Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Michelle Girash and Chandra Pasma write from personal experience about the uncertainty COVID-19 creates for workers. Bryan Borzykowski notes that the needed extension of the CERB through the summer has merely delayed the approach to a cliff for people who have rightly relied on public support. And Rachel Aiello reports on the Libs' stingy "volunteer" program for students which will pay less than minimum wage to participants while lining the pockets of a Trudeau-connected non-profit.
- Jean-Pierre Colin points out the opportunity to build a green economy in the course of redeveloping from the coronavirus pandemic. And Glen Pearson argues that we should take the opportunity to move away from an emphasis on growth at all costs.
- Shadia Nasralla reports on new research showing how just one pipeline has been emitting massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere - confirming the folly of allowing natural gas operators to ignore what they spew. Laura Tretheway discusses the "plastic superhighway" of waste finding its way into the environment and our food chain. And Jimmy Tobias reports on the Trump administration's use of cyanide bombs to wage war against wildlife on behalf of businesses.
- Rebecca Gao offers a primer on the definition and reality of systemic racism for the many leaders who seem utterly unaware of it.
- Finally, Sarath Peiris recognizes that police should be a last resort rather than a first option in responding to social ills. And Shawn Fraser writes that spending on remand beds represents an expensive way to avoid addressing the real causes of crime and insecurity.
Two inventions needed are: form-fitting latex gloves and form fitting body PPE that pneumatically are applied in seconds. I see a path to preventing pandemics but maybe not Covid-19 as it helps against Covid-30. Magnetic Particle Imaging should work better with high aspect ratio magnetite. I hope it can be encased with enzyme bilayers that breakdown iron oxide before it is released to the body.
ReplyDeleteMPI can be used to pick leaders and experts who would recognize Covid in the late Fall before it became very communicable.
I just barely suggested a robot to stop a meltdown. Mental fatigue almost made me forget to check for typos. A strong inclination here for the robot could be neuroimagible, but how important is the ethics here of a just-in-time solution versus in-the-bag? Ideally you could sort out the magnetite from blood with soft nanobiotechnology but this is very risky research. And who do you press to leave for power and how much more of a nuclear war risk do you accept to keep bad leaders there? A non-polemic medical imaging future can prevent future diseases but it is much harder than was the Cold War and will require the effort society displayed in the last two weeks of March, versus the slad days of May.