Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

FBI investigating possibility of 'criminal enterprise' in Jeffrey Epstein death, prisons chief says

11/19/19 7:59 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Sweden drops investigation into alleged rape by Julian Assange

11/19/19 5:15 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Taliban frees American, Australian in prisoner swap

11/19/19 2:01 AM

New story in Technology from Time: What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana

The banana has been the subject of Andy Warhol’s cover art for the Velvet Underground’s debut album, can arguably be the most devastating item in the Mario Kart video game franchise and is one of the world’s most consumed fruits. And humanity’s love of bananas may still be on the rise, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. On average, says Chris Barrett, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University, citing that U.N. data, every person on earth chows down on 130 bananas a year, at a rate of nearly three a week.

But the banana as we know it may also be on the verge of extinction. The situation led Colombia—where the economy relies heavily on the crop, as it does in several other countries including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Guatemala—to declare a national state of emergency in August. Banana experts around the world have raised concerns that it may be too late to reverse the damage.

The reason for the problem comes down to a single disease, but it also has far-reaching implications—and the world is watching. Even if the world’s relationship to bananas may never be the same, the lessons of the fruit can still save us from damage that could hit far beyond the produce aisle.

“The story of the banana is really the story of modern agriculture exemplified in a single fruit,” says Daniel Bebber, who leads the BananEx research group at the University of Exeter. “It has all of the ingredients of equitability and sustainability issues, disease pressure, and climate change impact all in one. It’s a very good lesson for us.”

Ninety-nine percent of exported bananas are a variety called the Cavendish—the attractive, golden-yellow fruit seen in the supermarket today.

But that wasn’t always the case. There are many varieties of banana in the world, and until the later half of the 19th century, the dominant one was called the Gros Michel. It was widely considered tastier than the Cavendish, and more difficult to bruise. But in the 1950s, the crop was swept by a strain of Panama disease, also known as banana wilt, brought on by the spread of a noxious, soil-inhabiting fungus. Desperate for a solution, the world’s banana farmers turned to the Cavendish. The Cavendish was resistant to the disease and fit other market needs: it could stay green for several weeks after being harvested (ideal for shipments to Europe), it had a high yield rate and it looked good in stores. Plus, multinational fruit companies had no other disease-resistant variety available that could be ready quickly for mass exportation.

The switched worked. As the Gros Michel was ravaged by disease, the Cavendish banana took over the world’s markets and kitchens. In fact, the entire banana supply chain is now set up to suit the very specific needs of that variety.

To the people who pay attention to such things, it wasn’t long before a case of banana déjà vu set in: the Cavendish had supplanted the Gros Michel, but—even though it had initially been selected for being disease-resistant—it was still at risk. Almost a decade ago, Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, warned in an NPR interview that Panama Disease would return to the world’s largest banana exporters, and this time with a strain that would hit the Cavendish hard. “[Every] single banana scientist I spoke to—and that was quite a few—says it’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when,’ and 10 to 30 years,” he said. “It only takes a single clump of contaminated dirt, literally, to get this thing rampaging across entire continents.”

Sure enough, the confirmation of the presence of Tropical Race 4 (TR4), another strain of Panama disease, on banana farms in Colombia, prompted this summer’s declaration of emergency there.

“The situation is very urgent,” says Bebber.

There are any number of ways the problem can spread. When it comes to bananas, everything from truck tires to workers’ boots can be disease carriers. But the bigger problem is how hard it is to stop. Because banana farmers are overwhelmingly growing the same exact crop—the Cavendish—they were all vulnerable to the same diseases.

“A lot of people would agree that we need to move to a more diverse, more sustainable system for bananas and agriculture in general,” says Bebber, “where we don’t put all our hope into a single, genetically identical crop.”

There’s a name for this situation: monoculture, the practice of fostering just one variety of something. Monoculture has its benefits. The entire system is standard, so there’s rarely new production and maintenance processes, and everything is compatible and familiar to users. On the other hand, as banana farmers learned, in a monoculture, all instances are prone to the same set of attacks. If someone or something figures out how to affect just one, the entire system is put at risk.

And as the banana industry has begun to battle the effects of monoculture, someone else has taken notice: the tech world.

The parallel was noticed as early as the late 1990s. Stephanie Forrest, one of the early researchers in this area, commonly cites the banana problem in lectures explaining the importance of diversity in computer systems. Forrest argues that some of the most notorious software attacks in history are comparable to Panama disease’s threat to the Cavendish; uniform software systems lead to uniform vulnerabilities. For example, the 1988 Morris Worm infected an estimated 10% of all computers connected to the Internet within just 24 hours, and, more recently, the 2016 Mirai Botnet, which allowed an outside party to remotely control a network of internet-connected devices, brought down Twitter, Netflix, CNN and more.

“Monocultures are dangerous in almost every facet of life,” echoes Fred B. Schneider, a cybersecurity expert at Cornell University. “With people, of course, populations are stronger and more disease-resistant if there’s more genetic diversity. And with transportation, it’s more effective to have several different options—when a train line is shut down, if you have other choices at your disposal, like a car or another form of transit, you won’t be stuck.”

Schneider points out that software monocultures are common because, without them, using your computer would be a lot harder. Default configuration settings, for example, are the norm to help users who may not be experts in the technology they’re using. Defaults like that can protect people from some problems, but also lead to others, as all the systems using the same default are vulnerable to the same problems. Knowledge of the problem, thanks to understanding of the issues facing crops like bananas, have led technologists to take steps to introduce artificial diversity into their systems. “To make a system artificially diverse, you just rearrange its guts in ways where the differences do not affect functionality in a material way,” Schneider says. Microsoft implemented one of the first large-scale commercial developments of artificial diversity in their Windows OS system, by randomizing the internal locations where important pieces of system data were stored.

For bananas, addressing the problems caused by monoculture may be harder, as market standards and supply chains make it very expensive for fruit companies to cultivate multiple varieties.

Jan Sochor—LatinContent via Getty ImagesA Colombian worker carries crude bananas to a transport car at a banana plantation. (Photo by Jan Sochor/Latincontent/Getty Images)

Existing disease-resistant varieties haven’t made inroads on the international market, but The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA) has spent more than three years working on developing a disease-resistant variety that is as close as possible to the Cavendish, so that the world’s banana infrastructure doesn’t have to be reshaped from scratch. Still, that’s a process that can take 15 to 20 years, Bebber estimates.

Genetic engineering can lead to the development of new varieties at much faster rates than traditional breeding methods, but it can also turn consumers off. However, it has been the answer to similar problems in the past—for example, when the papaya ringspot virus threatened the papaya supply in the 1990s, “the major supply shock was averted through the development of a transgenic ringspot virus-resistant papaya,” explains Cornell’s Barrett. He believes that consumers’ fears might ease if it becomes one of the only viable answers to the issues created by monoculture production. The UK-based biotech company Tropic Biosciences has received $10 million in funding to use gene-editing technology to research solutions to widespread issues with tropical crops, focusing specially on disease resistance in bananas.

And while even the most Cavendish-like of FHIA’s disease-resistant varieties, a banana known as the FHIA-18, hasn’t yet met the standards of multinational buyers, that may change, according to Adolfo Martinez, director general of FHIA. “It’s still not close enough to the Cavendish,” he says, but he thinks the crisis may convince them. “Maybe now, companies will be more interested in it.”

So, what’s next for the banana? Will it simply disappear from our diets, album covers and video games? Bebber says the banana may change, but hopes are high that it won’t completely vanish. “Science,” he says, “will find a way.” Meanwhile, tech researchers are watching—hoping they can once again learn a lesson from biology, learning how to prevent a crisis before everything goes bananas.

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Three people shot and killed at Duncan, Okla., Walmart, according to police

11/18/19 8:34 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards wins reelection in tight race

11/16/19 8:05 PM

New story in Technology from Time: Disney+ Adds Disclaimers, Content Warnings to Movies Featuring Racist Characters and Tropes

(NEW YORK) — Disney’s new streaming service has added a disclaimer to Dumbo, Peter Pan and other classics because they depict racist stereotypes, underscoring a challenge media companies face when they resurrect older movies in modern times.

The move comes as Disney+ seems to be an instant hit. It attracted 10 million subscribers in just one day. The disclaimer reads, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”

Companies have been grappling for years with how to address stereotypes that were in TV shows and movies decades ago but look jarring today. Streaming brings the problem to the fore.

In Dumbo, from 1941, crows that help Dumbo learn to fly are depicted with exaggerated black stereotypical voices. The lead crow’s name is “Jim Crow,” a term that describes a set of laws that legalized segregation. In Peter Pan, from 1953, Native American characters are caricatured. Other Disney movies with the disclaimer include The Jungle Book and Swiss Family Robinson.

Pocahontas and Aladdin do not have it, despite rumblings by some that those films contain stereotypes, too.

Read more: Disney Has Reshaped the Movie Industry. Will Disney+ Do the Same for Television?

On personal computers, the disclaimer appears as part of the text description of shows and movies underneath the video player. It’s less prominent on a cellphone’s smaller screen. Viewers are instructed to tap on a “details” tab for an “advisory.”

Disney’s disclaimer echoes what other media companies have done in response to problematic videos, but many people are calling on Disney to do more.

The company “needs to follow through in making a more robust statement that this was wrong, and these depictions were wrong,” said Psyche Williams-Forson, chairwoman of American studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. “Yes, we’re at a different time, but we’re also not at a different time.”

She said it is important that the images are shown rather than deleted, because viewers should be encouraged to talk with their children and others about the videos and their part in our cultural history.

Disney’s disclaimer is a good way to begin discussion about the larger issue of racism that is embedded in our cultural history, said Gayle Wald, American studies chairwoman at George Washington University. “Our cultural patrimony in the end is deeply tethered to our histories of racism, our histories of colonialism and our histories of sexism, so in that sense it helps to open up questions,” she said.

Wald said Disney is “the most culturally iconic and well-known purveyor of this sort of narrative and imagery,” but it’s by no means alone.

Universal Pictures’ teen comedy Sixteen Candles has long been decried for stereotyping Asians with its “Long Duk Dong” character.

Warner Bros. faced a similar problem with its “Tom and Jerry” cartoons that are available for streaming. Some of the cartoons now carry a disclaimer as well, but it goes further than Disney’s statement. Rather than refer to vague “cultural depictions,” the Warner Bros. statement calls its own cartoons out for “ethnic and racial prejudices.”

“While these cartoons do not represent today’s society, they are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed,” the statement reads.

At times, Disney has disavowed a movie entirely.

Song of the South, from 1946, which won an Oscar for the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” was never released for home video and hasn’t been shown theatrically for decades, due to its racist representation of the plantation worker Uncle Remus and other characters. It isn’t included in Disney+, either.

Disney and Warner Bros. did not respond to requests for comment.

Sonny Skyhawk, an actor and producer who created the group American Indians in Film and Television, also found the two-sentence disclaimer lacking.

What would serve minority groups better than any disclaimer is simply offering them opportunities to tell their own stories on a platform like Disney+, Skyhawk said. He said that when he talks to young Indian kids, “the biggest negative is they don’t see themselves represented in America.”

___

Associated Press writer Terry Tang in Phoenix contributed to this report.