Convenience Big Store: Glow-in-the-dark bacteria pinpoints landmines 💣

15 July, 2021

In the headlines

The Amazon rainforest is now emitting more CO2 than it's absorbing – mostly due to fires to clear land for beef and soy production. A new report on the British diet proposes taxing salt and sugar and prescribing vegetables on the NHS. Boris Johnson has cast doubt on it, saying he's "not attracted" to the idea of extra taxes "on hard working people". Britney Spears has won the right to choose her own lawyer, as she fights to end the 13-year conservatorship that controls her business and personal life. She posted a video of her cartwheeling on social media.

Comment of the day

A firefighter attempts to stop fire spreading in Doyle, California. AP Photo/Noah Berger

The Tories need to go green

The Earth is in trouble and "if we don't act now, an entire way of life will be destroyed", says Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. Saying that will lose me friends, but just look at Canada: hundreds have died in the extreme heat the country has been experiencing and most of the town of Lytton recently burned to the ground. It's true that politicians and big business are acting to tackle man-made climate change, but we're doing "too little too late". And as we fight a rearguard action here, the Conservatives need to get their act together. Otherwise, they will lose to a green-left alliance that uses environmentalism to redistribute power and money. "If you want to save capitalism, you've got to go green."

Leaders will have to be blunt with voters. We must all fly and drive less because you "can't consume your way out of an ecological crisis". Next, we must return to an older Toryism – to thrift, to localism, to the preservation of landscape. After all, what is more conservative than "an old lady lying down in front of a bulldozer to protect a tree from a digger"? It sounds like I've "drunk the green Kool-Aid". But too few of us listened to those who knew the climate crisis was coming. Now it's here, we have no time to quibble over facts. "Al Gore was right."

Read the full article here (paywall).

You're right not saving Haiti, Mr Biden

The best thing the US can do for Haiti, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times, is "as little as possible". Thankfully, Joe Biden's instincts seem to be right. Washington has agreed to help find out who was responsible for last week's assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, but that's it. There's undoubtedly a US link: two Haitian Americans were caught up in the plot, and a Haitian-born doctor based in Florida has been arrested in Haiti, accused of ordering the killing so that he could become president. Some members of the 28-man hit squad have claimed they were hired by a security firm based near Miami.

But if US authorities can help Haiti establish the facts about Moïse's murder, they "cannot help the country change the facts that led up to it". Endemic corruption, rampant lawlessness and institutional decay have long crippled the republic, making nearly every form of foreign assistance not only useless but harmful, too. American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama have sent troops to Haiti and none of their interventions has left the Haitians better off. Nor have decades of financial aid, which has fostered dependence and embezzlement, enervated institutions, discouraged local initiative (while diaspora Haitians have thrived elsewhere), enriched the well connected and enraged everybody else. "The greatest gift the Biden administration can give the people of Haiti is to stop trying to save them."

Read the full article here (paywall).

Gone viral

Kevin Parry is a Canadian animator whose video wizardry has been foxing the internet. "I (would like to think I) know how this s*** is done," tweeted the American director Ed Solomon, but "I have no f***ing idea." It's simple - Parry says that for his banana video he filmed his best impression of the falling fruit (onto some cushions out of shot), followed by "about 100" attempts at rolling the banana until one of them lined up with his fall. Then he spliced the videos together, visually "smearing" his dark hat into the banana's stalk.

Noted

According to his partner Emma Freud, British film director Richard Curtis once received a text from their son Jake: "Dad, can you pick me up from school today?" Curtis promptly responded: "I have been in America for the past eight days. I am so sorry you have not noticed."

Zeitgeist

Among Euro 2020's "main contenders", Italy's 26-man squad was the only one that didn't feature a single non-white player, says The Economist. Young sportsmen and women of colour aren't nurtured in Italy, partly because those born to immigrant parents are usually unable to apply to become Italian until they're 18. Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni, the leaders of two Italian hard-right parties that together are polling at 41%, support the policy. They both tweeted images of their team celebrating their win on Sunday. "It will do neither politician any harm that none of those faces was black."

Tomorrow's world

Glow-in-the-dark bacteria could pinpoint the position of old landmines, researchers have shown. They have been using genetic engineering to turn each bacterium into "a miniature firefly" when in the presence of a particular chemical associated with the devices, Shimshon Belkin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told the New York Times. There are an estimated 110 million anti-personnel landmines worldwide. In 2019 they killed or injured more than 5,500 people.