What does digital art have to do with sustainability?

By Ben Soltoff

The artist beeple, aka Mike Winkelman, in early 2021 sold a series of digital pieces

 for $69 million, the highest price ever paid for digital art.

Beeple

Minutes before midnight March 22, two art collectors got into a heated bidding war at a charity auction for a climate organization. The auction was happening online, but it was eliciting the same staggering dollar amounts and tense drama of an in-person auction house.

The item in contention was a single picture of a futuristic scene. The bidding had already exceeded $5 million, but Justin Sun, a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur, kept getting outbid by just $50. Ultimately, Sun offered an even $6 million and the auction was over. Sold, to the cryptocurrency millionaire.

His prize was a digital drawing by the artist beeple, who just a couple weeks earlier had sold a series of pieces for $69 million, the highest price paid for digital art. The auction was benefitting digital advocacy organization Open Earth Foundation, which ended up raising a total of $6.6 million. Beyond raising funds, the foundation aimed to raise awareness about the potential for digital technologies to address climate change, as well as their potential negative impact.

“Obviously, we landed at the right place at the right time,” said Martin Wainstein, executive director of Open Earth Foundation.

Blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) recently have made a big splash in the art world and beyond. Fundamentally, they allow for the unique differentiation and ownership of digital goods. In addition to generating both headlines and confusion, NFTs have drawn attention to the high carbon footprint of certain blockchain applications. Cryptocurrency and digital art are riding high on the tech hype cycle right now, but the current conversation around NFTs raises a critical question for anyone seeking to use blockchains as a sustainability tool: Are blockchains bad for the planet? As with any tech tool, the short answer is that it depends.

Moving away from proof of work

Much of the perceived negative impact of blockchains comes from just two of them, Bitcoin and Ethereum. These platforms are home to the most widely used forms of cryptocurrency, which makes them the most widely used blockchains in the world.

"We now have a misconception that blockchains are equal to energy and climate impact. That misconception comes from the fact that the two most important blockchains do [have high impact]," Wainstein said.

Blockchains are, by nature, decentralized data records. They include information distributed across a wide network of servers. In order to maintain trust in the veracity of the data, the network needs some way to validate new information. Because every server in the network needs to accept that the new information is authentic, this feature is called a consensus mechanism. Bitcoin and Ethereum both use a consensus mechanism called proof of work, in which computers solve a bunch of complex math problems, and the first one to reach a correct answer adds the next piece of information to the chain. Solving the math problems comes down to processing power, so it uses a whopping amount of electricity.

We now have a misconception that blockchains are equal to energy and climate impact. That misconception comes from the fact that the 2 most important blockchains do [have high impact].

"Bitcoin has a huge and unsustainable energy-consuming pattern. It’s a monster, and we’ve got to stop it," Wainstein said.

There are two ways to lessen the impact of blockchains that use a proof of work consensus mechanism. The first is not to use them at all. Many blockchains use alternatives that are far less energy-intensive. For example, a proof of stake mechanism requires some sort of collateral to be put up (or staked) in order for a member of the network to add new information. Ethereum is already in the process of switching to a proof of stake model.

Many sustainability applications that rely on blockchain technology are already avoiding proof-of-work-based blockchains in favor of more planet-friendly alternatives.

"In most cases, those blockchains are using other kinds of consensus mechanisms where the energy consumption is just not a big deal," Jesse Morris, chief commercial officer of Energy Web, an organization that helps companies manage electricity with digital technologies.

Regen Network, a market for landowners to sell ecosystem services, is based on the public Cosmos platform, which uses proof of stake. IBM’s supply chain tracking efforts are based on a private blockchain called Hyperledger, which uses a mechanism called Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

"First focus on what it is you need to solve, then find the right blockchain for meeting that need," Wainstein advised.

A Paris Agreement for blockchain

The other way to lessen the impact of blockchains is to ensure that the energy used is completely renewable. On April 7, a coalition led by Energy Web announced the Crypto Climate Accord, modeled loosely on the Paris Agreement. The top-level goal of the accord is for all of the world’s blockchains to be powered by 100 percent renewables by 2025. Like the Paris Agreement, this broad pact is pathway-agnostic. It pushes parties to sign onto ambitious goals and then meet those goals in whatever way makes the most sense for them.

"What we’re trying to do here is not about a single company, we want the whole industry to go green as early as 2025," Morris said.

To make blockchains greener, the coalition plans to encourage the same strategies that have enabled tech giants such as Google and Microsoft to make commitments of 100 percent renewable energy for their data centers, such as power matching and smart load management.

"What the tech companies are doing is exactly what crypto can do," Morris said.

Where do NFTs fit in?

NFTs may seem tangential to blockchain’s sustainability applications, because they’re mostly being used for art sales right now. However, just like blockchain overall, the potential uses extend far beyond the initial starting point.

“Art is the first mainstream adoption of it, but there have been many, many instances of people building NFTS for all sorts of different applications,” said Joshua Bijiak, chief technology officer of Creol, a startup that offers blockchain-based carbon credits.

An NFT attests digitally to the unique properties of a given asset, and art is far from the only asset with unique properties. It might eventually be possible to generate an NFT associated with a specific good that indicates the precise energy mix being used at the time it was produced, distinguishing it from a similar good produced just a few hours later.

As with many blockchain solutions, there still needs to be some process to enter physical products into a digital system, but many sustainability assets already are traded entirely in online marketplace. For instance, carbon offsets. An NFT could be used to record the unique attributes of a carbon offset project, helping to address issues of double counting.

For the recent climate NFT auction, the organizers generated unique offsets from the Verra registry that were themselves NFTs. That’s why the team at Open Earth Foundation was enthusiastic about the auction, even before its $6.6-million windfall. It highlighted the promise of using blockchain, not just the peril.

"It’s empowering things that we couldn’t do before in all sectors: currency, art, carbon, the planet; and we’ll continue seeing that, there’s no doubt about it," Wainstein said.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

76.23kWh per-transaction footprint... WTF, people?

Danny Bradbury 

Tue 4 May 2021 

In the art world this spring, there's just one phrase on everyone's facemasks: the non-fungible token (NFT). When artist Mike Winkelman sold a JPG embedded into a cryptocurrency token for $69m in Ether (he pocketed $53m of it) jaws hit floors. But what is an NFT, exactly, and should you care, or just roll your eyes and go about your business?
Three letters and a lot of theory

An NFT is a form of cryptocurrency token that has a unique identity. Bitcoins, litecoins, doge, ether, and most of the other hundreds of cryptocurrency tokens out there are fungible, like digital sausage meat. It doesn't matter which piece of a bitcoin lands in your wallet. The value lies in the general price of the asset at the time. In that way, it's a little like cash. Whether someone gives you this dollar bill or that one doesn't really matter.

Now, imagine that Sylvia Plath had written a poem on the dollar bill in your wallet, and you could prove its authenticity. The dollar would be worth much more, even if the poem itself could be reproduced elsewhere. It would gain unique value.

To replicate that in cryptocurrency, you need to make tokens unique. In 2018, the Ethereum cryptocurrency community did that with a standard called ERC-721. Now, people could digitally scrawl whatever they wanted to inside an Ethereum token. Winkelman (aka Beeple) embedded his 443,902,761 pixels in one, earning him just shy of 12 cents per pixel.

Beeple's is far from the first NFT. They date back to Cryptokitties and beyond, and there are platforms like OpenSea and Nifty Gateway (which sells Beeple's work) making money from them. But $69m for a JPG has a way of capturing the media's attention.

So NFTs are just another way of signing digital prints, then, and all this is just a bubble? Well, no and yes. Winkelman himself has said that NFT-based art collectibles are a massive bubble. But it hasn't stopped people trying to do more interesting things with them.

Matt Stephenson is one such person. Last month, the Columbia PHD and behavioural economist sold his own digital asset as an NFT: a polynomial smoothing graph. It was the result of his early research into a two decades-old piece of pseudoscience: the Shangri-La Diet. Professor Seth Roberts wrote the book on this diet after arguing that ingesting flavourless calories (such as extra-light olive oil) in between meals would program the brain to lower the 'set point' at which the body maintains weight.

It was pseudoscience because Roberts experimented on himself and didn't conduct peer-reviewed research. That doesn't mean the idea wasn't plausible. It gained traction, but never got the research it needed to prove or disprove it, explains Stephenson.

The problem is that the incentives just aren't there, he says, which is why so many ideas that might have some grounds for further research are ignored by academia. "It didn't get absorbed into a research stream of basic science that would preserve it," he tells us. "It also wasn't patentable. So nobody wanted to run the study."

He ran a rudimentary scientific study with crowdsourced respondents in 2018 to see if a more detailed study was worthwhile. "It looks promising enough based on the results of the study," he says. So he auctioned off a hash of the graphed study results as an NFT via OpenSea. It sold for $24,000, which is around a quarter of the amount he needs to run the more detailed replication study.

Ideally, Stephenson would like to see NFTs become an alternative incentive to fund scientific research into plausible ideas that fall through the cracks.
NFTs that compute

Some people envisage NFTs going beyond simply containing or pointing to collectibles. ERC-721 NFTs aren't just tokens. They're smart contracts. Rather than just representing a digital asset, they can run code, making them distributed blockchain-based programs. That enables people to encode rules around how a digital asset is used.

"You can control the access rights, earn rewards, or get paid by letting other people use your NFT to train or test their ML/AI algorithms," says Dragan Boscovic, a research professor at Arizona State University who founded its blockchain research lab.

"The only limit is your imagination," says Boscovic.

Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and blockchain software technology company ConsenSys, says he sees almost limitless opportunity in the kinds of things you can embed in an NFT.

Rather than storing a pre-made asset in an NFT or storing a pointer to it on an external storage system, a Consensys-based project called EulerBeats encodes the instructions to generate the art as a smart contract. The contract can create art and music from its own code directly on the Ethereum blockchain.

The project sold its second batch of 25 NFTs for at least 45 Ether (around $85,000) each at the end of March, with some fetching far more. Owners can then mint limited copies of each one and earn royalties from them.
Energy consumption

The blemish on this utopian landscape is energy usage. Ethereum still uses proof of work for its consensus mechanism, leading to what data scientist Alex De Vries' Digiconomist site says is a 76.23kWh per-transaction footprint.

"Ethereum's energy issues, which are non-trivial but not terrible, will disappear in nine to 12 months," asserts Lubin. That's because Ethereum 2.0 will use the more energy-efficient proof of stake mechanism. There are also existing PoS-based blockchains such as Charles Hoskinson's Cardano, which has native tokens in its ledger rules, so some have begun to use it for minting NFTs or making transfers. It appears to be working on an NFT standard.

For his part, Lubin is working on Palm, an NFT platform that will launch with a Damien Hirst NFT sale. Co-founded with others including David Heyman, who produced the Harry Potter movies, Palm will eventually use a small number of verifiers to slash energy usage to insignificant levels.

The Palm network, which will bridge to Ethereum, will also link to the Protocol Labs' Filecoin, which Lubin says will help to provide permanent decentralized storage for digital work on the Palm system.

The flurry of attention paid to NFTs will likely subside in time, and it remains to be seen how much of this will trickle down to those of us without wallets full of Ether. Tech luminaries like Jack Dorsey can flog tweets for millions, and you can pick up a certified unique picture of an anthropomorphised hotdog for 55 bucks on OpenSea. But we're looking for something we could actually use.

Here's a neat idea. Stephenson is plotting another use of smart contract-based NFTs called the Splitstream, to programatically split funds from an academic NFT sale among the authors of any works that it cited. And it would be recursive. "An NFT sale's proceeds is partially split toward the works that the NFT depended on, like a citation. Those "citations" can then further split and cite," he explains.

With so many interesting ideas in play, NFTs have the potential to be far more than an art and collectibles fad. But as with many nascent technologies, someone has to make the use cases work in practice. ®

At Satoshi’s Tea Garden
Ben Walker

LRB
Vol. 43 No. 9 · 6 May 2021

Prin 1979 words

Buzz Lightyear​ is naked, save for his standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs. The image is one of five thousand that make up the digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, the first purely digital artwork to be auctioned at Christie’s, on 11 March this year. It sold for $69.3 million, making it the third most expensive work by a living artist, after Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist. The buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, called it a ‘significant piece of art history’. Sundaresan doesn’t own the copyright to Everydays. All he bought was a non-fungible token (NFT): a collection of data stored using blockchain technology. There is nothing stopping you from downloading the image yourself, printing it off and sticking it above the fireplace. It will look exactly the same.

Each time an NFT is created – or ‘minted’ – or is transferred from one digital account to another, the data recording the event is stored as part of a ‘block’ on a chain. Each block contains information from the previous block in the chain; sneakily try to change a line of code and the chain collapses, so the erroneous entry is easily discovered. This makes a blockchain, in theory, incorruptible. As soon as a transaction is made, it is broadcast across a vast network of computers: it is ‘decentralised’, meaning that anyone can be the detective who spots the crime. There is no single authority declaring what’s what. For almost as long as this technology has existed, people have been excited about its potential use as a means of securing the provenance of assets. If records of financial transfers can be made totally tamper-proof, then why not deeds to houses, or medical records, or entire digital artworks?

The artist Kevin McCoy and the technologist Anil Dash minted the first NFT in 2014 as a way for digital artists to keep control of their work. ‘McCoy used a blockchain called Namecoin to register a video clip that his wife had made,’ Dash explained in the Atlantic, ‘and I bought it with the four bucks in my wallet.’ Later that year a company called Counterparty set up a few NFT ‘marketplaces’ – websites where NFTs are bought and sold. The biggest was the Rare Pepe Directory, devoted to images of Pepe the Frog, the comic book character beloved of the alt-right. In 2017, Larva Labs released ten thousand pixellated cartoon characters – for free – on the Ethereum blockchain. They can now fetch millions of dollars apiece. After Beeple’s Everydays, the second most expensive NFT sold so far is CryptoPunk #3100, a bald alien with a headband, which fetched 4200 ether, or about $7.6 million (ether is a currency, just like bitcoin). One collector is planning to sell nine CryptoPunks at an upcoming auction in New York.

1. CryptoPunk 3100 - Larva Labs

   https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks/details/3100

   

   33 rows · CryptoPunks are 10,000 collectible characters on the Ethereum blockchain. These are the details for Punk #3100

‘Cryptopunk #3100’

After CryptoPunks – inevitably, because this is the internet – someone came up with the idea of CryptoKitties, a game involving a digital marketplace where people could buy, sell and breed digital cats. An alarming number of CryptoKitties – fat little felines in a rainbow of colours – seem to have some form of anisocoria, where one pupil is larger than the other. Unlike the punks, which were all visually as well as cryptographically unique, two cats can look exactly the same, but since each kitten is attached to a unique NFT they’re treated as separate artworks, like prints in a series. Millions more dollars were made.

Because NFTs are essentially just digital deeds, they can be used to turn almost anything online into a saleable asset – pictures, video clips, even words on a webpage. In March the New York Times auctioned off an article about NFTs for 350 ether – half a million dollars. NBA Top Shot, the official NFT marketplace for the National Basketball Association, is a trading site for classic moments in basketball matches, like LeBron James dunking. William Shatner sold an X-ray of his teeth. I saw one developer offering NFTs of famous dates. Do you want to own Michael Jackson’s first moonwalk, on 25 March 1983? That’ll currently set you back 0.5 ether, or $1300. Bill Clinton’s impeachment on 19 December 1998? One ether. The first witch-burning at Salem on 10 June 1692? A steal at just 0.3 ether, or $780. One of the founders of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, auctioned an NFT of the first ever tweet, five words – ‘just setting up my twttr’ – that cost the winner some $2.9 million.

A CryptoKitty

A CryptoKitty itself isn’t a currency token, however. Instead, it’s a “digital asset” that’s stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Technically, each CryptoKitty is a unique ERC-721 token that’s stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Each CryptoKitty has a combination of “cattributes” that make it unique.

What the &#%$ is a CryptoKitty? - How-To Geek

www.howtogeek.com/354535/what-the-is-a-cryptokitty/

A CryptoKitty

The owners of these digital artefacts have no rights to the intellectual property. Sina Estavi, who bought Dorsey’s tweet, can’t stop people retweeting it. Whoever bought the New York Times article can’t reprint it without permission. And of course no one can own a date: what people are actually buying are just JPEGs of a calendar with the purchased event marked in bold. So what’s the point? For richer investors, it’s an exercise in clout, a tech-bro muscle flex. Only a certain type of person wants to be able to lean over your shoulder as you watch the latest viral video or meme and shout: ‘That’s mine! I own it!’ For less wealthy traders, NFT ownership operates more like a collectible card game. The programmers who developed CryptoPunks were amazed by the number of people willing to take a ‘conceptual leap’ about what ownership can now mean. Estavi said that buying Dorsey’s first tweet was like owning the Mona Lisa.

One problem with NFTs – which Dash and McCoy first developed in a ‘one-night hackathon’ – is that the data storage capacity of a blockchain is limited. It’s really just a string of code, which is capable of representing anything, but it can’t be too long or it will be too expensive for the network to process. (It is possible to store images on the blockchain, but it costs way too much.) What Dash and McCoy came up with was a system that records a link to an image that exists somewhere on the web. ‘We took that shortcut because we were running out of time,’ Dash wrote. ‘Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut.’ Worse still, the link that is bought and sold leads to ‘the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years’. Suddenly, NFTs seem no more indestructible than certificates of authenticity on plain old paper.

NFT artists and buyers are thrilled that they allow them to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the industry and interact directly with their audience. The banana taped to the nude Buzz in Beeple’s Everydays has become something of a motif for digital artists – a big fuck you to gallerists and art-biz moguls. (Beeple’s picture is a reference to the satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, an actual banana taped to a wall at Art Basel in 2019, which was the occasion for Twitter to explode with images of people sticking grapes, leeks and frozen peas to their kitchen cabinets.) The hope is that once venture capitalists and tech pioneers get bored of the novelty of NFTs, there will be some innovations worth holding on to. As one developer put it: ‘We will see some scammy projects, but there may be some gems with actual utility.’ A feature of NFTs that may make the gatekeepers superfluous is the option for artists to attach royalty clauses to their work. In this scenario, every time something is resold, the creator automatically takes a cut. If you buy an NFT of a song from a small band you like, the band gets an immediate investment as well as a royalty payment every time the token is sold on a secondary marketplace. If in a few years’ time they become global superstars, the NFT owner can make a lot of money – or, if they want to hold on to it, prove that they were there at the beginning.

‘CryptoBanana #4’

‘CryptoBanana #4’

Champions of NFTs should be alarmed by Christie’s smooth consumption of the concept, however. Maybe the buyers are different – so far, tech entrepreneurs and bitcoin fundamentalists rather than conventional collectors – but the business is the same: the perception of value can be exploited and translated into big bucks for the big beasts. The technology has already, and inevitably, been co-opted by corporations on the lookout for fresh markets. Nike has reportedly patented a ‘system and method for ... mining, intermingling and exchanging blockchain-enabled digital shoes’. Taco Bell sold digital pictures of its products with a $500 gift card attached (only the first buyers were entitled to the free food). There will be a multitude of beneficial uses for blockchain technology, and the promise of true decentralisation is a boon, but the bleak fact is that NFTs are quickly becoming another tool for companies to sell us things we already own.

There’s another problem with NFTs: they have an exorbitant environmental impact. The computing power that underpins decentralisation consumes a huge amount of energy. Earlier this year, Cambridge researchers reported that bitcoin was using more energy than the whole of Argentina. In December 2020, the artist Memo Akten estimated that the average carbon footprint of a single NFT artwork was equivalent to driving a car more than six hundred miles. The sculptor Joanie Lemercier discovered that six NFTs he minted had used 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as much as he had expended in his studio in two years. Artists and marketplaces are trying to compensate for their environmental impact with somewhat glib gestures to carbon offsetting. When the musician Grimes sold a series of video art pieces on the Nifty Gateway marketplace, she donated an unspecified percentage of the $6 million proceeds to the climate-change NGO Carbon-180. (Access to Nifty Gateway, one of the biggest marketplaces for NFT artworks, is by invitation only. No gatekeepers, though, right?)

A screenshot from Decentraland

A screenshot from Decentraland

One of the most curious uses for NFTs so far has been in managing the exchange of digital building blocks in virtual gaming worlds. Decentraland is the latest in a long line of world-building videogames (Sim City, Civilisation, Theme Park World, Minecraft), and is underpinned by NFTs and cryptocurrency. Since its launch in 2017, tens of thousands of players have travelled, often using virtual reality headsets, through its digital world, using Decentraland’s own cryptocurrency (MANA) to buy and sell individual land parcels (LAND) on which citizens can build computer-generated real estate. Each piece of land is represented by an NFT. It’s still an embryonic universe, with many plots containing only a few benches and bushes, but the possibilities are bountiful – and lucrative. Decentraland has virtual book launches and virtual art galleries displaying digital artworks: one gallery houses miniature versions of paintings by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Decentraland has bars, casinos, chapels, mosques. There’s even an electoral system in which users vote in referendums. It’s more like a plutocracy than a democracy: those with the most LAND and MANA get more votes. A couple of years ago a Decentraland user purchased 64 empty plots of land and combined them into a single estate. He called his new property ‘The Secret of Satoshi’s Tea Garden’ – a reference to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin. But it also put me in mind of Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, in which the narrator, on learning of his great-grandfather’s theory of multiple dimensions, describes his surroundings in a way that could apply to the Decentraland universe: ‘I sensed the pullulation ... that the dew-damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible people ... secretive, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time.’ Satoshi’s Tea Garden sold for $80,000, its price inflated because of its appealing location, completely surrounded by digital roads.

Ben Walker is an editor at the LRB.

EU: Pandemic measures to total about $5.85 trillion

FILE - In this Wednesday, April 28, 2021 file photo, European Commissioner for Economy Paolo Gentiloni addresses the plenary chamber at the European Parliament in Brussels. The European Union's top economy official said Monday, May 10, 2021 that the measures the EU and its 27 member states have in the works to come out of the pandemic total some US dollars 5.85 trillion. EU economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni told a European Parliament Committee said that if comparisons are made with U.S. President Biden pandemic stimulus relief package, the 27-nation EU can confidently stand next to to Washington when all efforts are counted together.Johanna Geron

By RAF CASERT

May 10, 2021

 Associated Press

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union's top economy official said Monday that the recovery measures the EU and its 27 member states have in the works to emerge from the pandemic total around $5.85 trillion.

EU Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni told a European Parliament committee said that if comparisons are made with U.S. President Joe Biden's pandemic stimulus relief package, the EU can confidently stand next to to Washington when all efforts are counted together.

“Measures taken until now from member states and the EU reach so far 4.8 trillion” euros, the Italian commissioner told legislators, sweeping aside criticism that authorities weren't doing enough compared with Washington.

The EU has agreed to a common recovery fund package of 750 billion euros ($910 billion), plus a 1.1 trillion euro ($1.3 trillion) seven-year budget that will be strongly geared toward dealing with the unprecedented economic recession caused by COVID-19 that the bloc's 450 million citizens will have to overcome. Many of those measures still need a final stamp of legislative approval.

During his first 100 days in office, Biden has secured passage of a sweeping $1.9 trillion pandemic package to bring relief to 330 million Americans. There is also a proposed $2 trillion-plus infrastructure plan and the recently unveiled $1.8 trillion proposed student-families-workers plan bringing the total to a potential $6 trillion.

“If we look at it in a certain way, we could say that the U.S. reaction was stronger, faster than the European one,” Gentiloni said.

Take note, however, “that we are not a federal state. And so we have to consider both member states and the EU level,” bringing the total to $4.8 trillion.

“So we are not used to mixing all the different interventions. But if we do this, we reach an amount which is not so different from the effort of the United States,” Gentiloni said.

Many major social affairs and economic policies are still run at a national level in the European Union, and stimulus measures for companies and the workforce also have a massive national input which is rarely visible in EU statistics.

Still the 750-billion euro “Next Generation EU” package stands out because it allows the bloc for the first time to raise money on the markets by itself. Much of the aid will be spent among the poorer and harder-hit member states.

EU Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said that if requests from member states proceeded as planned, the first disbursements to the member states on prefinancing could already be made in July. He added that the second tranches of financing could already be made before the end of the year.

The EU has a strict set of benchmarks that member states must reach if the money is to be paid out. In all, 37% must be spent on green projects, ranging from offshore wind parks to cycling tracks. And 20% must go to digital projects, including 5G networks and digitizing public administration.

Funds will only be released piecemeal once member states have proven previous aid has been spent according to plan.

‘Americans Want To Work’: Biden Says Modest Jobs Report Can’t Be Blamed On Unemployment Benefits

Like the President, Raimondo told CBS on Sunday that there is no data suggesting that Americans are out of work due to unemployment insurance, but that the fear of COVID-19 or the inability to find childcare are key reasons for why people aren’t able to go back to work.

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 10: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the economy in the East Room of the White House on May 10, 2021 in Washington, DC. Biden addressed criticism from Republicans after a weaker than .

By Summer Concepcion
May 10, 2021 

President Biden on Monday stressed that the slowdown of hiring nationwide last month is not an indicator that his administration’s American Rescue Plan is ineffective, and disputed the notion that unemployment insurance is hurting the job market.

Last week, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a modest 266,000 jobs in April, which falls short of the one million jobs that economists forecasted and the weakest monthly gain since January, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In remarks delivered Monday, the President stated that his administration’s economic plan is working, while emphasizing that “climbing out of the deep hole” the economy found itself in amid the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t a clean-cut process.

“Some months we’ll exceed expectations, others we’ll fall short,” Biden said. “The question is: what is the trend line? Are we headed in the right direction? Are we taking the right steps to keep it going? And the answer clearly is yes.”

Biden said that monthly reports are a “snapshot” of a moment in time, before laying out the circumstances behind the Labor Department’s latest jobs report that failed to meet economists’ expectations.

The President pointed out that the jobs report was taken around the week of April 12, and that COVID-19 cases decreased by more than 40 percent and vaccination rates among working age Americans has roughly doubled since then. Biden added that the survey was taken before every adult in the country met eligibility requirements for vaccinations, with a mere 18 percent of working age adults having been fully vaccinated in time for the report’s snapshot.

“Today, if it were taken, 34 percent are fully vaccinated,” Biden said. “No wonder things in America feel better today than they did back when the survey was taken.”

Later in his remarks, Biden said that his administration will make clear that anyone collecting unemployment benefits who is offered a suitable job will be required to take the job or lose their benefits, barring a few COVID-19-related exceptions.

The President went on to hit back at the idea that the slowdown in hiring, as reflected in the latest jobs report, can be blamed on unemployment benefits.

“I know there’s been a lot of discussion since Friday’s report that people are being paid to stay home rather than go to work — we don’t see much evidence of that,” Biden said. “Look, it’s easy to say the line has been because of the generous unemployment benefits that it is a major factor in labor shortages.”

Biden insisted that “Americans want to work” and reiterated that unemployed people who are offered a job must take it or risk losing their benefits, before taking aim at the Trump administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic that led to millions of Americans losing their jobs.

“They lost their jobs to a virus and to a government that bungled its response to the crisis and failed to protect them,” Biden said. “We still have 8 million fewer jobs than we did when the pandemic started.”

The President said that unemployment benefits are a “lifeline” for Americans struggling in the pandemic, but that his administration’s work search requirements for recipients of unemployment benefits will be reinforced.

Biden’s remarks were issued a day after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo similarly refuted the notion that unemployment benefits are detrimental to the job market, amid Republican governors beginning to cut jobless benefits in their states, arguing that the move would force more people to return to work.

Like the President, Raimondo told CBS on Sunday that there is no data suggesting that Americans are out of work due to unemployment insurance, but that the fear of COVID-19 or the inability to find childcare are key reasons for why people aren’t able to go back to work.

 Sarah Silverman calls out Caitlyn Jenner over her ‘dumb’ views on trans athletes: ‘This is transphobia full stop’ 

 Nola Ojomu Monday 10 May 2021

 Sarah Silverman slammed Caitlyn Jenner over her recent comments about trans athletes participating in girls’ sports

Sarah Silverman claims Caitlyn Jenner is being ‘transphobic’ after the former Olympian made comments stating trans athletes born male shouldn’t play on girls’ sports teams. The comedian was one of many who hit out at the reality TV star – who came out as transgender in 2015 – after the 71-year-old made the comment during an impromptu video interview with TMZ. 

Sarah, 50, shared her thoughts about the matter on her The Sarah Silverman Podcast as she pointed out that there are multiple physical difference between cis athletes within sports. 

The Wreck-It Ralph star stated: ‘Caitlyn, you’re a woman, right? A trans girl is a girl. She should have the same rights as cis girls. ‘What, you think a trans girl is too strong? What about tall girls as opposed to short girls? What about boys in high school who are teeny tiny and their teammates have already hit puberty and are shaving?’ 

She continued: ‘Why don’t you just have co-ed sports divided by weight and height, you know? 

This is so dumb. They are legislating this s**t without one single example of how this plays out.’ 

The debate around Caitlyn’s comments comes as multiple states recently moved towards banning transgender girls and women from partaking in female sports. Florida recently passed legislation that would restrict entry to girl’s sports teams to those who were born female. 

Transgender female athletes would be limited to playing coed sports or on teams with male athletes.

 The bill applies to high school and college sports sponsored by public schools, including intramural and club teams.

 Former Olympian Caitlyn – who came out as transgender in 2015 – has doubled down on her comments despite ongoing backlash 

Sarah added: ‘This is not worrying about girls’ sports, believe me. I think there are better ways to worry about girls’ sports. ‘This is not what that is, this is not concern for girls’ sports, this is transphobia full stop. It’s just such a bummer when such a prominent trans woman is such a t**t.’

https://metro.co.uk/2021/05/10/sarah-silverman-calls-out-caitlyn-jenner-over-transphobic-comments-14553931

 

Analysis of autopsy, toxicological and psychiatric reports of Portugal's first major forensic case

Part III

COMPUSCRIPT LTD

Research News

 

IMAGE: RECOVERED PORTRAIT OF VICENTE URBINO DE FREITAS IN BRAZIL DURING HIS HEYDAY. view more 

CREDIT: FORENSIC SCIENCES RESEARCH

Analysis of The Autopsy, Toxicological, and Psychiatric Reports of Portugal's First Major Forensic Case: Part III https://doi.org/10.1080/20961790.2021.1898079

Announcing a new article publication for Forensic Sciences Research journal. In this review article the author Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira of the University Institute of Health Sciences (IUCS)-CESPU, Gandra, Portugal continues a three-part investigation of the "Crime of Flores Street" one of the most famous cases of poisoning which occurred in Portugal in the late 19th century. The case demonstrated the weaknesses of the Portuguese medicolegal system and attests to the importance of toxicological analysis. The first article retold the case which gave birth to forensic toxicology studies in Portugal and informed present day Portuguese medicolegal procedures. The second article analysed all the relevant and contradictory testimonial evidence of the prosecution and defence witnesses.

In this latest publication the author analyses the forensic evidence, particularly from the autopsy, toxicological, and psychiatric forensic reports. Today, it would be easy to perform irrefutable toxicological analysis, but in those times, the circumstantially produced evidence, together with the toxicological expert reports, allowed the court to produce a damning judgment. The author suggests, that with current knowledge, it is now possible to add further insights if the burial location of at least one victim could be identified. In late 2020 one of the victims was finally located. Permission for a new autopsy for samples collection was obtained and has been performed more than 130 years after the first major autopsy was executed in Portugal. Future research will include correlation of the identity of the victim by DNA analysis and comparison with relatives and toxicological analyses.

CAPTION

Recovered portrait of António Joaquim Ferreira da Silva.

CREDIT

Forensic Sciences Research

Related Publications

Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira, Portugal's first major forensic case and the genesis of forensic toxicology: 10 years of research to reconstruct the event, Forensic Sciences Research, 2018, ISSN 2471-1411, https://doi.org/10.1080/20961790.2018.1534538

Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira, Analysis of the testimonial evidence of Portugal's first major forensic case: part II, Forensic Sciences Research, 2019, ISSN 2471-1411, https://doi.org/10.1080/20961790.2019.1682218

Author Biography

Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira University Institute of Health Sciences (IUCS)-CESPU, and Faculty of Medicine of University of Porto, Portugal. Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2003, doctorate in Toxicology, 2007, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto, Portugal. Member of Pedagogical, Scientific and Management Councils of the IUCS, member of the Installing Committee of the accreditation process of the Integrated Master in Medicine of IUCS and member of the Monitoring Committee of the 2nd and 3rd Cycles of Studies in Forensic Sciences of the University of Porto. Research interests include Toxicology and Forensic Medicine, namely in additive behaviors, fatal intoxications of pharmacological origin and others and driving under the influence of psychoactive substances. Member of Editorial Boards of several International Scientific Journals in the area of Health and Life Sciences. Author of more than 155 journal articles, 35 book chapters, 4 books and 4 national and 3 international patents. Founder and current President of the Portuguese Association of Forensic Sciences (APCF) and former Vice President of the Portuguese Society for the Study of Abuse and Neglect (SPEAN).

Article reference: Ricardo Jorge Dinis-Oliveira, Analysis of the autopsy, toxicological, and psychiatric reports of Portugal's first major forensic case: part III, Forensic Sciences Research, 2021, ISSN 2471-1411, https://doi.org/10.1080/20961790.2021.1898079

Keywords: Forensic reports; alkaloids; history of legal medicine; Flores Street; Vicente Urbino de Freitas; José António de Sampaio Junior; Mário Guilherme Augusto de Sampaio

The Journal of the Academy of Forensic Science (AFS), Shanghai, P.R. China.

Forensic Sciences Research is a quarterly peer reviewed open access, English language journal publishing international research on forensic sciences, including forensic pathology, clinical forensic medicine, criminalistics and crime scene investigation. It aims to promote forensic sciences through quality research articles, reviews, case reports, and letters to editors.

For more information, please visit https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/tfsr20/current

Editorial Board: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=tfsr20

Forensic Sciences Research is available on Taylor & Francis Online (https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=tfsr20 ).

Submissions to Forensic Sciences Research may be made using Editorial Manager® (https://www.editorialmanager.com/tfsr/default.aspx ).

Usage

187K annual downloads/views

Citation metrics

1.2 (2019) CiteScore
1.22 (2019) SNIP
0.487 (2019) SJR

Speed/acceptance

21 days avg. from submission to first decision
52 days avg. from submission to first post-review decision
53 days avg. from acceptance to online publication
31% acceptance rate

Print ISSN: 2096-1790

Online ISSN: 2471-1411

Cluster of mysterious brain disease patients baffles Canadian doctors

Alexandra Thompson
Thu, 6 May 2021

Six people are thought to have died with the mysterious disease. (Stock, Getty Images)

Doctors in Canada are somewhat baffled by a mysterious brain disease with no obvious cause.

As far back as 2013, a handful of patients have endured unexplained pain, muscle twitching and even hallucinations, to name a few symptoms.

Medics initially likened the mysterious condition to the deadly brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), until patient tests came back clear.

In March 2021, Radio-Canada reported medics of New Brunswick province had been warned of a cluster of patients showing signs of a disorder "not seen before".

The province is aware of 48 cases, evenly made up of men and women, aged 18 to 85. Six people are thought to have died with the disease.

Read more: Third coronavirus survivors endure psychiatric or neurological disorder within six months

Doctors believe the condition is "acquired", not genetic. With no treatment, medics are focusing on relieving a patient's discomfort ahead of further research.

While these 48 cases may be the tip of the iceberg, one medic has urged people stay calm, warning "fear paralyses".

Muscle twitching and wasting mean some patients require walking aids. (Stock, Getty Images)

One who knows the impact of this mysterious disease all too well is Roger Ellis, who collapsed on his 40th wedding anniversary two years ago following a seizure.

Healthy until that day, Ellis – who is in his early sixties – has since endured delusions and hallucinations.

Ellis – who also became unusually aggressive – was thought to be dying, however, doctors could not explain why.

Medics initially thought he may have CJD, the most famous form of which is known as mad cow disease.

Tests for CJD, along with other potential causes, have all come back clear, leaving doctors stumped.

Ellis' son Steve was listening to Radio-Canada when he heard about the public health memo.

The retired industrial mechanic is now living in a specialised care home, with his condition stable.

Read more: Stroke-like brain damage in coronavirus victims

Ellis is one of several patients under the care of Dr Alier Marrero at Dr Georges-L-Dumont University Hospital Centre, in the city of Moncton.

Dr Marrero claims medics first heard about the mysterious disease in 2015, however, one patient is thought to have developed symptoms in 2013. At the time, doctors believed it was a one-off highly-unusual case.

The majority of the 48 patients are thought to have become unwell from 2018 onwards.

They live in New Brunswick's largest city Moncton and its Acadian peninsula, which is made up of fishing communities.

The symptoms are said to be wide-ranging and vary from patient to patient.

In the early days of the illness, an individual's behaviour may change, with them becoming anxious, depressed and irritable. This may be accompanied by unexplained pain, aches and spasms.

Severe insomnia or excessive daytime sleepiness may also occur. A patient could then endure memory problems and speech defects, like stuttering or repeating words, that make it difficult to hold a conversation.

Rapid weight loss, muscle wasting, visual disturbances and co-ordination problems have also been reported.

Read more: Teacher back in classroom after being treated for brain tumour

Some patients require walking aids and wheelchairs due to severe muscle twitching.

Hallucinations have also occurred, as has temporary "Capgras delusion", when a person believes a loved one has been replaced by an imposter.

"It's quite disturbing because, for instance, a patient would tell his wife: 'Sorry ma'am you cannot get in bed, I'm a married man' and even if the wife gives her name, he'd say: 'You're not the real one,'" Dr Marrero told the BBC.

Researchers find new potential treatment for prion disease


Suspected patients are being tested for genetic diseases, as well as prions. These are a type of protein that can cause healthy proteins in a patient's brain to fold abnormally, triggering diseases like CJD.

Medics also assess whether the individual may have an autoimmune disease, cancer, an infection, heavy metals in their system or abnormal antibodies – the proteins that help fight off an infection.

As part of an investigation into the disease – led by Dr Marrero – patients are asked about their lifestyle and travel history, as well as medics uncovering any potential environmental factors or dietary sources.

"Our first common idea is there's a toxic element acquired in the environment of this patient that triggers the degenerative changes," said Dr Marrero.

One theory is chronic exposure to a so-called excitotoxin like domoic acid, which was linked to an outbreak of food poisoning from contaminated mussels in the nearby province of Prince Edward Island in 1987.

During the outbreak, a third of those affected endured memory loss, dizziness and confusion. Some fell into a coma and four died.

Researchers are also looking into the toxin beta-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA). Produced by blue-green algae, BMAA has been linked to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

While it may sound alarming, cases have not been reported outside of the Acadian peninsula and Moncton.

Dr Marrero has stressed: "Work with hope not with fear, fear paralyses".

COVID-19 deaths in US are 57% higher than official reports, study suggests
A new study challenges conventional wisdom about the number of COVID-19 deaths

By MATTHEW ROZSA
PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2021 

Medical Mask On Red Background (Getty Images)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has had the unenviable task of announcing, each and every week, just how many Americans have died of COVID-19. As of Wednesday, the official tabulation was that almost 562,000 Americans had passed away with COVID-19 being cited as the cause on their death certificates. This includes more than 178,000 deaths in the first four months of 2021.

Yet one group of researchers believe that these numbers, tragic enough as they are, may actually be lower than reality.

A new study released by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that more than 900,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, entered this country a little more than a year ago. They also argued that more than 7 million people have died worldwide from the disease, more than twice as many as the official estimate of 3.24 million.

The researchers reached these conclusions by first looking at excess mortality (which the CDC defines as "the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods") from March 2020 through May 3, 2021. After comparing those figures with what would be expected during an ordinary non-pandemic year, they adjusted the statistics to take a number of variables related to the pandemic into account. For instance, they accounted for how public health guidelines has reduced influenza infections during the pandemic era, while more people deferred their health care and might have therefore died from other ailments.

Ultimately they concluded that, effectively, all of the net extra deaths should be attributed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus because the drop in other death rates offset the additional deaths not caused by COVID-19.

"When you put all that together, we conclude that the best way, the closest estimate, for the true COVID death is still excess mortality, because some of those things are on the positive side, other factors are on the negative side," Dr. Christopher Murray, who heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told NPR.

An epidemiologist at Harvard University was skeptical about the IMHE study's conclusions.

"I think that the overall message of this (that deaths have been substantially undercounted and in some places more than others) is likely sound, but the absolute numbers are less so for a lot of reasons," William Hanage told NPR by email.

If the IMHE number is accurate, that would mean that roughly the same number of Americans have died of COVID-19 as died fighting in both the Civil War (498,332) and World War II (405,399). The COVID-19 pandemic has swept through the planet and left havoc in its wake, destroying economies and forcing much of the world to go into periodic stages of lockdown. The pandemic also became a big issue during the 2020 presidential election and likely played a role in why the incumbent, President Donald Trump, lost to the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.

MATTHEW ROZSA

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.