Tag: Science and Technology

Should we all stop eating salmon? Why it’s suddenly become endangered
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Atlantic salmon populations in England and Wales have plummeted to unprecedented lows, according to the Atlantic Salmon Stock Assessment for 2024, a report published this month by the United Kingdom Environment Agency and Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science.

According to the report by the two government agencies, a massive 90 percent of wild river salmon in England are classified as either “at risk” or “probably at risk”.

This latest classification is due to salmon stocks declining to levels that are insufficient for a self-sustaining salmon population.

“Forty years ago, an estimated 1.4 million salmon returned to UK rivers each year. We are now at barely a third of that – a new low and evidence of the wider, growing biodiversity crisis,” Alan Lovell, chairman of the Environment Agency, said when the report was released.

At the end of last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an international organisation dedicated to nature conservation, changed the status of Atlantic salmon from “least concern” to “endangered” in Great Britain on its Red List of Threatened Species.

“There are rivers that used to have in the UK maybe 20,000 to 30,000 Atlantic salmon running them, and they’re now down to 1,000 to 2,000, and there are some rivers with literally a few hundred left,” Dylan Roberts, head of fisheries at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust in the UK, told Al Jazeera.

“We’re looking at about an 80 percent decline over the last 40 years in wild Atlantic salmon.”

An Atlantic salmon jumps out of the water at the Shrewsbury Weir on the River Severn in Shropshire, England, as it migrates upstream to spawn [Shutterstock]

Why is Atlantic salmon endangered?

In December, Atlantic salmon was classified as endangered due to a 30 to 50 percent decline in British populations since 2006 and a 50 to 80 percent projected decline from 2010 to 2025, according to the IUCN.

The IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species has nine categories based on risk of extinction. These classifications help the wider scientific community assess and monitor the conservation status of different species.

They are the following:
- Not evaluated: species that have not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria
- Data deficient: species for which there is insufficient information to make a direct or indirect assessment of their risk of extinction
- Least concern: species that are widespread and abundant and do not qualify for any higher risk category
- Near threatened: species that do not currently qualify as threatened but are close to qualifying for a threatened category in the near future
- Vulnerable: species facing a high risk of extinction in the wild
- Endangered: species at very high risk of extinction in the wild
- Critically endangered: species that face an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild and meet criteria indicating an imminent threat to their survival
- Extinct in the wild: species that survive only in captivity or outside their natural range and are presumed extinct in their native habitat after exhaustive surveys
- Extinct: species for which there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died, confirmed by extensive surveys without sightings
The IUCN’s Red List includes more than 45,300 species that are threatened with extinction, which includes any species in the classifications from vulnerable to extinct in the wild.

According to Roberts, species do not automatically make the IUCN’s Red List just because of low numbers. What gets a species on the list is how sharp the slope of decline is.

“The slope on salmon is endangered. Hence they went on the red list. You’re looking at quite dramatic declines,” he said.

Why are salmon faring so badly in UK rivers?

Agricultural practices

Salmon habitats globally face multiple threats, including agricultural pollution, increased sedimentation on riverbeds, chemical run-off from industrial activities, wastewater discharge and even disruption of rivers due to new road infrastructure.

Additionally, structural barriers built in rivers that impede migration routes, water scarcity due to excessive use and rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change further endanger salmon ecosystems.

Bycatch

European and British salmon travel along a migration route through rivers and streams known as the “smolt superhighway” as they head north to feed into the North Atlantic.

Peak migration time when many of these young fish are heading through this superhighway is around May and June. At this time, young salmon often get caught by large trawlers entering in the same zone in the sea to catch other fish such as mackerel or herring.

This directly reduces the number of fish that can grow to adulthood and return to their natal rivers to spawn.

Bycatch refers to catching fish that are not the main target for trawlers. “Bycatch would be the accidental capture of things like seals, seabirds, dolphins, whales, sharks, rays, skates and [are] protected,” Roberts said. “All these species are recorded. The problem is that salmon just aren’t recorded. And other protected fish as well, such as sea trout, which go to sea.”

According to Roberts, a solution to this problem is to collect better data on how salmon are moving through the rivers and oceans to get a better sense of the impact on the population.

A turtle, shown on deck of a fishing trawler after being caught as bycatch, will be recorded as a protected species. Salmon caught in this way are not recorded, however [Shutterstock]

Maize production

The environmental impact of maize production in the UK has proven to be another factor that has adversely impacted rivers and streams vital to salmon. The growth in the use of maize in biofuels and cattle fodder has exacerbated the problem.

“The habitat has been destroyed by intensive agriculture and all the algae and the sediment run-off. So you get this filamentous algae growing on the riverbed, and the riverbed just gets smothered with it,” Roberts said.

The overproduction of algae is detrimental to insects and invertebrates that live in the river and on which salmon are dependent as a food source.

Farm salmon fishing in Norway, the biggest producer of farmed salmon in the world [Shutterstock]

Can salmon farming make up for these losses?

Not really and, in some cases, it may be making the situation for salmon stocks worse.

According to some estimates, roughly 70 percent of the world’s salmon is produced through salmon farming and not caught in freshwater streams.

Salmon farming in the UK generates 1.5 billion pounds ($1.95bn) a year in revenues.

Some experts argue that vast numbers of salmon raised in cramped conditions in aquaculture facilities pose significant challenges and health risks. These practices not only impact the welfare of the salmon but also carry implications for human health and environmental sustainability.

Intensive salmon farming coupled with cramped conditions in farming sea cages can result in the salmon being more susceptible to catching diseases.

“You end up with disease problems – viruses, biological sea lice, sea lice problems – then all the waste that goes into these lochs because they’re in sheltered areas. They don’t get a full flushing from the tides, and over time, they build up,” Roberts explained.

“And what they’re finding now in these lochs is that they’re getting eutrophication [a build-up of algae]. So the locks are turning green, and that’s killing the fish in the cages,” he added.

Eutrophication is often caused by agricultural practices and can cause salmon to experience hypoxia, a depletion of oxygen levels. This can happen to both wild salmon and farmed salmon.

Salmon sometimes escape from the aquaculture farms through nets damaged by severe weather, just being worn down or via poorly secured drains.

Once these escapees from the “fish asylum” are in freshwater rivers and streams, they can interbreed with wild salmon, disrupting their natural development and passing on diseases.

“If you upset the genetic gene pool, that’s a big problem,” Roberts said.

A salmon farm in Loch Fyne in Scotland that uses round fish ‘cages’ [Shutterstock]

According to a 2023 annual fish health report from the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, roughly 17 percent of the country’s farmed salmon died due to infectious diseases. Norway is the top producer of salmon, contributing roughly 50 percent of global production.

Diseases can range from winter sores to heart skeletal muscle inflammation. Although there are treatments for some of these diseases, the treatments themselves can weaken fish, making them even more susceptible to other infectious diseases.

“Infectious diseases are an extensive problem both for the fish’s welfare and survival in the sea,” said Edgar Brun, department director at the Veterinary Institute.

However, industry experts say finding the right preventive measures to reduce disease in fish remains challenging. Moreover, the overuse of vaccines can increase antibiotic resistance, making certain pathogens more entrenched in the salmon population.

Is salmon endangered in other parts of the world as well?

In Ireland and Iceland, overfishing and habitat destruction have led to significant declines in the salmon population.

According to Inland Fisheries Ireland, an organisation responsible for protecting inland fisheries and sea angling resources, wild salmon numbers returning to Ireland dropped from 1.76 million in 1975 to 171,700 in 2022.

In the US, specific species, including Chinook and Coho salmon, have endangered status due to overfishing, pollution from agricultural run-off and urban development.

In Canada, the fourth largest producer of salmon, production has fallen from a peak of 148,000 tonnes in 2016 to 90,000 tonnes in 2023, according to the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance. Many experts attribute some of the decline to hundreds of thousands of salmon escaping from sea cages and spreading diseases to the wild stock.

[Shutterstock]

Should we all stop eating salmon?

Until recently, salmon was considered a luxury food in many parts of the world. These days it is eaten much more frequently, and many experts say we eat too much of it.

Although salmon is often celebrated by health experts for its omega-3 fatty acids, which are beneficial for heart health, there is a risk of overconsumption, given the levels of freshwater contamination and diseases that can become pervasive in fish farms, causing populations to fall.

Some farmed salmon has more omega-3 fatty acids than wild salmon but can have high levels of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB). PCBs are synthetic chemicals that have widespread industrial uses. PCBs can “live” in industrial waste that gets dumped into our seas, rivers and streams. PCBs tend to be more prevalent in closed-system environments than open environments, like freshwater rivers.

Many health experts recommend eating wild salmon because of their lower levels of PCBs. Freshwater salmon also tend to be less susceptible to those fish-related diseases that are more common in farm-raised salmon.

According to Roberts, encouraging people to eat less salmon would not be particularly practical.

However, he said, collaboration with organisations like the Missing Salmon Alliance, which brings together other NGOs that advocate for sensible production of salmon while preserving the salmon ecosystem, can help put pressure on governments to implement more stringent rules for fisheries to preserve current populations and increase salmon populations.

A European eel in the River Culm, England [Shutterstock]

Are other fish species in danger as well?

According to Roberts, another endangered fish is the eel. The conditions that have endangered salmon are very similar to those that are threatening eels: overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and climate change.

Eels are an important food source for mammals that live around rivers and streams, including minks and otters. Smaller eels are an important food source for birds too.

Due to low eel populations, the European Union implemented regulations on eel fishing in 2018.

According to a May report from the European Parliamentary Research Service: “The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has suffered a 90 percent to 95 percent decline in its population since the 1980s. Within 50 years, the European eel has turned from one of the most abundant freshwater fish to an endangered species.”

How is climate change contributing to this?

Rising water temperatures as a result of climate change pose significant challenges for salmon. As the water warms, its oxygen content decreases, making breathing more difficult for these fish. Consequently, salmon must swim greater distances in pursuit of nourishment and cooler waters, further taxing their already strained systems.

According to Roberts, warmer waters destroy some nutrients in oceans and rivers, which affect food chains. Atlantic salmon typically eat zooplankton, blue whiting, sand eels, small insects, insect larvae and small crustaceans called amphipods or scuds. As food for the salmon becomes more scarce, this can have a negative impact on the size of the salmon.

Smaller salmon produce fewer eggs. Fewer eggs mean a decrease in the overall population.

“Now, as it grows, it gets faster, more powerful. It can evade predators, but if they grow more slowly, they’re more vulnerable to predation,” Roberts said. “And what we found is that the decrease in the growth rate of salmon is most marked during their first summer at sea.”
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October 19, 2024
Dealing with This Feeling

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From doomsday tourism to eco-anxiety therapy and preppers, a look at how coping in the 'end times' is developing.

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February 21, 2024
New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for infringing copyrighted works

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The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement, seeking to end the companies’ practice of using its stories to train chatbots.

The newspaper filed a lawsuit in the United States federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, alleging the companies’ powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models used millions of its articles for training without permission and saying that copyright infringements at the paper alone could be worth billions.

The Times said OpenAI and Microsoft are advancing their technology through the “unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it” and “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”.

Through their AI chatbots, the companies “seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”, the lawsuit said.

The Times, one of the most respected news organisations in the United States, is seeking damages as well as an order that the companies stop using its content – and destroy data already harvested.

While no sum is specifically requested, the Times alleged that the infringement could have cost “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”.

Confrontational approach

With the suit, The New York Times chose a more confrontational approach to the sudden rise of AI chatbots, in contrast to other media groups, such as Germany’s Axel Springer or The Associated Press, which have struck content deals with OpenAI.

Microsoft, the world’s second biggest company by market capitalisation, is a major investor in OpenAI and swiftly implemented the powers of AI in its own products after the release of ChatGPT last year.

The AI models that power ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing) were trained for years on content available on the internet under the assumption that it was fair to be used without need for compensation.

But the lawsuit argued that the unlawful use of the Times’s work to build artificial intelligence products threatened its ability to provide quality journalism.

“These tools were built with and continue to use independent journalism and content that is only available because we and our peers reported, edited and fact-checked it at high cost and with considerable expertise,” a spokesperson for the Times said.

The Times said it reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and reach a resolution on the issue.

During the talks, the newspaper said it sought to “ensure it received fair value” for the use of its content, “facilitate the continuation of a healthy news ecosystem and help develop GenAI technology in a responsible way that benefits society and supports a well-informed public”.

“These negotiations have not led to a resolution,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit said that content generated by ChatGPT and Copilot closely mimicked New York Times style and the paper’s content was given a privileged status in perfecting the chatbot technology.

It also said content that proved to be false was sourced incorrectly to The New York Times.

Wave of lawsuits

The newspaper joins a growing list of individuals and publishers trying to stop AI giants from using copyrighted material.

Last year, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin and other bestselling fiction writers filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the startup of violating their copyrights to fuel ChatGPT.

In June, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and other AI developers, accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots that “mimic and regurgitate” their language, style and ideas.

Universal and other music publishers have sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic in a US court for using copyrighted lyrics to train its AI systems and generate answers to user queries.

US photo distributor Getty Images has accused Stability AI of profiting from its pictures and those of its partners to make visual AI that creates original images on simple demand.

With lawsuits piling up, Microsoft and Google have announced they would provide legal protection for customers sued for copyright infringement over content generated by their AI.

This month, European Union policymakers agreed on landmark legislation to regulate AI, which requires tech companies doing business in the EU to disclose data used to train AI systems and carry out testing of products – especially those used in high-risk applications, such as self-driving vehicles and healthcare.

In October, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order focused on AI’s impact on national security and discrimination while China has rolled out regulations requiring AI to reflect “socialist core values”.

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December 27, 2023
Conflict over the clock: China among countries where time is political

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When Nuria Shamsed* was a child, she would sit with her family in front of her grandparents’ house on the outskirts of the Western Chinese city of Kashgar in the Xinjiang region and watch the summer sun set at about midnight.

Kashgar is not located particularly far north – it is approximately at the same latitude as the Turkish capital, Ankara, where sundown is several hours earlier.

But the sun goes down late in the Kashgar night because the Chinese Communist Party decided that all of China must operate in the same time zone as Beijing.

This means that clocks in Kashgar are about three hours ahead of the time that the city’s geographical location actually dictates.

“The midnight sunsets with my family are among the fondest memories I have from my childhood in Xinjiang,” 26-year-old Shamsed told Al Jazeera, speaking from her new home in San Diego, California, the United States.

“But at the same time, the phenomenon also shows how the Chinese authorities want to control everything in Xinjiang – even our time,” she said.

Police officers patrol the square in front of Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, in 2021 [File: Thomas Peter/Reuters]

Time is political in China, says Yao-Yuan Yeh, who teaches Chinese history and politics at the University of St Thomas in Houston, the US, and is used to instil a sense of interconnection and control.

“It is used to reinforce the official narrative of a Chinese nation united under the rule of the Communist Party,” Yeh explained.

Time zones are constructs that are constantly being renegotiated, and in few places has this been more true than in China and elsewhere in Asia.

State control through time

For as long as 56-year-old Payzulla Zaydun can remember, time has been a point of contention between the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the authorities in Beijing.

Xinjiang’s provincial capital, Urumqi, is geographically two hours behind Beijing, and Zaydun recounts that when he attended university in Urumqi in the 1980s and 1990s, some of his fellow Uighur students deliberately arrived two hours late for class if classes were only listed in Beijing time.

“They believed that Xinjiang time should be used in Xinjiang, and there was a sense that as an Uighur there was a responsibility to uphold the local time,” Zaydun told Al Jazeera from Maryland in the US.

Therefore, many local shops and businesses in Urumqi also opened and closed following a two-hour time difference in adherence to the local time over Beijing time.

However, that is not the case any longer.

Upholding the local time in Xinjiang is much more difficult today, Zaydun says.

“If you openly challenge the Beijing time now, you can be prosecuted for subversion,” he says.

“My elderly mother never used Beijing time before, but then a few years ago she suddenly started using Beijing time when we talked on the phone because she feared the consequences if she didn’t.”

Canadian-Uighur activist Rukiye Turdush says enforcing the use of Beijing time in Xinjiang is just one of many ways the Chinese authorities are trying to dilute the Uighur identity, alongside means such as social control, large-scale surveillance and mass detentions.

“Language, religion, culture, space and time are all elements of the Uighur national identity that the Chinese are trying to tear apart in Xinjiang,” Turdush says.

Other minorities in China are also experiencing that the keeping of time is the strict preserve of China’s central authorities.

“For other minorities in China’s outer regions such as the Tibetans and the Mongolians time is also controlled from Beijing,” says Yeh of the University of St Thomas.

Although there are practical and economic advantages to a single time zone, the impetus for standardisation was more about a signal the Chinese Communist Party wanted to send when it came to power in 1949.

“The Chinese state did not exercise full control over China before 1949, but the Communists sought to change that in order to consolidate and legitimise their power in China,” Yeh explains.

In pursuing that mission, controlling time became part of an official narrative about a China united under the party’s rule, which spurred the creation of a single time zone that temporally aligned the entire country with Beijing.

Under President Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, there has been a renewed focus on assimilating China’s minorities into the dominant Chinese culture promoted by the Communist Party.

“Due to that, the authorities have taken a tougher stance against any kind of separatist notions among the minority groups, including any ideas about belonging to a separate time zone,” Yeh says.

Time is sovereignty

China is not the only place where time is shaped more by politics than by geography.

One look at the jigsaw puzzle that constitutes the world’s distribution of time zones clearly indicates this and recent events in Ukraine are a case in point.

In January, Russian authorities announced that annexed regions of Ukraine were to switch from Ukrainian time to Moscow time.

A wall clock with a picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen in this photo illustration taken in a hotel room in Kazan, Russia, in 2015 [File: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters]

In March, Greenland also moved one hour closer to Europe.

Time can also be used by minorities to fight back against state power.

During the 25-year-long civil war in Sri Lanka between the central government and the Tamil Tigers, the government introduced a time change that set the country’s clock back half an hour. However, the Tamil Tigers refused to recognise and implement the change in 1996 in the areas of the island under their control, meaning Sri Lanka effectively existed in two different time zones simultaneously.

Just as time is used politically within the borders of nations, it is also used politically between the borders of nations.

In 2015, the North Korean government announced that the country would change its time zone by setting clocks back half an hour.

The shift was defended as a belated reckoning with Japanese imperialists that had deprived Korea historically of its time – a reference to the early 20th century when the Japanese, as Korea’s then-colonial rulers, brought the country into the same time zone as the Empire of Japan.

A man adjusts his wristwatch in front of a clock tower in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this photo taken by Kyodo in 2018 [File: Kyodo via Reuters]

In fact, the establishment of modern timekeeping traces its roots back to the colonial era and it was the world’s colonial powers that confirmed the global time zone system during a conference in the US in 1884, according to Karl Benediktsson, who has studied the connection between politics and time zones at the University of Iceland.

According to Benediktsson, it is revealing that the modern time zone system is based around the so-called Greenwich meridian, or the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich in London.

“The prime meridian could technically have been placed anywhere, but it was centred around London because Great Britain was the leading power at the time,” Benediktsson says.

While the time zone system established by Britain and the other colonial powers in the 19th century remains largely the same as the system still in use today, the division of the world within time zones has changed frequently since the dismantling of Europe’s colonial empires.

And the repositioning of postcolonial states on the world map has also led to some new and novel time zones.

The Rajabai Clock Tower in Mumbai, India [File: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters]

For example, when India gained independence from Britain in 1947, it abolished Mumbai time and Kolkata time and established Indian time as the country’s only official time.

Nepal has aligned its own time zone with the peak of the sacred Gaurishankar Mountain, located east of Kathmandu, which places the country within a quarter-hour time zone unlike most other states that position their time keeping within a certain hourly time zone or more rarely within a half-hour time zone.

Time zones are constructed

The jigsaw puzzle that makes up the map of time zones across borders and around the world reflects the many political considerations and histories at play in the creation of clock time.

Shifting geopolitical circumstances also means that the world’s time zone puzzle will likely continue to change into the future, according to the University of Iceland’s Benediktsson.

“I usually say that time zones are social constructions,” says Benediktsson, noting that the placement of countries within certain time zones was determined by people and can therefore be changed by people over and over again.

Workers are pictured beneath clocks displaying time zones in various parts of the world at an outsourcing centre in Bengaluru [File: Vivek Prakash/Reuters]

Reflecting back on her youth and observing the sun set at midnight during summer time in her native Kashgar, Nuria Shamsed believes that the enduring difference between local time and Beijing’s official time in Xinjiang demonstrates the power of people over timekeeping.

Attempts to deny the observance of local time is another tool to deprive Uighurs of their identity, Shamsed says.

“Time should not be a tool used by authoritarians to pursue their imperialist ambitions,” she says.

“I also consider it a human rights violation when Uighurs in Xinjiang do not have a say in what time defines their lives.”

*Nuria Shamsed is a pseudonym created to respect the source’s request for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.

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August 9, 2023
Chip war: Is there an end to tit-for-tat China-US trade restrictions?

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We consider the impact as China’s export curbs on the chipmaking metals gallium and germanium take effect.

Semiconductor chips are a vital component used in devices including smartphones, electric cars, wind turbines and even missiles. They are now considered as crucial to economic production as oil.

The United States is worried China could use chip technology to further develop its military power. It unveiled export controls in October to prevent Beijing from getting the most advanced ones. That marked the start of tit-for-tat trade restrictions and upped their geopolitical rivalry.

In a recent move, China has begun to restrict the export of industry-critical materials.

Elsewhere, after the coup in Niger, millions of its citizens could pay the price of sanctions.

And can Egypt lure dollars back into its financial system?

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August 5, 2023
Can AI predict cancer?

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A patient waits anxiously in the doctor’s office. The specialist walks in to inform them that they have been diagnosed with cancer. But there is good news. It has been discovered at an early stage. They have excellent prospects for a full recovery.

An artificial intelligence tool had analysed the patient’s entire medical history for red flags. Noticing several early indicators, it concluded that the patient had a high risk of developing cancer. So, the patient was sent for imaging tests.

The images were analysed by another AI program and were classified as indicative of early-stage cancer. Yet another platform screened the patient’s pre-existing conditions and associated prescriptions to help the doctor avoid medication combinations that could interact adversely. And still another AI system helped streamline administrative paperwork and improve the efficiency of appointment scheduling with specialists.

Right now, this image of AI seamlessly integrated into every aspect of healthcare is largely science fiction. But a number of researchers and companies are hoping to turn this into reality within a few years.

The emergence of generative AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, has turbocharged a global debate over the future of human-machine relations. These programmes can process and generate language-based content, and are interactive and understandable in ways that are more intuitive than previous generations of AI. People have also turned to platforms like ChatGPT for therapy.

While generative AI has led to a plethora of headlines, many cogs in the machine of modern medicine are becoming more intelligent by embracing a different kind of AI – one that could fundamentally transform healthcare but has also thrown up a complex set of questions that could define the future of the sector.

Can AI really help doctors foretell diseases? Can it also help make treatment better? What are the rules of this game? And what are the risks?

The short answer: AI has shown promise in diagnosing, predicting and potentially even treating a range of medical conditions, say leading scientists and entrepreneurs driving the technology. But it is early days. There have been – and will be – stumbles. And key technical limitations as well as ethical concerns remain unaddressed.

An AI-based camera being used to image a child with cerebral malaria [Business Wire/AP]

Not a new journey

Healthcare AI has been around longer than most might expect. In the 1970s, Stanford University first created an AI tool named MYCIN, which aimed to aid physicians in diagnosing and treating bacterial blood infections and meningitis. It used the available knowledge and ability of an expert in a certain domain as represented by if-then statements – functioning like an intelligent flowchart, where yes or no answers to the patient’s situation lead down a path to one among a set of predetermined responses.

Used for the limited purpose of asking patients for information and trying to diagnose the infection, MYCIN performed on par with bacterial disease experts. But this rules-based approach gave it little ability to learn.

The form and flexibility of healthcare AI have changed dramatically since MYCIN. There are now numerous types of AI being researched for various healthcare responsibilities. In the United States, from 2018 to 2019, the use of AI among life sciences organisations and healthcare providers more than doubled.

The pandemic has only accelerated that trend. Globally, 2021 saw investment in healthcare AI double over the previous year. Last year, the international medical AI market was valued at more than $4bn and is expected to grow by nearly a quarter annually over the next decade.

Much of the progress has been driven by machine learning, where AI aims to mimic the gradual methods by which human minds learn. Leading the show are artificial neural networks (ANNs) – with a multitude of nodes, connected like neurons and organised into layers. Each layer analyses information and performs operations before passing it forward to the next.

Ask a neural network to identify a tumour, for example, and the program might start by highlighting edges and gradients, helping “identify boundaries between the tumour and surrounding tissue,” says Nafiseh Ghaffar Nia, a PhD researcher at the University of Tennessee, who recently published an analysis of AI techniques in diagnosis and prediction.

As that information flows forward, subsequent layers would analyse features further in-depth, clocking the tumour’s irregular textures and growth patterns until the layers assemble all this information about complex tumour characteristics, like shape, size and arrangement, eventually diagnosing the growth as benign or malignant.

Because these ANNs can learn with less supervision, they have become a de rigueur approach for many medical applications, including cancer diagnosis, though many tools use a mishmash of AI techniques.

At the heart of it all is a clear set of medical goals that AI is being tested against, suggested Nigam Shah, the chief data scientist for Stanford Health Care. “Every AI gizmo that you look at will boil down to doing three things: classify, predict or recommend – in medical speak, diagnose, prognosticate or treat.”

A laboratory technician conducting AI-based cervical cancer screening at a test facility in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, on June 15, 2023 [AFP]

The promise

The standout advantage that AI offers in diagnosis is medical imaging – it is good at pattern recognition.

At the end of the day, said Sanjeev Agrawal, the president of the Silicon Valley healthcare predictive analytics company LeanTaaS, it can be trained on a volume of image data that is several orders of magnitude more than any one human will ever analyse.

And neural networks have had considerable practice with imagery. In 2012, the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge – which evaluates algorithms for object detection – first saw a program correctly classify images better than a human observer.

Since then, AI has advanced to the point where it can tackle truly complex imaging problems. Agrawal points to Google AI platform DeepMind’s modelling of a human’s protein structure and folding as one of the highest accomplishments of such medical imaging tools. Modelling protein behaviour, as DeepMind has done, “is an imaging problem, but a three-dimensional imaging problem that human beings could never have figured out on their own”, said Agrawal.

Aside from imagery, AI can draw on other data recorded in a patient’s electronic health record to draw conclusions on how likely someone is to have a given disease.

Samira Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi, a professor at McGill University, recently conducted a review of AI applications in primary healthcare. She told Al Jazeera that she has found AI to be particularly promising for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, ocular conditions, diabetes, cancer, orthopaedic conditions and infectious diseases.

Predictive AIs are even more diverse in application. Researchers have found that AI could be leveraged to predict the likelihood of many conditions – such as Type-2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and kidney disease – based on lifestyle, medical records, genetic factors and more.

And the past few months have seen significant breakthroughs in the use of AI to identify cancer risks. It can beat standard models in predicting breast cancer, research published in June showed. In January, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled an AI-based lung cancer risk-assessment machine. And in May, Harvard scientists showed that an AI tool could identify people with the highest risk of pancreatic cancer up to three years before an actual diagnosis.

That’s not all. In March, scientists at the University of British Columbia demonstrated that an AI program could predict cancer survival rates better than previous tools.

Likewise, AI can predict the potential toxicity and effects of various medications, helping streamline the process of testing them and bringing them to market.

But machine learning tools can also get it badly wrong.

Claudia da Costa Leite (L), professor of the Department of Radiology and Oncology, and Marcio Sawamura, the vice-director of the Radiology Institute of the Clinics Hospital, of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Sao Paulo in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on July 29, 2020, using a new AI-based platform to detect and diagnose COVID-19. Most such platforms failed [Nelson Almeida/AFP]

Failing the test

AI has the potential, at least in theory, to predict the severity of infections and model the spread of outbreaks. The COVID-19 pandemic saw an explosion of AI tools that promised to do just that. But the results were damning.

Two prominent reviews of nearly 650 AI-powered programs for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment found none of them to be fit for clinical use. Other reviews of AI platforms for forecasting the spread of COVID-19 found them broadly ineffective – likely due, primarily, to issues with data availability.

Those outcomes represent a reality check on AI in healthcare – the tools to actually integrate it into the field of medicine are still nascent.

“Over 95 percent of AI” that Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi studied in her review “were developed, pilot-tested, then never went to the implementation stage”, she said.

Central to the challenges confronting AI in medicine are three major limitations in the data used to develop it: paucity, access restrictions and quality.

For most AI to function, it needs to be trained on data that has been annotated by experts. Many diseases simply lack enough such data, though several techniques are being researched to reduce AI’s reliance on large sums of expert-annotated data.

Yet, even when there is data, it is not necessarily available to AI developers. Every patient, said Shah, has a medical history with numerous data points: checkups, readouts, diagnoses and prescriptions among others. However, various healthcare organisations – from hospitals to insurance and pharmaceutical companies – log different data points. Thus, medical data gets split and locked in different silos.

On an even larger scale, efforts to leverage AI to model and forecast the spread of the pandemic were hampered by opacity from countries about vital statistics such as infection rates and mortality. Organisations such as the Clinical Research Data Sharing Alliance – a consortium of universities, pharmaceutical firms, patient advocacy groups and nonprofit data-sharing platforms – are trying to push for change. But at the moment, the medical AI data-scape is one of the isolated islands adrift in calls for openness.

Lastly, even when data is present and available, there is the lingering difficulty of extracting quality from infrastructure often ill-designed to provide it. Electronic health records, a primary source of patient data, often offer much noise with the signal, said Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi.

Noise can take many forms. It can be imaging data annotated in a way that makes it illegible to an AI platform. It can be data formatted or recorded in incompatible ways.

Yet, there are even deeper challenges and risks that AI in healthcare must overcome to emerge as a truly trustworthy partner of the medical community, experts point out.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law hearing on artificial intelligence, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, May 16, 2023 [Patrick Semansky/AP]

When the AI errs, who do you blame?

Datasets can be biased. Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi’s analysis of primary healthcare AI research, for instance, found that sex, gender, age and ethnicity were rarely considered. Less than 35 percent of the programmes studied had sex-disaggregated data – datasets collected and tabulated separately for women and men.

Some ethnic groups can be underrepresented or incorrectly emphasised in datasets. Just two years ago, the US National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology recommended dropping a racial bias in how blood creatinine was judged that caused the severity of many Black Americans’ kidney failure to be underestimated.

AI tools trained on such biased data and guidelines will likely perpetuate these biases, though Shah argues the “same data quality also affects human decision-making”.

Given the potential for bias and the black-box nature of proprietary neural networks, the medical AI space has seen a growing push for explainable AI or XAI. This movement aims to emphasise the importance of making the reasoning by which an AI tool arrives at a diagnosis, prognosis or treatment recommendations more transparent.

Many experts see explainability as inextricably intertwined with one of the most pressing ethical questions underlying medical AI today: Doctors make mistakes but when AI makes mistakes, who are we going to blame more – the AI or the doctor using it?

Understanding the train of thought behind an AI tool that advises a physician could inform the degree of responsibility each has.

Likewise, the medical AI space is grappling with balancing the responsibility of protecting patient data with the need for more data sharing.

This fear is not unfounded. In the US, the first half of 2023 saw 295 healthcare data security breaches, which have affected 39 million Americans. Cybersecurity breaches aside, healthcare companies have seen no shortage of scandals over sharing patient data improperly or without anonymity. In 2017, London’s Royal Free Hospital was embroiled in controversy over sharing the health data, alongside personal information, of 1.6 million patients, with Google’s DeepMind.

More recently, the US Federal Trade Commission fined popular mental therapy app BetterHelp $7.8m for sharing the information of 7 million consumers with third-party platforms for advertising.

There are no easy answers to privacy concerns. Shah notes that while people might not want to share their data, they are often eager to benefit from an AI trained on others’ data.

Researchers are also working to hone analytics approaches that allow AI tools to train on less of patients’ real-world data than these platforms currently need.

Amid the rapid innovation and spiking investment, this race between medical AI and the infrastructure that informs it could prove decisive in shaping the future of health systems.

At the moment, the infrastructure is playing catch-up. Only if it does can that potential cancer patient in the clinic count on AI truly making an intelligent, accurate and safe prediction.

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July 31, 2023
Who is on board the missing Titanic submersible?

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A five-person submersible vessel taking tourist s on a trip to see the wreckage of the 1912 Titanic disaster 3.8km (2.4 miles) undersea is missing in the Atlantic off Canada.

It costs $250,000 per guest for an eight-day trip on the vessel.

Here’s what to know so far:

Who was on board?

Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman were on the vessel named Titan, according to their family.

Shahzada is vice chairman of one of Pakistan’s largest conglomerates, Engro Corporation, with investments in fertilisers, vehicle manufacturing, energy and digital technologies. According to the website of SETI, a California-based research institute that searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, of which he is a trustee, Shahzada lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and two children.

The Dawoods belong to one of Pakistan’s most prominent families.

“We are very grateful for the concern being shown by our colleagues and friends and would like to request everyone to pray for their safety while granting the family privacy at this time,” a statement released by his family said.

“The family is well looked-after and are praying to Allah for the safe return of their family members,” it added.

Shazada graduated from the University of Buckingham and received a degree from Philadelphia University.

Hamish Harding

The British billionaire and chairman of aviation company Action Aviation is also among those missing, according to his stepson.

Dubai-based Harding had posted on social media that he was proud to be heading to the Titanic as a “mission specialist”, adding: “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023.”

“The team on the sub has a couple of legendary explorers, some of [whom] have done over 30 dives to the RMS Titanic since the 1980s including PH Nargeolet,” he added.

Harding was also on board the 2019 One More Orbit flight mission that set a record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth by aircraft over both geographic poles.

Paul-Henri Gargeolet

The 77-year-old French explorer, whom media say was one of the five on board, is director of underwater research at a company that owns the rights to the Titanic wreck. A former commander in the French Navy, he was both a deep diver and a mine sweeper.

After retiring from the navy, he led the first recovery expedition to the Titanic in 1987 and is a leading authority on the wreck site.

In a 2020 interview with France Bleu radio, he spoke of the dangers of deep diving, saying: “I am not afraid to die, I think it will happen one day.”

Stockton Rush

The founder and CEO of the vessel’s US-based operating company OceanGate was also on board the submersible, according to media reports.

“It is an amazingly beautiful wreck,” Rush told Britain’s Sky News of the Titanic earlier this year.

“Rush became the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world when he obtained his DC-8 Type/Captain’s rating at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute in 1981 at the age of 19,” according to his biography on OceanGate’s website.

Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate exhibitions, poses at Times Square in New York [File: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters]

What firm is behind this?

Based in Everett in Washington State in the United States, OceanGate says it uses next-generation crewed submersibles and launches platforms to increase deep-sea access as far down as 4km (2.5 miles).

“OceanGate has successfully completed over 14 expeditions and over 200 dives in the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico,” its website says. “Following every mission, the team evaluates and updates the procedures as part [of] a continued commitment to evolve and ensure operational safety.”

We’ve been working hard to get ready for our 2023 Titanic Expedition that begins next month. We moved @OceanGate‘s sub, Titan, to The Launch at the @marineinstitute for final preparations.

The Launch has brand-new facilities with everything we need to prepare for expedition! pic.twitter.com/iLgs6CJXUI

— OceanGate Expeditions (@OceanGateExped) April 21, 2023

What is the vessel?

Although popularly called a submarine, in marine terminology the Titan vessel carrying the five is a submersible. While a submarine can launch independently from a port and can come back on its own power, a submersible needs a mother ship to launch it.

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June 20, 2023
The AI apocalypse: Imminent risk or misdirection?

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As tech bosses raise the doomsday alarm, others say it’s a distraction from AI’s real, less sensational dangers.

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June 10, 2023
Cannabis has great medicinal potential, but it’s no cure-all – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

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Over the last five years, an often forgotten piece of US federal legislation – the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, also known as the 2018 Farm Bill – has ushered in an explosion of interest in the medical potential of cannabis-derived cannabidiol, or CBD.

After decades of debate, the bill made it legal for farmers to grow industrial hemp, a plant rich incannabis-derived cannabidiol. Hemp itself has tremendous value as a cash crop; it’s used to produce biofuel, textiles and animal feed. But the cannabis-derived cannabidiol extracted from the hemp plant also has numerous medicinal properties, with the potential to benefit millions through the treatment of seizure disorders, pain or anxiety.

Prior to the bill’s passage, the resistance to legalising hemp was due to its association with marijuana, its biological cousin. Though hemp and marijuana belong to the same species of plant, Cannabis sativa, they each have a unique chemistry, with very different characteristics and effects. Marijuana possesses tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the chemical that produces the characteristic high that is associated with cannabis. Hemp, on the other hand, is a strain of the cannabis plant that contains virtually no tetrahydrocannabinol, and neither it nor the cannabis-derived cannabidiol derived from it can produce a high sensation.

As a professor and chair of the department of pharmacology at Penn State, I have been following research developments with closely and have…

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February 23, 2023
Russia sends Soyuz rescue ship to International Space Station

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Soyuz MS-23 will transport Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Sergei Prokopyev and NASA’s Frank Rubio back to Earth later this year.

Russia has launched an uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft on a rescue mission to return two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut whose trip back to Earth has been hampered after their original space vehicle was damaged by a mini meteorite while parked at the International Space Station (ISS).

The Soyuz MS-23 vessel blasted off successfully from the Russian-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, live video broadcast by ISS partner NASA showed.

Though the MS-23 is scheduled to dock with the ISS early on Sunday morning Moscow time, it is not expected to bring home Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev, and US astronaut Frank Rubio until later this year.

The three arrived at the ISS in September 2022 onboard the MS-22 spacecraft and were originally to stay about six months until the end of March. But the MS-22 began to leak coolant in December after an apparent micro-meteorite punctured an external radiator.

The same thing appeared to happen again earlier this month, this time on a docked Russian cargo ship. Camera views showed a small hole in each spacecraft.

The uncrewed Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft lifted off at 7:24pm ET on a two-day journey to the space station to replace the MS-22 that experienced a coolant system leak in December 2022. Read more.. https://t.co/xG17Qs7q7n pic.twitter.com/970Cle2yK6

— International Space Station (@Space_Station) February 24, 2023

MS-23, which took off on Friday, was initially scheduled to launch in mid-March with two cosmonauts and an astronaut on board who would take over from Rubio, Petelin and Prokopyev at the space station. But without the replacement crew on board MS-23, the two Russians and the US crew member will now continue working at the ISS until September.

Officials had determined that it was too risky to bring the three back in their damaged Soyuz MS-22 next month as originally planned. With no coolant, the cabin temperature would spike during the trip back to Earth, potentially damaging computers and other equipment, and exposing the suited-up crew to excessive heat.

NASA said in a statement that the damaged Soyuz MS-22 is scheduled to undock from the ISS in late March and return to Earth “for an uncrewed parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan, and post-flight analysis by Roscosmos” – Russia’s space agency.

After delivering people to the space station, capsules stay attached to the orbiting research lab throughout the duration of missions, in case of any emergencies and to eventually ferry their crews home to Earth.

In addition to the three crew awaiting the arrival of MS-23, there are also four others currently on the ISS after arriving on a SpaceX Dragon capsule last October as part of the Crew-5 mission.

They are scheduled to be joined next week by members of the Crew-6 mission – two US nationals, an Emirati and a Russian – who will also arrive on board a SpaceX capsule expected to launch on Monday from Florida. After a few days of overlap, Crew-5 will then return to Earth.

Space has remained a rare venue of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine and ensuing Western sanctions on Russia.

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February 23, 2023
ChatGPT and the sweatshops powering the digital age

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On January 18, Time magazine published revelations that alarmed if not necessarily surprised many who work in Artificial Intelligence. The news concerned ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot that is both hailed as one of the most intelligent AI systems built to date and feared as a new frontier in potential plagiarism and the erosion of craft in writing.

Many had wondered how ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, had improved upon earlier versions of this technology that would quickly descend into hate speech. The answer came in the Time magazine piece: dozens of Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to process an endless amount of violent and hateful content in order to make a system primarily marketed to Western users safer.

It should be clear to anyone paying attention that our current paradigm of digitalisation has a labour problem. We have and are pivoting away from the ideal of an open internet built around communities of shared interests to one that is dominated by the commercial prerogatives of a handful of companies located in specific geographies.

In this model, large companies maximise extraction and accumulation for their owners at the expense not just of their workers but also of the users. Users are sold the lie that they are participating in a community, but the more dominant these corporations become, the more egregious the unequal power between the owners and the users is.

“Community” increasingly means that ordinary people absorb the moral and the social costs of the unchecked growth of these companies, while their owners absorb the profit and the acclaim. And a critical mass of underpaid labour is contracted under the most tenuous conditions that are legally possible to sustain the illusion of a better internet.

ChatGPT is only the latest innovation to embody this.

Much has been written about Facebook, YouTube and the model of content moderation that actually provided the blueprint for the ChatGPT outsourcing. Content moderators are tasked with consuming a constant stream of the worst things that people put on these platforms and flagging it for takedown or further actions. Very often these are posts about sexual and other kinds of violence.

Nationals of the countries where the companies are located have sued for the psychological toll that the work has taken on them. In 2020, Facebook, for example, was forced to pay $52m to US employees for the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they experienced after working as content moderators.

While there is increasing general awareness of secondary trauma and the toll that witnessing violence causes people, we still don’t fully understand what being exposed to this kind of content for a full workweek does to the human body.

We know that journalists and aid workers, for example, often return from conflict zones with serious symptoms of PTSD, and that even reading reports emerging from these conflict zones can have a psychological effect. Similar studies on the impact of content moderation work on people are harder to complete because of the non-disclosure agreements that these moderators are often asked to sign before they take the job.

We also know, through the testimony provided by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen, that its decision to underinvest in proper content moderation was an economic one. Twitter, under Elon Musk, has also moved to slash costs by firing a large number of content moderators.

The failure to provide proper content moderation has resulted in social networking platforms carrying a growing amount of toxicity. The harms that arise from that have had major implications in the analogue world.

In Myanmar, Facebook has been accused of enabling genocide; in Ethiopia and the United States, of allowing incitement to violence.

Indeed, the field of content moderation and the problems it is fraught with are a good illustration of what is wrong with the current digitalisation model.

The decision to use a Kenyan company to teach a US chatbot not to be hateful must be understood in the context of a deliberate decision to accelerate the accumulation of profit at the expense of meaningful guardrails for users.

These companies promise that the human element is only a stopgap response before the AI system is advanced enough to do the work alone. But this claim does nothing for the employees who are being exploited today. Nor does it address the fact that people – the languages they speak and the meaning they ascribe to contexts or situations – are highly malleable and dynamic, which means content moderation will not die out.

So what will be done for the moderators who are being harmed today, and how will the business practice change fundamentally to protect the moderators who will definitely be needed tomorrow?

If this is all starting to sound like sweatshops are making the digital age work, it should – because they are. A model of digitalisation led by an instinct to protect the interests of those who profit the most from the system instead of those who actually make it work leaves billions of people vulnerable to myriad forms of social and economic exploitation, the impact of which we still do not fully understand.

It’s time to lay to rest the myth that digitalisation led by corporate interests is somehow going to eschew all the past excesses of mercantilism and greed simply because the people who own these companies wear T-shirts and promise to do no evil.

History is replete with examples of how, left to their own devices, those who have interest and opportunity to accumulate will do so and lay waste to the rights that we need to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.

We have to return to the basics of why we needed to fight for and articulate labour rights in the last century. Labour rights are human rights, and this latest scandal is a timely reminder that we stand to lose a great deal when we stop paying attention to them because we are distracted by the latest shiny new thing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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January 23, 2023
‘Anomaly’ thwarts UK attempt to put satellites into space

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Rocket carried beneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747 separated from the aircraft but failed to reach orbit.

The first attempt to launch a satellite from Western Europe appears to have failed after an “anomaly” was reported to have prevented the rocket from reaching orbit.

Virgin Orbit — owned by a consortium including the United Kingdom Space Agency and British airline tycoon Richard Branson — was attempting to send nine small satellites into space from a 70-foot (21-metre) rocket attached beneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747 aircraft.

The repurposed jumbo jet took off from the coastal town of Newquay in southwest England at 22:02 GMT on Monday, with the rocket detaching from the aircraft and igniting over the Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of 10,670 metres (35,000 feet) about an hour and 20 minutes later.

But Virgin Orbit later said there had been an “anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit”; it said it would provide more information when it could.

The UK space industry employs 47,000 people, but while the country is second only to the United States in the number of satellites it produces, they have long had to be sent into orbit via foreign spaceports operated by countries such as the US and Kazakhstan.

More than 2,000 space fans had gathered to cheer when the aircraft took off from the runway in Newquay.

Virgin Orbit said the jumbo jet returned safely to Newquay following the mission.

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January 9, 2023
US bans Chinese telecom devices, citing ‘national security’

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US Federal Communications Commission decision targets devices from Huawei, ZTE and other manufacturers.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced it is banning telecommunications and video surveillance equipment from prominent Chinese brands, including Huawei and ZTE, citing an “unacceptable risk to national security”.

The five-member FCC said on Friday that it had voted unanimously to adopt new rules that will block the importation or sale of the targeted products.

“Our unanimous decision represents the first time in the FCC’s history that we have voted to prohibit the authorization of communications and electronic equipment based on national security considerations,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in a statement on Friday.

He added that the move had “broad, bipartisan backing” among US congressional leadership.

Security officials in the United States have warned that equipment from Chinese brands such as Huawei could be used to interfere with fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks and collect sensitive information.

The ban is the latest move in a years-long push “to keep US networks secure” by identifying and prohibiting devices deemed to be security threats, the FCC said.

Friday’s initiative also includes a ban on Hytera Communications, the Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Company and the Dahua Technology Company.

Huawei declined to comment to the Reuters news agency. ZTE, Dahua, Hikvision and Hytera did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Huawei and the Chinese government have long denied the allegations of espionage and denounced US sanctions against Chinese technologies.

But in 2019, then-US President Donald Trump signed into law the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, which established criteria to identify communications services that Washington deemed could pose a risk to national security.

The services that were designated threats under that law were then subject to the Secure Equipment Act of 2021, signed by President Joe Biden.

That act created the groundwork for Friday’s announcement. It directed the FCC to “adopt rules clarifying that it will no longer review or issue new equipment licenses” to those companies.

At the time, Florida Senator Marco Rubio hailed Biden’s decision.

“The Chinese Communist Party will stop at nothing to exploit our laws and undermine our national security,” he said in a statement. “This legislation fixes a dangerous loophole in our law, curtailing their efforts to worm their way into our telecommunications networks.”

One of the largest manufacturers of telecommunications equipment in the world, Huawei has had an embattled relationship with the US and its allies, facing some of the heaviest sanctions ever placed on a single company in the US.

Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was detained for nearly three years in Canada, following allegations by the US Justice Department that she attempted to violate sanctions by trying to conduct business dealings with Iran.

She was indicted on bank and wire fraud charges and faced US extradition proceedings in Canadian court, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Canada, the US and China. Meng was released and returned to China in 2021.

Earlier this year, Canada joined the US in banning Huawei from 5G wireless networks.

Another FCC commissioner, Geoffrey Starks, described Friday’s ban as a preventative measure that would pay dividends in the future.

“By stopping equipment identified as a threat to the United States from entering our markets, we significantly decrease the risk that it can be used against us,” Starks said in a statement. “We also lower the possibility that we’ll need to rip and replace that equipment in the future. Ultimately, if it can’t get authorized, it can’t be deployed.”

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November 25, 2022