The Global Air Quality Map: September 16, 2018 Snippets
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This week’s theme: Aclima forges ahead with a major partnership with Google to map the world’s local air quality. Plus welcoming Tierra Biosciences to the family with a new investment round.
A few months ago, we introduced Aclima as a new portfolio company and member of the Social Capital family, and they’ve had a busy last few months of updates we’re excited to share today. Since their founding in 2010, Aclima has put in a tremendous effort to make their air quality mapping platform come to life: their fleet of vehicle-mounted outdoor sensors measures pollutants including carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and particulate matter (PM2.5). Now these efforts are beginning to pay off in a big way: their partnership with the team at Google Street View has broke new ground in our understanding of spatial urban pollution and how to measure it. And now, they’re ready to scale this partnership up to a global level, led by their CEO Davida Herzl.
The world has recently begun paying attention to the phenomenon of “outsourced emissions”, where wealthier areas and countries reduce their local pollution by shifting the source of its production to other areas and in other forms, out of sight and out of mind. The consequences are dramatic: seven million people die every year from pollution and poor air quality, with most of these deaths coming in developing countries. As it turns out, outsourced pollution isn’t just a global issue, it’s also local: within cities or metropolitan area, emissions from freeways, generators, industry, or other sources are continuously shunted away from those who can afford to breathe clean air, and towards those who are less fortunate.
This local inequality and imbalance in block-to-block air quality is something that the team at Aclima knows very well. As Davida and her team have to repeat often, “You can have the best air quality and the worst air quality on the same street.” But without measurement, you can’t manage it; and measuring something this variable, on a day-to-day and block-to-block basis, takes some real scientific and observation skill. A recent major study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology helped cement what has been clear to the team for a long time: to really understand local air quality, you need a lot of data and you need to analyze it very carefully. But once you do, an entire emergent picture unfolds itself, that tells a story we can no longer afford to put off.
The study concluded: “Equipping ~500 such vehicles could enable high-resolution mapping of the 25 largest US urban areas, which account for [36% of the US population]. Likewise, prior experience suggests that this approach could be extended to global megacities (the world’s 20 largest cities have 480 million people) and to the thousands of other cities where air quality management is impaired by an absense of robust monitoring infrastructure. … Routine availability of high-resolution air quality data in all major urban areas could have transformative implications for environmental management, air pollution science, epidemiology, public awareness, and policy. By highlighting localized pollution hotspots, these data may identify new opportunities for pollution control.”
Equipping five hundred vehicles with high-resolution sensors might be too expensive or logistically changing for a scientific study, but it’s absolutely possible for Google and Aclima to make it happen together. After the initial success of their partnership in select US cities, this past week Aclima and Google were proud to announce their expansion of the project to a global level, as well as open up access to their air quality database through Google:
Aclima & Google scale air quality mapping to more places around the world | Aclima
Air View is ready to expand to more places around the globe | Karen Tuxen Bettman, Google
Google Street View cars are now mapping pollution around the world | Adele Peters, Fast Company
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mssOGUbqVuc&feature=youtu.be
The announcement coincided with this year’s Global Climate Action Summit, which took place in San Francisco this week. On Friday at the summit,
Aclima was named as the first recipient of an award from a newly announced $14M pro bono legal fund to accelerate innovation and positive environmental change. Davida joined former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to inaugurate the fund and accept its first award, inspiring everyone present to continue their work — whether in the private, public or nonprofit world — to help continue to direct both philanthropic and investment capital to where it’s needed in our shared effort to improve air quality everywhere.
Aclima is currently hiring for a number of roles in San Francisco, including for two senior roles of VP Product and VP Engineering. If you or anyone you know is interested, please head Aclima’s way, or send them an email at hello@aclima.io.
One short but thoughtful piece to read this week comes from Matt Levine, who draws a thoughtful comparison between the financial crisis ten years ago and today’s crisis of unintended consequences of social media.
The crisis was in the system | Matt Levine, Bloomberg
Always a great observer of the connections between things, Matt observes a certain futility with trying to understand Facebook by deciphering Mark Zuckerberg that’s similar to our retrospective efforts to understand the financial crisis by questioning bank CEOs. These aren’t questions of “great leader”-designed purposeful motive, but rather of emergent, complex behavior of immense systems that defy understanding even from their own masters. As Matt observes: “For the most part, people now understand that the financial crisis was a crisis of systems, that understanding it and preventing the next one is about system design rather than personal morality. What brought down the global economy was the instability of a set of complicated interlocking architectures — mortgage securitization, credit derivatives, short-term wholesale bank funding, the bank/shadow-bank nexus, etc — that in many cases the bank CEOs themselves barely understood. The actual workings of those things — how repo funds flowed, what collateral-call rights existed in credit-derivative agreements, what correlation assumptions rating agencies made in assigning ratings to CDO-squareds — are what mattered, not the charisma or intent of the CEOs. The thing to understand is the thing itself, not what the people who (supervised the people who supervised the people who supervised the people who) built it thought or felt about it.”
The new Apple Watch steals the show, and emerges as a real health care device:
Apple Watch Series 4 first look: a medical wearable in pretty disguise | David Pierce, WSJ
The unfolding future of cars:
Driverless hype collides with merciless reality | Christopher Mims, WSJ
Longform interviews with tech leaders worth watching:
Jack Dorsey’s hour interview with Jay Rosen | Recode Media with Peter Kafka
Jeff Bezos at the Economic Club in Washington DC, September 13 (video) | CNBC
The very hot:
What future is there for America’s desert cities? | Saritha Ramakrishna, Literary Hub
Think entangled, act spooky | Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm
Other reading from around the Internet:
Memetic tribes and Culture War 2.0 | Peter Limberg & Conor Barnes
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, we have a new round of funding (and a new name) from a recently joined member of the family to share. Tierra Biosciences, previously called Synvitrobio, has raised $2.6 million dollars in a funding round led by Social Capital to expand the frontiers of synthetic biology:
Earlier this year in Snippets, we talked for several issues about biology as a new frontier for the tech industry. Cells and other more complex living organisms on earth all share one common mechanism, the “Central Dogma of Biology”: information is stored in DNA, and that information is expressed in the form of protein that the cell produces. This process happens in two steps: the copying of a DNA template into RNA (which is like an executable file, in computing terms), and then the translation of RNA into a chain of amino acids which come together to become protein — the desired product. Each of these steps requires its own machinery to carry out, and that machinery itself is composed of proteins and other little molecular factories present inside of all cells. We’ve gotten quite adept at engineering and harnessing cells to produce protein in large volumes: it’s how we make biological products like insulin, among other things. But do we really need the rest of the cell? What if we could get rid of everything else, except for that machinery? Would it speed things up? Would it open up new kinds of molecules we could discover and produce?
The team at Tierra Biosciences is betting the answer’s yes. They work in an area of biology called cell-free systems — extracting only the necessary machinery for DNA expression and protein production, and then reshaping not only the way we produce biological products but also the way we discover new ones. As CEO Zachary Sun describes their alternative perspective: “We keep [the internal stuff that] allows us to run reactions where a cell wall isn’t necessary. I want to reduce the complex system down to its component parts.” This changes the strategy, at a pretty fundamental level, of anyone looking to discover new biological molecules or invent new biological processes. With the rest of the cell out of the way, the individual component parts act a lot more the way a software developer is used to working with a computer, or the way machine learning developers are used to using inference as a tool to explore new possibilities. It even opens the door to new ways of teaching and learning biology, with newer, simpler systems that let users build their own systems more easily. Sun adds, “We look at this as a data collection problem. We want to sue cell-free to tell you what to put either in a cell or in cell-free systems… we can collect more data faster using our cell free system”
Cell-free biotech will make for better products | The Economist
Jay Zaveri at Social Capital, who led the investment round for Tierra, sums it up this way: “For over 3.5 billion years, nature has produced billions of molecules, most of whose properties have yet to be discovered. These molecules could be used to cure disease, improve food production, and create the products of tomorrow. Zach and the Tierra Biosciences team are building a scalable platform for deepening our understanding of these molecules. We’re excited to support them on their quest to improve healthcare, agriculture and so many other areas.” Along with their new round of funding, Tierra is excited to bring Dr. Louis Metzger, formerly of Novartis, on board as its Chief Scientific Officer. They’re also hiring for other positions, including one as a research associate. If you’re interested, please reach out to careers@tierrabiosciences.com.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
