All posts by LL

IEEE Spectrum, News, Zurich

How a New Middleman Might Help Balance Electricity Grids

A few years ago almost two thousand bold households on the Danish island of Bornholm joined a surge pricing experiment run by their electricity utility. It was supposed to empower the utility and consumers with a simple, direct market (“The Smartest, Greenest Grid,” IEEE Spectrum, April 2013).

The EU-funded project, called EcoGrid, won widespread buy-in from residents, who could also earn small payoffs when they reduced demand.  Yet researchers reported last year that they could reduce demand by only 1.2 percent of peak load, despite early predictions of up to 20-percent reductions for so-called virtual power plants. The market model was missing something. Continue reading How a New Middleman Might Help Balance Electricity Grids →

Features, Nature Outlook

Palliative care: The other opioid issue

When pharmacologist Ravindra Ghooi learned in 1996 that his mother had terminal breast cancer, he began to investigate whether he could obtain morphine, in case she needed pain relief at the end of her life. But a morphine prescription in India at that time, even for the dying, was a rare thing: most states required four or five different licences to buy painkillers such as morphine, and there were harsh penalties for minor administrative errors. Few pharmacies stocked opioids and it was a rare doctor who held the necessary paperwork to prescribe them. Ghooi, who is now a consultant at Cipla Palliative Care and Training Centre in Pune, used his connections to ask government and industry officials if there was a straightforward way of obtaining morphine for his mother. “Everybody agreed to give me morphine,” he recalls, “but they said they’d give it to me illegally.”  Continue reading Palliative care: The other opioid issue →

Features, Gumiel de Izán, Photos, Scientific American

Recopilando el testimonio genético de los muertos de la Guerra Civil española

En una zanja profunda hasta la cintura junto a la Autovía 1 de España, una docena de voluntarios con guantes de goma cepillan arcilla oscura que cubre restos de huesos humanos. Sus rodillas se apoyan sobre cojines de espuma, y una carpa blanca los protege del sol del verano boreal. Es julio de 2011; 75 veranos después de que en España estallara una guerra civil que llevó a los huesos de 59 personas a ese suelo.

A pocos pasos de la zanja, los voluntarios sostienen micrófonos frente al murmullo de los ancianos de la localidad de Gumiel de Izán, en la región centro-norte de Castilla y León. Esos ancianos, que albergan recuerdos de ejecuciones sumarias en ese sitio, bien pueden ser los hermanos menores, los vecinos y los hijos de los que están en esa tumba. Pero al momento de la exhumación, nadie lo sabe a ciencia cierta. En lugar de ello, los voluntarios documentan y recogen los restos físicos, y consiguen y graban las memorias imperfectas que fueron suprimidas durante cuatro décadas de dictadura.

Tales sitios se encuentran esparcidos por toda España, desde las Islas Canarias hasta La Mancha y las Islas Baleares. Las estimaciones recientes sugieren que alrededor de 2.000 fosas comunes pueden guardar los restos de hasta 150.000 víctimas de apresuradas ejecuciones durante la guerra. Continue reading Recopilando el testimonio genético de los muertos de la Guerra Civil española →

Features, Gumiel de Izán, Photos, Sapiens

Unburying the Spanish Civil War

In a waist-high trench alongside Spain’s national Highway 1, a dozen volunteers wearing rubber gloves brush tan clay from crumbling human bones. Their knees rest on foam cushions, and a white tent shades them from the summer sun. It’s July 2011—a full 75 summers after Spain erupted in the Civil War that put the bones of 59 civilians in the ground here.

A few steps away from the trench, volunteers hold microphones up to the murmuring mouths of elders from the town of Gumiel de Izán, in the north-central region of Castilla y León. The elders, who harbor memories of summary executions at the site, may well be the younger siblings, neighbors, and children of those in the grave. But at the moment of exhumation, nobody knows for sure. Instead, the volunteers document and collect the physical remains, coaxing out and recording imperfect memories that were suppressed during four decades of dictatorship.

Such sites are scattered throughout Spain, from the Canary Islands to La Mancha to the Balearic Islands. Recent estimates suggest that some 2,000 mass graves may hold the remains of up to 150,000 victims of hasty wartime executions. Continue reading Unburying the Spanish Civil War →