Genetically Modified Organisms Risk Global Ruin, Says Black Swan Author

Experts have severely underestimated the risks of genetically modified food, says a group of researchers lead by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is 20 years since the FDA approved the Flavr Savr tomato for human consumption, the first genetically engineered food to gain this status. Since then, genetically modified food has become a significant part of the human diet in many parts of the world, particularly in the US. In 2013 roughly 85 per cent of corn and 90 per cent of soybeans produced in the US were genetically modified.

Given the ubiquity of this kind of foodstuff, you could be forgiven for thinking that the scientific debate over its safety has been largely settled. It is certainly true that a large number of scientists seem to take that view. In 2012, for example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science declared that genetically modified crops pose no greater risk than the same foods made from crops modified by conventional plant breeding techniques.

Today, Nassim Nicholas Taleb at New York University and a few pals say that this kind of thinking vastly underestimates the threat posed by genetically modified organisms. “Genetically modified organisms represent a public risk of global harm,” they say. Consequently, this risk should be treated differently from those that only have the potential for local harm. “The precautionary principle should be used to prescribe severe of limits on genetically modified organisms,” they conclude.

Taleb and co begin by making a clear distinction between risks with consequences that are local and those with consequences that have the potential to cause global ruin. When global harm is possible, an action must be avoided unless there is scientific near-certainty that it is safe. This approach is known as the precautionary principle.

The question, of course, is when the precautionary principle should be applied. Taleb and co begin by saying that their aim is to place the precautionary principle within a formal statistical structure that is grounded in probability theory and the properties of complex systems. “Our aim is to allow decision-makers to discern which circumstances require the use of the precautionary principle and in which cases evoking the precautionary principle is inappropriate.”

Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Is 'Potentially More Dangerous Than Nukes'

Google Images

Back in June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CNBC that he'd invested in a company called Vicarious that is developing products and services based on artificial intelligence. But that wasn't why Musk got interested. His impetus for backing the firm was instead "to keep an eye on" unforeseen terrifying scenarios where the products began to threaten humanity.

He doesn't appear to have been exaggerating.

In a Tweet last night, Musk said this:

Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Bostrom is Nick Bostrom, the founder of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. That group recently partnered with a new group at Cambridge, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, to study how things like nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence and other innovations could someday wipe us all out, according to PCPro:

At [a] conference, Bostrom was asked if we should be scared by new technology. "Yes," he said, "but scared about the right things. There are huge existential threats, these are threats to the very survival of life on Earth, from machine intelligence – not the way it is today, but if we achieve this sort of super-intelligence in the future," Bostrom said.

"Superintelligence" is set to be published in English next month. In a blurb, Bostrom's colleague Martin Rees of Cambridge says of the work, "Those disposed to dismiss an 'AI takeover' as science fiction may think again after reading this original and well-argued book."

In our recent profile of Vicarious, the firm backed by Musk, we talked to Bruno Olshausen, a Berkeley professor and one of the firm's advisors. He said we are still way too far behind in our understanding of how the brain works to be able to create something that could turn heel.

"Absent a major paradigm shift - something unforeseeable at present - I would not say we are at the point where we should truly be worried about AI going out of control," he told us.

So at a minimum, it sounds like the robot takeover is not imminent.

But it seems like it's something all of us should "keep an eye on."

ORIGINAL: Business Insider

Rob Wile
Aug. 3, 2014

Artificial Intelligence could kill us all. Meet the man who takes that risk seriously

Thinking about the end of the world is something that most people try to avoid; for others, it’s a profession. The Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, UK specializes in looking at the ‘big-picture’ future of the human race, and notably, the risks that could wipe us out entirely.

As you’d probably imagine, the risks considered by the Institute include things like nuclear war and meteor strikes, but one perhaps unexpected area that it’s looking into is the potential threat posed by artificial intelligence. Could computers become so smart that they become our rivals, take all our jobs and eventually wipe us all out? This Terminator-style scenario used to seem like science fiction, but it’s starting to be taken seriously by those who watch the way technology is developing.

“I think there’s more academic papers published on either dung beetles or Star Trek than about actual existential risk,” says Stuart Armstrong, a philosopher and Research Fellow at the institute, whose work has lately been focused on AI. “There are very few institutes of any sorts in the world looking into these large-scale risks…. there is so little research… compared to other far more minor risks – traffic safety and things like that.”

HAL 9000 from ’2001: A Space Odyssey’

“One of the things that makes AI risk scary is that it’s one of the few that is genuinely an extinction risk if it were to go bad. With a lot of other risks, it’s actually surprisingly hard to get to an extinction risk,” Armstrong explains. “You take a nuclear war for instance, that will kill only a relatively small proportion of the planet. You add radiation fallout, slightly more, you add the nuclear winter you can maybe get 90%, 95% – 99% if you really stretch it and take extreme scenarios – but it’s really hard to get to the human race ending. The same goes for pandemics, even at their more virulent.

“The thing is if AI went bad, and 95% of humans were killed then the remaining 5% would be extinguished soon after. So despite its uncertainty, it has certain features of very bad risks.”

An AI meets a human in a bar… So, what kind of threat are we talking about here?

“First of all forget about the Terminator,” Armstrong says. “The robots are basically just armoured bears and we might have fears from our evolutionary history but the really scary thing would be an intelligence that would be actually smarter than us – more socially adept. When the AI in robot form can walk into a bar and walk out with all the men and/or women over its arms, that’s when it starts to get scary. When they can become better at politics, at economics, potentially at technological research.”

The first impact of that technology, Armstrong argues, is near total unemployment. “You could take an AI if it was of human-level intelligence, copy it a hundred times, train it in a hundred different professions, copy those a hundred times and you have ten thousand high-level employees in a hundred professions, trained out maybe in the course of a week. Or you could copy it more and have millions of employees… And if they were truly superhuman you’d get performance beyond what I’ve just described.”

Why would AI want to kill us?
Okay, they make take our jobs, but the idea that some superior being would want to kill us may seem presumptuous. Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, for example, has an optimistic view of how organic and cybernetic lifeforms will become increasingly intertwined in a more positive way – Skynet doesn’t have to become a reality, and if it does, it doesn’t necessarily have to turn against its creators. Armstrong thinks we should be aware of, and prepared for, the risks though.

“The first part of the argument is they could get very intelligent and therefore very powerful. The second part of the argument is that it’s extremely hard to design some sort of motivation structure, or programming… that results in a safe outcome for such a powerful being.

“Take an anti-virus program that’s dedicated to filtering out viruses from incoming emails and wants to achieve the highest success, and is cunning and you make that super-intelligent,” Armstong continues. “Well it will realise that, say, killing everybody is a solution to its problems, because if it kills everyone and shuts down every computer, no more emails will be sent and and as a side effect no viruses will be sent.

“This is sort of a silly example but the point it illustrates is that for so many desires or motivations or programmings, ‘kill all humans’ is an outcome that is desirable in their programming.”

Couldn’t we program in safeguards though? A specific ‘Don’t kill humans’ rule?
“It turns out that that’s a more complicated rule to describe, far more than we suspected initially. Because if you actually program it in successfully, let’s say we actually do manage to define what a human is, what life and death are and stuff like that, then its goal will now be to entomb every single human under the Earth’s crust, 10km down in concrete bunkers on feeding drips, because any other action would result in a less ideal outcome.

“So yes, the thing is that what we actually need to do is to try and program in essentially what is a good life for humans or what things it’s not allowed to interfere with and what things it is allowed to interfere with… and do this in a form that can be coded or put into an AI using one or another method.”

Uncertain is not the same as ‘safe’
Armstrong certainly paints a terrifying picture of life in a world where artificial intelligence has taken over, but is this an inevitability? That’s uncertain, he says, but we shouldn’t be too reassured by that.

“Increased uncertainty is a bad sign, not a good sign. When the anti-global warming crowd mention ‘but there are uncertainties to these results’ that is utterly terrifying – what people are understanding is ‘there are increased uncertainties so we’re safe’ but increased uncertainties nearly always cut both ways.

“So if they say there’s increased uncertainties, there’s nearly always increased probabilities of the tail risk – really bad climate change and that’s scary. Saying ‘we don’t know stuff about AI’ is not at all the same thing as saying ‘we know that AI is safe’. Even though we’re mentally wired to think that way. ”

When might we see true AI?

As for a timeframe as to when we could have super-intelligent AI, Armstrong admits that this is a tough question to answer.

“Proper AI of the (kind where) ‘we program it in a computer using some method or other’… the uncertainties are really high and we may not have them for centuries, but there’s another approach that people are pursuing which is whole-brain emulations, some people call them ‘uploads’, which is the idea of copying human brains and instantiating them in a computer. And the timelines on this seem a lot more solid because unlike AI we know exactly what we want to accomplish and have clear paths to reaching it, and that seems to be plausible over a century timescale.”

If computers can ‘only’ think as well as humans, that may not be so bad a scenario.

“(With) a whole brain emulation… this would be an actual human mind so we wouldn’t have to worry that the human mind would misinterpret ‘keep humans safe’ as something pathological,” Armstrong says. “We would just have to worry about the fact of an extremely powerful human – a completely different challenge but it’s the kind of challenge that we’re more used to – constraining powerful humans – we have a variety of methods for that that may or may not work, but it is a completely different challenge than dealing with the completely alien mind of a true AI.”

 David from ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’

As for those true AIs that can outsmart any human, timeframes are a lot more fuzzy.

“You might think you can get a good estimate off listening to predictors in AI, maybe Kurzweil, maybe some of the others who say either pro- or anti-AI stuff. But I’ve had a look at it and the thing is there’s no reason to suspect that these experts know what they’re talking about. AIs have never existed, they’ll never have any feedback about how likely they are to exist, we don’t have a theory of what’s needed in any practical sense.

“If you plot predictions, they just sort of spread over the coming century and the next, seemingly 20 years between any two predictions and no real pattern. So definitely there is strong evidence that they don’t know when AI will happen or if it will happen.

“This sort of uncertainty however goes both ways, the arguments that AI will not happen are also quite weak and the arguments that AI will not happen soon are also quite weak. So, just as you might think that say it might happen in a century’s time, you should also think that it might happen in five years’ time.

“(If) someone comes up with a nearly neat algorithm, feeds it a lot of data, this turns out to be able to generalize well and – poof – you have it very rapidly, though it is likely that we won’t have it any time soon, we can’t be entirely confident of that either.”

The philosophy of technology 
What became apparent to me while talking to Armstrong is that the current generation of philosophers, often ignored by those outside the academic circuit, have a role to play in establishing the guidelines around how we interact with increasingly ‘intelligent’ technology.

Armstrong likens the process behind his work to computer programming. “We try to break everything down into the simplest terms possible, as if you were trying to program it into an AI or into any computer. Programming experience is very useful. But fortunately, philosophers, and especially analytic philosophers, have been doing this for some time. You just need to extend the program a bit. So see what you have and how you would ground it, so theories of 

• how you learn stuff, 
• how you know anything about the world and 
• how to clearly define terms 

become very useful.”

  

AI’s threat to your job
The biggest problem Armstrong faces is simple disbelief from people that the threat of mass extinction from artificial intelligence is worth taking seriously.

“Humans are very poor at dealing with extreme risks,” he says. “Humans in general and decision makers at all levels – we’re just not wired well to deal with high-impact, low-probability stuff… We have heuristics, we have mental maps in which extinction things go into a special category – maybe ‘apocalypses and religions or crazy people’, or something like that.”

At least Armstrong is making headway when it comes to something that seems a little more impactful on our day-to-day lives in the nearer term – the threat AI poses to our jobs. “That’s perfectly respectable, that’s a very reasonable fear. It does seem that you can get people’s attention far more with mid-size risks than with extreme risks,” he says.

“(AI) can replace practically anybody, including people in professions that are not used to being replaced or outsourced. So just for that, it’s worth worrying about, even if we don’t look at the dangerous effect. Which again, I’ve found personally if I talk about everybody losing their job it gets people’s interest much more than if I start talking about the extinction of the human species. The first is somehow more ‘real’ than the second.”

Car assembly, one area where robots long ago replaced many human roles.

I feel it’s appropriate to end our conversation with a philosophical question of my own. Could Armstrong’s own job be replaced by an AI, or is philosophy an inherently human pursuit?

“Oh interesting… There is no reason why philosophers would be exempt from this, that philosophers would be able to be AI much better than humans because philosophy is a human profession,” he says.

“If the AI’s good at thinking, it would be better. We would want to have done at least enough philosophy that we could get the good parts into the AI so that when it started extending it didn’t extend it in dangerous or counterproductive areas, but then again it would be ‘our final invention’ so we would want to get it right.

“That does not mean that in a post AI world that there would not be human philosophers doing human philosophy, the point is that we would want humans to do stuff that they found worthwhile and useful. So it is very plausible that you would have in a post-AI society philosophers going on as you would have other people doing other jobs that they find worthwhile. If you want to be romantic about it, maybe farmers of the traditional sort.

“I don’t really know how you would organise a society but you would have to organize it so that people would find something useful and productive to do, which might include philosophy.

“In terms of ‘could the AIs do it beyond a human level’, well yes, most likely, at least to a way that we could not distinguish easily between human philosophers and AI.”

We may be a long way away from the Terminator series becoming a documentary, but then again maybe we’re not. Autonomous robots with the ability to kill are already being taken seriously as a threat on the battlefields of the near future.

The uncertainty around AI is why we shouldn’t ignore warnings from people like Stuart Armstrong. When the machines rise, we’ll need to be ready for them.

See also: Can machine algorithms truly mimic the depths of human communication?

Image credits: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images, Metro Goldwyn Meyer, Troll.me, Disney/Pixar, Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Thinking inside the box: using and controlling an Oracle AI by Stuart Armstrong

There is no strong reason to believe human level intelligence represents an upper limit of the capacity of artificial intelligence, should it be realized. This poses serious safety issues, since a superintelligent system would have great power to direct the future according to its possibly flawed goals or motivation systems. Solving this issue in general has proven to be considerably harder than expected. This lecture looks at one particular approach, Oracle AI. An Oracle AI is an AI that does not act in the world except by answering questions. Even this narrow approach presents considerable challenges and we analyse and critique various methods of control. In general this form of limited AI might be safer than unrestricted AI, but still remains potentially dangerous.
Paper at: http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf

ORIGINAL: The Next Web

By Martin Bryant

Absurd Creature of the Week: Foot-Long, Sex-Crazed Snails That Pierce Tires and Devour Houses

Giant African land snails carry quarters with them everywhere they go in case they need to, like, use payphones and stuff. Image: Roberta Zimmerman, USDA APHIS

Ah, the innocence of children. So free of corruption and cynicism, so sweet and sincere. Laughing and playing and introducing supremely destructive monster snails to Florida, where the beasts eat almost anything that’s green and then crap all over houses — quite literally laying waste to whole neighborhoods.

This actually happened in the 1960s, when a boy vacationing with his family in Hawaii had pocketed a few giant African land snails (Lissachatina fulica), a mollusk that grows to a foot long and a full pound. Hawaii had been battling the pest, and so too would Florida, where the boy returned with his new friends. Once home, he quickly grew bored of the snails and handed them over to his grandmother, who set them free in her backyard.

What ensued was an invasion by rapidly reproducing critters that have over the last century spread out of their native East Africa into tropical climes all over the world, from Asia to South America, as stowaways on ships or as pets brought home by people with a thing for snails. In Florida, eradication took seven years. Other places, like Brazil, have not been so lucky in their efforts.

You see, the giant African land snail is a hermaphroditic love machine. “Snails have female bits and male bits,” explained biologist Robert Cowie of the University of Hawaii, “a single pore, through which if you’re acting as a male, a penis extrudes, or if you’re acting as a female, through which the other snail puts its penis in. And in some cases they can do it reciprocally.”

Thus the giant snail never meets another snail it can’t get busy with. Once fertilized, the snail will bury several hundred eggs a few inches below ground, and because of the incredible size of the species, the young will emerge far larger than native varieties, making them that much more resistant to predation.

As these eggs demonstrate, cash rules everything around the giant snails from a very early age. Image: Wikimedia

Alas, four decades after evicting this enormous, fecund snail, Florida finds itself overrun once again. The creature was reintroduced here in 2011, and this time, according to Cowie, it may well be “bizarre, voodoo-like religious proceedings” to blame. The snail’s slime, he says, is coveted in certain South American rituals, and practitioners may have released the giant snails into their Miami-area backyards, hoping they’d breed freely.

The USDA and U.S. District Attorney’s Office are investigating this. It probably doesn’t help the ritualists’ case, though, that the year before the current outbreak, authorities questioned a Florida man said to have convinced his followers to drink the fluid from live giant African land snails, which he sliced open before squeezing the slime into their mouths. If you can believe it, the victims fell violently ill — ironic, what with this being a healing ritual.

Anyway, if it was indeed the practitioners who released the snails so they (the snails, not the practitioners) could multiply rapidly, it worked. Big time. Florida agriculture officials have collected 137,000 giant snails in just over two years. Compare that to the relatively few 17,000 collected in the first eradication in the 1960s, and you soon see the magnitude of this problem.

Today, Miami is simply overrun with the things. Not only do the giant snails chow on some 500 economically important plants in the area, they’re devouring houses. It seems they have a taste for stucco, which contains precious calcium. Without a ready supply of the stuff to fuel their amazing growth, they’ll simply turn on each other — at least in captivity.

You may be getting the impression that the giant snail’s natural habitat is the human hand. It is. Image: fiddledydee/Flickr

“A long time ago I had some African snails in the lab, in an aquarium-type tank,” said Cowie, “and apparently I wasn’t providing a sufficient source of calcium, and they would just eat each other’s shells. These snails produce big shells, they need a lot of calcium, and a lot of people these days when they keep snails they’ll put a bit of cattle bone in the terrarium for the snails to chew on, just to get the calcium.”

And because I know you were wondering: Yes, you can eat giant African land snails. But cook them well. I mean really well. Just boil them for a month. Grill them with napalm if you have it. Because like many snails and semi-slugs, this species carries the deadly rat lungworm.

As its name suggests, the parasite attacks rats, which pass the larvae in their feces. Snails that eat this waste are infected, as are folks who eat the snails. In humans, the larvae attack the brain, leading to meningitis and often a pretty horrible death. This has been documented as a particular problem in China, where people may not be cooking giant snails sufficiently.

But for all the folks who cook their giant snails properly, still others ingest them accidentally. All manner of critters could very easily end up in your Caesar salad, for instance, since cooks don’t always peel apart the lettuce before chopping it. “And it could just as well be a little baby African snail,” said Cowie. “OK, it’s a bit crunchy, but so is the lettuce a bit crunchy, and you’d never know. So that’s the way people generally get infected in places where they don’t habitually eat raw snails.”

The giant snail’s shell can grow to 8 inches long. To grow such a home, it eats the calcium-rich stucco from our own homes. There’s some sort of symbolism there, but I can’t figure it out. Image: Wikimedia

With such health risks combined with the damage to agriculture and the snails just being a public menace — with shells so big and sharp that they can puncture tires that run them over, for instance — Florida is sinking millions of dollars into its eradication measures. The state has 50 full-time staffers assigned to the project, said Denise Feiber of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is leading the effort.

By deploying common over-the-counter snail poison and advertising a hotline residents can call to report sightings, authorities have so far been able to contain the critter to Miami. And no, pouring salt on them is in no way an acceptable option for homeowners. It’s a horrible death. Osmosis pulls the water out of the snail, killing it of dehydration. Just don’t do it. Ever.

But it’s possible, according to Cowie, that the giant snail could well spread to other Gulf states, though luckily they probably can’t tolerate the cooler weather in Georgia and other states farther north (contrary to popular belief, Hotlanta is not in fact always hot — most of the time it’s just Atlanta).

Cowie knows all too well the explosive population growth these things are capable of when left unchecked. In Hawaii, where he lives, the giant African land snail was introduced in the 1930s by Japanese immigrants who wanted to keep them as pets. They have since essentially assumed ecological control, tearing through agriculture and muscling out native species.

In 1950s Hawaii, “there were stories of on a rainy day, when the snails all came out and crawled all over the road,” Cowie said, “the cars would squish them and cars would end up skidding on the squished snail. Dead, crushed snail and slime, sort of all mish-mashed together by the cars. So that was when Hawaii got serious about trying to control them. And we’ve not been successful at controlling them.”

So come to Hawaii. Come to Florida. There’s plenty of sunshine and escargot. Just bring a fork, some butter, and maybe a French accent, if that’ll get you in the mood.

Browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Have an animal you want me to write about? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

ORIGINAL: Wired

By Matt Simon

Madagascar hit by 'pneumonic and bubonic plague'

An ICRC-led programme is working to reduce prison rat populations

Two cases of pneumonic plague - more deadly than bubonic plague - have been reported in Madagascar, a health official has told the BBC.

It comes after it was confirmed that there was a deadly outbreak of the bubonic plague in a village in the north-west of the island.

Pneumonic plague can be inhaled and transmitted between humans without involvement of animals or fleas.

It is the most virulent and least common form of plague.

Bubonic and pneumonic plagues are both caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the primary difference being the location of the infection; bubonic plague refers to an infection of the lymphatic system, pneumonic plague an infection of the respiratory system. Via the BBC
Above: Yersinia pestis, by Rocky Mountain Laboratories/AP via Wikimedia Commons

It can kill within 24 hours.

'Most deaths'
Bubonic plague hit a village near Madagascar's north-western town of Mandritsara last week.

At least 20 people were reported to have died.

The plague is spread because of poor hygiene

The Pasteur Institute of Madagascar confirmed on Tuesday that tests taken from some bodies in the village, near the north-western town of Mandritsara, last week showed that they had died of the plague.

However, it did not say how many people had died.

Pneumonic plague is caused by the same bacteria that occur in bubonic plague - the Black Death that killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe during the Middle Ages.

But while bubonic plague is usually transmitted by flea bites and can be treated with antibiotics, pneumonic plague is easier to contract and if untreated, has a very high case-fatality ratio, experts say.

Madagascar's health ministry director-general Dr Herlyne Ramihantaniarivo confirmed to the BBC that two cases of the plague had been reported.

Last year, Madagascar had 60 deaths from bubonic plague, the world's highest recorded number.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned in October that Madagascar was at risk of a plague epidemic.

The BBC's Tim Healy in the capital, Antananarivo, says health officials have now gone to the remote area to investigate.

Prisoners on the island are usually most affected by bubonic plague, which is spread because of unhygienic conditions, he says.

The prevalence of rats in Madagascar's prisons means the plague can spread easily.

The Pasteur Institute said there were concerns that the disease could spread to towns and cities where living standards have declined since a coup in 2009 and the ensuing political crisis.

On 20 December a second round is being held of presidential elections aimed at ending the political deadlock.

Madagascar's prisons are overcrowded and dirty, the ICRC says

ORIGINAL: BBC

11 December 2013

Updated: FDA Orders 23andMe to Stop Genetic Tests

The U.S. government is concerned that some of 23andMe’s health assessments could mislead customers.

On Friday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki that her company “must immediately discontinue marketing the [Personal Genome Service].”

Saliva Collection Kit Single

For $99, 23andMe will analyze the DNA in a saliva sample for genetic traits related to ancestry information, physical characteristics, disease risk, and drug response.
The health-related information is what concerns the FDA. The agency says that customers may make health decisions such as prophylactic breast removal surgery as a result of 23andMe’s report on their genetic risk for breast cancer. The problem, writes the FDA, is that the company has not provided the data to prove that the tests work, so consumers may make major health decisions based on faulty results.

Over a year ago, 23andMe announced that it was working with the FDA to get approval on at least some of the health traits in its service (see “Personal Genetics Company Seeks Regulatory Approval”). At the time, the company said it was looking forward to a collaborative process with the agency in the new territory of consumer genetics. So it was a bit surprising to read in the FDA’s letter that the company has not provided the agency with the data the regulatory agency requested in January to support marketing the health portions of the personal genomics test.

So what has 23andMe been doing instead? For one, they kicked off a large marketing campaign, which seems to have stirred up some ire in the FDA. From the agency’s letter to Wojcicki:


“[The] FDA has not received any communication from 23andMe since May. Instead, we have become aware that you have initiated new marketing campaigns, including television commercials that, together with an increasing list of indications, show that you plan to expand the [Personal Genome Service’s] uses and consumer base without obtaining marketing authorization from FDA.”

23andMe acknowledges that it has been remiss in responding to the FDA, but doesn’t say much else:

“We recognize that we have not met the FDA’s expectations regarding timeline and communication regarding our submission. Our relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us and we are committed to fully engaging with them to address their concerns.”


This post was updated 1:30 pm EST with comment from 23andMe.

ORIGINAL: Tech Review
Susan Young
November 25, 2013

David Benjamin and the future of architecture

ORIGINAL: Azure
Elizabeth Pagliacolo

March 11, 2011

This creation of a new system of biofuel – with 80% less carbon emissions than petroleum fuel – involves design at multiple scales simultaneously, from DNA with a radius of about a billionth of a meter to the planet with a circumference of 40 million meters. (Nathan Smith, Bio Oil Workshop, Columbia GSAPP. Images are from Columbia’s Architecture Bio-Synthesis Project and Bio Oil Workshop

As biological technologies become more available, Do-It-Yourself inventors may engineer algae to create car grilles and catalytic converters that suck carbon from the air as you drive. (Nathan Smith, Bio Oil Workshop, Columbia GSAPP). Images are from Columbia’s Architecture Bio-Synthesis Project and Bio Oil Workshop

As it becomes possible to design cells as tiny, self-replicating computers, new forms of data processing and storage may emerge, such as embedding computing invisibly in our lakes and reservoirs. Cloud computing will become river computing. (Mike Robitz, Architecture Bio-Synthesis Class, Columbia GSAPP). Images are from Columbia’s Architecture Bio-Synthesis Project and Bio Oil Workshop

The co-founder of The Living, David Benjamin is blazing a trail in bringing synthetic biology to architecture.

Along with his partner at The Living, architect Soo-in Yang, Benjamin has already created paradigm-shifting projects, such as
Living Light, an interactive canopy in Seoul that reacts to air quality; and

Living Light (Seoul, 2009) from D B on Vimeo.

Amphibious Architecture, which communicates the level of pollution in New York’s Hudson River.

Amphibious Architecture (New York, 2009) from David Benjamin on Vimeo.

These projects entice people to participate in their environments in new ways, while making them aware of how they’re constantly changing.

At the Conversations in Design symposium hosted by the Interior Design Show in January, Benjamin spoke on the theme of crowd-sourcing as it applies to his firm’s projects as well as those by his students at Columbia University. Benjamin and his colleagues at Columbia developed a framework for students to share architectural tools, and he’s also created a new class exploring synthetic biology in architecture – a subject he’s been immersed in since participating in the National Science Foundation–funded Synthetics Aesthetics Project.

Azure sat down with Benjamin to discuss the brave new future of green architecture.

Why architecture needs to go beyond the blank page

In my teaching at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, I emphasize collaboration and open source design. This challenges the model of the architect as solitary genius and also the notion that each building has to be a one-off.

In the C-BIP [Columbia Building Intelligence Project] Studio that I teach with Scott Marble and Laura Kurgan, we created a framework for students to work individually to design a database of small-scale building elements, and then work in teams to combine a selection of elements into larger building designs. The teams start with modules of re-usable design intelligence rather than with a blank page, and they pick up where previous studios left off, rather than re-creating everything.

How synthetic biology can solve many persistent problems

Synthetic biology is a radical form of genetic modification. It is a new approach to designing new biological systems not found in nature. And some people say that in the near future, this technology will be the way we make everything, from medicines to fuels to buildings.

One example that is now being commercialized is a new anti-malaria drug. Synthetic biologists designed a way to combine 12 sequences of DNA never found together before and to create a new strain of yeast that could essentially churn out the anti-malaria medicine in a laboratory – without the use of the rare sweet wormwood plant. The new medicine is more pure and ten times cheaper than the old medicine, which means it could save millions of lives.

From the beginning, synthetic biology has been based on a framework from the field of electrical engineering. The idea is that if synthetic biology can develop a catalog of standardized biological parts – like transistors and capacitors in electrical engineering – then there can be a division of labor. Some people will be able to work on making new parts while other people will be able to work on combining the parts into devices and systems. This will allow for the creation of new medicines or new fuels or new building materials without starting from scratch.

This has some clear similarities with our database of building elements, but it potentially involves a wider spectrum of participants. The framework of synthetic biology may allow non-specialists – like architects, artists, computer scientists – to design new biological systems without learning all the details of molecular behavior. Just as non-specialists now combine electrical parts to make electrical circuits, soon they might be able to combine biological parts to make new organisms that perform specific functions. As biological technologies become less expensive and more domesticated, this may lead to an explosion of innovation similar to advances in computers after the domestication of digital technologies in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We may be at a transformative moment now, like the days of Apple Computer tinkering in the garage.

How synthetic biology can inform architecture

But so far, very few architects are working in this area. I am the only architect among six pairs of scientist-designer collaborators in the Synthetic Aesthetics Project, which involves conducting joint research (with funding from the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council in the U.K.) with plant biologist Fernan Federici in the Jim Haseloff Lab at the University of Cambridge, U.K. We are experimenting with synthetic biology and architecture in a real lab with all of the standard safety protocols.

Then at Columbia, we are creating an advanced architecture design studio to teach architecture students to conduct experiments and design with biology. This is part of a new lab I am starting at the School which will conduct long-term research on the intersection of architecture, synthetic biology, and computation. We have just started to work with a software company to develop new computational tools for architecture and synthetic biology.

Why we need to re-think “nature”

We definitely have to be careful with this technology for designing new living systems, but it’s not unprecedented from a philosophical view. First, people have been manipulating nature for thousands of years. Second, the technology’s already out there and the best way to deal with the risks is probably to increase awareness and knowledge, rather than outlawing it, which would just push malicious projects underground. Third, what’s most crucial for me – and this relates to Amphibious Architecture [developed by Benjamin and Yang at the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia, in collaboration with Natalie Jeremijenko] – is that the “do nothing” approach is not always the safest approach. In New York, the rivers have been damaged by years of pollution and development, and some public agencies say it’s best to do nothing at this point. But it’s actually better to remediate and experiment in order to re-engineer a viable eco-system, to re-introduce species, to build special reefs and piles so mussels and oysters can grow. In the case of synthetic biology, there are many urgent problems that the new science might be able to address. I’m not blindly faithful in technology, but I think at this point the benefits of synthetic biology far outweigh the risks.

How we will one day grow our buildings

Some of the first applications of synthetic biology and architecture may involve high-performance materials like carbon-sequestering concrete and self-healing silicone. But in the future, architects may be able to program the DNA of a seed so that it grows into a building. Then, instead of architects designing plans and sections, instead of bringing all of the construction materials from the factory to the site, architects might be able to design rules for growth and differentiation and material performance. And the new biological machine – the living building – might be able to use the nutrients of the land and the natural ecosystem to do both the factory manufacturing and the site construction.

In some ways, it’s tempting to wait until the technology becomes more advanced before we get involved as architects. But if we wait too long, there’s a risk in that too. Architects should help think about the frameworks and the protocols and the potential applications of synthetic biology. Architects should engage in the discussion about risks and utopian visions and design tools before these things get frozen and the design palette gets limited.

The thing that ties it all together for me is this sinking feeling I have that we’re at this crucial moment where we know what the stakes are, and what we need to do, but we aren’t acting. We’re still not acting intelligently about the crisis of climate change. Of course, a large part of our response as architects must be to aggressively use all of our known and existing strategies to increase the environmental performance of buildings. But I also think some architects should be searching for radical new strategies that might change our idea of what’s possible. Some experiments may fail, but some crazy ideas – like combining architecture and synthetic biology and growing buildings – may eventually change how we think about architecture, and how we live, work, and come together in cities.

What's the problem with balloons and sky lanterns (formerly known as Chinese lanterns)?

ORIGINAL: MCSUK

When balloons and sky lanterns are released, they don’t just disappear.
They float back down to earth where they are the same as any other litter. But balloons and sky lanterns are particularly dangerous pieces of litter. Balloons are mistaken for food by many species of wildlife, especially turtles.

Once balloons have been eaten they can block digestive systems and cause animals to starve. The string on balloons can also entangle and trap animals.

What is MCS doing?

We want to get outdoor balloon and sky lantern releases stopped. Read our Pollution Policy and Position Statement.

We do not want to stop people having fun – we just want to protect our vulnerable marine species and reduce litter.

In Wales, we are working with Keep Wales Tidy, the Welsh eco-schools and Cardiff Council. As a result of a petition in 2012, urging the Welsh Government to ban all intentional outdoor balloon and lantern releases, the Welsh Environment Minister asked officials to collect further evidence on this issue. In May this year this evidence was published.

The evidence highlights a significant fire hazard posed by sky lanterns; particularly to crops and aviation. It also acknowledges the ongoing risk to coastal rescue services who are falsely alerted to call-outs (when lanterns are mistaken for flares). The Minister for Natural Resources and Food will be writing to all welsh local authorities encouraging them to bring in a voluntary ban on council owned land.

We continue to encourage all schools, organisations and businesses in Wales to sign a pledge to not release balloons or lanterns, to find out more click here.

We encourage all organisations that are planning balloon or lantern releases to choose an event that will not threaten wildlife. We are trying to get every council to ban releases on their land – many have done so already.

To learn more about what happens to balloons and lanterns when they are released and to see some alternative ideas click on the link to download our booklet.

How you can help
Use our Don't Let Go Action Pack to try and get balloon or sky lantern releases stopped in your area, please let us know how you get on. Report your success here or write on our facebook page or tweet us.

Unfortunately we do not have the resources to contact every balloon or lantern release event organiser ourselves, however if you are not confident in doing this yourself, you can report an upcoming release in your area and we will do our best to get in touch and ask them to change their plans. If you are planning a balloon or lantern release, please try one of our wildlife friendly alternatives instead - Thank you.

Contaminación del aire mata más de 2,5 millones de personas al año (Globalmente)

ORIGINAL: El Colombiano
POR RAMIRO VELÁSQUEZ GÓMEZ

19 de julio de 2013



Estudio internacional que consideró solo dos contaminantes, el material particulado de tamaño 2,5 y el ozono superficial, revela que la polución es hoy un serio problema de salud pública.


Cada 12 minutos fallece en el mundo una persona por causas relacionadas con la contaminación del aire.

El aire sucio, enrarecido, mata cuatro veces más personas que la malaria tropical (655.000) y que el VIH (1,8 millones), una problemática de la que no escapa ningún país aunque hay regiones más afectadas.

Muertes causadas en su mayoría (2,1 millones) por el material particulado menor a 2,5 micrómetros y cerca de 470.000 por la exposición al ozono superficial

Las cifras fueron presentadas en un artículo científico aparecido en Environmental Research Letters, elaborado por 30 científicos de una veintena de universidades y centros de investigación, encabezados por Raquel Silva de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Estados Unidos.

Los investigadores indican que los estudios epidemiológicos han demostrado que esos dos contaminantes tienen una alta influencia en la salud humana, incluyendo la muerte prematura.

El número de muertes podría ser mayor dado que solo se analizó la población mayor de 30 años y la contaminación en exterior de origen antropogénico.

Un informe de la Organización Mundial de la Salud revela que la contaminación dentro de las viviendas mata otros tres millones de personas, en su mayoría niños de países en vías de desarrollo.

Afectación
El material particulado 2,5 con un grosor de 1/30 el de un cabello humano provoca afecciones cardiacas y pulmonares. Este tipo de contaminante es producido por los vehículos a motor, las termoeléctricas y algunos procesos industriales, de acuerdo con la Agencia de Protección Ambiental de Estados Unidos (EPA).

De las muertes por este material relacionado con actividad antropogénica, el 93 por ciento se debe a las enfermedades cardiacas y el resto al cáncer del pulmón.

La mortalidad relacionada con el ozono está diseminada por todo el globo, al haberse incrementado este alótropo debido a las actividades humanas, aunque es mayor su presencia en áreas densamente pobladas.

El ozono causa asma, enfermedad pulmonar y disminuye la capacidad respiratoria de las personas.

Tan inherente a las actividades humanas que en el Valle de Aburrá la estación del colegio Concejo de Itagüí es la que presenta el mayor número de excedencias de ozono con respecto a la norma, de acuerdo con un informe del Área Metropolitana preparado por Gloria Estela Ramírez Casas, de la Subdirección Ambiental.

En todas las estaciones, sin embargo, con frecuencia se supera la norma nacional horaria y octohoraria, una normatividad que es más permisiva que los estándares recomendados por la OMS.

El estudio internacional también concluyó que la contaminación del aire exacerbada por los cambios del clima desde los tiempos preindustriales tomando 1850 como base, contribuye poco a las muertes actuales: tan solo 3.700 muertes se pueden atribuir cada año a este factor.

¿Pero cuáles son las regiones del planeta con mayor número de muertes debidas a la contaminación?

Las regiones
Si bien existen diferencias sustanciales en la forma como se pueden considerar el polvo y la sal marina en aquella clase de material, los mayores problemas se sienten en regiones con mucha población.

En este sentido, el este de Asia e India, pero también el sudeste asiático, Europa y la antigua Unión Soviética son las más afectadas.

El este de Asia responde por más de 1.200.000 casos por ambos contaminantes, mientras en Suramérica el número de muertes prematuras por el material 2,5 más que duplica el de las debidas al ozono superficial.

"La mortalidad en ciudades con altos niveles de contaminación excede en 15 a 20 por ciento la observada en ciudades relativamente limpias", revela el estudio.

La OMS ha reconocido la dificultad de identificar las ciudades con mayor contaminación del aire, pero indica que es alta en "varias ciudades de Asia (Karachi, Nueva Delhi, Katmandú, Beijing), latinoamericanas como Lima y Arequipa y El Cairo en África".

En Latinoamérica se destacan además otras como Ciudad de México y Sao Paulo.

"Los datos son tan altos porque muchas de esas muertes ocurren en países de Asia, donde la población es alta y donde la contaminación del aire ha aumentado de manera significativa los últimos años, según el experto Frank Kelly, del King’s College London, citado por New Scientist.

La cantidad de muertes, destaca Kelly, no difiere mucho de lo estimado por la OMS. "Lo horrible es que el número viene en aumento debido al uso de combustibles fósiles", de acuerdo con María Neira, funcionaria de esa organización.

En Medellín la situación es complicada. Mediciones recientes con rayo láser por parte de Álvaro Efrén Bastidas y su grupo de Láseres y Espectroscopía Óptica, muestran que la capa de contaminación sobre la ciudad se mantiene baja varias horas al día debido a condiciones creadas por la radiación solar, incidiendo probablemente en la salud de sus habitantes.

La capa contiene varios de los contaminantes nocivos.

El estudio indica que aún en países de la Unión Europea la expectativa de vida se reduce 8,6 meses debido al material particulado 2,5.

Un tema delicado.

ANTECEDENTES

DESDE 2007 EL OZONO VIENE EN AUMENTO
El segundo contaminante que reviste preocupación en Colombia de acuerdo con el Ideam debido al aumento en las excedencias durante el periodo estudiado a partir de 2007 es el ozono.

En los sistemas de vigilancia de calidad del aire de Bogotá y Bucaramanga hubo disminución, pero en el Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá y Corantioquia las concentraciones aumentaron durante algunos años.

En la zona metropolitana la exposición diaria al ozono sobrepasó la concentración permitida durante todo el periodo analizado, dice el informe. Los mayores valores se presentaron en 2009.

PARA SABER MÁS

LOS COSTOS PARA EL SECTOR SALUD
Los efectos de la contaminación del aire se sienten sobre todo el sector salud.

El estudio del Banco Mundial Colombia: Strengthening Environmental and Natural Resources Institutions elaborado el año pasado estima que los costos en salud que representa la contaminación pasaron de 0,8 por ciento del Producto Interno Bruto en 2002 al 1,1 por ciento en 2011.

Los mayores niveles de contaminación se presentan en las áreas urbanas donde se asienta el 74 por ciento de la población colombiana, lo que sugiere la incidencia en morbilidad y mortalidad.

EN CIFRAS
25 mil muertes por ozono superficial y PM 2,5 se producen en Suramérica.
2.200 muertes anuales por ozono relacionado con el cambio climático reportó el estudio.
6 millones de muertes se dan por contaminación dentro y afuera de las viviendas.

EN DEFINITIVA
La contaminación del aire por ozono y material particulado de tamaño 2,5 mata más personas que la malaria y el VIH juntos, constituyendo un serio problema de salud pública.

En el Día Mundial del Agua: 10 hechos que debes conocer

ORIGINAL: Greenpeace España

Tianjie Ma

marzo 22, 2013

Vivimos en un planeta de agua. Sin agua no seríamos capaces de sobrevivir. Sin embargo, a pesar de este preciado recurso, en lugares como China, donde yo vivo, industrias como las textiles están vertiendo un cóctel de productos químicos tóxicos al agua. Tan solo tienes que ver las fotos que te muestro abajo para que te hagas una idea de la gravedad de esta situación.

En Greenpeace, estamos trabajando para evitar la contaminación de nuestras aguas señalando a las marcas que se abastecen de instalaciones contaminantes. Y además, estamos poniendo de manifiesto los graves impactos que suponen las sustancias químicas peligrosas en nuestras aguas.

Por todo esto, en este Día Mundial del Agua, es importante compartir contigo 10 hechos que seguramente no sabes y que es fundamental que conozcas:

10 hechos que debes saber sobre la contaminación del Agua

Original: The Economist

1. La gran mayoría de nuestra agua está en los océanos. Solo un 2,5% del agua disponible del planeta es agua dulce. (Y de ella sólo el 0.4 está en la superficie)
2. Solo en China, 320 millones de personas carecen de acceso a agua potable limpia.
3. El 40% de agua de superficie de China está contaminada.
4. Un 20% de las aguas subterráneas que se utilizan como agua potable en las zonas urbanas de China están contaminada. A veces contiene sustancias químicas que son cancerígenas.
5. En las investigaciones de Greenpeace en las que se realizaron análiticas a determinadas marcas de ropa, revelaron que la mayoría de los artículos de ropa de grandes marcas de moda como GAP, Vero Moda y Calvin Klein contenían sustancias químicas peligrosas. 
6. Algunos de estos tóxicos se descomponen formando sustancias que son disruptores hormonales e incluso que son cancerígenos cuando se liberan en los ríos de todo el mundo.
7. Cada año se fabrican en todo el mundo alrededor de 80 mil millones prendas, lo que equivale a unas 11 prendas al año por cada habitante del planeta. 
8. Se estima que cada persona (hombre, mujer e incluso en la fase fetal del embarazo) contiene cientos de sustancias químicas sintéticas en sus cuerpos incluyendo algunas que podrían estar relacionados con la industria textil.
9. Greenpeace está reclamando a las marcas mundiales de moda que hagan una moda sin tóxicos, así como tener una cadena de suministro transparente que haya eliminado todos los productos químicos peligrosos de sus procesos productivos para 2020.
10. Muchas grandes marcas ya escuchan. Marcas como Zara, Victoria Secret, Benetton y Valentino, han acordado eliminar las sustancias químicas peligrosas de sus productos y procesos de producción para 2020. 

Lamentablemente, otras marcas vinculadas a la contaminación tóxica del agua todavía no han tomado partido ni responsabilizado de este problema tan grave.

Aquí entras tú. Necesitamos tu voz para que nos ayudes a persuadir a otras grandes marcas como Tommy Hilfiger, GAP, Armani y Metersbonwe para conseguir que no contaminen nuestras aguas con tóxicos.

Únete a nosotro/as para pedir a la industria de la moda que proteja nuestra agua, nuestro cuerpo, nuestros niños y niñas, nuestras comunidades y en última instancia, nuestro futuro. (Firma aquí) 

La contaminación del agua con tóxicos es una realidad cotidiana para muchas personas que viven en China y en otras partes del hemisferio sur. Celebremos este Día Mundial del Agua junto con todas esas personas que luchan contra la injusticia y para la protección del medio ambiente.

Juntos podemos amplificar sus voces.

Tianjie Ma, responsable de la Campaña de Tóxicos de Greenpeace en Asia Oriental

Manifiesto, moda Detox

Somos un grupo de amantes de la moda, activistas, diseñadores, bloguero/as, unidas por la creencia de que la moda no puede contaminar nuestras aguas. Queremos que la ropa que llevamos sea tan estilosa y auténtica como somos nosotros.

Bio 2030, Plan Director de Medellín y el Valle de Aburrá

ORIGINAL: Eafit-Bio2030/

BIO 2030 es un plan territorial de carácter estratégico, que le apostará a la sostenibilidad y a la articulación de los municipios del Valle de Aburrá, proyectándolos como una metrópoli equitativa, equilibrada y sostenible a 20 años.

BIO 2030 asume el modelo de ocupación propuesto por las Directrices Metropolitanas para el Valle de Aburrá y lo desarrolla a partir de dos ejes: medio ambiente y espacio público, y movilidad y transporte; en unos escenarios estratégicos donde se deben concentrar las acciones que servirán para activar el modelo propuesto: el Río, definido como el gran centro metropolitano de actividades y hábitat, y la ladera en la cual se debe ejercer un control proactivo del borde para evitar la expansión urbana, disminuir el riesgo natural y preservar su función ambiental, de espacio público y de paisaje.

El Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá lanza "S.O.S RÍO SOS PURA VIDA"

ORIGINAL: Area Metropolitana

Oficina Asesora de Comunicaciones
26/02/2013

El Área Metropolitana presentó la estrategia de programas y proyectos destinados al saneamiento, educación ambiental, descontaminación, monitoreo, acciones de control, vigilancia y gestión de riesgos: S.O.S. RÍO

 El Área Metropolitana presentó la estrategia de programas y proyectos destinados al 

• saneamiento, 
• educación ambiental, 
• descontaminación, 
• monitoreo, 
• acciones de control, 
• vigilancia y 
•  gestión de riesgos: 

S.O.S. RÍO con una inversión total de 114 mil millones de pesos.

Para la actual administración del Área Metropolitana es prioridad el salvamento del río Medellín y así quedó manifestado desde su Plan de Gestión Pura Vida 2012-2015, cuya Línea 1 es: EL RÍO MEDELLÍN – ABURRÁ Y SUS AFLUENTES.

Surge así todo un compendio de programas y proyectos destinados al saneamiento, descontaminación, educación ambiental, monitoreo, acciones de control, vigilancia y gestión de riesgos enmarcados en la estrategia S.O.S. RÍO cuya inversión total asciende a 114 mil millones de pesos.

“Varias ciudades del país le han dado la espalda a sus ríos, nosotros por el contrario lo tenemos como eje integrador del Valle de Aburrá y con esta inversión, que es muy importante, realizaremos acciones para su cuidado y protección” afirmó Carlos Mario Montoya durante la presentación de S.O.S. RÍO.

Video Hora13Noticias Teleantioquia

El principio fundamental de este Plan es la conservación de la VIDA en todas sus formas, por lo cual es prioritario el tratamiento de los cuerpos de agua en su calidad de elementos propiciadores de la vida en los ecosistemas. S.O.S. RÍO tiene un conjunto de acciones encaminadas a la consolidación y recuperación del río y sus afluentes como principal elemento estructurante natural metropolitano. Las acciones están dirigidas no sólo a la recuperación y conservación de la cuenca del río Medellín, sino también al aprovechamiento del gran potencial de este elemento natural para consolidar una red de espacios naturales y construidos, que permitan fortalecer el espacio público, los centros de actividades y hábitat del río como elemento articulador del Valle de Aburrá.

PROGRAMAS

1. Equidad para uso y aprovechamiento eficiente del recurso agua. Meta: Elaboración e implementación del plan de ordenamiento del recurso hídrico del Valle de Aburrá
2. Monitoreo, seguimiento y control del recurso hídrico en la cuenca del río. Meta: Operación de 42 estaciones fijas y móviles de monitoreo del agua superficial.
3. Recuperación de la calidad del río y sus afluentes. Meta: Construcción de 7.5 kilómetros de interceptor y conexión de 1.500 viviendas a las redes de alcantarillado no convencional, para disminuir los vertimientos de aguas residuales al río y sus quebradas.
4. Integración espacial urbano regional de las márgenes del río y sus afluentes. Meta: Lograr laplanificación de 1700 hectáreas en torno al río.
5. Gestión del riesgo por inundación y avenidas torrenciales. Metas: Adecuación y reparación de 10 puntos críticos en el cauce principal del río (1.500 metros lineales) e intervención de 20 puntos críticos en quebradas afluentes en al menos 5.000 metros lineales de obra física, como medida de mitigación y prevención de inundaciones. Además lograr la remoción de 40.000 m3 de sedimentos para el mantenimiento de obras hidráulicas y cauces, como estrategia de protección de la vida de la población vulnerable por fenómenos de origen hidrometeorológico.

Proyectos Asociados:

Dentro de la estrategia el Área Metropolitana realizará proyectos tendientes al mejoramiento del control y la vigilancia del río Medellín con la puesta en operación de la Unidad de Emergencias Ambientales que funcionará 24 horas al día, 7 días a la semana, para optimizar la atención a casos urgentes como los vertimientos, facilitando la investigación de estos casos, para la posterior imposición de sanciones a los infractores que alteren los objetivos de calidad del río y modifiquen las condiciones de color del cuerpo de agua.

También se ejecutarán acciones de sensibilización y educación: con los Cuidá, visitas al nacimiento del río con públicos prioritarios, charlas en Instituciones Educativas y Universidades, difusión del mensaje en las Ludotecas Ambientales e identificación de empresas con relación directa al río. Adicionalmente se realizará una campaña con recicladores, escombreros y areneros sobre el cuidado al río.

Además se adelantarán una serie de actividades para la apropiación del río Medellín por parte de la comunidad como el Tour Pura Vida – actividad institucional del Área Metropolitana en los municipios - aprovechamiento de las ciclovías dominicales en la zona del río, actividades con grupos ambientales y con entidades que lideren proyectos asociados al río, realización de conciertos, semanas temáticas y concursos para incitar al cuidado, apadrinamiento, protección y exaltación de casos de éxito de empresas que le apuesten al cuidado del río Medellín