James' World 2

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CLIMATEWIRE | Time magazine selected Elon Musk as its “person of the year” in 2021 after the billionaire entrepreneur upended the car market, reinvigorated the space industry, and funded a $100 million competition for climate technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and sea.

But Musk won’t attend Time’s event in New York City on Wednesday to fete the winners of that groundbreaking contest. The $50 million grand prize will go to Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup founded three years ago that works with crushed rocks and subsistence farmers to soak up climate pollution.

It’s unclear why Musk, an environmental hero turned MAGA diehard, is skipping the capstone event for a climate contest bankrolled via his eponymous foundation. Neither he nor Time responded to requests for comment. The XPrize will be announced at the Time100 Summit, the magazine’s annual event featuring 100 influential people.

In addition to running electric-vehicle-maker Tesla and the aerospace firm SpaceX, Musk is leading President Donald Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency has slashed climate funding for research, projects and agencies.

“We live in very complicated times,” said Nikki Batchelor, who led the Musk-funded carbon removal competition at the XPrize Foundation. Prior to joining the nonprofit, she worked as an innovation adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first federal bureau effectively shuttered by Musk. (Musk has no ties to the three-decade-old foundation aside from being a donor.)

“He was one of the leading voices trying to push clean energy forward and think about innovative solutions to tackling climate change,” she said of Musk, the world’s richest person. “We’ve continued on with that.”

Batchelor spoke with POLITICO’s E&E News before XPrize publicly announced the final carbon removal contest winners, each of which removed at least 1,000 tons of CO2 in a year and provided a business plan for how they’ll reach 1 million tons annually. Since 2019, carbon removal companies have locked away about 650,000 tons in total, less than the annual emissions of two natural gas power plants.

The runners-up were NetZero, Vaulted Deep, and Undo Carbon, which netted prizes of $15 million, $8 million, and $5 million, respectively. Undo Carbon uses an enhanced rock weathering approach similar to Mati to remove CO2 from the air faster than the natural carbon cycle. NetZero and Vaulted Deep both lock away CO2 by preventing carbon-rich organic matter from biodegrading.

Commercializing carbon removal technologies is important because the world is unlikely to reduce the burning of oil, gas, and coal quickly enough to prevent the buildup of dangerous levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As a result, climate scientists have concluded that it will be necessary in the coming decades to increase the Earth’s carbon removal capacity by billions of metric tons annually.

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“The Department will also authorize guaranty agencies that they may begin involuntary collections activities on loans under the Federal Family Education Loan Program,” per the press release. There is the disclaimer, though, that “all FSA collection activities are required under the Higher Education Act and conducted only after student and parent borrowers have been provided sufficient notice and opportunity to repay their loans under the law.”

Involuntary collections are “one of the harshest consequences borrowers can face when federal student loans fall into default,” says Ken Ruggiero, co-founder and CEO of Ascent Funding, an education loan provider. This occurs typically after 270 days, or close to nine months, of missed payments.

“It’s an aggressive, automated system that often catches borrowers off guard and deepens their financial hardship,” says Ruggiero. “In addition to the financial hardship, the student borrower is often embarrassed when their employer is notified and then implements wage garnishments.”

Here is what student borrowers should know about involuntary collections, and the advice experts offer:

What can be withheld under involuntary collections?

Through involuntary collections, the government can garnish wages, withhold tax refunds, and seize portions of Social Security checks and other benefit payments to go toward paying back the federal loan.

According to the Treasury Department, for those who have defaulted on their federal loans, the Treasury Offset Program can withhold to 100% of federal tax refunds, up to 15% of federal salaries, up to 15% of Social Security and Railroad Retirement benefits, up to 25% of federal retirement payments, 100% of payments to vendors, and 100% of travel payments for federal employees

Wage garnishment, which the Education Department’s announcement said will begin late in the summer, is when your loan holder can order your employer to withhold up to 15% of your disposable pay to collect your defaulted debt, without taking you to court.

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Students studying in a library.Maskot—Getty Images

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Thirty-five years ago today, a revolutionary new era of astronomy began when the Hubble Space Telescope, tucked onboard the space shuttle Discovery, blasted off Earth into history. The next day, a robotic arm tipped the telescope into orbit from the shuttle’s cargo bay. Within a month, Hubble had truly begun its mission, gazing out at the cosmos for NASA and the European Space Agency with its 2.4-meter-wide starlight-gathering mirror—the largest ever launched to space at the time.

In the years since, Hubble has gathered more than 1.6 million observations and 430 terabytes of data. The telescope has revealed that supermassive black holes nestle at the heart of most large galaxies, Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may be shooting plumes of water out into space, and, in the distant future, our Milky Way galaxy will likely collide with our neighbor, Andromeda.

But the  mission almost flopped.

The Hubble Space Telescope was decades in the works, even making a cameo appearance in a Superman comic in 1972, before it reached space in 1990. But after Hubble’s deployment, as the telescope began operations, astronomers realized its vision was blurry and traced the issue to a tiny imperfection in the telescope’s mirror.

Astoundingly, that mirror is still in use today aboard the observatory. Fortunately, Hubble was uniquely designed to be serviced in orbit by astronauts. NASA’s first (and most urgent) servicing mission flew in December 1993; during five separate spacewalks, astronauts installed a new primary camera able to counteract Hubble’s blurred vision, as well a bulky new apparatus that corrected the light that fed into the observatory’s original suite of instruments. 

Additional shuttle missions in 1997, 1999, 2002, and 2009 also visited the observatory, extending its lifetime and expanding its view each time with new hardware and better instruments. 

The results have been nothing short of breathtaking. Hubble’s position well above most of Earth’s atmosphere allows it to see the cosmos unhindered by the tempests and turbulence that all ground-based observatories face. That privileged vantage point has profoundly shaped our understanding of the solar system and universe around us. 

In our own neighborhood, Hubble has studied the changing weather on the outer planets, discovered moons orbiting Pluto, and watched the once-in-a-lifetime impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter scar the giant planet with dark spots as big as Earth. It has even glimpsed the sun, in a feat it was most definitely not designed to attempt.

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From Alzheimer’s to cancer, earwax can contain valuable indicators to a person’s health. Now scientists are analysing its chemistry in the hope of finding new ways of diagnosing diseases.

It’s orange, it’s sticky, and it’s probably the last thing you want to talk about in polite conversation. Yet earwax is increasingly attracting the attention of scientists, who want to use it to learn more about diseases and conditions like cancer, heart disease, and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes. 

The proper name for the gloopy stuff is cerumen, and it’s a mix of secretions from two types of glands that line the outer ear canal: the ceruminous and sebaceous glands. The resulting goo is mixed with hair, dead skin flakes, and other bodily debris until it reaches the waxy consistency we all know and try our best not to think about. 

Once formed in the ear canal, the substance is transported by a kind of conveyer belt mechanism, clinging on to skin cells as they travel from the inside of the ear to the outside, which they do at a speed of approximately one 20th of a millimetre every day.

The primary purpose of earwax is debated, but the most likely function is to keep the ear canal clean and lubricated. However, it also serves as an effective trap, preventing bacteria, fungi and other unwelcome guests such as insects from finding their way into our heads. So far, so gross. And yet, possibly due to its unpalatable appearance, earwax has been somewhat overlooked by researchers when it comes to bodily secretions.

That’s now starting to change, however, thanks to a slew of surprising scientific discoveries. The first is that a person’s earwax can actually convey a surprising amount of information about them, both trivial and important.

For example, the vast majority of people of European or African descent have wet earwax, which is yellow or orange in colour and sticky. However, 95% of East Asian people have dry earwax, which is grey and non-sticky. The gene responsible for producing either wet or dry earwax is called ABCC11, which also happens to be responsible for whether a person has smelly armpits. Around 2% of people, mostly those in the dry earwax category, have a version of this gene, which means their armpits have no odour.    

However, perhaps the most useful earwax-related discoveries relate to what the sticky stuff in our ears can reveal about our health. 

Important clues

In 1971, Nicholas L Petrakis, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, found that Caucasian, African-American and German women in the USA, who all had “wet earwax”, had an approximately four-fold higher chance of dying from breast cancer than Japanese and Taiwanese women with “dry” earwax.

More recently, in 2010, researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology took blood samples from 270 female patients with invasive breast cancer, and 273 female volunteers who acted as controls. They found that Japanese women with breast cancer were up to 77% more likely to have the gene coding for wet earwax than healthy volunteers.

Nevertheless, the finding remains controversial, and large-scale studies in Germany, Australia and Italy have found no difference in breast cancer risk between people with wet and dry earwax, although the number of people in these countries with dry earwax is very small.

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(Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/ BBC)

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