1 Week, 7 Stories - Newsletter #27

Every edition features 7 stories, from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.

Sometimes built around a theme, sometimes random, but with a Canadian twist.

The Automated Vehicles Act has received the royal assent needed to become law in the United Kingdom. According to TechCrunch, the Transport Secretary has said this means that self-driving vehicles will be rolling down the roads by 2026. That is good news for the UK based company Wayve, which has quietly been building up its own autonomous vehicle technology. Earlier this month it announced a new $1.05 billion round of investment which included NVIDIA and Microsoft putting some change into the collection plate.

Creating driverless cars that are safe, practical, and cost-effective means overcoming numerous challenges including accurate cameras, reliable radar and infrared sensors, and counting on areas blanketed by 5G networks. I have a tough time imagining a self-driving vehicle here in Calgary after a winter storm where the roads are slippery, the snowbanks are high, and slush and gravel cover those sensors.? ?We’re not just talking about cars either. Trucker-less trucks could be on the highway this year, and already tractors are guided by GPS to the point where the farmer is often going through the motions of being in charge. US News published? a list of what it saw as the 10 vehicles that are “almost self-driving”. Bloomberg News has laid out why these vehicles still need a co-pilot.

In Canada, changes to British Columbia’s Motor Vehicle Act prohibits the use of fully automated cars (sorry to all my friends fleeing to the coast!). Not that it matters much right now because at the federal level, Transport Canada does not permit the purchase or import of automated vehicles.

There are still many questions to be answered about what the future looks like with a mix of driverless vehicles and those with drivers navigating around urban centres or doing a long haul on the highway. The Canadian Automobile Association will take you through some of the myths and questions about a technology that may be closer than we realize.?

While we sort out how the when, why, and where of driverless cars here on terra firma, the Boeing Starliner is still trying to get into space with a crew onboard. It was originally scheduled to blast off on May 6th but that was postponed when the launch vehicle developed a problem with a valve. It was re-scheduled to May 21st and that too was postponed because of a helium leak in the service module. To rub a little salt in the Boeing wound,? it is worth nothing that 12 years ago this month Elon Musk’s Space-X completed a commercial flight to the International Space Station (ISS).

So what’s up with the Starliner and another week with another leak?

The spacecraft was developed with the help of $4.2 billion in funding from NASA, first saw the light of day in 2015, and had its first successful uncrewed launch in 2019. Its first successful docking (no crew) with the ISS came in 2022. In between there was a mix of successes and failures which are laid out on the Interesting Engineering website.? A successful Starliner with a crew onboard will certainly help Boeing improve its reputation while another postponement or worse yet an accident, will raise more questions.

As I write this, the launch was delayed yet again. The new target is June 1st. ?My hat is off to the two astronauts who will eventually take the well-calculated risk to guide the problem-plagued craft successfully to its ISS destination.

Canada’s Public Health Agency is introducing new guidelines to deal with antimicrobial resistance or AMR. A Global News video from 2022 will set up this story for you with a good first-person account of what happens when a patient has an untreatable infection. AMR leads to infections that are resistant to most or all the drugs we commonly use to kill infections before they kill us. A Guardian story notes that drug resistant infections already kill more than a million people every year and the numbers are headed up. The new guidelines are important not just to save lives, but by 2050 the cumulative costs to Canada’s healthcare system to deal with antimicrobial resistance could hit $120 billion. The new guidelines are part of a pan-Canadian plan to deal with an increasingly serious problem that puts a strain on our healthcare system and can be lethal for patients.

There are options to deal with the AMR challenge, and a woman in Ottawa recently became the first Canadian to benefit from a new treatment called phage therapy which uses bacteriophages to deal with infections. Though still in the experimental stage in many countries, the potential of these phages goes back a hundred years and can be credited to a French-Canadian scientist. A bacteriophage is a virus which only infects bacteria and as you’ll hear in this interview from CBC Radio’s Calgary Eye Opener, what was old is new again and phages could be a key component in dealing with drug resistant infections.

A ?feature story published in the journal Nature this week, digs into the harassment that scientists around the world are facing more and more often. Climate scientists have dealt with it for years and during the COVID-19 pandemic researchers who spoke out about the causes and prevention of the disease were new targets for harassment.? Now you can add mathematic disease modellers, physicists, and fluid-dynamic researchers to the list!

The Nature story offers some good examples and this week we can add a made-in-Alberta example led by Calgary MLA Eric Bouchard who is organizing a meeting he calls “An Injection of Truth”. The meeting is centred around the COVID mRNA vaccine and says it will feature “an all-star cast of Doctors and scientists”.

?CTV News looked at the background of those panelists and found that one is not a medical doctor, one has an ongoing lawsuit against Alberta Health Services over mandatory vaccinations, one has had his medical licence cancelled by the? College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta,? another was suspended by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in 2023, one is a veterinarian, and one is a Doctor of Philosophy who calls herself an “independent researcher”. ?The MLA’s feed on X is heavy on attacks on opponents, contains a measure of climate change denialism, and lately an obsession with vaccines. One of the people he invited as a panelist for the meeting was Tim Caulfield a University of Alberta law professor, research director of the Health Law Institute, a champion of science in decision making, and someone who actively campaigns against disinformation. Tim declined and Mr. Bouchard immediately posted the fact on his X feed. To my mind it was a setup from the start. The town hall is geared towards anti-vaxxers, has a questionable panel, and had Tim appeared he was a target, not a guest.? The tickets for the event were originally sold through Eventbrite but the site dropped it earlier in the week.? Those tickets will set you back $53.52 if you are not a UCP member and if you want to “mix and mingle with the guest speakers” be prepared to shell out $174.90 to get your anti-vax misinformation booster shot. ?All this approved by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

Trust in science is important. Harassing scientists and researchers and hosting gatherings to spread misinformation as a political tool gets us nowhere.

Apart from misinformation and denial of facts, Artificial Intelligence is eroding trust even further. Or rather how AI is being used is eroding how we perceive our society, culture, and the world around us.

Take the case of an exclusive interview with Michael Schumacher printed by the German media outlet Die Aktuelle. Schumacher has not been seen in public since 2013 after he suffered a serious brain injury in a skiing accident. His family guards the seven-time Formula 1 winner’s condition and privacy closely so the interview was a front-page scoop.

Except it wasn’t.

Readers who skimmed through it or got the gist from social media could easily think it was legitimate. Readers with a longer attention span than a goldfish and who read right to the final few sentences found out they had been conned:

“Did Michael Schumacher really say everything himself?"

The print magazine also included a subheading which said, “It sounds deceptively real”.

The Schumacher family sued the magazine and this week the court ordered the magazine to pay 200,000 euros (about 296,000 Canadian dollars).

Die Aktuelle fired Ann Hoffman, the editor-in-chief and the German Press Council said the interview seriously mislead readers and was likely to damage the credibility of the media. Ironically, Ms. Hoffman sued the magazine’s publishers over her dismissal and won because the court said her firing was “not legally valid”.

This one story points out so much about where we look for news and information and who is delivering that information.

First off. Why generate a fake interview, dress it up to seem real, and bury the fact it was a fake?

Secondly, what is the rationale for voiding the dismissal of an editor who ignored the magazine and most of what journalism is supposed to stand for.

And what has happened to us as readers that we seemingly missed a confession that everyone involved – including readers – had wasted their time?

No wonder we are experiencing a crisis in trust.

While the world we live in seems strange enough, there are even stranger worlds out there.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered hundreds of new worlds and researchers have catalogued and described them in the latest Astrophysical Journal Supplement. The paper is a thorough scientific explanation but fortunately University of California, Riverside, makes it simpler for the rest of us. There is a planet that takes only 19 days to orbit a star similar to our own Sun. Image living on a planet so close to an orange dwarf star that you zip around it in 12 hours. New Years’ Eve twice a day!

Or the beautiful deep blue world that may look heavenly, but rains silicate glass.

Perhaps more hospitable is planet TOI 4633 c which orbits a double star. It has a more reasonable year that last 272 days and orbits in what is often referred to as the habitable zone where liquid water can form on a planetary surface.

Star Trek’s strange new worlds exist though it will take a lot more than five years to explore even one of them. In the meantime take in NASA’s own “Star Wars Planets in Our Own Galaxy”.

I saved this BBC story for last so the image of raw sewage coming out from under a manhole cover in the UK was not stuck in the back of your mind for too long. It seems the UK is not doing a very good job of protecting its rivers from yucky stuff making its way through poorly maintained or overloaded sewage systems. The BBC story highlights a report from the Royal Academy of Engineering which called for an upgrade of the sewage system across the country and more testing of the waterways. Rowers in the annual Oxford Cambridge Boat Race in March were warned not to take the usual splash of river water and definitely not to throw the winning coxswain into the river, all because of ?high levels of raw sewage.? River Action UK says the problem around the country is so bad “someone is going to die” because of the high E coli levels.

In Canada we are having our own problems.

In Manitoba, the provincial government has ordered the city of Winnipeg to complete an up-to $2.3-billion plan to reduce combined sewer overflows by 2045. Combined sewers collect both wastewater and precipitation which can overflow into rivers. ?Last week a heavy hail storm led to 5.5 million litres of diluted wastewater flowing into the Red River. In British Columbia’s Burrard Inlet wastewater and contaminants washed off city streets has made shellfish unsafe to eat and people are regularly barred from swimming at local beaches according to an investigation by The Narwhal.

Stay tuned for the Paris Olympics which get underway in 2 months, because some of those events are also being challenged by rising E coli levels. Organizers say a decade long clean-up has ensured the river is safe for competitors, but not everyone is convinced.

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I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.

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