US-based tech companies are stepping up efforts to restore connectivity in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has deployed balloons to bring cell service back to the island. And Facebook on Monday announced an initiative with the Red Cross to use artificial intelligence and satellite imagery to identify and help areas in need of aid. The social media company's video from the island, however, took flak from tech critics as being insensitive to Puerto Rico.

But how are the major tech companies' efforts being viewed on the island?

“It’s very polarizing,” says Puerto Rico resident Gabriel Rodriguez. “People are really for it or really against it. There are the people that say that of course it’s going to be a great improvement for us … but then there’s a lot of people that are very mad because they say we are selling the island to outside interests.”

To hear more about what tech companies are doing, and about and grass-roots efforts to bring aid to the island, listen to the interview above.

Sam Sinai was coming back to the US last month, after visiting family in Iran. When he got to Logan International Airport in Boston, US Customs and Border Protection agents told him he’d been selected for extra screening.

"I was asked for some information about what I did abroad and my address abroad and my address here," he says.

Nothing unusual, he thought. He’d been asked similar questions before. But then the agent said something that made him do a double take.

"[He] told me that there might be a call from the government regarding my political beliefs," Sinai recalls.

Wait a minute, he thought. Political beliefs?

The agent didn't give him any more details. And Sinai left the airport. Later, he mulled over why the agent had brought up his politics.

Then it clicked. They might have looked him up online.

Sinai is a PhD student at Harvard University and a dual citizen of Iran and the US. He says he occasionally writes online about US-Iran relations. In the past, he'd answered questions posted on Quora, "a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users." His contributions to the site are a mix of science and politics. He'd answered questions that range from "What are plants’ stem cells, and what purpose do they serve?" to "Why has the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] never sampled areas where suspected earthquakes occurred in Iran?"

"I think the adversarial approach that the US takes towards Iran is counterproductive," Sinai explains, sitting at a cafe not far from the Harvard University campus. "I advocate for a more conciliatory approach."

Sinai says, as an American citizen, he never imagined he could be questioned about his political stance. So far, he says, no one from the government has contacted him. But it’s been on his mind.

And rightly so.

Back in September, the Department of Homeland Security announced in the Federal Register that it had been collecting information from social media accounts of immigrants and foreign visitors. According to that notice, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS, keeps the data it collects from immigrants in what's known as their "A File." According to DHS, data gathered includes "social media [accounts], aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results."

According to Edward Hasbrouck, DHS has been collecting social media data since the Obama administration — for at least five years. Hasbrouck works for The Identity Project, a civil liberties and human rights project focused on travel-related issues and freedom of movement.

He explains that under the Privacy Act of 1974, DHS should have gotten approval from the Office of Management and Budget before it started tracking social media information.

A family exits after clearing immigration and customs at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, Sept. 24, 2017.

Credit:

James Lawler Duggan/Reuters

"This has been going on for at least five years without their complying with even those minimal notices that are supposed to give the public awareness of what's going on," he says. So now, he adds, the DHS has published this notice in order to legitimize what it has been doing.

“It’s good news that we at least know that this is happening,” says Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that promotes freedom on the internet. "The bad news is ... we find this to be a gross invasion of individual privacy and really far more information that is necessary to do the important work of the Department of Homeland Security."

What do you think of the government collecting social media information about immigrants? We're talking about it in the Global Nation Exchange on Facebook.

O'Connor, who worked for DHS during the George W. Bush administration, says she was surprised by the extent of the information DHS tracks.

"Think of your Facebook account and your Facebook messenger and your news feed and things that you post; [...] likes or dislikes or commentary that you make on other people’s pages, even search results." All that gets scooped up and kept as part of a user's immigration records. And the same happens on other social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and more.

What was also shocking to privacy and civil rights advocates was whose data was being collected.

"Immigrants of any kind," explains O'Connor, "lawful permanent residents, what we know as green card holders, and naturalized citizens, people who’ve gone through the immigration process and become full US citizens and, of course, through what they’re collecting, also information about anyone who has contact with them online in any form of social media."

A DHS official said in a statement that the DHS notice does not represent new policy. "DHS, in its law-enforcement and immigration-process capacity, has and continues to monitor publicly-available social media to protect the homeland," the official wrote in an email.

But the Office of Inspector General published a report back in February that said the DHS pilot programs to screen social media accounts "lack criteria for measuring performance to ensure they meet their objectives."

That means probably using keywords and algorithms, which can be misleading. "Words that might seem scary in one context," explains O'Connor, "in another context might be a child doing a book report on a story about some tragic event, or a reporter covering such an event.

Visa applicants or immigrants might also post in a language other than English, which adds to the complicated task of deciphering legitimate threats

This type of invasive, wholesale data collection can be traced back to the days after 9/11. But more recent events have played a part as well. After the attack in San Bernardino, California, officials became concerned about how terrorists use social media. That’s because the attackers, Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, had talked about jihad and martyrdom in private Facebook messages.

Lawmakers argued that had immigration officials had access to those messages and, had they checked them, they might have been able to flag the attackers. Less than two weeks after the attack, 24 senators, led by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, sent a letter to the secretary of Homeland Security requesting that, as soon as possible, DHS expand social media background checks for visa applicants.

DHS argues that it only collects data that's publicly available. But the messages Malik and her husband sent were private. That means even with the latest expansion of the social media screening, DHS would technically not have access to this data.

Shaheen said in a statement that her letter "was clearly intended to close security gaps in the visa application process and should not be misconstrued to justify this administration’s immigration policy overreaches or violate the privacy of law-abiding, legal residents.”

Others raised concerns, too. Last year, David Kaye, special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression at the United Nations, sent a letter to the US ambassador to the UN, raising concern about how the US collects social media information from visa applicants.

"I am concerned that affected travellers lack sufficient guidance on what information to provide, how the information may be used, and the consequences of not providing it," he wrote, "I am also concerned that, without sufficient guidance, relevant government officials might have largely unfettered authority to collect, analyze, share and retain personal and sensitive information about travellers and their online associations."

In response to Kaye's concerns, Jason Mack, US deputy permanent representative to the UN Human Rights Council, wrote"[US Customs and Border Protection] performs searches and inspections in full compliance with all applicable federal laws and constitutional protections, consistent with U.S. human rights obligations."

The public has until Oct. 18 to submit comments regarding the new DHS social media collection policy. About 2,000 comments have been submitted so far, many in opposition. One from F. Fitter is critical that the policy will have a broad chilling effect on freedom of speech.

"When officials have the power to deny visas based on their arbitrary interpretation of an individual's social media history, ALL Internet users will rightfully worry that those rules will someday be applied to them. Their resulting fear of openly expressing personal and political views will have an unacceptable chilling effect on free speech. […] Finally, applying these rules to naturalized citizens places them in a special category separate from natural-born citizens. Implying as it does that naturalized citizens are somehow "tainted" at birth and remain so forever, it is a grotesque perversion of the citizenship process, an insult to adults who have worked hard to be considered worthy of citizenship, and a particular insult to those naturalized as children.”

For Sinai, the Iranian who was told he’d be contacted about his political beliefs, the new DHS protocols are reminiscent of intimidation tactics the Iranian government uses.

"I had a lot of friends who were politically active and I could see that they would be harassed," he says. "I always felt like that was unjust and uncalled for and I don’t think it’s a good policy there, I don’t think it’s a good policy here.

Sinai says he hasn’t changed his online behavior, even though he was shaken after that exchange at the airport. He just wants to focus on his scientific work. Right now, he’s designing tools that help people with genetic conditions like Huntington’s disease.

He says he would like to stay in the US, as long as he’s treated fairly.

"If I don’t feel like I am a citizen like everyone else here," he says, "obviously I would look to go places where I am welcomed for my science and merits rather than my nationality or background."

Ask Dave Rank these days what he does and you’re likely to get an answer at once oblique and revelatory: “Boy, what am I?”

Among other things, he’s a man trying to get used to his new status as an ex-diplomat after 27 years in the foreign service — a tenure that ended when, for the first time, he refused an order from Washington.

His most recent posting was as head of the US embassy in Beijing and acting ambassador to China. It would’ve been his responsibility to officially notify the Chinese government of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

“I just couldn’t do it,” because the president’s decision was wrong in so many ways, Rank says. 

“It's wrong as a matter of US interests. It's wrong for the future of our kids, and just wrong morally. ... That’s the first time in my career where those three aligned like that.”

The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, under which countries around the world committed for the first time to report how much greenhouse pollution they’re emitting and how they’ll reduce it, was a feat of international diplomacy. It took decades to negotiate, built on years and years of international meetings and summits and whole libraries of scientific reports.

And for Rank, a lifelong diplomat, it was deeply inspiring.

“The issue that really unifies the world — you know 198 countries agree on — is the threat of climate change. There’s nothing out there that unites the world like the need to take on climate,” he says.

And he says the US and China were the key players in making it happen, and making it work.

Rank’s tenure in the foreign service saw him stationed all over the world, from the tiny island nation of Mauritius to Afghanistan to six postings in China. And there had been plenty of times over the years when he had to embrace policies he didn’t agree with, coming from presidents of both parties. It’s part of life in the foreign service.

But he knew he couldn’t uphold this one.

He knew President Trump had promised to leave the Paris deal while on the campaign trail, but he couldn’t believe that he would actually follow through on that pledge. Until it happened, on a Friday in June.

“It really hit me, ‘wow, we are honestly doing this,’” he remembers. And he also remembers his response.

“What I said was, ‘I'm not going to have any role in the implementation of this decision, and I'm not going to ask people who work for me to do something that I wouldn't do. So I'm not quitting, but I'm not going to be part of this decision.’”

Soon after that, he found himself out of a job and on a plane home to the US.

Rank says he never thought of himself as a “climate guy,” or even an environmentalist. But that began to change during his time in China, where he experienced environmental challenges in a whole new way. He gained an urgent sense of the biggest global environmental challenge of all.

He’s not sure what’s next for him, he says, but he is sure about one thing.

“You have to make yourself a climate person in one way or another. It can't be, ‘that's not my issue.’ You have to think in terms of longer term, and in terms bigger than yourself. And it's tough, we're not used to it. ... And there's probably not one answer [to how to do it]. But the answer can't be ‘it's someone else's issue.’"

This story was produced through a collaboration with the podcast Terrestrial, from KUOW in Seattle.

Check out all The World's Climate Change coverage here.

It’s early in the morning, and the entire city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, seems to be gazing at the sky with concern. It looks like rain but the island just can’t handle any more flooding.

On the highway, under the dark, heavy clouds, a small car makes its way through traffic. In it are four women, Ghislaine Rivera, Mia Lind, Janine Smalley and Katie Blanker, with whom I'm spending the day — it's Oct. 5. 

Our first stop? A school that’s been turned into a hurricane shelter.

Lind, an occupational therapist for the VA Caribbean Healthcare System in San Juan, goes to the door, asking, “Are there any veterans here?”

Every day since the hurricane hit, she and her team have been roaming from shelter to shelter, looking for veterans who need medical attention.  

Mia Lind is an occupational therapist for the VA Hospital in San Juan.

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

There are somewhere around 75,000 US Army veterans living in Puerto Rico. Most served during the Vietnam War. After Hurricane Maria, many are now living in shelters. Thousands of people, not just veterans, have been displaced by the storm, and the shelters are packed. 

At the school, a supervisor answers: Yes, there's a veteran here. 

The VA team finds 70-year-old Luis Torres lying in bed. His dress shirt is wide open and his baseball cap is flipped backward. His bed is surrounded by piles of clothing and some bags of food.

Luis Torres, 70, is a veteran of the Air Force.

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

The Air Force veteran was honorably discharged; he has his military ID, but the other paperwork was lost in the storm. “My house ... it disappeared,” he says, breaking down in tears.

His teenage son, Andrew Torres, who is also staying here, pulls out his phone to show us pictures of what's left of their house. It’s like the roof and the walls were just plucked out. On the second floor, a toilet stands alone in the open.

Janine Smalley takes Luis Torres's vitals. His blood pressure is 130 over 80, so that’s "perfect," she says, asking, "Do you take any meds?" Smalley is the VA team’s registered nurse and Disaster Emergency Medical Personnel trained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She’s here from Cleveland, Ohio. She volunteered to come help. She says when she saw what was happening in Puerto Rico, she asked to be sent here. 

Janine Smalley is the VA team’s registered nurse, and Disaster Emergency Medical Personnel (DEMP)  trained by FEMA. She’s here from Cleveland, Ohio.

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

Meanwhile, Katie Blanker, who also volunteered for this assignment, brings Torres toothbrushes, heating pads and food. Blanker is from Stevens Point, Wisconsin. She’s a social worker with the VA and a veteran herself.

Katie Blanker is working in Puerto Rico as a social worker with the VA. She’s also a veteran. She's originally from Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

Torres cheers up. “Where’s the T-bone steak?” he jokes. At least for a few minutes, the mood has lightened up.

Lind says that she, too, had been thinking about steak, just the day before. There is a meat shortage on the island. "I really want to have a meal for my kids that includes beef. That was my goal. To get my kids not canned food. When you have chaos like this, the only right you have is to stay alive. You stay alive, and you survive," she says. 

Lind fights back tears. The others from her team hug her. Then she smiles and announces the next neighborhood they’re heading to: “Let’s go to Rio Grande!”

Let’s go “before we’re all crying. I was hoping to wait till noon to cry again,” Smalley says. 

The next shelter is even more packed than the last one. 

“May we come in and ask if anyone is a vet?” Lind asks.

A man says there aren't any vets there. 

Lind asks the man how he knows.

The man bristles, saying, “I can’t force them to talk to you.” 

Lind thanks him, and the team leaves. Later on, in the parking lot, Lind tells me she suspects some shelters just don’t want the VA team coming in. She and her colleagues represent the federal government. And they have to report it if a hurricane shelter isn’t providing enough food and water. Or if it’s overcrowded.

A lot of these shelters are just repurposed schools, places for people to lie down and rest, with no running water or electricity. This is the new normal. Which is why the last shelter we go to takes us a little by surprise.

The team walks right in. There’s a radio blasting pop music. There are kids painting murals. And then there’s Benny Molina.

The residents cheer his name as he sits down for a checkup by nurse Smalley. Molina, 61, is a veteran — “National Guard in Riverdale, New Jersey. Specialized in tanks. Driving the tanks,” he says. 

“Benny that’s perfect!” interrupts Smalley. Benny’s blood pressure is normal. He jokingly offers to do pushups — in a while — he just had a big meal. The room erupts in laughter.

Benny Molina is a 61-year-old veteran. He served in the National Guard in Riverdale, New Jersey.

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

Ghislaine Rivera, a social worker, asks him what happened to his home. It’s gone. Benny lost everything he owned to the storm. The team offers to give him aid packages, with basic supplies, but he refuses. “Right now, we have food and everything ... but some other people are sleeping on the street and they have nothing to eat.”

As he fills out his paperwork, Smalley and Blanker take a quick break in the shade. They are red from the heat and visibly tired. They’ve come a long way, from Ohio and Wisconsin. But, they say, this is a responsibility they have. All of us do.

“We don’t know them all, but we owe them all,” says Smalley. 

“All of the veterans we’re here for served for the United States,” says Blanker. “This is Americans helping Americans. These veterans were stationed in the US, went to war with the US. I think that’s the thing that people forget.”

Follow along with our team from Across Women's Lives for more coverage from Puerto Rico. 

Unpredictable winds continue to fan the fires engulfing huge swaths of land in northern California Thursday. Authorities say more than two dozen people have died and hundreds are still missing, as of Thursday afternoon.

Evacuations in Napa and Sonoma counties have put some 25,000 people out of their homes. Many of these residents only speak Spanish, but most emergency information is delivered in English.

At the beginning of the week, as fires were starting to spread, Spanish speakers had one place to turn for emergency information — KBBF, a bilingual community radio station serving the region. On the morning of Oct. 9, Hugo Mata went on-air for his weekly, one-hour show about the environment, Nuestra Tierra. Hugo Mata is an environmental educator, but on that day, he was the go-to source for wildfire information.

"I had my show ready, but when I got [to the radio station], I started getting a lot of phone calls," Mata says. " They wanted to know the status of the fires. So everything that I had ready for the show was completely changed, and we opened the mics.”

Hugo Mata is a radio show host for KBBF. When fires broke out in Northern California on Oct. 9, Mata provided a live Spanish broadcast to listeners. His show helped Latino residents learn about developing emergency information on evacuations, road closures, shelters and more. 

Credit:

Courtesy of Hugo Mata

Mata's radio show was a beacon for Spanish speakers in the fire zone.

"There's a local radio station that was basically 24/7 fire information in English, but there was nobody else providing information in Spanish. So KBBF basically just started doing that on Monday morning," Mata says.

Staff hit the phones and called authorities to determine the location and direction of the fires, available shelters and other vital information for its Spanish-speaking listeners.

The KBBF audience had an urgent need for information.

"Many of those fires were so unexpected," Mata says. "Some callers said that they only had like two or three minutes to react because there was no time for them to gather anything. So it was almost immediate. A lot of people lost their houses and they didn't take anything with them."

Mata and his KBBF colleagues have been updating information frequently for the thousands of Napa and Sonoma residents displaced by the fires. He says that the community has pulled together in the crisis.

"We are hearing from all of the different centers, about the support that they're getting from the community and the volunteer teams that they have," he says. "They are in need of different supplies, and there are many shelters throughout Sonoma County and also Napa County where people can still go if they have to be evacuated. Each one of [the area's] cities has at least seven or eight shelters that are open and they're still receiving more people."

But despite the need, some people have been reluctant to seek help. Mata says that's because of persistent rumors.

"They're afraid that their information is going to be shared with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or with other federal agencies, which is not true," he says.

Also:Immigrants face impossible choices in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey

Mata is emphatic on this point: "It's safe. They're safe shelters when people go in there."

Shelter volunteers ask for minimal personal information.

"All they ask for is names," Mata says. "And the areas they were evacuated from."

Listen to emergency information on the California wildfires, in Spanish.

With some 450 people still reported missing, friends and family far from the fire zone are eager to learn what has become of their loved ones.

"Registering when they go to these different shelters helps, because they need to know who's there," says Mata.

The Sonoma County Sheriff's Department has launched a bilingual texting service, which provides subscribers updates about fires. Reports are based on the user's zip code.

People outside the region can hear the latest news, as it's heard in the Sonoma and Napa valleys, by clicking on KBBF's live stream.

Russia on Friday launched a European satellite dedicated to monitoring the Earth's atmosphere, the protective layer that shields the planet from the sun's radiation, live footage from the cosmodrome showed.

The Sentinel-5P orbiter took off on schedule at 0927 GMT from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.

The launch went according to plan and the 820-kilogram (1,800-pound) satellite was delivered into its final orbit 79 minutes after liftoff, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

"The Sentinel-5P satellite is now safely in orbit so it is up to our mission control teams to steer this mission into its operational life and maintain it for the next seven years or more," the agency's director general, Jan Woerner, said in a statement.

The satellite — carried by a Rokot, derived from the former Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile — left behind billows of yellow smoke amid an autumnal landscape of boreal forest, footage showed earlier Friday.

After separating from the upper stage, the satellite deployed its three solar panels and began communicating, the ESA said.

"The first signal was received 93 minutes after launch as the satellite passed over the Kiruna station in Sweden," it said.

Operational in six months

The launch and the early orbit phase will last three days, and the mission is slated to begin full operations in six months, the ESA said.

It is the first satellite dedicated to monitoring the atmosphere for Europe's Copernicus project, a joint initiative of the European Union and the ESA to track environmental damage and aid disaster relief operations.

It was the sixth satellite to join the Copernicus constellation. Others launched since April 2014 monitor forest cover and land and water pollution.

"Once operational, Sentinel-5P will map the global atmosphere every day with a resolution as high as 7 kilometers x 3.5 kilometers (4.3 miles x 2.2 miles)," the ESA said this week.

"At this detail, air pollution over cities can be detected."

The satellite is carrying a state-of-the-art Tropomi monitoring instrument that can map trace gases such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, methane, carbon monoxide and aerosols that "affect the air we breathe and therefore our health, and our climate," the agency has said.

The Copernicus program is named after the 16th-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who determined that the Earth orbited the sun, and not the other way around.

By mapping areas stricken by flood or earthquake, Copernicus will also help emergency teams identify the worst-hit areas and locate passable roads, rail lines and bridges. 

In the US there's YouTube, Groupon and Uber. In Iran there's Aparat, Takhfifan and Snapp.

"A couple years ago the tech community in Tehran was just really a handful of [venture capitalists] and a [few] young entrepeneuers," said Aki Ito, Bloomberg's tech editor and co-host of the podcast Decrypted.

But the country's tech sector flourished after sanctions were lifted as part of the Barack Obama-era nuclear deal.

“There’s no question that the lifting of sanctions allowed Iran’s tech community to grow so much faster than it would have with the sanctions there," Ito said. The lifting of sanctions "changed everything for a lot of young founders," who developed products and services that "people in Tehran use every single day."

Now that could all be at stake, as President Donald Trump said on Friday he would not formally certify the Iran deal, and warned the US could try to terminate it. 

How will the Trump administration's decision to decertify the Obama-era program affect Iran's entrepreneurs? Listen to the audio above. 

Wild elephants killed four Rohingya refugees, including three children, as they were building a shack on forest land in southern Bangladesh Saturday, police said.

The incident occurred at Balukhali camp in Cox's Bazar district, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have set up makeshift shelters since fleeing violence across the border in Myanmar.

"They were trampled to death by seven or eight wild elephants. They include a woman and three children," Afrozul Haq Tutul, deputy police chief of Cox's Bazar, told AFP. 

Two people were also injured, he said, adding all the victims were Rohingya who were building a shack in a part of the forest where wild elephants frequently search for food and shelter. 

Related: More than half of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are kids. Many are fleeing Myanmar alone.

This is the second time Rohingya refugees have been attacked by wild elephants in the area. Earlier two Rohingya — an elderly person and a child — were killed by elephants as they were sleeping in a makeshift shelter.

An estimated 536,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since a fresh outbreak of violence erupted on August 25 in Myanmar's westernmost Rakhine state.

Space at established refugee camps in Bangladesh has been all but exhausted, with new arrivals hacking away trees and other vegetation anywhere they can to erect shelters from the monsoon rain.

Many newly arrived refugees are camping in the open or along roadsides, where they rush aid trucks for food and other desperately needed supplies.

The Bangladesh government has allocated 3,000 acres of forest land to build proper shelters for the refugees but many have already set up shacks before the actual construction begins.  

A Cox's Bazar district forest official told AFP that clashes between animals and refugees were "inevitable" as the camp areas have been a roaming ground for elephants for centuries.

"The is a reserve forest land, frequented by wild Asian elephants all the time," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.   

The authorities want to extend the existing camps around Kutupalong and Balukhali into a refugee city for 800,000 Rohingya, but the United Nations has warned such a settlement would be dangerously overcrowded.

The latest violence erupted after Rohingya militant raids on 30 police posts in Rakhine triggered a military crackdown.

The UN calls the army fightback a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing" with villages set ablaze to drive Rohingya civilians out.

Hike long enough around the soft, chalky shales of western Kansas, and you just might stumble across a sea monster, half-buried in the soil.

That’s because 85 million years ago, Kansas was at the bottom of a gigantic, shallow sea that stretched from the Rockies all the way to the Appalachians, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Now, modern paleontologists are turning up riches in the sediments of that ancient seafloor.

The fossils paint a picture of a very different ocean ecosystem from what we would encounter today, says Laura Wilson, an associate professor of geosciences at Fort Hays State University and chief curator at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

“So you still have fish of all sizes — big teeth, those that are crushing shells — but there are no marine mammals,” she says. “So when we think of dolphins and whales and seals and sea lions, none of those had evolved yet, so those niches were filled by big marine reptiles” like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. “So big lizards, essentially, with big teeth and long tails that would be the top predators.”

“We also had some seabirds like we have today, but these [were] a lot more similar to their dinosaurian ancestors than the ones we might see flying around,” Wilson adds. “And then also we had the pterosaurs, so the big flying reptiles. They’re not birds, they’re not dinosaurs, but they were filling a lot of those aerial niches in the ecosystems.”

These strange animals don’t have direct descendants today, explains Mike Everhart, an adjunct curator of paleontology at the Sternberg Museum and the author of “Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea.”

“The marine lizards — the mosasaurs and so on — were related to modern snakes and monitor lizards, Komodo dragon-type stuff,” he says. “But they are not descendants. And of course, the pteranodons are all gone, most of the fish species. Of course, many lineages of fish are around today, but most of the ones that we collect or see out in the chalk went extinct about the same time as the dinosaurs.”

During the late Cretaceous period, marine animals had the benefit of a warm Earth that was about 85 percent covered in water, he says. “There were no ice caps, there were no glaciers, no real winter. So it was the marine animals that basically ran the Earth. The dinosaurs were all kind of limited to 15 percent of the mass.”

But today, hunting these sea monsters is a surprisingly leisurely undertaking in Kansas where, according to Everhart, the sea gave way to land at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 66 million years ago.

“Mike and I mostly — here in Kansas — spend our time in western Kansas, where when it comes to finding fossils, it’s finding the right age rock of the right environment at the surface of the Earth at the right time,” Wilson says.

“So right now in western Kansas [it’s] the chalks and the shales that have these fantastic creatures in them, and so we can go out, and it’s pretty low-tech. You walk around and look at the ground until you find something.”

Out in the badlands of western Kansas along the Smoky Hill, Saline, and Solomon rivers, “it’s just literally square miles of exposed chalk that you walk across," Everhart says. “And hopefully you find teeth, or you find a bone coming out, and that will lead you to a larger specimen, but it’s a lot of just walking and looking.”

If you do find a fossil, remember that it’s been in the ground for millions of years. “Once you start taking them out of the ground, they break down into pieces that are useless,” Everhart says. So if it’s big enough that you have to dig it up, he recommends calling a local museum. “Please contact someone who can help you do it right,” he says. 

This article is based on an interview from Science Friday‘s recent live show at the Orpheum Theater in Wichita, Kansas. 

In the recent film “Rememory,” an inventor has built a device that can extract memories from the brain. There’s more to the story — a murder, for one, and an amateur sleuth played by Peter Dinklage — but let’s pause here. How close are we in real life to being able to record our memories, Hollywood-style?

If you ask Boston University neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, in some ways we already do. “If you think about it, we outsource our memories already to things like social media, like Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, the works,” he says. But as he explains, these objective recordings of our day-to-day lives don’t work the same way as our memories, which can change a bit each time we recall them.

“When we recall a memory, often times it can be susceptible to modification,” he says. “So a blue shirt will turn purple, we add people in and out, the point of view that we're recalling the memory from changes. And I think that's a good thing, because some hypotheses out there are that what we lose for having inaccurate memories, we gain for being able to recombine elements of our past. And some would argue that that's a basis for things like imagination and creativity.”

In 2012, Ramirez and his colleague at MIT, Xu Liu, successfully created a false memory in mice. “We actually were able to go into the mouse brain and find the brain cells that held onto a particular memory and then artificially update that memory, so change the contents of that memory,” Ramirez explains. (Watch their famous TED talk about the research here.)

Since then, Ramirez has continued to study memory — including how in mice, pleasant memories can be “activated” to fight the symptoms of depression. As he described in an interview with National Geographic, memory manipulation could someday be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder or depression in humans — although he acknowledged the ethical road there could be thorny.

But Ramirez’s findings about mouse memory don’t translate directly to humans — at least not yet. Why? He likens the mouse brain to a 1988 Toyota Camry, and the human brain to a 2020 Lamborghini. “We can learn a lot from mouse brains in the same way that we can learn about the principles of how wheels work or how engines work between these two cars,” he says. “But you know, there's a lot of work to be done,” he adds. “We don't quite yet know where a memory is localized in the brain, or how it actually works, but we have some rough ideas.”

Ramirez is confident that in the future, we’ll crack the mysteries of memory. “As a scientist, I believe that everything in the physical universe has an answer, it can be understood and it can be reverse-engineered,” he says. “And the human brain, for instance, happens to exist in a physical universe, so it can be understood and it can be reverse-engineered.”

But for now, just like the rest of us, he outsources his memory to technology when he can. “Right now, my entire life depends on my Google calendar, for instance,” he says. “Maybe that opens up new corners so I can dedicate more time to other things that are in front of me, which I think is a sign of progress — we're never going to have less to remember, it's just going to be different things that we have to remember.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. 

The growth of data publicly available on the internet has been a boon for biological science and conservation. But it is also being used by poachers and dishonest collectors to locate rare plants and animals and sell them illegally for a hefty price.

This situation presents researchers and the public with a quandary: How to find a middle ground that preserves the spirit of scientific discovery while protecting at-risk species.

In other words, if you are in the woods of the southeastern United States and think you’ve found an ivory-billed woodpecker, which has been thought to be extinct since the 1940s, you may not want to post that information on eBird, says Adam Welz. He's a South African writer, photographer and filmmaker, who recently published an investigation on this topic in collaboration with Yale E360.

Instead, if you find something truly special, “you should give the information to somebody of great credibility, somebody perhaps who works for a well-established organization, who is in the public eye,” Welz recommends. But, he adds, we must “keep an eye on them, too, because some of the most professional poachers and smugglers are experts in their field [or] university professors.”

Then there are the international traders. They don't necessarily know as much as the specialists, but they move around the world picking up animals, to order, for their clients. These clients are often collectors interested in a particular group of species.

“The third crowd in this game are the criminal syndicates,” Welz says. “These are the seriously organized criminals who are often dealing all kinds of other things. They're dealing illegal drugs [and] guns, they're in human trafficking — and they're dealing endangered species as well, because that is just another way of making money.”

All of these groups use publicly available geospatial data to locate and steal rare and endangered species.

No can pinpoint a specific time at which this problem arose, Welz says. As the internet and online databases have grown, people have begun to see the potential of sharing data, either formally within the scientific community or informally among ordinary people on social media.

It’s a problem that has built up over time and has created many different streams of information.

“There is data that has been acquired by scientists using interesting tracking devices [and] these types of tracking technologies have become more and more sophisticated,” Welz explains. “Today, we can literally track tiny little honeybees with tiny little electronic tags, [and] we can track blue whales with satellite tags. … You can implant a tiny little transmitter in a snake that will not only tell you where the snake is, it will tell you what temperature the snake is at. It will tell you, perhaps, the altitude of the snake. All this technology is exploding, and it's being adopted very rapidly because it gives biologists and conservationists such incredibly useful data.”

According to Welz, biologists are extremely divided about what to do, because the geospatial data is extraordinarily valuable to science and to conservation.

“We're able to do the most incredible stuff with this data, and the whole of science rests upon transparency,” he says. “The entire scientific endeavor is based on the idea of transparency; on the idea that I can replicate the results you claim to have found in your study and your experiment. As soon as data starts being suppressed and starts being hidden and starts being held back, it can cause damage to the core of what we're trying to do when we do biological science.”

On the other hand, it is “absolutely, blatantly obvious to everybody that criminals are using this data, and there is also some evidence that holding the data back works.”

For example, he says, scientists working with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Tanzania discovered a new species of viper, a “very attractive little black-and-yellow snake, which was only found in a very small forest patch in that country.” The scientists published the snake’s formal scientific description without divulging its location. “I've just checked in with those guys and they say there's absolutely no evidence that the poachers have actually found this species yet,” Welz says.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

As some Puerto Ricans fill flights to Miami, we asked a handful of people in San Juan their thoughts about leaving their homes for the mainland US. About 3.4 million people live in Puerto Rico, and some will choose to leave the island behind and move permanently.

The House passed a $36.5 billion aid package last week and on Sunday, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricard Rosselló said he expected power to be restored to 95 percent of the island’s electric grid by Dec. 15. Currently, 85 percent of the island is still without electricity.

Most of the people we spoke to responded that they would not leave their families behind but planned to stay and rebuild.

Yolanda Prosper, teacher, San Juan resident

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

Gabriel Rodriguez, production and creative director at an advertising agency, San Juan resident

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Jasmine Garsd/PRI

Maria Olivero, acting public affairs officer at VA Caribbean Healthcare System

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Jasmine Garsd/PRI

César Gutiérrez, Marine Corps veteran, San Juan resident

Credit:

Jasmine Garsd/PRI

In the United States, this year’s wildfire season has been wild, to say the least. Roughly 50,000 fires have scorched more than 8.5 million acres across the country, hitting the Pacific Northwest, California and Montana particularly hard.

Occasional fires are important for the cycles of many ecosystems, but this year’s heavy fire season shows the mark of human influence. Jennifer Balch, director of Earth Lab and an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado, explains that scientists have long known there’s a strong link between a warmer climate and wildfires.

“We can even parse out that contribution and say that effectively, climate change and human-caused climate change have made fuels 50 percent drier,” she says, “and it’s doubled the amount of western forests that have burned since the 1980s.” She points out that California, Oregon and Montana — all deeply affected by the fires — have seen record-breaking heat or drought this summer.

But climate change isn’t the only factor behind this year’s glut of wildfires. In Oregon, the huge Eagle Creek fire near Portland was started by teenagers playing with a firecracker. Balch and her colleagues recently studied two decades’ worth of government wildfire data — 1.5 million fires in all — and found that humans caused 84 percent of wildfires.

“We effectively bring fire with us wherever we go,” she says. “We use it for debris burning. It’s part of our campfires. It’s a consequence of fireworks. We toss cigarettes out and they catch vegetation on fire.” And while lightning strikes tend to be seasonal in the western United States, “what people are doing is we’re effectively creating a year-round fire season,” she says, “where we’re coupling the ignition availability and the spark that starts those fires with a warmer and extended fire season.”

Humans also tend to start fires in unusual areas compared with lightning-strike fires, adds Hugh Safford, an adjunct professor in environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, and a regional ecologist with the Forest Service.

“Humans are igniting fires usually on the peripheries of urban areas, along highways, very often in canyons,” he says. “And particularly in a place like the Sierra Nevada, where most of the canyons are aligned with the general wind directions … when people start fires at the bottom of canyons, they race very quickly up into wildlands, and they can become very difficult to contain.”

So, knowing the impact that we have on wildfires, what can we do to better manage them? Compared with the early 1970s, when “a district ranger or a forest supervisor was expected to get a fire out by 10:00 a.m. the next morning,” Safford says some burning is now encouraged — and that’s the right approach.

“It’s usually called sort of a confine-and-contain process, where you might build a box in a landscape around the fire and say, if we can keep it in here and if we like the effects, we’ll just monitor this thing,” he says. “But when it becomes a problem elsewhere, they can jump on it.”

After years of fire suppression and warming climates, however, there’s a lot of fuel in America’s forests. In California alone, more than 100 million trees have died in California as a result of the drought. “And we are seeing large and very difficult-to-control fires in those systems now,” Stafford says.

Removing fuel can be part of the fire management solution in some ecosystems, he says. But it’s a massive undertaking — and from a fuel standpoint, he adds, the biggest issues are brush and little trees. “And in this country right now, there is not an economy to deal with that stuff,” he adds. “We live in the US, we don’t live in a command economy. And if a profit can’t be made off something, it’s likely not going to happen, absent a huge subsidy from somewhere.”

Balch agrees. “We can’t really address the amount of fuel that’s available and the fire problem with thinning and removing fuels alone,” she says, noting it would be a “very, very expensive process.”

“So ... we have to be really strategic about where we do treatments of fuels and how we do them,” she says. “And fundamentally, I think it’s most important where people are living and working, and protecting those areas, in terms of reducing and mitigating the potential risk for larger intense and severe wildfires, and then letting fire do the good work that it does when and where we can do it.

“Because ultimately we do live in flammable places,” she adds. “And part of our strategy has to be working with fire.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. 

Visitors to certain New Zealand caves are treated to an amazing sight: Thousands of little lights twinkling on the cave walls, like Christmas lights. But the little lights aren’t bulbs or even fireflies — they’re glow worms.

“Technically, a glow worm is actually a glowing maggot, but that doesn't sound as romantic," says Miriam Sharpe, a biochemistry researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Sharpe and her colleague Kurt Krause are working to understand the chemistry behind the glow worm’s ghostly blue light — one of at least 40 different bioluminescent systems that animals around the world have evolved to help them hunt or mate. Video producer Chelsea Fiske filmed their research for Science Friday’s newest Macroscope documentary, “Shedding Light on the New Zealand Glow Worm.”

The first thing you need to know: Glow worms are not larval fireflies. “So fireflies are in the northern hemisphere and it's funny, because fireflies are actually beetles, and these glow worms, they're the larval stage of a fungus gnat, which is more like a fly,” Fiske says. “This species was specific to New Zealand; there's also a couple of other species in Australia, and that's it.”

To capture the glow worms on film, Fiske and her husband set out at night to some of New Zealand’s lesser-known glow worm caves. “Oftentimes these caves are in the strangest places, in the middle of a sheep paddock or something,” she says. “And so we would trek in with our gear and it's kind of eerie because there are oftentimes eels in the creeks in the caves, which can bite. But it was completely worth it, it’s magical.”

One scene shows the researchers collecting glow worms in the dark, in a ravine not far from their university. Using a little wooden kebab stick, Sharpe gently works the glow worms off of the ravine wall and drops them in a test tube. (Not too many in one tube, according to Fiske: the glow worms are carnivores, and will even devour each other.)

Back in the lab, the researchers freeze the glow worms. Then, they cut off the light organs at the end of their tails and mash them together. From there, it’s all biochemistry: the researchers separate the proteins according to size and test them in a machine to determine which proteins are producing light.

“So they're separating out the proteins in these light organs to identify the protein or enzyme which they call a luciferase,” Fiske says. “And then also a chemical, a small molecule substrate or a luciferin. And so those two things are the components that they're looking for that make these bioluminescent creatures glow.”

What the researchers have found is, well, illuminating. For one, the glow worm’s substrate is made from different chemicals than those used by fireflies, as Sharpe explains in the film — a discovery that could have real-world applications.

“People use bioluminescence all the time in biomedical research, but the thing is with every different bioluminescent system it has its own characteristics,” she adds. “And with different characteristics, you can come up with different uses for that particular system.” 

But the researchers also just want to understand why glow worms glow. “It's very refreshing actually,” Fiske says. “You know, they're definitely just in the pursuit of knowledge.” Even if in the end, we’re just talking about maggots.

“When you're there in the middle of a glow worm cave and you feel like you're surrounded by 360 degrees of starlight, it's still magical regardless of the fact that they're actually a fungus gnat,” Fiske says.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow. 

Three weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, we’ve seen images of the destruction and heard stories about the lack of electricity and basic supplies like food and water in some areas.

But the main way we measure — and understand — the scope of any disaster is through the death toll.

The official count is now 48 deaths. But the news site Vox thought that number seemed off.

“We knew from reports on the ground, and investigative journalists who've also been looking into this, that this was very likely way too low of a number,” said Eliza Barclay, an editor at Vox.

So they dug into the numbers, cross-checking with news reports, and found that the number of casualties resulting from the hurricane was probably much closer to 450.

Two members of Congress have now announced they will request an audit of the official death toll.

Here are a few highlights from Vox’s report:

• At the time of the report, the official death toll was 43.
• National and local news outlets reported an additional 36 deaths attributed to the hurricane.
• NPR reported an additional 49 bodies with unidentified cause of death sent to a hospital morgue since the storm.
• The Los Angeles Times reported 50 more deaths than normal in one region in the three days after the hurricane.
• Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Reporting found 69 hospital morgues were are at “capacity.”
• According to El Vocero newspaper, 350 bodies are being stored at the Institute of Forensic Sciences awaiting autopsies, but it’s not clear how many of them were there before the hurricane.

Listen to The World’s full interview with Vox’s Eliza Barclay, above.

On Sunday night, Rafael Kotcherha Campora posted a series of alarming status updates on Facebook:

Kotcherha Campora was staying at his partner's farm in Galicia, Spain, when he spotted a fire on the horizon. Soon, the winds began to whip up, "and the smoke started tunneling down in all directions," he recalls. "The smoke was so dense that we literally couldn't breathe anymore."

He and his friends decided to go to the front lines to see if they could help the local fire brigade put out the flames. When they got there, they found a slapdash response. "It was just us and volunteers and local neighbors all with sticks and buckets. There was a total lack of organization. People were in a panic. And the fire was at the point where it was at the foot of the villages."

Hundreds of fires have raged across Portugal and Spain since Sunday, devouring homes and killing 41 people in Portugal and four in northern Spain.

Portugal's civil protection agency said that 71 people had been injured in the fires, 16 of them seriously. One person was still missing. Among the dead was a 1-month-old baby. 

In Spain, two of the victims were found in a burned-out car on the side of the road.

Environmental factors are partly to blame for the spate of fires, says reporter Paul Ames in Lisbon, Portugal. "We've had a very bad drought, very high temperatures, and then of course we've had very strong winds pushed along" by Hurricane Ophelia, which helped fan and spread the flames.

But poor land management, Ames said, has made Portugal especially vulnerable to forest fires. "Portugal is a major paper producer. And much of the country has been planted with fast-growing eucalyptus trees which feed into the paper industry."

Eucalyptus can be harvested quickly — which the paper industry likes — but it also contains a highly flammable oil and "has this bark which flakes off," Ames explains. "If the forest isn't well-managed, there's an accumulation of dry strips of bark which build up underneath the trees and that's a very flammable mix."

In Portugal, the fires have overwhelmed rescue services and the government is facing public criticism over its perceived slow response. An opposition party has even launched a motion of no confidence in the government. The fires themselves have died down on Tuesday, thanks to overnight rain, "but public anger is still burning fiercely here," says Ames.

In Spain, Kotcherha Campora says the fires have left behind an otherworldly landscape. "There were lots of places that weren't burnt, so you have this contrast between autumn leaves changing and green pastures surrounded by these massive parcels of thousands of hectares of land that is just black, charred earth," he said. "It's a strange parallel world of beautiful autumn and total black destruction."

Material from Agence France-Presse was used in this report.

High-tech, remote imaging developed for the military has become a powerful tool in the hands of scientists studying the health of natural ecosystems.

The technology allows scientists to assess forests and coral reefs from satellites and from specially equipped aircraft that can get an even closer look — down to individual branches of trees.

On board these custom-built aircraft is a system of instruments called ATOMS, which stands for Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System.

Greg Asner, principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution’s Global Ecology Lab at Stanford, helped develop this ultra-high-resolution imaging system — work that won him the 22nd Heinz Award in the environment category.

“ATOMS is comprised of a suite of instruments that work together,” Asner explains. “One of the instruments is a laser scanning system. We fire laser beams out of the bottom of the plane, and those lasers interact with the land, the trees, whatever we’re flying over. Those lasers give us a three-dimensional view of the ecosystem: How tall are the trees? What's the architecture of the branches? It tells us about even the leaf-level architecture — and then we have other instruments that work with [the lasers].”

These include an imaging spectrometer that uses sunlight reflected off the tree canopy to measure the chemical composition of individual trees, and high-resolution cameras that act as a kind of reference that collects all the background information about data the aircraft gathered that day, Anser says.

So far, Asner and his team have focused their work on the biomass of forests. They measure how many species per acre are part of the forest, how much water is in the tree canopy, nitrogen levels — all the things that indicate the health of the forest.

Recently, the team has been conducting similar work on coral reefs. “We just had a breakthrough last year where we figured out how to fly over a coral reef and digitally remove the seawater so that we exposed the bottom and we were able to understand the health and the condition of the corals that live below that sea surface,” Asner explains.

Asner says he and his colleagues have mapped areas all over the planet, but place particular emphasis on regions that are undergoing rapid development. “[O]ur science and our technology can play a role in mapping the attributes of a forest in a way that allows for better decision-making in the context of development [or] in the context of, say, putting in new agricultural fields and avoiding areas of high biodiversity.”

All of this highly detailed mapping has revealed what Asner calls “the good, the bad and the ugly.”

“We found extremely high biological diversity — lots and lots of species coexisting in patterns that were unknown to science,” he explains, “so, the good thing is that we were able to unveil those landscapes and see them for the first time.”

“The bad would be when our work reveals that there are, say, illegal gold miners in a region,” he continues. “The ugly is some of the hardest work we do, which is mapping regions in preparation or in consultation for the effort to mitigate losses as climate change proceeds. I call that ‘the ugly’ because those are really hard problems to crack. That science is in its infancy and we're still trying to figure out how to do it.”

Asner says the project’s “most operational, mature type of science” is its ability to measure how much carbon is stored in a forest.

“Today, we're able to fly over a forest and relatively quickly get an estimate of the carbon stock, and that's important for a lot of reasons,” he explains. “One, carbon is a great metric of the health of a forest. A forest with lots of carbon stored is generally a forest that's in good shape. But also, it's a critical component of the climate change mitigation efforts of state and federal governments. They want to be able to store carbon in forests rather than it being in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, so they want to know how much they're storing in these forests today, and they want advice, consultation and guidance on how they might store even more carbon in their forests in the future.”

NASA wants to put some of this technology into orbit, Asner says. He believes the laser technology may be available on the International Space Station within the next 18 months or so.

“The chemical mapping is the most critical at this point, in terms of mapping the health of coral reefs and ecosystems in general, on land and in the sea,” he says. “Those technologies are of interest to organizations like NASA and the federal government.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

One month ago, on the afternoon of Sept. 19, a massive quake struck Mexico City and surrounding areas. That day, The World's Monica Campbell was in the Boston newsroom, far from her home and family in Mexico City. She watched footage of buildings collapse and waited as death tolls rose.

"I couldn't believe it," she says. "The quake struck 32 years to the day since the massive 1985 quake."

That time, at least 10,000 people died. Fewer people died this time — 369 people confirmed dead. And fewer buildings collapsed. Some say it was because the recent quake was weaker and that buildings codes have improved over the years. Or, maybe it was just plain luck.

The first wave of university students displaced by Hurricane Maria has arrived to study in the mainland US, taking advantage of tuition discounts offered to Puerto Rican students whose home institutions remain shuttered.

“Coming here was a big relief,” says Rosamari Palerm, 23. She was the first student from Puerto Rico to arrive at St. Thomas University, a private Catholic school in Miami Gardens, Florida with over 5,000 students.

The electricity, clean water and cell service available on campus — not to mention college classes — stand in stark contrast to conditions at home. Much of Puerto Rico is still without power a month after the hurricane. Water contamination is widespread. The scope of the disaster there is still not completely understood.

A month ago, Palerm was in her apartment in San Juan with her parents and two older brothers sheltering from Hurricane Maria. They hunkered down in the hallway and listened to the wind crashing into the windows and walls.

“The building would sway, it felt kind of like a boat,” Palerm says.

When the winds died down, the apartment was largely intact. But outside, sewage water flooded the streets, the electric grid was down, and life as Palerm knew it was on hold.

“I worked at a mall and the mall is completely destroyed, so I couldn’t work,” Palerm says.

Classes were suspended at Sacred Heart University where Palerm was a senior biology major. She planned to graduate this academic year and apply to veterinary school, but that seemed unlikely after the hurricane. So when Palerm heard through family on the mainland that St. Thomas University was offering free room and board and tuition discounts to students displaced by the hurricane, she jumped at the chance to transfer.

Palerm moved into her dorm room on the university’s gated campus two weeks ago. The grounds are full of old-growth trees, but inside her dorm room, the walls above her standard-issue bed and desk are bare.

“I literally left with nothing. I just had my clothes,” Palerm says.

She points to her mini-fridge, towels, and a bright yellow bedspread, fresh from Target.

“All this is new,” Palerm says. “Thank God I have a credit card!”

St. Thomas is one of about a dozen private schools in Florida offering discounted tuition and room and board to students displaced by Hurricane Maria.

Florida’s public colleges and universities, along with the State University of New York system, are offering in-state tuition to students from Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Tulane University in New Orleans, where their own students scattered to other schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, will accept displaced students this spring, provided they pay tuition to their home institutions.

Many of these colleges and universities will start accepting students for the spring term. St. Thomas, however, began enrolling students almost immediately, allowing them to join classes mid-term or add on additional credits with a shorter semester that started just a few days ago. Provost Irma Becerra, who grew up in Puerto Rico and lived through Hurricane Andrew in Miami in 1992, felt she had a personal stake in the issue.

“When we saw the devastation in Puerto Rico we needed to jump into action,” said Becerra, who evacuated from her home in Miami for Hurricane Irma in September.

Luis Rodriguez, who is studying for his master’s degree, just moved into his dorm at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida. On Oct. 10. 2017, he was setting up his room. When he left his home near Carolina, Puerto Rico, his family still didn’t have power.

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler/PRI

He arrived the day before and took two hot showers in his first night at the dorm.

“It was a relief, because it’s been like a month since I’ve had any air conditioning and hot water,” Rodriguez says. “It’s just amazing.”

This growing contingent of Puerto Rican students eat together in she school’s small dining hall, pulling tables together so they can all sit next to each other.

“I feel like I’m not alone,” says senior psychology major Victoria Angulo, two days after her arrival. “If I say something or if I feel sad, they’ve felt the same way. We support each other.”

But they’re still feeling disconnected from the families they’ve left at home.

“I still got my mom down there, I still got my brother down there, I still got my dad down there,” says freshman Luis Aviles, who’s from the hard-hit center of the island. “Not talking to them every single day, that’s the bad part of it.”

Students after dinner at the dining hall at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida on Oct. 10, 2017. Puerto Rican students have transferred to St. Thomas and are finding community with each other.

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler/PRI

Cell phone service is still spotty in Puerto Rico, even in San Juan, the largest city on the island. Palerm is never sure if she’ll reach her parents when she calls home. When she does reach them, they tell her there’s still not enough food or water in the grocery stores. The diesel-powered generator in her family’s apartment building, which had been supplying electricity and pumping water to their fifth-floor apartment for four hours a day before she left, is only working three hours a day now.

About 20 percent of the country has power from the electric grid, according to the Puerto Rican government.

“When I wake up, I try to be positive,” says Rosa Nadal, Palerm's mother, in a phone call. “But you get frustrated because when you go out on the street you see there’s nothing happening. You feel trapped in a place that is not moving."

Palerm's two older brothers are also heading to the mainland. The three of them are all of Nadal's children.

“[I’m] sad because I am not here with them,” Nadal says. “But I’m happy at the same time, because I know they’re going to be safe in another place, moving on with their lives. If they’re OK, I’m OK.”

The fact that Palerm’s parents are struggling while she’s pushing forward with her education has not escaped her.

“At first I felt narcissistic because obviously I’m leaving them in the struggle to go better my life,” Palerm says. “But my mom told me, 'This is for your future, this is what we want for you. You don’t say no to this kind of opportunity.'”

And with free room and board at school, there’s a practical upside to leaving an island still in disaster-recovery mode.

“I’m one less person that they have to feed,” Palerm says.

Puerto Rico was already losing population because of its economic challenges before Hurricane Maria. Estimates suggest its population has shrunk by more than 300,000 people since 2010. The devastation wrought by Maria is expected to accelerate that exodus. And the wave of new arrivals to the mainland could be considered environmental migrants because of the role of climate change in making hurricanes more intense.

“At this point we don’t have a good estimate of how many people exactly will move, but I think everyone agrees it’s going to be massive,” says Jorge Duany, anthropology professor at Florida International University. “We’re talking about 350,000 to perhaps half a million.”

Some estimates put the figure closer to a million people. This environmental migration is likely to only make Puerto Rico’s economic problems worse.

“That kind of loss will mean a smaller tax base, less economic activity, fewer incentives to remain — especially for those who can find jobs here,” Duany says. “The other thing we don’t know is how many people will remain here in the [mainland] states, or whether they’ll go back once life returns to normalcy on the island.”

In the short-term, tuition breaks for Puerto Rican students will help them graduate on time and continue on to graduate school, if they choose. But over time, Duany warns, they could exacerbate the island’s brain drain.

For Palerm, the relative permanence of her move to the mainland didn’t sink in until she was at the airport with her mom, waiting in chaotic lines to leave San Juan. Her mother hugged her tightly and started to cry.

“It didn’t hit me [until then],” Palerm says. “I’m probably not going to come back for a while.”

That question of when — or if — Puerto Ricans will return home could also have big implications for the demographics of Florida, a key battleground state in national politics. Many students at St. Thomas say they don’t see a future for themselves on the island anymore.

But Palerm’s family ties hold her tightly, and she says she wants to go back to Puerto Rico eventually.

“[I] don’t know when that is, might be a year, two years, but I want to go back,” Palerm says. “I love my little island. I want to be a part of helping it get better.”

Flying insect populations dropped by more than 75 percent during the last three decades in dozens of protected areas across Germany, researchers have found.

A club of mostly amateur entomologists used traps to capture insects and measure their biomass at 63 nature protection areas in Germany since 1989.

“It’s not just one species, it seems there’s basically a kind of wholesale collapse of wild insects,” says Dave Goulson, a co-author of a study published in the online journal PLoS ONE on Wednesday.

The study did not pinpoint a reason for the precipitous drop, but Goulson notes that many nature preserves are surrounded by agricultural lands.

“I think it’s likely [that] it’s how the surrounding land is being managed, because the nature reserves themselves haven’t really changed, but the surrounding landscape is full of these big monoculture crops treated with lots of insecticides,” says Goulson, a biology professor at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. “We’ve turned a huge proportion of the surface of the world into a fairly bleak and inhospitable place for life other than the crop.”

Insects may often seem a nuisance to humans, but they’re vital pollinators and food sources for species higher on the food chain.

An estimated 80 percent of wild plants species are pollinated by insects, and more than half of birds rely on insects as a food sources, according to the study.

“If we were to lose the insects, we would lose most of our crops, we would lose all the flowers from the countryside, and we’d lose most of the bird life, the mammal life, and so on,” Goulson told The World in an interview. “So essentially we’re talking about complete catastrophe for life on Earth.”

The study found that the decline in insects occurred regardless of habitat type, and changes in weather patterns, land use and habitat don’t explain the overall decline.

Hans de Kroon of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who supervised the research, suggested reducing the use of pesticides, expanding nature reserves and developing good monitoring programs as ways to exercise “the utmost caution” in an effort to protect insect populations.

A researcher who is unconnected to the study, Lynn Dicks from the University of East Anglia in the UK, told the BBC that the study provides new evidence for "an alarming decline" that many entomologists have suspected for some time.

"If total flying insect biomass is genuinely declining at this rate [about 6 percent per year], it is extremely concerning," she said.

“I hope this is sufficiently dramatic that people will sit up and listen, and realize that actually we are doing irrevocable damage to the Earth’s environment,” Goulson says.