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)
Monday, March 20, 2023
Mysterious streaks of light seen in the sky over California
This image from video provided by Jaime Hernandez shows streaks of light travelling across the sky over the Sacramento, Calif., area on Friday night, March 17, 2023. “Mainly, we were in shock, but amazed that we got to witness it,†Hernandez said. "None of us had ever seen anything like it." (Jaime Hernandez via AP)
Jennifer Mcdermott, The Associated Press Published Saturday, March 18, 2023
Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night, shocking St. Patrick's Day revelers who then posted videos on social media of the surprising sight.
Jaime Hernandez was behind the King Cong Brewing Company in Sacramento for a St. Patrick's Day celebration when some among the group noticed the lights. Hernandez quickly began filming. It was over in about 40 seconds, he said Saturday.
“Mainly, we were in shock, but amazed that we got to witness it,” Hernandez said in an email. “None of us had ever seen anything like it.”
The brewery owner posted Hernandez's video to Instagram, asking if anyone could solve the mystery.
Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he's 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.
McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added.
The flaming bits of wreckage created a “spectacular light show in the sky,” McDowell said. He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour.
The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added. The Space Force could not immediately be reached Saturday with questions.
McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
US banks want socialism for themselves - and capitalism for everyone else
When banks like Silicon Valley Bank collapse, money floods to bigger ones like JPMorgan. Clients know they’re ‘too big to fail’
Greg Becker, the former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, sold $3.6m of SBV shares on 27 February, just days before the bank disclosed a large loss that triggered its stock slide and collapse. Over the previous two years, Becker sold nearly $30m of stock.
But Becker won’t rake in the most from this mess. Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest Wall Street bank, will probably make much more.
That’s because depositors in small- and medium-sized banks are now fleeing to the safety of JPMorgan and other giant banks that have been deemed “too big to fail” because the government bailed them out in 2008.
Last Friday afternoon, the deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, met with Dimon in New York and asked whether the failure of Silicon Valley Bank could spread to other banks. “There’s a potential,” Dimon responded.
Presumably, Dimon knew such contagion would mean vastly more business for JPMorgan. In a note to clients on Monday, bank analyst Mike Mayo wrote that JPMorgan is “battle-tested” in volatile markets and “epitomizes” how the largest US banks have shed risk since the 2008 financial crisis.
Recall that the 2008 financial crisis generated a gigantic shift of assets to the biggest Wall Street banks, with the result that JPMorgan and the other giants became far bigger. In the early 1990s, the five largest banks had accounted for only 12% of US bank deposits. After the crisis, they accounted for nearly half.
After this week, they’ll be even bigger.
Their giant size has already given them a huge but hidden effective federal subsidy estimated to be $83bn annually – a premium that investors and depositors willingly pay to these enormous banks, in the form of higher fees and lower returns, precisely because they’re considered too big to fail.
Some of this hidden federal subsidy goes into the pockets of bank executives. Last year alone, Dimon earned $34.5m.
Dimon was at the helm in 2008 when JPMorgan received $25bn from the federal government to help stem the financial crisis which had been brought on largely by the careless and fraudulent lending practices of JPMorgan and other big banks. Dimon earned $20m that year.
In March 2009 Barack Obama summoned Dimon and other top bank executives to the White House and warned them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”.
But the former president never publicly rebuked Dimon or the other big bankers. When asked about the generous pay Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs continued to rake in, Obama defended them as “very savvy businessmen” and said he didn’t “begrudge peoples’ success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”
What free market system? Taxpayers had just bailed out the banks, and the bank CEOs were still raking in fat paychecks. Yet 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs, causing the unemployment rate to soar to 10%. Total US household net worth dropped by $11.1tn. Housing prices dropped by a third nationwide from their 2006 peak, causing some 10 million people to lose their homes.
Rather than defend CEO paychecks, Obama might have demanded, as a condition of getting bailed out, that the banks help underwater homeowners on Main Street.
Another sensible proposal would have been to let bankruptcy judges restructure shaky home mortgages so that borrowers didn’t owe as much and could remain in their homes.
Yet the big banks, led by Dimon, opposed this. They thought they’d do better by squeezing as much possible out of distressed homeowners, and then collecting as much as they could on foreclosed homes.
In April 2008, Dimon and the banks succeeded: the Senate voted down a bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages to help distressed homeowners.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Dimon warned against policies that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were then advocating, including Medicare for All, paid sick leave and free public higher education. Dimon said they amounted to “socialism”.
“Socialism,” he wrote, “inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse – such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives – which they frequently do to maintain power,” adding that socialism would be “a disaster for our country”.
Dimon also warned against “over-regulation” of banking, cautioning that in the next financial crisis, big institutions like JPMorgan won’t be able to provide the lending they did during the last crisis.
“When the next real downturn begins,” he wrote, “banks will be constrained – both psychologically and by new regulations – from lending freely into the marketplace, as many of us did in 2008 and 2009. New regulations mean that banks will have to maintain more liquidity going into a downturn, be prepared for the impacts of even tougher stress tests and hold more capital.”
But, as demonstrated again this past week, American capitalism needs strict guardrails. Otherwise, it is subject to periodic crises that summon bailouts.
The result is socialism for the rich while everyone else is subject to harsh penalties: bankers get bailed out and the biggest banks and bankers do even better. Yet average people who cannot pay their mortgages lose their homes.
Meanwhile, almost 30 million Americans still lack health insurance, most workers who lose their job aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance, most have no paid sick leave, child labor is on the rise and nearly 51m households can’t afford basic monthly expenses such as housing, food, childcare and transportation.
Is it any wonder that many Americans see the system as rigged against them? Is it surprising that some become susceptible to dangerous snake-oil peddled by power-hungry demagogues?
Paul Krugman: Three and a half myths about bank bailouts
The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier. (Jim Wilson | The New York Times) A line of clients outside the entrance to Silicon Valley Bank's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., March 13, 2023. The FDIC and other entities will protect most people’s bank and brokerage balances; but it’s as good a time as any for consumers to create other backstops.
By Paul Krugman | The New York Times | March 18, 2023
Last weekend, U.S. policymakers went all-in on bailing out two medium-size banks: Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
And yes, they were bailouts. I wish the Biden administration weren’t trying to claim otherwise. Yes, stockholders were cleaned out. But legally, deposits are insured only up to $250,000; by choosing to make all depositors whole, the feds have done holders of big accounts a major favor.
It’s true that losses, if any — it’s not clear whether either bank was insolvent as opposed to simply lacking the ready cash to handle a bank run — won’t be made up with higher conventional taxes; the money is coming from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which will recover funds, if necessary, by imposing higher fees on banks. But these fees will be passed on to the public, so taxpayers are de facto on the hook.
But was it a bad decision? I’ve heard four basic kinds of criticism. One is ridiculous. Two are dubious. But the last one has me a bit worried, although I think it’s probably wrong.
Let’s start with the silly stuff. On the right side of the political spectrum, many have quickly rallied around the claim that SVB failed because it was excessively woke — which is only marginally less ludicrous than claiming that wokeness somehow causes train derailments.
For what it’s worth, no, SVB didn’t stand out from other banks in its concern for diversity, the environment and so on. And banks have been going bust for centuries, since long before human resources departments began including boilerplate language about social responsibility in their mission statements. So the talk about wokeness tells us nothing about bank failures — but a lot about the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the modern American right.
On to more serious criticism. There is a reasonable argument, one that I largely agree with, to the effect that the failure of SVB didn’t pose a systemic threat in the way that the failures of financial institutions beginning with Lehman Brothers did in 2008. So why rescue the depositors?
Well, one answer is that, like it or not, Silicon Valley Bank had come to play a key role in what you might call the financial ecosystem of the technology sector. Notably, if depositors had lost access to their money, even temporarily, this would apparently have left many technology companies unable to meet their payrolls and pay their bills — which might have done lasting damage. True, killing the crypto industry would be a public service, but there’s also a lot of good stuff that might get hurt.
In this sense, the bailout of SVB was something like the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, which was also justified on the grounds that it would preserve a crucial piece of the economic ecosystem. And although the auto bailout was harshly criticized at the time, in retrospect, it looks like the right call, even though it ended up costing taxpayers billions.
A third criticism is the claim that the feds have now established the principle that all deposits are effectively insured without imposing correspondingly tighter regulation on what banks do with those deposits — creating an incentive for irresponsible risk-taking. But policymakers explicitly didn’t guarantee all deposits everywhere, and at least so far, we’re seeing an outflow of funds from smaller banks to more tightly regulated large banks. You may not like this; whatever else you may say about big financial institutions, they aren’t lovable. But on balance, we seem to be seeing the financial system move toward reduced, not increased, risk-taking.
Which brings me to the criticism I take seriously, although I think it’s probably wrong: claims that the bank failures will undermine efforts to control inflation.
It’s true that the bank blowups have caused investors to rethink the future course of Federal Reserve policy: A rate hike at the next Fed meeting, which seemed to be a done deal, now looks uncertain, with markets now pricing in the possibility of a rate cut and two-year interest rates (a good indicator of expected Fed policy over the near future) plunging. And some sensible people I talk to are now warning about financial dominance, in which the Fed puts a higher priority on protecting Wall Street than on stabilizing inflation.
But given the way the banking system is reacting to the SVB affair, there are actually good reasons for the Fed to limit rate hikes, at least for a while. The Fed has been trying to cool off the economy; well, banks’ increased sensitivity to risk and the shift of deposits to more tightly regulated banks will probably cool the economy even if the Fed doesn’t raise rates. Some financial newsletters are even predicting a recession. And market expectations of inflation have, if anything, declined.
The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier, and it will be a while — maybe forever — before we know whether policymakers made the right call. But I’m hearing a lot of apocalyptic rhetoric right now, none of which seems justified by the available facts.
Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is a columnist for The New York Times.
Sunday, March 19, 2023
ICYMI
Markings on the leg and butt bones of early riders indicate people started riding horses 5,000 years ago
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Ability to ride horses was likely a big factor in enabling the Yamnayans' continental-scale migration
CBC Radio ·
Grave of a Yamnaya horse rider discovered in Strejnicu, Romania. The man, 30 to 40 years old at the time of death, displays skeletal traits typical of "horsemanship syndrome." (Alin Frînculeasa)
The bones of horseback riders from thousands of years ago are helping scientists to piece together the story of when and where people first started riding horses.
"Bones are living tissue in your living person and they always react and remodel to handle stress demands, so you can read bones like biographies," said Martin Trautmann, a bioanthropologist from the University of Helsinki.
Trautmann said he wasn't expecting to find evidence of horse riding when he first started studying skeletal remains of Yamnayan people from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
However, while looking at the femur of one particular individual, he saw a sign that he described as "very typical for horse riding." The more he looked, body part by body part, the more signs he saw.
"When I found, later, another skeleton with the same symptoms and then one more and one more and one more, the plausibility that this could just be some random effects became smaller and smaller," Trautmann said.
Early Yamnayans were not mounted warriors, but more like cowboys.- Martin Trautmann, University of Helsinki
Figuring out the skeletons of these people bore marks indicating they were horse riders lends strength to the idea that they were early domesticators of horses.
"This is the first time we've really proven that we had people who were habitual riders in 3,000 BC," said Trautmann's colleague David Anthony, an anthropologist from Harvard University and Hartwick College.
Any time we regularly engage in an activity that requires specific muscles to do — swinging a tennis racquet, throwing a baseball, or riding a horse — the pull from the muscles creates rough patches on the part of the bone where the expanding muscles attach.
"In this case, what you're talking about is an activity in which you're squeezing your thighs and your knees together while you're keeping your legs far apart and bouncing up and down on your tailbone," said Anthony, in an interview with Quirks & Quarks' host, Bob McDonald.
"There are very few activities that require all of that other than horseback riding."
Some of the changes that can occur to the bones: indentation on the hip socket (A), wear on the pelvis where muscles attached (B, C), marks on the thigh bone where it attached to various muscles (D, E) and cross sections of the thigh bone that become more oblong in shape with regular horse riding (F). (M. Trautmann/University of Helsinki)
Most of the bone changes in habitual horse riders occur at the muscle, tendon and ligament attachment sites in the thigh bones and pelvis. Other changes can include: deformations in the diameter of the round thigh bones that tend to become oblong-shaped; imprints of thigh bones left behind in the hip sockets; signs of injury in the tailbone and degeneration in the vertebrae.
Detecting many of these characteristic signatures on bone helped the researchers conclude they belonged to horse horse riders.
Putting together the story of horse domestication
Before this new study, everything we knew about the origins of horseback riding came from the horses themselves. The strongest evidence could be found in horse vertebrae, but Anthony said they were rarely well preserved.
So for the past 30 years, Anthony's been working to solve this mystery by studying bit wear left behind on the teeth of ancient horses. The oldest evidence he said he found came from a site in Botai, Kazakhstan, that dated back to sometime between 3,500 and 3,000 B.C. and belonged to the Yamnaya people.
The earliest Yamnayan sites are located in Russia and Ukraine, but they eventually spanned as far as the Mongolian Altai Mountains in the east, and to southeastern Europe in the west, where the human skeletons for this current study originated.
From the human remains Trautmann studied in this work, he estimates that between 20 and 30 per cent of the Yamnayan population at that time were riding horses.
Riding horses was as revolutionary to human civilization as the ability to make fire, the invention of the wheel and writing, according to Martin Trautmann. (Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)
Horse riding was a game-changer
Both Anthony and Trautmann agree that the ability to ride horses, and their eventual domestication, were huge turning points for human civilization.
On horse, the Yamnaya people had the ability to carry more and travel farther than ever before. A 100-kilometre trek that once took 10 days to traverse on foot became a distance a horse rider could complete in a day.
Anthony said the Yamnayans migrated enormous distances east and west, which was partially made possible by horseback riding.
"That's a range of 5,000 kilometers, the equivalent of the Atlantic to the Pacific, the entire width of North America, that's how far these people migrated, and that was unprecedented at the time," explained Anthony.
Riding horses was also revolutionary for herding animals. On horse, it became possible for the Yamnayans to herd three times as many animals, a factor that helped their economy grow.
Using horses for warfare likely came later though because at that time, horses weren't fully domesticated. Anthony said that likely meant they were too skittish to trust in battle.
Trautmann added, "Early Yamnayans were not mounted warriors, but more like cowboys."
Written by Sonya Buyting.
ALBERTA
Union negotiations stalled by ‘chaotic’ Chestermere government: CUPE
Mayor Jeff Colvin denies the city's administration has had any role in slowing negotiations with the union
The City of Chestermere town hall is shown on June 19, 2022. Jim Wells/Postmedia
Little progress toward a collective agreement has been made in the nearly 10 months since City of Chestermere employees voted to unionize as dysfunction within the city’s embattled government has thwarted attempts to get to the bargaining table, according to the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
The city is currently dealing with the fallout of a lengthy province-ordered investigation into its governance; provincial officials last week unveiled a 215-page municipal inspection report that found multiple instances of “irregular, improper and improvident” governance and handed the city a slate of 12 binding directives that, if not followed, could result in the dismissal of Mayor Jeff Colvin, city councillors or administrative officials. The report highlights issues with Colvin and his council that the union says are contributing to the drawn-out bargaining process.
“The report confirms that the paranoid, chaotic management practices from this mayor and his council supporters have left city employees in even more need of union protection and a legal collective agreement to safeguard their rights,” said CUPE Alberta spokesperson Lou Arab.
“But unfortunately, the very dysfunction at city hall that we need protection from is delaying the process of getting that contract in place. So nothing in the report was particularly surprising to us.”
Union says city’s top negotiator removed due to assault charge
Arab says Kim Wallace, one of the city’s three chief administrative officers (CAO), was removed as the city’s chief negotiator for talks with the union after she was charged with assault in relation to an altercation with an employee last month, and the city has not named a replacement. The unusual three-CAO model employed by Chestermere, splitting the typically solitary top administrative role into three positions, has added complications to the process, according to the union.
“We’re calling it the three-AO system,” said Arab. “We don’t know who to talk to; everybody’s got a different answer. There’s no sort of person who’s responsible for dealing with CUPE right now.”
Responding to Postmedia via email, Colvin denied that the city has had anything to do with the stalled negotiations, noting that the city’s recent correspondence to the union hasn’t been returned. He noted the city asked to delay a recent meeting because it wanted to hire an “expert union negotiator” and defended the city’s three-CAO model.
“All three CAOs are involved in the union negotiations, as all decisions are discussed thoroughly and agreed upon by the three CAOs,” he said. “Having three senior leaders involved in the negotiations demonstrates another benefit of the tri-CAO model as it exemplifies cohesive and comprehensive decision-making for the city.”
The inspection report, however, noted the three-CAO model as an irregular move, criticizing it for its removal of the buffer between elected officials and city staff and its “very real potential” to allow the mayor and council to improperly act as managers of the administration.
Among the many findings in the report, it outlines multiple instances of the mayor and some councillors’ disrespect toward staff members. The report highlights the perceived distrust the mayor and some councillors had of staff upon their election, which a former city official alleged led to some employees being fired at the direction of the mayor and his supporting councillors for being “disloyal.” Additionally, Coun. Mel Foat is reported to have told a senior official from another city that Chestermere’s departing employees were like “rats leaving a sinking ship,” the report states.
“That is contributing to the dysfunction of the city, these kinds of comments from the mayor and his supporters,” said Arab.
“These are your front-line workers who are being impacted by this dysfunction and I’ve never seen that before in another municipality. Different politicians come in with different political agendas and sometimes people at the top get shuffled around a little bit, but, generally speaking, the rank and file workers who are just trying to do their jobs don’t get impacted.”
The report states 62 employees left between October 2021, when Colvin and the new council took office, and September 2022, when the investigation came to a close. Four workers retired, 19 left involuntarily and 39 left “voluntarily,” according to the report, stipulating that much of that turnover came due to employees being perceived as non-supporters of the new mayor and council’s agenda and a number of staff members being uncomfortable with the “abrupt change in governance style.”
Arab says while he’s not sure how many of those 62 workers are members of the bargaining unit, “there are definitely some, and there are definitely some who left involuntarily.”
“We’re doing the best we can to put fires out but we don’t have the protection of a contract in place with a grievance procedure that we need to sort of put those fires out. So if somebody does get fired and we feel it’s unjust — when there’s a contract, there’s a grievance procedure,” Arab said.
“When you’re in a unionized environment without a contract, it’s much more difficult in any case. But, in particular, it’s more difficult when the administration is just a dumpster fire.”
Chestermere residents and observers packed the recreation centre in Chestermere on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 as the province presented a report on Chestermere’s city council. Jim Wells/Postmedia
Colvin says his city’s administration is not dysfunctional and the union is attempting to “take advantage of comments that were taken out of context by (municipal inspector) George Cuff well over a year ago.”
“Our current leaders and outstanding staff are highly organized and highly effective,” he said. “We have excellent leaders and managers and hard-working professionals on every team. The team our city directors have built is working hard and succeeding.”
City has ‘action plan’ to meet province’s directives
In a statement from Colvin posted to the city’s Facebook page on Friday, the mayor said the city has established a plan — not detailed in the post — that will guide it toward meeting the 12 directives it was handed by Municipal Affairs Minister Rebecca Schulz.
“We are committed to reassuring Municipal Affairs that we are, and have always been, top-notch, hard-working professionals dedicated to good governance,” reads the statement. “An action plan has been implemented, and our team is eager to complete the directives as requested. We will continue business as usual, striving for excellence for our residents and our city.”
Previously, the city had said it would seek legal advice regarding the report and the minister’s orders.
New Toyota CEO Still Wants To Prioritize Hydrogen Over BEVs Koji Sato will officially take over from Akio Toyoda in April.
Mar 19, 2023
Toyota's new CEO, Koji Sato, believes hydrogen is the way forward when it comes to carbon neutrality. While virtually every other automaker on the planet is focusing solely on battery electric vehicles, Sato reckons hydrogen will be the backbone of the Japanese marque's future.
Speaking at an endurance race on March 18, Sato gave an outline of what he aims to do when he takes over as Toyota CEO in 2 weeks time. He mentioned the importance of exploring non-BEV solutions (via Automotive News):
"We want to ensure that hydrogen stays a viable option. We need a production and transport supply chain. Unless we see evolution there, we cannot expect a volume increase in the energy's use."
However, Sato is not discounting BEVs. He believes they will also play a crucial role in Toyota's future alongside hybrid and hydrogen vehicles:
"We are making full-fledged efforts on everything. It is important to remain flexible in order to tailor products and energies to different carbon neutral needs in different markets." Toyota's sole hydrogen offering, the Mirai, has been a mixed success so far. In the US, the Mirai is exclusively sold in California as no other state has the required fueling infrastructure. Revised for 2020, the second-gen Mirai is a sleek sedan - not a retrofitted Prius like the original model. It also now starts at $50,595 (it used to be closer to $60k) and has a range of up to 402 miles. Still, only 2,094 Mirais were sold in the US in 2022.
Meanwhile, Toyota only has one battery electric vehicle on sale in America, the bZ4X. The brand actually has a substantial BEV range in China, including the $27k bZ3. However, Americans have to make do with the bZ4X, a $42,000 crossover that's range and technology struggle to match rivals like the Tesla Model Y.
Researchers in Italy have engineered an artificial leaf that can be embedded within plants to create electricity from raindrops or wind.
It functions extremely well under rainy or windy conditions to light up LED lights and power itself, according to a report by IEEE Spectrum published on Wednesday.
Fabian Meder, a researcher studying bioinspired soft robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, Italy, told the science news outlet that the system could be practical for agricultural applications and remote environmental monitoring in order to observe plant health or monitor climate conditions.
In order for the device to work, it is added to the leaves of a real plant.
“When the [leaves] move in the wind, the two surfaces touch each other and separate again, creating static charges on the plant leaf cuticle and on our device,” told IEEE Spectrum Meder.
“These charges are induced into the inner cellular tissue of the plant, where they create a current. We can harvest this current by an electrode inserted into the plant tissue.” Harvesting energy from rain
We have witnessed artificial leaves that use a similar technique to create electricity from wind, but the process of harvesting energy from raindrops is new.
The researchers proceeded to embed their artificial leaf system within the leaves of a living oleander plant, and evaluate its ability to produce energy.
The results indicated that single water drops could create voltage and current peaks of over 40 volts and 15 microamperes and can power 11 LED lights.
“The results revealed that wind and rain energy harvesting are possible with the device—either separately or simultaneously—making it a multifunctional energy harvester or self-powered sensor,” told IEEE Spectrum Barbara Mazzolai, associate director for robotics and director of the IIT’s Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory, who also took part in the study.
She further explained that the main advantage of this energy-harvesting system compared to other similar models is that it can actually create more electricity in wet conditions. Other artificial leaves are bogged down when wet.
Now, the researchers are working on improving the performance of their artificial leaf through design modifications such as the shapes of the electrodes and the materials chosen.
“We have filed a patent application on the technology and are analyzing the potential markets,” concluded Mazzolai. “Still, some research is necessary before defining the final product—for example, we want to test the systems in detail under outdoor and strongly varying wind and rain conditions.”
The study is published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
Study abstract:
Soft (bio)hybrid robotics aims at interfacing living beings with artificial technology. It was recently demonstrated that plant leaves coupled with artificial leaves of selected materials and tailored mechanics can convert wind-driven leaf fluttering into electricity. Here, we significantly advance this technology by establishing the additional opportunity to convert kinetic energy from raindrops hitting the upper surface of the artificial leaf into electricity. To achieve this, we integrated an extra electrification layer and exposed electrodes on the free upper surface of the wind energy harvesting leaf that allow to produce a significant current when droplets land and spread on the device. Single water drops create voltage and current peaks of over 40V and 15µA and can directly power 11 LEDs. The same structure has the additional capability to harvest wind energy using leaf oscillations. This shows that environment-responsive biohybrid technologies can be tailored to produce electricity in challenging settings, such as on plants under motion and exposed to rain. The devices have the potential for multisource energy harvesting and as self-powered sensors for environmental monitoring, pointing at applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the Internet of Things (IoT), smart agriculture, and smart forestry.
Indigenous communities leading Canada's clean energy boom
The 10 MW Awasis solar project which opened in November is seen on the Cowessess First Nation in an undated handout photo.
(Cowessess First Nation, *MANDATORY CREDIT*)
CALGARY -
On a wintry day last November, Daphne Kay looked up at an expanse of gleaming solar panels located on Cowessess First Nation reserve land just east of Regina and and cried.
It was the mix of past and present that moved her, watching her fellow community members hold a traditional round dance to mark the grand opening of Cowessess' newly completed 10 MW solar farm.
"I thought about my grandfather, who has passed away, and how during his time he wanted us to live in a healthy way that honoured our traditions, but also brought prosperity for future generations," said Kay, who grew up on Cowessess and, in her role as community energy specialist with Cowessess Ventures Ltd., played an instrumental role in the development of the new solar farm.
"So I thought about him, I thought about my mom, I thought about all the people who were affected by residential schools. I thought about all the people who came before me, and all the people who will come after me."
Cowessess' $21-million Awasis solar project connects to Saskatchewan's electricity grid and is capable of powering 2,500 homes annually, on average. Over its 35-year estimated life, the solar farm is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 350,000 tonnes -- in total, equivalent to the emissions of over 70,000 gas-powered cars driven for one year.
The Awasis solar farm is also an example of many Indigenous-led clean energy projects blossoming right now from coast to coast.
Others include the First Nations-owned Meadow Lake Tribal Council Bioenergy Centre, also in Saskatchewan, which will generate carbon-neutral green power using lumber waste from nearby sawmills. In Nova Scotia, the Membertou, Paqtnkek and Potlotek First Nations are equity partners in what is expected to be North America's first green hydrogen and green ammonia project. And in Ontario, the recently-approved Oneida energy storage project, the largest battery storage project in Canada, is being developed in partnership with the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corp.
A 2020 report by national not-for-profit organization Indigenous Clean Energy Social Enterprise identified 197 medium-to-large renewable energy generating projects with Indigenous involvement, either in operation or in the final stages of planning and construction.
While the group's 2023 data has not yet been released publicly, executive director Chris Henderson said many additional projects have come online in the last two-and-a-half years -- everything from solar and wind to hydro to geothermal.
In fact, he said Indigenous communities are so heavily involved in clean energy that they now own, co-own, or have a defined financial benefit agreement in place for almost 20 per cent of Canada's electricity generating infrastructure.
"They're the largest asset owners, outside of utilities," Henderson said. "Indigenous communities across the country right now are, quite literally, the largest change agents for clean energy."
As part of its pledge to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the Government of Canada has set the goal of achieving a net-zero electricity grid as early 2035.
Experts have said such a goal will require tens of billions of dollars in public and private investment, and it seems clear that Indigenous communities -- simply by nature of being landowners and treaty rights owners -- are poised to reap a significant amount of that economic benefit.
"We can't have a net-zero transition without continued and growing Indigenous participation," Henderson said. "If you're going to modernize the electricity grid, you're going to be using land, which means you're going to have to work with the Indigenous communities whose land it is."
Private companies have been partnering with Indigenous communities on energy infrastructure projects for decades. But early agreements typically involved guaranteeing construction jobs or other financial benefits for the community and fell short of offering Indigenous people a full equity stake.
That's changing, however. Canada's commitment to net-zero comes at a time when the federal government has also committed to reconciliation with Indigenous people, a commitment that includes the recognition of Indigenous people's right to economic self-determination.
Indigenous communities are also asserting that right, increasingly seeking to get involved in clean energy projects as full owners. Cowessess, for example, owns 95 per cent of the Awasis solar project with the opportunity to become full owners after five years. Kay said it was able to become involved because of a First Nations Opportunity Agreement between the First Nations Power Authority (FNPA) and SaskPower, the provincial utility. The agreement gave FNPA the responsibility of securing First Nations-led solar generation projects to add capacity to the grid.
"Jobs are nice, but equity ownership is nicer," said Kay. "Because it allows us to really steer the ship, and bring forth our own sovereignty in the energy sector."
Henderson said Canada's energy and electricity sectors have historically been dominated by large oil and gas companies, large utilities, and governments.
But new technology allows for more diversification of ownership," he said. "Moving to a clean energy future requires us to decolonize the energy system."
There is significant federal funding support available for Indigenous-led clean energy projects. The Awasis solar project on Cowessess received $18.5 million from the federal government. But Henderson said many other clean energy projects in Canada are the result of joint ventures between Indigenous communities and private companies, and are fully funded with private capital.
For Cowessess, being a leader in clean energy is a way to ensure the long-term economic sustainability of the community, Kay said. But it's also about the long-term sustainability of Mother Earth, which is another reason Indigenous communities are attracted to the opportunity.
"Renewable energy fits really well with our traditional values," she said. "There's a saying that we have that is 'seven generations.' You're always supposed to think seven generations ahead, and that's integral to our world view. Even though we won't ever be able to sit in the shade of the tree, it's imperative that we plant the seed in our lifetime."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 19, 2023.
Erik Rosolowsky a physics professor at the University of Alberta joins Global News Calgary with details on a recent discovery involving the James Webb Telescope and what it tells us about the universe.
Fossil site is 'Rosetta Stone' for understanding early life
A small piece of Rhynie fossil plant with fossil fungi colonizing the ends, viewed through a microscope. Credit: Loron et al.
Leading edge technology has uncovered secrets about a world-renowned fossil hoard that could offer vital clues about early life on Earth.
Researchers who analyzed the 400 million-year-old-cache, found in rural north-east Scotland, say their findings reveal better preservation of the fossils at a molecular level than was previously anticipated.
Fresh scrutiny of the exquisitely preserved treasure trove from Aberdeenshire has enabled scientists to identify the chemical fingerprints of the various organisms within it.
Just as the Rosetta Stone helped Egyptologists translate hieroglyphics, the team hopes these chemical codes can help them decipher more about the identity of the life forms, that other more ambiguous fossils represent.
The spectacular fossil ecosystem near the Aberdeenshire village of Rhynie was discovered in 1912, mineralized and encased by chert—hard rock composed of silica. Known as the Rhynie chert, it originates from the Early Devonian period—about 407 million years ago—and has a significant role to play in scientists understanding of life on Earth.
Researchers combined the latest non-destructive imaging with data analysis and machine learning to analyze fossils from collections held by National Museums Scotland and the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh were able to probe deeper than has previously been possible, which they say could reveal new insights about less well-preserved samples.
Employing a technique known as FTIR spectroscopy—in which infrared light is used to collect high-resolution data—researchers found impressive preservation of molecular information within the cells, tissues and organisms in the rock.
Since they already knew which organisms most of the fossils represented, the team was able to discover molecular fingerprints that reliably discriminate between fungi, bacteria and other groups.
These fingerprints were then used to identify some of the more mysterious members of the Rhynie ecosystem, including two specimens of an enigmatic tubular "nematophyte."
These strange organisms, which are found in Devonian—and later Silurian—sediments have both algal and fungal characteristics and were previously hard to place in either category. The new findings indicate that they were unlikely to have been either lichens or fungi.
Dr. Sean McMahon, Chancellor's Fellow from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy and School of GeoSciences, said, "We have shown how a quick, non-invasive method can be used to discriminate between different lifeforms, and this opens a unique window on the diversity of early life on Earth."
The team fed their data into a machine learning algorithm that was able to classify the different organisms, providing the potential for sorting other datasets from other fossil-bearing rocks.
Dr. Corentin Loron, Royal Society Newton International Fellow from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy said the study shows the value of bridging paleontology with physics and chemistry to create new insights into early life.
"Our work highlights the unique scientific importance of some of Scotland's spectacular natural heritage and provides us with a tool for studying life in trickier, more ambiguous remnants," Dr. Loron said.
Dr. Nick Fraser, Keeper of Natural Sciences at National Museums Scotland, believes the value of museum collections for understanding our world should never be underestimated. He said, "The continued development of analytical techniques provides new avenues to explore the past. Our new study provides one more way of peering ever deeper into the fossil record."
The research is published in Nature Communications.
America’s timeline for development of domestic battery metal supply chain may be unrealistic – research
Staff Writer | March 19, 2023 | Evaporating ponds at Albemarle’s Silver Peak lithium mine in Nevada. (Reference image by Ken Lund, Flickr).
By 2027, for an EV to be tax-credit eligible in the US, 80% of the market value of critical minerals in its battery must be extracted or processed domestically or by US free-trade partners (FTPs), Northwestern University researchers say.
In a commentary published in the journal Nature Sustainability, Jennifer Dunn and Jenna Trost wrote that while this goal – part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – is well-intended, there are reasons to believe the mandate is unreachable and could create new problems.
According to Dunn and Trost, the 80%- target could be achievable for some types of batteries for plug-in hybrid vehicles, but meeting demand for fully electric vehicles with batteries that meet IRA criteria would be challenging. Instead, a mass-based target could avoid some of the challenges posed by a market-value target, such as pinning down a consistent market value for each mineral when market prices are volatile.
The researchers also concluded that the approach taken by the IRA discounts the environmental effects of mining, non-critical minerals supply, and definitions that avoid gamesmanship.
In their view, to meet the demands of the bill, a steep increase in domestic mining would be needed. This could pose environmental issues, including water pollution, in addition to creating greenhouse gas emissions from burning fuel to operate mining equipment.
Building mines also takes time. Permitting processes to protect the environment and worker safety can create delays and extend that timeline. Communities may also resist new mines because of the potential environmental impact. This means that establishing a domestic supply of minerals is unlikely to meet the IRA’s aggressive timeline.
“There’s a lot of interesting social and political dynamics. Some people don’t want new or expanded mines, and others welcome the economic activity and the opportunity to become more energy independent by building out a domestic minerals supply chain,” said Dunn, who is the director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience. “It’s fascinating to watch how this is going to play out.”
She believes that much of the mineral supply chain will continue to be international. As a result, there’s also the issue of labour laws in countries that are not FTPs, raising the question of responsible sourcing.
The researcher pointed to Argentina as a case study. The South American nation is a non-FTP country that provided 59% of the 2,618 tons of lithium mineral the US imported in 2019. Argentina does not offer the labour and environmental protections the US requires of FTP partners, but any minerals acquired from the country would still count if they were processed domestically.
Dunn and Trost argue that guidance should be provided regarding what constitutes processing, and what are allowable sources for the minerals that would be processed in the US or an FTP.
“We have ostensibly good labor protections for miners, but that’s not the case everywhere. What are the ethical implications of using minerals from other places?” Dunn pointed out. “And then, are we going to be really serious about recycling? because we’re clearly not with plastics. We have to be really serious. Investment in battery recycling is growing, but it still needs to be larger.”
Market value target
Dunn and Trost also raised concerns about the use of a market value-based target.
A market value-based target can be met before all the critical minerals in a battery are acquired from a secure source such as the US or an FTP, depending on the battery chemistry.
The environmental effects of critical minerals acquisition are physically tied to the amount of mineral produced rather than its market value.
Market values fluctuate. The researchers noted that prices for cobalt and nickel, for example, have increased by about $13,000 and $4,000 per metric ton, respectively, since 2019.
Many non-critical minerals central to batteries are mainly produced outside the US, raising supply risks.
Instead, the authors suggested using a mass-based standard. Using a mass-based target, they wrote, would reduce uncertainty and hold all automakers to the same standard in the interpretation of market value.
“Given the fluctuations in mineral market values, using a mass-based target in the policy could improve its transparency but may not incentivize production of high-value minerals domestically, which is important for mineral security,” Dunn and Trost said.
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