The worldwide race to make solar power more efficient

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Image captionBlue skies in the UK in April were a bonanza for solar power

One of the few parts of the UK economy to have a good April was solar power,

The Met Office says it has probably been the sunniest April on record and the solar power industry reported its highest ever production of electricity (9.68GW) in the UK at 12:30 on Monday 20 April.

With 16 solar panels on his roof Brian McCallion, from Northern Ireland, has been one of those benefitting from the good weather.

"We have had them for about five years, and we save about £1,000 per year," says Mr McCallion, who lives in Strabane, just by the border.

"If they were more efficient we could save more," he says, "and maybe invest in batteries to store it."

Image copyrightBRIAN MCCALLION

Image captionSolar panels even make sense in cloudy Northern Ireland

That efficiency might be coming. There is a worldwide race, from San Francisco to Shenzhen, to make a more efficient solar cell.

Today's average commercial solar panel converts 17-19% of the light energy hitting it to electricity. This is up from 12% just 10 years ago. But what if we could boost this to 30%?

More efficient solar cells mean we could get much more than today's 2.4% of global electricity supply from the sun.

Solar is already the world's fastest growing energy technology. Ten years ago, there were only 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity globally - one gigawatt being roughly the output of a single large power station. For context, New York City, with 8.4 million people uses about 12 gigawatt-hours of electricity a day.

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Image captionThis solar farm covers 200ha (500 acres) in southern France

By the end of last year, the world's installed solar power had jumped to about 600 gigawatts.

Even with the disruption caused by Covid-19, we will probably add 105 gigawatts of solar capacity worldwide this year, forecasts London-based research company, IHS Markit.

Most solar cells are made from wafer-thin slices of silicon crystals, 70% of which are made in China and Taiwan.

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But wafer-based crystalline silicon is bumping pretty close to its theoretical maximum efficiency.

The Shockley-Queisser limit marks the maximum efficiency for a solar cell made from just one material, and for silicon this is about 32%.

However, combining six different materials into what is called a multi-junction cell can push efficiency as high as 47%.

Another way to break through this limit, is to use lenses to magnify the sunlight falling on the solar cell, an approach called concentrated solar.

But this is an expensive way to produce electricity, and is mainly useful on satellites.

"Not anything you would see on anybody's roof in the next decade," laughs Dr Nancy Haegel, director of materials science at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionThe technology of the current generation of solar panels is close to its theoretical maximum efficiency

The fastest improving solar technology is called perovskites - named after Count Lev Alekseevich von Perovski, a 19th Century Russian mineralogist.

These have a particular crystal structure that is good for solar absorption. Thin films, around 300 nanometres (much thinner than a human hair) can be made inexpensively from solutions - allowing them to be easily applied as a coating to buildings, cars or even clothing.

Perovskites also work better than silicon at lower lighting intensities, on cloudy days or for indoors.

You can print them using an inkjet printer, says Dr Konrad Wojciechowski, scientific director at Saule Technologies, based in Oxford and Warsaw. "Paint on a substrate, and you have a photovoltaic device," he says.

With such a cheap, flexible, and efficient material, you could apply it to street furniture to power free smartphone charging, public wifi, and air quality sensors, he explains.

He's been working with the Swedish construction firm Skanska to apply perovskite layers in building panels.

Image copyrightINSOLIGHT

Image captionSaule Technologies is using perovskites in solar panels

According to Max Hoerantner, co-founder of Swift Solar, a San Francisco start-up, there are only about 10 start-up firms in the world working on perovskite technology.

Oxford PV, a university spin-off, says it reached 28% efficiency with a commercial perovskite-based solar cell in late 2018, and will have an annual 250-megawatt production line running this year.

Both Oxford PV and Swift Solar make tandem solar cells - these are silicon panels which also have a thin perovskite film layer.

Since they're made from two materials, they get to break through the Shockley-Queisser limit.

The silicon absorbs the red band of the visible light spectrum, and the perovskite the blue bit, giving the tandem bigger efficiency than either material alone.

One challenge is when "you work with a material that's only been around since 2012, it's very hard to show it will last for 25 years," says Dr Hoerantner.

Image copyrightINSOLIGHT

Image captionInsolight panels use lenses to concentrate light

Insolight, a Swiss startup, has taken a different tack - embedding a grid of hexagonal lenses in a solar panel's protective glass, thus concentrating light 200 times.

To follow the sun's motion, the cell array shifts horizontally by a few millimetres throughout the day. It is a bid to make concentrated solar cheap.

"The architecture of these conventional concentrated photovoltaics is very costly. What we've done is miniaturise the sun tracking mechanism and integrate it within the module," says Insolight's chief business officer David Schuppisser.

"We've done it in a cheaper way [that] you can deploy anywhere you can deploy a conventional solar panel," he says.

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's solar energy institute measured Insolight's current model as having an efficiency of 29%. It is now working on a module that is hoped to reach 32% efficiency.

Current silicon technology is not quite dead, though, and there are approaches to make tiny, quick wins in efficiency. One is to add an extra layer to a cell's back to reflect unabsorbed light back through it a second time. This improves efficiency by 1-2%.

Another is to add an outside layer, which lessens losses that occur where silicon touches the metal contacts. It's only a "small tweak", says Xiaojing Sun, a solar analyst Wood Mackenzie research - adding 0.5-1% in efficiency - but she says these changes mean manufacturers only need to make small alterations to their production lines.

From such small gains - to the use of concentrated solar and perovskites - solar tech is in a race to raise efficiency and push down costs.

"Spanning this magical number 30%, this is where the solar cell industry could really make a very big difference," says Swift Solar's Max Hoerantner.

THIRD WORLD USA
Four Amish children killed in horse-drawn buggy accident
FLASH FROM THE PAST TODAY

GETTY IMAGES

An Amish horse-drawn buggy (file photo)

Officials in Kentucky say four children were killed and one is missing after their horse-drawn buggy was washed away while trying to cross a stream.

The Amish family of six were crossing a low water bridge when their horse was swept away by the current, police say.

The incident occurred in the Salt Lick Community of Bath County around 17:00 local time (22:00BST) on Wednesday.

As of Thursday, the National Guard and state police are still searching for the missing child.

The ages of the four children, who were siblings, has not yet been released.

Emergency workers staged themselves beside a flooded creek and searched through the night, according to WKYT-News, which reports that they were hampered by muddy conditions.

Missi Mosley and her boyfriend rushed to the scene after hearing a call for rescue on a police scanner, she said.

"It was devastating," Ms Mosley told WKYT.

"The waters are so swift, and the rain was pouring down. It was just a sombre feeling."

WHEN BABE RUTH AND THE GREAT INFLUENZA GRIPPED BOSTON
As Babe Ruth was emerging as baseball’s great slugger in 1918, he fell sick with the flu

Baseball star Babe Ruth in his last year with the Boston Red Sox in 1919, one year after he survived the flu. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

BY RANDY ROBERTS AND JOHNNY SMITH

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | April 30, 2020


Even before Babe Ruth reached the Red Sox spring training camp in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and took his first tentative steps toward revolutionizing the game of baseball, the influenza virus destined to convulse the world lurked nearby.

Many epidemiologists believe that what became known as the “Spanish Flu” in all likelihood took shape in early 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas. Loring Miner, a successful country doctor and health official, first noticed the odd strain of influenza. He had never encountered one like it. The “grippe” tore into residents of the county—the characteristic chills, blinding headache, high fever, hacking cough, and debilitating body aches came on fast, and for some rugged, healthy residents of the county just as rapidly killed them.

Americans were on the move in early 1918, and the flu Miner identified moved with them. In early March, it showed up in the shamefully overcrowded barracks and tents of Camp Funston, Kansas, one of the Army’s hastily and poorly constructed cantonments to train soldiers for action in the war in Europe. At Funston more than several thousand doughboys sickened, dragging themselves to the camp hospital or infirmaries. Thirty-eight died. Those who recovered, and many others who were not sick enough to seek medical treatment, soon boarded trains for other camps further east. Many traveled to Camp Devens, near Boston, and from there to the Western Front. Others spent time at such posts as Camp Pike, on the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas. Everywhere they traveled it was like the contagion was packed in their kit.

Around the same time, in the second week of March, professional baseball players, eager to escape northern winters, began to trickle toward the warmer climes of the South. Babe Ruth, carrying his left-handed golf clubs, and his Red Sox teammates boarded trains bound for their quarters in Hot Springs. Babe moved about the train like a Newfoundland puppy, greeting other ballplayers, making plans for golf and other “relaxations,” jabbering about anything that jumped into his head, and shaking hands with other passengers, especially with the soldiers who got on at every stop. Boston Globe beat reporter Edward Martin noticed Ruth’s bonhomie, commenting how the moon-faced athlete “was the life of the party and fraternized with a lot of the soldier boys from Camp Devens.” Always generous, Babe “passed around his cigars and did not overlook any of the lads in khaki.”

Martin informed his readers no golf matches were set on the train, “but it is understood that there will be other games played.” For Ruth, those games—gambling at the casinos and racetrack, drinking in the saloons, enjoying nights at the brothels—were the sine qua non of spring training. But he did not ignore the ballpark, where he discovered an added pleasure, one not on his usual list. The war had decimated the Red Sox roster. Almost a squad of veterans was missing in action, casualties of the draft. Their absence left the team dangerously short on hitters. Ruth, who at the time was one of the best pitchers in the league, swung a bat as hard as he heaved a fastball, and he relished the chance to strut his stuff.

War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War

A "richly detailed" portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston (Michael S. Neiberg): baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck and Harvard Law student Charles Whittlesey.

The top officials of the Boston Red Sox, Ed Barrow, left, and Harry Frazee, seated center, talk with Babe Ruth, center top, and Stuffy McInnis about the upcoming baseball season in 1918. (Mark Rucker / Transcendental Graphics / Getty Images)

For manager Edward Grant Barrow, an old school “small ball” man, Babe’s stuff was purely a circus act. Instead of choking up on the bat and laying down bunts or chopping singles the way Ty Cobb did, Ruth gripped the bat low near the knob, and swung with a ferocious long-arcing, uppercut action. He often missed the ball by a foot or more, but when he connected, when he “banged that old apple” with the sweet spot on the barrel of the bat, it was a sight to see. The ball seemed to explode off his bat, climb high in the air, and sail over the heads of the outfielders.


He hit balls where none had ever been hit before. In one game, he belted a home run over the fence and into the middle of an alligator farm. “The intrusion kicked up no end of commotion among the ‘Gators,” reported Martin. Another time, he took a few swings and then “calmly announced” that he was going to knock one over the fence. Then he did it.

On yet one more occasion, in a game scheduled for Camp Pike, he entertained “the khaki boys.” Although lightning, thunder, and rain forced the cancellation of the contest, Babe’s batting practice performance was one for the ages. While the soldiers cheered, he drove five balls over the right field fence. The next day, a Boston American headline announced Ruth’s unprecedented power display: “BABE RUTH PUTS FIVE OVER FENCE, HERETOFORE UNKNOWN TO BASEBALL FAN.”

Babe Ruth warms up before a 1918 game. ( The Stanley Weston Archive via Getty Images)

During the exhibition season in Hot Springs, Babe Ruth the slugger, the Boston “Colossuses” was born. On the field it seemed like such an innocent time. But for some odd reason, an unusual number of Red Sox players began to suffer from sore throats and fevers. In Hot Springs, reporters noticed it. One called it “the reign of grippe.” Another wrote, “A perfect epidemic has run through the entire city, and almost everyone complains.”

A reign of grippe? A perfect epidemic? Or just the flu—sick for a few days then back to work. No one on the team seemed too concerned. Yet out in Haskell County, Loring Miner had recently contacted the U.S. Public Health Service to report some strange influenza patterns. This seemed to be a new kind of flu. And it killed.


***

It all happened so fast. On May 19, 1918, the first warm day of the year, Ruth took his wife, Helen, to Revere Beach for an afternoon outing. Located just north of the city, it was the nation’s first public beach, a working-class “people’s beach” that featured amusement rides, a boardwalk, and an elaborate pier, as well as swimming facilities. Babe spent the day in the sun, eating a picnic basket full of sandwiches and drinking warm beer, swimming on a full stomach, and enjoying his own celebrity by playing a game of baseball in the sand with some locals. He couldn’t have been happier.

Later that night, Ruth complained of a terrible fever. His temperature climbed to 104 degrees, his body ached, he shivered with chills, and his throat throbbed. He had all the symptoms of the flu, a condition that he shared with millions of other Americans in the spring of 1918. This first wave of influenza coursed through U.S. training camps and followed soldiers aboard transport ships set for France. By May, hundreds of thousands of troops—countless infected—sailed across the Atlantic each month, carrying the virus into the packed trenches on the Western Front. There the virus mutated and then a more lethal strain returned home later that summer. Wartime censorship, however, prevented American reporters from writing many stories about the emerging epidemic. Although some people died, most struck with the virus that spring struggled through the aches and sweats of the fever and recovered.

Ruth might have been among the lucky ones, but the Red Sox physician made matters worse. The day after his trip to the beach, Babe was scheduled to pitch. He showed up at Fenway looking like a ghost, feeling miserable, obviously ill, and in no condition to take the field, but determined to throw nonetheless. Team doctor Oliver Barney “took a look at the big fellow, decided that the trouble was something more than a mere sore throat, and recommended four or five days of complete rest in bed.” Barrow agreed and immediately crossed Ruth’s name off the lineup card, sending him home with the doctor, who liberally swabbed his throat with a caustic compound of silver nitrate, probably a 10 percent solution, to ill effect. Among the dangers of using silver nitrate to treat tonsillitis, the standard American Journal of Clinical Medicine noted in 1914: “Caution: Great care must be exercised that no excess silver-nitrate solution oozing from the swab drops into the throat, lest serious results follow; for as we know, cases are on record in which edema [swelling] of the glottis, severe spasms of the larynx and other spastic affections of the throat, even suffocation, resulted from such accidents.”

The treatment hit Ruth like a line drive to the throat. He choked and gagged, writhed in pain, and finally collapsed. He was rushed to the eye and ear ward of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a physician packed his inflamed throat in ice. Soon rumors shot through Boston that “the Colossus . . . worth more than his weight in gold” was on his deathbed.

Two days later, the news from Massachusetts General significantly improved. “Babe’s great vitality and admirable physical condition have started to throw off the aggravated attack of tonsillitis [sic],” noted the Boston Herald and Journal. “The prophecy now is that the big lad will be out of the hospital in four or five days” and would be ready by the end of the month to travel west with his teammates.

Ruth’s brief spell of illness came at a time when he was emerging as baseball’s first slugger, cracking 11 home runs, more than five entire American League teams would hit that year. In the context of America’s deadly attacks on the Western Front, Ruth’s awesome power, his violent, full-bodied swings, resonated with the country’s glorification of unrestrained force. Whenever “The Colossus” stepped to the plate, carrying his mighty “war club” like a cudgel, he struck “the fear of the Lord” into opposing pitchers.

By the end of June, when Ruth was back on the field, journalists had begun to compare American fighting forces in France with Babe’s performances on the home front. “The story of Babe Ruth’s mighty hitting, his Homeric smashes, kindles a glow in the hearts of all those who know baseball,” commented a Boston Herald and Journal columnist. “In Italy, in Normandy, in Alsace, and in a hundred camps along the firing line, men meet and ask for the latest news of the gifted hitter of home runs. The story of each succeeding circuit clout is received with acclaim. It lightens and breaks the dangerous tension of a soldier’s duty and it’s not stretching a point to say that in his own inimitable way the Colossus is contributing a worth-while gift to the morale of Uncle Sam’s fighting men both in the new and the old world. He is the hero of all present-day baseball.”

Increasingly, Ruth’s power at the plate became a metaphor for America’s power in the war. As his reputation ascended, his German heritage vanished into the mist of the past. Reporters molded Ruth into an emblem for all that was good in America. This ballplayer who “only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization” was transformed, as Harry Hooper dimly said, “into something pretty close to a god.”

***

On August 27, during the team’s final homestand at Fenway Park, as the Red Sox moved closer toward playing in the World Series, the epidemic’s second wave arrived at Commonwealth Pier in Boston. That day, two sailors reported to the receiving ship’s sick bay with chills, fever, sore throat, and coughing—the usual symptoms of influenza. The next day, eight more staggered into the infirmary; the following day, 58; and by the end of the week, there was an average of 150 a day. The receiving ship—a massive floating barracks where the sailors slept and ate as they waited to depart—was “grossly overcrowded,” a petri dish for multiplying victims of the disease.

Soon the outbreak overwhelmed the limited medical facilities, and short of beds, physicians transferred patients to Chelsea Naval Hospital, just north of Charlestown. But the sailors were not suffering from the ordinary flu. Struggling to breathe, the patients coughed violently and displayed a bluish complexion with purple blisters.


In less than a week, the killer had made its way into the neighborhoods of Boston. On September 3, the first civilian struck by the flu had entered Boston City Hospital. That same day, 4,000 men, including 1,000 sailors from Commonwealth Pier, marched the streets of Boston in a “Win the War for Freedom” parade. The sailors’ contact with civilians and shipyard workers spread the disease throughout the city.

Two days later, when the Red Sox and Cubs began playing the World Series in Chicago, John S. Hitchcock, head of the communicable disease section of the Massachusetts State Department of Health, warned Boston officials about the developing crisis: “Unless precautions are taken the disease in all probability will spread to the civilian population of the city.”

Hitchcock’s urgent warning proved prophetic. Boston, a major port where soldiers and sailors came and went, would soon become the epicenter of a pandemic that killed more than 675,000 of the nation’s 105 million inhabitants.

When the World Series resumed at Fenway Park on September 9, an increasing number of civilian cases appeared in Boston. Undoubtedly, crowded public events—three World Series games, parades, rallies, and a draft registration drive—fueled the plague. The contagion afflicted passengers riding ferries, trollies, and subway cars. And it infected the patrons of dance halls, theaters, saloons and Fenway Park.


Yet before the Series began no one publicly campaigned to call off the games or forewarned Red Sox fans about the dangers of sitting in the bleachers, rubbing elbows and shaking hands. In fact, reading the Boston papers during the week of the World Series one could hardly tell that a mutant virus had already contaminated the city. In the first week of September, most front-page stories broke the latest reports from the Western Front and Fenway Park. Boston reporters gave the impression that the influenza outbreak remained a problem contained among sailors at Commonwealth Pier.

Belatedly, on September 11, 1918, the last day of the Series, William Woodward, the city’s health commissioner, issued a warning: people should avoid “crowded cars, elevators, or buildings”—that would have included Fenway Park, though he did not urge people to stay home entirely. Perhaps, Red Sox fans took the warning seriously, or maybe some resented the fact that the players nearly went on strike over diminished playoff bonuses before Game Five. Nonetheless, over the course of two days, a precipitous decline in attendance at Fenway Park reveals that something prevented the Red Sox faithful from showing up.

A baseball player wearing a mask during the 1918 pandemic. (George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images)

In a stadium that could hold about 35,000 spectators, empty patches of seats checkered the stands. For Game Five, 24,694 fans showed up. The following afternoon for Game Six, the same day Woodward issued his warning, merely 15,238 saw the Red Sox win the championship.

After the World Series ended, no Red Sox victory parades were held and no wild celebrations erupted. Consumed with the war while the pandemic spread, baseball mattered little amidst more than 3,000 cases of influenza.

Over the next few weeks, the situation worsened. On September 25, the Boston Health Department reported that nearly 700 citizens had already died from influenza and pneumonia. Besieged physicians and nurses could barely keep pace with hospitals overflowing with desperate patients. The next day, after Woodward advised Mayor Andrew Peters, the city closed all movie houses, theaters, concert halls and dance halls. Soon, the closure order extended to schools and all “public gathering places,” forcing high schools and colleges to cancel football games.

The streets emptied as hysteria paralyzed the city. Rumors fed widespread panic. One story circulating around town claimed that a German sub had penetrated Boston Harbor and emitted a deathly gray gas that drifted ashore and poisoned people with germs.

No cure for influenza existed—no medication, no vaccination, no antibiotics, no miracle drug. As the death toll rose, patrolmen stacked decomposing corpses wrapped in white sheets on the sidewalks, waiting for the meat wagons to scoop them up. The stench of putrefying bodies poisoned the air. The Boston newspapers published daily tallies of the deceased.

Under government orders to find “essential work” after the World Series ended, Ruth signed with Charles Schwab’s Bethlehem Steel plant in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. But he hardly worked there. Ruth expected to play baseball and get paid for it. Years later, a Bethlehem worker complained that Babe and the other ballplayers avoided real work. They just played ball, as everyone suspected. “Babe Ruth used to show up at the plant an hour before practice. He’d be wearing fancy trousers, silk shirts and patent-leather shoes. He’d just walk around talking to people about baseball. There wasn’t anything essential about what he was doing.”

Ruth played sporadically for the Lebanon team. The little surviving evidence of his time there doesn’t indicate how many games exactly he played, but he was back home in Baltimore in early October. His extended disappearance from the team was likely caused by a bout of influenza, as reported by the Baltimore Sun at the time. In Ruth’s old neighborhood, “Pig Town,” a gritty waterfront of stockyards and slaughterhouses, the grippe tore through the crowded miserable hovels. The outbreak was so severe that Baltimore’s city hospitals could no longer accept new patients.

In Boston, during the third week of October, as the death toll waned, city officials announced that the worst had passed and removed the closure order on October 20. By that time, more than 3,500 Bostonians had died from the flu. After being confined to their homes for three weeks, massive crowds flocked to theaters and dance halls. Patrons packed cafés and saloons, celebrating the end of the closure order with suds and spirits.

Ruth spent much of the winter at his farm cottage in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he regained his strength. He built up his body that winter chopping pine trees, splitting wood, and shouldering logs. Forever restless, when he got bored, he threw parties or invited children from an orphanage for a day of games. His wife had hoped that a quiet life in the country, 20 miles away from Boston, might bring them closer together. She disliked the crowds and the spotlight that her husband drew whenever they went out in the city. Perhaps, she thought, Sudbury would be different. Perhaps, she’d have him all to herself. “Someday people are going to find I’ve kidnapped my own husband and run away someplace where we can lead a simple life, away from grandstands and managers and photographers,” she said.

But Babe did not share Helen’s fantasy. He loved the attention and the company of fawning women. He was always on the go, searching for his next adventure.

Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith are the authors of War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War.

High Waters in the Great Lakes Reveal Two Centuries-Old Shipwrecks

In the month of April alone, the remnants of two historic vessels washed up on Lake Michigan’s shores 

The wreckage of a mid-19th century ship washed ashore north of Ludington, Michigan, on April 24. (Mason County Historical Society)

By Alex Fox
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
APRIL 30, 2020

The depths of the Great Lakes are littered with the sodden remains of an estimated 6,000 sunken ships. Many of these wrecks—preserved by the cold, fresh water of the so-called inland seas—are nearly pristine, frozen in their final death throes for centuries.

This month, waves and high water levels unearthed two historic shipwrecks on the shores of Lake Michigan, reports Lynn Moore for MLive. Experts from the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association (MSRA) identified the first, discovered near the city of Manistique on April 20, as an early 20th-century schooner named after part-owner Rokus Kanters, a marine contractor and the former mayor of Holland, Michigan. The second, which washed up near Ludington on April 24, has yet to be identified but is thought to date back to the mid-19th century, according to the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum.


The high water levels divulging these ancient wrecks have plagued the Great Lakes region over the past several years, eroding its beaches and threatening lakefront properties.

“We’re seeing some of the highest water levels in recorded history on the Great Lakes, and that’s the result of very wet weather experienced over the last several years,” Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the Detroit district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told the Washington Post’s Kim Frauhammer in 2019.

Climate change is the simple explanation for the region’s unprecedented weather and rising water levels, but in lakes, the situation is more complicated than in seas. Instead of an inexorable march upward, the Great Lakes are expected to seesaw between extremes, according to the Post. That means both flooded basements and shipping lanes too shallow for cargo ships loom in the lakes’ future.

The unidentified ship bears the hallmarks of vessels built between the 1850s and 1880s, according to the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum. (Mason County Historical Society)
MSRA experts identified R. Kanters—the more recent of the two shipwrecks—by tracking down photographs, old newspapers and historic records following a video call with the local man who happened upon the wreck, reports Emily Bingham in a separate story for MLive. Records indicate that the 112-foot-long, double-masted schooner sank on September 7, 1903, after getting stuck in shallow water south of Manistique during a storm.


Just three days after its reappearance, the wreck had already started to sink back into the shores of Lake Michigan, reports Brent Ashcroft for local broadcast station WZZM 13.

The older, unidentified ship bears the hallmarks of vessels built between the 1850s and 1880s, according to the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum. Its hull fragment measures roughly 32 feet long and 8 feet wide, according to local broadcast station WWMT3.

The area where the 19th-century ship was discovered is notoriously hazardous for ships: More than 300 vessels have grounded along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan over the past 170 years, the museum notes in a Facebook post. Collaborative research with the MSRA has yielded the names of five vessels that may be responsible for the chunk of hull: The J.B. Skinner, built in 1841; the George F. Foster, built in 1852; the J.O. Moss, built in 1863; the Eclipse, built in 1852; and the Orphan Boy, built in 1862.

The two newly discovered wrecks may soon be added to a recently launched interactive map of the shipwrecks found in Michigan’s state waters. And for those looking to learn more about the thousands of ships lost in the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum on the shores of Lake Superior offers a wealth of information and artifacts. The museum is located at Whitefish Point, a treacherous area known for possessing a trove of some 200 shipwrecks.


Speaking with Smithsonian magazine’s Arcynta Ali Childs in 2011, Sean Ley, the museum’s development officer, explained, “The reason there are so many wrecks along there is because there are no natural harbors for ships to hide when they have these huge storms. Whitefish Bay is kind of a natural bay, and with its point sticking out, it does provide a great deal of protection for ships that are lost.”


Alex Fox is a freelance science journalist based in Washington, D.C. He has written for Science, Nature, Science News, the San Jose Mercury News, and Mongabay. You can find him at Alexfoxscience.com.

PRIVATE NURSING HOME HORROR
Coronavirus: Searching for truth behind Spain's care home tragedy

By Hugo Bachega BBC News 30 April 2020
Related Topics
Coronavirus pandemic

Monte Hermoso was one of the care homes worst hit by Covid-19 in Spain

To Castillo's frustration, the worker said nothing else and went back inside Monte Hermoso. As she exchanged phone numbers with some relatives, Castillo saw another worker rushing away, covering her mouth with a piece of cloth. They had known each other for a long time but, the woman did not stop to talk, Castillo became suspicious. "At that moment," she told me, "I felt something wasn't right."

Care homes across Western Europe have been ravaged by coronavirus and in Spain alone there have been more than 16,000 deaths, many around the capital Madrid. The true number may never be known, but families are asking why so many of their elderly relatives were lost.

Around lunchtime on 8 March, Rosana Castillo met up with some close friends not far from her house in Lucero, a working-class neighbourhood in west Madrid, and, as they did every year, joined a protest to mark International Women's Day. They gave each other a warm hug, held hands and marched to chants of "Down with the patriarchy" and "Feminism will win".

Spaniards, then, could still venture freely outside and coronavirus, which had already killed several hundred in Italy, felt more like someone else's pain. Castillo, a 60-year-old retired primary school co-ordinator, had seen a few people on the underground wearing surgical masks as a protection, but thought most of them were probably tourists. "We weren't really talking about it here," she said.

But it was preying on her mind. She had visited Carmela, her 86-year-old mother, hours before at Monte Hermoso, the care home near the square where the women had gathered. Arriving at the main gate, Castillo was told she could not come in. A worker said two residents had contracted Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and visits had been suspended.

Castillo had seen Carmela, who had advanced Alzheimer's, three days earlier, when her mother was discharged from hospital after a week's treatment for breathing difficulties. The doctor told her Carmela was going to be fine, that her case was not related to the virus even though she had not been tested.


It was already widely known, first from China, then Italy, that elderly people with existing health issues were especially vulnerable to the virus. Yet in Spain, where a fifth of the population is above 65, or some 8.9 million people, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had done little in response.

As Castillo followed news of the outbreak, she wondered if enough was being done to protect her mother or, indeed, anyone else. Unable to visit Carmela, who had lived there for five years, her only source of information came from infrequent, and usually very brief, phone calls from Monte Hermoso. No matter how much Castillo asked, few things were said.

Consuelo Domínguez, a long-time friend, coincidentally, also had her mother living in Monte Hermoso, a red-brick, private centre with large windows and rooms for up to 130 residents. She, too, struggled to get details. Both daughters knew some staff had gone into isolation with coughs and a fever, the most common symptoms of Covid-19, and were pretty sure there was more going on.

Coronavirus was spreading in Spain at an alarming speed and, on 14 March, the prime minister imposed a state of emergency with a nationwide stay-at-home order. No-one was truly safe.

On that afternoon, Domínguez received an unexpected call from Monte Hermoso. The worker was "very tense," she said, "you could feel it." Surreptitiously, Domínguez was told that 70 people had been infected with the virus and at least 10 patients had already died. "I was frightened," she said. Domínguez called her friend. "I couldn't believe it," Castillo recalled. "We weren't being told the truth."

GETTY IMAGES

After the deaths, the Madrid government announced it would intervene in Monte Hermoso

Castillo and Domínguez alerted journalists and, on 17 March, Monte Hermoso became national news. Only then did the Madrid government reportedly become aware of the devastating outbreak. Nineteen people were already dead.

It had been a stressful day. In the evening, Castillo received a call from Monte Hermoso. Her mother, who shared her room with another woman in similarly poor health, had a fever. "It shocked me," Castillo said. She knew Carmela was unlikely to survive.

The relatives created a WhatsApp group, and disturbing messages flowed in. "Staff were very nervous... Some [residents] were even a little bit delirious," said one of a visit two days before they had been halted. Aurora Santos, whose mother was also at Monte Hermoso, recalled seeing residents unwell in the cafeteria around the same time. "We didn't know anything the management had done," she told me, "the protocols they had followed, nothing".

She joined Castillo and Domínguez in gathering information. They believed patients with symptoms had not been separated from those without, before the virus spread rapidly through the home. Staff who had been in isolation after falling ill were reportedly not being replaced, while those who continued to work were having to do longer, exhausting shifts. Lacking adequate protection, workers had to make face masks at home. "We were trying to help, our loved ones were there," Domínguez said. "Why weren't they being honest with us?"

Monte Hermoso, it turned out, was not alone. In fact, nobody seemed to know the true scale of what was going on. For years, Carmen Flores, head of the Patients' Defenders ombudsman group, had warned about precarious conditions in some of Spain's 5,417 care homes. "The amount of messages we were getting those days was insane," Flores told me. "I was thinking: You can't let these people rot."

ALAMY

"We weren't being told the truth," said Rosana Castillo, whose 86-year-old mother lived in Monte Hermoso

Three in every four homes in Spain are privately run and many patients, like Carmela, have some of their costs publicly funded. José Manuel Ramírez, president of the federation representing social care managers, said fees received by the residences had not changed in the past decade, a result of years of austerity in Spain.

Many companies had to carry out savings somewhere to make a profit, claimed Flores, who also alleged that some lacked equipment even in normal times, while many operated with minimum staff. Workers' unions also say staffing was insufficient, which Ramírez rejected. A worker at one care home where more than 90 patients died told me: "For a long time we had been saying something serious would happen. The conditions were unsustainable. This isn't a surprise at all."

Crowded hospitals were having to turn away patients from care homes and send them back, often to die. Many residences did not have oxygen bottles, crucial in treating a disease known to cause severe respiratory problems, or even a doctor. Monte Hermoso, Castillo said, had one doctor, who most days worked only in the mornings.

The Spanish government had centralised the purchase and distribution of medical material, so the homes asked officials to send tests and protective kits. However, Ramírez alleged they were not given priority, and pictures emerged of carers wearing gowns made of plastic bags. "There was nothing that could be done without support," he said. "It was a catastrophe."

ALAMY

The army was sent to disinfect residences across Spain and Monte Hermoso was one of the first

The army was deployed to disinfect 1,300 care homes and Monte Hermoso was one of the first. Margarita Robles, the defence minister, said patients, in some places, were found abandoned without care, sometimes dead in their beds, the bodies left for funeral services to retrieve. "Un horror," Flores told me.

Almost 6,000 people have now died in nursing homes in Madrid, after showing Covid-19 symptoms. "I think there was a lot of wrongdoing," said Castillo. "These people couldn't shout or say they were unwell. They died in silence and alone."

Public prosecutors are investigating possible crimes including manslaughter for neglect, mistreatment and abandonment. Monte Hermoso has not replied to interview requests by email; when contacted by phone, an employee told me they would not talk to journalists.

Coronavirus: Ecuador sees massive surge in deaths in April

BBC•April 20, 2020

Ecuador's official coronavirus death toll is 403, but new figures from one province suggest thousands have died.

The government said 6,700 people died in Guayas province in the first two weeks of April, far more than the usual 1,000 deaths there in the same period.

Guayas is home to Guayaquil - a key port and the part of the country worst-hit by Covid-19.

Footage obtained by the BBC showed residents forced to store bodies in their homes for up to five days.

Ecuador's coronavirus nightmare in pictures

They said authorities had been unable to keep up with the huge rise in deaths, leaving corpses wrapped in sheets in family homes and even in the streets.

Authorities last week began distributing thousands of cardboard coffins in Guayaquil. A dedicated helpline was also set up for families that needed a corpse removed from their home.
Cardboard coffins have been distributed amid a huge number of deaths

Jorge Wated, the head of a police unit created to tackle the problem, said earlier this week that 771 bodies had been removed from houses in the city.

According to the government's figures, 14,561 people have died in Guayas province since the beginning of March from all causes. The province normally sees 2,000 deaths a month on average.

Ecuador as a whole has had 8,225 confirmed cases of coronavirus to date, according to Johns Hopkins University, though a lack of widespread testing means this is likely a significant undercount.



Analysis box by Katy Watson, South America correspondent

Across Latin America, Covid-19 has been dubbed a rich person's disease. A virus introduced to the region by affluent parts of society who had been travelling abroad.

The case of Ecuador is no different but experts have suggested that the country's deep ties with Spain and transport links between there and Guayaquil, a key port, could be partly responsible for higher numbers. Indeed, the first recorded case was of an Ecuadorean woman returning from Spain.

But the high death toll is also a devastating consequence of the combination of an overburdened healthcare system and a deeply unequal society which means not everybody is able - or willing - to socially distance and stop work.

Authorities argue they were quick to impose strict regulations and people chose to disregard measures but experts argue more could be done - and one thing that could help is testing. While Ecuador is not the worst offender in the region, low testing rates have made it very difficult to understand how the virus has moved through communities, some of which have been devastated by the high death toll.

Ecuador's vice president, Otto Sonnenholzer, apologised to the nation earlier this month for the government's slow response to the pandemic.

"We have seen images that should never have happened, and as your public servant I apologise," Mr Sonnenholzer said.

Guayaquil is densely populated and has high levels of poverty, with many residents living in close proximity.

THE FATHER OF RIGHT WING LIBERTARIANISM (BAR*)
The Complicated Legacy of Herbert Spencer, the Man Who Coined ‘Survival of the Fittest’
Spencer’s ideas laid the groundwork for social Darwinism, but scholars say there was much more to the Victorian Age thinker than that

Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase "survival of the fittest" in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology. (Photo illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Getty Images and public domain)

By Dan Falk

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

APRIL 29, 2020

Victorian England had its fair share of great minds. Some, like Charles Darwin, changed the way we think about the world, while many more have faded into obscurity—along with their ideas. Teetering on the boundary is Herbert Spencer, born 200 years ago this week.

Spencer’s first writings on evolution came in 1851, eight years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. And it was Spencer, not Darwin, who gave us the phrase “survival of the fittest,” though Darwin would later use it in his writing. Spencer introduced the phrase in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology, where he saw parallels between his conservative ideas about economics and what Darwin had written about the natural world: “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.”


“For a brief period, for a couple of decades at the end of the 19th century, he was world-famous,” says Bernard Lightman, a historian of science at York University in Toronto.

Like his more famous contemporary, Spencer was enamored with the idea of evolution. But where Darwin focused on biology, Spencer imagined that evolutionary thinking could be applied much more broadly. In his mind, it governed entire societies. Today, when Spencer is remembered at all, it is usually for inspiring the ideology known as “social Darwinism”: roughly, the idea that the successful deserve their success while those who fail deserve their failure.

Modern scholars, and the public at large, understandably view this idea with disdain. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has described social Darwinism as “an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking in defense of political doctrines that range from callous to heinous,” while the journalist Robert Wright said that social Darwinism “now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history.” Today, few read Spencer’s dense and ponderous books, and his ideas are rarely taught. Gregory Claeys, a historian at the University of London, writes that of all the great Victorian thinkers, it is Spencer whose “reputation has now indisputably fallen the farthest.”

Yet some scholars and historians dispute this characterization of Spencer’s work. Yes, Spencer misunderstood Darwin’s theory in important ways, and his attempt to anchor an entire philosophy on it was ill-fated. But, they argue, Spencer doesn’t deserve to be so closely linked to social Darwinism and the noxious ideas that grew out of it (and which occasionally surface today). He may have been misguided, but those who utter “survival of the fittest” to justify callous, mean-spirited or even racist ends may be doing the man who coined the phrase a disservice.

Herbert Spencer as a young man (Engraving by Geo. E. Perine)
Born in Derby in central England, Spencer was largely self-taught. He worked as a railway engineer and a journalist before making a name for himself with his philosophical writings, which were published in Britain’s leading intellectual journals and later in a series of wildly ambitious books. Eventually, he supported himself solely through writing. He settled in London and became a regular at the city’s exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, where he rubbed shoulders with great intellectuals of the day.

Beginning in 1860, Spencer focused his energy on his “System of Synthetic Philosophy,” which was to be a multi-volume work covering biology, psychology, sociology, ethics and metaphysics. Nine of these volumes appeared between 1862 and 1893. Like Darwin, Spencer was struck by evolution’s explanatory power, but he took the idea much further than his countryman.

“Spencer goes on to ask: What are the implications of the theory of evolution for our understanding of human society, politics, religion, the human mind?” Lightman says. “Evolution is the glue that holds this ‘synthetic philosophy’ together. It’s a comprehensive worldview.”

In Spencer’s view of evolution, nature is seen as a force for good, guiding the development of individuals and societies, with the power of competition allowing the strong to flourish while eliminating the weak. In his first book, 1851’s Social Statics, he argues that suffering, although it harms the individual, benefits society at large; it is all part of nature’s “plan,” and leads to improvement over time. Spencer wrote:


“The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many ‘in shallows and in miseries,’ are the decrees of a large, farseeing benevolence.”

(Arguably, some echo of this sentiment was on display in the past few weeks, as protesters voiced their disapproval of mandatory lockdowns in the fight against COVID-19. In Nashville, at least one protester held up a sign saying “Sacrifice the weak / Re-open Tennessee.”)

Spencer’s view, though mostly anathema now, appealed to influential conservatives and laissez-faire capitalists—among them, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie—just as it angered the socialists of the time. “Spencer hated socialism because he thought socialism was all about protecting the weak,” Lightman says. “To him, that was intervening in the natural unfolding of the evolutionary process.”

Spencer imagined a better, more moral society, and believed the best way to achieve that goal was “to let the market loose,” says David Weinstein, a political scientist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Weinstein says Spencer advocated the idea that “those who survive the struggle are by definition not only the fittest but also morally the best. So it’s defining ‘good’ as ‘survival.’ Whatever survives is by definition good.”


Later thinkers, especially in the early years of the 20th century, took a hatchet to Spencer’s logic. Critics accused him of committing what has come to be known as the “naturalistic fallacy”—roughly, the mistake of trying to derive morality and ethics from nature. The term was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica, which was highly skeptical of Spencer. “The attack by Moore really served to discredit Spencer among serious philosophers,” Weinstein says (though Moore, too, has largely disappeared from history).

More recently, however, a few scholars have sought to salvage Spencer’s reputation. In 2014, a collection of essays titled Herbert Spencer: Legacies, edited by Mark Francis and Michael Taylor, explored Spencer’s far-reaching influence and the diversity of his ideas. For example, while Spencer’s ideas were used to justify imperialism and conquest, Francis notes that Spencer himself was committed to pacifism, including his vocal opposition to Britain’s participation in the Boer War. While Spencer felt that war might have been a necessary part of humanity’s past, he also believed that a progressive society would be a peaceful one. Violence, in Spencer’s view, was on its way to becoming a relic of the past.

Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, says that Spencer is not “as heartless as he is now remembered,” pointing to Spencer’s emphasis on altruism, sympathy and pacifism. Pamela Lyon at the University of Adelaide goes even further, arguing that Spencer used the phrase “survival of the fittest” to mock it. Rather than seeing nature as cruel, he saw it as beneficent; nature was a progressive affair. (This view, she notes, became harder to maintain as Darwin’s more scientific approach to evolution—one driven by chance and not “guided” in any way—took hold.)

Meanwhile, Gowan Dawson of the University of Leicester has argued that both the ideological left and the right embraced Spencer’s ideas, especially that of social evolution. Weinstein also notes that Spencer’s writings “have been adopted and appropriated by socialists as much as by libertarians,” and asserts that his ideas have shaped modern liberalism. And a few scholars, including Dawson, argue that prominent contemporary thinkers like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson, who have written on the power of evolution to shape culture, may be more indebted to Spencer than they realize. In Legacies, sociologist Jonathan Turner writes that many of Spencer’s ideas have endured to the present day, though “most people do not know that they came from Spencer, so ingrained is the avoidance of anything Spencerian.”


Spencer, by the standards of the day, also held a progressive view of gender, arguing that women were as intellectually capable as men and advocating for full political and legal rights for women. Claeys even describes him as a feminist.

That label is open to debate. Ruth Barton, a historian at the University of Auckland, points to Spencer’s treatment of the women in his life, especially the novelist Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot. “She really fell in love with Spencer,” Barton says. “They went to the theatre together, they went to Kew Gardens together, they went everywhere together for a year; people thought they were engaged.” Then Spencer broke off the relationship. “Spencer told her that he enjoyed her company, he liked her mind, but she wasn’t beautiful enough for him to marry. He wanted a prettier, more feminine sort of person,” Barton says. “I wouldn’t label him a feminist.”

Spencer never married, and he appears to have been isolated and lonely in his final years. He spent nearly two decades writing and rewriting his two-volume autobiography. He struggled to control his public image, even going so far as asking to have his letters returned to him and then destroying those that he felt might damage his reputation.

All the while, English politics were drifting to the left. “The political climate was changing,” says Barton. “His antagonism toward socialism of any kind was less and less acceptable. Anything that had any scent of government regulation about it, he associated with socialism.”


Science and philosophy had moved on as well. “Already in the 1890s, he’s saying ‘Everyone’s forgotten me; I gave my whole life for this,’” Lightman says. “So he becomes a very tragic figure.” Today, Spencer’s tomb can be found in London’s Highgate Cemetery, just about opposite that of Karl Marx, whose ideas he despised (and who ended up with a far more elaborate monument).

Still, as remote as Spencer and his ideas seem today, he was a vital figure in his own time, Barton says. “He seemed to know everything, which made him impressive,” she says. “He was full of confidence; he had this really ambitious vision of the universe.” Above all, he appeared to be one of the few philosophers who fully embraced science— at least, his interpretation of science.

“Science seemed to be the way of the modern world,” Barton says. “And Spencer seemed to be a philosopher who understood science.”



*(BEFORE AYN RAND)