CANADA

Senator proposes plan to get conversion therapy bill passed this summer

© Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press The Senate of Canada is on a summer break until September 20 at the earliest.

A senator is pitching a plan to reconvene the Senate in order to adopt legislation that would ban the practice of conversion therapy in Canada.

The Senate went on its summer break earlier this week before it was able to vote on the legislation, titled Bill C-6.

With the Senate not scheduled to return until Sept. 20 at the earliest, supporters of the legislation fear it could be further delayed or wiped out entirely if a widely anticipated federal election is called in the late summer or early fall.

"It has become increasingly clear that the inability of the Senate to complete its study of this legislation before the fall has generated a great deal of concern, anxiety and frustration for those in our LGBTQ2 community," said Sen. Marc Gold, the government representative in the upper house, in a public letter issued on Friday.

Under Gold's proposal, the Senate's committee on legal and constitutional affairs would examine the bill during virtual meetings this month and finish its work by July 26.

The Senate referred Bill C-6 to that committee during its final days before summer break, but committees typically do not meet when the Senate itself is not sitting.

The Senate would then return on July 26 to vote on the bill by the end of the week.

"I believe this would be a responsible approach that would bring hope to LGBTQ2 Canadians and to the Senate's role as a chamber of sober second thought," Gold wrote.

Bill C-6 proposes changes to the Criminal Code that would effectively outlaw conversion therapy — the widely discredited practice of attempting to change an individual's sexual orientation to heterosexual or their gender identity to cisgender (which means identifying with the sex assigned to them at birth).

Video: Liberals’ conversion therapy bill fails to pass the Senate before summer break (cbc.ca)

The bill would make it illegal in Canada to subject a person to conversion therapy without their consent, and would make it illegal to subject children to the practice, regardless of consent.

Conservatives say government playing 'petty politics'

Opposition to the bill has come almost exclusively from Conservative MPs and senators, who have said the legislation's definition of conversion therapy is too vague.

Critics say that could turn voluntary conversations about personal identity and sexuality into criminal acts.

Conservatives also have criticized the timing of the bill, arguing that the Trudeau government set it up to fail by introducing the bill so late in the Parliamentary calendar. That created an opportunity for the Liberals to make conversion therapy an election issue, those critics say.

"It is clear by the latest actions of this government that the priority isn't now, nor was it ever, putting an end to this terrible practice," said Sen. Leo Housaskos, a Conservative.

"The priority is in using it as a tool to play petty politics in the lead up to an election campaign rather than in advancing good legislation."

The Liberal government also delayed the bill by proroguing Parliament in August 2020, which removed the bill from the House of Commons agenda.

The Speaker of the Senate, currently Sen. George Furey, has the power to recall the upper house "if satisfied that the public interest so requires."

That happened as recently as April 30 and during the summer of 2020, when the Senate was debating COVID-19 emergency bills.

David Lametti, Canada's justice minister and attorney general, said he hoped the plan to recall the Senate could save the bill.

"I hope Conservative senators take this opportunity to do the right thing and finally pass our ban on conversion therapy this month," Lametti said.

Paris airport workers block terminal to protest pay cut

PARIS (AP) — Paris airport workers protesting pay cuts on Friday blocked a busy terminal at a Charles de Gaulle Airport and skirmished with police, prompting flight delays and causing travel chaos and confusion among passengers.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Police fired pepper spray to try to disperse the protesters at the 2E terminal, primarily used for international travel. An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw passengers wiping their stinging eyes and children frightened.

Banging drums and tooting horns, a few hundred union activists blocked the terminal’s passport control area, causing hundreds of passengers to miss their flights. Riot police with helmets and shields fanned out, and passengers were re-routed to a neighboring terminal.

Unions have been negotiating with Paris airport management over pay cuts linked to the collapse in air travel amid the pandemic. Management of the Paris airport network says revenue was down 80% in 2020 and that it is trying to avoid layoffs by trimming pay instead.

Unions announced strikes and protests through Monday, just as many French families leave on summer holidays. The airport warned passengers of possible delays and disruptions to road traffic and check-in procedures throughout the duration of the union action.

The Associated Press

Biden says teachers deserve 'a raise, not just praise'


Speaking to the nation’s largest teachers union, President Joe Biden said Friday that the pandemic has given America’s parents the “ultimate education” on the challenges of the teaching profession. But even more, he said, the last year has proved that teachers across the U.S. deserve higher pay.

 Provided by The Canadian Press

“You deserve a raise, not just praise,” Biden said in remarks at the National Education Association’s annual meeting in Washington. “Every parent in this country who spent the last year educating their children at home understands that you deserve a raise.”


Biden made the case while selling his proposed legislative priorities and budget for next year, which includes $20 billion in new funding that aims to spur states to increase teacher pay. A close ally of teachers unions, the president went on to describe educators as “the single most important component of America’s future.”

Biden and first lady Jill Biden gave remarks at a mostly empty Washington Convention Center while union members watched virtually. Biden is the first president in recent history to address the labor group, whose 3 million members include his wife, a longtime community college professor.

After a year in which some teachers unions were villainized for slowing the return to the classroom, the president and his wife had nothing but praise. Jill Biden called teachers heroes who adapted overnight to support students and families.

“You spoke out for safely reopening schools and more student support,” she said. “You carried families through the darkest year in modern history with patience, compassion and care. And you did it all while you worried about your own families' health and education and safety."

The president mostly used the speech to push his proposals. He made the case for the bipartisan infrastructure deal, including its plan to improve broadband access. He said the problem was laid bare last year as many children struggled to access remote classes offered by their schools.

He promoted his American Families Plan, which would offer two years of free community college to all Americans, along with two years of preschool for all 3- and 4-year-old children. And he pitched further investments for teachers, including a proposal to double the amount of a federal grant for aspiring teachers and to boost career training for current teachers.

Both of the nation's major teachers unions endorsed Biden as a presidential candidate, and he has kept close ties with them since his election. While introducing Biden, NEA President Becky Pringle applauded Biden for nominating Miguel Cardona, a former teacher and principal, to lead the Education Department.

Some Republicans have accused Biden of being too close to the powerful unions, saying he should have taken stronger action to press teachers to return to in-person instruction. And some said his goal to have most elementary and middle schools reopened within 100 days — a goal he achieved in May — was not ambitious enough.

Biden addressed the union days before a July Fourth holiday that he said should be celebrated as a “summer of freedom” as the nation recovers from the coronavirus. He drew attention to a recent survey by the teachers union finding that 84% of its members had been vaccinated. But he also looked forward to challenges as schools work to recover from the pandemic.

“On Sunday we’ll celebrate our independence as a nation, as well as our progress against the virus,” he said. “In the days ahead, we have a chance to make another beginning, the beginning of a stronger, fairer education system. But it can’t be done without you.”

Collin Binkley, The Associated Press

Workers are 'epiphany-quitting' their jobs after the pandemic forced them to rethink everything about their lives

sjackson@insider.com (Sarah Jackson) 

 People are quitting their jobs at rates not seen in two decades. 

shironosov/Getty Images

The pandemic prompted many people to reevaluate their personal and professional fulfillment.

With new clarity and urgency, some people left their jobs to pursue new priorities.

Some people said they quit to start a business or move to another country in search of better work-life balance.

Lauren Good had been working in healthcare administration for about a decade when the pandemic struck. At the time, Good had a 9-month-old daughter and struggled navigating new motherhood alongside her demanding job.

"Seeing so many people around me losing their lives, losing loved ones, losing their jobs - it put things into perspective," she told Insider. "I said to myself, 'Why am I, like, busting my butt for a place that doesn't even really support me?'"

So Good quit in September. Five months later, she became a pre- and post-natal health coach to provide the support she said her workplace never gave her following her pregnancy.

Good is among a group of workers who could be called epiphany quitters for deciding to quit their jobs after reevaluating their lives in the midst of the pandemic. Insider spoke with nine people who said they quit their jobs within the last year to pursue new priorities. Several people walked away without other offers ready. Some started businesses. Others moved to another country or retired early.

The state of the pandemic job market deterred many people from quitting in case they couldn't find other work. But with hiring now on the upswing, emboldened workers are taking their chances in greater numbers. Four million Americans quit their jobs in April, a 20-year high.

"Workers are finally fed up and saying the jig is up," said Sylvia Allegretto, co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley.
Pivoting from 'constant fire' and looking for a big change

Pandemic burnout and weakened work-life boundaries motivated some people to start businesses to wrest back control over their work lives in a year that took much of that away.

Jen Reeves is one of them. She was working in communications for the University of Missouri last summer when she started a consulting firm on the side. Increased work demands during the pandemic - which Reeve described as "constant fire" - compelled her to quit in October to run her business full-time.

"Everything was so constantly urgent" at her former job, she said. "It's strange to think that a pandemic offered something positive, but I do think it was the one push that finally got me into doing what I was meant to do."

For others, pandemic-inspired epiphanies meant leaving the workforce altogether. The anonymous writer behind the finance blog A Purple Life said she left her marketing job in October and retired at 30 after spending five years working toward an early retirement goal. She quit to move closer to family to care for them if they got sick.

"It was a global pandemic that seemed to disproportionately harm people of color; I'm a Black woman, so I was worried even moreso for my family," she said. "I don't really care about the money in comparison."

Some workers quit so they could relocate. Jessica Byrne, a software engineer, said she left Santa Barbara, California, in March to join a micromobility startup in Amsterdam for better work-life balance and travel opportunities.

"After being cooped up from the pandemic for so long, I knew I needed a big change," she said. "I wanted a culture that appreciated lots of time off and [understood] that there's more to life than just staying at home coding. I didn't want to be expected to be tethered to my computer."

As the economic reopening continues, quit rates may keep rising, especially among those who have the financial freedom to leave their jobs. Forty-four percent of US workers plan to look for new jobs in the next year, according to a study conducted by experience management company Qualtrics. Their reasons for doing so include burnout, stress, lack of growth opportunities, and desire for higher pay.

"The fact that workers are quitting is a sign of optimism," said Allegretto. It's also a sign that workers are gaining more bargaining power.

"People are saying, 'I need to make a change here. Things weren't working, there seems to be some opportunity out there. ...I can maybe bargain for a bit of a higher wage. I can maybe bargain for some benefits,'" Allegretto said. "And that's a really good thing because that has been lacking for far too long."

Read the original article on Business Insider

Teenagers aren't taking all the jobs anymore

asheffey@businessinsider.com (Ayelet Sheffey,Madison Hoff)

© Provided by Business Insider A Texas-based restaurant chain has promoted young workers to manager roles amid a labor shortage. Getty Images

Teenage employment in June dropped close to pre-pandemic levels, after trending higher in the spring.

This suggests they won't be taking as many jobs this summer as they did in the spring.

Workers in industries largely staffed by teenagers, like restaurants, are hiring more, at higher wages.

While the June jobs report exceeded expectations, adding 850,000 payrolls, it also blew up a developing narrative that teenagers were helping solve the country's labor shortage.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, teen unemployment rates in April and May were at 12.3% and 9.6%, respectively, signaling that in the spring, teenagers were jumping into the labor force. But the unemployment rate for the 16-19 age group sat at 9.9% in June, suggesting the trend might not continue throughout the summer.

The New York Times economics reporter Ben Casselman wrote on Twitter that in the spring, teen employment was well above pre-pandemic levels, but with their employment level in June fairly close to the pre-pandemic level, teens likely won't be boosting labor supply.

The following chart shows employment for 16 to 19 years old in May from 2015-2021:

Edmonton: Why Are People Snapping Up This $89 AC Unit?SEE MORESponsored by ARTICAIR

The following chart shows employment for 16 to 19 years old in June from 2015-2021. Employment in June 2021 seems to be similar to levels seen in 2019.

Video: Businesses Struggling to Find Workers Turn to Teens and College Students (Inside Edition)

US business owners have been flocking to hire teens amidst a labor shortage, according to a Wall Street Journal report in early June, as teen unemployment rates in the US were at their lowest level since 1953 following the May jobs report, and the number of teens in work had reached the highest rate since 2008.

The labor shortage had given teens the opportunity to cherry-pick for the best-paying jobs. As Ric Serrano, CEO of Serrano's Mexican Restaurants, told the Journal, "It's a perfect storm for them."

Another restaurant owner, Ben Eli - who owns Doris Metropolitan steakhouses in Houston and New Orleans, told the Journal that he had been significantly struggling to find workers, and he's only been able to hire teens.

"I've never seen anything like this," he said. "They are 100% of my staffing right now."

Employees are definitely coming back to work, though, and restaurants may not have to rely on teenagers to keep service afloat. June's jobs report revealed a 343,000 payroll gain in just the leisure and hospitality sector, largely thanks to increased wages for those workers in the industries that teenagers had mainly staffed.

And President Joe Biden saw this as a promising sign moving forward in economic recovery.

"More jobs, better wages - that's a good combination," Biden said during his remarks on Friday. "Put simply: Our economy is on the move, and we have COVID-19 on the run." While this may be true, teens may not be leading the charge after June.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Alberta company fined in incident where Sask. worker's clothes caught fire
Theresa Kliem 

© Radio-Canada Blueforce Logistics Ltd. pleaded guilty to one count under Saskatchewan's Occupational Health and Safety Regulations in Estevan provincial court, shown here.

An Alberta company will have to pay a total of $65,000 after a Saskatchewan worker's clothing caught fire in 2019.

In January 2019, sparks from a grinder set a worker's clothes on fire in Oxbow, Sask., resulting in serious injuries, the province of Sakatchewan said in a Wednesday news release.

On June 21, Edmonton-based Blueforce Logistics Ltd. — which supplies welders other skilled trades to clients — pleaded guilty to one count under Saskatchewan's Occupational Health and Safety Regulations in provincial court in Estevan.

The fine was related to a section of the regulations that says an employer must provide and require the use of protective clothing when there is a risk of injury from sparks or molten metal.

One other charge was withdrawn.

The company was ordered to pay $46,428.57 plus a surcharge of $18,571.43 resulting in a total of $65,000.

According to the Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety, employers must provide approved protective equipment to their employees as required by regulations.

Oxbow is about 220 kilometres southeast of Regina.

GM shakes up lithium industry with California geothermal project

By Ernest Scheyder 

 Reuters/REBECCA COOK Logo of GM atop the company headquarters

(Reuters) - General Motors Co is investing in a U.S. lithium project that could become the country's largest by 2024, making the automaker one of the first to develop its own source of a battery metal crucial for the electrification of cars and trucks.

The deal, announced on Friday, comes as automakers around the world scramble for access to lithium and other electric vehicle (EV) metals as internal combustion engines are phased out.

Detroit-based GM said it will make a "multimillion-dollar investment" in and help develop Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) Ltd's Hell's Kitchen geothermal brine project near California's Salton Sea, roughly 160 miles (258 km) southeast of Los Angeles.

"This will supply a sizeable amount of our lithium needs," said Tim Grewe, GM's director of electrification strategy.

The company declined to be more specific on its investment amount, but said the project's lithium will be used to build EVs in the United States and that GM engineers and scientists will visit the site once pandemic-related travel restrictions end.

While other automakers, including China's Great Wall Motor Co and BYD, have invested in lithium producers before, none appear to have taken such an aggressive step to be part of the production process, as GM is taking with CTR.

The move could spark other automakers to follow suit with similar partnerships, especially as demand for the metal is expected to outstrip supply by 20% within four years, according to industry consultant Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The Hell's Kitchen project could be producing 60,000 tonnes of lithium - enough to make roughly 6 million EVs, depending on design - by mid-2024 if all goes as planned, said Rod Colwell, CTR's chief executive. The company expects to obtain federal environmental permits by the end of next year.

That output would make CTR's Hell's Kitchen the largest U.S. producer of the white metal, with production roughly twice as much planned by a rival Nevada project from Lithium Americas Corp.

"There's a great window of opportunity here to develop more lithium in the United States," Colwell said.

The announcement comes two weeks after GM boosted its electric and autonomous vehicles budget by 75% to $35 billion.

The geothermal process involves extracting super-hot lithium-rich brine from reservoirs 8,000 feet (2.4 km) underground and using the heat to produce electricity, after which lithium is extracted from the brine.

The brine is then reinjected into the earth, making the process more sustainable than open-pit mines and brine evaporation ponds, the two most-common existing methods to produce the white metal.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc operates geothermal power plants at the Salton Sea and has in the past studied ways to produce lithium there. The Salton area is estimated to contain more than 15 million tonnes of lithium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

CTR, which received California state funding last year, said its project will emit 15 times less carbon dioxide than lithium mines in Australia, the world's largest producer.

GM is also talking with other U.S. lithium companies for supply, including those who plan to produce the metal from clay, brine and other geological sources, Grewe said.

The announcement comes the day after U.S. President Joe Biden promoted a video on his Twitter feed featuring U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy driving in a GM-produced electric Chevy Bolt.

GM said there was no connection between the tweet and Friday's announcement.

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Heat waves kill people—and climate change is making it much, much worse

Heat waves, like the one that has held the Northwest United States in its grip for the past week, are deadly.

 PORTLAND, OR - JUNE 27: Portland residents fill a cooling center with a capacity of about 300 people at the Oregon Convention Center June 27, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. Record breaking temperatures lingered over the Northwest during a historic heatwave this weekend. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

The human toll of the record-breaking temperatures that slammed both coasts of the U.S. and Canada in recent weeks is already enormous. At least 80 people have died in the U.S during the past few days of extreme heat; in British Columbia, the number is in the hundreds. And, as more data trickles in, those numbers are likely to rise even further.

A mountain of scientific research has shown that climate change is making heat waves longer, hotter, more likely, and more dangerous. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change adds additional detail by assessing the human cost of that extra heat: In June, a team of some 70 researchers reported that for the 732 sites on 6 continents they studied, on average, 37 percent of all heat-related deaths can be pinned directly on climate change.

The study underscores the urgency with which we need to address human-caused climate change, says Ana Vicedo Cabrera, lead author of the study and a climate change epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.

“Climate change is not something in the future: It’s something in the present, and it is already affecting our health in very dramatic ways,” she says. Extreme, deadly heat events like the one battering North America are a foreshadowing of what will come. “We can expect that what we’ve seen in the past—that 37 percent—is going to increase exponentially in the future.”
Extreme heat is deadly

Extreme heat kills more people each year in the U.S. than any other kind of natural disaster. Globally, its impacts are enormous. During historic heat waves—like 1995 in Chicago, 2003 in Europe, or 2019 in France—thousands of people can die, and many more suffer severe health impacts that can last long after the heat dissipates, says Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii who authored a study titled “27 ways a heat wave can kill you: Deadly heat in the era of climate change.”

“These events can have long-term consequences, from kidney failure to your brain being damaged, to heart damage,” he says.

Previous studies have linked particular climate change-fueled heat waves that sweep through a city with higher deaths. In the sweltering 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, human-caused climate change increased the risk of dying by 70 percent in Paris. This new study expands this type of analysis globally, looking at more than 700 locations across all inhabited continents.

The researchers looked at all the recorded deaths that occurred during summertime, as well as temperature data for those same places and times, in order to sift out all the deaths that were likely to be caused by extreme heat. There are temperature thresholds beyond which people are much more likely to die, but those thresholds are different in different parts of the world.

The team developed a mathematical formula that linked extreme temperatures—how hot it was beyond the comfortable average temperature for that city or town—to the number of people who might die if it got that hot. This approach allowed the researchers to figure out how many people have died because of extreme heat in each location they looked at.

Then, they used a climate model to simulate an imaginary world in which human-driven climate change hadn’t occurred. They used their formula to figure out how many people would have died of extreme heat in that alternate, theoretical universe.

The differences were stark. The planet has warmed roughly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since the late 1800s and stands to warm at least that much again by the end of the century without serious efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

Video: Historic heat wave raises concerns over climate change (ABC News)

Without just that 1.8 degrees of warming that have already occurred, heat-related deaths would have made up just under one percent of all summertime mortality worldwide on average. But instead, heat-related deaths made up an average of over 1.5 percent of all summertime deaths—roughly 60 percent more.

If extended world-wide, that would mean more than 100,000 deaths per year could be attributed to human-caused climate change, though Vicedo Cabrera cautions that much more data and analysis are needed to come up with an accurate global estimate.
Climate injustice

The study found that, on average, more than one in three heat-related deaths can be pinned on climate change. But in some South American countries, Kuwait, Iran, and parts of southeast Asia, the human toll is much higher: as much as 77 percent in Ecuador, or 61 percent in the Philippines. This disparity emerges not just because these places are particularly hot, but because there is often less access to air conditioning, well-constructed housing that manages heat distribution better, and other factors that can lower people’s vulnerability to heat.

The patterns of vulnerability the study uncovered reveal a profound inequity, says Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental health expert at the University of California, San Diego.

“Think about who contributed to climate change over the last century, and who is seeing the most consequences today, and you see it is not fair. There is a huge environmental injustice in term of who is suffering the heat-related mortality caused by anthropogenic climate change.”

The U.S. is responsible for about 25 percent of all planet-warming emissions currently in the atmosphere, while Guatemala, for example, has contributed roughly 0.0002 percent. But more 75 percent of the heat deaths in that country can be linked to climate change.

The impacts in the U.S. are also devastating: About 35 percent of the U.S.’s heat-related deaths could be attributed to the climate change that has already occurred. Other research has clearly shown that those costs are not borne equally: in many cities, older people of color are twice as likely to die during extreme heat events than older white people.

“Worldwide, the effects are unequal. Within the U.S., the effects are unequal. At the county, at the city, in the neighborhood—the effects are unequal,” says Benmarhnia.
Deadly signs of climate change

Scientists are working to determine how much worse and more likely climate change has made this Northwest heat wave, but there is little question that it played a major role, says Mora.

“How many times do we need to prove that when it rains, we get wet?” he asks. “For decades now, we climate scientists have been hammering the drum that this is going to get bad. Now, it is that bad.”

Even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, the planet will continue to warm well past the 1.8°F it already has. That would make the kind of severe heat events we experience today more in line with a norm, rather than an extreme. But how bad the heat gets in the future depends on the climate actions we take now, says Mora.

“Our choices for the future are more of this, or a lot more of this. We can still choose between bad and worse,” he says.

Either way, it is well past time to start helping people across the country prepare for extreme heat, says University of Washington’s Kristie Ebi, a global environmental health expert. Some actions can be simple, like making sure people have access to fans, air conditioning, and shade. Other actions, such as figuring out how to make the electrical grid robust enough to stand up to the extra stresses imposed by too much heat, will be much more complex.

But the basic message is simple, according to Ebi: We can choose to save lives.

“Heat kills, but it doesn’t have to,” she says.

Which Crops Can Survive Drought? Nanosensors May Offer Clues

Keith Gillogly 


For crops, climate change is literally a growing problem.

The warming of our planet has increased the odds of drought worsening throughout the world. In the US, it’s threatening soybean, corn, and wheat production, and the future isn’t looking much wetter. So with water in short supply, we might try to plant crops that manage it more efficiently. “A big focus today is breeding for a changing climate,” says Abraham Stroock, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University. “We want to discover new traits and their genetic origins for resilience in a hot and dry climate of our future—of our today in many parts of the world.”

But first, researchers have to better understand how existing plants manage their water flow. Stroock and his colleagues have developed a nanoscale sensor called AquaDust that uses tiny fluorescent dyes to illuminate how water moves through plant tissue—a minimally invasive way for breeders and biologists to assess crops’ health at the microscopic level. Their work is described in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June.

Water is vital for plants. It keeps cells hydrated and is critical for photosynthesis. But it’s also under tension. Plants work to draw water out of the soil and up into their leaves. Meanwhile, the surrounding atmosphere is pulling that water out through evaporation, especially when the air is hot and dry. The measure of this tension is called “water potential.” Knowing a plant’s water potential matters because it correlates with its growth, yield, and the delicate balance between water loss and carbon dioxide uptake. During a drought, a plant with very negative water potential might dry up and die.

Currently, the gold standard for measuring this tension is a tool called the Scholander pressure chamber. It’s about the size and shape of an open lunch box, and it contains a pressure gauge and sample chamber, plus an external tank of pressurized gas. After sealing a leaf in the chamber, the researcher turns up the pressure, which forces the liquid out of the plant to get a reading. But this technology is decades old, it's heavy, and if you want to get a reading across an entire leaf, you have to cut it off and destroy it, says Stroock, a coauthor on the PNAS study and the associate director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture.

So Stroock’s team is taking a different approach, one that keeps the leaves alive.

They started by developing nanoparticles they dubbed AquaDust, microscopic sensors made from a hydrogel that expands or contracts in response to changes in water availability. The particles can be mixed into a solution, creating a pinkish liquid.

© Photograph: Piyush Jain/Cornell University Pictured is a confocal micrograph of maize leaf highlighting array of stomatal cavities separated by vascular bundles where epidermal cell wall autofluorescence is false-colored as blue, chloroplasts as green, and hydrogel nanoreporter (AquaDust) of water potential in leaves as red

For the current study, the researchers injected the solution into maize leaves, which they chose, in part, because the crop is critical to worldwide food supply. The nanosensors coated the outside of the leaf’s cells, swelling or shrinking based on how much water was available.

The dye molecules in AquaDust fluoresce at different wavelengths, depending on their proximity to each other, and these wavelengths can be measured with an instrument called a spectrometer. When water is readily available, the nanoparticles swell, pushing the dyes apart and creating a peak in the green wavelength the dyes emit. When there’s not much water, the nanoparticles shrink, and the dyes move closer together, resulting in a peak in the yellow wavelength. Then the researchers can convert the emission spectrum readings into water potential measurements, all without harming the plant.

The technique can be applied to different locations along the leaf to track water flow, says Piyush Jain, a study coauthor and mechanical engineering PhD candidate at Cornell. “What that allows us to do is basically model the water flow through different tissues, starting from the stem to different parts of the leaf,” he says.

The researchers focused their AquaDust measurements on the area just beneath the leaf’s surface, where plants carry out important functions like taking in CO2, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere, and packaging sugars created by photosynthesis. To breed crops that manage water better, having a better grasp of the biology and behavior of water at such critical points will be very helpful, the researchers say.

Ultimately, the technology might be used in real-world situations, like for workers in fields or greenhouses. It might even be possible to someday spray AquaDust over a field and then use a multispectral camera to quickly measure water potential across hundreds of plants

.

© Photograph: Siyu Zhu/Cornell University A researcher using AquaDust in a corn field.

And while that’s still a far-off development, AquaDust sounds like useful technology, says Irwin Goldman, professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Using any sort of remote sensing technology—in this case they’re using nanosensors—is an enormous leap forward,” he says. “My sense of this technology is that it is the future, really.”

Breeders have focused on developing drought-resistant crops for some time, says Goldman. “For at least the last 15 years, there’s been a sense in the plant-breeding community that we need to be incorporating selection for greater resilience in our crops as part of our breeding programs, that it’s not enough to just breed higher-yielding or better quality, or for disease resistance,” he says. But, he points out, it will be a long process to identify which plants best defy water loss and which genes are linked to that resiliency, before then pairing them with other desirable traits like good nutrition and flavor. “Once we identify the genes, that’s very helpful, but it doesn’t necessarily get us all the way to the end of the project,” he says. “We still have to find useful combinations.”

For now, AquaDust is primarily a research tool, not something that’s ready to be rolled out at scale that farmers or breeders could use to, say, assess 1,000 plants in an hour. For one thing, the injected solution itself contains water, which must evaporate before anyone can take a measurement. “We wait for about a day to get the leaf to come back into its natural state,” says Jain.

AquaDust’s application and readout methods would need to be refined before it could be ready for such high-throughput measurements or commercial products. But in the meantime, being able to precisely target the flow of water within plants might help researchers solve some mysteries. One of them, says Stroock, is whether plants ever allow the innermost layers of their leaves, called mesophyll, to dry out. For years, the conventional wisdom was that they avoid it, but indirect measurements by other labs now suggest that it’s a possibility. Being able to test this directly with AquaDust could fundamentally alter our understanding of how plants manage their water and how they handle the stress caused by dry inner tissue, he says.

“We believe there are very exciting questions to answer in the lab that take precedence over commercialization,” Stroock says. “Right now, Iowa farmers are not calling us to say, ‘Can we cover our field with AquaDust?’”

Those farmers are probably just hoping for rain. But, someday, technology like nanosensors might help them out when those hopes run dry.

Climate scientists blame Exxon lobbyists for disinformation that undermines efforts to reduce emissions and global warming

salarshani@businessinsider.com (Sarah Al-Arshani) 
© Pixabay Pixabay

A leaked draft report by top climate scientists blamed lobbyists for climate change disinformation.

The report said the disinformation is stalling efforts to curb emissions, Politico reported.

An Exxon official was previously caught on camera talking about the company's lobbying strategy.


Top climate scientists blamed disinformation and lobbying campaigns including those from Exxon Mobile for slowing down efforts to curb emissions, a leaked draft report obtained by Politico said.

The report, part of an upcoming review of climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a section called "resistance to climate change science" under its North American section.

The report blamed think tanks, foundations, and trade associations that represent fossil fuel companies for spreading fake science that misleads the public and hampers efforts to curb the climate crisis.

"Rhetoric on climate change and the undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, unduly discounted risk and urgency, dissent, and, most importantly, polarized public support delaying mitigation and adaptation action, particularly in the US," the report said.

This comes after Greenpeace investigation project Unearthed released videos showing an Exxon Mobil official who was tricked to believe he was in an interview speaking frankly about the group's lobbying strategies.

Keith McCoy, Exxon's senior director for federal relations, spoke about "shadow groups" working to influence senators to weaken parts of President Joe Biden's infrastructure bill.

"Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week," McCoy bragged to the interviewer. He called the Democratic senator from West Virginia a "kingmaker" and discussed how "on the Democrat side we look for the moderates on these issues" in their efforts to stop policies that could hurt the company's business.

In a statement, Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods said: "We condemn the statements and are deeply apologetic for them, including comments regarding interactions with elected officials."

Rep. Ro Khanna, who chairs the environment subcommittee of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told Politico he's spoken to government leadership about subpoenaing leaders of groups like Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies about disinformation efforts

Khanna also said he and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse will write laws that force these companies to disclose what money is going to groups that distort climate information.

"It is a major problem. One of the reasons that we haven't had action is that we don't have a common source of facts," Khanna told Politico. "Until we solve the climate disinformation issue or at least mitigate the issue, it becomes very hard to build a broad-based political consensus that is needed to take the kind of bold steps that are needed to tackle the crisis."

Insider has reached out to Exxon for comment.

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