It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
This image of the young volcanic region of Elysium Planitia on Mars [10.3°N, 159.5°E] was taken on 14 April 2021 by the CaSSIS camera on the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)
The two blue parallel trenches in this image, called Cerberus Fossae, were thought to have formed by tectonic processes. They run for almost one thousand km over the volcanic region. In this image, CaSSIS is looking straight down into one of these 2 km-wide fissures.
The floor here is a few hundred meters deep and is filled with coarse-grained sand, likely basaltic in composition, which appears blue in the CaSSIS false-color composite image. The flat volcanic plains nearby are punctured by small impact craters, which expose possibly the same basaltic materials that we see within Cerberus Fossae.
TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet's atmospheric gases, and mapping the planet's surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.Image: Crater trio
More than half a billion years ago, headless sea creatures that looked like leaves, teardrops and coils of rope trawled the primeval seas.
Although these primordial animals looked nothing like us, some of our most important genes may be 555-million-year-old relics from these long-lost creatures, according to a new study.
The study found that Earth's earliest and most primitive animals may have had genes that code for body symmetry, sensory organs and immune systems that are still around today.
Animals of the Ediacaran era were flat, bottom-feeding ocean dwellers that scoured the seafloor. They were truly otherworldly in appearance; some, such as shape-shifting rangeomorphs, looked so much like leaves that scientists debated for decades whether the creatures were in fact animals, Live Science previously reported.
"These animals are super weird, and they don't look like what we expect animals should look like," study lead author Scott Evans, a post-doctoral researcher at Virginia Tech, told Live Science.
Most of these Ediacaran animals would have been simplistic, perhaps one or two steps more advanced than sponges in that they had nerves and a gut. But in their time, they represented a huge evolutionary leap. Animals from this era were the first multicellular animals to exist, making them the distant ancestors of all modern animals.
Their weirdness and lack of distinct characteristics have made it difficult for scientists to determine the creatures' positions on the tree of life. So, for the new study, Evans and his co-authors — Mary Droser, a professor of geology at the University of California, Riverside, and Douglas Erwin, a research biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. — examined fossils from four genera representing the diversity of the more than 40 known Ediacaran species from fossil sites in the Australian Outback.
Their goal was to identify clues about how these primitive animals were related and what species came after them.
The four types of creatures they looked at were: the veiny-looking, oval-shaped Dickinsonia; the teardrop-shaped Kimberella; the completely immobile, pinwheel-shaped Tribrachidium; and Ikaria, a wormlike genus Evans himself helped discover.
These four ambassadors from the Ediacaran era showed that these animals are not as different from modern animals as once believed. Despite lacking heads and legs, the animals still possessed some basic features that persist today. For example, three of the four were symmetrical from left to right and had segmented bodies.
Although it is not possible to directly examine the genetic makeup of these creatures, the presence of developmental characteristics, like symmetry and body segmentation, suggests that many of the most important genes in modern animals — master controllers known as high-level regulatory genes — were present in these ancient animals.
"Developmental biologists have learned that everything with a front and a back, or a left and a right, is using the same genetic elements to establish a front and a back or a left and a right," Evans said. "We can use that fact to say that if these Ediacaran animals have these same characteristics, then they are probably controlled by the same genes." Genetic scaffolding
Regulatory genes tell other genes what to do. So, while a modern animal has genes that encode for eyes, it also has a set of regulatory genes that tell the body where those eyes go. Regulatory genes dictate which body segments become heads and which become feet. Dickinsonia’s symmetrical body with raised ridges extending from the midline suggests that the genetic scaffolding for a complex body was already in place, even if all of those body segments were functionally the same.
This is the same genetic scaffolding found in all animals with symmetrical bodies today.
"The fact that we can say these genes were operating in something that's been extinct for half a billion years is fascinating to me," Evans said in a statement.
The study, which was published Feb. 24 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, doesn't stop with regulatory genes. The researchers predicted that many of the genes responsible for more complex traits, such as nerves and muscles, were likely hidden within the genomes of the Ediacaran animals, too.
Fossil evidence suggests that many of these animals actively foraged for food rather than passively filtering it from the environment. That indirectly suggests that they carried genes that could build rudimentary nervous systems and sensory organs that would enable them to detect and collect food from the seafloor.
And some fossils of Dickinsonia bear scars. This suggests these animals were able to repair their own damaged tissues through the process of programmed cell death — again, all functions that are controlled by genes that are an integral part of an animal's immune system.
Originally published on Live Science.
Tiny animals survive 24,000 years in suspended animation
These waterborne rotifers awoke after being thawed from millennia in Arctic permafrost Rotifers are rugged microscopic organisms that live in water. A “stem” grips the surface to keep the rotifer in place. New data show that when conditions get too cold, they can enter suspended animation. PROYECTO AGUA/WATER PROJECT/FLICKR (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
When conditions get tough, some tiny animals enter suspended animation and wait it out. Some might have to wait a long time for conditions to improve. As in 24,000 years, scientists now report. But once revived, these reanimated animals will resume life as normal.
They’re called rotifers. And if you have ever inspected a drop of pond water under a microscope, you might have spotted some. These tiny, multicelled animals live in water the world over. That includes ponds that dry up now and again, and anywhere it freezes.
The newly studied rotifers are known as bdelloids (DELL-oyds). Shaped a bit like a torpedo, they’re curious animals. All are females, with a pointy end that can grip surfaces to hold themselves in place. A bristled mouth at their other end scoops up algae and other food from the water.
This tiny rotifer is the offspring of one that survived 24,000 years of suspended animation.
LYUBOV SHMAKOVA
If their watery home dries up or freezes, these super-survivors enter a state of suspended animation. They simply wait for liquid water to again become available. Then they resume their activities as if nothing had happened. They will even go back to reproducing. Being all female, they do this by creating clones. It’s a process known as parthenogenesis (Parth-en-oh-GEN-eh-sis).
Stas Malavin is a biologist at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science. That’s in Pushchino, Russia. He was part of a team that wanted to know how long bdelloids could survive freezing. Permafrost soil stays frozen year-round. And some researchers had found roundworms and fruits with seeds that survived tens of thousands of years in Arcticpermafrost. For its new study, Malavin’s team decided to search for other types of life.
They drilled 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) into Siberia’s permafrost and removed a core of the frozen soil. To avoid contamination, they took samples from its center. Slowly, they brought those samples to room temperature, checking them every few days for five weeks. By the end, they had retrieved dozens of live rotifers. Scientists Say: Permafrost
To figure out how long ago the soil samples had frozen, the team used radiocarbon dating. Carbon-14 is radioactive. It eventually decays into carbon-12 at a set rate. The dating procedure compares the amount of carbon-12 and carbon-14 in a sample of carbon-based material. That ratio of C-12 to C-14 will give scientists an idea of a sample’s age. And for the Siberian soil, this pinned it age at 24 millennia.
The discovery shows that “a multicellular animal can be preserved frozen for thousands of years,” Malavin says.
“It is amazing that these researchers not only found rotifers, but [also] many other unicellular and multicellular organisms in this permafrost layer” says Andrew Rosendale. He’s a biologist at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio. “It will be exciting,” he says, “to see what additional creatures are found living in other frozen soil around the world.”
Both Rosendale and Malavin note that knowing how these tiny animals survive might aid people, too. Knowing how to survive suspended animation for so long could be useful for space exploration, says Malavin. Or it could “be applied in medicine to better preserve tissues, organs and embryos.”
There are probably other organisms out there in a similar state of suspension, Rosendale points out. “As climate change continues to thaw permafrost around the globe,” others may begin to awaken, he says. It’s just a matter of time. Scientists thawed out bdelloid rotifers that had been frozen for 24,000 years and then cloned them in a lab.
Dark regions of the genome may drive the evolution of new species
The findings suggest a way to rescue "doomed" animal hybrids.
Ovarioles, or tubes that carry egg cells, in the fruit fly species Drosophila melanogaster.
(Image credit: Daniel Kirilly in the Ting Xie Lab, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, and the 2004 Olympus BioScapes Competition)
Genetic "dark matter" may drive the emergence of new species, new research finds.
These long, repeating stretches of the genome, called satellite DNA, may ultimately prevent incompatible animals from mating by scrambling the chromosomes in their hybrid babies, according to the study. And if animals from different populations can't mate, they will diverge over time, leading to speciation.
Just 1% of the 3 billion letters, or nucleotides, in the human genome make the proteins that determine traits such as eye color and height. Other stretches of DNA may tell the body how many copies of a protein to make, or turn genes on or off in different tissues, among other functions. Yet nearly 10% of the human genome is composed of long, repeating stretches of satellite DNA that, for many years, scientists didn't think did much of anything, said study co-author Madhav Jagannathan, currently an assistant professor at the ETH Zurich Institute of Biochemistry in Switzerland.
"Satellite DNA repeats were very abundant in species and widely observed in eukaryotes," or life-forms with cell nuclei, Jagannathan told Live Science in an email. "Despite this, they were largely dismissed as junk DNA."
However, in a 2018 study, Jagannathan, who was then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his former postdoctoral adviser, biologist Yukiko Yamashita, also at MIT, discovered that some of this DNA served a critical purpose: It organizes DNA within a cell's nucleus. That study found that certain proteins grab DNA molecules and arrange them in densely packed bundles of chromosomes called chromocenters. Satellite DNA, they found, tells these grabby proteins how to bundle and organize chromosomes.
In the newest study, published July 24 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, Jagannathan and Yamashita found another role for satellite DNA: driving speciation. The team was investigating fertility in the fruit-fly species Drosophila melanogaster. When the researchers deleted a gene that codes for a protein called prod, which binds to satellite DNA to form chromocenters, the flies' chromosomes scattered outside the nucleus. Without the ability to correctly organize chromosomes, the flies died.
A 2-hour-old fly embryo, with DNA shown in red, a signaling protein called Bicoid in blue and another protein (Hunchback) shown in green, which play a key role in the differentiation of the head and thorax. New research shows that satellite DNA may play a role in such fruit fly embryos developing normally; flies of different species with incompatible satellite DNA-binding proteins will have cells with misshapen nuclei and chromosomes scattered throughout the cell.
(Image credit: Thomas Gregor/Princeton University/NIGMS)
This was fascinating, Jagannathan said, because the deleted protein is unique to D. melanogaster. That meant that these rapidly evolving satellite DNA sequences must also have rapidly evolving proteins that bind to them.
To test this idea, Jagannathan bred D. melanogaster females with males of a different species, Drosophila simulans. As expected, the hybrids did not live long. When the researchers looked into the flies' cells, they saw misshapen nuclei with DNA scattered throughout the cells, just as they had when they deleted the prod protein in previous experiments.
So why does that mean satellite DNA could drive speciation? The team suspects that, if satellite DNA evolves quickly and two creatures make different satellite-DNA-binding proteins, they won't produce healthy offspring. As chromocenter binding proteins and satellite DNA segments evolve differently in separate populations or species, this incompatibility could arise rather quickly.
To test this hypothesis, they mutated satellite DNA-binding genes that led to the incompatibility in both parents. When they rewrote the flies' genomes to be compatible, they produced healthy hybrids.
Such satellite DNA disagreements could be a big factor in the evolution of new species, Jagannathan suspects. He hopes further research can test their model of hybrid incompatibility with other species. Ultimately, this research could lead to a way for scientists to rescue "doomed" hybrids, or hybrids that don't survive long after birth. This could pave the way for using hybridization as a method for rescuing critically endangered species, such as the Northern White Rhino, of which only two females survive.
Ultimately, the new research confirmed Jagannathan's hunch that satellite DNA served a purpose.
"I thought that there was no way evolution could be so wasteful," Jagannathan said.
Originally published on Live Science.
Viewpoint: ‘The fetus is 1/25th of an inch’ — Texas abortion ban bungles the science on when human life begins, contends biologist and professor
Now that early abortion is essentially banned and criminalized in Texas, with other states soon to debate similar legislation, it’s important to reflect on one of the key issues raised by this new law: When does human life begin? Here is a background primer on human prenatal development. Understanding the biology is more important than ever, because the new Texas law is even more draconian than it appears to be at first blush, if that’s even possible. It bans abortion at 6 weeks, but this cutoff is actually 4 weeks after conception when the fetus is 1/25th of an inch. Counting gestation from the last menstrual period is archaic, perhaps a holdover from the days when most obstetricians were male. And as anyone who has ever suspected she is pregnant knows, that reasoning is absurdly wrong. The “morning-after pill” is not a “two-weeks-later” pill. Nonetheless and unfortunately, much of the media have spread the meaningless 6-week factoid.
Credit: Mark Reinstein/Corbis/ Getty Images
A biologists view of conception and when human life ‘begins’
I’m the author of several college textbooks, on human genetics, human anatomy and physiology, and intro biology. Being a biologist, a textbook author, and a mother, I’ve thought a great deal about the question of when a human life begins. So here are my selections of times at which a biologist might argue a human organism is alive. I’ll save my opinion for the end.
Life is a continuum. Gametes (sperm and oocyte) link generations.
The germline. As oocytes and sperm form, their imprints – epigenetic changes from the parents’ genomes – are lifted.
The fertilized ovum. Of the hundreds of sperm surviving the swim to the oocyte, one jettisons its tail and nuzzles inside the much larger cell, which becomes an ovum. A fertilized ovum = conception.
Pronuclei. The DNA in these packets from each gamete replicate, and then the pronuclei meet and merge, within 12 hours. The intermingling chromosomes at this first mitotic division form a new human genome. Following that first division, some genes from the new genome are accessed to make proteins, but maternal genetic information, in the form of RNA transcripts, still guides development.
Cleavage divisions ensue. The components of an 8-celled embryo (day 3) have not yet committed to becoming part of the embryo “proper” (one with layers) or the supportive membranes. A cell from a cleavage embryo can still develop on its own if teased apart from the whole, yielding identical multiples.
The new genome takes over as maternal transcripts wane (day 5). Cells continue to divide, bending the structure into a hollow ball of cells. Then a smidgeon of cells, the inner cell mass (icm), separates and lodges on the interior surface. It will become the embryo proper, as the hollow ball contorts into the extra-embryonic membranes. End of the first week. The embryo implants in the uterine lining.
Day 16. The gastrula. Tissue layers form, first the ectoderm and endoderm, then the sandwich filling, the mesoderm. Each layer gives rise to specific body parts. Day 14. The primitive streak forms, the first sign of a nervous system and when some nations ban experimenting on human embryos.
Day 18. The heart beats.
Day 28. A strip along the back of the embryo, the notochord, closes. Within it the neural tube forms, which gives rise to the spinal cord as the bulge at the top comes to contain the brain. If the tube doesn’t close completely, a neural tube defect (such as anencephaly or spina bifida) results.
End of week 8. The embryo officially becomes a fetus, all structures present in rudimentary form.
Week 14. “Quickening,” the flutter a woman feels in her abdomen that will progress to squirms and kicks from within.
Week 21. A fetus has a (very slim) chance of becoming a premature baby if delivered. Birth.
Puberty. Sexual maturity is the Darwinian definition of what matters to populations and species, when reproduction becomes possible.
Social milestones. Acceptance into (a) preschool (b) college or (c) medical school; marriage; when grown offspring leave home.
My answer? #14.
The ability of a fetus to survive outside of a woman’s body sets a practical, if fluid, technological limit on defining when a sustainable human life begins.
Having an active genome, tissue layers, a notochord, a beating heart … none of these matter if the organism cannot survive where humans survive, untethered and breathing oxygen.
Technology has taken us to the ends of the prenatal spectrum, yet not provided too much for the middle, other than fetal surgeries for a handful of conditions. We can collect and select gametes, and even do the same for very early embryos, allowing those without specific diseases to continue development. At the other end, the gestational age at which a premature infant can survive hasn’t crept younger by much over the years. So until an artificial uterus becomes a practical reality, technology defines, for me, when a human life begins: at viability outside a woman’s body.
[Note: This article is adapted from a previous piece I posted on my website] Ricki Lewis has a PhD in genetics and is a science writer and author of several human genetics books. She is an adjunct professor for the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College. Follow her at her website or Twitter @rickilewis
This star-studded image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts NGC 6717, which lies more than 20,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. NGC 6717 is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical collection of stars tightly bound together by gravity. Globular clusters contain more stars in their centers than their outer fringes, as this image aptly demonstrates; the sparsely populated edges of NGC 6717 are in stark contrast to the sparkling collection of stars at its center
The center of the image also contains some interlopers from closer to home. These bright foreground stars reside between Earth and the cluster. They are easily spotted by the crisscross diffraction spikes that form when their light interacts with the structures supporting Hubble's secondary mirror.
The constellation Sagittarius is in the same area of the night sky as the center of the Milky Way, which is filled with light-absorbing gas and dust. This absorption of light—which astronomers call "extinction"—makes studying globular clusters near the galactic center challenging. To determine the properties of NGC 6717, astronomers relied on a combination of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Electrolytic hydrogen production powered by renewable energy is seen as an environmentally friendly means to ameliorate global climate and energy problems. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a research team has now introduced a novel and inexpensive material for electrodes that may provide for highly efficient, energy-saving hydrogen production: porous, phosphorized CoNi2S4 yolk-shell nanospheres.
Both half reactions of water electrolysis—hydrogen and oxygen evolution—are unfortunately slow and require a lot of power. Catalytically effective electrodes, particularly those based on precious metals, can accelerate the electrochemical processes and improve their energy efficiency. However, their large-scale use is impeded by high costs, limited abundance, and low stability. Alternatives based on abundant, inexpensive metals usually do not work satisfactorily for both half reactions.
A team led by Shuyan Gao (Henan Normal University, China) and Xiong Wen (David) Lou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) has now developed a novel, inexpensive, multifunctional electrode material based on cobalt (Co) and nickel (Ni) for efficient electrocatalytic hydrogen production. To make the material, nanospheres made of cobalt–nickel–glycerate are subjected to combined hydrothermal sulfidation and gas-phase phosphorization. This forms objects called yolk-shell nanoparticles made of phosphorus-doped cobalt–nickel–sulfide (P-CoNi2S4). These are tiny spheres with a compact core and a porous shell with a space in between—much like an egg whose yolk is surrounded by the egg white and so does not touch the shell.
Phosphorus doping increases the proportion of Ni3+ relative to Ni2+ in the hollow particles and allows for faster charge transfer, causing the electrocatalytic reactions to run faster. The material can be used as either an anode or a cathode, and demonstrates high activity and stability in the production of hydrogen and oxygen in the electrolysis of water.
To reduce the overall voltage of the electrolysis cell, hybrid electrolysis concepts are also being researched. For example, instead of being coupled to the production of oxygen, hydrogen production could be coupled to the oxidation of urea, which requires significantly less energy. Sources of urea could include waste streams from industrial syntheses as well as sanitary sewage. The new nanoparticles are also very useful for this half reaction.
Both water and urea electrolysis require comparatively low cell voltage (1.544 V or 1.402 V, respectively, at 10 mA cm–2 over 100 hours). This makes the new bimetallic yolk-shell particles superior to most known nickel–sulfide- and even precious-metal-based electrocatalysts. They present a promising approach for electrochemical hydrogen production, as well as for the treatment of urea-containing wastewater.Making hydrogen energy with the common nickel
More information:Xue Feng Lu et al, Phosphorized CoNi 2 S 4 Yolk‐Shell Spheres for Highly Efficient Hydrogen Production via Water and Urea Electrolysis,Angewandte Chemie International Edition(2021).DOI: 10.1002/anie.202108563
Massive Attack is working with scientists to reduce live music's carbon footprint
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The U.K. band commissioned a report looking at the environmental impact of touring
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British band Massive Attack commissioned a report by the University of Manchester to measure the environmental impact of the live music industry. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)
6:35Live music has a big carbon footprint. Massive Attack is working with scientists to change that
The live music industry has a heavy carbon footprint.
So when the popular British band Massive Attack reached out to Carly McLachlan about what they could do to reduce the environmental impact of their touring and concerts, the University of Manchester professor was all ears.
McLachlan is the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the university. In 2019, she and a team of researchers were commissioned by Massive Attack to map carbon emissions in the music business and create an open resource for the industry to reduce its environmental impact.
McLachlan spoke with As It Happens host Carol Off about her research and why she hopes it will help bands lower their carbon footprint as they planning tours again. Here is part of their conversation.
Do you really think that rock music stars would be willing to ditch their private jets and take trains?
Yeah. I do, actually.
In our workshop with industry people, they were saying some artists who would really struggle to give up a private jet. But actually, most touring is not done in private jets. It's done on commercial aircraft.
And what we're seeing is there's lots of opportunities to swap that for train travel, as long as you think about these things right from the inception of a tour.
The more you hear artists and people throughout the industry talking about wanting to make a contribution to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, it seems actually pretty reasonable to me that these new practices would be adopted.
Carly McLachlan is a professor of climate and energy policy with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. (Submitted by Carly McLachlan)
This study of yours came about after a phone call from Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack.
I love the idea and I kind of don't want to ruin the romanticism of the idea that Rob just rang me up one day. But actually, someone from his team rang me up, and we had a chat about how we would approach the work.
Then, actually very quickly, we did meet Rob and talk with Rob. And that's occurred throughout the work. We've reported back to him on what we've found and what we plan to do next.
And what are you recommending to music acts, music stars, who are doing these tours?
It's about the artists, but it's [also] about everyone in the sector. All the different elements of it — agents, promoters, venues, tour managers, audiovisual engineers — everybody's got a part to play here. And the key thing is to think about it from the very inception of the tour.
So low carbon is baked in to everything. How much stuff you move around? Can you adopt more plug-and-play approaches? Can venues do that in a more extensive way for you? How are you getting between places?
And then, also, how are you thinking about helping your audience make the lowest carbon travel option the easiest, most obvious, and funnest way to do it?
[Popular bands] have got the power to do it. So use it — and use that influence. Use your network amongst the industry to try and drive change.- Carly McLachlan, climate change researcher
We've seen in other sectors, as well as in music and performance, that virtual performances have taken a much larger role during the pandemic. And so is that a possibility? I mean, people are anxious to get back to the mosh pit, back to the concert venue. They want to be there with all those people because you just get that energy and that vibe. But do you think that there is a place in this new reality for more virtual performances?
I think it's a really interesting question. It's not where we've gone with the research.
What we've been trying to say in this research is live music touring — how do you still do this beautiful thing that we all love? It's been something we've missed so much during COVID, and people are so desperate to get back to it.
But I think it is interesting that people have trialled these things because of COVID. I think that's kind of fun to see where that goes. But it's certainly not our intention to say, you know, everything's going to be like that.
What we would like is the sector to really grasp this challenge, to say: We are going to get ahead of it; we are going to really transition to a much lower carbon way of doing things, very quickly. And so, then that becomes an obvious part of a sustainable future.
And for the things that you can't get the carbon out of, you know, aviation, for example, there isn't an obvious drop in technology. So you would still have some carbon going on. Then, if we say, actually, as a global community, a thing that's really worth the limited carbon we emit is live music — that's a value judgment.
But it's made much easier if the rest of the sector — the things that are easier to decarbonize, like your energy consumption — that that stuff has really been happening at pace.
Is it easier for a band like Massive Attack to do this kind of thing than those up-and-coming acts that are just going from festival to venue to town to bars, and all that?
I think you can see that in the really big artists that have come out and said that they want much lower carbon options. And some people have been critical of that because they're like, well, they've got the power to do that.
But I think, yeah, great. They've got the power to do it. So use it, and use that influence. Use your network amongst the industry to try and drive change.
And that actually helps people coming up. Because if you arrive at the venue, the plug-and-play stuff is there for you, as well. You don't have to fight this battle in 10 years' time when you're the megastar. It will already be sorted out.
We're really sensitive to the idea that there's really different kind of levels of power and influence. And what we are asking in the report is for where people have direct control, and they can do things differently, and they're able to do that, then great, do that. But also use your wider influence.
Written by John McGill. Interview produced by Katie Geleff. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
'MAYBE' TECH
Research project proposes turning CO2 into stone under the sea Geologists know that the Earth's systems naturally turn CO2 into solid carbonates, it's a matter of figuring out how to engineer the process at a large scale.
Author of the article: Derrick Penner Publishing date:Sep 10, 2021 •
Ben Tutolo is a geologist at the University of Calgary. PNG
University researchers want to test the idea that large amounts of carbon dioxide could be captured from the air offshore and injected into basalt aquifers deep beneath the ocean floor where it will solidify, essentially into stone.
A demonstration project won’t be cheap, $30 million to $60 million, but the consortium, which includes the University of Victoria, wants to figure out if this could be a game-changing technology in the race to stall climate change at 1.5ºC of warming.
“This is critically important,” said Kate Moran, project lead for the initiative under the name Solid Carbon, about carbon-capture technology. “By the middle part of the century or earlier, it has been demonstrated by the science community that we need to be removing CO2 from the atmosphere in order to keep the planet habitable.”
This test, planned for 2024, would involve injecting 10,000 tonnes of CO2 into a basalt aquifer within the Cascadia basin, 200 kilometres off the coast of Vancouver Island and under 2,700 metres of water. If it works as well as they hope, however, Moran said the technology could be developed into an industry that sequesters more than the equivalent of all of Canada’s emissions from transportation on an annual basis.
The Cascadia basin’s capacity, however, is much, much greater, she added.
What scientists know is that when CO2 is injected into porous basalt aquifers, the gas reacts with minerals in the rock to form solid, stable carbonates in a process known as basalt carbonation.
“You can look at these rocks, I have one here on my desk from southern Alberta, and it’s clear that basalt is naturally carbonated by the Earth’s systems,” said lead scientist Ben Tutolo, a geologist from the University of Calgary.
Their quest is to engineer ways of doing so faster.
Researchers with Solid Carbon also know that artificially injecting CO2 into basalt will work, because an Icelandic company called Carbfix has already been doing it, but above ground by injecting CO2 dissolved in water into rock.
Most of the world’s basalt is beneath the ocean, Moran said, and Canada has a ready-made lab to test the process in the Cascadia basin, where Oceans Network Canada has a deep-sea observatory that is already continuously monitored.
The test would likely involve ships and equipment already used by the oil and gas industry in extraction, Moran said, with offshore service companies already having expressed interest in supporting the experiment through in-kind contributions.
At production level, Moran said Solid Carbon is developing scenarios that would match direct-air-capture technology — similar to the system being developed by the firm Carbon Engineering in Squamish — powered by renewable energy. Such plants would be based on offshore rigs or drilling ships to capture and store CO2 in a whole new industry, where Canada could be “the know-how hub in the world,” Moran said.
Tutolo estimated that an industry that captures and sequesters about one gigatonne of CO2 annually, which is equivalent to more than all of Canada’s 750 megatonnes of emissions now, is a possibility.
The catch with carbon-capture technologies is cost, said Chris Severson Baker, Alberta director for the energy think-tank the Pembina Institute.
“The problem with these types of things is not that it isn’t technologically feasible, (it’s that) it’s so expensive to do,” Severson Baker said.
Carbon capture is sometimes viewed as a distraction that gets in the way of actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but Severson Baker said scientists acknowledge that emissions reductions alone won’t get countries to the goal of net-zero by 2050.
“I think a couple more summers of fires and floods and people are going to start to say, ‘OK, what can we do to actually make things better on this planet?’ ” Severson Baker said. “But a lot of things are going to have to happen before people are willing to spend that kind of money sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.”
In the meantime, Moran said research still needs to be done now so such technologies can be ready when they’re really needed.
“One can imagine, as we prove this particular concept — and it is needed to keep the planet habitable for humans,” carbon capture could be a “bridge” industry for skilled workers already in the oil and gas sector.
“It’s beautifully suited for that purpose, right?”
‘We’re going after creatives that greenwash fossil fuels’: the group targeting ad agencies Jocelyn Timperley
Jamie Henn, the founder of Fossil Fuel Free Media, on how advertising agencies help legitimise the fossil fuel industry
Oil companies are saying they care about the climate crisis but we need to ask: are you still drilling for oil?
Photograph: Eric Gay/AP
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Sat 11 Sep 2021
Jamie Henn, a co-founder of the climate group 350.org, had for a long time noticed a gap in climate advocacy that many had overlooked: while the fossil fuel industry pours money into ad campaigns, much of the climate movement simply doesn’t have the resources to do that work.
Inspired to change that, Henn launched Fossil Free Media to give public relations and communications support to grassroots groups taking on the fossil fuel industry and campaigning for climate justice.
Fossil Free Media is also trying to change the wider PR and advertising industry through its Clean Creatives campaign, pressuring agencies to break their ties with the fossil fuel industry.
Henn spoke with the Guardian about the power of communications, why we’ve entered an era of true climate greenwashing, and the damage advertising firms can cause.
Jamie Henn, founder of Fossil Fuel Free Media.
Photograph: Courtesy of Jamie Henn Why did you decide to launch the Clean Creatives campaign?
As we were setting up Fossil Free Media to try to push forward our own messaging and priorities on the need to end fossil fuels, we realized that we weren’t going to be effective if at the same time the fossil fuel industry was able to pour tens of millions of dollars behind its own propaganda efforts. So we had to find a way to simultaneously throw a wrench in the gears of big polluters’ propaganda while trying to get out our own messaging. Clean Creatives emerged from that instinct.
It also came just out of a sense of frustration. Every time climate activists launch a campaign, here comes a multimillion-dollar effort to push back: fake websites, front groups or fake studies about how fossil fuel divestment will destroy the economy.
Clean Creatives was our way to try to think about how we can begin to dismantle the fossil fuel industry’s ability to spread disinformation. This is our attempt to go after the wordsmiths and creatives that greenwash the industry.
It’s an effort that really tries to appeal to people within the advertising and PR world to say, look, you probably got into this for reasons of wanting to do creative work or wanting to make the world a better place. But creativity has consequences: if you are making a flashy ad that’s greenwashing a fossil fuel company, it doesn’t matter how creative it is, or how pretty it is, it’s doing real damage.
What are you asking PR and ad agencies to do?
We are asking them to take a pledge to stop working with fossil fuel clients. More than 100 PR and ad agencies have signed.
Many agencies have already pledged not to work with tobacco companies. Fossil fuels kill more people than cigarettes each year, so if you’re going to draw a red line on smoking, you should certainly do the same on pollution.
We also have a pledge for individuals within those agencies to decline future contracts with fossil fuel companies, trade associations or front groups, because we know that a lot of people who work in huge multinational conglomerates would not be able to get their entire agency to switch overnight. We want to build a movement within the industry of individual creatives and freelancers.
Then, finally, we have a pledge for clients. We know that one of the ways to move a big ad agency is to get their top clients, who may care deeply about sustainability and see it as part of their business plan, to really send the signal that they don’t want to work with an agency that is also working with fossil fuels.
I think these just aren’t questions that companies are asking of their PR and ad firms, even if it’s something they ask of their suppliers or other contracts. Have you had any fight back from the fossil fuels industry about the campaign?
Early on the [oil industry lobby group] American Petroleum Institute really pushed back and gave some quotes saying it was outrageous and an attack on their ability to get our message out there, that somehow it’s an infringement on their free speech rights.
The more sophisticated pushback that we’re seeing from companies like BP is: “Hey, wait a second, we’re trying to make ads that highlight the importance of the transition to clean energy. What’s the problem with BP running ads about wind turbines and why climate action is so important?” That’s pushback we get from some of the agencies as well.
But these ads are political propaganda designed explicitly to try to block the type of real action that we need. Oil companies are trying to act as if they’re on top of the problem, they’re dealing with it, they care, so that they can avoid the type of public pressure and ultimately political regulation that would truly force them to change at the pace that we need them to.
The people they need to be working with are the engineers, lawyers and others who are figuring out how to restructure these companies to be part of the clean energy economy. Not PR and ad people who figure out how to make them look good while they’re continuing to pollute the planet.
We are in the era of true climate greenwashing. We’re seeing these companies pretend that they’re part of the solution. And I think it’s so important for the next decade for people to not believe the problem is solved when they hear oil companies saying they care about the climate crisis but instead to ask: are you still drilling for oil? Or, have you developed a new business plan? What are the most effective things that companies can do about the climate crisis?
One is really committing to a clear zero emissions plan, not just net zero. Making sure that they are going to be compliant with the Paris climate agreement and have a plan to transition over the next decade is essential.
But just as important is getting involved in political pressure. Supporting grassroots advocates, where companies can, but also really getting involved in the political process is really important.
We’ve heard time and again from senators, including the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, that they’re not seeing Apple, Google or Facebook put any lobbying muscle behind the fight against climate change, despite all their grandiose statements on climate action.
Specifically for Clean Creatives, people should call up their advertising and PR shop and ask them if they’re working with fossil fuel companies. That doesn’t mean you have to drop them tomorrow, we understand that there are contracts and people have pre-existing relationships. But what we want to do is really spark that conversation.
