Good News
South Australia has become the largest grid in the world to have 100% of its electricity demand met by solar power, even as electricity prices have become the cheapest in the country. For years, fossil fuels advocates here in Australia have been warning that too much wind and solar will increase energy prices. Unsurprisingly, those voices are now conspicuously absent. Renew Economy
Amidst the excitement surrounding GM's pledge to stop making petrol and diesel vehicles by 2035, you might have missed the even bigger news that ZF Frederickshavn, one of the world's top five automotive component manufacturers, has officially ceased R&D on internal combustion engines. "We are preparing for the fact that hardly any combustion engines will be sold in Europe in 2035, perhaps none at all in the passenger car sector."
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world's biggest, has sold its entire portfolio of companies focused on oil exploration and production. The portfolio, worth about $6 billion in 2019, was fully exited by the end of 2020. The fund’s new CEO has made sustainable investing an explicit strategic focus and says all portfolio managers "need to operate with that in mind." World Oil
Pakistan experienced a record drop in terrorism last year, with a 45% decrease compared to 2019. Law-enforcement agencies also averted more than half of terror threats in 2020 and recovered 72,227 weapons and five million rounds of ammunition. There's now been an 86% reduction in terror attacks since 2013, and a 97% decline in suicide bombings since 2009. Gulf News
Crime and murder rates declined in a majority of South American and Caribbean nations last year, including significant reductions in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela, some of the most homicidal nations in the world. While it's not clear how much was attributable to the pandemic, law enforcement authorities hope it represents a turning point. Insight Crime
In the past two decades Australia has experienced one of the most astonishing falls in crime ever recorded by any country. Since 2001, the rate of break-ins has fallen by 68%, motor vehicle theft by 70%, robbery by 71% and other theft by 43% per cent. Across the same period the Australian murder rate fell by 50%, the attempted murder rate by 70% and overall homicide by 59%. The Australian
Oregon's Measure 110 went into effect this week, the first legislation in the United States to decriminalize possession of all illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth and oxycodone. The state's new health-care-based approach will now offer addicts treatment instead of prison. “Criminalization creates barriers to treatment. If we want people to make different choices, we have to give them more options." USA Today
A new study in The Lancet looking at the impact of ten different diseases in low and middle income countries estimates that vaccines saved the lives of 37 million kids between 2000 and 2019. For those born in 2019, increases in vaccine coverage and introductions of new vaccines will result in an estimated 72% reduction in lifetime mortality compared to those born in 2000.
India's new budget has doubled the country's spending on healthcare, from 1% to 2% of GDP. It's the largest investment in healthcare in the country's history, and will dramatically improve public health systems as well as fund the huge vaccination drive to immunize 1.3 billion people. Imagine the kind of headlines this would receive if it happened in the United States or Europe? Al Jazeera
Tesco, the UK's biggest supermarket chain, removed 1 billion pieces of plastic from across its stores in 2020, including the bags used to pack loose vegetables, fruit and baked goods, plastic shrink wraps around tinned food, plastic in Christmas products and plastic wrapping around greetings cards. Shows you how powerful consumer pressure can be when directed in the right way. Greenbiz
The US government has trebled the size of the Gulf of Mexico's largest coral sanctuary, from 145 km² to 414 km². The expansion protects 14 additional reefs from the bottom-tending fishing gear, ship anchors and oil and gas exploration. Initially proposed under the Bush administration and formalized by Obama, the process concluded during the final week of the Trump administration. Nola
For the first time in more than a generation, chinook salmon have spawned in the upper Columbia River system, thanks to a successful re-introduction program by biologists from the Colville Tribe. “I was shocked at first, then I was just overcome with complete joy. I don’t know that I have the right words to even explain the happiness and the healing.” Spokesman
Fishermen in Namibia have reduced the accidental deaths of seabirds, including endangered albatrosses, from 30,000 per year in 2009, to just 215 at last count. It's down to a simple regulation created in 2015 that made bird-scaring lines mandatory on all fishing boats. The 98.4% reduction in seabird mortality is an “absolutely amazing” achievement. Eco Magazine
Indistinguishable from magic
The global advertising industry is quickly cottoning on to the fact that AI can resurrect dead people to make living people buy things. At this weekend's Super Bowl, a walking, talking likeness of legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi will be making an appearance, while in Spain, a brewery has reincarnated beloved singer, Lola Flores - to sell beer. Capitalism huh? Salud!
If you live in the Pingshan district, a quiet suburb of Shenzhen, you can now tap your phone screen a few times and within minutes a driverless car will arrive to pick you up, and take you to any place in the suburb without seeing another human being. This is probably one of those things that has to be experienced in person to truly appreciate the magic. Engadget
Researchers in Maryland have invented a low-tech technique for making wood transparent by chemically altering lignin, rather than removing it. The final product allows 90% of light to pass through and is both lighter and stronger than glass. It could potentially be used for load-bearing windows and roofs, or even to make a see-through house. New Scientist
Porsche is using additive manufacturing to print housing units for their electric vehicle drive trains that are 10% lighter and double the strength compared to cast parts. When you consider that automakers do insane things like not including spare tires just to get slightly better fuel economy ratings, saving a tenth of your drive unit’s total weight is a big deal. Clean Technica
It was only a matter of time before this happened, but it still feels very weird. There is now a company in Massachusetts that offers a service for two people to upload their .vcf.gz genetic files to see whether there are any health risks to a potential child they may conceive. How much longer before this comes to dating apps? Swipe left if she's not a good genetic match. SafeM8
Meanwhile, in Israel, another company is now selling software to fertility clinics that uses AI to screen embryos. The company claims its algorithm leads to a 12% increase in positive predictions - identifying embryos that lead to a healthy pregnancy - and a 29% increase in negative predictions - identifying embryos that do not result in successful pregnancy - compared to an external panel of embryologists. The ethics of this seem... complicated. Tech Crunch
Scientist just scanned the brains of 20 healthy volunteers after ingesting an active dose of LSD. They discovered that it drastically increases the functional complexity of the human brain; essentially, splitting it up into more segregated parts, while temporarily preventing it from combining separate streams of information into a unified whole (hence the 'ego dissolution' of a psychedelic trip). Science Alert
Information superhighway
Environmental writer Emma Marriss says a lot of the planetary doom stories we've heard in the last few years are exaggerated. We're not really in a sixth mass extinction, and we haven't actually lost 60% of wild animals since the 1970s. We're in a crisis, yes, but there are many reasons to believe 2021 will be better than 2020, and 2031 can be much, much better, if we demand it. Atlantic
We're probably a little late to this party, but we've just come across the ideas of social activist Hilary Cottam and we're hooked. She says welfare states aren't working because they're designed for industrial societies. Her solution? Rather than fixing it with bureaucracy, fix it with relationships. Start by asking “What are you doing? What do you need? Who do you need to flourish? How can we build that?” Quartz
Don't teach your kids to code. They can figure that out for themselves. Instead, make sure they learn how to play a music instrument. In the biggest study of its kind, cognitive neuroscientists have proven that learning music early in life has lifelong benefits, giving the brain stronger structural and functional connections and improving neurological capabilities beyond music. Inverse
Noah Smith says we should all be paying a lot more attention to Taiwan. It's an incredibly successful democracy, one of the most gender equal countries in the world, has a vibrant LGBTQI scene, makes vigorous attempts to preserve the culture of its indigenous people, welcomes immigrants and has great food, pop culture and night life. Lots of MDMA in the water, apparently. Noahpinion
This one is a wild ride. For the last 12 months Alexandra Tanner has been following Mormon mommies on Instagram. "The mommies go collectively crazy for a little graphic that shows a passage from Revelation in which every instance of 'mark of the beast' has been edited to read 'mask of the beast.' Some mommies love the Snoo, a motorized bassinet that rocks your baby to sleep. Others say the Snoo causes SIDS. Others still say SIDS is really caused by vaccines." Jewish Currents
Give a damn
In November last year you helped us send $5,000 to Sirkhane Darkroom, a charity on the Turkish-Syrian border using photography to give refugee children an opportunity to be creative and have fun. They were trying to raise money for a caravan to turn into a mobile darkroom, but were struggling, especially during the pandemic. Thanks to your generosity, they've now purchased the caravan and are in the process of converting it as we speak. Nice work people. Here's a video message to all of you from Serbest Salih, the founder of the project. Also - some great pictures of the caravan in action.
We did it !!! Dear Friends,
With your great support and donations we got the opportunity to get a mini caravan, with the caravan we will be able to reach hundreds of children 📸.
Our next step is to expand to much wider areas with the Sirkhane Darkroom caravan. Children will be able to access opportunities that they can naturally learn by experiencing social skills, have fun and produce. We will start mobile caravan workshops very soon. Thank you so much to Future Crunch subscribers for the chance!
Başardık!!!
Serbest
Humankind
Meet Karen Atekem, a 30 year old healthcare worker from Cameroon working with the nomadic Massangam people to help them eliminate the tropical disease onchocerciasis, also known as ‘river blindness’.
Growing up, Karen heard stories about the Massangam nomads and after years of working with them, came to deeply respect their culture and travel patterns. Nomadic tribes are a challenge for many healthcare workers in Africa as they often miss the routine community health interventions and as a result, curable infections like onchocerciasis lead to irreversible blindness.
Karen has taken a different approach. She schedules her health-checks around the Massangam’s migration patterns rather than the other way around. Three times a year she uses satellite imagery to locate the tribe and travels over ten hours by car, motorbike and on foot through remote, unmapped regions of the country to treat them. Together with her team, Karen spends one month every year with the tribe, testing and treating individuals with river blindness and training members of the community to become liaisons between the researchers and their communities, an essential step in building trust.
As testament to this, a few months ago when Karen didn’t show up as expected, members in the community sent their 19 year old liaison on a long hike to access a phone and call her. Karen informed him about the COVID pandemic and shared vital information about how his community could take precautions. “These people love their health and are willing to do whatever it takes to protect it,” she says. “Providing equitable medical care means everyone has a right to treatment, not just those who are settled — nomads, too.” Global Citizen
That's a wrap for this week, thanks for joining us. This one's a bit of a rodeo (from those Mormon mommy bloggers to nomadic tribes in West Africa). Hope you managed to hang on. As always, we are super grateful for both your support and your attention.
We'll see you next week.
Watch out for those Oreos.
With love,
FC HQ
