AFP UK

Around 300 Extinction Rebellion activists, some dressed as clowns, attempted to blockade central Zurich on Monday in a bid to force the Swiss government to heed the environmental movement’s climate demands.

XR urged its activists to return every day at noon to block traffic at three key strategic points in Switzerland’s financial capital, including a bridge and the crossroads of the city’s main shopping street.

Students and senior citizens were among those who descended on Zurich from across the wealthy Alpine nation, unfurling banners and stretching out large sheets of blue plastic symbolising the oceans suffocating with rubbish.

Others installed a ship daubed with climate crisis slogans, “because we are all in the same boat”, one activist said.

“We have children and are worried about their future,” said Genevieve, a teacher from Neuchatel who came with her physicist husband.

“We are a little afraid of being arrested because this is the first time we have taken part in civil disobedience.” 

A retired humanitarian, who did not wish to give her name, said that the prospect of being arrested “does not scare me”, adding that “everything else, at the political level, did not work”. 

In June, XR petitioned the Swiss government asking it to “officially” recognise the climate emergency and mandate a citizens’ assembly on “climate and ecological justice”, warning that its activists were otherwise prepared to engage in civil disobedience. 

After an hour, the police ordered activists to retreat to designated areas to clear the way for trams on Zurich’s main shopping street.

They were eventually let out, one by one.

Dozens of Greenpeace activists blocked a Shell oil refinery in the Dutch port of Rotterdam with boats on Monday in protest against fossil fuel advertising.

Campaigners from the environmental group used a sailing ship, kayaks and rubber dinghies to obstruct the entrance to the refinery, AFP journalists said.

Dutch police later arrested 22 activists and removed a group of protesters who had climbed onto an oil tank and unfurled slogans.

Greenpeace and 20 other groups have launched a petition calling on the EU to ban advertising and sponsorship by fossil fuel companies. 

“The action is to shine a light on the need to ban fossil fuel ads and sponsorship,” Silvia Pastorelli, one of the lead organisers of the protest, told AFP.

“We do it against Shell because they are one of the worst Greenwashers.”

The protest began when Greenpeace’s yacht, Beluga II, dropped anchor in front of the entrance to several refineries including one belonging to the Anglo-Dutch oil giant.

Campaigners blocked the port with a barrier made from four floating cubes emblazoned with fossil fuel company adverts collected from around Europe.

“I grew up reading signs about how cigarettes kill you, but never saw similar warnings in petrol stations or fuel tanks,” activist Chaja Merk said.

“It’s frightening that my favourite sports and museums are sponsored by airlines and car companies.”

Greenpeace International chief Jennifer Morgan pointed out that the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland was less than a month away.

But “Europe is buzzing with how to increase fossil gas production that would lock us into more emissions, when we need to break this dependence,” she said.

A Dutch police spokeswoman said they had acted against the protest because “shipping traffic was blocked. That is really out of the question.”

They arrested 22 people and fined 32 others.

Shell criticised the protest, saying that the demonstrators were “illegally on our property”, according to the Dutch ANP news agency.

US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch.

The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain.

Julius, who in 2019 won the $3-million Breakthrough Prize in life sciences, said he was stunned to receive the call from the Nobel committee early on Monday.

“One never really expects that to happen,” he told Swedish Radio. “I thought it was a prank.”

Our ability to sense heat, cold and touch is essential for survival, the Nobel Committee said, and underpins our interaction with the world around us.

“The groundbreaking discoveries… by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can initiate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world,” the Nobel jury said.

“In our daily lives we take these sensations for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived? This question has been solved by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates.”

– Chili pepper inspiration –

Julius, 65, was recognised for his research using capsaicin — a compound from chili peppers that induces a burning sensation –- to identify which nerve sensors in the skin respond to heat.

The human body generates heat in response to inflammation, so we can protect the affected area and allow it to heal.

Julius told Scientific American in 2019 that he got the idea to study chili peppers after a visit to the grocery store.

“I was looking at these shelves and shelves of basically chili peppers and extracts (hot sauce) and thinking, ‘This is such an important and such a fun problem to look at. I’ve really got to get serious about this’,” he said.

Patapoutian’s pioneering discovery was identifying the class of nerve sensors that respond to touch.

“In science many times it’s things we take for granted that are of high interest,” Patapoutian told the Nobel Foundation website.

Touch receptors were “the big elephant in the room: we knew they existed, we knew they did something very different than how most other cells communicate with each other, which is through chemicals.”

Julius, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco and the 12-year-younger Patapoutian, a professor at Scripps Research in California, will share the Nobel Prize cheque for 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million, one million euros).

The pair were not among the frontrunners mentioned in speculation ahead of the announcement.

– Peace Prize favourites –

Pioneers of messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which paved the way for mRNA Covid vaccines, and immune system researchers had been widely tipped as favourites.

While the 2020 award was handed out during the pandemic, this is the first time the entire selection process has taken place under the shadow of Covid-19.

Last year, the award went to three virologists for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus.

The Nobel season continues on Tuesday with the award for physics and Wednesday with chemistry, followed by the much-anticipated gongs for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday before the economics prize winds things up on Monday, October 11.

Speculation on potential Peace Prize winners has ranged from the Belarusian opposition to climate campaigners such as Sweden’s Greta Thunberg.

Literary circles have been buzzing with speculation that the Swedish academy could choose to rectify an imbalance with the literature prize that has seen Europe and North America dominate since 2012.

In total, those two regions account for 95 of 117 literature laureates.

Blue Origin on Monday confirmed William Shatner, who starred as Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series, will fly to space October 12 aboard the company’s crewed rocket, becoming the oldest ever astronaut.

“I’ve heard about space for a long time now. I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle,” said the 90-year-old Canadian actor in a statement.

The science fiction television show aired for only three seasons starting in 1966, but was hugely influential in popular culture and has spawned more than a dozen movies and several spin-off series.

It was notable for the utopian vision of its creator Gene Rodenberry, who imagined a future where by the 23rd century humanity had put aside its divisions and united with other peaceful space-faring civilizations.

Shatner, as Kirk, commanded the U.S.S. Enterprise on a five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

His actual voyage to space will be far shorter: about 10 minutes, in a flight that will take the crew just beyond the Karman line, 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea-level. They’re also unlikely to encounter alien foes such as Klingons.

If successful, Shatner will become the first Star Trek actor to reach the final frontier — with the important caveat “while living.”

The ashes of fellow Star Trek actor James Doohan, who played the Enterprise’s chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, were smuggled aboard the International Space Station in 2008 and remain under its floor cladding, according to the space tourist who carried out the plot devised by the actor’s son.

– Work culture allegations –

Blue Origin also announced the identity of the remaining passenger, Audrey Powers, the company’s vice president of mission and flight operations.

Powers worked as an engineer for almost a decade before becoming a lawyer, Blue Origin said. 

As a guidance and controls engineer, she was a flight controller for US space agency NASA with 2,000 hours of console time in mission control for the International Space Station Program.

They will join Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer and co-founder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a co-founder of clinical research platform Medidata Solutions, on the sub-orbital flight.

The news comes as Bezos’s company is under a cloud of allegations relating to a “toxic” work culture with rampant sexual harassment.

The claims, firmly rejected by Blue Origin, were outlined in a lengthy blog post signed by Alexandra Abrams, the company’s former head of employee communications, last week.

The post said it also represented the views of 20 other workers and ex-workers in various divisions who wanted to remain anonymous.

Abrams and her co-authors further alleged the company had a pattern of decision-making that prioritized speedy rocket development over safety, and that several of them would not feel safe in the company’s New Shepard spaceship.

Blue Origin responded by saying Abrams was dismissed two years ago after warnings over issues involving US export control regulations, adding it would investigate any new claims of misconduct.

Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and paying customer Oliver Daemen flew into space on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight on July 20 from the company’s base in west Texas.

What signals spark in our bodies when we experience the fiery heat of a chili pepper or feel the sudden pressure of a tap on the shoulder?

While scientists had long ago figured out the mechanisms for sight and smell, the way in which touch, heat and cold trigger a response in the nervous system remained a mystery until research by this year’s Nobel Medicine Prize winners.

Thanks to their work we understand how temperature and touch are converted into electrical impulses sent through the body — a crucial mechanism for perceiving and surviving the world around us.   

It has also opened up the possibility of new treatments for a range of diseases.    

– Too hot to handle –

Biochemist and molecular biologist David Julius has used a range of natural substances to examine how the sensations of pain and temperature are transmitted to the brain. 

Working at his laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, Julius has looked at toxins from tarantulas and the chemicals producing the nose-tingling burn of horseradish and wasabi. 

But it was his research in the 1990s to solve the “riddle” of what exactly happens when the body is exposed to capsaicin, the molecule that produces the hot sensation caused when we eat or touch chili peppers, that was singled out by the Nobel committee.  

His team created a database of millions of DNA fragments from genes within sensory neurons, which were known to react to pain, heat and touch. 

They then located the gene that made cells specifically sensitive to capsaicin.

Further investigation revealed that a type of protein on the outer tip of sensory nerves, which they called the TRPV1 ion channel, responds both to the “heat” in chilies and to high temperatures. 

When activated this receptor “sends the electrical signal from the periphery –let’s say, your lips or your eye, wherever you feel the hot chili pepper — and it takes the signal to the spinal cord,” said Julius in a 2019 interview with Scientific American. 

The signal is then relayed by different neurons up to the brain, “where you perceive it as being something noxious and painful” he said. 

Julius and his colleagues have since identified another receptor that reacts to cold, as well as the “wasabi receptor”, which responds both to the pungency of the Japanese condiment and is also involved in pain linked to inflammation.

– Prodding –

Working around the same time at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, Ardem Patapoutian was searching for specific receptors activated by mechanical stimuli such as pressure and touch.

He identified a type of cell that emitted a measurable electric signal whenever an individual cell was poked with a micropipette. 

“We literally poked the cell while recording its electrical current,” he told BrainFacts in a 2020 interview. 

He then launched an arduous process of elimination, looking for a gene linked to the possible receptor.  

To do this the researchers inactivated dozens of candidate genes one by one to see which one was responsible for the cell’s sensitivity to touch. 

The team called the previously unknown “mechanosensitive ion channel” Piezo1, after the Greek word for pressure, and they have since identified a second receptor Piezo2. 

Patapoutian said finding these receptors is like finding “a doorknob”, which could open up the understanding of pain or touch. 

“So, the receptor is like the first entry point — it allows you to open the door and start investigating what’s in this room,” he told BrainFacts. 

While there is still a lot to learn about these protein receptors, the discovery has “exploded this field of research”, Bertrand Coste, who conducted the studies with Patapoutian, told AFP.

– Painkillers? –

Coste said another crucial step is to find the receptors that detect the types of touch that cause pain, which would be “fantastic therapeutic targets” for chronic or inflammatory pain.

Pain itself plays an important role — from telling us when to pull away from something hot, to letting us know when we have suffered an injury. 

Julius told the Scientific American that some early pharmaceutical research into using the receptors had produced unwelcome side effects, like decreasing people’s ability to tell when something is too hot. 

But he said he hoped that identifying the specific mechanisms for these sensations would help lead to the development of painkillers that do not rely on opiods, which can have wide ranging effects on the body and lead to addiction. 

Blue Origin on Monday confirmed William Shatner, who starred as Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series, will fly to space October 12 aboard the company’s crewed rocket, becoming the oldest ever astronaut.

“I’ve heard about space for a long time now. I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle,” said the 90-year-old actor in a statement by Jeff Bezos’s space company.

The science fiction television show aired for only three seasons starting in 1966, but was hugely influential in popular culture and spawned several movies and spin-off series.

It was notable for the utopian vision of its creator Gene Rodenberry, who envisaged a society where humanity had put aside its divisions and united with other peaceful space-faring civilizations.

Shatner, as Kirk, commanded the USS Enterprise on a five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

His actual voyage to space will be far shorter — about 10 minutes, in a flight that will take the crew just beyond the Karman Line 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth.

Blue Origin also announced the identity of the remaining passenger, Audrey Powers, the company’s vice president of mission and flight operations.

They will join Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer and co-founder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a co-founder of clinical research platform Medidata Solutions, on the sub-orbital flight.

The news comes as Bezos’s company is under a cloud of allegations relating to a “toxic” work culture with rampant sexual harassment.

The claims, firmly rejected by Blue Origin, were outlined in a lengthy blog post signed by Alexandra Abrams, the company’s former head of employee communications, last week.

The post said it also represented the views of 20 other workers and ex-workers in various divisions who wanted to remain anonymous.

Abrams and her co-authors further alleged the company had a pattern of decision-making that prioritized speedy rocket development over safety, and that several of them would not feel safe in the company’s New Shepard rocket.

Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and paying customer Oliver Daemen flew into space on Blue Origin’s first crewed flight on July 20.

Dozens of Greenpeace activists blocked a Shell oil refinery in the Dutch port of Rotterdam with boats on Monday in protest against fossil fuel advertising.

Campaigners from the environmental group used a sailing ship, kayaks and rubber dinghies to obstruct the entrance to the refinery, AFP journalists said.

Dutch police later arrested 17 activists and removed a group of protesters who had climbed onto an oil tank, Greenpeace said.

Greenpeace and 20 other groups have launched a petition calling on the EU to ban advertising and sponsorship by fossil fuel companies. 

“The action is to shine a light on the need to ban fossil fuel ads and sponsorship,” Silvia Pastorelli, one of the lead organisers of the protest, told AFP.

“We do it against Shell because they are one of the worst Greenwashers.”

The protest began when Greenpeace’s yacht, Beluga II, dropped anchor in front of the entrance to several refineries including one belonging to the Anglo-Dutch oil giant.

“I grew up reading signs about how cigarettes kill you, but never saw similar warnings in petrol stations or fuel tanks,” activist Chaja Merk said.

“It’s frightening that my favourite sports and museums are sponsored by airlines and car companies.”

Greenpeace International chief Jennifer Morgan pointed out that the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland was less than a month away.

But “Europe is buzzing with how to increase fossil gas production that would lock us into more emissions, when we need to break this dependence,” she said.

Neither Shell nor Dutch police made any immediate comment.

California authorities and emergency responders were racing Monday to contain the damage from a major offshore oil spill that the city of Huntington Beach described as an “environmental catastrophe.”

Popular beaches along a 15-mile (24-kilometer) stretch of coastline south of Los Angeles were closed from Huntington Beach to Laguna Beach, city officials reported as crews scrambled to clean up one of California’s biggest spills in decades.

Fishing operations in the area were ordered halted, and wildlife has been killed due to the 126,000-gallon (480,000-liter) spill of post-production crude that began leaking early Saturday from what officials said is a pipeline connected to an oil rig offshore.

The US Coast Guard coordinating the response said early Monday that oil amounting to less than three percent of the spill plume — estimated to be 5.8 nautical miles (6.7 miles, 10 kilometers) long — had been recovered, and that more than a mile of oil containment booms had been deployed.

“Unfortunately, we are starting to see oil covered fish and birds washing up along our coastline,” including in protected wetlands, the City of Huntington Beach said in a statement Sunday.

The city of around 200,000 people identified the company responsible for the leak as Beta Offshore, a California subsidiary of Houston-based Amplify Energy Corp.

“We will be working to ensure that Amplify Energy Corporation does everything possible to rectify this environmental catastrophe,” Huntington Beach said.

Amplify Energy said in a statement Monday that “as a precautionary measure, all of the company’s production and pipeline operations at the Beta Field have been shut down.”

The spill prompted US Senator Alex Padilla of California to renew his call for an end to offshore oil drilling. 

“We’ve seen time and time again how damaging offshore oil spills are to our coastal ecosystems as well as to our economy,” he tweeted. “We have the power to prevent future spills.”

At a press conference Sunday afternoon, officials warned residents not to touch or try to save any wildlife themselves, but to instead call local authorities to alert them to animals affected by the oil. 

“This is just devastating for our marine life, our habitat, our economics, our entire community,” Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley said Sunday on MSNBC.

“Our natural habitat we’ve spent decades building up and creating is just damaged in a day.”

Foley said she had learned that responders had capped the pipeline and were working to repair it, but that as of Sunday some oil was still leaking. 

The spill originated near the Elly platform, which was built in 1980 and is one of 23 oil and gas drilling platforms in federal waters off California, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Orange County officials warned that the affected beaches could be closed for weeks or months.

“This is why the US needs to end coastal oil drilling,” the Times wrote in an editorial.

US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch.

The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other in the late 1990s and 2000s, is being used to develop treatments for a wide range of diseases and conditions, including chronic pain.

Julius, who in 2019 won the $3-million Breakthrough Prize in life sciences, said he was stunned to receive the call from the Nobel committee early on Monday.

“One never really expects that to happen… I thought it was a prank,” he told Swedish Radio.

Our ability to sense heat, cold and touch is essential for survival, the Nobel Committee explained, and underpins our interaction with the world around us.

“The groundbreaking discoveries… by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can initiate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world,” the Nobel jury said.

“In our daily lives we take these sensations for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived? This question has been solved by this year’s Nobel Prize laureates.”

– Chili pepper inspiration –

Julius, 65, was recognised for his research using capsaicin — a compound from chili peppers that induces a burning sensation –- to identify which nerve sensors in the skin respond to heat.

The human body generates heat in response to inflammation, so we can protect the affected area and allow it to heal.

Julius told Scientific American in 2019 that he got the idea to study chili peppers after a visit to the grocery store.

“I was looking at these shelves and shelves of basically chili peppers and extracts (hot sauce) and thinking, ‘This is such an important and such a fun problem to look at. I’ve really got to get serious about this’,” he said.

Patapoutian’s pioneering discovery was identifying the class of nerve sensors that respond to touch.

Julius, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco and the 12-year-younger Patapoutian, a professor at Scripps Research in California, will share the Nobel Prize cheque for 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million, one million euros).

The pair were not among the frontrunners mentioned in the speculation ahead of the announcement.

Pioneers of messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which paved the way for mRNA Covid vaccines, and immune system researchers had been widely tipped as favourites.  

While the 2020 award was handed out during the pandemic, this is the first time the entire selection process has taken place under the shadow of Covid-19.

Last year, the award went to three virologists for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus.

– Peace Prize favourites –

The Nobel season continues on Tuesday with the award for physics and Wednesday with chemistry, followed by the much-anticipated gongs for literature on Thursday and peace on Friday before the economics prize winds things up on Monday, October 11.

Speculation on potential Peace Prize winners has ranged from the Belarusian opposition to climate campaigners such as Sweden’s Greta Thunberg.

Meanwhile,  literary circles have been buzzing with speculation that the Swedish academy could choose to rectify an imbalance with the literature prize that has seen Europe and North America dominate since 2012.

In total, those two regions account for 95 of 117 literature laureates.

Britain will aim to shift all of its energy production to renewable sources by the middle of the next decade, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday.

“Looking at what we can do with other renewable sources, carbon capture and storage, with hydrogen, potentially we think we can get to complete clean energy production by 2035,” the UK leader told broadcasters.

The aspiration comes as he prepares to host world leaders next month at a crucial UN climate summit when they will be under unprecedented pressure to decarbonise economies and chart humanity’s path away from catastrophic global warming.

Britain has already committed to phasing out the sale of all polluting road vehicles by 2040 as part of plans to decarbonise its transport systems, while the country has become a leading offshore wind energy producer in recent years.

Johnson’s comments also coincide with rising wholesale gas prices globally, which in Britain have contributed to rocketing bills for consumers and fears of a cost-of-living crisis this winter.

The British leader, who is currently facing a slew of issues related to the challenges of the pandemic and Brexit, highlighted the potential for a shift to green technology to lessen dependence on natural gas.

“It will mean that for the first time the UK is not dependent on hydrocarbons coming from overseas, with all the vagaries in hydrocarbon prices and the risks that poses for people’s pockets,” Johnson said.

“The consumer will be reliant on our own, clean power generation which will help us also to keep costs down.”

In an interview with The Times newspaper published on Saturday, Johnson also said Britain had “got to get back into nuclear”, as the country seeks to replace its ageing reactors.

Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist Doug Parr welcomed Johnson’s comments on renewables but said the government remained “unhealthily attached” to more expensive nuclear technology.

He highlighted the cost of nuclear and said the case for large-scale reactors was “weakening day by day as it becomes more obvious that the future of energy is a decentralised, flexible grid”.

The switch to using new storage technologies and renewables will be slower if the government tries to “prop up the nuclear industry”, he added.