, thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team
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