Friday, October 15, 2021

Trump demands to be 'declared the winner' of 2020 race — or get a do-over election
Bob Brigham
October 15, 2021



Former President Donald Trump is pushing a new conspiracy theory while demanding to be either reinstated as president or get a do-over election.

The United States Constitution does not allow for either option, but facts have never seemed to matter when it comes to Trump pushing his "Big Lie" of election fraud.

Trump remains fixated on Arizona, which he lost to Joe Biden, but has changed his focus within the state. The controversial Cyber Ninjas "audit" of Maricopa County, the state's most populous county that includes Phoenix, failed to prove Trump's conspiracy theories of election fraud.

Now Trump has shifted his focus to Pima County, Arizona's second most populous which includes the county seat of Tuscon.

"A new analysis of mail-in ballots in Pima County, Arizona means the election was Rigged and Stolen from the Republican Party in 2020, and in particular, its Presidential Candidate. This analysis, derived from publicly available election data, shows staggering anomalies and fictitious votes in Pima County's mail-in returns, making it clear they stuffed the ballot box (in some precincts with more ballots than were ever sent!)," Trump claimed, even though there is no evidence that ballot boxes were stuffed.

Trump included charts from disgraced conspiracy theorist Shiva Ayyadurai, who was hired for the Maricopa audit even though he didn't understand the process.

"The Department of Justice has had this information since the November 2020 Election, and has done nothing about it. The Pima County GOP should start a canvass of Republican voters, in order to identify and remove the obvious fictitious voters from the system," Trump wrote.

"Either a new Election should immediately take place or the past Election should be decertified and the Republican candidate declared the winner," Trump said.



QUEBEC IS GOING TO BE PISSED
New electoral boundaries strip Quebec of a seat, gives Alberta 3 more

OTTAWA — Elections Canada says Quebec will lose one seat in the next redistribution of federal ridings in Canada
.
© Provided by The Canadian Press

Overall, the number of seats in the House of Commons will increase by four to 342 seats to reflect Canada’s growing population.

Alberta will gain three seats, Ontario one and British Columbia one, while the number of MPs in other province and territories, except Quebec, will remain unchanged.

Quebec's 78 MPs will be reduced to 77 — the first time since 1966 that a province has lost a seat during redistribution.

The number of ridings is adjusted every 10 years following the decennial census to reflect changes in population.

Elections Canada says the new electoral map will not be ready until 2024 at the earliest.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2021

Marie Woolf, The Canadian Press

BECAUSE IT HAD TO BE SAID; SHATNER TELETUBBIE

George Takei disses William Shatner's trip to space: 'He's boldly going where other people have gone before'


·Writer, Yahoo Entertainment

George Takei and William Shatner's decade-long feud continues. 

Takei threw shade at his former Star Trek co-star following Shatner's historic trip to space. When asked by Page Six what he thought about Shatner's ride on Blue Origin, Takei quipped, "He's boldly going where other people have gone before."

Star Trek's George Takei takes a jab at William Shatner's trip to space.
Star Trek's George Takei takes a jab at William Shatner's trip to space. (Photo: Getty Images)

"He's a guinea pig, 90 years old and it's important to find out what happens,” Takei, 84, added. The actors starred together on the original 1966 series.

"So 90 years old is going to show a great deal more on the wear and tear on the human body, so he'll be a good specimen to study," Takei continued. "Although he's not the fittest specimen of 90 years old, so he'll be a specimen that's unfit!"

Shatner is well aware his age made him the oldest person ever to go into space on Wednesday.

"I had to walk up that platform, I was exhausted. My muscles hurt from all this training, I'm aching, I'm in pain," the actor quipped on Thursday's CBS Mornings. "And I'm up there, and I'm saying, 'Holy s***, I am 90!'"

Shatner admitted to getting nervous before blastoff.

"You're lying back there and you know there's all this explosive material. And we know it's safe. They've made this, Blue Origin has made it safe. I want to emphasize that. So it's safe. But it's one thing to say it's safe, and it's another thinking 'Oh, I remember O-rings, and I remember explosions," he shared, admitting the feeling of being in G-force was an emotional experience.

"You're floating. Your gut is floating, your head is floating. The outside is, you're immersed in things that are indescribable," Shatner continued. "I was so moved. And what I wanted when I said I want to hold on to it, it's like a truth that suddenly comes to you. And you don't want to dissipate it. You don't want to lose it. You want to hold it for the rest of your life."

William Shatner says Prince William is 'missing the point' of space tourism


Charles Riley
CNN Digital
 Friday, October 15, 2021


William Shatner is firing a rhetorical rocket back at Prince William after the future king criticized space tourism.

Shatner, who blasted into space earlier this week on one of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' rockets, said the prince has "got the wrong idea" by saying that solving problems on Earth should be prioritized over tourist trips to space.

"He's a lovely, gentle, educated man, but he's got the wrong idea," Shatner said during an interview with Entertainment Tonight. "The idea here is not to go, 'Yeah, look at me. I'm in space,'" Shatner added, claiming that trips such as his represent a "baby step" toward relocating polluting industries to space.

Related Stories
Prince William says great minds should focus on saving Earth not space travel


The 90-year-old "Star Trek" actor said that a power generating base could be constructed 400 kilometres above the Earth and used to supply homes and businesses below. "The prince is missing the point," he added.

"All it needs is... somebody as rich as Jeff Bezos [to say], 'Let's go up there.'"

Without mentioning names, William criticized billionaires focused on space tourism in an interview Thursday with the BBC, saying they should invest more time and money in saving Earth. Bezos, SpaceX boss Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson are all taking tourists to space.

"We need some of the world's greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live," said the prince.

The second-in-line to the British throne stated that he had "absolutely no interest" in going to space. He also expressed concerns over the environmental impact of space tourism, saying there was a "fundamental question" over the carbon cost of space flights.

Shatner became the oldest person ever to travel to space when his vessel — a suborbital space tourism rocket built by Blue Origin — brushed the boundary of Earth's atmosphere and vaulted him into weightlessness. Shatner described the payoff of floating above the Earth as "profound."

The actor said that space travel is not something a person can understand until "you're up there and you see the black darkness, the ugliness."

"From our point of view, space is filled with mystery ... but in that moment, it is blackness and death. In this moment down here, as we look down, [Earth] is life and nurturing. That's what everybody needs to know," Shatner told CNN after his flight.



In this photo provided by Blue Origin, William Shatner, experiences weightlessness with three other passengers inside the Blue Origin capsule on Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021. (Blue Origin via AP)

NASA Leadership Visits JPL, Discusses Climate Change and Mars

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson addresses participants during a climate roundtable at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Oct. 14, 2021.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson addresses participants during a climate roundtable at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Oct. 14, 2021.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 Oct 14, 2021

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy met with elected officials about Earth science and visited mission control for the Perseverance Mars rover.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy affirmed the agency’s commitment to studying climate change during a visit to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Oct. 14. The visit was hosted by JPL Interim Director Larry James and also included a meeting with scientists and engineers operating the Perseverance Mars rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

Administrator Nelson convened an Earth science roundtable discussion at JPL that focused on ways scientists, engineers, resource managers, and policymakers can work together to address climate challenges on our home planet. Taking part in the roundtable were Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum, California Reps. Judy Chu, Pete Aguilar, Julia Brownley, and Ted Lieu; California Natural Resources Sec. Wade Crowfoot; and California Environmental Protection Sec. Jared Blumenfeld.

“In truth, this discussion is about saving our planet,” Nelson said. “NASA is the point of the spear on climate change.”

Central to the discussion were NASA JPL efforts to address climate resilience by measuring key indicators, such as the powerful greenhouse gas methane, and tracking freshwater across the globe. NASA assets also provide decision-makers and responders with critical data about damage following natural disasters such as earthquakes and wildfires.

On Oct. 14, NASA Administrator (second from left) and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy (far right) visited JPL.
On Oct. 14, NASA Administrator (second from left) and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy (far right) visited JPL. With them are (from far left) Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum, JPL Interim Director Larry James, JPL CFO Sammy Kayali, and NASA Office of JPL Management and Oversight Marcus Watkins.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

After the roundtable, NASA leadership and California officials then headed to the surface mission support area that controls operations for the Perseverance rover, which landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, with an experimental helicopter attached to its belly. Perseverance engineers and scientists shared details about recent rover activities in the crater floor region nicknamed “Séítah” and what they hope to discover at the ancient river delta in the distance and beyond.

JPL leaders also discussed future plans for the Mars Sample Return campaign to bring rock and sediment samples Perseverance collects back to Earth for study. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter team updated the group on their next flight plans.

The visit ended with a trip to the gallery looking into JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility, the clean room where Moon probes, orbiters sent to Jupiter and Saturn, and generations of Mars rovers have taken shape. Engineers and technicians there are assembling the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) spacecraft. NISAR, a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organisation, will track subtle changes to the Earth’s surface, providing new ways to mitigate the threat of natural hazards, better manage natural resources, and understand climate change.

NISAR is part of NASA’s Earth System Observatory, a new set of Earth-focused missions to provide key information to guide efforts related to climate change, disaster mitigation, fighting forest fires, and improving real-time agricultural processes. The satellites within the Earth System Observatory will complement each other, working in tandem to create a 3D, holistic view of Earth, from bedrock to atmosphere.

JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California.

For more information about NASA’s climate change research, visit:

https://climate.nasa.gov/

For more information about NASA’s Mars missions, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov

AMAZON OWNED
Twitch downplays this month's hack, says it had minimal impact
By Sergiu Gatlan
October 15, 2021



In an update regarding this month's security incident, Twitch downplayed the breach saying that it had minimal impact and only affected a small number of users.

"We've undergone a thorough review of the information included in the files exposed and are confident that it only affected a small fraction of users and the customer impact is minimal. We are contacting those who have been impacted directly," Twitch said.


The company also stated that no login credentials or full credit card numbers/payment data belonging to users or streamers were exposed following last week's massive data leak.

"Twitch passwords have not been exposed. We are also confident that systems that store Twitch login credentials, which are hashed with bcrypt, were not accessed, nor were full credit card numbers or ACH / bank information," Twitch added.

Data exposed in the incident and leaked on the 4chan imageboard primarily contained documents from Twitch's source code repository and a subset of creator payout data.

As explained in previous updates issued after the attack, the attackers could gain access to data due to a faulty server configuration change that exposed it to the Internet.



125 GB of source code and payment reports stolen

Although Twitch hasn't revealed what servers were misconfigured, the unknown individual behind the leak said the data was allegedly stolen from roughly 6,000 internal Twitch Git repositories.

"Their community is also a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them, and in part one, are releasing the source code from almost 6,000 internal Git repositories," the anonymous poster said.

Image: BleepingComputer

According to the 4chan user, the archive leaked on the imageboard contained the following Twitch info:
The entirety of twitch.tv, with commit history going back to its early beginnings
Mobile, desktop, and video game console Twitch clients
Various proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch
Every other property that Twitch owns, including IGDB and CurseForge
An unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios
Twitch SOC internal red teaming tools (lol)
Creator payout reports from 2019 until now.

The 4chan thread was named "twitch leaks part one," which hints at additional stolen data likely to be leaked in the future.

Related Articles:

Twitch: No credentials or card numbers exposed in data breach

Massive Twitch hack: Source code and payment reports leaked

Accenture confirms data breach after August ransomware attack

Acer confirms breach of after-sales service systems in India

T-Mobile says hackers stole records belonging to 48.6 million individuals


Lee Valley warns customers of delays of up to 1 year, higher prices to come

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Supply chain issues show no sign of abating

Retailers are warning of the massive problems they are seeing in getting products from suppliers and manufacturers to the shelves. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

Canadian retailer Lee Valley Tools has a bleak warning for anyone looking to get their hands on high-end garden shears, brass escutcheons or crokinole boards any time soon: good luck.

The Ottawa-based home and garden chain with 20 stores across Canada told customers in an email this week that it is sending out its Christmas catalogue "uncomfortably early" this year because it is anticipating major delays in getting its goods to market. 

"The message for consumers is buy early, because there is no chance to reorder or to replenish [before Christmas]," said CEO Robin Lee in an interview with CBC News. He said that the inventory the company has now are products they ordered a year ago.

Lee Valley is just the latest company to warn of the massive problems it is seeing in getting its products from suppliers and manufacturers to the shelves — a complicated process known as a supply chain.

The COVID-19 pandemic waylaid the usual trends of supply and demand by wiping out both in early 2020 as factories shut down to keep workers safe, and consumers weren't in the mood to buy anything but the essentials anyway. 

But now that things are slowly heading back toward some sort of normalcy, suppliers can't ramp up fast enough to keep up with booming demand of everything from cars to appliances to gaming consoles and even iPhones.

Shipping costs are a major factor, with the price to ship containers from Asia to the West Coast of North America more than quadrupling this year, one logistics firm told CBC News in an interview recently.

Container ships wait off the coast of Long Beach, Calif., on Oct. 1. The cost of shipping containers from Asia to the West Coast of North America has more than quadrupled this year, according to logistics firms. (Alan Devall/Reuters)

Labour shortages, fuel costs blamed

Lee Valley's CEO says labour shortages and higher fuel costs are contributing to higher prices.

"There are a lot of [shipping] containers out there, but the cost of moving those around has gone up. In some cases, orders of magnitude. We used to pay about $7,000 to bring a container from Asia, and the cost today is $34,000," Lee said.

Lee Valley says consumers shouldn't expect to receive some items until closer to next Christmas, never mind this one.

Lee pointed to one of the router bits his company carries. Normally, that part would take four months to arrive from a company in Taiwan where he's ordered from for years. He put an order in last week and said the expected delivery date is May 2022. 

"A lot can happen between now and then. And if we get just a tiny little bit more demand, we could be out of stock for more than a year on that product."

He estimates problems with the supply chain may continue for another 12 to 18 months — but cautions that it's hard to tell.

"Consumers have to understand that even when COVID is over, it's not over," Lee said. "This ripple effect is going to continue for a very, very long time." 

Ikea reports problems, too

Small firms like Lee Valley have been swept up, but even the big fish are having problems. Swedish furniture retailer Ikea says it also can't keep its shelves fully stocked right now.

Company CEO Jon Abrahamsson said the biggest challenge is getting goods out of China, where around a quarter of Ikea products are made. As a result, he expects consumers will face difficulties well into 2022.

Most of the chain's wares in Europe are made there, too, but more of what gets sold in North America comes from Asia, so the supply crunch is being felt most acutely in Canada and the U.S.

"On the retail side we have learned agility like never before because every day you have to work with what you have," Abrahamsson said. "You have to find ways to solve customer needs with limitations that we have never seen before."

With files from Reuters

2005-2007 DEJA VU

With average prices up another 14%, Swiss bank UBS warns of housing bubbles in Canada

UBS says Toronto has second-biggest housing bubble in the world 

VANCOUVER IS #6

House prices in Canada have risen by 14 per cent in the past year, fuelled by record-low mortgages rates and a pandemic-caused desire for more space. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

Average house prices rose 14 per cent in the past year, the Canadian Real Estate Association said Friday, adding to concerns that Canada's most expensive real estate markets are dangerously overvalued.

The group that represents realtors across the country says the average price of a Canadian home sold on its MLS system was $686,650, almost 14 per cent higher than it was in the same month a year ago.

Canada's inflation rate hit four per cent in August, the fastest increase in the cost of living in almost 20 years. The new data on house prices Friday means that house prices are going up at more than three times that record pace.

CREA says the average price can be misleading, since it is heavily skewed by sales in the most expensive markets of Toronto and Vancouver. It trumpets another number, known as the MLS House Price Index (HPI), as a more accurate gauge of the overall market, because it strips out some of the volatility.

But the HPI is rising by even more than the average is right now — up 21.5 per cent in the past 12 months. In the Greater Toronto area, the average price of a home that sold was $1,136,280 in September, up 18 per cent in a year, according to the local real estate board. In Vancouver, the average is 1,186,100 — up by more than 13 per cent in the past year.

"There is still a lot of demand chasing an increasingly scarce number of listings, so this market remains very challenging," CREA chair Cliff Stevenson said.

The pandemic has had an unexpected impact on house prices in that instead of causing people to be more conservative because of the economic uncertainty, buyers have been eager to shell out for more space.

Canada's central bank slashed its benchmark rate to help stimulate the economy through the pandemic, and when lenders passed those rates on to consumers in the form of record low mortgage rates that had the effect of pouring gasoline on the fire of housing demand, making it more affordable to borrow more and more money to buy a home.

UBS warns of bubble

The fresh numbers on prices come as a major Swiss bank was already warning that Toronto and Vancouver are home to two of the worst housing bubbles in the entire world.

In an annual ranking, UBS examines the housing markets in 24 major world cities in Europe, North America and Asia to assess them based on how expensive housing is compared to local income levels and other factors.

It then puts all the cities into one of five categories: 

  • Depressed housing market (a score of -1.5 or lower).
  • Undervalued (-0.5 to -1.5).
  • Fairly valued (-0.5 to +0.5).
  • Overvalued (+0.5 to +1.5).
  • Bubble (1.5 and up).

Six cities were deemed to have housing bubbles. Two of them are in Canada. 

Toronto got a score of 2.02. That was higher than every other city except Frankfurt, Germany, which scored a 2.16.

Vancouver scored a 1.66, just behind Hong Kong (1.90), Munich (1.84) and Zurich (1.83).

Realtors say a lack of homes is the problem and are urging the construction of new ones. But one expert says supply and demand imbalances are nowhere near able to explain the current price increases. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press)

The bank says house prices in Toronto have effectively doubled in the past decade. Government interventions through things like foreign buyers taxes and rent controls caused the market to take a breather in 2018 and 2019, but things have only accelerated since, the bank said.

"Real prices increased by almost eight per cent from mid-2020 to mid-2021," the bank said.

The bank says price gains are being fuelled by record-low mortgage rates, which are not expected to last much longer once the Bank of Canada inevitably has to raise its rate.

That "could lead to an abrupt end to the current housing frenzy," the bank said.

Isabel Serrano, a prospective homebuyer in Toronto, is well aware of how frothy things have gotten in the city. She and her husband have been renting for the past 15 years, and are finally ready to buy. But despite having more than $200,000 a year in combined income, the pair can't find anything in their price range — and they keep getting outbid when they try.

In an interview with CBC News, she said she has looked at between 40 or 50 houses in the past few months, and placed offers on four. In some cases, the house sold for six figures more than the asking price.

"I never thought it was going to be this hard. I really didn't," she said. "It blows my mind that there are no homes to buy. It blows my mind that we cannot find a house to buy for $800,000."

WATCH | Isabel Serrano says house prices are out of reach for people like 

Prospective home buyer Isabel Serrano says even though she and her husband have steady incomes, there's only so high they can go in terms of buying a home to live in. (Credit: Mark Boschler/CBC) 0:53

'A fast rebound'

Things don't look much better in Vancouver. Taxes on vacant homes and foreign buyers in 2016 cooled what was then a red-hot market, as prices rose by more than 20 per cent that year. Those moves seemed to relieve some of the pressure, as prices declined by 10 per cent between 2018 and 2019.

"Since then, however, lower prices, falling mortgage rates and looser stress test rules have enticed households to buy properties again, leading to a fast rebound," UBS said. "From mid-2020 to mid-2021, property prices increased by 11 per cent, offsetting past losses."

High prices aren't just bad for would-be buyers like Serrano, who plan to live in them — they don't augur well for investors hoping to pay them off by renting them out either.

According to UBS, anyone buying an investment property with the intent to rent it out would need to rent it for 31 years in Vancouver to cover the price of buying it. In Toronto, it would take 28 years. In cities like Miami and Dubai, it's half that.

It's a big reason why the bank suspects both Toronto and Vancouver are in bubble territory, which UBS defines as "a substantial and sustained mispricing of an asset, the existence of which cannot be proved unless it bursts."

UBS has no qualms calling what's happening in Canada's two biggest housing markets a bubble, and they aren't the only ones.

Prof. George Fallis, who teaches economics at York University in Toronto, says the city's housing market shows all the signs of being detached from fundamentals.

Supply and demand

"A bubble exists if you can't explain price increases by using the normal variables we look at," he said in an interview. "Whenever you see that kind of thing, that should be a warning light."

Fallis says he worries some people buying today are doing so based solely on the expectation that gains in the future will be the same as those of the past, and it's always dangerous when that happens.

"Economists are not psychologists and the psychology of frothy expectations is poorly understood. But it's clear that it's [caused by] something arising which sort of shocks you," he said. The most likely trigger could be a rapid rise in interest rates, something that experts have already warned is inevitable.

"You only know a bubble exists when it bursts," Fallis said. "It just keeps going and going and going until it doesn't."

Canadian homebuyers pile into variable loans, blunting

 impact of rising fixed rates


04:45 What to know about new mortgage rules


Nichola Saminather
Published Oct. 14, 2021 

TORONTO -

A recent move by major Canadian banks to increase fixed mortgage rates on the back of surging bond yields is unlikely to slow the country's red hot housing market, as more than half of new borrowers take out variable-rate loans that are the cheapest they've ever been.

The market share of new variable-rate mortgages surged to 51% in July, the highest level since the Bank of Canada began tracking the data in 2013, from less than 10% in early 2020, and mortgage brokers say this has continued to increase since then.

The shift is the result of a growing gap between variable rates that move alongside the overnight rate, and fixed rates, which have followed bond yields higher. The spread is set to further expand, thanks to the Bank of Canada's pledge that it won't raise the benchmark rate until the second half of 2022, even as bond yields continue to surge on rising inflation.


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This, in turn, means the popularity of variable-rate mortgages will grow further, overturning a trend that has been in place for over a decade, according to experts.

Surging demand for housing during the pandemic has led the country's mortgage insurer and the Bank of Canada to warn of escalating risks, and politicians have vowed to take steps to boost affordability. Yet, the central bank's own low-rate policies have helped fuel soaring demand.

"We are at a point where there's an artificial suppression of the short-term, central bank controlled rate," said mortgage broker Ron Butler. But "a marketplace-based rate like the five-year fixed says 'no no no, I think rates have to go up'."

But "the effect on the marketplace, where the variable rate is so low, is very much blunted," he added.

Canada's biggest banks have raised their five-year fixed rates in response to the surge in bond yields - ranging from Royal Bank of Canada's rate of 2.44% to Toronto-Dominion Bank's 2.29%.

That has pushed the average discounted fixed mortgage rate to a 16-month high of 1.94% as of Wednesday, while the discounted variable rate dropped to a record 0.95%, according to rate comparison site RateHub.ca.

"The variable rate is half the fixed rate," said Ratehub.ca co-founder James Laird, adding that demand for variable-rate mortgages usually rises when they are at least 75 basis points cheaper than fixed. "This is the most extreme difference we've seen."


Mortgages powered earnings growth for banks during the pandemic, but as economies open up, banks have more opportunities to lend and their willingness to pass on their higher borrowing costs to home buyers shows that flexibility.

The increase in fixed rates illustrates that some of the banks' eagerness during the pandemic to boost mortgage lending to deploy excess capital has ebbed, said Newhaven Asset Management portfolio manager Ryan Bushell.

The fact that they are driving more borrowers to variable-rate loans shows they "want people to be adjusting up the curve quicker," he said, since any central bank interest rate hike would raise floating rates while fixed rates remain the same.

A pullback in overall mortgage demand will only come if bond yields were to rise by 100 basis points or more, although this would be offset by better margins for lenders, said Rob Colangelo, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody's Investors Service.

"If bond yields continue to rise, they may need to make adjustments here and there, but I don't feel they'd ... be as significant as if the Bank of Canada says they were going to raise rates 50 to 100 basis points, for example," he said.

SYNTHETIC MEANS UNNATURAL

Synthetic biology moves into the realm of the unnatural

Synthetic biology moves into the realm of the unnatural
An artificial metalloenzyme based on the natural enzyme called P450 (gray structure)
. UC Berkeley chemists created a heme molecule (magenta) with an embedded iridium 
atom (red) that, in E. coli, was incorporated into P450 to execute a reaction unknown in
 the natural world. Credit: UC Berkeley image by Brandon Bloomer

The field of synthetic biology has had great success engineering yeast and bacteria to make chemicals—biofuels, pharmaceuticals, fragrances, even the hoppy flavors of beer—cheaply and more sustainably, with only sugar as the energy source.

Yet, the field has been limited by the fact that microbes, even with genes thrown in from plants or other animals, can only make  by using the chemical reactions of nature. Much of chemistry and the chemical industry is focused on making substances that are not found in nature with reactions invented in a laboratory.

A collaboration between synthetic chemists and  at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has now overcome that hurdle, engineering bacteria that can make a molecule that, until now, could only be synthesized in a laboratory.

While the biosynthesis in the bacteria E. coli produced a substance of low value—and in small quantities, at that—the fact that the researchers could engineer a microbe to produce something unknown in nature opens the door to production of a broader range of chemicals from yeast and bacterial fermentation, the researchers said.

"It's a completely new way of doing chemical synthesis. The idea of creating an organism that makes such an unnatural product, that combines laboratory synthesis with synthetic biology within a —it is just a futuristic way to make organic molecules from two separate fields of science in a way nobody's done before," said John Hartwig, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and one of four senior authors of the study.

The findings were published online today (Oct. 14) in the journal Nature Chemistry.

The achievement could greatly expand the applications of synthetic biology, which is a greener, more sustainable way to make chemicals for consumers and industry, said co-author Aindrila Mukhopadhyay, a Berkeley Lab senior scientist and vice president of the Biofuels and Bioproducts Division at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, California.

"There is just so much need in our lives right now for sustainable materials, materials that won't impact the environment. This technology opens up possibilities for fuels with desirable properties that can be produced renewably, as well as new antibiotics, new nutraceuticals, new compounds that would be exceedingly challenging to make using only biology or only chemistry," she said. "I think that is the real power of this—it expands the range of molecules we can address. We really need disruptive new technologies, and this most definitely is one of them."

Hybridizing metal catalysts with natural enzymes

Hartwig, the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab, embeds metal catalysts in natural enzymes to make so-called artificial metalloenzymes, which can synthesize chemicals that have been hard to make by other means in the laboratory. One reaction of these systems he and his lab have worked on for the past six years is incorporating a cyclopropane—a ring of three carbon atoms—into other molecules. Such cyclopropanated chemicals are becoming increasingly useful in medicines, such as a drug to cure hepatitis C infections.

He and UC Berkeley graduate student Zhennan Liu created one metalloenzyme that is a hybrid of a natural enzyme, P450—widely used in the body, particularly in the liver, to oxidize compounds—and the metal iridium. P450 naturally incorporates a cofactor called heme—also at the core of the hemoglobin molecule that transports oxygen in the blood—that naturally contains a metal atom, iron.

Switching out the iron for iridium, Hartwig's lab generated a metalloenzyme that, in test tubes, successfully adds cyclopropanes—by sticking a third carbon onto a carbon-carbon double bond—to other . The iridium-based metalloenzyme does this with stereoselectivity—that is, it generates a cyclopropanated molecule, but not its mirror image, which would behave differently in the body.

They then teamed up with Berkeley Lab postdoctoral fellow Jing Huang, a synthetic biologist in the labs of Mukhopadhyay and Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and CEO of JBEI, to see if they could incorporate the iridium-containing heme into P450 enzymes inside living E. coli cells and give the bacteria the ability to make cyclopropanated molecules completely within the cell.

Working with UC Berkeley graduate student Brandon Bloomer, they found a way to transport the heme molecule containing the iridium into E. coli, where a majority of the iridium added to the medium in which the bacteria grow became incorporated into a P450 enzyme.

The synthetic biologists then balanced the metabolism of the bacteria so that they could produce the final product—a cyclopropanated limonene—in a living bacterial culture.

"The product is a relatively simple molecule, but this work demonstrates the potential to combine biosynthesis and chemical synthesis to make molecules that organisms have never made before, and nature's never made before," Hartwig said.

Mukhopadhyay said that incorporating other metalloenzymes into bacteria could be a game changer in terms of microbial production to make pharmaceuticals, as well as sustainable fuels.

"Today, many drugs are laboriously extracted from plants that are challenging to cultivate and negatively impact the environment. To be able to reliably make these compounds in a lab using biotechnology would really address a lot of these problems," she said.

This applies to making "not just medicines, but precursors to polymers, renewable plastics, biofuels, building materials, the whole gamut of things that we use today, from detergents to lubricants to paints to pigments to fabric," she added. "Everything can be made biologically. But the challenge lies in developing sustainable renewable pathways to it. And so here, we've taken a pretty substantial step toward it, where we have been able to demonstrate an artificial chemistry within a cell, a living growing cultured cell, which is inherently then scalable."

Hartwig agrees.

"The bigger view is to be able to create organisms that will make unnatural products that combine nature's chemistry with laboratory chemistry," Hartwig said. "But the laboratory chemistry would now occur inside the cell. If we could do this in a general way, we could engineer organisms to make all sorts of drugs, agrochemicals and even commodity chemicals, like monomers for polymers, that would take advantage of the efficiency and selectivity of fermentation and biocatalysis."Scientists replace iron in muscle protein with non-biological metal

More information: Jing Huang et al, Unnatural biosynthesis by an engineered microorganism with heterologously expressed natural enzymes and an artificial metalloenzyme, Nature Chemistry (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-021-00801-3

Journal information: Nature Chemistry 

Provided by University of California - Berkeley