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An entrancing short film by designer and artist Rus Khasanov (previously) fuses multiple optical tricks into a single work. Splashes of glittery, inky liquids crawl across the screen, resulting in a series of bubbles that mimic magnified shots of human eyes. The hypnotic footage utilizes pareidolia—the inclination to see an object where it physically doesn’t exist—while referencing heterochromia iridum, a fairly common condition in which a person’s irises are multi-colored, sometimes in the forms of spikes radiating around the pupil or swirls that split the tissue with different hues. Khasanov’s rendition mimics that phenomenon through saturated droplets and innumerable veins that plume outward.

For more of the Russia-based artist’s work, check out his Behance and Vimeo, where he shares a range of technicolor photography-based projects.

 

What began as a task to install a new parking structure in Bansberia, India quickly morphed into an open community center awash with patterned brickwork. Conceived by Abin Design Studio, “Gallery House” spans 380-square-meters and combines multiple masonry techniques to form the asymmetric facade. The Kolkata-based team alternated ceramic blocks created by a local artist and a mixture of rectangular, chevron, and curved bricks sourced from a nearby field, resulting in a variegated, textured structure that mimics the terracotta temples of Bengal.

Positioned opposite the gaping ground entrance, a large staircase spills into the street and offers a seating area for residents hoping to watch the yearly festivities that pass by the building. A spacious hall fills the first floor with a lounge, pantry, and multi-purpose area used for yoga and other classes on the upper stories. When community members head home after the day’s activities, the rooms are converted into dormitories for the staff.

Explore more of the studio’s projects that focus on gathering and social support on its site. (via designboom)

 

In 1987, a giant star exploded right next to our own Milky Way galaxy. It was the brightest and closest supernova since the invention of the telescope some four centuries earlier, and just about every observatory turned to take a look. Perhaps most excitingly, specialized observatories buried deep underground captured shy subatomic particles called neutrinos streaming out of the blast.

These particles were first proposed as the driving force behind supernovas in 1966, which made their detection a source of comfort to theorists who had been trying to understand the inner workings of the explosions. Yet over the decades, astrophysicists had constantly bumped into what appeared to be a fatal flaw in their neutrino-powered models.

Neutrinos are famously aloof particles, and questions remained over exactly how neutrinos transfer their energy to the star’s ordinary matter under the extreme conditions of a collapsing star. Whenever theorists tried to model these intricate particle motions and interactions in computer simulations, the supernova’s shock wave would stall and fall back on itself. The failures “entrenched the idea that our leading theory for how supernovas explode maybe doesn’t work,” said Sean Couch, a computational astrophysicist at Michigan State University.

Of course, the specifics of what goes on deep inside a supernova as it explodes have always been mysterious. It’s a cauldron of extremes, a turbulent soup of transmuting matter, where particles and forces often ignored in our everyday world become critical. Compounding the problem, the explosive interior is largely hidden from view, shrouded by clouds of hot gas. Understanding the details of supernovas “has been a central unsolved problem in astrophysics,” said Adam Burrows, an astrophysicist at Princeton University who has studied supernovas for more than 35 years.

In recent years, however, theorists have been able to home in on the surprisingly complex mechanisms that make supernovas tick. Simulations that explode have become the norm, rather than the exception, Burrows wrote in Nature this month. Rival research groups’ computer codes are now agreeing on how supernova shock waves evolve, while simulations have advanced so far that even the effects of Einstein’s notoriously intricate general relativity are being included. The role of neutrinos is finally becoming understood.

“It’s a watershed moment,” said Couch. What they’re finding is that without turbulence, collapsing stars may never form supernovas at all.

A Chaotic Dance

For much of a star’s life, the inward pull of gravity is delicately balanced by the outward push of radiation from nuclear reactions inside the star’s core. As the star runs out of fuel, gravity takes hold. The core collapses in on itself — plummeting at 150,000 kilometers per hour — causing temperatures to surge to 100 billion degrees Celsius and fusing the core into a solid ball of neutrons.

The outer layers of the star continue to fall inward, but as they hit this incompressible neutron core, they bounce off it, creating a shock wave. In order for the shock wave to become an explosion, it must be driven outward with enough energy to escape the pull of the star’s gravity. The shock wave must also fight against the inward spiral of the star’s outermost layers, which are still falling onto the core.

Until recently, the forces powering the shock wave were only understood in the blurriest of terms. For decades, computers were only powerful enough to run simplified models of the collapsing core. Stars were treated as perfect spheres, with the shock wave emanating from the center the same way in every direction. But as the shock wave moves outward in these one-dimensional models, it slows and then falters.

Only in the last few years, with the growth of supercomputers, have theorists had enough computing power to model massive stars with the complexity needed to achieve explosions. The best models now integrate details such as the micro-level interactions between neutrinos and matter, the disordered motions of fluids, and recent advances in many different fields of physics — from nuclear physics to stellar evolution. Moreover, theorists can now run many simulations each year, allowing them to freely tweak the models and try out different starting conditions.

One turning point came in 2015, when Couch and his collaborators ran a three-dimensional computer model of the final minutes of a massive star’s collapse. Although the simulation only mapped out 160 seconds of the star’s life, it illuminated the role of an underappreciated player that helps stalled shock waves turn into fully fledged explosions.

Hidden inside the belly of the beast, particles twist and turn chaotically. “It’s like boiling water on your stove. There are massive overturns of fluid inside the star, going at thousands of kilometers per second,” said Couch.

This turbulence creates extra pressure behind the shock wave, pushing it further from the star’s center. Away from the center, the inward pull of gravity is weaker, and there’s less inward-falling matter to temper the shock wave. The turbulent matter bouncing around behind the shock wave also has more time to absorb neutrinos. Energy from the neutrinos then heats the matter and drives the shock wave into an explosion.

For years, researchers had failed to realize the importance of turbulence, because it only reveals its full impact in simulations run in three dimensions. “What nature does effortlessly, it has taken us decades to achieve as we went up from one dimension to two and three dimensions,” said Burrows.

These simulations have also revealed that turbulence results in an asymmetric explosion, where the star looks a bit like an hourglass. As the explosion pushes outward in one direction, matter keeps falling onto the core in another direction, fueling the star’s explosion further.

These new simulations are giving researchers a better understanding of exactly how supernovas have shaped the universe we see today. “We can get the correct explosion energy range, and we can get the neutron star masses that we see left behind,” said Burrows. Supernovas are largely responsible for creating the universe’s budget of hefty elements such as oxygen and iron, and theorists are starting to use simulations to predict exactly how much of these heavy elements should be around. “We’re now starting to tackle problems that were unimaginable in the past,” said Tuguldur Sukhbold, a theoretical and computational astrophysicist at Ohio State University.

The Next Blast

Despite the exponential rise in computing power, a supernova simulation is far rarer than an observation in the sky. “Twenty years ago there were around 100 supernovae being discovered every year,” said Edo Berger, an astronomer at Harvard University. “Now we’re discovering 10,000 or 20,000 every year,” a rise driven by new telescopes that quickly and repeatedly scan the night sky. By contrast, in a year theorists carry out around 30 computer simulations. A single simulation, re-creating just a few minutes of core collapse, can take many months. “You check in every day and it’s only gone a millisecond,” said Couch. “It’s like watching molasses in the wintertime.”

The broad accuracy of the new simulations has astrophysicists excited for the next nearby blast. “While we’re waiting for the next supernova , we have a lot of work to do. We need to improve the theoretical modeling to understand what features we could detect,” said Irene Tamborra, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen. “You cannot miss the opportunity, because it’s such a rare event.”

Most supernovas are too far away from Earth for observatories to detect their neutrinos. Supernovas in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way — like Supernova 1987A — only occur on average about once every half-century.

But if one does occur, astronomers will be able to “peer directly into the center of the explosion,” said Berger, by observing its gravitational waves. “Different groups have emphasized different processes as being important in the actual explosion of the star. And those different processes have different gravitational wave and neutrino signatures.”

While theorists have now broadly reached a consensus on the most important factors driving supernovas, challenges remain. In particular, the outcome of the explosion is “very strongly dictated” by the structure of a star’s core before it collapses, said Sukhbold. Small differences are magnified into a variety of outcomes by the chaotic collapse, and so the evolution of a star before it collapses must also be accurately modeled.

Other questions include the role of intense magnetic fields in a rotating star’s core. “It’s very possible that you can have a hybrid mechanism of magnetic fields and neutrinos,” said Burrows. The way neutrinos change from one type — or “flavor” — into another and how this affects the explosion is also unclear.

“There are a lot of ingredients that still need to be added to our simulations,” said Tamborra. “If a supernova were to explode tomorrow and it matches our theoretical predictions, then it means that all the ingredients that we are currently missing can safely be neglected. But if this is not the case, then we need to understand why.”

This article was reprinted on Wired.com.

The post Secret Ingredient Found to Power Supernovas first appeared on Quanta Magazine.

In 1841, the English biologist Richard Owen marveled at the intricate skeleton of a new sea sponge species found near the Philippines. It resembled “a delicate cornucopia,” he wrote, one woven from “stiff, glistening, elastic threads, resembling the finest hairs of spun glass.” The skeleton is indeed made of glass, which the animal, Euplectella aspergillum — nicknamed “Venus’ flower basket,” — creates using acid extracted from seawater.

Scientists still marvel at this sponge 180 years later. Its notable properties include stunning longevity — some glass sponges are thought to live many thousands of years, placing them among the longest-lived animals — and the ability to channel light through its silica strands in the manner of fiber optics. For the last two decades, a group of biologists, materials scientists and engineers at Harvard University has focused on the feature of Venus’ flower basket that attracted Owen: the intricate design of its glass skeleton. Their recent work reveals that the skeleton is, for unknown reasons, exceptionally strong — nearly as uncrushable as possible for this kind of structure.

“It’s sort of the holy grail of engineering design,” said Dhruv Bhate, an associate professor of engineering at Arizona State University who studies the Venus’ flower basket but is not involved in the work of the Harvard team.

The skeleton’s strength derives from its peculiar lattice pattern, which first intrigued the Harvard materials scientist and chemist Joanna Aizenberg about 20 years ago. Katia Bertoldi, one of Aizenberg’s co-authors on the recent studies, was also captivated by the lattice pattern as soon as she saw it. “It’s this periodic architecture, but it’s not a simple one,” Bertoldi said. She and her colleagues wondered, “Why this particular architecture?”

They noted that the glass beams that form the skeleton of the Venus’ flower basket have a lot in common with trusses, the assemblages of beams used to stabilize bridges and skyscrapers. For well over a century, engineers’ preferred design for trusses has been a sturdy lattice consisting of a square grid with diagonals running in both directions for added support. “We’ve been doing this the same way for a long, long time,” said Matheus Fernandes, a graduate student on the team. The skeleton of the Venus’ flower basket, however, has pairs of diagonals running in both directions rather than the single diagonals crisscrossing a typical truss. These pairs are spaced apart so the grid looks like a checkerboard, with diagonals crossing every other square.

The researchers fabricated and computer-simulated a lattice based on the sponge and compared it with three other lattice structures of the same weight, including the standard truss pattern. In simulations and experiments, they saw the bio-inspired lattice withstand the most stress — first from compression in one direction, and then from opposing pressures at three points in another test — before breaking. In further simulations, they varied the number of diagonals as well as their spacing and thickness to find the lattice that could sustain the most compression. It turned out to be the one modeled on the sponge.

With its additional diagonals, the sponge’s lattice has more joints than a traditional truss and less distance between the joints, which may allow the structure to sustain greater compression before buckling, Fernandes said. The team detailed their initial findings about the skeleton’s strength in Nature Materials in September. “Deeper dives” into different aspects of these glassy skeletons are ongoing, according to James Weaver, another co-author.

The researchers are also pursuing a patent for the sponge-inspired lattice they created. Adding more strength to architectural structures without adding more weight could theoretically allow for longer bridges, lighter infrastructure that’s easier to transport, or even more streamlined engineering in vehicles bound for space. “The process of trial and error over millions of years of evolution brings out the best” in materials, said Pablo Zavattieri, a professor in civil engineering at Purdue University.

However, in the case of Venus’ flower basket, the evolutionary purpose of its incompressibility is unclear.

The sponges often live thousands of meters deep where water pressure is extreme, but this pressure comes from all directions, pressing on opposite sides of the glass beams equally and canceling itself out. The sponge doesn’t experience a “crushing force,” explained Clint Penick, a biologist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, via email.

Penick said the sponge does need a strong structure, however, to stand up and filter plankton from the water. It also needs to contain a pair of shrimps that often permanently inhabit the sponge once they grow too big to leave it. (These occupants have earned the sponge status as a symbol of eternal love in Japan, where it is given as a wedding present.) Their sturdy skeletons may also deter predators or prevent damage from animals that might collide with them, Penick added, though none of this fully explains their ultra-robustness.

Brute strength is not all Venus’ flower basket offers. The lattice walls of its skeleton are just one of several levels of complexity in its structure. Zoom in to see how its fibers can shift slightly within its lattice walls, or how its arrangement of proteins and silica molecules stops fractures in their tracks. Zoom out to examine how the lacy skeleton allows the living sponge to filter water. Bhate’s team is investigating the way some of the strands aren’t completely attached to the others, allowing the skeleton flexibility, and he’s curious about the way the structure would stand up to twisting.

“It’s one of those things that you can spend a lifetime on, and you still have not replicated all those capabilities,” Bhate said. “And that’s why it’s exciting.”

This story was produced in collaboration with InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom in Seattle with a focus on the environment, public health, and government accountability.

With dozens of people killed by wildfires in the western U.S., millions of acres scorched, and choking smoke spreading far into British Columbia, Washington Governor Jay Inslee lit up the news wires in September. “These are not just wildfires,” Inslee asserted at a press conference from Olympia, “these are climate fires.”

Two days later on George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday-morning ABC News talk show, the recent presidential candidate recounted a poignant visit to a town nearly wiped out by the fires. “The only moisture in Eastern Washington was the tears of people who have lost their homes,” said Inslee. “And now we have a blowtorch over our states in the West, which is climate change.”

Just days after his return to the national stage, however, the question in a Seattle courtroom was whether the state he’d run since 2013 should be sanctioned for helping to load and light that torch. On Thursday September 17, an attorney representing Inslee and the entire apparatus of Washington state government stood to tell three masked judges behind a plexiglass shield that courts could not hold the state legally responsible for its part in the climate crisis: The part where it expanded highways. The part where it licensed power plants and factories to emit many tons of greenhouse gases. Where it set building standards that would keep residents’ stoves and furnaces and water heaters polluting the atmosphere for decades to come.

Thick haze from the climate fires still clogged the air outside the appeals courtroom in downtown Seattle as Assistant Attorney General Chris Reitz offered his arguments. The panel of judges peppered him with questions and probed for logical holes.

“I have asthma,” interjected one of the judges, David Mann of the Washington Court of Appeals Division One. “So I have to stay inside, with the windows shut.”

“Why isn’t that affecting my life and my liberty?”

The events leading to this legal confrontation in Washington, years in the making, are akin to those that recently prompted similar battles in Oregon and British Columbia courtrooms — government action and inaction that has increasingly spurred legal actions around the globe. In the Washington case, as in those to the north and south, young people are suing to stop what they call a state-sanctioned degradation of their futures.

One of the Washington plaintiffs is 20-year-old Seattleite Aji Piper, who has been suing the state and U.S. governments over climate’s impact on his life and liberty for five years. As Piper said in a 2018 TED Talk, he is fighting for humanity’s ability to “change places with another, see their plight, adapt, and make better choices.”

But the halting pace and limited progress amplifies the anxiety and anguish that the climate crisis represents for so many young people, he said.

“The worst for me as a plaintiff is when we’re just sitting nowhere and waiting,” Piper said in a Zoom interview after the court hearing.

“It’s frustrating,” agreed his attorney, Andrea Rodgers, from her adjacent Zoom picture box.

“Washington has been defending itself by saying, ‘We have been doing the best we can. We have got Inslee. Look at the progress,’” Rodgers said.

“But emissions don’t lie and the emissions keep rising.”

Cascadia’s broken promise

The official record shows that Rodgers and the youth litigants in all three jurisdictions are right at least about this: Washington, British Columbia, and Oregon promised to significantly reduce their emissions of greenhouse gasses by 2020.

But they did not.

This happened even though renewable energy sources and other solutions are available. Technologically speaking, climate change is neither insurmountable nor unaffordable. It’s the politics that have fallen short.

Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia — the heart of an eco-friendly region that’s frequently dubbed Cascadia — consider themselves a global leader on climate action.

The three governments set some of North America’s first mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over a decade ago. And if any place on earth can show the world how to confront the climate crisis, it should be here. Cascadia’s abundant hydropower provides a head start toward living without fossil fuels, and the majority of voters in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon say they want to make that transition.

Yet Washington, B.C., and Oregon were not on track to meet their 2020 targets. In fact, until Covid hit last year, emissions were rising. Between 2013 and 2018, the most recent five-year period for which Cascadia’s governments have completed counts, emissions rose by about 5, 6, and 7 percent in Washington, Oregon, and B.C., respectively, according to a new analysis by InvestigateWest.

Over the same period, similarly fast-growing economies such as California and Germany released fewer of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. “I wouldn’t say we’ve done nothing. But there’s been an awful lot of dithering. We were supposed to do a whole hell of a lot better,” says KC Golden, who spent over a decade at Seattle-based think tank Climate Solutions and now serves on the board of international activist group 350.org.

B.C.’s trend paints a particularly stark picture. In 2018 it came within 0.1 percent of setting a new all-time emissions record for releases of greenhouse gases, according to InvestigateWest’s analysis, which adjusts the province’s official data to enable accurate comparisons with the U.S. figures. Over the five years prior, B.C.’s emissions grew more than five times faster than the Canadian average. And there could be more to come as its government fosters the province’s nascent liquified natural gas export industry.

Golden and other climate policy experts say measures to meet the climate goals set in 2007-2008 prevented some emissions, and may ultimately drive reductions. But they say Earth’s climate doesn’t give A’s for effort. As Golden puts it: “The atmosphere doesn’t care about anything but CO2 molecules [and] how many molecules go into the atmosphere.”

Despite the dithering, Cascadia does have the solutions to climate change within its reach. The example set in California and modeling by Cascadia’s own planners show that renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other solutions exist to get Cascadia off fossil fuels, slashing the carbon dioxide created by burning fossil gas, oil, and coal, and the methane from leaked gas. In other words, Cascadia has the technology required to decarbonize.

Holding Earth’s warming to levels that avoid the worst effects of climate change demands faster reductions here, and everywhere. Global climate experts say that means halving global emissions by 2030. That requires a six-fold speed-up in renewable energy growth, for example, and a 12-fold speedup in electric vehicle sales, according to the World Resources Institute.

So why is environmentally-conscious Cascadia stuck in first gear? The consensus answer from experts and activists interviewed by InvestigateWest: a shortage of political will. The region has been beset by partisan wrangling, fear of job losses, disagreements over how to ensure equity for already polluted and marginalized communities, and misinformation obscuring the full potential of well-documented solutions.

“The constraining factor has always been political feasibility, not economic feasibility,” says political economist and energy modeling expert Mark Jaccard, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., and a former chair of the British Columbia Utilities Commission.

The story of Cascadia’s decade of policy delay and emissions backsliding is a story of ambitious goals eroded by inertia. It’s a story of overestimating faith in economic logic and underestimating the enduring allure of economic growth. And, south of the 49th Parallel, it’s a tale of a bipartisan consensus split asunder, such that fighting for a cleaner future is seen, in some quarters, as an attack on freedom. Or worse.

Powering down coal

The imperative to transform fossil fuel-dependent energy systems took center stage around the world after the deadly destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the record heat of 2007, when Arctic sea ice melted to a fraction of its previous norms. Climate change was no longer just a future threat. It had arrived.

Cascadia lawmakers acted, mandating emissions reductions by 2020 and steeper cuts by 2050. As of 2008 B.C., Washington, and Oregon were among only four provinces and eight states to legally commit to decarbonization.

Oregon and B.C. set ambitious long term goals of 75-77 percent reductions from their 1990 emissions, reflecting the global carbon cuts scientists believed were needed by mid-century to avert the worst of the impending climate disaster. Washington state came in with a relatively modest 50 percent-by-2050 goal reflecting what then-governor Christine Gregoire thought the state could guarantee.

Cascadia’s governments had experience with decarbonization. Hydropower continued to provide more than two-thirds of the region’s power thanks to a long legacy of leadership in energy efficiency. Since the 1970s, making customers more efficient had provided more “virtual” power capacity than actual generation from new power plants burning gas and coal.

All three governments chalked up quick wins in their power sectors.

B.C. immediately scrapped plans for a new gas-fired power plant and two coal generators. The province told its primary utility, provincially-owned BC Hydro, to instead buy additional electricity from renewable energy projects such as wind farms and small-scale hydropower stations. Washington voters and Oregon’s legislature passed some of North America’s first requirements mandating privately-owned utilities to add a rising share of wind, solar, and other types of renewable power. That unleashed a boom in wind power development concentrated along the Columbia River Gorge, the natural wind tunnel that separates the states.

And guess what? It actually saved consumers money. Falling prices for wind and solar driven by innovation and scale made the mandates more economical.

Rural economic development made the mandates politically palatable. Jackie Dingfelder, a former member of the Oregon legislature who led passage of a package of climate bills in 2007, said representatives for rural counties saw renewable energy plants as a boost to declining tax revenues — one that panned out. “If you drive out in eastern Oregon and Washington you see tons of wind farms and those farmers get royalties and those communities get money,” said Dingfelder.

These power moves delivered for the atmosphere, particularly in Oregon. In 2007 coal provided over one-third of Oregon’s power. A decade later it was less than a quarter, and emissions from electricity consumption had declined by 27 percent.

Oregon also dialed in further reductions to come. In 2010 utility Portland General Electric cut a deal with environmentalists, codified by the legislature, to shut down Oregon’s only in-state coal-burning power plant. The utility got out of a $470-million retrofit of its air pollution controls, which would have extended the plant’s operating life to 2030 or beyond, by agreeing to shutter it in 2020.

Cascadia’s problem was the rest of its economy. Buildings, industry, and especially transportation generate over two-thirds of Cascadia’s emissions. Carbon-cutting options for those — such as electric heat pumps to replace gas furnaces and urban redesigns to reduce vehicle travel — were more complex and costly than swapping out coal stacks for wind turbines. And none of Cascadia’s governments had policies strong enough to forcefully drive those options into use.

Greenhouse gas emissions — about four-fifths of which are carbon-based CO2 and methane from extraction and use of fossil fuels — fell for several years thanks to cleaner electricity, as well as the global financial crisis of 2008. People traveled less, consumed less, and produced less. Fossil fuel use dropped. Cascadia’s emissions fell by 8 percent. Then the economy rebounded. People moved more. Production and consumption rose. And carbon emissions came roaring back.

By 2018 robust economic growth across Cascadia had restored over four-fifths of the 19.5-megatons of annual emissions that the region shed during the downturn.

Reed Schuler, a senior advisor to Inslee on climate, told InvestigateWest that emissions rose because Washington’s economy is among North America’s fastest growing. “There’s more people living and working in buildings, more people driving around, more people flying around,” said Schuler.

However, comparative analysis by InvestigateWest puts the blame squarely on Cascadia’s weak decarbonization policies. Between full economic recovery in 2012 and 2018, the most recent reporting year, California and Cascadia both booked a robust 26 percent increase in GDP. Over that period California drove its annual emissions down by more than 5 percent. Washington’s emissions — and Cascadia’s as a whole — ballooned by over 7 percent.

Tracking Arnold

California “decoupled” economic growth from rising carbon via a raft of laws and policies that encouraged or mandated use of efficient products and cleaner energy. Many were legislated in 2006 under then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, including the centerpiece: a scheme known as cap and trade. It set a cap on carbon emissions that declined annually, and enforced that cap by requiring polluters to buy credits — sold at auction — for every ton of carbon they released. By putting a price on carbon, cap and trade created a financial incentive to reduce pollution.

Cascadia’s governments all sought to match the breadth of California’s carbon-cutting policies. They sought to follow its harnessing of financial markets to drive down carbon emissions. They failed.

Early efforts in Washington and Oregon to enact cap-and-trade schemes fizzled. Washington approved a bill in 2008 that was later deemed unenforceable. Oregon ran out of time when the global economic meltdown struck that year, stoking economic anxiety. “The recession basically dashed that to the floor,” recalls Portland-based energy policy expert and climate activist Angus Duncan, then an advisor to the governor.

BC, in contrast, raced ahead. Like Schwarzenegger, then-Premier Gordon Campbell was a center-right politician who embraced climate action. BC’s parliamentary government, with its fewer checks on power than the U.S. system, enabled him to move fast — if he had his caucus behind him. In May 2007 Schwarzenegger visited Vancouver, signing a climate agreement and injecting star power into Campbell’s climate vision.

By the end of the year Campbell had surmounted opposition within the province’s business community, and had a climate package in place. In May 2008 Campbell’s Liberal Party majority in the legislature formally approved North America’s first carbon tax. It took effect that July — five years before California’s more complex cap-and-trade system went into effect.

The tax started at C$10 (about US $7.77 today) per metric ton of CO2 emissions anticipated from every liter of gasoline, diesel and natural gas sold in B.C. It was modest — adding just $1 or so to the price of a fill on a small car — but was set to increase annually to reach C$50 (about US $39.43) by 2020.

Within a few years economists were reporting small benefits and a reassuring lack of harms. The tax had trimmed fuel consumption in B.C. compared to other provinces in Canada while stimulating BC’s economy thanks to the government’s design for the revenues. B.C. returned its tax take by lowering income and business taxes and sending rebate checks to residents. The rebate checks protected lower-income residents from rising energy costs. Other measures protected energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries such as cement producers from being pushed out of the province.

Those measures could not, however, protect the tax and its champion from political attacks and misinformation. The province’s left-of-center New Democratic Party took the first swipe. During the 2009 election the NDP ran on an “Axe the Tax” platform, alleging that the carbon tax hurt working families. Campbell’s 20-point lead quickly evaporated.

When Campbell barely held on to his majority, arguments ensued as to whether the tax had nearly pulled him down or narrowly saved him by peeling environmental votes away from the NDP. But in 2011 Campbell’s Liberal party dumped him for a more populist leader. Premier Christy Clark took her lead from B.C.’s business lobbies — including fossil gas interests with large fracking operations in B.C.’s interior. She froze the carbon tax, rolled back funding for other climate measures, and rolled out a sales pitch for LNG investment.

So despite its early policy lead, B.C.’s decarbonization results proved worse than underwhelming. Instead of declining versus 2007, emissions rose through 2018.

Similar dynamics played out on Canada’s national stage, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper gained a majority in parliament in the 2009 election by attacking “job-killing carbon taxes” championed by his rival. Harper’s win kicked off a decade of Canadian climate inaction, including expansion of Alberta’s carbon-intensive oil sands. As Jaccard laments in his 2020 book The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success, “Canada’s emissions went up rather than down.”

The price of partisanship

To the south, hopes sprung high — but also tanked because of politics. Washington and Oregon governors returned to carbon pricing with their eyes on California’s cap-and-trade program rather than the political bloodbath up north. Alas, the same political crossfire leveled at B.C.’s tax — along with some novel attacks — would doom their carbon trading schemes in the state legislatures.

Inslee pushed carbon pricing after he became governor in 2013, in spite of Republican control of the state senate, where Senator Doug Ericksen, an opponent of climate action whose district includes two refineries, chaired the environment committee. “It was ‘Into the valley of Death, Rode the six hundred’,” recalled Patrick Mazza, a longtime Seattle-based climate policy analyst and activist, evoking the Alfred Tennyson poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” that immortalized an ill-fated 1854 cavalry charge in Crimea.

Inslee tried several times, and voters rejected two ballot measures, before Washington took a year off from carbon pricing battles in 2019.

Oregon governor Kate Brown led repeated charges over the same ground after she took office in 2015. Republican pushback there led to the strange events of June 2019, when Oregon state senators quit the capitol in Salem, denying Democrats the quorum they needed to outvote the Republicans.

On June 23, 2019 a reporter for The Wall Street Journal reached Oregon State Senator Cliff Bentz by phone. From an undisclosed location in Idaho, Bentz admitted that he and his colleagues were “on the lam” — fugitives from a debate over cap-and-trade legislation advanced by the legislature’s Democratic leaders. Bentz had changed hotels twice over the past four days and secured a burner phone, after Governor Brown ordered the Oregon State Police to find and return the wayward senators.

The senators’ run from law-making — a ruse they reprised last year — capped years of political dissolution that transformed an earlier consensus on climate action into open political warfare. In 2007 Oregon’s climate bills passed on bipartisan votes. In 2020 not one Republican would even cast a vote on a cap and trade measure backed by the state’s utilities.

Climate, said former legislator Dingfelder, is “right up there now with god and guns and abortion.”

Lower-income voters in Oregon and Washington understandably worry about new taxes and higher energy costs. Regressive tax systems in both states mean the lowest 20 percent of earners already pay the highest proportion of their income in taxes. Unions often paint carbon pricing as a job killer, in spite of contrary evidence from B.C. and California. Climate justice groups attack industries’ ability to buy rights to continue polluting the often minority, low-income communities nearby.

And then there’s the influence of corporations that sell fossil fuels or profit most when they are cheap. The sophisticated, well-financed Western States Petroleum Alliance has an especially strong record lobbying in Olympia, thanks to the state’s refineries, which provide over 4,800 jobs, most of which provide a healthy paycheck.

In Oregon, energy-intensive firms such as Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific gave $117,619 in campaign donations over a decade to the 11 senators who skipped town, according to reporting by The Oregonian’s Rob Davis. The same firms gave $43,250 to the Democratic senators who stayed to vote.

Dingfelder sees Oregon’s vulnerability to ideology and misinformation as a legacy of decline in Cascadia’s long-standing forestry and mining industries. As well-paid resource jobs evaporated, some states such as California and Washington pivoted faster, investing in universities that then spun off new job creators such as Microsoft and Amazon.

“We were the poor step child,” she said. “A lot of people got left behind.”

Climate as roadkill

As political backlash and game-playing blocked carbon pricing, Cascadia’s economies kept growing along the path of least resistance. In a world awash in cheap fossil fuels, that meant more carbon emissions. Especially from cars, trucks, trains, and planes.

Transportation has long been Cascadia’s top climate challenge, accounting for nearly two-fifths of emissions by the time its economies rebounded from the global economic meltdown in 2012. Six years later vehicle emissions had ballooned by over 10 percent in Washington and Oregon and over 29 percent in BC. (in contrast, California’s grew only 5 percent during that period.)

Cascadia’s transportation policies simply lacked the focus and strength to transform an inefficient system almost exclusively reliant on gasoline and diesel-fueled vehicles.

Fuel standards akin to California’s slowed emissions growth in Oregon and B.C. by requiring fuel suppliers, as a whole, to ratchet down the amount of fossil carbon per gallon in their gasoline and diesel. By 2018 B.C.’s law had prevented the release of over 9 million metric tons of carbon emissions — about as much as 2 million cars produce in a year — according to B.C.’s Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation, and costs consumers, at most, 12 cents per gallon according to B.C.’s Utilities Commission.

But much of that reduction occurred outside B.C., where the fuels were produced. And the reduction was small compared to in-province transport emissions. Carbon pollution from B.C. vehicles rose by more than a quarter with the standard in place.

Even if all of the estimated 1.49 million ton cut in carbon-intensity for fuel in 2018 was credited to the province’s carbon balance sheet, BC transport emissions would still have increased that year.

Cascadia efforts to push vehicles to new fuels also proved ineffective. For example Cascadia’s leaders joined Schwarzenegger in 2008 in a Pacific Coast Collaborative promising, among other coastal infrastructure, a string of hydrogen filling stations. But as automakers pivoted from hydrogen-consuming fuel cell vehicles toward faster-growing battery-powered electric vehicles, the Hydrogen Highway faded. California pivoted, ramping up mandates for EVs, but Cascadia’s alternative fuel programs stalled.

The entrenched problem across Cascadia is a failure to stem increasing road and air travel. Cascadia’s governments pinned early hope on high-speed rail between their coastal cities to stem driving and coastal flights — another inaugural project of the Pacific Coast Collaborative. That pricey vision fizzled with the economic meltdown.

What persisted is road construction, and driving. Oregon’s carbon-counters noted in 2018 that annual vehicle-miles of travel on their state’s roads had been growing even faster than the state’s population.

Seizing the high ground

While adults tarried, Cascadia’s youth — and their defenders — cried foul. Cascadia’s policy drift is what set up the September face-off in Washington’s Division 1 Court of Appeals impugning Inslee’s government — and dozens of associated cases.

A battle in a federal courtroom in Vancouver two weeks after Seattle’s hearing pitted lawyers for 15 young people from across Canada against their federal government. Youth such as Haana Edenshaw, from Haida Gwaii, who says rising emissions in B.C. and Canada-wide threaten her culture.

Haida Gwaii, better known to some by its colonial name, the Queen Charlotte Islands, lies over 45 miles from B.C.’s northern coast. Warming seas and weather already threaten iconic Haida resources such as Pacific salmon and yellow cedar. In an interview ahead of last fall’s court hearing, Edenshaw worried aloud about the future of her language, mythology, morality, and science — all of which she described as inseparable from nature and passed to future generations through it. “Elders will tell me things when we’re going to get salmon that otherwise you would just never know,” said Edenshaw.

Governments failed to protect the hopes of youth such as Edenshaw in B.C., Aji Piper in Seattle, and Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, a 24-year-old Oregonian who is suing both the U.S. government and her own state.

And governments have vigorously fought these challenges. In September the plaintiffs’ attorneys in Seattle and Vancouver were on defense, fighting government motions to dismiss their claims before judges even considered their merits.

Canada ‘won’ its motion in October and the youth immediately appealed; Washington’s youth still await a ruling on whether they’ll get their day in court. Just two more twists in nearly a decade of “unusually challenging and demanding” litigation is how Eugene, Oregon-based environmental lawyer Julia Olson described the developments in an interview last month.

Olson founded the environmental law group Our Children’s Trust in 2010, hired Rodgers to craft a legal plan, and recruited dozens of collaborators across the U.S. and beyond. On Mother’s Day 2011 they launched legal actions on behalf of youth in all 50 U.S. states and against the U.S., Ukraine and Uganda governments.

The suits, while so far unsuccessful, helped spark the youth climate activism that’s crystallized around Greta Thunberg since 2019. And they set the table for future attempts to achieve in the courtroom what the youthful plaintiffs and their allies have been unable to secure from legislatures.

Rulings so far have affirmed that government action is allowing an existential threat to grow. A decision in the U.S. federal case cited clear evidence that the government has “long promoted fossil fuel use despite knowing that it can cause catastrophic climate change.” The 2-1 majority expressed regret that, in their opinion, U.S. courts could not step into the breach.

But the young people and their lawyers hope they are planting seeds that may later deliver victories. An Oregon Supreme Court decision affirmed that the state had a duty to protect certain natural resources, such as navigable waters, and wrote that duty “might be expanded” in future judgements.

To which Oregon Chief Justice Martha Walters replied in a dissenting opinion: “the time is now.”

---

“Getting to Zero: Decarbonizing Cascadia” explores the path to low-carbon energy for British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. All rely heavily on hydropower, are transitioning from resource extraction industries, have rapidly diversifying populations, and face common challenges as they transition off fossil fuels.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia pledged to slash emissions. They failed. on Jan 11, 2021.

At the center of Coderch & Malavia’s artistic practice is the beauty of the human figure and its various expressions. The Valencia-based duo works collaboratively to cast bronze sculptures that explore the nuances of the body through dance-like movements and distinct gestures. Natural details like golden branches and feathered wings embellish many of the heavily patinaed works, Coderch & Malavia share, to evoke themes from classic literature, theater, photography, cinema, and ballet. “The human being is three-dimensional,” they say. “Probably that is the main reason why we are attracted to sculpture. It is the closest artistic representation of ourselves.”

After a discussion on intentions for a new project, the pair generally works with a live model to help the sculpture take shape. “The complicated part is organizing and sharing the physical creation of the work itself because you need double discipline,” they say. “You must learn to trust your partner and be able to share your ideas and your work with him, and, above all, you must put your ego aside in order to stay equal to commit to the final result.”

Get a glimpse into Coderch & Malavia’s process on their site and Instagram, where you can also follow their upcoming exhibitions.

 

Suspended within Rosa de Jong’s simple wooden frames are miniature dwellings that climb the steep, rocky terrain. Stilt houses, tents, and exceptionally tall ladders form the idyllic environments that are surrounded by faux moss, minuscule trees, and generally rugged topography. Once assembled, the enchanting scenes appear to float in the open air or within the vertical enclosures of test tubes.

Based in Amsterdam, de Jong (previously) shares with Colossal that she hopes to incorporate water-rooted plants and crystals into future projects. “I feel like a huge part of my work is how I frame things—let’s see if I am able to frame these inspiring natural elements,” she says, noting that the actual boxes are hand-crafted by her father.

Follow de Jong’s latest miniatures, which include studies of artificial moon rocks, on Behance and Instagram.

 

On December 16, three 40 foot-long wind turbine blades were delivered via truck from a wind farm in Belfast to the Cork Institute of Technology in southern Ireland. For the next few months, civil engineers will subject the blades to a battery of tests as they design and build a pedestrian bridge that uses pieces of them to replace traditional steel girders. By April, the bridge will be complete, and the Cork County Council will pick it up and install it on a bicycle route connecting the towns of Youghal and Middletown.

If this experimental bridge is a success, it could be the first of many. Angela Nagle, a civil engineering Ph.D. student at the University College Cork who is investigating environmental, economic, and policy issues surrounding blade bridges, hopes to see dozens of them dotting the Irish countryside in the not-so-distant future. With 11,000 tons of blades expected to be decommissioned across Ireland by 2025, there should be no shortage of material to work with.

“What I’d love to do is turn it into a blade waste brokerage business,” Nagle said.

Nagle’s blades-to-bridges dream is part of an emerging effort to find creative ways to deal with blade waste, a fast-growing part of the overall waste stream that poses unique challenges. Because wind turbine blades are very large and sturdy, Nagle and her colleagues at the Re-Wind project are hoping they can be repurposed for electrical transmission towers, bridges, and more. Meanwhile, General Electric recently announced it has begun turning decommissioned wind turbine blades into cement, while scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are cooking up new materials that could make the blades of the future far more recyclable than today’s state of the art.

Taken together, these innovations — if they prove technically sound and economically viable — could help stave off a looming wind turbine blade waste crisis, something that Re-Wind team lead Larry Bank, a research faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology, describes as a “potential black eye” for the wind industry.

“If you are talking about a sustainable, renewable fuel source, it’s not appropriate to then pollute the environment with materials that are decommissioned,” Bank said.

[Solar panels are starting to die. What will we do with the megatons of toxic trash?]

Wind turbines are built to last about 20 years, and most of the turbines in existence have not reached the end of their lifespans yet. But blades often get taken out of service sooner as companies replace them with bigger ones that can produce more energy, a process known as “repowering.” And once old blades are no longer catching the wind, they have to go somewhere.

Unfortunately, in the U.S. and many other countries lacking blade waste regulations, somewhere often means a landfill, where wind turbine blades take up a huge — and growing — amount of space. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, blade sizes have “increased dramatically” in recent years, from an average diameter of 145 feet in 1997 to 367 feet in 2017. And the tough, fiber-reinforced plastics blades are made of don’t break down easily once they’re in the ground.

“They are very difficult to move around, and they are not biodegradable,” Bank said. “It’s like a big, hollow tube that takes up a tremendous amount of space.”

While industry groups will point out that the several million tons of blades projected to enter the U.S. waste stream in the coming decades are a small fraction of the total trash we produce each year, it still would be better for the environment and the climate if we could put these structures — which take a great deal of energy and resources to make — to another use.

Bank’s team is betting we can. Since 2016, Re-Wind, a collaboration among researchers in the U.S., the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland that includes funding from all three governments, has been investigating the feasibility of repurposing blades for a variety of civil engineering projects. Within the next six months, the team expects to have its first two large-scale demonstrations out in the wild.

These include the pedestrian bridge in County Cork, as well as “Blade Pole,” a collaboration with an electric power company to repurpose wind blades as large, high-voltage electrical transmission towers. To test the idea, three decommissioned blades will be installed as power towers on a wind farm in Kansas next summer. While they won’t be connected to the electric grid in this initial trial run, Re-Wind engineers will be studying the durability of the structure to determine if the idea is sound.

“We’ve got all the theory and calculations, but of course, as engineers, we also want to make sure that this works before putting live wires on it,” Bank said.

The Re-Wind team has numerous other ideas it would like to test, including laying blades horizontally along stretches of coastlines to act as wake brakes and help prevent erosion, using them to build better noise barriers for highways, and separating the curved surfaces to use in skate parks, archways, or art installations. Old blades could even be installed underwater to serve as artificial reef scaffolds, perhaps in the same areas where offshore wind turbines are being built.

The group is particularly excited about the prospect of using old blades to construct affordable housing. “One of the first things we looked at was cutting up these blades into pieces that could be given for free or for very low cost to individuals in economically deprived neighborhoods that could be using them for construction,” Bank said, adding that the durability of turbine blades makes them an attractive building material in communities that are vulnerable to extreme weather.

Others, like General Electric, are using old turbine blades to cook up new materials. Last month, the renewable energy division of the conglomerate announced it had begun contracting recycling company Veolia North America to take blades from U.S. wind farms it is in the process of repowering, shred them up, and use them as a feedstock in cement kilns.

Using shredded blade waste to produce cement, a technique known as co-processing, was first deployed commercially in Europe about a decade ago. While a bit less glamorous than a skate park, proponents say this application could help solve another environmental challenge: the enormous climate impact of cement-making, which involves heating limestone to more than 2,700 degrees F in a furnace.

Typically, this is done by burning lots of coal.

GE estimates that by burning blades instead, the carbon emissions of cement production can be cut by 27 percent. According to a recent press release, GE plans to recycle “the majority of blades that are replaced during repowering efforts.” This fall, Veolia already processed more than 100.

GE declined to share its data demonstrating the climate benefits of its co-processing technique. But independent research led by Nagle has demonstrated that co-processing is more environmentally friendly than landfilling. However, because co-processing still produces emissions and essentially destroys high-quality construction materials, Nagle and Bank both stressed that repurposing is an even better choice when possible.

“Co-processing is the best thing that can be done with blade waste right now that’s viable,” Nagle said. But it is “definitely better to build bridges out of the blades.”

In the not-so-distant future, there might be another option: recovering the materials wind turbine blades are made of in order to manufacture new ones. This sort of material recycling also has a greater environmental impact than repurposing, but it could become an important waste management solution once large numbers of blades have deteriorated to the point that they can’t be repurposed.

However, today material recycling is difficult because most wind turbine blades are made using a “thermoset resin,” an ultra-sturdy plastic which is cured at high heat in a chemical process that can’t be reversed.

“The typical thermoset materials don’t melt down,” said Derek Berry, a senior wind technology engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Therefore, our options for recycling are limited, less cost effective, and produce recycled material that is less useful in terms of material properties.”

Berry and his team have spent the last five years investigating whether thermoset resins can be replaced with thermoplastics, a different type of polymer that can be melted down and reused. After constructing a 42-foot blade from thermoplastic resin and subjecting it to a battery of tests alongside a traditional thermoset blade, the results were encouraging: The two types of blades have very similar mechanical properties, according to a paper published in October in the journal Renewable Energy.

What’s more, because thermoplastic blades cure at room temperature, they are faster and, potentially, slightly cheaper to make.

While there are still research questions to explore, Berry said his team is now satisfied that thermoplastic resins could be used in blade manufacturing “because of the matching of the material properties” with thermoset resins. The next step, he says, will be for the wind industry to take what the laboratory has learned and apply it at scale.

And Berry expects that the wind industry will start doing just that in the next few years. While recyclability was “low on the list” of the wind industry’s priorities a decade ago, Berry says there has been a “sea change” since that time.

“Today, recyclability is something that is near the top of the list of concerns” for wind energy companies and blade manufacturers alike, Berry said. “All of these companies are saying, ‘We need to change what we’re doing, number one because it’s the right thing to do, number two because regulations might be coming down the road. Number three, because we’re a green industry and we want to remain a green industry.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Today’s wind turbine blades could become tomorrow’s bridges on Jan 8, 2021.

Mallard to go, anyone? Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient thermopolium—aka the Roman equivalent of a street food vendor—at the Regio V site in Pompeii. The well-preserved stand is decorated with multiple frescoes featuring a nereid (nymphs of Greek mythology) riding a sea horse, tall jars with two-handles that commonly were used for storage, and some of the formerly available fare, like mallards and chickens. A rendering of a muscular dog adorns another side of the stand with the insult, “Nicia cineadecacator,” scribed nearby. Various food-based remnants were found, as well, including duck bones, fava beans, wine, and a paella-style dish of pork, goat, bird, fish, and snail, alongside cooking dishes, flasks, and storage vessels.

This thermopolium is thought to be one of about eighty in the Italian city, and excavation on the site began in 2019. When archaeologists discovered that the counter was still in-tact, they extended the project to uncover more of the area. Additional findings now include a small dog’s skeleton and two sets of human bones from people who were trapped when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. Although the remains were disassembled by scavengers who dug up the site in the 17th Century, there’s evidence that one of the individuals was about 50 years and lying down on a bed when the volcano buried the area.

The site is slated to open to the public in the spring of 2021 and is just one of the impressive discoveries in Pompeii during 2020. Watch the video below, which is in Italian, to see the excavation process. (via designboom)

 

From her studio in Coxsackie, New York, Ruby Silvious (previously) repurposes the thin paper pouches holding her beverage of choice into miniature canvases. Sometimes strung together or ripped to remove the leaves, Silvious’s tea bags depict the quiet, unassuming moments of everyday life: Passersby trudge through the snow, masks hang to dry, and two women meet for a swim on the naturally dyed backdrops. The artist generally keeps the string and tag attached, matching the mundane subject matter with the material’s ritualistic origins.

Following her 2019 release Reclaimed Canvas, Silvious is working on another book and preparing for upcoming solo shows in France, Germany, and Japan. Shop prints on her site, and follow her soothing works on Instagram and Tumblr.

 

People who grew up with the internet of the 1990s probably remember forums — those clunky, lo-fi spaces where people came together to argue about cars, cycling, video games, cooking, or a million other topics. They had their problems, but in retrospect the internet of those days felt like a magical land of possibility, not a place for organizing pogroms.

What killed most forums is the same thing that killed local journalism across the country, and has turned the internet into a cesspool of abuse, racism, and genocidal propaganda: corporate monopolies. A few giants, led by Facebook and Google, now command an overwhelming share of online activity. What enables the modern online hellscape is Section 230, an obscure legal provision that protects internet companies from certain legal liability, and allows them to grow as large as they have.

It's time to reconsider this liability shield.

Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act, and it stipulates that content-hosting companies like Facebook cannot be considered the publisher of that content, and so can't be sued if that content violates the law. As Rachel Lerman explains at the Washington Post, the intent was actually to incentivize website moderation — when one company was sued and defended itself by noting it did no moderation whatsoever, the bill drafters figured this was a bad incentive, and so carved out explicit protection so websites could feel free to moderate without opening themselves up to liability. It seemingly worked alright in the early days of the internet. "The idea was that people would use whichever sites suited them and had rules they agreed with," writes Lerman.

But as Steve Randy Waldman argues in a brilliant article, now that a few corporations have consolidated effective control over the internet, Section 230 doesn't work anything like this. Instead it provides an excuse for the big platforms to do very little moderation, which is a requirement for them to exist because they host such a gigantic firehose of content. Moreover, hate speech and political extremism are at the core of the business model of Facebook and YouTube, because inflammatory content is a very reliable way of producing "engagement" and therefore profits.

The side effects of this business model are bloody indeed. Facebook has been used to coordinate genocide and ethnic cleansing, and a study in Germany found that heavy use was associated with a marked increase in attacks on refugees. Elsewhere, the New Zealand government recently published an investigation into the Christchurch terrorist massacre, and found that the culprit was radicalized on YouTube. As Josh Marshall writes, "Facebook is [akin] to a fantastically profitable nuclear energy company whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the road and accepting frequent accidents and explosions as inherent to the enterprise."

On the other hand, when platforms do moderate, it is consistently half-hearted or worse — banning some but not all Holocaust deniers here, labeling President Trump's tweets as misleading there, but ultimately just trying to appease the loudest and best-organized interest groups as cheaply as possible. Often that means boosting conservative propaganda, no matter how flagrantly deceptive — indeed, Facebook has both tweaked its algorithm to stop punishing conservatives for publishing misinformation, and rigged it to boost right-wing posts while downplaying left-wing ones, apparently in part to appease the sensitive feelings of Ben Shapiro.

It's the worst of both worlds — the most commonly-used online spaces are infested with Nazis and pandemic deniers, while massive corporations exercise dictatorial control over what people are allowed to say and see.

This wretched situation strikes at the heart of the early understanding of why the internet was good, and the moral self-justification of the big platforms. By enabling an unprecedented amount of communication — where any people on Earth who are hooked in can talk to each other instantaneously — it was thought the internet would usher in a new age of rational dialogue and human understanding. Free speech was an unqualified good, it was thought, and more speech was by definition better. This ideology allowed the platform behemoths to pose as somehow being on the side of the impoverished masses. "Zuckerberg believes peer-to-peer communications will be responsible for redistributing global power, making it possible for any individual to access and share information," reads a Wired profile of Facebook's founder back in 2016, neatly stating the precise opposite of truth.

It's easy to look back at those days and think we were fools, and undoubtedly there was some naive techno-optimism behind such sentiments. But the early internet genuinely did have many of these characteristics. I know because I was there. We just didn't realize how fragile those early communities were, what made them actually work, and how quickly they would die once capitalism got its teeth into them.

And that brings me back to the forums and blog comment sections of old. The reason these worked as well as they did was not just that people could post on them from anywhere on the globe (though that of course was a precondition). The reason was moderation. Participants quickly realized that if there weren't clear rules about what could be posted, the place would quickly be overrun by trolls or straight-up Nazis, and developed quality standards they could enforce through warnings or bans. That in turn implies a modest scale, because moderating requires work, which is expensive and even to this day impossible to automate well. Mods of course could be abusive, as any person with power can be. But they were key to the functioning of the early internet — and the tiny size of most forums meant that even the bad ones couldn't destabilize entire nations.

The major lesson of the past decade of the big platforms' cancerous growth across the globe is this: Free speech, like any public good, requires regulation. As sociologist Zeynep Tufecki argues, the mere ability to express oneself online means little for free speech today — what matters is the ability to be heard. It is "attention, not speech, that is restricted and of limited quantity that the gatekeepers can control and allocate," she writes. The big platforms have more effective control over speech than any entities in human history, and they use that power to inflame polarization, extremism, conspiracy theories, and genocidal racism, because that rakes in the most short-term profit. They need to be cut down to size, and reforming Section 230 is one way to do it. (As an aside, this is not meant as a replacement for more traditional anti-trust. It would still be a good idea to force the Big Tech barons to sell off their lesser companies, like making Facebook divest itself of Instagram.)

So what do we do? I am not a legal expert, and of course I can't write out a whole new law here. But let me suggest some broad principles. First, as Waldman suggests, there should still be common carriers like internet service providers that would not be liable for the content disseminated over their infrastructure. But they would be required to identify the people or companies transmitting over their services.

Second, all companies that host online content will be considered publishers, but with some distinctions. Those that rely on automated moderation — that is, the big platforms — will be considered strictly liable for everything. However, ones that can prove they made a good-faith moderation effort involving a real person will get the benefit of the doubt, basically as they currently do. So if Facebook's crummy algorithm misses a terrorist cell organizing on its platform for months, it would be criminally liable. But if a celebrity threatens a news website with defamation for a comment posted on an article, the publisher will be able to defend itself by pointing to a hand moderation process (for example, if comments are held for review prior to being published, and actually examined).

The overall point here would be to force the big platforms to undertake the expensive moderation required to actually police their platforms, while simultaneously carving out a space for smaller spaces to operate with some 230-style protections.

Such a proposal would go well with restrictions on abusive lawsuits. As First Amendment lawyer Dan Horwitz points out, monied interests are already suppressing online speech all the time by filing, or threatening to file, lawsuits against people or companies without the means to defend themselves. Even those with money and legal insurance aren't immune — billionaire (and Facebook board member) Peter Thiel, for instance, destroyed the journalism website Gawker by filing a blizzard of lawsuits on ginned-up pretexts until one stuck and bankrupted the company. A federal "anti-SLAPP" (strategic lawsuit against public participation) law that made such behavior itself illegal and liable for damages would make the legal system more fair, and less the plaything of litigious rich jerks.

A good indicator for whether reformers are on the right track will be Facebook's reaction to any proposed changes. With the previous consensus around Section 230 crumbling, the company has expressed rhetorical support for regulatory adjustments. But what it for sure wants is weak new requirements that it could easily handle but smaller upstart companies could not — effectively entrenching its dominance even further. If Facebook is for it, it is probably bad, and vice versa.

There are sure to be many objections to this proposal. For instance, there was a slight rollback of Section 230 a couple years ago in the form of the SESTA/FOSTA Act, which removed protection for posts about sex trafficking. The idea supposedly was to protect women from exploitation, but it seems to have backfired. Online platforms like Reddit and Craigslist had provided a quasi-legitimate way for workers to conduct business and monitor potential clients, but SESTA/FOSTA effectively forced those pages to shut down whether there was evidence of trafficking or not. Just as many predicted at the time, doing so seems to have driven women back underground or onto the street, where they are more vulnerable to abuse or traffickers (and in the process created a movement of sex worker organizing).

I am definitely in favor of making sex work as safe as possible. But the problem here is not so much Section 230 as the fact that prostitution is illegal, and that police virtually always prosecute the sex workers instead of the johns. The pre-SESTA/FOSTA world was far from ideal, and there was indeed some trafficking on those sites. Sex trafficking would be much easier to deal with if prostitution was legalized and regulated, so that women would not fear going to the authorities to protect themselves.

Make no mistake, amending Section 230 in this way would be a hugely disruptive change — basically blowing up most of the global system of publishing websites as we know it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all the other big platforms would have to drastically increase the amount of moderation they are doing. The likely endgame for those platforms is that they would end up like network TV — relatively bland and boring, purged of anything seriously controversial. But they would also probably shrink drastically, because it would be more expensive to moderate heavily, and because political discussion would migrate to smaller, more curated websites with paid teams of moderators — or volunteer hobbyists, like how most blogs and forums used to work.

The early promise of the internet has not worked out. But that is because ruthless capitalist profiteers have been allowed to consolidate control over so much of online communication. The few genuinely great early websites that still survive are always regulated — like Wikipedia, which has both moderation and a quasi-constitution establishing rules for what can be published and cited. We could rediscover that early promise by forcing Facebook and it ilk to take responsibility for the civilization-wrecking nightmare they have inflicted on humanity.

Eight years one month. That’s how long a beer can pinhole camera spent capturing this solargraph at the University of Hertfordshire’s Bayfordbury Observatory. Featuring 2,953 light trails of the sun’s movement, the image is thought to be the longest exposure photograph in existence, surpassing Michael Wesely’s record of four years eight months.

Then an MFA student at the university, Regina Valkenborgh set up the camera in 2012 and subsequently forgot about it. This past September, principal technical officer David Campbell discovered it still fastened to one of the observatory’s telescopes, alerting Valkenborgh about the finding. The photographer said in a statement:

It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched, to be saved by David after all these years. I had tried this technique a couple of times at the Observatory before, but the photographs were often ruined by moisture and the photographic paper curled up. I hadn’t intended to capture an exposure for this length of time and to my surprise, it had survived. It could be one of, if not the, longest exposures in existence.

PetaPixel created a handy guide for anyone interested in trying a six-month pinhole camera. You also might enjoy this long-exposure image of the moon streaking across the sky. (via Kottke)

The platypus has puzzled researchers for centuries. From its venom-filled spurs, milk-secreting skin, and ability to eat a quarter of its body weight every day, the egg-laying mammal even had European zoologists believing it was a hoax well throughout the 19th Century.

A recent study published in the journal Mammalia adds to the duck-billed creature’s lengthy list of peculiarities. Apparently, when illuminated with ultraviolet light, the platypus’s dull, brown coat glows. The discovery happened after Jonathan Martin, an associate professor of forestry at Wisconsin’s Northland College, shined a UV flashlight on a flying squirrel in his backyard, which he found emitted a candy-colored pink hue. He then joined a few colleagues to visit Chicago’s Field Museum, where they replicated the process on the institution’s platypus collection, revealing the animals’ bright green and purple coat.

According to one study, the fluorescent substances are found embedded within mammals’ hair follicles, although scientists aren’t sure why. Sensory biologist Sönke Johnsen told The New York Times that “just finding fluorescence doesn’t mean it has any particular purpose.” Similar radiating colors exist in coral reefs and sea turtles, among other organisms, although the phenomena are less common in mammals.

Overall, the discovery has prompted further questions about whether the platypus can see UV light—most humans cannot, except for on certain items like white T-shirts—and even more interest in what we’ll discover about the curious creature next.

Japan-based artist Jumpei Mitsui is one of just 21 LEGO Certified Professionals in the world—this means his full-time job is to create artworks with the plastic building blocks—and is the youngest of the renowned group. He’s fulfilled this title most recently with a sculptural recreation of Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” During the course of 400 hours, Mitsui snapped together 50,000 cobalt and white LEGO into an undulating wave that mimics the original woodblock print.

To recreate this iconic work in three-dimensions, Mitsui studied videos of waves crashing and pored over academic papers on the topic. He then sketched a detailed model before assembling the textured water, three boats, and Mount Fuji that span more than five feet.

If you’re in Osaka, Mitsui’s wave is on view permanently at the Hankyu Brick Museum. Otherwise, find a decade’s worth of the artist’s LEGO tutorials on YouTube, and follow his work on Twitter and Instagram. (via Spoon & Tamago)

 

レゴで作った「富嶽三十六景 神奈川沖浪裏」を動画で撮ってみました。絵の登場人物の目線で楽しむことができます。 pic.twitter.com/V8TTIJ8l2D

— 三井淳平 / Jumpei Mitsui (@Jumpei_Mitsui) December 12, 2020

Since the 12th Century, Japanese artisans have been employing a construction technique that uses just one simple material: wood. Rather than utilize glue, nails, and other fasteners, the traditional art of Japanese wood joinery notches slabs of timber so that the grooves lock together and form a sturdy structure. Yamanashi-based carpenter Dylan Iwakuni demonstrates this process in the endlessly satisfying video above, which depicts multiple styles of the angular joints and how they’re slotted together with the tap of a mallet.

As Iwakuni notes at the end, new joineries often are used in traditional architecture to replace a damaged portion, maintaining the integrity of the original edifice. “Structures built from natural materials and the knowledge and skills passed down generations,” he says. “Through the fine skills and knowledge, Japanese Wooden Architecture has been standing for (thousands of) years.”

If you’re interested in trying your hand at the centuries-old artform, Iwakuni recommends reading The Complete Japanese Joinery and Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use. He also offers a collection of tutorials and videos on his Instagram and YouTube. You might enjoy watching the creation of this kokeshi doll and the fine art of Japanese marquetry, which uses razor-thin slices of mosaics, as well. (via The Kids Should See This)

 

Utah is full of strange occurrences these days: first, the mysterious monolith popped up in a remote region of the Southwestern state, and now, the moon was caught peering over its landscape in an act of supernal surveillance.

During Halloween weekend, Phoenix-based photographer Zach Cooley traveled to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah, and staked a spot near this sandstone arch that dates back millions of years. The location wasn’t just a good guess—Cooley relied on three smartphone apps to position himself in the right place at the right time. When the moon passed by the opening, he snapped the incredible juxtaposition, revealing a massive eye embedded in the rocky landscape. The fortuitous photograph subsequently was named NASA’s Photo of the Day, which then mused: “Who’s watching whom?”

For more of Cooley’s moon-chasing escapades, check out his Instagram, and pick up a print on his site. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

There is no task so simple that a developer can't find a harder, more wasteful, and pointless way to do it. For example, let's say you want to know how many rows are in a data grid object?

Hans found this C# snippet in production a few years ago:

int count = 0;
for(int i = 0; i <= dgView.Rows.Count; i++)
{
    count++;
}

To find out how many rows are in our dgView, we start a for loop which counts from 0 to the… Rows.Count in the view. Worse, this has an off-by-one bug, as they use <= to compare, ensuring an extra iteration.

The old saying is "work smarter, not harder," but this code doesn't just work harder, it also works dumber.

The unbound slats of Pablo Reinoso’s unassuming benches curl sideways and up walls in a tangle of wood and metal. Based just outside of Paris, the French-Argentine artist and designer (previously) applies a rebellious and playful lens to his otherwise simple seating, merging functionality and aesthetics to create roving sculptural artworks. His wall frames snarl in a similar manner with knotted masses descending from their inner edges.

Reinoso’s spaghetti-style works will be included in a group show at Mad Paris from December 16, 2020, to May 11, 2021. Until then, explore more of his projects on his site and Instagram.

 

Along the beaches of Hormuz Island in the Persian Gulf lies a series of gumdrop-esque abodes. The multipurpose project, titled “Presence in Hormuz,” features earthen structures that dot the sandy landscape in a textured cluster of peaks and bulbs.

To build the candy-colored domes, ZAV Architects utilized the SuperAdobe process of renowned Iranian architect Nader Khalili, which involves stacking coils of wet earth, and trained local craftsman in the technique. “A carpet is woven with granular knots inspired by the particles that make up the ecotone of the island,” the Tehran-based firm says in a conversation with designboom, noting that the area’s topography inspired much of the architecture. “The sandbags that create the spatial particles (aka domes) are filled with the dredging sand of the Hormuz Dock as if the earth has swollen to produce space for accommodation.”

Most of the bulbous structures hold living accommodations with communal dining, laundry, and prayer areas woven throughout. The vibrant venues were designed as part of an initiative to remedy local economic struggles and bring together tourists and the community in a shared cultural space. ZAV expands on the intention of the project:

In a country where the state struggles with political disputes outside its borders, every architectural project becomes a proposal for internal governing alternatives, asking basic questions: What are the limits of architecture and how can it suggest a political alternative for communal life? How can it attain social agency?

“Presence in Hormuz” follows an earthen cultural center ZAV embedded in the island. You can see minimal renderings of the firm’s projects and upcoming plans on Instagram.

 

This story was published in partnership with the Daily Yonder, with support from the IRE Freelance Investigative Fellowship Award.

In 2009, App Thacker was hired to run a dredge along the Emory River in eastern Tennessee. Picture an industrialized fleet modeled after Huck Finn’s raft: Nicknamed Adelyn, Kylee, and Shirley, the blue, flat-bottomed boats used mechanical arms called cutterheads to dig up riverbeds and siphon the excavated sediment into shoreline canals. The largest dredge, a two-story behemoth called the Sandpiper, had pipes wide enough to swallow a push lawnmower. Smaller dredges like Thacker’s scuttled behind it, scooping up excess muck like fish skimming a whale’s corpse. They all had the same directive: Remove the thick grey sludge that clogged the Emory.

The sludge was coal ash, the waste leftover when coal is burned to generate electricity. Twelve years ago this month, more than a billion gallons of wet ash burst from a holding pond monitored by the region’s major utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA. Thacker, a heavy machinery operator with Knoxville’s 917 union, became one of hundreds of people that TVA contractors hired to clean up the spill. For about four years, Thacker spent every afternoon driving 35 miles from his home to arrive in time for his 5 p.m. shift, just as the makeshift overhead lights illuminating the canals of ash flicked on.

Dredging at night was hard work. The pump inside the dredge clogged repeatedly, so Thacker took off his shirt and entered water up to his armpits to remove rocks, tree limbs, tires, and other debris, sometimes in below-freezing temperatures. Soon, ringworm-like sores crested along his arms, interwoven with his fading red and blue tattoos. Thacker’s supervisors gave him a cream for the skin lesions, and he began wearing long black cow-birthing gloves while he unclogged pumps. While Thacker knew that the water was contaminated — that was the point of the dredging — he felt relatively safe. After all, TVA was one of the oldest and most respected employers in the state, with a sterling reputation for worker safety.

Then, one night, the dredging stopped.

Sometime between December 2009 and January 2010, roughly halfway through the final, 500-foot-wide section of the Emory designated for cleanup, operators turned off the pumps that sucked the ash from the river. For a multi-billion dollar remediation project, this order was unprecedented. The dredges had been operating 24/7 in an effort to clean up the disaster area as quickly as possible, removing roughly 3,000 cubic yards of material — almost enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool — each day. But official reports from TVA show that the dredging of the Emory encountered unusually high levels of contamination: Sediment samples showed that mercury levels were three times higher in the river than they were in coal ash from the holding pond that caused the disaster.

Then there was the nuclear waste. According to a 2011 TVA report, the river-bound coal ash and sediments contained higher radiation levels than the holding pond. Half of the river sediment samples taken contained cesium-137, a highly soluble compound with a 30-year half-life that can contaminate large bodies of water for well over a generation. It’s best known as the predominant source of radiation in the fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It can cause burns, acute radiation sickness, and death. Exposure also increases the risk for cancer.

by Kshama Sawant
The last nine months have inflicted the greatest economic suffering on working people since the Great Depression. Tens of millions in the US have lost their jobs or income since the start of the pandemic. Nearly one in four households have experienced food insecurity this year. Tens of millions have been unable to pay the rent, and a recent study estimated that 30 to 40 million households could face eviction next year. US Census data revealed that already by the end of October, over half a million renters in Washington state had been forced to accumulate credit card debt or seek short-term loans to meet their basic needs, including rent.

Here in Seattle, I've received hundreds of messages from Seattleites on the brink of homelessness, worried about where their next meal will come from or whether they'll ever be able to return to their jobs after the months of business closures drag on due to COVID. One renter in North Seattle said: "I am disabled & have fallen behind on my rent due to COVID. I would not survive living on the street. That would definitely be my fate if the eviction moratorium were not extended for a long time more."

A single mother of three who is out of work as a waitress said, "Now I am making next to nothing and am making do due to the graciousness of family and friends which cannot go on forever. I and many others need this to be extended."

Another renter in Belltown wrote, "I'm a mom of a two-year-old who was recently laid off again and having trouble paying my rent for the first time this year right now. I'm terrified of being evicted and possibly having to be on the streets with my child."

My office has hosted, alongside Be: Seattle, dozens of renters rights bootcamps, where renters say they face eviction letters or threats despite a moratorium, as corporate landlords eye the December 31 deadline for the moratorium to end.

Big landlords and property management corporations have always gone to court to try to undo Seattle's tenant protections, and when they lose, they try to ignore their legal obligations. With the moratoriums set to expire at the end of the month, they are now trying to roll back or seriously weaken these life-saving protections. Under pressure from them, Democratic Governor Inslee is considering passing a severely watered-down moratorium for next year.

That's why I urge everyone to sign and circulate my Council office's new petition, calling on Mayor Durkan to extend and strengthen the existing eviction moratorium for a minimum of one year. And, I urge you to also sign and circulate the Tenant's Union appeal to Governor Inslee.

We know that renter organizing works. In March, my socialist Council office organized alongside renters' rights activists and progressive union members and quickly gathered more than 9,000 signatures, including 3,400 in the first day alone, on a petition demanding a citywide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, forcing Mayor Durkan to issue an executive order protecting tenants and struggling small businesses from eviction during COVID.

We won because working people are starting to recognize that big business and the wealthy must pay for the deep crisis in the capitalist system. Working people should not face crushing debt, while property management corporations, large landlords, big banks, and Wall Street make away with massive profits.

The housing affordability crisis in cities across the nation predates the pandemic by many years and has been a direct product of the capitalist economy. Corporate landlords and Wall Street interests dominate the housing market, and have consolidated increasing profits through the increased exploitation of renters. According to Zillow, America's renters paid an unprecedented $4.5 trillion to landlords in the last decade. Wall Street real estate owners spent a shocking $86.2 million this year just to defeat California's Proposition 21, which would have enabled moderate but crucial improvements to the state's rent control laws.

It's not only corporations like Amazon that are making profits through the pandemic. Essex Property Management, a West Coast company with nearly 12,000 apartments in the Seattle area, and which is one of the most-evicting landlords in Seattle/King County according to renters' rights organizations like Be:Seattle, just announced staggering profits of $473 million for the first nine months of 2020. Equity Apartments, which controls more than 9,400 apartments in the Seattle area and nearly 79,000 nationwide, reported nearly $700 million in profits during the same period. The prominent real estate investment website Mashvisor just reported that even during COVID, "Seattle real estate investors are continuing to enjoy a good return on investment on rental properties," and that the housing affordability crisis is good news for rich investors: "Although affordability continues to be an issue for local residents, it does have a positive aspect for Seattle real estate investors. Owning a rental property in Seattle does mean high demand which translates into good occupancy rates and cash flow," the site reported.

Corporate landlords and right-wing politicians in Olympia claim that there are "bad actors" among renters who may be abusing the moratorium, and say that tenants must "prove" their financial hardship to qualify for eviction protection.

Such means-testing would be a blatant attack by some of the wealthiest in our state on the most vulnerable during a period of unprecedented hardship, and would be nothing short of criminal. In fact, it is the exploitative corporate landlords and Wall Street banks who are the "bad actors" in our society. Weakening the moratoriums would lead to a tsunami of evictions and increased homelessness, putting not just renters but entire communities at increased risk of increased COVID spread.

We cannot rely on the Democratic Party to fight to defend, let alone strengthen, the moratorium. Just as in March, at the start of the COVID crisis, whatever we win will be a function of our power as an independent movement. Just this year, we made Seattle the first and only city to win a winter evictions ban. We won the Amazon Tax to fund a big expansion of affordable housing and the Green New Deal during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer.

We also know that extending the moratorium will not be enough because it merely pushes the renter debt crisis out. We need to fight to cancel rents, mortgages, utility costs, and debt payments for renters, working-class homeowners, struggling small businesses, and small landlords who have lost income due to COVID and the economic recession. My office is proud to be part of the statewide and national #CancelRent and #CancelMortgage movements, alongside grassroots community organizations like Be:Seattle and the Tenants Union.

The question in this housing struggle is clear: Who will pay for the twin crisis of COVID and the capitalist recession—big business or working people? We have to fight to ensure big business pays for the housing debt crisis, not working people who have struggled and suffered during COVID.

Kshama Sawant represents District 3 of the Seattle City Council.

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For Myriam Dion, a newspaper’s narrative qualities go beyond the text on the page. The Montreal-based artist accentuates the daily briefs and profiles in publications like The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Le Monde by overlaying broadsheets with painstakingly cut newsprint. Brilliantly hued flowers veil an issue focused on the wildfires raging across California, while masked subjects appear in the foreground of a piece about the post-COVID economy. Each tableau centers on one narrative, supporting the journalism with intricate motifs and trimmed photographs spread across the unfolded issue.

Masking the text-based print with color and woven sections has been a recent addition to Dion’s practice. “This operation often doubles or triples the working time, but it helps solidify the works (which are already quite fragile) and gives more depth and possibilities to the patterns that I choose and invent,” she writes, noting that weaving thin strips through whole editions visually aligns her works more closely with fiber arts.

More often utilizing vintage copies of North American newspapers than she had previously, the artist has identified a through-line in many of the editions. “For a long time, and even today, the print media has been a forum articulated by and for the male sex, where women have occupied a limited place, and interestingly enough, the newspaper articles I have accumulated document the perception of women in the mass media over the last century,” she says.

Dion will be an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn in 2021, where she plans to create 8-10 new pieces that merge these historic narratives with traditionally feminine art forms, like lacework and embroidery. The idea is subversive and pays “homage to the female public figures represented in these old newspapers, but more particularly to ordinary women to whom the recognition of any artistic contribution, both from a technical and conceptual point of view, has long been denied by the politics of art.”

View more of Dion’s elaborately collaged projects on her site and Instagram.

 

Archaeologists have discovered an enormous collection of prehistoric art that spreads across a nearly eight-mile-long cliff within the Amazon rainforest. Now dubbed as the “Sistine Chapel of the ancients,” tens of thousands of paintings depict humans and animals like sloths, horses, and the now-extinct palaeolama and mastodon. The latter creatures haven’t occupied regions in South America for almost 12,000 years, which has provided the British-Colombian archaeology team with a timeline for the artworks’ origins.

Although the findings were discovered last year, they’ve been kept private because they’ll be presented as part of a Channel 4 documentary titled Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon, which airs this month. Archaeologist Ella Al-Shamahi, who is leading the television series, told The Guardian that the site, which is located in the Serranía de la Lindosa, required a two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare and an additional four-hour trek on foot to reach. “When we entered Farc territory, it was exactly as a few of us have been screaming about for a long time,” Al-Shamahi said. “Exploration is not over. Scientific discovery is not over but the big discoveries now are going to be found in places that are disputed or hostile,” noting that Colombia has been ravaged by a civil war for decades.

Because of the breadth of the paintings—some are so high on the cliff that they only can be studied with drones—researchers believe the findings will take generations to study. So far, though, they’ve found traces of ochre pigments, in addition to renderings of hallucinogenic plants and depictions of people who appear to be bungee jumping.

 

By Lambert Strether of Corrente Readers, I have purchased Obama’s latest autobiography, along with the complimentary handtruck needed to take it home, and now I’m going to have to pull on my yellow waders and read it, as much as I can stand. So that post is coming, but that post is not this post, […]

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In 2014, the remaining staff of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA, fled their beloved gene bank in Tel Hadia, 20 miles south of Aleppo. Syria’s civil war, which had broken out three years earlier, had finally made the staffing of the facility untenable. But the scientists had already shipped off a resource of incalculable value: the seeds of the most important crops on Earth.

The destination of these little bits of genetic information was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a frigid facility sticking out of the permafrost on a remote Arctic island. ICARDA staffers had been among the first to deposit seeds after the vault opened in 2008, stashing away unique varieties of chickpeas, lentils, and alfalfa, among many others. They were backing up their own collection, a standard practice among some 1,700 seed gene banks dotted around the world, which are meant to preserve the genes that code our essential crops for resistance to disease, pests, and climate change. Syria’s civil war had been the most dramatic example why you’d want to do such a thing: The treasures inside the ICARDA facility required constant upkeep, and as the war raged on, it became increasingly difficult to tend to them.

Ultimately, the researchers sent three more shipments north between the years 2012 and 2014, before abandoning their own facility. All told, they ended up sending some 116,000 accessions — or seed samples representing a population of plants from a certain location — to chill in Svalbard’s -18 degrees C (-0.4 degrees F) stacks. Those samples represented 83 percent of ICARDA’s total holdings at the time of the outbreak of civil war.

The conflict in Syria has not ceased, but by 2015, the ICARDA staff couldn’t wait to restart operations: A gene bank exists to preserve unique seeds, but also to distribute those seeds to researchers and farmers. So they became the first — and remain the only — depositors to make a withdrawal from Svalbard, combing the stacks for tens of thousands of samples and shipping them to new ancillary operations in Morocco and Lebanon. From each sample they took only 300 seeds, and started planting. “This was a task that really made us not sleep sometimes at night,” says Mariana Yazbek, gene bank manager at ICARDA and a coauthor on a recent paper in Nature Plants describing the saga.

After all, they were working with vanishingly few seeds from small samples. If they lost their new crop before it was able to produce more seeds, they’d have wasted that shipment from Svalbard. So they worried about the plants not getting enough rain or facing too many diseases and pests. Crops like wheat and barley dry out in the field as they mature too. “What if a fire breaks and you lose the whole season?” Yazbek asks. “So there are a number of external factors that are beyond our control.”

But, overall, it worked: Over the past five years, they’ve successfully grown more than 100,000 of their original accessions, shipping 81,000 newly grown samples back to Svalbard to bolster their deposit. They’ve also been shipping the new seeds around the world to those who request them — that could include scientists who want to research a more drought-resistant variety of wheat, or farmers who need the same to subsist on a rapidly warming planet. This could well make these researchers the stewards of humanity’s future food supply, ensuring the resiliency of dietary staples like barley, wheat, and chickpeas, as well as forage crops like clover and alfalfa that are eaten by livestock.

Some 11,000 years ago, the Fertile Crescent birthed humanity’s modern food supply, right where ICARDA has operated for the past 40 years. In a great band of productive soil stretching from modern-day Egypt to the Persian Gulf, people planted roots — figuratively and literally — giving up the hunter-gatherer modus operandi for the settled life of agriculture. They planted wheat and barley in controlled environments, using irrigation and tilling the soil. With the resulting bounty of food, human populations swelled, requiring still more food. Today, the nearly 8 billion people of Earth are dependent on these staple crops, the genetic descendants of those wild varieties, now bred to be even more productive.

These have become our monocrops, vast fields of species like wheat that are great at producing a lot of food, but not great at warding off pests and diseases. That’s a problem of genetic diversity — or lack thereof. When our ancestors began selecting the particular wheat plants that produced the most food, they created one-track genetic lines that favored supercharged production. Wild wheat dotted across a landscape, on the other hand, is more genetically diverse — that is, different groups of plants are gifted with different traits. Some of them might have the lucky genes that allow them to resist a specific insect or a disease, and survive to pass those genes along. So when a pest or pestilence invades, at least some part of the wheat supply may survive. But when modern farmers all use the same variety of wheat, the homogeneous crop is more vulnerable to disaster. If the wheat hasn’t been selected to resist whichever specific threat arises, farmers can lose entire harvests.

That’s exactly what’s happening right now with a wheat disease called stem rust, caused by a fungus called Ug99 that’s rapidly spreading across Africa, in large part because it threatens between 80 and 90 percent of global wheat varieties. But ICARDA provided researchers with wheat accessions that they hoped could be resistant to the disease. “And yes, they found what they want,” says Ahmed Amri, former head of ICARDA’s genetic resources unit, and now a consultant with the group. (He coauthored the paper with Yazbek.) “And it has launched successful breeding programs to develop varieties that are resistant.”

This is why it’s so critical that ICARDA, or any other gene bank, back up their collections by sending seeds to Svalbard. Some 80 percent of ICARDA’s seed collection is made up of wild species and landraces — unique varieties of plants developed by farmers in a given region. (ICARDA staffers have actually been able to back up 98 percent of their collection in 11 other banks around the world, but they decided it would be more efficient to withdraw from Svalbard, which hosts a more complete collection than any of their other individual backups.)

But once you pull seeds out of a bank, the trick is getting them to actually sprout into plants. When planting in Morocco and Lebanon, ICARDA staffers were only working with a handful of seeds from each Svalbard accession. Yazbek and her colleagues began by considering how a particular species reproduces. Some, like barley, lentils, and chickpeas, pollinate themselves to produce seeds. Others cross-pollinate, meaning individuals of the same species can sometimes pollinate each other. But Yazbek and her colleagues don’t want pollinating insects mixing the genetic material from individuals in different accessions.

“So for these, we simply put them in a large isolation cage, preventing pollinators from coming in, and we keep large distances between accessions of the same species,” says Yazbek. Basically, the cage is a prison of fine mesh that keeps bugs out. “This is enough to prevent cross-pollination,” she continues.

But some cross-pollinating plant species are “self-incompatible,” meaning they need pollinators to carry the genetic materials between individuals of the same species. So for these, Yazbek and her colleagues planted samples from the same accession in a smaller cage, then introduced bumblebees, which happily pollinated the plants.

Their success has been extraordinary. At one point, Yazbek stood in a field in which every known type of wild relative of wheat was growing, the spawn of seeds that not long before had chilled in the Svalbard Arctic vault. “All species are growing in the same field right next to each other. You’re talking about between 25 to 30 species,” says Yazbek. “This was an amazing thing to see all this diversity, at the same time, from different countries.”

These are potentially the seeds of scientific breakthroughs. Climate change has already brought fiercer heat waves and more frequent, severe droughts, all of which combine to imperil crops worldwide. And while modern humans have developed crops optimized for productivity, they’re not necessarily designed for climate resilience. Yet the wild varieties and unique landraces that ICARDA stored away in the Arctic and revived in Morocco and Lebanon are the products of the often harsh conditions of the Fertile Crescent — they’ve already got the genetics to survive on a hot planet.

“The droughts that we are experiencing today — in parts of France or Spain or whatever — have been experienced already in Morocco in the dry areas,” says Amri. “The genes there have been already selected naturally over millions of years to really have those genes of adaptation that will be needed to breed new varieties that will be heat- and drought-tolerant, and disease-resistant.”

This genetic diversity makes the frigid halls of Svalbard a sort of ancient catalog of resilience. “Breeders can tap into some of the diversity that was lost in the domestication process,” says Charlotte Lusty, head of programs and the gene bank platform coordinator at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which helps run the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. She coauthored the paper with Amri and Yazbek. “Diversity, in a sense, is more relevant to us than ever before,” she says.

Gene banks the world over are fielding more requests for wild varieties of staple crops, Lusty adds. “In gene bank distribution, there is more and more call for some of the wild relatives, in the hope that some of the traits, especially against pests and diseases, can be picked up from species that have grown in the wild,” she says.

In the end, the ICARDA researchers’ triumph is not just their own, but one of international cooperation. In 2001, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, signed by 146 parties including the European Union, united countries in the pursuit of agricultural biodiversity. “Before we had that international agreement, there was a lot of distrust between countries, and a lot of this ‘We should go it alone’ kind of attitude,” says Ola Westengen, who previously coordinated the Svalbard vault and is now at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He was also a coauthor on the paper. “So you had a situation where a lot of unique seed or genetic diversity was sitting in only one gene bank in one country — and then, of course, being very vulnerable if something happened to that particular gene bank,” Westengen continues.

The opening of Svalbard changed all that. Now gene banks the world over share a common repository, a sort of fail-safe against a catastrophe like Syria’s civil war. Last year, Westengen went to Morocco and stood in that field of wheat grown from seed that had journeyed thousands of miles from home and (nearly) back, all crops that could help humanity weather the chaos of climate change. “It was quite emotional, actually,” he says, “to be there and see these seeds that had been sitting in boxes in Svalbard, were now growing out there in the field.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These rare seeds escaped Syria’s war — to help feed the world on Nov 22, 2020.

by Sophie Cocke, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Officials in Honolulu have granted the developers of a luxury, oceanfront estate tied to Barack Obama a major exemption from environmental laws designed to protect Hawaii’s beaches.

The shoreline permit, issued by Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting on Monday, clears the way for the controversial multimillion dollar renovation of a century-old seawall in the heavily Native Hawaiian community of Waimanalo.

Under state and county laws, such projects are typically banned. Scientists and environmental experts say seawalls are the primary cause of beach loss throughout the state, and officials expect older ones to fall into obsolescence.

But the property owners, including Marty Nesbitt, chair of the Obama Foundation, argued they needed an exemption to protect the sprawling compound they are building in eastern Oahu. State officials and community members say the former president, who was born and raised in Hawaii, is expected to be among the property’s future occupants. Representatives for Nesbitt and Obama did not return requests seeking comment for this story.

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As the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported this summer, the so-called shoreline setback variance is just one of several loopholes that developers have exploited across the islands over the past two decades to get around policies that are supposed to protect the state’s treasured beaches and sensitive coastlines.

The consequences are stark. Oahu has already lost about a quarter of its beaches to seawalls, which essentially cause beaches to drown. Future projections are more dire, with scientists warning that most of Hawaii’s beaches could be lost if hundreds of homes, condos, hotels and roads that line the coasts aren’t moved inland.

Beach advocates and some community leaders in Waimanalo had urged government officials to require Nesbitt to take down the crumbling wall, or at least move it farther inland to restore a portion of the public shoreline. The beach there is virtually gone. The turquoise ocean now slams up against the seawall most of the time, leaving no room for the public to fish or sit along the coast.

Opponents also cited a Honolulu County ordinance, which stresses that it’s the “primary policy of the city to protect and preserve the natural shoreline, especially sandy beaches,” as well as to maintain public access and open space along the shoreline. Secondary to these priorities is the protection of private property from coastal hazards and flooding.

But on Monday, Kathy Sokugawa, the director of the Department of Planning and Permitting, sided with the property owners, approving their request to revamp and expand the seawall. She agreed with the owners that not allowing them to renovate the structure would create a hardship, depriving them of “reasonable use of the land.”

In her decision, Sokugawa noted the seawall fronting the property is at risk of failing and said it was important to repair the wall so that its collapse wouldn’t endanger coastal homes, the nearshore water and public safety.

At the same time, the department is also requiring the property owners to participate in plans to restore a beach right beside the estate.

Critics, however, blasted the decision, saying it was an extraordinary departure from county policy.

Hardship exemptions are typically given out to property owners seeking to protect existing homes. In this case, the owners of the property bulldozed the structures on the site and started construction of new homes before applying for the shoreline setback permit.

Doorae Shin, coordinator for the local Surfrider Foundation, said she’s concerned that the approval sets a “dangerous precedent” for the expansion of many old seawalls, noting similar arguments could be made in their favor.

Sokugawa, who declined an interview request, didn’t address the issue in her final written decision.

The permit marks the last significant regulatory hurdle for developers of the Waimanalo property, which according to building permits will include three new single-family homes, two pools and a guard post. Construction has been underway for the past year.

As the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported this summer, the property was purchased by Nesbitt, co-CEO of a Chicago-based private-equity firm, and his wife for $8.7 million in 2015, and they subsequently subdivided the site into two lots. The overall development triggered the state’s Shoreline Protection Act, which requires coastal projects to get an environmental permit from the local government. But the owners skirted the requirement by building homes on each lot just under 7,500 square feet — the threshold under the law.

Consultants for Nesbitt later argued the $3.2 million seawall renovation was necessary in order to protect the property from erosion and ocean-related hazards. The plan will increase the height of some sections of the wall, while two new walls totaling 70 feet in length will be built behind it for support.

During a public hearing last month, the Oahu Surfrider Foundation and Sierra Club testified in opposition to the renovations, as did neighbors concerned about the potential impact of the project on the beach fronting their properties.

A Native Hawaiian community group restoring a historic turtle pond that fronts the property also registered opposition to the project, worried that it will cut off freshwater flowing into the ocean that’s needed for limu, or seaweed.

Honolulu Councilwoman Heidi Tsuneyoshi told county officials that she was gravely concerned that the primary purpose of the seawall repair project was to protect the private estate, as opposed to environmental and cultural resources. She urged planning officials to require the owners to go back and obtain the environmental permit they had skirted. She said that exemption violated the spirit of the law. The county declined.

“I’m just disappointed that this project wasn’t more fully vetted because of the sensitivities of the area,” she said.

"In 1990, a panel of the windscreen on British Airways Flight 5390 fell out at 17k feet, causing the cockpit to decompress & its captain to be sucked halfway out of the aircraft. The crew held onto him for more than 20 minutes as the copilot made an emergency landing. The pilot made a full recovery."

"If I remember correctly, the accident happened because someone eyeballed the screws when they replaced the window, and they were like a millimeter off."

Pretty close. The screws used to secure the windshield were different lengths for different areas. Instead of using a template to know where each screw came out of or referring to the IPC (illustrated parts catalog) they just put the screws in a pile and slammed them back in without ever knowing if the screws were actually grabbing enough threads on the nutplates."

A point of levity during the temporary shutdowns of museums and cultural institutions during the last few months has been the plethora of digital archives making artworks and historical objects available for perusing from the comfort and safety of our couches. A recent addition is Van Gogh Worldwide, a massive collection of the post-impressionist artist’s paintings, sketches, and drawings.

From landscapes to self-portraits to classic still lifes, the archive boasts more than 1,000 artworks, which are sorted by medium, period, and participating institution—those include the Van Gogh Museum, Kröller-Müller Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Each digital piece is supported by details about the work, any restorations, and additional images.

In his short lifetime that spanned just 37 years, the prolific Dutch artist created thousands of works, many of which he finished in his final months. His thick brushstrokes are widely recognized today, particularly in masterpieces like “The Starry Night,” although his sketches, drawings, and prints offer a nuanced look at his entire oeuvre.  (via My Modern Met)