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)
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Czech bobsledder shows deafness no barrier at Beijing Olympics
Czech Republic's Dominik Dvorak and Jakub Nosek react at the end of their final run in the two-man bobsleigh
AFP | Daniel MIHAILESCU
YABQING - Bobsleigh teams begin their charge over the ice with encouraging shouts, but Czech Republic racer Jakub Nosek has to rely on his team-mates' "rhythm" at the Olympics.
The 32-year-old lost all hearing in his right ear and 85 percent in the other after suffering from meningitis as a small child.
That has not stopped him competing at the last two Winter Games as brakeman behind Czech pilot Dominik Dvorak.
They finished 15th in Tuesday's two-man event and hope to rank higher Sunday as part of a four-man crew.
All-rounder Nosek has represented his country in high jump, long jump, decathlon and javelin at three editions of the Deaflympics, for athletes with impaired hearing.
However, pushing a sled down an ice track requires team work, especially hard when Nosek cannot hear.
"The jumping into the sled is pretty difficult," said Dvorak.
"We’ve had the same rhythm for eight years so we know how to do it now."
Team-mate Dominik Zalesky says Nosek takes his cue from "our rhythm" at the start of each charge.
Some bobsleigh teams count to three in unison before starting.
Nosek is inspired by his family and the names of partner Aneta and daughter Viktorie are written on his race shoes.
He says the Covid pandemic, and wearing protective face masks, makes it much harder to communicate. "I read lips but I can't now."
He hopes to prove physical disability is no barrier to competing at an Olympics and blocks any negative comments.
"I hear everything -- except what I don't want to hear," he said.
ryj/pst
Transgender US swimmer wins Ivy League 500-yard women's freestyle Penn State's transgender swimmer Lia Thomas competes in the 500-yard freestyle (AFP/Joseph Prezioso)
Fri, February 18, 2022
Transgender US swimmer Lia Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle race at the 2022 Ivy League women's championships Thursday, defying critics who have called for her to be barred from competing.
Thomas has dominated US collegiate women's swimming recently as a student athlete at Penn State, where just a few years ago she competed as a man.
Her case has divided opinion, with some arguing she has an unfair physiological advantage while others say she should be allowed to compete freely as a woman.
This month the governing body of swimming in the United States, USA Swimming, unveiled new guidelines which include a more stringent threshold for athletes' testosterone levels -- widely seen as making it harder for Thomas to be able to compete in major meets.
But she got the go-ahead to compete in the prestigious Ivy League championships, and came in first place with a time of 04 mins 37.32 secs Thursday -- a record for Harvard University's Blodgett Pool.
She was among three swimmers from Penn State to make the finals.
Thomas beamed and flashed a peace sign as she received the medal.
Also competing Thursday was fellow transgender swimmer Iszac Henig, who won first place in the women's 50-yard freestyle race.
bur-oho/leg
Ukraine's Russian speakers worry about being 'saved' by Putin
Debates over language in Ukraine became more heated after a 2014 pro-EU revolution pulled Kyiv out of Moscow's orbit
(AFP/Sergei SUPINSKY)
Dmitry ZAKS Fri, February 18, 2022
Kyiv driving instructor Andriy Atamanyuk does not want to be saved by Vladimir Putin despite the Kremlin chief's pledge to fight "discrimination" against Russian speakers in Ukraine.
"Never," the 48-year-old Ukrainian said in Russian. "There is no-one to save here. There is no discrimination. It is utter nonsense."
The treatment of ethnic Russians -- many of them living in Ukraine's industrial southeast -- has been an obsession for Putin ever since a pro-EU revolution pulled Kyiv out of Moscow's orbit in 2014.
But the issue has gained added attention as Putin tries to reverse NATO's post-Soviet expansion, sending more than 100,000 troops to Russia's border with Ukraine.
Analysts and some Western governments fear that Putin may use language and the perceived mistreatment of ethnic Russians as a pretext for launching an all-out war on Ukraine.
So does Atamanyuk.
"These fairy tales about the language are just an excuse to invade," he said. "There is nothing for Putin to see here." - 'Native land' -
Ukrainian became the former Soviet republic's official language during Mikhail Gorbachev's embrace of democratic freedoms in 1989.
The collapse of the USSR two years later created economic mayhem on a scale so sweeping that politically sensitive issues such as language became trivial by comparison and were put aside.
But the Kremlin's March 2014 annexation of Crimea and the Moscow-backed revolt in Ukraine's east that broke out around the same time stirred up patriotic passions and reopened old fault lines.
The Western-backed government in Kyiv began to unroll legislation designed to promote Ukrainian on television and in the streets.
And the Kremlin started to grumble about the alleged persecution of ethnic Russians by a Kyiv administration that it casts, by turns, as a puppet of the US government and an offshoot of neo-Nazis.
Russians "are not being recognised as indigenous people on what is effectively their native land", Putin fumed earlier this month. - 'Hybrid war' -
The latest rules require Russian-language publications to release Ukrainian editions of similar circulation and content.
The law particularly upsets Putin because it makes an exception for English-language media in Ukraine.
Human Rights Watch said the new law raises "concerns".
But the New York-based rights group also stressed that the "Ukrainian government has every right to promote its state language and strengthen its national identity".
Finding the difficult balance of doing this without provoking Putin has been something IT entrepreneur and philanthropist Yevgeniy Utkin has been mulling over for some time.
Utkin says he speaks Russian "out of principle, because I love it very much".
But this has not held him back from serving as an adviser for the Ukrainian government or appearing on political talk shows.
"I have never -- not once -- had a single incident related to me speaking Russian," Utkin said.
Yet he worries that any attempts to strengthen the Ukrainian language will be seized upon by Putin and provide added ammunition for the Kremlin media's unrelenting attacks on Kyiv.
"Language is simply another bullet in Russia’s hybrid war," said Utkin. "There is an information war being waged in our heads." - Putin's essay -
The Kremlin's current standoff with the West escalated a few months after Putin penned a 7,000-word essay last July entitled "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians".
"The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us," Putin said in the English version of the text.
The article was widely interpreted as Putin's defining argument for stripping Ukraine of its independence and subjecting it to Kremlin rule.
It has also been picked apart by historians as wildly inaccurate.
"Russian propaganda depends upon myths and counterfactuals, all spun in the direction of Russian greatness and innocence," Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder wrote.
Many leading thinkers in Ukraine believe that the two countries have drifted too far apart to be rejoined by force.
"Freedom is now in Ukrainians’ DNA. And the problem is that the Russian elite does not understand this," said Utkin.
Ukraine's bestselling Russian-language author Andrey Kurkov summed it up along similar lines.
Russians subscribe to a "collective mentality", he told AFP. "Ukrainians are individuals."
bur-zak/jbr/gil
EU Pledges Funding For Health, Education And Stability To African Leaders At Brussels Summit
18-Feb-2022
The European Union will offer several packages of support at the summit to bolster health, education and stability in Africa, and will pledge half of a new 300 billion euro ($340.9 billion) investment drive launched to rival China's Belt and Road Initiative.
But the meeting also takes place just as France and its allies fighting Islamist militants in Mali said on Thursday they would begin their military withdrawal from the country.
European and other wealthy nations were heavily criticised for hoarding protective equipment and later vaccines during the pandemic, with some African leaders saying the slow pace of donations could lead to "vaccine apartheid".
By the start of February, only 11% of Africans were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus - far fewer than in richer parts of the world.
Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio challenged Europeans to remember there are "human beings on the other side" in Africa who have been left behind in the unequal global response to COVID-19, adding this has security implications.
There was also dismay over Europe's travel bans on South Africa after the Omicron variant was detected there late last year.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said he and other African leaders would raise the issue of intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines and treatments. Many developing countries want these rights waived, but face opposition from rich nations, including many in the EU. Avoiding thorny issues Tensions run deeper on other issues between two continents with colonial ties, including over migration flows and the erosion of democracy in several African countries, some of which have recently seen coups d'etat including Mali.
Frank Mattheis, an expert in regional studies at the United Nations University, said the summit would seek to highlight areas where cooperation is promising and avoid thorny issues.
The European Commission announced this week that the EU and the Gates Foundation would invest more than 100 million euros in the next five years to help set up an African medicines regulator to boost the continent's drugs and vaccine production.
The race to establish the African Medicines Agency (AMA) comes after the pandemic exposed the region's dependence on imported vaccines.
Just over 5% of medicines and 1% of vaccines consumed by Africa's population of 1.2 billion people are produced locally. The EU says it will provide support to help Africa produce 60% of the vaccines it needs by 2040.
Part of the funding for the AMA will come from 150 billion euros to be mobilised for Africa over the next seven years under the EU's Global Gateway scheme.
Separately, the European Investment Bank announced on Thursday it would make available 500 million euros in cheap loans to African countries to strengthen healthcare systems. That credit line is expected to mobilise a total of 1 billion euros in private and public investments, the bank said.
W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, welcomed the investment pledge and said he hoped it would start a partnership of true equals.
"But there is a long history of unfulfilled promises like this when it comes to the EU and Africa, so the African Union, while cautiously optimistic, will remain sceptical until this pledge is converted into projects on the ground.”
Source: France 24
NO IT AIN'T DISNEY'S LITTLE MERMAID
Mysteries and music: listening in to underwater life
In the Mediterranean Sea, up to 90 percent of sounds in a given recording might be unidentified (AFP/Boris HORVAT) (Boris HORVAT) Kelly MACNAMARA Fri, February 18, 2022
When marine researchers started recording sounds in the seagrass meadows of the Mediterranean Sea they picked up a mysterious sound, like the croak of a frog, that resounded within the dense foliage -- and nowhere else.
"We recorded over 30 seagrasses and it was always there and no-one knew the species that was producing this kwa! kwa! kwa!" said Lucia Di Iorio, a researcher in ecoacoustics at France's CEFREM.
"It took us three years to find out the species that was producing that sound."
The melodious songs of whales might be familiar music of the world's underwater habitats but few people will have heard the hoarse growl of a streaked gurnard or the rhythmical drumbeat of a red piranha.
Scientists are now calling for those sounds and many thousands more to become more widely accessible.
They say a global database of the booms, whistles and chatter of the sea will help to monitor diversity in aquatic life -- and help put a name to mystery sounds like the one Di Iorio and her colleagues investigated.
Experts from nine countries are working to create what they have dubbed the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds -- or "GLUBS".
This would gather together recordings held all over the world and open them up to artificial intelligence learning and mobile phone apps used by citizen scientists.
While experts have been listening to life underwater for decades, the team behind GLUBS say that audio collections tend to be narrowly focused on a specific species or geographical area.
Their initiative is part of burgeoning work on marine "soundscapes" -- collecting all the sounds in a particular area to discern information about species types, behaviour and overall biological diversity.
Scientists say these soundscapes are a non-invasive way to "spy on" life underwater.
In a paper published recently in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, the GLUBS team said many fish and aquatic invertebrates are mainly nocturnal or hard to find, so acoustic monitoring could help conservation efforts.
"With biodiversity in decline worldwide and humans relentlessly altering underwater soundscapes, there is a need to document, quantify and understand the sources of underwater animal sounds before they potentially disappear," said lead author Miles Parsons of the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
- Sonic 'barcode' -
Scientists believe that all 126 marine mammal species emit sounds, as do at least 100 aquatic invertebrates and some 1,000 fish species.
The sounds can convey a wide range of messages -- acting as a defence mechanism, to warn others of danger, as part of mating and reproduction -- or just be the passive noise of an animal munching a meal.
Di Iorio, a co-author on the GLUBS paper, said while marine mammals, like humans, learn their language of communication, the sounds made by invertebrates and fish are "just their anatomy".
Many fish produce a distinctive drumming sound using a muscle that contracts around their swim bladder.
"This dum-dum-dum-dum-dum, the frequency, the rhythm and the number of pulses vary from one species to another. It's very specific," Di Iorio told AFP.
"It's like a barcode."
Scientists can recognise families of fish just from these sounds, so with a global library they might be able to compare, for example, the thrumming calls of different grouper fish in the Mediterranean to those off the coast of Florida.
But another key use for the library, they say, could be to help identify the many unknown sounds in the world's seas and freshwater habitats. - Mystery music -
After many months investigating the strange seagrass croaker, Di Iorio and her colleagues were able to point the finger of suspicion at the scorpionfish.
But they struggled to explain how it was making such an unusual noise -- and it refused to perform for them.
They tried catching the fish and recording it in a carrier. They sunk sound equipment onto the seabed next to the fish. They even listened in to aquariums that contained scorpionfish.
"Nothing," she said.
Eventually colleagues from Belgium took a camera that could record at low light and staked out some seagrass in Corsica.
They were able to capture the kwa! kwa! sound as well as video of the fish making a shimmying motion.
Back in the lab, they dissected a scorpionfish and found that they have tendons strung along their bodies.
Their hypothesis is that the fish contracts these muscles to produce the sound.
"It's a guitar, an underwater guitar," said Di Iorio.
But there are many more mysteries where that came from.
Di Iorio said in the Mediterranean, up to 90 percent of noises in a given recording might be unknown.
"Every time we put a hydrophone in the water we're discovering new sounds," she added.
klm/gil
IAEA wraps up first trip to monitor Fukushima water release
More than a million tonnes of liquid has accumulated in tanks at the crippled Fukushima plant.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday it made "significant progress" on its first mission to review the planned release of treated water from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
Since Monday, an IAEA taskforce has been in Japan to assess the country's plan to gradually release the water, which has been processed to remove most radioactive elements, into the ocean.
The organisation's deputy director general Lydie Evrard said the international team including non-IAEA experts had examined early preparations at the site for the release, expected to begin as soon as March next year.
"The IAEA taskforce made significant progress in its work this week to get a better understanding of Japan's operational and regulatory plans for the discharge of the treated water," she told reporters.
More than a million tonnes of liquid, including rain, groundwater and water used for cooling, has accumulated in tanks at the crippled Fukushima plant since it went into meltdown after a tsunami in 2011, and space is running out.
The IAEA has already endorsed the release, which it says is similar to wastewater disposal at nuclear plants elsewhere.
But neighbouring countries have expressed environmental and safety concerns, and local fishing communities are opposed, fearing it will undermine years of work to restore their reputation.
The water is treated but some radioactive elements including tritium remain. Experts say there is no evidence that would pose any danger, but opponents want the plan blocked.
Evrard said the taskforce collected water samples and gathered technical information on the trip and will release its findings in late April, the first of several reports in a multi-year review.
Ahead of the press conference on Friday, Greenpeace said it had "low expectations" for the taskforce's investigation, calling for alternative options to the release to be explored.
"The IAEA is incapable of protecting the environment, human health or human rights from radiation risks—that's not its job," Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist for Greenpeace East Asia, said in a statement.
Evrard said the UN-affiliated organisation is listening to concerns over the plans and takes them "very seriously", and the review was "aimed at providing an objective and science-based approach".
Flying-Taxi Startup Joby Slumps After Test-Flight Accident
Thomas Black and Alan Levin Thu, February 17, 2022
(Bloomberg) -- Joby Aviation Inc., a startup vying to be among the first to fly a new class of electric air taxis, said one of its aircraft was involved in an accident, sending the shares tumbling.
The Feb. 16 incident involved a remotely piloted prototype at the company’s test base in California, according to a regulatory filing. There were no injuries, the company said without detailing the specifics of the accident.
“Experimental flight test programs are intentionally designed to determine the limits of aircraft performance, and accidents are unfortunately a possibility,” Joby said.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident, which resulted in “substantial damage” to the aircraft, spokesman Peter Knudson said. The NTSB’s authority to investigate all aviation accidents includes most serious drone crashes.
Joby said in the filing that it’s supporting authorities in an investigation.
The shares fell 6% at 11:54 a.m. in New York after an earlier decline of 11%, the biggest intraday slide since Jan. 24.
Joby is one of several startups building electric aircraft that take off vertically like helicopters and then fly like small planes once in the air. Joby is seeking regulatory authorization to fly with an onboard pilot its five-seat air taxi, which has a maximum range of 150 miles (241 kilometers) and a top speed of 200 mph (322 kph).
The accident could complicate Joby’s effort to win approval for the ground-breaking plane, which has already made more than 1,000 successful flights. The startup has said it expects to receive authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration and fly its aircraft commercially by 2024.
The flight test involving the accident was not for FAA credit, Morgan Stanley analyst Kristine Liwag wrote in a research note. The company has a second aircraft with which it will likely continue test flights. Door Still Open
“In our view, the accident with the Joby aircraft does not close the door on FAA certification,” Liwag said. “However, the cause of the accident must be understood.”
Aerospace is a “difficult technical industry,” Liwag said. The analyst highlighted that General Dynamics Corp.’s Gulfstream unit suffered an accident in 2011 during test flights of its G650 jet. That plane went on to be one of private aviation’s most successful and profitable aircraft. The Gulfstream crash killed four employees.
“This execution risk highlights why we have such a wide range of outcomes for Joby considering the nascency of the industry,” said Liwag, who rates the stock the equivalent of a buy.
JUST ASKING FOR A NIETZSCHEAN FRIEND
Is eating people a solution to world hunger?
The science behind 'Soylent Green'
Cassidy Ward Wed, February 16, 2022
Released in 1973, Soylent Green imagines a dystopian nightmare version of 2022 in which overpopulation and climate disaster have made the Earth nearly unlivable. Resource and housing shortages have exacerbated class stratification, with the wealthy living in lush, reinforced houses while the rest of the population is scrounging for scraps just to survive.
With not enough to eat, half of the world's population is sustained only by a staple food source created and sold by the Soylent Corporation. It comes in various colors, the best of which is the titular Soylent Green. The company bills their new green variety as more nutritious, having been manufactured from oceanic plankton, but by the end we know the truth. Soylent Green is people!
The film was a stark commentary about the dangers of destroying our environment and the lengths to which some corporations could go to maintain profit. Now that we're actually in 2022, the world has seen an increase in novelty foods, including one supposed meal replacement shake named after the famed movie.
The question now is, could we really make Soylent? And would we want to?
CONVERTING CORPSES TO CRACKERS
Supposing, of course, we decided we wanted to transform our lost loved ones into food, we could definitely do it. The infrastructure already exists. After all, humans are just meat, no different from any other animal at the end of the day.
The easiest way to do it, but the least palatable — particularly if you're trying to hide what you're doing, as was the case in the film — would be to treat humans the way we treat livestock. Establish a butchering process, package the cut meat, put it on the shelf. Job done. But we suspect that if we're going to eat people, we'll want at least the illusion that we're eating something else. So, let's think of other options.
If you've ever looked at a seasoning packet you've probably noticed they list chicken, beef, pork, or other meats as ingredients. Yet, when you look inside, all you'll find is powder. Where's the beef? It's in the powder, of course. And if we want to make a human biscuit, that's probably the way to go. Cassidy Spices Photo: Helminadia/Getty Images
Meat powders are fairly simple to produce. Typically, the skin and bones of your chosen animal are removed. Though, in a pinch that may not be strictly necessary. After dressing, they go through a dehydration process either using a dehydrator or cooking over a low temperature for an extended period. The aim is to remove as much moisture as possible. Finally, the meat is ground into a powder and sifted to remove any chunks which were missed.
At this point, your Soylent people are unrecognizable and ready to be baked into crackers or used for soup bases. The possibilities are endless.
WOULD SOYLENT MAKE A GOOD FOOD?
Nutritionally, sure. Human bodies are made of the same sorts of things as other animals. You could get protein and fat, albeit at different distributions than other animals. All things being equal, eating human meat is a perfectly efficient way of calorie exchange. Certainly, other animals have done it throughout our history.
Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on if you're being eaten or doing the eating — things aren't equal. Animal meat produced at factory farms undergoes all sorts of precautions in order to prevent the transmission of disease to the people consuming it.
Livestock animals are given antibiotics throughout their lives and the presence of disease is usually cause for that individual animal to be discarded. Even still, factory forms still present a significant disease risk. If we were eating people, especially ordinary people, there's little guarantee those same precautions would be present. Moreover, there are comparatively few diseases which jump species from animals to humans. Every disease a person has necessarily infects humans, so the risk of disease transmission from contaminated meat would be immense.
Of course, properly cooking and preparing our Soylent could eliminate a significant number of those diseases, but not all of them.
Cassidy Prion Photo: SCIEPRO/Getty Images
Mad Cow Disease occasionally prompts recalls of tainted meat. The disease is caused by prions, which cause proteins in the brain to fold irregularly. Prions don't respond to temperatures at which meat is normally cooked. In order to fully denature prions they have to be heated to temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius or more. They've been shown to remain effective even after being heated to 600 C. Nobody cooks meat at those temperatures.
Similar prion diseases exist in humans and are documented to have been transmitted through cannibalism. Creating a system in which half the human population gets most of their food from human remains might be a highly efficient way to end our species.
IS SOYLENT EVEN SUSTAINABLE?
Let's suppose we solve all those problems. A robust marketing campaign has convinced humanity that eating the deceased is not only acceptable but noble, and we've discovered ways to effectively rid the meat of dangerous pathogens. Could it even sustain itself?
This one is a pretty obvious no. The only way this system is sustainable is if there's a consistent one for one exchange. Every living person gets to eat one dead person. Then, they themselves are eaten. You'd have to create a sort of horrible perpetual motion machine of consumption in which no energy is ever lost. Even still, the average human about 136 pounds and the average adult in America eats roughly 525 pounds of food every year. Even if you were eating everything, organs, bones, the whole shebang a person would only provide about a quarter of the food you'd need for a single year.
Not only is the prospect of turning people into crackers despicable and dangerous, it's also just a bad business model.
This ancient 'killer' crocodile had a dinosaur as its last meal, research shows
Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY
A new species of crocodile that lived about 95 million years old was discovered in Australia, and researchers discovered it ate a dinosaur as its final meal.
The fossils of the crocodilian species were first found in 2010 near the Winton Formation in eastern Australia, a rock bed from the Cretaceous period, when most of the commonly known dinosaurs were roaming Earth.
Some of the fossils of the crocodile were partially crushed, but researchers noticed that within the fossils were numerous small bones that belonged to another animal. Now, researchers at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum have identified those smaller bones as belonging to a dinosaur. Their findings were published in the journal Gondwana Research on Friday.
Artist's reconstruction of Confractosuchus devouring a juvenile ornithopod.
The freshwater crocodile, named Confractosuchus sauroktonos, which means "the broken dinosaur killer," was over 8 feet long. But Matt White, research associate at the museum and lead researcher, said it would have grown much larger. Researchers were unsure how the crocodile died.
About 35% of the animal was preserved; it was missing its tail and limbs but had a near-complete skull. Researchers then used X-ray and CT scans to find out what bones were inside the remains.
Researchers in Australia have discovered remains of a freshwater crocodile they named Confractosuchus sauroktonos, which means "the broken dinosaur killer."
The findings showed the remains belonged to a 4-pound juvenile ornithopod, a group of plant-eating dinosaurs that included duck-billed creatures. The ornithopod's remains also were the first of their kind found in Australia, suggesting it is a newly discovered species.
What was left inside the crocodile's stomach was one of the ornithopod's femurs "sheared in half" and the other with a bite mark so hard a tooth mark was left. That led researchers to believe the Confractosuchus "either directly killed the animal or scavenged it quickly after its death."
"While Confractosuchus would not have specialized in eating dinosaurs, it would not have overlooked an easy meal, such as the young ornithopod remains found in its stomach," White said.
The findings were "extremely rare" because there are so few definitive examples of dinosaurs being preyed on, and the discovery is the first evidence that crocodiles were eating dinosaurs in Australia. In August 2020, researchers discovered the fossils of "terror crocodiles" that could take down large dinosaurs with teeth "the size of bananas."
"It is likely dinosaurs constituted an important resource in the Cretaceous ecological food web," White said. "Given the lack of comparable global specimens, this prehistoric crocodile and its last meal will continue to provide clues to the relationships and behaviors of animals that inhabited Australia millions of years ago.”
Vanilla Vida wants the world to eat more natural vanilla
Christine Hall Wed, February 16, 2022, 7:30 AM·
Vanilla is indeed “the world’s most popular flavor.” However, despite its popularity, its production is so complex that many people aren’t often getting the real thing, but a synthetic version of the flavoring.
About 70% of the vanilla we consume is grown in Madagascar, and if you saw the weather news lately, the area was hit by not one, but two cyclones in the past 10 days. This isn’t just a “now” problem, but storms and poor growing conditions have plagued the area for nearly 20 years and caused vanilla prices to go from $25 per kilogram to hundreds of dollars per kilo.
That growing climate change, inconsistent supply of natural vanilla beans and labor-intensive practices for growing vanilla are some of the reasons that 95% of the vanilla we consume is synthetic, according to Oren Zilberman, CEO of Vanilla Vida. Israeli-based Vanilla Vida is among a handful of companies trying to replicate vanilla using innovative approaches. For example, Spero Renewables, which developed a process for extracting an acid in corn fiber to make vanilla, and Pigmentum, which is working on a way to produce the taste and smell of vanilla in lettuce.
In Vanilla Vida’s case, it is taking the more direct farming approach — Zilberman’s roots are in farming — by developing vertical integration and supply chain technologies so natural vanilla can be grown in a controlled environment.
The company started in 2019 with an idea stemming from a failed research experiment on vanilla growth done in The Netherlands. Vanilla Vida took the aspects of the research that did work and expanded it into new places for growing and processing, basically to disrupt the entire supply chain.
“The thing that pushed us forward more than in the past, was to reach the important milestone of giving value to the customer — quality of the product,” Zilberman told TechCrunch.
Since officially launching the company in 2020 at The Kitchen, the Strauss accelerator in Israel, the team has been focused on engagement and connected with customers, which Zilberman called “initial scale.”
“The good news is we have more demand than capabilities, but scale is the most challenging part and that is where we are at right now,” he added.
The goal is to provide end-to-end quantity, quality and cost stability for the vanilla supply chain through advanced growing methods for the beans via smart farms and in climate-controlled greenhouses.
To aid in the scaling, Vanilla Vida raised $11.5 million in a Series A round, led by Ordway Selections, with participation from FoodSparks, Newtrition by PeakBridge Partners and Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael.
The latest round gives the company about $15 million in total funding to date. Zilberman said investors were so excited about the technology that he had the opportunity to raise double that amount, but he decided to take it slow and choose strategic investors that would help his company grow the right way.
Meanwhile, the company was engaged in a pilot program in 2021 with more than 20 companies.
“At the beginning, almost no potential customer knew who Vanilla Vida was, and now that they have seen the quality of the product, we are getting results from them that say they didn’t see such a high quality product until today,” Zilberman said.
The customers are asking for volume the company can’t support yet, but he said the new capital will enable the company to push deeper into its R&D and technology while also making a bigger barrier of entry for competitors that Zilberman says are coming soon.
The capital will also be used for its laboratory facilities, starting in Israel and then expanding to the United States and Europe, hiring and engaging with its customers that he says are some of the largest food manufacturers and flavor houses.
Vanilla Vida is still a new player working with a new technology, but Zilberman expects the company will be able to increase its volume in 2023 with visible change to the vanilla supply chain starting in 2024 or 2025.
“There will be two big initial movements at the same time, building facilities and continuing our work with existing farmers in countries where they grow vanilla, like Uganda and Papua New Guinea,” he added.
Christine Hall