Renewables overtook fossil fuels in EU electricity mix in 2020: Report

By Susanna Twidale  

© Reuters/PASCAL ROSSIGNOL FILE PHOTO: 

An aerial view shows power-generating windmill turbines in a wind farm in Morchies

LONDON (Reuters) - Renewables overtook fossil fuels as the European Union's main source of electricity for the first time in 2020 as new projects came online and coal-power shrank, a report showed on Monday.

Renewable sources such as wind and solar generated 38% percent of the 27-member state bloc's electricity in 2020, with fossil fuels such as coal and gas contributing 37%, the report by think tanks Ember and Agora Energiewende showed.

© Reuters/Reuters Staff FILE PHOTO: 

Middelgrunden offshore wind farm is pictured outside Copenhagen

(Graphics: Electricity production share (%) in EU 27 - https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/rlgvdgxnjpo/Pasted%20image%201611313645338.png)

Denmark achieved the highest proportion of wind and solar power, which contributed 61% of its electricity needs in 2020. Ireland achieved 35% and Germany 33%.

Video: Renewable Energy Group CEO on how biofuels help reduce carbon output (CNBC)


Countries with the lowest share of renewables, below 5%, were Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the data showed.

Curbs on homes and business designed to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus led to a 4% drop in overall electricity demand in the EU last year, but the impact was felt more keenly by fossil fuel producers, the report showed.

Coal-fired power generation fell 20% in 2020 and has halved since 2015 it said.

"Coal generation fell in almost every country, continuing coal's collapse that was well in place before Covid-19,” the report said.

Many European countries are phasing out polluting coal-plants in order to meet emission reduction targets, but low electricity prices amid the pandemic lockdowns also made some coal plants unprofitable to run compared with cheaper renewable generation.

"Renewables will keep rising, because we keep installing more and more. The jury’s out as to whether fossil fuels will rebound but if they do rebound it’s not expected to be by a lot," Dave Jones, Ember's senior electricity analyst said.

(Reporting By Susanna Twidale;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

BECAUSE JARED SOLD THEM OFF

CDC director says federal government does not know how much Covid vaccine the U.S. has

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Sunday that the federal government doesn't know how much coronavirus vaccine the nation has.

"I can't tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can't tell it to you then I can't tell it to the governors and I can't tell it to the state health officials," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told "Fox News Sunday."

© Provided by CNBC Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who has been selected to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speaks during an event at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020.

WASHINGTON – The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Sunday that the federal government does not know how much coronavirus vaccine the nation has, a complication that adds to the already herculean task before the Biden administration.

"I can't tell you how much vaccine we have, and if I can't tell it to you then I can't tell it to the governors and I can't tell it to the state health officials," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told "Fox News Sunday."

"If they don't know how much vaccine they're getting not just this week but next week and the week after they can't plan. They can't figure out how many sites to roll out, they can't figure out how many vaccinators that they need, and they can't figure out how many appointments to make for the public," Walensky said.

In a dig at the Trump administration, Walensky said the lack of knowledge of vaccine supply is indicative of "the challenges we've been left with."

Read more: Biden surgeon general pick says U.S. racing to adapt against new Covid strains

President Joe Biden has set a goal to administer 100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots within his first 100 days. The Biden administration has been repeatedly pressed on whether that target is ambitious enough given the severity of the pandemic.

Walensky acknowledged that the U.S. must vaccinate people faster, but she said the nation faces supply constraints. Production will increase after the first 100 days, Walensky said, and the expected introduction of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine will also help ease supply problems.

"We are really hoping that we'll have more vaccines and that will increase the pace at which we can do the vaccinations," Walensky said.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain said the nation also faces distribution problems because the Trump administration, which started the program, did not have a clear plan.

"The process of distributing the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals, out into the community as a whole did not really exist when we came into the White House," Klain told MSNBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"So, the process of getting that vaccine into arms, that's the hard process, that's where we are behind as a country and that's where we are focused in the Biden administration on getting that ramped up," he added.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served in the Trump administration, said Sunday the Biden target of 100 million doses in 100 days is not a final number.

"It is really a floor and not a ceiling," Fauci told CBS' "Face The Nation". "It is going to be a challenge. I think it was a reasonable goal that was set. We always want to do better than the goal that you've set."

Those 100 million injections will cover about 67 million people, Fauci said, some of whom will have received the required two doses while others will have received only one dose. So far, the U.S. has administered nearly 22 million doses, far below federal targets.

The need to vaccinate as many people as possible has taken on new urgency as the coronavirus mutates. Fauci said the Covid-19 vaccines currently on the market may not be as effective against new strains.

Biden's surgeon general pick stressed on Sunday the U.S. is in a race to adapt against the new variants.

"The virus is basically telling us that it's going to continue to change and we've got to be ready for it," Dr. Vivek Murthy said during an interview with ABC News' "This Week."

"So the bottom line is, we're in a race against these variants, the virus is going to change and it's up to us to adapt and to make sure that we're staying ahead," Murthy said.

When asked if the U.S. is in a race against time before a Covid variant emerges that renders the vaccines ineffective, Walensky said Americans need to get inoculated when they have the opportunity and adhere to mitigation strategies to deny the virus opportunity to circulate.

"I would say we've been in a race all along," Walensky said. "The more virus that is out there, the more virus that is replicating, the more likely that we are going to have mutations and variants."

WHY I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE
Scientists Have Described a Dinosaur's Butthole in Exquisite Detail


(Bob Nicholls/Paleocreations.com 2020)

MICHELLE STARR
19 JANUARY 2021

When a dog-sized Psittacosaurus was living out its days on Earth, it was probably concerned with mating, eating, and not being killed by other dinosaurs. It would never even have crossed its mind that, 120 million or so years later, scientists would be peering intensely up its clacker.

However, that's precisely what they have done, yielding the most detailed description yet of a non-avian dinosaur's cloaca: the catch-all hole used for peeing, pooping, mating, and laying eggs.

This Swiss Army knife of buttholes is common throughout the animal kingdom today - all birds, amphibians, reptiles, and even a few mammals possess a cloaca. But we know little about the cloacae of dinosaurs, including their anatomy, what they looked like, and how the animals used them.

"I noticed the cloaca several years ago after we had reconstructed the colour patterns of this dinosaur using a remarkable fossil on display at the Senckenberg Museum in Germany which clearly preserves its skin and colour patterns," explained palaeobiologist Jakob Vinther of the University of Bristol in the UK.

"It took a long while before we got around to finish it off because no one has ever cared about comparing the exterior of cloacal openings of living animals, so it was largely uncharted territory."

(Vinther et al., Current Biology, 2020)

So this is what the team did, comparing the fossilised cloaca to modern cloacae. Their specimen is the only non-avian dinosaur fossil known to have a preserved cloaca, but due to the way the fossil is positioned, the internal anatomy of this opening has not been preserved; only the external vent is visible. This means there was a lot of information the researchers couldn't gauge.

"We found the vent does look different in many different groups of tetrapods, but in most cases it doesn't tell you much about an animal's sex," said anatomist and animal reproductive system expert Diane Kelly of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.


"Those distinguishing features are tucked inside the cloaca, and unfortunately, they're not preserved in this fossil."

Even so, that exterior anatomy could contain some pretty interesting clues as to what some dinosaur cloacae looked like, and how they were used. Although the dinosaur's cloaca is unlike any other known modern animal, the team was able to identify several features in common with crocodilian reptiles, such as alligators and crocodiles, and birds.

There was a dorsal lobe that seemed similar to the cloacal protuberance seen in birds - a rounded swelling near the cloaca during breeding season, where the male stores sperm - although, again, without the internal anatomy, it's impossible to say for sure.

Secondly, the cloaca had lateral lips on either side of the opening, much like those of crocodilians. Unlike crocodilians however, Psittacosaurus had them arranged in a V-shape, thus the opening could have been slit shaped; it also could have been round, like in birds.

(Jakob Vinther, University of Bristol and Bob Nicholls/Paleocreations.com 2020)

Other features, however, were also similar to crocodilians. The cloacal lips were covered in small, overlapping scales and heavily pigmented with melanin. In crocodilians, these lobes function as musky scent glands that are used during social displays - a function, the researchers said, that would be supported by the heavy pigmentation.

"As a palaeoartist, it has been absolutely amazing to have an opportunity to reconstruct one of the last remaining features we didn't know anything about in dinosaurs," said palaeoartist Robert Nicholls.

"Knowing that at least some dinosaurs were signalling to each other gives palaeoartists exciting freedom to speculate on a whole variety of now plausible interactions during dinosaur courtship. It is a game changer!"

Because only one fossilised cloaca has been recorded, it's impossible to tell whether the display may have been sexual, and whether the fossilised dinosaur is male or female. But the colourful lobes could hint at the shared ancestry between birds and non-avian dinosaurs, the researchers noted in their paper.

(Vinther et al., Current Biology, 2020)

For lack of samples, this is a very understudied region of dinosaur anatomy, and only by examining a wide range of dinosaur cloacae can we learn more about how they functioned in the social and reproductive lives of these ancient animals.

No doubt, other palaeontologists will now be on the lookout for fossilised buttholes to try to fill this gap in our understanding of dinosaur life.

The research has been published in Current Biology

One of The Largest Whale Carcasses Ever Found Has Washed Up in Italy


Italian Coast Guard tows the carcass of a large finback whale into the port of Naples.

 (© Coast Guard of Italy)
NATURE


BRANDON SPECKTOR, LIVE SCIENCE
25 JANUARY 2021

The carcass of an enormous finback whale (Balaenoptera physalus) was discovered near the Italian port of Sorrento earlier this week, the Italian Coast Guard said in a Facebook post.

Officials discovered the carcass on Sunday (Jan. 17), before towing it to the nearby port at Naples. The whale measured about 65 feet (20 meters) long and likely weighed more than 77 tons (70 metric tons) - likely making the corpse "one of the largest" ever found in the Mediterranean Sea, according to the agency.

Coast Guard divers first discovered the whale after a young calf swam into the Sorrento harbor in a state of distress, according to news reports.

The calf reportedly rammed its head into the harbor walls several times before retreating back underwater; when divers followed it, they discovered the fin whale's corpse.

Related: Images of whales: giants of the deep

The calf is presumed to be the dead whale's offspring, and the Coast Guard is monitoring for signs of the young whale's return. Meanwhile, marine biologists in Naples are working to ascertain what killed the whale.

Finback whales (also known as fin whales) are the second-largest animals on Earth, after the iconic blue whale. Finbacks can grow to be 85 feet (25 m) long and weigh up to 80 tons (72 metric tons), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

They are considered endangered after commercial whaling decimated the global finback population over the last century.

Today, commercial whaling is illegal throughout most of the world, and boat strikes pose the biggest threat to finbacks, according to NOAA.

Related content:

In photos: A rare albino Risso's dolphin

Image gallery: Russia's beautiful killer whales

Images: Sharks and whales from above

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

The Oldest City in The Americas Is an Archeological Wonder, And It's Under Invasion

The Caral archaeological complex. (Ernesto Benavides/AFP)
HUMANS

CARLOS MANDUJANO, AFP
20 JANUARY 2021

Having survived for 5,000 years, the oldest archeological site in the Americas is under threat from squatters claiming the coronavirus pandemic has left them with no other option but to occupy the sacred city.

The situation has become so bad that archeologist Ruth Shady, who discovered the Caral site in Peru, has been threatened with death if she doesn't abandon investigating its treasures.

Archeologists told an AFP team visiting Caral that squatter invasions and destruction began in March when the pandemic forced a nationwide lockdown.

An agricultural area that has invaded the protected site. (Ernesto Benavides/AFP)

"There are people who come and invade this site, which is state property, and they use it to plant," archeologist Daniel Mayta told AFP.

"It's hugely harmful because they're destroying 5,000-year-old cultural evidence."

Caral is situated in the valley of the Supe river some 182 kilometers (110 miles) north of the capital Lima and 20km from the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Developed between 3,000 and 1,800 BCE in an arid desert, Caral is the cradle of civilization in the Americas.

Its people were contemporaries of Pharaonic Egypt and the great Mesopotamian civilizations.

It pre-dates the far better known Inca empire by 45 centuries.

None of that mattered to the squatters, though, who took advantage of the minimal police surveillance during 107 days of lockdown to take over 10 hectares of the Chupacigarro archeological site and plant avocados, fruit trees, and lima beans.

"The families don't want to leave," said Mayta, 36.

"We explained to them that this site is a (UNESCO) World Heritage site and what they're doing is serious and could see them go to jail."

Death threats

Shady is the director of the Caral archeological zone and has been managing the investigations since 1996 when excavations began.

She says that land traffickers - who occupy state or protected land illegally to sell it for private gain - are behind the invasions.

"We're receiving threats from people who are taking advantage of the pandemic conditions to occupy archeological sites and invade them to establish huts and till the land with machinery ... they destroy everything they come across," said Shady.

"One day they called the lawyer who works with us and told him they were going to kill him with me and bury us five meters underground" if the archeological work continued at the site.

Shady, 74, has spent the last quarter of a century in Caral trying to bring back to life the social history and legacy of the civilization, such as how the construction techniques they used resisted earthquakes.

"These structures up to five thousand years old have remained stable up to the present and structural engineers from Peru and Japan will apply that technology," said Shady.

The Caral inhabitants understood that they lived in seismic territory.

Their structures had baskets filled with stones at the base that cushioned the movement of the ground and prevented the construction from collapsing.

The threats have forced Shady to live in Lima under protection.

She was given the Order of Merit by the government last week for services to the nation.

"We're doing what we can to ensure that neither your health nor your life are at risk due to the effects of the threats you're receiving," Peru's President Francisco Sagasti told her at the ceremony.

Police arrests

Caral was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2009.

It spans 66 hectares and is dominated by seven stone pyramids that appear to light up when the sun's rays fall on them.

The civilization is believed to have been peaceful and used neither weapons nor ramparts.

Closed due to the pandemic, Caral reopened to tourists in October and costs just US$3 to visit.

During the lockdown, several archeological pieces were looted in the area and in July police arrested two people for partially destroying a site containing mummies and ceramics.

© Agence France-Presse

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Change Doesn't Happen Overnight, But Research Shows How Social Movements Succeed

(Vlad Tchompalov/Unsplash)
HUMANS

CLARE WATSON
23 JANUARY 2021

One was kickstarted by a school kid and her placard; another took flight after a hashtag went viral. Years later, these powerful social movements – demanding action on climate and racial justice – are in full swing, with millions of people raising their voices, fists, and hand-painted posters in support.


While subsets of communities have raised their voices in protest throughout history, things are different right now – the US hasn't before seen numbers participating like those we're seeing today.

Which has researchers wondering just how 21st-century social movements succeed in creating social change.

Now, a new analysis provides insights from consumer behaviour research suggests the most effective campaigns start small and turn local connections into larger networks through organisation and social influence.

It's pretty clear where movements begin – with a shared concern among supporters for a particular issue coupled with an urgency to make change.

"At their core, social movements advance when people act collectively by rising in solidarity with a shared purpose to address injustice and inequality," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"Yet, we often become aware of these movements only as their work nears completion, when the voices clamouring for social justice reach their peak and the movement has become widespread."

How then do social movements mobilise people in the early days, build a critical mass, sustain momentum, and make meaningful change? How do they turn people's shared concern into solid commitment?

Here, consumer psychology recognises the power of social influence where one person can impact another person's beliefs and behaviours.

In years gone by, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists have all weighed in on what makes social movements successful whereas this new analysis looked through the lens of consumer behaviour research to understand why some movements take off when others fizzle out.

The recent research was led by marketing expert Gia Nardini from the University of Denver, Colorado, who has previously examined how successful social entrepreneurs grow their organisations.

It focused on how movements turn 'bystanders' who watch from the sidelines into 'upstanders' who are compelled to contribute, looking specifically at the thundering Black Lives Matter protests.

Their analysis found that successful movements are able to connect people with the cause, and to one another, before assembling a network to expand their reach.

How social movements grow: the ripple effect. (Nardini et al., J Consumer Psychology 2020)

According to the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, Patrisse Cullors, their chapters make these connections by "co-creating with comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported" and where "differences and commonalities are respected and celebrated," the researchers noted in their paper.

And then, "By systematically investing in its network – sharing, collaborating, coordinating, and investing resources and knowledge in its grassroots – Black Lives Matter coalesced separate small wins, driven and energized by localized actions, into a nationwide movement," the researchers wrote.


"Individuals who had never participated in protests before and who could never have imagined themselves participating felt compelled to get involved," they added, perhaps because people felt supported to do so or duty-bound by a sense of responsibility.

Looking at consumer behaviour research, the authors also noted how movements must strike the right balance with their emotive messaging, as this helps bystanders get on board.

While anger at injustice motivates some people, others need to hear messages of hope and progress to overcome the existential dread they might feel, for example, facing a frightening future under climate change. Research suggests this approach garners broader social support and spurs action.

Leadership is also a key factor, but the Black Lives Matter movement galvanised supporters in a different way to the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, which rallied behind social activist Martin Luther King, Jr. and other key figures.

Since 2013, the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have empowered others to lead their own communities, said Nardini: "They recognize[d] the power of local communities and they empowered those communities."


But change doesn't come overnight, and supporters have got to be in it for the haul. Social movements tend to surge and decline in what social movement scholar Sidney Tarrow calls a 'cycle of protest'.

"It's easy to feel demotivated by a lack of progress or how slow progress is," said Nardini. "I think it's important to recognize how long the process could be or how arduous it might be as well."

"We make the case that you don't necessarily want to go for a policy change right away," said Nardini.

Instead, successful movements motivate people from the bottom up and, as other research has suggested, seek change by lobbying social spheres of society rather than targeting the obvious arms of government.

"In the same way a megaphone amplifies a single voice … social movements channel, focus, and amplify the voices and actions of people at the grassroots level to create social change," the researchers wrote.

It also works well if movements embrace so-called tactical diversity with a spectrum of activities that together appeal to a broader supporter base.

"If you can check these boxes, you have a good chance for social change to succeed," Nardini said.

The research was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

COVID-19 Recovery Plans Must Be Green to Meet Paris Climate Goals, Say Scientists

(Marcin Jozwiak/Unsplash)
ENVIRONMENT

H. DAMON MATTHEWS AND KASIA TOKARSKA, THE CONVERSATION
22 JANUARY 2021

The amount of carbon dioxide that we can still emit while limiting global warming to a given target is called the "remaining carbon budget," and it has become a powerful tool to inform climate policy goals and track progress towards net-zero emissions targets.

This carbon budget is like a fixed financial budget: There is a cap on total allowable expenses over time, and excess spending in the near term requires deceased spending in the future. Similarly, the remaining carbon budget is a fixed total quantity of future emissions that is small enough to limit global temperature increases before they exceed our climate targets.

Scientists' estimates of the remaining carbon budget vary widely. Studies often use different approaches or even definitions of what the carbon budget represents. This can involve different treatment of how greenhouse gases other than CO2 contribute to climate change, or the incomplete representation of some processes, such as the role of aerosols in climate change.

The large range of estimates can be used either to write off ambitious climate targets or argue that the transition to a low-carbon economy can proceed gradually over several decades. Neither extreme reflects the actual uncertainty especially well.

We developed a new way to generate a better estimate of the remaining carbon budget for the 1.5C limit of the Paris Agreement that integrates all major sources of uncertainty. Our results suggest that even if the growing list of countries committing to 2050 net-zero emissions targets reached their goals, we would still deplete the 1.5C remaining carbon budget more than a decade too soon.

This is a stark reminder of how quickly we are running out of time to achieve the most ambitious temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.

How much budget is left?

Our best estimate of the 1.5C remaining carbon budget is 440 billion tonnes of CO2 from 2020 onward. If human activities around the globe continue to produce CO2 at current rates, we will deplete the remaining carbon budget in a little more than 10 years.

If we slow our rate of emissions, the remaining budget will last longer. To avoid exceeding the remaining carbon budget, we need to stop emitting CO2 altogether. A budget of 440 billion tonnes from 2020 means that global CO2 emissions need to decrease to net-zero by about 2040.

However, even this would give us only a 50 percent chance of not exceeding 1.5C. For a 67 percent chance, total CO2 emissions must not exceed 230 billion tonnes. This is about five years of current emissions, or reaching net-zero emissions by 2030.

Global decarbonization within 10 to 20 years is obviously a daunting challenge. But is it an impossible one?

The past year saw global CO2 emissions drop by seven percent relative to 2019. Continued decrease at this rate would cause global emissions to reach net-zero by about 2035, giving us better than even odds of limiting global warming to 1.5C.

This will not occur without a global effort to change the trajectory of future emissions. The 2020 emissions drop was a side-effect of efforts to control COVID-19. If economic recovery efforts were targeted to try to bring emissions down further this could keep the 1.5C target within reach.

Changing the course of future emissions

At the peak of global lockdowns in April 2020, daily CO2 emissions decreased by almost 20 per cent relative to the same period in 2019. These insights can inform how COVID-19 recovery investments could be used to drive emissions further downward.

The largest relative decreases in emissions came from reductions in road transport, such as commuting by car, and air travel. Although we are all suffering from the loss of in-person interactions, we have also learned a lot about how to convene meetings, presentations, and collaborations online. While individual mobility will rebound as lockdowns ease, our crash course in remote working and learning means that we may not need to return to pre-COVID-19 travel levels.

Emissions from industry and power generation did not decrease as much, in relative terms. This points to the need for systemic changes in technological infrastructure to unlock the potential for lower-carbon economic activity.

Similar technological advances are also needed to support low-carbon travel in circumstances where online platforms are not up to the task. The combination of sustained individual behavioural change, with a rapid expansion of low-carbon infrastructure, has the potential to have a substantial effect on the trajectory of future CO2 emissions.

Staying within the remaining carbon budget

An increasing number of countries, cities, and companies are committing to net-zero emissions targets, where CO2 emissions are decreased to zero or to a level that is matched by the intentional removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. These targets are essential to any effort to stay within the remaining carbon budget.

Countries that have adopted or promised net-zero emissions targets include the European Union, United Kingdom, China, Canada, and the United States under the new Biden administration. Currently, most of these targets are set for 2050 (or 2060 in the case of China).

According to our estimate of the remaining carbon budget, these commitments are insufficient to limit warming to 1.5C. They may, however, limit warming to the higher temperature goal of the Paris Agreement: well below 2C.

The climate effects of other greenhouse gases, as well as of aerosols emitted from fossil fuel use, remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in estimates of the remaining carbon budget. Our effectiveness in mitigating these other emissions could expand or contract the size of the remaining carbon budget.

This year will be key in our efforts to decrease emissions. COVID-19 has opened a window of opportunity to meet ambitious climate targets that might otherwise have been out of reach.

Governments around the world are spending unprecedented amounts to support and reinvigorate national economies. We must actively pursue this opportunity for a green recovery and avoid investing in infrastructure and industries that will lock in future CO2 emissions. Yet the COVID-19 stimulus packages announced so far are "missing the opportunity," according to the UN Environment Program's adaptation report released last week.

There are no emergency lockdown measures that will slow the rate of climate warming. Instead, we need targeted, substantial, and sustained effort and investments to continue to decrease and eventually eliminate global CO2 emissions. This window is open now, and we must not miss the opportunity.

H. Damon Matthews, Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Climate Science and Sustainability, Concordia University and Kasia Tokarska, Postdoctoral research fellow, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UK 50% USA 0.8%

Better Genetic Surveillance of COVID-19 Will Help Us Control The Pandemic, Says WHO

(vchal/iStock/Getty Images)
HEALTH


KELLY MACNAMARA, AFP
23 JANUARY 2021

To monitor changes to the coronavirus that could supercharge the pandemic or render vaccines less effective, scientists must sequence its genetic code to catalogue potentially dangerous mutations as they emerge.

But so few countries are conducting and sharing surveillance that experts are as worried about the mutations they cannot see as those they can.

Publication of the first genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in January last year, at the very outset of the pandemic, allowed scientists to identify it as a new coronavirus, and begin developing diagnostic testing and vaccines.

Since then, tens of thousands of sequences have been uploaded on public databases, enabling mutations to be tracked with a degree of detail and a speed never achieved before.

But the lion's share of this information has come from just one country: Britain.

As of mid-January, GISAID – a major data sharing platform originally created to monitor influenza – had received 379,000 sequences.

Of these, 166,000 were from Britain's COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK), a partnership between health authorities and academic institutions.

"This is the first time we are ever seeing how a pathogen evolves at this scale," said Ewan Harrison, Director of Strategy and Transformation at COG-UK and a fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where much of the sequencing is being done.

"We are learning that these mutations accrue way faster than we thought."

Currently, the programme is sequencing 10,000 genomes a week – roughly 6 percent of known cases in Britain although that fluctuates – and the plan is to double that.

"The UK blows everyone else out of the water," said Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern and co-developer on the Nextstrain virus tracking project.

"To me, this has been the moonshot of the pandemic, alongside the vaccines."

Denmark, she noted, also routinely sequences and shares data, but the information coming from most other countries is sporadic at best.

Sequencing has identified distinct variants – strains that have acquired clusters of new mutations – in Britain, South Africa, and Brazil in recent weeks.

The new, fast-spreading variant in the UK is "like a mini-pandemic within the pandemic", said Harrison.

But without systematic monitoring, he added, scientists might still not have figured out it was a "game changer".

Early warning did not stop the variant spreading – it has been detected in dozens of countries. But it has allowed other nations to prepare.

Without the warning from UK scientists, the world would probably be flying blind, said Hodcroft.

"If this was expanding in another country, we would just be looking at whatever country it was and going: 'Oh, they're having a bad rise in cases, I guess people aren't following the guidelines'," she told AFP.

Other variants have become visible only when they spread internationally from their point of origin.

Earlier this month, for example, a new strain – carrying a mutation, known as E484K, that researchers fear could evade immunity – was identified in Japan in people arriving from Brazil.
'Eyes and ears'

The World Health Organization has said better sequencing capacity is a worldwide priority.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, recently described the number of sequences shared so far as "astounding", but said they were coming from just handful of countries.

"Improving the geographic coverage of sequencing is critical for the world to have eyes and ears on changes to the virus," she told an online forum.

New WHO guidance said a "revolution" in virus genomic investigation has helped build a better understanding of everything from Ebola to influenza.


And now, it said: "For the first time, genomic sequencing can help to guide the public health response to a pandemic in near-real time."

When another coronavirus, SARS, began spreading in 2002, only three genome variants were publicly shared in the first month, and 31 by month three.

This time, six genomes were available to researchers worldwide a few weeks after the virus emerged. Within six months there were 60,000 variants published.

Initially, the new coronavirus did not show much genetic diversity, said Hodcroft, even as it "exploded across Europe" due mainly to widespread travel.

But that lack of mutation was an important clue in itself.

"We were able to see that it really did seem to originate in China, because all the other sequences that were detected around the world nested within the diversity of the Chinese sequences," she told AFP.

During the summer of 2020 new strains emerged, displacing the earlier incarnations of the virus.
Emerging mutations

Mutations are to be expected in viral evolution and occur when a pathogen infects someone and sets about replicating itself.

Most of these new strains confer no advantage to the virus, and some are even detrimental. But occasionally a mutation increases infectiousness or causes more severe illness.

SARS-CoV-2 picks up changes at a slower rate than some other viruses, like HIV or influenza. But the more people a virus infects, the greater the opportunity for mutation.

This becomes even more likely in someone with a chronic illness – an extended exposure to a weakened immune system gives the virus more time to rack up multiple mutations.

Harrison said this may be how the new variant emerged in the UK, and researchers are now sequencing tests from immunocompromised patients, as well as people whose vaccine failed.
'New vision'

Systematic, countrywide sequencing has given researchers new insights into viral transmission.

In one case, it helped identify a minibus as the culprit in a hospital outbreak.

On a wider scale, an analysis of tens of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 sequences, published in Science this month, found that abundant travel and virus imports to the UK at the beginning of the epidemic seeded more than a thousand transmission lineages.

The next step is testing how different mutations affect transmission, disease severity, and vaccine effectiveness, and predicting as quickly as possible how a new variant might behave.

The WHO has said global sequencing will help "better understand the world of emerging pathogens and their interactions with humans and animals in a variety of climates, ecosystems, cultures, lifestyles and biomes".

"This knowledge will shape a new vision of the world and open new paradigms in epidemic and pandemic prevention and control."

But sequencing at scale is logistically complex.

"There were weeks when things didn't work properly, because you're building the systems from scratch at pace, mid-pandemic," Harrison said.

The Sanger Institute stores the tens of thousands of samples it receives every day in huge shipping container freezers and had to build robotics infrastructure to help sort through them.

Legal concerns meant COG-UK decided to share minimal information on the sequences in order to make them public, Harrison said. The issue was a hurdle for other countries, particularly those reliant on private healthcare providers retaining ownership of data.

Costs are also a challenge in many parts of the world, but Hodcroft said richer nations like the United States and those in Europe have no excuse.

"There is no reason we don't have coordinated sequencing responses, except... that we haven't decided to do it," she said.

© Agence France-Presse

Why Are New SARS-CoV-2 Variants Spreading So Dramatically Around The World?


Distribution of the virus's genomes. (https://nextstrain.org/)


SARAH OTTO, UBC, THE CONVERSATION
24 JANUARY 2021

A new variant of coronavirus has swept across the United Kingdom and been detected in the United States, Canada and elsewhere. Scientists are concerned that these new strains may spread more easily.

As an evolutionary biologist, I study how mutation and selection combine to shape changes in populations over time. Never before have we had so much real-time data about evolution as we do with SARS-CoV-2: over 380,000 genomes were sequenced last year.

SARS-CoV-2 has been mutating as it spreads, generating slight differences in its genome. These mutations allow scientists to trace who is related to whom across the family tree of the virus.

Evolutionary biologists, including myself, have cautioned against over-interpreting the threat posed by mutations. Most mutations will not help the virus, just like randomly kicking a working machine is unlikely to make it better.

But every once in a while a mutation or suite of mutations gives the virus an advantage. The data are convincing that the mutations carried by the variant that first appeared in the UK, known as B.1.1.7, make the virus more "fit."

Higher fitness or chance?

When a new variant becomes common, scientists determine the reason behind its spread. A virus carrying a particular mutation can rise in frequency by chance if it is:

carried by a superspreader;

moved to a new uninfected location;

introduced into a new segment of the population.


The latter two examples are called "founder events": a rapid rise in frequency can occur if a particular variant is introduced into a new group and starts a local epidemic. Chance events may explain the rise in frequency of several different SARS-CoV-2 variants.

But B.1.1.7 is an exception. It shows a very strong signal of selection. For the past two months, B.1.1.7 has risen in frequency faster than non-B.1.1.7 in virtually every week and health region in England. This data, reported on Dec. 21, 2020, helped convince UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to place much of the country under lockdown and led to widespread travel bans from the UK

The rise of B.1.1.7 cannot be explained by a founder event in new regions, because COVID-19 was already circulating across the UK Founder events in a new segment of the population (e.g., following a conference) also aren't plausible given the widespread restrictions against large gatherings at the time.

Our ability to track the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is due to the massive effort by scientists to share and analyze data in real time. But the incredibly detailed knowledge we have about B.1.1.7 is also due to just plain dumb luck. One of its mutations altered a section of the genome used to test for COVID-19 in the UK, allowing the picture of evolutionary spread to be drawn from more than 275,000 cases.

Evolution in action

Epidemiologists have concluded that B.1.1.7 is more transmissible, but there are no signs that it is more deadly. Some researchers estimate that B.1.1.7 increases the number of new cases caused by an infected individual (called the reproductive number or Rt) by between 40 and 80 per cent; another preliminary study found that Rt increased by 50-74 per cent.

A 40-80 per cent advantage means that B.1.1.7 isn't just a little more fit, it's a lot more fit. Even when selection is this strong, evolution isn't instantaneous. Our mathematical modelling, as well as that by others in Canada and the U.S., shows that it takes B.1.1.7 a couple of months to reach its meteoric rise, because only a small fraction of cases initially carries the new variant.

For many countries, like the U.S. and Canada, where the number of COVID-19 cases has been precariously rising, a variant that increases transmission by 40-80 per cent threatens to push us over the top. It could lead to exponential growth in cases and overwhelm already threadbare medical care. Evolutionary change takes a while, buying us maybe a few weeks to prepare.

More variants

One surprise for researchers was that B.1.1.7 bears a remarkable number of new mutations. B.1.1.7 has accumulated 30-35 changes over the past year. B.1.1.7 doesn't mutate at a higher rate, but it appears to have undergone a bout of rapid change in the recent past.

(NextStrain/CC BY 4.0)

The virus may have been carried by an immunocompromised individual. People with weaker immune systems fight the virus constantly, with prolonged infections, recurrent rounds of viral replication and only a partial immune response to which the virus is constantly evolving.

Preliminary research reports that have yet to be verified have described two other variants of concern: one originally from South Africa (B.1.351) and one from Brazil (P1). Both variants show a recent history of excess mutations and rapid increases in frequency within local populations. Scientists are currently gathering the data needed to confirm that selection for higher transmission, not chance, is responsible.
What changed to allow spread?

Selection plays two roles in the evolution of these variants. First consider the role within those individuals in which the large number of mutants arose. B.1.1.7's 23 mutations and P1's 21 mutations aren't randomly arrayed across the genome but clustered in the gene encoding the spike protein.

One change in the spike, called N501Y, arose independently in all three variants, as well as in immunocompromised patients studied in the U.S. and UK Other changes in the spike (e.g. E484K, del69-70) are seen in two of the three variants.

Beyond the spike, the three variants of concern share one additional mutation that deletes a small part of the drably named "non-structural protein 6" (NSP6). We don't yet know what the deletion does, but in a related coronavirus NSP6 tricks a cellular defence system and may promote coronavirus infection. NSP6 also hijacks this system to help copy the viral genome. Either way, the deletion might alter the ability of the virus to take hold and replicate within our cells.
Easier transmission

The parallel evolution of the same mutations in different countries and in different immunocompromised patients suggests that they convey a selective advantage to evade the immune systems of the individuals in which the mutations occurred. For N501Y, this has been backed up by experiments in mice.

But what accounts for the higher transmission rate from individual to individual? This is challenging to answer because the many mutations that arose at once are now bundled together in these variants, and it could be any one or a combination of them that leads to the transmission advantage.

That said, several of these variants have arisen before on their own and haven't led to rapid spread. One study showed that N501Y had only a weak transmission advantage on its own, rising rapidly only when coupled with the suite of mutations observed in B.1.1.7.

While the evolutionary story of COVID is still being written, one important message is emerging now. The 40-80 per cent transmission advantage of B.1.1.7, and potentially the other variants B.1.351 and P1, will overwhelm many countries in the next few months.

We're in a race against viral evolution. We must roll out vaccines as quickly as possible, stem the flow of variants by restricting interactions and travel, and get in front of spread by ramping up surveillance and contact tracing.

Sarah Otto, Killam University Professor in Evolutionary Biology, University of British Columbia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Is news worth a lot or a little? 

Google and Facebook want to have it both ways

Tim Dwyer

January 24, 2021

Executives from Google and Facebook have told a Senate committee they are prepared to take drastic action if Australia’s news media bargaining code, which would force the internet giants to pay news publishers for linking to their sites, comes into force.

Google would have “no real choice” but to cut Australian users off entirely from its flagship search engine, the company’s Australian managing director Mel Silva told the committee. Facebook representatives in turn said they would remove links to news articles from the newsfeed of Australian users if the code came into effect as it currently stands.

Read more: Expect delays and power plays: Google and Facebook brace as news media bargaining code is set to become law

In response, the Australian government shows no sign of backing down, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg both saying they won’t respond to threats.

So what’s going on here? Are Google and Facebook really prepared to pull services from their Australian users rather than hand over some money to publishers under the bargaining code?
Is news valuable to Facebook and Google?

Facebook claims news is of little real value to its business. It doesn’t make money from news directly, and claims that for an average Australian user less than 5% of their newsfeed is made up of links to Australian news.

But this is hard to square with other information. In 2020, the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report found some 52% of Australians get news via social media, and the number is growing. Facebook also boasts of its investments in news via deals with publishers and new products such as Facebook News

.

Facebook executive Simon Milner appears before the Senate committee via video link. 

Mick Tsikas / AAP

Google likewise says it makes little money from news, while at the same time investing heavily in news products like News Showcase.

So while links to news may not be direct advertising money-spinners for Facebook or Google, both see the presence of news as an important aspect of audience engagement with their products.

On their own terms

While both companies are prepared to give some money to news publishers, they want to make deals on their own terms. But Google and Facebook are two of the largest and most profitable companies in history – and each holds far more bargaining power than any news publisher. The news media bargaining code sets out to undo this imbalance.

What’s more, Google and Facebook don’t appear to want to accept the unique social role of news, and public interest journalism in particular. Nor do they recognise they might be involved somehow in the decline of the news business over the past decade or two, instead pointing the finger at impersonal shifts in advertising technology.

The media bargaining code being introduced is far too systematic for them to want to accept it. They would rather pick and choose commercial agreements with “genuine commercial consideration”, and not be bound by a one-size-fits-all set of arbitration rules.

Read more: Changing the rules to control monopolies could see the end of Facebook domination

A history of US monopolies

Google and Facebook dominate web search and social media, respectively, in ways that echo the great US monopolies of the past: rail in the 19th century, then oil and later telecommunications in the 20th. All these industries became fundamental forms of capitalist infrastructure for economic and social development. And all these monopolies required legislation to break them up in the public interest.

It’s unsurprising that the giant ad-tech media platforms don’t want to follow the rules, but they must acknowledge that their great wealth and power come with a moral responsibility to society. Making them face up to that responsibility will require government intervention.

Online pioneers Vint Cerf (now VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google) and Tim Berners-Lee (“inventor of the World Wide Web”) have also made submissions to the Senate committee advocating on behalf of the corporations. They made high-minded claims that the code will break the “free and open” internet.

Read more: Web's inventor says news media bargaining code could break the internet. He's right — but there's a fix

But today’s internet is hardly free and open: for most users “the internet” is huge corporate platforms like Google and Facebook. And those corporations don’t want Australian senators interfering with their business model.

Independent senator Rex Patrick hit the nail on the head when he asked why Google wouldn’t admit the fundamental issue was about revenue, rather than technical detail or questions of principle.
How seriously should we take threats to leave the Australian market?

Google and Facebook are prepared to go along with the Senate committee’s processes, so long as they can modify the arrangement. The don’t want to be seen as uncooperative.

The threat to leave (or as Facebook’s Simon Milner put it, the “explanation” of why they would be forced to do so) is their worst-case scenario. It seems likely they would risk losing significant numbers of users if they did so, or at least having them much less engaged – and hence producing less advertising revenue.

Google has already run small-scale experiments to test removing Australian news from search. This may be a demonstration that the threat to withdraw from Australia is serious, or at least, serious brinkmanship.

People know news is important, that it shapes their interactions with the world – and provides meaning and helps them navigate their lives. So who would Australians blame if Google and Facebook really do follow through? The government or the friendly tech giants they see every day? That’s harder to know.

For transparency, please note The Conversation has also made a submission to the Senate inquiry regarding the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code.

AUTHOR

Tim Dwyer
Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

Disclosure statement
Tim Dwyer receives funding from the Australian Research Council for media policy projects researching media pluralism and online news, and platform governance.
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