Category Archives: Good Fact

Space Lawyer Protected Us From Mercury

Kevin Bell, space lawyer, got word from a whistleblower that a company planned on making satellites that use mercury as a propellent. Thanks to their efforts a global rainstorm of mercury was avoided.

They took their concerns to the American government and were confronted by a lot of departments denying it was their responsibility. So they went further and got the United Nations to ban the use of the deadly metal in orbit!

“The Minamata Convention on Mercury seeks to eliminate all mercury uses where technically-achievable non-mercury alternatives are available,” said Elena Lymberidi-Settimo, ZMWG Coordinator at the European Environmental Bureau. “In the case of satellite propulsion systems, mercury-free alternatives have been available and used for decades.”

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Save Forests by Removing Just One Item From Your Diet

We are what we eat, and right now many of us need to change who we are. Changing one’s diet can be one of the biggest things one does for the environment since we must eat everyday. Researchers have yet again shown that just removing red meat from your diet can make a big difference for the environment.

If removing meat from your diet is too much of a challenge then just reduce your consumption of it. Fighting climate change requires big groups of people making tiny changes so even doing a little can add up to a lot.

The team used a mathematical model that considered increases in population growth, income and livestock demand between 2020 and 2050. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the global increase in beef consumption would require the expansion of pasture areas for grazing and of cropland for feed production, which would double the annual rate of deforestation globally. Methane emissions and agricultural water use would also increase.

Replacing 20% of the world’s per-capita beef consumption with mycoprotein by 2050 would reduce methane emissions by 11% and halve the annual deforestation and associated emissions, compared with the business-as-usual scenario (see ‘Meat substitution’). The mitigating effects on deforestation are so great because, under this scenario, global demand for beef does not increase, so there is no need to expand pasture areas or cropland for feeding cattle, Humpenöder says.

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Better Beer by Biological Betterment

beer

Barley, like many other plants, faces worse growing conditions thanks to the ongoing climate crisis. Also like other plants, researchers are looking into ways to help the plant survive unpredictable weather changes. Biologists in Japan have modified the barley plant to survive early flooding which will help farmers get a good price for their crop while also ensuring we have a reliable source of a key ingredient for beer.?

The researchers are ecstatic to have hit gold in their plant biotechnology endeavor. Dr. Hisano exclaims, “We could successfully produce mutant barley that was resistant to pre-harvest sprouting, using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Also, our study has not only clarified the roles of qsd1 and qsd2 in grain germination or dormancy, but has also established that qsd2 plays a more significant role.”

Overall, this study serves as a milestone for present and future crop improvement research, using efficient gene manipulation like that offered by CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers are hopeful that they may be able to solve the food and environmental problems that human beings are currently facing worldwide, using their enhanced biotechnology techniques.

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Visualize the Supply Chain of Every USA-Based Company

wind enhanced ship

COVID-19 revealed to many the precariousness of modern “free trade” supply chains, indeed the pandemic supply chain issue is still impacting us to this day. Various international deals that favour profits over people put us in this situation, so how do we get out of it? This is the question many are trying to answer and now there’s a website to help. Import Yeti lets NGOs, companies, and anyone examine the supply chains of any company based in the USA.

Bill of ladings are public information that every large eCom owner or FBA seller I know uses but they are too cost prohibitive, challenging to obtain and difficult to use for the average joe. ImportYeti’s goal is to solve that problem.

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Whales Share Knowledge to Defend Against Whalers

ocean shore

Animals warn each other whenever a predator approaches, and in some cases they help each other. In the case of sperm whales they share defensive measures to avoid being killed by whalers. When whalers first started hunting sperm whales they were very successful; however, their effective harpooning rate soon started to drop. Researchers have been able to demonstrate that the whales shared knowledge to help them survive.

This provides another example of group intelligence in animals and can add to the argument that animals need protection as nonhuman persons.

Animals can mitigate human threats, but how do they do this, and how fast can they adapt? Hunting sperm whales was a major 19th Century industry. Analysis of data from digitized logbooks of American whalers in the North Pacific found that the rate at which whalers succeeded in harpooning (striking) sighted whales fell by about 58% over the first few years of exploitation in a region. This decline cannot be explained by the earliest whalers being more competent, as their strike rates outside the North Pacific, where whaling had a longer history, were not elevated. The initial killing of particularly vulnerable individuals would not have produced the observed rapid decline in strike rate. It appears that whales swiftly learned effective defensive behaviour. Sperm whales live in kin-based social units. Our models show that social learning, in which naïve social units, when confronted by whalers, learned defensive measures from grouped social units with experience, could lead to the documented rapid decline in strike rate. This rapid, large-scale adoption of new behaviour enlarges our concept of the spatio- temporal dynamics of non-human culture.

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