Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
the increasing digitalization of financial transactions is also related to changes in the banks’ competitive environment, where the recent rapid growth of the fintech startups has revealed a new articulation between finance and technology. These fintechs are companies organized as digital platforms with business models focused on customer relationships in the areas of payment systems, insurance, financial consultancy and management, besides virtual coins. The advantages of their business models are low operating expenses, greater operational agility and the ability to generate data for the design of customized financial products and services.
In this digital environment, new technologies – such as advanced analytics, block chains and big data, in addition to the use of robotics, artificial intelligence, as well as new forms of encryption and biometrics – have been enabling changes in the provision of financial products and services that could challenge current central banks’ patterns of policy and regulation.
Taking into account the global changes in the provision of financial products and services, Central Banks have closely followed the recent expansion of fintechs. Indeed, the transformations provoked by these startups in the financial markets have raised a relevant discussion about the impacts of recent technological innovations on the financial regulation agenda – mainly focused on the Basel Accords.
The intense advance of fintechs is raising new questions for regulators: How to deal with loan activities that are being performed by means of electronic platforms? How to regulate the fintechs’ activities related of consultancy and financial management that are characterized by the collection, treatment and custody of information from users? Which is the scope of the Central Bank and of other financial regulators when considering the surveillance over the fintechs?
Moreover, there are legal concerns related to information security practices, legal validity of electronic documents, digital signatures and data storage in the cloud. Besides, the increasing growth of the privatisation of money is also at stake.
On Hayek, Digital Currencies and Private Money
Central banks the world over publish sophisticated Flow of Funds data which shows who and how and, to an extent, why all kinds of money are created and used and if stocks and flows of debt and money are becoming a threat to stability. Institutional analysis of these data, which looks at different kinds of credit as well as at different kinds of money and using a grid which enables the economist to distinguish between different kinds of economic sectors shows that they can be used to gauge the (in)stability of an economy. Macro-economists have too often however only looked at crude aggregates of total money or even purged money from their models while analysis of credit is, in 2017, still wanting as the connection between all kinds of money and all kinds of credit is still absent from the models, even if a monetary sector is increasingly added to these models.
Everyone can create money
Management thinking is moving towards an understanding of human action as a process of sense making. What an organization becomes emerges from the sense-making relationships of its members, rather than being determined by the choices of few powerful individuals.
Management is historically seen as a collection of tasks involving planning, organizing, controlling and incentivizing. A competent manager is believed to be able to analyze organizational and task requirements plus the emotionally loaded human motivations. Successful management has then been able to remove conflict and uncertainty and accurately predict and plan the future.
The future is accordingly described as goals and performance targets. Following this logic, the role of management is to control the movement into a chosen future. But what management really is, is about reduction of anxiety. Anxiety levels in the individual experiences most often depend on the perceived level of control people have over themselves and their environment. This drives our need to believe that someone is, or should be, in control.
The opposites of being in control, such as responsiveness as opposed to planning, not knowing as opposed to knowing or differences as opposed to consensus should be removed by management. Success is equated with equilibrium.
However, the ability to do this in a complex world that is highly sensitive to the tiniest changes is questionable. Neither can rational causality be applied to humans because human action is not deterministic. The idealistic view of a manager as one who is in control is not consistent with our practical experience, or with modern science. From the point of view of the sciences of complexity, an organization is not even a system, but should be understood as a pattern, or as interconnected patterns in time.
These interconnected patterns are the results of self-organizing processes across the network forming the organization. Many events, local interactions generate emergent outcomes that cannot be traced back to any specific management action. Looking towards the future, we create what happens next, without knowing what will happen next.
The organization, then, is no longer self-regulating in a cybernetic sense, but self-influencing in a complex sense. Self-influence as a concept is not necessarily positive, it can lead both to self-sustaining and self-destructive behaviors.
The key management capability is not being in control, but to participate and influence the formation of sense making and meaning. It is about creating a context that enables connectedness, interaction and trust between people.
Most people believe that the role of leaders is to choose strategic directions and then persuade others to follow them. A modern view of strategy is about exploration and experiments, a search process of trial and error. The openness to the possible through the search process leads to having to live with anxiety and not knowing. Work needs to equal learning.
The Future of Management
One more signal in the development of the concept of Universal Basic Income.
Scotland Will Begin Funding Universal Basic Income Experiments
Expanding the Experiment
Scotland is about to join the slowly expanding list of countries that are experimenting with Universal Basic Income (UBI). These trial-runs are exploring a variety of different ways in which citizens will receive a guaranteed salary from the government, regardless of social status or any other factor. There are currently UBI experiments being run or seriously considered in areas of the United States, Canada, Germany, Finland, and a host of others, which are being funded both by governments and private organizations.
It seems that everyone from Nobel Prize winners, to Silicon Valley innovators, to even billionaire heads of multinational corporations are behind this idea.
According to Jamie Cook, Director of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA), “This is a significant opportunity for Scotland to be a global leader in social policy innovation, and to work with other pilots across the world to develop robust evaluation of UBI as a response to the challenges we face. We look forward to working with Scottish Government and other parties in taking this forward.”
This Scottish experiment will start small with local municipalities creating proposals to be involved. The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, is open to the widespread adoption of UBI policies stating that it “is an idea that merits deeper consideration.”
This article asks a question - that is an important signal to information overload and transformation of our medical systems.
Who Will Build the Health-Care Blockchain?
Decentralized databases promise to revolutionize medical records, but not until the healthcare industry buys into the idea and gets to work.
There are 26 different electronic medical records systems used in the city of Boston, each with its own language for representing and sharing data. Critical information is often scattered across multiple facilities, and sometimes it isn’t accessible when it is needed most—a situation that plays out every day around the U.S., costing money and sometimes even lives. But it’s also a problem that looks tailor-made for a blockchain to solve, says John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Imagine that when a doctor sees a patient or writes a new prescription, the patient agrees to have a reference or “pointer” added to a blockchain—a decentralized digital ledger like the one underlying Bitcoin. Instead of payments, this blockchain would record critical medical information in a virtually incorruptible cryptographic database, maintained by a network of computers, that is accessible to anyone running the software (see “Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency”). Every pointer a doctor logs on the blockchain would become part of a patient’s record, no matter which electronic system the doctor was using—so any caregiver could use it without worrying about incompatibility issues, Halamka says.
Technologists and health-care professionals across the globe see blockchain technology as a way to streamline the sharing of medical records in a secure way, protect sensitive data from hackers, and give patients more control over their information. But before an industry-wide revolution in medical records is possible, a new technical infrastructure—a custom-built “health-care blockchain”—must be constructed.
For all of us how stand not only on the shoulders of giants - but on the shoulders of creators, inventors, researchers before us and around us - the 21st Century needs new institutions to reward creators and advance knowledge so more can create in return.
The Curies deliberately decided not to patent their process for producing radium. Jonas Salk declined to patent the polio vaccine. CERN declined to patent the World Wide Web.
Isn’t it wonderful living in a world where the internet is widely available? A world (almost) free of polio? Or do we want to live in a world where most people can’t benefit from breakthrough medical procedures, like the recently approved CAR-T leukemia treatment, which costs about $500,000 per treatment?
Dear Harvard, Berkeley, and MIT: don’t patent CRISPR
Everyone should benefit from this once-in-a-lifetime discovery
There is nothing scientists like to talk about more than the purity of their profession. Egalitarian. Transparent. A cut above other professions, if we do say so ourselves.
That isn’t true, of course. Science is a human endeavor, so it’s just as gnarled and bitter (and racist and sexist) as any other business. Nowhere is this clearer than the soulless, ongoing battle over the CRISPR gene editing patent. It’s a petty, damaging fight; less a spirited debate about intellectual property than a mud-slinging competition between the rich and powerful to get a little bit richer. But if there were any bravery among the litigants, there wouldn’t be a CRISPR patent at all.
The story, though we’re still in the middle of it, has long transcended from real events to legend. Starting in the late 1980s, scientists started discovering weird, repeating sequences of DNA in the genomes of bacteria. Eventually, they determined that these sequences are like a cork board where “wanted” posters for viruses get stapled. If a virus has a sequence of DNA matching a sequence in the bacteria’s genome, some bacterial proteins kill the virus. These sequences were named CRISPR.
Here is a very sensible take on AI by Rodney Brooks.
Amara’s law:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI
We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. There is hysteria about how powerful they will become how quickly, and there is hysteria about what they will do to jobs.
As I write these words on September 2nd, 2017, I note just two news stories from the last 48 hours.
Yesterday, in the New York Times, Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, wrote an opinion piece titled How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence where he does a good job of arguing against the hysteria that Artificial Intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. He proposes rather sensible ways of thinking about regulations for Artificial Intelligence deployment, rather than the chicken little “the sky is falling” calls for regulation of research and knowledge that we have seen from people who really, really, should know a little better.
Today, there is a story in Market Watch that robots will take half of today’s jobs in 10 to 20 years.
Mistaken predictions lead to fear of things that are not going to happen. Why are people making mistakes in predictions about Artificial Intelligence and robotics, so that Oren Etzioni, I, and others, need to spend time pushing back on them?
Below I outline seven ways of thinking that lead to mistaken predictions about robotics and Artificial Intelligence. We find instances of these ways of thinking in many of the predictions about our AI future. I am going to first list the four such general topic areas of such predictions that I notice, along with a brief assessment of where I think they currently stand.
This is a scary signal building on the platform of a surveillance society. Not only could Apple become an irresistible target - but as Spider Man and Batman learned - with great power comes great temptations and great responsibilities. Apple could become tempted to use this power for ‘reasons’ it feels that it has no choice but to use its power.
And this could in theory make Apple an irresistible target for a new type of mass surveillance order. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match.
APPLE’S FACEID COULD BE A POWERFUL TOOL FOR MASS SPYING
THIS TUESDAY APPLE unveiled a new line of phones to much fanfare, but one feature immediately fell under scrutiny: FaceID, a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones.
Unsurprisingly, this raised major anxiety about consumer privacy given its profound ramifications: Retailers already crave facial recognition to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms, Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores, or develop and sell data to others. It's also possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face.
But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments have the capacity to run face recognition searches . But until now, co-opting consumer platforms hasn’t been an option. While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day. Apple’s new system changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.
This is a vital signal (although increasingly old news) - not just about Facebook (but yes about Facebook) but also about the entire business model of marketing applied to social media with AI but without transparency. We need some serious protections regarding transparency and accountability of social media in relation to business clients and government access toward user information - but equally toward how our ‘news feeds’ can be shaped to ‘manufacture consent’.
The key question is who will the ‘guardrails’ protect? Users, civil society, marketers?
“There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards,” said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. “In this case, we’ve removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’
After being contacted by ProPublica, Facebook removed several anti-Semitic ad categories and promised to improve monitoring.
Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you.
Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”
To test if these ad categories were real, we paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes.
After we contacted Facebook, it removed the anti-Semitic categories — which were created by an algorithm rather than by people — and said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.
Facebook’s advertising has become a focus of national attention since it disclosed last week that it had discovered $100,000 worth of ads placed during the 2016 presidential election season by “inauthentic” accounts that appeared to be affiliated with Russia.
This is not the first controversy over Facebook’s ad categories. Last year, ProPublica was able to block an ad that we bought in Facebook’s housing categories from being shown to African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, raising the question of whether such ad targeting violated laws against discrimination in housing advertising. After ProPublica’s article appeared, Facebook built a system that it said would prevent such ads from being approved.
This is a very interesting signal of new ways to transform energy to provide zero-marginal cost cooling.
Electricity-free Stanford system cuts cooling costs by beaming heat into space
Over the last few years a Stanford team has been developing a roof-mounted system that can cool a building by doing just that, and the latest test of the technology has managed to use solar panel-like devices to cool water without requiring any other energy source.
The Stanford system, which its developers call radiative sky cooling, first arose in 2013 as a step towards eventually cooling homes and buildings without using any external power source. The system would draw thermal radiation out of the building and emit it into the sky at a wavelength that allows it to easily pass through the Earth's atmosphere and escape straight out into space. To negate the incoming thermal energy from the Sun, the panel is coated in a multilayer optical film, which reflects 97 percent of the sunlight that hits it, allowing the system to still function on a hot, sunny day.
...the Stanford scientists have scaled up the system and shown it could be a practical way to chill running water, which could then be piped through a building to cool it. In the most recent tests, the team placed up to four panels of the reflective material measuring 2 sq ft (0.2 sq m) on a rooftop, with water flowing quickly through pipes underneath them. Over three days, the panels were able to consistently cool the water 3° to 5° C (5° to 9° F) lower than the ambient air.
This is an important signal about hydrogen and its potential role a form of battery - where very cheap abundant wind and sun can produce hydrogen for transport and an energy storage.
"One of the great problems with hydrogen is that it's difficult to transport over long distances because it has such a low density," he told ABC News.
"Ammonia is a very nice way of transporting hydrogen from point A to point B — be it from Australia to Japan, for example — because it actually has a higher hydrogen density than liquid hydrogen."
Renewable hydrogen could fuel Australia's next export boom after CSIRO breakthrough
Australia's next big export industry could be its sunlight and wind, as game-changing technology makes it easier to transport and deliver their energy as hydrogen.
Industry players are even talking up renewable hydrogen as the next liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, which could supply hydrogen to power cars, buses, trucks and trains in Japan, South Korea and even Europe.
Their plans have been given a boost by a CSIRO-developed metal membrane, which allows the high-purity hydrogen, needed for hydrogen-powered cars, to be separated from ammonia.
The technology the CSIRO has developed can then be applied at the point of use, converting ammonia back into hydrogen for use in transport fleets.
Dr Dolan said the technology had the potential to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower.
This is a good signal for the future of farming - or at least one part of the future. With this sort of automation one can think of near-zero marginal cost precision and mass customized farming. There are three short videos as well.
Modern farming is much more complicated than just dropping some seeds on the ground and then coming back later for tasty food; the amount and composition of the pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, and even the timing of the final harvest, depends on a data-driven understanding of the state of the crop. To make these decisions, robot scouts (including drones and ground robots) surveyed the field from time to time, sending back measurements and bringing back samples for humans to have a look at from the comfort of someplace warm and dry and clean.
Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
Agriculture is no stranger to autonomy. Tractors were among the first commercial autonomous vehicles, and there’s a huge market for drones packed with sensors that can help farmers make more informed decisions. The problem, though, is that farming is still work for humans. There’s still dirt, early mornings, dirt, more dirt, and a lot of hard work that involves some extra dirt. All this dirty-ness makes farming an ideal target for robots, especially since farms also offer repetitive tasks in a semi-constrained environment. At Harper Adams University, they’re taking the farm autonomy idea very seriously: Seriously enough that they’ve managed to plant, tend, and harvest an acre and a half of barley using only autonomous vehicles and drones.
During the Hands Free Hectare project, no human set foot on the field between planting and harvest—everything was done by robots. This includes:
- Drilling channels in the dirt for barley seeds to be planted at specific depths and intervals with an autonomous tractor;
- Spraying a series of fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers when and where necessary;
- Harvesting the barley with an autonomous combine.
This is another important signal - not just because it focuses on Africa’s leapfrogging the developed world in terms of the use of drones - but also because it points to the many other opportunities to leapfrog into the digital environment when considering the implementation of renewables energy and digital environment infrastructure.
“Countries like Rwanda can make decisions fast and can implement new technologies in concert with new regulations fast, so we’re now in a position where the US is trying to follow Rwanda,” says Keller Rinaudo, CEO and co-founder of Zipline. “They’re not trying to catch up to US infrastructure. They’re just leapfrogging roads and trucks and motorcycles and going to a new type of infrastructure.”
AFRICA’S DELIVERY DRONES ARE ZIPPING PAST THE US
Tech visionaries may tantalize us with visions of instant gratification via drone delivery, but Silicon Valley has yet to deliver on such promises. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe in an African country barely the size of Maryland, drone deliveries have already taken flight—with more serious cargo than burritos.
In October 2016, Rwandan crowds cheered the launch and landing of delivery drones developed and operated by Zipline, a San Francisco-based startup. The locals call the Zipline drones “sky ambulances” as they soar overhead and swoop in low to drop off lifesaving blood supplies by parachute to remote hospitals and clinics located hours outside the Rwandan capital of Kigali. That may sound very different from the PR circus surrounding Google drones testing delivery of Chipotle fare to Virginia Tech college students—and it is. But Zipline and similar delivery drone pioneers have also learned some valuable lessons about what a large-scale delivery drone operation can look like—and whether Silicon Valley can ever realize the dream of drone delivery to your doorstep.
In early 2018, Zipline will officially kick off the world’s largest delivery drone service in Tanzania, Rwanda’s much larger neighbor. The Tanzanian government aims to use Zipline’s delivery drones to make up to 2,000 deliveries of medical supplies per day. Those deliveries of supplies such as blood products, medicines, and snake antivenom will go to more than 1,000 hospitals and clinics serving 10 million people. An operation at this scale will dwarf anything previously attempted in the drone-delivery universe.
This is a serious signal indicating the trajectory of future military platforms.
Rolls-Royce to Make an Autonomous Naval Ship Powered by AI
On Tuesday, the luxury car manufacturer Rolls-Royce revealed its plans to build an autonomous naval ship–a move that signals the company’s official entry to the naval shipping arena.
According to a post published by Rolls-Royce on its website, the company is planning to create a single-role, autonomous naval ship that will have a 3500 nautical-mile range. Apparently, Rolls-Royce is interested in making autonomous ships only, rather that remote-controlled ones. As quoted, Benjamin Thorp, Rolls-Royce General Manager of Naval Electrics, Automation, and Control, said:
“Rolls-Royce is seeing interest from major navies in autonomous, rather than remote controlled, ships. Such ships offer a way to deliver increased operational capability, reduce the risk to crew and cut both operating and build costs.
“Over the next 10 years or so, Rolls-Royce expects to see the introduction of medium sized unmanned platforms, particularly in leading navies, as the concept of mixed manned and unmanned fleets develops. With our experience and capabilities, we expect to lead the field.”
While there is a lot of anxiety around AI and some form of automation that can change any job - here’s a signal of the ‘revenge of the nerds’ type of responsive AI development.
Chatbot lets you sue Equifax for up to $25,000 without a lawyer
Equifax’s security failure affected 143 million US consumers, or 44 percent of the US population. To add insult to injury, Equifax waited over a month before revealing the security breach it had suffered. If you’re one of the millions affected by the breach, a chatbot can now help you sue Equifax in small claims court, potentially letting you avoid hiring a lawyer for advice.
Even if you want to be part of the class action lawsuit against Equifax, you can still sue Equifax for negligence in small claims court using the DoNotPay bot and demand maximum damages. Maximum damages range between $2,500 in states like Rhode Island and Kentucky to $25,000 in Tennessee.
The bot, which launched in all 50 states in July, is mainly known for helping with parking tickets. But with this new update, its creator, Joshua Browder, who was one of the 143 million affected by the breach, is tackling a much bigger target, with larger aspirations to match. He says, “I hope that my product will replace lawyers, and, with enough success, bankrupt Equifax.”
Not that the bot helps you do anything you can’t already do yourself, which is filling out a bunch of forms — you still have to serve them yourself. Unfortunately, the chatbot can’t show up in court a few weeks later to argue your case for you either. To add to the headache, small claims court rules differ from state to state. For instance, in California, a person needs to demand payment from Equifax or explain why they haven’t demanded payment before filing the form.
This is another important signal of the potential trajectory for future farming - as a consequence of domesticating DNA.
Bayer And Ginkgo Bioworks, A Startup, Aim To Make Crops Produce Their Own Nitrogen Fertilizer
German conglomerate Bayer, together with Boston biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks, announced this morning that they’re creating a new company that could make it possible for crops like corn, wheat and rice to produce nitrogen fertilizer. The yet-to-be-named joint venture between Bayer’s crop science division and Ginkgo, has the backing of $100 million in investment capital from the two companies and New York venture firm Viking Global Investors.
Gingko CEO Jason Kelly, who will serve on the board, says the new company’s 50 employees will work on creating a microorganism called a “plant microbiome” that could upset the $80 billion worldwide market for chemical nitrogen fertilizer, and curb pollution.
Most nitrogen fertilizer is made by big chemical producers. Farmers spray it or inject it into the soil. While it boosts crop yields, it causes environmental damage, says Kelly. Some 3% of the world’s carbon emissions result from nitrogen fertilizer production and toxic nitrogen fertilizer run-off pollutes waterways and kills fish.
The Bayer/Ginkgo team wants to turn crops into their own mini-fertilizer manufacturers. A handful of plants, including peanuts and soybeans, produce nitrogen naturally, and don’t require man-made fertilizer to grow. The plan is to empower other crops to make their own nitrogen by designing a nitrogen-producing microbiome in the lab and coating seeds with the synthetic cells.
Here’s another signal of the accelerating progress in domestication of DNA - starting with understanding it.
Using heavy-duty computers to sift through this mess, the team ultimately reconstructed 7280 bacterial and 623 archaeal genomes – about a third of which were new to science.
The newly identified microbes added 20 major branches, or phyla, to the tree of life. “To give this context, every single insect on Earth belongs to just one phylum, and every single animal with a backbone belongs to one phylum, so this is crazy new levels of stuff,” says Nicholas Coleman at the University of Sydney.
‘Dark matter’ microbes add 20 new branches to the tree of life
They were right under our noses all along – thousands of novel microscopic life forms, now unmasked by genetic analysis. Many belong to entirely new groups, as different from other microbes as an insect is from a chimpanzee.
Earth’s microorganisms are split into groups called bacteria and archaea. Together, they make up the vast majority of species on the planet, but until recently we were only able to study a tiny fraction of them.
This is because less than 10 per cent can be isolated and grown in the lab. The rest can only survive in the conditions of their native environment – be it a hydrothermal vent or the guts of a cow. Researchers call them microbial dark matter.
However, a technique called metagenomics is bringing them to light. It involves taking an environmental sample, sequencing all the DNA in it – its metagenome – then piecing together the genomes of each of the microbes present. “It’s like getting a mix-up of lots of different jigsaw puzzles, and then trying to put together the pieces of each individual puzzle,” says Donovan Parks at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Parks and his colleagues analysed more than 1500 metagenomes that researchers worldwide had uploaded to a public database. Each contained jumbles of DNA sequences collected from environments such as soil, the ocean, hydrothermal vents, industrial effluent, and cow and baboon faeces.
Well this is not Stephen King’s ‘IT’ - but industrial ‘monsters’ do lurk in the nether worlds of our cities plumbing.
Thames Water’s head of waste networks, Matt Rimmer, said: “This fatberg is up there with the biggest we’ve ever seen. It’s a total monster and taking a lot of manpower and machinery to remove as it’s set hard.
'Total monster': fatberg blocks London sewage system
Thames Water must break up congealed mass of fat, wet wipes and nappies to prevent raw sewage flooding streets
A fatberg weighing the same as 11 double decker buses and stretching the length of two football pitches is blocking a section of London’s ageing sewage network.
The congealed mass of fat, wet wipes and nappies is one of the biggest ever found and would have risked raw sewage flooding on to the streets in Whitechapel, east London, had it not been discovered during a routine inspection earlier this month.
Now workmen armed with shovels and high-powered jets are working seven days a week to break it up. The grim task is expected to take three weeks.
The fatberg is estimated to weigh 130 tonnes and stretches for 250 metres making it 10 times larger than the one found in a sewer in Kingston, London, in 2013.
For any Jim Carrey fans - this is a dimension of him that I never knew about - really an awesome 6 minute video.
