1 Week, 7 Stories - Newsletter #40

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.

By the time you read this edition of my newsletter back-to-school is ever so close and that means kids with a lot more on their minds running through crosswalks or hopping out of cars into the street. And with it comes my lead story.

In Alberta the first Schoolboy Patrol Club hit the streets in 1937 with fifth and sixth graders directing traffic in downtown Calgary near?Haultain School. (Safety patrols started in the UK around the same time where they are known as Lollipop Men/Women). ?In 1938 the Police Service became involved and there were 16 more schools with patrols. It continued to expand and had its own marching band in ?1957 which is still around today as the Calgary Round-Up Band. There was even a weekly TV program called Calgary Safety Roundup with Ernie McCullough and the Golden Rockets as the house band and other entertainers including Dixie Lee Stone (my grade school crush at the time!) who went on to become part of the musical group, The Original Caste.? Safety was?the over-arching theme for the show of course.

There is a National School Safety Patrol program run by the Canadian Automobile Association but every province has their own version of school crosswalk patrols. An interview this week on CBC Radio in Ottawa featured 2 of the 300 paid crossing guards in the city talking about what the job is like and why they do it.

?In British Columbia, 51 children are injured every year in school and playground zones. A 2021 paper in the Journal of Transport & Health found a high percentage of speeding in front of schools. 45% in Calgary and 42% in Toronto.

The CAA has done polling on school zone safety which highlights the need for school patrols. Nearly half of Canadians polled say they have seen distracted drivers in school zones and 70% say they have witnessed speeding. ?

And when is the month for pedestrians in school zones? September, so look sharp in the coming weeks.

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Ferris wheels (or pleasure wheels as they were once called) have been around for about 400 years and are one of the more popular attractions at midways, festivals, and amusement parks. Sometimes however things can go awry as was the case with a Ferris wheel in Germany which caught fire last week.? Twenty people were injured with burns, smoke inhalation, and one from falling. Fortunately, no one was killed.

Most Ferris wheel problems come from the ride stalling or being stuck, leaving people stranded a long way from the ground. In April, ten people had to be rescued from a stalled Ferris wheel at the Woodbine Centre in Toronto. In June something went wrong with the Rock-O-Plane wheel in Torbay, Newfoundland & Labrador, and pieces of metal fell from the ride to the ground below. No one was hurt, but workers had to manually spin the wheel to get all the riders off the ride. In Chicago, several people spent an hour stuck on the Navy Pier Centennial Wheel when an electrical? problem stopped it from turning. And in a rather bizarre incident in July, a small Ferris wheel in Washington State simply tipped over, injuring six people.

You’ll notice Ferris is always capitalized. That’s because it is a proper noun referring to George Washington Ferris Jr. who designed the modern amusement park favourite in 1893. His wheel debuted at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and had 36 gondolas that could hold 60 people each. They were able to take in the view from a height of 80.5 metres (264 feet). Though it was not the first pleasure wheel ever built, it was the biggest and used? a steel framework which made it stand out from the wooden rings with seats attached that was rotated by what must have been a very strong crew.

For comparison, the Dubai Eye which closed unexpectedly last year, is 250 metres (820 feet) high, leaving the High Roller Observation Wheel in Las Vegas as the tallest at 168 metres (550 feet). Quite a jump from the record holder to second place.

The rules governing Ferris wheels (and other midway rides) are a provincial responsibility. They are highly regulated, must be licensed (as are the mechanics who maintain the equipment), are inspected before a ride is allowed to open, and subject to surprise inspections.

Climb aboard and ?Wheeeeeeeeeee ….!

The banana apocalypse is nigh, but then I was writing about bananas on the verge of collapse when I worked in the biotech sector many years ago. Genetics was heralded as the saviour then and it is again, but moving away from a monoculture agricultural system is the more sustainable solution.

First, the latest news on the problem of fusarium wilt which needs to be brought under control before it does more damage. In the 1950s the Gros Michel banana was the variety of choice but was devastated by fusarium wilt and has been replaced by the Cavendish banana. ?Now that too is being threatened. A paper published in Nature Microbiology last week, concluded that it is a different strain of the disease that brought the Gros Michel reign to an end. With a little genomic wizardry to eliminate two genes, researchers hope that the spread of fusarium can be mitigated or at least controlled.

In Australia researchers seem to be one step ahead in the effort to keep the Cavendish banana on our breakfast and snack menus. The Government of Australia has given the Queensland University of Technology a licence to release a genetically modified Cavendish, and Food Standards Australia New Zealand has approved the variety for human consumption. It has taken more than 20 years from the start of the research to the approval of the new resistant variety but there are no immediate plans to grow it in Australia. Strict biosecurity regulations have kept fusarium at bay and the GM variety is seen more as a safety net to protect the Australian industry.

There are about a thousand different varieties of bananas though only about half are edible. Good luck trying to find anything other than the run of the mill Cavendish or Plantain at your local grocery store and there lies one of the other problems with the supply and security of bananas around the world. Monoculture is the practice of growing one crop in a field or in the case of bananas, one variety across the sector in a given country. It is an intensive form of agriculture and as illustrated by the current Cavendish threat, leaves entire crops or regions susceptible to a single disease or pest. Large companies find it easier and more profitable to buy or produce a single crop variety. Consumers need to shoulder some of the problem. Unless we ask for, demand, and purchase other varieties there is no incentive for retailers or wholesalers to make the varieties available.? You can try growing your own (yes it is possible in Canada) but that is hardly an answer for most of us. If you live in the Unites States, Miami Fruit has lots of varieties for sale, but we don’t seem to have an equivalent here.

Have a chat with your local retailer or stall owners at a farmers’ market. Who knows what may turn up!

Bubble nets. Sounds like it could be another Internet tool or a new Bubble Tea. Nope. Bubble nets are created by a humpback whale when it dives deep and then blows air to create big bubbles which confuses and traps fish caught in the path of the bubbles.

New research published this week in the peer-reviewed Royal Society Open Science shows that these bubble nets are not just random or an opportunistic practice. The humpbacks can manipulate and control the bubbles and engage in co-operative feeding efforts with other whales. The authors make the case that the behaviour puts the whale in the same company as other animals which manufacture and use their own tools. ?

In the animal science world, a tool is defined as “the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool”.

The use of tools by animals is rare, but even more rare are animals who manufacture and modify their own tools, which is where the bubble net fits.

Chimpanzees use stick tools to dig food such as fruit and insects out of otherwise hard to reach spots. Research published in Current Biology found the chimps chose the sticks, trimmed them to suit the task at hand, and used them as a spear and not just for digging out the food. They also learned over time to modify their tool grip and use.

New Caledonian crows not only use sticks to poke around for insects and larvae but choose specific types of sticks for certain tasks and will peck at the sticks to alter the shape. Cockatoos have also demonstrated similar skills.

In captivity, elephants have learned to use tires to help get at food and in the wild use sticks and leaves to swat away flies.

In areas where prey for sea otters is declining, they have turned to hard-shell foods that requires some extra help to crack them open. The otters have learned to use rocks to crack open clams.

The new research findings about humpback whale behaviour shows that there is so much more to learn about the very animals we are harming through climate change and our actions which destroy their habitat and food sources.

The rise of the robotaxi is in sight.

According to TechCrunch Waymo has 100,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across its fleet of autonomous electric Jaguars in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix.? Waymo got its start as the Google Self-Driving Project in 2009 and has evolved into a subsidiary of Alphabet. It refers to its hardware and software technology as Waymo Driver?which as of this month, is in its 6th generation. The cars are equipped with “13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers” which overlap fields of view up to 500 metres away.

Robotaxis are still in only a few markets, but they are hitting the streets in significant numbers. A Forbes story says that Chinese and U.S. self-driving taxis have logged 60 million miles.? Waymo is the leader, but Zoox is now owned by Amazon so you can expect that start-up to be putting on some miles soon. For several years now Tesla has been saying it would be entering the market but has yet to hit the roads and the Forbes story is skeptical that it will ever happen. Cruise is majority owned by GM and was forced to stop operation after one of its cars hit a pedestrian, however the company said in July it was ready to get the project back on track.

The MIT Technology Review says the road ahead for the North American robotaxi industry is a bumpy one. For a start no one is making a profit yet and while that might be typical for fledging technology, the autonomous services have some unique challenges. Uber or regular taxi drivers work for barely minimum wage, use mid-priced vehicles, and cover the cost of much of the maintenance themselves. Robotaxis are complex vehicles, are expensive to get on the road, and require specialized maintenance. Human operated services certainly have accidents, but when an autonomous vehicle has an accident, it makes the headlines and regulators pay extra attention. ??

The market in China is somewhat different probably because some cities are on an all-out campaign to become the first driverless city. In Wuhan passengers can take a six-mile ride for the equivalent of 50 cents while the same taxi with a person behind the wheel could cost 4 or 5 times that amount. In the U.S. the experience is the exact opposite.?

Yes, robotaxis are coming, but not necessarily to a neighbourhood near you anytime soon.

A new Covid vaccine was been approved in the United States this week,?and if past practice holds true, you can expect to see it in Canada in time for the fall flu and Covid vaccine push. The vaccine is targeted at a variant of the virus that was prevalent in the spring, but Covid is no slacker when it comes to outfoxing the vaccine makers. New variations already prowl among us in particular the JN.1 strain leading the way in Canada.

In the U.S. the rate of hospitalization is twice what it was last summer, and in July 600 Americans were dying from Covid every week. Despite the rise and the risks, only 1 in 5 adults got the jab last year.

Here at home, there is an increase of the virus in Ontario and the National overview pegs the virus levels as high in BC, Alberta, and Nova Scotia.??Quebec’s immunization committee has recommended high risk groups get the latest vaccine when it becomes available in the Fall after 820 people were hospitalized the week of July 14th and the positivity rate for Covid testing rose to 16.3% in July compared to 2.3% in April.

As has become the usual trend, Alberta is near the bottom of the Covid vaccination rates with only 16.7% of the population having received the latest vaccine compared to 27.1% in BC.??We should however have the highest embarrassment rate this week after the AFP news service (Agence France-Presse) had to fact check an Instagram video from Darrell Komick, constituency association president for the UCP in Calgary-Lougheed. The video from the Injection of Truth town hall event made the rounds on social media with the added suggestion that there has been a “3328% Increase in Child Mortality in Alberta” after Covid 19 vaccinations were introduced in Alberta. (His capitalization not mine btw),

Well, it ain’t true, and with Premier Danielle Smith supporting the June event all the way, it is not hard to understand why Alberta’s vaccination rates are low, and Covid cases are up.

‘This just in’ as the news expression goes: “About 500,000 trees cut down at site of Tesla gigafactory near Berlin”

Yes, in our effort to electrify cars to save the planet, 329 hectares (813 acres) of land were cleared.

While I could write a whole segment on that one project, this is not just a Tesla problem.

Globally we deforest about ten million hectares (24 million3 acres) every year, but only half of that is replaced by regrowing forests. ?That scale of tree loss means that forests are gradually moving from net carbon sinks (soaking up carbon) to net sources (releasing carbon). We have not yet moved all the way along that scale, but the principle is straightforward – living forests soak up carbon, cutting them down releases the carbon.

Canada has 367 million hectares (906 million acres) of forests and according to Natural Resources Canada, our 0.02% deforestation rate is among the? lowest in the world. Overall we do a decent job of managing forests (especially compared to global numbers), but it does not appear that those statistics take into account the year-over-year effect of increasingly devastating wildfires.

Forests offer biodiversity, shelter for animals, recreational opportunities, and are important for spiritual and cultural health. We’re not just talking about remote or rural forests. Urban forests which include trees in parks, the trees in your yard, and trees planted along boulevards are important as well. They offer habitat for wildlife, they can act as traffic calming measures, help manage flooding and runoff, and reduce temperatures. In 2023, the Green Communities Canada Mini Forest program planted 6,000 trees in 16 mini forests across the country and are aiming for 10,000 more by the end of this year.

In Calgary, the city’s ‘drought dial’ is at the dry stage and the Canadian Drought Monitor puts us at abnormally dry. ?The problem has made worse by a crumbling water supply system which has left the city in water restrictions since June 5th, and which will continue to at least the end of September. We have seen leaves turn yellow and fall from the trees for several weeks already and local arborists are concerned about the urban tree canopy.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend under the shade of your favourite tree!

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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.