JAR JAR BOLSOARNO ALLOWS RAPE OF THE AMAZON
Vale and Asian miner seek Brazil nod to fast-track mine projects

Bloomberg News | September 16, 2021 

Railroad transporting iron ore from Vale’s Carajás complex. Image: Vale

Mining giant Vale SA and an Asian-owned metals producer are among the first to tap a Brazilian program that aims to cut red tape and speed up mining projects in the South American nation.


Vale and Sul Americana de Metais S.A. have qualified for a new policy adopted by Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro administration that aims to streamline the licensing process for mining projects considered strategic to the country’s economic development. The Pro-Strategic Minerals policy was created in March to boost resources and production of minerals used in high-tech products and deemed vital for trade surplus.

Vale, the world’s second-largest iron ore producer, qualified for a mine and projects at its Serra Norte complex as well as Alemao copper project in northern Brazil. Another project in Carajas is under analysis. The Rio de Janeiro-based company declined to comment. Vale had cited delays in securing permits to these operations last week as a reason to justify lowering its annual target for iron ore production by 7.5% from a previous forecast.

Sul Americana de Metais, a unit of Hong Kong-based Honbridge Holdings Ltd., has been seeking to develop a $2.1 billion iron ore complex in Minas Gerais state, though it has struggled to get licenses.

“We hope this will help speed up the licensing process and take the project off the ground,” Chief Executive Officer Jin Yongshi said in a message.

His company’s Bloco 8 project aims to produce 27.5 million tons a year and includes a slurry pipeline and dam capable of storing 70 times more tailings than the Vale dam that collapsed in that southeast Brazilian state in January 2019 in the country’s deadliest mining disasters.

Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry, which coordinates the program, said qualification doesn’t guarantee projects will get permits. The government measures will help facilitate relations with environmental authorities, which are still in charge of licensing.

(By Mariana Durao)

New photo battery harvests the sun, stores energy in a single device

MINING.COM Staff Writer | September 17, 2021 | 

The research team developing an inexpensive, lightweight, and 

lead-free photo battery.

 (Image courtesy of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology).

A team of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed an inexpensive, lightweight, and lead-free photo battery that has dual functions in harvesting solar energy and storing energy in a single device.


In theory, photo batteries should permit increased energy storage efficiency and energy density, while decreasing ohmic losses, relaxing packaging requirements and thus reducing the weight, the bulk, and the cost of the system. In reality, however, the poor interface between materials tends to create problems with charge transport, greatly reducing the efficiency in comparison to the simple system of a solar cell wired to an external battery.

To address these challenges, the HKUST team led by Jonathan Eugene Halpert decided to expand the utility of perovskite, which has had applications in solar cells and most recently in batteries.

In detail, the team developed a perovskite halide that acts as a photo-electrode that can harvest energy under illumination without the assistance of an external load in a lithium-ion battery. This is in stark contrast with its existing counterpart for it does not contain lead, hence it has higher stability in air and is free from the concerns of metal poisoning.

For their research, the team has replaced lead with bismuth, a non-toxic element, thus forming a strongly light-absorbing crystalline material.

THE PHOTO BATTERY HAS A MECHANISM SIMILAR TO AN ORDINARY BATTERY EXCEPT THAT IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE SUPPLIED CURRENT TO BE CHARGED ELECTRICALLY BUT CAN BE CHARGED PHOTOELECTRICALLY UNDER THE SUNLIGHT

In a paper published in the journal Nano Letters, the group explains that the lithium-ion battery works by allowing electrons to move from a high-energy state to a lower one while doing work in an external circuit. The photo battery, on the other hand, has a mechanism similar to an ordinary battery except that it need not be supplied current or plugged into the wall to be charged electrically, but can be charged photoelectrically under the sunlight.

The active material is the perovskite which, when put under light, absorbs a photon and generates a pair of charges, known as an electron and a hole.

To back their proposal, the team conducted chrono-amperometry experiments under light and in the dark to analyze the increase in charging current caused by the light; they recorded a photo-conversion efficiency rate of 0.428% on photo-charging the battery after the first discharge.

“At present, we plug all our appliances into the wall to charge them. With further development in this field of photo-batteries, we might not have to plug them in at all in the future,” Halpert said in a media statement.

“We might be able to harvest solar energy and use it to fulfill the power requirements of any devices with modest power needs. Our work is one of the initial steps taken in this field, and, of course, a lot of improvements will be needed to achieve better performance, but we are confident that we can improve its stability and average efficiency with further refinement.”

According to Halpert, the lab’s photo battery can serve as the built-in battery for devices such as smartphones or tablets, and even remote energy storage applications.

The next steps are, thus, to experiment with different materials for better performance and efficiency, so that the photo battery can be commercialized in the market.

Greenland prepares legislation to halt large rare earth mine

Reuters | September 17, 2021

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Greenland’s new government is preparing legislation that will ban uranium mining and cease development of the Kvanefjeld mine, one of the biggest rare earth deposits in the world, the country’s mineral resources minister said.


Kvanefjeld, owned by Australian mining firm Greenland Minerals and located near the southern town of Narsaq, contains a large deposit of rare earth metals but also radioactive uranium which locals fear could harm the country’s fragile environment if extracted.

Greenland’s left-leaning government, which came to power in April after campaigning against the development of Kvanefjeld, says it will ban the exploration of deposits with a uranium concentration higher than 100 parts per minute (ppm), which is considered very low-grade by the World Nuclear Association.

LOCALS WORRY THAT A POTENTIAL LAWSUIT AGAINST GREENLAND WILL HURT ITS ABILITY TO ATTRACT INVESTMENTS

“What we know is that the background radiation in and around Narsaq is quite high, which means that the project will collide with the upcoming zero tolerance policy on uranium mining,” minister for mineral resources Naaja Nathanielsen told Reuters in an interview in the capital Nuuk.

Kvanefjeld was granted preliminary approval last year and was on track to gain final approval under the previous government.

Mining companies have been pushing for rights to exploit rare earth deposits in Greenland, which the U.S. Geological Survey says has the world’s biggest undeveloped deposits of the metals used in everything from electric vehicle batteries to missiles.

A public hearing on the project ended this week. Greenland Minerals, in which Chinese partner Shenghe Resources has about a 10% stake, participated in community meetings in February, but did not attend meetings in August and September citing the political nature of the meetings.

Chief executive John Mair, whose company has spent more than $100 million preparing the project, told Reuters on Friday he believes his company still holds the “valid right to pursue an exploitation licence for the project in compliance with Greenland laws.”

Locals worry that a potential lawsuit against Greenland will hurt its ability to attract investments in a nascent mining sector which they think is key to growing their economy.

Mair said it was too early to look at legal action, “but as a public company, we must protect shareholder interests in the event a practical solution is not found.”

Nathanielsen said the government in 2013 put a clause in its contract with the company that states it “has no claim to an exploration license and that a refusal can be given for political reasons.”

“We cannot issue guarantees against a lawsuit, but we believe that we stand quite well in a potential court case,” she said.

The new bill, which will also include the option of banning the exploration of other radioactive minerals such as thorium, will be passed in the autumn with backing of the Naleraq party, a coalition partner, Nathanielsen said.

(By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)

IT NEVER WAS ABOUT THE FETUS IT WAS ABOUT SEX

Women can say no to sex if Roe falls, says architect of Texas abortion ban

Jonathan Mitchell writes in supreme court brief that ‘women can “control their reproductive lives” without access to abortion’

Pro-choice protesters rally outside the Texas state capitol in Austin on 1 September. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images


Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Jessica Glenza
Fri 17 Sep 2021 16.16 BST


The legal architect of the Texas abortion ban has argued in a supreme court brief that overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark decision which guarantees a right to abortion in the US, could cause women to practice abstinence from sexual intercourse as a way to “control their reproductive lives”.

Former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who played a pivotal role in designing the legal framework of the state’s near-total abortion ban, also argued on behalf of anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life that women would still be able to terminate pregnancies if Roe was overturned by traveling to “wealthy pro-abortion” states like California and New York with the help of “taxpayer subsidies”.

“Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion; they can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse,” Mitchell wrote in the brief. “One can imagine a scenario in which a woman has chosen to engage in unprotected (or insufficiently protected) sexual intercourse on the assumption that an abortion will be available to her later. But when this court announces the overruling of Roe, that individual can simply change their behavior in response to the court’s decision if she no longer wants to take the risk of an unwanted pregnancy.”

The supreme court is due to hear a Mississippi case this term that experts say could lead to the reversal of the Roe decision by the court’s conservative majority. The argument was made in an amicus, or “friend of the court”, brief in which outside parties can present arguments on cases before the court. The brief was filed on 29 July, about four weeks before Texas’s abortion ban went into effect.

In the same brief, which calls for Roe to be overturned, Mitchell and co-counsel Adam Mortara, an anti-abortion activist and lawyer who clerked for the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, said such a decision could open the door for other “lawless” rights and protections to be reversed, including the right to have gay sex and the right to same-sex marriage.

The lawyers argued that while it was not necessary for the high court to immediately overrule the legal cases that enshrine those rights, “neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread”.

Those cases (Lawrence, which outlawed criminal sanctions against people who engaged in gay sex, and Obergefell, which legalized same-sex marriage) were “far less hazardous to human life”, they said, but just “as lawless as Roe”.

It is common for high-profile cases such as the Mississippi abortion case to elicit amicus briefs by activists and lawyers who are seeking to weigh in on the legal debate.

But Mitchell and Mortara’s brief is significant because conservatives on the high court recently ruled in a controversial 5-4 decision to allow a Texas law to stand that was designed by Mitchell and in effect bans abortions after about six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant.

While the majority of the justices stressed that they had not yet ruled on the constitutionality of the Texas law itself, the ruling showed that the majority was receptive to Mitchell’s legal strategy.

The abortion case the supreme court will hear this term centers on the legality of a Mississippi law that can ban abortion at 15 weeks gestation. Roe gives pregnant women the right to an abortion up to roughly 24 weeks, or the point at which a fetus can live outside the womb.

The court’s decision to hear the case has alarmed reproductive rights advocates because it blatantly violates the standard set by Roe. Now, in the wake of Texas’s near-total abortion ban, the possibility that the court could overturn the constitutional right to abortion has come into sharp focus. Such a ruling could come in spite of polls that show most Americans believe abortion should be legal in most circumstances.

At the heart of Mitchell and Mortara’s argument in the Mississippi case lies the view that overturning Roe would not outlaw all abortion in the US, but would “merely” return the issue to individual states, which could individually decide whether to ban or restrict terminations. More than half of US states are hostile to abortion rights.

“But women who reside in those states can travel to pro-abortion states to get their abortions – and there is no shortage of ‘abortion funds’ throughout the country that are eager to pay the travel costs and abortion-related costs for indigent women who are seeking to abort their pregnancies,” they said.

Mitchell has been the subject of media attention since it became clear that he had helped devise the Texas law, which allows private citizens to sue anyone “aiding or abetting” a pregnant woman in obtaining an abortion past roughly six weeks.

This structure, which one legal expert called a “fig leaf” for the state, led to the supreme court’s refusal to block the law, with a 6-3 majority describing the law as presenting “complex antecedent procedural questions” that needed to be litigated.

Mitchell has been portrayed in some media accounts as an outsider in the conservative judicial network that has led the drive to seat anti-abortion judges and justices in the past decades. But an examination of Mitchell’s record has found that the former clerk for Antonin Scalia, the late conservative supreme court justice, has ties to groups and organizations that are at the heart of the conservative movement. Those organizations, in turn, have direct links to conservative members of the court.

In 2016, in emails that were released after a Freedom of Information Act request, Mitchell’s name was raised by Henry Butler, the then dean of the George Mason Law School, as a person that he and Leonard Leo, the head of the conservative Federalist Society, would consider hiring.

Leo, who is known to have selected a short list of potential supreme court nominees for Donald Trump when he entered office, has been credited by conservatives for building a court that would – someday – overturn Roe.


Texas’s largest companies stay silent on state abortion ban despite outrage

Friends and colleagues of Mitchell say that Mitchell and Leo do not have an especially close relationship.

In 2019 the powerful, conservative religious law group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) began paying Mitchell’s private law firm for services listed as “religious freedom”. The more than $36,517 payment came as Mitchell was simultaneously building case law on his unusual legal theory, the very same provision that would come to define Texas’s six-week abortion ban called SB8.

In an email, Mitchell declined to respond to the Guardian’s questions about the nature of his work for ADF.

ADF was in the spotlight in 2020 after it emerged that Trump’s final nominee to serve on the court, Amy Coney Barrett, was a paid speaker for a program run by ADF, which was established to inspire a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law”. The head of the organization, Michael Farris, attended the infamous Rose Garden event in which Barrett was nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The event would later emerge as a super spreader event in which multiple individuals, including possibly Trump, contracted Covid-19.

Texas anti-abortion law shows ‘terrifying’ fragility of women’s rights, say activists

Campaigners fear ban emboldens anti-choice governments as more aggressive opposition, better organised and funded, spreads from US

A protest at the Capitol in Austin, Texas, against the state’s six-week abortion ban, which makes no exceptions even for incest or rape. Photograph: Jay Janner/AP

Global development is supported by


Lizzy Davies
Sat 18 Sep 2021 

The new anti-abortion law in Texas is a “terrifying” reminder of the fragility of hard-won rights, pro-choice activists have said, as they warn of a “more aggressive, much better organised [and] better funded” global opposition movement.

Pro-choice campaigners have seen several victories in recent years, including in Ireland, Argentina and, most recently, Mexico, where the supreme court ruled last week that criminalising abortion was unconstitutional. Another is hoped for later this month when the tiny enclave of San Marino, landlocked within Italy, holds a highly charged referendum.


But Texas’s law, which bans abortions after about six weeks, once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, and does not make exceptions for incest or rape, has sent shock waves around the world, making pro-choice activists realise they can take nothing for granted.


Mexico activists celebrate abortion ruling as a sign of culture change


Sarah Shaw, head of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, said: “Even though we have seen little gains here and there, in some places, we can never, ever be complacent because we’re only ever really hanging on to these rights by the skin of our teeth.”

She said the Texas law was “really terrifying” because of the emboldening message it sent to other anti-choice governments and organisations, with the fact it had happened in the US giving it “a huge weight and legitimacy”.

“This is all happening in the context of a rising, much more aggressive, much better organised, better funded and much more legitimised opposition movement than we’ve ever seen before,” Shaw said.

Pro-choice campaigners say they have faced increasingly vocal opposition from organisations that started on the US religious right but have spread to other countries, such as 40 Days for Life, a group that distributes graphic and misleading leaflets to women outside UK abortion clinics.

Heartbeat International, a conservative US Christian federation, funds and coordinates a network of anti-abortion “pregnancy resource” centres, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa, to provide women with what it calls “true reproductive help”.

“It’s a transnational movement now,” said Shaw. “What we’re seeing is them [US organisations] exporting their playbooks and their money overseas.”

‘Green wave’ abortion-rights activists in Buenos Aires celebrate as Argentina’s Congress voted to legalise elective abortion last December. Photograph: Natacha Pisarenko/AP

Attacks on abortion rights usually happen in countries where other human rights are under threat, according to analysts. Last year, more than 30 countries, many of them led by authoritarian strongmen or rightwing populists, including Belarus, Uganda, Hungary, Egypt and Donald Trump’s US administration, signed a non-binding anti-abortion document known as the Geneva consensus declaration. The text was also seen as being anti-LGBTQ, as most of the signatories had not legalised same-sex marriage and several prosecute their LGBTQ+ citizens.

In one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden removed the US from the declaration in January, as well as ending the Mexico City policy, known as the “global gag rule”.

Among the signatories was Poland, which is one of only three countries to have significantly rolled back abortion rights since 2000, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The other two are Nicaragua and the US.

In October last year, Poland’s constitutional tribunal ruled that terminations due to foetal defects were unconstitutional. Three months later, a near-total ban on abortions was imposed. Abortion is now only legal in the case of rape, incest or a threat to the mother’s health.

Meanwhile, human rights observers have said that a Nicaraguan law punishing abortion without any exceptions, passed in 2006, has simply forced women to seek unsafe backstreet terminations.

Marge Berer, coordinator of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion, said setbacks were all too common, with breakthrough moments often followed by backlashes.

A protest against restrictions on abortion in Krakow in March. Poland has imposed a near-total ban. Photograph: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

“My experience of this is one step forward, two steps forward, or one step back, 10 steps back,” she said. “And much of it, if not all of it, depends on who is the head of the government of the day.”

Berer, who has been involved in the pro-choice movement for almost 40 years, said the overall picture was brighter than it had been then: fewer deaths from unsafe abortions, and many more countries where terminations are legal.

But, she added, she was not hugely optimistic about the future. “There’s so much misogyny in the world. And I don’t know how anybody is going to make that go away,” she said. “For me, that’s the real problem. It’s that when misogyny takes over on a policy level, it’s very nasty.”

However, there is more hope among activists in Latin America, where the marea verde, or green wave, has swept through first Argentina and, last week, Mexico, where the supreme court struck down a state law that imposed prison terms for having an abortion. While it did not automatically legalise abortion, the decision is thought to set a binding precedent for the country’s judges.

Eugenia López Uribe, regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, said the legal change was the result of “40 years of hard work” by campaigners, with mass demonstrations, backroom lobbying and “a mainstreaming” of women’s rights in public discourse.

She said the ability of the Catholic church to tell people what to do when it came to abortion and contraception had been greatly reduced. “What we know from different surveys … is that in reality Catholics … feel that this is a private decision that you have to do with your own conscience.”


‘Treating us like criminals’: Texas abortion ban creates chilling effect across state

As women in Texas bear the brunt of the law brought in by the governor, Greg Abbott, their Mexican allies across the border were planning to take the fight north, she added.

“The ‘green wave’ hasn’t reached the United States so this is a very good opportunity for [it] to cross the border of the Rio Grande and go to the United States. We can make it go even further. We’ve been used to thinking about it in Latin America. Now is the time for North America.”

LIKE BIG OIL BIG AGRA IS A CORPORATE WELFARE BUM
90% of global farm subsidies damage people and planet, says UN

Almost half a trillion dollars of support a year harms people’s health, the climate and drives inequality

The biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, such as beef and milk, received the biggest subsidies.
Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian


Damian Carrington Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 14 Sep 2021 


Almost 90% of the $540bn in global subsidies given to farmers every year are “harmful”, a startling UN report has found.

This agricultural support damages people’s health, fuels the climate crisis, destroys nature and drives inequality by excluding smallholder farmers, many of whom are women, according to the UN agencies.

The biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, such as beef and milk, received the biggest subsidies, the report said. These are often produced by large industrialised groups that are best placed to gain access to subsidies.

Without reform, the level of subsidies was on track to soar to $1.8tn (£1.3tn) a year by 2030, further harming human wellbeing and worsening the planetary crisis, the UN said.

Support for the “outsized” meat and dairy industry in rich countries must be reduced, while subsidies for polluting chemical fertilisers and pesticides must fall in lower-income countries, the analysis said.

The report, published before a UN food systems summit on 23 September, said repurposing the subsidies to beneficial activities could “be a game changer” and help to end poverty, eradicate hunger, improve nutrition, reduce global heating and restore nature. Good uses of public money could include supporting healthy food, such as vegetables and fruit, improving the environment and supporting small farmers.

Numerous analyses in recent years have concluded the global food system is broken, with more than 800 million people experiencing chronic hunger in 2020 and 3 billion unable to afford a healthy diet, while 2 billion people are obese or overweight, and a third of food is wasted. The total damage caused has been estimated at $12tn a year, more than the value of the food produced.


$1m a minute: the farming subsidies destroying the world - report

The report was published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and is an underestimate of the total subsidies in the food system, as it only includes those for which reliable data is available in 88 countries.

“This report is a wake-up call for governments around the world to rethink agricultural support schemes to make them fit for purpose to transform our agri-food systems and contribute to the four betters: better nutrition, better production, better environment and a better life,” said Qu Dongyu, the FAO director general.

The UNDP head, Achim Steiner, said redirecting the subsidies would also boost the livelihoods of the 500 million smallholder farmers worldwide by ensuring a more level playing field with industrial agriculture.

Marco Sánchez, the FAO deputy director and an author of the report, said: “Current support to farms needs transforming for today’s realities. For instance, the US is now aligning to the Paris climate agreement, which is very welcome, but there is no way they can achieve those climate goals if they don’t tackle the food industries.”

Joy Kim, at UNEP, said: “Agriculture contributes a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of biodiversity loss and 80% of deforestation.” She said international finance pledges for climate change were $100bn a year and $5bn a year for deforestation. “But governments are providing $470bn [in farm support] that has a huge damaging impact on climate and nature.”

The report found that between 2013 and 2018, support to farmers totalled an average of $540bn a year, of which 87% ($470bn) was “harmful”. This included price incentives for specific livestock and crops, subsidies for fertilisers and pesticides, and distorting export subsidies and import tariffs.

These damage health by promoting the overconsumption of meat in rich countries and overconsumption of low-nutrition staples in poorer ones. “If you are not promoting fruits and vegetables, then in relative terms it is very expensive for the consumer to eat healthily,” said Sánchez. “That’s why 2 billion people in the world cannot afford a healthy diet.”

The report highlighted some cases of positive action, such as moves in China to cut chemical fertiliser and pesticide use, and the zero budget natural farming policy in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

The UK is also shifting its £3bn-a-year subsidy scheme towards environmental goals. Some subsidies should also be redirected to help farmers cope with the increasing extreme weather impacts of the climate crisis, the report said.

The EU is to pay €387bn (£330bn) in farm subsidies from 2021 to 2027, but last Thursday green MEPs in Brussels said a planned overhaul failed to align agriculture with EU climate change targets.

Overhauling farm support in the face of vested interests was hard, said Sánchez, but could be done by spelling out the costs to governments, by consumers demanding better and by financial institutions stopping lending to damaging activities.

“The true costs of our food system have been hidden for too long,” said Morgan Gillespy, the programme director at the Food and Land Use Coalition. The damage caused to nature by subsidy regimes was $4tn to $6tn, according to a recent review, she said.

“Changes in subsidy regimes are likely to be politically controversial and could spark protests among farmers and other groups,” Gillespy said. “But just because it is hard, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen. The facts are now clear.”

Consultation with farmers was vital, she said. Copa-Cogeca, the largest interest group for Europe’s farmers did not respond to a request for comment.

A separate report, published by the World Resources Institute in August, said without reform, farm subsidies “will render vast expanses of healthy land useless”.

It said: “Given that the world will have 10 billion people by 2050, the loss of this land will make it impossible to feed the global population.”

Instead, farmers should be supported to restore their land through techniques such as agroforestry, it said.

GMO IS OMG SPELLED BACKWARDS

Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start

As the UK prepares to approve genome editing, a leading food scientist argues it should also ease up on GM crops

Rape field at the Cherhill White Horse, Calne, Wiltshire.

IT IS RAPE BECAUSE IT IS NOT GMO, 

IF IT WAS THEN IT WOULD BE CANOLA (TM)

 Photograph: Chris George/Alamy

Nick Talbot
Sun 19 Sep 2021

Empty shelves in supermarkets have reminded us that our food supply is rather more fragile than we thought. Indeed, who would have believed that in 2021 we need a cabinet minister responsible for the supply of food? Whatever the reasons for the situation, this might be a sign of the future. Ensuring food security in the long term could prove much more challenging than our short-term problems. Even amid the pandemic, it is hard to ignore the floods, wildfires and hurricanes occurring with ever-increasing ferocity. The climate emergency now feels very real and doing nothing is no longer an option.

I study plant diseases, many of which are serious threats to humankind. The rice blast fungus, my main obsession, destroys enough rice each year to feed 60 million people. We are already seeing the effects of climate change with new plant diseases moving rapidly around the world and need new disease-resistant crops to combat these threats.

Conventionally, we have created these through plant breeding. However, this is a long process, requiring skill and patience. We must act more quickly given the magnitude of the climate emergency. The predicted increase in the human population and greater urbanisation mean we will also need to grow much more food on much less land, in a way that does not damage the planet.

However, we are still struggling to find sustainable solutions to plant diseases that have plagued us for centuries. One example that is relevant to the history of the British Isles is potato late blight, which causes about $5bn (£3.6bn) in losses worldwide each year. This is the disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s from which the Irish population has yet to fully recover. The warm and humid late summers of these islands mean that late blight is a constant threat for potato farmers. Currently, we spray 15 to 20 times a year with fungicides to control the disease. These agrochemicals are not only expensive, but entirely fossil-fuel based.

It has been reported that the government is looking to relax the rules on genome editing following departure from the EU. In a consultation earlier this year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recently asked whether genome editing should be treated in the same way as genetic modification (GM) is regulated under EU law. With genome editing, very small and specific changes are made to a plant gene that can have a significant impact on that plant’s resilience to its environment and ability to grow with fewer inputs, such as lower nitrogen levels. We can thereby achieve the outcomes of plant breeding, which has been so successful in improving crop yields, but in a much more precise manner. Genome editing has considerable promise in accelerating plant breeding and the decision to proceed would be very welcome, but where does this leave the debate on GM crops?

Take, for instance, the situation with potato blight. Research at the Sainsbury Laboratory, led by my colleague Professor Jonathan Jones, has already discovered many resistance genes from close relatives of commercial potatoes. We know that, if introduced through genetic modification, these genes enable potatoes to detect the disease and activate natural defences. This works in the field. If British farmers could access these resistant potato varieties, it would immediately lead to a substantial reduction in the carbon footprint of agriculture.

The perception that GM is more disruptive and less safe than genome editing is not based in scientific evidence

GM therefore enables innovation in ways that cannot be achieved just through genome editing; by moving genes from one plant to another we can achieve a blight-resistant potato. The perception that genetic modification is more disruptive, and therefore less safe, than genome editing is not based in scientific evidence. These crops have been subject to more than 4,400 risk assessments by regulatory experts in 71 countries and no increased risk to humans or the environment has been revealed. They have been consumed by more than 350 million people for more than 25 years with no recorded ill-effects. Both methods offer potential solutions to different aspects of our food security problems.

These genetic technologies could be vital in achieving net-zero carbon agriculture within the critical timeframe. Yet they are only one of a set of tools that we will need – there is no single “magic bullet” solution. Many facets of our farming methods need to change, in addition to crop breeding methods. Organic farming has provided us with creative and powerful alternatives for how we grow food. By combining the benefits of ecologically sensitive organic production with innovation in crop improvement, we could develop powerful holistic solutions for sustainable agriculture. For this to happen, however, we need to focus on the shared objectives of the proponents of genetic technologies and those environmental groups who oppose these methods. Both sides want to neutralise the pressure of farming on our ecosystems by reducing chemical inputs.

We need a robust, transparent regulatory framework for genetic technologies in crop development. This is vital for public confidence in these methods, but also needs to be part of a national debate about the innovations necessary to change agriculture and to provide clear consumer benefits.

Regulations should focus on novel crop varieties being safe, healthy, nutritious and environmentally beneficial, rather than the technologies used to produce them. We have an opportunity to make British agriculture world-leading in sustainability, rather than having innovations crippled by excessively stringent regulations based on outdated knowledge and media-driven fears.

There is a real opportunity for these technologies to underpin the changes to our agricultural system that we so desperately need, and to do it relatively quickly. A good starting point would be to shift the conversation away from where we disagree to where we definitely agree – a future in which we can grow more healthy and nutritious food on less land and finally get off the chemical treadmill.

Professor Nick Talbot is executive director of the Sainsbury Laboratory

 

NASA Selects Five U.S. Companies – Including SpaceX and Blue Origin – for Artemis Lunar Lander Concepts

By NASA SEPTEMBER 18, 2021

Illustration of an Artemis astronaut stepping onto the Moon. Credit: NASA

NASA has selected five U.S. companies to help the agency enable a steady pace of crewed trips to the lunar surface under the agency’s Artemis program. These companies will make advancements toward sustainable human landing system concepts, conduct risk-reduction activities, and provide feedback on NASA’s requirements to cultivate industry capabilities for crewed lunar landing missions.

The awards under the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP-2) Appendix N broad agency announcement are firm fixed-price, milestone-based contracts. The total combined value for the awards is $146 million, and the work will be conducted over the next 15 months. The companies that received awards and their award values are:  

• Blue Origin Federation of Kent, Washington, $25.6 million. 
• Dynetics (a Leidos company) of Huntsville, Alabama, $40.8 million.
• Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $35.2 million.
• Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, $34.8 million.
• SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $9.4 million.

“Establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon through recurring services using lunar landers is a major Artemis goal,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at Headquarters in Washington. “This critical step lays the foundation for U.S. leadership in learning more about the Moon and for learning how to live and work in deep space for future missions farther into the solar system.”

Illustration of SpaceX Starship human lander design that may carry the first NASA astronauts to the surface of the Moon under the Artemis program. Credit: SpaceX

The selected companies will develop lander design concepts, evaluating their performance, design, construction standards, mission assurance requirements, interfaces, safety, crew health accommodations, and medical capabilities. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

The work from these companies will ultimately help shape the strategy and requirements for a future NASA’s solicitation to provide regular astronaut transportation from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon.

“Collaboration with our partners is critical to achieving NASA’s long-term Artemis lunar exploration goals,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, Human Landing System Program manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “By partnering with innovative U.S. companies, we will establish a robust lunar economy while exploring new areas of the Moon for generations to come.”

This opportunity is distinct from the initial crewed lunar landing demonstration mission awarded under the NextSTEP-2 Appendix H procurement, which will serve as the proof of concept for the Artemis architecture.

NASA’s goals under Artemis include enabling a safe and cost-efficient long-term approach to accessing the lunar surface and becoming one of multiple customers purchasing services in a lunar transportation market. Much of what the agency develops for the Moon will be applied to future exploration at Mars.

NASA’s Artemis missions include landing the first woman and first person of color on the lunar surface, sending a suite of new science instruments and technology demonstrations to study the Moon, and establishing a long-term presence there.

Australian scholar hails success of China's crewed mission for space station construction

2021-09-18 15:48:22XinhuaEditor : Xue Lingqiao

The success of China's first manned flight during the construction of its space station showed the country's ambition and space capability, said an Australian scholar in astrophysics.

Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at the Australian National University (ANU), told Xinhua on Saturday that the task was a great step to getting the Tiangong space station ready.

"The taikonauts did a lot of work in establishing the Tiangong space station for full operation, with multiple spacewalks and upgrades," he said. "This is exactly the work they needed to accomplish to progress the building of Tiangong to full operations."

He noted that as the International Space Station started to show its age, "it is also important that this (Tiangong) is operating and can perform science into the future, which was what their 90-day mission was working towards."

"It means that in the future, not just the International Space Station hosts experiments from around the world, so can the Tiangong space station," Tucker said.

Three Chinese astronauts, the first sent to orbit for China's space station construction, have completed their three-month mission and returned to Earth safely on Friday.

The success of the Shenzhou-12 manned spaceflight mission laid a solid foundation for the continued construction and operation of the country's space station, said the China Manned Space Agency.

Do the northern lights make sounds that you can hear?

September 16, 2021 10.17am EDT


It’s a question that has puzzled observers for centuries: do the fantastic green and crimson light displays of the aurora borealis produce any discernible sound?

Conjured by the interaction of solar particles with gas molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, the aurora generally occurs near Earth’s poles, where the magnetic field is strongest. Reports of the aurora making a noise, however, are rare – and were historically dismissed by scientists.

But a Finnish study in 2016 claimed to have finally confirmed that the northern lights really do produce sound audible to the human ear. A recording made by one of the researchers involved in the study even claimed to have captured the sound made by the captivating lights 70 metres above ground level.



Still, the mechanism behind the sound remains somewhat mysterious, as are the conditions that must be met for the sound to be heard. My recent research takes a look over historic reports of auroral sound to understand the methods of investigating this elusive phenomenon and the process of establishing whether reported sounds were objective, illusory of imaginary.

Historic claims

Auroral noise was the subject of particularly lively debate in the first decades of the 20th century, when accounts from settlements across northern latitudes reported that sound sometimes accompanied the mesmerising light displays in their skies.

Witnesses told of a quiet, almost imperceptible crackling, whooshing or whizzing noise during particularly violent northern lights displays. In the early 1930s, for instance, personal testimonies started flooding into The Shetland News, the weekly newspaper of the subarctic Shetland Islands, likening the sound of the northern lights to “rustling silk” or “two planks meeting flat ways”.

These tales were corroborated by similar testimony from northern Canada and Norway. Yet the scientific community was less than convinced, especially considering very few western explorers claimed to have heard the elusive noises themselves.

An early photograph of the aurora, captured in 1930 in Finnmark, Norway. Nasjonalbiblioteket, Norway

The credibility of auroral noise reports from this time was intimately tied to altitude measurements of the northern lights. It was considered that only those displays that descended low into the Earth’s atmosphere would be able to transmit sound which could be heard by the human ear.

The problem here was that results recorded during the Second International Polar Year of 1932-3 found aurorae most commonly took place 100km above Earth, and very rarely below 80km. This suggested it would be impossible for discernible sound from the lights to be transmitted to the Earth’s surface.

Auditory illusions?

Given these findings, eminent physicists and meteorologists remained sceptical, dismissing accounts of auroral sound and very low aurorae as folkloric stories or auditory illusions.

Sir Oliver Lodge, the British physicist involved in the development of radio technology, commented that auroral sound might be a psychological phenomenon due to the vividness of the aurora’s appearance – just as meteors sometimes conjure a whooshing sound in the brain. Similarly, the meteorologist George Clark Simpson argued that the appearance of low aurorae was likely an optical illusion caused by the interference of low clouds.

Nevertheless, the leading auroral scientist of the 20th century, Carl Størmer, published accounts written by two of his assistants who claimed to have heard the aurora, adding some legitimacy to the large volume of personal reports.

Carl Størmer observing the northern lights. Nasjonalbiblioteket, Norway

Størmer’s assistant Hans Jelstrup said he had heard a “very curious faint whistling sound, distinctly undulatory, which seemed to follow exactly the vibrations of the aurora”, while Mr Tjönn experienced a sound like “burning grass or spray”. As convincing as these two last testimonies may have been, they still didn’t propose a mechanism by which auroral sound could operate.

Sound and light

The answer to this enduring mystery which has subsequently garnered the most support was first tentatively suggested in 1923 by Clarence Chant, a well-known Canadian astronomer. He argued that the motion of the northern lights alters Earth’s magnetic field, inducing changes in the electrification of the atmosphere, even at a significant distance.

This electrification produces a crackling sound much closer to Earth’s surface when it meets objects on the ground, much like the sound of static. This could take place on the observer’s clothes or spectacles, or possibly in surrounding objects including fir trees or the cladding of buildings.

Chant’s theory correlates well with many accounts of auroral sound, and is also supported by occasional reports of the smell of ozone – which reportedly carries a metallic odour similar to an electrical spark – during northern lights displays.

Yet Chant’s paper went largely unnoticed in the 1920s, only receiving recognition in the 1970s when two auroral physicists revisited the historical evidence. Chant’s theory is largely accepted by scientists today, although there’s still debate as to how exactly the mechanism for producing the sound operates.

What is clear is that the aurora does, on rare occasions, make sounds audible to the human ear. The eerie reports of crackling, whizzing and buzzing noises accompanying the lights describe an objective audible experience – not something illusory or imagined.

Sampling the sound

If you want to hear the northern lights for yourself, you may have to spend a considerable amount of time in the Polar regions, considering the aural phenomenon only presents itself in 5% of violent auroral displays. It’s also most commonly heard on the top of mountains, surrounded by only a few buildings – so it’s not an especially accessible experience.

In recent years, the sound of the aurora has nonetheless been explored for its aesthetic value, inspiring musical compositions and laying the foundation for novel ways of interacting with its electromagnetic signals.

The Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds has used journal extracts from the American explorer Charles Hall and the Norwegian statesman Fridjtof Nansen, both of whom claimed to have heard the northern lights, in his music. His composition, Northern Lights, interweaves these reports with the only known Latvian folksong recounting the auroral sound phenomenon, sung by a tenor solo.

Or you can also listen to the radio signals of the northern lights at home. In 2020, a BBC 3 radio programme remapped very low frequency radio recordings of the aurora onto the audible spectrum. Although not the same as perceiving audible noises produced by the the northern lights in person on a snowy mountaintop, these radio frequencies give an awesome sense of the aurora’s transitory, fleeting and dynamic nature.

PHOTO John A Davis/Shutterstock

Author

Fiona Amery
PhD Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.