EU Parliament backs tough new rules to rein in U.S. tech giants
By Foo Yun Chee 1 day ago

The logos of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU lawmakers voted on Wednesday to beef up draft rules to rein in U.S. tech giants, including extending the scope to their retailing activities and to their business users outside Europe, as part of their common position in forthcoming talks with EU countries.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA), unveiled by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager last December, sets out a list of dos and don'ts for U.S. tech giants designated as online gatekeepers with fines up to 10% of global turnover for violations, a global first.

Vestager's proposal targets Amazon, Apple, Alphabet unit Google and Facebook but the European Parliament wants to extend it to travel website booking.com, China's Alibaba and online retailer Zalando.

EU lawmakers also want the rules to apply to web browsers, virtual assistants and connected TV, adding to Vestager's list of online intermediation services, social networks, search engines, operating systems, online advertising services, cloud computing and video-sharing services.

The lawmakers' proposal would also make it easier for users to switch default settings on their services and products to rivals.

They want the Commission to do an annual report on gatekeepers, with the possibility for lawmakers to propose investigations into new services and new products.

Vestager cheered the vote.

"It sends a clear message that in our EU democracy it is not for BigTech to set the rules of the game, it is for legislators," she said in a tweet.

Lawmakers will now have to reconcile their proposal with that of EU countries and the Commission next year before the draft rules can become law.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Gregorio)

Mining the future: Canada's high hopes to become a global critical mineral powerhouse

OTTAWA — Getting the world to net-zero emissions by 2050 will require the production of critical minerals and metals to grow sixfold over the next 30 years, the International Energy Agency declared in a report earlier this year — and it found the current pace of growth isn't even close.

 

As electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels explode in popularity, so too does demand for the minerals that make them go. Some are familiar, like nickel, lithium and cobalt, and others are known only to those who memorized the periodic table in high school, like tellurium, bismuth and molybdenum.

Canada, having promised that all the electricity it generates and the new cars that are sold in the country will be zero-emission by 2035, is among the countries driving up demand.

As one of the world's biggest producers of raw metals and minerals, Canada also wants to be filling that demand as a key link in the supply chain for rechargeable batteries.

But even as the federal government pushes a new critical minerals strategy and forges partnerships with allies to develop supply chains that seek to tamp down China's dominance in the field, Canada's position on the world stage is already slipping.

"We're starting to do what we need to do but there's a lot of missing pieces," said Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada.

A year ago, BloombergNEF listed Canada as the fourth most important player in the world's lithium-ion battery supply chain, based on an analysis of raw material production, manufacturing and processing, environmental protections, regulatory regimes and domestic demand.

This fall, the second iteration of that report saw Canada drop to fifth, losing ground in every category.

"We've been viewed sort of as a global leader in the past," said Gratton. "We've lost ground, though."

Canada's ranking slipped because of raw materials and environmental stewardship — the latter a key point in all the sales pitches Canada makes on the world stage.

The problem is, meeting those higher standards comes at a cost, said Gratton. Canada also has to convince buyers that the premium is worth it.

"If you care about climate, and you care about the environment, and if you care about how people are treated, including Indigenous people, then buying from Canada is the right thing to do."

China is the biggest player in the battery supply chain field, both in raw materials and value-added production. Many of the alliances Canada is part of with the United States and Europe are designed in large part to whittle away at China's dominance.

Canada, second in the world in nickel production in 2008, ranked sixth in 2020. It is also sixth for cobalt, and 10th for graphite. Production of all three declined last year.

Those elements, along with lithium and manganese, which Canada could but doesn't currently produce, are the five main components of the lithium-ion batteries that run electric cars.

More than 70 per cent of Canada's nickel is sold to make stainless steel. The nickel that makes batteries is nickel sulphate. Canada does not make it, said Gratton, but it needs to in order to be part of the battery chain.

He said that is being discussed among nickel producers and bandied about as a potential project for Ottawa's strategic infrastructure funding.

But Sarah Petrevan, policy director at Clean Energy Canada, said Canada "needs to have a strategic focus about where we can win."

"We have finite resources, and so you want to make sure that you're putting those finite resources in the place that can have the biggest impact."

Quebec, said Petrevan, has done some of that strategic work of assessing their own supply chains, trying to match what Quebec makes with new manufacturing that meets demand. At least two battery production plants are in the works now in that province.

Canada, however, has not yet done a similar assessment.

Last March, Canada identified the 31 critical minerals it can produce and that at least one of its allies wants, but little has been done with that list since.

Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has been dropping broad hints about a major new battery-chain investment coming to Canada, though Petrevan said the dispute with the United States about electric vehicle incentives and trade barriers may be slowing that down.

Last spring's federal budget promised $9.6 million over three years for a battery minerals centre of excellence within the Department of Natural Resources, but nothing has happened yet. Nearly $37 million was also promised for federal research on advancing critical battery mineral processing and refining.

Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson is expected to make both a priority early in the new year.

For his part, Gratton said Canada needs to also encourage more production in general. The Liberals made an election promise to double the mineral exploration tax credit and he hopes to see that in the next budget.

"We don't just need to sort of redirect existing production to battery metals, we also need more production," he said. "And you're only going to get that through new discovery."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 16, 2021.

Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press

PUTSCH PLOTTERS

Congressman Jim Jordan sent plans for Capitol attack to Mark Meadows

Richard Luscombe 

The Ohio congressman Jim Jordan has been identified as the Republican who sent a message to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows the day before the deadly 6 January US Capitol riots outlining a plan to stop Joe Biden – the legitimate winner of the presidential election – from reaching the White House.

The House select committee investigating the insurrection has been looking at numerous messages sent to Meadows on and around that day, many of which were from Trump supporters urging the then-president to call off a mob of his supporters as they ransacked the Capitol building.

Meadows, whose role in events has become a central plank of the investigation, and who provided many of the messages to the committee, is facing possible contempt of Congress charges for withdrawing his cooperation.

Jordan, a staunch Trump ally whom Republicans originally wanted to sit on the committee, forwarded a text message to Meadows on 5 January, one of the congressman’s aides has confirmed, containing details of the plot to block Biden.

The message was sent to Jordan by Joseph Schmitz, a former US defense department inspector general who outlined a “draft proposal” to pressure vice-president Mike Pence to refuse to certify audited election returns on 6 January.

A portion of the message was shown by Democratic committee member Adam Schiff on Tuesday. It read: “On January 6, 2021, Vice-President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

The plotters falsely believed Pence had the constitutional authority to reject the election results and allow rival slates of electors from Republicans in states that Biden won to decide the outcome. Pence refused to do so, and has since been castigated by Trump and his allies.

Jordan was one of five Republicans rejected from serving on the committee by Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker who instead appointed Trump critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Some commentators say the move “saved” the committee’s integrity.

The panel has accelerated its inquiries in recent days and weeks, issuing dozens of subpoenas, interviewing more than 300 witnesses and reviewing more than 30,000 documents as it attempts to tie Trump to the events of 6 January.

A clearer picture has emerged of the involvement of Trump loyalists, including senior Republican party officials such as Jordan, in the coup attempt, with questions swirling this week particularly over the role of Meadows.

Trump’s former chief of staff is revealed to have received numerous messages on the day of the riot from Republican politicians, Fox News television personalities such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.

The text from Trump Jr was succinct. “We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand. He’s got to condemn this shit asap.”

Meadows replied: “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.”

Schiff, a California Democrat who led the prosecution in the Senate at Trump’s second impeachment in January, has argued that Meadows was at the heart of the pressure campaign on Pence, and voted for him to face contempt charges for his refusal to explain it.

“You can see why this is so critical to ask Mr Meadows about,” Schiff said during the committee’s presentation on Tuesday.

“About a lawmaker suggesting that the former vice-president simply throw out votes that he unilaterally deems unconstitutional in order to overturn a presidential election and subvert the will of the American people.”

A new approach finds materials that can turn waste heat into electricity

Jan-Hendrik Pöhls, 

McCall MacBain Postdoctoral Fellow, 

Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,

 McMaster University 

The need to transition to clean energy is apparent, urgent and inescapable. We must limit Earth’s rising temperature to within 1.5 C to avoid the worst effects of climate change — an especially daunting challenge in the face of the steadily increasing global demand for energy.

Part of the answer is using energy more efficiently. More than 72 per cent of all energy produced worldwide is lost in the form of heat. For example, the engine in a car uses only about 30 per cent of the gasoline it burns to move the car. The remainder is dissipated as heat.

Recovering even a tiny fraction of that lost energy would have a tremendous impact on climate change. Thermoelectric materials, which convert wasted heat into useful electricity, can help.

Until recently, the identification of these materials had been slow. My colleagues and I have used quantum computations — a computer-based modelling approach to predict materials’ properties — to speed up that process and identify more than 500 thermoelectric materials that could convert excess heat to electricity, and help improve energy efficiency.

Making great strides towards broad applications

The transformation of heat into electrical energy by thermoelectric materials is based on the “Seebeck effect.” In 1826, German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck observed that exposing the ends of joined pieces of dissimilar metals to different temperatures generated a magnetic field, which was later recognized to be caused by an electric current.

Shortly after his discovery, metallic thermoelectric generators were fabricated to convert heat from gas burners into an electric current. But, as it turned out, metals exhibit only a low Seebeck effect — they are not very efficient at converting heat into electricity.

SOVIET SCIENCE

In 1929, the Russian scientist Abraham Ioffe revolutionized the field of thermoelectricity. He observed that semiconductors — materials whose ability to conduct electricity falls between that of metals (like copper) and insulators (like glass) — exhibit a significantly higher Seebeck effect than metals, boosting thermoelectric efficiency 40-fold, from 0.1 per cent to four per cent.

This discovery led to the development of the first widely used thermoelectric generator, the Russian lamp — a kerosene lamp that heated a thermoelectric material to power a radio.

Are we there yet?

Today, thermoelectric applications range from energy generation in space probes to cooling devices in portable refrigerators. For example, space explorations are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, converting the heat from naturally decaying plutonium into electricity. In the movie The Martian, for example, a box of plutonium saved the life of the character played by Matt Damon, by keeping him warm on Mars.

Despite this vast diversity of applications, wide-scale commercialization of thermoelectric materials is still limited by their low efficiency.

What’s holding them back? Two key factors must be considered: the conductive properties of the materials, and their ability to maintain a temperature difference, which makes it possible to generate electricity.

The best thermoelectric material would have the electronic properties of semiconductors and the poor heat conduction of glass. But this unique combination of properties is not found in naturally occurring materials. We have to engineer them.
Searching for a needle in a haystack

In the past decade, new strategies to engineer thermoelectric materials have emerged due to an enhanced understanding of their underlying physics. In a recent study in Nature Materials, researchers from Seoul National University, Aachen University and Northwestern University reported they had engineered a material called tin selenide with the highest thermoelectric performance to date, nearly twice that of 20 years ago. But it took them nearly a decade to optimize it.

To speed up the discovery process, my colleagues and I have used quantum calculations to search for new thermoelectric candidates with high efficiencies. We searched a database containing thousands of materials to look for those that would have high electronic qualities and low levels of heat conduction, based on their chemical and physical properties. These insights helped us find the best materials to synthesize and test, and calculate their thermoelectric efficiency.

Read more: Researchers invent device that generates light from the cold night sky – here's what it means for millions living off grid

We are almost at the point where thermoelectric materials can be widely applied, but first we need to develop much more efficient materials. With so many possibilities and variables, finding the way forward is like searching for a tiny needle in an enormous haystack.

Just as a metal detector can zero in on a needle in a haystack, quantum computations can accelerate the discovery of efficient thermoelectric materials. Such calculations can accurately predict electron and heat conduction (including the Seebeck effect) for thousands of materials and unveil the previously hidden and highly complex interactions between those properties, which can influence a material’s efficiency.

Large-scale applications will require themoelectric materials that are inexpensive, non-toxic and abundant. Lead and tellurium are found in today’s thermoelectric materials, but their cost and negative environmental impact make them good targets for replacement.

Quantum calculations can be applied in a way to search for specific sets of materials using parameters such as scarcity, cost and efficiency. Although those calculations can reveal optimum thermoelectric materials, synthesizing the materials with the desired properties remains a challenge.

A multi-institutional effort involving government-run laboratories and universities in the United States, Canada and Europe has revealed more than 500 previously unexplored materials with high predicted thermoelectric efficiency. My colleagues and I are currently investigating the thermoelectric performance of those materials in experiments, and have already discovered new sources of high thermoelectric efficiency.

Those initial results strongly suggest that further quantum computations can pinpoint the most efficient combinations of materials to make clean energy from wasted heat and the avert the catastrophe that looms over our planet.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jan-Hendrik Pöhls does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A Couple Just Gave Away Their Property For Free To Help Save Grizzly Bears In BC

A couple from Bella Coola, B.C., just donated their riverfront property to Nature Conservancy of Canada to protect the thriving wildlife in the area.

© Provided by Narcity

Morgan Leet 

The generous couple, Harvey and Carol Thommasen, bought their property a few years ago and wanted to make it a bird sanctuary, but have now chosen to give it away to help keep it safe.

The beautiful property, which is in the traditional, unceded territory of the Nuxalk Nation, spans 122 hectares and is now called the Snowshoe Creek Conservation Area, according to a press release from the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Iris Siwallace, a councillor for the Nuxalk Nation said in the release that the area "could be destroyed by extractive industries such as logging and mining," which is why they worked with the couple and the NCC to help protect it.

The couple made the donation in the hopes of preserving all of the amazing wildlife there, which would be threatened by these industries.

They are now able to maintain a "thriving rainforest, floodplain and riverside habitat that supports an abundance of wildlife and plant diversity," said the release.

Grizzly bears are known to roam the area, as well as 15 different species that have been put on the federal Species at Risk Act. This includes wolverines, which are listed as a special concern in SARA's Schedule 1.

The area is within the Bella Coola Valley, which as a whole has an amazing amount of grizzly bears. There are actually so many that tourists will travel there to take grizzly watching tours, especially during the season when the salmon is running through.

Harvey Thommasen | Nature Conservancy of Canada

"Carol and I donated this land to the Nature Conservancy of Canada mostly to help forest birds, whose populations have declined by 30 per cent since the 1970s," said Henry Thommasen.

It will also "provide a secure travel corridor for animals like deer, grizzly bear and other large mammals moving through the Bella Coola Valley," he added.

Harvey Thommasen | Nature Conservancy of Canada

Not only is the land home to these animals, but it is also stunning.

The SEC wants to crack down on corporate insiders' big stock sales
prosen@insider.com (Phil Rosen) 

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler. 

Evan Vucci/Associated Press

The SEC unanimously proposed an amendment to insider-trading rules that cover so-called 10b5-1 plans.

The new rules are meant to bring more transparency to the market and crack down on insider-trading abuses.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others have long been vocal in calling out the SEC to make changes to 10b5-1 plans.

The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed changes to insider-trading regulations that would limit how corporate executives — who are often privy to non-public information — can sell shares of their own companies.

Currently, executives are allowed to schedule stock sales days ahead of their actual execution, under so-called 10b5-1 plans. When they were conceived two decades ago, the plans were supposed to allow execs to sell stock without being accused of insider trading.

Morgan Stanley data showed that insiders at more than half of S&P 500 companies have enacted 10b5-1 plans, and doing so has grown increasingly popular. But critics say the plans have been abused, allowing insiders to dump shares ahead of big company moves or announcements. In addition, there's no requirement for executives to disclose they have such plans.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others have called on the SEC to overhaul 10b5-1 plans, claiming corporate chiefs can bag profits with privileged knowledge that everyday retail traders don't have, and that it undermines public confidence in the market.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler acknowledged the problems in a press release Wednesday. "Over the past two decades, we've heard concerns about and seen gaps in Rule 10b5-1 — gaps that today's proposal would help fill."

Under the amendments to Rule 10b5-1 that the SEC unanimously proposed, company insiders would have to wait about four months between scheduling a trade and shedding their stock.

The proposed amendments also would prohibit overlapping trading plans and limit single-trade plans to one per year. Additionally, executives would be required to attest that they were not aware of any non-public information when they made plans for trades.

The SEC will now seek public comment before finalizing its proposals.

Freakish fish with transparent head captured in mind-blowing viral video
Joshua Hawkins 

© Provided by BGR barreleye fish in the ocean

Researchers with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have captured video of a fish that can see through its own head. It’s known as a barreleye fish and has rarely been seen in the past.

The MBARI researchers managed to capture video of the barreleye fish earlier this month. The video was captured thousands of feet below the surface of Monterey Bay, off California. According to the institute, this is one of only nine times that it has managed to spot the species.

Footage of the barreleye fish is rare

© Provided by BGR a barreleye fish swims in the ocean

Looks at the barreleye fish are rare, MBARI says. When it managed to spot the fish, the institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) was cruising at around 2,132 feet. The researchers were exploring the Monterey Submarine Canyon. The canyon is one of the deepest found on the Pacific coast (via Live Science).

Thomas Knowles, one of the senior aquarists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium told Live Science that he immediately knew what he was looking at. He says that he saw it in the distance at first, and it was very small. Despite the size, though, the fish was unmistakable.

Knowles also says that the control room buzzed with excitement as the ROV camera brought the barreleye fish into focus. In the video that MBARI shared, you can see how the barreleye fish’s eyes glow bright green in the light from the ROV. It’s a striking sight, especially against the calm blue of the ocean.
Eyes that see through a translucent head

Part of what makes the barreleye fish so intriguing is the way its eyes literally see through its forehead. The eyes can be moved straight ahead or directly up. There are two dark-colored capsules that sit in front of the eyes, too. These capsules act as the fish’s sense of smell.

Barreleye fish can be found in their natural habitat from the Bering Sea to Japan and in Baja California. Because they are found in the ocean’s “twilight zone”, which is roughly 650 to 3,300 feet, there’s no real number on just how many barreleyes there are in the world. MBARI has been getting lucky with its discoveries lately. Just earlier this month it captured footage of a massive phantom jellyfish.

Another scientist with MBARI told Live Science that they encounter barreleye fish less commonly than other twilight zone fish. Other fish found in these areas include the lanternfish and bristlemouth.

The post Freakish fish with transparent head captured in mind-blowing viral video appeared first on BGR.

Click here to read the full article.

Rare monstrous-looking fish washes ashore on San Diego beach

Lynn Chaya 

A rare deep-sea creature was discovered washed ashore on Swami’s Beach in Encinitas, San Diego last week, the third incident of its kind in the past year.

© Provided by National Post

Lifeguards on duty alerted local scientists when a strolling surfer stumbled upon the 33 centimetre fish, said David Huff, a marine safety sergeant with the city of Encinitas. The pristine specimen was handed over to the collection manager of marine vertebrates at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Ben Frable.

“I first found out about anglerfish from an educational video game on Windows ’95 back in elementary school, so it’s pretty exciting,” said the collection manager.

Scientifically known as Himantolophus sagamius, the Pacific footballfish, a rare species of anglerfish, swims between 300 and 1,500 metres beneath the surface. This particular species inhabits deep waters beyond the sun’s reach, the scientist said. The dangling bioluminescent light on top of its head acts as a lure to attract prey into its razor sharp tooth-filled mouth.

Frable said that only 31 anglerfish specimens are known to exist worldwide and the fish has never been observed in the wild. Curiously, however, the creature has has made three appearances on the shores of Southern California in the last year alone.

“It is pretty amazing that we’ve had three just in the past year and in Southern California alone because before that, the last time it happened in California, at least that we were aware of, that somebody saw and brought to scientists was 20 years ago today,” said Frable.

Jay Beiler, the man who stumbled upon the same species on Black’s Beach just a few weeks prior, told NBC “it’s the stuff of nightmares.”

Very little information has been collected due to its rarity, bewildering scientists. Basic data such as the fish’s diet, its reproduction systems or why they’ve been coincidentally washing ashore in Southern California are unknown.

“Unfortunately, we don’t really know why. We have such little information and so few data points that we can’t really make a determination,” Frable said.

“I’m chatting with colleagues who study coastal oceanography, talking to other colleagues that work on anglerfishes and other fish, and we’re having a little chat trying to figure out, to come up with any ideas. But with these three data points, we can’t really draw any conclusions.”

The deep-sea creature will be preserved in a jar of alcohol and stored with two million other fish specimens at the Scripps Institute.

B.C.’s ‘southern resident’ orcas have been wandering far from home. Could this be the end?

Bill Donahue 13 hrs ago

© Provided by Maclean's Orcas in the Southern Resident Killer Whale endangered J Pod play in the Salish Sea at sunset on Aug. 4, 2018, off Vancouver Island, B.C. (Richard Ellis/Alamy)

Orcas in the Southern Resident Killer Whale endangered J Pod play in the Salish Sea at sunset on Aug. 4, 2018, off Vancouver Island, B.C. (Richard Ellis/Alamy)

It’s one of the most jubilant rites of summer. When the world’s most famous contingent of killer whales, the J pod, comes swimming through the Salish Sea, off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, the animals churn along in a tight pack, the water frothing about them as they arc low under the surface and then vault skyward, their giant black-and-white torsos glistening and dapper, as though they’d donned tuxedos for the cotillion.There are currently 24 whales in the J pod, a group cohered by lifelong ties and led in procession, almost always, by its eldest females. Weighing over four tonnes apiece and still possessed of a Fred Astaire grace, these creatures chitter and call to one another as they ride the cold sea. Nearby, on sandy shorelines packed with tourists bearing binoculars, on docks and on ferries bound for Vancouver, the whales’ adoring public scans the water for rock stars. For each J podder has an almost human charisma. These whales are sociable like us, and they’re defined by their stories. According to legend, J2, also known as Granny, lived to the age of 105 before her 2017 death. (It’s a scientifically weak legend: she was actually more like 65, but still.) In 2018, J35, also known as Tallequah, grieved by towing her dead calf through the water for 17 days and 1,000 miles.

For decades, J-pod observers have relied on the whales to appear on the Salish almost daily from May through September. Last summer, though, the pod was absent from the area for an unprecedented 108 straight days, raising fraught questions: would they ever come back? Will we see the J pod plying the waters off Vancouver Island in 2022?

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The short answer to both questions is yes, the beloved whales will surely be back this coming summer. Late in the summer, that is—if Vegas were taking bets, you’d do well to predict an Aug. 31 arrival. But how many more years they’ll be around is in question, while another population of killer whales will be on the sea as well. To the uninitiated, the transient orcas look the same as the residents. They too are black-and-white giants, but half again as big, with pointier dorsal fins and a more sinister aura. They move in small packs of three to six, stealthily, making almost no noise so that they can swoop into coves and bays and catch seals and sea lions unawares. The transients are well-fed and thriving.

The J pod, meanwhile, faces an uncertain future. It seems unlikely that they’ll be on the Salish Sea 30 or 40 years from now, and the group may perish altogether by the end of the century. It is, in any case, perilously small these days, for reasons pertaining to diet. The J pod, which ranges as far south as southern Oregon, subsists exclusively on the Pacific coast’s most iconic fish, the oily, fat-rich salmon. Indeed, an average J podder needs to gobble about 20 chinook salmon a day, and the chinook—an anadromous fish that grows up in rivers, then migrates to the sea—is in steep decline.

The rivers the chinook live in, the veins of British Columbia and the U.S. Northwest, are bruised. Over the past century, intensive logging has robbed them of cool, shaded backwaters in which salmon spawn. Climate change has exacerbated the water’s warming and, worst of all, hundreds of hydroelectric dams, most of them built amid the mid-20th-century craze for taming nature, now choke the region’s river system, restricting the chinook’s movement to and from the ocean.

READ: What does it take to move a rotting whale carcass? Glute strength and Vicks VapoRub.

Since 2013, the J pod has been straying from the Salish Sea because its largest adjacent river, the Fraser, has all but gone dry of spring and early summer chinook. As other rivers likewise lose salmon, despair thickens amid the J-pod faithful. It settles most heavily on perhaps the whales’ oldest human advocate.

Ken Balcomb, 81, has been tracking killer whales on the Salish Sea since 1976. He founded the Center for Whale Research in 1985, and for 35 years the group’s headquarters was Balcomb’s ramshackle cedar-shingled house on Washington’s San Juan Island, just across the binational Salish from Victoria.

White-bearded and hulking, with a quiet, scratchy voice, Balcomb arrived on the Salish after the whales had endured carnage. Up until the 1960s, salmon fishers shot at the sea’s southern resident whales—along with the J pod, this includes their close cousins in the genetically distinct K and L pods. Marine parks rounded up the orcas for stunt shows. They employed chase boats to corral the whales into bays, and then drove them into nets by throwing underwater “seal bombs” behind them.

MORE: An abandoned U.S. dam is blocking fish from B.C.’s Similkameen River—and key spawning ground

In Balcomb’s early years on the Salish Sea, the combined population of the J, K and L pods actually climbed. It stood at 98 in 1995. Now it’s at 74. “We’re looking at the bottom of the barrel,” Balcomb says. “The whales are skinny now. Have you ever been around a horse that’s nothing but skin and bones? That’s how they look.”

It’s the gauntness that worries Balcomb most, not the J pod’s semi defection from the Salish Sea. As he describes it in his trademark plain language, J-pod fans are a bit misguided, nostalgically connecting the pod to the Salish Sea, for the animals have never carried any particular loyalty to that body of water. “They go there for the food,” Balcomb says, “not the sights.” Another whale researcher, Michael Weiss, also with the Center for Whale Research, explains the J pod’s early summer absence on the Salish this way: “If all the grocery stores and restaurants in your town closed, you’d probably move too.”

The J pod is now desperately improvising. Early last summer, it was spotted several times on Swiftsure Bank, a spot in the open ocean that straddles the U.S.-Canada border just west of Vancouver Island, and is aswim during the summers with chinook travelling to and from disparate rivers. The whales returned to the Salish Sea on Aug. 31 because the Fraser’s late-summer chinook run is still doing OK, and for a little over half of September, the Salish was able to float the J-pod meal plan.

© Provided by Maclean's The J-pod resident orcas gather in the Salish Sea ( Marli Wakeling/Alamy)

Over the coming years, the J pod could travel anywhere between northern Vancouver Island and southern Oregon in its search for food. In so doing, it would be emulating the K and L pods, which have always been less “resident” on the Salish Sea. And at least one cetologist thinks there could be hope in the whales’ adaptability. “They’re doing what they need to do to find fish,” says Monika Wieland Shields, director of the Washington-based Orca Behavior Institute. “We hope their new patterns help them to grow their population, but we don’t know if they have found something better to sustain them, and we’re waiting to see how effective their geographical shift will be at helping them increase the population.”


READ: The goldfish invasion of Hamilton Harbour

Meanwhile, a dark music plays in the background. In their current emaciated state, the J pod’s females are having great difficulty bringing calves to term. Roughly two-thirds of J pod pregnancies have failed since 2000, and of the 19 calves that have been born since 2010, only six have been female. The lopsided sex ratio may be caused by pollution. “There are PCBs in the food chain,” Shields explains, referencing a family of chemicals that still lingers in nature, even though it was banned in the late 1970s. “These toxins accumulate in whales’ blubber, and when they don’t have enough food, they survive on the fat stores in the blubber. That affects the endocrine system, so the whales have a bias toward male offspring.”

Shields continues: “We’re at the tipping point. If we fail to give these whales the fish they need to successfully reproduce, we will not get the next generation of breeders.”

In 2018, Ottawa pledged to spend $61.5 million to help the southern residents, and since then it’s been building chinook hatcheries, restoring habitat for the fish and hiring Coast Guard enforcement officers to make ships slow down on the Salish Sea to mitigate whale stress as well as ship strikes on these marine mammals. “They’re spending a lot of money,” Shields says, “with very little results.”


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Whale experts concur that the optimal fix for the J pod’s woe? is a radical one: widespread dam removal, a freeing up of rivers so that chinook can once again gush into the sea. In his wildest dreams, Ken Balcomb envisions the detonation of all 14 of the hydroelectric dams constricting the region’s mightiest river, the Columbia, where up to 16 million salmon and steelhead once spawned every year.

But the Columbia’s dams are fixtures of the U.S. Northwest economy. They’re not moving anytime soon, so the J pod’s hopes lie upstream, on the Columbia’s largest tributary, the Snake River, whose lower reaches are home to four aging concrete dams, all of them situated in the high desert of eastern Washington state. In 2019, Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson joined environmentalists in calling for their removal. Simpson released a $42.7-billion demolition plan.

Shields says, “I can see those dams coming down in 10 to 20 years.” But a freed Snake River is far from inevitable, and it wouldn’t bring the J pod back to the Salish Sea anyway. It would shift these whales south, toward where the Columbia River meets the Pacific; it would also leave them hungry, if it happened in isolation.

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The J pod needs many more miracles to happen before it can fatten up and flourish. It needs other rivers to shed their dams, too, and it needs rivers like the Fraser to somehow shrug off the scars of development—the vast parking lots by the banks, the car washes trickling toxic suds down into what was once salmon habitat.

For now, this storied pod of whales, once the Salish Sea’s home team, has become a lean and hungry gang of freelancers searching the ocean for food that, increasingly, may not be there. And last September, as the days became shorter and the nights cooler—and as the J pod’s fans scooped up their binoculars and took to the seashore—a sad question lingered: could we be nearing the end for the J pod? Have these vaunted whales already commenced their long goodbye?

Surgeons in New York Successfully Transplant Pig Kidneys to Two People


Scientists are inching closer to a major breakthrough in organ donation. This week, researchers at New York University announced that they transplanted a pig kidney to a human for the second time with no short-term issues, following their initial success two months earlier. Clinical trials of this technology are likely still a while away, though.

© Photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP (Getty Images)

The procedure was performed in late November by a surgical team at NYU Langone Health. As with the first procedure, the doctors transplanted a kidney from a genetically modified pig into a living human body. The kidney wasn’t attached to its normal position in the body, but to blood vessels in the upper leg. It was then covered with a protective shield as the researchers observed it for 54 hours. During those hours, the kidney seemed to function as normal and no signs of rejection from the person’s body were detected.

The first transplant, performed in September, involved a human recipient considered to be brain-dead who was about to be taken off life-support; the recipient’s family agreed to help with the research. This time, according to the team’s announcement, the recipient was a functionally dead organ donor who was being maintained on a ventilator. The donor was found with the help of LiveOnNY, a nonprofit group that has reportedly enrolled 6.5 million organ donors in the greater New York City area.

“We have been able to replicate the results from the first transformative procedure to demonstrate the continued promise that these genetically engineered organs could be a renewable source of organs to the many people around the world awaiting a life-saving gift,” said lead surgeon Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, in a statement from the university.

Animal-to-human transplantation, or xenotransplantation, has been a long-sought goal in medicine. One of the many challenges facing these transplants is that the organs of even closely related mammal species can have subtle but important differences that would quickly lead to rejection by the host body. One major limitation of donated pig organs is that pigs (and many other mammals) naturally produce a sugar called alpha-gal, which humans do not. But the pigs used by the NYU team were genetically engineered by Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation, to not produce alpha-gal—in theory making them safe for human use.

Though xenotransplantation is controversial, opinion polls have suggested that most would accept the technology if it became widely available. For now, though, that possibility is still far off. Both surgeries were part of an ongoing research project by NYU to test the feasibility of their approach, and further studies will be needed to justify the leap to trials involving actual patients who would benefit from donation. But should all this work pay off, xenotransplantation could save the lives of many Americans who die annually while languishing on the transplant waiting list.

“With additional study and replication, this could be the path forward to saving many thousands of lives each year,” Montgomery said.

UCP TREATS ADDICTION AS A CRIME

Edmonton outreach groups to come together to stand in solidarity with people who use substances

NOT A MEDICAL CONDITION

Edmonton community outreach groups, families, people with lived and living experience, and health care providers are coming together Thursday afternoon to stand in solidarity with people use substances.

© Provided by Edmonton Journal Pedestrians make their way past a sticker raising awareness about opioids in an alley near 81 Avenue and Calgary Trail, in Edmonton Friday May 28, 2021.

Attendees are aiming to send a message that as drug poisoning deaths continue to increase and the illegal drug supply becomes more toxic and unpredictable, current drug laws continue to amplify suffering and more harm reduction services are needed.

“In light of the reality on the ground, it is absolutely necessary for us as Community Outreach groups to come together to support the community to collaborate and provide support for people affected by this poisoning crisis to help keep people safer and healthier, but most importantly alive,” said Shanell Twan, of Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs in a news release.

Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., volunteers will be on hand to provide warm clothes, drinks, and food for attendees on the northside of 106 Avenue between 96 and 95 Street N.W.

Experienced volunteers will also be on standby to respond to overdoses and promote safety. Overdose response training will also be provided and naloxone distributed.

Following the event, outreach teams will go into neighbourhoods to provide safer use supplies and distribute naloxone.

According to the latest provincial data, between January and August of this year, 1,026 Albertans died of a drug poisoning. A total of 378 Edmontonians have died so far this year from a drug poisoning.

“By adopting a robust community response including outreach, harm reduction, and advocacy, we can end the drug overdose and poisoning claiming far too many of our neighbours,” the release states.

National modelling suggests Canada's opioid overdose crisis could worsen through 2022

OTTAWA — The latest data from a federal special advisory committee on opioid overdoses shows that opioid-related deaths could remain high and even increase in the next six months.

In a statement released today, co-chairs Dr. Theresa Tam and Dr. Jennifer Russell said that the number of deaths and hospitalizations related to opioids remained high in the first half of 2021.

On average, 19 people died and 16 people were hospitalized due to opioid-related overdoses every day.

They added that more than half of opioid-related deaths also involved the use of a stimulant like cocaine or methamphetamine, which underscores how the overdose crisis is tied to the consumption of more than one drug at once.

The data suggests that the people most affected by the overdose crisis are men, people aged 20 to 49, and those who live in Western Canada and Ontario.

Tam, Canada's chief public health officer, and Russell, New Brunswick's chief medical officer of health, said current projections suggest that between 1,200 and 2,000 people could die during each quarter through to June 2022.

They said the modelling projections highlight the importance of working collectively to prevent harms from substance use and help people who use drugs to access supports.

Actions that can address this problem include improved access to naxolone, supervised consumption sites and safer supply programs, said Tam and Russell.

"While harm reduction interventions are essential, we must not lose sight of the importance of the broader conditions that impact substance use," they said.

They pointed to the broader context in which substance use takes place, saying that efforts like ensuring affordable housing for all, fostering social connection within communities, and supporting positive child and youth development can help prevent substance use-related harms.

Tam and Russell called on jurisdictions to work together on improving how they share and compare data, so that decision-makers have the evidence needed to inform policies and programs.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 15, 2021.

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Erika Ibrahim, The Canadian Press