1 Week, 7 Stories #72
A new colour, new signs of water on Mars, and a better cup o' coffee.
Every edition features 7 stories from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.
I am lousy at identifying colours. I’m not colour blind. I just can’t seem to differentiate between shades of any given colour. And it is about to get more complicated and that’s where we will start this week’s newsletter.
Scientist from University of California, Berkeley have discovered a new colour. ‘Olo’ is an “intense blue-green” according to a paper published in AAAS Science Advances. You are not going to see it in your next box of Crayola crayons or featured on a designer t-shirt because it lies outside the usual range of our lowly human eyes. A story in EuroNews said it is artificially created using laser pulses fired into the eyes of the five people involved in the study. (Three of the participants were co-authors of the research paper.)
That begs the question of whether it is a true colour.
A BBC article said some experts have said it is “open to argument” because the laser pulses are selectively stimulating the light perception cone cells in the retina. Without that direct stimulation, the colour does not exist independently. While the participants also described the colour as an “off-the-charts saturated’ greenish hue” we know that colour perception has a subjective component meaning my red, may not be your red.
Even the critics seem to agree however that it is a technological breakthrough. Scientific American quoted one expert who said that it could be used to stimulate different photoreceptors on human subjects to discover “really what a dog would see, what a mouse would see, what a goldfish would see…“Now this would be interesting”.
Last week if you wanted to catch the season opener of the Halifax Wanderers soccer club of the Canadian Premier League you could swap your blood for a free ticket. It was part of a joint effort between the team and Canadian Blood Services to get new blood donors and maybe new fans.
As of this week, Canadian Blood Services says they have a 23-day supply of AB+ and only a 4-day supply of O- to meet normal demand. Those numbers are not bad compared to some countries but overall, our global blood supply is facing some difficult times, in part because of climate change. A story from EuroNews says that natural disasters affect both the supply and demand for blood. In Europe, 25 million blood units are used every year. One unit of whole blood is approximately 450 mL (a little less than a pint) and can be used for whole blood transfusion or broken down into components such as platelets and plasma for specific needs. An article in The Lancet, Planetary Health points out that climate change emergencies can vastly increase demand for blood while limiting supply, challenge transportation, and disrupt distribution of new supplies and that we are not prepared for these changes. Bloomberg News pointed out for instance, that during Tropical Cyclone Alfred in Australia more than 3,500 blood donation appointments were cancelled.
One way to deal with threats to global blood supply is artificial blood. We have been searching for an artificial replacement for donated blood since the mid 1800s but have still not perfected an “artificial oxygen carrier” that can be used when donated blood is not available – especially in trauma-related emergencies. Often considered the “Holy Grail” of trauma medicine, artificial blood could held deal with the roughly 2 million global deaths every year attributed to the shock of blood loss. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. invested $46 M in a blood substitute research last year but imitating the function of human blood remains elusive and there are no approved products available.
It's easy to donate blood in Canada so give it try.
I try to buy eco-friendly products and like many Canadians right now I am trying to buy Canadian-made products, but it isn’t easy being green. Even planet friendly products often come in packaging which can only be disposed of in the garbage, and take-out food packaging can be especially challenging.
Enter a Canadian company featured on the Globe & Mail’s Decibel podcast this week, that is doing its part to produce greener packaging and that may turn out to be a company positioned to thrive during the trade war.
Founded in 2004, Eco Guardian produces packaging for the food service sector that is compostable. Much of it is made from re-purposed sugar cane and bamboo waste from other manufactured products. The company was importing many of its products, but the challenge of tariffs has been the impetus it to start up Canadian production lines for its products.
My biggest pet peeve and one that doesn’t seem to have an alternative at Eco Guardian or elsewhere is cellophane. I have abandoned Starbucks for a variety of reasons, but the sheer waste that comes out of a typical location is one of the main factors. Ordering a croissant for instance means getting a product that is made elsewhere in the city and delivered in bulk packaging that is mostly non-recyclable. Inside that bulk box are individual cellophane wrapped croissants. When I order one, the staff very carefully take it out of the cellophane package, throw that in the garbage, and put the croissant into a small paper bag. They then print out the little label with my name on it, stick it on the paper bag and hand it to me. Cellophane is not compostable in municipal composting programs or even biodegradable. Even though it is made from cellulose, it is coated after production and like other so-called bioplastics still contains petroleum-based ingredients. The Sierra Club says that studies have shown that bioplastics contain thousands of “chemical features”.
There are a few cellophane alternatives for home use, but from what I have been able to find, nothing to replace consumer packaging products.
Time for a food packaging re-think around the world. This BBC podcast looks at some possible solutions, but ultimately it is up to you and me as consumers to push for change.
While I’m in the subject of getting rid of waste, here is a new alternative to dispose of organic waste – the larvae of the black soldier fly. These tiny bugs can eat four times their weight and send it out the other end as a sustainable fertilizer. They larvae will mature in a couple of weeks and become a high-protein source of food for fish and livestock.
They are so good at their job that more than 200 billion are farmed around the world and in Canada the market could be worth $62.93 million by the end of the decade. What make this particular bug so attractive for commercial use is that it is native to North America and does not bite or sting.
Oberland Agriscience is a major producer of black soldier fly larvae and its byproducts in Canada. The company says the larvae are high in calcium and a good source of protein so can be used as a quality food supplement for “backyard, broiler, and egg-laying hens”. It also produces dehydrated larvae that are incorporated into pet foods. The poo that the larvae produces is called frass, and can be used as a soil amendment or fertilizer. According to the company’s website the frass has been successful in fertilizer trials with strawberry plants, bean plants, and vines for wine production.
The soldier fly may be the latest poster bug for breaking down organic waste but it certainly isn’t the only bug being put to use. A 2024 paper in ScienceDirect said that crickets, yellow mealworms, superworms, house flies, the flesh fly and blow flies were already in common use around the world.
The paper did note however that social acceptance of bugs as bio-converter is still an issue. Let’s face it, if you saw ‘black soldier fly larvae’ on the list of ingredients for your pet’s kibble, you just might but the bag down and move on.
Globally, the cost of solid waste management is about 375 billion dollars and if we can put bugs to work to reduce the cost and produce beneficial by-products, we are doing the planet a favour.
It took a large team of scientists and more than 30 authors for the resulting paper, along with a major contribution from the Mars Curiosity rover, to discover iron carbonate on the Red Planet and proof of an ancient carbon cycle. The SUV sized rover has an onboard drill that can drill down 3 or 4 centimetres (1 to 1 ½ inches) and analyze the chemical and mineral composition of the samples. The iron carbonate was in the form of siderite, a brown, yellow or gray mineral made mostly of iron and carbon. On Earth, siderite can be found in places where hot water moved through rocks a long time ago, leaving behind minerals as it cooled.
The discovery suggests that the Martian atmosphere contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water on the surface at one time. Ben Tutolo is an associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary. He was the lead author of the paper and is part NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover team. In a media release from the U of C he said the results show that the planet was habitable at some point. Exactly when and why that changed requires more research.
The Curiosity Rover is climbing a mountain inside the Gale Crater on Mars, about 34 km (21 mi) from where it landed in August of 2012. It has collected 42 rock samples with the drill on the end of its robotic arm. The original life expectancy of the rover was 2 years and it is now expected to last into 2026.
As the U.S. – Canada trade war continues, ‘Buy Canadian’ is becoming a force to combat tariffs. Sometimes however, buying Canadian is a challenge, especially in your weekly trip to the grocery store. You’re never going to find a grown in Canada banana and some produce like strawberries are seasonal fare in Canadian fields.
Modern technology and the buy Canadian spirit is starting to change that.
A story in the Globe & Mail this week looks at one company trying to change how the humble strawberry is grown by harnessing AI. Plant genetics are complex to and it is no small task to identify the molecular markers needed to grow a strawberry under greenhouse condition that can produce quality fruit all year round. Traditional breeding techniques can take years to sift through all the traits and select for generation after generation of plants. Artificial intelligence can parse the data and predict what plants or seeds meet a grower’s requirements in a short period of time.
Like strawberries, lettuce grown in farm fields is seasonal and subject to the whims of weather. According to a Maclean’s story 90% of our salad greens are imported. The story goes on to point to a new, fully automated greenhouse facility north of Toronto which could produce 4,500 kgs (10,000 lbs) of lettuce per day. The lettuce does not see a human hand from seeding to harvest with irrigation, climate control, and lighting handled by a central computer system.
Meanwhile out in the traditional fields of soil, sun, and weather, automation and AI are having a similar impact. AI is working to improve plant genetics and automation handles irrigation, seeding, and fertilizing.
According to a CBC story, Canada did a better job of producing its own fruit and vegetables before the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement. Since then, it has been not only easier to import from the U.S., but many growers in Canada simply moved south where it year-round production was possible.
Might be time to re-think those decisions.
Ready for coffee and cake?
We’ll start with coffee and how physicists have found a way to make your morning Java Jive better and cheaper. With the price of coffee beans going up, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania embarked on a project to make good coffee with fewer beans (I’m also guessing they wanted to improve the quality of the coffee they drank in their lab!). The results of the team’s work were published this month in the journal, Physics of Fluids. They experimented with the pour-over filter coffee method which is probably the easiest way to make coffee. It simply means the water is poured directly over the ground coffee and filters through to your cup. According to a UPenn press release they started with silica gel particles and a glass cone and using a laser and a
\high speed camera were able to observe how the water flowed over the particles. After studying the fluid mechanics of the process, they moved on to using real coffee.
They concluded that the most efficient and best tasting results came from using a gooseneck kettle and pouring the water from a height that creates the strongest mixing effect. Pouring from too high breaks the water stream apart and pouring from too low reduces the ‘avalanche’ effect which is key to stirring the coffee particles and water together to extract the flavour. The gooseneck kettle ensures more control over the flow of the water, so you do not pour too quickly. The overall goal is to increase the contact between the water and the coffee grounds, so you’ll need to experiment a bit to perfect your own technique.
As for the cake?
French pastry chefs used 4,000 eggs, 150kg (330lbs) of sugar, 415kg (914 lbs) of cream and 350kg (771 lbs) of strawberries to make the world’s longest strawberry cake. It was 121.8 metres (399 feet) long and weighed 1.2 tonnes.
Should pair well with your coffee.
I especially liked discussion about soldier flies!