SAINT LOUIS TODAY

Editorial: Without changes, kids today face climate disasters unimagined by their elders


An air tanker drops retardant on a wildfire Wednesday in Goleta, Calif. A wildfire raging through Southern California coastal mountains threatened ranches and rural homes and kept a major highway shut down as the fire-scarred state faced a new round of dry winds that raise risk of flames.
(AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)Ringo H.W. Chiu, Associated Press

A sobering recent study in the journal Science predicts today’s children will experience two to seven times as many climate disasters as their grandparents did unless society changes its ways. If that sounds alarmist, consider that scientists have been remarkably prescient about global warming in the past. That’s worth remembering when assessing these dire predictions.

The mechanics of climate change aren’t mysterious: Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trap the sun’s heat, raising global temperatures. Those gases, produced by human activity like the burning of fossil fuels, have filled the atmosphere at unprecedented levels in the past half-century.

The correlation between rising greenhouse-gas levels and rising average global temperatures is unmistakable today. But scientists predicted it well before it was obvious.

“It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century,” predicted a landmark 1981 study, also from the journal Science. “Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage” in the Arctic.

Forty years later, every single one of those predictions has come to pass.

The same 1981 paper predicted that “political and economic forces” make it “unlikely” that society would change its approach to energy “until convincing observations of the global warming are in hand.” From California’s unprecedented wildfires to more frequent and severe hurricanes to the record global temperatures of the past decade, that moment is here.

In the more recent Science piece, entitled “Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes,” researchers analyzed the societal effects of climate change today, then extrapolated the changes expected in the near future if human activity doesn’t change. It provides stark comparisons between what past generations experienced and what awaits today’s children.

A child born this year, the study predicts, will experience an average of twice as many wildfires, two to three times as many droughts, three times as many floods and seven times as many heat waves as a current 60-year-old person has experienced in his or her lifetime.

“It used to be … ‘Yeah we have to limit global warming because of grandchildren,’” Wim Thiery, lead author of the study, told The Washington Post. “This study is making clear that climate change has arrived. It’s everywhere.”

Had the U.S. and other societies heeded the science of a few decades ago, the world would not be facing such a heavy lift today. It’s time to stop listening to the science-deniers and all the others who have consistently gotten it wrong, and start listening to those who have consistently gotten it right. The future of today’s children depends upon it.

UK

Ford to make electric car parts at Halewood plant

IMAGE SOURCE,FORD EUROPE


Ford is to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in its Halewood plant on Merseyside, helping safeguard 500 jobs.


The factory will be Ford's first European plant to produce components for electric cars.


The investment will mean the plant will run for many years longer, said Stuart Rowley, president, Ford of Europe.


There had been speculation about the future of the Halewood factory complex as Ford moves towards electrifying its vehicles.

Up to £230m will be invested in the plant, with an undisclosed portion of that coming from the government's Automotive Transformation Fund.

Ford is not the first manufacturer to receive financial help for electric vehicle production through the fund, set up to encourage investment in electric vehicle manufacturing in the UK.

In July, Nissan said it would expand electric vehicle production at its car plant in Sunderland, with support from the government. And Nissan's partner, Envision AESC, will build an electric battery plant.

Ford's Halewood plant will begin manufacturing electric power units - which replace the engine and transmission in petrol cars - in 2024.

Mr Rowley said the plans were "a huge vote of confidence in [the] workforce".

"Ford has been part of the industrial and social fabric of the UK for many decades," he said, adding that the plant would be a "very important" part of Ford's electrification plans in Europe.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the Ford decision was "further proof that the UK remains one of the best locations in the world for high-quality automotive manufacturing".


"In this highly competitive, global race to secure electric vehicle manufacturing, our priority is to ensure the UK reaps the benefits," he added.

Image caption,Ford's Halewood plant will manufacture electric power units

Kevin Pearson of the Unite union said the Ford investment "recognises the experience, commitment and competitiveness of our world class workforce and is a great source of pride for all of us working at Halewood Transmission Plant and for the wider community".

The announcement suggested the facility would be an important part of electric vehicle manufacturing in the UK, Prof David Bailey of Birmingham Business School, said.

He said that was "especially great news" because there had been "a lot of speculation about the plant", including that Ford might move parts manufacturing and car assembly abroad.

Had Halewood closed, it would have had a knock-on effect on other parts of the UK car industry and the local economy, he said.

Prof Bailey said that the UK's exit from the EU had been a "huge concern" initially, before the tariff-free trade deal was agreed between the EU and the UK.

However, Ford said that it was not currently facing the kind of supply chain difficulties affecting some other UK businesses. Additional post-Brexit paperwork at ports, which has contributed to bottlenecks for some UK-based firms, has not been much of an obstacle for Ford as it has its own landing facilities at Dagenham, the firm said.

Ford is concerned about any possible fallout from UK and EU negotiations over the Northern Ireland Protocol, a spokesperson said.

The global car giant also recently announced a $1bn (£730m) investment in its vehicle assembly facility in Cologne, Germany, and an expansion of electric vehicle production in Turkey and Romania.

 

Quantum phase transition detected on a global scale deep inside the Earth

by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science

Cold, subducting oceanic plates are seen as fast velocity regions in (a) and (b), and warm

 rising mantle rock is seen as slow velocity regions in (c). Plates and plumes produce a 

coherent tomographic signal in S-wave models, but the signal partially disappears in 

P-wave models. Credit: Columbia Engineering

The interior of the Earth is a mystery, especially at greater depths (> 660 km). Researchers only have seismic tomographic images of this region and, to interpret them, they need to calculate seismic (acoustic) velocities in minerals at high pressures and temperatures. With those calculations, they can create 3D velocity maps and figure out the mineralogy and temperature of the observed regions. When a phase transition occurs in a mineral, such as a crystal structure change under pressure, scientists observe a velocity change, usually a sharp seismic velocity discontinuity.

In 2003, scientists observed in a lab a novel type of phase change in minerals—a spin change in iron in ferropericlase, the second most abundant component of the Earth's lower mantle. A spin change, or spin crossover, can happen in minerals like ferropericlase under an external stimulus, such as pressure or temperature. Over the next few years, experimental and theoretical groups confirmed this phase change in both ferropericlase and bridgmanite, the most abundant phase of the lower mantle. But no one was quite sure why or where this was happening.

In 2006, Columbia Engineering Professor Renata Wentzcovitch published her first paper on ferropericlase, providing a theory for the spin crossover in this mineral. Her theory suggested it happened across a thousand kilometers in the lower mantle. Since then, Wentzcovitch, who is a professor in the applied physics and applied mathematics department, earth and environmental sciences, and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, has published 13 papers with her group on this topic, investigating velocities in every possible situation of the spin crossover in ferropericlase and bridgmanite, and predicting properties of these minerals throughout this crossover. In 2014, Wenzcovitch, whose research focuses on computational quantum mechanical studies of materials at extreme conditions, in particular planetary materials predicted how this spin change phenomenon could be detected in seismic tomographic images, but seismologists still could not see it.

Working with a multidisciplinary team from Columbia Engineering, the University of Oslo, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Intel Co., Wenzcovitch's latest paper details how they have now identified the ferropericlase spin crossover signal, a quantum phase transition deep within the Earth's lower mantle. This was achieved by looking at specific regions in the Earth's mantle where ferropericlase is expected to be abundant. The study was published October 8, 2021, in Nature Communications.

Illustration to accompany Nature Communications paper, “Seismological expression of the 

iron spin crossover in ferropericlase in the Earth’s lower mantle.”. Credit: Nicoletta Barolini/Columbia Engineering

"This exciting finding, which confirms my earlier predictions, illustrates the importance of materials physicists and geophysicists working together to learn more about what's going on deep within the Earth," said Wentzcovitch.

Spin transition is commonly used in materials like those used for magnetic recording. If you stretch or compress just a few nanometer-thick layers of a magnetic material, you can change the layer's magnetic properties and improve the medium recording properties. Wentzcovitch's new study shows that the same phenomenon happens across thousands of kilometers in the Earth's interior, taking this from the nano- to the macro-scale.

"Moreover, geodynamic simulations have shown that the spin crossover invigorates convection in the Earth's mantle and tectonic plate motion. So we think that this quantum phenomenon also increases the frequency of tectonic events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions," Wentzcovitch notes.

There are still many regions of the mantle researchers do not understand and spin state change is critical to understanding velocities, phase stabilities, etc. Wentzcovitch is continuing to interpret seismic tomographic maps using seismic velocities predicted by ab initio calculations based on density functional theory. She is also developing and applying more accurate materials simulation techniques to predicting seismic velocities and transport properties, particularly in regions rich in iron, molten, or at temperatures close to melting.

"What's especially exciting is that our materials simulation methods are applicable to strongly correlated materials—multiferroic, ferroelectrics, and materials at high temperatures in general," Wentzcovitch says. "We'll be able to improve our analyses of 3D tomographic images of the Earth and learn more about how the crushing pressures of the Earth's interior are indirectly affecting our lives above, on the Earth's surface."Constraining the composition of Earth's interior with mineral elasticity

More information: Grace E. Shephard et al, Seismological expression of the iron spin crossover in ferropericlase in the Earth's lower mantle, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26115-z

Journal information: Nature Communications 

Provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science 

3 reasons China in the 2020s could start slowing dramatically like Japan in the 1990s

Harry Robertson and Andy Kiersz
Oct 16, 2021,

China's bubbly property sector is in trouble. Jade Gao/Getty Images

Japan was the prime threat to the US's economic dominance in the 1980s, but then things went wrong.

Now, economists see worrying similarities between China in the 2020s and Japan in the 1990s.

China faces high levels of debt, an ageing population, a hostile US, and even a possible financial crisis.

Name the Asian country. It has a rapidly expanding economy that has grown wealthy through exports. It has high levels of investment and debt, and a ballooning property market. Its growing economic power threatens to overtake that of the US.

It could be China in the 2020s, but that was exactly how Japan was seen in the 1980s, when the country was hailed as an economic miracle and the principal threat to US primacy. Its growth of 10% per year on average from the 1960s onward helped it become the world's second-biggest economy by the 1980s, when its corporate icons like Toyota and Sony threatened to replace American counterparts like Ford and General Electric.

Then it all went wrong when its massive asset bubble popped. What followed was an end to the miracle and a full-blown financial crisis that rocked Japan in the early 1990s, leading to a "lost decade" where the economy flatlined. "Japanification" has since become a shorthand for the brutal mix of stagnation and deflation that has lasted to the present day.

These days, the similarities between China and Japan are starting to worry economists. Like Japan in the '90s, China is dealing with high levels of debt, an ageing population, a hostile US, and even the potential for a financial crisis. Recently, its own massive real-estate bubble is showing signs of bursting.

"The assumption that China's going to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy, I just don't think that's ever going to happen," Mike Riddell, a global fixed income portfolio manager at Allianz, told Insider.

A slowdown in the Chinese economy is the last thing the world needs in the 2020s, given that the country has accounted for around 30% of global growth in recent years, and could even lead to the "Japanification" of the world economy. Economists are worrying about China's own lost decade for four reasons.

Big debt problems and fears of a bubble bursting

Japan's real-estate bubble got so big in the 1980s that property prices in the country still haven't recovered from its popping. The chart below shows just how much corporate debt in Japan skyrocketed during the 1980s and early 1990s:

Fast forward to today, and China has been gorging on debt for years, powering rapid growth, particularly in the real-estate sector, which accounts for around 30% of the country's GDP.

The problem is that one of the biggest real-estate developers in China, Evergrande, is poised to default on $300 billion of debt. That's the most debt of any company in the world, worth around 2% of China's GDP. And while Evergrande might be the most indebted Chinese real-estate firm, it's not the only one.

Evergrande's looming implosion comes against a backdrop of China's government clamping down on debt and trying to "rebalance" the economy towards consumption-driven growth.

Economists think China will slow as it shifts its economic model. The IMF expects the economy to be expanding at around 5% a year by 2025, compared to 10% a year in 2010. The Atlantic Council thinks growth could be as low as 3% a year by the middle of the decade. That looks like the beginning of a Japan in the '90s-style slowdown, but that's not all.

There are already "tremendous levels of panic and stress" in certain sectors of the Chinese financial system, Kevin Lai, Asia chief economist at Daiwa Capital Markets, told Insider. Bonds in the property sector have crashed, making it more difficult for some of China's biggest companies to borrow.

Wall Street analysts hope Beijing can keep a lid on any contagion, but Lai said the situation is far from predictable: "I think the market is way behind the reality … there will be many surprises."

A graying population

One of the major problems Japan's economy ran into in the 1990s was a rapidly ageing population. Simply put, a graying population means there are fewer workers, making economic growth harder. Rising pension costs and welfare spending also add to the pressure on public spending.

China's working age population peaked in 2015, after its one-child policy held down the national birthrate. Its huge population has allowed the economy to suck workers into the cities, powering its industrial boom. But China was increasingly urbanized at the turn of the 2020s and its supply of workers has slowed sharply.

China's demographic path is likely to resemble Japan's in the coming decades:

According to Allianz's Riddell, China's demographic "bomb has gone off." Riddell says the demographic problems also feed into worries about debts, with high levels of investment looking less appropriate for a slowing and ageing economy.

Tensions with the US

Japan's surge up the economic league tables startled the US establishment in the 1980s. Academics produced books with titles like "Japan As Number One" and "The Emerging Japanese Superstate." The Atlantic wrote about "containing Japan."

The US played tough with Japan then and it's playing even tougher with China now. President Donald Trump launched a full-blown trade war against the country in 2018, slapping tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods. President Joe Biden's administration is sticking to Trump's path.

Economists worry about a "decoupling" between the world's two biggest economies, ending the relationship that has been at the centre of global growth for a decade.

In a warning to the rest of the world, Japan may have just been ahead of the curve. A developing economy like Japan's before the 1980s and China's before the 2020s can only industrialize once, after which they'll have a lot of debt, a graying workforce, and low growth.

Once that happens, we'll need a better term than "Japanification" to describe it.

NORTH VANCOUVER 

$1B contract cancelled

Company set to build wastewater treatment plant decries contract cancellation

The Canadian Press - Oct 17, 2021  | Story: 348884

Photo: Paul McGrath, North Shore News

A company formerly contracted to build a wastewater treatment plant in North Vancouver, B.C., calls the deal's cancellation "regrettable, unnecessary," and against the community's interests.

The Metro Vancouver Regional District announced Friday that it had terminated its contract with Acciona when the plant's price tag rose from $500 million to $1 billion.

But Acciona says it's done about $100 million in contracted work on the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant, for which it says it has yet to be paid.

The company says in a written statement that the project has been "fraught with unforeseen challenges" including "flaws in the design provided by Metro Vancouver as part of the original bid process."

The company says its officials have been meeting with regional authorities over the past six months to negotiate a way forward, and it is "regrettable that Metro Vancouver has chosen to take this unnecessary and counterproductive course of action."

On Friday, the chief administrative officer for the regional district said the project was 36 per cent complete when by Acciona's timeline it should be at 55 per cent.

It was intended to be completed by 2020.

Jerry Dobrovolny said it's unusual to cut ties with a contractor, but the decision was made to shield taxpayers from further costs.

U of T astronomer's research suggests 'magnetic tunnel' surrounds our solar system



Jennifer West, a researcher at U of T's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, says two magnetic structures seen on opposite sides of the sky form what looks like a tunnel around the solar system (photo courtesy of Jennifer West)

A University of Toronto astronomer’s research suggests the solar system is surrounded by a magnetic tunnel that can be seen in radio waves.

Jennifer West, a research associate at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, is making a scientific case that two bright structures seen on opposite sides of the sky – previously considered to be separate – are actually connected and are made of rope-like filaments. The connection forms what looks like a tunnel around our solar system.

The data results of West’s research have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

“If we were to look up in the sky,” says West, “we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked – that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light.”

Called “the North Polar Spur” and “the Fan Region,” astronomers have known about these two structures for decades, West says. But most scientific explanations have focused on them individually. West and her colleagues, by contrast, believe they are the first astronomers to connect them as a unit.

Made up of charged particles and a magnetic field, the structures are shaped like long ropes, and are located about 350 light-years away from us – and are about 1,000 light-years long.

“That’s the equivalent distance of travelling between Toronto and Vancouver two trillion times,” West says.


Left: A curving tunnel, with lines formed by the tunnel lights and road lane markers, forms a similar geometry to the proposed model of the North Polar Spur and Fan Region (photo by Pixabay/ illustration by Jennifer West). Right: The sky as it would appear in radio polarized waves (image by Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory/Villa Elisa telescope/ESA/Planck Collaboration/Stellarium/Jennifer West)

West has been thinking about these features on and off for 15 years – ever since she first saw a map of the radio sky. More recently, she built a computer model that calculated what the radio sky would look like from Earth as she varied the shape and location of the long ropes. The model allowed West to “build” the structure around us, and showed her what the sky would look like through our telescopes. It was this new perspective that helped her to match the model to the data.

“A few years ago, one of our co-authors, Tom Landecker, told me about a paper from 1965 – from the early days of radio astronomy,” West says. “Based on the crude data available at this time, the authors [Mathewson and Milne], speculated that these polarized radio signals could arise from our view of the Local Arm of the galaxy, from inside it.

“That paper inspired me to develop this idea and tie my model to the vastly better data that our telescopes give us today.”



Illustrated map of Milky Way Galaxy shown with the position and size of proposed filaments. Inset shows a more detailed view of the Local environments, and the position of Local Bubble and various nearby dust clouds (image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt/SSC/Caltech with annotations by Jennifer West)

West uses the Earth’s map as an example. The North pole is on the top and the equator is through the middle – unless you re-draw the map from a different perspective. The same is true for the map of our galaxy. “Most astronomers look at a map with the North pole of the galaxy up and the galactic centre in the middle,” West explains. “An important part that inspired this idea was to remake that map with a different point in the middle.”

“This is extremely clever work,” says Bryan Gaensler, a professor at the Dunlap Institute and an author of the publication. “When Jennifer first pitched this to me, I thought it was too ‘out-there’ to be a possible explanation. But she was ultimately able to convince me. Now, I’m excited to see how the rest of the astronomy community reacts.”

An expert in magnetism in galaxies and the interstellar medium, West looks forward to the more possible discoveries connected to this research.

“Magnetic fields don’t exist in isolation,” she says. “They all must to connect to each other. So, a next step is to better understand how this local magnetic field connects both to the larger-scale galactic magnetic field, and also to the smaller scale magnetic fields of our sun and Earth.”

In the meantime, West agrees that the new “tunnel” model not only brings new insight to the science community, but also a ground-breaking concept for the rest of us.

“I think it’s just awesome to imagine that these structures are everywhere whenever we look up into the night sky.”

Knife found beneath Parliament to be returned to Algonquin nations in historic move

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The stone knife will be displayed in the revamped Centre

 Block

Marie Woolf · The Canadian Press · Posted: Oct 17, 2021

This stone knife, estimated to be 4,000 years old, is thought to have been used by the Algonquin people. It was discovered by archeologists on Parliament Hill during the renovation of Centre Block in Ottawa. It is to be returned to the stewardship of local First Nations and put on display when the renovation is complete. (The Canadian Press)

An ancient Indigenous knife unearthed during the renovation of Centre Block will be the first artifact found on Parliament Hill to be returned to the stewardship of the Algonquin people who live in the Ottawa region.

Archeologists say the return of the stone knife, which is estimated to be 4,000 years old, is a historic move that officially recognizes that Indigenous people inhabited the land — considered unceded territory — that is now the site of Parliament Hill.

The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin First Nation located about 130 kilometres north of Gatineau, Que., and the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, about 150 kilometres west of Ottawa, are to share ownership of the artifact.

It will be displayed on Parliament Hill when the refurbishment of Centre Block finishes and the building reopens, which is not expected to happen until at least 2030.

Until then, it will be shown in Indigenous communities, including schools, according to Doug Odjick, a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg council.

The ground in front of Parliament Hill's Centre Block is excavated for the building of the new welcome centre in June. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

The knife, shaped from Onondaga chert quarried in Ontario or New York state thousands of years ago, is not the first Indigenous artifact found in the parliamentary precinct. Shards of pottery and a shell bead were found on Parliament Hill in the 1990s.

A historic first for Ottawa

However, Ian Badgley, manager of the archeology program at the National Capital Commission, said the knife's discovery prompted a new approach by the federal government to returning First Nations artifacts.

"It's the first time that the government of Canada has accepted a pre-contact artifact as indicating use of Parliament Hill by the Indigenous population," said Badgley, who is also archeological consultant to the two First Nations who will take stewardship of the knife.

Scaffolding lines the Hall of Honour during a media tour of Centre Block renovations on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa in June. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

"It's one artifact, but it is really remarkable how it has spawned an interest in the Canadian government in working with the Anishinaabe Algonquins."

Jeremy Link, a spokesperson at Public Services and Procurement Canada, said: "Discussions are ongoing on how to transfer joint ownership of this artifact to the communities."

• Anand says Senate's plans for Centre Block renovations are too costly

The knife's discovery by archeologists working on the revamp of Centre Block coincided with the capital's first archeological field school, aimed at training First Nations archeologists. The field school, which this year excavated the site of an Algonquin camp in Ottawa, will now be an annual event near the capital.

There are plans to establish field schools across Canada to train First Nations archeologists and give Indigenous people greater control over their own excavations.

Knife to be displayed in Parliament

For many thousands of years, the Ottawa Valley was a trading hub for First Nations from across North America because of its location at the confluence of rivers, which made travel by canoe easier. This has made the capital region a rich seam for archeologists.

They have dug up pre-contact artifacts originating from across North America, including shell beads and alligator teeth, as well as knives and other tools made from stone found far from Ottawa. These were likely passed on as trade goods by different Indigenous communities over many seasons.

"The things that have been found in and around Ottawa have come from places as far as New York, to Hudson Bay to the West Coast as far as California," said Odjick, who is responsible for the education, culture and language portfolio on the band council.

• Commons board recommending $733M plan to build Parliament Hill visitors centre

• Parliament Hill is getting the reno of the century — and some MPs say they're being kept in the dark

"The knife that was found on Parliament Hill still has a point. It's about two-and-a-half inches long and it kind of looks like a spearhead. It definitely had a handle. It was from the early Woodland to late Archaic period, 2,500 to 4,000 years old."

The two First Nations who will share the knife are in talks with the federal government about "showing it off," Odjick said. "We would like it to be at the main entrance of Parliament."

The refurbished Centre Block is to have more Indigenous elements, including carvings by Indigenous people who are being recruited to work there, according to Public Services and Procurement Canada, which is in charge of the renewal project.

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Beyond the
Frankfurt Book Fair

Poets of the apocalypse: Catherine Hernandez & Waubgeshig Rice's new works
Passer au contenu


What’s it like to release a post-apocalyptic book in the middle of a global pandemic?

Toronto-based writer Catherine Hernandez, whose 2020 novel Crosshairs describes a climate-related societal collapse followed by the rise of a fascist regime, can tell you that it makes it hard to ask fellow authors for feedback.

“It was, like, ‘Hi, I know that you’re fearing for your life, but can you read my book about fearing for your life and then write something nice about it,” says Hernandez, laughing but then quickly turning serious. “The book felt like a warning. I do think that writing is a form of mediumship, and what my ancestors wanted to say to the world was: this is a warning, but it’s also a model for hope.”

Though of course Hernandez had no way of knowing about the havoc that covid-19 was about to wreak on the world, she did foresee some of the forms of social unrest that might follow a modern-day disaster, especially those centred around dwindling resources. Journalist and author Waubgeshig Rice, whose 2018 dystopia Moon of the Crusted Snow received a renewed wave of attention as the first coronavirus lockdowns swept the globe, foresaw similar divisions but from a different perspective. Moon of the Crusted Snow tells the story of a remote northern Anishnaabe community’s struggle for survival after a widespread and seemingly permanent power outage. The story was born out of Rice’s experience of the 2003 blackout, and his desire to explore how Indigenous peoples might react in the face of a similar upheaval.

“Indigenous nations everywhere have already survived the ends of their worlds,” says Rice. “I knew the Anishnaabe closeness to land and more broadly the Indigenous perspective of land, and how it supports and sustains us in the face of catastrophe. I wanted to put that sort of lens on surviving something like that.”

Hope & survival within the apocalypse

But while both Crosshairs and Moon of the Crusted Snow contain some pretty grim scenes - they are, after all, books about apocalypses - they’re also ultimately hopeful books. One of the things Hernandez set out to do in her work was provide a “blueprint for hope.” Though the dystopian world she brings to life is characterized by anyone who is not white, able-bodied and cis being driven into hiding by an oppressive regime, she also writes about privileged characters who are willing to join the fight against the fascists. Specifically, she imagines “allies who really want to learn allyship [...] on their own dime, on their own time, and in their own bodies, so that QTBIPOC people can do whatever the heck they want to do with their lives while they figure themselves out. It felt hopeful to give ourselves rest while allies learn allyship.”

For Rice, it was important that narrative showed the possibility of survival and renewal after a world-changing disaster, especially through the cohesion of a community. Part of his inspiration came from his early experiences with classic dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World.

“I liked their ability to comment on the ills of modern society and show the reader how bad things can get if we don’t address those things,” says Rice. “But as years went on and I became more familiar with literature by people of colour, and I started to think about my own experiences as someone from the rez, I got to thinking about how all these books that we hold up in this so-called canon are written by white dudes, and they have this grim outlook on the future. I think it’s because [these authors] knew generally what colonizing white people are responsible for around the world, so there is that inherent knowledge of destroying things. I wanted to show how we see the world, and with that experience of survival already, how we can frame things differently. We’ve always looked to the future.”

Hernandez, a queer woman of colour, similarly relished the chance to write a dystopia that doesn’t focus on white heteronormative experiences. For her, that felt like another facet of her activism.

Says Hernandez, “Someone did a post when Crosshairs was released and said, ‘isn’t science fiction a form of organizing?’ That’s what feels so empowering about writing this kind of work, that I get to imagine into being a world that feels good to me, that centres our stories.”

Storytelling for a purpose, and a moment in time

Both authors also believe in the power of art to change perspectives, and even lives. Rice remembers reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shortly after arriving in Toronto for his undergraduate degree. Up until then, Rice had lived in the Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, and his knowledge of the Black experience in North America was limited. But while he learned a lot from Ellison’s book, he also saw the parallels between structural anti-Black racism and his experiences as an Indigenous person in a colonial society. He felt a camaraderie with the book’s protagonist right away, and he hopes to create similar feelings of empathy for Indigenous people with his own work.

“I want to humanize Indigenous people in whatever way I can,” says Rice. “I just want people to remember that there are beautiful, vibrant, complex Indigenous people living everywhere, people with the same hopes and dreams as anyone else. In that sense, fiction helps me get closer to the truth than journalism ever did.”

For Hernandez, it’s her Filipino heritage that provides one of her favourite examples of how art can have a real-time impact on the world. She describes a traditional practice in villages in the Philippines where local conflicts would be resolved by spoken word artists. Each would write a poem arguing one side of the issue, and then the community would decide what the outcome was based on the quality of the poems.

“I tell people that’s why I won’t get into governance,” says Hernandez. “Because I’m already the poet.”

As Canada and the rest of the world continue to try to figure out how to live through this pandemic, we’re fortunate to have storytellers like Rice and Hernandez to fill a similar role to those poets. Their blueprints (as Hernandez would say) for how to survive are beyond timely, even if that timing was accidental.

Catherine Hernandez & Waubgeshig Rice are both members of the official literary delegation at the Frankfurt Book Fair from October 20th to 24th, 2021 where Canada is the Guest of Honour. Learn more about them and other Canadian authors and illustrators.

To get the books, click here:
Catherine Hernandez : Original language
Waubgeshig Rice : Original language 

Scientists propose new ‘salty,’ non-toxic gold extraction process

Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | October 16, 2021 |

Gold. (Image by Robert von Bonsdorff, courtesy of Aalto University).

Researchers at Finland’s Aalto University published a paper in the journal Chemical Engineering where they describe a new scalable, non-toxic alternative to cyanide for gold extraction from ore.


The new process is based on the use of chloride, one of two elements in table salt, for the leaching and recovery of the yellow metal.

“With our process, the amount of gold we’ve been able to recover using chloride is as high as 84%,” Ivan Korolev, lead author of the study, said in a media statement. “In comparison, using the standard cyanide process with the same ore yielded only 64% in our control experiment.”

The novel approach is called electrodeposition-redox replacement (EDRR) and it combines electrolysis, which uses electric currents to reduce gold or other metals present in the leaching solution, and cementation, which adds particles of other metals to the solution to react with the gold.

THE NEW PROCESS IS BASED ON THE USE OF CHLORIDE, ONE OF TWO ELEMENTS IN TABLE SALT, FOR THE LEACHING AND RECOVERY OF THE YELLOW METAL

Using copper to test it out, Korolev and his colleagues applied short pulses of electricity to create thin layers of metal on the electrode and cause a reaction that encourages gold to replace the copper layer by layer.

“The method has low energy consumption and doesn’t require the addition of any other elements,” the researcher said.

The lab work was conducted in collaboration with Finnish mining-technology giant Metso Outotec, which invited the scientists to work at its research center in western Finland.

“Collaborating with Metso Outotec allowed us to develop the method in a way that’s much closer to real-world implementation,” Korolev said. “We started with about 9% recovery, but it then grew to 25%, and soon we were hitting 70% — sometimes we even achieved close to 95%.”

According to the doctoral candidate, it is the first time that an experiment like this is conducted in a large-scale setting. Given the positive results, he expects to see mining companies interested in the technology and willing to test with their own ore on site.

“The extraction methods of the past have always left some valuable metals behind. Now, as demand for metals grows all the time, even these small amounts are important,” he said. “I think we can still increase the yield with our EDRR technology. Perhaps we cannot reach 100%, but I believe we can hit the 90% mark or more.”

Revisiting the Out of Africa Theory: New Narrative From Genetic Analysis and AI

By ESTONIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL OCTOBER 16, 2021

West African migrations. Credit: The graph is made by Saoni Banerji, and the map was downloaded from Wikimedia

Researchers from Estonia and Italy developed an innovative method by combining neural networks and statistics. Using this newly developed method, they refined the “Out of Africa” scenario. The researchers claimed that the African dynamics around the time of the Out of Africa expansion are more complex than previously thought.

Archaeologists and geneticists agree that all modern humans originated somewhere in Africa around 300 thousand years ago. The population movement that colonized the rest of the globe occurred approximately 60-70 thousand years ago. Both Y-chromosomal data (which follows patrilineal lineage) and the Mitochondrial genome (which follows the matrilineal line) agree on this. However, the exact relationship between the people who left Africa and the human populations currently inhabiting the continent is not fully understood.

A simplistic model would see the first phase of within-Africa population subdivisions, followed by a separation between the ancestors of modern Eurasians and the ancestors of modern East or North-East Africans. New research on this topic, recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, argues that the Out of Africa expansion was preceded by a significant population turnover from East to West Africa. This event likely homogenized West and East Africans. This turnover, which may account for up to 90% of the contemporary West African gene pool, increased the affinity between West Africans and Eurasians. This event better explains the lower bound (~60 thousand years ago) inferred from genetic data for the separation time between Africans and non-Africans.

“A similar hypothesis was proposed before for the Y chromosome. But this is the first time we demonstrated it for autosomal DNA,” said Francesco Montinaro, a Lead author in this study from the University of Bari. Autosomal DNA comes from both parents, instead of Y-chromosome or Mitochondria, which comes only from one of our parents.

“It is fascinating to see how our understanding of the human past becomes ever more complex and detailed. Our new model can give us a clue why West Africa shows such a young separation time from the out of Africa populations,” said Vasili Pankratov, a lead co-author from the University of Tartu.

Reference: “Revisiting the out of Africa event with a deep-learning approach” by Francesco Montinaro, Vasili Pankratov, Burak Yelmen, Luca Pagani and Mayukh Mondal, 8 October 2021, American Journal of Human Genetics.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2021.09.006