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Green light for giant mine
TOM JEFFERSON/GREENPEACE
UPFRONT
Green light for giant mine TO DIG or not to dig? The Queensland government has issued controversial licences for the development of a coal mine that would be Australia’s largest once completed. But conservationists are fighting the plan, which they say will be a disaster for the Great Barrier Reef. Issued on Sunday, the three licences would permit the India-based company Adani to extract coal from the planned Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin, one of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves, in the heart of Queensland. As part of the plan, which would see huge exports of coal to India, the port at Abbot Point (pictured) adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef would be expanded. This would potentially release plumes of soil and debris over
the reef, damaging its ecosystem. What’s more, mining the coal and burning it will generate huge amounts of carbon dioxide that will accelerate global warming and affect the health of the reef. “If it goes ahead, burning coal from the Carmichael mine would create billions of tonnes of pollution, making climate change worse and irreversibly damaging the reef,” says Josh Meadows of the Australian Conservation Foundation, which is challenging the legality of previous federal-level approval for the mine in a Brisbane court in May. “We will argue that the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, did not properly consider the impact that pollution from burning the coal will have on the Great Barrier Reef,” he says.
A weighty world
(The Lancet, doi.org/bd2d). About a fifth of all obese adults are in six rich, English-speaking countries – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Some 50 million severely obese people also live here. Island nations in Polynesia and Micronesia have the highest average body mass index. TimorLeste, Eritrea and Ethiopia have the lowest. By 2025, the World Health Organization wants to reduce global obesity rates to their 2010 levels. The report suggests this will be no easy task.
–More industry, less reef –
Royalty-free drugs
anticancer drugs. “Companies, such as Roche, Novartis, Bayer, Astellas and BMS, with important oncology drugs, should begin to engage on expanding access to their patented medicines”, it said. Of five major multinationals contacted by New Scientist, only Pfizer had responded by the time we went to press. “We are committed to providing broad access to our medicines through a variety of ways including partnerships, flexible access arrangements, and in certain less developed countries, donations,” a spokesperson said.
POOR countries will soon be able to make their own versions of GlaxoSmithKline’s drugs without paying royalties, the UK-based pharma giant has announced. GSK said it will not file patents
for its drugs in countries deemed to be low income and least developed. In lower middle income countries, it will offer 10‑year licenses on generous terms to firms seeking to make generic copies of its drugs. It will also explore putting its experimental anticancer drug patents into a UN-backed “patent pool” so that the drugs can be made available cheaply to certain countries if and when they are approved. Knowledge Ecology International, a non-governmental organisation in Washington DC, described the move as welcome and impressive. It urged others to follow GSK’s lead, especially with 6 | NewScientist | 9 April 2016
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
“GSK’s move is welcome but other companies should begin to expand access to patented medicines”
WE’RE getting fatter. The number of people who are classified as obese has rocketed from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, according to an analysis of data from 196 million people in 186 countries. “The world has transitioned from an era when underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” team member Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London wrote in the report
Blow-up spacecraft THE International Space Station is about to get a new room – but first the crew will have to blow it up. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be carried to orbit folded inside a SpaceX cargo capsule, set to launch on 8 April. Unlike the rest of the ISS, which is aluminium, it is made from a top-secret soft and foldable fabric that still holds up to the harshness of space. It is –Puffed up new digs– designed to inflate in orbit, using
UPFRONT
Green light for giant mine TO DIG or not to dig? The Queensland government has issued controversial licences for the development of a coal mine that would be Australia’s largest once completed. But conservationists are fighting the plan, which they say will be a disaster for the Great Barrier Reef. Issued on Sunday, the three licences would permit the India-based company Adani to extract coal from the planned Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin, one of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves, in the heart of Queensland. As part of the plan, which would see huge exports of coal to India, the port at Abbot Point (pictured) adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef would be expanded. This would potentially release plumes of soil and debris over
the reef, damaging its ecosystem. What’s more, mining the coal and burning it will generate huge amounts of carbon dioxide that will accelerate global warming and affect the health of the reef. “If it goes ahead, burning coal from the Carmichael mine would create billions of tonnes of pollution, making climate change worse and irreversibly damaging the reef,” says Josh Meadows of the Australian Conservation Foundation, which is challenging the legality of previous federal-level approval for the mine in a Brisbane court in May. “We will argue that the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, did not properly consider the impact that pollution from burning the coal will have on the Great Barrier Reef,” he says.
A weighty world
(The Lancet, doi.org/bd2d). About a fifth of all obese adults are in six rich, English-speaking countries – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Some 50 million severely obese people also live here. Island nations in Polynesia and Micronesia have the highest average body mass index. TimorLeste, Eritrea and Ethiopia have the lowest. By 2025, the World Health Organization wants to reduce global obesity rates to their 2010 levels. The report suggests this will be no easy task.
–More industry, less reef –
Royalty-free drugs
anticancer drugs. “Companies, such as Roche, Novartis, Bayer, Astellas and BMS, with important oncology drugs, should begin to engage on expanding access to their patented medicines”, it said. Of five major multinationals contacted by New Scientist, only Pfizer had responded by the time we went to press. “We are committed to providing broad access to our medicines through a variety of ways including partnerships, flexible access arrangements, and in certain less developed countries, donations,” a spokesperson said.
POOR countries will soon be able to make their own versions of GlaxoSmithKline’s drugs without paying royalties, the UK-based pharma giant has announced. GSK said it will not file patents
for its drugs in countries deemed to be low income and least developed. In lower middle income countries, it will offer 10‑year licenses on generous terms to firms seeking to make generic copies of its drugs. It will also explore putting its experimental anticancer drug patents into a UN-backed “patent pool” so that the drugs can be made available cheaply to certain countries if and when they are approved. Knowledge Ecology International, a non-governmental organisation in Washington DC, described the move as welcome and impressive. It urged others to follow GSK’s lead, especially with 6 | NewScientist | 9 April 2016
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
“GSK’s move is welcome but other companies should begin to expand access to patented medicines”
WE’RE getting fatter. The number of people who are classified as obese has rocketed from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, according to an analysis of data from 196 million people in 186 countries. “The world has transitioned from an era when underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight,” team member Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London wrote in the report
Blow-up spacecraft THE International Space Station is about to get a new room – but first the crew will have to blow it up. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be carried to orbit folded inside a SpaceX cargo capsule, set to launch on 8 April. Unlike the rest of the ISS, which is aluminium, it is made from a top-secret soft and foldable fabric that still holds up to the harshness of space. It is –Puffed up new digs– designed to inflate in orbit, using