Idea first floated at the TEDxOilSpill conference by Francis Belland of the X Prize Foundation and David Gallo of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute becomes real.

Since the BP gusher started spewing millions of gallons of crude oil and methane into the Gulf of Mexico more that three months ago, there have other high profile spills, including one of China’s largest, near the city of Dalian, that created a 170 mile slick. Closer to my home in Chicago, a pipeline break released over 800,000 gallons into western Michigan’s Kalamazoo river, which flows into Lake Michigan.

Last year, Australia took a one-two punch, first with a tanker spill that fouled 40 miles of Queensland’s coast, then an oil rig blow-out eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In Nigeria, oil spills have become such an every day nightmare – an estimated 7,000 between 1970 and 2000 - that the tally is measured in units of “Exxon Valdez” (over 50 and still counting).

Clearly, if you drill, it will spill. Although the X Prize Foundation’s Oil Clean-up Challenge was developed in response to the mess in the Gulf, its importance goes far beyond our local oily waters. “The oil industry has focused on,”How do you drill deeper, further, more efficiently. Little money has actually been spent so far on “How do you clean it up properly?’, ” notes Peter Diamandis,  X Prize CEO.

With $1.4 million in incentive prizes provided by the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Challenge is designed to wrap up next summer, with demonstrations of the promising technologies at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHMSETT) in Leonardo, New Jersey.

RELATED READING:

“Introducing the Oil Clean-up Challenge,” by Wendy Schmidt, Huffington Post

“TEDxOilSpill: Surface Slicks, Deep Water Despair, Galaxies of Oil Platforms and Why We Really, Truly, Don’t Need Oil” by J.A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Editor’s Blog

What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

Trailer from Al Gore's documentary on climate change

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.  Meanwhile, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. Or…

• Argentina and Uruguay shiver in below freezing temperatures? Hypothermia in the streets of Buenos Aires and snow reported in seaside resort town. Or…

• the Rio Grande actually looks like a big raging river? Some sections along the U.S. / Mexican border have risen 17 feet and more above flood stage, cutting off clean water supplies, affecting tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of homes and triggering mass evacuations. Or…

• NOAA says 2010 is on track to becoming the hottest year on record? Earth has been on a hot streak for the last 304 months (a little over 25 years), with the average monthly global temperatures exceeding than the average for entire 2oth century. This past June was the hottest on record.

“Warmer than average global temperatures have become the new normal,” says Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which tracks these numbers. “The global temperature has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit [0.7 degree C] since 1900 and the rate of warming since the late 1970s has been about three times greater than the century-scale trend.”…

…”Frankly, I was expecting that we’d see large temperature increases later this century with higher greenhouse gas levels and global warming,” Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who headed up the research, said in a prepared statement. “I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades.”

Was last Spring’s  Nashville flood, which took the region by surprise after 13 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, a local catastrophe or part of much larger trend? What about the 8 inch deluge than drowned Milwaukee last week? Or the second tornado ever to hit the Bronx?

WEATHER HAPPENS / CLIMATES CHANGE

If man-made greenhouse gases are behind the deadly weather, that’s good news: We can still do something about it. But as a new study of historic droughts in Asia shows, the ramifications of disturbed weather patterns can be devastating, no matter what the cause.

Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spent 15 years collecting samples from more than 300 sites across Asia to create an atlas of tree ring data for monsoon weather patterns. The correlations between major droughts and political unrest are striking, if not completely surprising. From the collapse of the Khmer civilization to the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the French Revolution, nothing topples a government faster than a desperate hungry mob.

Perhaps the worst drought, the scientists found, was the Victorian-era “Great Drought” of 1876-1878. The effects were felt across the tropics; by some estimates, resulting famines killed up to 30 million people. According to the tree-ring evidence, the effects were especially acute in India, but extended as far away as China and present-day Indonesia. Colonial-era policies left regional societies ill-equipped to deal with the drought’s consequences, as historian Mike Davis details in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Famine and cholera outbreaks at this time in colonial Vietnam fueled a peasant revolt against the French.

The political opposition to the now crippled U.S. Climate Bill should be quaking in their boots. Given the staggering amount of scientific evidence linking human-generated greenhouse gas emissions to global warming and climate change, they will bear the blame for blocking action when it could have made a difference. (According to a new survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97% of scientists say climate change “very likely” has a man-made component.)

A BOUNTY OF BLIGHTS: CAUSE & EFFECT OR COINCIDENCE?

The cruelty of blight is uniquely insidious. Hopes, dreams and futures are destroyed along with crops. A blight is promise snatched away. In a matter of weeks, sometimes days, sometime hours, months of labor is laid to waste and investment is turned to debt.

It doesn’t take much: just a few invisible spores carried by the wind to a host plant. Once a botanical beach-head is established, blights – which thrive in the monocultures of modern agriculture – quickly become “community diseases,” spreading from plant to plant, field to field, region to region, painting once verdant fields black with the brush of death.

The first major victory in the The Green Revolution was genetic lab-tweak that made wheat impervious to a blight called stem rust, while also increasing yields – a rare and remarkable “two-fer” benefit. So significant was this breakthrough, plant biologist Norman Borlaug was award the Nobel Prize for it. The dream of eradicating hunger seemed within reach. Yet a little over a half-century later, the solution – crop protection provided by a single gene – has become part of the problem.

In 1999, a strain of rust was discovered in a wheat field in Uganda that had evolved past the genetic barrier. Dubbed “Ug99,” it has since splintered off into several strains or “races,” some of which are impervious to more recently developed multi-gene defenses. In a little over a decade, stem rust has traveled 5,000 miles and now threatens grain production in Africa and Asia, and indirectly threatens production everywhere else. From the pathogen’s perspective, all wheat has become more or less alike as diversity has been systematically bred away.

Wheat is the primary source of calories for millions of people worldwide, and accounts for around 30 percent of global grain production and 44 percent of cereals used as food. Globally, wheat provides nearly 55 percent of the carbohydrates and 20 percent of the food calories we consume every day.

- Dr. Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

With so much at stake, an international collaborative effort, spearheaded by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, is playing a frantic game of defense, developing resistant strains to deploy strategically as barriers to slow the blight’s spread. But the work requires the cooperation of countries otherwise at odds, such as India and Pakistan. And it takes money: steady, dependable funding and lots of it.

Stem rust isn’t the only globetrotting super-pathogen:

• An especially aggressive strain of brown streak virus is attacking Cassava, a staple for 800 million people in Africa, Asia and South America. In the 6 years since it was first spotted in East Africa, it has spread at pandemic speed. Cassava, a drought-tolerant plant that requires very little tending, is particularly important for regions beset with malaria and HIV/AIDS. Its loss means billions of dollars more needed for basic food aid.

• Late blight, a.k.a. the blight that caused Ireland’s Great Potato Famine, turns out to also have a taste for American tomatoes. Last year, its spores not only rode the wind, but took to the highways, hitching on seedling plants trucked to home improvement stores across the country. In only two years, it appears to have become entrenched.

• Stripe rust, another wheat  plague, was recently discovered to have an alternate host, the common ornamental barberry plant, on which the fungus sexually reproduces. The resulting genetic diversity of the fungus, set against the genetic uniformity of wheat, supplies the resilience that has made it so difficult to stamp out.

A warming world favors pathogens’ survival over winter, while shifting weather patterns can blow them into new territories. Human-mediated transport (trade and travel) clearly play a large role as well.

Whatever the drivers, these colliding trends of record-breaking weather / climate change and emerging plant diseases spell big trouble for global food security. In just the past month, wheat prices spiked 30%, due mostly to the Russian drought. Russia will still have enough for domestic needs, but higher prices are expected to drive up inflation, and there will be that much less for export. Stem rust primarily affects small farmers gowing for local consumption in the developing countries. Higher global commodity prices also translates into higher food aid costs.

According to the scientists at NOAA, the extreme weather of 2010 may very well be the “new normal.” Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. And way beyond inconvenient.

FURTHER READING

• “NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are the Warmest on Record,” NOAA data sheet (2010)

• “Climate Bill, R.I.P.” by Tom Wilkinson, Rolling Stone

• “Rust in the Bread Basket: A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas,” The Economist

• Al Gore’s Amazon books page
  

At TrackerNews, our approach is a little different from most aggregators. While they focus either on the latest or most popular stories, we focus on context. Stories cycle through the site in groups to deliver  a more faceted experience: breaking news is paired with archived stories, research papers, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books – print, audio, video. Every link is researched, reviewed, summarized, curated. Stephen Baker, former BusinessWeek journalist and author of the The Numerati, summed up it best: “TrackerNews puts the human algorithm back in the equation.”

We are not opposed to automated news feeds. Indeed, we scour them all the time. But they tend to skew to the new and the popular. Likewise, search engines often have hidden skews, affecting the order in which links appear (sponsored links, deals with news organizations, SEO tricks, etc.). Thousands of links make come up in a Google search, but who ever goes beyond the second page? As Mies van der Rohe pithily noted, “Less is more.”

"TrackerNews" Screen Grab Slide Show

Over the last year, TrackerNews has covered everything from malaria, mapping and microfinance, to chemical spills, earthquakes, political protests, human trafficking, energy, lighting, mobile tech, logistics, floods, famines, urban farming, the bushmeat trade, rapid diagnostics, mental illness and global warming. Our searchable database, which also includes an extensive collections of resources, has swelled to 3,000+ links and is just beginning to get interesting. (see slide show)

THE POPTECH TRACKER: A BETA DEMO

Ironically, as our database grows day by day, becoming a richer and more useful resource, its very size may itself start to become an issue.

The PopTech ’09 Tracker (“PopTracker”) is an experiment in managing a tremendous number of links that relate to a single overarching subject. Conference presenters, teachers, fellows, along with PopTech-sponsored programs,  have been sorted into categories, then listed alphabetically. Between 4 and 10 related links are attached to each person or program, including presentation videos (added as they become available).

Even in its bare-bones format, the PopTracker shows promise as an at-a-glance research tool. Ultimately, our goal is to create a tool that will not only give everyone the ability to curate and organize information themselves, but also to share content with others using graphically intuitive templates. This is just a first step.

It has, however, been a really fun one.

PopTech 2009 Tracker / "PopTracker"

With a conference as sprawling as PopTech, it  is impossible for anyone to take it all in, even someone attending every lecture (and a blur of parties…). Researching and selecting links has been an education, full of delightful surprises. The goal was not to be exhaustive, but to provide insight. The biggest challenge? Trying to figure out which category best captured someone’s work.

Where do you put a Willie Smits, for example? His agro-forestry schemes repair the environment, while providing both food and energy. Or what about Michael Wesch, whose YouTube research deftly weaves together pop culture, social networks and cultural anthropology?  Or Daniel Nocera, whose “biomimick a molecule” fuel cell design not only has the potential to provide an endless supply of clean cheap power,  but purify polluted water in the process?

These are people who live hyphenated lives, who think between the boxes. Solar textiles. MacBook-ified cello music. “Scent” dinners. Cyber-security-digital-book-translation. Urban agriculture.

The PopTracker is itself a mash-up as well, riffing on the conference and going beyond it with links to research, books, music and  interviews. Yet while it provides a good way to get a sense of the whole, any cross-disciplinary links must still be made by readers. So…

A CHALLENGE

To the graphically gifted (and you know who you are Frog Design, Winterhouse, Nick Bilton, Nancy Duarte, Nicholas Felton, et al):

A data visualization showing connections and potential connections between the ’09 PopTech’ers.

The prize:

A “Green Bar” link on TrackerNews & a permanent  ”Red Bar” link on the PopTracker!

• Get people to donate old cell phones to a recycling company
• Get recycling company to assign each phone a value
• Use value to trade for refurbished phones
• Donate refurbished phones to clinics in developing countries to use for sending health-related text messages
• Good begets good

Stanford student Josh Nesbit, who came up with the scheme, spent last summer at a tiny hospital in rural Malawi armed with 100 refurbished phones ($10 per), a used laptop and some free software called FrontlineSMS for managing text messages. Could he set up a phone network to deliver more and better health care to the 250,000 people living in the region served by the hospital?

Phones were given to a group of volunteer community health workers who support the hospital’s two (count’em two) staff doctors, traveling dozens of miles by motorbike and on foot each day to meet patients. It was the first time some of them they had ever used a phone. $500 was allocated as the annual budget for messages (10 cents per = 5,000).

The wins were immediate and sizable. In the first six months, the hospital saved $3,000 in motorbike fuel, shaved off 3,500 hours in staff travel time, while doubling the number of TB patients served. Nesbit, pumped by such a simple triumph of tech-for-the-greater good, now wants to scale up the project and duplicate it Bangladesh, Burundi, Honduras, Uganda, Lesotho and additional clinics in Malawi. Which means phones. Lots of phones.

But Hope Phones may prove to be an even better idea than he realizes.

MOBILE PILE-UP

As amazing and essential as cell phones have become, their disposal is a logistical and hazmat nightmare. Even in a down economy, well over a billion cell phones and smartphones are sold each year. According to the EPA, between 100 million and 130 million discarded phones are sitting in drawers in the U.S., mostly because people don’t know what to do with them. (Some estimates peg the annual number “retired” handsets at 155 million, which translates 426,000 per day. Taking current recycling numbers into account, then rolling over the surplus from year to year, the number of stashed phones can probably be measured in the hundreds of millions.)

If nothing else, it is a giant waste of energy. According ot the EPA: 

If Americans recycled 100 million phones, we could save enough upstream energy to power more than 194,000 U.S. households for a year. If consumers were able to reuse those 100 million cell phones, the environmental savings would be even greater, saving enough energy to power more than 370,000 U.S. homes each year.

Most Americans, of course, want the upgrade, not last year’s model. The average life expectancy of a phone in the U.S. is a fleeting 18 months. Still, they are more than good enough for sending basic SMS messages, so it’s a matter of getting them to where they’re needed and wanted.

Photographer Chris Jordan's presentation at the 2008 Greener Gadgets Conference

PHONE LOBOTOMIES

Probably the single biggest hurdle keeping donation numbers hovering at an uninspiring 20% is the fear of identity theft. Stories of sensitive, embarrassing and occasionally downright dangerous information turning up on a refurbished phones are not, alas, the stuff of urban legend. A recent survey by a recycler found that a gobsmacking 99% of the phones sampled still had prior owner data – and the “smarter” the phone, the more kinds of data are stored.

If you aren’t terribly techy and can’t bear the detailed torture of user manuals, take your phone to a retailer and ask for some help removing the memory/SIM card and resetting. Then donate.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR PHONES…

Along with silver, palladium, copper and tin. There isn’t very much of anything in a single phone, but there are so darn many phones, it adds up. A ton of ore from a gold mine typically yields only 5 or 10 grams of gold, but a ton of cell phones (~10,0000) can produce 300 to 400 grams. For the last several months, Sony Corporation has been testing out a recycling program in Kitakyushu, Japan to extract high quality metals from mountains of electronic waste dubbed “urban mines.” 4,400 pounds of raw electronic “ore” (all kinds of electronics, not just cell phones) yielded 39 grams of gold, 164 grams of silver, 73 kilograms of copper and 8 grams of palladium. Unfortunately, unless the labor-intensive extraction process can be improved five-fold, it doesn’t pay.

Yet anything that keeps phones – and their toxic batteries – out of landfills is a plus. Both are full of chemicals known to leach into groundwater. In a few states it is illegal to toss a cell phone.

___________________________________________

HEART OF DARKNESS (ELECTRONICS  EDITION)

Getting rid of cell phones turns out to be the easier half of the cradle-to-grave equation. Sourcing some of the metals required to to run a phone – or an MP3 player or any number of electronic miracles – can be ethically treacherous. Cell phones, however, have been singled out as the poster-gadget in a campaign to stop black market mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has helped fuel violence by funneling millions of dollars to warlords while condemning hundreds of thousands to virtual slavery.

Crew after documentary film crew has slogged through the African jungle for the last decade to haul back footage of scenes from Dante’s worst nightmares. In the middle of nowhere, in wilting tropical heat, surrounded by every kind of creature that bites and stings, far from clean water, healthy food or bare-bones medical care, an estimated 700,000 “artisanal miners” (according to USGS figures) hack away at rock, often working deep in airless mines, hoping to strike cassiterite, coltan or wolframite before it literally strikes them. Mine safety isn’t on the agenda and injuries are common. Many of the miners are children. Ore is carried out in sacks that weigh more than the people whose backs they break.

CONFLICT MINERALS

Cassiterite (a tin ore), coltan (an ore from which tantalum and niobium a.k.a columbium are extracted) and wolframite (a tungsten ore) have been dubbed “conflict minerals” and are the target of an international effort spearheaded by human rights groups to get electronics manufacturers to support an independently verifiable system for tracking supply chains. It’s a hot issue. In just the last few months, the U.N. released a new report, while the  Congo Conflict Mineral Act 2009 (S.891) was introduced in the U.S. Congress.

Maybe not. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't care. A lot.

Now a group called “Enough!,” (a project of the Center for American Progress) has  launched “Come Clean 4 Congo,” a campaign to raise awareness via a YouTube-sponsored video contest: “You may not realize it, but you’re cell phone is fueling the deadliest war in the world.”

Well…

Maybe not. Beyond the breathless hyperbolic weirdness of ranking wars by deadliness (do you think the millions of people caught in the cross-hairs and refugee camps of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan would feel much relief to know that whew! at least they’re not victims of the deadliest war?), it turns out the DRC supplies a very small percentage of the minerals in question.

According to USGS statistics:

• In 2008, Congo supplied just under 1% of the world’s tin.

• Australia, Brazil and Canada supply the lion’s share of the world’s tantalum and niobium (aka columbium), which are the minerals extracted from coltan.  Congo’s contribution is so small, it is lumped with “other countries” at the bottom of the “World Mine Production, Reserves, and Reserve Base” lists. (However, according to “Enough!,” the figure may be as high as 30% due to a halt in Australian production)

• Congo is lumped with “other countries” for tungsten mining. China dominates the global market with ample reserves.

"In Search of Coltan" / Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting: 80%? The true figure is closer to 30%, according to activist group Enough! - possibly much less.

Even if the 30% tantalum figure is accurate, it still much lower than an oft-cited statistic that 80% of the world’s coltan comes from eastern Congo. That stat opens a popular documentary produced the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which was first broadcast on a program with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria.

What gives?  How can this massive horror continue if there isn’t all that much money to be made? Why don’t the electronics manufacturers simply declare themselves conflict mineral-free and steer clear of the DRC?

Perhaps part of the answer is that war comes cheap in Congo and lives come even cheaper. The miners work to survive, to barter for food. They have few, if any, other options. Those hauling ore through the jungle are lucky to keep a little profit after paying off rebels and soldiers en route. Smugglers make money from importers willing to turn a blind eye to save customs fees. Guns are easy to come by. Rich is a relative term.

“Enough!” and other humanitarian organizations actually do not want to stop mining in Congo, nor do they want to see foreign companies abandon the country. It is one of the few opportunities for trade and income. Instead, they want supply chain transparency to make it easier to identify, isolate and root out illegal operations. That may be easier said than done. The technology exists to “fingerprint” ore samples and link them to specific mines, but it is a pricey process. Once the ore is refined and mixed with ore from other mines, it is impossible.

Ironically, in the corruption-warped day to day reality, the status quo offers perverse security. In the 2008 French documentary “Blood Coltan,” a middleman dealer filmed via hidden camera justifies his business by noting that miners wouldn’t have any work at all if he weren’t there to buy the minerals. Despite the bone-chilling amoral cynicism, he has a point. It is not enough to call for a halt to the conflict-mineral trade without also providing alternative livelihoods and the safety in which to pursue them.

Even with legal operations, mine working conditions are likely a low priority in the DRC and in other countries such as China where some of these minerals are sourced. Conflict minerals is a first bold volley in the battle for ethical e-sourcing.

DO THE RIGHT THING

Whether or not my adorable, talented app-happy iPhone – the Swiss Army knife of the 21st century – has blood on its screen, the point is it could.

The point, as Daniel Goleman explores in his new book, “Ecological Intelligence,” is that the supply chain of even a simple glass bottle has nearly 2,000 links. Everything has a bit of everywhere.

The point, as Jaqueline Novogratz explains in her new book, “The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World,” is that we are connected in ways we can’t even imagine. (The title refers to a sweater she loved as a girl, outgrew and donated to Goodwill. Years later, she met a boy wearing the very same sweater – name tag and all – on the streets of Kilgali, Rwanda, where she was working on a micro-finance project.) Our actions, as well as our failures to act, have ramifications.

The point is to pay attention and try to do the right thing.

That’s not always such an easy call. Except when it is. Recycle electronics. Donate old cell phones. Help a clinic in a developing country. Make Josh Nesbit’s day.

Hope Phones.

MORE READING / VIEWING:

“Congo Fighting Revives Tainted Phone Fears,” Jack Ewing, BusinessWeek

“Blood Coltan,” Tac Presse Productions

"Current WHO phase of pandemic alert"

Last week, the World Health Organization ratcheted up its pandemic rating for swine flu (aka H1N1) all the way to an unprecedented “pandemic imminent” level 5, with a top-of-the-chart 6 considered inevitable. Was it time to wear masks? Stock up on Tamiflu and canned goods? Update wills? Pull out old high school lit-class copies of The Decameron?

Well, no. At least not yet. Plenty of people got sick, but is was mostly run-of-the-mill seasonal flu-style misery. Fevers, aches, pains, head-aches, gastrointestinal woes. In the jargon of the public health set: “mild.”  Yet swine flu remains an imminent pandemic and will likely be once all the cases are tallied up.

What’s wrong with this scale?

Quite a few things, it turns out. But the biggest complaint from doctors (including my neighbor, a hospital administrator at a major medical center in Chicago) has been its emphasis on viral spread rather than  severity of illness.

If hospital staffers weren’t sure how deeply furrowed their brows should be, how could anyone expect the media to strike the right tone, or the general public to have a clue? A system intended to inject a sense of thoughtful rationality into the management of global public health emergencies has ended up confusing and frightening more the clarifying. Now that the immediate danger appears past, there is almost of a sense of “Whoops! Nevermind…”  The CDC is already voicing concern over public complacency, worried people will shrug off warnings the next time. Who’s fault is that? (literally…)

A possible easy fix:

• Add a new level 6 that factors in virulence along with human-to-human transmission, and bump the current level 6 to a 7.

PANDEMICS: FIGHTING THE LAST WAR, PREPARING FOR THE NEXT

The scale’s other issues are more subtle. According to the official “WHO phase of pandemic alert” webpage, “pandemic” means “influenza pandemic.” It is as if the SARS scare never happened. In fact, by the WHO’s definition, HIV/AIDS wouldn’t make the cut as a pandemic, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Instead of promoting an approach to biosurveillance designed to track both known and novel pathogens, the WHO’s scale seems oddly specific and limited.

It is even odder considering research the WHO itself has supported to develop cheap rapid diagnostic tests that actually can test for novel pathogens. By a back-of-envelope estimate, 99% of vertebrate viruses have yet to be identified (50,000 vertebrate species, assuming 20 viruses each = 1 million). Since most diseases are zoonotic (meaning they affect multiple species, including humans), such tests are critically important.

Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, who heads up the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, which as been working with the WHO,  gave a quick overview to three such tests in a recent Pop!Tech lecture: Mass Tag PCR, GreeneChips and High Through-put Sequencing. Each is able to test for dozens of pathogens simultaneously and narrow down candidates. Even if a pathogen hasn’t been seen before, Lipkin’s team can identify its family – what viruses, bacteria or fungi it is related to and how closely – in a matter of hours.

Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin explains cutting edge diagnostics: "We have the tools to address the risks of pandemics. The implementation difficulties are political and logistical."

SCIENCE FACT / SCIENCE FICTION

What could be worse than pandemic influenza? How about pandemic rabies?  No one is saying the threat is imminent, but the recent emergence of a new strain of the virus in Arizona spreading animal-to-animal through casual contact has researchers more than a little concerned.

Rabies attacks the central nervous system, causing victims to become aggressive, crazy and likely to bite, which is how the virus typically transmits. Fortunatelely, unlike flu where a vaccine must be given prior to infection, a rabies vaccine can be given post-infection. That’s where the good news ends.

The new strain, which mutated from a bat strain, spreads like flu – no bite required – vastly increasing transmission efficiency, especially among social animals such as foxes and raccoons. It has also been seen in skunks. Whether the mutated virus can jump to humans is anybody’s guess, but the fact that it has been observed in foxes means coyotes and dogs are probably at risk. And since foxes, raccoons and skunks have adapted with gusto to the suburban/urban life good life, the opportunity is certainly there.

A wildlife vaccination campaign using an edible vaccine might help contain the spread, but funding is scarce. Howeer, based on limited research, it is clear that the problem has been brewing for a few years, so instead of one small viral fire to put out, there are likely several smoldering across an increasingly large geographic area.

_________________________________

Contagious, fatal madness. An animal disease spread to humans. Civilization ripped to shreds. Shrieks! Screams! Blood! Gore! Wait a minute…haven’t we seen this movie?

TrackerNews could be described as a sort of artisanal aggregator. Content isn’t driven by datelines, but  contextual relevance (a nod to Alta Haggarty for that wonderful phrase). It is about creating an interesting mix and match, grouping stories (breaking news, research, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books, in print, audio, video) to deepen understanding and/or make it easier to see connections.

TrackerNews is also not limited by RSS feeds. No matter how many feeds one gathers, there is always much more to be mined from the web. Also, most feeds skew toward breaking news, or what’s popular. Tracker mixes it up a bit more, often featuring lesser-known stories (research abstracts, for example, or a flashback to an older article). This isn’t to say that I don’t scan RSS feeds early and often – they’re darn useful. But Tracker is trying to do something a little different.

With such an omnivorous charge and broad beat – one health, humanitarian work and technology that supports both -  I am always on the look-out for for sources, particularly blogs, that offer the kind of insider’s depth and insight that can add a real richness to the mix on TrackerNews.

Many are linked on the TrackerNews’ Resources section -  a work in in progress (The Resources section is not intended to be a definitive list, but a good place to begin research. We gratefully link to other aggregators that do a better job covering particular fields).

Still, there is no way to acknowledge leads for story links sourced from blogs. After mulling what to do about this unintentionally rude state of affairs, I thought it might be an idea to try occasional shout-outs of thanks from the Editor’s blog.

For those who aren’t already familiar with the following, have I got some good links for you!

Today’s list focuses on humanitarian blogs:

• Paul Currion’s blog, humanitarian.info, arcs from tech reviews, short essays and news-from-the-field, to discussions of overarching issues such as innovation. The comment threads are often as sparky as the posts.

• In fact, that’s how I formally met Jon Thompson, who writes Aid Worker Daily – although I had been reading his tech-filled blog for some time. We traded a few thousand words this week on humanitarian.info, mostly about TrackerNews. It was a thought-triggering, occasionally horn-locking discussion and one that, as Tracker evolves, I very much look forward to continuing.

• “Identifying what works in international development” is the tagline for Alanna Shaik’s Blood & Milk blog. Shaik, who holds a master’s degree in public health, speaks a dazzling array of languages (including Arabic, Urdu and Uzbek) and as worked both for NGO’s and contractors, brings a unique and eclectic perspective.

• Peter Casier runs a warren of blogs and aggregators under The Road to the Horizon banner. So seemingly effortlessly prolific is he, I told him he reminded me of the Tom Leher line about Mozart: “When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for two years.” Sigh… Be sure to click on the “More” button in the navigation bar – and be prepared to lose a few hours.

• Full Circle’s Nancy White is difficult to categorize and I suspect that is just the way she likes it. She is generous with connections, a restless thinker and as passionate about learning as she is about teaching. You never know for sure what you’ll be reading on her blog, but chances are she’ll send you off a tangent that mysteriously and surprisingly tells you  exactly what you need to know. I hear she works for chocolate.

• It was through Nancy that I found Dina Mehta’s blog, Conversations with Dina. Mehta, a Mumbai-based consultant, weaves together qualitative research and ethnography and writes about social media, with considerable insight on the experience of new technologies. Her continued reporting and analysis in the aftermath of the recent terror attacks in her home city are incisive and moving.

• Finally, to round things out, Sanjana Hattotuwa’s ICT4 Peace blog. Hattotuwa, based in Sri Lanka, focuses on policies that affect how technologies is used, particularly in the developing world. Although some of his posts stretch my limited would-be wonk’s abilities, he is a beautiful writer of thought-provoking essays.

That’s enough for now. As with all things Tracker, we are just warming up…

( *twitter-friendly url: http://tinyurl.com/ck2jbs)

Reported Incidents of Somali Pirate Attacks and Hijackings in the Gulf of Aden - UNOSAT

When the Great Somali Pirate story broke into the headlines last week, the media’s first reaction was to make a joke of it. Pirates are Jack Sparrow, popcorn, a night on the couch for a cable-movie marathon and one of the best film scores ever. Piracy is a fake Fendi. Yes, buckles are swashed (if not copied), alcoholism is a job requirement, and mythic monsters are part of the scenery. But pirates are heroes. The villains are the bloodless bureaucrats driven only by corporate greed. Ask any little kid: Who wants to be the tea-sipping dressed-for-success executive from the East India Company for Halloween? Who wants to swill a bit o’ rum and sing about rotten eggs as Captain Jack?

While the pirates of Disneyland swaggered around an imaginary 17th century Caribbean, the 21st century pirates of Somalia, a rag-tag bunch of 1,500 men with nothing to lose and millions of dollars to gain, patrol the Gulf of Aden, holding the world hostage. Still, it is difficult, at least for me, not to take a moment to savor the image of a supertanker stowing $100 million worth of a climate-threatening fossil fuel literally stuck in the water – a perversely green turn of events.

"The Fragility of Domestic Energy," by Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, The Atlantic, November, 1983

News of a robust modern pirate trade took many by surprise, though not the folks at UNOSAT, who have been diligently charting and mapping attacks for some time. Nor was it a surprise to relief workers, who started using escort vessels courtesy of NATO and the Netherlands in 2007 to protect shipments of vital food aid for 2 million people.

Nor was it news to Amory and L. Hunter Lovins who, 25 years ago this month, penned a long article for The Atlantic magazine spelling out in great detail the dangers of sprawling energy delivery networks:

On shipping: (emphasis added)

…The lumbering supertankers that bring Middle Eastern
oil halfway around the world to Western ports are also
insecure. Naval planners shudder at the tankers’ vulnerability
to submarines, but even pirates in small boats manage
regularly to board and rob tankers off the coasts of
Singapore and Nigeria. Moreover, it is not at all unusual.

Somalia may have been left off the list, but the point is made. As for Nigeria, protesters / militants seem to prefer pipeline sabotage.

(Also see the Bowoto vs. Chevron case currently working its way through U.S. Courts. At issue: Whether the oil giant, enlisting the Nigerian military, used lethal force against unarmed peaceful protesters who occupied an oil platform.)

On drilling for oil off the coast of the U.S.:

Offshore oil is favored by the secretary of the interior,
James Watt, as a secure substitute for Persian Gulf oil. The
Coast Guard says that in good weather it could put a vessel
alongside a threatened platform in the main Gulf of Mexico
fields in eight hours. Only an incompetent saboteur could
fail to destroy the platform in eight minutes.

On the Trans-Alaska Pipeline:

Our research revealed a comprehensive denial of reality:
policy-makers tend to be so preoccupied with Persian Gulf
oil that they fail to consider the frailty of their favorite
alternatives. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, for example, carries
a seventh of all the crude oil fed to American refineries.
Its failure would cost more than $700 per second*, and
in three winter weeks could turn the line into “the world’s
biggest Chapstick,” as 9 million barrels of hot oil congealed
inside. (The pipeline’s proprietors believe that the
pumps are powerful enough to get the oil moving again,
but no one knows for sure.)

* 1982 dollars

Just last week, a recently-retired EPA investigator blew the whistle on what looks like sweetheart deal between BP and the U.S. Department of Justice over a fine levied against just such a “Chapstick” spill in 2006. According to the investigator, BP had a full year’s warning that corrosion in a section of pipeline could lead to a catastrophic failure at any time. BP was charged with a misdemeanor and fined $20 million, but since oil prices spiked at news of the pipeline shutdown, it is hard to know how much the company’s profits suffered, if at all.

Beyond Alaska, a simple Google search yields a gusher of problem pipeline stories. Indeed, one website – “Iraq Pipeline Watch“  lists 469 incidents just in that one country going back to 2003 (as of March 2008, only sporadic updates).

On alternatives:

According to a study released by the Solar Energy
Research Institute in 1981, the U.S. could double its energy
efficiency and convert at least a third of its energy supply
to renewable sources within the next two decades. The
institute’s data suggest that such a shift could save several
trillion dollars, make the energy sector deflationary, and
provide as many as a million jobs.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Imagine what the world would have been like in 2001 – two decades later – had this path been followed.

When the Lovins’ wrote their article, foreign oil imports accounted for about 10% of the total energy supply in the U.S., and it was a buyer’s market. Today, the U.S. imports 60% of its oil, 16% of its natural gas, faces stiff competition for resources – primarily from China and India – and a much more volatile and vulnerable world.

________________________________________

Watching the Congressional hearings this week, where executives from the Big Three Detroit automakers begged for a multi-billion dollar bailout because “1 out of 10 American jobs depended on it,”* I kept thinking what an absurdly dumb position to find ourselves in: Why can’t factory workers be employed to build something else, something better?

After decades of lemonade-out-of-lemons “teachable moments,” haven’t we learned anything? Maybe. The new Obama administration has made jump-starting a “green economy” a top priority. It’s a win-win-win for jobs, energy independence and climate change.

What if pirates boarded an oil supertanker and no one minded? In fact, for “sequestering carbon,” they’d be paid, no extortion required. That’s the kind of easy booty that would bring a rum-soaked grin to Captain Jack’s face. Aye, matey. Yo ho to that.

* The “1 in 10″ figure is a bit misleading, as the New York Times’ Catherine Rampell explains.