“7 stories to know” is a new Monday series showcasing stories that may have been ignored in the crush of news over the past few weeks, and stories that have continued to evolve over the weekend. Expect to read coverage about health, science, and climate that frequently take second chair to what’s happening at the top of the page, plus information from local sources that the national media may have overlooked.
1. The progressive, clean-energy candidate running to replace Joe Manchin
There aren’t many states with recent voting records as blood red as West Virginia. That would seem to make a Democratic senator a much-appreciated anomaly.
But while Joe Manchin has helped Democrats maintain control of the Senate, he has often served as a stumbling block for even moderate legislation, and either forced concessions to protect his personal interests or blocked passage of critical legislation.
He’s been occasionally reasonable, often maddening, and a destructive force in fighting climate change and preserving voting rights. As he approaches the end of a 24-year Senate career, it’s possible to say that Manchin loves coal—or at least the millions he has made from it—and he loves to hear himself talk on TV. And that seems to be about it. The closest thing he has to signature legislation is all the good bills that have died at his anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood door.
With Manchin set to retire, it may seem like a foregone conclusion that his seat will flip to whichever West Virginia Republican can bring the most MAGA to the election, but there is an alternative: a progressive, clean-energy Democrat who, as The New Yorker reports, might stand a much better chance of taking Machin’s seat than anyone outside of the state believes.
Zach Shrewsbury is a 32-year-old Marine veteran who announced his candidacy at the historic site of Harper’s Ferry.
“Why am I honoring John Brown?” Shrewsbury asked the few people who had gathered to hear him that day. “We need a leader who will not waver in the face of these powers that keep the boot on our neck.”
With his thick beard and numerous tattoos, Shrewsbury doesn’t look like a typical politician. Because he’s not.
The expected Republican candidate for Senate, Jim Justice, is a coal mine operator, two-term governor, and one of the richest men in the state. Shrewsbury is a community organizer with a battered old car and little experience in large-scale politics.
But by the time the general election comes around, things might be a bit more even than anyone would expect. That’s because Justice’s personal fortune is collapsing. He owes $300 million in defaulted loans to a West Virginia bank, the federal government is suing him for millions in unpaid fines for violations at his remaining mines, and he recently had to hand over a helicopter to a Russian energy firm to satisfy an unpaid debt.
Justice is also the proud new owner of a harsh ban on abortion that gives Shrewsbury and other Democrats a platform for pounding the former billionaire.
The Democratic primary in West Virginia is this Tuesday. Shrewsbury will face off against Machin’s hand-picked successor, Wheeling Mayor Glenn Elliot.
2. The cicada invasion is underway
At the moment, they are rare. A few early bugs have started to burrow their way out of the ground, climb up trees and structures, and sing their hearts out for potential mates who are still largely taking a dirt nap. But within the next few weeks, “few” is going to change to “many.” Many, many. Oh. So. Many.
And those plaintive love songs are going to turn into a buzzsaw whine that rises and falls but never drops far from bringing on insanity.
Different groups of cicadas emerge in different years and remain in the ground for different periods. What makes 2024 extra special is the overlap between the widespread 13-year Brood XIX and the 17-year Brood XIII.
They’re not harmful, except to anyone trying to sleep over the next few months. But they do completely alter the local ecology in a way that can affect other species for years to come.
Consider this a bonus video to explain why what’s happening this year is a once-in-221-years event. And yes, you will notice this video is 8 years old, especially when they discuss presidential candidates.
If you live in an area where cicadas are emerging, and you would like the chance to turn this noisy invasion into a chance to do some citizen science, you might try searching for fungus-infected zombie cicadas.
3. Marines testing robot dogs armed with rifles
As it turns out, the biggest thing that the “Terminator” movies got wrong was the number of feet.
Ars Technica reports that the Marine Forces Special Operations Command is currently testing a new generation of robot dogs. Unlike the ones you may have seen from Boston Dynamics, these dogs don’t dance, and they don’t have a funky hand on top of their heads.
What they have is guns. Guns that are aimed using AI to select targets.
Over the two years since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, aerial drones have played a larger and larger role in that war. On any given day, more armed vehicles—and more humans in those vehicles—are likely to fall to drones than any other cause. Ukraine has also successfully expanded its drone operations into the Black Sea where they have decimated Russian naval ships.
What’s made many of these drones so effective and important isn’t just improving technologies, but plummeting costs. Drones costing well under $1000 are taking out tanks and other gear costing hundreds of thousands or even millions. That’s happening every day in Ukraine. It is changing the face of war and the tactics by which wars are fought.
Those same factors are at work in this test.
The evaluation of armed robotic dogs reflects a growing interest in small robotic unmanned ground vehicles for military use. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been remotely delivering lethal force under human command for at least two decades, the rise of inexpensive robotic quadrupeds—some available for as little as $1,600—has led to a new round of experimentation with strapping weapons to their backs.
Now if we can only figure out how to have a war fought only by the drones while everyone else stays safe, we may be onto something.
4. Two systems vie for the best way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere
Right now, the prospect of staying within the guidelines for atmospheric carbon dioxide is bleak. Despite everything that’s been tried so far, 2023 set a record for emissions from fossil fuels as the global crisis gets worse by the day. But even as more CO2 is being released into the atmosphere, scientists are working to find new ways to get it out.
Last week, Science Daily covered a new catalyst from Northwestern University that helps break down CO2 into CO, which can be a critical step in either using the carbon to manufacture another product or locking it up in a more stable form. This isn’t the first time this has been done. Such catalysts have been around for decades, but so far they haven’t made significant contributions to fighting the greenhouse gas problem. However, the key ingredient in this catalyst is plain old table sugar, which gives it a certain edge: it should be cheap, stable, and relatively easy to produce.
The process also requires molybdenum, which may not be something the average family keeps handy in a jar. However, molybdenum is much less rare than platinum or palladium used in other catalysts.
However, while that catalyst is likely years away from being deployed in a practical system, another means of capturing carbon is much closer. Climeworks switched on the world’s largest direct air capture system, known as Mammoth, in Iceland this past week.
The plant is reportedly capable of capturing and storing 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year, and Climeworks plans to scale it up by a factor of 100 before 2030. That sounds pretty good. Now we only need 10,340 more just like that.
5. First human trials of new mRNA vaccine show progress against glioblastoma
For years, mRNA vaccines languished in testing, working their way through the layers of evidence required by the FDA before approving such a radically new technology. Then COVID-19 came along, and in the race to create a vaccine the last of those layers were sliced away.
Since then, there have been encouraging developments using mRNA vaccines to attack difficult medical problems, but few have made it into human trials. That’s not the case with this paper from Cell, which reports results that could point the way to a breakthrough.
Granted, it’s hard to find a quote that captures the scope of what’s at stake.
In a first-in-human trial, RNA-LPAs elicited rapid cytokine/chemokine release, immune activation/trafficking, tissue-confirmed pseudoprogression, and glioma-specific immune responses in glioblastoma patients. These data support RNA-LPAs as a new technology that simultaneously reprograms the TME while eliciting rapid and enduring cancer immunotherapy.
Sure. Let’s have some tissue-confirmed pseudoprogression and that sweet rapid cytokine release.
What does this mean? Here’s what Fiercebiotech had to say.
A personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccine for glioblastoma with an “onion-like” delivery mechanism can prolong survival both in dogs and humans, the results of a small study have suggested.
Glioblastomas are among the deadliest cancers. In part, that’s because they are considered “cold” to the immune system. That is, they don’t trigger a strong enough immune response for the system to fight the cancer. This treatment is designed to make those cold tumors go “hot.” It doesn’t kill the cancer directly, it sounds the alarm for the immune system to come racing in.
This first test certainly didn’t deliver an instant cure. Dogs that had been expected to live 30 to 60 days instead survived an average of 139 days. Humans given the treatment lived “longer than expected,” which is vague and may not seem all that encouraging. But this treatment seems to suggest that at least some of the promise of mRNA is real and that using these tools researchers may find a means to fight one of the most difficult cancers.
6. Are ultraprocessed foods really the danger that some nutritionists suggest?
The first thing that ultraprocessed foods need is a name change. Because … what are they? It’s easy to believe that something arriving in your freezer in a box listing a hundred six-syllable ingredients might be ultraprocessed. But is bread ultraprocessed? Will I drop dead from the donut I eat on Sunday mornings, and is that worse than a hot dog on the Fourth of July? Most importantly, where is cheese? Is cheese ultraprocessed?
As The New York Times reports, the classification is “agnostic to nutrition.” It doesn’t really have anything to do with levels of fat, fiber, vitamins, or even calories. Meaning that many of the things we think of as healthy, from chewy whole-grain bread to tangy lemon yogurt, may be consigned to the same category as a slab of high-fat bologna or the latest Little Debbie sugar bomb.
So does it mean anything? Most of the studies so far have been observational studies, the kind where people answer questions about their diet and health. Those are useful because they can make it easier to deal with large groups over long periods. Those studies have associated health issues with the consumption of UPFs, but they may be less useful exactly because UPFs cover such broad groups of foods.
One study that suggests UPFs caused weight gain involved a small group who ate about 500 calories more each day when they were eating UPFs than when they were eating unprocessed foods. UPFs might make it easier to cram in those calories, but that study may also suggest that it’s simply the calories that count.
And that may be the heart of the problem. Ultraprocessed foods are “cheap, convenient, and accessible.” Foods that take less time to prepare and are more readily available are more likely to be eaten in greater quantities. They’re unhealthy just because we eat too much of them.
7. Video: Cleo Abram goes to CERN
Over the weeks that this series has been running, I’ve introduced some of my favorite popular science and history YouTubers, from Dr. Becky and “Fall of Empires” to Mark Rober and PBS’ “SpaceTime.”
But if I had to select the one person on YouTube of whom I’m most jealous, the answer is easy: Cleo Abram. She creates what she calls “an optimistic show about technology” that “acts as an antidote to the doom and gloom, helping its audience decode the world around them and see positive futures they can help build.”
Not only does Abram have a dazzling ability to process the most complex subjects and play them back with mile-a-minute charm, but her videos are graced with impeccable production values. Most of all, she gets to go to all the best places, interview the brightest people, and appears to be loving every movement of it.
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