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Business

US food banks struggle to feed hungry amid surging prices

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OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — U.S. food banks already dealing with increased demand from families sidelined by the pandemic now face a new challenge — surging food prices and supply chain issues walloping the nation.

The higher costs and limited availability mean some families may get smaller servings or substitutions for staples such as peanut butter, which costs nearly double what it did a year ago. As holidays approach, some food banks worry they won’t have enough stuffing and cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“What happens when food prices go up is food insecurity for those who are experiencing it just gets worse,” said Katie Fitzgerald, chief operating officer of Feeding America, a nonprofit organization that coordinates the efforts of more than 200 food banks across the country.

Food banks that expanded to meet unprecedented demand brought on by the pandemic won’t be able to absorb forever food costs that are two to three times what they used to be, she said,

Supply chain disruptions, lower inventory and labor shortages have all contributed to increased costs for charities on which tens of millions of people in the U.S. rely on for nutrition. Donated food is more expensive to move because transportation costs are up, and bottlenecks at factories and ports make it difficult to get goods of all kinds.

If a food bank has to swap out for smaller sizes of canned tuna or make substitutions in order to stretch their dollars, Fitzgerald said, it’s like adding “insult to injury” to a family reeling from uncertainty.

In the prohibitively expensive San Francisco Bay Area, the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland is spending an extra $60,000 a month on food. Combined with increased demand, it is now shelling out $1 million a month to distribute 4.5 million pounds (2 million kilograms) of food, said Michael Altfest, the Oakland food bank’s director of community engagement.

Pre-pandemic, it was spending a quarter of the money for 2.5 million pounds (1.2 million kilograms) of food.

The cost of canned green beans and peaches is up nearly 9% for them, Altfest said; canned tuna and frozen tilapia up more than 6%; and a case of 5-pound frozen chickens for holiday tables is up 13%. The price for dry oatmeal has climbed 17%.

On Wednesdays, hundreds of people line up outside a church in east Oakland for its weekly food giveaway. Shiloh Mercy House feeds about 300 families on those days, far less than the 1,100 families it was nourishing at the height of the pandemic, said Jason Bautista, the charity’s event manager. But he’s still seeing new people every week.

“And a lot of people are just saying they can’t afford food,” he said. “I mean they have the money to buy certain things, but it’s just not stretching.”

Families can also use a community market Shiloh opened in May. Refrigerators contain cartons of milk and eggs while sacks of hamburger buns and crusty baguettes sit on shelves.

Oakland resident Sonia Lujan-Perez, 45, picked up chicken, celery, onions bread and and potatoes — enough to supplement a Thanksgiving meal for herself, 3-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son. The state of California pays her to care for daughter Melanie, who has special needs, but it’s not enough with monthly rent at $2,200 and the cost of milk, citrus, spinach and chicken so high.

“That is wonderful for me because I will save a lot of money,” she said, adding that the holiday season is rough with Christmas toys for the children.

It’s unclear to what extent other concurrent government aid, including an expanded free school lunch program in California and an increase in benefits for people in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, will offset rising food prices. An analysis by the Urban Institute think tank in Washington, D.C. found that while most households are expected to receive sufficient maximum benefits for groceries, a gap still exists in 21 percent of U.S. rural and urban counties.

Bryan Nichols, vice president of sales for Transnational Foods Inc., which delivers to more than 100 food banks associated with Feeding America, said canned foods from Asia— such as fruit cocktail, pears and mandarin oranges— have been stuck overseas because of a lack of shipping container space.

Issues in supply seem to be improving and prices stabilizing, but he expects costs to stay high after so many people got out of the shipping business during the pandemic. “An average container coming from Asia prior to COVID would cost about $4,000. Today, that same container is about $18,000,” he said.

At the Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado in Colorado Springs, CEO Lynne Telford says the cost for a truckload of peanut butter —40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms)_has soared 80% from June 2019 to $51,000 in August. Mac and cheese is up 19% from a year ago and the wholesale cost of ground beef has increased 5% in three months. They’re spending more money to buy food to make up for waning donations and there’s less to choose from.

The upcoming holidays worry her. For one thing, the donation cost to buy a frozen turkey has increased from $10 to $15 per bird.

“The other thing is that we’re not getting enough holiday food, like stuffing and cranberry sauce. So we’re having to supplement with other kinds of food, which you know, makes us sad,” said Telford, whose food bank fed more than 200,000 people last year, distributing 25 million pounds (11.3 million kilograms) of food.

Alameda County Community Food Bank says it is set for Thanksgiving, with cases of canned cranberry and boxes of mashed potatoes among items stacked in its expanded warehouse. Food resourcing director Wilken Louie ordered eight truckloads of frozen 5-pound chickens —which translates into more than 60,000 birds— to give away free, as well as half-turkeys available at cost.

For that, Martha Hasal is grateful.

“It’s going to be an expensive Thanksgiving, turkey is not going to cost like the way it was,” said Hasal as she loaded up on on cauliflower and onions on behalf of the Bay Area American Indian Council. “And they’re not giving out turkey. So thank God they’re giving out the chicken.”

——

AP reporters Terence Chea in Oakland and Ashraf Khalil in Washington contributed to this story.

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Technology

NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Powered GeForce RTX 40 GPUs To Be Twice As Fast & Twice As Power Hungry Than Ampere

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NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPUs-based GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards will be one of the major launches for 2022. The new lineup is expected to bring more than 2x the performance increase over Ampere but will also be one of the most power-hungry lineups ever released.

NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Powered GeForce RTX 40 GPUs To Be Twice As Fast & Twice As Power Hungry Than Ampere

The rumor once again comes from Greymon55 who has been actively sharing details regarding AMD and NVIDIA next-gen GPU launches. In his new tweet, the leaker claims that Ada Lovelace, NVIDIA’s next architecture for its GeForce RTX graphics cards will feature double the performance but also double the power consumption.

NVIDIA’s Upgraded GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB & RTX 3080 12 GB Rumored To Launch in January Following December Unveil

Based on previous reports, this is looking to be the case as both AMD and NVIDIA next-gen GPUs are going to end up offering over 2x the performance increase but will also increase power input dramatically.

The NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPUs will power the next-generation GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards that will go head-on with AMD’s RDNA 3 based Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. There’s still some speculation regarding the use of MCM by NVIDIA. The Hopper GPU, which is primarily aimed at the Datacenter & AI segment, is allegedly taping out soon and will feature an MCM architecture. NVIDIA won’t be using an MCM design on its Ada Lovelace GPUs so they will keep the traditional monolithic design. The Ada Lovelace GPUs are expected to utilize TSMC’s 5nm process node and will bring in a series of key innovations, architecturally.

Previously rumored specs have shown us a huge update to the core specs. The NVIDIA AD102 “ADA GPU” appears to have 18432 CUDA Cores based on the preliminary specs (which can change) provided by Kopite. This is almost twice the cores present in Ampere which was already a massive step up from Turing. A 2.2 GHz clock speed would give us 81 TFLOPs of compute performance (FP32). This is more than twice the performance of the existing RTX 3090 which packs 36 TFLOPs of FP32 compute power.

NVIDIA Ampere GA103 GPU May Debut As The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Mobile On The Fastest Gaming Laptops Ever Made!

At the same time, these huge performance figures would come at the cost of higher overall power consumption. NVIDIA is already expected to ship its RTX 3090 Ti (reportedly the first PCIe Gen 5.0 graphics card) with a TGP of 450W. Ada Lovelace-based GeForce RTX 40 series is expected to end up with a TDP well over 500W and even around 600W. That’s why a new connector type that can support such high-power figures is being designed for the next generation of graphics cards.

Kopite7kimi also hinted at some specification details of the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace chips a while back which you can read more about here and check out the specs in the table provided below:

NVIDIA CUDA GPU (RUMORED) Preliminary:

GPU TU102 GA102 AD102
Architecture Turing Ampere Ada Lovelace
Process TSMC 12nm NFF Samsung 8nm 5nm
Graphics Processing Clusters (GPC) 6 7 12
Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) 36 42 72
Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) 72 84 144
CUDA Cores 4608 10752 18432
Theoretical TFLOPs 16.1 37.6 ~80 TFLOPs?
Flagship SKU RTX 2080 Ti RTX 3090 RTX 4090?
TGP 250W 350W 450-600W?
Release Sep. 2018 Sept. 20 2022 (TBC)

The NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU family is expected to bring a generational jump similar to Maxwell to Pascal. It is expected to launch late in Q4 2022 but based on GPU supply and availability, it’s likely to move back to 2023.

Which next-generation GPUs are you looking forward to the most?Poll Options are limited because JavaScript is disabled in your browser.



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World

With no tourist handouts, hungry Bali monkeys raid homes

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SANGEH, Indonesia (AP) — Deprived of their preferred food source — the bananas, peanuts and other goodies brought in by tourists now kept away by the coronavirus — hungry monkeys on the resort island of Bali have taken to raiding villagers’ homes in their search for something tasty.

Villagers in Sangeh say the gray long-tailed macaques have been venturing out from a sanctuary about 500 meters (yards) away to hang out on their roofs and await the right time to swoop down and snatch a snack.

Worried that the sporadic sorties will escalate into an all-out monkey assault on the village, residents have been taking fruit, peanuts and other food to the Sangeh Monkey Forest to try to placate the primates.

“We are afraid that the hungry monkeys will turn wild and vicious,” villager Saskara Gustu Alit said.

About 600 of the macaques live in the forest sanctuary, swinging from the tall nutmeg trees and leaping about the famous Pura Bukit Sari temple, and are considered sacred.

In normal times the protected jungle area in the southeast of the Indonesian island is popular among local residents for wedding photos, as well as among international visitors. The relatively tame monkeys can be easily coaxed to sit on a shoulder or lap for a peanut or two.

Ordinarily, tourism is the main source of income for Bali’s 4 million residents, who welcomed more than 5 million foreign visitors annually before the pandemic.

The Sangeh Monkey Forest typically had about 6,000 visitors a month, but as the pandemic spread last year and international travel dropped off dramatically, that number dropped to about 500.

Since July, when Indonesia banned all foreign travelers to the island and shut the sanctuary to local residents as well, there has been nobody.

Not only has that meant nobody bringing in extra food for the monkeys, the sanctuary has also lost out on its admission fees and is running low on money to purchase food for them, said operations manager Made Mohon.

The donations from villagers have helped, but they are also feeling the economic pinch and are gradually giving less and less, he said.

“This prolonged pandemic is beyond our expectations,” Made Mohon said, “Food for monkeys has become a problem.”

Food costs run about 850,000 rupiah ($60) a day, Made Mohon said, for 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of cassava, the monkeys’ staple food, and 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of bananas.

The macaque is an omnivore and can eat a variety of animals and plants found in the jungle, but those in the Sangeh Monkey Forest have had enough contact with humans over the years that they seem to prefer other things.

And they’re not afraid to take matters into their own hands, Gustu Alit said.

Frequently, monkeys wander into the village and sit on roofs, occasionally removing tiles and dropping them to the ground. When villagers put out daily religious offerings of food on their terraces, the monkeys jump down and make off with them.

“A few days ago I attended a traditional ceremony at a temple near the Sangeh forest,” Gustu Alit said. “When I parked my car and took out two plastic bags containing food and flowers as offerings, two monkeys suddenly appeared and grabbed it all and ran into the forest very fast.”

Normally, the monkeys spend all day interacting with visitors — stealing sunglasses and water bottles, pulling at clothes, jumping on shoulders — and Gustu Alit theorizes that more than just being hungry, they’re bored.

“That’s why I have urged villagers here to come to the forest to play with the monkeys and offer them food,” he said. “I think they need to interact with humans as often as possible so that they do not go wild.”

___

Karmini reported from Jakarta. Associated Press writer David Rising in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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Science

Plastic Toxin Are Tricking Hungry Hermit Crabs With a Tasty Smelling Lie

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In today’s anthropogenic world, an innocent hermit crab, just minding its own business and swimming in its search for food, has far more than the usual dangers of predators to contend with.

 

After expending effort and energy to get to that delicious scent of decaying prawn or mussels, these scavengers may sometimes end up with nutrition-less plastics instead of a fulfilling dinner.

New studies from University of Hull researchers have revealed that several chemicals leaching from plastic pollution poison mussels and befuddling hermit crabs in laboratory experiments.

“Oleamide has a striking resemblance to oleic acid, a chemical released by arthropods during decomposition. As scavengers, hermit crabs may misidentify oleamide as a food source, creating a trap,” explained chemical ecologist Paula Schirrmacher. 

“Our study shows that oleamide attracts hermit crabs. Respiration rate increases significantly in response to low concentrations of oleamide.”

Oleamide is a common plastic additive used as a slip agent, a lubricant for plastics that need to be released from molds after shaping. It also helps the internal structure of plastics, like polypropylene, flow smoothly and is used in a wide number of food containers.

But it is an organic molecule also found naturally in human blood plasma and animal pheromones. In the cleaner shrimp (Lysmata boggessi), oleamide has been found to help catalyze a mating response in sexual partners through a pheromone bouquet.

 

Contrary to some media reports, oleamide seems only to be involved in triggering food attraction in hermit crabs, not sex.

“Hermit crabs show a behavioral attraction comparable to their response to a feeding stimulant,” said Schirrmacher.

“Plastic additives mimicking marine infochemicals may be a problem not limited to hermit crabs and not limited to the odor associated with food,” the team wrote in their paper.

Meanwhile, mussels have their own plastic-related difficulties. 

DEHP (Di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate), a common plastic softener additive in PVC, was found to interfere with blue mussel (Mytilus species) reproduction systems.

This chemical contributes to almost 40 percent of the global plasticizer market, despite its known biological toxicity.

What’s more, the animals are reacting differently to these toxins, along with chemical changes caused by climate change-induced temperature increases, depending on their sex.

While DEHP messed with female mussels’ ability to express the genes for their estrogen-related receptors, in males, these genes seem to be expressed more highly under higher water temperatures, which increased their out-of-season spawning organs.

“The combined stressors DEHP and increased temperature, in environmentally relevant magnitudes, have different consequences in male and female mussels, with the potential to impact the timing and breeding season success in Mytilus spp,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

 

“It is critically important to understand how plastic additives work on molecular levels, especially on reproductive success,” said ecologist Luana Fiorella Mincarelli.

While these studies involved experimental exposure of the animals to the chemicals in question, they were conducted within the laboratory. They may not fully take into account all the factors that would be involved in their natural environments.

However, that these few chemicals are capable of having such profound impacts on the physiology of the few species studied so far is very concerning.

It’s even more concerning given the amount of other chemicals we’ve also dumped into our world’s waters via plastic pollution.

Unless we massively curb our plastic addiction soon, the World Wildlife Foundation warns that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. 

Just 20 companies are responsible for over half of the world’s single-use plastic, and no doubt have played a huge political and social role in fostering our addiction to their products.

Now, this addiction may be contributing to starving and sexually frustrating countless ocean creatures – including our own food sources.

The research on hermit crabs and mussels was published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.

 

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Technology

Counterfeiters are hungry for a piece of Apple’s $16B AirPod market

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Enlarge / These AirPods, displayed at the Apple Park Visitor Center in Cupertino, are genuine—but spotting the difference between real and counterfeit electronics isn’t always simple.

US Customs and Border Protection reports that so far in fiscal year 2021, it has seized about 360,000 sets of wireless headphones, worth an estimated $62.2 million. That’s only nine months’ worth of seizures—but it’s already more than the 290,000 sets worth $61.7 million that were seized throughout fiscal year 2020.

In one such large seizure, CBP seized roughly 6,400 counterfeit AirPods and AirPods Pro in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 11th. If the seized goods had been genuine, their combined Apple MSRP would have been about $1.3 million—but the five seized shipments were manifested at only $312 each. All five shipments were headed for a single address in Brownsville, Texas.

Then again, the feds may not always get it right. In September 2020, CBP in New York City seized a 2,000 unit shipment of perfectly legitimate OnePlus earbuds headed for Nevada, claiming they were “counterfeit AirPods.” When pressed about the error, CBP doubled down, saying that a company “does not have to put an ‘Apple’ wordmark or design on their products” to violate trademark law and adding that importers “have many opportunities… to provide evidence that their product does not violate the relevant recorded trademarks.”

Not all counterfeiters target Apple, of course—well-known brands such as Sony, Jabra, Samsung, and Bose have their own knockoff artists. But despite its premium brand position, Apple holds the lion’s share of the wireless earbud market. In 2020, Apple held 25% of the “smart personal audio” market share—nearly triple that of Samsung, its closest competitor. That market share added up to nearly 109 million units—and, according to market analysis firm Canalys, $16 billion or more in revenue.

Roughly 80% of the world’s counterfeit consumer goods come from China, according to the Counterfeit Report’s Craig Crosby. In late 2016, Apple bought 100 supposedly Apple-made products on Amazon and found that 90% of them were counterfeits—despite coming directly from Amazon, not from third-party listings. During the ensuing lawsuit, Amazon notified Apple that the counterfeit products were supplied by Mobile Star, despite the copious use of Apple branding.

Although some of the counterfeit goods are obvious rip-offs, some require physical disassembly and expert product knowledge to identify. Reuse of stolen factory molds is common, and some counterfeit AirPods properly mimic the pairing process with iPhones and even display proper Apple serial numbers.

Unfortunately, “similar appearance” does not imply “similar quality”—it’s much more difficult to spot subpar audio drivers and amplification circuits than a slightly off-color or misshapen chassis. Consumers should be concerned with safety, as well; Amazon product reviews of counterfeit chargers often include stories of the phony parts overheating, smoldering, or even burning outright during normal use.

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Science

Hungry baby sea stars eat each other in unexpected case of underwater cannibalism

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Baby sea stars may look innocent and adorable, but they’re teensy little cannibals and eat their own siblings for their own survival, according to a new study.

Two researchers discovered this behavior among baby Forbes’ sea stars (Asterias forbesi) by accident. They were originally trying to understand how baby sea stars reacted when introduced to ferocious crab predators in the lab.

“But they all started eating each other before we even introduced the crabs. So we had to scrap that experiment,” Jon Allen, associate professor in William & Mary’s Department of Biology, said in a statement. So Allen and his team shifted gears to observe this previously unknown phenomenon among the baby sea stars.

Related: Dangers in the deep: 10 scariest sea creatures

The Forbes’ sea stars, which are commonly found on the East Coast of the U.S., can reach between 4.7 and 9.4 inches (11.9 and 24 centimeters) in length as adults, according to National Geographic. Juvenile sea stars are basically pinhead-size versions of their parents, Allen said. These sea stars undergo a process called metamorphosis in which they transform from an immature form to an adult form just as caterpillars transform into butterflies.

These sea stars, in their immature larval form, look like “weird little spaceships” flying through the water, said Karina Brocco French, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine (who was an undergraduate student working in Allen’s lab during this research). They stay in this weird-little-spaceship stage for about a month before they metamorphosize into juvenile sea stars and settle on the seafloor, Brocco French said in the statement.

Scientists already knew that juveniles on the seafloor would eat the much-smaller larval forms sinking to the bottom  — but they didn’t realize that juveniles would eat each other. Still, even though the juveniles are roughly the same size as one another, the slightly bigger ones always ended up eating the smaller ones, according to the statement. 

French and Allen discovered that the baby sea stars engaged in this cannibalistic behavior as early as four days after metamorphosing. They did so using one of their multiple stomachs, known as their “cardiac stomach,” which they push out to engulf and break down their food.

Sibling cannibalism might give the individual stars an adaptive advantage, especially since adult female sea stars produce 5 million to 10 million eggs a year, Allen said.

While such behavior was unknown in this species, cannibalism is not uncommon in the animal kingdom, with more than 1,300 species (including humans) documented to exhibit it, according to the statement. And the researchers think that cannibalism is likely to be even more widespread among small animals, including juveniles.

The findings were published on March 26 in the journal Ecology. 

Originally published on Live Science.

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US

Florida veterinarians remove shoe from stomach of hungry crocodile

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University of Florida veterinarians surgically removed a shoe swallowed twice by the same hungry crocodile, the school said.

The 10.5-foot, 341-pound Nile crocodile, named Anuket, consumed the apparently tasty footwear in December when it fell off a zip liner at St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, where the reptile resides, according the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine in Gainesville.

Witnesses spotted Anuket consuming the shoe, regurgitating it and then swallowing it again, the college said.

“If the shoe fits your fancy …. swallow it?” the school said in a Facebook posting. “Not a good idea!”

Garrett Fraess, zoo medicine resident at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, reaches into the esophagus of Anuket, a gator, to try to remove a show lodged in her stomach on Feb. 5, 2021.University of Floria College of Veterinary Medicine

The size 6.5 Walmart women’s sneaker was made of synthetic materials, meaning it couldn’t have been digested and would have stayed inside Anuket and blocked passage from the stomach to intestines, according to Gen Anderson, general curator at St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park.

“If it was leather sandals, then it would have been a whole other ballgame,” Anderson told NBC News on Tuesday.

Without surgery, the crocodile would have suffered “a very slow death,” she added.

After Anuket was brought to the University of Florida on Feb. 5, vets tried various less invasive methods to push the shoe out of the beast, with no luck.

They were eventually forced to perform “a gastrotomy which allowed easier access to the crocodile’s stomach,” according to the school.

After previous unsuccessful attempts, Anuket, a gator, finally had the shoe removed, that was lodged in her stomach, at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine on Feb. 5, 2021.University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine

“Within a short time, he was able to remove the shoe,” the school said. “After an overnight stay, Anuket returned home, and has been recuperating at the park since then.”

Anuket is at least 34 years old and is expected to live between 60 and 80 years, according to Anderson.

David K. Li

David K. Li is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.

Ali Gostanian contributed.

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