Water-starved Saudi confronts desalination’s heavy toll
Robbie Corey-Boulet – September 16, 2023
General manager Mohamed Ali al-Qahtani checks the quality of the ouput at the Ras al-Khair desalination plant (Fayez Nureldine)
Solar panels soak up blinding noontime rays that help power a water desalination facility in eastern Saudi Arabia, a step towards making the notoriously emissions-heavy process less environmentally taxing.
The Jazlah plant in Jubail city applies the latest technological advances in a country that first turned to desalination more than a century ago, when Ottoman-era administrators enlisted filtration machines for hajj pilgrims menaced by drought and cholera.
Lacking lakes, rivers and regular rainfall, Saudi Arabia today relies instead on dozens of facilities that transform water from the Gulf and Red Sea into something potable, supplying cities and towns that otherwise would not survive.
But the kingdom’s growing desalination needs –- fuelled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dreams of presiding over a global business and tourism hub –- risk clashing with its sustainability goals, including achieving net-zero emissions by 2060.
Projects like Jazlah, the first plant to integrate desalination with solar power on a large scale, are meant to ease that conflict: officials say the panels will help save around 60,000 tons of carbon emissions annually.
It is the type of innovation that must be scaled up fast, with Prince Mohammed targeting a population of 100 million people by 2040, up from 32.2 million today.
“Typically, the population grows, and then the quality of life of the population grows,” necessitating more and more water, said CEO Marco Arcelli of ACWA Power, which runs Jazlah.
Using desalination to keep pace is a “do or die” challenge, said historian Michael Christopher Low at the University of Utah, who has studied the kingdom’s struggle with water scarcity.
“This is existential for the Gulf states. So when anyone is sort of critical about what they’re doing in terms of ecological consequences, I shake my head a bit,” he said.
At the same time, he added, “there are limits” as to how green desalination can be.
– Drinking the sea –
The search for potable water bedevilled Saudi Arabia in the first decades after its founding in 1932, spurring geological surveys that contributed to the mapping of its massive oil reserves.
Prince Mohammed al-Faisal, a son of King Faisal whom Low has dubbed the “Water Prince”, at one point even explored the possibility of towing icebergs from Antarctica to quench the kingdom’s growing thirst, drawing widespread ridicule.
But Prince Mohammed also oversaw the birth of the kingdom’s modern desalination infrastructure beginning in 1970.
The national Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) now reports production capacity of 11.5 million cubic metres per day at 30 facilities.
That growth has come at a cost, especially at thermal plants running on fossil fuels.
By 2010, Saudi desalination facilities were consuming 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, more than 15 percent of today’s production.
The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on current energy consumption at desalination plants.
Going forward, there is little doubt Saudi Arabia will be able to build the infrastructure required to produce the water it needs.
“They have already done it in some of the most challenging settings, like massively desalinating on the Red Sea and providing desalinated water up to the highlands of the holy cities in Mecca and Medina,” said Laurent Lambert of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
– Going green? –
The question is how much the environmental toll will continue to climb.
The SWCC says it wants to cut 37 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025.
This will be achieved largely by transitioning away from thermal plants to plants like Jazlah that use electricity-powered reverse osmosis.
Solar power, meanwhile, will expand to 770 megawatts from 120 megawatts today, according to the SWCC’s latest sustainability report, although the timeline is unclear.
“It’s still going to be energy-intensive, unfortunately, but energy-intensive compared to what?” Lambert said.
“Compared to countries which have naturally flowing water from major rivers or falling from the sky for free? Yeah, sure, it’s always going to be more.”
At desalination plants across the kingdom, Saudi employees understand just how crucial their work is to the population’s survival.
The Ras al-Khair plant produces 1.1 million cubic metres of water per day –- 740,000 from thermal technology, the rest from reverse osmosis –- and struggles to keep reserve tanks full because of high demand.
Much of the water goes to Riyadh, which requires 1.6 million cubic metres per day and could require as much as six million by the end of the decade, said an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media.
Looking out over pipes that draw seawater from the Gulf into the plant, he described the work as high-stakes, with clear national security implications.
If the plant did not exist, he said, “Riyadh would die”.
Scientists find shocking new use for cocoa beans that could affect our entire planet — and it has nothing to do with chocolate
Roberto Guerra – September 17, 2023
A novel way to counter climate change is taking place in the German port city of Hamburg.
It’s a process that begins with cocoa bean shells going in one end of a factory and coming out as a black powder called biochar, which is doing its part to slow climate change.
What is biochar?
Biochar is the black powder mentioned above, and it’s produced by — in this case — heating cocoa husks in a room that has no oxygen to a temperature of 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Phys.org. Biochar producers can also use other organic wastes as raw materials.
The process prevents plant-warming toxic gases from entering the atmosphere, and the final product can be turned into fertilizer or an ingredient for concrete that is environmentally friendlier than traditional concrete, per Phys.org.
How does the process work?
Biochar captures the carbon dioxide present in the husks of the cocoa shells from the European plant mentioned above, and this method can be implemented by any other facility.
If the cocoa shells were discarded conventionally, the carbon within the unused byproduct would be released into the atmosphere during its decomposition.
Rather than following the usual disposal method, where the carbon within the unused cocoa shells would be released into the atmosphere, which heats up the planet, it is instead stored in the biochar for a very long time.
David Houben, an environmental scientist at the UniLaSalle Institute in France, told Phys.org that the biochar could hold onto the planet-warming gas for centuries.
Why is biochar important?
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that biochar could potentially capture billions of tons of the environmentally damaging gases released by our species every year.
This is important because human activities, such as electricity production and transportation, spew around 77 billion tons of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere each year. So far, this warming has triggered an increase in heatwaves, floods, droughts, and forest fires over the past few decades.
Some experts believe implementing renewable energy to reduce the amount of planet-warming emissions into the atmosphere isn’t enough and that it may already be too late to prevent the most damaging effects of a warming planet.
That’s why carbon sequestration, or the process of removing the planet-warming gases we’ve already injected into the atmosphere, is considered so important by many climate experts, and the use of biochar does exactly that.
However, the production of biochar is still difficult to scale up to the levels where it could actually slow the overheating of the planet.
“To ensure the system stores more carbon than it produces, everything needs to be done locally, with little or no transport. Otherwise it makes no sense,” Houben, the environmental scientist, told Phys.org.
However, even though challenges remain, the number of biochar initiatives is increasing rapidly. As reported by Phys.org, the production of biochar is expected to nearly double this year compared to last year.
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The Mighty American Consumer Is About to Hit a Wall, Investors Say
Reade Pickert and Vildana Hajric – September 11, 2023
(Bloomberg) — After staving off recession for longer than many thought possible, the US consumer is finally about to crack, according to Bloomberg’s latest Markets Live Pulse survey.
More than half of 526 respondents said that personal consumption — the most important driver of economic growth — will shrink in early 2024, which would be the first quarterly decline since the onset of the pandemic. Another 21% said the reversal will happen even sooner, in the last quarter of this year, as high borrowing costs eat into household budgets while Covid-era savings run down.
The finding is at odds with the optimism that’s permeated US equity markets for most of the summer, as cooling inflation and low unemployment bolstered hopes for a so-called soft landing. Should the economy stop growing — a scenario that’s quite likely if consumer spending contracts — it could mean more downside for stocks, which have already slipped from late-July highs.
“The likelihood of a soft landing, falling inflation, an end to Fed tightening, a peak in interest rates, a stable dollar, stable oil prices — all those things helped drive the market up,” says Alec Young, chief investment strategist at MAPsignals. “If the market loses confidence in that scenario, then stocks are vulnerable.”
‘It Is Not Sustainable’
Right now, the US economy appears to be speeding up rather than stalling. Growth is forecast to accelerate in the third quarter on the back of a recent pickup in household spending, which jumped in July by the most in six months.
To some analysts, it looks a bit like a last hurrah.
“The big question is: Is this strength in consumption sustainable?” says Anna Wong, Bloomberg Economics’ chief US economist, who expects a recession to start by year-end. “It is not sustainable, because it’s driven by these one-off factors” – notably a summer splurge on blockbuster movies and concert tours.
Read More: Barbenheimer, Swift, Beyonce = Mirage of US GDP Boom
The enduring strength of the US job market has propped up household spending in the face of the biggest price increases in decades. It’s led some analysts to push out their expectations for a recession — or even scrap them altogether.
Economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. expect the consumer to outperform yet again in 2024 — and keep the economy growing — amid steady job growth and pay hikes that beat inflation.
‘Really Struggling’
But there are plenty of headwinds looming.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco say the excess savings that have helped consumers get through the price spike will run out in the current quarter — a sentiment that three-quarters of the MLIV Pulse respondents agreed with.
“There’s increasingly an issue where the lower end of the income and wealth spectrum is really struggling with the accumulated inflation of the last couple years,” while wealthier Americans are still cushioned by savings and asset appreciation, said Thomas Simons, Jefferies’ US economist.
In the aggregate, consumers have been able to bend under the weight of higher prices, he said. “But there will come a point where that’s no longer feasible.”
Read full results: Savings Dwindle, US Student Debts Come Due: MLIV Pulse Results
Delinquency rates on credit cards and auto loans are rising, as households feel the financial squeeze after the Fed raised interest rates by more than 5 percentage points.
And another kind of debt — student loans — is about to come due again for millions of Americans who benefited from the pandemic freeze on repayments.
A majority of investors in the MLIV Pulse survey pointed to the declining availability and soaring cost of credit — mortgage rates are near two-decade highs — as the biggest obstacle for consumers in the coming months.
Some three-quarters of respondents said auto or retail stocks are the most vulnerable to declining excess savings and tighter consumer credit – a concern that’s not entirely priced in by the markets. While General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. have essentially missed out on this year’s wider stock rally, Tesla Inc. more than doubled in value.
‘Just Taking Longer’
Since the economy’s fate hinges on what US consumers will do next, investors are looking in all kinds of places for the answer.
Asked what they consider a good leading indicator, MLIV Pulse respondents pointed to everything from the most standard measures – like retail sales or credit-card delinquencies — to airline bookings, pet adoptions, and the use of “Buy Now Pay Later” installment plans.
That’s perhaps because conventional guides have often proved to be unreliable amid the turbulence of the past few years.
“The traditional playbook for the economy and markets is challenging in this post-pandemic environment,” said Keith Lerner, co-chief investment officer at Truist Wealth. “Things are just taking longer to play out.”
The MLIV Pulse survey of Bloomberg News readers on the terminal and online is conducted weekly by Bloomberg’s Markets Live team, which also runs the MLIV blog. This week, the MLIV Pulse survey asks whether investors have fully regained the confidence in UK assets that they lost during the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss. Click here to share your views.
Expert reveals super easy way to legally dispose of electronics: ‘Was anyone going to tell me it’s illegal?’
Laurelle Stelle – September 11, 2023
While many Americans don’t know it, throwing your electronics in an ordinary trash can for pickup is actually illegal in some states. Thankfully, there’s still a low-effort way to recycle these items without leaving your house.
TikToker Love of Earth Co. (@loveofearthco) posted a video in March introducing followers to Redwood Materials, an e-waste recycler in partnership with Panasonic that will let you mail your electronics and accessories straight to them for disposal.
How does recycling with Redwood Materials work?
As Love of Earth Co. explains, Redwood Materials accepts a wide range of materials, including old power cables.
“We’re in the middle of a move, and I just keep finding cord after cord after cord,” she says. “Since electronics are considered prohibited waste, meaning you can’t just toss them away in the trash, I will instead be responsibly recycling them.”
She then shares a shot of Redwood Materials’ website.
“I just quickly created a profile on their website to let them know what I’m sending, boxed up all my cords, slapped a shipping label on there, and put it out on my porch for the postman to pick up.”
Redwood Materials accepts a wide range of electronics, appliances, and rechargeable devices. A list of examples on their web page includes everything from laptops to hearing aids to electric power tools.
Love of Earth Co. calls the process “easy-peasy” and “guilt-free.”
“I feel so much better not sending our e-waste off to the landfills,” she says.
TikTok users were shocked by how easy the process was, with some admitting they didn’t know cords and other e-waste aren’t supposed to go in the trash.
“Was anyone going to tell me it’s illegal or were you all just going to let me keep living as a CRIMINAL,” one user wrote.
“What else can you not just put in the trash?!?!?” said another.
Why should I recycle with Redwood Materials?
For residents of states where throwing out e-waste is illegal, Redwood Materials offers a simple way to get rid of unwanted electronics without the hassle of transporting them to a local recycling center. If you aren’t sure whether this applies to you, you can check out this state-by-state breakdown on Recycle Nation.
Even if you can throw out e-waste normally, recycling it is a great way to keep the materials in circulation, which helps keep the cost of electronics down. In 2022, Panasonic and Redwood Materials expanded their partnership to supply the manufacturer with cathode materials and copper foil, Electrive.com reported. Arrangements like this reduce the need for costly mining.
Recycling electronics also helps protect the environment by keeping toxic materials out of landfills, reducing the need for mines that damage the environment, and reducing the energy used in manufacturing.
Are there similar programs to Redwood Materials?
Other companies also offer recycling and trade-in options for your used electronics. For example, Best Buy has a trade-in calculator that will tell you how much store credit you can get for your items, and other retailers like Target and Costco also offer deals for electronics.
New tool reveals swaths of American coastline are expected to be underwater by 2050: ‘Time is slipping away’
Brittany Davies – September 11, 2023
If you ask Climate Central — which has a coastal risk screening tool that shows an area’s risk for rising sea levels and flooding over the coming decades — Texas’s coastline is in trouble.
The new map-based tool compiles research into viewable projections for water levels, land elevation, and other factors in localized areas across the U.S. to assess their potential risk.
The predictive technology indicates that, under some scenarios, many of Texas’s coastal areas, such as much of Galveston Island, Beaumont, and the barrier islands, will be underwater during floods by 2050.
What’s happening?
Coastal areas face threats from rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps and warming oceans, as well as flooding from storms intensified by changing temperatures. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates more than 128 million people live in coastal communities, many of which will be severely impacted by the effects of higher tides and dangerous storms.
CNN reports that coastal flooding could cost the global economy $14.2 trillion in damages, not including loss of life and well-being, by the end of the century. The loss of land due to sea level rise is also detrimental to the entire ecosystem, disrupting important wetlands and freshwater supplies.
Why is this concerning?
The coastal risk screening tool provides startling insight into how many areas will likely be affected by rising tides and floods, especially if nothing is done to mitigate Earth’s rapidly rising temperatures. As 2050 quickly approaches, time is slipping away to prepare and protect communities and ecosystems from the rising waters.
Planning, approving, and implementing new infrastructure and other major projects to keep communities safe can take years to complete. Because the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, cities need to start planning now before they find themselves in too deep.
What’s being done to reduce the risk?
Many of the most vulnerable regions are densely populated and people are already dealing with personal and economic damages from intensified flooding. While some may be able to move or make changes to their homes and communities to prepare for rising waters, not everyone has the means or desire to make these changes.
Several actions may be taken by individuals, organizations, municipalities, and the government to reduce the impacts of coastal flooding. The first step is understanding where the vulnerabilities are, indicates Peter Girard of Climate Central. Protecting existing wetlands and utilizing nature-based solutions such as living shorelines or sand dunes can lessen the impacts of flooding, storm surges, and erosion.
Community developers are encouraged to consider those most vulnerable when implementing coastal resiliency strategies such as shifting populations or building flood walls. Individuals living in flood zones should learn about the risks and obtain insurance protection if available.
Wealthy Homeowners in Florida Are Facing Sky-High Insurance Premiums to Protect Their Waterfront Properties
Abby Montanez – September 11, 2023
The cost of owning a waterfront home in Florida is going up fast.
Rick Ross. Diddy. Jennifer Lopez. These are just a few celebs who call Florida’s uber-exclusive Star Island home. While the multimillion-dollar Miami Beach enclave is known for being one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country, the mega-mansions along this stretch of Biscayne Bay are also subject to climate-related disasters such as rising sea levels and tropical storms—including Hurricane Isalia, which rocked the Gulf Coast last month. As a result, well-heeled property owners are now being hit with five- to six-figure insurance policies to protect their coastal abodes, Bloomberg reported.
“I’ve done this for 32 years, and I’ve never seen rates rise the way it’s happening today. If you’re getting a rate increase under 20 percent, it’s almost a gift,” Cindy Zobian, managing director at insurance broker Alliant Private Client, told Bloomberg. Zobian noted that increases of 800 percent are closer to the new standard. (Nope, that is not a typo!)
While not all Floridians are paying the same sky-high rate, the numbers are still way above the norm. The average premium for property insurance in Florida clocks in at $6,000 per year. For context, that’s a 42 percent uptick just this year, and more than three times the average rate nationally. While hurricanes and flooding are the main factors at play here, inflation is also causing rates to spike.
Insurance rates in Florida have tripled in the last three years.
To put things into perspective, insurance rates across Florida have tripled over the past three years. The owner of a $50 million residence on Star Island was recently shopping around for a new carrier, and to his surprise, he was hit with an eye-watering $622,000-per-year quote. In another example, Chris Rim, a resident of one of Miami Beach’s low-lying man-made islands, got a $98,000 bill.
“Florida was the beginning,” Oscar Seikaly, chief executive officer at NSI Insurance, told the outlet. “But now, between the fires and the floods and everything else that’s happening, it’s trickling to other areas.”
Wildfires in places like Aspen and California are also causing home insurance premiums to climb. In the Golden State, major companies, including Allstate and State Farm, have even stopped selling owners new policies, blaming wildfire risks and soaring construction costs.
“Only wealthy Americans are going to be able to afford to buy homes in some of these coastal communities,” Mark Friedlander, a director at the Insurance Information Institute, told Bloomberg.
A boy saw 17 doctors over 3 years for chronic pain. ChatGPT found the diagnosis
Meghan Holohan – September 11, 2023
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Courtney bought a bounce house for her two young children. Soon after, her son, Alex, then 4, began experiencing pain.
“(Our nanny) started telling me, ‘I have to give him Motrin every day, or he has these gigantic meltdowns,’” Courtney, who asked not to use her last name to protect her family’s privacy, tells TODAY.com. “If he had Motrin, he was totally fine.”
Then Alex began chewing things, so Courtney took him to the dentist. What followed was a three-year search for the cause of Alex’s increasing pain and eventually other symptoms.
Ever since undergoing surgery to fix his tethered cord syndrome, Alex can’t stop smiling. (Courtesy Courtney)
The beginning of the end of the journey came earlier this year, when Courtney finally got some answers from an unlikely source, ChatGPT. The frustrated mom made an account and shared with the artificial intelligence platform everything she knew about her son’s symptoms and all the information she could gather from his MRIs.
“We saw so many doctors. We ended up in the ER at one point. I kept pushing,” she says. “I really spent the night on the (computer) … going through all these things.”
So, when ChatGPT suggested a diagnosis of tethered cord syndrome, “it made a lot of sense,” she recalls.
Pain, grinding teeth, dragging leg
When Alex began chewing on things, his parents wondered if his molars were coming in and causing pain. As it continued, they thought he had a cavity.
“Our sweet personality — for the most part — (child) is dissolving into this tantrum-ing crazy person that didn’t exist the rest of the time,” Courtney recalls.
The dentist “ruled everything out” but thought maybe Alex was grinding his teeth and believed an orthodontist specializing in airway obstruction could help. Airway obstructions impact a child’s sleep and could explain why he seemed so exhausted and moody, the dentist thought. The orthodontist found that Alex’s palate was too small for his mouth and teeth, which made it tougher for him to breathe at night. She placed an expander in Alex’s palate, and it seemed like things were improving.
“Everything was better for a little bit,” Courtney says. “We thought we were in the home stretch.”
But then she noticed Alex had stopped growing taller, so they visited the pediatrician, who thought the pandemic was negatively affecting his development. Courtney didn’t agree, but she still brought her son back in early 2021 for a checkup.
“He’d grown a little bit,” she says.
The pediatrician then referred Alex to physical therapy because he seemed to have some imbalances between his left and right sides.
“He would lead with his right foot and just bring his left foot along for the ride,” Courtney says.
But before starting physical therapy, Alex had already been experiencing severe headaches that were only getting worse. He visited a neurologist, who said Alex had migraines. The boy also struggled with exhaustion, so he was taken to an ear, nose and throat doctor to see if he was having sleep problems due to his sinus cavities or airway.
No matter how many doctors the family saw, the specialists would only address their individual areas of expertise, Courtney says.
“Nobody’s willing to solve for the greater problem,” she adds. “Nobody will even give you a clue about what the diagnosis could be.”
Next, a physical therapist thought that Alex could have something called Chiari malformation, a congenital condition that causes abnormalities in the brain where the skull meets the spine, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Courtney began researching it, and they visited more doctors — a new pediatrician, a pediatric internist, an adult internist and a musculoskeletal doctor — but again reached a dead end.
In total, they visited 17 different doctors over three years. But Alex still had no diagnosis that explained all his symptoms. An exhausted and frustrated Courtney signed up for ChatGPT and began entering his medical information, hoping to find a diagnosis.
“I went line by line of everything that was in his (MRI notes) and plugged it into ChatGPT,” she says. “I put the note in there about … how he wouldn’t sit crisscross applesauce. To me, that was a huge trigger (that) a structural thing could be wrong.”
She eventually found tethered cord syndrome and joined a Facebook group for families of children with it. Their stories sounded like Alex’s. She scheduled an appointment with a new neurosurgeon and told her she suspected Alex had tethered cord syndrome. The doctor looked at his MRI images and knew exactly what was wrong with Alex.
“She said point blank, ‘Here’s occula spinal bifida, and here’s where the spine is tethered,” Courtney says.
Tethered cord syndrome occurs when the tissue in the spinal cord forms attachments that limit movement of the spinal cord, causing it to stretch abnormally, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
With tethered cord syndrome, “the spinal cord is stuck to something. It could be a tumor in the spinal canal. It could be a bump on a spike of bones. It could just be too much fat at the end of the spinal cord,” Dr. Holly Gilmer, a pediatric neurosurgeon at the Michigan Head & Spine Institute, who treated Alex, tells TODAY.com. “The abnormality can’t elongate … and it pulls.”
It can happen in patients with spina bifida, a birth defect where part of the spinal cord doesn’t develop fully and some of the spinal cord and nerves are exposed. In many children with spina bifida, there’s a visible opening in the child’s back. But the type Alex had is closed and considered “hidden,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which means it can be difficult to diagnose.
“My son doesn’t have a hole. There’s almost what looks like a birthmark on the top of his buttocks, but nobody saw it,” Courtney says. “He has a crooked belly button.”
Gilmer says doctors often find these conditions soon after birth, but in some cases, the marks — such as a dimple, a red spot or a tuft of hair — that indicate occult spina bifida can be missed. Then doctors rely on symptoms to make the diagnosis, which can include dragging a leg, pain, loss of bladder control, constipation, scoliosis, foot or leg abnormalities and a delay in hitting milestones, such as sitting up and walking.
“In young children, it can be difficult to diagnose because they can’t speak,” Gilmer says, adding that many parents and children don’t realize that their symptoms indicate a problem. “If this is how they have always been, they think that’s normal.”
When Courtney finally had a diagnosis for Alex, she experienced “every emotion in the book, relief, validated, excitement for his future.”
ChatGPT and medicine
ChatGPT is a type of artificial intelligence program that responds based on input that a person enters into it, but it can’t have a conversation or provide answers in the way that many people might expect.
That’s because ChatGPT works by “predicting the next word” in a sentence or series of words based on existing text data on the internet, Andrew Beam, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard who studies machine learning models and medicine, tells TODAY.com. “Anytime you ask a question of ChatGPT, it’s recalling from memory things it has read before and trying to predict the piece of text.”
When using ChatGPT to make a diagnosis, a person might tell the program, “I have fever, chills and body aches,” and it fills in “influenza” as a possible diagnosis, Beam explains.
“It’s going to do its best to give you a piece of text that looks like a … passage that it’s read,” he adds.
There are both free and paid versions of ChatGPT, and the latter works much better than the free version, Beam says. But both seem to work better than the average symptom checker or Google as a diagnostic tool. “It’s a super high-powered medical search engine,” Beam says.
It can be especially beneficial for patients with complicated conditions who are struggling to get a diagnosis, Beam says.
These patients are “groping for information,” he adds. “I do think ChatGPT can be a good partner in that diagnostic odyssey. It has read literally the entire internet. It may not have the same blind spots as the human physician has.”
But it’s not likely to replace a clinician’s expertise anytime soon, he says. For example, ChatGPT fabricates information sometimes when it can’t find the answer. Say you ask it for studies about influenza. The tool might respond with several titles that sound real, and the authors it lists may have even written about flu before — but the papers may not actually exist.
This phenomenon is called “hallucination,” and “that gets really problematic when we start talking about medical applications because you don’t want it to just make things up,” Beam says.
Diagnosis and treatment
Alex is “happy go lucky” and loves playing with other children. He played baseball last year, but he quit because he was injured. Also, he had to give up hockey because wearing ice skates hurts his back and knees. He found a way to adapt, though.
“He’s so freaking intelligent,” Courtney says. “He’ll climb up on a structure, stand on a chair, and starts being the coach. So, he keeps himself in the game.”
After receiving the diagnosis, Alex underwent surgery to fix his tethered cord syndrome a few weeks ago.
“We detach the cord from where it is stuck at the bottom of the tailbone essentially,” Gilmer says. “That releases the tension.”
Alex is still recovering. Gilmer says children bounce back from this surgery relatively quickly. Often the treatment, reduces any symptoms children were having, she says. Alex’s mom can see the joy on his face now.
Courtney shared their story to help others facing similar struggles.
“There’s nobody that connects the dots for you,” she says. “You have to be your kid’s advocate.”
New report reveals a stunning fact about the future of wind and solar power: ‘The more you install, the cheaper it gets’
Leo Collis – September 9, 2023
In a hugely encouraging update in the move toward clean energy, a new report has suggested renewable sources could be responsible for one-third of the world’s electricity production by 2030.
A study from the Rocky Mountain Institute concluded that exponential growth in the sector will lead to 33% of global energy being produced by wind or solar generation. It marks a significant increase from the 12% generated by the same sources now.
While it’s excellent news for the planet in terms of reducing reliance on dirty fuel for energy — with emissions from those sources contributing to global heating — it will also make a massive difference to the bank balance of consumers.
According to the RMI report, as more solar projects are completed — and costs are reduced due to increased production — the price per megawatt could reduce from $40 to $20.
The study provides hope for our energy future, but positive developments are happening now. According to Systems Change Lab, as detailed in RMI‘s report, eight countries have already invested enough in solar and wind power to do their part to limit global heating to 34.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Such rapid progress toward global climate goals suggests that similar feats can be achieved on a wider scale if the infrastructure and funding is available.
The RMI data also noted that fossil fuel demand in terms of electricity production will also fall by as much as 30% by 2030.
In a statement, Kingsmill Bond, senior principal of RMI, said: “Exponential growth of clean energy is an unstoppable force that will put more spending power in the pockets of consumers. The benefit of rapid renewable deployment is greater energy security and independence, plus long-term energy price deflation because this is a manufactured technology — the more you install, the cheaper it gets.”
Part of the reason for the increase is this reduction in the costs of materials, especially batteries. According to RMI, “solar and battery costs have declined 80% between 2012 and 2022.”
Meanwhile, RMI quoted Bloomberg New Energy Finance data that found the cost of both offshore (73%) and onshore (57%) wind generation have decreased.
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18 times US presidents told lies, from secret affairs to health issues to reasons for going to war
James Pasley – September 8, 2023
US President Donald J. Trump delivers his first address to a joint session of Congress from the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington, United States on February 28, 2017. Traditionally the first address to a joint session of Congress by a newly-elected president is not referred to as a State of the Union.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Pool/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Every US president has told a lie — from war and taxes to health conditions and extramarital affairs.
When Dwight D. Eisenhower was caught lying by Russia, he said it was his greatest regret in office.
President Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements while in office.
“This is what we will say publicly but now, let’s talk about what we will actually do,” President Richard Nixon wrote in a memo about secret bombings in Cambodia in 1970.
“Every president has not only lied at some time, but needs to lie to be effective,” Ed Uravic, who wrote “Lying Cheating Scum,” told CNN.
From President James Polk lying to invade Mexico in 1846 to then-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush famously promising no new taxes, here are some of the most famous lies US presidents have ever made.
In the 1840s, President James Polk told Congress that Mexico had invaded the US.
Former President James Polk.Universal History Archive/Getty Image
This was a lie. In actual fact, his administration had ordered US soldiers to occupy an area in Mexico near the Texan border in 1846. Then when Mexican forces attacked the US soldiers, Polk claimed it was an attack against the US.
In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln, also known as “Honest Abe,” might not have lied, but he wasn’t always truthful.
Former President Abraham Lincoln.Getty Images / Staff
In response to rumors that he was about to meet with Confederate representatives in Washington, he told the House that no representatives were on their way to Washington, The Washington Post reported.
He wasn’t lying — they were on their way to Virginia, where he would later meet them. He didn’t tell the whole truth at the time because he didn’t want his meeting to impact the passing of the 13th Amendment.
Political theory professor Meg Mott told The Conversation his use of truth when dealing with the Confederacy was “devious.”
In 1898, President William McKinley declared Spain had attacked a US warship called the USS Maine in Cuba, killing 355 sailors.
Former President William McKinley.Library of Congress
The actual cause of the sinking has never been conclusively proven.
Although reluctant to go to war with Spain, his insistence that the Spanish were behind the attack led to war, per the Columbus Dispatch.
In 1940, during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised the nation that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Hulton Archive/Getty
But Roosevelt was already preparing to enter the war. His declaration was an election promise — one he would not keep — made during his campaign against Wendell Willkie.
After his speech, his speechwriter, Sam Rosenman, asked him why he hadn’t said the final part of the speech, which was, “Except in case of attack.”.
Roosevelt responded, “If we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.”
The following year, in 1941, Roosevelt lied again. This time, he said a German submarine had attacked a US ship called the Greer without provocation.
Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Keystone Features/Getty Images
In actuality, the Greer had been protecting British ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean and had been following that German submarine and letting the British know its path.
Roosevelt used the attack as a provocation to prepare the US for entering World War II.
In August 1945, the Truman administration issued a press release after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, describing it as “an important military base.”
Former President Harry Truman in 1945.MPI/Getty
Hiroshima was home to 350,000 people, although it did have a military base in the city.
About 10,000 soldiers were killed in the blast, but most of the 125,000 people who died were civilians.
In 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower dismissed claims that the US had flown spy planes over Russia after one of its planes was shot down.
Former President Dwight Eisenhower.Getty Images
Thinking the pilot was killed, he approved a number of statements that said it was a weather plane. But when Russia announced it had one of the pilots named Gary Powers in custody, he had to admit he had been lying.
“I didn’t realize how high a price we were going to pay for that lie,” he said.
On October 20, 1962, President John F. Kennedy told America he had a cold.
Former President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office signing copies of his official portrait in 1961.Henry Burroughs/AP
The truth was he was dealing with a crisis. Intelligence agents had found that the Soviets were creating a missile base in Cuba.
To ensure the public didn’t panic, Kennedy told the press he had to leave Chicago where he was campaigning because he had a fever. In reality, he had to attend a meeting back at the White House to decide whether to invade Cuba.
He also claimed that the Russians had more nuclear weapons than the US.
Though he lied about having an illness, Kennedy lied about not having another one. In 1960, he said he had “never” had Addison’s disease.
Former President John F. Kennedy in the White House in 1963.Keystone/Getty Images
Despite scientists later confirming he had the disease, in his primary campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson, he called himself “the healthiest candidate for President in the country.”
Kennedy wasn’t the only president who lied about his health. Numerous presidents — including Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower — lied about their health at some point.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson said in a televised speech, “We still seek no wider war.”
Former President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Sitting Room of the family quarters of the White House.Bettmann/Getty Images
This was in reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which North Vietnamese patrol boats had reportedly attacked US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
In the same speech, he declared, “Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.”
Johnson’s administration claimed that the US ships were out on routine patrols, but they were actually on a secret mission in North Vietnamese territory. The attacks were used to increase the US’s presence in Vietnam.
Johnson’s lies didn’t end there either. He went on to withhold information from the public and Congress about how much was spent on the Vietnam War and how badly the war effort was going.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon lied to the country about a US covert bombing campaign in Cambodia.
Former President Richard Nixon.Getty Images
After the bombings were made public, Nixon let people believe the attacks on Cambodia were over.
He advised his staff to tell the public that the soldiers were providing support for local soldiers when, in fact, the attacks continued.
In a memo, Nixon wrote, “This is what we will say publicly but now, let’s talk about what we will actually do.”
In 1974, Nixon declared, “I’m not a crook” after being accused of obstructing justice and lying during the Watergate scandal.
Former President Richard Nixon in 1969.Bettmann/Getty Images
He claimed he was not involved in the scandal, but an investigation found evidence that he was. He later resigned as president instead of potentially being impeached.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan promised the nation: “We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.”
Former President Ronald W. Reagan in the Oval Office in 1985.Diana Walker/Getty Images
This was during the Iran-Contra Affair, where the US government secretly traded weapons with Iran in exchange for the release of US hostages being held by terrorists in Lebanon.
The government then used the money from the weapons to fund anti-communist groups in Nicaragua.
Despite Reagan’s promise, it later turned out the US had in fact traded arms for hostages.
He later said, “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
In 1988, then-Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush said, “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
Former President George H.W. Bush.Diana Walker/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
His whole statement was: “My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no. And they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say, to them, ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.'”
At the time, the six words were seen as a successful political slogan.
But Bush was later forced to raise taxes during negotiations with a Senate and House controlled by Democrats. After he did so, The New York Post went with a headline that said: “Read my lips: I lied.”
His U-turn on taxes was widely seen as one of the reasons he did not get re-elected for a second term.
In 1998, President Bill Clinton said before a federal grand jury, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” referring to his intern Monica Lewinsky, with whom he did, in fact, have an affair.
Monica Lewinsky and former President Bill Clinton.Fiona Hanson – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images. Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs via Getty Images.
Clinton was impeached for lying under oath, but he was acquitted by the Senate.
It was thought to be the first time a president was caught lying about their sex life because it was the first time a president had ever really been asked about it.
In 2003, two months after the US invaded Iraq, President George W. Bush claimed to have found weapons of mass destruction to justify the war.
Then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 1999.David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images
“We found the weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “For those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong; we found them.”
Bush later said, “We do not know whether or not [Iraq] has a nuclear weapon.”
However, then-CIA Director George Tenet later testified that Bush was advised there were no nuclear weapons and it would be unlikely that the country could even make one until 2007.
In 2008, when President Barack Obama was pushing through his new Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, he promised people wouldn’t need to change their plans if they didn’t want to.
Former President Barack Obama in 2017.Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
“If you like your plan, you can keep it,” Obama said. But it wasn’t true.
In the end, millions of people had to change their plans. He also didn’t just say it once, but around 37 times, Politico reported.
“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” he said in 2013.
President Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements while in office.
Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a political rally on July 29, 2023 in Erie, Pennsylvania.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
This averaged out at about 21 false claims a day, The Washington Post reported.
Some of Trump’s lies included his claim that the pandemic was “totally under control,” the altering of a weather map with a Sharpie after he wrongly said Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, or his claim that Rep Ilhan Omar supported al Qaeda.
He also falsely claimed the election was stolen from him.
To keep workers going in the heat, companies try fledgling cooling tech
Jacob Bogage – September 8, 2023
In crop fields, on construction scaffolding, beside drive-through lanes, working conditions are getting hotter, igniting a small but fast-growing industry to cool workers down.
There are vests packed with ice and pressed against the skin, and others soaked in water to evaporate on the body. There are high-tech stickers that measure sweat content and core temperature. One commercial lab is attempting to make fabric that reflects sunlight, mimicking the skin of a desert ant.
Gus Lackerdas, a national sales manager at cooling-gear firm Techniche and parent company OccuNomix, has a quick and easy pitch for prospective buyers, who include developers, contractors and road pavers: “Not only can your people be more productive, which I know you want, but they’ll be safer, which I know your HR department wants.”
It has been a successful pitch so far. By the company’s estimates, the cooling-gear sector has grown from $30 million to $100 million in sales over the past three years. Cooling products for Techniche and OccuNomix have brought in at least $3 million to $5 million in annual revenue over that span, Lackerdas said.
The new interventions offer alternatives to the well-established fundamentals of heat safety: water, rest and shade. In a warming world – 2023 is on track to be the hottest year in Earth’s recorded history, according to multiple recent climatological studies – those simple yet effective strategies may not be enough to keep workers safe, some experts say.
“We need a more robust kind of system in place for workers to be able to protect themselves,” said Roxana Chicas, a nurse and scientist at Emory University. “I think that includes cooling devices, personal protective equipment.”
Heat killed 121 workers between 2017 and 2022, according to federal data, but some research suggests the real number is much higher because heat-related deaths and injuries are often blamed on accidents or underlying health conditions. A 2021 study published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics concluded that occupational injury data from California – a state used as a stand-in for federal measurements – may undercount heat-induced injuries by a fivefold margin.
Occupational cooling technology remains a largely unproven field, with a small body of academic research on certain devices in workplace settings. Much of the research has been conducted using athletes or military members, who are not reliable stand-ins for a civilian workforce, experts say.
But the U.S. economy cannot stop when it gets hot, said Justin Li, co-founder and CEO of Qore Performance, which makes ice vests. To a large extent, his business model relies on the idea that some employers will seek ways to keep work viable at any temperature.
“In a free market, it creates open space for your competition to beat you, because maybe you choose not to try to manipulate the environment,” Li said. “But what if your competitor does figure out how to manipulate that environment?”
What are the options?
For Chick-fil-A franchisee Troy Seavers, the complaints hit a crescendo in 2020. Why, customers asked, were drive-through employees at his restaurant near Phoenix outside in the hottest part of the day?
So Seavers tallied the investments he made to keep workers safe in the desert heat and distributed the list to the customers who raised concerns.
He built a shade canopy over part of the drive-through and bought a misting station and a swamp cooler. At 100 degrees or more, drive-through workers must wear Qore ice vests. No one is allowed to work outside for more than an hour at a time, and all workers receive paid cooling breaks. Those working outdoors wear two-way radios in case they need to call for help.
“The guests need to see that I proactively am protecting my team from the sun,” he said. “I haven’t had a guest call me in three years.”
At Dutch Bros. Coffee, a popular West Coast chain with locations 10 minutes away, franchisee Josh Hayes purchased more than 200 ice vests for employees across multiple stores, he said. He bought extra freezers for each location, so there’s always another frozen vest available.
DPR Construction, a general contractor with worksites across the Sun Belt, distributes cooling caps and neck towels that can be dunked in water for evaporative cooling. During breaks, supervisors hand out electrolyte ice pops. But in the Southeastern United States, DPR worksites have started moving away from those items in favor of longer, better rest periods, said Lance Wafler, who leads the company’s field operations in the region.
Wafler’s break areas have complete shade and running water. At particularly hot sites, DPR will rent an air-conditioned storage container, he said, and put picnic benches inside. The company has cut down on overtime, especially during heat waves.
“We are very cautious of trying to push our craft of trying to work longer, harder because of several safety concerns,” Wafler said. “Heat illness is one of them. But construction is inherently hazardous.”
Still, on a construction site, no one asks whether it’s “too hot to work,” he said.
Qore’s ice vest, which presses cold surfaces against the back, sides and abdomen, has been used by fast-food chains such as Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s and Dutch Bros. Coffee.
Meanwhile, Techniche’s evaporative vest, common among industrial workers, can decrease skin temperature by 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit, the company says, depending on ambient humidity.
These interventions are supposed to interrupt the effects of heat, said Margaret Morrissey-Basler, an assistant professor of health sciences at Providence College. They’re designed to work by keeping the body cool enough that natural heat reactions don’t kick in, or start at a higher temperature.
That’s noteworthy, she said, because water, rest and shade are normally sufficient on their own. “If you don’t have those in your work environment, you’re already off to a bad start,” said Morrissey-Basler, who also works with the University of Connecticut’s Korey Stringer Institute to help employers put together heat safety protocols.
Water replenishes fluid, which ensures there’s enough blood in the body and allows you to keep sweating. Rest slows or stops aerobic activity, so your muscles don’t produce as much heat. Shade gets you out of direct sunlight, giving your body the ability to radiate heat to your surroundings.
Don Chernoff, founder of the commercial research firm Small World Sciences, is working with North Carolina State University and University of Chicago researchers to produce textiles for “clothing that essentially lets you wear the shade on your body.” Tiny pyramids built into the fabric are designed to deflect sunlight, much like the leaves of a tree overhead – or similar tiny pyramids on the skin of the Saharan silver ant.
The bugs are so well adapted to searing conditions, they venture out during the hottest periods of the day, feasting on the decaying carcasses of animals that died in the heat.
Chernoff’s firm and research partners have not yet been able to make an economically feasible textile that could be woven into garments. “It theoretically should work,” he said.
A few inventors have touted other new ideas.
For workers in construction and agriculture, CalidGear is a garment that can be worn underneath work attire, as opposed to cooling vests or towels normally worn on top of other clothes. Tayyaba Ali, a 24-year-old entrepreneur, is hoping to roll the product into another start-up that makes water filtration monitoring software.
Young Ko, a mechanical engineering PhD student at MIT, developed a cooling wrap that in tests reduced skin temperature by 50 degrees Fahrenheit in dry conditions.
Sheng Xu, a wearable-tech researcher and nanoengineering professor at the University of California at San Diego, and a team of graduate students created a battery-powered fabric patch designed to conduct heat away from the wearer.
Do any of these things work? The ideas are promising, Chicas of Emory University said, but many emerging heat devices haven’t yet faced sufficient scientific or job site scrutiny.
For example, Chicas and co-authors from Tulane University and Boston University studied the effects of cooling bandannas and ice vests on farm and landscaping workers in Florida in 2020. The bandanna did prove effective, reducing the odds that a worker’s core temperature exceeded the dangerous threshold of 100.4 degrees. But the vest did not: 40 percent of workers wearing it reported symptoms of heat-related illness, and 60 percent had core temperatures greater than 100.4 degrees.
Chicas noted that her sample of 84 workers was too small to draw definitive conclusions. But it was an encouraging start to more research, she said.
What happens when you overheat?
When your body gets hot, hundreds of thousands of years of physiology kick in to cool you down.
Your heart pumps blood to the surface of your skin, where it’s not as warm. You sweat, causing water to evaporate off your body and provide relief, but it makes you lose fluid, decreasing blood supply.
When your internal temperature reaches around 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, your body has to make difficult choices. Which organs are going to get that limited amount of blood?
Eventually, your body reacts like it’s fighting an infection, pitching your temperature even higher and shunting blood away from your skin to protect vital organs, said Pope Moseley, a research professor at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions.
“Then you’re really screwed because now you’re not cooling,” said Moseley, who is also an intensive-care physician.
Our bodies also adjust to regular high heat exposure in a process called acclimatization, which experts say can take about a week. Effective acclimatization yields cell-level changes that help us retain fluids and keep core temperature low. For example, Moseley said, a heat-acclimated body sweats at a cooler temperature – essentially leaving your internal air conditioner on. Your blood volume increases so your body doesn’t have to make as many tough choices.
Tracking workers’ health signs
Because heat affects individuals differently, Moseley said, it’s hard to give workers solid health advice. One farmworker may be fine in conditions that are debilitating to a colleague an arm’s length away.
“We are not seeing the totality of the impact of heat,” Moseley said. “We are missing this massive number of people, both in the workplace and not, who are highly vulnerable, and we’re going to be seeing more of this.”
Some emerging technologies in the heat-safety industry are designed not to keep workers cool but to provide precise measurements of when they are in danger.
A skin patch developed by Epicore Biosystems measures sweat content and skin temperature and contains an accelerometer to measure work rate. The company markets the patches to industrial employers, CEO Roozbeh Ghaffari said. Bluetooth transmitters in each patch communicate to management when workers need more hydration, electrolytes or just a break. If a wearer sweats out 2 percent of their body weight, the patch vibrates.
“You can begin to predict based on the skin temperature and accelerometer data what risk profiles start to look like,” Ghaffari said.
Meanwhile, Chicas is researching a patch that’s worn on the chest and measures core temperature, respiratory function and other biomarkers to predict when heat strain, a precursor to the more dangerous heat stress and heat stroke, sets in. But she wonders whether employers will draw the right conclusions from the data.
Sensors can have their own drawbacks, said Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor in the law and engineering schools at Pennsylvania State University. In certain cases, she said, their accuracy can be affected by darker skin complexions, certain medications or even hair spray.
And sensor data by itself isn’t always a reliable predictor of health. A worker can feel ill without showing symptoms of heat stress. Data should always be combined with human feedback, she said.
There are also privacy concerns. A supervisor could use health sensor data to claim an employee isn’t working hard enough, Chicas noted. Matwyshyn has a similar worry and wonders whether a manager could use that data to weed out workers seen as too unhealthy.
“There’s always a trade-off,” Chicas said. “But doing nothing I don’t think is an option.”
