Mounties to see their salaries soar as first collective agreement is ratified

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A constable could make up to $20K more

Catharine Tunney · CBC News · Posted: Aug 17, 2021 

Beyond its federal policing obligations, the RCMP operates as the provincial police in most provinces and as the local police service in 150 communities across the country. (Nic Amaya/CBC)

Thousands of Mounties are about to receive a massive pay increase.

For the first time ever, a union representing RCMP members has ratified a collective agreement with the federal government to cover nearly 20,000 members.

A tentative agreement with Treasury Board was announced earlier this summer. Following a ratification vote, it was signed digitally (due to pandemic restrictions) earlier this month, says the National Police Federation, the Mounties' union.

Before the new collective agreement, a constable could make up to $86,110, while a staff sergeant made between $109,000 and just over $112,000.

According to the RCMP, as of April 1, 2022 a constable will make up to $106,576 — a jump of $20,000. A staff sergeant will make between $134,912 and $138,657 next year. Constables account for more than half of the RCMP's ranks.

• Read the agreement here

• RCMP's union reaches tentative deal with Ottawa — a first in Mountie history

The deal also includes retroactive increases going back to 2017— the last time the RCMP updated its wages was 2016. According to the agreement, the rates of pay will change within 90 days of the signing of the collective agreement.

The pay boost will cause the public safety budget to balloon for the next federal government.

The deal covers all RCMP members from constables to staff sergeant majors, including special constables. According to the latest numbers published online, the RCMP employs 11,913 constables and 3,599 corporals — which means the raise could cost the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

• After pandemic delays, RCMP union's quest for salary bump resumes

• As calls to 'defund' police grow, some say it's time for the RCMP to do less

The salary increase comes as the RCMP struggles to recruit new members amid an international reckoning over police budgets, driven by in-custody deaths in the United States and investigations of Canadian police services' use-of-force policies.

RCMP members have been fighting for years to get to this stage. Until 2015, RCMP officers had been barred from forming a union since the 1960s, when other federal public servants gained the right to collective bargaining. It was one of the only police forces in Canada with that restriction.

BECAUSE IT WAS CLASSIFIED AS A MILITARY POLICING FORCE THEY FOUGHT IN THE BOER WAR AS NWMP

Municipalities eye impact of RCMP union contract with 23 per cent raise over six years

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First collective agreement between federal government, National Police Federation signed this month

Shane Magee · CBC News · Posted: Aug 17, 2021 4:15 PM AT | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

The new collective agreement between thousands of Mounties and the federal government includes a wage increase of more than 23 per cent over six years. (Shane Magee/CBC)

RCMP members have ratified their first collective agreement, and it provides a salary increase of 23.7 per cent over six years — an increase that has New Brunswick municipalities calculating how much more they will be paying for policing.

The contract signed Aug. 6 between the federal Treasury Board and National Police Federation, the RCMP union, includes retroactive pay increases.

Dan Murphy, executive director of the Union of Municipalities of New Brunswick, said communities are just starting to get the details of the contract. He said the cost of policing has been among the top issues for municipalities after the province's planned reforms to local governance.

"It's kind of an issue that affects smaller municipalities as well as larger municipalities," Murphy said in an interview. "So everyone is kind of grappling with what this could mean, trying to make plans accordingly."

In Moncton, where Codiac Regional RCMP is the largest detachment in the province, $3.5 million had been set aside by the Codiac Regional Policing Authority to cover retroactive payments. The amount was based on an assumed 2.5 per cent annual wage increase, though the actual increase is higher.

"We think there's going to be a shortfall, we just do not know at this point what the amount is," Jacques Doucet, Moncton's chief financial officer, said in an interview Monday evening.

Jacques Doucet, Moncton's chief financial officer shown at a council meeting earlier this year, says they're awaiting information from the RCMP to determine whether enough money had been set aside to cover the wage increase. (Shane Magee/CBC)

Doucet said the details of the contract were received late last week, and its implications are still being analyzed by RCMP and the regional policing authority, which oversees the Mounties who police Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview. 

Doucet said they need to know who was on staff in the previous years, their rank, and who was on leave before a more complete accounting can be done. When that can be done will depend on the RCMP, which has the required payroll information.

The contract covers RCMP reservists and officers below the rank of inspector. It says pay rates will change within 90 days of the agreement being signed.

Union president Brian Sauvé has previously said that his goal was to bring Mountie pay in line with other police agencies. In a statement announcing the tentative agreement in June, Sauvé said RCMP pay "fell significantly behind municipal and provincial police counterparts."

In Fredericton, which has its own police force, a first class constable earned $87,008.66 in 2016, and $97,359.61 in 2020, according to their pay scale.

Under the RCMP's 2016 pay scale, a first class constable would earn $86,110. That rises to to $106,576 by next April. A corporal who made $94,292 in 2016 would see their pay rise to $116,703 next year.

• Mounties to see their salaries soar as first collective agreement is ratified

• RCMP's union reaches tentative deal with Ottawa — a first in Mountie history

Codiac RCMP Insp. Benoit Joliette, speaking to Moncton council Monday night, acknowledged the new contract and said the force is working to determine its impact. 

"We'll keep working with the three communities to see what the impact will be," Joliette said.

Under the policing contract, Moncton pays about 70 per cent of the $33 million Codiac RCMP budget, with Dieppe paying about 18 per cent and Riverview covering the rest. 

"It's been on our radar for a long time," Moncton Mayor Dawn Arnold said of the salary increase. "We've known it was coming. But as far as the precision of what the implications will be, we don't know those exactly right at this time."

The increase comes as the city has yet to make a decision on whether to go ahead with building a new Codiac RCMP station. The cost, once pegged at $46 million, has risen but the city has not made the new estimate public. 

 

Capturing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Transforming It Into Industrially Useful Materials

TOPICS:Atmospheric ScienceCarbon CaptureCarbon DioxideSalk Institute

By SALK INSTITUTE AUGUST 17, 2021

Scanning electron microscopy image of SiC petrified corn husks. Credit: UC San Diego

Salk scientists quantify process to permanently store plant-captured CO2 as SiC, a valuable material for electronics.

Plants are unparalleled in their ability to capture CO₂ from the air, but this benefit is temporary, as leftover crops release carbon back into the atmosphere, mostly through decomposition. Researchers have proposed a more permanent, and even useful, fate for this captured carbon by turning plants into a valuable industrial material called silicon carbide (SiC)—offering a strategy to turn an atmospheric greenhouse gas into an economically and industrially valuable material.

In a new study, published in the journal RSC Advances, scientists at Salk transformed tobacco and corn husks into SiC and quantified the process with more detail than ever before. These findings are crucial to helping researchers, such as members of Salk’s Harnessing Plants Initiative, evaluate and quantify carbon-sequestration strategies to potentially mitigate climate change as CO₂ levels continue to rise to unprecedented levels.

“The study offers a very careful accounting for how you make this valuable substance and how many atoms of carbon you’ve pulled out of the atmosphere. And with that number, you can start to extrapolate what role plants could play in mitigating greenhouse gases while also converting an industrial byproduct, CO₂, into valuable materials by using natural systems like photosynthesis,” says co-corresponding author and Salk Professor Joseph Noel.

SiC, also known as carborundum, is an ultrahard material used in ceramics, sandpaper, semiconductors, and LEDs. The Salk team used a previously reported method to transform plant material into SiC in three stages by counting carbons at each step: First, the researchers grew tobacco, chosen for its short growing season, from seed. They then froze and ground the harvested plants into a powder and treated it with several chemicals including a silicon-containing compound. In the third and final stage, the powdered plants were petrified (turned into a stony substance) to make SiC, a process that involves heating the material up to 1600 °C.

“The rewarding part was that we were able to demonstrate how much carbon can be sequestered from agricultural waste products like corn husks while producing a valuable, green material typically produced from fossil fuels,” says first author Suzanne Thomas, a Salk staff researcher.

Through elemental analysis of the plant powders, the authors measured a 50,000-fold increase in sequestered carbon from seed to lab-grown plant, demonstrating plants’ efficiency at pulling down atmospheric carbon. Upon heating to high temperatures for petrification, the plant material loses some carbon as a variety of decomposition products but ultimately retains about 14 percent of the plant-captured carbon.

The researchers calculated that the process to make 1.8 g of SiC required about 177 kW/h of energy, with the majority of that energy (70 percent) being used for the furnace in the petrification step. The authors note that current manufacturing processes for SiC carry comparable energy costs. So while the production energy required means that the plant-to-SiC process isn’t carbon neutral, the team suggests that new technologies created by renewable energy companies could bring down energy costs.

“This is a step towards making SiC in an environmentally responsible approach,” says co-corresponding author and Salk visiting scientist James La Clair.

Next, the team hopes to explore this process with a wider variety of plants, in particular plants like horsetail or bamboo, that naturally contain large amounts of silicon.

Reference: “Plant-based CO₂ drawdown and storage as SiC” by Suzanne T. Thomas, Yongsoon Shin, James J. La Clair and Joseph P. Noel, 27 April 2021, RSC Advances.
DOI: 10.1039/d1ra00954k

Embryo discovery shines light on dinosaur-era turtles: U of C researcher

The land tortoises, or nanhsiungchelyids, were the largest such creatures during the Cretaceous period with the fossilized egg dating back 75 to 90 million years

Author of the article: Bill Kaufmann
Publishing date: Aug 17, 2021 •

University of Calgary palaeontologist Darla Zelenitsky in a file photo from 2015. 

PHOTO BY LEAH HENNEL /Calgary Herald

They were giant turtles hunted by dinosaurs, but the lack of any embryo evidence limited our knowledge of them.

That changed in 2018 when a farmer in the central Chinese province of Henan discovered an egg between the size of a golf and tennis ball, and figured it should be analyzed by scientists.

Chinese researchers called on University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky and former Royal Tyrrell Museum researcher Dr. Don Brinkman to help determine the find’s significance.

“This is the first time a turtle embryo has been identified to belong to a specific type of turtle,” said Zelenitsky.

“They don’t usually have embryos encased in them.”

CT scans developed 3-D models of the egg’s contents — the skeleton of a baby turtle that would likely have grown to have a shell 1.6 metres in length.

The land tortoises, or nanhsiungchelyids, were the largest such creatures during the Cretaceous period, with the fossilized egg dating back 75 to 90 million years.

“These were giant, land-dwelling turtles that lived alongside the dinosaurs,” said Zelenitsky.

“The surprising part of this study was the size of these turtles.”

The tortoises also vanished with the dinosaurs, she noted.

But they managed to migrate from Asia to North America, though their cousins in places like Alberta seemed to have been smaller, said the paleontologist.

And discoveries of the significance of the ones made in China haven’t been replicated in Canada, said Zelenitsky, whose work along with that of Brinkman’s and Chinese researchers will be published next week in the Royal Society Journal.

“They lived in Alberta, too, but we just haven’t found those eggs yet,” she said, adding ancient turtle eggs have been unearthed in the Milk River area.

The find supplies a better glimpse of how the tortoises nested and reproduced — and how they might have survived the unwanted attention of hungry dinosaurs who would have been deterred by the turtles’ hard shell.

Their eggs wouldn’t have been easy to crack, with hard shells that were 1.88 mm thick and laid in considerable profusion — 15 to 30 at a time.

“But eggs and hatchlings were the worst off for predation,” said Zelenitsky.

Perhaps just as noteworthy as anything from the discovery is spreading awareness of the diversity of life that existed at that time on earth, said Zelenitsky.

“We’ve always known of dinosaurs as creatures living during the Cretaceous, but not many people know there were turtles as well,” she said.

Rare embryo from dinosaur age was laid by human-size turtle


By Laura Geggel - Editor 

The eggshell was incredibly thick.


An illustration of the Cretaceous period turtle (Yuchelys nanyangensis) hatching from its tennis ball-size egg. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)

About 90 million years ago, a giant turtle in what is now central China laid a clutch of tennis ball-size eggs with extremely thick eggshells. One egg never hatched, and it remained undisturbed for tens of millions of years, preserving the delicate bones of the embryonic turtle within it.

In 2018, a farmer discovered the egg and donated it to a university. Now, a new analysis of this egg and its rare embryo marks the first time that scientists have been able to identify the species of a dinosaur-age embryonic turtle.

This specimen also sheds light on why its species, the terrestrial turtle Yuchelys nanyangensis, went extinct 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth. The thick eggshell allowed water to penetrate through, so clutches of eggs were likely buried in nests deep underground in moist soil to keep them from drying out in the arid environment of central China during the late Cretaceous, the researchers said.

While these turtles' unique terrestrial lifestyle, thick eggs and underground nesting strategy may have served them well during the Cretaceous, it's possible that these specialized turtles couldn't adapt to the cooler "climatic and environmental changes following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction," study co-researcher Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of paleobiology at the University of Calgary in Canada, told Live Science.

Egg-cellent discovery

The farmer discovered the egg in Henan province, a region famous for the thousands of dinosaur eggs people have found there over the past 30 years, Zelenitsky said. But in comparison with dinosaur eggs, turtle eggs — especially those with preserved embryos — rarely fossilize because they're so small and fragile, she said.

The Y. nanyangensis egg, however, persisted because it's a tank of an egg.

At 2.1 by 2.3 inches (5.4 by 5.9 centimeters) in size, the nearly spherical egg is just a bit smaller than a tennis ball. That's larger than the eggs of most living turtles, and just a tad smaller than the eggs of Galápagos tortoises, Zelenitsky said.

The eggshell's 0.07 inch (1.8 millimeters) thickness is also remarkable. To put that in perspective, that's four times thicker than a Galápagos tortoise eggshell, and six times thicker than a chicken eggshell, which has an average thickness of 0.01 inch (0.3 mm). Larger eggs tend to be thicker, like the 0.08-inch-thick (2 mm) ostrich eggshell, but "this egg is much smaller than an ostrich egg," which average about 6 inches (15 cm) in length, Zelenitsky said.


An equation that uses egg size to predict the length of the carapace, or the top part of the turtle's shell, revealed that this thick egg was likely laid by a turtle with a 5.3-foot-long (1.6 meters) carapace, the researchers found. That measurement doesn't include the length of the neck or head, so the mother turtle was easily as long as some humans are tall.

Image 1 of 4

Other clutches from this turtle family had nests of 30 and 15 eggs. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)



An illustration of the turtle as a hatchling. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)



An illustration of what the turtle might have looked like after hatching. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)



Different views of what the turtle hatchling might have looked like. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)

Doomed egg

The researchers used a micro-CT scan to create virtual 3D images of the egg and its embryo. By comparing these images with a distantly related living turtle species, it appears that the embryo was nearly 85% developed, the researchers found.

Part of the eggshell is broken, Zelenitsky noted, so "maybe it tried to hatch," but failed. Apparently, it wasn't the only embryonic turtle that didn't make it; two previously discovered thick-shelled egg clutches from Henan province that date to the Cretaceous — one with 30 eggs and another with 15 eggs — likely also belong to this turtle's now-extinct family, known as Nanhsiungchelyid, the researchers said.

Image 1 of 2

The now-extinct nanhsiungchelyidae turtle family lived in North America and Asia. Here is a Nanhsiungchelyid turtle fossil that was found in Alberta, Canada. (Image credit: Royal Tyrrell Museum)

The fossil carapace of a turtle from the nanhsiungchelyidae family that was found in China. (Image credit: Don Brinkman)


Turtles in this family — relatives of today's river turtles — were very flat and evolved to live entirely on land, which was unique during that time, Zelenitsky said.


The study of the newfound egg is special for its virtual 3D analysis of the embryo, which helped lead to its species diagnosis, said Walter Joyce, a professor of paleontology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study. Furthermore, this study offers evidence that Nanhsiungchelyid turtles were "adapted to living in harsh, terrestrial environments, but laid their large, thick-shelled eggs in covered nests in moist soil," Joyce told Live Science in an email.

The study will be published online Wednesday (Aug. 18) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

US lab stands on threshold of key nuclear fusion goal

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
Published1 hour ago

The research takes place at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California

A US science institute is on the verge of achieving a longstanding goal in nuclear fusion research.

The National Ignition Facility uses a powerful laser to heat and compress hydrogen fuel, initiating fusion.

An experiment suggests the goal of "ignition", where the energy released by fusion exceeds that delivered by the laser, is now within touching distance.

Harnessing fusion, the process that powers the Sun, could provide a limitless, clean energy source.

In a process called inertial confinement fusion, 192 beams from NIF's laser - the highest-energy example in the world - are directed towards a peppercorn-sized capsule containing deuterium and tritium, which are different forms of the element hydrogen.

This compresses the fuel to 100 times the density of lead and heats it to 100 million degrees Celsius - hotter than the centre of the Sun. These conditions help kickstart thermonuclear fusion.

Fusion milestone passed at US lab

Giant laser experiment powers up

An experiment carried out on 8 August yielded 1.35 megajoules (MJ) of energy - around 70% of the laser energy delivered to the fuel capsule. Reaching ignition means getting a fusion yield that's greater than the 1.9 MJ put in by the laser.

"This is a huge advance for fusion and for the entire fusion community," Debbie Callahan, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which hosts NIF, told BBC News.

As a measure of progress, the yield from this month's experiment is eight times NIF's previous record, established in Spring 2021, and 25 times the yield from experiments carried out in 2018.

"The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start the process," said Prof Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London.

Artwork showing a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a container called the hohlraum

NIF scientists also believe they have now achieved something called "burning plasma", where the fusion reactions themselves provide the heat for more fusion. This is vital for making the process self-sustaining.

"Self-sustaining burn is essential to getting high yield," Dr Callahan explained. "The burn wave has to propagate into the high density fuel in order to get a lot of fusion energy out.

"We believe this experiment is in this regime, although we are still doing analysis and simulations to be sure that we understand the result."

As a next step, Dr Callahan said the experiments would be repeated. "That's fundamental to experimental science. We need to understand how reproducible and how sensitive the results are to small changes," she said.

"After that, we do have ideas for how to improve on this design and we will start working on those next year."

Prof Chittenden explained: "The mega-joule of energy released in the experiment is indeed impressive in fusion terms, but in practice this is equivalent to the energy require to boil a kettle."

He added: "Far higher fusion energies can be achieved through ignition if we can work out how to hold the fuel together for longer, to allow more of it to burn. This will be the next horizon for inertial confinement fusion."

Existing nuclear energy relies on a process called fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Fusion works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one.

Interior of the target chamber, where fusion takes place

Construction on the National Ignition Facility began in 1997 and was complete by 2009. The first experiments to test the laser's power began in October 2010.

NIF's other function is to help ensure the safety and reliability of America's nuclear weapons stockpile. At times, scientists who want to use the huge laser for fusion have had their time squeezed by experiments geared towards national security.

But in 2013, the BBC reported that during experiments at NIF, the amount of energy released through fusion had exceeded the amount of energy absorbed by the fuel - a breakthrough and a first for any fusion facility in the world. Results from these tests were later published in the journal Nature.

NIF is one of several projects around the world geared towards advancing fusion research. They include the multi-billion-euro Iter facility, currently under construction in Cadarache, France.

Iter will take a different approach to the laser-driven fusion at NIF; the facility in southern France will use magnetic fields to contain hot plasma - electrically-charged gas. This concept is known as magnetic confinement fusion (MCF).

But building commercially viable fusion facilities that can provide energy to the grid will require another giant leap.

"Turning this concept into a renewable source of electrical energy is likely to be a long process and will involve overcoming substantial technical challenges, such as being able to re-create this experiment several times a second to produce a steady source of power," said Prof Chittenden.

Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion

A tiny pellet of deuterium and tritium released more energy than it absorbed from the National Ignition Facility’s bank of 192 lasers.

David Kramer

Preamplifiers at the National Ignition Facility boost the energy of the laser beams

 that ultimately irradiate hydrogen fuel. The photo is color-enhanced. 

Credit: Damien Jemison/LLNL

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that it has produced a fusion reaction in the laboratory that yielded more energy than was absorbed by the fuel to initiate it.

Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 1016 watts of power.

The shot, which occurred on 8 August, demolished the facility’s previous record yield of 170 kJ, observed in February, and was 25 times as high as the best results obtained just a year ago. “Everyone has a spring in their step,” says NIF director Mark Herrmann. The results have not yet been peer reviewed.

Although the achievement represents a milestone in fusion research, the laboratory stopped short of declaring ignition, the goal for which NIF was named and which it had planned to achieve by 2012. The fusion yield fell short of the 1.9 MJ that the NIF laser brought to bear on the hollow target, called a hohlraum, in which the fuel capsule was suspended. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences review of NIF’s design defined ignition as fusion yield equal to or more than the laser energy input. In NIF’s approach, known as indirect drive, 85% of the laser’s energy is lost in the conversion of UV to x rays that occurs inside the hohlraum.

Stephen Bodner, a former director of the laser fusion program at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and a persistent critic of NIF and the indirect drive approach, congratulated the lab on the achievement, saying it was close enough to ignition for him. “They made spectacular progress,” he says. “I’m surprised they found a way to minimize the laser–plasma problems,” he says. He added that “it demonstrates to the world that there’s no fundamental reason why laser fusion can’t work.”

But Bodner cautions that the NIF results won’t extrapolate to higher energy gains due to the inefficiency of the indirect drive process. “If you want to get to high gains, you have to directly illuminate the target,” he says, referring to an approach pursued at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) and NRL, where laser beams are symmetrically directed onto the fuel capsule.

A colorized image of a laser fusion shot conducted at the National Ignition Facility in 2016. Credit: Don Jedlovec/LLNL

Michael Campbell, director of the LLE at the University of Rochester in New York, says that ignition was attained by most scientific measures, including the extent to which alpha particles from fusion reactions heat the plasma and create more fusion. “It gives the US a lab capability to study burning plasmas and high-energy physics relevant for [nuclear weapons] stewardship,” he says. “It’s an enormous scientific achievement.” Like NIF, LLE and its Omega laser are funded by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Jill Hruby is the undersecretary for nuclear security at DOE and the NNSA administrator. “These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production. It also offers potential new avenues of research into alternative energy sources that could aid economic development and help fight climate change,” she said in a press release.

By most measures, the NIF results exceed the best results achieved in tokamaks, which bottle fusion plasmas in magnetic fields. In 1997 the Joint European Torus generated about 16 MW, roughly two-thirds of the power that it took to start the reaction.

Research on laser fusion, also known as inertial confinement fusion, was initiated at LLNL by John Nuckolls, who went on to become the lab’s director, soon after the invention of the laser in 1960. The goal has always been to create at laboratory scale what happens in the secondary stage of a thermonuclear weapon.

When NIF opened for experiments in 2009, five years behind schedule, LLNL scientists were confident they could reach ignition within two years. That concerted effort, known as the National Ignition Campaign, formally expired in 2012 (see Physics Today, October 2012, page 28), and the frequency of fusion shots was scaled back in favor of other research in support of the nuclear weapons program.

But experimenters continued to test a wide variety of compositions and different shapes of capsules and hohlraums, while also fine-tuning the timing and sequence of the laser pulses. Until now, they’d been unable to implode the fuel capsule with the precise degree of symmetry needed to prevent the plasma from squeezing out.

Over the years, the lab developed a suite of unique diagnostic tools that have provided a clearer picture of the reaction dynamics. Among the tools are 3D neutron and 2D x-ray imaging instruments and neutron time-of-flight detectors (see Physics Today, February 2017, page 33). Herrmann noted that in previous experiments, neutrons exiting the capsule on one side of the implosion arrived a few picoseconds earlier than did those flying off the opposite way. Those exquisitely sensitive measurements indicated that the plasmas were jetting off in one direction. The problem was traced to capsules that were a fraction of a micron out of round.

The lab hasn’t yet reproduced this month’s results, and Herrmann cautioned that doing so might not be straightforward. “We don’t know what variability will be in successive shots. It’s a nonlinear process where alpha heating heats up the fusion fuel and creates more fusion, which creates more heat.” Herrmann says the 3.5 MeV alpha particles, which remain in the plasma, produced 20% of the fusion yield, with 14 MeV neutrons accounting for most of the energy.

Further experiments will require the manufacture of additional fuel capsules and hohlraums. These may not be ready until at least October, Herrmann says. The nanocrystalline diamond-coated capsule that was imploded in this month’s event took six months to grow at General Atomics, which has long worked with LLNL on fabricating capsules. The spheres have to be polished and the core’s interior etched with tools inserted through a 2-micron-diameter hole drilled into it. The tritium–deuterium mixture is injected through a tiny fill tube just prior to the shot.

The lab is still analyzing the results from the shot. It’s not yet known which or what combination of advances to the targets, laser pulse lengths, or other variables led to the leap in performance. Some of the instruments were saturated by the unexpected yield of the reaction. A few that are used in the target chamber for other, non-ignition experiments will need repair.

Herrmann acknowledged that the announcement deviates from the standard practice of peer-reviewed publication. But the results, he says, were leaking, “so we wanted to put it out so people could discuss the facts.”

Editor’s note, 17 August: The first sentence was updated to clarify that the fusion reaction did not meet the National Academy’s definition of ignition.

À PARTIR DE LA DROITE

As millennials fall out of love with Trudeau, Liberals need to stop bleed towards the NDP

'With millennials, it's not just who they're supporting, but are they motivated?'

Author of the article: Christopher Nardi

POSTMEDIA

Publishing date: Aug 17, 2021 • 

Justin Trudeau greets supporters during a campaign stop in his Papineau riding in Montreal on Aug. 15, 2021. PHOTO BY CHRISTINNE MUSCHI /Reuters
Article content

OTTAWA — In 2015, millennials mobilized in droves to support the Justin TrudeauLiberals, but, six years and two elections later, experts say millennials have fallen out of love with the prime minister and his party will have to work hard to stop them from bleeding over to the emerging NDP.

“There’s a bit of disillusion or disappointment,” said Andrew Enns, executive vice-president at Leger polling firm. A far cry from 2015, where he says there was “shocking rise for the liberals in the 18- to 34-year-old bracket.”

David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data which does a lot of work focused on millennials specifically, has reached the same conclusion. Whereas millennials — which is broadly defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 — were enamoured with 2015 Trudeau, that veneer has now washed away.

And polling numbers illustrate that fall eloquently. According to Leger polling, nearly half (46 per cent) of Canadians aged 18 to 34 supported the Liberal Party of Canada by the end of the 2015 campaign that led Trudeau from leader of the third opposition to prime minister of Canada.

There’s a bit of disillusion or disappointment

Fast forward to the end of his mandate in 2019, and that number had already fallen to around 30 per cent, both Coletto and Enns’ data shows. The Liberals remain the party favoured by millennials, but the gap with the NDP is closing.

Incidentally, 2019 is also the electoral year in which Trudeau’s government lost its majority status and became a minority government.

“I think they need millennials, certainly to win a majority,” Coletto said about the Liberals. “And these numbers probably aren’t as good as they’d like, though aren’t devastating.”

Liberal party spokesperson Braeden Caley says millennial Canadians and their younger counterparts known as “Gen X” are “absolutely” a key demographic for Trudeau because they care about issues that the party holds dear: “fighting climate change, making life more affordable and keeping our community safe.”

But two years after 2019, and as a new federal election begins, millennials’ support has barely risen for the Liberals, and is currently a far-cry from the record support they had back in 2015.

Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie wave on stage in Montreal after winning the election in 2015. 

PHOTO BY NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP, GETTY IMAGES

“It’s no longer love. I’d say it’s better than acceptance, but not as good as love is where I think most of them are,” said Coletto about millennials’ current feelings about the Liberals.

“This is not a generation anymore that looks at the prime minister and says, ‘He’s different, he’s one of us, he’s going to change politics,’” he continued.

When asked if he is concerned with millennials’ significantly dampened appreciation of the Liberals, Caley insisted that Trudeau has “very robust support” from young Canadians, though he did not provide any data contradicting polling numbers.

According to experts, the falling out of love between millennials and Trudeau began before the 2019 election, notably with the SNC-Lavalin scandal that shook the Trudeau government and led to the resignation of ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott. The ethics commissioner later found that Trudeau had acted improperly by trying to push Wilson-Raybould to end criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

The government’s decision to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline in order to facilitate its expansion in western Canada also dealt a heavy blow to millennials’ impressions of the Liberals, since they often rate the fight against climate change and environmental issues amongst their top political priorities when voting, experts say.

“There’s some disappointment, even significant disappointment. Electoral reform, Indigenous reconciliation, even climate change, I think the Liberals have really strengthened their brand around climate change, but there are many who would still say we haven’t done nearly enough in the six years that you’ve been in power to move this along,” Coletto said.

“I think SNC-Lavalin, and some of the other decisions they’ve made since they were elected, have really deteriorated that image of a prime minister and a leader who is different.”

I think SNC-Lavalin, and some of the other decisions they've made since they were elected, have really deteriorated that image of a prime minister and a leader who is different

But has millennials’ perception of the Liberals changed at all throughout the COVID-19 pandemic? And more specifically, have the Trudeau governments’ costly and generous financial aid benefits — which have led to record deficits and pushed Canada’s debt over the $1 trillion mark — swayed 20 to 40 year old Canadians’ whose top concern lately is affordability?

No, say both pollsters, who note that millennials seem mostly ambivalent about Liberal COVID-19 policy such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), possibly due to factors that aren’t always of the federal government’s purview (such as lockdowns imposed by the provinces).

“CERB for sure has been welcomed by that millennial group, they’ve appreciated it. But I also do think that some of the lockdown measures such as the closures of the bars, lounges, and gyms has really also been more negatively perceived by that age group as well,” Enns said.

“So the pandemic has kind of been a bit of a wash when it comes to their impression of the government,” he added.

Justin Trudeau gives a thumbs up to supporters, accompanied by his daughter Ella-Grace, before embarking on his first election campaign visit, in Ottawa, Aug. 15, 2021. PHOTO BY LARS HAGBERG /Reuters

If millennials aren’t voting for Liberals en masse like in 2015, then where is their vote going? In some cases, it has slowly shifted towards the NDP and its increasingly popular leader Jagmeet Singh.

But for the most part, experts agree that it stays home.

Elections Canada data shows that Canadians between 18 and 34 had the lowest turnout amongst all age groups in the 2019 federal election. For example, barely over half (54.2 per cent) of voters under the age of 25, and just over 58 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 34, cast a ballot.

That is roughly 10 to 15 points under the national average of 67 per cent and shows how difficult it can be to mobilize millennial voters if they do not feel particularly compelled by one cause or party. In comparison, Enns says millennials voted “in record numbers” in 2015.

“With millennials, it’s not just who they’re supporting, but are they motivated?” Enns said. “In 2015, Justin Trudeau and the liberals, through a combination of his policies and who he was … created this buzz in this group that not only got their support, but actually got them out of their chair to vote.”

The pandemic has kind of been a bit of a wash when it comes to their impression of the government

But times have changed significantly since 2015, and this election is not gearing up to be anywhere as exciting to youth, the experts say. According to an Abacus poll released last week, millennials (59 per cent) were a whopping 20 per cent less likely to say they would “absolutely vote” compared to Canadians over 40 (79 per cent)

Liberals are not the only party courting millennials though. Singh’s NDP is aggressively pursuing the 20- to 40-year-old vote and pollsters say there are some initial signs of success that could be catalyzed by the current federal election.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, currently have little appeal to Canadians under 40, both pollsters’ data shows.

According to Coletto, millennials’ appreciation of Singh has boomed over the course of the pandemic and now exceeds Trudeau’s, with 46 per cent of them saying they have a positive view of the NDP leader compared to 39 per cent for Trudeau.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh visits the East Village Beer Garden before meeting with the Calgary and District Labour Council on July 17, 2021. 

PHOTO BY BRENDAN MILLER / POSTMEDIA

“Jagmeet Singh’s popularity has improved with this cohort. And as a result, their willingness and openness to considering the NDP has grown, but that hasn’t converted yet into hard support for the New Democrats,” Coletto said.

“If Singh and the New Democrats can engage and mobilize young people, he’s a wild card among the under 40 crowd and could foil the Liberals’ plans for a majority.”

NDP spokesperson Mélanie Richer says the party has noticed that young Canadians are more and more attracted to Singh’s message of “hope and change” — the same message that was so effective in 2015 for Trudeau and in 2008 for American presidential candidate Barack Obama, for example.

But both the NDP and the Liberals recognize that their main challenge will not only be to win over the youth vote, but then get them out to polls and fill out a ballot. The struggle will likely be compounded by the fact the election is occurring in the middle of a pandemic and during the fourth wave driven by the more contagious Delta variant.

So, each party says they’ve set up specific strategies to mobilize millennials, and even Gen Xers who are of voting age, to make sure they cast a ballot.

Instead of waiting until the last two weeks to do your ‘get out the vote’ efforts, we’re starting on day one

For example, Richer says that NDP candidates will be spending significantly less money on physical promotional items like pamphlets or cards or even big offices capable of hosting many people due to the pandemic. Instead, that money will go towards ads on digital platforms or improving their volunteer program.

The NDP will also be pushing young supporters to get out and vote as soon as possible instead of waiting for election day on Sept. 20.

“Instead of waiting until the last two weeks to do your ‘get out the vote’ efforts, we’re starting on day one,” Richer said. “By making sure people show up for advanced voting, people don’t have to wait until the day of, which by that point is going to be square in the middle of a fourth wave.”

The Liberals say a lot of their mobilization strategy will rely on groundwork being done by young Liberal groups and associations, as well as a series of digital communication tools focused on millennials’ favourite tools: cellphones and social media.

One new tool is Greenfly, an app used by various political parties, entertainment companies and sports teams and leagues to create online content on the fly and share it near-instantly with supporters on any number of social media websites.

The party will also be aggressively promoting a new short code telephone number — generally a five-digit phone number that is used by groups to send out mass text messages quickly — that potential supporters can text to interact with the party and receive Liberal alerts (text “forward” to 54222).

“If you looked at the American campaigns, if you saw just about any event with Joe Biden, you would see a short code mentioned everywhere. You would even see him mention it in debates. It’s an important way of people getting involved in politics,” Caley said.

Carbon dioxide can be 'captured from the air with 97% efficiency', study finds

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Mon., August 16, 2021

The researchers analysed carbon-capture technology from Swiss firm Climeworks. (Reuters)

New technologies can capture carbon dioxide directly from the air with up to 97% efficiency, a study has shown.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich investigated different technologies to remove CO2 directly from the air.

The researchers cautioned that such technology would not remove the need to cut carbon emissions, but would instead work alongside carbon reduction to help countries hit their climate goals.

Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a fairly new technology for removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

The research was published in Environmental Science and Technology.

Carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere and then either buried or used in carbon-based fuels.

The researchers analysed five different ways to capture CO2 from the air and their use at eight different locations around the world.

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

To separate CO2 from the atmosphere, air is first passed over a so-called absorbent with the help of fans. This binds CO2 until its capacity to absorb the greenhouse gas is exhausted.

Then, in the second, so-called desorption step, the CO2 is released from the absorbent again – but the technology requires large amounts of heat (and therefore energy).

"The use of this technology only makes sense if these emissions are significantly lower than the amounts of CO2 it helps to store," said Tom Terlouw, who conducts research at PSI's Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis and is first author of the study.

The researchers focused their examination on a system from Swiss company Climeworks.

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

The PSI team analysed the use of the technology at eight locations worldwide: Chile, Greece, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

For each location, they calculated the overall greenhouse gas emissions over the entire life cycle of a plant.

The researchers found a huge variation in efficiency (from 9 to 97 percent) in terms of actual greenhouse-gas removal through the use of DACCS.

"The technologies for CO2 capture are merely complementary to an overall decarbonisation strategy – that is, for the reduction of CO2 emissions – and cannot replace it," said Christian Bauer, a scientist at the Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis and a co-author of the study.

"However, they can be helpful in achieving the goals defined in the Paris Agreement on climate change, because certain emissions, for example from agriculture, cannot be avoided."

The researchers believe that the net-zero emissions target can only be achieved with the help of suitable negative-emissions technologies.

Would you let a robot lawyer defend you?

By Padraig Belton
Business reporter
BBC

AI is increasingly being used by the legal industry

Could your next lawyer be a robot? It sounds far fetched, but artificial intelligence (AI) software systems - computer programs that can update and "think" by themselves - are increasingly being used by the legal community.

Joshua Browder describes his app DoNotPay as "the world's first robot lawyer".

It helps users draft legal letters. You tell its chatbot what your problem is, such as appealing against a parking fine, and it will suggest what it thinks is the best legal language to use.

"People can type in their side of an argument using their own words, and software with a machine learning model matches that with a legally correct way of saying it," he says.

The 24-year-old and his company are based in Silicon Valley in California, but the firm's origins go back to London in 2015, when Mr Browder was 18.

Joshua Browder developed DoNotPay to solve his own need - contesting parking tickets

"As a late teenager in Hendon, north London, I was a horrible driver," he says. "I got a lot of expensive parking tickets - which, since I was still in secondary school, I couldn't afford."

Through lots of research and freedom of information requests Mr Browder says he found the best ways to contest the tickets. "If you know the right things to say, you can save a lot of time and money."

Rather than copy and paste the same document each time, he says it seemed "the perfect job for software". So he created the first version of DoNotPay in a few weeks in 2015, "really just to impress my family".

Since then the app has spread across the UK and US, and it can now help the user write letters dealing with a range of issues; insurance claims, applying for tourist visas, complaint letters to a business or local authority, getting your money back for a holiday you can no longer go on or cancelling gym membership. Mr Browder says the last two uses soared during the pandemic.

DoNotPay now claims to have 150,000 paying subscribers. And while it has its critics, with some saying its legal advice is not accurate enough, last year it won an award from the American Bar Association for increasing legal access.

Mr Browder claims an 80% overall success rate, down to 65% for parking tickets, because "'some people are guilty".

Lawyers using AI is "becoming the norm" says legal software boss Eleanor Weaver

You might think human lawyers would fear AI encroaching on their turf. But some are pleased, as the software can be used to quickly trawl through and sort vast quantities of case documents.

One such lawyer is Sally Hobson, a barrister at London-based law firm The 36 Group, who works on criminal cases. She recently used AI in a complex murder trial. The case involved needing to quickly analyse more than 10,000 documents.

The software did the task four weeks faster than it would have taken humans, saving £50,000 in the process.

Lawyers using AI for assistance is "becoming the norm and no longer a thing that's nice to have", says Eleanor Weaver, chief executive of Luminance, which makes the software Ms Hobson uses.

More than 300 other law firms in 55 countries also use it, working in 80 languages.

Eleanor Weaver says that document-checking software is now a lot better than it used to be

"Historically you had a lot of [document checking] technologies that were no better than keyword searches, like hitting Control-F on your laptop," says Ms Weaver. By contrast, she says that today's sophisticated software can connect associated words and phrases.

AI is, however, not just helping lawyers sort through documentary evidence. It can also now help them prepare and structure their case, and search for any relevant legal precedents.

Laurence Lieberman, who heads London law firm Taylor Wessing's digitising disputes programme, uses such software, which has been developed by an Israeli firm called Litigate.

"You upload your case summary and your pleadings, and it will go in and work out who the key players are," he says. "And then the AI will link them together, and pull together a chronology of the key events and explanation of what happens on what dates."

Some countries, such as Brazil, have a huge backlog of court cases that the use of AI lawyers and judges could help solve

Meanwhile, Bruce Braude, chief technology officer of Deloitte Legal, the legal arm of accountancy giant Deloitte, says that its TAX-I software system can analyse historical court data for similar tax appeal cases.

The firm claims it can correctly predict how appeals will be determined 70% of the time. "It provides a more quantifiable way of what is your likelihood of success, which you can use to determine if you should proceed," adds Mr Braude.

Yet while AI can help write legal letters, or assist human lawyers, will we ever see a time of robot solicitors and barristers, or even robot judges?

"I think, really in reality, we're nowhere near that," says Ms Weaver.

But others, like Prof Richard Susskind, who chairs the Lord Chief Justice of England's advisory group on AI, aren't so sure.

Prof Richard Susskind says that AI systems are increasingly accurate in how they predict the results of court cases

Prof Susskind says in the 1980s he was genuinely horrified by the idea of a computer judge, but that he isn't now.

He points out that ven before coronavirus, "Brazil had a court backlog of more than 100 million court cases, and that there is no chance of human judges and lawyers disposing of a caseload of that size".

So if an AI system can very accurately (say with 95% probability) predict the outcome of court decisions, he says that maybe we might start thinking about treating these predictions as binding determinations, especially in countries that have impossibly large backlogs.