Category Archives: Web Article Review

nitrogen fixing bacteria as an alternative to fertilizer

The invention of nitrogen fertilizer is a key reason the Earth is able to support so many humans, but it has also taken a huge toll on our natural water bodies and climate. Grist has an interesting article on the possibility of using nitrogen-fixing bacteria, either naturally occurring or genetically engineered, on a much wider range of crops and on a much larger scale to help solve this problem.

A pack of startups is racing to market with a means of fixing nitrogen without polluting the Earth. One of them, Pivot Bio, just garnered a $70 million vote of confidence in a funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the coalition of big-name billionaires — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson — hoping to power climate change-beating innovation…

Next year, Pivot plans to start getting farmers nitrogen-fixing bacteria — which efficiently delivers fertilizer to crops, no fossil fuels required. Farmers will spritz seeds with a liquid probiotic as they bury them in the ground. Another startup, Azotic Technologies based in England, is racing to bring a different bacterium to market around the same time. Intrinsyx Bio — a spin-off from a company that supplies NASA with bacteria and other critters for experiments — plans to put yet another bacterium on the market in 2020. And at least one other, the Bayer-backed Joyn Bio, is just ramping up. If any of them is able to provide a viable alternative to the international fertilizer industry, it could be the most significant environmental breakthrough since Haber figured out a way to synthetically release nitrogen from its natural bonds.

So this could be a big deal. Of course, I can’t help thinking of Donella Meadows talking about “layers of limits”. Remove one layer and continue to grow and expand, and you will eventually bump up against the next one.

 

fair vs. unfair inequality

This interesting article in Vox talks about academic ideas on how to distinguish and measure a difference between fair and unfair inequality. The premise is that there is no moral justification for leaving anyone below the poverty line, even if they are there due to bad choices of their own making. But once out of poverty, there is a need for incentives for people to make effort, make good choices and take the kind of good risks that sometimes pay off for society. There is also a difference between people who are less well off because of bad luck (often the luck of who their parents are) and people who are less well off because they have made less effort or bad choices. Of course, people who are better off because of luck or breeding will tend to rationalize their success relative to others as being due to superior effort and good choices, when in fact they may not be the case. So having an objective way to measure this is an interesting idea. It suggests you could have policies that kick in automatically when some measure of “unfair inequality” gets to a certain level. I don’t quite understand the measure itself, but this is a blog post referring to an academic paper, and I didn’t dig into the academic paper itself.

Modern Monetary Theory

The Intercept has a long article on Modern Monetary Theory.

In a nutshell: MMT proponents believe that the government can safely spend far more money than it currently does, and increasing the federal deficit is not a bad thing in and of itself — a public deficit is also a private-sector surplus, after all.

While typically we hear rhetoric that our political leaders must first “find” money through new taxes or budget cuts in order to pay for new programs, MMT proponents say that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works. In so-called fiat currency systems (meaning societies in which money isn’t backed by physically valuable commodities like gold or silver) governments literally create the money and tax it later to control for inflation and keep it in demand.

Inflation is still a risk, MMT advocates say, but it’s a much more remote risk than mainstream economists let on, and it’s one that can be addressed down the line if it arises, without so much pre-emptive austerity.

They also talk about the idea of a federal jobs guarantee.

I just had a few college economics courses, but the idea seems risky. By expanding the money supply so drastically, I thought you risked hyper-inflation and a devaluing of your currency relative to others. Of course the U.S. can push it further than other countries, but there still must be a breaking point. But the idea of some kind of counter-cyclical automatic investment in infrastructure, education, training, and research is appealing to me. This could kick in if unemployment hits a certain level, growth falls below a certain level, or some combination of the two. Then during stronger economic times, the government steps back and lets the private sector take the lead. I think it would have to be some kind of formula or else the politicians will ruin it.

Project Censored’s Top 25

Project Censored has released its top 25 censored stories for 2017-2018 (2019 is available for sale as a book). Among the interesting ones:

The Florida Parkland High School shooter was a member of the school’s Junior Reserve Office Training Corps and was taught to shoot surplus military weapons by something called the Junior Marksmanship Program.

“Solutions journalism” is a relatively simple idea to offer solutions along with coverage of problems to avoid “negative news overload”.

Natural systems such as rivers are being given legal rights and even personhood in some places.

Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and vegetation on a large scale.

Cell phones might be causing miscarriages.

Also, Russia may be up to no good but at the same time the exhaustive coverage of it may be distracting us from other important issues. Opioid drugs continue to kill a lot of people. And the rich are getting richer. But I don’t think these really qualify as “breaking news” for those who have been paying attention.

Trump and the next pandemic

Add to the stupidity of the Trump administration slashing funding to prepare for and respond to the next deadly pandemic outbreak. These are the unwanted border crossings we should actually be worried about, and by helping people in countries where diseases are breaking out we could also be protecting ourselves.

The investments made after the 2014 Ebola crisis have been slashed in recent proposed federal budgets from the Centers for Disease Control, the agency that works to stop deadly diseases in their tracks, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which responds to international disasters, including the Ebola outbreak. Moreover, Timothy Ziemer, the top White House official in charge of pandemic preparedness, has left his job, and the biosecurity office he ran was summarily disbanded…

Perhaps most terrifying, difficult to treat and highly fatal strains of H7N9 avian influenza are spreading throughout China.

This strain of bird flu causes rapid respiratory illness with associated multiorgan dysfunction that’s easily spread by a small droplet. That’s why it’s so difficult to control and why recurrent epidemics continue to crop up: There have been five epidemics of H7N9 since 2013 in China alone, the most recent between the fall of 2016 and fall of 2017. Across these epidemics, among the 1,565 confirmed cases, about 40 percent of infected individuals died.

artificial spider silk

Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber.

Amsilk is located in Martinsried, Germany, and owned by twins Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann. The Strüngmann brothers made their fortunes with Hexal, a generic drugmaker, and the company’s fibers came from research by Thomas Scheibel, a biomaterials professor at the University of Bayreuth.

The fibers are made by genetically modifying E.coli bacteria to produce spider silk proteins. These purified proteins are then dried into a silk powder, which can be put into textiles, cosmetics or used as the basis for lightweight composites.

Amsilk calls it “Biosteel” and says synthetic silk is resistant, flexible and soft, giving it an advantage over carbon fiber for use in implants and prosthetics, or even aviation. “The disadvantage of carbon is that aircraft are often grounded after a bump because parts have to be replaced,” said Amsilk boss Jens Klein. Minor damage to carbon fiber can be a big problem whereas Biosteel may be able to take the knock and remain in use.

 

the mini-recession of 2015-16

The New York Times has a nice piece of economics reporting on a downturn that affected the U.S. manufacturing, farming and energy industries in 2015 and 2016. I’ll see if I can summarize it, but really we have to admit to ourselves that spinning these narratives after the fact doesn’t mean we have the ability to predict the future.

  • China tried to slow down lending because it was worried about a bubble. The article doesn’t say how, but maybe they raised interest rates or put other requirements on banks.
  • This affected developing countries that export to China.
  • The U.S. Federal Reserve was also starting to raise interest rates because it thought growth and inflation were both starting to pick up.
  • Europe and Japan were decreasing interest rates due to low growth at time.
  • The disparity in interest rates caused a rise in the dollar, because investors pulled money out of other countries/currencies to invest in the U.S.
  • China’s currency is (partially?) pegged to the dollar, so this caused its currency to rise and hurt its exports.
  • China reduced its peg to the dollar in response to allow its currency to depreciate and help its exports. However, this caused more investors to shift money out of China and reduced growth even more.
  • Governments and companies in emerging markets had a lot of dollar-denominated debt, which was now more expensive to repay in their local currencies.
  • The slowdown in emerging markets reduced demand for oil, minerals and agricultural goods, which caused prices to drop and hurt those sectors in the U.S., along with manufacturing that serves those sectors. Some emerging countries are also active in energy, mining, and agriculture so they were also hurt.
  • This may have had political consequences both in terms of disgruntled voters in key states during the 2016 election, and the perception of increased growth following the election.

It’s pretty interesting how it is all connected, and even though it seems complex the reality is probably much more complex than the way I have tried to puzzle it out above. The lesson going forward seems to be that a slow down in China, coupled with a disparity in growth between the U.S., China, and other developed countries in Europe and Asia, can lead to recession conditions in the U.S., even if the U.S. economy is healthy at the beginning of the process. Put another way, global growth is clearly not a zero sum game as some politicians would like to try to convince us. The U.S. Federal Reserve is trying to gradually raise rates to give it some ability to respond to an event like this in the future, but it is clearly a balancing act.

this is your brain on music, but the kind matters

Here’s an interesting article on how jazz and classical music wire your brain differently.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences studied the brains of thirty pianists—half jazz players, half classical. They found, the Institute reports, that “different processes occur in jazz and classical pianists’ brains, even when performing the same piece…”

While jazz improvisation may better teach creativity, classical training, as neuroscientist Ardon Shorr argues in his TEDx talk above, may better train the brain in information processing. These studies show that the effect of music on the brain cannot be studied without regard for the differing neurological demands of different kinds of music, just as the study of language processing cannot be limited to just one language.

As a classically trained musician (okay, an out of practice, amateur one at best but I did put significant time and effort into it in my youth), I can vouch for taking a jazz improv class once and being completely out of my depth. But the other students were all jazz musicians and nobody was really interested in bringing me along as a beginner. I also took a class once called “far out improv” with other classical musicians and a teacher who was specifically interested in teaching classical musicians to improvise, and I remember that being very cool. I’ve never heard or experienced anything like that since so it must have been unusual.

what’s up with solar roadways

This article from “The Conversation” surveys a number of solar road installations around the world. It is pretty down on them, saying they are less efficient and less cost-effective than solar panels on solar farms or rooftops. Okay, but it never says they make bad roads. So where this has been tried, you have functioning roads that didn’t generate electricity before and now do. Most technologies have a tendency to improve and come down in cost over time, so the fact that these pilot projects are up and running and generating power without major mishap doesn’t seem to me like a reason to give up on the idea.

The exponential climate action roadmap

This report from the “Global Climate Action Summit” outlines a plan to actually meet the Paris agreement.

The Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce the risk of dangerous
climate change can be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions
peak by 2020, halve by 2030 and then halve again by 2040
and 2050. This is now technologically feasible and economically
attractive but the world is not on this path.

They identify actions in energy, industry, buildings, transport, food, agricultural, and forestry, as well as carbon capture and storage technology.

Here’s one more paragraph that caught my eye:

If current diffusion rates of renewable energy technology continue into the 2020s, the sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2030 will create “stranded assets” – worthless pipelines, coal mines and oil wells – which could lead to losses on the scale of trillions of dollars by 2035. China and parts of Europe importing fossil fuels stand to benefit most from the bursting carbon bubble, while the US, Canada, Russia and others stand to lose an estimated $4 trillion if climate action falters now and so requiring stronger policies later to avoid catastrophes