“Studies of whale populations make it clear that virtually all species are now increasing. Humpback numbers have risen sharply, along with blue and minke whales. The main exception is the North Atlantic right whale, which has suffered badly from vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.

However, the rest of the world’s whales are doing well, said Bridgewater. ‘Species numbers have bounced back since the moratorium to varying degrees levels. And that is the point of our message to the IWC: ‘You have done your job. It’s been really good work. You have got a result. Now it is time to hang up things and go with dignity.’’

From The Guardian.

“A laughing frog and an intertidal marine worm named after Sir David Attenborough are among 750 animals, plants and other organisms that have been newly recognised on Australia’s list of species.”

From The Guardian.

Sign up for our newsletter to receive these emails in your inbox.

---

Microplastics, pesticides, forever chemicals, gas stoves, ultra-processed foods—it’s as if modernity is trying to kill us.

It’s actually worse: everything is trying to kill us. Take oxygen.

Our cells use oxygen to turn nutrients into energy. Without oxygen, we quickly run out of energy and die. But there’s a catch: that process also creates free radicals, highly reactive molecules that damage our DNA. In other words, our own metabolisms are responsible for a large proportion of cancer. The geneticists Vilenchik and Knudson estimate that the damage is equivalent to 1500-2000 millisieverts of radiation per day, or a few hundred daily CT scans.

The sun, which is vital to life on Earth, also causes a great deal of DNA damage, along with seemingly innocuous foods like mushrooms, celery, parsnips, potatoes, rhubarb, and coffee.

We need many of these things to survive and modern dangers are no different.

Gas stoves give us heat, which we need to stay warm and cook food. Without heat, we die, even in tropical places. And as far as sources of heat go, gas is a very safe one, despite its CO2 emissions. Before we used gas, we burned solid fuels like coal, wood, and dung, all of which produce extremely harmful smoke. Here’s a colorful example from an ethnographic survey of peasants in Tsarist Russia:

Stoves with chimneys are called “white,” while chimneyless stoves are referred to as “black.” When a “black” stove is being lighted, the door from the main room into the entryway is left open so that the smoke up to the level of the door is drawn out, but above that level it forms a blue and white blanket through which nothing can be seen…

In the drought years of 1891–1892, around ten people in two of our small villages (each containing about fifteen households) lost their eyesight temporarily or permanently from the smoke of their stoves. The smoke, which was produced by burning dried manure and weeds found on the roadside and in ravines, was so acrid that the victims (mostly old people and children) developed cataracts. All of them were admitted to the regional hospital in town, but three of them never got their eyesight back.

As late as the 1950s, toxic fogs would settle on coal-burning cities like London, killing hundreds to thousands. In poor countries, where people still burn these fuels, household air pollution kills millions of people each year.

There’s a similar story to many modern pollutants. The pesticides people complain about today have replaced highly toxic compounds made of lead and arsenic. One of the earliest chemical insecticides, copper acetoarsenite (nicknamed “Paris Green” because of its use as pigment), has a lethal dose of roughly a teaspoon. Paris Green was eventually replaced by lead arsenate, which is much less toxic but tends to accumulate in soils, which is why you shouldn’t make a habit of foraging in old apple orchards.

Pesticides are also crucial to our survival—they are our primary defense against mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue and disasters like locust plagues—and we should be thankful that modern iterations don’t give us heavy metal poisoning.

Plastics revolutionized medicine, allowing for the production of cheap and disposable syringes, gloves, masks, and IV bags, and plastic packaging keeps our food fresh and uncontaminated. Even forever chemicals have lifesaving applications, namely extremely effective fire suppressing foams.

This is not to say that we should ignore harmful substances and pollutants. Identifying problems is the first step to making progress regarding safety. But we should take a deep breath (of oxygen, that poison). The world is a dangerous place, and the things that stop us from dying now may harm us later. These things should not be demonized but iterated on, improved, and eventually, only after a better technology arrives, replaced.

Malcolm Cochran, Digital Communications Manager

---

Economics:

• Working Hours in Wealthy Countries Declined by Half over Last 150 Years
• The Typical US Worker Out-Earned Inflation by $1,400 a Year

Energy & Environment:

• Rare Moth Found 50 Years after Becoming “Extinct” in Britain
• This Bird Species Was Extinct in Europe. Now It’s Back
• Numbers of Rare Sticky Plant Triple in Scottish Hills
• Massive Helium Reservoir in Minnesota Could Solve US Shortage
• New Zealand Rushes Vaccination of Endangered Birds
• Facebook Looks to a New Type of Geothermal Clean Energy
• The Plastic-Eating Fungi That Could Help Clean up Oceans
• Thwaites Glacier Won’t Collapse Like Dominoes as Feared
• Swiss Plan to Allow Construction of New Nuclear Plants
• New Reactor Could More than Triple the Yield of Highly Valuable Chemical
• Endangered Species Restored in Yunnan Province

Health & Demographics:

• Donating a Kidney Is Safer than Ever, Reassuring Research Finds
• Startup Raises $191 Million to Edit Pig Organs for Human Transplant
• Ozempic Could Delay Ageing, Researchers Suggest
• WHO Exceeds Target for Gaza Polio Vaccinations
• HIV Antiretroviral Therapy Saves over a Million Lives Each Year
• Diabetes Took over Her Life, until a Stem Cell Therapy Freed Her
• A New Device That Stops Bleeding from Gunshot Wounds
• Africa: Malaria Vaccine Breakthrough for Pregnant Women
• Cigarette Smoking Rate in US Ties 80-Year Low
• Lab-Grown Stem Cells Could Be a Breakthrough for Cancer Treatment
• Day Zero Antivirals for Future Pandemics
• Merck Ebola Vaccine Shown to Offer Substantial Protection
• An Implantable Sensor Could Reverse Opioid Overdoses

Science & Technology:

• AI Is Helping Scholars Decipher the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Want an EV with 600 Miles of Range? It’s Coming
• Ask Claude: Amazon Turns to Anthropic’s AI for Alexa Revamp
• Robot Metalsmiths Resurrect Toroidal Tanks for NASA
• These New AI Bots Will Do Just about Anything for You

Violence:

• Schools Have Grown Less Violent since COVID

Tweets:

• CRISPR allows for temporary gene edits
• Diamond progress
• 200 years of trade liberalization

“The distinctive northern bald ibis, hunted essentially to extinction by the 17th century, was revived by breeding and rewilding efforts over the last two decades. But the birds — known for their distinctive black-and-iridescent green plumage, bald red head and long curved beak — don’t instinctively know which direction to fly to migrate without the guidance of wild-born elders. So a team of scientists and conservationists stepped in as foster parents and flight instructors…

To prepare them for travel, the chicks are removed from their breeding colonies when they are just a few days old. They are taken to an aviary that’s overseen by the foster parents in the hopes of ‘imprinting’ — when the birds will bond with those humans to ultimately trust them along the migration route…

Steininger and the other foster parents then sit on the back of a microlight aircraft, waving and shouting encouragement through a bullhorn as it flies through the air.”

From Associated Press.