BusinessMirror January 08, 2023

A broader look at today’s business

STUDY: SOCIAL COMMERCE SEEN TO FUEL E-COMMERCE GROWTH IN PHL, ASEAN

Reasons to go ‘live shopping’

By Roderick L. Abad Contributor

B ased on results of its newly released inaugural report titled “Social Commerce in Southeast Asia 2022,” social experiences are expected to directly influence $42 billion, or 25 percent, of online trade sales in the region by the end of last year.

The ensuing Covid-19 pandemic, which limits people’s mobility, has made them spend more time on social platforms. This, eventually, has opened longerterm opportunities in e-commerce.

R ather than just depending solely on advertising for highquality traffic, virtual trade channels have also relied on social media—thanks to their strong followings—which are expected to capture a greater share of the economic value.

M arketplaces are trying to introduce social features to make their own platforms more engaging. Such trend makes different brands wonder how big, viable, profitable and effective social commerce is to their growth.

To address these questions,

“By introducing e-commerce into this environment, live shopping catches customers in the right mindset, at a time when they are having fun and are more emotionally available for brands to connect with them,” —Simon Torring, head of growth and client service at Cube Asia

Cube Asia, in partnership with Sprinklr, conducted this research initiative by systematically dissecting the four different social elements in online trade that make up the social commerce market.

Social commerce on the rise

THE study projected that e-

commerce on social platforms will wrap up 2022 well, bringing $34-billion sales to the region.

Th is largest contributor to social commerce refers to any form of sales activity that occurs directly on social channels. It is influenced heavily by social aspects of human relationships, such as real-time communication, authenticity, trust and community.

W hile Facebook and Instagram played earlier than TikTok on social platform commerce, they are now falling behind the Chinese short mobile video platform—a rising star in this space—that offers a number of distinctive features and solutions.

D igital conversation breeds mobile, physical sales. Cube Asia’s report, on the other hand, shows that conversational commerce directly contributes $12 billion

in SEA, where customers choose a product and pay using the messaging app.

Th is form of social commerce is ubiquitous as it covers the whole e-commerce journey and improves customer experiences. Also, it gives buyers a new way of seeking service and clarity while buying online, thus encouraging more consumer-led transactions.

W hat’s more, conversational commerce indirectly transacts a much bigger volume of $50 billion via web chat and $200 billion for online-to-offline transactions. This is best exemplified by customers having initial conversations with store staff over messaging platforms like WhatsA pp and, eventually, complete their purchases in the physical or brick-and-mortar outlet.

Th is form of social commerce is among the most promising and

vibrant trends in SEA’s online trade. Expanding out of sheer organic demand from consumers, it gained impressive penetration and usage rates despite limited platform and vendor tools.

“ The pandemic changed consumer behavior forever, accelerating the rapid adoption of digital products and services and boosting the importance of e-commerce across Southeast Asia,” said Florian Zenner, senior vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan at Sprinklr.

“As Cube Asia’s research demonstrates, conversational commerce is set to play a growing role among the region’s retailers. The most successful businesses will seize the opportunity to harness technology such as AI chatbots or voice assistance to deliver customers experiences that are convenient

and personalized,” he added.

Actual selling streamed online

RESTRICTIONS on the movement of Southeast Asians, especially during the lockdown periods, did not stop them from seeing what they are about to buy, though virtually with actual selling activities streaming on the web, including real-time visual engagement and product demonstrations. Hence, it’s not surprising for live shopping sales in the region to increase more than tenfold to $13 billion in 2022, per the research.

Nearly half or 44 percent of netizens in the region have participated in live shopping in the last 12 months, with the most active audiences in Vietnam and Thailand where 60 percent of respondents have made a purchase. Singapore lags behind in comparison with only about 35 percent of users shopping from live streams this year.

L ive shopping in the Philippines is seen as encouraging in this market since Filipinos are big consumers of entertaining online content, with 75 percent of Internet users having watched live streams in 2022, according to Simon Torring, head of growth and client service at Cube Asia.

“ By introducing e-commerce into this environment, live shopping catches customers in the right mindset, at a time when they are having fun and are more emotionally available for brands to connect with them,” he told the BusinessMirror in an email interview.

WITH the booming social commerce market in Southeast Asia (SEA), live shopping and conversational commerce are the most effective ways for Filipinos to spend online, according to Singapore-based market intelligence firm Cube Asia.

SUTTHINON SANYAKUP DREAMSTIME.COM

Russia’s hypersonic missile-armed ship to patrol global seas

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday sent a frigate armed with the country’s latest Zircon hypersonic missile on a trans-ocean cruise in a show of force as tensions with the West escalate over the war in Ukraine.

Russia touts that the Zircon missile can evade any Western air defenses by flying at an astounding 11,265 kilometers per hour.

Here is a glance at the ship and its weapons.

THE PRIDE OF THE RUSSIAN NAVY COMMISSIONED by the Navy in 2018 following long trials, the Admiral Gorshkov is the first ship in the new series of frigates, which were designed to replace the aging Sovietbuilt destroyers as a key strike component of the Russian navy.

A rmed with an array of missiles, the ship is 427-feet long and has a crew of about 200.

In 2019, it circled the world oceans on a 35,000-nautical mile journey.

INTENSIVE TESTS

THE Admiral Gorshkov has served as the main testbed for the latest Russian hypersonic missile, Zircon.

In recent years, the Zircon has undergone a series of tests, including being launched at various practice targets. The military declared the tests successful and Zircon officially entered service last fall.

Zircon is intended to arm Russian cruisers, frigates and subma-

rines and could be used against both enemy ships and ground targets. It is one of several hypersonic missiles that Russia has developed.

THE NEW WEAPON PUTIN has hailed Zircon as a potent weapon capable of penetrating any existing anti-missile defenses by flying nine times faster than the speed of sound at a range of more than 1,000 kilometers.

Putin has emphasized that Zircon gives the Russian military a long-range conventional strike capability, allowing it to strike any enemy targets with precision.

Russia’s hypersonic weapons drive emerged as the US has been working on its own Conventional Prompt Global Strike capability that envisions hitting an adversary’s strategic targets with precision-guided conventional weapons anywhere in the world within one hour.

Putin heralded Zircon as Russia’s answer to that, claiming that the new weapon has no rival, giving Russia a strategic edge.

Months before ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Putin put the US and its Nato allies on notice when he warned that Russian warships armed with Zircon would

give Russia a capability to strike the adversary’s “decision-making centers” within minutes if deployed in neutral waters.

Speaking via video link during Wednesday’s sendoff ceremony, Putin again praised Zircon as a “unique weapon” without an “equivalent for it in any country in the world.”

In response, the Pentagon said it is monitoring the ship, and did not think it presented a threat that could not be countered.

We are aware of the reports regarding the Russian launch of a

frigate, the Admiral Grorshkov. We will continue to routinely monitor its activities as we maintain awareness of our operating environment,” said Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Roger Cabiness. While we do not comment

on specific capabilities or speculate on hypotheticals, the Department of Defense remains confident in our ability to deter our adversaries and defend United States national security interests at any time, in any place.”

OTHER RUSSIAN HYPERSONIC WEAPONS

RUSSIA has already commissioned the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles for some of its ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles that constitute part of Russia’s strategic nuclear triad.

Putin has hailed the Avangard’s ability to maneuver at hypersonic speeds on its approach to target, dodging air defenses.

The Russian military has also deployed the Kinzhal hypersonic missiles on its MiG-31 aircraft and used them during the war in Ukraine to strike some priority targets. Kinzhal reportedly has a range of about 1,500 kilometers.

PATROL DUTY

RUSSIAN Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin on Wednesday that the Admiral Gorshkov will patrol the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean, but didn’t give further details.

S hoigu said the Admiral Gorshkov ’s crew will focus on “countering the threats to Russia, maintaining regional peace and stability jointly with friendly countries.” He added the crew will practice with hypersonic weapons and long-range cruise missiles “in various conditions.”

Some military experts say a single, hypersonic missile-armed warship is no match for the massive naval forces of the US and its allies.

But others noted that the frigate’s potential deployment close to US shores could be part of Putin’s strategy to up the ante in the Ukrainian conflict.

“ This is a message to the West that Russia has nuclear-tipped missiles that can easily pierce any missile defenses,” pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov wrote in a commentary. AP

Reasons to go ‘live shopping’

Pinoys love live shopping, conversational commerce BEYOND entertainment, trust and immediacy make live shopping and conversational commerce the most effective ways for Filipino Internet users to shop online, per the top executive.

For him, trust is a key concern in the Philippines. In fact, he cited that 30 percent of consumers polled earlier this year by another agency, TransUnion, said they had been targeted by thirdparty scams.

With live shopping, buyers can see a real person using the products live before deciding to make the purchase. This helps even more if the live streamer is a well-known or trusted personality,” Torring said.

Me anwhile, immediacy, he explained, is about making sure that customers get fast responses to their questions, thus reducing the chances that they will drop out of the purchase funnel.

“A closer integration of messaging and e-commerce through conversational commerce makes available a channel for buyers to easily ask their questions and get immediate replies,” he said.

All of these elements help to strengthen consumer comfort in online shopping, compared to more passive e-commerce channels such as marketplaces or eretail, where often there is no human face on the other side of the transaction,” he added.

It takes a village to buy online AT present, community group buy accounts for only 2 percent to 3 percent of the e-commerce sales in SEA, according to the study.

W hile it’s the smallest contributor to online trade, many

new retail start-ups in the region have tried to use community or group dynamics as they take a cue from Pinduoduo in China and Meesho in India. Apart from Indonesia, this model has found footing in Singapore, wherein messaging apps like WhatsApp are helpful for small neighborhood communities to aggregate demand to get better prices.

C ommunity group buy models are divided into two types, both influenced by the dynamics of small communities or groups. First is a Price-Led model, where people come together organically to unlock a special deal. Second is an Agent-Led model, with a reseller who provides services or value adds to the group’s members.

I n order for brands to drive further community group buy among Filipino consumers, Torring suggested that building an effective network of resellers is very important. He explained: “These resellers are the most critical link between the brands and communities of end consumers who are using their products. Brands should focus on recruiting, training and incentivizing their resellers to build a strong brand image and loyalty within their communities.”

L ikewise, he advised brands here and elsewhere in SEA to “also plan the logistics for this model in detail. Penetration of traditional e-commerce models lags in Tier 2/3 cities in the region partly due to the lack of logistics infrastructure for last-mile deliveries. The community model allows brands to use their resellers in a hub-andspoke manner, allowing for the ‘outsourcing’ of last-mile deliveries to the resellers, which can be very cost effective.”

Future of PHL e-commerce

OVER the last five years, e-commerce in the Philippines has grown at 60 percent per annum. With the changing approach of key players, however, it’s projected to slow down further by 2027.

There is still plenty of upside, as e-commerce penetration lags regional peers, but future growth will likely be slower (15 percent to 20 percent per annum in the next five years), given the big mindset shift towards profitability among major online channels this year,” Torring said.

U nder the broad umbrella of e-commerce, though, social commerce is expected to grow faster, the head of growth and client service at Cube Asia pointed out. He noted, for instance, that TikTok saw a remarkable growth last year.

“According to our surveys that covered over 15,000 respondents, Filipinos are now ranked third in the region after Vietnam and Indonesia in making purchases on TikTok Shops. Eightysix percent of Filipino consumers who made purchases through live shopping this year also said they will continue to buy the same or more through this format over the next 12 months. These are very encouraging signs for social commerce,” he stressed.

Cu be Asia’s report compiled estimates from multiple sources, including online surveys with such number of respondents across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Additional sources also include web crawling to collect thousands of data points across public sources, primary research of company literature and financial reports, as well as interviews with industry experts and stakeholders.

RUSSIAN frigate Admiral Gorshkov is seen moored in the Neva River during the Navy Day celebration in St. Petersburg, Russia, onJuly 31, 2022. AP/DMITRI LOVETSKY

Drone advances in Ukraine could bring killer robots to battlefield

By Frank Bajak & Hanna Arhirova The Associated Press

killed an unspecified number of combatants.

A spokesman for STM, the manufacturer, said the report was based on “speculative, unverified” information and “should not be taken seriously.” He told the AP the Kargu-2 cannot attack a target until the operator tells it to do so.

Fully autonomous AI is already helping to defend Ukraine.

CES tech start-ups face cautious investors amid economic woes

By Haleluya Hadero AP Business Writer

LAS VEGAS—More than a thousand start-ups are showcasing their products at the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas, hoping to create some buzz around their gadgets and capture the eyes of investors who can help their businesses grow.

But amid the slew of layoffs in the tech industry and an economic landscape battered with high inflation and interest rates, many may be met with cautious investors looking for products that can deliver quick returns instead of hype.

Analysts say the event this year has somewhat of a muted tone compared to prior shows, when many companies routinely unveiled pie-in-the-sky projects that never saw the light of day.

Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at the consumer tech research firm Creative Strategies, said this time around, many of the tech items displayed during the show’s media preview days, which occurred Tuesday and Wednesday, have been less “flamboyant” compared to prior years, which showcased things like talking microwaves and smart jeans that vibrate to direct users.

“The economy—and I think the mood in general—is a little bit negative around tech,” Milanesi said. “It’s really getting companies to focus on real value for customers.”

CES, the most influential tech gathering in the world, officially opened on January 5 to attendees in the industry. Roughly 3,000 companies have registered to attend the event, including big companies like Amazon that are laying off thousands of employees and axing unprofitable areas of their business amid uncertainty in the wider economy.

Simultaneously, many startups are attempting to find their wings at a time when consumers are tightening their belts and being more picky about how to spend their money. And experts note the somber economic climate can be particularly difficult for companies who make hardware products—they typically require robust investments to manufacture their gadgets and often encounter challenges with securing the money they need.

Marco Snikkers, founder and CEO of OneThird, a startup that tests produce ripeness, said investors have been much more critical this year about which companies to fund. Securing investments for his own company took much longer than anticipated but luckily, he said, some existing investors stepped up to help and the company didn’t run out of cash. They were able to secure more funding last month.

“We can hopefully survive 2023 with what we have today,” Snikkers said, adding the Netherlandsbased company, which also has an app, hopes to expand their products to the US.

Another CES attendee, Mohamed Soliman, founder of the French electric skates startup AtmosGear, said investors have

been more fearful about putting money into projects during the entire pandemic and are asking for a higher level of maturity from companies before they put some skin in the game.

“I think CES could be a ‘do or die’ time for many start-ups,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “The clock struck midnight in terms of tech investors just giving away free money. There’s a lot more competing for capital.”

Saving money has now become a big priority for the tech industry, a shift from the past when more analysts and investors were more focused on how companies were growing. Ives said unlike products that received a lot of buzz during prior shows but didn’t have a clear revenue path, like drones, investors are now looking to fund things that can be deployed, such as artificial intelligence, chip technology and electric vehicles.

More transformational tech themes, such as broader use of virtual reality and immersive experiences in the metaverse, are also being showcased at the show.

Though the metaverse has its skeptics, Ives said he believes all these technologies could lay the groundwork for what’s likely to be a fourth industrial revolution.

But as of now, a recession is potentially on the doorstep, he said.

“And I think that’s the elephant in the room at this year’s CES.”

Event organizers for their part say excitement hasn’t dampened.

Brian Comiskey, the director of thematic programs at the Consumer Technology Association, the trade group putting together the show, said many start-ups are excited to be back at the event and mingle in person with investors after Covid kept many of them away for the past two shows.

The organization also has a program, called CTA Match, that pairs start-ups with investors who might be interested in their products, he said, adding many companies have showcased items that can be rolled out soon, or are innovations that could be deployed if they meet the right investors.

But even entrepreneurs that raise money are facing higher costs due to inflation. That, coupled with a more challenging investment scene could mean more companies won’t be able to make it—or won’t be able to make it with the cash they have on hand, a scenario that could lead to more mergers with big companies, said Peter Csathy, chairman of the media and tech advisory firm Creative Media.

Still, start-ups are trying to get the most out of the show and will attempt to create buzz around their products in an effort to grab some headlines and get free marketing, Csathy said.

“I don’t think the pie-in-thesky, ultra-cool, ultra-novel gadgets go away,” he said. “They just may not be getting the emphasis that they otherwise would have had in a vibrant economic environment.”

The Associated Press staff writers Adriana Morga, Brittany Peterson and Cara Rubinsky contributed to this report.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semiautonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. “Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

Ukraine’s digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, agrees that fully autonomous killer drones are “a logical and inevitable next step” in weapons development. He said Ukraine has been doing “a lot of R&D in this direction.”

“I think that the potential for this is great in the next six months,” Fedorov told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

Ukrainian Lt. Col. Yaroslav Honchar, co-founder of the combat drone innovation nonprofit Aerorozvidka, said in a recent interview near the front that human war fighters simply cannot process information and make decisions as quickly as machines.

Ukrainian military leaders currently prohibit the use of fully independent lethal weapons, although that could change, he said.

“We have not crossed this line yet—and I say ‘yet’ because I don’t know what will happen in

the future,” said Honchar, whose group has spearheaded drone innovation in Ukraine, converting cheap commercial drones into lethal weapons.

Russia could obtain autonomous AI from Iran or elsewhere. The long-range Shahed-136 exploding drones supplied by Iran have crippled Ukrainian power plants and terrorized civilians but are not especially smart. Iran has other drones in its evolving arsenal that it says feature AI.

Without a great deal of trouble, Ukraine could make its semiautonomous weaponized drones fully independent in order to better survive battlefield jamming, their Western manufacturers say. Those drones include the USmade Switchblade 600 and the Polish Warmate, which both currently require a human to choose targets over a live video feed. AI finishes the job. The drones, technically known as “loitering munitions,” can hover for minutes over a target, awaiting a clean shot.

“The technology to achieve a fully autonomous mission with Switchblade pretty much exists today,” said Wahid Nawabi, CEO of AeroVironment, its maker. That will require a policy change—to remove the human from the decision-making loop—that he estimates is three years away.

Drones can already recognize targets such as armored vehicles using cataloged images. But there is disagreement over whether the technology is reliable enough to ensure that the machines don’t err and take the lives of noncombatants.

The AP asked the defense ministries of Ukraine and Russia if they have used autonomous weapons offensively and whether they would agree not to use them if the other side similarly agreed. Neither responded.

If either side were to go on the attack with full AI, it might not even be a first.

An inconclusive UN report suggested that killer robots debuted in Libya’s internecine conflict in 2020, when Turkish-made Kargu-2 drones in full-automatic mode

Utah-based Fortem Technologies has supplied the Ukrainian military with drone-hunting systems that combine small radars and unmanned aerial vehicles, both powered by AI. The radars are designed to identify enemy drones, which the UAVs then disable by firing nets at them—all without human assistance.

The number of AI-endowed drones keeps growing. Israel has been exporting them for decades.

Its radar-killing Harpy can hover over anti-aircraft radar for up to nine hours waiting for them to power up.

Other examples include Beijing’s Blowfish-3 unmanned weaponized helicopter. Russia has been working on a nuclear-tipped underwater AI drone called the Poseidon. The Dutch are currently testing a ground robot with a .50-caliber machine gun.

Honchar believes Russia, whose attacks on Ukrainian civilians have shown little regard for international law, would have used killer autonomous drones by now if the Kremlin had them.

“I don’t think they’d have any scruples,” agreed Adam Bartosiewicz, vice president of WB Group, w hich makes the Warmate.

AI is a priority for Russia. President Vladimir Putin said in 2017 that whoever dominates that technology will rule the world. In a December 21 speech, he expressed confidence in the Russian arms industry’s ability to embed AI in war machines, stressing that “the most effective weapons systems are those that operate quickly and practically in an automatic mode.”

Russian officials already claim their Lancet drone can operate with full autonomy.

“It’s not going to be easy to know if and when Russia crosses that line,” said Gregory C. Allen, former director of strategy and policy at the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

Switching a drone from remote piloting to full autonomy might not be perceptible. To date, drones able to work in both modes have performed better when piloted by a human, Allen said.

The technology is not especially complicated, said University of California-Berkeley professor Stuart Russell, a top AI researcher. In the mid-2010s, colleagues

he polled agreed that graduate students could, in a single term, produce an autonomous drone “capable of finding and killing an individual, let’s say, inside a building,” he said.

An effort to lay international ground rules for military drones has so far been fruitless. Nine years of informal United Nations talks in Geneva made little headway, with major powers including the United States and Russia opposing a ban. The last session, in December, ended with no new round scheduled.

Washington policymakers say they won’t agree to a ban because rivals developing drones cannot be trusted to use them ethically.

Toby Walsh, an Australian academic who, like Russell, campaigns against killer robots, hopes to achieve a consensus on some limits, including a ban on systems that use facial recognition and other data to identify or attack individuals or categories of people.

“If we are not careful, they are going to proliferate much more easily than nuclear weapons,” said Walsh, author of “Machines Behaving Badly.” “If you can get a robot to kill one person, you can get it to kill a thousand.”

Scientists also worry about AI weapons being repurposed by terrorists. In one feared scenario, the US military spends hundreds of millions writing code to power killer drones. Then it gets stolen and copied, effectively giving terrorists the same weapon.

To date, the Pentagon has neither clearly defined “an AI-enabled autonomous weapon” nor authorized a single such weapon for use by US troops, said Allen, the former Defense Department official. Any proposed system must be approved by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and two undersecretaries.

That’s not stopping the weapons from being developed across the US. Projects are underway at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, military labs, academic institutions and in the private sector.

The Pentagon has emphasized using AI to augment human warriors. The Air Force is studying ways to pair pilots with drone wingmen. A booster of the idea, former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, said in a report last month that it “would be crazy not to go to an autonomous system” once AI-enabled systems outperform humans—a threshold that he said was crossed in 2015, when computer vision eclipsed that of humans.

Humans have already been pushed out in some defensive systems. Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield is authorized to open fire automatically, although it is said to be monitored by a person who can intervene if the system goes after the wrong target.

Multiple countries, and every branch of the US military, are developing drones that can attack in deadly synchronized swarms, according to Kallenborn, the George Mason researcher.

So will future wars become a fight to the last drone?

That’s what Putin predicted in a 2017 televised chat with engineering students: “When one party’s drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender.”

Frank Bajak reported from Boston. Associated Press journalists Tara Copp in Washington, Garance Burke in San Francisco and Suzan Fraser in Turkey contributed to this report.

KYIV, Ukraine—Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

A SWITCHBLADE 600 loitering missile drone manufactured by AeroVironment is displayed at the Eurosatory arms show in Villepinte, north of Paris, on June 14, 2022. Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. AP/MICHEL EULER

AN exhibitor demonstrates the OneThird avocado ripeness checker during CES Unveiled before the start of the CES tech show on Tuesday, January 3, 2023, in Las Vegas. More than a thousand start-ups are showcasing their products at the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas, hoping to create some buzz around their gadgets and capture the eyes of investors who can help their businesses grow. AP/JOHN LOCHER

The World

Study: Two-thirds of glaciers on track to disappear by 2100

By Seth Borenstein AP Science Writer

THE world’s glaciers are shrinking and disappearing faster than scientists thought, with twothirds of them projected to melt out of existence by the end of the century at current climate change trends, according to a new study.

But if the world can limit future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree and fulfill international goals—technically possible but unlikely according to many scientists—then slightly less than half the globe’s glaciers will disappear, said the same study. Mostly small but well-known glaciers are marching to extinction, study authors said.

In an also unlikely worst-case scenario of several degrees of warming, 83 percent of the world’s glaciers would likely disappear by the year 2100, study authors said.

The study in Thursday’s journal Science examined all of the globe’s 215,000 land-based glaciers—not counting those on ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica—in a more comprehensive way than past studies. Scientists then used computer simulations to calculate, using different levels of warming, how many glaciers would disappear, how many trillions of tons of ice would melt, and how much it would contribute to sea level rise.

The world is now on track for a 2.7-degree Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise since pre-industrial times, which by the year 2100 means losing 32 percent of the world’s glacier mass, or 48.5 trillion metric tons of ice as well as 68 percent of the glaciers disappearing. That would increase sea level rise by 4.5 inches (115 millimeters) in addition to seas already getting larger from melting ice sheets and warmer water, said study lead author David Rounce.

“No matter what, we’re going to lose a lot of the glaciers,” Rounce, a glaciologist and engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said. “But we have the ability to make a difference by limiting how many glaciers we lose.”

“For many small glaciers it is

too late,” said study co-author Regine Hock, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Oslo in Norway.

“However, globally our results clearly show that every degree of global temperature matters to keep as much ice as possible locked up in the glaciers.”

Projected ice loss by 2100 ranges from 38.7 trillion metric tons to 64.4 trillion tons, depending on how much the globe warms and how much coal, oil and gas is burned, according to the study.

The study calculates that all that melting ice will add anywhere from 3.5 inches (90 millimeters) in the best case to 6.5 inches (166 millimeters) in the worst case to the world’s sea level, 4 percent to 14 percent more than previous projections.

That 4.5 inches of sea level rise from glaciers would mean more than 10 million people around the world—and more than 100,000 people in the United States— would be living below the high tide line, who otherwise would be above it, said sea level rise researcher Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central. Twentieth-century sea level rise from climate change added about 4 inches to the surge from 2012 Superstorm Sandy costing about $8 billion in damage just in itself, he said.

Scientists say future sea level rise will be driven more by melting ice sheets than glaciers.

But the loss of glaciers is about more than rising seas. It means shrinking water supplies for a big chunk of the world’s population, more risk from flood events from melting glaciers and about losing historic ice-covered spots from Alaska to the Alps to even near Mount Everest’s base camp, several scientists told The Associated Press.

“For places like the Alps or Iceland...glaciers are part of what makes these landscapes so special,” said National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze, who wasn’t part of the study but praised it. “As they lose their ice in a sense they also lose their soul.”

Hock pointed to Vernagtferner glacier in the Austrian Alps, which is one of the best-studied glaciers in the world, but said “the glacier will be gone.”

The Columbia Glacier in Alaska had 216 billion tons of ice in 2015, but with just a few more tenths of a degree of warming, Rounce calculated it will be half that size.

If there’s 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, an unlikely worst-case scenario, it will lose two-thirds of its mass, he said.

“It’s definitely a hard one to look at and not drop your jaw at,” Rounce said.

Glaciers are crucial to people’s lives in much of the world, said National Snow and Ice Center Deputy Lead Scientist Twila Moon, who wasn’t part of the study.

“Glaciers provide drinking water, agricultural water, hydropower, and other services that support billions [yes, billions!]z of people,” Moon said in an e-mail.

Moon said the study “represents significant advances in projecting how the world’s glaciers may change over the next 80 years due to human-created climate change.”

That’s because the study includes factors in glacier changes that previous studies didn’t and is more detailed, said Ruth Mottram and Martin Stendel, climate scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute who weren’t part of the research.

This new study better factors in how the glaciers’ ice melts not just from warmer air, but water both below and at the edges of glaciers and how debris can slow melt, Stendel and Mottram said. Previous studies concentrated on large glaciers and made regional estimates instead of calculations for each individual glacier.

In most cases, the estimated loss figures Rounce’s team came up with are slightly direr than earlier estimates.

If the world can somehow limit warming to the global goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times—the world is already at 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit)—Earth will likely lose 26 percent of total glacial mass by the end of the century, which is 38.7 trillion metric tons of ice melting. Previous best estimates had that level of warming melting translating to only 18 percent of total mass loss.

“I have worked on glaciers in the Alps and Norway which are really rapidly disappearing,” Mottram said in an email. “It’s kind of devastating to see.”

Japan wants G-7 to work together against China’s ‘economic coercion’

By Christopher Anstey

JAPAN wants the Group of Seven advanced economies to take a coordinated approach this year aimed at preventing the “economic coercion” that China has applied to some of its trading partners.

Actions taken by China in recent years, such as suspending imports of Taiwanese pineapples and Australian wine, represent a “clear and present danger” for economies around the world, Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s minister of economy and trade, said in Washington on Thursday. “We expect effective responses to economic coercion will be a major item at this year’s G-7 summit.”

Japan is the rotating head of the G-7 industrial democracies this year and will host the group’s summit. Nishimura said that “countermeasures” may be necessary to help countries and regions that are the target of mercantilist actions by authoritarian regimes.

Identifying chokepoints that could be used by such regimes would also be helpful, he said.

China has repeatedly applied economic punishments toward trading partners amid diplomatic disputes. Japan itself saw its imports of rare earths from China— crucial to a number of manufacturing supply chains—affected in 2010 following a maritime incident in contested East China Sea waters.

Export controls

BEIJING , for its part, has blasted G-7 members for what it says are their own protectionist moves that are designed to prevent China’s economic rise. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has warned that export controls on semiconductors imposed by the Biden administration hurt the global economy and US businesses. Late last year, China also criticized the UK for abusing state power in overturning a chip-factory deal.

Nonetheless, Nishimura indicated his intention to press ahead with such policies in remarks following a meeting with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, at which Jiji Press said they discussed cooperation on chip equipment export restrictions.

“In order to address the misuse of critical and emerging technologies by malicious actors and inappropriate transfers of technologies, it is also absolutely imperative for us to reinforce our cooperation in the area of export control,” Nishimura said. “We will implement strict export control grounded in international

cooperation,” he added, without giving details.

If Japan goes ahead with the plan to restrict local chip equipment companies including Tokyo Electron Ltd. and Nikon Corp. from selling their advanced products to Chinese customers, it would mark a major victory for the Biden administration in its increasingly aggressive campaign to prevent China from acquiring key foreign technologies.

Vital mistake

JAPAN’S economy chief said that democratic powers had made a mistake more than two decades ago in assuming that deepening economic interdependence, by bringing China and then Russia into the World Trade Organization, would “unquestionably bring about a peaceful world” following the end of the Cold War.

Rather than prosperity helping to build peace however, it only ended up increasing geopolitical risks, Nishimura said. Authoritarian governments used economic growth and technological advancement to boost their power.

“The free trade system ended up increasing the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes,” he said. “The illusion we embraced ended up amplifying the threat of hegemonic powers.”

At the same time, there’s no way to “turn back the clock,” and a complete economic decoupling is “impossible,” Nishimura said.

WTO Reform

HE urged greater coordination among free-market democracies on measures including export controls, boosting supply chain resilience and energy security.

He also said that, given how the WTO’s dispute-settlement mechanism is now effectively crippled— after the Trump administration paralyzed the appellate body in 2019—Japan, the US, Europe and other like-minded partners need to “work hard on reform of the WTO.” This will be “one of biggest challenges we need to work toward this year,” he said.

Nishimura, who also cited Russia’s moves to cut off European energy supplies in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, was speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. That’s the venue where the late former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe famously declared that “Japan is back” on the world stage.

Nishimura said his nation embraces that same sentiment in leading the G-7 this year. With assistance from Isabel Reynolds and Jon Herskovitz/Bloomberg.

PALESTINIAN BACKERS, ISRAEL AT ODDS OVER HOLY SITE VISIT

By Edith M. Lederer The Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS—The Palestinians and many Muslim and non-Muslim supporters sharply disagreed with Israel on Thursday at an emergency UN Security Council meeting over the visit of an ultranationalist Israeli Cabinet minister to a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site and its impact.

The Palestinians warned it could lead to another deadly uprising, while Israel dismissed it as “a trivial matter” and “non-event.”

The Palestinian UN ambassador, Riyad Mansour, said new Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a West Bank settler leader who draws inspiration from a racist rabbi, didn’t go to visit the site, “but to pursue his extremist view, to end the historic status quo” under which Jews have been allowed to visit but not pray there since Israel captured the area in the 1967 war.

Known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, Arabic for the Noble Sanctuary, the site is the holiest in Judaism, home to the ancient biblical temples. Today, it houses the Al Aqsa

Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. The site has been the scene of frequent clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces.

Calling Ben-Gvir “an extremist minister of an extremist state” who was convicted of incitement and is known for his “racist views,” Mansour said the Israeli minister is committed to allowing Jews to pray at al-Haram al-Sharif. He urged the Security Council and all countries to stop this from happening, and “to uphold international law and the historic status quo,” warning that “if they don’t, our Palestinian people will.”

Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan, who also visited the Temple Mount as minister of public security in 2017, criticized the Security Council for holding the emergency meeting, saying Ben-Gvir’s 13-minute visit was non-violent and within the status quo and his right as a Jew.

Erdan told reporters that calling the meeting “is an insult to our intelligence” and “pathetic,” and that the council should instead be meeting about the war in Ukraine or Iran’s killing of protesters.

“Israel has not harmed the status quo and has no plans to do so,” Erdan said. “The only side that is changing the status quo is

the Palestinian Authority. Why? Because by turning the site into a battleground...the Palestinian Authority is making it clear that not only is Jewish prayer intolerable on the Temple Mount, but so is any Jewish presence.”

“This is pure anti-Semitism,” he added.

Khaled Khiare, the UN assistant secretarygeneral for political and peacebuilding affairs, briefed the council at the start of the meeting, saying that Ben-Gvir’s visit wasn’t accompanied or followed by violence. But, he said, “it is seen as particularly inflammatory,” given the minister’s “past advocacy for changes in the status quo.”

The visit sparked widespread condemnation in the region and internationally “as a provocation that risked sparking further bloodshed,” he said.

Khiare said that UN efforts to de-escalate the situation will continue and that “leaders on all sides have a responsibility to lower the flames and create the conditions for calm.”

In September 2000, Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s opposition leader, visited the Temple Mount, which helped spark clashes that led to a full-fledged Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. The Security Council deplored Sharon’s visit, which it called a

“provocation.”

Most recently, in April 2021, clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian demonstrators in and around the site also fueled an 11-day war with Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

When Ben-Gvir visited the Temple Mount on Tuesday he described it as “the most important place for the Jewish people” and decried what he called “racist discrimination” against Jewish visits to the site.

With the Islamic shrine the Dome of the Rock in the background, he said visits would continue. As for threats from Gaza’s Hamas militant group, Ben-Gvir said in a video clip taken during the visit: “The Israeli government won’t surrender to a murderous organization, to a vile terrorist organization.”

At the emergency meeting, which was called jointly by the Palestinians, the United Arab Emirates, China, France and Malta, all 15 council members expressed concern at Ben-Gvir’s visit and the potential fallout, and strongly supported the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites.

US deputy ambassador Robert Wood underscored the firm support by President Joe Biden for “the historic status quo,” especially

the “Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount.”

Wood said the United States, which is Israel’s closest ally, noted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s platform calling for preservation of the status quo, adding: “We expect the government of Israel to follow through on that commitment.”

Wood also said that the possibility of a two-state solution to the decades-old IsraeliPalestinian conflict must be preserved, “and we must ensure all Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal measures of freedom, justice, security and prosperity.”

UAE deputy ambassador Mohamed Abushahab, the Arab representative on the council, and Jordanian Ambassador Mahmoud Hmoud, whose country’s ruler is custodian of Jerusalem’s Islamic and Christian holy sites, both called Ben-Gvir’s act “the storming of Al Aqsa mosque” under protection of Israeli forces. They said it was a “provocative” move that violates the historic and legal status of Jerusalem’s holy sites.

Abushahab said the minister’s action further destabilizes the fragile situation in the Palestinian territories, moves the region further away from a path to peace, and threatens to escalate current tensions “and

contribute to fueling and stoking extremism and hatred in the region.”

Hmoud warned that serious consequences and repercussions could result from any unilateral Israeli measures “that aim to impose new realities on the ground,” such as annexing more land, expanding settlements, violating Jerusalem’s holy sites or demolishing houses.

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, expressed “serious concern” at Ben-Gvir’s visit and said he hoped the new Israeli Cabinet “will not take the path of escalation” and “create irreversible realities on the ground.”

“The explosive developments in Jerusalem once again demonstrate how urgent it is to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said.

He reiterated Russia’s call for a ministerial meeting of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators—the UN, US, Russia and the European Union—and key regional players to relaunch direct dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nebenzia said the US, has “again and again refused to cooperate in resuming the peace process” under the Quartet, which he called the only internationally recognized mechanism approved by the Security Council.

CHUNKS of ice float on Mendenhall Lake in front of the Mendenhall Glacier on May 30, 2022, in Juneau, Alaska. A study of all of the world’s 215,000 glaciers published on Thursday, January 5, 2023, finds even if with the unlikely minimum warming of only a few tenths of a degrees more, the world will lose nearly half its glaciers by the end of the century. With the warming we’re now on track to get, the world will lose two-thirds of its glaciers and overall glacier mass will drop by one-third while sea level rises 4.5 inches just from melting glaciers. AP/BECKY BOHRER

Science Sunday

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What is cultivated meat? Here are some info

CULTURED meat. Cultivated meat. Lab-grown meat. Cellbased meat. Whatever you call it, the newest addition to alternative protein is having a bit of a moment.

Over the past few months, Singapore’s government wined and dined VIP guests with cultivated meat at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27).

Lab-grown chicken passed its first hurdle with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a landmark global agreement to protect biodiversity applied new pressure to rethinking how beef, pork, chicken and seafood are produced.

Advocates of cultivated meat say it could be an answer to soaring agricultural emissions, deteriorating biodiversity, and alarming food insecurity, while critics worry that the high cost of cultivated meat, alongside its regulatory hurdles and unproven scalability, make it mostly hype for now. Everyone agrees that many questions remain. For now, here’s what we know about the present and potential future of meat grown in a lab.

What is cultured meat?

CULTURED or cultivated meat is made by harvesting cells from live animals, “feeding” the cells with nutrients so they can grow in a bioreactor and turning the result into a product consumers can eat.

Take fish maw, for example. The swim bladder of a fish, it’s considered a delicacy in many Asian countries.

To create a lab-grown version of croaker fish maws, scientists from Hong Kong-based Avant Meats place fish cells in a culture medium containing dozens of different nutrients, and store them in a bioreactor connected to an oxygen tank.

Within weeks, those cells proliferate into tissues the size of a grain of rice, at which point they’re ready for assembly into larger pieces.

Cultivated meat is not new THE science behind cultivated meat isn’t new—cell cultures were first used in medical research in 1907—but applying that idea to meat gained traction after a Dutch pharmacologist presented the world’s first cell-based vitro hamburger on television in 2013.

Today, more than 100 companies around the world are trying to create cell-based protein, ranging from labgrown lamb to lab-grown oysters, and even lab-grown foie gras.

Different proteins present different complications, though: Makers of cell-based seafood don’t have the advantage medical research gives those cultivating mammalian cells, for example.

And meats made up of more complex tissue and texture can be more difficult to construct—a process known as “scaffolding” that holds together muscle, fat and connective tissue to recreate meat’s structure.

How is cultivated meat different from plant-based meat?

PLANT-BASED meat refers to meat that is made from soy or other nonmeat ingredients—Impossible Foods Inc. and Beyond Meat Inc. are two of the more high-profile companies producing plant-based meat products.

Cultivated meat, on the other hand, is produced by cultivating animal cells directly. It has the exact same nutrition as conventionally produced beef, pork, poultry and seafood—though both plant-based and cell-based meats are still perfecting the taste and texture.

The other big difference between

plant-based and cultivated protein is availability.

Plant-based meat is still struggling to reach consistent price parity with regular meat—and commands less than 1 percent of the global market, according to an estimate from Good Food Institute Asia Pacific— but it is sold in restaurants and grocery stores around the world.

For now, the commercial sale of lab-grown meat is only legal in Singapore, a country of 5 million that is focused on dramatically reducing its reliance on food imports.

Experts say that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Scaling up the production of cultivated protein from a pilot stage to a commercial level requires technological advances, industry observers say, and massive bioreactors required for mass manufacturing don’t exist yet.

Regulatory hurdles also remain. In the US, the FDA recently told Upside Foods that it had no questions about the safety of the company’s cell-based chicken for human consumption.

But the California-based startup still needs more approvals, including from the US Department of Agriculture, which jointly oversees the rollout of cultivated meat.

Elsewhere, policy-makers in China, Israel and the Netherlands have signaled support for cellbased meat, but none have approved commercial sales.

Can vegetarians eat cultivated meat?

TECHNICALLY, cultivated meat is not vegan or even vegetarian: It’s made from growing cells taken from real animals.

But people become vegetarians for different reasons, ranging from concerns over animal rights to fears about the use of antibiotics and hormones in livestock.

Many vegetarians avoid meat in an effort to keep from exhausting environmental resources. On some of these fronts, cell-based meat might be a viable alternative.

“If you believe that taking anything from an animal, including a cell, is

UPD-CS green model may help LGUs become environmentally sustainable

PHILIPPINE communities may soon be environmentally sustainable. The solution may be found in the green model that the University of the Philippines-Diliman College of Science (UPD-CS) developed through an automated environmental monitoring technology and other environmental testing procedures

UPD Chancellor Dr. Fidel Nemenzo, who prioritized the protection and preservation of UP Diliman’s natural environment in his vision for the campus, appointed a multi-sectoral Task Force on Environmental Sustainability (TFES) to create a possible model for a green campus.

The UPD-CS recently steered other colleges and institutions in the university in setting up sophisticated sensors on the environment.

The project is seen to serve as the prototype for green spaces nationwide.

The expert team determined two key action points. These are the deployment in the UPD-CS’s National Science Complex (NSC) of the AirboxSense system for real-time air quality reporting to the general public, and the establishment of an air- and water-quality monitoring network with the Diliman Environmental Management Office

The AirboxSense was co-developed by UP and foreign university partners with funding from the AsiaIndia Science, Technology and Innovation Cooperation (AISTIC).

Dr. Mylene Cayetano, a professor at the UPD-CS’s Institute of Environmental Science and Meteorology (IESM) and a member of the UPD TFES, said: “Air-quality monitoring using AirboxSense in the NSC started in August 2022. It’s an initiative between the Philippines, Malaysia and India to put up these monitoring devices for air quality control.” Cayetano is also the Philippine principal investigator for the AISTIC.

To complement the AirboxSense data, Cayetano said the IESM undertakes regular monitoring of the university’s various creeks and streams.

They collected water samples at least once a month and analyzed them in the laboratory to assess factors, such as the presence of excessive nutrients and suspended solids, irregular pH, and alkalinity, among other parameters.

Solar-powered campus UPD-CS also aims to lessen its ecological footprint through solar power installations throughout the NSC, Cayetano added.

C ayetano and her colleagues were able to determine the best ways to address the campus’s energy needs and save energy by considering the optimal size and placement of solar panels.

“ Together with UPD-CS scientists Dr. Lillian Jennifer Rodriguez and Jelaine Gan, we calculated the area of all rooftops of CS buildings. We

determined the surface area of the rooftops facing south. Then we proposed how many solar panels we need to install in CS to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, and eventually we will transform into an efficient campus,” Cayetano explained.

“UPD-CS Dean Giovanni Tapang presented the idea to Chancellor Fidel [Nemenzo], and it aligns with the Chancellor’s initiative to make UPD an environmentally sustainable campus,” she added.

Beyond UP

PURSUING its green agenda does not stop at UP-Diliman.

The UPD-CS and the IESM collaborated with the Rotary Club of Makati on adapting a system that reports real-time data on air quality through the Airtoday.ph web site.

The system was initially designed to record and display air quality data on other areas outside the UPD, including the Lung Center of the Philippines and EDSA-Muñoz area.

“Picking up from this initiative, more initiatives arose toward a smart campus and environmental sustainability,” Cayetano said.

She cited the UPD Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute for helping automate the AirboxSense through the UP Center for Air Research program.

The Robust Optical Aerosol Monitor developed by Dr. Len Herald Lim of the Institute of Chemistry could be deployed outside UPD in the future, she cited.

Nationwide deployment

THE projects are of nationwide significance, Cayetano pointed out.

She noted that the information they gather and the data they record will greatly help organizations and institutions across the country in finding solutions to environmental issues.

“These [information and data] will eventually tell the numbers. Where are we now? Where’s the  baseline? What were the emissions when there were no activities because of the pandemic?” Cayetano said,

She added that they “want to get the rate of increase of emissions during the resumption of activities, such as face-to-face classes and the opening of the UPD campus and offices.”

By knowing these, she said, “we know where to stand. By knowing those numbers, we will know how to manage the impacts on the environment of such activities.”

Through this and other projects, UPD’s TFES is spearheading the creation of “tailor-fit approaches” to environmental challenges that can be implemented outside the campus.

Data collected from these initiatives can also be used by local governments and other decision-makers in managing localized environmental activities, Cayetano said.

Rizal Raoul Reyes

exploitative, then you won’t be [eating cultivated meat],” says Sonalie Figueiras, founder of sustainability website Green Queen.

“But if your focus is more on reducing the overall impact of [animal] suffering, then you would probably eat it,” Figueras added.

Is cultivated protein better for the environment?

CELL-BASED meat can play a vital role in helping restore biodiversity, which has long been threatened by traditional agriculture.

Consider, for example, that clearing land for cattle ranching is responsible for about 80 percent of deforestation in the Amazon.

But when it comes to the climate impact of cultivated protein, the answer isn’t entirely straightforward.

Growing meat from cells in bioreactors does use far less land than traditional farming, and avoids a lot of the emissions associated with, for example, cow burps.

It could also allow companies to produce meat closer to their consumers, reducing the amount of fuel needed to deliver foodstuffs.

But growing meat in bioreactors demands significant amounts of electricity, particularly at scale. That makes cultivated pork and chicken a viable option to reduce emissions only if its production is powered by wind, solar and other renewable energy sources, according to one 2021 study by Dutch environmental consultancy CE Delft.

The same study finds cell-based beef, on the other hand, can achieve more climate gains than its farmed counterpart no matter what kind of power is used to make it, because conventional cattle ranching is so resources-intensive.

What’s ‘wrong’ with cultivated protein?

MOST doubts about cultivated protein have to do with its limitations: For now, it’s still highly expensive to produce, which makes widespread sales—even with regulatory approval—difficult to imagine anytime soon.

Indeed, nearly a decade after the world’s first cultivated vitro burger was created at a phenomenal cost of $325,000, the only commercially available cultivated meat is sold in small amounts in Singapore and made by San Francisco-based Eat Just. The company says it will take eight years for its products to become cost-competitive with conventional meat.

Transparency has also been a point of contention. Jaydee Hanson, a policy director at the Washington DC-based nonprofit Center for Food Safety, says makers of cultivated protein rarely disclose how they keep the cells growing.

That can sometimes expose problematic processes and raise new questions about ethicality, like for example the use of  the blood of unborn calves as a medium for cell culture. (Some cultivated protein companies, however, are making efforts to ditch all production materials of animal origin.)

Then there’s the more quotidian but equally important challenges: appearance, texture and taste.

On a November night at the Four Seasons in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, a dozen COP27 attendees dined on grilled chicken thigh with mushroom rice, a dish made using Eat Just’s cellbased chicken. The entree was met with mixed results.

“It’s got the look [of chicken],” one guest commented. “I can definitely tell it’s not chicken,” noted another. “It’s too smooth.” Coco Liu/Bloomberg News

Balik Scientist invents Nipahol as alternative fuel to LPG

WITH the current high prices of fuel, including liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a project of a Balik Scientist hosted by the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, may be a cheaper and environmental-friendly alternative to it.

Dr. Fiorello B. Abenes is leading the technology transfer and commercialization of MMSU’s Village-Scale Nipahol Technology (VSNT). Abenes is a Professor Emeritus in California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in California, USA, and a recipient of the Balik Scientist Program of the Department of Science and Technology, the DOST-BSP said.

Nipahol Technology may be used as cooking fuel and is seen to replace LPG fuel for stoves.

“Dirty cooking is still a problem in many of the rural areas of the Philippines. The use of firewood or charcoal emit unhealthy levels of particulates and noxious gases that affect the respiratory track, mostly affecting women [who do household cooking]. Ethanol as cooking fuel is cleaner,” Abenes said.

Nipahol Technology is an innovation produced from extracting sap from nipa into “Nipahol” at a facility housed at the National Bioenergy Research and Innovation Center of the MMSU, the DOST-BSP explained.

“We have developed a prototype that we hope we can scale up and make into a cooking stove suitable for indoor use and in commercial establishments,” he added.

Although the stove prototype is yet to be developed as pressurized, Abenes and his team successfully created a Nipahol-fueled stove with burner and functions through the pull of gravity, DOST-BSP said.

The successful adoption of MMSU’s VSNT rests on finding more uses for the ethanol produced from nipa.

The use of Nipahol as cooking fuel is seen to accelerate the commercialization of the VSNT technology.

Technologies from nipa is seen to provide a multitude of uses, given its commercial viability in different portions of the value chain.

The Balik Scientist Program aims to promote information exchange and accelerate the flow of new technology into the country through strengthening the scientific and technological manpower of the academe and public and private institutions.

The program encourages Filipino scientists, technologists, and experts abroad to return to the Philippines and share their expertise in order to promote scientific, agro-industrial, and economic development, including the development of the country’s human capital in science, technology, and innovation.

The enactment of the Balik Scientist Act in June 2018 also paved the way for the DOST to grant returning Filipino scientists with competitive benefits, such as daily subsistence allowance, health insurance and roundtrip airfare.

THE AirboxSense is one of several automated air quality sensors deployed within the National Science Complex by the IESM. UPD-CS scientists are looking at the feasibility of rolling out similar initiatives nationwide. EUNICE JEAN PATRON PHOTO

BALIK Scientist Dr. Fiorello Abenes discusses the cooking stove prototype he developed that is powered by energy innovations from nipa sap. The technology is seen as an alternative fuel to LPG. BSP

A CHEF grills a piece of cultivated thin-cut steak in the Aleph Farms Ltd. development kitchen in Rehovot, Israel, on Sunday, November 27, 2022. The UN predicted last year that with the world's population expected to climb by 11 percent in the coming decade, meat consumption would rise by an even greater 14 percent. BLOOMBERG

Editor: Lyn Resurreccion • www.businessmirror.com.ph

While blamed, Benedict fought sex abuse more than past popes

VATICAN CITY—Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is rightly credited with having been one of the 20th century’s most prolific Catholic theologians, a teacher-pope who preached the faith via volumes of books, sermons and speeches.

But he rarely got credit for another important aspect of his legacy: having done more than anyone before him to turn the Vatican around on clergy sexual abuse.

As cardinal and pope, Benedict pushed through revolutionary changes to church law to make it easier to defrock predator priests, and he sacked hundreds of them.

He was the first pontiff to meet with abuse survivors. And he reversed his revered predecessor on the most egregious case of the 20th century Catholic Church, finally taking action against a serial pedophile who was adored by St. John Paul II’s inner circle.

‘Taking church’s darkest secrets to his grave with him’

BUT much more needed to be done, and following his death on December 31, 2022, abuse survivors and their advocates made clear they did not feel his record was anything to praise, noting that he, like the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, protected the image of the institution over the needs of victims, and in many ways embodied the clerical system that fueled the problem.

“In our view, Pope Benedict XVI is taking decades of the church’s darkest secrets to his grave with him,” said SNAP, the main US-based group of clergy abuse survivors.

Matthias Katsch of Eckiger Tisch, a group representing German survivors, said Benedict will go down in history for abuse victims as “a person who was long responsible in the system they fell victim to,” according to the dpa news agency.

In the years after Benedict’s 2013 resignation, the scourge he believed encompassed only a few mostly English-speaking countries had spread to all parts of the globe.

Benedict refused to accept personal or institutional responsibility for the

problem, even after he himself was faulted by an independent report for his handling of four cases while he was Munich bishop.

He never sanctioned any bishop who covered up for abusers, and he never mandated abuse cases be reported to police.

Asked Vatican to remove abusers

BUT Benedict did more than any of his predecessors combined, and especially more than John Paul, under whose watch the wrongdoing exploded publicly.

And after initially dismissing the problem, Pope Francis followed in Benedict’s footsteps and approved even tougher protocols designed to hold the hierarchy accountable.

“He [Benedict] acted as no other pope has done when pressed or forced, but his papacy [was] reactive on this central issue,” said Terrence McKiernan, founder of the online resource BishopAccountability, which tracks global cases of clergy abuse and cover-up.

As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for a quartercentury, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger saw first-hand the scope of sex abuse as early as the 1980s.

Cases were arriving piecemeal to the Vatican from Ireland, Australia and the US, and Ratzinger tried as early as 1988 to persuade the Vatican legal department to let him remove abuser priests quickly.

Vatican law at the time required long and complicated canonical trials to punish priests, and then only as a last resort if more “pastoral” initiatives to cure them failed.

That approach proved disastrous, enabling bishops to move their abusers around from parish to parish where they could rape and molest again.

The legal office turned Ratzinger down in 1988, citing the need to protect the priest’s right to defense.

Fast-track procedures to defrock abusers

IN 2001, Ratzinger persuaded John

Paul to let him take hold of the problem head on, ordering all abuse cases be sent to his office for review.

He hired a relatively unknown canon lawyer, Charles Scicluna, to be his chief sex crimes prosecutor and together they began taking action.

“We used to discuss the cases on Fridays; he used to call it the Friday penance,” recalled Scicluna, Ratzinger’s prosecutor from 2002 to 2012 and now the archbishop of Malta.

Under Ratzinger’s watch as cardinal and pope, the Vatican authorized fast-track administrative procedures to defrock egregious abusers.

Changes to church law allowed the statute of limitations on sex abuse to be waived on a case-by-case basis; raised the age of consent to 18; and expanded the norms protecting minors to also cover “vulnerable adults.”

Defrocked 848 priests, sanctioned 2,572

THE changes had immediate impact: Between 2004 and 2014—Benedict’s eight-year papacy plus a year on either end—the Vatican received about 3,400 cases, defrocked 848 priests and sanctioned another 2,572 to lesser penalties, according to the only Vatican statistics ever publicly released.

Nearly half of the defrockings occurred during the final two years of Benedict’s papacy.

“There was always a temptation to think of these accusations of this scourge as something that was contrived by the church’s enemies,” said Cardinal George Pell of Australia, where the allegations hit early and hard and where Pell himself was accused of abuse and of dismissing victims.

“Pope Benedict realized very, very clearly that there is an element of that, but the problem was much, much deeper, and he moved effectively toward doing something about it,” said Pell, who was eventually acquitted of an abuse conviction after serving 404 days in solitary confinement in a Melbourne lockup.

First on agenda

AMONG the first cases on Ratzinger’s agenda after 2001 was gathering testimony from victims of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Mexico-based Legionaries of Christ religious order.

Despite volumes of documentation in the Vatican dating from the 1950s showing Maciel had raped his young seminarians, the priest was courted by John Paul’s Curia because of his ability to bring in vocations and donations.

“More than the hurt that I received from Maciel’s abuse, later on, stronger was the hurt and the abuse of power from the Catholic Church: the secrecy, ignoring my complaints,” said

Juan Vaca, one of Maciel’s original victims who along with other former seminarians filed a formal canonical case against Maciel in 1998.

Their case languished for years as powerful cardinals who sat on Ratzinger’s board, including Cardinal Angelo Sodano, John Paul’s powerful secretary of state, blocked any investigation. They claimed the allegations against Maciel were mere slander.

But Ratzinger finally prevailed and Vaca testified to Scicluna on April 2, 2005, the very day that John Paul died.

Ratzinger was elected pope two weeks later, and only then did the Vatican finally sanction Maciel to a lifetime of penance and prayer.

‘Courage’ only went so far

BENEDICT then took another step and ordered an in-depth investigation into the order that determined in 2010 that Maciel was a religious fraud who sexually abused his seminarians and created a cult-like order to hide his crimes.

Even Francis has credited Benedict’s “courage” in going after Maciel, recalling that “he had all the documentation in hand” in the early 2000s to take action against Maciel but was blocked by others more powerful than he until he became pope.

“He was the courageous man who helped so many,” Francis said.

That said, Benedict’s protocolbending courage only went so far.

When the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, publicly criticized Sodano for having blocked the Vatican from investigating yet another high-profile serial abuser—his predecessor as Vienna archbishop—Benedict summoned Schoenborn to Rome for a dressing down in front of Sodano.

The Vatican issued a remarkable reprimand taking Schoenborn to task for having dared speak the truth.

Independent report; ‘part of the problem’ AND then an independent report commissioned by his former diocese of Munich faulted Benedict’s

actions in four cases while he was bishop in the 1970s; Benedict, by then long retired as pope, apologized for any “grievous faults” but denied any personal or specific wrongdoing.

In Germany, on December 31, 2022, the We are Church pro-reform group said in a statement that, with his “implausible statements” about the Munich report, “he himself seriously damaged his reputation as a theologian and church leader and as an ‘employee of the truth.’”

“He was not prepared to make a personal admission of guilt,” it added.

“With that, he caused major damage to the office of bishop and pope.”

The US survivors of the Road to Recovery group said Benedict as cardinal and pope was part of the problem.

“He, his predecessors, and current pope have refused to use the vast resources of the church to help victims heal, gain a degree of closure, and have their lives restored,” the group said in a statement calling for transparency.

Underappreciated legacy

BUT Benedict’s longtime spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, says Benedict’s action on sex abuse was one of the many underappreciated aspects of his legacy that deserves credit, given that it paved the way for even more far-reaching reforms.

Lombardi recalled the prayers Ratzinger composed in 2005 for the Good Friday Via Crucis procession at Rome’s Colosseum as evidence that the future pope knew well—earlier and better than anyone else in the Vatican—just how bad the problem was.

“How much filth there is in the church, especially among those who, in the priesthood, are supposed to belong totally to him [Christ],” Ratzinger wrote in the meditations for the high-profile Holy Week procession.

Lombardi said he didn’t understand at the time the experience that informed Ratzinger’s words.

“He had seen the gravity of the situation with far more lucidity than others,” Lombardi said.

Nicole Winfield/Associated Press

ROME—The Vatican published Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s Spiritual Testament hours after his death on December 31, 2022, in which the late pope underlined “the reasonableness of faith.”

St. Therese’s pilgrim relics arrive; going around PHL

&

by Lyn Resurreccion

THE pilgrim relics of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus arrived in the Philippines on January 2, and are currently visiting dioceses until April 30.

Welcome ceremonies were held at the Shrine of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus in Villamor, Pasay City.

A c ivic reception was held in front of the shrine, where the reliquary that travelled straight from Lisieux, France, was uncrated.

It was followed by a Mass presided by the Apostolic Nuncio to the Philippines Archbishop Charles John Brown.

T he Mass was attended by Bishop Oscar Jaime Florencio of the Military Ordinariate of the Philippines, French Ambassador to the Philippines Michèle Boccoz, military officials, and national and local government officials, among others, and by the faithful.

A fter the Mass, the winner in the song writing competition was announced. The song, “Walk With Us,

T he devotees later venerated the relics by touching the reliquary.

T he visit of the St. Therese’s relics to the Philippines coincided with her 150th birth anniversary on January 2, and the centennial of her beatification on April 30.

It was the pilgrim relics’ fifth visit

to the country, after those in 2000, 2008, 2013 and 2018.

It should be noted that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) recognized the 150th birth anniversary of St. Thérèse, the Sanctuary of Lisieux said on its web site.

The recognition by Unesco of Thérèse of Lisieux on the proposal of France [and with support of Belgium and Italy] opens new perspectives for

the dissemination of her message of life, peace and love to ‘the most remote islands’ as Thérèse of Lisieux expresses it itself, to the ‘outskirts,’” Pope Francis said as quoted by Sanctuary of Lisieux.

S aint Thérèse of Lisieux, mystic (1873-1897) was a nun of the Order of Carmel, doctor of the Catholic Church. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 24, and is best known for her posthumous publications, including the book Story of a Soul.

“G iven the fame of Thérèse de Lisieux in the Catholic community [the city of Lisieux being the second place of pilgrimage in France after Lourdes], the celebration of her birthday can be an opportunity to highlight the role of women in religions, in the fight against poverty and the promotion of inclusion. It can also reinforce Unesco’s message on the importance of culture [poems and written plays] in the promotion of universal values and as a vector of interreligious dialogue,” said Monsignor Francesco Follo, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to Unesco.

“What I said before to my countrymen, I say now to all those in the Church who have been entrusted to my service: Stand firm in the faith! Do not let yourselves be confused,” the late Benedict XVI wrote, expressing the final thoughts he wished to share with the Church.

Each pope writes a spiritual testament to be made public only after his death.

In the text, the late pope remarked that with each passing generation he saw how “out of the tangle of assumptions, the reasonableness of the faith emerged” again and again.

He cited Marxism, existentialism, and other intellectual movements at odds with the Church and its teachings.

“Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth, and the life—and the Church, with all its insufficiencies, is truly his body,” Benedict said.

The spiritual testament was signed on August 29, 2006, just one year and four months into Benedict pontificate.

The pope, who died at the age of 95, went on to live 16 years after writing the testament.

In the short text, Benedict XVI expressed gratitude to God, his family and his friends who accompanied him through his life and asked for forgiveness from “all those whom I have wronged in any way.”

“If in this late hour of my life I look back at the decades I have gone through, first I see how many reasons I

have to give thanks. First and foremost I thank God himself, the giver of every good gift, who gave me life and guided me through various moments of confusion; always picking me up whenever I began to slip and always giving me again the light of his face,” he wrote.

“In retrospect I see and understand that even the dark and tiring stretches of this journey were for my salvation and that it was in them that he guided me well,” he added.

Reflecting on his decades of studying theology, particularly the Bible, Benedict said that he has seen “theses that seemed unshakable collapse proving to be mere hypotheses,” noting in particular: “the liberal generation [Harnack, Jülicher etc.], the existentialist generation [Bultmann etc.], the Marxist generation.”

The late pope said that it is in “dialogue with the natural sciences that faith, too, has learned to better understand the limit of the scope of its claims and, thus, its specificity.”

The funeral for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on January 5 was carried out “under the sign of simplicity” in keeping with Benedict’s wishes, according to the Vatican’s spokesman.

His body had lain in state from January 2 to 4, 2023, in St. Peter’s Basilica, where members of the public paid their final respects.

He was buried in the crypt under St. Peter’s Basilica.

Benedict concluded his Spiritual Testament by asking for prayers: “Finally, I humbly ask: Pray for me, so that the Lord, despite all my sins and insufficiencies, welcomes me into the eternal dwellings. To all those entrusted to me, day by day, my heartfelt prayer goes out.” Courtney Mares/Catholic

POPE Benedict XVI kneels during a service in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican on April 2, 2010, as pilgrims and tourists flock to the Vatican ahead of Good Friday ceremonies. At the same time, the Catholic church was defending itself against accusations that Benedict played a role in covering up sex abuse cases. Pope Benedict XVI rarely got credit for having turned the Vatican around on clergy sexual abuse. AP/ALESSANDRA TARANTINO

Benedict’s XVI’s spiritual testament underlines ‘the reasonableness of faith’

Story

photos

Dear Thérèse,” with lyrics by Rev. Francis Edward Baasis, and music by Leonard Laurio, was played for the first time.

PAPAL Nuncio Archbishop Charles Brown incenses the relics of St. Thérèse.

THE reliquary of the pilgrim relics of St. Thérèse is removed from the crate before it is carried inside the shrine.

DEVOTEES of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus venerate her relics at the Shrine of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus in Villamor, Pasay City.

Biodiversity Sunday

Alpine slopes face snow shortage in warm winter

PHL bags top CHM award at UN biodiversity confab

MONTREAL, Canada—The Philippines received the gold CHM Award at the the recent 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 15) in Montreal, Canada.

At the same time, Malaysia and Mexico bagged the bronze and silver, respectively.

The Asean Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM), on the other hand, received a certificate of achievement as an existing regional CHM.

The CHM serves as the CBD’s platform for information sharing, with the CBD web site serving as its central node, National ClearingHouse Mechanisms at the national level, and partner institutions at thematic or regional levels.

Making biodiversity information easily accessible contributes to the achievement of science-based and informed decision-making among policymakers working on biodiversity-relevant laws and regulations.

The Asean CHM serves as a single point of access to the national CHMs of the Asean member states (AMS).

It also offers a variety of services, such as biodiversity information and tools and resources for capacity development, to

assist the AMS with conservation planning, monitoring, and decision-making.

Additionally, it highlights the regional status of protected areas, among other regional assessments that can be utilised as a foundation for the prioritisation and conservation of species and protected areas.

CBD Executive Secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema said that the CHM awards were given to recognize parties with the most significant progress in the establishment and further development of their national and regional CHM platforms, and to encourage other countries to do the same.

The awardees were chosen based on the criteria of the CHMs’ content, online services, layout and functionality, visibility and usage, content management, and governance.

This year’s CHM Awards jury panel, or the internal advisory committee to the CHM, consisted of global experts in biodiversity information management.

Among them were Han de Koeijer from Belgium as the committee chairman; Rigobert Ntep from Cameroon and John Tayleur from the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre as jury members; and Tim Hirsch from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as an observer.

GENEVA—Much of the Alps just don’t look right for this time of year. Sparse snowfall and unseasonably warm winter weather in Europe’s central mountains are allowing grass to blanket hillsides across the region, causing headaches for ski slope operators and aficionados of Alpine white.

Patches of grass, rock and dirt were visible in some of Europe’s skiing meccas—like Innsbruck in Austria, Villars-sur-Ollon and CransMontana in Switzerland, and Germany’s Lenggries and far beyond.

The dearth of snow has revived concerns about temperature upheaval linked to climate change.

On a swath stretching from France to Poland, but with the Alps at the center, many parts of Europe were enjoying short-sleeve weather.

A weather map showed Poland racking up daily highs in the double digits Celsius in recent days.

It’s a sharp contrast to the frigid weather and blizzards in parts of the United States late last year.

Swiss state forecaster MeteoSuisse pointed to some of the hottest temperatures ever this time of year.

A weather station in Delemont, in the Jura range on the French border, already hit a record average daily temperature of 18.1 degrees Celsius on the first day of the year, over 2.5 degrees Celsius higher than the previous record high for January.

Other cities and towns followed suit with records.

MeteoSuisse quipped on its blog: “... this turn of the new year could almost make you forget that it’s the height of winter.”

Forecaster Anick Haldimann of MeteoSuisse said a persistent weather system that brought in warmer air from the west and southwest has lingered, locking in warmer temperatures expected to last through the week.

While slopes above 2,000 meters have gotten snow, lower down, “the order of the day is patience” for skiing buffs, she said.

The shortage has been particularly burdensome around Switzerland’s Adelboden, which was set to host World Cup skiing, and generally draws 25,000 fans for a single day of racing.

Resorts like these look for such races to offer up bucolic wintertime images to draw amateur skiers, but grassy, brown sides to the course can mar the landscape—and dampen the appeal.

Course director Toni Hadi acknowledged that the race will be run on 100 percent artificial snow this year.

“The climate is a bit changing but what should we do here? Shall we stop with life?” he said by phone, noting that other challenges, such as the coronavirus pandemic and war, show “life is not easy” these days.

“Everything is difficult—not only to prepare a ski slope,” Hadi said.

The start to 2023 picked up where many countries had already left off: Last year was the hottest on record in both Switzerland and France.

More broadly, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization says the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record. Its final tally on global temperature figures for 2022 will be released in mid-January.

Next door in France, national weather agency Meteo France said

2022 ended with some of the warmest weather the country has ever experienced at this time of year— capping an exceptionally warm year that saw temperature records broken and rampant forest fires and drought conditions.

Meteo France says the southern Alps and, in the northern Alps, slopes above 2,200 meters, have seen close to normal snowfalls. But snow is notably lacking at lower altitudes in the northern Alps and across the Pyrenees, it said.

To be sure, the Alps cover a lot of territory and not all of it is bereft of snow: Perhaps counterintuitively, some of the best snowfall has been reported in the Italian Dolomites, to the south of the Swiss Alps.

Early in the ski season, fortunes looked bright for snow lovers: In France, freezing weather into midDecember raised hopes that ski resorts in the Alps, the Pyrenees and elsewhere might see plenty of early snow and the lasting subzero temperatures needed to keep runs open.

But exceptionally warm weather followed, prompting some resorts at lower altitudes to close down as snow cover melted away.

“There was a good start to the season with a cold wave in mid-December which provided some white to pretty much everyone. Then, last week, there was quite a bit of rain and warm temperatures, so a certain

number of runs had to close again,” Laurent Reynaud of the Domaines Skiables de France industry group that represents French ski resorts, lift operators and others, said on C-News television.

Germany too has seen unusually springlike temperatures— as high as 16 degrees Celsius in parts of the country early in the past week.

New Year’s Eve is believed to have been the warmest since reliable records began. The German Weather Service reported readings of 20 Celsius and just above at four weather stations in southern Germany, news agency dpa reported.

Wim Thiery, a professor of climate science at the University of Brussels, said the same jet stream that pulled down cold air from the Arctic into the US has fanned warm air from subtropical zones into Europe.

He warned that climate change hasn’t finished its work—unless people cut use of fuels that trap heat in the atmosphere.

”By the end of the century [it’s] just going to be over ... skiing in the Alps as we know it,” he said, adding that lower-altitude mountain areas already feel the impact.

“In the future, these problems will get worse, because the snow will continue to melt as long as the climate warms,” he added. Jamey Keaten and John Leicester/Associated Press

Scientists: Oral supplements do not repel mosquitoes

AMEDICAL myth suggests that taking vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, can make your body repel mosquitoes.

A “systemic repellent” that makes your whole body unappealing to biting insects certainly sounds good. Even if you correctly reject the misinformation questioning safe and effective repellents like DEET (the chemical N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, the active ingredient in many insect repellent products), oral repellents would still have the benefit that you wouldn’t need to worry about covering every inch of exposed skin or carrying containers of bug spray whenever you venture into the great outdoors.

Along with thiamine, other alleged oral mosquito repellents include brewer’s yeast, which contains thiamine, and garlic, the legendary vampire repellent.

If oral repellents sound too good to be true, it’s because they are.

As a professor of entomology in Taiwan, where the mosquito-transmitted dengue virus is endemic, I was curious what science really

says about food-based repellents. After a very deep dive into the literature and reading practically every paper ever written on the subject, I compiled this knowledge into the first systematic review of the subject.

The scientific consensus is, unequivocally, that oral repellents don’t exist. Despite extensive searches, no food, supplement, medication, or condition has ever been proven to make people repellent.

People with vitamin B1 deficiency don’t attract more mosquitoes, either.

So where did the myth that mosquitoes hate vitamins come from, and why is it so hard to exterminate?

Making of a myth

IN 1943, Minnesota pediatrician W.

Ray Shannon gave 10 patients varying doses of thiamine, which had only first been synthesized seven years prior. They reported back that it relieved itching and prevented further mosquito bites.

In 1945, California pediatrician Howard Eder claimed 10

milligram doses could protect people from fleas.

In Europe in the 1950s, physician Dieter Müting claimed that daily 200 milligram doses kept him bite-free while vacationing in Finland, and hypothesized a breakdown product of thiamine was expelled through the skin.

These findings drew rapid attention, and almost immediate repudiation. The US Naval Medical Research Institute tried to replicate Shannon’s findings, but failed.

By 1949, Californians using thiamine to repel fleas from dogs were reporting it as “completely worthless.” Controlled studies from Switzerland to Liberia repeatedly failed to find any effects at any dose.

The first clinical trial in 1969 concluded definitively that “vitamin B1 is not a systemic mosquito repellent in man,” and all controlled studies since suggest the same for thiamine, brewer’s yeast, garlic, and other alternatives.

The evidence was so overwhelming that, in 1985, the US Food and

Drug Administration declared all oral insect repellents are “not generally recognized as safe and effective and are misbranded,” making labeling supplements as repellents technically fraud.

Medical mechanisms aren’t there

SCIENTISTS know much more about both mosquitoes and vitamins today than ever before.

Vitamin B1 does not break down in the body and has no known effect on skin. The body strongly regulates it, absorbing little ingested thiamine after the first 5 milligrams and quickly excreting any excess via urine, so it does not build up. Overdose is almost impossible.

Thiamine nutrient for mosquitoes

AS in humans, thiamine is an essential nutrient for mosquitoes. There is no reason they would fear it or try to avoid it. Nor is there evidence that they can smell it.

The best sources of thiamine are whole grains, beans, pork, poultry and eggs. If eating a carnitas

burrito won’t make you repel mosquitoes, then neither should a pill.

What explains the early reports, then?

ALONG with shoddy experimental design, many used anecdotal patient reports of fewer bite symptoms as a proxy for reduced biting, which is not a good way to get an accurate picture of what’s going on.

Mosquito bites are followed by two reactions: an immediate reaction that starts fast and lasts hours and a delayed reaction lasting days.

The presence and intensity of these reactions depends not on the mosquito, but on your own immune system’s familiarity with that particular species’ saliva.

With age and continued exposure, the body goes from no reaction, to delayed reaction only, to both, to immediate reaction only, and eventually no reaction.

What Shannon and others thought was repellency could have been desensitization: The patients were still getting bitten, they just stopped showing symptoms.

So, what’s the problem?

DESPITE the scientific consensus, a 2020 survey of pharmacists in Australia found that 27 percent were still recommending thiamine as a repellent to patients traveling abroad: an unacceptable recommendation.

Besides wasting money, people relying on vitamins as protection against mosquitoes can still get bitten, potentially putting them at risk of diseases like West Nile and malaria.

To get around the American ban and widely agreed-upon scientific consensus on oral repellents, some unscrupulous dealers are making thiamine patches or even injections.

Unfortunately, while thiamine is safe if swallowed, it can cause severe allergic reactions when taken by other routes. These products are thus not only worthless, but also potentially dangerous.

Not every problem can be solved with food. Long sleeves and bug spraycontaining DEET, picaridin or other proven repellents are still your best defense against biting pests. Matan Shelomi, National Taiwan University/The Conversation (CC) via AP

Asean

THE Patscherkofel winter sport resort near Innsbruck, Austria, is pictured on January 2. Sparse snowfall and unseasonably warm weather in much of Europe is allowing green grass to blanket many mountaintops across the region where snow might normally be. It has caused headaches for ski slope operators and aficionados of Alpine white this time of year. AP/MATTHIAS SCHRADER

(From left) Liu Ning, representative of the Chinese COP 15 Presidency, and CBD Executive Secretary Elizabeth Mrema hand the gold CHM Award to Philippine Environment Undersecretary Ernesto Adobo Jr. ACB PHOTO

Fisk University gymnasts make giant leap for HBCUs

JORDYNN CROMARTIE entered her senior year of high school facing a daunting choice, one countless other Black gymnasts have faced for decades.

The teenager from Houston wanted to attend a historically Black college or university. And she wanted to compete in the sport she’s dedicated most of her life to.

O ne problem. She knew she couldn’t do both, something Cromartie brought up over Thanksgiving dinner while talking to her uncle, Frank Simmons, a member of the Board of Trustees at Fisk University, a private HBCU (historically Black college or university) of around 1,000 students in Nashville, Tennessee.

“ He and my aunt were like, ‘Oh you haven’t made a decision, you should come to Fisk,’” Cromartie said. “I’m like, ‘Well, they don’t have a gymnastics team.’ To go to a college that doesn’t have what I would be working for forever was crazy to me.”

Simmons, stunned, made a promise to his niece.

“ Watch,” he told her. “I’ll make it happen.”

He wasn’t kidding.

I n the span of a few weeks, Simmons connected Derrin Moore— the founder of Atlanta-based Brown Girls Do Gymnastics, an organization that’d been trying to drum up support for an HBCU for years—with Fisk’s trustees. One trustee listened to Moore’s pitch and offered to make a $100,000 donation on the spot if Fisk adopted the sport.

A nd seemingly in a flash, all the roadblocks and misconceptions Moore had encountered while spending the better part of a decade trying to persuade an HBCU to take the leap on an increasingly diverse sport evaporated.

On a Friday afternoon at Orleans Arena in Las Vegas, barely 14 months after Fisk committed to building a program from the ground up, Cromartie—now a freshman at her uncle’s alma mater—and the rest of her teammates will make history when they become the first HBCU to participate in an NCAA women’s gymnastics meet. The Bulldogs will compete against Southern Utah, North Carolina and Washington as part of the inaugural Super 16, an event that also includes perennial NCAA powers like Oklahoma, UCLA and Michigan.

I feel like it’s nice to show that Black girls can do it, too,” Cromartie said. “We have a team that’s 100 percent of people of color and you’ve never seen that before anywhere.... I feel like we have a point to prove.”

The face of high-level women’s gymnastics is changing. While athletes of color have excelled at the sport’s highest level for decades, participation among Black athletes in particular has spiked over the last 10 years thanks in part to the popularity of Olympic champions Gabby Douglas and Simone Biles.

Bl ack gymnasts account for around 10 percent of

scholarships at the NCAA Division I level, an increase from 7 percent in 2012 when Douglas became the first Black woman win to Olympic gold . More than 10 percent of USA Gymnastics members self-identify as Black.

It’s a massive jump from when Corrinne Tarver became the first Black woman to win an NCAA allaround title at Georgia in 1989.

“ When I first went to school, there were a scattering of [Black gymnasts],” said Tarver, now the head coach and athletic director at Fisk. “One on this team, one on that team...there wasn’t a lot of AfricanAmerican gymnasts around back then compared to today.”

S till, it caught Umme SalimBeasley off guard when she began exploring her college options in the early 1990s. Salim-Beasley grew up in the Washington, DC, area and competed in the same gym as fourtime Olympic medalist Dominique Dawes. Salim-Beasley wanted to go to an HBCU. When she approached an HBCU recruiter at a college fair and told the recruiter she was a gymnast, the response she received shocked her.

“ They didn’t see it as a sport for women of color,” said Salim-Beasley, who ended up competing at West Virginia and is now the head coach at Rutgers. “And that was the perception, that gymnastics was not a sport that was welcoming or had enough interest from women of color.”

W hich has made the response to Fisk’s inaugural class all the more rewarding.

For years, Moore and SalimBeasley—a member of the advisory council at Brown Girls Do Gymnastics— would struggle just to set up exploratory interviews with HBCU athletics officials. In the months since Fisk’s program launched, Moore and SalimBeasley have talked to presidents at nine HBCUs.

People are really interested,” Moore said. “They still have a lot of questions and still not pulling the trigger, but they are reaching out.”

A ll of which puts Fisk in an enviable if challenging spot. The program is a beta test of sorts as other HBCUs watch from afar to see how Fisk handles the massive logistical and economic hurdles that come with launching a program.

The Bulldogs don’t have an oncampus facility and are currently training at a club gym a few miles from campus, though they are fundraising in hopes of remedying that soon. They are competing this year as an independent while waiting to get their NCAA status sorted out.

A nd Tarver immediately threw the program into the deep end of the pool. Their inaugural schedule includes meets at Michigan, Georgia and Rutgers. AP

HARARE, Zimbabwe— Highlights of the World Cup and other sports events are on widescreen televisions in Ruwa on the outskirts of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. But all eyes are on the pool tabl...and the money.

A mong them is 18-year-old Levite Chisakarire.

“ I have to take the cash home... there is big money today,” he said, holding a pool stick and awaiting his next opponent.

At stake is a $150 first prize, a princely sum in a country where the majority earn slightly over $100 a month, according to official government figures, and about half of the 15 million population live in extreme poverty, according to the World Food Program.

It can go a long way to pay the bills,” said the boyish Chisakarire, the youngest player vying for the day’s prize.

P reviously a minority sport played in Zimbabwe’s wealthier neighborhoods, pool has increased in popularity over the years, first as a pastime and now as a survival mode for many in a country where full-time jobs are very hard to come by.

Unable to further his education after finishing high school with low grades in 2019, Chisakarire struggled to find a job in Zimbabwe’s stressed industries. The outbreak of Covid-19 meant his father, a truck driver, lost regular work. So Chisakarire began hanging around an illegal tavern where patrons dodged or bribed police to overlook pandemic restrictions so they could drink beer and play pool.

H is hobby became a skill and he showed a talent for shooting the round balls into the pockets. Soon it helped solve his financial problems

POOL BETS ON IN ZIMBABWE

as he began betting on his games and winning. These days he earns about $300 on a good month by playing pool, he says.

He’s not the only one. The majority of Zimbabweans earn a living from informal activities, which include selling tomatoes at roadside stands and also by playing pool, according to an October labor survey by the country’s statistics agency. About half of young people aged between 15 and 34 are unemployed and not engaged in education or training.

Some, such as Chisakarire, are finding a livelihood at pool tables.

“ Pool became popular as a form of entertainment in bars, but it is now proving to be more popular than soccer in many places,” said Michael Kariati, a veteran Zimbabwean sports journalist for over 30 years. “It has evolved into a fiercely competitive sport with people placing bets and surviving off it.”

I n Harare alone, the number of professional players has quadrupled to about 800 in the past five years, according to Keith Goto, spokesman of the Harare Professional Pool Association.

Then there are the money games that have grown exponentially. You find pool tables everywhere you go in the townships,” he said. “It is offering

a form of employment and it is paying through betting.”

O thers warn that betting is a dangerous habit that can have disastrous impacts on families. But with so many people out of work and Zimbabwe’s economic outlook so dire, many people are desperately scrambling to make money through a cue stick.

Makeshift pool arcades flourish in bars, verandas in front of shops, and just about any open space. Some enterprising residents have pool tables at their homes where they charge people 50 cents to play and place bets in violation of city laws that require such enterprises to be properly licensed. The tables are often worn and wobbly, but people don’t seem to care.

I n Warren Park, a Harare township, people ignored the country’s biggest local soccer derby at the country’s biggest stadium nearby to congregate around pool tables where money changed hands fast.

For quick money, betting takes ingenious means. Instead of playing the entire 8-ball game, some bet on the position of the black eight-ball after the first shot of the game, also called the break. Others punt on the best of three balls. One expert player offered to play using only one hand

James, Durant ahead in All-Star starter voting

for the third consecutive year. James had 3,168,694 votes entering Thursday, topping the list of Western Conference frontcourt players. Denver’s Nikola Jokic is second (2,237,768) and the Lakers’ Anthony Davis is third (2,063,325).

because people were too hesitant to bet against him.

Authorities sometimes carry out so-called clean-up operations to confiscate pool tables scattered all over. Often enforcers of city by-laws are simply paid off with as little as a $2 bribe to look the other way. Most punters in low-income townships place dollar bets on games in which they can win $3 or $4.

I n Ruwa, competition is more organized and stakes are higher.

Each club member paid $10 as a participation fee, which went toward the prize money. On a recent day, 31 players paid to participate. Dozens more were spectators, cheering and betting on their favorite players.

Imagine taking home $150! That’s more than what many gainfully employed people get per month,” said Goto, the spokesman. “Pool should now move from bars to schools and community halls like other sports, it has become mainstream after all.”

For Chisakarire, the 18-year-old, pool has become more than a game. From playing and betting in backyard taverns, he is dreaming bigger.

It has changed my life,” he said, before sinking his next ball to win the tournament and pocket $150. “I can see myself playing in Europe one day.” AP

Games. His team beat a Durantpicked team in 2020 and 2021, beat teams picked by Antetokounmpo in 2018 and 2019, and beat a team picked by Curry in 2017.

Voting continues through January 21. The captains and the starters will be announced January 26.

Reserves—chosen by NBA coaches— will be revealed February 2, and the game is February 19 in Salt Lake City.

James

D urant leads Eastern Conference frontcourt players with 3,118,545 votes. That’s just ahead of Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo (2,998,327) and Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid (2,226,712).

Golden State’s Stephen Curry leads all guards in the balloting with 2,715,520 votes. Dallas’ Luka Doncic has the No. 2 spot among West guards with 2,388,502 votes.

A mong East guards, Brooklyn’s Kyrie Irving leads with 2,071,715 votes, and Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell is second with 1,637,374.

The top three frontcourt players and top two guards in each conference will be chosen as starters, with the leading overall votegetters from each conference serving as captains and choosing their teams.

Fan voting counts for 50 percent of the starters balloting, a media ballot counts for 25 percent and the ballots turned in by NBA players count for the other 25 percent.

James has been a captain in all five previous uses of that process, going 5-0 in All-Star

In Lake Charles, Lousiana, McNeese has renamed its basketball court for Basketball Hall of Famer Joe Dumars, the two-time NBA champion player who scored a record 2,607 points in his four seasons at the school.

Joe Dumars Court was being unveiled Thursday, part of “Joe Dumars Day” at the school.

“Joe is by far the most accomplished basketball player to ever come out of McNeese,” athletic director Heath Schroyer said.

“However, Joe is more than just an athlete. He’s a leader, a pioneer, and has accomplished so much in his professional and personal life.”

D umars scored all of his college points before the 3-point line was established. He was the 18th pick in the 1985 NBA draft, going to the Detroit Pistons. Dumars spent his entire NBA playing career with the Pistons, becoming an All-Star six times and winning two titles.

He went into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006, and is now the executive vice president and head of basketball operations for the NBA.

The naming of our court will allow future generations to know and understand the positive example Joe made to so many,” Schroyer said. AP

PEOPLE play pool in an open space in Harare, Zimbabwe. AP

JAMES

DURANT

NEW YORK—LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers and Kevin Durant of the Brooklyn Nets might be headed toward yet another National Basketball Association (NBA) AllStar Game rematch.

is the overall leader so far in All-Star balloting, and Durant leads all Eastern Conference players in early voting returns—putting them on track to be All-Star captains

12 ways to finally achieve your most elusive goals

Publisher : Editor-In-Chief : Concept :

PAVING HIS WAY

YB

Neet dictates his own way of music

By Patrick V. Miguel

WHILE the hip-hop scene oftentimes consists of voyeuristic lyricism and revealing music videos that are considered “sexy,” Young Blood Neet (or known as YB Neet) chooses otherwise. According to the 21-year-old rapper, he wants to use HipHop as a way to “motivate” his listeners in life.

“Madalas na sinusulat ko kasi talaga [ay] more on motivational, mga pampagana kumbaga [at] pampagaan ng pakiramdam,” he said.

He further defines his music as a “drug,” similar to a tranquilizer in which it calms the nerves of everyone who listens to it. He described, “Nakikita ko ‘yung sa kanta ko na parang drug siya, parang drug siya na parang pag pinapakinggan nila si YB Neet, kumakalma sila.”

T. Anthony C. Cabangon Lourdes M. Fernandez Aldwin M. Tolosa

Jt Nisay Edwin P. Sallan Eduardo A. Davad Niggel Figueroa Anabelle O. Flores Tony M. Maghirang, Rick Olivares, Leony Garcia, Patrick Miguel

S.

YB Neet explains that one of the reasons why a lot of people could relate to his song is because of its inspiration—his personal life. He shared that writing a song about a life he has not been through is difficult. Instead, he chose to harvest his life experiences and translate it through HipHop.

“Kapag iniisip mo lang siya na gusto mo magbigay ng motivational pero out of nowhere lang, hindi mo naman naranasan, hindi rin mafe-feel ng tao,” he expounded.

YB Neet added that in general, his sound always relies on neutrality. He explained, “Feeling ko si YB Neet kasi ‘yung brand niya nasa gitna lang siya eh, neutral lang siya… hindi siya sobrang bait, hindi [rin] siya sobrang sama… parang nasa gitna lang talaga siya na naglalaro, kumbaga ‘yon din ‘yung pinaka sentro ng YB Neet—’yung power niya.”

Emerging from Pasay

BEFORE he was known as YB Neet the rapper, he was just an ordinary boy in Pasay City. Most of his days are spent with his family, helping out in their family business and driving around. He also worked in the corporate world prior to rapping.

Smugglaz, Lucky9, and Lil Baby.

Asked on why he chose the stage name of “Young Blood Neet,” he explained that he wanted to immortalize his youth by forever referencing himself as a “young blood.” Meanwhile, “Neet,” was his car’s name—a hyundai accent sedan.

Since he rose to fame two years ago, the rapper does not think his journey as an artist is “too fast.” He believes otherwise, wanting to achieve more as a rapper while he’s still young.

Fully decided to take on rapping, his parents disagreed—or at least, at first.

With his background, his parents were worried of not earning enough as a rapper and the general uncertainties it has.

“Noong una parang ayaw nila kasi syempre, hindi nila alam kung ano talagang ginagawa ng anak nila tapos hindi alam kung may pupuntahan talaga,” YB Neet narrated. “Pero syempre ako lang yung nakakita ng gusto kong puntahan, so parang nabingi na lang muna ako hanggang sa minamahal na din nila ulit yung ginagawa ko.”

YB Neet currently has around 255, 000 monthly listeners on Spotify. His single “Dem dayz” has 2 million streams on the same music-streaming platform as of writing.

From his album “Big Ape,” he narrated his story as a starting rapper.

Asked on his advice to his fellow “young bloods,” YB Neet imparts, “Kailangan, habang bata pa kayo, madapa na kayo ng madapa. Ubusin niyo na ‘yan, ubusin niyo ‘yon kasi kapag umabot sa punto na nakabangon ka na, kabisado mo nang bumangon.”

His latest album “Meta,” in collaboration with fellow Filipino rapper CK YG is available on all music-streaming platforms.

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After working at 5 in the afternoon, he would spend his free time working on his music until 3 in the morning. He kept on to this routine until he fully committed to pursuing music as a career.

As an emerging artist, he shared that his inspirations came from

COMING TO VINYL THIS 2023

OPM releases to open first quarter with a bang

By Rick Olivares

The following titles will be available on vinyl in the very first quarter of 2023.

Endings of A New Kind – Taken by Cars (Party Bear Records)

THE debut album from retro new wavers Taken By Cars will be finally available, thus completing the release of all three albums on vinyl.

When the album was first released on compact disc in 2008, it stood out with its energy and its revitalizing sound by bringing back that New Wave sound. The vinyl release coincides with its 15th anniversary.

Love In the Land of Rubber Shoes and Dirty Ice Cream – Orange&Lemons (Plaka Express Records)

THE debut album was rerecorded several years ago by the reformed Orange&Lemons as a three-piece outfit (they are now back to a quartet). At that time, I asked Clem Castro, who has been a very good friend of mine in the last decade, if we could put this out on vinyl.

The vinyl record was supposed to be out during this past summer but after some delays, it will be out late 2022 or early January as a two-record set. Just in time for the album’s 20th anniversary.

Gintong Musika at Panahon –Maria Cafra (Eikon Records)

THE story about this third album by these Pinoy Rock legends was

I caught them at a show at 70s Bistro. And while chatting with guitarist, singer, and songwriter Resty Fabunan, I intimated releasing new material in time for the band’s 50th anniversary release this 2023.

It turns out that Resty had written quite a few new songs with the band performing them in the last year or so. The recording process began right before the pandemic and was finished only in a marathon session this November.

It’s a hard rocking album that will remind some of Wolfgang and of course, their 70s style. They pay tribute as well to Pepe Smith, Wally Gonzalez, Mike Hanopol, and Sampaguita.

2-Week Panic – Brownbeat All-Stars (Psychedelic Juice Records)

ANOTHER of my projects is this second and independent release from the Brownbeat All-Stars from 2005. Am working with this new indie label for the first time.

Stinky Dinkies – Chain Gang (Backspacer Records)

I saw this all-female crew during the early 90s right before the band explosion led by their university mates, the Eraserheads. I saw them multiple times at the old Club Dredd and even had their cassette.

While working on Betrayed’s vinyl release of Then & Now, the band’s guitarist Boyet Miguel

put me in touch with the girls. After several months of talking and planning, we brought this project over to our friends from Backspacer Records.

And… it’s here. Celebrate the 30th anniversary of Smelly Smiley Stinky Dinkies on white vinyl.

Ame II – Victor MK II (Kind of Blue Records)

VICTOR MKII has got to be one of the more prolific lo-fi electronic artists of the last few years. He averages around three releases a year on cassette and vinyl format. And the delectable electronic hip hop he makes is wrapped around gorgeous anime-style art.

And this is the sequel to his beloved Ame album. I just can’t wait.

A Drop Into Blue – The Bloomfields (CDs Atbp.)

THE fourth album by this hard rocking band (released in 2019) that is probably their best album thus far. And you have to give it to these guys at CD Atbp. Who have made

this their second ever vinyl release. Good to see this hard working band get their props.

Choke Cocoi (Delusion of Terror/SPHC Records/Love Form Hate)

Four years after their split seveninch extended play single with Tiger Pussy, these hardcore heroines have their debut full-length album out early this 2023. Know how this band are underground favorites.

Deeper It Goes – Sauna (Still Ill Records)

DEFUNCT metalcore band Sauna didn’t hang around too long after their one and only album, Deeper It Goes, was released in 2008. But this band and their music – heavily influenced by American band Converge – left behind one album that is still talked about to this day. A tightly-wound stick of C4 waiting to explode. That is what this wicked sound is all about. For those unable to get the compact disc of Deeper It Goes, it will be on vinyl this first quarter.

BUSINESS MUSIC

Smelly Smiley

SOME 51 records from independent artists and labels were released this past 2022, and it looks like 2023 is going to be even bigger. There will still be reissues but there will be a lot more first time releases and new music.

12 ways to finally achieve your most elusive goals

By Peter a. Heslin, unSW; Sydney Lauren a. Keating, EM Lyon and ute-Christine Klehe, university of Giessen

The best advice when making resolutions is to set goals that are “SMART”— specific, measurable, achievable, relevant (to you) and time-bound.

Once you’ve set your goals, what can help you achieve them? Based on our research, we’ve distilled 12 goal-enablers. These cover four broad principles you can use to keep yourself on track.

SET RELEVANT SUPPORTING GOALS

An outcome goal isn’t enough. Set clear supporting goals that equip you to attain that outcome.

1. Behavioral goals stipulate the actions required to reach your outcome goal. If you want to change jobs, for example, behavioral goals could include working out what job you want, networking with relevant people, getting advice on your resume, and submitting at least three job applications each month.

2. Learning goals are the knowledge and skills you need to achieve your goal. Ways to identify your highest-priority learning goals, and how to attain them, include seeking advice from others who have mastered the skill you aim to learn, working with a coach, or watching instructional videos.

3. Sub-goals are small milestones on the way to your goal. They indicate your

rate of progress towards attaining your ultimate goal. They can also provide a motivating sense of momentum.

BUILD YOUR INTERNAL MOTIVATION

ThIS is the inner energy and focus that fuels, directs and sustains your efforts to reach your goals.

4. Connect goals to passions. If you like feeling like you’re on a mission, try framing your goals as reflecting a novice, apprentice or master level of development. If competition gets you going, perhaps frame your learning or sub-goals as indicating a bronze, silver, gold or platinum level of performance.

5. Engage in mental contrasting. This involves toggling between focusing on a vivid written or visual depiction of your present state with your desired future state. Mental contrasting increases goal achievement in areas such as eating more healthily, exercising more, improving grades and cutting down on alcohol consumption.

6. Build self-efficacy. Your self-efficacy is your belief in your capacity to succeed at a particular task. Set modest initial

goals you are likely to achieve (see point 3). Ensure you have adequate resources and support (see point 8). If you find yourself thinking defeatist thoughts—“I don’t think I can do this” or “I’m too old for this”—then stop and think more encouraging thoughts instead.

CRAFT AN ‘ENABLING CONTEXT’

An enabling context helps keep your goals front of mind and sustains you in working to achieve them.

7. Implementation intentions stipulate when to pursue behavioral goals. These intentions increase the odds of attaining any goal. Two types are:

n When-then intentions (for example: “When I am tempted to eat a snack, then I will drink a glass of water and wait 10 minutes to see if I still feel I need that snack”) n After-then intentions (for example: “After I eat lunch each day, then I’ll walk for at least 15 minutes somewhere green with my phone off”).

8. Ensure adequate resources. These could include adequate materials, technology, support of others, time and energy

(enabled by an effective recovery routine).

9. Seek useful feedback to help gauge your progress and correct errors. Try asking the following questions: What happened? What went right? What went not so well and why? What can be learned? What are one or two things I can now do differently?

ANTICIPATE AND MANAGE OBSTACLES

A S boxer Mike Tyson once said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” You need to be realistic about competing priorities and distractions bound to get in the way.

10. Identify and plan to manage points of choice, where other temptations may divert you from pursuing your goal. Points of choice may arise from within yourself (such as feeling tired, distracted or uninspired) or your surroundings (such as work pressures or family responsibilities). Plan ahead as to what you will do when these points of choice arise.

11. Remind yourself it’s OK to make mistakes. Repeating “error management training” mantras has been shown to improve learning and performance, particularly on complex tasks where people need to learn their way to a solution. Try these: Errors are a natural part of the learning process.

I have made an error. Great! That gives me something to learn from.

12. Keep building your commitment. Lose that and all bets are off! All the above steps will help. It can also help to share your goals and progress with others, but choose carefully. Share your journey with people you respect, whose opinion of you matters, and whom you know won’t be a wet blanket.

Good luck. You’ve got this! The Conversation

Why you should give the gift of mindfulness this New Year

MIndfuLnESS has been shown to have a number of meaningful health benefits. It can help reduce anxiety and promote healing in those suffering from long-term chronic illness.

The practice is based on an insight first described by ancient Buddhist texts that human beings have the capacity to observe experience without being caught up in it. This means, simply and wonderfully, that it is possible to observe ourselves having a craving, or a happy thought, or even a scary emotion, without reacting in the moment in a way that amplifies the feeling or sends

the mind spiraling off into thinking about old memories or anticipating events.

This practice can help calm the mind and the body as we learn not to react to experience with likes and dislikes or judgments of good and bad. It does not make us cold or apathetic but more fully present.

While most mindfulness research focuses on the individual benefits of the practice, scholars argue that we not only practice mindfulness for ourselves but that we can also practice it for others. It can help us build stronger, healthier relationships.

The sad truth is that living in the at-

tention economy, most of us have become bad listeners. ho wever, just as it is possible to watch ourselves having an experience without reacting, it’s possible to watch another person have an experience without getting tied up in reactivity and judgment. It’s possible simply to be present.

The gift of mindfulness is a practice of listening with compassion to another person describe their experiences. To give this gift means putting away your phone, turning off social media, and setting aside other common distractions. It means practic-

ing being fully present in another person’s presence and listening to them with complete attention, without reacting with judgment, while resisting the urge to make the interaction about you.

If we judge the value of gifts based on how much they cost, this gift may seem worthless. But in a distracted world, I argue, it is a precious one.

It is not a gift that you will wrap, or put inside a card; it’s not one you will have to name as a gift or draw attention to. It’s something you can do right now. The Conversation

It’S that time of year to muse on what you hope to accomplish over the next 12 months.

"You don’t have to do all 12. Just focusing on the most relevant three to five can make a big difference."