Monthly Archives: December 2020

Satellites Shed Light on Modern Slavery in Fishing

While forced labor, a form of modern slavery, in the world’s fishing fleet has been widely documented, its extent remains unknown. No methods previously existed for remotely identifying individual fishing vessels potentially engaged in these abuses on a global scale. By combining expertise from human rights practitioners and satellite vessel monitoring data, scientists have showed in an recent study that vessels reported to use forced labor behave in systematically different ways from other vessels. Scientists used machine learning to identify high-risk vessels from among 16,000 industrial longliner, squid jigger, and trawler fishing vessels.

The study concluded that 14% and 26% of vessels were high-risk. It also revealed patterns of where these vessels fished and which ports they visited. Between 57,000 and 100,000 individuals worked on these vessels, many of whom may have been forced labor victims. This information provides unprecedented opportunities for novel interventions to combat this humanitarian tragedy….

The study found, inter alia, that longliners and trawlers using forced labor travel further from port and shore, fish more hours per day than other vessels, and have fewer voyages and longer voyage durations… Taiwanese longliners, Chinese squid jiggers, and Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean longliners are consistently the five fisheries with the largest number of unique high-risk vessels. This pattern is consistent with reports on the abuses seen within distant water fleets that receive little legal oversight and often use marginalized migrant workers .

Excerpts from Gavin G. McDonald et, al, Satellites can reveal global extent of forced labor in the world’s fishing fleet, Dec. 21, 2020

The Secrecy Around the Origin of Beef Steaks

Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed. Ranchers in the precious biome use bulldozers, machetes, and fire to make room for pastureland—a practice that’s illegal but so widespread that it’s almost impossible for strapped regulatory teams to root out. The sheer size of the country’s beef industry—2.5 million ranchers, 2,500 slaughterhouses, and about 215 million heads of cattle spread across 3.3 million square miles (8.5 million square kilometers)—is one reason the big meatpackers say they’ve struggled to keep tabs on their suppliers. Another hurdle: Brazil’s government, which requires ranchers to file documents detailing the movements of their cattle, keeps that paperwork largely to itself.

JBS SA, the global beef industry leader, vowed in September 2020 to start monitoring its indirect suppliers—i.e., the farmers who raise the cattle to sell to the folks who sell it to JBS. That followed a similar announcement months earlier from rival Marfrig Global Foods SA. Brazil’s cattle ranches come in all shapes and sizes, from mom and pop farms that ship out calves as soon as they’re born to one-stop shops that breed, fatten, and finish cows all on their own.

Cattle tagging (think of the microchip a veterinarian might slip under your dog’s skin) is already an established practice in large parts of the global food supply chain. For big farms it would be cheap to implement, costing about 0.5% of an animal’s revenue, according to a report from the Brazilian Coalition on Climate, Forests & Agriculture. Uruguay, a direct competitor to Brazil, was an early adopter in the Americas, making it possible to trace a single cow from birth to plate, says Erasmus zu Ermgassen, a sustainable livestock and supply chain researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

Some cows spend their entire life on one ranch, but that’s pretty rare…Cattle move…as many as six times before they’re slaughtered. That constant shuffling makes it all too easy to hide a cow’s real origin, a practice known as “cattle laundering.”

Each time a cow is moved from one property to another, the state issues a guide to animal transport, or GTA, which identifies the shipping farm, the receiving farm, the number of cattle being moved, and the date of transfer. This process helps ensure the safety of the overall herd in the case of a disease outbreak, but deforestation fighters have also latched on to the documents as a potential key to traceability.

Currently the only people who regularly get to see the GTAs are the ranchers, the drivers moving the cattle, and food sanitation officials. The government says making them more widely available would violate ranchers’ privacy rights, even as the secrecy helps bad actors evade the law.

Excerpt Why it’s hard to stop Amazon deforestation, starting with beef industry, Bloomberg, Dec. 17, 2020

A Present for the Earth: Reducing Plastic Leakage

Approximately 8 million metric tonnes of plastic litter flow to the ocean annually, and only 9% of plastic waste ever produced has been recycled….Another major issue relates to microplastics – those plastics that are smaller than 5 millimeters, and that pose increasing environmental, economic and health hazards… Discarded plastics break down into these smaller particles through natural weathering processes. Microplastics can enter water bodies through different pathways, including atmospheric deposition, run-off from land, roads and through municipal wastewater.

A review of technical solutions from source to sea explores a set of innovative tech solutions. Among these potential technologies include:

Introducing debris-cleanup boats, debris sweepers and sea-bins to remove plastics and other wastes carried into water bodies;
Protecting large bodies of water by introducing wetlands along coastlines;
Secondary and tertiary wastewater treatment which relies on membrane filtration to prevent microplastics entering rivers and lakes;
Advanced coagulation technology to make water contaminated with microplastics drinkable;
Promoting sustainable waste management practices to reduce plastic leakage.

A key principle of this work is preventing untreated wastewater, which is often packed with plastics and microplastics, from entering the environment in the first place. The wastewater coming from urban residential, industrial and commercial settings is full of contaminants including plastics, microplastics and other debris…

Water pollution by plastics and microplastics: A review of technical solutions from source to sea, UNEP Press Release, Dec. 27, 2020

How to Reach Beyond the Stars? Nuclear Power

The US President issued Space Policy Directive-6 (SPD-6), the Nation’s Strategy for Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion (SNPP) on Dec. 16, 2020. Space nuclear systems power spacecraft for missions where alternative power sources are inadequate, such as environments that are too dark for solar power or too far away to carry sufficient quantities of chemical fuels. Space nuclear systems include radioisotope power systems and nuclear reactors used for power, heating, or propulsion. SPD-6 establishes high-level goals, principles, and a supporting roadmap that demonstrate the U.S. commitment to using SNPP systems safely, effectively, and responsibly…

NASA, the Department of Energy, and industry will design, fabricate, and test a 10-kilowatt class fission surface power system. NASA plans to demonstrate the system on the Moon in the late 2020s, providing power for sustainable lunar surface operations and testing its potential for use on Mars. The space agency is also advancing nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion capabilities. Nuclear propulsion can enable robust human exploration beyond the Moon. For crewed missions to the Red Planet, a traditional chemical propulsion system would require a prohibitively high propellant mass.

NASA Supports America’s National Strategy for Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion, NASA Press Release, Dec. 16, 2020

The Coral Reefs of the High Seas

While the terms “coral reef” and “high seas” are rarely combined in the same sentence, reef-building corals are found in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), the high seas. A study that has been published in the Frontiers in Marine Science identified 116 coral reefs in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, most of them located outside Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

There is currently no comprehensive legal framework for the establishment of MPAs in ABNJ. Rather, initiatives to protect critical habitats on the high seas remain scattered throughout the legal mandates of organizations with different management purposes…. Yet, high seas MPAs are possible…. For example, the member countries of the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Life (CCAMLR) have established MPAs in ABNJ of the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, respectively While these MPAs provide important advances in protecting biodiversity on the high seas, they still only cover a very small portion of the international ocean.

David Wagner et al., Coral Reefs of the High Seas: Hidden Biodiversity Hotspots in Need of Protection, Frontiers in Marine Science, Sept. 14, 2020

See also Coral Reefs on the High Seas Coalition

How Mining Waste Can Help us Deal with Climate Change

Every year, mining and industrial activity generates billions of tons of slurries, gravel, and other wastes that have a high pH.

These alkaline wastes, which sit either behind fragile dams or heaped in massive piles, present a threat to people and ecosystems. But these wastes could also help the world avert climate disaster. Reacting these wastes with carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air solidifies them and makes them easier to handle.

At the same time, carrying out this type of an operation on a global scale could trap between 310 million to 4 billion tons of CO₂ annually, according to recent surveys. That could provide the world with a much needed means of lowering atmospheric CO₂.

Peridotite weathered by carbon

Peridotite weathered by carbon

But there are major hurdles. Governments will need to offer incentives for mineralization on the massive scale needed to make a dent in atmospheric carbon. And engineers will need to figure out how to harness the wastes while preventing the release of heavy metals and radioactivity locked in the material…

If regulators verified mines and other alkaline waste producers as CO₂ sequestration sites…incentives would skyrocket, companies could claim tax benefits, and industry might start to tackle climate change on the grand scale that’s necessary.

Excerpt from Robert F. Service, The Carbon Vault, Science, Sept. 4, 2020

Netherlands, China and Mexico: Lethal Narco-States

The setup—Mexican cooks using Dutch equipment to process chemicals from China—offered a window into the new global drug economy…Mexican cartels, which dominate drug trafficking in North America, are drawn to the Netherlands because it is a global trade nexus with sea and rail links to Asia that has long been Europe’s top manufacturer of synthetic drugs.

Piggybacking legitimate commercial channels, Mexican cartels are combining sophistication with ruthlessness to expand their reach world-wide. Their multinational drive is enabled by the advent over recent decades of highly potent synthetic drugs that don’t rely on crops or farmers and can be manufactured in compact facilities almost anywhere. Production experts instant-message instructions to overseas workers and hop the globe like factory troubleshooters in any industry.

With the U.S. drug market saturated and methamphetamine labs in Mexico already supersize, cartels that murder for market share see Europe as a new hub. The cartels are “like global corporations,” said DEA Regional Director for Europe Daniel Dodds. “If they can expand and broaden their customer base, they will.”

Mexican cartels first connected with Dutch drug smugglers in the 1990s, bringing cocaine through Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port. Cocaine remains Europe’s top illicit stimulant, but Dutch police say over the past two years surging quantities of Mexican meth have hit the Netherlands, Mexican “cooks” have arrived to teach local chemists, and Dutch technicians are honing production methods.

The Netherlands offers Mexican cartels an ideal production base because of its experienced chemists, unrivaled cargo networks and liberal attitude to drugs. Connections to labs in China supply chemicals that constantly adapt to remain legal. Dutch traffickers cultivated those links over decades as they perfected ecstasy manufacturing for party scenes in London, Berlin and New York…

Dutch officials are awakening to the impact of tolerating drug use for a long time and “allowing for too long a parallel economy to grow and become more influential,” Mr. Struijs said. “We have the characteristics of a narco-state.”

Excerpts from Valentina Pop, Cartels Are Now Cooking Chinese Chemicals in Dutch Meth Labs, WSJ, Dec. 8, 2020

Winning Strategy: How China Uses US Firms to Get What it Wants

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has described the creation of fully domestic supply chains as a matter of national security. The question is how to build them. Chinese officials know that they cannot turn their backs on the world. Exports are still an important source of revenue for many firms. And China must attract technology and investment from abroad. Pushing too transparently for “indigenous innovation”, a term once bandied about by the government, only makes foreigners wary. Striking the right balance is tough.

Enter the newest of China’s big economic policies: the “dual-circulation” strategy. At its most basic it refers to keeping China open to the world (the “great international circulation”), while reinforcing its own market (the “great domestic circulation”). If that sounds rather vague, it is: the government has not spelled out the details. In May 2020, at a meeting of the Politburo, Mr Xi described dual circulation as the framework for economic policy… More recent comments by Mr Xi on the economy have been less about promoting consumption and more about bolstering China’s defences. China needs “self-developed, controllable” supply chains, with at least one alternative source for vital products, he said in a speech published on October 3, 2020.

Even more striking was his inversion of the idea of international circulation. Instead of talking about it in terms of the economic benefits China reaps from globalisation, he emphasized only the strategic purpose of opening China’s doors to foreign firms, ie that making them more dependent on the Chinese market would deter foreign powers from putting pressure on the country.

Excerpts from Economic Policy: Circling Back, Economist, Nov. 7, 2020

See also China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street—Trade deal left many U.S. industries disappointed, but financial firms such as BlackRock see a potential windfall

Surveillance for Conservation: the Smart Wildlife Parks in Africa

In 2010, Rwanda’s government partnered with international conservation group African Parks to manage the Akagera Park…African Parks, based in South Africa, is known for reviving troubled national parks. The nonprofit worked to strengthen Akagera’s security, brought in anti-poaching dogs, purchased better field equipment, and hired and trained more rangers. The number of patrols increased from about 1,500 in 2011 to more than 5,400 last year.

Since 2013, poaching has dropped dramatically, which led to a wildlife revival that once seemed inconceivable. In 2017 Akagera reintroduced 18 black rhinos from South Africa. In a conservation milestone, the first rhino calves were born in the park a year later. As for lions, seven were reintroduced to the park in 2015. Today there are at least 35 of them prowling Akagera’s highlands, grassy plains, and forests…The Howard Buffett Foundation even donated a helicopter to the Rwandan government for rhino patrols.

Fences, more patrols, and reintroductions are all part of the park-rehabilitation playbook, but Akagera is also using a distinctive new technology to help even the odds against poachers. In 2017, Akagera became the world’s first “Smart Park” when it tested and installed a telecommunications network called LoRaWAN, or Long Range Wide-Area Network for securely tracking and monitoring just about anything in the park. Poachers can potentially intercept the conventional radio signals parks use to track animals but the low-bandwidth LoRa signals are relayed on a private, closed network on various frequencies, making them harder to crack. The network also runs on solar energy and is cheaper than satellite tracking technology.

Akagera partnered with Dutch conservation technology group Smart Parks to install LoRa receivers on towers throughout the park. (Smart Parks is the result of a merger between the Shadow View Foundation and the Internet of Life.) LoRa sensors, which vary in size and can be small enough to fit in one’s hand, can then communicate with towers to track the location of rangers, vehicles, equipment, and more. In 2017 they collected more than 140,000 location updates per day. Next year the park plans to install 100 sensors to monitor tourist vehicles as well, says Hall.

Excerpt from AMY YEE , In Rwanda, Learning Whether a ‘Smart Park’ Can Help Both Wildlife and Tourism, Atlas Obscura, Nov. 24, 2020

When Shepherds are Wolves: States Culpability in Illegal Fishing

Ecuador portrays itself as a victim of illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing by Chinese trawlers near the Galapagos islands. In fact, its fishing industry is just as bad…Since 2018 at least 136 large Ecuadorean fishing vessels have entered the Galapagos islands’ reserve, which covers 133,000 square km (51,000 square miles), says the director of the archipelago’s national park…

Many boats illegally transfer their catch on the high seas to larger vessels, which carry them to other markets. Under Ecuadorean law fishermen can sell endangered species like sharks or turtles if they catch them unintentionally. Some boats report half their catch as by-catch….The European Union, the biggest buyer of Ecuadorean tuna, has told the country to step up action against IUU or risk losing access to its market. In 2018 a committee within CITES, an international convention on trading in endangered species, recommended that its 183 members suspend trade in fish with Ecuador.

Its government is incapable of reining in a powerful industry. Fishing companies employ 100,000 people, and contribute $1.6bn a year, 1.5% of GDP to the economy. Ecuador’s tuna fleet, the largest in the eastern Pacific, has around 115 large mechanised ships. The rest of the fishing industry consists of more than 400 semi-industrial vessels and nodrizas, small boats with no machinery that catch a greater variety of fish…

Purse seine vessels and gear in this Google Earth image show the path of FADs belonging to just three vessels (typically vessels have about 100 FADs each) fishing in Central and Western Pacific (image from Parties to Nauru Agreement).

More controversial than purse seining and longlining is the use of fish aggregating devices (FADs). Industrial ships release these into the current that passes through the Galapagos islands’ protected area to attract prey, say green groups. Sometimes they fix goats’ heads on the devices to lure sharks, say Galapagans. Crews track them with GPS and surround them with nets when they leave the protected zones, entrapping turtles, sea lions, manta rays and sharks. Ecuadorean ships deploy more FADs than those of any other country, according to a study in 2015 by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Excerpt from Piscine Plunder: Ecuador, a Victim of Illegal Fishing, is Also a Culprit, Economist, Nov. 21, 2020

Climate Change Unlikely to Kill Amazon Rainforest

The current Earth system models used for climate predictions show that the Amazon rainforest is very sensitive to water stress. Since the air in the future is predicted to get warmer and drier with climate change, translating to increased water stress, this could have large implications not just for the forest’s survival, but also for its storage of CO2. If the forest is not able to survive in its current capacity, climate change could greatly accelerate.

Columbia Engineering researchers decided to investigate whether this was true, whether these forests are really as sensitive to water stress as what the models have been showing. In a study published in Science Advances, they report their discovery that these models have been largely over-estimating water stress in tropical forests.

The team found that, while models show that increases in air dryness greatly diminish photosynthesis rates in certain regions of the Amazon rainforest, the observational data results show the opposite: in certain very wet regions, the forests instead even increase photosynthesis rates in response to drier air…[In fact] As the trees become stressed, they generate more efficient leaves that can more than compensate for water stress.”…

“So much of the scientific research coming out these days is that with climate change, our current ecosystems might not be able to survive, potentially leading to the acceleration of global warming due to feedbacks,” Gentine added. “It was nice to see that maybe some of our estimates of approaching mortality in the Amazon rainforest may not be quite as dire as we previously thought.”

Excerpts from Some Amazon Rainforest Regions More Resistant to Climate Change than Previously Thought, Columbia Engineering, Nov. 20, 2020

Your Phone Is Listening: smart-phones as sniffers

U. S. government agencies from the military to law enforcement have been buying up mobile-phone data from the private sector to use in gathering intelligence, monitoring adversaries and apprehending criminals. Now, the U.S. Air Force is experimenting with the next step.

The Air Force Research Laboratory is testing a commercial software platform that taps mobile phones as a window onto usage of hundreds of millions of computers, routers, fitness trackers, modern automobiles and other networked devices, known collectively as the “Internet of Things.” SignalFrame, a Washington, D.C.-based wireless technology company, has developed the capability to tap software embedded on as many as five million cellphones to determine the real-world location and identity of more than half a billion peripheral devices. The company has been telling the military its product could contribute to digital intelligence efforts that weave classified and unclassified data using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The Air Force’s research arm bought the pitch, and has awarded a $50,000 grant to SignalFrame as part of a research and development program to explore whether the data has potential military applications, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Under the program, the Air Force could provide additional funds should the technology prove useful.

SignalFrame has largely operated in the commercial space, but the documents reviewed by the Journal show the company has also been gunning for government business. A major investor is Razor’s Edge, a national-security-focused venture-capital firm. SignalFrame hired a former military officer to drum up business and featured its products at military exhibitions, including a “pitch day” sponsored by a technology incubator affiliated with U.S. Special Operations command in Tampa, Fla.

SignalFrame’s product can turn civilian smartphones into listening devices—also known as sniffers—that detect wireless signals from any device that happens to be nearby. The company, in its marketing materials, claims to be able to distinguish a Fitbit from a Tesla from a home-security device, recording when and where those devices appear in the physical world. Using the SignalFrame technology, “one device can walk into a bar and see all other devices in that place,” said one person who heard a pitch for the SignalFrame product at a marketing industry event…

“The capturing and tracking of unique identifiers related to mobile devices, wearables, connected cars—basically anything that has a Bluetooth radio in it—is one of the most significant emerging privacy issues,” said Alan Butler, the interim executive director and general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a group that advocates for stronger privacy protections. “Increasingly these radios are embedded in many, many things we wear, use and buy,” Mr. Butler said, saying that consumers remain unaware that those devices are constantly broadcasting a fixed and unique identifier to any device in range.

Byron Tau, Military Tests New Way of Tracking, WSJ, Nov. 28, 2020

The Havana/China Syndrome: Who Used Directed-Energy Weapons on US Diplomats?

In December 2020, U.S. scientific panel has concluded that exposure to a type of directed energy was the most likely culprit for a number of medical symptoms, including dizziness and memory loss, experienced by diplomats posted in Cuba and China. In a new assessment published on December 5, 2020 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, scientists identified “directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy” as the most likely explanation for a series of symptoms experienced by diplomats posted at U.S. facilities—a broad category of energy that can include microwave radiation.

The scientists concluded that the symptoms experienced by a number of U.S. and Canadian diplomats, which included dizziness, headache, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, cognitive difficulties and memory loss, were “unlike any disorder in the neurological or general medical literature.”… Governments, including the former Soviet Union and the U.S., have tested using directed energy as a potential weapon or a tool for espionage or crowd control in the past.

Excerpts from Byron Tau, U.S. Diplomats’ Illnesses Likely Linked to Pulsed Energy Attack, WSJ, Dec. 7, 2020

Time for Burial: Last Repository for Nuclear Waste, Germany

Germany published on September 28, 2020 a list of potential storage sites for radioactive waste as part of its plans to exit nuclear power, dropping the Gorleben salt dome in Lower Saxony from the running. The 444-page list of sites, to be assessed by 2031 for use from 2050 to hold waste currently in interim storage at nuclear plants, was published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Final Storage (BGE). Some 90 locations, including parts of Lower Saxony, Bavaria, Baden Wuerttemberg and eastern German states, have been found to be potentially suitable after BGE undertook preliminary mapping that revealed 54% of German territory could be satisfactory.

Taking three years, the process identified salt, clay and crystalline, above all granite, formations, stressing the criteria were science-based, without political influence. No location was predetermined, said Stefan Studt, head of BGE’s managing board, at a news conference. “Any region in today’s list would take a long, long time to become the actual final space,” he said. Germany had been on a course to exit nuclear power since 2000 but hastened the plan, now set for 2022, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

Gorleben, which became the focus of anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s, failed on three points related to retention, hydrochemical and overall geological qualities, so that it could not be ruled out that aquifers may come into contact with salt, said Steffen Kanitz, a BGE board member.

Germany publishes nuclear storage list, Gorleben dropped

Who is the Boss? Cyber-War

A new National Cyber Power Index by the Belfer Centre at Harvard University ranks 30 countries on their level of ambition and capability…That America stands at the top of the list is not surprising. Its cyber-security budget for fiscal year 2020 stood at over $17bn and the National Security Agency (NSA) probably gets well over $10bn. The awesome scale of America’s digital espionage was laid bare in leaks by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, in 2013, which showed the agency hoovering up vast amounts of the world’s internet traffic and trying to weaken encryption standards.

China, in second place, has demonstrated a voracious appetite for commercial cyber-espionage abroad and an iron grip on the internet at home. Britain, whose National Cyber Security Centre has parried over 1,800 cyber-attacks since its creation in 2016, is third. Russia, whose spies interfered with America’s last election, is in fourth place. The big surprise is the Netherlands in fifth place, ahead of France, Germany and Canada. Dutch expertise in analyzing malware is particularly sharp…

Many countries outsource the dirtiest work to deniable proxies, like “hacktivists” and criminals….But while stealing things and disrupting networks is important, what matters most over the longer term is control of digital infrastructure, such as the hardware that runs mobile telecommunications and key apps. Dominance there will be crucial to economic strength and national security.

Excerpt from Digital dominance: A new global ranking of cyber-power throws up some surprises, Economist, Sept. 19, 2020

Under-Water Data Centers: Reliable, Cool and Cheap

Earlier this year a ship hauled a large, barnacle-covered cylinder sporting a Microsoft logo from the seas off the Orkney islands. Inside were a dozen server racks, of the sort found in data-centres around the world. Sunk in 2018, and connected to the shore by cable, the computers had spent the past couple of years humming away, part of an experiment into the feasibility of building data-centres underwater.

On September 14th, 2020 Microsoft revealed some results. The aquatic data-centre suffered equipment failures at just one-eighth the rate of those built on land. Being inaccessible to humans, the firm could fill it with nitrogen instead of air, cutting down corrosion. The lack of human visitors also meant none of the bumping and jostling that can cause faults on land.

Microsoft hopes some of the lessons can be applied to existing, land-based data-centers. In the longer term, though, it notes that building underwater offers advantages beyond just reliability. Immersion in seawater helps with cooling, a big expense on land. Data-centres work best when placed close to customers. Land in New York or London is expensive, but nearby sea-floor is cheap. More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles (192km) of the sea. Ben Cutler, the engineer in charge of the project, says submarine data-centres could be co-located with offshore wind farms as “anchor” customers. The cylinder fits in a standard shipping container, so could be deployed to remote places like islands, or even disaster areas to support relief efforts.

Excerpts from Cloud computing: Davy Jones’s data-center, Economist, Sept. 19, 2020