Searching for solutions to a crisis decades in the making

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Island Press is “the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues.” In its latest release, Thicker than Water, Erica Cirino, a photojournalist and licensed wildlife rehabilitator, explores what becomes of plastic—all 8 billion or so tons of it that humans have manufactured in the last seventy-ish years. 

Plastic’s greatest strength is also its greatest flaw: It takes eons to break down. It breaks apart, into smaller and smaller micro- and nano-sized particles. But unlike natural materials like wood and glass, plastic doesn't break down into its constituent chemicals. Those micro- and nano-sized particles are still plastic. According to Alice Zhu, a graduate student studying plastics at the University of Toronto, this is because the carbon-carbon bonds that form the backbone of most plastic polymers require an immense amount of energy to break apart. And because these bonds are in synthetic arrangements, there are no microorganisms that can break most of them down (yet).

The big asymmetry

There is a marked disconnect between how long plastic sticks around and how long we get utility from it. Many single-use items, like straws and cutlery, are used for only minutes; thin plastic bags, like those needlessly wrapped around produce and almost everything we order online (and even plastic cutlery), are immediately thrown away. This thin plastic is made of low density polyethylene, which is the most difficult kind to recycle and emits more climate-warming methane and ethylene when exposed to sunlight than other, harder types of plastic. It is also one of the most commonly produced.

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This is the world’s oldest image of a ghost

(credit: Photograph: The British Museum)

A curator exploring the shadowy recesses of the British Museum’s archives recently encountered a ghost—or rather, the world’s oldest image of one, etched onto a 3,500-year-old Babylonian clay tablet. The figure of a tall, emaciated spirit with his hands bound illustrates the text of an ancient exorcism ritual meant to banish the sort of ghost that “seizes hold of a person and pursues him and cannot be loosed.”

Irving Finkel, the curator of the British Museum’s Middle Eastern department and a specialist in cuneiform, the angular writing system of the ancient Babylonian civilization, recently translated the text of the ritual, which had remained unread and ignored since the British Museum acquired the tablet in the 1800s. At that time, museums across Europe were in a rush to stockpile Babylonian artifacts, and curators would often pay local people to loot clay and stone tablets, along with other artifacts, from archaeological sites in what is now Iraq. Most of those items arrived with little or no information about their context and ended up in storage.

Seeing ghosts

The ghost tablet, for example, had never been displayed to the public, and no one had translated its text. Nor had anyone noticed the hidden ghostly image on the reverse side of the clay tablet, either. That side appears blank until it’s viewed under a light at just the right angle, when the image of the ghost seems to leap out at the viewer.

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Lidar reveals hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial centers

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An airborne lidar survey recently revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites in southern Mexico. The 32,800-square-mile area was surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, which made the data public. When University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues examined the area, which spans the Olmec heartland along the Bay of Campeche and the western Maya Lowlands just north of the Guatemalan border, they identified the outlines of 478 ceremonial sites that had been mostly hidden beneath vegetation or were simply too large to recognize from the ground.

“It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago,” said Inomata. “Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology.”

Over the last several years, lidar surveys have revealed tens of thousands of irrigation channels, causeways, and fortresses across Maya territory, which now spans the borders of Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Infrared beams can penetrate dense foliage to measure the height of the ground, which often reveals features like long-abandoned canals or plazas. The results have shown that Maya civilization was more extensive, and more densely populated, than we previously realized.

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Spiders are much smarter than you think

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People tend to associate intelligence with brain size. And as a general guideline, this makes sense: more brain cells, more mental capabilities. Humans, and many of the other animals we’ve come to think of as unusually bright, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, all have large brains. And it’s long been assumed that the smallest brains simply don’t have the capacity to support complex mental processes. But what if they do?

The vast majority of Earth’s animal species are rather small, and a vanishingly small portion of them have been studied at all, much less by cognition researchers. But the profile of one group of diminutive animals is rapidly rising as scientists discover surprisingly sophisticated behaviors among them.

“There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.”

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Fossil fuels doomed in New York as regulator blocks new gas power plants

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New York took an aggressive stance toward fossil fuels this week, effectively killing the development of new fossil fuel power plants in the state. The Department of Environmental Conservation denied permits for two proposed natural gas power plants, saying they were incompatible with the state’s climate law, which calls for an end to fossil fuel-generated electricity by 2040. 

Though the proposed plants would be more efficient than those currently in operation, the state agency said the plants would generate “significant” amounts of pollution and that their construction now, less than 20 years from the targeted net-zero emissions date, would be “inconsistent” with what is required by the climate law.

New York’s climate law requires polluters to account for two sources of emissions: from the plants themselves and from the natural gas supply chain. Once the latter was included—figures which in the past were nearly always ignored when determining a power plant’s pollution—the emissions quickly exceeded the DEC’s thresholds, the decisions say.

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Microsoft reclaims title of most valuable public company after Apple falls

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Microsoft regained its crown as the most valuable publicly listed company in the world on Friday from Apple, whose shares slumped following a weak quarterly earnings update from the maker of iPhones and Mac computers.

Microsoft’s 2.2 percent gain on Friday lifted its market valuation to $2.49 trillion. Apple slid 1.9 percent, taking its market cap to $2.46 trillion.

Microsoft reported this week that its revenues soared in the third quarter, aided by a pandemic-fuelled surge in cloud computing resulting from a shift to remote working. The company’s quarterly revenue grew 22 percent, its largest gain since 2014.

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2021 MacBook Pro review: Yep, it’s what you’ve been waiting for

Enlarge / The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro stacked on top of the 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has long offered an application called Time Machine that lets you revert the software on your computer to the state it was in before something went seriously wrong. In many ways, the new MacBook Pro is a hardware Time Machine of its own; you could say it makes it seem like the past five years never happened.

The 2021 MacBook Pro is notably bulkier, more flexible, and more powerful than its predecessor. It clicks "revert" on a whole bunch of changes that have been generally unpopular, like the inclusion of the Touch Bar in place of physical function keys and the singular focus on Thunderbolt as the port of choice.

The new laptop also has the most advanced CPU,  GPU, and NPU ever included in a consumer laptop and display technology that has never been seen in mainstream consumer products. So maybe it's not so much like the past five years never happened; it's more like we've slipstreamed into an alternate timeline where Apple never changed course at a critical juncture when a lot of people felt it shouldn't have.

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There are ominous portents of the end of days in The Witcher S2 trailer

The second season of Netflix's hugely popular sci-fi/fantasy series, The Witcher, returns on December 17.

It's been two long years for fans of The Witcher, eager for a second season, but that long wait is nearly over. Netflix dropped a new trailer for its hugely popular sci-fi/fantasy series, starring Henry Cavill as a solitary monster hunter with magical powers.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As I've written previously, The Witcher is based on the popular books by Andrzej Sapkowski. The series was one of the streaming platform's top ten shows of 2019, despite boasting a fairly complicated narrative structure: three separate timelines spanning 100 years. It played a little fast and loose with the source material, but that turned out to work quite well.

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Children poisoned by birthday cake decorations loaded with lead, copper

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A recent baking trend of using "luster dusts" to give cake frostings and decorations a shimmery look has poisoned young children with heavy metals in at least two states, health researchers warn in a new report published Friday.

A toxic birthday cake for a 1-year-old left six children (ages 1 to 11) severely ill with vomiting and diarrhea after an October 2018 birthday party in Rhode Island. One child needed to be taken to the emergency room.

A birthday cake with rose gold dust frosting, a bottle of gold dust used for cake decorating, and industrial drums containing fine copper powder—Rhode Island, 2018. (credit: CDC)

Investigators from the Rhode Island Department of Health traced the illnesses to the cake's thick layer of frosting laced with a rose gold "luster dust." The cake was produced in a commercial bakery, and the health investigators identified three possible sources of the bakery's luster dust. One was an importer who identified the dust as "fine copper powder" that was initially sold as "metallic pigment for consumer goods such as floor coverings." Though the dust was labeled "nontoxic," it was also labeled "nonedible."

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Congress fails to pin down oil company execs on their bad-faith arguments

Enlarge / At some point, this must stop. A recent congressional hearing left us no closer to figuring out when that point will be reached. (credit: Getty Images)

Thursday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held hearings on the role of oil companies in fostering our present climate crisis. The companies led by these executives have a long history of playing down the risks of climate change, leading a number of House Democrats to suggest that this hearing could be the equivalent of the 1994 hearings with tobacco executives, in which the executives denied well-established scientific data on the addictiveness of nicotine.

But that expectation was doomed to disappointment. Oil companies, after all, had already demonstrated that they are happy to accept the science of climate change when under oath; they just tend to spin the details of their own role in influencing public perceptions of that science. Congress was treated to a repeat performance of that sort that neatly avoided the kind of catastrophic failure in public perception that the tobacco company executives produced.

However, the hearing did manage to highlight the gap between what many companies are saying now and the reality of what society has determined it needs to accomplish. What follows is less a recap of the testimony and more of an analysis of how the companies' spin brought them to their current circumstances—and where they'll go from here.

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