syndication – Page 15

Automakers hedge their bets with plug-in hybrids as EV sales slow

BEV, Cars, Hybrid, PHEV, syndication / DJ Henderson / May 10, 2024

electrons and hydrocarbons —

Originally regarded as stopgap solutions, hybrids are in it for the long haul.

Mari Novik, Arjun Neil Alim, Kana Inagaki, and Peter Campbell, FT – May 10, 2024 3: 57 pm UTC

Global carmakers are stepping up their investment in hybrid technologies as consumers’ growing wariness over fully electric vehicles forces the industry to rapidly shift gear, according to top executives.

A combination of still high interest rates and concern over inadequate charging infrastructure has chilled buyers’ enthusiasm for fully electric cars, prompting a rebound in sales of hybrid vehicles that most of the industry had long regarded as nothing more than a stop-gap.

Tapping the resurgent demand for hybrids was a priority, executives from General Motors, Nissan, Hyundai, Volkswagen and Ford told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit this week.

“We have to invest heavily in the future of plug-in hybrids,” said Mark Reuss, the president of General Motors. “We have to be agile. We have a global tool chest of technical things that we can deploy fairly rapidly.”

The view was echoed by José Muñoz, global president of Hyundai, which is now considering manufacturing hybrids at its new $7.6 billion plant in Georgia given more drivers are balking over buying fully electric vehicles.

“If you asked me six months ago, definitely a year ago, I would have told you… fully electric,” said Muñoz. “A lot of things have happened between then and now. Electric is still the future. But now we are seeing a longer transition.”

Electric car sales growth slowed in the US and Europe last year, prompting carmakers to offer discounts. Industry executives have already acknowledged that the market has lost some momentum as future sales growth increasingly depends on demand from mainstream buyers rather than early adopters.

At the same time, there are concerns over whether governments might backtrack on previous plans to force a rapid transition away from petrol-based cars.

Ford’s European boss, Martin Sander, said that the pace of the transition in Europe was “down to the consumer,” and that the US group was prepared to continue selling hybrid models into the next decade.

“We want to make sure that we are setting up our business model so that we are flexible enough” to address shifts in demand, Sander told the summit. “Our whole business and life cycle planning is much more dynamic now.”

US rival General Motors, which had largely eliminated plug-in hybrids from its range, said in January that it would reintroduce the technology.

Consumers’ increasing hesitation comes just as carmakers face a growing threat from Chinese manufacturers rolling out cheaper electric vehicles both in their domestic market and, increasingly, in Europe.

To remain competitive in China, Peugeot needs to stay “agile” to avoid getting sucked into the country’s price war, said its chief executive, Linda Jackson. “We’re holding on, but the Chinese market is the biggest automotive market in the world so it’s very difficult for a global manufacturer not to be present,” Jackson said.

According to Schmidt Automotive Research, Chinese brands like BYD as well as brands such as Polestar that manufacture in China accounted for almost 10 percent of the fully electric cars registered in western Europe in March. That is up from just over 4 percent two years ago.

“We see an increase of competition coming from China brands and other technology worlds,” Nissan chief executive Makoto Uchida told the summit.

The threat from Chinese companies has only heightened carmakers’ focus on hybrids, which typically have double-digit margins compared with often loss-making fully electric vehicles.

For many carmakers, the slower switch is allowing them to continue to squeeze profits from traditional engines while also providing more financial firepower to develop electric vehicle technology.

The majority of the industry still believes that developing profitable fully electric cars is the most important long-term goal.

Earlier this week, Toyota, the biggest champion of hybrids in recent years, said that it planned to lift spending on new technologies by more than 40 percent after hybrid sales drove the group’s profits to a record last year.

Automakers hedge their bets with plug-in hybrids as EV sales slow Read More »

The wasps that tamed viruses

Biology, entomology, Parasitic wasps, Science, syndication, virology, viruses / DJ Henderson / May 10, 2024

Parasitoid wasp — Enlarge / *Xorides praecatorius* is a parasitoid wasp.

If you puncture the ovary of a wasp called Microplitis demolitor, viruses squirt out in vast quantities, shimmering like iridescent blue toothpaste. “It’s very beautiful, and just amazing that there’s so much virus made in there,” says Gaelen Burke, an entomologist at the University of Georgia.

M. demolitor is a parasite that lays its eggs in caterpillars, and the particles in its ovaries are “domesticated” viruses that have been tuned to persist harmlessly in wasps and serve their purposes. The virus particles are injected into the caterpillar through the wasp’s stinger, along with the wasp’s own eggs. The viruses then dump their contents into the caterpillar’s cells, delivering genes that are unlike those in a normal virus. Those genes suppress the caterpillar’s immune system and control its development, turning it into a harmless nursery for the wasp’s young.

The insect world is full of species of parasitic wasps that spend their infancy eating other insects alive. And for reasons that scientists don’t fully understand, they have repeatedly adopted and tamed wild, disease-causing viruses and turned them into biological weapons. Half a dozen examples already are described, and new research hints at many more.

By studying viruses at different stages of domestication, researchers today are untangling how the process unfolds.

Partners in diversification

The quintessential example of a wasp-domesticated virus involves a group called the bracoviruses, which are thought to be descended from a virus that infected a wasp, or its caterpillar host, about 100 million years ago. That ancient virus spliced its DNA into the genome of the wasp. From then on, it was part of the wasp, passed on to each new generation.

Over time, the wasps diversified into new species, and their viruses diversified with them. Bracoviruses are now found in some 50,000 wasp species, including M. demolitor. Other domesticated viruses are descended from different wild viruses that entered wasp genomes at various times.

Researchers debate whether domesticated viruses should be called viruses at all. “Some people say that it’s definitely still a virus; others say it’s integrated, and so it’s a part of the wasp,” says Marcel Dicke, an ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who described how domesticated viruses indirectly affect plants and other organisms in a 2020 paper in the Annual Review of Entomology.

As the wasp-virus composite evolves, the virus genome becomes scattered through the wasp’s DNA. Some genes decay, but a core set is preserved—those essential for making the original virus’s infectious particles. “The parts are all in these different locations in the wasp genome. But they still can talk to each other. And they still make products that cooperate with each other to make virus particles,” says Michael Strand, an entomologist at the University of Georgia. But instead of containing a complete viral genome, as a wild virus would, domesticated virus particles serve as delivery vehicles for the wasp’s weapons.

Enlarge / Here are the steps in the life of a parasitic wasp that harbors a bracovirus.

Those weapons vary widely. Some are proteins, while others are genes on short segments of DNA. Most bear little resemblance to anything found in wasps or viruses, so it’s unclear where they originated. And they are constantly changing, locked in evolutionary arms races with the defenses of the caterpillars or other hosts.

In many cases, researchers have yet to discover even what the genes and proteins do inside the wasps’ hosts or prove that they function as weapons. But they have untangled some details.

For example, M. demolitor wasps use bracoviruses to deliver a gene called glc1.8 into the immune cells of moth caterpillars. The glc1.8 gene causes the infected immune cells to produce mucus that prevents them from sticking to the wasp’s eggs. Other genes in M. demolitor’s bracoviruses force immune cells to kill themselves, while still others prevent caterpillars from smothering parasites in sheaths of melanin.

The wasps that tamed viruses Read More »

A crushing backlash to Apple’s new iPad ad

advertising, Apple, ipad, syndication, Tech / Shannon Garcia / May 9, 2024

1984 called and would like to have a word —

Hydraulic press destroying “symbols of creativity” has folks hopping mad.

Daniel Thomas, Financial Times – May 9, 2024 1: 15 pm UTC

Enlarge / A screenshot of the Apple iPad ad.

Apple via YouTube

An advert by Apple for its new iPad tablet showing musical instruments, artistic tools, and games being crushed by a giant hydraulic press has been attacked for cultural insensitivity in an online backlash.

The one-minute video was launched by Apple chief executive Tim Cook to support its new range of iPads, the first time that the US tech giant has overhauled the range for two years as it seeks to reverse faltering sales.

The campaign—soundtracked by Sonny and Cher’s 1971 hit All I Ever Need Is You—is designed to show how much Apple has been able to squeeze into the thinner tablet. The ad was produced in-house by Apple’s creative team, according to trade press reports.

The campaign has been hit by a wave of outrage, with responses on social media reacting to Cook’s X post accusing Apple of crushing “beautiful creative tools” and the “symbols of human creativity and cultural achievements.”

Advertising industry executives argued the ad represented a mis-step for the Silicon Valley giant, which under late co-founder Steve Jobs was lauded for its ability to capture consumer attention through past campaigns.

Christopher Slevin, creative director for marketing agency Inkling Culture, compared the iPad ad unfavorably to a famous Apple campaign directed by Ridley Scott called “1984” for the original Macintosh computer, which positioned Apple as liberating a dystopian, monochrome world.

“Apple’s new iPad spot is essentially them turning into the thing they said they were out to destroy in the 1984 ad,” said Slevin.

Actor Hugh Grant accused Apple of “the destruction of the human experience courtesy of Silicon Valley” on X.

However, Richard Exon, founder of marketing agency Joint, said: “A more important question is: does the ad do its job? It’s memorable, distinctive, and I now know the new iPad has even more in it yet is thinner than ever.”

Consumer insights platform Zappi conducted consumer research on the ad that suggested that the idea of the hydraulic press crushing art was divisive.

It said that the ad underperformed benchmarks in typically sought-after emotions such as happiness and laughter and overperformed in traditionally negative emotions like shock and confusion, with older people more likely to have a negative response than younger consumers.

Nataly Kelly, chief marketing officer at Zappi, said: “Is the Apple iPad ad a work of genius or the sign of the dystopian times? It really depends on how old you are. The shock value is the power of this advert, which is controversial by design, so the fact that people are talking about it at all is a win.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A crushing backlash to Apple’s new iPad ad Read More »

No one has seen the data behind Tyson’s “climate friendly beef” claim

beef, cattle, climate change, greenhouse gas, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / May 8, 2024

About five miles south of Broken Bow, in the heart of central Nebraska, thousands of cattle stand in feedlots at Adams Land & Cattle Co., a supplier of beef to the meat giant Tyson Foods.

From the air, the feedlots look dusty brown and packed with cows—not a vision of happy animals grazing on open pastureland, enriching the soil with carbon. But when the animals are slaughtered, processed, and sent onward to consumers, labels on the final product can claim that they were raised in a “climate friendly” way.

In late 2022, Tyson—one of the country’s “big four” meat packers—applied to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), seeking a “climate friendly” label for its Brazen Beef brand. The production of Brazen Beef, the label claims, achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Soon after, the USDA approved the label.

Immediately, environmental groups questioned the claim and petitioned the agency to stop using it, citing livestock’s significant greenhouse gas emissions and the growing pile of research that documents them. These groups and journalism outlets, including Inside Climate News, have asked the agency for the data it used to support its rubber-stamping of Tyson’s label but have essentially gotten nowhere.

“There are lots of misleading claims on food, but it’s hard to imagine a claim that’s more misleading than ‘climate friendly’ beef,” said Scott Faber, a senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “It’s like putting a cancer-free label on a cigarette. There’s no worse food choice for the climate than beef.”

The USDA has since confirmed it is currently considering and has approved similar labels for more livestock companies, but would not say which ones.

On Wednesday, the EWG, a longtime watchdog of the USDA, published a new analysis, outlining its efforts over the last year to push the agency for more transparency, including asking it to provide the specific rationale for allowing Brazen Beef to carry the “climate friendly” label. Last year, the group filed a Freedom of Information Act request, seeking the data that Tyson supplied to the agency in support of its application, but received only a heavily redacted response. EWG also petitioned the agency to not allow climate friendly or low carbon claims on beef.

To earn the “climate friendly” label, Tyson requires ranchers to meet the criteria of its internal “Climate-Smart Beef” program, but EWG notes that the company fails to provide information about the practices that farmers are required to adopt or about which farmers participate in the program. The only farm it has publicly identified is the Adams company in Nebraska.

A USDA spokesperson told Inside Climate News it can only rely on a third-party verification company to substantiate a label claim and could not provide the data Tyson submitted for its review.

“Because Congress did not provide USDA with on-farm oversight authority that would enable it to verify these types of labeling claims, companies must use third-party certifying organizations to substantiate these claims,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, directing Inside Climate News to the third-party verifier or Tyson for more information.

The third-party verification company, Where Food Comes From, did not respond to emailed questions from Inside Climate News, and Tyson did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The USDA said it is reviewing EWG’s petitions and announced in June 2023 that it’s working on strengthening the “substantiation of animal-raising claims, which includes the type of claim affixed to the Brazen Beef product.”

The agency said other livestock companies were seeking similar labels and that the agency has approved them, but would not identify those companies, saying Inside Climate News would have to seek the information through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“They’re being incredibly obstinate about sharing anything right now,” said Matthew Hayek, a researcher with New York University who studies the environmental and climate impacts of the food system. “Speaking as a scientist, it’s not transparent and it’s a scandal in its own right that the government can’t provide this information.”

This lack of transparency from the agency worries environmental and legal advocacy groups, especially now that billions of dollars in taxpayer funds are available for agricultural practices deemed to have benefits for the climate. The Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, appropriated nearly $20 billion for these practices; another $3.1 billion is available through a Biden-era program called the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities.

“This is an important test case for USDA,” Faber said. “If they can’t say no to a clearly misleading climate claim like ‘climate friendly’ beef, why should they be trusted to say no to other misleading climate claims? There’s a lot of money at stake.”

No one has seen the data behind Tyson’s “climate friendly beef” claim Read More »

These dangerous scammers don’t even bother to hide their crimes

Biz & IT, Security, syndication / Shannon Garcia / May 4, 2024

brazenly out in the open —

Cybercriminals openly run dozens of scams across social media and messaging apps.

Matt Burgess, WIRED.com – May 4, 2024 11: 37 am UTC

One hundred dollar bill Benjamin Franklin portrait looks behind brown craft ripped paper

Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers.

Thousands of people are members of dozens of Yahoo Boy groups operating across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, a WIRED analysis has found. The scammers, who deal in types of fraud that total hundreds of millions of dollars each year, also have dozens of accounts on TikTok, YouTube, and the document-sharing service Scribd that are getting thousands of views.

Inside the groups, there’s a hive of fraudulent activity with the cybercriminals often showing their faces and sharing ways to scam people with other members. They openly distribute scripts detailing how to blackmail people and how to run sextortion scams—that have driven people to take their own lives—sell albums with hundreds of photographs, and advertise fake social media accounts. Among the scams, they’re also using AI to create fake “nude” images of people and real-time deepfake video calls.

The Yahoo Boys don’t disguise their activity. Many groups use “Yahoo Boys” in their name as well as other related terms. WIRED’s analysis found 16 Yahoo Boys Facebook groups with almost 200,000 total members, a dozen WhatsApp channels, around 10 Telegram channels, 20 TikTok accounts, a dozen YouTube accounts, and more than 80 scripts on Scribd. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Broadly, the companies do not allow content on their platforms that encourages or promotes criminal behavior. The majority of the Yahoo Boys accounts and groups WIRED identified were removed after we contacted the companies about the groups’ overt existence. Despite these removals, dozens more Yahoo Boys groups and accounts remain online.

“They’re not hiding under different names,” says Kathy Waters, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Advocating Against Romance Scammers, which has tracked the Yahoo Boys for years. Waters says the social media companies are essentially providing the Yahoo Boys with “free office space” to organize and conduct their activities. “They’re selling scripts, selling photos, identifications of people, all online, all on the social media platforms,” she says. “Why these accounts still remain is beyond me.”

The Yahoo Boys aren’t a single, organized group. Instead, they’re a collection of thousands of scammers who work individually or in clusters. Often based in Nigeria, their name comes from formerly targeting users of Yahoo services, with links back to the Nigerian Prince email scams of old. Groups in West Africa can be often organized in various confraternities, which are cultish gangs.

“Yahoo is a set of knowledge that allows you to conduct scams,” says Gary Warner, the director of intelligence at DarkTower and director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Computer Forensics Research Laboratory. While there are different levels of sophistication of Yahoo Boys, Warner says, many simply operate from their phones. “Most of these threat actors are only using one device,” he says.

The Yahoo Boys run dozens of scams—from romance fraud to business email compromise. When making contact with potential victims, they’ll often “bomb” people by sending hundreds of messages to dating app accounts or Facebook profiles. “They will say anything they can in order to get the next dime in their pocket,” Waters says.

Searching for the Yahoo Boys on Facebook brings up two warnings: Both say the results may be linked to fraudulent activity, which isn’t allowed on the website. Clicking through the warnings reveals Yahoo Boy groups with thousands of members—one had more than 70,000.

Within the groups—alongside posts selling SIM cards and albums with hundreds of pictures—many of the scammers push people toward other messaging platforms such as Meta’s WhatsApp or Telegram. Here, the Yahoo Boys are at their most bold. Some groups and channels on the two platforms receive hundreds of posts per day and are part of their wider web of operations.

After WIRED asked Facebook about the 16 groups we identified, the company removed them, and some WhatsApp groups were deactivated. “Scammers use every platform available to them to defraud people and constantly adapt to avoid getting caught,” says Al Tolan, a Meta spokesperson. They did not directly address the accounts that were removed or that they were easy to find. “Purposefully exploiting others for money is against our policies, and we take action when we become aware of it,” Tolan says. “We continue to invest in technology and cooperate with law enforcement so they can prosecute scammers. We also actively share tips on how people can protect themselves, their accounts, and avoid scams.”

Groups on Telegram were removed after WIRED messaged the company’s press office; however, the platform did not respond about why it had removed them.

Across all types of social media, Yahoo Boys scammers share “scripts” that they use to socially manipulate people—these can run to thousands of words long and can be copied and pasted to different victims. Many have been online for years. “I’ve seen some scripts that are 30 and 60 layers deep, before the scammer actually would have to go and think of something else to say,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, the chief fraud fighter at Intelligence for Good, which works with cybercrime victims. “It’s 100 percent how they’ll manipulate the people,” Tokazowski says.

Among the many scams, they pretend to be military officers, people offering “hookups,” the FBI, doctors, and people looking for love. One “good morning” script includes around a dozen messages the scammers can send to their targets. “In a world full of deceit and lies, I feel lucky when see the love in your eyes. Good morning,” one says. But things get much darker.

These dangerous scammers don’t even bother to hide their crimes Read More »

Swimming and spinning aquatic spiders use slick survival strategies

aquatic spiders, arachnids, Science, syndication / Shannon Garcia / April 29, 2024

Spider (He is our hero) —

Some make nests inside seashells, others tote bubbles of air on their backs.

Amber Dance, Knowable Magazine – Apr 28, 2024 11: 11 am UTC

Diving bell spider — Enlarge / Of all the aquatic spiders, the diving bell spider is the only one known to survive almost entirely underwater, using bubbles of air it brings down from the surface.

Shrubbery, toolsheds, basements—these are places one might expect to find spiders. But what about the beach? Or in a stream? Some spiders make their homes near or, more rarely, in water: tucking into the base of kelp stalks, spinning watertight cocoons in ponds or lakes, hiding under pebbles at the seaside or creek bank.

“Spiders are surprisingly adaptable, which is one of the reasons they can inhabit this environment,” says Ximena Nelson, a behavioral biologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Finding aquatic or semiaquatic spiders is difficult work, Nelson says: She and a student have spent four years chasing a jumping spider known as Marpissa marina around the pebbly seaside beaches it likes, but too often, as soon as they manage to find one it disappears again under rocks. And sadly, some aquatic spiders may disappear altogether before they come to scientists’ attention, as their watery habitats shrivel due to climate change and other human activities.

What scientists do know is that dozens of described spider species spend at least some of their time in or near the water, and more are almost surely awaiting discovery, says Sarah Crews, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It also appears that spiders evolved aquatic preferences on several distinct occasions during the history of this arthropod order. Crews and colleagues surveyed spiders and reported in 2019 that 21 taxonomic families include semiaquatic species, suggesting that the evolutionary event occurred multiple independent times. Only a swashbuckling few—not even 0.3 percent of described spider species—are seashore spiders; many more have been found near fresh water, says Nelson.

It’s not clear what would induce successful land-dwelling critters to move to watery habitats. Spiders, as a group, probably evolved about 400 million years ago from chunkier creatures that had recently left the water. These arthropods lacked the skinny waist sported by modern spiders. Presumably, the spiders that later returned to a life aquatic were strongly drawn by something to eat there, or driven by unsafe conditions on land, says Geerat Vermeij, a paleobiologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis — because water would have presented major survival challenges.

“Since they depend on air so much, they are severely limited in whether they can do anything at all when they are submerged, other than just toughing it out,” says Vermeij. Newly aquatic spiders would have had to compete with predators better adapted to watery conditions, such as crustaceans, with competition particularly fierce in the oceans, Vermeij says. And if water floods a spider’s air circulation system, it will die, so adaptations were obviously needed.

Swimming and spinning aquatic spiders use slick survival strategies Read More »

Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back

coal, germany, nuclear power, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / April 28, 2024

Enlarge / Jürgen Trittin, member of the German Bundestag and former environment minister, stands next to an activist during an action of the environmental organization Greenpeace in front of the Brandenburg Gate in April 2023. The action is to celebrate the shutdown of the last three German nuclear power plants.

One year ago, Germany took its last three nuclear power stations offline. When it comes to energy, few events have baffled outsiders more.

In the face of climate change, calls to expedite the transition away from fossil fuels, and an energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin’s move to quit nuclear before carbon-intensive energy sources like coal has attracted significant criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labeled it “a mistake.”)

This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war socio-political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism predated the public climate discourse.

From a 1971 West German bestseller evocatively titled Peaceably into Catastrophe: A Documentation of Nuclear Power Plants, to huge protests of hundreds of thousands—including the largest-ever demonstration seen in the West German capital Bonn—the anti-nuclear movement attracted national attention and widespread sympathy. It became a major political force well before even the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Its motivations included: a distrust of technocracy; ecological, environmental, and safety fears; suspicions that nuclear energy could engender nuclear proliferation; and general opposition to concentrated power (especially after its extreme consolidation under the Nazi dictatorship).

Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).

This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War.

Germany’s Energiewende

The contrast here with Thunberg’s latter-day Fridays for Future movement and its “listen to the experts” slogan is striking. The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.

This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.

That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023.

These figures are all the more remarkable given the contributions of ordinary citizens. In 2019, they owned fully 40.4 percent (and over 50 percent in the early 2010s) of Germany’s total installed renewable power generation capacity, whether through community wind energy cooperatives, farm-based biogas installations, or household rooftop solar.

Most other countries’ more recent energy transitions have been attempts to achieve net-zero targets using whatever low-carbon technologies are available. Germany’s now-famous “Energiewende” (translated as “energy transition” or even “energy revolution”), however, has from its earlier inception sought to shift away from both carbon-intensive as well as nuclear energy to predominantly renewable alternatives.

Indeed, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was, significantly, titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.

Consecutive German governments have, over the past two and a half decades, more or less hewed to this line. Angela Merkel’s pro-nuclear second cabinet (2009–13) was an initial exception.

That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan. Small wonder that so many politicians today are reluctant to reopen that particular Pandora’s box.

Another ongoing political headache is where to store the country’s nuclear waste, an issue Germany has never managed to solve. No community has consented to host such a facility, and those designated for this purpose have seen large-scale protests.

Instead, radioactive waste has been stored in temporary facilities close to existing reactors—no long-term solution.

Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back Read More »

Lost opportunity: We could’ve started fighting climate change in 1971

climate change, CO2, CO2 emissions, exxon, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / April 28, 2024

President Nixon on the phone in the Oval Office — Enlarge / A newly revealed research proposal from 1971 shows that Richard Nixon’s science advisors embarked on an extensive analysis of the potential risks of climate change.

Oliver Atkins/National Archives

In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News.

The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the atmosphere. It would have engaged five government agencies in a six-year initiative, with spending of $23 million in the project’s peak year of 1974—the equivalent of $172 million in today’s dollars. It would have used then-cutting-edge technology, some of which is only now being widely implemented in carbon monitoring more than 50 years later.

But it stands as yet another lost opportunity early on the road to the climate crisis. Researchers at the National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, could find no documentation of what happened to the proposal, and it was never implemented.

“Who knows what would have happened if we had some kind of concerted effort, just even on the monitoring side of things?” asked Rachel Santarsiero, an analyst who directs the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project.

It turns out that the monitoring proposal, which was authorized by the head of Nixon’s White House Office of Science and Technology, Edward E. David Jr., did get a second life in another form. After leaving the Nixon administration, David joined the oil giant Exxon, and as president of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company from 1977 to 1986, he signed off on a groundbreaking Exxon project that used one of its oil tankers to gather atmospheric and oceanic carbon dioxide samples, beginning in 1979. That research, which was first reported by Inside Climate News in 2015, confirmed fossil fuels’ role in global warming. It also showed the oil industry knew the harm of its products and is now a key piece of evidence in lawsuits by states and cities across the country seeking compensation from the oil industry for climate damages.

The National Security Archive relies on the Freedom of Information Act to obtain such historical documents, and it currently maintains one of the largest non-governmental archives of declassified government documents—many relating to military and security issues. In the past year, the Archive has launched a project specifically to compile the historical record of the US government’s reckoning with climate change. On Friday, to mark Earth Week, the group released a briefing book detailing climate change discussions in the Nixon White House, including the new document.

Lost opportunity: We could’ve started fighting climate change in 1971 Read More »

The fungi in our guts can make cases of Covid worse

fungus, gut microbiome, health, syndication / Kelly Newman / April 22, 2024

Microscopic image of blue bulbs on stalks against violet background. — Enlarge / Computer illustration of Candida fungi.

Kateryna Kon | Science Photo Library | Getty

Fungi are an indispensable part of your microbiome, keeping the body’s host of microorganisms healthy as part of a system of checks and balances. But when you’re hit by an infection, fungi can be thrown out of equilibrium with other organisms inside you, leading to a more severe infection and other symptoms of illness.

For this reason, the pandemic immediately set off alarms for Iliyan Iliev, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical School. “We were thinking, the first thing that’s going to happen is people will start getting fungal co-infections,” he says. With the microbiome unbalanced, fungi might start running riot inside Covidpatients, Iliev reasoned. His fears were soon realized.

In research published in Nature Immunology, he and his team discovered that in patients with severe Covid, certain strains of gut fungi—knocked off-kilter by the virus—set off a prolonged immune response that could last long after the initial infection. This response potentially led to some of the respiratory symptoms experienced by these patients. These results, Iliev says, point to the critical role of the gut microbiome in the human immune response and could lead to better disease treatments down the line.

Imbalance of the gut microbiome has long been linked to disease. Ken Cadwell, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks of the microbiome as a metaphorical rainforest. “It’s a nice ecosystem—but if you cut down too many trees or bring in invasive species, you could make things go out of whack,” he says.

To see how the body’s internal fungi were affected during Covid and how this triggered the immune system, Iliev and his team started by looking at patients’ blood. After collecting samples from 91 people with Covid, they measured levels of antibodies against several fungi, to figure out if the body’s immune system was reacting against these. Significantly more anti-fungal antibodies, for instance, would indicate fungal overgrowth or invasion.

Takato Kusakabe, a postdoctoral fellow in Iliev’s lab and study author, ran plate after plate of experiments—a painstaking process—to quantify these antibody levels. The team found in patients with severe Covid, several fungi commonly found in the gut had increased antibodies against them (in comparison to uninfected people). Notably, these included Candida albicans, which is a common culprit of yeast infections. When the team then ran tests on fecal samples from 10 of the hospitalized Covid patients, these confirmed that the fungi being targeted by the antibodies were present in the patients’ guts—and at seemingly at higher levels than in uninfected controls, suggesting an imbalance in their microbiome.

The fungi in our guts can make cases of Covid worse Read More »

The GMO tooth microbe that is supposed to prevent cavities

dentistry, health, syndication, tooth decay / Shannon Garcia / April 21, 2024

oral hygiene —

Some experts have concerns over the safety of the genetically modified bacteria.

Christina Szalinski, Undark Magazine – Apr 20, 2024 10: 49 am UTC

About seven years ago, Aaron Silverbook and his then-girlfriend, a biologist, were perusing old scientific literature online. “A romantic evening,” joked Silverbook. That night, he came across a study from 2000 that surprised him. Scientists had genetically engineered an oral bacterium that they said could possibly prevent tooth decay: “I read it and sort of boggled at it and said, ‘Wow, this is a cavity vaccine. Why don’t we have this?’”

So, Silverbook tracked down the primary author, Jeffrey Hillman, a now-retired oral biologist formerly at the University of Florida, to see if he could pick up the torch.

In 2023, Silverbook founded Lantern Bioworks, which made a deal with Oragenics, the company Hillman co-founded and that owned the technology, for the materials. Lantern Bioworks then launched the genetically engineered bacteria under the name Lumina Probiotic. “I didn’t expect it to happen in my lifetime,” said Hillman.

As recently as last month, a website for the product included language about cavity prevention. And a previously available press kit stated that “a one-time brushing with this genetically modified bacteria could indefinitely prevent dental cavities.” By the time Lumina became available for pre-orders last week, however, that wording and the press kit had been removed. Silverbook—who does not have a background in dentistry or microbiology—told Undark that his lawyer advised the change in wording on the website, as Lantern Bioworks is bringing the product to market as a cosmetic, meaning it can’t make health claims about Lumina. Cosmetics don’t need to go through the same rigorous trials a drug would. “If anything I said sounded like a medical claim,” Silverbook told Undark in an interview earlier this year, “it wasn’t.”

The product can be applied to teeth as a one-time application either at home or by a dentist. Additional applications can “expedite inoculation,” Silverbook wrote in a follow-up email. He said the company anticipates Lumina will ship by mid-June.

Some people have already received it. Silverbook said he introduced Lumina into his own mouth in October of 2023, and that Lantern Bioworks has also provided it to about 60 people, including attendees of Vitalia, a biotechnology conference held in Honduras earlier this year. At the conference, Lumina was offered for $20,000 per treatment, though the pre-order price has been reduced to $250 before taxes and shipping fees. (Silverbook would not comment on how many people went for Lumina at the conference.)

Experts, though, have safety and ethical concerns: Despite earlier efforts by Oragenics, the treatment has never successfully moved through human clinical trials. “Without human trials, you really can’t determine whether it’s safe or efficacious,” said Jennifer Kuzma, a professor and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University. In fact, it’s possible it could do the opposite of its original intention: She noted that subtle changes in the oral microbiome might lead to more cavities or other problems.

“I read it and sort of boggled at it and said, ‘Wow, this is a cavity vaccine. Why don’t we have this?’”

There’s also no data about whether it could spread between people, which brings up questions of informed consent. If someone doesn’t want to risk taking the untested bacteria, but kisses or shares spoons with someone who got the product, would it be transmitted? No one is quite sure.

Although Lantern Bioworks is bringing Lumina to market as a cosmetic product, precisely how it should be categorized isn’t entirely obvious, Kuzma points out: “The regulatory system isn’t 100 percent clear on this.”

The GMO tooth microbe that is supposed to prevent cavities Read More »

Password crackdown leads to more income for Netflix

culture, netflix, streaming, syndicaiton, syndication / Shannon Garcia / April 21, 2024

Sharing is caring —

Netflix to stop reporting subscriber numbers, prioritizing viewer engagement instead.

Christopher Grimes, Financial Times – Apr 19, 2024 1: 28 pm UTC

Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing helped the streaming service blow past Wall Street’s earnings forecasts, but its shares fell after it said it planned to stop regularly disclosing its subscriber numbers.

The company’s operating income surged 54 percent in the first quarter as it added 9.3 million subscribers worldwide, proving that the efforts to reduce password sharing it launched last year have had more lasting benefits than some investors expected.

However, Netflix said on Thursday that from next year it would stop revealing its total number of subscribers, a metric that has been a crucial benchmark for investors in the streaming era.

In its letter to shareholders, Netflix said it was shifting its focus to engagement—the amount of time its subscribers spend on the service—while also developing new price points and sources of revenue, including advertising.

“Each incremental member has a different business impact” with the new subscription plans, Greg Peters, co-chief executive, said in a call with investors. “And that means the historical simple math that we all did—the number of members times the monthly price—is increasingly less accurate in capturing the state of the business.”

He added that Netflix would “periodically update” on subscriber figures when it hits “major milestones.”

Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, said Netflix’s decision to no longer disclose quarterly subscriptions starting in 2025 “will not go down well.”

“No matter the company’s attempt to switch focus from subscribers to financials, net [subscriber] adds is the key metric everyone wants to see,” he said.

The latest results showed there was still room for growth as a result of its password crackdown and push into advertising, Pescatore added. Netflix said memberships to its advertising-supported tier rose 65 percent from the previous quarter.

Before Thursday’s report the streaming pioneer’s shares had risen 30 percent this year, significantly outperforming the broader market. The shares fell 4.7 percent in after-hours trading following the earnings report.

Netflix executives said among their primary goals was improving the variety and quality of their entertainment, including television shows, movies, and games. It recently appointed Dan Lin as the new head of its film division.

“Even though we have made and we are making great films, we want to make them better,” said Ted Sarandos, co-chief executive. He added that he saw no need to spend more money on content.

Netflix has been pushing further into sports-related content, including a $5 billion deal to livestream World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship Raw program in the US over the next decade.

It is also offering a livestream of a fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul in July, leading analysts to question whether the company plans to move further into live sport. “We’re not anti-sports, but pro-profitable growth,” Sarandos said.

Netflix reported earnings of $5.28 a share, well ahead of Wall Street forecasts of $4.51, while its number of subscribers rose 16 percent to 269 million from a year earlier.

Its revenue forecast for the current quarter of $9.49 billion was slightly below Wall Street forecasts of about $9.5 billion. But Netflix said it expected revenue to grow between 13 and 15 percent for the full year.

The company said it generated strong engagement in the first quarter from subscribers in the UK with Fool Me Once, which had 98 million views. Other standouts included the drama series Griselda with 66.4 million views and 3 Body Problem with about 40 million.

Password crackdown leads to more income for Netflix Read More »

Why do some people always get lost?

navigation, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / April 14, 2024

I don’t know where I’m going —

Experience may matter more than innate ability when it comes to sense of direction.

Bob Holmes, Knowable Magazine – Apr 14, 2024 10: 55 am UTC

Enlarge / Scientists are homing in on how navigation skills develop.

Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND)

Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

“People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate,” says Nora Newcombe, a cognitive psychologist at Temple University who coauthored a look at how navigational ability develops in the 2022 Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.”

While it’s easy to show that people differ in navigational ability, it has proved much harder for scientists to explain why. There’s new excitement brewing in the navigation research world, though. By leveraging technologies such as virtual reality and GPS tracking, scientists have been able to watch hundreds, sometimes even millions, of people trying to find their way through complex spaces, and to measure how well they do. Though there’s still much to learn, the research suggests that to some extent, navigation skills are shaped by upbringing.

Nurturing navigation skills

The importance of a person’s environment is underscored by a recent look at the role of genetics in navigation. In 2020, Margherita Malanchini, a developmental psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, and her colleagues compared the performance of more than 2,600 identical and nonidentical twins as they navigated through a virtual environment to test whether navigational ability runs in families. It does, they found—but only modestly. Instead, the biggest contributor to people’s performance was what geneticists call the “nonshared environment”—that is, the unique experiences each person accumulates as their life unfolds. Good navigators, it appears, are mostly made, not born.

A remarkable, large-scale experiment led by Hugo Spiers, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, gave researchers a glimpse at how experience and other cultural factors might influence wayfinding skills. Spiers and his colleagues, in collaboration with the telecom company T-Mobile, developed a game for cellphones and tablets, Sea Hero Quest, in which players navigate by boat through a virtual environment to locate a series of checkpoints. The game app asked participants to provide basic demographic data, and nearly 4 million worldwide did so. (The app is no longer accepting new participants except by invitation of researchers.)

Through the app, the researchers were able to measure wayfinding ability by the total distance each player traveled to reach all the checkpoints. After completing some levels of the game, players also had to shoot a flare back toward their point of origin—a dead-reckoning test analogous to the pointing-to-out-of-sight-locations task. Then Spiers and his colleagues could compare players’ performance to the demographic data.

Several cultural factors were associated with wayfinding skills, they found. People from Nordic countries tended to be slightly better navigators, perhaps because the sport of orienteering, which combines cross-country running and navigation, is popular in those countries. Country folk did better, on average, than people from cities. And among city-dwellers, those from cities with more chaotic street networks such as those in the older parts of European cities did better than those from cities like Chicago, where the streets form a regular grid, perhaps because residents of grid cities don’t need to build such complex mental maps.

Why do some people always get lost? Read More »