New reports over the past two days have brought increased attention to three long-simmering subplots in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
First, the Wall Street Journal revealed new details about GOP operative Peter W. Smith's quest to obtain Hillary Clinton's emails from Russian hackers during the 2016 campaign — including that he raised at least $100,000 for the effort and then pitched in $50,000 of his own money. (Smith was found dead last year, and local authorities ruled his death a suicide.)
Second, the New Yorker revisited the question of mysterious online communications between a Russian bank and a domain tied to the Trump Organization. This topic came up during the campaign and wasreceivedskeptically, but now the New Yorker quotes experts who've reviewed the data and still suspect there's something there.
Third, the New York Times revealed that an Israeli firm called Psy-Group pitched its "social media manipulation" services to Trump campaign aide Rick Gates in early 2016, but that Gates didn't hire the firm. Mueller's team has been investigating Psy-Group closely for months for reasons that are not entirely clear but seem to be about whether the firm did in fact do work on behalf of Trump's campaign.
All three of these storylines could be quite consequential — or they could have relatively innocuous explanations. But as former Justice Department official Matthew Miller observed on Twitter, all this news should remind us of the staggering complexity of the Mueller investigation, and that there's still so much we don't know about what he's found.
Peter W. Smith: what happened when he sought Hillary Clinton's emails from Russian hackers?
Michael Flynn. The Washington Post/Getty Images
What we already knew: During the 2016 campaign, 80-year-old GOP operative Peter W. Smith recruited a team to try to obtain Hillary Clinton's 33,000 deleted emails from "dark web" hackers — including hackers he thought were "probably around the Russian government." It's not clear if Smith had any success, but we know he tried because he freely admitted all this to reporter Shane Harris in May 2017.
Then, 10 days after Smith told his story to Harris (but before it published), Smith was found dead in a Minnesota hotel, with a plastic bag over his head and a source of helium attached. Per the Chicago Tribune, an accompanying note said Smith was taking his life because of a "RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017," and because of "LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING." The note stated that "NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER" was involved in his death. Local authorities ruled his death a suicide.
Since Smith's death, we've learned that he name-dropped Michael Flynn a lot during the email quest, and that Smith distributed a document suggesting "Trump campaign" involvement. Harris also reported that US intelligence reports describe Russian hackers talking about how to get Clinton emails to Flynn through an intermediary. Mueller's team started looking into the matter last year.
First off, they described how Smith communicated with some associates about the project. He and others had access to a Gmail account with the name "Robert Tyler." Sometimes, rather than sending emails, they would simply type messages in the "drafts" folder to try to avoid a paper trail. (The other person could then log in and see the draft.)
Second, they revealed that a large amount of money was involved. They describe an October 11, 2016, email in the account from an unknown person called "ROB" to Smith, mentioning in an apparent code that "$150K" will "allow us to fund the Washington Scholarship for the Russian students." The code is somewhat undercut by the subject line ("Wire Instructions — Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative") and a mention that "the students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen" (WikiLeaks had begun posting John Podesta's emails a few days earlier).
Finally, the Journal reporters say that Mueller's team has remained quite focused on John Szobocsan, a business associate of Smith's who was involved in the email operation, was interviewed by the special counsel's team three times this year, and went before a grand jury in August.
The questions remaining: Did Smith's operation come up with nothing in the end, as he claims? After all, Clinton's deleted emails were never released. Was he operating independently (as he claimed to Harris), or was the Trump campaign involved somehow (as his document claimed)? And, uh, are local authorities correct that he killed himself?
Smith may be dead, but Flynn is alive and cooperating with Mueller, so he may have provided some answers. But the fact that a grand jury was hearing testimony about this as recently as August suggests it's still very much under scrutiny.
Psy-Group: did this social media "manipulation" company end up helping Trump, or not?
Erik Prince, who met with Psy-Group owner Joel Zamel, George Nader, and Donald Trump Jr. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
What we already knew: This year, Mueller's investigators have focused intently on a new set of non-Russian supporting characters in the scandal: a trio who met with Donald Trump Jr. in August 2016 to discuss how they could help the Trump campaign on social media.
There's Joel Zamel, owner of the Israeli "social media manipulation" company in question, Psy-Group. There's George Nader, an adviser to the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. And there's Erik Prince, the American private security company CEO and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who had a mysterious meeting with a Russian financier in Seychelles after the election. (Also shortly after the election, Nader paid Zamel about $2 million, for unclear reasons.)
Mueller has questioned both Zamel and Nader at US airports and called them in for grand jury testimony, and he's even sent FBI agents to Israel to dig into Psy-Group. But we still haven't gotten the full picture of why, and how it might relate to Russian interference.
What's new: On Monday, the New York Times's Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, David Kirkpatrick, and Maggie Haberman reported that Psy-Group actually pitched Trump campaign aide Rick Gates on their services back in March 2016.
At the time, the big question was whether Trump could hold on to enough delegates at the Republican convention to lock down the nomination. Psy-Group wrote a proposal that "veteran intelligence officers" would create psychological profiles of thousands of delegates and bombard them with "authentic looking" but fake online messages to encourage them to back Trump. However, Gates did not end up hiring Psy-Group, it seems.
The questions remaining: This has clearly been a major focus for Mueller this year, and the big question is why he's so focused on Psy-Group and this cast of characters. Might it involve information provided by his cooperators, Michael Flynn and Rick Gates?
The answer is unclear, but reading between the lines, Mueller may suspect Psy-Group did in fact end up doing social media manipulation on Trump's behalf (Zamel has denied this), that George Nader (who paid Psy-Group $2 million after the election) and Erik Prince were involved, and that there may even have been a Russian angle.
Alfa Bank: what is up with a Russian bank's online contacts with a Trump domain?
A branch of Alfa Bank in Minsk. Viktor Drachev\TASS via Getty Images
What we already knew: All the way back in October 2016, Franklin Foer asked in a reported piece: "Was a Trump server communicating with Russia?" He asked because computer scientists crawling the internet for signs of Russian hacking online had noticed something odd: that two servers owned by Russia's Alfa Bank had repeatedly looked up a Trump Organization domain (mail1.trump-email.com) over several months. Then two days after New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau asked Alfa's lobbyists for comment on the matter, the Trump domain was deleted, which seemed odd.
But Foer's piece was received skeptically. For one, when Lichtblau's Times piece finally ran, it was under the soon-to-be infamous headline "Investigating Donald Trump, FBI sees no clear link to Russia," and said the FBI had "ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts." Other media outlets and commentatorschimedinto opine that because the Trump domain was administered by a separate company handling the Trump Organization's marketing emails, the "spam" explanation or some other mistake was more likely.
So the conventional wisdom became that Foer's piece was probably wrong, and that's remained the case even after Trump-Russia links started looking a lot less conspiratorial. Still, CNN reported in March 2017 that the FBI was still looking into the topic.
What's new: On Monday, the New Yorker's Dexter Filkins revisited the issue at length. He talked to members of the initial group of computer experts who first surfaced the matter, who reaffirmed their analysis that this was not a coincidence. He also revealed that a former FBI investigator and Democratic Senate staffer, Dan Jones, had assembled two separate teams of computer scientists to independently look over the server data.
They concluded that the domain lookups were deliberate and likely entailed some form of communication (perhaps use of an instant messaging service). "Is it possible there is an innocuous explanation for all this?" one told Filkins. "Yes, of course. And it's also possible that space aliens did this. It's possible — just not very likely." In the article, they elaborate at length as to why they think so (and Alfa Bank continues to dispute their claims).
The questions remaining: I'm not equipped to judge the technical details of this argument, but if you do buy it, the questions of what this communication actually entailed and who was involved remain unanswered.
The piece notes that one of the only other companies to repeatedly look up the Trump domain was Spectrum Health, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, nonprofit whose board chairman is Dick DeVos — brother-in-law of the aforementioned Erik Prince. It also mentions that the curious server traffic mostly occurred within the time Paul Manafort chaired the Trump campaign, though it continued after he resigned in August 2016.
Now, of these three stories, Alfa Bank is the one with the weakest evidence that Mueller is still investigating it. (The FBI looked into the matter before Mueller's appointment, but we don't have a more recent report confirming continued interest.) Still, Manafort recently flipped, meaning if he does know anything nefarious about this, Mueller probably now knows too, so stay tuned.
Short. Sweet. To the point. That's the beauty Dave's iPhone.
Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC
The world's leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
The authors of the landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on Monday say urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.
The half-degree difference could also prevent corals from being completely eradicated and ease pressure on the Arctic, according to the 1.5C study, which was launched after approval at a final plenary of all 195 countries in Incheon in South Korea that saw delegates hugging one another, with some in tears.
Quick guide
What difference would restricting warming to 1.5C make?
A key finding of the new IPCC report is the dramatic difference that restricting warming to 1.5C above pre industrial levels would have on the global environment.
The scientists found:
• By 2100, global sea level rise would be 10cm lower with global warming of 1.5C compared with 2C.
• Extreme heatwaves will be experienced by 14% of the world's population at least once every five years at 1.5C. But that figure rises to more than a third of the planet if temperatures rise to 2C
• Arctic sea ice would remain during most summers if warming is kept to 1.5C. But at 2C, ice free summers are 10 times more likely, leading to greater habitat losses for polar bears, whales, seals and sea birds.
• If warming is kept to 1.5C, coral reefs will still decline by 70-90% but if temperatures rise to 2C virtually all of the world's reefs would be lost
"It's a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now," said Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the working group on impacts. "This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilises people and dents the mood of complacency."
Policymakers commissioned the report at the Paris climate talks in 2016, but since then the gap between science and politics has widened. Donald Trump has promised to withdraw the US – the world's biggest source of historical emissions – from the accord. The first round of Brazil's presidential election on Sunday put Jair Bolsonaro into a strong position to carry out his threat to do the same and also open the Amazon rainforest to agribusiness.
The world is currently 1C warmer than preindustrial levels. Following devastating hurricanes in the US, record droughts in Cape Town and forest fires in the Arctic, the IPCC makes clear that climate change is already happening, upgraded its risk warning from previous reports, and warned that every fraction of additional warming would worsen the impact.
Scientists who reviewed the 6,000 works referenced in the report, said the change caused by just half a degree came as a revelation. "We can see there is a difference and it's substantial," Roberts said.
At 1.5C the proportion of the global population exposed to water stress could be 50% lower than at 2C, it notes. Food scarcity would be less of a problem and hundreds of millions fewer people, particularly in poor countries, would be at risk of climate-related poverty.
Attendees take a photo before the opening of the 48th session of the IPCC in Incheon. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images
At 2C extremely hot days, such as those experienced in the northern hemisphere this summer, would become more severe and common, increasing heat-related deaths and causing more forest fires.
But the greatest difference would be to nature. Insects, which are vital for pollination of crops, and plants are almost twice as likely to lose half their habitat at 2C compared with 1.5C. Corals would be 99% lost at the higher of the two temperatures, but more than 10% have a chance of surviving if the lower target is reached.
Sea-level rise would affect 10 million more people by 2100 if the half-degree extra warming brought a forecast 10cm additional pressure on coastlines. The number affected would increase substantially in the following centuries due to locked-in ice melt.
Oceans are already suffering from elevated acidity and lower levels of oxygen as a result of climate change. One model shows marine fisheries would lose 3m tonnes at 2C, twice the decline at 1.5C.
Sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times fast than the world average, would come once every 100 years at 1.5C, but every 10 years with half a degree more of global warming.
Time and carbon budgets are running out. By mid-century, a shift to the lower goal would require a supercharged roll-back of emissions sources that have built up over the past 250 years.
The IPCC maps out four pathways to achieve 1.5C, with different combinations of land use and technological change. Reforestation is essential to all of them as are shifts to electric transport systems and greater adoption of carbon capture technology.
Carbon pollution would have to be cut by 45% by 2030 – compared with a 20% cut under the 2C pathway – and come down to zero by 2050, compared with 2075 for 2C. This would require carbon prices that are three to four times higher than for a 2C target. But the costs of doing nothing would be far higher.
"We have presented governments with pretty hard choices. We have pointed out the enormous benefits of keeping to 1.5C, and also the unprecedented shift in energy systems and transport that would be needed to achieve that," said Jim Skea, a co-chair of the working group on mitigation. "We show it can be done within laws of physics and chemistry. Then the final tick box is political will. We cannot answer that. Only our audience can – and that is the governments that receive it."
He said the main finding of his group was the need for urgency. Although unexpectedly good progress has been made in the adoption of renewable energy, deforestation for agriculture was turning a natural carbon sink into a source of emissions. Carbon capture and storage projects, which are essential for reducing emissions in the concrete and waste disposal industries, have also ground to a halt.
Reversing these trends is essential if the world has any chance of reaching 1.5C without relying on the untried technology of solar radiation modification and other forms of geo-engineering, which could have negative consequences.
A nearly ice-free Northwest Passage in the Arctic in August 2016. Photograph: VIIRS/Suomi NPP/Nasa
In the run-up to the final week of negotiations, there were fears the text of the report would be watered down by the US, Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich countries that are reluctant to consider more ambitious cuts. The authors said nothing of substance was cut from a text.
Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said the final document was "incredibly conservative" because it did not mention the likely rise in climate-driven refugees or the danger of tipping points that could push the world on to an irreversible path of extreme warming.
The report will be presented to governments at the UN climate conference in Poland at the end of this year. But analysts say there is much work to be done, with even pro-Paris deal nations involved in fossil fuel extraction that runs against the spirit of their commitments. Britain is pushing ahead with gas fracking, Norway with oil exploration in the Arctic, and the German government wants to tear down Hambach forest to dig for coal.
At the current level of commitments, the world is on course for a disastrous 3C of warming. The report authors are refuseing to accept defeat, believing the increasingly visible damage caused by climate change will shift opinion their way.
"I hope this can change the world," said Jiang Kejun of China's semi-governmental Energy Research Institute, who is one of the authors. "Two years ago, even I didn't believe 1.5C was possible but when I look at the options I have confidence it can be done. I want to use this report to do something big in China."
The timing was good, he said, because the Chinese government was drawing up a long-term plan for 2050 and there was more awareness among the population about the problem of rising temperatures. "People in Beijing have never experienced so many hot days as this summer. It's made them talk more about climate change."
Regardless of the US and Brazil, he said, China, Europe and major cities could push ahead. "We can set an example and show what can be done. This is more about technology than politics."
James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist who helped raised the alarm about climate change, said both 1.5C and 2C would take humanity into uncharted and dangerous territory because they were both well above the Holocene-era range in which human civilisation developed. But he said there was a huge difference between the two: "1.5C gives young people and the next generation a fighting chance of getting back to the Holocene or close to it. That is probably necessary if we want to keep shorelines where they are and preserve our coastal cities."
Johan Rockström, a co-author of the recent Hothouse Earth report, said scientists never previously discussed 1.5C, which was initially seen as a political concession to small island states. But he said opinion had shifted in the past few years along with growing evidence of climate instability and the approach of tipping points that might push the world off a course that could be controlled by emissions reductions.
"Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1C warming, it is painful," he told the Guardian. "This report is really important. It has a scientific robustness that shows 1.5C is not just a political concession. There is a growing recognition that 2C is dangerous."
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Short. Sweet. To the point. That's the beauty Dave's iPhone.
While we sit here and endlessly debate whether the guy is fit to be a justice on the Supreme Court (he's not, how hard was that?), there are actual things happening which could have a more devastating impact on humanity - and which get little coverage.
Here's one that is dire for humanity. But scientists aim to prevent it and want to harness its energy. How's that for American ingenuity? Why doesn't this get coverage?
A supervolcano that could destroy humanity is ready to erupt — and NASA is trying to figure out how to contain it Business Insider
Below Yellowstone National Park, there's a huge magma reservoir that has the potential to destroy humanity. Yellowstone erupts roughly every 600,000 years, and it's about 600,000 years since it last exploded. An eruption at Yellowstone National Park could lead to the end of human civilisation. However, NASA has a plan that could prevent such an explosion and could also create a geothermal plant to generate electricity. What images go through your mind when you think of the end of the world? Read the full story
* They target people with Jewish sounding last names.
* They sent text messages, but where and how did they get those numbers?
* Desantis' team is behind it, and says gillums running mate is anti Semitic....hmmm the same desantis who took a holocaust denier as his guest to the state of the union?
* the comment by the running mate could maybe be construed as insensitive. But really?
* so a comment made by a dem candidate years ago are proof that he is something. But an allegation about the activities (possibly criminal) of a Supreme Court justice appointed by an rep are to be discounted as not mattering. I see...
* does the campaign not realize that this might actually offend people?
I wound up watching what I thought might be an interesting show called Timeless which had aired on NBC for a couple of seasons; ostensibly it's about time travel.
I had to suspend a lot of disbelief and their time travel nonsense was silly. But it was an okay show with a couple of running themes.
One was about an old-as-the-country organization that was controlling everything in history.
That's an intriguing plot point and I found it clever and a little cute.
But the stupidity of time travel and the lack of action in many situations by the protagonists was irritating me. I almost stopped watching.
But to me, there was a more interesting running theme that kept me watching.
The plot point was about the millionaire inventor who came up with the time machine. He lost his edge and couldn't do anything technical. And he loses his fortunes.
Over time, he starts to regain his skill by working at it and in the scene that made me laud the show (even though I started to really dislike it) was one where he and another engineering type were faced with long odds and a big problem, and they struggled to stay focused.
He says to the guy "We're engineers. We solve problems. It's what we do."
And went on to tell the other guy they need to focus on the task at hand.
They naturally save the day.
But nevertheless the line resonated with me.
I am an engineer, but I don't flex my engineer mind, the muscle that makes me who I am.
In short, I have forgotten what it is to be engineer.
I need to rebuild those skills, to focus on the task at hand and solve problems.
Thanks random mediocre tv show for helping me find my way again.
Short. Sweet. To the point. That's the beauty Dave's iPhone.
The price of cable, phone, and internet keeps rising. So we decided it was time to make a change.
We realized there were only a handful of channels we watched, and the provider stepped down the quality to SD, and then wanted to have us move into a higher tier AND rent a converter box to get HD. We lived with SD.
We already have amazon prime and Netflix, so really it was just about getting live tv for those few channels.
So we searched and studied, and narrowed it to SlingTV and Hulu. Really there is no wrong answer. They are similar in terms of channels and cost if you get the full package.
But Hulu offers a DVR and some local channels, so we went with them.
It's been a week, and so far it's great. Everything is HD. We get a few new channels that I might watch.
Canceling the cable portion of our bill was a savings of almost $70; the price point means we're saving about $40 per month.
For better quality.
And no contract.
Yeah, it's a no brainer.
I have to get used to not using the traditional tv remote to channel surf...but what I have quickly come to realize is that it's simply a matter of adjusting my viewing habits.
Next up, I want to look at doing away with my home phone. That's a little harder - we have a security system tied to it and I'm not *quite* there yet.
But the day is coming.
Short. Sweet. To the point. That's the beauty Dave's iPhone.
By 2050, somewhere between nine and 11 billion people will be living on the planet. What will everyone eat? More than half the calories consumed by humans come directly from plants, mainly from grains such as rice, wheat, and corn. But agricultural yields of some of these row crops have already plateaued in a third of world. How to feed everyone—without degrading the environment—may be one of the great social problems of the next generation.
In absolute terms, the projected shortfall in staple grain crops by 2050 is immense—394 million too few tons of rice alone—and the path to higher yields uncertain. The situation invites comparison to the decades that followed World War II, when many countries could not grow enough food to feed their own people. As the global fertility rate set a pace that would lead to a doubling of population, from three to six billion, between 1960 and 1999, there was a Malthusian question to confront. Even with globalization, could the farmers of the world feed twice as many mouths? The answer in 1960 was clear: they could not—not without the help of a "Green Revolution."
That revolution—championed by American agronomist Norman Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work—led farmers to increase their use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides; to adopt high-yielding crop varieties; to improve their irrigation practices and technologies; and to purchase machines for cultivating and harvesting their crops. Today, those practices are firmly entrenched facets of industrialized agriculture.
At the same time that these technologies have largely reached their potential, and their pitfalls have become more apparent, incomes have risen in the developing world, leading to preference-driven increases in demand for certain foods. In China, for example, as the population grew 41 percent between 1980 and 2015 and incomes soared far more, demand for pork quintupled, and demand for soybeans rose tenfold. Such shifts have global consequences. Brazil, an increasingly important exporter of soybeans to China, lost 9.5 percent of its forested land in conversions to "farming and other commercial purposes" between 2000 and 2014, according to a 2017 New York Times article chronicling the transformation of richly biodiverse Pantanal wetlands into soybean deserts. This in turn has contributed to substantial increases in Brazil's greenhouse-gas emissions.
Globally, between a fifth and a third of total greenhouse-gas emissions have been attributed to agriculture, as has three-quarters of all deforestation. Pesticide-contaminated farm runoff (involving insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and poisons for killing mites, rodents, snails, and slugs) pollutes fresh-water resources, while nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers can even poison the oceans, creating dead zones thousands of square miles in extent. People have begun to ask whether modern technology has a second act, one that would allow farmers to sustainably feed a peak population of 10 billion people without bumping into absolute limits in the availability of arable land and fresh water—not to mention the potential threats to cultivating food crops in a changing climate.
Innovators in new agricultural technologies say yes—the seeds of a new revolution are already growing. In the corporate sector, change is being driven by consumers in developed nations—thinking of their health, and the impacts of their food choices (see, for example, "Eating for the Environment," March-April 2017, page 11)—and has been enabled by molecular biology, genomics, and information technology. Starting with major row crops, researchers have identified beneficial microbes that help plants grow, have edited plant genomes to improve them, and have pioneered ingenious solutions to reduce waste in the food-supply chain. These innovations could mark the beginning of a second Green Revolution—with the potential to help people in developing nations in Southeast Asia and Africa. And David Perry, M.B.A. '97, the CEO of Indigo Ag, an agricultural-technology startup headquartered in Boston, believes that this time, these revolutionary changes will be better for everyone.
"In the 1940s we created industrialized agriculture for a good reason: we had to feed a whole bunch of people, and it worked," he points out. "But the unintended consequences of that were technologies and methods that probably weren't good for the environment, weren't good for us as consumers, and arguably haven't been very good for farmer profitability either. They end up spending all their money paying for those technologies": chemical fertilizers and pesticides, expensive varieties of seed, giant tillers and combines.
Perry, who speaks with a hint of a drawl, knows about such things first hand. He grew up on a farm in Arkansas, where his family also sold fertilizer to their neighbors. After earning a chemical-engineering degree from the University of Tulsa, he worked at an oil refinery as an engineer for Exxon, then earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. After running two successful startups, the second of which Pfizer ultimately acquired, he could have retired. Instead, he began searching for an opportunity that would allow him to work on a problem he cared about, and "that would make a positive difference in the world."
That's when he found Indigo Ag, a company that is commercializing microorganisms that help plants grow. Indigo Ag's scientists have identified microbes that confer resistance to drought, and are developing others that reduce the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides in five important row crops: corn, rice, soybeans, cotton, and wheat. They coat seeds with these beneficial microbes to reduce the need for irrigation, increase resiliency in drought-stressed plants, and enhance their ability to extract nutrients from the soil. Perry sees an opportunity for Indigo Ag to lead or catalyze a change in the way industrialized agriculture is done.
"I am conscious of what a big ambition that is," he says. Agriculture is the largest industry in the world, employing a billion and a half people, "but there is a better way to do it than the way we are doing it right now." Microbes have the potential to be a significant part of the solution.
The Anti-Darwinian Food Revolution
Awarenessof the mutually beneficial relationships that plants maintain with microbes—both those in the soil and those, known as endophytes, that reside within their roots, shoots, leaves, and stems—has been growing during the past decade. In fact, scientists are just beginning to understand this anti-Darwinian world, based on evolution through cooperation, rather than competition. A recent article in Arnoldia, the journal of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, summarizes some of the research in this area, describing, for example, remarkable seasonal flows of nutrients between sugar maple trees and nearby trout lilies through underground mycorrhizal networks of symbiotic or mildly pathogenic fungi. Experiments in tomatoes and beans have demonstrated that plants can communicate the presence of pests through those same networks by releasing chemicals that then stimulate nearby plants of the same species to secrete protective chemicals. Oaks grown in a greenhouse and subjected to drought conditions have been shown to transfer water from their tap roots up through their root systems to associated fungal networks, sustaining these beneficial partners. The finding makes sense: some researchers believe that these fungal networks, not roots, are the principal way that plants extract nutrients from the soil.
Indigo Ag was founded to capitalize on the mutualisms among plants and their endophytic, in-plant microbial partners. When Perry joined the company as CEO in January 2015, it was "just 14 employees and the technology." (It now employs nearly 250 people in four countries.) "But it was the most interesting combination of technology and unmet need I had ever seen," he says, "because microbiology not only potentially addresses the yield problem, but does it in a way that is fundamentally healthier and more sustainable than current technologies."
Identifying which microbes are beneficial to plants, though, presented a potentially gigantic screening challenge: a single gram of soil contains billions of microbes, and only a few play a role in plant biology. Perry calls Indigo Ag's solution to that problem "probably the key to our early technical success, that allowed us to leapfrog everybody else." One of the company's most important scientific insights, he explains, "was that plants have already done this experiment for us. The ancestors of these plants have been growing in this soil for 200 million years. Every single one of them has sampled those microbes and evolved ways of incorporating the ones that are helpful and rejecting the ones that are potentially harmful. And so, we can leverage those 200 million years of experiments by just looking inside the plant….It is a super simple insight, but nobody else was thinking about it that way."
Instead of dealing with billions of microbes, Indigo's scientists were left with just hundreds of microbial associates within a plant. They began by collecting tens of thousands of plant samples, many of them crops, from every continent except Antarctica, and made sure to collect species growing in extreme environments, such as deserts, seeking to identify the microbiome of plants that can live under the most challenging conditions of drought and heat. Next comes DNA sequencing, to characterize the bacteria and fungi found in or on the specimens, and then machine learning to identify sequences likely to be beneficial, often sequences that resemble those the scientists have seen in association with other plant species growing under similar conditions.
These they test in plants. The greenhouses in the four-year-old company's Charlestown, Massachusetts, headquarters cost $1.2 million—reflecting the need to control light, heat, and humidity identically for every plant in order to isolate the effect of the microbes being studied. Each quarter, Indigo Ag uses two-week lab assays to weed more than 1,000 candidate microbes per crop down to 100, followed by greenhouse assays to select the top 10 of that hundred for testing in the field. Once they have identified the bacteria and fungi that work best, they multiply them in a fermenter, scaling up in as little as four months from one to 2,500 liters of solution that can be used to coat seeds.
Their first product, Indigo Cotton™ (cotton seeds coated with their proprietary mix of microbes) was launched in the spring of 2016 in West Texas, and led to an 11 percent improvement in yield by protecting against drought stress. Now the company is buying their similarly treated crops—soy, cotton, rice, wheat, and corn—from growers at a premium based on improved quality of the harvest, as well as traceability and sustainability, and selling them to buyers who want those characteristics. In development are products that will reduce the need for nitrogen fertilizer, or confer pest protection. Eventually, Indigo Ag expects to "stack" its products, selling, for example, a drought-resistant corn that uses less fertilizer and also resists pests.
The potential appeal for farmers, whose costs in land, equipment, seeds, and fertilizer are all upfront, is enormous. "What they most want to avoid," Perry explains, is "a down year that puts the farm at risk. So our ability to help these crops deal with extreme stress makes them profitable for farmers."
Meanwhile, Indigo Ag has potential competitors, of two sorts. One is other startups, of which there are half a dozen, including NewLeaf Symbiotics in St. Louis and AgBiome in Durham, North Carolina, both "relatively small companies…doing good science," Perry believes. The other potential rivals are big agricultural companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, and DowDuPont, which primarily sell seeds, chemicals, and fertilizers. "But you can imagine," Perry says, "that if this is the next most important technology, they would have an interest in it."
He doesn't dismiss the possibility that Indigo Ag could be purchased by a large firm, and he takes seriously his responsibility to give investors the best possible return, but the company's plans are explicit that "there is an opportunity to build a big independent company here, and that we are likely to have the biggest impact on the world if we remain independent."
Perry defines Indigo Ag's place in the big picture thus: "We need about 70 percent more food than we currently produce—or rather than we deliver—to feed 10 billion people. Some of that can be managed through reducing waste and changing eating habits, but we have got to produce a lot more—let's says 50 percent more." As much as half of that additional production, he believes, will come from microbiology. Furthermore, he adds, "I think ultimately we have the opportunity to replace at least half of the chemical fertilizer used and maybe 90 percent of the chemical insecticides and fungicides."
As for the remainder of the projected yield shortfall, Perry suggests that 20 to 30 percent is likely to come from genetic enhancements of staple crops, and the final 20 or 30 percent from "digital ag." "Every decision a farmer makes right now is suboptimal, because they don't have enough information to make an optimal decision," he declares. With a digital infrastructure that aggregated data from many farms, farmers could learn from one another and make data-based decisions about what crops to grow, what portfolio of seeds to use, and when and how densely to plant them, he says. Today, though, "These are decisions that farmers are more or less making based on myth and legend."
Reconnecting Farmers to Consumers
Once there is enough food—and Perry believes that technological solutions will meet that need—people can begin to consider the healthiest and most sustainable ways to grow food, what land it should be grown on, and what land to set aside for other purposes. "The decisions are very different all of a sudden," he points out. "And I think we are just entering an era where that is going to become the new reality."
He is hinting at the engine behind much of the technological change—a movement that is slowly reconnecting consumers with farmers. For most of history, he explains, farmers knew exactly for whom they were producing food: "It was them, their families, and maybe a really tight-knit community."
Industrialized agriculture, despite its benefits, broke that link, turning crops into commodities. "Farmers got paid by the bushel of wheat or corn, and it is just an economic reality that if you pay for volume, and you are not paying for nutrition, or quality, or production method, then those will be sacrificed in order to maximize volume," he says. "That's the nature of commoditization." But increasingly, people care about how their food is produced. To the extent that consumers are willing to pay for those preferences, as they do with organic foods, Perry sees an opportunity to change the system for the better.
Calyxt CEO Federico Tripodi stands in the greenhouse at the company's new headquarters near Minneapolis. Photograph by Thomas Strand
As consumers have become increasingly aware of the foods they eat, a disconnect has grown between their preferences and the commoditized agricultural supply chain that emphasizes low costs and efficiencies of scale, says Federico Tripodi, echoing Perry. As a consequence, supermarkets have begun to offer more brands and options, so that "large consumer-package companies have lost market share to small, nimble ones." Tripodi is the CEO of Calyxt, a publicly traded specialty-foods company; like Perry, he sees in this disconnect a business opportunity. The two companies take different scientific approaches, however. Calyxt, rather than focusing on the plant's microbiome, makes tiny edits in plants' internal genomes in order to achieve a specific effect. The company's first product is a soybean that produces high-oleic oil, a healthy fat—a notable coup as government regulations force a phaseout of trans fats from the food supply this year. Because Calyxt achieved its goal by deleting a few DNA base pairs among 1.2 billion, Tripodi likens it to "taking a book and deleting a word."
The company plans to partner with farmers, agreeing in advance to buy the entirety of the altered soybean crop, and then arranging to extract and sell the healthy oil to major food producers. The flavorless, odorless oil contains zero trans fats and has 20 percent less saturated fat than traditional soybean oil, says Tripodi: characteristics that make it preferable to sunflower, canola, or olive oils for making products such as salad dressings, granola bars, or baked goods. Tests have also shown, he adds, that when used for commercial frying, the oil resists polymerization, so it remains stable longer in fryers.
Ultimately, Tripodi envisions a soybean that not only makes better oil, but has more protein and is herbicide-tolerant. "Maybe we work on some environmental traits that help farmers be more productive growers, and combine everything together. That's what I think is going to happen in the next five to 10 years—a general improvement in the quality and environmental footprint of our target crops."
TALEN®, the technology for making such edits, was invented by Daniel Voytas '84, Ph.D. '90, Calyxt's chief scientific officer, and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, where Voytas, a world-renowned expert in the biology of plants, directs the Center for Genome Engineering (see "Engineering Superior Photosynthesis"). In practical terms, the edit TALEN made possible in soybeans is the kind of change that could occur with a single random mutation, or that could be bred into a plant in five to 10 years by traditional hybridization, he explained during an interview at Calyxt's New Brighton, Minnesota, headquarters. The soybean plant already makes the desirable oil—the change made by Calyxt merely prevents it from converting the high-oleic oil into a less desirable linoleic form. And because this change does not involve the introduction of foreign genes from an unrelated species (transgenes), the U.S. Department of Agriculture does not consider the new variety a conventional genetically modified (transgenic) organism (GMO). The product can be planted anywhere without worry that it might introduce new genes into the natural environment.
Voytas points out that Calyxt's initial products, including a high-fiber white flour that would bring the benefits of whole grain to white bread, are focused on the consumer. "Up to now, biotech has just been focused on the farmer," he explains, as companies like Monsanto and DowDuPont engineered herbicide-tolerant, pathogen-resistant, or high-yield varieties of seeds for sale. Now, he says, there are "big consumer trends that could be met by genetically editing crop plants" to create healthier food products. "What's cool about plants is that we have learned a lot in the past 15 to 20 years about how their genomes function to dictate various traits. Now, we can go in and start to tweak them."
Voytas has horticulture in his own genes. His father worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and he's been an avid gardener and reader of horticulture magazines himself since he started a business selling bedding plants as a boy. He arrived at Harvard as a freshman hoping to study plant biology, but the closest class he could find was a graduate-level course in plant taxonomy, which he took instead. He went on to develop a strong interest in molecular biology, then in its infancy, and pursued that during his doctoral studies with Harvard Medical School professor of genetics Frederick Ausubel, who has worked extensively with Arabidopsis thaliana (mustard weed), a model organism that was the first plant genome ever sequenced (see "Simple Hosts," January-February 2003, page 48—read an online version here or find the original with images here).
The co-invention of TALEN came much later, in 2009. Although there are now other methods for editing genes, TALEN retains some advantages: Voytas has become proficient at targeting specific sites in plant genomes, and has helped build a large portfolio of intellectual property around TALEN and its use in plants. (The University of Minnesota has licensed TALEN to Cellectis, Calyxt's parent company, which has already used it to cure two instances of childhood leukemia and plans to create off-the-shelf immunotherapies for the disease.)
Although Calyxt's initial focus is consumer markets, Voytas has also developed several other products that target farmers and middlemen in the supply chain. An improved potato, for example, lasts longer in cold storage and, when cooked using high-heat oil, produces less acrylamide, a potential carcinogen. He achieved this by turning off a single gene that causes the potato to turn sucrose into glucose and fructose when exposed to cool temperatures.
A lab technician checks on the company's high-fiber wheat plants. Photograph courtesy of Calyxt
And Voytas has been working with wheat to develop varieties with traits that confer resistance to both fungal diseases and herbicides. Wheat is particularly challenging to modify, he explains, because its genome is huge: 17 billion base pairs, compared to about 3.5 billion for corn (and humans). In addition, wheat is hexaploid, carrying six copies of its genome (humans carry two, one from each parent). Furthermore, commercial wheat varieties are sexually compatible with wild North American species. That means that if a seed company started selling GMO wheat, the pollen could affect wild species and lead to "gene flow" (which is one reason why no GMO wheat is currently being grown commercially in the United States). Voytas is developing wheat varieties that have no foreign DNA, can tolerate two different herbicide chemistries (which kill weeds, but not the crop), and produce pollen that won't transmit herbicide tolerance characteristics to wild relatives—a feat he achieves by selectively editing just a few of the plant's six genomes. Ultimately, all these traits, whether desirable to consumers or farmers, can be stacked, he explains: because each is controlled by a separate biological pathway, they can be combined in a single seed variety.
A Revolution to Live With
The previous Green Revolution came with trade-offs. A new one may not require the same kinds of compromises. Perry, for his part, is optimistic that new technologies focused on the health and productivity of plants will lead to an agricultural system that is better for the environment, better for humans, and better for farmers. "That is what I got into this for," he says. "If we can solve those things, the positive impact on the world would be enormous." Agriculture already uses 70 percent of the world's fresh water. Fertilizers have led to chemical pollution of aquatic environments and soil degradation. "Roughly a third of greenhouse-gas emissions come from agriculture or the products that are ultimately consumed by agriculture," Perry says. Most of the people who live in poverty today are among the billion and half people who work in agriculture. "Those three goals—of improving human health, of improving environmental sustainability, and making farming a living wage—are three of the most important things I think we can do." Companies like Indigo and Calyxt are not going to do that on their own, he acknowledges, "But we have got a shot at playing a really significant role."
Short. Sweet. To the point. That's the beauty Dave's iPhone.
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