1 Week, 7 Stories - Newsletter #37

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.

Summertime means hanging out on a patio sometime with a cold drink and some pub grub. Top of my pub fare are good old French fries. But there are changes afoot for the humble potato which means it simply has to be the lead story for this week’s newsletter.

A California start-up and an established company in the Netherlands are both working with the latest agricultural technology to give the potato a 21st century makeover according to a Wall Street Journal story.  Total potato production around the world is 375 million tonnes with China coming in at the top. Potatoes are Canada’s largest vegetable crop at 6.2 million tonnes which puts us at number 11. It is an important staple around the world right behind rice and wheat, so developing a better potato is important for food security.

Following traditional plant breeding methods to create new varieties seems to be reaching its limit, but by employing the latest in gene-editing tools researchers are making headway to increase storage life, up the nutrition level, increase yields, and make them more resistant to disease. The new technology achieves these goals by tweaking the existing genes and not by introducing foreign genetic material.

 Prince Edward Island grows about a quarter of Canada’s potatoes and leads the way in developing new varieties with a focus on climate resilience. One of the efforts underway is featured in this podcast with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientist Bourlaye Fofana who is working to increase genetic diversity to deal with drier and hotter weather patterns in Atlantic Canada.  Also taking place in PEI is research to keep Fusarium at bay which is a fungi that attacks potatoes and carrots.

There are more than 5,000 varieties of potatoes but your average supermarket shelf generally only has a few of those, but any variety that can improve our favourite spuds is likely to make it into the fresh or frozen section eventually. And if you like your potatoes baked, Yahoo! went directly to the farm to find out the best way to get it right.

The TechCrunch Minute is actually 2 minutes, but what the heck, tech doesn’t always play by the rules. It does however cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. This week it was all about money being poured into non-alcoholic drinks. Even my local Co-Op is riding the wave with a large display this week of alcohol-free beer, some of them from breweries and labels better known for their higher-octane versions.

In the US the volume of non-alcoholic drink sales was up 29% last year thanks to millennials and Gen Z hoisting an extra glass or two.  The pattern is similar in Canada where alcohol sales are decreasing and non-alcoholic sales are on the rise according to BC Business. The Société des alcools du Québec (the provincial Crown corporation which controls alcoholic beverages in Quebec) reported a drop in revenue of $18.7 million in the third quarter of the fiscal 2023-2024 year notes a Global News story and some of that slack has gone to outlets selling non-alcoholic beverages. 

The trend is also changing nightlife. Instead of heading for destinations to drink for the evening, sober bars are appearing on the scene where social contact is important and the bartenders are getting creative with mocktails and the variety of non-alcohol drinks available. A Maclean’s story followed a reporter’s quest for a night-out that didn’t rely on a boozy-evening and found that “sobriety is having a full-on moment” in Canada.

A column last fall by Sylvain Charlebois a professor and senior director of the Agri-Food analytics lab at Dalhousie University said the numbers show Canada may be sobering up.

Maybe I’ll grab a six-pack or two of the new brews this weekend and see if they really do pass the taste text.

Calgary is about to be invaded by a little beetle that comes by its name naturally.

YYC is the latest battleground for the emerald ash borer in its march across Canada after first landing in North America in the 1990’s stowing away in wood shipping crates. Already chowing down on ash trees in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia, Calgary’s 70,000 plus ash trees will be a buffet for the adult beetle and for the larvae which do the most damage. Stopping the invasion is not easy. Windsor lost 7,000 trees, Sudbury is removing all of its ash trees, and over 10 years Winnipeg estimates that it cost $22.5 million to deal with the problem.

The beetle’s home turf is China and Russia, and one possible control being investigated is to introduce a parasitic wasp which kills off the beetle, but introducing another foreign species has its own risks. There are new systemic insecticides which can be used to treat the trees which in turn kills the larvae feeding under the bark. At the top of the control list however is stopping the spread and increased surveillance. Firewood should not be moved between locations (burn it where you buy/cut it is the tagline) which is how experts believe the beetle made it into Vancouver originally.  Where ash trees are dying for any reason, replanting with alternative species is another control to guard against the spread.

August is “Tree Check Month” in Canada which is meant to raise awareness of a number of invasive species.

Make a note on your calendar now!

Is it theft, rustling, or is it ‘beenapping’? Either way beekeepers are finding their hives have become a target.

A Quebec beekeeper lost 200,000 bees to thieves last week. With 700 hives to protect she has added a surveillance system to make sure it does not happen again. Last month 7 bee colonies were stolen from an orchard in Ontario. It has become a chronic problem and some beekeepers have added GPS trackers inside the hives.  As a deterrent, California has reclassified stealing bees to theft of livestock which increases the penalties for convictions. 

The motive for stealing bees varies but includes other bee owners replacing lost colonies from disease, or shady beekeepers who rent out colonies to pollinate agricultural crops. In places such as California where almond crops require intensive pollination, producers will pay high prices to ensure proper pollination of their orchards and bee rustlers are willing to cash in. Similarly this was the case in New Zealand where a man was convicted after stealing $184,000 ($151,000 Cdn) worth of hives to rent out to kiwi growers looking for pollinators.  When the thief was caught and the bees recovered, many had to be destroyed because they had not been properly cared for and were diseased.  He was sentenced to 11 months home detention and ordered to pay reparations.

There are more than 15,000 beekeepers in Canada, and you can bet they will be stepping up surveillance and protection of their hives to deter would bee(!) thieves.

Starbucks was in the news this week. First from a decline in sales for the second consecutive quarter and then a hiccup in mobile ordering after a Microsoft cloud service outage.

Despite the decline, the sales numbers were about what was expected by the pundits. Reuters reported that one of those experts said that “investors are viewing this as not as bad as was feared potentially”, which is not quite the ideal scenario for the coffee giant. Starbucks says that there was a drop in coffee sales in China because of increased competition from local coffee chains, and in the US, consumers are simply spending less on high-priced drinks. The company also said that cost control efforts helped reduce the impact of the sales drop.  One of the Chinese competitors making inroads is Luckin Coffee, which reported this week that its second quarter was an improvement thanks to an increase in the number of beverage served and a “surge in average monthly transacting customers”. Customer preferences may also play into the sales and revenue picture, at least here in Canada, as more customers are turning to cold beverages. Hot coffee is still the most common drink but milkshakes, smoothies, and iced and frozen coffees are picking up. Tim Hortons has seen cold drink sales grow and says they will be a big part of growth in the years to come.

As for the mobile ordering problem. Though the CrowdStrike outage 2 weeks ago was not Microsoft’s problem, the new outage was all on the company. It started on Tuesday afternoon and Microsoft said that it was fixed that evening, but its effect was far reaching including the UK Courts and Tribunals Service, a Dutch football club ticket sales, Xbox Live, Minecraft gaming, Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Starbucks.

The headline calls it “Breaking MAD”. A much easier AI term to remember than Model Autophagy Disorder. I first alluded to the problem in the 28th edition of my newsletter back in June. A new paper does a much better job of explaining the how and why of where I thought we could be headed.

We know that artificial intelligence needs huge quantities of data in the form of text, code, images, and videos to reason, learn, plan, and create so that it can perform that task it is asked to take on.  The Wall Street Journal suggested in April that AI companies need so much data that the “internet might be too small for their plans”. The paper published this week by researchers at Rice University said that the data hungry technology may soon exhaust available training resources. One of the problems from that diminishing supply is that synthetic data is increasingly part of what is available and creates a ‘self-consuming’ loop. If you have played around with AI image editing, you know that strange artifacts such as an extra finger or random cross-hatching often appear in the final image. The researchers trained an AI model using nothing except synthetic image data and found that with each iteration of the loop, the artifacts were amplified.

What happens then, for cases where people are after genuine information? Forbes played around with this in 2023 and looked at what questions were asked of ChatGPT and what the answers were.

“How do you build a magical potato?” AI did try to answer an obviously frivolous question. People also asked more serious questions such as how to get their wife back, how to stop war, or how to cook crystal meth. The bot would not answer, but we have no reason to believe those safeguards will remain in place, and if the answers are based on radical sites or on answers generated by less than ethical AI programs, we simply don’t know the likely answers. In May Gizmodo revealed some strange Google AI answers which included using non-toxic glue to hold your pizza cheese in place and that Andrew Jackson graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005. If those become part of AI learning from itself, we can shudder at where we end up. 

AI experts have said that the data we currently use includes data bias, sampling errors, or inaccurate data. Sometimes that inaccurate data is unintentional, but AI is not built to “umremember” even when it is intentionally fed wrong information. There is even a term for it – “data poisoning”.

The search for an antidote is on.

The final story this week is back to the challenges of climate change. It seems to be clear that we are not going to cut emissions enough to limit, let alone actually stop, the rise in global temperatures. That leaves us with adapting and mitigating the effects of global warming.

Enter science fiction like ideas to re-arrange out planet. So where else to start than hearing what a science fiction writer has to say about climate change in this podcast from the BBC. Kim Stanley Robinson has written 22 novels and short stories most of them with some element of ecology or sustainability built into the plot. They are fiction, but he says sticking with real science and the laws of physics is important to his stories. His ideas are equally woven into realistic culture and societies and those views earned him an invitation to speak ay COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. In the podcast you’ll hear a few ideas discussed and one of those involves reflecting the sun’s energy back into space.  That idea is top of mind for a  University of Chicago scientist in a New York Times story on August 1st.

The basic idea as outlined by David Keith is similar to what happens when a volcano erupts. Large quantities of ash are sent into the atmosphere and the sulfur dioxide reflects enough sunlight to cause a measurable drop in temperatures. He does admit that “There certainly are risks, and there certainly are uncertainties,” but like Kim Stanley Robinson, he feels that not even considering our options may be an even greater risk.  The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering is a non-profit organization which tries to walk that line between not advocating for the idea while trying to avoid the do-to-little-to-late scenario. It takes the view that the technology is real and there is an urgent need to regulate it to avoid large scale side-effects and study it in a governed and organized manner.

Geoengineering is controversial but there is significant research taking place and equally significant money being funneled into the idea according to the MIT Technology Review. The Marine Cloud Brightening Project at the University of Washington is another example of how seriously the idea is being considered and this short video from the project will go a long way to help you understand the possibilities and the challenges.

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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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