Odlin confirms that for all of the Icelandic wood-chip ocean deposits, it was impossible for Running Tide to monitor the wood chips for more than three hours after their release, saying, “We couldn’t measure signal from noise in the ocean on the alkalinity.”

The Dead Zone

Despite having sold credits to Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, financial pressures on Running Tide continued to mount as the flow of funds from Silicon Valley dried up. According to one former employee, Odlin would start meetings in spring 2024 by announcing that the company had only a few more weeks of funds before it would have to close. That June, Odlin admitted defeat.

In a LinkedIn post on June 14, 2024, Odlin wrote that “there simply isn’t the demand needed to support large-scale carbon removal.” The company ceased global operations that month. Nearly all employees in Iceland and the US were suddenly let go. One employee was presenting about Running Tide at an algae conference when he was told the news.

“People were happy with our credits. We were filling our contracts. We were selling additional contracts. It just wasn’t enough,” Odlin says. Running Tide had sold $30 million of credits and said it had commitments for tens of millions more, but by Odlin’s estimate, the company needed somewhere between $100 million and $150 million of sales. “That was, like, the rent we were designed for.”

The legacy the company leaves behind after its wood-chip dumping is unclear. It’s simply not known what effect the sinking of biomass will have on the ocean, and the scientists and deep-sea experts WIRED spoke to remain hesitant about pursuing such marine geoengineering until more is understood about the deep sea.

Dumping biomass in the ocean could create “dead zones,” areas where aquatic life is starved of oxygen, says Samantha Joye, a Regents’ Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, who has worked on dead zones in the Mississippi Delta as well as on the cleanup of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Deep sea environments—some of which provide life-saving drugs or insights into how early Earth formed—could also be forever damaged, Joye adds. A recent carbon flux report by Convex Seascape Survey, an international research collaboration, found that once the seabed is disrupted, this could actually halt the ability for sediments to absorb carbon. Joye also points out that without proper research, ocean alkalinity enhancement could also cause spikes in ocean acidity if it draws lots of carbon into the sea that isn’t then distributed into its deep waters—the very opposite of what the treated wood chips were trying to achieve.

This includes me. I’ve been wearing the heck out of True Classic’s black crew-neck, in the belief that the shirt makes a virtue out of a life well-enjoyed. And it apparently also includes WIRED senior editor Jeremy White. “To my shame,” averred White, “the ‘dad bod’ fit is perfect and the neck size is not too big, not too small, just right.”

The True Classic is not fancy fabric, just a basic cotton-poly blend like a lot of the T-shirts currently on the market. Which is to say a bit soft and a bit stretchy, kind of a gym shirt or a muckaround shirt. It’s comfortable, but not embarrassing.

If you have a dad-bod in your life, this may be the time for a gift of a six-pack for those without defined six-packs. You don’t have to tell him why you bought it.

Oh, but note, the current flash deal says it’s “58 percent off.” This is only true when compared to buying six single shirts. However, the flash deal as of December 10 is an additional 25 percent off the standard bulk discount, making for a pretty nice price. When the current $75 flash deal expires, there’s a good chance it’ll be replaced by another flash deal on True Classic’s most popular shirt, but … no guarantees.

Most Democratic-led states say they will continue to universally recommend and administer the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, despite new guidance against it issued last week by a federal vaccine advisory panel handpicked by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Northeast Public Health Collaborative and the West Coast Health Alliance, which formed earlier this year in response to Kennedy’s concerning overhaul of vaccine policy, along with a other blue states, plan to to defy the latest recommendations made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP.

Hepatitis B is a serious, incurable infection that can lead to liver damage and liver cancer. It can be passed from mother to child during delivery, and without vaccination, about 90 percent of infants infected at birth develop chronic hepatitis B infection. Among those with chronic infection, 25 percent will die prematurely from the disease.

Since 1991, ACIP and the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended a universal dose of the hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours after birth. The sooner a newborn gets the vaccine, the higher the chance of preventing chronic infection. The birth dose is credited with dramatically lowering infection rates in children. Yet last week, Kennedy’s newly formed ACIP, which includes several vaccine skeptics, overturned that 30-year precedent. In June, Kennedy announced a “clean sweep” of ACIP, removing all of its previous 17 experts and replacing them with new members of his choosing.

During a chaotic two-day meeting that was riddled with misinformation, the committee voted to recommend the hepatitis B vaccine at birth only for infants born to pregnant people who test positive for the virus or whose status is unknown. For those whose hepatitis B status is negative, the panel recommended “individual-based decision-making”—meaning parents should talk with their doctors about vaccination first. If the baby does not receive the first dose at birth, the panel suggests delaying the first dose until the child is at least two months old.

Medical experts have decried the decision, saying that screening across the US is imperfect and does not catch all infections. Half of people who have it don’t know that they’re infected.

“The United States went through several iterations of recommendations for vaccinating against hepatitis B that were all risk-based. We tried screening mothers, we tried only vaccinating babies born to mothers living with hepatitis B, and they all failed. The universal birth dose was the ultimate success and the reason why we’ve seen childhood hepatitis B cases decline by 99 percent since we implemented it,” says Michaela Jackson, director of prevention policy at the Hepatitis B Foundation.