In December 2017, for the first time ever in winter, a tanker sailed without an icebreaker through the Northern Sea Route, a shipping lane that runs along the Arctic coast of Russia.

Two things made this possible: dramatically thinning ice in the Arctic and a shipbuilding company in South Korea that constructed a new type of tanker capable of moving both forward and in reverse that can break through ice up to 2 meters thick.

On its maiden voyage, the tanker sailed from South Korea to northern Russia, where it took on a cargo of liquefied natural gas that it then delivered to France. At about 14,000 kilometers (8,700 miles), that route is roughly 40 percent shorter than the traditional route through the Suez Canal.

For sailing between Asia and Europe, the Northern Sea Route, shown above in red, is about 40 percent shorter than the Suez Canal Route, shown in green.

Credit:

RosarioVanTulpe/Wikimedia Commons

While, in the short run, this might save the oil and gas industry money, the potential for accidents and spills could spell disaster for the fragile Arctic ecosystem, says Nancy Kinner, director of the Coastal Response Research Center and Center for Spills in the Environment at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

“The resources are very, very fragile in the Arctic,” Kinner says. “The biota are stressed anyway, because of climate change, and [it would] put a further stress on them to have a contaminant in the water.”

The Arctic has very few navigational aids, Kinner points out. There is little satellite coverage and bathymetry data, which measures water depth, is sparse. “If you can’t see where there might be a mountain jutting up from the bottom, you could have an accident pretty easily,” Kinner notes.

In addition, if a ship got into trouble up in the Arctic, there are very few other ships around to help out, Kinner says. And if a ship did have an accident or a spill, the equipment isn't there to help clean it up — and even if there were, it's hard to get people up there to work it.

Spills are also much more difficult to contain and to clean up in the icy waters of the Arctic, Kinner explains. If material leaks out below the water line, it gets trapped under the ice. If an accident happens in broken-up ice, then they’ve got to try to clean it up, but if the ship stops moving, the ice will freeze around the ship and trap it.

What’s more, “there's a whole ecosystem that lives at the bottom of the ice,” Kinner says. “Microorganisms grow there, and then other organisms come feed on those microorganisms and there is a whole food chain built around that.”

Kinner says she worries about the long-term consequences of tankers regularly traveling the Northern Sea Route, as other nations, including Canada and the US, will no doubt also increase their tanker traffic, as well.

“I don't think that we are prepared for the kinds of accidents that could happen, and I mean prepared with respect to navigation, with respect to bathymetry, all of these kinds of things — satellites, communication — let alone a spill response,” Kinner says. “All of these are threats to a very, very fragile environment; not only an ecosystem but also to the peoples who live in those areas. A lot of them are indigenous peoples whose livelihoods depend on subsistence from the sea. So, I'm worried. We need to get our act together here.”

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

First, “fake news” from questionable news sites permeated social media during the 2016 presidential campaign. Now, behold the next trend in skewed reality that experts say could threaten US democracy: fake videos that appear authentic by embedding real people's faces onto other bodies through artificial intelligence algorithms. It has sparked a debate on how to verify videos shared online.  

This phenomenon also began during the presidential campaign. People began slicing videos to falsely make it look as if events took place.

"This is just the next level in that," says Samantha Cole, an assistant editor at Vice's tech news site, Motherboard. "How we view things as true, a lot of the times is — if you see a video and you see that person in the video, you can say that [event] happened. And now maybe that's not the case."

Cole wrote a series of stories in December about the now-closed Reddit thread, “deepfakes,” in which users could post fake porn using the faces of celebrities or even their exes or friends (or ex-friends?).

The videos were created using a machine-learning algorithm. It works by taking a data set with hundreds of photos of one person and blending them into original video footage where the person's face is pasted onto another person's body. Recently, an app was released that could help anyone achieve this result.

“We say that anyone can do it, but it does take a lot of patience, some curiosity and a little bit of knowledge about AI to begin with,” Cole says. “So, it's accessible and it's democratized, but I'm not going to say it's easy.”

Reddit and the popular pornography site, Pornhub, have banned deepfakes videos. But Cole says it's just a first step because the videos are “just being driven to more scattered places on the web.”

Aviv Ovadya is the chief technologist at the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. He says this technology can easily be adapted to audio-only platforms.

“Let's say there's a hot mic of [President] Trump ordering a missile attack on North Korea. It didn't actually happen, but that doesn't mean North Korea won't launch a missile attack back,” Ovadya says.

The technology seems to already exist: A Chinese company already has an audio-forgery video creating the illusion that Trump is fluent in Mandarin.

"It's something that we should really worry about,” Ovadya says. “It affects the foundations of our democracy and a lot of our civil institutions."

"I think that for a long time, video has been our gold standard of truth. Maybe not legally, but definitely in our minds. You see something, you say, 'Oh my gosh, that happened.’ You see it for five seconds. You hit "share" and ‘retweet’ and it gets a million shares on Facebook, and then, that is what happened,” Cole explains.

Things that may have previously seemed far-fetched appear true because a video is thought to be indisputable evidence, Cole says, adding, "And that's the scariest part of this." 

Siwei Lyu serves as an associate professor in the department of computer science at the University at Albany, State University of New York, in addition to working as the director of the university’s computer vision and machine-learning lab.

Lyu, who is an expert on digital media forgery, says that while the foundation of this technology has been around for years — mainly used by Hollywood studios — those who worked with it needed special hardware tools, software systems and technical training.

“What has been changed recently are these new artificial intelligence-enabled algorithms that can take a lot of data and bypass a lot of this manual process and a need for technical facilities," Lyu says. People who may not have been able to afford the technology can suddenly access it almost for free.

Lyu is conducting research with a team at Dartmouth College to develop technology that distinguishes real and fake videos by using physiological signals of those featured: namely, heart rate and blood flow. He says his team’s algorithms can detect tiny fluctuations in the skin color due to changes from the blood flow. Then, using a separate technology developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lyu and his colleagues can enhance those physiological signals to determine a video’s authenticity.

“So, we have some pretty clear results [and it] seem to be promising, but [we're] still exploring this idea,” Lyu says.

Ovadya says that even once a mainstream system to detect fake videos is established, those who create the videos will eventually come up with new technology to counter it.

“I don't see that as sort of a super long-term solution. I think it's a cat-and-mouse game,” he says.

“And even if you can detect whether or not something has been manipulated, that still needs to be shown in some way when it's being represented on Facebook or YouTube wherever. And so this is sort of a [question of] not just, can you detect it, but also how does this actually affect the ecosystem around which we share information."

Lyu is working on a media forensics program sponsored by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that is poised to assemble teams from academia, industry, government and international partners to devise technical solutions. The holy grail of the project is a kind of crowdsourcing platform where viewers can decide a video's authenticity.

“We as a research committee are working very hard toward that goal. So, there’s just a little bit [of] hope for this problem ... We're working hard; we're trying to fight back this trend. As Aviv just mentioned, there's a cat-and-mouse game, so we keep we keep growing both sides of the war."

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

One of the world’s most sensitive telescopes is buried deep in Antarctic ice, searching for evidence of elusive, subatomic particles called neutrinos — elementary particles scientists believe are one of the building blocks of the universe.

In his new book, "The Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a New Astronomy at the South Pole," writer Mark Bowen chronicles the decadeslong project to build the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

Ever since Galileo turned his telescope towards the heavens four centuries ago, these finely tuned instruments have produced breathtaking images of planets and other galaxies. But IceCube doesn’t “look” at anything at all, in the traditional sense. Instead, it is made up of thousands of light detectors, buried in a cubic kilometer of diamond-clear ice.

A neutrino is a fundamental particle — a basic constituent of matter — and hard to detect. “The strange thing about the neutrino is that even now nobody understands it very well,” Bowen says. “It’s at the forefront of particle physics because it is just this really weird particle.”

Researchers hope the neutrino can help explain the behavior of some of the “incredibly strange things that are being discovered far off in outer space,” Bowen says. “We have now entered an era called ‘multimessenger astronomy.’ … The neutrino would be a third messenger, besides light and gravitational waves, with which we can look at exotic things like merging neutron stars, blazars and things of that sort.”

Back in the 1970s, physicists developed the theory known as the Standard Model of particle physics, which postulates that “everything in the universe is found to be made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces.” The most recently discovered fundamental particle is the Higgs boson, which was announced with great fanfare in 2012.

The neutrino has revealed some physics beyond the Standard Model. The model says that a neutrino should not weigh anything, but a 1998 experiment similar to IceCube showed that neutrinos do indeed have mass.

The key to detecting a neutrino is to monitor a huge volume of a clear material — ice, air or water — and watch for an interaction of a neutrino with that material, Bowen explains. When a neutrino interacts with a proton, a neutron or something else in the nucleus of an atom, the neutrino disappears; but as it does so, it “knocks out a particle" that emits light.

That particle is knocked out like a billiard ball when hit head-on with a cue ball: It travels almost exactly the same direction as the neutrino. Scientists can’t observe the neutrino itself, only the product of the neutrino’s collision.

A neutrino collision can produce several kinds of particles — the key one, for observational purposes, is called a muon. When a muon is released, it speeds through the ice and, at that moment, it travels faster than the light it is emitting. So, the muon drags a cone of light behind it. “It’s just like a boat on a lake,” Bowen explains. “The waves come off in an angle behind the boat because they can't go as fast as the boat. That’s exactly what's happening.”

IceCube’s enormous 3-D grid of basketball-sized light detectors, sunk into holes a mile and a half deep in the clear ice of the South Pole, can detect that muon’s light trail. And since the muon is traveling in the same direction as the neutrino, scientists can see where the neutrino came from and possibly see what object might have created it. In 2013, IceCube announced the first detection of neutrinos that originated outside our solar system.

Eighty-six IceCube strings made up of 60 sensors (called Digital Optical Modules, or DOMs) had to be quickly installed before the ice completely froze around them. 

Credit:

IceCube/NSF

IceCube, like its predecessor, the Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detector (DUMONT), is buried a mile deep because the researchers want to use the massive area above the instruments as a shield to block the zillions of other cosmic ray particles that are zipping through the Earth all the time.

In fact, the instrument is actually designed to look the other way, Bowen explains. If you're standing on the South Pole, the instrument looks down. “It is looking for neutrinos that have made it all the way through the Earth and then happen to interact with the ice right near the detector, or even the bedrock below it, and set a muon zooming through the detector.”

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

Located 30 miles off the coast of New England, Nantucket is a historical gem and an upscale haven for summer vacationers. But erosion and rising seas are threatening some of its most expensive real estate.

The National Park Service calls Nantucket the “finest surviving architectural and environmental example of a late 18th-and early 19th-century New England seaport.” Back then, Nantucket grew rich on the spoils of the whaling industry. Today, it is a popular summer colony, and the historic homes have been joined by newer, but still tasteful, construction.

At the east end of the island is Siasconset — locals call it simply, ’Sconset. Its multimillion-dollar cottages have stunning views facing the Atlantic Ocean, where it comes ashore in its full ferocity. Now, the bluff on which they are built, and the beaches below, are under assault, says Mark Borrelli, a coastal geologist at University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Geotubes during installation.

Credit:

‘Sconset Beach Preservation Fund

These powerful waves are slowly eating away at the island. And it’s not just the energy at the coast that’s to blame: Rising seas caused by climate change, and the island’s geology, are also part of the problem. “We’re very vulnerable here,” says naturalist Peter Brace. “We’re not the rocky coast of Canada or Maine or Oregon. We’re sand.”

At ’Sconset, that sand holds up dozens of big, sturdy cottages, covered in gray cedar shingles that keep out the fierce storms that pummel Nantucket. But Josh Posner, the President of the Siaconset Beach Preservation Fund, says they’re no match for the erosion that’s creeping closer to their foundations.

“The edge of the bluff has moved back towards the road behind the houses,” Posner says. “In a lot of the places, 100 feet of the lot has now collapsed, so what used to be a 150-foot lot is now a 50-foot lot or, in some cases, even less.”

Posner and his neighbors aren’t sitting back and waiting for the waves to carry their property out to sea. After trying a few different ways of shoring up the bluff over the years with limited success, in 2013 Posner and his deep-pocketed neighbors decided to try something on a much larger scale. They began to install massive jute sandbags called geotubes.

Two hundred feet long, seven-and-a-half feet tall and 20 feet wide, the geotubes line the bluff for 1,000 feet and are stacked at an angle, four high. The geotubes are covered with sand to make the engineered bluff to a state as close to natural-looking as possible. They are designed to defy the force of the nonstop waves and stay firmly in place. 

“We add on top of our geotubes the amount of sand that historically has washed away in the natural erosion process,” Posner explains, “So, the system is covered with sand almost all of the time.”

But only “almost all the time.” In the fiercest storms, like a couple of recent powerful Nor’easters, the sand covering the geotubes is washed away. After such a storm, the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund brings in the dump trucks, carting material from sand pits elsewhere on the island. That effort, like the geotubes, is funded by the homeowners at Siasconset Bluff.

Other homeowners have had to resort to even more drastic measures. After an enormous chunk of earth fell away from her backyard, Loretta Yoder and her partner decided to move their house 34  feet back from the edge. “It was getting to the point where it just felt like, if we wanted to stay in a place and that it was secure, we needed to do it,” she says. But at some point, homeowners will run out of room.

Yoder’s part of the bluff isn’t protected by geotubes, but the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund wants to change that. Josh Posner took the first step in January by submitting a proposal to expand the geotubes from 1,000 feet to nearly 4,000.

The choice between whether to engineer solutions to erosion and sea level rise, or to retreat, is faced by coastal communities everywhere. Sea levels are predicted to rise two to seven feet this century. Nantucket, an island of nothing more than loose, sandy material, is no match for powerful waves and rising seas in the long run, Brace says.

“We’re right where it’s going to happen,” he says. “We’re gonna go underwater before a lot of the [mainland] coastline.”

This article is based on a story that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

In their labs at the University of Colorado, research scientists Dirk Richter and Petter Weibring were busy building lasers to detect gasses when Richter heard about a contest being held by the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group.

“My wife forwarded me a tweet from the EDF saying this is a challenge," Richter said. "We looked at it and said, ‘Well, I think I have an idea. We can do this.’"

The EDF was looking for ways to detect leaks of invisible, odorless methane gas from things like oil and natural gas wells. The two engineers — Richter is originally from Germany and Weibring from Sweden — formed the company Quanta3 to develop their idea. 

“We are a garage startup,” Richter said. The device they developed in Richter’s home is the size of moving box, with a laser and some mirrors. It runs on solar power. The lasers detect methane by the way its molecules absorb light. 

“We can tune the color, or the wavelength, very, very precise. So the more molecules you have along the laser line, the more each molecule will eat a little bit of your light,” Weibring said.

Richter has an easy way to explain the science. 

“Imagine the laser being a Pacman of a specific color,” Richter added. “The more it eats of a certain color, it grows fatter and fatter and fatter.”

The fatter the light, the more methane is present. And at high levels, the box can ping an oil or gas company with an e-mail notification or an alarm. It's a much cheaper alert system than how leaks are currently detected.

“Right now, how do we know if there are leaks? People have to manually go around and check and come back at the site from time to time. And that takes them a lot of work, right?” said Weibring. “It’s a waste of money.”

That’s been the big problem, since finding methane leaks has been expensive. But the cost of not finding them might be even higher. 

Methane emissions come from livestock and wetlands, but also from leaks from natural gas and oil wells. As developed nations wean themselves off of coal — which is a major contributor to climate change — and move toward clean solar and wind power, they need something during the transition. Enter natural gas.

Methane is the main component of natural gas. It burns cleaner, but it comes with a big problem.

When it’s burned, natural gas produces carbon dioxide, a major climate pollutant. But the methane from natural gas itself is the far bigger concern when it escapes from gas and oil wells.  

“It traps 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the short-term. That’s why we realized that the world needs a smoke alarm for methane,” said Aileen Nowlean with the Environmental Defense Fund.

Spread over a century, methane’s global warming potential is 28 to 36 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. And while scientists warn of the dangers of methane, the Trump Administration is trying to relax the rules for methane emissions on public lands. 

“What’s important is that ending oil and gas methane emissions is one of the most cost-effective and impactful climate solutions anywhere. Just using the solutions, that are no net costs, would have the same impact as closing all of China’s coal power plants,” Nowlean said.

That’s why the EDF held its contest. The grand prize for the best methane detectors was zero dollars. Instead, the two most successful entries were connected to oil and gas companies.

“This relationship is actually very rare and harder to get than money,” Nowlean said.

Shell and the Norwegian company Statoil are both now trying out Richter and Weibring’s pilot devices. (Many oil and gas companies don't even report methane leaks, according to the EDF.) In some cases, just knowing there’s a leak is the hard part.

“If you see a leak around a pipeline or a joint or a fitting, then they are very easy to fix. That’s a matter of a wrench and a few hours,” said Dr. Desikan Sundararajan, a principal researcher with Statoil.

If issues occur in the oil or gas reservoir, that’s a more complicated picture and much harder to fix. But good, cheap detectors can at least help spot the problem.

And preventing those leaks isn’t just about protecting the environment; escaping methane means escaping profits. Sundararajan said that’s one reason Statoil got involved in the effort to develop cheaper detectors. 

“The initial implantations of any technologies are very expensive. But then we need pioneers like Statoil and other companies to come forward and do more and more of these technology pilots where the cost of the technology then can be driven down,” Sundararajan said.

Engineers Richter and Weibring have come a long way already. 

“So that was the challenge: how to make it much, much cheaper and still good enough,” Weibring said.

In the four years they’ve been working on the project, they’ve transformed equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars into portable devices that cost a few thousand.

“The technology today is there to solve the leak problem,” Richter said. “It is now up to the oil and gas industry as a whole to adapt it, to embrace it.”

Other engineers and startups are also looking to tackle the methane problem with different types of lasers or technology such as drones to measure methane emissions over areas bigger than a single well. Their solutions might still seem pricey. But when you factor in the long-term costs of climate change, these small contraptions  start to look much more like a bargain.

The death of a pedestrian hit by a self-driving Uber vehicle in Arizona this week could offer a test of who can be held legally responsible for accidents when a human is no longer at the wheel, legal experts said.

Any litigation that arises from the accident, the first fatality involving a fully autonomous vehicle, could pit the ride-hailing service against technology suppliers and the vehicle's manufacturer, legal experts said. It could also provide a window into confidential indemnification agreements that companies developing self-driving car systems may have reached to shield themselves legally.

In Sunday's accident, Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk on a four-lane road in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe when she was hit by the Volvo XC90 SUV, which was traveling in autonomous mode at about 40 miles per hour, police said.

Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir, who saw video of the crash, told the San Francisco Chronicle late Monday that it "would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway."

The Tempe Police Department said in a statement later that the department does not determine fault in vehicle collisions. "Ultimately the investigation will be submitted to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office for review and any potential charges," it said.

It was not clear whether a lawsuit would be filed on behalf of Herzberg's estate.

Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina with expertise in self-driving cars, said most states, including Arizona, require drivers to exercise due care to avoid hitting pedestrians on a roadway, even if the pedestrians use an unmarked crosswalk.

Sergei Lemberg, a California-based lawyer who has brought several lawsuits against self-driving car manufacturers, said that Uber, Volvo, which manufactured the sport utility vehicle, and any companies that supplied self-driving technology could potentially be held liable if litigation ensued from the Tempe accident. The "safety" driver who was behind the wheel but who appears not to have operated the vehicle could also be named as a defendant, Lemberg said.

"Suing all these parties would be my top thought right now," he said.

Uber said in a statement it was fully cooperating with local authorities investigating the accident.

Volvo, the Swedish car brand owned by China's Geely, confirmed its vehicle was involved in the crash but said the software controlling the SUV was not its own. Volvo said in 2015 it would accept full liability when one of its vehicles equipped with its own self-driving system was in autonomous mode. The company said in 2017 it had agreed to supply Uber with 24,000 self-driving vehicles.

Until now, most litigation over non-fatal accidents involving self-driving vehicles has been confidentially settled, according to legal experts. A case in which a motorcyclist sued General Motors after a collision last year with one of the company's autonomous test cars in San Francisco is pending.

GM has said in a statement regarding the lawsuit that in its collision report the San Francisco Police Department determined that the autonomous vehicle was not at fault in the accident.

Legal experts said liability in the Tempe case would depend on the facts of the accident and the results of US National Highway Safety Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigations.

With no driver, spotlight on design

Car accident litigation usually turns on whether a driver acted negligently, or failed to exercise a reasonable level of care.

By contrast, a lawsuit involving an autonomous vehicle could revolve around whether the self-driving system had a design defect, legal experts said.

Design defect claims do not require a finding of fault or negligence. To prevail, a plaintiff must show only that a product had an inherent design defect that would render it unsafe.

Automakers and software writers could counter with detailed data gathered by onboard sensors on how cars behaved during a collision, experts said, to show that it was impossible for the vehicle to avoid a collision and that all the systems functioned properly.

One question that would likely arise in litigation is whether Uber, Volvo or any companies that supplied self-driving technology entered into indemnification agreements, in which an entity assumes another company's liability costs.

Paul Rafferty, a California-based lawyer who represents carmakers, said such agreements in the autonomous vehicle world are confidential and disputes over indemnification are generally arbitrated or mediated behind closed doors.

Volvo declined to comment on whether it had entered into indemnification agreements with Uber.

Jennifer Dukarski, a Detroit-based lawyer representing suppliers of autonomous-vehicle technology, said the lawsuit filed by the San Francisco motorcyclist against GM raised only negligence claims.

So if any litigation in the Arizona accident alleges design defect claims, it could set legal precedent and be "very impactful" on the nascent autonomous vehicle industry, she said.

Regardless of who is at fault, the University of South Carolina's Smith said he would expect Uber, which has faced past scrutiny over its business practices, to settle any litigation quickly to avoid the public spotlight.

"Only if Uber believes that it was wholly without fault could I see this case going to trial," he said.

Facebook has been rocked this week by a whistleblower who said that Cambridge Analytica, a British-based firm hired by Trump for his election campaign, had improperly accessed information on millions of Facebook users to build detailed profiles on American voters.

Now, the academic who provided the data says Cambridge Analytica greatly exaggerated its role in Donald Trump's 2016 US presidential victory and would not have been able to sway an election result.

The news this week has knocked nearly $50 billion off Facebook's stock market value in two days and hit the shares of Twitter and Snap over fears that a failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users, and invite tougher regulation.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have both blamed Aleksandr Kogan, a psychologist at Cambridge University who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook.

Kogan told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Wednesday that he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, saying the services provided by the political consultancy had been greatly exaggerated.

"I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and they've made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it's not that," he said.

Kogan's smartphone application, "thisisyourdigitallife," offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as "a research app used by psychologists."

Facebook says Kogan then violated its policies by passing the data to Cambridge Analytica for commercial use, saying on Friday he "lied to us." Cambridge Analytica said it destroyed the data once it realized the information did not adhere to data protection rules.   

Kogan said the events of the last week had been a "total shell shock.""My view is that I'm being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," he said.  

"We thought we were doing something that was really normal and we were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the limits of the terms of service."

Cambridge Analytica has denied various allegations made about its business practices in recent media reports.

Personality test

Alexander Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, said in a secretly recorded video broadcast on Tuesday that his company had played a decisive role in Trump's election victory.

"We did all the research. We did all the data. We did all the analytics. We did all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign and our data informed their strategy," Nix told an undercover reporter working for Britain's Channel 4 News.

Nix was suspended by the company shortly before the video was broadcast.

Kogan said he had gathered the data in 2014 because he wanted to model human behavior through social media. He was then approached by Cambridge Analytica who provided the legal advice around the use of the data, he added.

Around 270,000 people downloaded the app, Facebook said. The app scored the results of each quiz and gathered up data from test-takers' Facebook accounts. However, it also pulled down the data of their Facebook friends, vastly increasing the size of the sample.

Kogan put the number of app users as closer to 200,000.

The researcher said, in total, he passed the data of around 30 million American Facebook users to SCL, a government and military contractor that is an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica. Media reports have put the total number of Facebook profiles collected at around 50 million users.

Kogan said it was possible it was used in the US presidential election campaign but he did not have any knowledge of that. Asked by the BBC if he was willing to cooperate with lawmakers investigating the case, he said "absolutely" and added he had tried to be as cooperative as possible. "I think there's a really big question here in terms of how do social media platforms actually use everybody's data," he said.  

US and European lawmakers have demanded an explanation of how Cambridge Analytica gained access to user data in 2014 and why Facebook failed to inform its users.

Facebook said it had been told by the Federal Trade Commission that it would receive a letter this week with questions about the data acquired by Cambridge Analytica. It said it had no indication of a formal investigation.

Canada's data protection authority joined the list of regulators saying they were investigating Facebook on Wednesday.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner wants to determine whether the personal information of Canadian citizens was scooped up in the haul of Facebook member profiles used by Cambridge Analytica to target tens of millions of US voters.

By Kate Holton and Sarah Young/Reuters

Additional reporting by Eric Auchard; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and David Stamp.

For the past decade, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been speaking of a grand vision for Turkey for the year 2023, the year the modern Turkish Republic will turn 100. On the agenda is a flurry of ambitious infrastructure projects.  

One of these projects is the Eastern Anatolia Observatory. Currently under construction and slated to open in 2019, the observatory will hold one of the largest telescopes in Asia. Professor Sinan Aliş, an astronomer at Istanbul University, says it will be a “giant leap for Turkish astronomy.”

“This telescope will work in the near infra-red wave length, which is totally new in Turkish astronomy.”

In the modern Turkish state, astronomy was first developed as a field of study in the 1930s — in part by several German scientists who came to Istanbul after escaping Nazi Germany. The astronomy department at Istanbul University — where Aliş works — is the oldest one in the country. It was established in 1933 by Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, who was an associate of Albert Einstein. The department is home to one of the oldest observatories still in operation. It has an impressive Zeiss telescope, which was brought over from Germany 83 years ago. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, personally signed the purchase order. Aliş said he feels emotionally connected to the telescope. 

“Keeping it operational is also keeping it alive, so we like it,” he said.

Today, Turkey's goal is to become the next rising Muslim power in the region in all fields, including science. This scientific ambition is reminiscent of an era commonly known as the Islamic Golden Age — the period from the 8th to 13th century when the arts and sciences flourished in the Muslim Middle East. The greatest of these advances were in the fields of astronomy and cartography.

The Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam, located in Istanbul's historic district, is dedicated to the Arabic and Islamic world's contributions to these fields of study. Around the 8th century, Arabic became the language of science and Baghdad the center of knowledge. 
 
The museum houses a wide range of groundbreaking scientific instuments — testimony to the momentum and creativity that existed in Islamic science in the Middle Ages. The key artifact is the map commissioned by Caliph Al-Ma'mun, who reigned in Baghdad from 813 to 833. The map depicts a world with a triangular-shaped Africa, where oceans are open, instead of surrounded by land as they had been portrayed until then, and the globe as a spherical projection. 

Detlev Quintern, a historian of science at the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University, calls the map a “breakthrough,” as it used Greek knowledge as a base to further advance scientific discoveries. “This map revolutionized the history of geography and cartography,” he said. 

Although Turkey reveres these historic scientific advances and has regional ambitions in astronomy, the country has also seen some regression in the scientific field. Last summer, the Ministry of Education announced a new school curriculum that entirely omits Darwin's theory of evolution.    

This worries Yavuz Ekşi, a professor of astrophysics at Istanbul Technical University. He doesn’t see how teaching evolution conflicts with Islam: “Science tells you how you originate. Religion and philosophy would tell you why.” 

It’s too soon to know the impact of this new curriculum for future Turkish scientists, but astronomy seems to be left untouched for now. 

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, strongly supported scientific progress; “the future is in the skies” is one of his most famous quotes — most Turks learn it in childhood. This may help explain the Turkish government’s investment in the new Eastern Anatolia Observatory.

There is a concern, however, that the money being spent on these projects isn't going to the scientists themselves. It doesn't always go into buying the latest equipment either. Turkey's best telescopes are what professor Yavuz Ekşi calls “mediocre.” And while the new four-meter telescope at the Eastern Anatolia Observatory will be a big step forward, it will still pale in comparison to what some other countries have. The United States has three 10-meter optical telescopes and a 40-meter telescope is being built in Chile.  

But what Turkey lacks in telescopes, it may make up for in satellites. Preparations are under way for an upcoming Turkish Space Agency. Lawmakers will likely vote on a bill this year, with the goal of producing and launching satellites within the next few years. 

The trip began in Punta Arenas, the capital of Magallanes region, Chile. We had spent three days aboard the Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace ship docked in one of the city’s harbors, to test our equipment and conduct security drills. I was eager to get to Antarctica.

Penguins are seen on Curverville Island, Antarctica, Feb. 15, 2018.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Greenpeace, the global environmental group, organized the journey to raise awareness of, and support for, a European Union proposal to create the biggest protected area on Earth in Antarctica. The plan was to create a safe haven for marine life there from industrial fishing.

A whale swims in Selvick Cove.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

The strategy involved documenting the effects of climate change, pollution and fishing on native wildlife. Pictures and video footage, specimen samples from the Antarctic seafloor, and surface water sampling for microplastics were all collected by Greenpeace to help build the case for the sanctuary.

Related: Thanks to science, we can hear the voices of icebergs. But are we listening?

The proposed Weddell Sea Marine Protected Area (MPA) would cover some 1.8 million sq km (1.1 million square miles) of natural habitat for whales, seals, penguins and many kinds of fish. It will be considered by the Antarctic governance body, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, at its October 2018 in Australia.

"Antarctica itself is currently protected under the Antarctic Treaty, but there is a lot of scope for abuse of the waters around Antarctica, and it is already dealing with the issues that are happening elsewhere in the world, such as increasing CO2 levels, acidification of the oceans, and plastics," said Tom Foreman, a Greenpeace expedition leader.

“So, the chance to protect these areas, which are so vital to such a huge number of species in so many ways, it can’t really be missed," he said.

A krill fishing ship with unknown nationality in Half Moon Bay.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

According to Greenpeace, a key concern is industrial fishing for krill. The group issued a report this month noting that most Antarctic wildlife, including penguins, whales and seals, depend either directly or indirectly on the small shrimp-like creatures for food. Humans use krill in Omega-3 tablets and in pet food.

Related: Climate change research can be risky. But not doing it is even riskier.

"We are asking all krill fishing vessels not to fish in any area in the Antarctic being proposed for protection," said Luke Massey, a spokesman for Greenpeace.

Waves break on Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise at the Drake Passage.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

When the ship finally left port, I realized how much I enjoyed the feeling of being at sea. It provides a sense of freedom and promise for the future, the kind you get when you start a new relationship, a new job, or a trip to somewhere that you’ve never been.

Related: A Delaware-sized iceberg has broken off of the Antarctic Peninsula

After rounding Chile’s Tierra del Fuego, escorted by dolphins that reminded me of dogs chasing a car, we reached a spot I had studied in college Geography classes: the fabled Drake Passage, the point where the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans violently collide off the southern headland of South America.

A Greenpeace boat sails in Andvord Bay.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

We had been informed the passage could be rough, so we started tying everything down. Pills for seasickness were handed out and the bathroom lights were left on to accommodate those who handled the ride poorly. I decided not to take the pills. That was a mistake.

It felt like being in a centrifuge. After the first few hours of the passage, I went to the bridge to ask the captain how many more hours it would take to get to calmer waters. “It can be up to four days,” he said. He reminded me we were in an icebreaker, a solidly built ship, but not designed for a smooth, swift ride. These were possibly the longest four days of my life.

Related: Antarctica is getting greener. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

When we arrived at the Antarctic Peninsula, the ocean was again calm, and we could spot lots of wildlife. Contrary to what some may think, the Antarctic is full of life. Penguins, seabirds, and different species of seals and whales could be seen at all times.

We went ashore on rubber boats, wearing survival suits weighing nearly 10 kilograms (22 pounds). I packed an extra camera and a couple of long lenses, too, adding even more weight to the already uncomfortable suit. It would be worth it. I could not afford to waste a rare chance at a good Antarctic photo due to a camera malfunction in a distant penguin colony.

Penguins in Neko Harbor.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

My encounters with the penguins were wonderful and joined my list of unforgettable moments. They do not see humans as predators and can surround you for hours if you do not move much. Along with my dog, I think they are the sweetest things in this world. On these trips ashore, I generally had a couple of hours to shoot pictures. On every one of them I felt like a child in a candy store.

Seals on a beach in Half Moon Bay.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

I made it onto a helicopter after several days, when the weather became clear enough for safe flight. During three trips over the peninsula, I saw some of the most splendid landscapes I had ever seen. None of my pictures do justice to the experience of seeing these places first hand.

As my long trip proved, Antarctica is remote from civilization. But it is not untouched. Greenpeace came here to point out some of the region’s vulnerabilities. I hope my pictures reveal some of the region’s beauty.

A penguin's carcass. 

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Remnants of an old whaling factory are seen on Deception Island, which is the caldera of an active volcano in Antarctica, Feb. 17, 2018. 

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Remains of a boat belonging to an old whaling factory lie on the ground on Deception Island, which is the caldera of an active volcano, in Antarctica, Feb. 17, 2018.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A penguin walks next to an old whaling factory on Deception Island, which is the caldera of an active volcano in Antarctica, Feb. 17, 2018. 

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A seal rests over a rock on Maxwell Bay.  

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Penguins swim next to a glacier in Neko Harbor. 

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Penguins are seen over an iceberg in Andvord Bay, Antarctica.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Penguins' footprints are seen on Danco Island, Antarctica.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A penguin feeds a young one on Curverville Island, Antarctica.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A glacier is seen in Half Moon Bay, Antarctica. 

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A glacier is seen from overhead in Half Moon Bay, Antarctica.

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

A penguin walks through the geothermal fog on Deception Island, which is the caldera of an active volcano in Antarctica. 

Credit:

Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Photos and piece by Alexandre Meneghini. 

In the wake of accusations that Facebook mishandled data for 50 million of its users, the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg apologized on Wednesday for what he called mistakes his company made. Zuckerberg on Wednesday also promised tougher steps to restrict developers' access to such information.

The world's largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblower's allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect President Donald Trump in 2016.

"This was a major breach of trust. I'm really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data," Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN, breaking a public silence since the scandal erupted at the weekend.

Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook the company "made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it."

He said the social network planned to conduct an investigation of thousands of apps that have used Facebook's platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them to disable access to their Facebook data more easily.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers' ability to use Facebook data, which is the company's lifeblood.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the US Congress if he was the right person.

"I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated," he told CNN. "I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? ... People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook."

Zuckerberg said Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the US midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil.

Investor fears

Facebook shares pared gains on Wednesday after Zuckerberg's post, closing up 0.7 percent. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Zuckerberg told the New York Times in an interview published on Wednesday he had not seen a "meaningful number of people" deleting their accounts over the scandal.

Facebook representatives, including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman, met US congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users' data would cost "many millions of dollars."

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said on Twitter he had accepted invitations to testify before US and UK lawmakers.

The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the country's 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

'Scapegoat'

On Tuesday, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was caught in a secret recording boasting that his company played a decisive role in Trump's victory.

However, the academic who provided the data disputed that on Wednesday.

"I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and they've made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it's not that," psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogan's quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those people's Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends and maintains that no breach occurred because the original users gave permission. Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

Analysts have raised concerns that the incident will reduce user engagement with Facebook, potentially lessening its clout with advertisers. Three Wall Street brokerages cut their price targets.

"Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable," said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

The company has risen more than 550 percent in value in the past five years.

By David Ingram/Reuters

Reporting by David Ingram; Additional reporting by Dustin Volz and David Shepardson in WASHINGTON and Kate Holton in LONDON; Writing by Susan Thomas; Editing by Bill Rigby, Lisa Shumaker and Paul Tait.

A data analytics firm used by Donald Trump's campaign during the 2016 presidential election continues to face intense criticism for its alleged misuse of the data of tens of millions of Facebook users.

UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica stands accused of using data it got from Facebook to build sophisticated psychological profiles of US voters, and then deliver content to them that might sway their vote.

Related: Trump consultant 'exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,' whistleblower says

And, as it turns out, the firm has a controversial record in politics beyond the US.

Cambridge Analytica top executives were caught on video, shot by London’s Channel 4 News, boasting about their global reach to an undercover journalist.

The company’s international portfolio includes Kenya.

“Just the extent of how much work they did here was staggering,” said Larry Madowo, a Kenyan broadcast journalist and writer.

He says the firm played a critical role in the 2013 election, and the still-disputed 2017 re-election of Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Cambridge’s involvement in those elections had been previously reported, but Madowo says the Channel 4 video —  in which executives can be heard boasting about their involvement in all aspects of Kenyatta’s campaigns — provided confirmation about the extent of that involvement.

“We assumed that they were involved in some minor role — maybe in data crunching and microtargeting,” Madowo said. “But … they were basically involved in every aspect of the campaign,” including writing speeches for Kenyatta.

Madowo said Cambridge Analytica used various media — not just social media — to push messaging in support of Kenyatta and against his opponents.

“They went out on radio, they went out online, they went out on TV, they went out on the papers,” he said.

Related: Zuckerberg apologizes for Facebook mistakes with user data, vows curbs

According to the New York Times, Cambridge Analytica may have even gotten access to government-held data when it was helping Kenyatta get re-elected.

Cambridge Analytica has also reportedly done political work in Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, India, as well as other countries.

Human activities are causing an alarming decline in the variety of plant and animal life on Earth and jeopardizing food, clean water and energy supplies, a UN-backed study of biodiversity said on Friday.

Pollution, climate change and forest clearances to make way for farmland were among the worsening threats to nature, according to more than 550 experts in a set of reports approved by 129 governments after talks in Colombia.

"Biodiversity, the essential variety of life-forms on earth, continues to decline in every region of the world," the authors wrote. "This alarming trend endangers the quality of life of people everywhere."

Four regional reports covered the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Europe and Central Asia — all areas of the planet except the poles and the high seas.

For the Americas, the report estimated that the value of nature to people — such as crops, wood, water purification or tourism — was at least $24.3 trillion a year, equivalent to the region's gross domestic product from Alaska to Argentina.

Almost two-thirds of those natural contributions were in decline in the Americas, it said.

"Biodiversity and nature's contributions to people sound, to many people, academic and far removed from our daily lives," said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

"Nothing could be further from the truth."

Elephants and mosses

Among other economic estimates, the Africa report said the absorption of greenhouse gases by a hectare  of forest in Central Africa was worth $14,000 a year.

Around the world, ever more animals and plants were under threat, ranging from elephants in Africa to rare mosses in Europe. More than half of African bird and mammal species could be lost to climate change by 2100, it said.

"By 2100, climate change could ... result in the loss of more than half of African bird and mammal species," said Emma Archer of South Africa, the co-chair of the African assessment.

For pollution, eight of 10 rivers around the world with most plastic waste were in Asia. On current trends, overfishing meant there could be no exploitable fish stocks in the Asia-Pacific region by mid-century.

Rising human populations in many developing nations would require new policies both to protect nature and to meet UN goals to eradicate poverty and hunger by 2030.

In Europe and Central Asia, wetlands have declined by half since 1970. The average ecological footprint — or land needed per person for a sustainable environment — was 5.1 hectares against an available 2.2.

Amid the gloom, there were some bright spots.

Forest cover had risen by 22.9 percent in China and other nations in northeast Asia between 1990 and 2015. Parks and other protected areas were expanding in many regions, including the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

And populations of animals such as the Iberian lynx, Amur tiger and far eastern leopard were coming back from the brink of extinction thanks to conservation.

It may be hard to believe, but the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station’s initial launch will take place in November. In those soon-to-be two decades, the ISS has proven to be immensely helpful in facilitating research on microgravity — and it remains the only destinations for astronauts moving through Earth’s lower orbit.

Recent news out of Washington, though, has raised questions about the station’s future. President Donald Trump has hinted at the possibility of the US ending its part in the funding of the ISS by 2025. Besides the US, the ISS consortium consists of Canada, Japan, the Russian Federation and 11 member states of the European Space Agency, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Political issues aside, there is also the issue of upkeep: The station is aging, with some parts dating back to the ’90s and the ’80s. Even in near-zero gravity, the station suffers from wear and tear, including fatigue problems with the station’s docking area and damage from encounters with micro-meteoroids. 

Sandra Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and executive director emeritus of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was on the last shuttle crew to go to the station. She says her crewmates brought “10,000 pounds of stuff” to the station, mostly replacement boxes and spare parts to assist with maintenance.

“When you talk about the certification of the space station and how long it can remain on orbit, the real limiting factor is the structure, and the structural integrity, because there’s a lot of piece parts that were designed to be replaced,” she says. “And NASA has indeed done that over the years.”

In the US, private space travel companies — like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin — have emerged to take up some of the activities, like supplying ISS, that were previously performed by government space agencies. Magnus says it is important to know that any advancements made by those companies will be built on top of a foundation of aerospace knowledge accumulated across more than 50 years of government investment, research and development.

“The government across the board — not just NASA — will continue to need the ability to do research in space, both in low Earth orbit and beyond. And that’s never going to go away. It’s just a matter of what type, and intelligently designing our research program that benefits everybody,” Magnus says.

“We have to continue to push that envelope so 50 years from now the next wave continues to have access to that expanding knowledge base that research and development provides.”

It's true that private companies are positioning themselves to step forward if the ISS is retired — or if government agencies withdraw their support. Bigelow Aerospace is hoping to develop its own name recognition when it comes to commercial space habitats and satellites. The Las Vegas-based company recently created a spinoff venture by the name of Bigelow Space Operations (BSO) specifically with the goal of building and selling private space stations. 

Bigelow currently has an inflatable module, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), attached to the ISS as part of a two-year demonstration project approved by NASA. BEAM is the only privately owned and human-related expandable habitat in space, according to Blair Bigelow, the vice president for corporate strategy for Bigelow Aerospace and Bigelow Space Operations.

She says the Trump administration’s comments have added urgency to the company's efforts.

“We feel very strongly that in order for there to be continuity of human presence in space, and for there to be a seamless transition from government-owned-and-operated platforms to commercial-owned-and-operated platforms, we need to have a commercial space station in parallel with the International Space Station,” she says.

When it comes to potential customers, Blair Bigelow says her company is in the process of reaching out to governments, corporations, universities and individuals. Although she cannot name a price point for travel to and use of their space habitats, the goal is to make them relatively affordable.

“We are going to be opening up access to space for many countries and many corporations at prices that have never been offered before in history,” she says.

BSO would love one of its first and primary customers to be NASA, Blair says. The hope would be to work hand-in-hand with the organization so that the research on microgravity can continue to be conducted — while NASA can share its experience regarding safety protocols and general knowledge.

“They’ve been there, done that. So we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel,” Blair says. “We want to do things efficiently and smart, but we also understand the enormous responsibility of keeping humans alive in space.”

Magnus loves the aspirations of a company like Bigelow. The next great advancements in science and technology depend on getting as many researchers actually up in space.

“Life up there is really magical. We’re very busy, but just living in the microgravity environment the way we do gives you a whole different appreciation for it. And I think that’s really the key — having a platform that’s constantly in that environment allows us to test and develop technology and explore the boundaries of science that we can’t do on Earth,” Magnus says.

“When you live in microgravity, you understand it in a different way," she says. "So I think getting people up there who have technical training and creative sparks to actually internalize what that microgravity environment is all about will really expand the possibilities of what we may be doing in space from a not government-based, but more of an economic development side, and I’m actually excited about those possibilities.”

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

Sometime this spring, a falling Chinese space station will crash to Earth. That is known. What is not as clear is when it will hit — or where.

“Scientists have left it pleasantly vague,” says Maggie Koerth-Baker, a senior science reporter for FiveThirtyEight.com.

Koerth-Baker says that the Tiangong-1 space station will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere somewhere between March 29 and April 9. Furthermore, the landing area covers a lengthy swath of land that includes Spain, France, Portugal and Greece.

The Tiangong-1 was used for basic research for five years, Koerth-Baker says. It actually was the working location of the first Chinese woman in space, she says, before the Chinese lost control of the structure in 2016.

“So now it is descending to Earth without anyone being able to guide it to some other place that’s not populated,” Koerth-Baker says.

Koerth-Baker adds that there is always some sort of “space junk” that is re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

“There’s probably about one piece of space junk that falls to Earth every day,” she says. “Most of it is not this big. The chunks of this space station could be as big as 220 pounds.”

The silver lining, though, is that only one person have ever been recorded as having been hit with a piece of space debris, Koerth-Baker says. That would be Lottie Williams, a resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was struck with a six-inch fragment of a second-stage Delta rocket in 1997. Williams did not sustain major injuries.

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

The United States asked China on Friday not to implement a ban on imports of scrap materials, after the world's top scrap buyer abruptly shut the door to many types of waste, throwing the global recycling industry into turmoil.

Reuters broke the news last July that China had told the World Trade Organization that it would stop accepting shipments of rubbish such as waste plastic and paper as part of a campaign against "foreign garbage."

The US Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries said at the time that the ban would devastate an industry that supported 155,000 jobs and had exported scrap worth $5.6 billion to China in 2016.

The United States raised concerns about the ban, and a subsequent revision of standards for a variety of scrap metals, at the WTO's Council for Trade in Goods on Friday.

"China's import restrictions on recycled commodities have caused a fundamental disruption in global supply chains for scrap materials, directing them away from productive reuse and toward disposal," a US representative told the meeting, according to a trade official in Geneva.

The United States recognized China's environmental concerns, but Beijing's approach seemed to be having the opposite effect to what was intended, and its rules had changed far too quickly for industry to adjust, the US representative told the meeting.

WTO obligations

China seemed to be breaching its WTO obligations by treating domestic and foreign waste differently and employing an overly trade-restrictive policy, the US official said.

"We request that China immediately halt implementation and revise these measures in a manner consistent with existing international standards for trade in scrap materials, which provide a global framework for transparent and environmentally sound trade in recycled commodities."

The European Union's representative at the meeting said China's policy would force scrap to be rerouted to third countries which may not have facilities for safe recycling, or to landfill or incineration, causing environmental damage.

The EU also questioned the science behind China's ban, while several countries said they appreciated China's goal but were not convinced about how it was trying to get there.

China's representative agreed to take the comments into account but said that every country had a responsibility to dispose of its waste, and with its large population China was obliged to restrict imports of waste while cleaning up at home.

"China is seeking a path toward harmonization of man and nature," the trade official quoted China's delegate as saying.

The dispute over scrap comes amid increased concerns of a full-blown trade war between the United States and China.

US President Donald Trump this week signed a memorandum targeting up to $60 billion in Chinese goods with tariffs over what his administration says is misappropriation of US intellectual property but only after a 30-day consultation period that starts once a list is published.

Trump has also announced steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the United States.

Roma Agrawal spends a lot of time thinking of the sheer power of concrete. She’s a structural engineer who helped design The Shard in London, an iconic 95-story skyscraper that opened in 2012.

“What I really like about it is that it has so many different forms,” Agrawal says. “It's quite an indeterminate material … I just love the fact that it can be anything you want it to be."

Agrawal’s recently released book, “Built: The Hidden Stories our Structures,” provides insight on how skyscrapers like The Shard are constructed and other fascinating tidbits behind iconic buildings and structures across the globe. And yes, the book includes an ode to concrete and the Romans’ mastery of the building material.

It was the Romans who developed a type of concrete using a specific volcanic ash that could dry underwater. The mixture of concrete and ash did not need air for the final solidification stage.

“The Romans had, I think, this amazingly can-do attitude about construction as well. And they just built. They built big. They built complicated. They tried new materials that were really, really experimental,” says Agrawal, whose favorite structure in the world — or at least one of them — is the Pantheon.

Every large structure comes with its challenges. With The Shard, the biggest obstacle was its location on the banks of the River Thames next to London Bridge. Compared to a city like New York City, built atop Manhattan’s strong bedrock, the land underneath The Shard is composed of soft, wet clay. To establish a firm foundation, the solution was to install gigantic concrete piles “to basically anchor it like the tree roots do for the tree.”

Then there was the wind coming off the river.

“So we think, ‘Oh, the wind is quite harmless.’ We like a nice little breeze. But it can play havoc with skyscrapers, so we need to make sure that the buildings are stable when wind hits from all the different directions,” Agrawal says.

Another challenge comes from making sure a skyscraper’s massive weight is equally distributed so that the building’s lower levels are not crushed beneath the floors above them.

“All of this comes down to getting the right materials, so we have a lot of experience,” Agrawal says. “Now we've got computing power, so we can do a lot of mathematical analysis to understand how heavy the building itself is — but also all the stuff that's going inside the buildings: like people, like books in a library or [whatever] else. We basically crunch the numbers, and then we make sure that the base of the columns are the right material and there's enough material there to resist those forces."

Part of that analysis includes how much a building can sway without making people inside it nauseous. Agrawal says engineers generally know what level of a building's acceleration humans can perceive as it sways.

“When we do our analysis, we're looking at how much the building is moving, but more importantly, how quickly the building is moving,” she says. “We try and make sure that that movement is slower than we can really perceive, or that makes us feel nauseous."

The book also goes into detail about the Brooklyn Bridge, the suspension bridge designed by renowned architect John A. Roebling. Lesser known is the role his daughter-in-law, Emily Roebling, played in the bridge’s construction. Even though Emily Roebling was not allowed to pursue an engineering degree, given the late 1800s-era in which she lived, she managed to finish the massive project after her father-in-law died of tetanus and her husband became bedridden with what is now known as decompression sickness.

“She's such a heroine of mine… What I really particularly admire is that, not only did she learn all the technical skills you need as an engineer, but Washington Roebling, her husband, said her biggest contribution to the build was her talent as a peacemaker. And that is such an important part of engineering structures,” Agrawal says.

Construction materials used for skyscrapers and bridges has been tremendously influenced by climate change, Agrawal says. Although concrete — the most-used manmade material on the planet — has remarkable properties, it emits a substantial amount of carbon. There have been extensive efforts to make it more eco-friendly. Almost 95 percent of steel, the backbone of most large structures, can also be recycled and reused.

“When you think about buildings more broadly, we're thinking about energy consumption, because our buildings use a lot and lot of energy,” she says. “So we're also thinking about, how can we insulate them better? What kind of cladding can we use? Can we use more efficient air conditioning? There's lots of different angles that we need to look at from a building point of view."

Building cities, she adds, are "another level" of consideration. 

Agrawal hopes her book will cultivate a deeper appreciation for the immense calculations and details that go into building skyscrapers and other large structures that city dwellers may take for granted.

“I want everyone to look at our world through the eyes of an engineer. So when I go up to the viewing gallery in The Shard, for example … everyone's taking photographs of the river and of St Paul's Cathedral, but I'm looking up at the steel and I'm looking at the bolts and the welds, and I'm thinking about how I can see how it was put together,” Agrawal says.

“I feel like you should be looking for peculiar details. You should be looking for the materials, but you should also very much try and look beyond what you can actually see and try and delve deeper into our structures."

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

Look around you: at your computer, your phone, your water bottle, or the books on your desk. Chances are, all of these things came from a factory. Even if you don’t think about them too often, factories make our modern world possible. Indeed, you might argue that factories created the modern world, sometimes in ways that are rarely discussed.

The factory has been an integral part of America for a long time. Consider the 1876 centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. It was a celebration of the American nation; its legacy, triumphs, and greatness. And what was its centerpiece? “It’s not the [founding] documents,” Joshua Freeman author of Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, says. “It’s not George Washington’s wooden teeth. It’s a steam engine. And President Grant comes and flips the switch, and the steam engine starts and powers all the factory equipment that’s there.”

Though the first factory was an English silk mill, built in 1721, the idea of the factory system spread quickly. First throughout England, then Europe, then to America. The reason? “There are just enormous efficiencies associated with the factory, with the coordination of production, the scale of production, and the application of external power to production,” Freeman says.

And these enormous efficiencies have sometimes impacted people’s lives in horrifying ways. Freeman notes that young children were often put to work in the crowded chaos of early factory floors. Sometimes orphans would be conscripted.

Much like labor conditions, environmental impacts often weren’t important to factory owners of the 18th and 19th century. (Freeman points out that smoke was seen as a sign of prosperity.)

These factories drove foreign policy too. Growing cotton isn’t exactly possible in Europe, and England needed that raw material for its textile mills. Freeman believes that Europe’s hunger for cotton absolutely shaped the entire world order. “[It] was one of the great reasons for the spread of American slavery. ... Ninety percent of their cotton comes from America by the 1820s, 1830s. So there’s a huge amount of global transformation, and frankly, global misery, in the process of supplying factories with raw materials,” he says.

Beyond the motivations of nations, the factory also changed the daily lives of workers. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, as children learn in school, but that wasn’t the end of it. When he first launched the assembly line, workers absolutely hated it, according to Freeman.

Turnover was so great that Ford had to hire four times the number of laborers the assembly line actually needed. His solution was to increase wages, and make that wage increase contingent on workers adopting “good habits.” These included not drinking, not being wasteful, and not “living in sin.” And he created a “sociological department” that would go to people’s homes and make sure they were practicing those habits. In a sense, Freeman says, Ford didn’t just create “a new assembly line, but a new social system to accompany it.”

But this social system didn’t stay in place. It evolved, and was shaped by workers themselves, especially workers in unions. Freeman points out that consolidation in factories actually gave workers power, since they were able to stop work and go on strike. (Think of Norma Rae as a cinematic example.)

“You could argue [that] this golden age of America that people are often very nostalgic for — from the end of the Second World War up to the late 1970s — in part, rested on the combination of the large factory and unionization,” Freeman says.

This golden age may have ended, and many manufacturing jobs may have left the US, but the factory still shapes our world. “The largest factories in human history exist right now,” Freeman says. “They’re making things like your sneakers and your cell phone. And some of these factories have 200,000 or 300,000 workers in a single factory complex. They’re absolutely mind-boggling.”

A version of this story originally appeared on Innovation Hub. 

It maybe be hard to believe, but the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station’s initial launch will take place in November. In those soon-to-be two decades, the ISS has proven to be immensely helpful in helping facilitate research on microgravity — and it remains the only destinations for astronauts moving through Earth’s lower orbit.

Recent news out of Washington, though, has raised questions about the station’s future. President Trump has hinted at the possibility of the U.S. ending its part in the funding of the ISS by 2025. Besides the U.S., funders for the ISS consists of Canada, Japan, the Russian Federation and 11 member states of the European Space Agency (including France, Germany and the United Kingdom). Then there is the issue of upkeep. Just like any structure, its parts are aging, with some dating back to the ’90s and the ’80s.

“When you talk about the certification of the space station and how long it can remain on orbit, the real limiting factor is the structure, and the structural integrity, because there’s a lot of piece parts that were designed to be replaced,” says Sandra Magnus. “And NASA has indeed done that over the years.”

Magnus is a former NASA astronaut and executive director emeritus of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She was on the last shuttle crew to go to the station. She says they brought “10,000 pounds of stuff,” mostly consisting of replacement boxes and spare parts. Aside from the materials for the inside, there are external factors to consider as well, Magnus says, including low- and high-cycle fatigue problems with the station’s docking area and damage from encounters with micro-meteoroids. 

U.S. space travel enterprises have been shifting for years from being run by the government to being driven by the funding and ambitions of private companies. Magnus says it is important to know that any advancements made by private companies will be built on top of a foundation of aerospace knowledge obtained with 50 years of government investment, research and development.

“The government across the board — not just NASA — will continue to need the ability to do research in space, both in low Earth orbit and beyond. And that’s never going to go away. It’s just a matter of what type and intelligently designing our research program that benefits everybody,” Magnus says.

“We have to continue to push that envelope so 50 years from now, the next wave continues to have access to that expanding knowledge base that research and development provides.”

In the past few weeks, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been making headlines by attempting a string of recent rocket launches — but another company, Bigelow Aerospace, is hoping to develop its own name recognition when it comes to commercial space habitats and satellites. The Las Vegas-based company recently created a spinoff venture by the name of Bigelow Space Operations (BSO) specifically with the goal of building and selling private space stations. 

Bigelow currently has an inflatable model, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), attached to the ISS after being granted permission by NASA. BEAM is the only privately-owned and human-related expandable habitat in space, according to Blair Bigelow, the vice president for corporate strategy for Bigelow Aerospace and Bigelow Space Operations.

Blair adds that her company is currently producing several B330s — which have 330 cubic meters of space inside — “on somewhat of a production line.” The company builds about half of the space stations in-house and contracts out the rest.

“This spacecraft represents an entire human space program and an entire space station in a single launch,” she says.

Although Bigelow is not purposefully lining up the major push of BSO to coincide with U.S. government’s apparent withdrawal from the ISS, Blair says the Trump Administration’s comments have added urgency to the matter.

“We feel very strongly that in order for there to be continuity of human presence in space, and for there to be a seamless transition from government-owned-and-operated platforms to commercial-owned-and-operated platforms, we need to have a commercial space station in parallel with the International Space Station,” she says.

When it comes to potential customers, Blair Bigelow says her company is in the process of reaching out to governments, corporations, universities and individuals. Although she cannot name a price point for travel to and use of their space habitats, the goal is to make them relatively affordable.

“We are going to be opening up access to space for many countries and many corporations at prices that have never been offered before in history,” she says.

BSO would love one its first and primary customers to be NASA, Blair says. The hope would be to work hand-in-hand with the organization, so that the research on microgravity can continue to be conducted — while NASA can share its experience regarding safety protocols and general knowledge.

“They’ve been there, done that. So we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel,” Blair says. “We want to do things efficiently and smart, but we also understand the enormous responsibility of keeping humans alive in space.”

Magnus loves the aspirations of a company like Bigelow. The next great advancements in science and technology depend on getting as many researchers actually up in space.

“Life up there is really magical. We’re very busy, but just living in the microgravity environment the way we do gives you a whole different appreciation for it. And I think that’s really the key: having a platform that’s constantly in that environment allows us to test and develop technology and explore the boundaries of science that we can’t do on Earth,” Magnus says. “When you live in microgravity, you understand it in a different way. So I think getting people up there who have technical training and creative sparks to actually internalize what that microgravity environment is all about will really expand the possibilities of what we may be doing in space from a not government-based, but more of an economic development side, and I’m actually excited about those possibilities.”

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

Alert Bay isn’t exactly a premier destination on British Columbia’s rugged Pacific Coast. On this winter day, there are more crows than people on the town’s wooden sidewalks, and most of the few small businesses near the waterfront are closed for the season. The biggest building is an abandoned salmon cannery, a reminder of what used to be here.

It’s a past that Bill Cranmer remembers well.

“In the ’40s, ’50s, Alert Bay was the — you could call it the salmon capital of the world,” says Cranmer, a hereditary chief of the Namgis First Nation, one of British Columbia’s native groups. “Before that, of course, our people had the richest river on Vancouver Island.”

Namgis First Nations Chief Bill Cranmer says conventional open-water salmon farms have contributed to the demise of local wild stocks and the salmon-based economy of his people. 

Credit:

Eilis O'Neill/PRI

Cranmer sits for an interview in one of those closed businesses — his own restaurant, which he’s been rebuilding since it burned down a couple of years ago.

For centuries, he says, salmon sustained the Namgis’ lives and culture.

“Our ceremonies are tied to all of these things that used to make our people healthy,” he says. “We even have a salmon dance.”

But he says there are hardly any wild salmon left here. They’ve been hit by dams and other development along the region’s rivers, overfishing, a warming ocean, and, he says, the rise of salmon farms nearby. There are now more than 60 salmon farms in the waters of British Columbia and neighboring Washington state, and Cranmer says they’re bringing big problems for wild fish, including fish waste and parasites.

Cranmer says if he and his Namgis First Nation people had their way, they’d get rid of open-water salmon farms. But they can’t, so they’re trying another idea for rebuilding a salmon economy for their community. They’ve built their own salmon farm — on land.

The biggest building in the town of Alert Bay, British Columbia, is the closed salmon cannery. In decades past, local native leaders say, the town was the "salmon capital of the world," but the local salmon-based economy has been largely wiped out by environmental damage.

Credit:

Eilis O'Neill/PRI

It’s called Kuterra, and it sits across the bay in nearby Port McNeill, in what looks like a non-descript warehouse, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Behind its gray metal walls is Canada’s first land-based farm for Atlantic salmon, the most commonly farmed species. Inside, hundreds of salmon glint greenish in big round tanks, where they feed and grow until they’re ready for harvest. The sound of swirling water and food pellets rushing through metal tubes fills the huge room.

CEO Gary Ullstrom says Kuterra produces about 12,000 pounds of fish a week. What it doesn’t produce is contaminants that enter the local ecosystem.

Hundreds of salmon swirl in the water of each tank at the Kuterra salmon farm in Port McNeill, Britsh Columbia. Unlike open-water salmon farms, the waste from Kuterra fish is processed naturally and the water is recirculated.

Credit:

Eilis O'Neill/PRI

“Kuterra is good for the environment,” Ullstrom says. “There's no antibiotics. There's no pesticides” — and no parasites to infect wild fish.

Also no fish waste. On the other side of the warehouse from the feeding tanks, the wastewater flows through a filtration tank, where it’s treated by bacteria and reused.

This is in stark contrast to open water fish farms, where the salmon are raised in mesh pens and the waste and other contaminants flow right into the sea.

Critics say that’s bad for the ecosystem and wild fish. Operators of open-water fish farms say it’s not. They also argue that their approach is less resource-intensive, using less energy and land.

The science itself is still uncertain. Both approaches are supported by credible evidence. But Kuterra’s land-based approach has gotten support from a range of sustainable seafood organizations, including a "Best Choice" recommendation from the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program and an Ocean Wise designation from the Vancouver Aquarium.

But despite these endorsements, there are still some big hitches in the company’s plans. Its approach might be more environmentally sustainable, but Kuterra has struggled to build a sustainable business.

For one thing, while all those farms in the ocean can just let their waste float away, Kuterra has to carry the cost of its wastewater treatment system.

And then there’s the company’s location.

Each tank in the Kuterra facility holds hundreds of salmon. The company harvests roughly 12,000 pounds of fish a week.

Credit:

Eilis O'Neill/PRI

“You’re out in, you know, northern Vancouver Island, literally at the end of the road, of the world,” says John Volpe, a professor who studies fish farms at the University of Victoria. “Transportation costs are quite demanding.”

Only one grocery chain in British Columbia carries Kuterra salmon, and on a recent day it was the most expensive fish at their seafood counter. Across the border in Washington state, one grocery chain stopped carrying Kuterra because of the expense and the unreliable supply.

And then there are the jobs.

The big idea behind Kuterra was to help restore a salmon-based economy for the Namgis Nation. But so far, Kuterra has barely made a dent, in part because nearly everything about the facility is mechanized. The facility has only three full-time employees, none of whom are Namgis. The only members of the Namgis employed by the company are two men who come in once a week to help harvest and pack the fish.

CEO Ullstrom says he believes Kuterra can overcome its challenges and achieve its goals.

“There's a whole host of innovations” coming along that will drive down costs he says, citing things like bigger facilities and tanks that automatically sort and move the fish as they grow.

But, ultimately, Kuterra's also counting on a shift in public opinion, and maybe in regulation.

That might be starting to happen. Just south of the British Columbia border, Washington just passed a law that will phase out open-water salmon farming in the state over the next five years.

Elias, the new language teacher at a Finnish primary school, has endless patience for repetition, never makes a pupil feel embarrassed for asking a question and can even do the "Gangnam Style" dance.

Elias is also a robot.

The language-teaching machine comprises a humanoid robot and mobile application, one of four robots in a pilot program at primary schools in the southern city of Tampere.

The robot is able to understand and speak 23 languages and is equipped with software that allows it to understand students' requirements and helps it to encourage learning. In this trial however, it communicates in English, Finnish and German only.

The robot recognizes the pupil's skill levels and adjusts its questions accordingly. It also gives feedback to teachers about a student's possible problems.

Some of the human teachers who have worked with the technology see it as a new way to engage children in learning.

"I think in the new curriculum the main idea is to get the kids involved and get them motivated and make them active. I see Elias as one of the tools to get different kinds of practice and different kinds of activities into the classroom," language teacher Riikka Kolunsarka told Reuters.

"In that sense I think robots and coding the robots and working with them is definitely something that is according to the new curriculum and something that we teachers need to be open minded about."

Elias the language robot, which stands around a foot tall, is based on SoftBank's NAO humanoid interactive companion robot, with software developed by Utelias, a developer of educational software for social robots.

The math robot — dubbed OVObot — is a small, blue machine around 10 inches high and resembles an owl, and was developed by Finnish AI Robots.

The purpose of the pilot project is to see if these robots can improve the quality of teaching, with one of the Elias robots and three of the OVObots deployed in schools. The OVObots will be trialled for one year, while the school has bought the Elias robot, so its use can continue longer.

Using robots in classrooms is not new — teaching robots have been used in the Middle East, Asia and the United States in recent years, but modern technologies such as cloud services and 3D printing are allowing smaller start-up companies to enter the sector.

"Well, it is fun, interesting and exciting and I'm a bit shocked," pupil Abisha Jinia told Reuters, giving her verdict on Elias the language robot.

Despite their skills in language and mathematics however, the robots' inability to maintain discipline amongst a class of primary school children means that, for the time being at least, the human teachers' jobs are safe.