Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
GiveMeSport integrates artificial intelligence for newsgathering
 U.K. sports publisher GiveMeSport has used its proprietary technology to help grow its Facebook audience to an impressive 25 million followers. Now, it’s integrating artificial intelligence from its new owner, Breaking Data Corp., to give it an advantage over competitors.

The publisher is using AI to play at both ends of the news spectrum — analysis and reaction pieces as well as breaking news. Before this, most of the publisher’s 2,000 monthly articles, created by 14 full-time and 50 freelance writers, were reaction pieces.

The new program also frees up writers’ time to focus on longer-form 1,500-word articles, which carry more ad space around them.

“There are lots of talented artificial intelligence teams globally,” said Nick Thain, CEO of Breaking Data, which acquired GiveMeSport at the end of 2016. “Where Breaking Data separates itself is by understanding the language of social media, the abbreviations and vernacular, how language is adapting is changing, the first time something like Throwback Thursday was used.”

Here’s how the media company is using artificial intelligence in the newsroom.

News gathering and event identifying

Using natural language processing, Breaking Data’s technology scans Twitter every second, sifting through relevant tweets around predetermined keywords, like sports teams, player names, team names, clubs, leagues or sports grounds. This content is filtered and verified; organized into categories like “major event,” “related news” or “marquee news”; and sent as alerts to journalists in a BreakingSports Slack channel, giving the edit team a head start on announcements, particularly during periods like player transfer windows. GiveMeSport is in the process of using Breaking Data’s technology to pull together other publicly available data sources like Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia.

Countless social listening tools are available, but Thain explains this platform also highlights potentially inaccurate tweets by identifying trusted and reliable sources: For instance, when it was announced that footballer Neymar would join Paris Saint-Germain for €222 million ($261 million), the AI platform could track when the content first emerged on Twitter and label the account as a credible authority.

As the AI platform’s understanding of language grows, it identifies deviations in the norm around specific areas. One hypothesis, said Thain, is that it could scrape the tweets within a one-mile radius of a football stadium. A physical therapist might tweet regularly, then after a tough day might send out a number of tweets complaining about the workload. This change in frequency and topic would be noted and sent as an alert to journalists in the Slack channel, who could then contact the specific club and investigate whether a player has been injured.

Managing Facebook distribution

Facebook is by far the publisher’s biggest distribution platform. GiveMeSport’s journalists also write the Facebook posts and the headlines for their articles. The publisher’s proprietary tech is embedded in the content-management system and scores the writer out of 100 on the likelihood of the post getting high click-through rates or engagement, without the post becoming clickbait. The technology analyzes how the word combination, sentence structure and image will resonate with the intended audience.

“It could be as simple as identifying a capitalized word in the title, which Facebook users might be fed up with. Or it could identify that Manchester United fans prefer not to be referred to as MU or the Red Devils,” said Thain. “It supports the writers in what they are naturally skilled to do.”

“Distribution is a science; we don’t want to leave this to chance,” he added. “AI gives us a further advantage.”

Tying content to emotion

GiveMeSport is currently undergoing a manual process in which writers tag each story in the CMS according to a range of about 30 predetermined emotions that go beyond happy and sad — like tribal, debatable or relatable — to organize the content based on the emotional rewards they satisfy. AI can build out this small analysis to historical data sets. The theory is that understanding this deeper net of emotions and how they connect to users will predict performance.

“Sport is all about emotion,” said Thain. “It’s about feeling that you belong to something, about feeling that you want to tell someone about what you’ve read; it’s about feeling that a story is unmissable or that you relate to the experience within it.”

Output: Canadian firm Breaking Data is using artificial intelligence to help UK sport news publisher GiveMeSport, which it acquired at the end of 2016, to find real-time breaking news on social media. Its proprietary AI technology scans social media using natural language processing and predetermined keywords, with gathered content sent to GiveMeSport's journalists in the form of news alerts. The software can also verify the accuracy of tweets, while the related content management system helps writers to maximise engagement with stories and readership without resorting to clickbait.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
DJI to offer drones that don't need an internet connection
 DJI will soon let you fly without data transfer to the net

DJI’s flight control apps are great in that they offer local geofencing data as well as relevant local maps. However, keeping these databases requires routine communication with the internet, and that lends itself to privacy concerns.

So, the engineers at DJI are coming up with a new local data mode that stops the app from sending and receiving data over the internet. Brendan Schulman, DJI Vice President of Policy and Legal Affairs said: “We are creating local data mode to address the needs of our enterprise customers, including public and private organizations that are using DJI technology to perform sensitive operations around the world. Local data mode will provide added assurances for customers with heightened data security needs.”

Because it blocks all data, DJI apps on local data mode won’t get updated maps or geofencing information. Pilots will also not receive notifications of newly-issued flight restrictions or software updates. DJI says it may also result in other performance limitations, but that’s a necessary trade-off for data assurance on sensitive flights.

The company also states that they do not collect or have access to user flight logs, photos or videos unless the user chooses to share those by syncing flight logs with DJI servers, uploading photos or videos to DJI’s SkyPixel website, or by physically sending the drone in to DJI for servicing.

Local data mode has been in development for several months and will be included in future versions of DJI apps, starting in the next several weeks. These include the DJI GO, DJI GO 4, DJI XT Pro, DJI Pilot and Ground Station Pro apps, which run on smartphones and tablets that control the drone or connect to the drone’s remote control unit. The local data mode feature may not be available in locations where an internet connection is required or highly advisable due to local regulations or requirements.

Output: Engineers at Chinese drone firm DJI are developing a local data mode that prevents flight control apps from sending or receiving data over the internet for users with "heightened data security needs", according to Brendan Schulman, DJI's vice-president of policy and legal affairs. Local data mode will be available in versions of the DJI Go, DJI Go 4, DJI XT Pro, DJI Pilot and Ground Station Pro apps available from this autumn. The company warned pilots that using the new mode may result in some performance limitations, which it said were a "necessary trade-off for data assurance on sensitive flights".


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
LA schools look at efficacy of online credit recovery courses
 Researchers have received a $3.26-million federal grant to study the effectiveness of online academic credit recovery programs — the kind that allow students to make up failed classes and graduate on time — in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The grant, from the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, will pay for the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research group, to study how online makeup courses for Algebra 1 and ninth-grade English compare with retaking the class in person.

“The growing use of online credit recovery for high school students has outpaced the research,” the grant description reads. “As concerns mount over whether students actually learn in online courses, and as questions arise about how to best implement online credit recovery, there is a critical need for rigorous evidence about the effective use of online credit recovery for high school students.”

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L.A. Unified has dramatically expanded its online and in-person credit recovery programs since 2015 to come closer to its goal of a 100% graduation rate, drawing concern that not all graduates have achieved the same level of subject knowledge. The results of this study, which will focus on roughly 3,000 students from about 15 high schools throughout the district, could answer some questions that critics have about how rigorous the online courses are.

The students in the study will all be sophomores in the 2017-18 or 2018-19 school years who failed either Algebra 1 or English 9.

They’ll be randomly split into either a traditional face-to-face course or a “prescriptive blended learning” class that uses material from online course provider Edgenuity Inc., taught with an L.A. Unified teacher in the classroom, said Jessica Heppen, the vice president of research and evaluation at AIR. In those classes, the teacher is responsible for providing individualized instruction in the places where the students need help.

The goal is to not just compare online and face-to-face credit recovery options, Heppen said, but also to see how online courses differ depending on the school and teacher. Ideally, the blended learning models should allow teachers to spend more time on individual students’ needs, but the researchers want to know “exactly how they do it and how much variation there is across courses and across schools,” Heppen said.

To compare the outcomes of online and in-person classes, researchers will look at factors such as students’ end-of-course scores, 11th-grade standardized test results, graduation rates and a student experience survey.

The study will build on a similar one that AIR researchers conducted in Chicago, comparing online Algebra 1 credit recovery to summer school. They determined the online course materials to be more rigorous and found that 76% of face-to-face students passed their credit recovery courses, compared with 66% of online students, Heppen said. But students in the face-to-face classes also scored better on an algebra assessment that AIR developed, and the two groups graduated at the same rates three years later.

The researchers and L.A. Unified haven’t yet finalized the list of participating schools, but they’ll be spread across the district, said Oscar Lafarga, the executive director of data and accountability for L.A. Unified.

“We do want to look at the efficacy of online credit recovery courses,” Lafarga said. This study is about “moving past reading research projects from another city or district and having the ability to have our own students be part of the research.”

Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli.

Output: A study in the Los Angeles Unified School District is to examine the efficacy of online educational credit recovery courses, following a $3.26m grant from the Department of Education. The aim of the study will be to determine the rigorousness of online courses that give high school students the chance to make up for failed exams compared to face-to-face classes. It will also explore how online courses differ between schools. A previous study in Chicago revealed 76% of face-to-face students passed, compared with 66% of online students. The students in the study will be those who failed either algebra or English.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Japanese farmer builds AI system to sort cucumbers
 Not much about Makoto Koike’s adult life suggests that he would be a farmer. Trained as an engineer, he spent most of his career in a busy urban section of Aichi Prefecture, Japan, near the headquarters of the Toyota Motor Corporation, writing software to control cars. Koike’s longtime hobby is tinkering with electronic kits and machines; he is not naturally an outdoorsy type. Yet, in 2014, at the age of thirty-three, he left his job and city life to move to his parents’ cucumber farm, in the greener prefecture of Shizuoka. “I thought I was getting old,” Koike told me. “I wanted to be close to my home and my family.”

The Koikes have been growing cucumbers in Kosai, a town wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the brackish Lake Hamana, for nearly fifty years. Their crop, which fills three small greenhouses, grows year-round. Koike’s father, Harumi, plants the seeds; Koike oversees their cultivation; and his mother, Masako, sorts the harvest. This last job is particularly important in Japan, which is famously discerning about its produce. Nice strawberries can fetch several dollars apiece in some markets, and a sublime cubic watermelon can go for hundreds. Vegetables hold a less privileged place than fruits, but supermarkets rarely stock produce that is at all irregular in shape or size. The Koikes send their better cucumbers, the ones that are straight and uniform in thickness, to wholesalers. The not-so-perfect ones go to local stands, where they are sold at half price. (“They taste the same,” Koike said.) Masako judges the vegetables one by one, separating them into bins. Though she devotes only half a second to each cucumber, the task takes up most of her work time; on some days, she goes through around four thousand of them.

The laborious process of categorizing the cucumbers had remained essentially the same for decades, until last spring, when Koike began developing a new approach. It was inspired, in part, by articles he read about AlphaGo, the first computer program ever to beat a human master of the game of Go. Developed by Google DeepMind, the program relied on deep learning, a method for making computations by arranging basic processing units into complex, layered networks, rather like the way that billions of neurons work together to produce the incomparable (for now) intelligence of the human brain. In the past several years, deep learning has proved exceptionally useful for finding patterns in big piles of data; it has been incorporated into Facebook’s facial-recognition algorithms, Amazon Alexa’s language processing, and autonomous cars’ navigation systems. In AlphaGo’s case, the program was fed thirty million images of positions from real games, which it used to help determine which kinds of moves work best. Koike hoped that a similar strategy might help him sort his family’s cucumbers.

Makoto Koike with his parents, Harumi and Masako, at the family’s cucumber farm, in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. The Koikes have been growing cucumbers for nearly fifty years. Photograph Courtesy Makoto Koike

Advanced A.I. techniques, including deep learning, have traditionally been the province of specialized researchers and moneyed software companies. Recently, though, some of the tech world’s biggest players—including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, and various universities—have released free, open-source versions of their tools, making A.I. accessible to small-time programmers who aren’t well-versed in the field, such as Koike. For his project, he used TensorFlow, which Google released to the public in 2015. He began by building a custom photo stand, which allowed him to photograph each cucumber from three angles. Then, to analyze the images, he adapted a popular piece of TensorFlow software used for recognizing handwritten numerals. Before he could turn the A.I. loose, though, Koike had to train it. He captured seven thousand photos of cucumbers that his mother had already sorted, then used the data to teach his software to recognize which vegetables belonged in which categories. Finally, he built an automated conveyor-belt system to move each cucumber from the photo stand to the bin designated by the program.

Koike completed his machine last year, and it works—to some degree. It sorts cucumbers with an accuracy of seventy per cent, which is low enough that they must subsequently be checked by hand. What’s more, the vegetables still need to be placed on the photo stand one by one. Koike’s mother, in other words, is in no immediate danger of being replaced, and thus far, she and her husband are none too impressed. “They are quite severe,” Koike said. “ ‘Oh, it’s not useful yet,’ ” they tell him. Tech enthusiasts, meanwhile, have had decidedly more positive reactions, and Koike has been invited to events such as the Maker Faire, in Tokyo, and the CeBIT expo, in Hanover, Germany. There are machines that work better and faster than Koike’s, but they are industrial-sized and -priced affairs. Before the democratization of deep learning, it would have been difficult for someone like him to design such an effective device himself.

Koike sees his system as an encouraging proof of concept, and he is currently at work on a new version, which he hopes will be capable of analyzing more than one cucumber at a time. He also plans to build a gentler conveyor system, to preserve the fragile prickles on the vegetables’ skin, which are considered a sign of freshness. He expects that, within a few years, his A.I. sorter will be nearly as accurate as his mother, freeing her up to do something else. Either way, he told me, he is back in Kosai for the long haul. “That’s the plan,” he said. “I’ll probably die as a farmer.” By the time that happens, the work may look very different.

Output: A Japanese farmer who left his city job as an engineer to return to his parents' cucumber farm has created an AI system to potentially replace the laborious task of sorting the vegetables manually. Makoto Koike used Google's TensorFlow to build the AI system, which at present has an accuracy rate of only 70% so each cucumber still has to be checked by hand – mostly by Koike's mother, who sometimes sorts up to 4,000 cucumbers a day. However, Koike hopes to improve his system enough to relieve his mother of her duties in the future.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Cancer Drug Price Increases Cost Medicaid Millions in Extra Spending, Analysis Shows
 An analysis by Kaiser Health News shows that Medicaid incurred billions of dollars in extra spending as a result of price increases for hundreds of common drugs from 2015 to 2016, including decades-old branded drugs and generics used to treat cancer.

The report, published Monday, lists 313 brand-name drugs and 67 generics that have had their prices raised in 2016, leading to a total of nearly $3.5 billion more in Medicaid spending compared with 2015. While generics are expected to drop in price over time, the price per unit for dozens of these drugs increased by 2- or 3-fold in 2016.

For instance, potassium phosphates have been used since the 1980s to treat low phosphate levels, including in patients receiving chemotherapy, but their cost to Medicaid is now $6.70 per unit, an increase of 290%. This price hike, which the report states is the result of a shortage that began with a manufacturing facility closure, cost Medicaid an extra $1.8 million in 2016.

Other cancer therapies on the list include temozolomide, an authorized generic oral chemotherapy drug, which was responsible for $2.2 million more in Medicaid spending in 2016. Unsurprisingly, branded drugs had more significant price increases than generics. For instance, the price increase of Neulasta, a brand-name biologic used to treat chemotherapy-associated neutropenia, resulted in $14.6 million in additional 2016 expenditures for Medicaid.

Medicaid’s enrollment total of nearly 69 million beneficiaries means that even small price increases can have large impacts. The painkiller naproxen sodium, sold over the counter as Aleve, saw its price per pill increase from $0.72 to $1.70, which translated into $10.7 million in additional Medicaid spending.

The report points out that generic status and length of time on market do not insulate drugs from price increases, especially if there are few or no comparable generic competitors available. The FDA has noted this occurrence and has recently stepped up its emphasis on generic drugs as an area where competition and innovation could help bring down prices.

“Too many patients are being priced out of the medicines they need,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, in a June blog post where he announced the development of the agency’s Drug Competition Action Plan and called out the ways that brand-name manufacturers game the regulatory system to block generic development.

The Action Plan outlined shortly thereafter seeks to encourage innovation by allowing an expedited review process for generic products with few or no competitors. The FDA also published a list of drug products without generics that have no patent barriers, as a guideline for manufacturers looking to produce a generic that would receive the new accelerated review.

This list includes several oncology drugs, such as chemotherapy agents carmustine, lomustine, and teniposide. Another drug on the list, nabilone, is used to treat chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.

The FDA’s announcement regarding the Action Plan said it had been “based on data that indicate that consumers see significant price reductions when there are multiple FDA-approved generics available.” As the Kaiser Health News report indicates, increased generic competition could also potentially alleviate the burden on the Medicaid program and taxpayers if it does result in lower drug prices.

Output: An analysis by Kaiser Health News found that Medicaid incurred billions of dollars in extra spending as a result of price increases for hundreds of common drugs from 2015 to 2016, including decades-old branded drugs and generics used to treat cancer.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Trump tweets up a storm on drug prices but delivers little change
 “His rhetoric is full of fire and fury, but so far the White House has not taken any real action to lower drug prices,” said David Mitchell, president of Patients for Affordable Drugs, which is pushing for policies at the state and federal level to lower drug prices.

To be sure, Trump’s campaign pledges on reducing drug prices had no buy-in from congressional Republicans who would have to pass legislation to enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices. But the president has authority to take certain steps on his own. He doesn’t need congressional approval, for instance, to move forward with drug importation, or to use Medicare to test new ways to pay for drugs. The administration also has broad authority to intervene when the government has invested in drug research but the manufacturer sets a price that puts it out of reach of many Americans.

Absent such concrete steps from his administration, many wrote off Trump’s tweets assailing Frazier as more of a personal feud than a sign Trump was preparing to take any action. While pharma stocks had nosedived in response to Trump’s remarks in January, they scarcely budged after his latest threats — a sign that investors wrote them off.

“We are still waiting for policy proposals from the White House that might match the rhetoric, but no one is holding their breath,” said John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, which represents more than 80 groups seeking health system reform, and executive director of the Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing, a coalition that includes health insurers, businesses like Walmart, physician groups and others pushing for drug pricing changes.

“Sounds like a rant, but not one with any policy intentions. At least for now,” said Ronny Gal, who advises pharmaceutical investors for investment bank Bernstein in New York City.

Most of the steps the White House is considering to tackle drug costs have received underwhelming reviews from those calling for lower prescription pricing and sighs of relief from the powerful pharmaceutical lobby.

A leaked draft of Trump’s executive order on drug prices, obtained by POLITICO earlier this summer, contained few policies that would substantially reduce drug costs.

For example, the draft calls for allowing federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid to tie payments for drugs to their “value,” as opposed to the volume purchased. The idea is directly promoted by the drug industry and both health policy experts and Wall Street believe it wouldn’t result in lower drug prices.

“We do not see how a drug company would lose in this effort,” wrote David Maris of Wells Fargo in a note to investors about the idea. Drug companies would simply price their products to make up for any losses that might ensue if a product doesn’t work as well as expected in certain patients.

“Odds are that outcomes-based contracts will do little to ameliorate the crushing cost of drugs in the U.S., and may delay reforms that actually link a drug’s price to its benefits,” wrote Anna Kaltenboeck and Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Center for Health Policy and Outcomes in an op-ed this summer.

The administration effort is led by Joe Grogan, director of health programs for the OMB, who spent the last five years as the head of federal affairs for Gilead Sciences — the drug company that helped ignite the drug pricing debate in 2013, when it set the price of a new hepatitis C treatment at more than $80,000 for a course of treatment.

Another adviser with strong pharmaceutical industry ties, Tomas Philipson, was appointed Monday to sit on Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Philipson, an economist at the University of Chicago, is also a co-founder of Precision Health Economics, a consultancy serving major drug companies like Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AbbVie that has been accused of blurring the lines of academia and advocacy for for-profit companies.

Media reports of the administration’s work on an executive order on drug pricing make it appear “that pharma has captured the process,” Mitchell said. “What I have seen does more to help pharma keep prices high than help patients by lowering the prices of drugs.”

The draft executive order also calls for the federal government to come up with ways to reduce out-of-pocket drug spending by consumers. On its face, the proposal may seem to benefit Americans’ pocketbooks, but critics worry this could raise costs to the government and taxpayers. Reductions in out-of-pocket spending don’t force overall price cuts to medicines. It means insurance premiums would likely have to rise to compensate for the lower out-of-pocket costs, while government health care bills would see no benefit.

Beyond the executive order, the Trump team has taken other steps that make people skeptical the administration is serious on drug pricing.

In July, Medicare proposed lowering the rate it reimburses hospitals and clinics that serve many low-income patients for administering costly drugs. Hospitals say this could impact their ability to treat uninsured or poorly insured patients, while drug companies would continue to receive the same amount for the products.

The administration says this policy should lead to a decline in out-of-pocket costs for seniors because Medicare patient co-pays are tied to the government reimbursement rate, but patients on private Medicare Advantage plans wouldn’t see any savings, nor would patients who supplement their Medicare insurance.

Hospitals say this is just another gift to drugmakers, who have been pushing for a rollback of the program that requires drug companies to give steep discounts on medicines to hospitals serving the poor for years. The draft executive order also calls for curtailing this program.

If there is one bright spot in the administration’s efforts on drug pricing, most point to new FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who has pledged to take several steps to speed cheaper generic drugs to market. He’s also looking at ways to prevent some anti-competitive behavior that brand-name drug companies use to delay competition from generics.

But most of Gottlieb’s ideas deal only with getting cheaper copycat medicines to market after government-mandated monopolies expire. These proposals do little to address the high cost of brand-new medicines — which is where the bulk of drug costs are felt.

Brand-name drugs account for about 12 percent of the medicines sold in the U.S. but about 80 percent or more of the spending on drugs, said Aaron Kesselheim, who studies the costs of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Democrats who once saw the president as an unusual Republican ally on the topic say they are not hopeful he is willing to fight the drug industry.

“On the campaign trail, he said he was all for it. In the Oval Office, he said he was all for it. Fast forward to today, and he has provided zero relief to Americans struggling to pay for their medicine,” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), who chairs the House Democrats’ task force on drug pricing and who met with Trump in March to enlist his support for a bill, H.R. 1776 (115), that he was co-sponsoring with Rep. Elijah Cummings, also a Democrat.

Output: President Donald Trump’s condemnation on Twitter Monday of Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier for what he called “RIPOFF DRUG PRICES” was just his latest rebuke of the drug industry for its soaring prices. But six months into his administration, the president’s rhetoric bears little resemblance to his record.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
SCAN Health Plan celebrates 40 years of senior care in Long Beach
 SCAN Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicare Advantage provider, is commemorating 40 years of activity in Long Beach after its founding by a group of local seniors who had had it with the kinds of services they were getting from other providers.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” SCAN Chief Executive Chris Wing said. “They were unhappy, not with their health care, per se, but with social services.”

SCAN traces its founding to the efforts of those seniors’ to improve services in 1977. The organization did not function as a health plan in its earliest form. Initially, as the Long Beach Area Geriatric Health Care Council, its founding purpose was to provide case work to seniors seeking aid.

The organization also used the name SCAN, or Senior Care Action Network, in its early days and claims May 1978 as the first time when the organization’s service coordination efforts were available for an entire month.

SCAN entered the health plan business in the mid-1980s after evolving into a social health maintenance organization.

By 1990, about 2,500 seniors living in the Long Beach area obtained Medicare plans through membership in the local organization. SCAN had some 37,000 members in 2000 and now counts 186,000 members. Several plan members who have achieved the age of 100 are depicted in portraits that decorate the walls of the nonprofit’s Kilroy Airport Way headquarters.

Besides its management of health plans, the current version of SCAN also collaborates with university researchers and others to publish studies that Wing said he is hopeful will improve geriatric care from coast to coast.

“Every pilot we do, we want to have an academic medical center verify our outcome,” Wing said.

This decade’s leadership changes

Wing has held his job with the nonprofit since 2011. He came to the Long Beach nonprofit from HealthCare Partners, a for-profit insurer headquartered in El Segundo.

His arrival came in the midst of a difficult time for SCAN. The year after he was hired, the nonprofit reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice requiring payment of more than $320 million to resolve claims the company accepted overpayments for Medi-Cal and Medicare patients. The settlements followed a multi-agency investigation that revealed actuarial errors the government blamed for Medi-Cal overpayments being made during a time that spanned from 1985 to 2008. A whistleblower also filed a case in 2009 that alleged SCAN undertook actions that led to Medicare overpayments.

SCAN’s leadership went through an overhaul of its senior managers shortly after Wing arrived. The new faces included those of president Bill Roth and chief administrative officer Nancy Monk. Roth is an executive qualified to be SCAN’s next CEO, and Monk is the leader who rebuilt the nonprofit’s compliance program, Wing said

“We brought in some good people. They brought in some good people,” he said.

Research outcomes

SCAN announced this past May that research, still in progress, assessed the effectiveness of a program intended to provide at-home mental health care to seniors.

“Our goal is to overcome barriers to getting mental health treatment,” said Dr. Soo Borson, one of the researchers and a former professor at University of Washington School of Medicine.

Researchers worked with patients involved with SCAN’s Independence at Home program to examine a program that involved sending licensed social workers or therapists to provide in-home care to patients living with persistent, mild- to moderate-depression. Seniors and relatives providing unpaid care to seniors could both receive therapies free of charge.

The cost of care is one of the barriers Borson said researchers want to eliminate. Language barriers and some seniors’ lack of access to personal transportation are others.

Preliminary assessments for the roughly 90 patients who completed the first phase of treatment showed an amelioration of depression and anxiety levels, according to SCAN’s reported results.

Borson expressed optimism other insurers willing to foot the bills for at-home mental health care may also see positive results and “make this a viable way of giving back.”

Output: SCAN Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicare Advantage provider, is commemorating 40 years of activity in Long Beach after its founding by a group of local seniors who had had it with the kinds of services they were getting from other providers.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
California faces shortage of primary-care doctors
 Tracy Seipel

San Jose Mercury News

California is heading for a serious shortfall of primary care doctors, physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners over the next few decades — a crisis that could force patients to seek medical help for routine illnesses at hospital emergency rooms instead, a new study released Tuesday warns.

That alternative is among the most troubling scenarios if a predicted shortage of 4,700 primary care clinicians occurs in California by 2025, according to authors of the UC San Francisco Healthforce Center report.

“We need to ask our (state) leaders: What can we do now to avoid a crisis in the future?’’ said Janet Coffman, associate professor of health policy at USCF, and one of the study’s authors.

The projected deficits come as more Californians have obtained health insurance since the Affordable Care Act kicked into gear in 2014. But the coming decades also will witness large numbers of primary care doctors and nurse practitioners reaching retirement age, the authors say.

Primary care clinicians are the front line in patient care, said Coffman, so when people with chronic conditions have good access to primary care, ”they tend to use the emergency room departments and the hospitals less.’’

The study forecasts that the state would need about 4,700 additional primary care clinicians in 2025 and about 4,100 more clinicians in 2030 to meet demand.

The Central Valley, Central Coast and Southern border regions — which Coffman said have fewer opportunities for primary care education and training — will experience the worst shortages, the study predicted.

Forecasts suggest the first two areas will have about 71 primary care clinicians per 100,000 residents, while the Southern border region will have 80 per 100,000 residents, compared to the state average of 86 clinicians per 100,000 residents.

By comparison, the greater Bay Area is expected to fare better than most other regions of the state, she said.

“We have more training programs for primary care clinicians,’’ Coffman said, including those at UCSF, Stanford, Kaiser Permanente and the Veterans Affairs, among others.

And evidence shows that most family physicians end up practicing within 100 miles of where they train by the time they graduate from residencies in their late 20s and early 30s.

“That’s a time you become more settled,’’ said Coffman.

Still, the biggest challenge continues to be drawing people into primary care careers, when specialty medicine careers usually pay better and may offer more flexible hours, she added.

The study suggests a number of strategies to address the coming shortage, including: actively recruiting primary care doctors to practice in California; expanding primary care residency programs, particularly in the regions at greatest risk for long-term shortages, and allowing nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants to work at the highest level of their education and knowledge.

Nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants, for example, make up a larger share of the primary care workforce in rural regions, where primary care doctors are in short supply.

At the California Academy of Family Physicians, Dr. Jeremy Fish said the group’s members are pleased to see the UCSF study is “taking seriously the issue of the primary care shortage’’ that the academy has warned about for years.

“The shortage of primary care clinicians likely will get worse unless the state remains committed to two specific initiatives it began this year,’’ said Fish.

That includes higher Medi-Cal reimbursements for doctors, and more funding for primary care and emergency medicine physician residency programs, generated by Proposition 56 revenue, which increased taxes on tobacco products. An additional $100 million appropriation by the state legislature will also help fund primary care residencies.

Tuesday’s report is the second in a series of three UCSF Healthforce Center reports assessing the adequacy of the state’s primary care workforce, and identifying policies that address the future employment gaps.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

Output: California is heading for a serious shortfall of primary care doctors, physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners over the next few decades — a crisis that could force patients to seek medical help for routine illnesses at hospital emergency rooms instead, a new study released Tuesday warns.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Supervolcanoes could become vital source of lithium for batteries
 The Stanford team has come up with a new technique to detect lithium in volcanic lakes that have appeared in calderas – holes in the ground that were created when supervolcanoes erupted, displacing huge quantities of lava.

Lithium, found in the volcanic deposits, has been drawn out into the lake over thousands of years, and gathered as a clay in the lake. But some lakes are more lithium-rich than others, depending on the original magma content, and the key is being able to identify which ones.

“Because lithium is a very volatile element, it is extremely difficult to measure,” Tom Benson, lead author of the study, says. “You can't simply measure the whole-rock chemical composition of a volcanic rock, like volcanologists typically do.”

Instead, the team worked out a way to identify how much lithium was in the lake. By extracting tiny blobs of magma that had been trapped in crystals, heating them up and quenching them, Benson could identify the lithium content in the magma.

The process was fiddly and time-consuming, but it helped reveal a simpler way to find lithium. “What this research shows is that the zirconium content of the magmas show a nearly linear relationship with lithium,” says Benson. “When the lithium content of the magma is high, the zirconium content is low, and vice-versa.” And zirconium is much easier to measure because it is non-volatile.

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The study was based in the US, but the whole world will be facing similar challenges in the future. For example, in the UK, “the grid-connected energy storage market is expected to expand from total installed capacity of 3 GW at the end of 2016 to 28 GW by 2022,” Marek Kubik, a market director for energy storage systems at AES, says.

“It’s a neat study and very interesting,” adds professor Stephen Piercey, from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, who was not involved in the study. “Their use of micro chemical methods provide a means of documenting what types of volcanoes may have been enriched in lithium, and by association what supervolcanic environments might have the potential for lithium redistribution... as potential sources for lithium extraction.”

People living around volcanoes, in places like Iceland, have been harnessing their energy for over a hundred years, using steam from geothermal vents to drive turbines. However, this only works around active volcanoes.

“The lithium deposits I discuss in this manuscript only occur in old, dormant volcanoes where the caldera lake has drained and exposed the old lake sediments,” says Benson.

“Geothermal is used to provide the energy, and lithium can store the energy; they are not in competition and can actually really complement each other,” he adds. “I think it is important to use both volcanic resources as we strive to develop a global clean energy portfolio.”

The research is published in Nature Communications.

Output: Scientists at Stanford University have developed a simple method for detecting levels of lithium in the holes in the ground created when supervolcanoes erupted, known as calderas. The team extracted tiny blobs of magma from volcanic lakes created by the now dormant supervolcanoes and analysed the zirconium levels, knowing if they were high, the lithium concentration would be low – and vice versa. The results suggested dormant supervolcanoes around the world could provide rich sources of lithium for the batteries used in electric vehicles.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
HHS supports Affordable Care Act waivers to shore up Medicaid, reduce premiums
 While the administration supports an end the Affordable Care Act and the program's Medicaid expansion, officials are providing funds to shore up Medicaid coverage and to offer residents in individual states relief from higher premiums.

The Department of Health and Human Services supports two sets of ACA waivers that provide funding to states, which in turn benefits hospitals.

[Also: Fitch: States will take the lead on Medicaid reform despite ACA repeal and replace failure]

In Florida, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently approved a renewal of a Section 1115 waiver. Under the program, federal funding for Florida's low-income pool will increase from $607 million to $1.5 billion. Hospitals must put up matching funds through their local government or special taxing districts.

"This extension has a positive and direct impact on people's lives and their ability to access care," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said. "Florida's program offers an innovative and realistic pathway to tackling some of Medicaid's biggest challenges."

The 1115 waiver is credit positive for the state's not-for-profit and public hospitals because it will help them defray the cost of providing services to uninsured patients, Moody's said in a report released Monday.

The largest beneficiaries include safety-net hospitals, children's hospitals and providers treating a high percentage of Medicaid, uninsured and underinsured patients. Hospitals are able to access funds for uncompensated care through the federally matched low-income pool.

Shands Jacksonville Medical Center and the Public Health Trust of Miami-Dade County in Florida are among the hospitals standing to benefit the most from the waiver extension because they treat a high percentage of low-income patients and because low-income pool funding accounts for the majority of their cash flow, according to Moody's.

Florida is one of 19 states that elected not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Medicaid expansion also cut down on the amount of uncompensated care provided by hospitals as more people gained coverage. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia adopted Medicaid expansion.

However, the new administration supports waivers, though the federal government is still picking up the tab for coverage.

Alaska will get $323 million over the next five years under a Section 1332 waiver of ACA requirements, according to Politico.

Section 1332 waivers allow states to design state-operated reinsurance programs or high-risk pools.

The Alaskan waiver puts downward pressure on premium increases in the state's individual market, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Without 1332, Alaskan consumers were looking at premium hikes of 40 percent.

[Also: Feds approve Alaska waiver to the Affordable Care Act for high-risk pool reinsurance program]

"State Innovation Waivers are just one step of many we are taking to inaugurate a new era of state flexibility and innovation in healthcare, and we look forward to more productive work with our state partners," Price said in July.

Four other states -- Oklahoma, Oregon, Minnesota and Iowa -- have submitted waiver applications. New Hampshire and Maine are considering similar programs, according to the Politico report.

Twitter: @SusanJMorse

Output: While the administration supports an end the Affordable Care Act and the program's Medicaid expansion, officials are providing funds to shore up Medicaid coverage and to offer residents in individual states relief from higher premiums.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Obamacare’s Bare County Problem Looks Mostly Solved, for Now
 A few months ago, it looked as if large swaths of the country might end up without any insurers willing to sell Obamacare insurance in 2018. But in the last few weeks the “bare county” problem, which President Trump had cited as a sign the markets were failing, has nearly solved itself.

Now, every county in the nation has at least one insurer currently willing to sell coverage for next year.

The bare county problem had been an unplanned policy hole in Obamacare, which depends on private companies to provide insurance to people who don’t get coverage through a government program or work. The federal government provides subsidies on a sliding scale to help middle-income Americans pay their premiums, but it does not force insurers to offer coverage if they don’t want to. For a while, it seemed there would be a smattering of mostly rural places in the country where no company saw a reason to participate in 2018.

Output: A few months ago, it looked as if large swaths of the country might end up without any insurers willing to sell Obamacare insurance in 2018. But in the last few weeks the “bare county” problem, which President Trump had cited as a sign the markets were failing, has nearly solved itself.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Trump Threat to Obamacare Would Send Premiums and Deficits Higher
 WASHINGTON — Premiums for the most popular health insurance plans would shoot up 20 percent next year, and federal budget deficits would increase by $194 billion in the coming decade, if President Trump carried out his threat to end certain subsidies paid to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

The subsidies reimburse insurers for reducing deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs that low-income people pay when they visit doctors, fill prescriptions or receive care in hospitals.

Even before efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act collapsed in the Senate last month, Mr. Trump began threatening to stop paying the subsidies, known as cost-sharing reductions. He said the health care law would “implode” and Democrats would have no choice but to negotiate a replacement plan. Mr. Trump described his strategy as, “Let Obamacare implode, then deal.”

Those threats continue, though the Trump administration has paid the subsidies each month.

The nonpartisan budget office has now quantified the cost of the threats and potentially handed Democrats a weapon to force Congress and the administration to keep the money flowing.

Output: Premiums for the most popular health insurance plans would shoot up 20 percent next year, and federal budget deficits would increase by $194 billion in the coming decade, if President Trump carried out his threat to end certain subsidies paid to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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AUG 15MORE ON MEDICARE & MEDICAIDCMS cancels mandatory episode payment models, cuts participation in joint replacement model
 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday officially announced it is pulling back from mandatory bundled payment models set up under the Obama administration.

CMS is proposing to cancel the episode payment models and the cardiac rehabilitation incentive payment model, which were scheduled to begin on January 1, 2018.

[Also: Trump administration, HHS stepping away from Affordable Care Act promotion, bundled payments]

CMS is also reducing the number of mandatory geographic areas participating in the comprehensive care for joint replacement model, from 67 to 34.

Participants from the 33 remaining areas may take part on a voluntary basis, CMS said. Voluntary participation in the CJR model is to allow for low volume and rural hospitals.

Eliminating these models gives CMS greater flexibility to design and test innovations that will improve quality and care coordination across the inpatient and post-acute-care spectrum, the agency said.

"Changing the scope of these models allows CMS to test and evaluate improvements in care processes that will improve quality, reduce costs, and ease burdens on hospitals," said CMS Administrator Seema Verma. "Stakeholders have asked for more input on the design of these models. These changes make this possible and give CMS maximum flexibility to test other episode-based models that will bring about innovation and provide better care for Medicare beneficiaries."

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a physician, has long opposed mandatory bundled initiatives.

[Also: CMS should retain mandatory payment bundles, health policy experts say]

Moving forward, CMS expects to increase opportunities for providers to participate in voluntary initiatives rather than large mandatory episode payment model efforts, including additional voluntary episode-based payment models, the agency said.

The episode payment models and the cardiac rehab incentive models were designed as mandatory payment models to test the effects of bundling cardiac and orthopedic care beginning in 2018.

[Also: Patrick Conway is leaving CMS to head Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina]

They were established by CMS's Innovation Center, headed by Patrick Conway, MD, who last week announced he was leaving to lead Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina as of Oct. 1. Conway also served under the Obama administration.

Public comment is due by October 16.

Output: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday officially announced it is pulling back from mandatory bundled payment models set up under the Obama administration.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
State standards do little to improve access to specialists in Medicaid
 Credit: Dreamstime

More needs to be done to eliminate the gap in access to specialty care for Medicaid patients, a new Yale School of Public Health study in JAMA Internal Medicine concludes.

Medicaid patients nationwide have consistently reported less access to specialist medical care than patients with other types of coverage. While some federal regulations have been aimed at improving access to primary care, ensuring access to specialty care has largely been left to state and local agencies with national efforts lagging far behind.

As a result, many low-income patients find themselves without adequate access to specialty care. This is particularly concerning because, as more adults have joined Medicaid in recent years through the Affordable Care Act, many have chronic conditions that require coordinated specialty care.

"As millions of individuals have gained health insurance coverage through Medicaid, it is increasingly important that we facilitate access to the full spectrum of services that may be needed by this population. Our study demonstrates that aspirational policies without appropriate monitoring or enforcement are limited in their capacity to ensure access," said Assistant Professor Chima Ndumele, Ph.D., the study's lead author.

To attempt to remedy this, new federal regulations are set to take effect in 2018 that will require Medicaid managed care plans in every state to set standards for specialty care access. These planned standards will include limits on wait time to see a specialist, as well as on distance a patient have to travel to a specialist appointment.

Ndumele said the multistate study is the first to compare access to specialty care for Medicaid enrollees before and after the implementation of the types of regulation that are set to take effect next year. Using data from the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, covering the years 2005-2011, the research team compared responses from Medicaid enrollees regarding access to specialty care in five states that had previously adopted standards with the responses of both commercial beneficiaries in the same states, as well as Medicaid enrollees in matched control states where standards already existed.

The results revealed little evidence that these standards narrowed the gap in access to specialty care for Medicaid enrollees: overall, 69 percent of Medicaid enrollees and 75 percent of commercial beneficiaries in states without access standards reported that it was easy to get an appointment with a specialist prior to the implementation of access standards, and this gap between Medicaid and commercially insured enrollees persisted after the adoption of standards.

The findings suggest that the upcoming new regulations alone may do little to improve access, and additional interventions will likely be needed.

Output: More needs to be done to eliminate the gap in access to specialty care for Medicaid patients, a new Yale School of Public Health study in JAMA Internal Medicine concludes. Medicaid patients nationwide have consistently reported less access to specialist medical care than patients with other types of coverage.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Shipper denied claim for hijacked cargo under 'known loss' clause
 In I.T.N. Consolidators Inc v Northern Marine Underwriters Ltd, 2017 WL 2804888 (11th Cir. June 28, 2017), the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit applied the “known loss doctrine” to deny coverage for a hijacked cargo shipment that was known by the policyholder to be lost prior to purchasing the insurance coverage, report Jason P Minkin and Brian J Watson of BatesCarey LLP in Chicago.

Northern Marine sold an open cover policy to freight forwarder ITN, and under the policy ITN could insure as many or as few cargo shipments as it chose.

In November 2007 ITN learned that it failed to obtain insurance coverage for a shipment that had been hijacked. After the hijacking, ITN filed a standard form to obtain coverage for the shipment under the open policy, and then filed a claim for coverage, which Northern Marine denied. In response, ITN filed suit against Northern Marine in federal court in Florida.

The district court granted summary judgment to Northern Marine, holding that the open cover policy did not cover known losses, such as the one at issue here. ITN appealed. On initial review, the appellate court agreed that the open cover policy did not cover known losses, but remanded the case to the district court to consider whether a new contract had been formed whereby Northern Marine agreed to insure the known loss in exchange for some new consideration.

On remand, the district court entered summary judgment for ITN, finding that ITN’s payment of premium after it learned of the hijacking constituted an offer to enter a new insurance contract that covered the known loss, which Northern Marine accepted by retaining the premium and continuing to do business with ITN after the claim.

Northern Marine appealed, arguing that, under new case law reflecting a change in Florida law prohibiting coverage for known losses as against public policy, there was no coverage for the hijacked shipment. The appellate court agreed, explaining that insurance necessarily involves contingencies such that the payment of a non-contingent loss is contrary to the very concept of insurance.

The appellate court pointed out that there was a public policy of protecting the public from insolvent insurers. The rule against insuring a known loss was part of that public policy, because such insurance contracts risk the solvency of the insurer. Contracts to insure against the known loss were, the appellate court said, against public policy regardless of whether an insurer knows about the loss before it agrees to the contract. Accordingly it was ruled that the policy in this case was unenforceable as a matter of Florida public policy. http://www.batescarey.com/

Output: Freight forwarder ITN Consolidators was denied an insurance claim for a hijacked cargo shipment when a US Court of Appeals applied the "known loss doctrine", arguing that the company was aware of the theft before seeking coverage from insurer Northern Marine Underwriters. The court heard that ITN had taken out an open cover policy with NMU but found it hadn't covered the the lost shipment. It then filled in a coverage form and claimed for the loss, which NMU denied. The court said the case touched on public policy as the doctrine existed to protect insured parties from insolvent insurers.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Australia's Cyclone Debbie insurance loss tally rises to $1.1bn
 According to the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) the insurance and reinsurance industry loss due to Cyclone Debbie has now officially reached AU $1.4 billion (around US $1.1 bn), after the tally of almost 66,000 claims was counted.

The new total released this morning from the ICA includes claims covering a wide swathe of Australia that was impacted by Cyclone Debbie, from far north Queensland to northern New South Wales.

The total remains below the expectations of some in the industry, reinsurance giant Munich Re said that it expects the eventual industry loss from Cyclone Debbie will hit US $1.4 billion, which suggests there will be more claims filed, or that current claims estimates are set to continue rising.

The latest figure is aligned with the latest estimate from Zurich-based catastrophe risk data aggregator PERILS AG, which at the latest update raised its estimate of insurance and reinsurance losses due to Debbie to AU $1.411 billion.

In recent days a number of the world’s largest reinsurance firms have said that they saw rates increase for treaties that were affected by losses from Cyclone Debbie at the recent mid-year renewals.

However, loss free accounts remained largely flat, so it appears that the loss from Debbie has not been sufficient to cause any major turn in reinsurance pricing for Australian accounts.

On that note, the ICA reported that an Australian Senate report insurance has supported calls for the Federal Government to invest at least $200 million a year in natural disaster mitigation and resilience measures, while ICA CEO Rob Whelan said that a report concluded that insurance premiums appropriately reflected the level of risk in Australia .

Risk commensurate pricing is a hot topic right now, given the rapid softening seen in reinsurance markets. Primary insurance lines have not experienced the same levels of softening, but in Australia there have been concerns over the years whether the true catastrophe and weather exposure was being priced in.

Cyclone Debbie struck parts of Queensland and New South Wales, Australia between March 28th 2017 and early April, with the remnant low from the storm also impacted the North Island of New Zealand with rainfall and flooding, causing property damage there as well.

Reinsurance companies have reported losses due to the event, and some ILS fund managers have experienced relatively small hits to collateralized reinsurance contracts and vehicles that have exposure.

At this time it’s uncertain whether any reinsurer sidecars will pass on any of the Debbie losses to third-party capital. However with Hannover Re reporting it has passed on some of its claims to retrocessionaires, while other reinsurers are likely to have done so as well, there is a good chance the capital markets will pay a reasonable slice of the total loss.

Output: Cyclone Debbie, which tore through northern Australia in March and April, notched up $1.1bn in insurance and reinsurance losses, lower than some insurers had anticipated. The latest figures from the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) account for 66,000 claims resulting from rainfall and flooding, which caused massive property damage. Reinsurer Munich Re said it had expected the losses to total $1.4bn, implying that claims will continue to roll in.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Humberts launches online letting agent using Propoly software
 Humberts Lettings Direct launches its new service today and is working with PropTech company Propoly. In February this company was reported to have won £600,000 investment from Countrywide: a pitch to further potential investors on its behalf by Angel Investment Network claimed that Propoly cut out letting agents.

Humberts has launched an online-only lettings option for landlords with a PropTech firm which has previously operated a service described as ‘cutting out letting agents.’

Humberts Lettings Direct costs landlords £199 plus VAT and, controversially, includes marketing the property on OnTheMarket - even though this portal has operated a long-standing policy of not allowing online-only listings.

HLD will also list its online-only properties on Rightmove and on Propoly’s own website.

HLD’s service also includes preparation of a tenancy agreement, registering a deposit, tenant reference, legal protection insurance and access to another online portal which Humberts’ launch statement describes as being “an online portal for landlord/tenant interactions.”

The agency says: “If at any stage a landlord wishes to move over to the traditional Humberts Lettings department (that is, they need extremely detailed advice or they wish to have a full valuation, viewings, negotiation service and continued management) Humberts will charge in the traditional way but will deduct from the fee the £199 already received.”

This follows a similar model to that operated in the sales field for some time by some Countrywide branches.

HLD and the agency’s traditional lettings department are being headed up by Suzanne Diamond, who previously led a 21-branch lettings operation at Curchods.

“Humberts Lettings Direct department will be run from a central location with an experienced manager and team – landlords using this small fixed fee service will have access to experienced professionals via phone or email to ensure a good level of support” she says.

“The Humberts traditional lettings service is available from all of our 23 sales branches across the UK and will launch with no tenant administration fees. The two departments will have separate but complementary branding.”

In recent months Humberts has attempted to shed its rural-centric traditional image.

In the spring it announced the opening of a central London office and earlier this summer revealed it had attracted “significant investment from a Gulf consortium” to “strengthen the brand via traditional expansion and investment in technology.”

Output: Estate agency Humberts has partnered with proptech firm Propoly to launch online service Humberts Lettings Direct, according to a company statement. For £199 ($256) plus VAT, landlords have access to preparation of a tenancy agreement, registering a deposit, tenant reference, and legal protection insurance. Online-only properties will be listed on Rightmove, Propoly’s own website and OnTheMarket, despite the latter's policy of refusing online-only listings.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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World Bank-backed catastrophe risk scheme launched in Philippines
 WASHINGTON DC, August 15, 2017—A new catastrophe risk insurance program to help the Philippines better respond to losses from climate and disaster risks was launched by the Government of the Philippines, supported by the World Bank (IBRD, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the U.K. Department for International Development.

The program provides the Philippine peso equivalent of US$206 million in coverage against losses from major typhoons and earthquakes to national government assets, and to 25 participating provinces against losses from major typhoons. Insurance payouts are made when pre-defined parametric triggers are met.

The Philippines is among the world’s most vulnerable countries to natural disasters. The country is expected to incur, on average, US$3.5 billion in asset losses each year due to typhoons and earthquakes.

“Financial shocks caused by natural disasters undermine economic growth and poverty reduction,” said Joaquim Levy, Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank Group. “This new insurance program illustrates how the World Bank Group can leverage capital from the market to help governments receive fast cash injections for emergency response and to sustain essential services in times of crisis, empowering local governments to more effectively assist their citizens.”

“This initiative is a major advancement in the Philippines’ efforts to bolster its resilience,” said Mara Warwick, World Bank Country Director for the Philippines. “It demonstrates the global leadership of the country in developing innovative financial solutions to mitigate the financial impacts of extreme climate and weather related events, as well as major earthquakes.”

Under the program, the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), a government-owned insurance agency, provides the government and the 25 participating provinces with catastrophe risk insurance. IBRD acts as an intermediary to transfer GSIS’s risk to a panel of international reinsurers which were selected through a competitive bidding process – Nephila, Swiss Re, Munich Re via the subsidiary NewRe, Axa, and Hannover Re. Air Worldwide provides the underlying risk modeling for the transaction.

The program is the first of its kind in the Philippines and builds on six years of intensive partnership with the World Bank, including the preparation of the first catastrophe risk model for the country and the adoption of a Disaster Risk Finance Strategy by the Department of Finance. This is the first time that the World Bank has entered into a reinsurance agreement with a governmental agency, and the first time it is executing a catastrophe risk transaction in local currency.

This new insurance program will support the country in responding to impacts of severe natural disasters. It acts as the last line of defense, complementing other funding sources such as the national and local disaster risk reduction management funds and contingent credit that protect against less severe natural disasters.

Since 2009, the World Bank has issued, hedged, or facilitated over US$2.5 billion in transactions to transfer earthquake, wind, drought-related and pandemic risks from its borrowing member countries to the capital markets.

Output: The Philippine government has launched the country’s first catastrophe risk insurance programme, supported by the World Bank and UK Department for International Development. The government and 25 participating regions will be covered for the peso equivalent of $206m for losses incurred in the event of a natural catastrophe, with parametric triggers predefined to determine payouts. The insurance will be provided by the Government Service Insurance System, and the risk transferred to a panel of reinsurers selected by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The southeast Asian archipelago is expected to incur an average of $3.5bn worth of losses annually from typhoons and earthquakes.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Mobile take-up of proptech depends on user journey and security
 Our entire lives are going mobile, there’s an argument to say we’re already there, so my suggesting that property should go mobile may seem pretty obvious. But the ‘mobile’ I’m thinking about isn’t limited to viewing listings on an app or receiving live notifications of new matches.

Last week, I had one of those experiences and, above everything else, it’s confirmed my belief that the sooner property goes mobile, the better.

I’m excited to write this piece. I love it when something comes along and delivers that genuine thrill; the thrill of experiencing a game changer.

I’m talking about the entire lifecycle of a property, from the moment it arrives on the market to that which the keys are handed over, and everything in between. That’s my definition of truly mobile.

It’s a tall order, and leans heavily on the hope that the general public is ready to place enough faith in their smartphone as to use it as their primary tool when house hunting. The way I see it, it’s a potential obstacle that can be overcome with a combination of two things: security and user experience.

When it comes to security, it’s simply a case of winning user trust. Many people still have doubts about mobile security, especially with high profile cases of cloud hacking and email leaks.

Users of Facebook Marketplace, for example, where, if you want, you can sell your house via social media, have received stark warnings about possible security flaws in the platform.

All of these stories combine and no doubt plant significant seeds of doubt in the consumer’s mind. The technology required to secure mobile activity is, more or less, available, and educating the wider the market will go a long to solve the trust issue.

The more interesting side of things, in my opinion, is the perfection of the user experience...

The UX will be the life or death of any mobile product. If it doesn’t make life easier, people just won’t use it. Last week I had the pleasure of experiencing a new mobile service that demonstrates perfectly the standard of UX we should be aspiring to. It comes from virtual reality tours company, EyeSpy 360, and it’s called EyeSpy Live.

Another level of virtual tours

Launching in September, EyeSpy Live is a platform, available across all mobile and desktop devices, that takes remote house viewings to a whole new level. To quote their own announcement of the platform:

Rather than simply taking a virtual tour around a property, EYESPY LIVE allows agents to join the client in a video chat, where both parties can talk to one another whilst taking the virtual tour. It’s exactly like a property viewing in person, but without actually having to leave the house or office.

I tried it and I can honestly say, it’s brilliant. You can watch, in the video at the bottom of this piece, as I am guided through my very first tour.

There’s also a lot of chat on the video, between myself and EyeSpy CEO, Andrew Nicholls, about exactly how the platform works, so I really recommend watching it. This is a great example of how a good user experience elevates one product above the rest.

The agent and the client can both join the tour from independent locations, and both parties have control of movement.

You can step outside and view the property’s exterior, as well as explore the surrounding area. You can even leave notes and messages throughout the property, perhaps reminders for things that you and your partner should discuss when you take another virtual tour, just the two of you, at a later date.

Mobile contracts

EyeSpy Live isn’t the only piece of tech helping take mobile property to the next level. News was announced recently of the first ever property contract to be exchanged on a mobile phone. To quote the Press Release:

In yet another leading development by the clicktopurchase platform, a London agent has accepted a binding offer on his mobile phone...the property in question was a retail investment in Weymouth town centre, let to SportsDirect.com Retail Limited, available at an asking price of £900,000 at singerviellesales.com.

If you like, you can watch the historic moment for yourself in this video.

Clicktopurchase has found success in digitising the contract exchanges required for property sales. By taking their technology and ramping it up a gear, they have proven that the mobile phone is a perfectly viable way of conducting transactions and closing deals.

Fruitful and accessible

Going mobile is, I believe, the most fruitful goal for property to pursue. It reduces costs, streamlines lengthy processes and improves customer service; it’s flexible, it’s universal, it’s inclusive; it maximises returns and it’s constantly accessible.

But it’s always important to remember, the best property technology works hard to keep human interaction at its heart.

When it comes to taking property mobile, the goal should not be to replace real people with technology, but to clear the obstacles that currently inhibit interaction between agent and client.

The most prominent of these obstacles are distance and time; by going truly mobile, property can overcome them both.

*James Dearsley is founder of the Digital Marketing Bureau and a PropTech communicator. To sign up to James’ Sunday PropTech Review, click here.

Output: The smartphone could be the key to overcoming the property sector's biggest hurdles, with new technology offering secure and exciting user experiences on a mobile platform, according to James Dearsley, founder of the Digital Marketing Bureau. He cited the recent exchange of binding property contracts via mobile as a way of streamlining the buying process, while virtual tours of homes that include real-time interaction with estate agents could offer a way to solve distance-related issues and improve customer service.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Four Dutch airports aim for 100% renewable energy by 2018
 It’s well-documented that airplanes contribute heftily to global carbon dioxide emissions. But what about airports?

From their fluorescent lighting to their perpetually-moving walkways, airports themselves also use large amounts of energy.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s 12th busiest airport, which receives more than 60 million people each year, is no exception. In a given year, the airport uses about about 175 million Kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of 50,000 households.

Take Action: Educating Girls Strengthens the Global Fight Against Climate Change

But now, Schiphol, along with three other Dutch airports, is launching a ~ pilot ~ program to reduce its environmental footprint.

Embed from Getty Images

These four airports — Schiphol, Rotterdam The Hague Airport, Eindhoven Airport and Lelystad Airport — will run exclusively on renewable energy produced in the Netherlands beginning Jan. 1, 2018, the Royal Schiphol Group announced in a statement Tuesday.

“For our new energy contract, we wanted nothing but sustainable power generated in the Netherlands,” Jos Nijhuis, President and CEO of Royal Schiphol Group, said in the statements. “After all, one thing is certain: aviation can and must be made more sustainable.”

The renewable energy will be delivered through Eneco Group, a sustainable energy company, who signed off on a 15-year contract with Royal Schiphol Group.

By 2020, all of the energy will come from newly-build Dutch wind farms. Until then, the energy will come through a combination of newly-built wind farms, such as one in the municipality of Vianen, and already-existing sources of renewable energy within the country, the group said.

Embed from Getty Images

“We feel that the most important elements of this collaboration with Eneco are that all the Schiphol Group airports are involved and that additional sustainable energy sources will be developed in the Netherlands,” Nijhuis said. “This will allow our airports to increase their sustainability and offer economic benefits.”

Read More: These Hybrid-Electric Planes Are Revolutionizing the Future of Air Travel

When it comes to renewable energy, the Netherlands is charting a bold path. The country plans to completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and to have 16% of its energy produced through sustainable sources by 2023, according to CNBC.

In June, the Netherlands announced that 100% of its trains now run on renewable energy, a full year earlier than government officials had previously announced it would.

The Global Goals for Sustainable Development enshrine affordable and clean energy as one of 17 goals for eliminating extreme poverty.

Since 1990, the world’s output of carbon dioxide has been cut by nearly half thanks to advances in clean energy, but the proportion of carbon emissions from air travel is expected to rise “significantly” as “the volume of air travel is increasing much faster than gains in flight fuel efficiency,” according to the New York Times.

Read More: South Africa Plans to Have Six Solar-Powered Airports by End of Year

Making airports more energy efficient is a good way to start addressing air travel’s immense, and growing, carbon footprint.

The Netherlands is not the first country to embrace sustainability in airports.

At George Airport in South Africa, 41% of the airport’s energy consumption comes from solar energy, according to NACO, an airport planning and design firm. Worldwide, more than 100 airports produce at least some of their energy from solar power.

Industry leaders are increasingly recognizing not only the environmental, but also the economic benefits of transitioning to clean energy.

Embed from Getty Images

“For the energy transition, it is crucial for the business sector – which is by far the largest energy consumer – to embrace sustainability,” Jeroen de Haas, CEO of Eneco Group said.

As for airports’ primary export — planes? They too are slowly moving in the direction of sustainability.

Hybrid-electric and solar-powered planes could provide an even greater lift for sustainability.

Output: Amsterdam's Schipol Airport, the world's 12th busiest airport, is looking to run on 100% renewable energy by January 1 2018. Also making the transition are Rotterdam the Hague Airport, Lelystad Airport and Eindhoven Airport. The energy will be supplied by Eneco Group, and by 2020, all the energy consumed at the airports will come from Dutch wind farms. The Netherlands achieved a clean energy milestone in June of this year, with its train system now being powered by 100% renewables.


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US renewables prevented up to 12,700 US deaths
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The massive increase in wind and solar energy helped prevent the premature deaths of up to 12,700 people over a nine-year period in the US, according to new research which illustrates the wider benefits of ditching fossil fuels beyond limiting global warming.

The lower carbon emissions were worth billions of dollars as a result of the avoidance of the range of problems caused by fossil fuels, according to a paper about the study published in the journal, Nature Energy.

The UK Government has pledged that the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles will be banned from 2040 – a deadline criticised by environmentalists as being too far in the future to make a difference. In contrast, Norway plans to phase out such vehicles by 2025.

According to the Royal College of Physicians, about 40,000 deaths a year in the UK are “attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution”, which has been associated with “cancer, asthma, stroke and heart disease, diabetes, obesity and changes linked to dementia”.

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The new research, which was funded by the US Department of Energy, found there had been significant declines in major air pollutants between 2007 and 2015.

Carbon dioxide fell by 20 per cent, sulphur dioxide by a staggering 72 per cent, nitrogen oxide by 50 per cent and tiny particles known as PM2.5 by 46 per cent.

While some of this was due to fossil fuels being replaced by renewable energy, tougher emission regulations also played a part. Sulphur dioxide emissions fell from nine million tonnes in 2007 to 2.5 million tonnes in 2015 after coal power plants were forced to fit equipment that filters the gas out to meet air quality standards.

The growth in solar and wind power was dramatic, increasing tenfold from about 10 gigawatts in 2007 to roughly 100GW in 2015.

“From 2007 to 2015, solar and wind power deployment increased rapidly while regulatory changes and fossil fuel price changes led to steep cuts in overall power-sector emissions,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

“We find cumulative wind and solar air-quality benefits of … $29.7bn to $112.8bn [during 2007 to 2015] mostly from 3,000 to 12,700 avoided premature mortalities."

In 2015 alone, some 1,850 premature deaths were avoided.

The researchers, led by Dr Dev Millstein of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, also estimated the increased generation of renewable energy was worth between $5.3bn and $106.8bn in “cumulative climate benefits” over the same period.

These include “changes to agricultural productivity, energy use, losses from disasters such as floods, human health and general ecosystem services”.

Sam Bright, a lawyer at environmental activist group ClientEarth, which has twice successfully sued the Government over sub-standard air quality plans, said it was clear that "moving away from coal brings major health benefits".

But he added: "It's essential that we make sure we use the opportunity the end of coal gives us to create the energy system of the future.

"That means replacing coal power stations with renewables, yes, but also making sure energy efficiency is top of the agenda and we build storage and flexibility into the system to lower and manage demand.

"A cleaner, more flexible energy system will mean fewer emissions of those pollutants that are harming people and our planet."

Nina Schrank, energy campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said: "Our energy system is radically transforming. Milestones such as the falling costs of offshore wind and solar, and the first working day without coal in Britain, are coming thick and fast as we move towards a low carbon economy. Now research also suggests that renewable power could be beginning to clean up the air by displacing some fossil fuels, but we need so much more.

"Our Government should prioritise speeding up the energy transition and making the UK a world leader in clean, green technology. Public opinion polls show that more than three quarters of people in the UK already support renewable energy. It's time to grasp the enormous potential of renewable energy and energy efficiency, which can give us cleaner air, skilled jobs and fair bills, whilst also helping towards our climate targets."

This article has been corrected. Up to 12,700 premature deaths were avoided between 2007 to 2015 inclusive, not in 2015 alone.

Output: An increase in wind and solar energy contributed to declines in major air pollutants that helped prevent the premature deaths of between 3,000 and 12,700 US residents between 2007 and 2015, research funded by the US Department of Energy found. Levels of carbon dioxide in the US fell by 20% during that period, while sulphur dioxide dropped by 72% and nitrogen oxide declined by 50%, according to the report. Over the same period, US solar and wind capacity grew from 10 GW to 100 GW. The benefits of cleaner air were estimated to be worth between $29.7bn and $112.8bn in the period, mainly from the lower mortality rates.


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Grindr launches digital magazine to protect brands
 Correction: A quote in this story has been altered to reflect Grindr’s outlook on brand safety.

Even sex apps want to be seen as brand-safe these days.

On Tuesday, gay hookup app Grindr launched a digital magazine called Into, which had been in pilot mode since March.

Because Into’s content is less about having sex and more about pop culture, fashion and travel, Grindr hopes its new publishing arm can win over big brands that are otherwise pretty nervous about preventing their ads from appearing next to sexual content. Grindr didn’t deny its app can present brand-safety concerns for advertisers, but emphasized that its new website will open the doors to working with a broader range of brands.

“Not every company wants to advertise in a dating app,” said Peter Sloterdyk, vp of marketing at Grindr. “But Into’s content is very different from the app. With Into’s launch, we are introducing Grindr as a total lifestyle brand.”

Similar to ads on Grindr, some of the ads on Into are specifically tailored toward gay men. For instance, its homepage features two ads that promote HIV prevention. Truvada for PrEP, an antiretroviral drug that helps prevent HIV transmission, also has ads within articles.

But there are also ads from national brands like ice cream maker Halo Top and the FX show “American Horror Story.” Over the next month, about 10 more national brands will run campaigns on the site, said Michele Tobin, vp of brand partnerships at Grindr.

Ian Schafer, chief experience officer at Engine and founder of ad agency Deep Focus, believes liquor companies and brands who have supported LGBT pride, like Doritos, will advertise on Into. Since sex isn’t considered to be brand-safe for most advertisers, Grindr was smart to brand its publishing division with a new name, he said.

“While many advertisers will not touch sexual content, there is a trend [among ad execs] that advertising to the LGBT community has upside,” said Schafer, who was bullish about the hookup app leveraging its audience to create a new brand. Grindr has 5 million active users per month, according to Apptopia. For comparison, dating apps Zoosk, Bumble and Tinder have 1 million, 3 million and 77 million active users per month, respectively, per Apptopia.

Grindr hired seven full-time editorial people to create content for Into. Former Out magazine editor Zach Stafford is the new website’s editor-in-chief. The content aims to attract millennials, the elusive demographic that advertisers are most thirsty to reach. Among Grindr’s users in the U.S., 64 percent are under 34, according to Apptopia.

Into is entirely ad-supported and relies heavily on display ads. It also serves pre-rolls, as seen below. Branded video and events are coming to the site, said Tobin, who declined to provide a timetable.

All of the ads are sold directly, but Into plans to eventually sell its display inventory programmatically. About 30 salespeople from Grindr work part of the time on selling Into inventory.

Grindr’s users spend 54 minutes on the app per day, on average, according to App Annie. To increase the amount of time users spend in the app, Grindr is working on building a tab in its app that would feature Into articles. But the tab won’t launch for several months since its web developers have to reconfigure the app to load the articles natively within the app rather than pulling them from the mobile web, where content takes much longer to load.

Into’s launch comes at a time when screenshot activists have spooked CMOs to pull their ads from any potentially controversial subject that includes not just sex but even hard news. Aside from already having to compete with dating services like Tinder and OkCupid, launching a publishing division means Grindr will also compete with LGBT media stalwarts like Out and Advocate and large digital publishers like HuffPost and BuzzFeed, which have sections on their sites dedicated to LGBT news. But Sloterdyk insists the space isn’t too crowded for a new player.

“We see a lot of content that is focused on an older generation because [popular LGBT publishers] have been around forever,” he said. “They paved the way in a beautiful manner, but they are not taking full advantage of that millennial audience.”

Photo via Grindr

Output: Gay social networking app Grindr has launched Into, a digital lifestyle magazine it hopes will attract more brands who are nervous about their ads appearing next to sexual content. Peter Sloterdyk, VP of marketing at Grindr, said Into's content would be very different, with brands including Halo Top and FX show American Horror Story already appearing, and 10 further campaigns to follow. Grindr has five million active users per month, and there are already moves to develop a tab to feature Into articles.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Lithium discovered in US supervolcanoes
 Most of the lithium used to make the lithium-ion batteries that power modern electronics comes from Australia and Chile. But Stanford scientists say there are large deposits in sources right here in America: supervolcanoes.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists detail a new method for locating lithium in supervolcanic lake deposits. The findings represent an important step toward diversifying the supply of this valuable silvery-white metal, since lithium is an energy-critical strategic resource, said study co-author Gail Mahood, a professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

“We’re going to have to use electric vehicles and large storage batteries to decrease our carbon footprint,” Mahood said. “It’s important to identify lithium resources in the U.S. so that our supply does not rely on single companies or countries in a way that makes us subject to economic or political manipulation.”

Supervolcanoes can produce massive eruptions of hundreds to thousands of cubic kilometers of magma – up to 10,000 times more than a typical eruption from a Hawaiian volcano. They also produce vast quantities of pumice and volcanic ash that are spread over wide areas. They appear as huge holes in the ground, known as calderas, rather than the cone-like shape typically associated with volcanoes because the enormous loss of magma causes the roof of the chamber to collapse following eruption.

The resulting hole often fills with water to form a lake – Oregon’s Crater Lake is a prime example. Over tens of thousands of years, rainfall and hot springs leach out lithium from the volcanic deposits. The lithium accumulates, along with sediments, in the caldera lake, where it becomes concentrated in a clay called hectorite.

Exploring supervolcanoes for lithium would diversify its global supply. Major lithium deposits are currently mined from brine deposits in high-altitude salt flats in Chile and pegmatite deposits in Australia. The supervolcanoes pose little risk of eruption because they are ancient.

“The caldera is the ideal depositional basin for all this lithium,” said lead author Thomas Benson, a recent PhD graduate at Stanford Earth, who began working on the study in 2012.

Since its discovery in the 1800s, lithium has largely been used in psychiatric treatments and nuclear weapons. Beginning in the 2000s, lithium became the major component of lithium-ion batteries, which today provide portable power for everything from cellphones and laptops to electric cars. Volvo Cars recently announced its commitment to only produce new models of its vehicles as hybrids or battery-powered options beginning in 2019, a sign that demand for lithium-ion batteries will continue to increase.

“We’ve had a gold rush, so we know how, why and where gold occurs, but we never had a lithium rush,” Benson said. “The demand for lithium has outpaced the scientific understanding of the resource, so it’s essential for the fundamental science behind these resources to catch up.”

Working backward

To identify which supervolcanoes offer the best sources of lithium, researchers measured the original concentration of lithium in the magma. Because lithium is a volatile element that easily shifts from solid to liquid to vapor, it is very difficult to measure directly and original concentrations are poorly known.

So, the researchers analyzed tiny bits of magma trapped in crystals during growth within the magma chamber. These “melt inclusions,” completely encapsulated within the crystals, survive the supereruption and remain intact throughout the weathering process. As such, melt inclusions record the original concentrations of lithium and other elements in the magma. Researchers sliced through the host crystals to expose these preserved magma blebs, which are 10 to 100 microns in diameter, then analyzed them with the Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe in the SHRIMP-RG Laboratory at Stanford Earth.

“Understanding how lithium is transported in magmas and what causes a volcanic center to become enriched in lithium has never really systematically been done before,” Benson said.

The team analyzed samples from a range of tectonic settings, including the Kings Valley deposit in the McDermitt volcanic field located on the Nevada-Oregon border, which erupted 16.5 to 15.5 million years ago and is known to be rich in lithium. They compared results from this volcanic center with samples from the High Rock caldera complex in Nevada, Sierra la Primavera in Mexico, Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily, Yellowstone in Wyoming and Hideaway Park in Colorado, and determined that lithium concentrations varied widely as a function of the tectonic setting of the supervolcano.

“If you have a lot of magma erupting, it doesn’t have to have as much lithium in it to produce something that is worthy of economic interest as we previously thought,” Mahood said. “You don’t need extraordinarily high concentrations of lithium in the magma to form lithium deposits and reserves.”

Improving identification

In addition to exploring for lithium, the researchers analyzed other trace elements to determine their correlations with lithium concentrations. As a result, they discovered a previously unknown correlation that will now enable geologists to identify candidate supervolcanoes for lithium deposits in a much easier way than measuring lithium directly in melt inclusions. The trace elements can be used as a proxy for original lithium concentration. For example, greater abundance of easily analyzed rubidium in the bulk deposits indicates more lithium, whereas high concentrations of zirconium indicate less lithium.

“We can essentially use the zirconium content to determine the lithium content within about 100 parts per million,” Benson said. “Now that we have a way to easily find more of these lithium deposits, it shows that this fundamental geological work can help solve societal problems – that’s really exciting.”

Co-authors of the paper, “Lithium enrichment in intracontinental rhyolite magmas leads to Li deposits in caldera basins,” include Matthew Coble, a research and development scientist and engineer at Stanford University, and James Rytuba of the U.S. Geological Survey. The research was partially supported by a U.S. Department of Defense NDSEG Fellowship.

Output: A new source of lithium, a vital component in batteries for electric vehicles, has been identified in US supervolcanoes by Stanford University scientists. At present, the majority of lithium comes from Australia and Chile, and increasing the quantities available is essential for the development of green tech. Researchers studied the contents of craters left by such volcanoes in parts of the US including Oregon and Nevada, discovering the metal within magma, trapped inside crystals.