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Going Vegan May Not Be The Most Sustainable Option for Humanity.

If you’ve decided to go vegan because you think it’s better for the planet, that might be true—but only to an extent.

A group of researchers has published a study in the journal Elementa in which they describe various biophysical simulation models that compare 10 eating patterns: the vegan diet, two vegetarian diets (one that includes dairy, the other dairy and eggs), four omnivorous diets (with varying degrees of vegetarian influence), one low in fats and sugars, and one similar to modern American dietary patterns.

What they found was that the carrying capacity—the size of the population that can be supported indefinitely by the resources of an ecosystem—of the vegan diet is actually less substantial than two of the vegetarian diets and two out of the four omnivorous diets they studied.

When applied to an entire global population, the vegan diet wastes available land that could otherwise feed more people. That’s because we use different kinds of land to produce different types of food, and not all diets exploit these land types equally.

• Grazing land is often unsuitable for growing crops, but great for feeding food animals such as cattle.
• Perennial cropland supports crops that are alive year-round and are harvested multiple times before dying, including a lot of the grain and hay used to feed livestock.
• Cultivated cropland is where you typically find vegetables, fruits and nuts.

The five diets that contained the most meat used all available crop and animal grazing land. The five diets using the least amount of meat—or none at all—varied in land use. But the vegan diet stood out because it was the only diet that used no perennial cropland at all, and, as a result, would waste the chance to produce a lot of food.

One downside of non-perennial crops is that when springtime rolls around, the frozen soil’s stored nutrients usually drain into rivers and streams before farmers have a chance to plant the next season’s crops. Here’s Brooke Borel, reporting for NOVA Next in 2014:

Perennial crops, on the other hand, could survive for many seasons, axing the annual cycle and lessening farming’s wear-and-tear on the environment. Some varieties could also have longer, lusher root systems that would sink deeper into the ground, helping maintain soil health and curbing erosion. They could even help the plants survive a drought.

Such a system would allow for longer growing seasons, too, taking advantage of the late autumn and early spring months when fields usually lay bare. Assuming that perennial crops produced the same amount as their annual counterparts—a big assumption—this would provide additional food each year from the same plot of land. A shift from annuals to perennials, or a mixture of both, could benefit both the environment and food security.

If modern agriculture in the U.S. were adjusted to the vegan diet, according to the study in Elementa, we’d be able to feed 735 million people—and that’s from a purely land-use perspective. Compare that to the dairy-friendly vegetarian diet, which could feed 807 million people. Even partially omnivorous diets rank above veganism in terms of sustainability; incorporating about 20 to 40% meat in your diet is actually better for the long-term course of humanity than being completely meat-free.

Of course, some environmental ethicists would argue that this is an overly utilitarian, anthropocentric view of how a person should live. What the study doesn’t take into account is the moral question of whether or not we should be raising livestock for our benefit at all. So while the jury’s out on whether veganism is a good way to sustain the future of humanity, it’s certainly a viable life choice for people who are vegan for other reasons, including dietary or ethical concerns.

Source: http://to.pbs.org/2c6Eg0G

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Taking a Picture of Your Hotel Room Could Help Stop Child Trafficking.

The TraffickCam app enables travelers to submit pictures of hotel rooms around the world. The images are matched against a national database used by police.

“You just enter your hotel room, and your room number. You take four pictures, and you submit them to the website,” Washington University Researcher and TraffickCam developer Abby Stylianou said. “And then those become part of the pipeline that law enforcement can use to track down where the victims are being trafficked.”

Stylianou was among the speakers at a Human Trafficking Town Hall at Maritz Tuesday.

“Right now there are pictures posted every day. Hundreds of pictures, in every city around the United States, posted online, that show victims of trafficking, in hotel rooms posed on beds,” she said.

Hotel photos submitted by travelers will allow police to querry the database to determine where the pictures of victims were taken.

TraffickCam now has more than 1.5 million images of hotels across the world, thanks to support from the public.

The idea for the app is merging of ideas between researchers at Washington University and the Exchange Initiative, a non-profit formed by Nix Conference and Meeting Management. A few years ago, police sought the help of Nix staff to identify the specific hotel where a victim was trafficked.

“It was a photo that they had from the internet,” Nix Principal Molly Hackett said. “One of the girls in our office knew exactly what it was.”

The Exchange Initiative created the app, which Hackett said is widely used by her staff. But use of the app isn’t limited to her line of work.

“It’s great that everyday citizens can do everyday things by taking a picture help stop sex trafficking,” Hackett added.

The internet has made it easier for criminals to engage in sex trafficking and child exploitation, Sgt. Adam Kavanaugh with St. Louis County Police said. Kavanaugh is the deputy commander of the Missouri Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

He said detectives are noticing an increase in younger victims.

“The average age, when we talk to our girls that we deal with, most of them have started at 13, 14 years old. And most of them have been sexually abused as children,” he said.

He said he is optimistic the new technological tool will make a difference.

“I think it’s going to be crucial to help us identify not only where they’re at now, but where they’ve been at. Which is something we need – that’s helps with prosecution.”

TraffickCam is free and available for iPhone, iPads, and Android devices.

Source: http://bit.ly/2c11fvo

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WikiLeaks outs gay people in Saudi Arabia in reckless mass data dump.

Whistleblowing group WikiLeaks is under fire for publishing Saudi government data that outs gay men, leaving them at risk of attack.

Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most repressive countries when it comes to LGBT rights, and gay people can face punishments ranging from a fine or flogging up to to the death penalty.

Wikileaks is known for routinely publishing illicitly-obtained government data from around the world – recently publishing emails illegally hacked from the servers of the US Democratic National Convention. That attack was thought to have been perpetrated by Russian-backed hackers.

The organisation has now been accused of carelessly and recklessly publishing unredacted data from Saudi Arabia in a separate mass info dump, including the personal details of thousands of Saudi people.

Among the thousands of documents, the data includes personal information identifying at least one man with a gay sex conviction – as well as a number of rape victims and people living with HIV.

It also makes public the identity of domestic workers who had been tortured or sexually abused by their employers – even listing people’s passport numbers, alongside their full names.

One of the cables includes private details of a Saudi man detained for ‘sexual deviation’ – the charge for homosexuality – raising fears of reprisals or ‘vigilante’ attacks.

A disabled woman whose private debt information was released in the data dump told Associated Press: “This is a disaster.

“What if my brothers, neighbours, people I know or even don’t know have seen it? What is the use of publishing my story?”

A doctor whose patients’ data was released branded the leak “illegal”.

Embattled WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who has spent years hiding in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, said previously: “The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself.”

Source: http://bit.ly/2ciSD6R

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Putin appoints church historian as Russia’s new science minister.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed a church historian as the country’s new science and education minister.

On 19 August, the president announced that Olga Vasilyeva would succeed the current science minister, Dmitry Livanov, who will become presidential envoy on trade and economic relations with Ukraine, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

During his 4-year term as minister, Livanov oversaw a radical overhaul of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia’s main basic research organization. The formerly separate academies of sciences, medical sciences and agricultural science were merged and put under the governance of a federal agency. Livanov told Nature last year that the academy’s future role will mainly be to provide expert advice to the government and society.

But many members of the academy, which runs hundreds of research institutes across Russia, are unhappy with the changes and with the way that Livanov handled the painful reform. Vladimir Ivanov, a vice-president of the academy, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta news portal that he welcomed the move because Livanov had failed to involve scientists and academic officials in the overhaul of the academy.

In making the decision, Putin followed a proposal made by prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, according to Interfax.

Putin gave no reason for Livanov’s replacement. The minister was unpopular in public for his education policies — many parents are upset, for example, that they must now pay fees for their children’s school textbooks, according to Rossiyskaya Gazeta. But whether a lack of public popularity was the reason for Livanov’s dismissal is unclear. Putin and Medvedev did value Livanov’s work, and they say that they consider his experience to be important in other spheres, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

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Stanford University Bans Hard Liquor From On-Campus Parties to Help Curb Future Rapes. Outrage ensues.

As Stanford undergrads get ready for the fall semester, the university’s administrators have issued a new mandate: Pack your books and calculators, but leave the fifths and handles at home.

On Monday, just over a month before classes resume, the university announced a set of changes to its alcohol policy.

Hard liquor will now be completely banned from on-campus parties — unless the party is hosted by groups exclusively for graduate students, and in that case, only mixed drinks are allowed. “Straight shots of hard alcohol are never allowed at any party,” the school says.

Beer and wine are still allowed.

And in dorms, individual students (provided they’re 21 and over) will be allowed to have liquor — but only in bottles smaller than 750 mL.

Violating the policy could prompt “administrative action” and could result in people being kicked out of on-campus housing.

In its statement, Stanford called this “a sensible, creative solution that has roots in research-based solutions.” Administrators say they are aiming not to prohibit alcohol, but to limit high-risk behavior, specifically. They believe limiting bottle sizes will have that effect:

“Most alcohol retailers only sell large-volume containers — 750 mL and above. Only select retailers sell hard alcohol containers smaller in volume than 750 mL. Therefore, the outlet density of establishments that sell hard alcohol around campus will be greatly reduced. Also, the costs associated with purchasing smaller containers of hard alcohol are higher than the cost per volume of larger containers, which may serve as a deterrent.”

Stanford spokeswoman Lisa Lapin tells NPR that her office is not aware of any other college that has instituted a bottle-size limit on hard alcohol.

But Stanford is far from the first school to restrict liquor on campus. Bowdoin, Bates, Colby and Notre Dame have all had bans in place for more than six years.

Dartmouth banned hard liquor entirely at the beginning of 2015, while the University of Virginia established rules limiting hard liquor at large Greek parties to events with a hired bartender.

Both Dartmouth and U.Va. announced their policy changes in the wake of high-profile sexual assault allegations.

Stanford’s policy change comes just a few months after former Stanford student Brock Allen Turner was sentenced to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.

During the case, Turner blamed his behavior on drinking. “I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decision hurt someone … my poor decision making and excessive drinking hurt someone that night,” he said in a statement. “I’ve been shattered by the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school.”

In a letter that went viral, the woman Turner assaulted repeatedly pointed out that drinking was not Turner’s crime: It was assault.

“You were not wrong for drinking. Everyone around you was not sexually assaulting me. You were wrong for doing what nobody else was doing,” she said, before graphically describing the assault. “Why am I still explaining this.”

“You realize, having a drinking problem is different than drinking and then forcefully trying to have sex with someone?” she said.

On Twitter, two Stanford professors expressed frustration with the announcement of the alcohol policy change, specifically that it was announced in the wake of sexual assaults but addresses drinking instead of consent.

Source: http://n.pr/2bpTfDo

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Organ Donor? There’s more you need to understand.

Becoming an organ donor seems like a win-win situation. Some 3.3 people on the transplant waiting list will have their lives extended by your gift (3.3 is the average yield of solid organs per donor). You’re a hero, and at no real cost, apparently.

But what are you giving up when you check the donor box on your license? Your organs, of course—but much more. You’re also giving up your right to informed consent. Doctors don’t have to tell you or your relatives what they will do to your body during an organ harvest operation because you’ll be dead, with no legal rights.

The most likely donors are victims of head trauma (from, say, a car or motorcycle accident), spontaneous bleeding in the head, or an aneurysm—patients who can be ruled dead based on brain-death criteria. But brain deaths are estimated to be just around 1% of the total. Everyone else dies from failure of the heart, circulation and breathing, which leads the organs to deteriorate quickly.

The current criteria on brain death were set by a Harvard Medical School committee in 1968, at a time when organ transplantation was making great strides. In 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act made brain death a legal form of death in all 50 states.

The exam for brain death is simple. A doctor splashes ice water in your ears (to look for shivering in the eyes), pokes your eyes with a cotton swab and checks for any gag reflex, among other rudimentary tests. It takes less time than a standard eye exam. Finally, in what’s called the apnea test, the ventilator is disconnected to see if you can breathe unassisted. If not, you are brain dead. (Some or all of the above tests are repeated hours later for confirmation.)
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Here’s the weird part. If you fail the apnea test, your respirator is reconnected. You will begin to breathe again, your heart pumping blood, keeping the organs fresh. Doctors like to say that, at this point, the “person” has departed the body. You will now be called a BHC, or beating-heart cadaver.

Still, you will have more in common biologically with a living person than with a person whose heart has stopped. Your vital organs will function, you’ll maintain your body temperature, and your wounds will continue to heal. You can still get bedsores, have heart attacks and get fever from infections.

“I like my dead people cold, stiff, gray and not breathing,” says Dr. Michael A. DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “The brain dead are warm, pink and breathing.”

You might also be emitting brainwaves. Most people are surprised to learn that many people who are declared brain dead are never actually tested for higher-brain activity. The 1968 Harvard committee recommended that doctors use electroencephalography (EEG) to make sure the patient has flat brain waves. Today’s tests concentrate on the stalk-like brain stem, in charge of basics such as breathing, sleeping and waking. The EEG would alert doctors if the cortex, the thinking part of your brain, is still active.

But various researchers decided that this test was unnecessary, so it was eliminated from the mandatory criteria in 1971. They reasoned that, if the brain stem is dead, the higher centers of the brain are also probably dead.

But in at least two studies before the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act, some “brain-dead” patients were found to be emitting brain waves. One, from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the 1970s, found that out of 503 patients who met the usual criteria of brain death, 17 showed activity in an EEG.

Even some of the sharpest critics of the brain-death criteria argue that there is no possibility that donors will be in pain during the harvesting of their organs. One, Robert Truog, professor of medical ethics, anesthesia and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, compared the topic of pain in an organ donor to an argument over “whether it is OK to kick a rock.”

But BHCs—who don’t receive anesthetics during an organ harvest operation—react to the scalpel like inadequately anesthetized live patients, exhibiting high blood pressure and sometimes soaring heart rates. Doctors say these are simply reflexes.

What if there is sound evidence that you are alive after being declared brain dead? In a 1999 article in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology, Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington, reported a case in which a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. The physicians said that, because there was no chance of recovery, he could still be considered dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move, and then react to the scalpel with hypertension.

Organ transplantation—from procurement of organs to transplant to the first year of postoperative care—is a $20 billion per year business. Recipients of single-organ transplants—heart, intestine, kidney, liver, single and double lung and pancreas—are charged an average $470,000, ranging from $288,000 for a kidney transplant to $1.2 million for an intestine transplant, according to consulting firm Milliman. Neither donors nor their families can be paid for organs.

It is possible that not being a donor on your license can give you more bargaining power. If you leave instructions with your next of kin, they can perhaps negotiate a better deal. Instead of just the usual icewater-in-the-ears, why not ask for a blood-flow study to make sure your cortex is truly out of commission?

And how about some anesthetic? Although he doesn’t believe the brain dead feel pain, Dr. Truog has used two light anesthetics, high-dose fentanyl and sufentanil, which won’t harm organs, to quell high blood pressure or heart rate during harvesting operations. “If it were my family,” he said, “I’d request them.”

Source: http://on.wsj.com/2bbcApy

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What you eat may affect your mental health. New research links diet and the mind.

Jodi Corbitt had been battling depression for decades and by 2010 had resigned herself to taking antidepressant medication for the rest of her life. Then she decided to start a dietary experiment.

To lose weight, the 47-year-old Catonsville, Md., mother stopped eating gluten, a protein found in wheat and related grains. Within a month she had shed several pounds — and her lifelong depression.

“It was like a veil lifted and I could see life more clearly,” she recalled. “It changed everything.”

Corbitt had stumbled into an area that scientists have recently begun to investigate: whether food can have as powerful an impact on the mind as it does on the body.

Research exploring the link between diet and mental health “is a very new field; the first papers only came out a few years ago,” said Michael Berk, a professor of psychiatry at the Deakin University School of Medicine in Australia. “But the results are unusually consistent, and they show a link between diet quality and mental health.”
Health expert-approved recipes

“Diet quality” refers to the kinds of foods that people eat, how often they eat them and how much of them they eat. In several studies, including a 2011 analysis of more than 5,000 Norwegians, Berk and his collaborators have found lower rates of depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder among those who consumed a traditional diet of meat and vegetables than among people who followed a modern Western diet heavy with processed and fast foods or even a health-food diet of tofu and salads.

“Traditional diets — the kinds of foods your grandmother would have recognized — have been associated with a lower risk of mental health issues,” Berk said. Interestingly, that traditional diet may vary widely across cultures, including wheat for some people but not for others; the common element seems to be whole, unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods.

“There’s lots of hype about the Mediterranean diet [fruits, vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, nuts, fish] but the traditional Norwegian diet [fish, shellfish, game, root vegetables, dairy products, whole-wheat bread] and the traditional Japanese diet [fish, tofu, rice] appear to be just as protective” of mental health, he said.

The association between diet and mental well-being may start even before birth. A 2013 study of more than 23,000 mothers and their children, led by Berk’s frequent collaborator and Deakin colleague Felice Jacka, suggests a link between a mother’s consumption of sweets and processed foods during pregnancy and behavioral and mental health issues in her child at age 5.

It’s unclear how diet relates to mental health, said Rif El-Mallakh, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. “There seems to be a clear link, but it’s an association — it doesn’t tell you cause and effect,” he said. “We don’t know which is the chicken and which is the egg.”

It could be, he said, that mood disorders change how and what people choose to eat.

But an alternate theory is that the relationship works the other way: Certain foods, or their absence, may contribute to poor mental health. For example, studies in people and rats have linked zinc deficiency to depression. Also, illnesses that cause deficiencies — including celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body reacts to gluten — have shown associations with mood disorders.

“There’s a two-way street between what’s going on in the gut and what’s going on in the brain,” said Linda A. Lee, director of the Johns Hopkins Integrative Medicine and Digestive Center — and recent research points to bacteria as possible middlemen in this back-and-forth. Gut bacteria are known to make most of the body’s serotonin, one of several chemicals that regulate mood, and the bugs may even have a hand in shaping behavior. A 2011 study in mice for example, showed that swapping the gut bacteria of two strains of mice — one known for its daring behavior, the other for its fearfulness and shyness — could make the timid mice more willing to explore and the bold mice more anxious and hesitant.

Of course, mice are not men, but changing diet has been shown to change human gut bacteria, and fairly quickly. That suggests it’s possible that dietary choices can alter well-being and behavior, Lee said, but researchers aren’t yet sure if this complex interplay means that swapping food in or out of one’s diet can ease or cure a mental illness.

“We’re not at the point where we can use diet as therapy, especially when we’re dealing with someone whose mental health issues render them very disabled, because we just don’t know enough,” Lee said. “I think we’re just on the new frontier, and five or 10 years from now we’ll know more.”

Jacka, president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research, echoes these reservations. She notes that nearly all research on the connection between diet and mental health has been limited to animal studies and observational studies in humans.

“We can’t say [that] if we improve your diet, you’ll feel better,” she said. “We have circumstantial evidence that suggests this could be true, but we can’t say for sure.”

The lack of strong evidence and well-designed studies has led to some resistance to Berk’s and Jacka’s work. Until recently, “the idea that what you put in your mouth could affect your mental health was met with great skepticism,” said Jacka, who recalled colleagues’ dismissing the idea as “rubbish.” With more studies, though, the research community is beginning to come around, she said.

Even as scientists struggle to understand the link between food and mood, some patients, such as Corbitt, seem to tap into it without intending to.
She saw a link

“I changed my diet because I had gastrointestinal issues,” said a 32-year-old woman with bipolar disorder who lives in San Francisco and asked not to be named because she worries about being stigmatized. Three years ago, at her gastroenterologist’s urging, she tried the Atkins diet and found relief — not just from her digestive issues but also from her mental illness, which had at one point nearly derailed her life.

“I noticed within a day or two the marked difference in my head,” she recalled. “It felt clear for the first time in years and years.”

That may seem like a surprisingly quick turnaround, but Jacka said it is not out of the question. “We know from animal studies and a human study that a poor diet can impair memory and attention within a week,” she said.

The woman no longer takes the medication prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder, and she said she has remained stable for the past three years. She said she has sought out psychiatric and neurological researchers across the country, hoping to share her experience and to learn what they know, but has found little interest and few studies.

“It surprised me how little information was out there, because for me it was life-changing,” she said. “I wanted to validate the experience I was having, and to make sure that everything I was doing was safe. That’s how I found Dr. El-Mallakh.”

El-Mallakh had hypothesized in 2001 that a ketogenic diet — a high-fat, moderate-protein and low-carbohydrate diet often used to control epileptic seizures and nearly identical to the diet adopted by the 32-year-old woman — could be helpful for bipolar disorder, because many of the medications that work for bipolar disorder have anti-
seizure properties.

After being contacted by the woman, El-Mallakh found several other people with bipolar disorder who said they were benefiting from a ketogenic diet. Last year,he published two case studies of its apparent effectiveness. His report drew interest from people with the mental illness, but efforts at Stanford University to test the diet with a controlled trial failed to recruit enough participants.

Without such studies, El-Mallakh acknowledged that no one can say how the diet might quell the symptoms of bipolar disorder. With his own patients, herecommends it only alongside mood-stabilizing medications. Despite his own willingness to supplement mental health treatment with dietary changes, El-Mallakh remains skeptical that diet alone can heal the mind.

“There are a lot of people out there who call themselves depressed who aren’t actually depressed,” he said. “I think people confuse low energy with depression, or sugar crashes with mood swings, but they probably don’t have a mental illness. And those people may do better with dietary interventions alone.”

And even if diet can do the trick, providers don’t yet know how to use it effectively or safely. The problem, El-Mallakh said, is that mental illness is still poorly understood. Eventually, he hopes, the connection between food and mental health could benefit researchers who study mental illness as well as those who live with it.
Experimenting with change

Berk and Jacka areconducting the most comprehensive controlled study yet, involving 176 people, of whether dietary intervention can help ease depression, but they don’t yet have results. For now, Berk advocates an integrative approach to treating mental illness that includes experimenting with changes in diet and exercise along with more traditional treatments.

“For a mood disorder like depression, there are hundreds if not thousands of risk pathways that all contribute to the disorder,” Berk said. “Targeting one factor doesn’t target all the factors that cause someone to develop depression. That’s why you need to develop an integrated package of care as the norm.”

That time can’t come soon enough for Corbitt.

“This was such a simple solution,” she said. “I could have saved myself a lot of money and a lot of misery if someone had asked about my diet 15 years ago. My life could have been different.”

Source: http://wapo.st/2bmw0fj

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In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book “On Photography.” This was something I thought about when I recently read that Google was making its one-hundred-and-forty-nine-dollar photo-editing suite, the Google Nik Collection, free. This photo-editing software is as beloved among photographers as, say, Katz’s Deli is among those who dream of pastrami sandwiches.

Before Google bought it, in 2012, the collection cost five hundred dollars. It is made up of seven pieces of specialized software that, when used in combination with other photo-editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, give photographers a level of control akin to that once found in the darkroom. They can mimic old film stock, add analog photo effects, or turn color shots into black-and-white photos. The suite can transform modestly good photos into magical ones. Collectively, Nik’s intellectual sophistication is that of a chess grand master. I don’t mind paying for the software, and neither do thousands of photographers and enthusiasts. So, like many, I wondered, why would Google make it free?

My guess is that it wants to kill the software, but it doesn’t want the P.R. nightmare that would follow. Remember the outcry over its decision to shut down its tool for R.S.S. feeds, Google Reader? Nik loyalists are even more rabid. By making the software free, the company can both ignore the product and avoid a backlash. But make no mistake: it is only a matter of time before Nik goes the way of the film camera—into the dustbin of technological history.

“The giveaway is bad news, as it means the software they paid for has almost [certainly] reached the end of the line in terms of updates,” wrote PC World. And, as Google explained in the blog post announcing the news, the company will “focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile.” That means Google Photos, the company’s tool for storing and sorting, and Nik’s own Snapseed app for mobile phones.

Google’s comments—disheartening as they might be—reflect the reality of our shifting technologies. Sure, we all like listening to music on vinyl, but that doesn’t mean streaming music on Spotify is bad. Streaming just fits today’s world better. I love my paper and ink, but I see the benefits of the iPad and Apple Pencil. Digital photography is going through a similar change, and Google is smart to refocus.

To understand Google’s decision, one needs to understand how our relationship with photographs has changed. From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today we don’t even think twice about snapping a shot. About two years ago, Peter Neubauer, the co-founder of the Swedish database company Neo Technology, pointed out to me that photography has seen the value shift from “the stand-alone individual aesthetic of the artist to the collaborative and social aesthetic of services like Facebook and Instagram.” In the future, he said, the “real value creation will come from stitching together photos as a fabric, extracting information and then providing that cumulative information as a totally different package.”

His comments make sense: we have come to a point in society where we are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them.

“The definition of photography is changing, too, and becoming more of a language,” the Brooklyn-based artist and professional photographer Joshua Allen Harris told me. “We’re attaching imagery to tweets or text messages, almost like a period at the end of a sentence. It’s enhancing our communication in a whole new way.”

In other words, “the term ‘photographer’ is changing,” he said. As a result, photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives. And, just as with bookmarks, after a few months it becomes hard to find photos or even to navigate back to the points worth remembering. Google made hoarding bookmarks futile. Today we think of something, and then we Google it. Photos are evolving along the same path as well.

Humans have two billion smartphones, and, based on the ultra-conservative assumption that we each upload about two photos a day to various Internet platforms, that means we take about four billion photographs a day. It’s hard to imagine how many photos total are sitting on our devices.

Thanks to our obsession with photography—and, in particular, the cultural rise of selfies—the problem of how to sort all these images has left the realm of human capabilities. Instead, we need to augment humans with machines, which are better at sifting through thousands of photos, analyzing them, finding commonalities, and drawing inferences around moments that matter. Machines can start to learn our style of photography.

Google Photos, a service the company has fully committed to, is built to do just that—organize and enhance maddeningly large photo libraries. Upload your photos to Google’s Cloud and the program will sort through them, remove duplicates, pick out the best ones, tag them, build albums of your vacations, and create animated GIFs for you to share with others. The Assistant feature even edits your photos. The human just has to dump a lot of stuff in a pile; the machine takes care of the rest.

The more photos Google has, the easier it is for its algorithms to learn and become even more precise and effective at the job of creatively editing. I worry about Google’s data ethics and about the idea of handing over the corpus of my life, but I can’t deny that it is exceptional at making sense of my ever-growing photo library. Facebook, too, is clever at arranging photos along the axis of relationships and time. This is a moment for incredible automation, because of the confluence of affordable and large-scale parallel computation, the increased availability of bigger data sets, and advanced deep-learning algorithms.

It’s not just improved technological capabilities bringing about this shift. Google, Facebook, and Instagram are also reacting to a larger shift away from desktop-oriented computing to always-on computing via our Chromebooks, phones, tablets, and other devices. These devices essentially need software that is built to work with the Cloud, not with one machine on your desk. The functionality of the desktop-centric Nik Collection and its plugins is going to be and should be shoved into mobile apps such as Snapseed and VSCO. Just as apps like Instagram and devices like iPhone made us all able to take decent photos, the new intelligent software should make all our shots effortlessly better, as well as much easier to find and share.

The amateur in me is thrilled by the prospect of living in the Cloud, editing on the go. The purist in me wonders if, in the future, desktop photo editing will be like the film-photography revival of today—a luxury to feed our nostalgia, a wistful effort to exercise human control over a task machines have taken over from us. I wonder what Sontag would make of that.

Source: http://bit.ly/2bgObQM

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Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here.

Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.

“Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the seawater filters before making its way to a vast metal hangar, where it is transformed into enough drinking water to supply 1.5 million people.

We are standing above the new Sorek desalination plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desal facility in the world, and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.

Bar-Zeev, who recently joined Israel’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research after completing his postdoc work at Yale University, is an expert on biofouling, which has always been an Achilles’ heel of desalination and one of the reasons it has been considered a last resort. Desal works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. But microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But Bar-Zeev and colleagues developed a chemical-free system using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. It’s just one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.

Driven by necessity, Israel is learning to squeeze more out of a drop of water than any country on Earth, and much of that learning is happening at the Zuckerberg Institute, where researchers have pioneered new techniques in drip irrigation, water treatment and desalination. They have developed resilient well systems for African villages and biological digesters than can halve the water usage of most homes.

The institute’s original mission was to improve life in Israel’s bone-dry Negev Desert, but the lessons look increasingly applicable to the entire Fertile Crescent. “The Middle East is drying up,” says Osnat Gillor, a professor at the Zuckerberg Institute who studies the use of recycled wastewater on crops. “The only country that isn’t suffering acute water stress is Israel.”

That water stress has been a major factor in the turmoil tearing apart the Middle East, but Bar-Zeev believes that Israel’s solutions can help its parched neighbors, too — and in the process, bring together old enemies in common cause.

Bar-Zeev acknowledges that water will likely be a source of conflict in the Middle East in the future. “But I believe water can be a bridge, through joint ventures,” he says. “And one of those ventures is desalination.”

Driven to Desperation

In 2008, Israel teetered on the edge of catastrophe. A decade-long drought had scorched the Fertile Crescent, and Israel’s largest source of freshwater, the Sea of Galilee, had dropped to within inches of the “black line” at which irreversible salt infiltration would flood the lake and ruin it forever. Water restrictions were imposed, and many farmers lost a year’s crops.

Their counterparts in Syria fared much worse. As the drought intensified and the water table plunged, Syria’s farmers chased it, drilling wells 100, 200, then 500 meters (300, 700, then 1,600 feet) down in a literal race to the bottom. Eventually, the wells ran dry and Syria’s farmland collapsed in an epic dust storm. More than a million farmers joined massive shantytowns on the outskirts of Aleppo, Homs, Damascus and other cities in a futile attempt to find work and purpose.

And that, according to the authors of “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was the tinder that burned Syria to the ground. “The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria,” they wrote, “marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.”

Similar stories are playing out across the Middle East, where drought and agricultural collapse have produced a lost generation with no prospects and simmering resentments. Iran, Iraq and Jordan all face water catastrophes. Water is driving the entire region to desperate acts.

More Water Than Needs

Except Israel. Amazingly, Israel has more water than it needs. The turnaround started in 2007, when low-flow toilets and showerheads were installed nationwide and the national water authority built innovative water treatment systems that recapture 86 percent of the water that goes down the drain and use it for irrigation — vastly more than the second-most-efficient country in the world, Spain, which recycles 19 percent.

But even with those measures, Israel still needed about 1.9 billion cubic meters (2.5 billion cubic yards) of freshwater per year and was getting just 1.4 billion cubic meters (1.8 billion cubic yards) from natural sources. That 500-million-cubic-meter (650-million-cubic-yard) shortfall was why the Sea of Galilee was draining like an unplugged tub and why the country was about to lose its farms.

Enter desalination. The Ashkelon plant, in 2005, provided 127 million cubic meters (166 million cubic yards) of water. Hadera, in 2009, put out another 140 million cubic meters (183 million cubic yards). And now Sorek, 150 million cubic meters (196 million cubic yards). All told, desal plants can provide some 600 million cubic meters (785 million cubic yards) of water a year, and more are on the way.

The Sea of Galilee is fuller. Israel’s farms are thriving. And the country faces a previously unfathomable question: What to do with its extra water?

Water Diplomacy

Inside Sorek, 50,000 membranes enclosed in vertical white cylinders, each 4 feet high and 16 inches wide, are whirring like jet engines. The whole thing feels like a throbbing spaceship about to blast off. The cylinders contain sheets of plastic membranes wrapped around a central pipe, and the membranes are stippled with pores less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair. Water shoots into the cylinders at a pressure of 70 atmospheres and is pushed through the membranes, while the remaining brine is returned to the sea.

Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).

The International Desalination Association claims that 300 million people get water from desalination, and that number is quickly rising. IDE, the Israeli company that built Ashkelon, Hadera and Sorek, recently finished the Carlsbad desalination plant in Southern California, a close cousin of its Israel plants, and it has many more in the works. Worldwide, the equivalent of six additional Sorek plants are coming online every year. The desalination era is here.

What excites Bar-Zeev the most is the opportunity for water diplomacy. Israel supplies the West Bank with water, as required by the 1995 Oslo II Accords, but the Palestinians still receive far less than they need. Water has been entangled with other negotiations in the ill-fated peace process, but now that more is at hand, many observers see the opportunity to depoliticize it. Bar-Zeev has ambitious plans for a Water Knows No Boundaries conference in 2018, which will bring together water scientists from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for a meeting of the minds.

Even more ambitious is the US$900 million Red Sea–Dead Sea Canal, a joint venture between Israel and Jordan to build a large desalination plant on the Red Sea, where they share a border, and divide the water among Israelis, Jordanians and the Palestinians. The brine discharge from the plant will be piped 100 miles north through Jordan to replenish the Dead Sea, which has been dropping a meter per year since the two countries began diverting the only river that feeds it in the 1960s. By 2020, these old foes will be drinking from the same tap.

On the far end of the Sorek plant, Bar-Zeev and I get to share a tap as well. Branching off from the main line where the Sorek water enters the Israeli grid is a simple spigot, a paper cup dispenser beside it. I open the tap and drink cup after cup of what was the Mediterranean Sea 40 minutes ago. It tastes cold, clear and miraculous.

The contrasts couldn’t be starker. A few miles from here, water disappeared and civilization crumbled. Here, a galvanized civilization created water from nothingness. As Bar-Zeev and I drink deep, and the climate sizzles, I wonder which of these stories will be the exception, and which the rule.

Source: http://bit.ly/2aFnNAI