Robots Chop a Few Bucks off the Price of Lunch at This Fully Automated Restaurant

ByVanessa Bates Ramirez
August 31, 2022



Even before labor shortages and supply chain issues began plaguing the economy, the food service industry was bringing in robots. From flipping burgers to making pizzas, automation has been taking over a variety of food preparation tasks. A San Francisco restaurant has now taken it to the next level, opening what it claims is the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant this past weekend (though the “world’s first” title is likely not accurate; Pazzi Pizzeria in Paris, for one, has been serving up robot-made pies for just over a year).

The restaurant is located in an outdoor food court in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, alongside similar businesses. The similar businesses are namely food trucks, which is probably a more accurate label for Mezli than “restaurant,” except for the important detail that it’s not a truck. It is a lot like a shipping container in shape and size, though.

Here’s how it works. Customers place orders on a touch screen kiosk on the container’s side or from a smartphone app. Inside the container, which is refrigerated, robots select ingredients from bins of prepared items, transferring those that need to be cooked or heated to a smart oven. Once all the ingredients are ready to go, additional robots mix and box them. Completed orders are transferred to designated windows, where waiting customers pick them up on the other side.

True to its Mediterranean-ish name, Mezli serves “fresh, healthy Mediterranean bowls” that include options like falafel, roasted vegetables, spiced lamb or chicken, tzatziki, turmeric rice, hummus, etc. (I mean, you had me at falafel).

Mezli says it can whip up about 75 meals in an hour; probably not quite the scale of your neighborhood Chipotle or Roti, but getting there. The company was started by three graduate students from Stanford University, who started working on the concept in January 2021 at startup accelerator Y Combinator. During their first year of research and development, the team opened a pop-up restaurant, built a prototype robot, and got investors and a few new employees on board.

Focusing exclusively on the tech side of things wouldn’t get them very far once lunch time rolled around, though—in the end, food service comes down to one key question: does it taste good? So Mezli’s founders hired Bay Area fine dining chef Eric Minnich, a veteran of Michelin-starred establishments, to help perfect their recipes and menu.

To be fair, Mezli can only be called “fully automated” because the food served there is prepared by humans in a commercial kitchen then transferred to the robo-restaurant; machines aren’t cooking food so much as selecting and mixing it.

However, it’s automated enough to offer prices slightly lower than those of comparable competitors. The lowest-priced option is a roasted carrot and cauliflower bowl with red rice, hummus, and veggie garnishes, which goes for $6.99. The highest price point is $11.99, which is what you’ll pay for bowls that include chicken or lamb.

For the first few weeks of its operation, Mezli will have employees onsite to answer questions from customers and field any unexpected issues that may pop up. But eventually the restaurant will operate unsupervised, with customers’ only recourse after a botched meal to reach out to the company via phone or email.

Mezli had its grand opening on Sunday, and its founders’ ultimate goal is to scale their idea and mass-produce the robotic container restaurants; they have thus far raised about $3.5 million in seed funding from venture capitalists.

A food writer for The Spoon who sampled Mezli’s food said his falafel platter was “pretty good” and noted the generous portion size for the price. Alex Kolchinski, Mezli’s CEO and co-founder, said “People have generally been a combination of surprised and pleased” after trying the food.

However, there’s no guarantee Mezli will have more success getting off the ground (and staying there) than its robo-restaurant predecessors. As much as people like affordable food, maybe they also like that food to have a (more visible) human touch.

We’ll soon find out whether it really does come down to taste and price, as Mezli is likely one of the first in an imminent line of restaurants serving up dishes made by robots.

Image Credit: Mezli

Why we should forget about the 1.5C global heating target

Bill McGuire

The goal of 1.5C by 2030 is arbitrary and now unachievable – yet working to prevent every 0.1C rise can still give us hope

‘The 33 million people displaced from their homes in Pakistan might justifiably say climate change has already become dangerous.’ 

Photograph: Akram Shahid/AFP/Getty Images

Mon 12 Sep 2022

Keeping the global average temperature rise (since pre-industrial times) below 1.5C is widely regarded as critical if we are to sidestep dangerous, all-pervasive climate change.

This idea of a 1.5C temperature threshold is in the news again because just-published research has revealed that several catastrophic climate tipping points are in danger of being crossed at around this level of warming, including collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, which would lock in about 12 metres of sea-level rise.

To have a fair chance of keeping this side of 1.5C, emissions have to fall by 45% in little more than 90 months, and I am on record as saying that this is practically impossible. But it’s worse than that. It is perfectly feasible that we will crash through the 1.5C guardrail even earlier.

The UK Met Office, for one, forecast in 2021 that there was at least a 40% chance that 1.5C would be breached temporarily at least once in the following five years. This means the average temperature would be above 1.5C one year, but likely return below it the next – and we will fluctuate around that number before crossing it permanently some time in the future.

In both 2016 and 2020, the Earth was 1.36C hotter than during pre-industrial times, so we are already getting disturbingly close. The development of El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean in the next year or two, which typically ramps up the level of global heat, could well provide the final push that breaches the threshold.

The idea of breaching “temporarily” opens a whole can of worms. Does one year of 1.5C mean we have breached the barrier or not? How many years of 1.5C or more of heating does there need to be before we have officially crashed through the guardrail? And how critical would this really be, anyway, in terms of real-world consequences??

Maybe we are too fixated with this precise temperature rise. The fact is, while not exactly picked out of a hat, the 1.5C figure is an arbitrary one. The exact level of temperature rise at which climate change becomes dangerous is simply not known. Indeed, the 33 million people displaced from their homes in Pakistan might justifiably say we have reached it already. As for tipping points, any or all of those flagged in the new research could happen at some point below 1.5C, so we may have crossed one or more already – only time will tell. Just as easily, we might need a 1.6C, 1.7C or even higher rise before the first runaway impacts of global heating are encountered.

The key point, then, is not the precise value of the global average temperature rise, but the simple fact that it is continuing to rise.


World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds

The climate system is so sensitive to additional heating that every fraction of a degree rise counts, so that every 0.1C rise is just as important as every other. Global heating is now translating into extreme weather rapidly: there has been a huge hike in these events over the last few years, during which time the global average temperature climbed by one- or two-tenths of a degree at most.

The bottom line is that 1.5C is not sacred. Whether we crash through it or – by some miracle – stay below it, we cannot be certain what the consequences will be. The number has been a useful metric in the global heating story, marking a somewhat concrete focal point. But we mustn’t become obsessed with a single target figure. On the contrary, we need to knuckle down as much as we can to prevent every 0.1C rise, both below this figure and above, in order to rein in climate breakdown as best we can.

 You never know, we might just get lucky.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, and the author of Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant’s Guide

 New Brunswick

Former college directors describe pressure from forestry industry over instructor's views

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Former forestry instructor Rod Cumberland suing college 

for wrongful dismissal

Jacques Poitras · CBC News · Posted: Sep 12, 2022 

Rod Cumberland was fired from the Maritime College of Forest Technology on June 20, 2019 and believes it was because of his views on the spraying of the herbicide glyphosate. (CBC)

Two former executive directors of the Maritime College of Forest Technology say that industry officials complained to them about an instructor's anti-glyphosate views in the years before he was fired.

Robert Whitney, who retired from the position in 2014, testified in Court of King's Bench on Monday about conversations he had about Rod Cumberland after the instructor sent out an email about glyphosate on his college account.

 "We can get rid of him. He has no tenure," Whitney remembered being told at the time by Blake Brunsdon, then the chief forester for J.D. Irving Ltd. and an industry representative on the college board.

And Gerry Redmond, Whitney's successor, said he was approached by industry representatives on the college board "on a couple of occasions … wanting me to sanction Rod to prevent him from talking about the glyphosate issue."

Robert Whitney was one of two former executive directors of the school who testified Monday. (Ed Hunter/CBC )

Cumberland is suing the college for wrongful dismissal, alleging his 2019 firing from the college was motivated by his vocal criticism of the use of glyphosate by the forest industry.

The college argues it fired Cumberland because he had bullied students and undermined a colleague.

"It had absolutely nothing to do with glyphosate," one of the college's lawyers, Chad Sullivan, said during his opening statement Monday.

"He was terminated because he became intolerable to work with."

Whitney's testimony centred on an email that Cumberland sent on his college account in 2014 calling for a ban on herbicide spraying because of his belief it was responsible for a decline in the deer population in the province.

Whitney said his only objection to the email was that Cumberland sent the email on his college account.

Gerry Redmond says he pushed back against industry criticism of Cumberland during his time as executive director of the Maritime College of Forest Technology. (Jacques Poitras/CBC)

Students and staff were encouraged to follow their passions through community involvement, he said, whether that was in sports, religious groups or other activities.

Cumberland's email prompted a "barrage" of calls, emails and visits to his office by industry representatives, Whitney testified.

Brunsdon, he said, was "concerned that the college's brand had been used to promote a personal interest and he was very much concerned that the students might be exposed to a one-sided perspective … on the use of herbicides."

Whitney told him the use of the college email account was embarrassing but he testified Monday that Cumberland's views were within the acceptable terms of the debate over spraying.

"Even in science, there's lots of room for argument about the validity of one perspective or another," he said.

He rebuffed Irving's offer, in a Jan. 28, 2014 letter from Brunsdon, to present what the company called "a more science-based review" of literature on glyphosate "to ensure that facts are being considered in addition to opinions."

Rod Cumberland, seen here speaking at an anti-glyphosate rally, was the New Brunswick government's deer biologist for 15 years before going on to work at the Maritime College of Forest Technology in Fredericton. (Radio-Canada)

Whitney responded that students were already getting that in their courses.

To have an additional perspective from an outside organization like J.D. Irving Ltd. would be "just the same or worse as having a biased view in the classroom," Whitney wrote in a Jan. 31, 2014 letter.

He told the court that Cumberland had a right to his opinions. "I would be really concerned about a wildlife biologist who was not concerned about the fate of wildlife," he said.

In cross-examination, Whitney acknowledged that his retirement as executive director was five years before the firing.

"The board had turned over quite a bit," college lawyer Clarence Bennett said.

"Right," Whitney said.                                                   

The former executive director also admitted that Brunsdon's comments about getting rid of Cumberland didn't lead to anything.

"That didn't happen, right?"

"That's right," Whitney said.

Pushed back

In his testimony, Redmond said that he pushed back on the industry criticism.

"If they had problems with his research, they should bring forth those individuals to counter his arguments, moreso than me suppressing his ability to be a scientist and present his information," he said.

Redmond acknowledged during cross-examination that he got complaints from students and other instructors about Cumberland's classroom behaviour when he was the college director.

In one email Cumberland told a student, "Put on your big boy pants and man up."

Redmond said he didn't think that phrase was condescending or inappropriate.

"Not in the culture of our college. I didn't see it as anything out of the ordinary. It's an expression. What we wanted to do is train these students to take responsibility for their own actions. That's just a figure of speech."

• Documents show concerns about instructor's views on glyphosate ahead of firing

• Forestry professor was fired for harassment and discrimination, college says

Redmond also acknowledged he had posted allegations on a pro-Cumberland Facebook page without knowing whether they were true or not.

He said a post alleging that the forestry industry was stalling the case from going ahead to run Cumberland out of money for his lawyers was based on "my gut feeling, my opinion."

 "I still believe what I said," Redmond said.

"You still believe that Mr. Bennett and myself are financed by the forestry industry?"

"I have no idea," Redmond answered.

In another post Redmond implied that delays in the case getting to trial, including a judge's infection with COVID-19, were suspicious.

"In your view is the judge in on this conspiracy as well?" Sullivan asked.

"There's been delay after delay after delay," Redmond said. While some were legitimate, "it just looks strange to me."

Asked if he was willing to say that the posts were untrue, Redmond answered, "I have no idea whether they're true or not."

Sullivan said Redmond had no more solid basis for his claim that Cumberland was fired over glyphosate.

"You don't really know," the lawyer said. "You've got a gut feeling, right?"

Cumberland starts testimony

Cumberland himself began testifying late on Monday.

He said he began researching glyphosate more than a decade ago when he noticed as a Department of Natural Resources biologist that the deer population was increasing near urban areas but not in public forests. 

He started attending seminars where glyphosate was discussed and found them one-sided.

"I thought they might present some of the independent research … but there was nothing about that."

After Tim Marshall, the current director and the man who fired Cumberland, took over as executive director of the college in 2017, Cumberland said he told him that he was involved in the spraying issue and there didn't seem to be any concern.

"I assumed that he knew that that was my issue and those were my concerns, and if there was another seminar I would probably be there to ask questions," he said.

Cumberland's testimony will continue Tuesday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacques Poitras

Provincial Affairs reporter

Jacques Poitras has been CBC's provincial affairs reporter in New Brunswick since 2000. He grew up in Moncton and covered Parliament in Ottawa for the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. He has reported on every New Brunswick election since 1995 and won awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the National Newspaper Awards and Amnesty International. He is also the author of five non-fiction books about New Brunswick politics and history.

September heat blazed across North Atlantic, melting ice and fueling Hurricane Danielle

September heat kept alive a warming trend seen over much of the summer in the North Atlantic. Scientists say its more evidence of climate change.

Key Points

A burst of heat over parts of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans continued a series of summer record-breakers.

The warmer water temperature helped fuel creation of a hurricane much farther north than typical.

Hotter than normal temperatures weren’t just confined to the American Southwest as September started.

A burst of heat over parts of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans continued a series of summer record-breakers that brought unusually warm temperatures to the world's coolest regions.

A huge melt event occurred on Greenland’s ice sheet last weekend, when temperatures rose above freezing, even at an elevation near 10,000 feet. At the same time, warmer water temperatures – as much as 9 degrees above normal in parts of the northern Atlantic Ocean – helped fuel creation of a hurricane much farther north than typical.

Three-month seasonal summaries released last week reported temperature and melt records in Greenland, Svalbard and the Swiss Alps. To scientists in the region, the melting glaciers and warmer waters seem to be further evidence of the changing climate, although further research will be done to attribute specific events.

This summer “shifted the realities for Alpine glaciers,” said Matthias Huss, a glaciology professor at ETH Zürich and Glacier Monitoring Switzerland. He finds the speed of melt in the Alps “hard to accept.”


A glacier in northern Greenland taken during a NASA science flight on July 11, 2022.
USA TODA

“Within just two months, a mountain pass at Les Diablerets in western Switzerland, ice-covered for several thousand years, became ice-free,” said Huss. All previous records were shattered at one location monitored by the university’s glaciology group for more than 60 years.

“We measured 4 meters of melt at the highest observation site,” the group posted this week. “Simply shocking, and sad. This is a glacier on its way to extinction.”


And if you find the numbers difficult to grasp, here is what a 50% #glacier volume loss looks like in the landscape! Taken near #Zermatt, facing the #Matterhorn 😟 (repeat photo by Leo Hösli and Guillem Carcanade). (6/6) pic.twitter.com/riT4fsbpxf— VAW Glaciology (@VAW_glaciology) August 22, 2022

Hurricane Danielle formed Sept. 2 in a region rare for hurricane creation, near the 40th parallel, intensifying to sustained winds of 90 mph as it moved northeast. It finally weakened to a tropical storm six days later.

“Normally when storms form that far north, they weaken quickly due to relatively cold water,” said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist in Colorado State University’s atmospheric science department. Danielle’s “slow forward motion over much warmer than normal water allowed the storm to survive.”

The hurricane picked up fuel and energy from an ongoing marine heat wave in the Atlantic, said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist who studies marine heat waves at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory.

“The Atlantic is basically on fire right now,” Amaya said, with the Gulf Stream bringing lots of warmer water into the region.

 

This NOAA image shows the anomalies in sea surface temperatures for the week of Aug. 28, with the darker red showing water temperatures nearly 9 degrees above normal and the palest orange showing temperatures about 1.9 degrees above normal.     NOAA

Meanwhile, a “highly unusual” heat wave brought warmer winds and temperatures over Greenland from the south, said Martin Stendel, a senior climate scientist at the National Center for Climate Research at the Danish Meteorological Institute. It's a wind pattern similar to the one that brought the heat dome to the Pacific Northwest in 2021.

The polar jet stream is in “a very wave state at the moment,” flowing in a loop over Newfoundland and farther north over western Greenland, then southward again near Svalbard and northern Scandinavia, Stendel said. It’s called an Omega block because it resembles the shape of the Greek letter Omega (Ω).

Warm air inside that loop has been as much as 35 degrees above normal, Stendel said. The warmer air holds more water vapor, so the warmer temperatures dumped more precipitation on Greenland, much of that as rain rather than snow.

Some climatologists suggest summer fluctuations in the jet stream are increasing as the Arctic warms, slowing the jet stream and allowing pressure systems to amplify extremes in heat and rain, while others say more research is needed.

A set of graphs posted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center this week surprised researchers with the burst of warm temperatures and melt seen around much of Greenland’s perimeter Monday.

Almost 40% of Greenland’s ice sheet “experienced melt this past weekend that is exceptionally unusual for this time of year,” said Liam Colgan, a senior researcher at the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

According to its data, Southern Greenland’s South Dome – elevation nearly 9,800 feet – ”went above the freezing line into melting temperatures” on Sept. 2, Colgan said. The weather station there recorded a temperature about a half-degree above freezing.

Learn more: Scientists find new population of polar bears hanging on despite rapidly changing climate

Warm blocking wind patterns and hurricane remnants that wind up in the region as extratropical lows do occur naturally, but such precipitation events are becoming more intense, Stendel said. “With generally increasing temperatures, it is probable that such events occur more frequently in the future, thus enhancing sea level rise.”

Colgan and other researchers recently concluded Greenland’s melting ice sheet could add at least a foot of sea level rise to the world’s oceans by 2100.

“Unusually large and late melt events are another signal that the ice sheet is trending towards a warmer climate,” Colgan said. “Hopefully today’s extreme does not become tomorrow’s average.”

On the opposite side of the Omega block, where warm air flows south again, sits Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, where many travel to see polar bears.

Svalbard saw its warmest summer on record in the western and southern end of the islands, Norway’s Meteorological Institute reported. Its 7.4-degree Celsius summer average was .2 degrees hotter than its previous record high in 2020, on Sept. 2.

"There is an end to the 'refrigerator temperature' that you had before, when you could count on keeping food fresh in your rucksack for several days if you were going out on a trip," the Institute said in its update.

The summer average exceeded the previous decade’s average by nearly a full degree, and the previous 30-year average by nearly two degrees.

On the north end of Svalbard, summer heat matched the previous all-time record observed in 2018.

 

This satellite image of a portion of Nordaustlandet, an island in northeast Svalbard, shows extensive light blue areas where layers of snow have melted away and exposed bare ice, according to NASA. A cluster of small blue dots in the upper right are melt ponds, while colorful water offshore is likely due to sediments eroded by the flow of ice over bedrock and carried by meltwater into the adjacent Arctic Ocean.

LANDSAT 9/NASA AND THE U. S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Svalbard is one of the fastest warming places on the planet, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Observatory. Its satellite photos show record ice melt there this summer, starting with an earlier than normal sea ice melt, has taken "a visible toll."

How global warming happens 

MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION

 

Rocket Lab to conduct first private mission to Venus

BY MARK R. WHITTINGTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 09/11/22 10:00 AM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Institute of Space and Astronautical Science

One benefit of the commercial space launch revolution has been the lower cost of planetary missions. Launch systems such as the SpaceX Falcon 9 have enabled public-private partnerships such as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in which NASA has partnered with small businesses to launch probes to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis moon-exploration program. The costs of these missions are a fraction of the past NASA-only missions.

Now, Rocket Lab, a launch company that is rapidly becoming a competitor to SpaceX, is taking cheap robotic space exploration one step further. The joint American-New Zealand company is sending a probe to search for life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the second planet from the sun.

Venus would seem to be a strange target for a search for extraterrestrial life. Its surface is a hell of crushing CO2 and sulfuric acid with an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of the Earth’s surface and a temperature of roughly 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists believe that Venus was once a world much like Earth but, because of natural processes, underwent a runaway greenhouse effect that made the planet what it is today.

On Venus, 50 kilometers above the hellish surface, above the sulfuric acid clouds, the planet is a relatively benign place. The temperature and atmospheric pressure are very close to Earth normal.

Recently, scientists thought they had detected phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine is a gas that is only created in nature by microbes. The discovery sparked speculation that microbes trapped in droplets of water are floating 50 kilometers above the surface of Venus.

Other scientists have since disputed the discovery. Nevertheless, Rocket Lab is sending a privately financed probe that will dip into the Venusian atmosphere to find out for sure. The probe, called the Venus Life Finder (VLF), would be launched on a Rocket Lab Electron, according to Ars Technica, in May 2023. The Electron’s Photon upper stage would raise the VLF probe’s orbit until it achieves escape velocity. Some months later, in October 2023, the VLF would plunge into Venus’ atmosphere and spend three minutes looking for life.

The VLF represents the second development that promises to revolutionize planetary exploration. The probe, developed by scientists at MIT, weighs just 50 pounds. When it plunges into Venus’ atmosphere it will use an instrument called the “autofluorescing nephelometer” that will use a laser to illuminate organic molecules that may or may not exist 50 kilometers above the planet’s surface.

If the VLF probe finds signs of life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, the discovery will be a historic event. Scientists have been trying to find microbial life on Mars for decades. Extraterrestrial life may reside in warm oceans beneath the ice layers of Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Venus might be the last place that anyone expected to find the first lifeform to have evolved on — or above — another world.

Even if the VLF does not find life in the upper atmosphere of Venus, just putting the probe where it needs to be to look for it will open all sorts of possibilities for Rocket Lab and any other company that cares to take advantage of them. Tiny, light-weight robotic probes combined with cheap launch systems could usher in a new era of solar system exploration.

Even when the launch system is monstrously expensive, tiny space probes can take advantage of ridesharing opportunities. The Artemis 1 mission, currently stuck on the launch pad, contains 10 such cube satellite probes, called “CubeSats,” that will be deployed along with the uncrewed Orion spacecraft once the expensive and complex Space Launch System gets off the ground.

The CLPS program is another example of small, privately developed space probes using modern, inexpensive launch vehicles, in this case to explore the lunar surface in advance of the first Artemis missions. The Intuitive Machines Nova-C and the Astrobotic Peregrine are due to launch to the moon in December 2022. NASA is partly financing these missions.

Rocket Lab, which has already launched numerous satellites to low-Earth orbit, has also boosted the CAPSTONE CubeSat to a lunar orbit. However, the success or failure of the Venus Life Finder mission will likely determine that company’s role in exploring the solar system.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of space exploration studies “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

A PRIVATE MISSION WANTS TO FIND ALIEN LIFE ON THE SOLAR SYSTEM'S MOST UNRELENTING PLANET

The Venus Life Finder mission wants to find microbes on the place they shouldn't be able to survive.

Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

JEFF NAGLE
12 HOURS AGO

THE LAST MISSION to enter the mysterious cloud layers of Earth’s superheated twin Venus was long enough ago that it was launched by the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists. Vega 2 spent two days floating through the clouds in the summer of 1985, and its lander survived for 56 minutes on the unrelentingly hostile surface.

Since then, missions to Venus have remained in the comparative safety of orbit. The last American mission to visit Venus itself was the Magellan, which visited in 1989 and hung out until 1994. But that will soon change.

While NASA has plans for VERITAS and DAVINCI+ to orbit Venus and for the latter to drop a probe into its cloud layers, a privately-funded mission to Venus could chase a controversial 2020 discovery indicating microbial life in the upper cloud layers of Venus.

The Venus Life Finder Mission team, based at MIT, wants to send a small, single-instrument probe to descend through the clouds that permanently huddle over Earth’s nearest neighbor next May, according to the team’s latest mission summary.

WHAT’S NEW — Venus Life Finder team proposes three increasingly complex missions, with the first already prepared in collaboration with Rocket Lab. (Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck spoke with Inverse about his interest in the planet in 2021.)

The “small mission,” as the team refers to it, involves sending an instrument known as an autofluorescence nephelometer (really rolls off the tongue) plummeting through Venus’ three layers of clouds to look at the makeup of the clouds. The instrument will shine an ultraviolet laser into Venus’ atmosphere and watch it pass over the particles that fly by.


Artist’s rendering of the Venus Life Finder fleet and what it might look for Venus Life Finder team

According to Janusz Petkowski, an astrobiology researcher at MIT and deputy PI on Venus Life Finder, “many atmospheric anomalies have accumulated over decades from the time of Pioneer-Venus and Venera from the Soviets,” from the presence of ammonia and oxygen, to non-spherical particles in the clouds that might be salts, to the controversial presence of phosphine first announced in 2020. Venus Life Finder’s mission would mark the first direct observations of the cloud layer in nearly four decades.

Petkowski says Venus Life Finder will give scientists a chance to determine which of those anomalies are actually present in Venus’ atmosphere — or “maybe even discover some new anomalies in the process.”

MIT astrophysicist and Venus Life Finder principal investigator Sara Seager tells Inverse, “if there’s ringed carbon molecules they’re very easy to fluoresce. And that would be really a big breakthrough. It doesn’t tell us if there’s life there, but if there’s organic molecules it means there’s organic chemistry, and that would definitely be a step in the right direction.”

The tight focus of this mission means that the question of phosphine, which drew the team together during the pandemic, will have to wait for subsequent missions. Current plans call for a medium and a large follow-up to the nephelometer. A medium mission would involve floating a balloon through the harsh clouds for several days.

The more ambitious large mission would involve returning a Venusian sample to Earth. These missions have a much longer timescale, and rely on other parts of the community to solve critical engineering problems – like NASA’s Mars Sample Return, scheduled to collect Perseverance’s samples sometime after 2028.


A panorama of images from Venera 13.Russian Academy of Sciences / Ted Stryk

WHY IT MATTERS — Since the last time probes visited Venus’ atmosphere, Seager says, “there’s this quiet revolution happening about thinking about Venus as a habitable environment.”

“Most of our life's biochemicals can’t survive in it, it was kind of the accepted wisdom that it was sterile,” she adds.

But laboratory experiments have begun to demonstrate that even an environment made up of sulfuric acid is not necessarily anathema to complex organic chemistry, or even life.

“Our organic chemistry might not be able to survive it, but that doesn’t mean that all organic chemistry is impossible,” Petkowski say. Finding organic molecules in Venus’ clouds would be the first step toward determining if there’s a rich hydrocarbon chemistry within the clouds.

Additionally, some of the anomalies observed by previous Venus missions point to the potential for much more habitable spots within a planet that is still hostile to life. The presence of ammonia would mean that “the clouds are not exactly what we think they are,” Petkowski adds, and that while Venus overall is extremely dry, local measurements from Pioneer and the Soviet Venera probes indicate that there may be local patches where there are anomalously high amounts of water. “Venus’ clouds are a Pandora’s box — each time we dive into the old data collected by the Americans and the Russians we discover there is much more to the clouds than we actually thought and they are much more mysterious than we previously thought.”

WHAT’S NEXT — NASA and the European Space Agency each have missions planned for the end of the decade. But if it launches on schedule in May of 2023, Venus Life Finder would be the first privately-funded scientific mission to another planet. “This is kind of the opposite approach,” notes Seager. The mission would launch aboard a Rocket Lab vehicle, marking that company’s first interplanetary mission.

Compared to these larger, multi-mission probes, VLF’s first mission has only one instrument, and one focus as a project: determining if there is organic chemistry in Venus’ clouds. “Instead of waiting 10 years or 40 years to go back to the atmosphere of Venus, we’re trying to do things that are focused–but still very expensive–missions that can answer questions sooner,” Seager says.

The team hopes that Venus Life Finder’s small first mission will inspire a new focus on Venus’ present, not just its past. Notes Seager, “The search for life on Venus is taboo, still kind of crazy, and despite people having thought of this half a century ago starting with Carl Sagan, it’s kind of out there. And so there’s a real niche for small focused privately funded missions to fill because there could be something big there, but if people are too conservative to search for it, it leaves an opening for a new way of doing things.”

Insurance brokers stroll away from Carmichael coal mine in Australia

BY MIRZA SHEHNAZ

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

Two insurance coverage brokers have walked away from a giant Australian coal mining operation as stress grows on the business to step again from tasks with the potential to worsen local weather change.

Adani Enterprises’ Carmichael mine in north-eastern Australia has a goal this yr of manufacturing 10mn tonnes of thermal coal — used to supply warmth and electrical energy — and did have plans to treble this in three years. Its first coal cargo was shipped in January.

Insurers and brokers, which negotiate protection for corporations, have turn into a goal for teams campaigning towards environmentally damaging tasks as a result of insurance coverage is a pre-requisite for monetary backing.

Marsh McLennan, the world’s greatest dealer, stopped arranging insurance coverage for Adani final yr after the conclusion of the mine’s development section, in accordance with an individual conversant in the matter. Specialist publication InsuranceERM was the primary to report that Marsh was now not appearing for Adani.

Earlier this yr, Lockton, one other top-10 world dealer, entered talks with Adani earlier than deciding in July to not proceed after stress from marketing campaign teams and workers.

Activists parked a van exterior the dealer’s London workplace, displaying the message: “Lockton taking on Adani’s new coal mine as a client will fuel climate disaster.”

Environmental issues concerning the undertaking had been additionally raised internally, prompting Lockton to inform workers and a consumer, in emails seen by the FT, that it had determined to not organize insurance coverage for the undertaking.

Adani mentioned it has the required insurance coverage to function.

In latest years, 44 of the world’s greatest insurers, together with 5 which have beforehand insured Carmichael — Brit, Apollo, Tokio Marine Kiln, Aspen and Ascot — have mentioned they won’t present protection to the mine sooner or later, in accordance with the marketing campaign group Market Forces. Banks together with BNY Mellon and China’s ICBC have reduce ties with or dominated out financing the Adani mine in Australia.

After Adani’s contractor BDM failed to search out insurance coverage final yr for the undertaking’s rail part, the contractor mentioned both the federal government must present insurance coverage or shoppers must assist.

Australia’s new Labor authorities has set out a lot harder environmental targets and this week handed laws mandating a 43 per cent discount in carbon emissions from 2005 ranges by 2030, in contrast with a earlier goal of an as much as 28 per cent discount. But it has resisted stress from the Green occasion for a moratorium on new fossil gas tasks.

Adani has the permissions to supply as much as 60mn tonnes of thermal coal a yr at Carmichael, which might make it one of many largest coal mines on the earth, however has mentioned that reaching this stage will rely on market situations.

During an earnings name in May, the corporate mentioned the mine confronted “logistics issues” in its plans to increase manufacturing to 15mn tonnes within the subsequent monetary yr and to 30mn tonnes per yr by 2024-2025.

In the six months following the mine’s first export, whole volumes passing via the terminal Adani operates in north Queensland, which additionally exports coal from a variety of mines below totally different possession, fell from 14.96mn in comparison with 14.05mn a yr earlier, in accordance with customs information compiled by commodity evaluation supplier Argus.

Australian coal exports have been severely affected by heavy rain and flooding within the first half of the yr, in accordance with Argus. At the identical time, world demand for the gas has made a comeback and costs have hit a file excessive after Russia slashed fuel provides to Europe

Adani Australia mentioned: “Carmichael has the requisite insurances in place for operations and as a low-cost producer of high-quality coal, the mine will remain part of the sustainable energy mix alongside Adani’s significant renewables generation for decades to come as energy needs grow as populations in Asia and south-east Asia grow.”

Pablo Brait from Market Forces mentioned: “Adani’s plans to expand [Carmichael] into Australia’s biggest coal mine are completely out of line with efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.”
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Canada's crumbling roads are getting worse in climate change — but Alberta oil may be the answer

Bright future could see an oil industry that hasn’t been left for dead by electrification, but pivoted to a new calling: building roads

Author of the article: Joe O'Connor
Publishing date: Sep 12, 2022 • 

A road in need of repair in Timmins, Ont. 

PHOTO BY BENJAMIN AUBÉ/THE TIMMINS DAILY PRESS/QMI AGENCY FILES

There is a certain predictability to springtime in Timmins, a northern Ontario mining town surrounded by lakes, the great boreal forest and the gold deposits that led to its founding more than a century ago and continue to define it today.

It is a town full of stories, although the one Ken Krcel tells, on a late August afternoon, is not about the latest lucky strike, but about a local road maintenance man’s never-ending fight against a much less heralded but no less prominent town feature: potholes.

Big potholes. Small potholes. Potholes that lead to road closures. Potholes that keep Krcel on high alert, particularly in the spring and even more so now amid climate change, because the deep freeze that used to take hold of the north in November and not release its grip until April is now often marked by mid-winter warm spells that heap more pothole-generating stress upon an already aging road network.

“We’ve got more potholes than we can deal with,” the town’s director of public works said. “I don’t drive in the curb lane in the spring. I drive in the fast lane to get away from the potholes.”

At least Krcel knows the town’s cracking, potholed thoroughfares and increasingly unpredictable weather are not outliers. They are just one example of a pan-Canadian crisis gripping municipalities, big and small, that are beset with roads needing repair, and budgets that can’t keep up with the increasing costs. But the solution to this pricey conundrum could come from an unlikely saviour in this dawning age of climate awareness: Alberta crude. That’s not a typo.

The holey road journey from here to the oilsands begins with the drive to get to net-zero emissions by 2050 and wean people off combustion-engine vehicles.

Going electric won’t be the end of roads. 

PHOTO BY MARK BLINCH/REUTERS FILES

Going electric won’t be the end of roads. Canadians are still going to need to get around, and companies are still going to need to haul goods around, but almost 40 per cent of the roads they are currently driving on rate as being in “fair or worse” condition, according to a 2019 Canadian Infrastructure Report Card. About 50 per cent of municipal roads and 30 per cent of highways were built prior to 1970, which means they need replacing.

Spotting the problem is as easy for Joe Canuck as walking out the front door and surveying the scarred, pitted and patchworked asphalt streets beyond. Fixing them will require some creative thinking.

“We need to look at the roads to last, because there is no magic pot of money that is going to give us hundreds of millions of dollars for road rehabilitation,” said Steve Goodman, an Ottawa-based pavement expert with Gemtec Consulting Engineers and Scientists Ltd. “The funding deficit is not a couple million dollars — or even a couple hundred million dollars — it is in the billions.”

Goodman has a doctorate in civil engineering, and a Twitter handle — @PavementDude — that speaks to a consuming passion for assessing road surfaces good and bad. It is a habit without an off-switch, one he carries with him wherever he goes, including the finest cities of Europe, where he will find himself staring at the asphalt instead of some architectural wonder nearby.

The funding deficit is not a couple million dollars — or even a couple hundred million dollars — it is in the billions

STEVE GOODMAN

“It never stops,” he said.

Goodman studied under “pavement god” Ralph Haas, now deceased, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Haas wrote the so-called book on modern pavement management before there was a book on modern pavement management. It was published in 1994. In the decades since, the challenge of managing the country’s aging infrastructure has grown more complex in the face of a changing climate.

Road designers, engineers and builders rely upon historical weather data to set the optimal performance temperature range for a project’s asphalt pavement, which needs to be able to contract without cracking apart in extreme cold temperatures, and to expand without excessively softening in blistering heat.

Failure at the high end can cause the asphalt binder — the crude-oil-derived glue that holds the road together — to liquefy, causing a gooey, nasty mess that costs money to fix. Melting roads were the hot topic around the United Kingdom in July. Stories of “binder bleed” and buckling roads briefly dominated the international news cycle during a once-in-a-lifetime heatwave that, nowadays, seems to be happening once every few years.

In Ottawa, the asphalt pavement is currently graded to withstand a road surface

 temperature of 58 C at the upper end, and minus 34 C at the lower. 

PHOTO BY JEAN LEVAC/POSTMEDIA FILES

In Ottawa, the asphalt pavement is currently graded to withstand a road surface temperature of 58 C at the upper end, and minus 34 C at the lower. Goodman anticipates the upper number is going to be increased to 64 C in short order.

More problematic is the increasing frequency of the dreaded freeze-thaw cycle. Goodman moved to Ottawa 24 years ago, when winters were as predictable as springtime potholes in Timmins.

“It would get cold here in November and warm up in April,” he said. “Now you can get 15 degrees in January, the snow melts, filters into the pavement, refreezes overnight and then the water expands and it literally blows up the pavement.”

The country’s shoddy roads cost Canadian drivers $3 billion annually, according to a 2021 study by the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA). Getting mechanics to fix a tire rod that falls victim to a nasty pothole doesn’t earn you any discounts, just another headache. And highways that are seemingly under perpetual repair prevent freight trucks from getting where they need to be on time, further sapping productivity.

The CAA study suggests that spending a dollar today on road preservation could eliminate or delay “spending $6-$10 on costly repairs later on.”

The country’s shoddy roads cost Canadian drivers $3 billion annually, study says. 

PHOTO BY BRUNO SCHLUMBERGER/THE OTTAWA CITIZEN FILES

But spending money up front, with taxpayers ultimately footing the bill, isn’t necessarily possible, and not simply because road repair isn’t a hot button political issue such as, say, affordable housing, but because a lot of municipalities don’t have the money to do anything more than fill potholes.

“I don’t know if the weather itself is causing us as much grief as the way the North works,” Krcel said. “We just don’t have the population growth here, and so now we are caught with very old infrastructure without the tax base to rebuild it as quickly as it needs to be.”

The gold mines in Timmins are still producing, so heavy ore trucks still rumble through town. But much like other industries, mining requires less people now to do the work. Timmins’ population has been stuck around 40,000 for 40 years.

The site of Porcupine Gold Mines in Timmins, Ont.

 PHOTO BY TYLER ANDERSON/NATIONAL POST FILES

Over roughly the same span, York Region, which encompasses the collection of municipalities bordering Toronto’s northern edge, and where Krcel got his start working on roads right out of college, has grown from a few hundred thousand people to almost 1.2 million.

“Without growth, we can’t rebuild our roads at the same pace,” Krcel said.

As a result, there is a pressing need for civil engineers, city engineers, road design nerds and extremely smart university professors to apply some creative, cost-conscious thinking to the country’s road headaches.

Simon Hesp has some ideas. He is an asphalt-pavement focused chemical engineering professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and he said the answer to our infrastructure crisis is found in Alberta. Specifically, in the oilsands.

An oil and gas pump jack in Alberta. 

PHOTO BY TODD KOROL/REUTERS FILES

Hesp’s research has shown that Alberta crude produces asphalt binder — that black sticky stuff that holds asphalt together — of virtually unparalleled quality.

“Russian crude? No comparison,” he said. “Crude from the Middle East? No comparison. Crude from China, India? No comparison. Alberta and Venezuelan crude perform better than anything else in the world.”

Asphalt has a limited life cycle. In Ontario, it ranges between 15 and 25 years. Hesp, in collaboration with some municipalities, including Timmins, has test sections of road made with straight Alberta binder that are showing a predicted life cycle of 40 years.

“If we do it smarter, I am sure we can make it 60 years,” he said.

Research shows that Alberta crude produces asphalt binder of virtually unparalleled quality. 

PHOTO BY KIRSTEN GORUK/DAILY HERALD-TRIBUNE/QMI AGENCY AGENCY FILES

The professor sketches a bright, future-facing picture, full of electric vehicles rolling over freshly paved, built-to-last roads held together with Alberta bitumen, and an oil industry that hasn’t been left for dead by electrification, but pivoted to a new calling: building roads.

“Alberta has enough reserves underground to pave every road on Earth for the next 100 to 200 years,” Hesp said.

But even good ideas have entrenched interests to navigate. As it stands, the asphalt-binder wholesale industry is somewhat of a hodgepodge: quality control can often be hit and miss, and the gooey stuff from oil refineries, even if it’s of the good variety, can be cut with additives, including recycled motor oil and shingles, that don’t fare well when cars are travelling over them.

Alberta has enough reserves underground to pave every road on Earth for the next 100 to 200 years

SIMON HESP

Then there’s politics. A 2016 Ontario Auditor General’s report revealed that the province’s Ministry of Transportation (MTO) identified issues of premature pavement cracking as early as 2000, but had done next to nothing to address it. Worse, any policy changes enacted were driven by private contractors for their benefit “over the taxpayers’ best interests,” the report said.

The MTO has since strengthened its pavement-testing protocols and tightened its standards around the use of motor oil additives and such, but the road work that was done all those years when nothing was being done at the political level continues to fall apart prematurely.

Back in Timmins, Ken Krcel was getting ready to head out to the cottage for the Labour Day long weekend. The town has embraced Hesp’s enthusiasm for Alberta binder and is seeing the results. Roads that were repaired, pre-Hesp experimentation, are full of cracks; roads that have been fixed with the Alberta goo aren’t showing any wear six years after being laid.

By the road man’s best count, his pothole repair crews have filled about 15,000 potholes since the spring melt. Now, fall is in the air, and the cycle is set to begin anew.

“Someday, we will get caught up on the work,” Krcel said.

Someday.

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites

Canada needs to consider air conditioning a human right: Climate Proof

High water levels are washing out Highway 307, this campground at Otter Falls and leading to several hundred residents being evacuated from the area just north east of Winnipeg, Tuesday, May 24, 2022. A coalition on climate adaptation and disaster resilience says air conditioning should become a human right on par with winter heating as climate change brings more risks of extreme heat waves across Canada. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

Coalition on climate adaptation says Canada needs hard targets on disaster resilience

THE CANADIAN PRESS
Sep. 12, 2022

A coalition on climate adaptation and disaster resilience says air conditioning should become a human right on par with winter heating because climate change is increasing the risks of extreme heat waves across Canada.

The recommendation is among a list of hard targets and goals Climate Proof says the federal government needs to include this fall in its national adaptation strategy.

The group of insurance companies, disaster experts, Indigenous groups and municipalities wants that strategy to set specific goals — and not just vague ambitions — for making the country more resilient to extreme weather.

Canada has hard targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to prevent climate change from getting worse, but Climate Proof says the country needs to better adapt to the changes that are already happening.

Climate Proof is calling for a 2028 target to flood proof at least 300,000 of the most flood-prone homes, either with water diversions and protections or relocations.

It is also calling for better education about fire risk, assessing those at most risk from extreme heat and ensuring a heat alert response system is in place in every province and territory.

—Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press

Coalition on climate adaptation says Canada needs hard targets on disaster resilience

A red sky sunrise is seen between power lines in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. 

(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Mia Rabson
The Canadian Press
Published Sept. 12, 2022

OTTAWA -

A broad coalition on climate adaptation and disaster resilience says air conditioning should become a human right on par with winter heating -- one of a series of hard targets it says Canada needs to meet in the next few years as climate change impacts increase.

"We're focusing on the immediate term," said Blair Feltmate, head of the University of Waterloo's Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.

"What is still missing with the federal government is a lack of a sense of the need to act with urgency."

Feltmate's institute is a member of Climate Proof Canada, a coalition whose members include the Insurance Bureau of Canada, Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Canadian Red Cross, Metis National Council, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Forest Products Association of Canada and an array of research organizations and environmental groups.

As the federal government prepares its national adaptation strategy for later this fall, the coalition released Monday a statement on what it should contain -- mostly, hard, short-term targets.

It says Canada should protect at least 35 per cent of the 840,000 homes at high risk of flooding by 2028. Those measures could run from changing how lots are graded to building berms, holding ponds and diversion channels or other natural infrastructure.

By 2028, the coalition says 15 per cent of communities at risk should have wildfire protection plans in place, 15 per cent of those homes should have protective retrofits and all new builds should be wildfire resilient.

Extreme heat has caused hundreds of deaths in recent years -- 619 in British Columbia this summer alone, according to the provincial coroner. The coalition says Ottawa should commit to reducing such deaths by 70 per cent and related hospitalizations by 50 per cent over the next five years.

That may require measures such as requiring all buildings to have air conditioning, Feltmate said.

"We consider it a human right that people have warmth in the winter," he said.

"That's a safety and security issue. It's the same thing now for extreme heat in the summer."

Feltmate said the recommendations are achievable and affordable.

"These are all actionable and doable things."

Air conditioning, he said, could be provided to those who need it for as little as $5 a month. Experience with programs such as Fire Smart, which educates homeowners on how to protect their homes against wildfires, shows that almost three-quarters of those who used the program incorporated at least two of its recommendations.

Feltmate said the federal government's approach to climate adaptation has so far been too vague and too long-term. Most of its climate goals don't have targets until 2030 or 2050, and that's not fast enough, he said.

Federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault said his government is increasingly aware of the need to move quickly. But he said adaptation requires co-operation with provinces, municipalities, First Nations and other players, and is in many ways more complex than emissions reduction.

"We can't just come up with a federal plan," he said. "There's a lot of people we need to engage with."

Ottawa, for example, has little say in urban planning, which regulates how and where people build in places including floodplains.

But Guilbeault said hard federal targets, such as the ones the coalition proposes, are possible.

"We could do that," he said. "That's what we're working towards."

By 2050, most Canadian cities are forecast to see their maximum summer daily temperatures increase by up to five degrees Celsius. The number of days over 30 C will have doubled or even tripled and the length and frequency of heat waves will also increase.

"We know it's coming," Guilbeault said. "We're not ready."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2022.

--

With files from Bob Weber in Edmonton