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The Green Planet Monitor

The Green Planet Monitor

Von: David Kattenburg
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  • Green Planet Monitor Podcast

    Green Planet Monitor Podcast
    Jul 23 2023
    GPM # 20 In a recent appeal to the world, Canadian AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and 180 other leading scientists and luminaries issued a warning about the existential threats to humanity posed by … not climate change, not the demise of Earth’s biosphere … but artificial intelligence. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI,” their statement reads, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” According to other AI practitioners and observers, the prospects of human extinction at the hands of self-reproducing, self-defending generative AI systems and autonomous killer robots are overblown. The scariest things about AI – they warn — are much more mundane. “Big data increases inequality and threatens democracy,” Cathy O’Neil wrote in her 2016 work, Weapons of Math Destruction. Then there’s AI’s carbon footprint. According to a 2019 report in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review magazine, cloud computing is responsible for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — a larger carbon footprint than the global airline industry. According to a more recent report, ‘training’ a single AI model consumes more energy than a hundred American households. The GPM spoke with Dylan Baker, a research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio box on top, or go here. Ever wonder what secrets lurk within your personal genetic source code? How much DNA did you inherit from Neanderthals? Perhaps you’re the proud owner of a sports gene! Hopefully no skeletons in the closet – like the Alzheimer’s allele. Would you want to know? If so, consumer genome kits can oblige, in exchange for a bit of spit. Listen to this story in today’s podcast, produced in 2013. Click on the audio box on top, or go here. Update: The US FDA warned 23andMe about marketing health predictive genome testing in 2013. In 2017, the FDA authorized it to market Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s and Hereditary Thrombophilia risk reports. As for National Geographic’s Geno Kits, the Society stopped marketing these in 2019. National Geographic says, at its website, that it deleted or destroyed DNA data in June 2020, with the exception of info from users who consented to their use for population-related research. UBC Professor Rosie Redfield checks her genome test results (David Kattenburg) Their precise scientific name is a mouthful. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. But you don’t want to get them in your mouth. Hard to avoid. Forever chemicals are in non-stick cookware; greasy food wrap; microwave popcorn bags … even lipstick. They don’t break down, they build up in your body, and they’re very bad for your health. And, most people have them in their blood! A recent mapping study reports that PFASs are present at high concentrations in thousands of spots across the UK and Europe. A similar exercise was carried out in the US. Now, a scientific study from California reports nine compounds in the blood of pregnant women and umbilical cords. Jessica Trowbridge is the study’s lead author. Trowbridge is a research scientist in the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco. Here’s more about the program’s research. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the audio box on top, or go here. Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
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    59 Min.
  • Green Planet Monitor Podcast

    Green Planet Monitor Podcast
    Jul 30 2023
    GPM # 21 You are what you eat, so they say. As it happens, the trillions of bacteria inhabiting your intestinal tract eat what you eat, turning meals into molecules that affect your gut, immune system and mind. The brain and nervous system, in turn, seem to be able to scan and modulate your gut microbiome. Premek Bercik and his colleagues untangle the mysteries of this bi-directional relationship. Bercik — a Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and member of the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario — studies gut disorders such as Celiac disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and the links between gut bacteria, bowel inflammation and affective disorders such as depression and anxiety. Listen to the GPM‘s conversation with Premek in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here. Gut bacteria have numerous tricks up their sleeves. Virtuosic metabolisers of the meat, carbs, fiber and fats we feed them, those bacteria generate molecules that modulate our immune system, stimulate neurons in the walls of our intestinal tract or travel straight to mood centres in our brain. Among these, neurotransmitters such as serotonin and histamine. Bacteria also stimulate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body, connecting the brain stem and the walls of the gut. The beneficial effects of bacterial supplements (probiotics) may be mediated by the vagus. In return, the vagus seems to affect gut microbes, scanning those bugs and modifying the composition of bacterial populations. Not surprisingly, the gut microbiome is affected by emotional stress. Much of what we know about the gut-brain axis has been established in experiments on germ-free mice. Inoculated with stool samples from people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), germ-free mice exhibit negative shifts in their own bowel behaviour. Inoculated with gut samples from people with mood disorders, germ-free mice exhibit their own behavioural shifts. Drilling down into the mysteries of human gut physiology, Premek Bercik and his team have studied specific strains of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria. In the former category, Bifidobacterium longum is a well known probiotic. B. longum NCC3001 reduces patient depression scores and improves gut symptoms, Bercik and his colleagues have found. It also shifts neural activity in brain regions known to be targeted by antidepressants, such as the hippocampus and amygdala. And, B. longum raises levels of a molecule called brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus of mice. Then there’s a known intestinal ‘bad guy’, Klebsiella aerogenes. Certain strains possess an enzyme that converts the amino acid histidine — found in dietary protein — into the inflammatory and pain mediator, histamine. That histamine crosses the intestinal barrier, where it stimulates mast cells, a type of white blood cell. They, in turn, secrete even more histamine. Consistent with this scenario, people with IBS tend to secrete elevated levels of histamine in their urine. And, decreased consumption of certain types of fermentable fiber (which, when digested by bacteria, create optimal metabolic conditions for bacterial histamine production) leads to lower urinary histamine and pain relief. Listen to our conversation with Premek in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here. Land of a Thousand Hills (David Kattenburg) The 29th anniversary of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide has just come to a close. Over the course of those awful hundred days, between April 7 and July 15, 1994, an estimated eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsis and a lesser number of their Hutu neighbors were brutally killed by Hutu extremists armed with knives, hoes and machetes. Over the airwaves, venom flowed. Announcers at Radio-Télévision Mille Collines (from Rwanda’s popular nickname, the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’), urged listeners to “kill the cockroaches.” RTLM chiefs distributed cheap pocket radios to stoke the furnace of ethnic hatred. Established in July 1993 by Hutu extremists “to create harmonious development in Rwandan society,” it became the genocide’s key driving force, mobilizing grassroots members of the notorious Interahamwe militia. This documentary was produced in 2009. All the people you hear have moved on. ‘Gacaca’ courts ended in 2012. Radio Izuba continues to broadcast in Kibungo, eastern Rwanda. Listen to the story in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here. They’re all the rage. Drones. Every country wants them, packed with sensors, cameras and missiles. Small ones that loiter, drop tear gas or bombs, or crash with a big bang, in kamikaze fashion; big ones that fire missiles, blowing up cars, buildings and people to bits. All on command from control rooms hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers away. Now, Canada is in the market for a fleet of its own. Hellfire missiles and laser guided bombs may be on its ...
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    59 Min.
  • Little Boy and Fat Man

    Little Boy and Fat Man
    Aug 4 2023
    GPM # 22 Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki. When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty numbers vary widely. One thing is clear: almost all were civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come. America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that would supposedly have resulted from putting boots on Japanese soil. Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time. Here’s a story about America’s development of Little Boy and Fat Man, adapted from a documentary produced by Clive Baugh, Ed Reece and David Kattenburg back in 1986. It takes its name from a prose-poem by the American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic and writer Thomas Merton. The story features interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. We interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. A memorable conversation. You’ll also hear Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility. Johns joined the McMaster faculty in 1947, and helped manage its small experimental particle accelerator. He shares the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs (Canada was indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe). And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the health effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell was a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, and author of the 1985 work No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She won the 1986 Right Livelihood Award — the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ — for “raising public awareness about the destruction of the biosphere and human gene pool, especially by low-level radiation.” Thanks to Brenda Muller for her cello and Michael J. Birthelmer for his guitar. And to the Firesign Theatre, America’s counterculture comics. Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Bikini Island, the atoll’s largest island, at sunset (David Kattenburg) Almost eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – Glenn Alcalay. Alcalay is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York. Back in the mid-1970s, Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific. The US carried out 67 nuclear tests there, between 1946 and 1958. The biggest was Bravo, its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954. Alcalay spent those two years on a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, he began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer. Read this recent piece by Glenn Alcalay. And listen to our complete conversation here: Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg) It’s a sobering truth that few know. Having dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have consolidated its status as the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there. They didn’t have much choice. America tested its first bomb, Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It dropped its second and third bombs on Japan. A year later — having been handed the Marshall Islands as a Strategic Trust by the UN — the US set out to use it as the testing ground for its now burgeoning nuclear arsenal. In July 1946, the US set off Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls. Twenty-one more atomic and thermonuclear tests would follow, including the leviathan, 15-megatonne Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954. Forty-four bombs were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls. Read a detailed account of the history of the Marshall Islands here, written back in 2007. Nothing much has changed since then. Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled. Radiation monitoring continues, under the aegis of the US Department of Energy. Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the now defunct Nuclear Claims ...
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