1 Week, 7 Stories #74
Polluting our planet and space itself. We seem to be slow learners.
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.
That giant fiery orb we see every day is having a stormy week of sorts and that’s how we’ll kick off this week’s edition.
While we tend to think of the sun as being tremendously hot everywhere and all the time, it does have some cooler spots. Not cool, as in the ideal place for a vacation, but about 3,300C (6,000F) compared to the 5,530C (10,000F) elsewhere. These sunspots are caused by variations in the sun’s magnetic field.
Solar Active Region 4079 started to become active in April and is now 140,000km (87,000m) across which makes it is bigger in diameter than the Earth. It will be in a position this week where it will be directly facing us. If it erupts into a solar flare, we will take a “direct hit of solar energy and solar particles”. Never fear, this doesn’t mean we are going to be vapourized, as these geomagnetic storms are fairly common and are even part of the Space Weather report. It does mean however we may see some increased Northern Lights activity and if powerful enough, may disrupt your GPS signal and can even cause power grid problems.
Beyond the Northern Lights that it may produce, this sunspot is big enough that with the right equipment you might be able to see it.
I’ll include this caveat from Forbes magazine:
“Note: it is dangerous to look at the sun through anything other than a pair of certified safe solar filters (solar eclipse glasses) bearing the ISO 12312-2 international safety standard. Don’t make your own, don’t use sunglasses and don’t use welder’s glass.”
Forbes goes on however to give you some tips on how to safely observe the phenomenon.
If you have any doubts about it however, The Sky Live site has some good pictures of what 4079 looks like.
Staying up in space for one more story, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are set to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink service. I have written before about Starlink and its 7,100 (and counting) satellites circling the planet to provide Internet service. Starlink has a significant head start on the competition from home and abroad, but Amazon has deep pockets and hopes to make a dent in Starlink’s hold on satellite Internet delivery.
Amazon’s near Earth orbit Project Kuiper (named after the Kuiper Belt which by definition has nothing at all to do with near Earth orbits) launched its first satellites in late April with the eventual goal of 3,200 satellites providing broadband service around the world.
Also circling us in Low Earth Orbit are 600 satellites belonging to OneWeb, which is part of the Eutelsat Group, but it is facing some financial challenges and this week appointed a new CEO.
Internet satellites are an important part of bridging the digital divide facing people in rural, remote, and underserved parts of the world. They provide low latency service which simply means there is no significant delay between sending and receiving data. Without reliable high speed satellite services, video conferencing is nearly impossible. While streaming audio and video may not seem crucial, without a reliable and fast internet connection filing your taxes or applying for a passport online are important and many rural communities live in a digital canyon.
But our reliance on Internet services comes at a price. Scientific American points out that Project Kuiper and Starlink will fundamentally alter the “appearance, and usability, of the night sky—and we still don’t have solutions”. We will be in uncharted territory if Starlink ever reaches its goal of 30,000 satellites, which already need to perform 50,000 maneuvers every six months to avoid collisions with other objects (including its own satellites) every six months.
In 2009, a U.S. commercial Iridium satellite collided with an inactive Russian satellite resulting in thousands of pieces of debris which will remain in orbit for decades. As if we don’t have a big enough problem here on Earth, this fact sheet from the Secure World Foundation gives us a glimpse into how we are polluting the vastness of space.
Seems we have not learned our lesson yet.
Robotaxis are becoming more common in many parts of the U.S. and China, but look out, here come the robo-trucks.
According to TechCrunch, Aurora Innovation has a fleet of driverless trucks on the road in Texas. In a media release, the company says it is operating regular routes between Dallas and Houston with driverless trucks and will expand the service to El Paso, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona by the end of this year. The system that drives the trucks is called ‘Aurora Driver’, and the media release says, “In over four years of supervised pilot hauls, the Aurora Driver has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across three million autonomous miles”.
Aurora is not alone in the driverless truck business. Kodiak Robotics was founded in 2018 and made its first autonomous commercial delivery the following year. It has been making steady progress in its ‘Kodiak Driver’ system. In 2022 it started a pilot project to operate autonomous freight deliveries for Ikea and has a contract with the U.S. government to develop a Robotic Combat Vehicle. Being able to operate off main highways is a special challenge for autonomous vehicles because Google maps does not lend itself well to off-road terrain and the landscape is not clearly marked as it is in cities and highway.
In Canada we have a few projects underway. Loblaws has a daily 25km run underway in Etobicoke and Canadian company, NuPort Robotics has a pilot project to move goods for Canadian Tire in Toronto.
A Bloomberg News story says these latest developments signal that “autonomous trucking may have arrived”. It goes on to point out that driverless trucks do not have to worry about driver fatigue, can operate without rest breaks which means better range and delivery times, and are more fuel efficient.
What does this mean for truck drivers? For the moment at least, the American Trucking Association says jobs are safe and the Truck Driver Institute sees a hybrid future for the industry. In the U.S. there is also a shortage of truck drivers and driverless vehicles may only fill the gap over the short term. Canada is also facing a shortage of nearly 40,000 drivers by 2030, and the driverless truck fleet is a long way from making up the shortfall.
The robots are also coming to your surgery – and they are SuPER.
Specifically, to help with surgery at the Surgical Performance Enhancement and Robotics Centre at McGill University. A media release from the University Health Centre last week says it is Canada’s first robotics and artificial intelligence centre that can take basic research and move it into the clinic to improve our health and well-being.
A journalist from the Montreal Gazette was at the inauguration of SuPER and reported that it was a glimpse into the future of surgery “that, in some cases, is nearly here”. Robotic surgery can cover a range of uses such as realigning broken bones with better speed and accuracy than human surgeons to simpler but important tasks such as high-definition cameras to give the surgeon an enhanced, 3D view of the area being worked on during an operation. From a patient’s perspective robotic surgery can get the job done with smaller incisions, less pain, and a faster recovery. As you’ll read in this story from Global News , a robotic surgery has the surgeon sitting at a console while a team are at the patient’s side looking after anesthesia and ready to intervene if needed. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Thoracic Disease found that patients who had cardiac surgery using the system mentioned in the Global story shortened the ICU time and hospital stay, and improved patient satisfaction and their quality of life after the surgery. In a CTV story from last week, a surgeon says that using a robotic system has enabled her to perform surgery they simply could not have performed before.
The SuPER Centre at McGill brings together clinicians, engineers, researchers, students and trainees to collaborate on the design, development, testing and refinement of robotic surgery and is changing how surgery and arguably medicine itself, is carried out.
McGill is also home to an online hub for researchers, students, and professionals to connect with each other and share resources and research on climate change and sustainable development. The Sustainability Academic Network (SUSAN) was created six months ago and recently added a new objective to the volunteer run platform according to a story in the Montreal Gazette this week. It is now part of the effort to save important climate information and research from being lost because of new policies and orders coming from the White House. For instance, https://climate.nasa.gov/ is now https://science.nasa.gov/ , the USDA has removed website sections referring to the climate crisis, and portions of the United States Forest Service referring to climate change and the climate crisis are gone. A Guardian story says scientist are bracing “for the worst” as research data, studies, and papers are taken down to echo the Newspeak expert Syme in the novel, 1984.
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,"
That’s where sites like McGill’s SUSAN come in to try and save the destruction of words about climate change.
A BBC story describes the rush to save information as a global effort ranging from rescuing data, to replicating entire websites covering science information related to climate, environment, pollution, energy, greenhouse gases, weather records, ocean monitoring, and carbon dioxide monitoring.
By some measures the U.S. was already starting to fall behind some countries and the latest science purge will only make the situation worse. The cuts and changes to science funding will also trickle down to Canadian research according to Evidence for Democracy. Canada is involved in many collaborations with U.S. funded research agencies and institutions and often rely on access to U.S. data. We also benefit from jointly funded research projects and if one half of that funding disappears or is significantly stifled by ideological driven decisions both side of the border will feel the impact.
There is a danger that the “destruction of words” is only the beginning.
If you have a cup of coffee in hand while you read this, you are holding a pretty volatile product. It is subject to weather and climate change, the taste of the day with consumers, and now the whims of the 47th president of the United States.
And of course, where you live. Already the line up for a latte in the U.S. is getting shorter according to a BBC story. The reason for the current jump in prices down south is largely due to the tariffs imposed by the current administration. Independent coffee shops are less able to absorb those tariff costs and consumers are reacting accordingly. The story says that coffee drinkers are buying smaller drinks, choosing a less expensive plain coffee instead of a specialty drink, or simply brewing more coffee at home. If you live at the edges of the supply chain such as in Yellowknife, your costs go up even more.
In Canada price increases are less affected by tariffs because we buy from countries that are not entangled in a trade dispute. That doesn’t mean we are off the hook. General inflation increases, minimum wage increases in some provinces, and in some cases sales volumes which never came back to pre-COVID levels, says Toronto Now. Tariffs become a factor when coffee shops or roasters buy their coffee through a U.S. based importer so we are facing a new look to the North American coffee trade according to The Perfect Daily Grind.
Apart from tariffs, inflation, and demand, weather is a major factor in the price of your daily caffeine fix. The July price for arabica and robusta coffee is up this week because of “lackluster rainfall in Brazil” and a drop in production from Vietnam because of drought. Brazil is turning to irrigation to keep up production levels, but that adds to the overall cost of doing business.
In Canada, 74% of us knock back at least one cup of coffee every day so drink up because by June or July, you may be drinking less.
On May 7th, 1953, Hooker Chemicals sold a piece of land that had been originally envisioned as a canal by William T. Love, for water and hydroelectric power to the City of Niagara Falls, New York for $1.00. It turned out to be the worst environmental disaster anyone could imagine.
Work started on digging the canal in 1890 to link Lake Erie and Lake Ontario but never became more than a ditch and was described by at least one case study as a “useless hold in the ground”. For a while the locals used it as a swimming hole in summer and an ice rink in winter. A hole in the ground however is good for something after all – it is a good place to dump all manner of municipal and industrial waste. In the case of Mr. Love’s ill-fated canal, ideal for chemical waste, and in 1942 Hooker Electrochemical Corporation took over the site and started to fill that big hole in the ground with toxic waste from its manufacturing activities. By the time the company sold the land the hole was filled up with an estimated 21,000 tons of chemicals.
In 1953 the Niagara Falls School Board bought the land for one dollar. Hooker Chemical told the school board what was underneath, and that one-dollar bill protected the company from future liabilities.
By the late 1950s there were about 100 houses on the site and of course the school that had been the reason for the land purchase. All the construction activities however breached the containment measures and chemical leached into the ground. Rain helped the chemicals spread. By 1978 the problem had become an environmental disaster with “abnormally large cases of birth defects, miscarriages, chromosome damage, and cancer” and 800 families were evacuated from the area. In 1979 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history”. In May of 1980 President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a national emergency.
Environmental regulations that could have prevented the tragedy of Love Canal were non-existent before the full extent of the problem was understood.
There was little in federal or state legislation to hold polluters financially responsible for cleaning up toxic waste, and the site met Environmental Protection Agency standards at the time.
That started to change with the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (informally referred to as Superfund). The disaster was a major factor in the rise of environmental activism beginning in the seventies.
The National Environmental Policy Act in the U.S. was adopted in 1978 in part as a response to Love Canal and other similar sites. In February, the current administration published an interim final rule repealing all of the implementing regulations for the Act.
Today, Love Canal has been classified as a safe place to live, though not everyone agrees. Either way it is worth remembering what happened and why we need to take care of the environment around us.