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The decline of coal means less money to clean up coal mining's toxic past

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The dramatic drop in coal production in states like Pennsylvania has had an unfortunate consequence: less money to clean up abandoned coal mines that continue to pollute rivers and streams.

Much of the funding for mine cleanup projects comes from fees on coal production and the construction of new mines. As the coal industry struggles, that money is slowly disappearing.

Pennsylvania officials estimate the slowdown in coal production will lead to about a six percent decline in mine cleanup funds this year. The shortfall will slow efforts to clean up what is essentially a slow-motion environmental catastrophe. Abandoned strip mines, refuse piles and mine drainage have poisoned about 5,000 miles of streams and waterways.

The small village of Fredericktown, about an hour south of Pittsburgh, features one example of this widespread problem — although it differs from other polluted areas in one significant way: The coal waste is not off in some remote area. A large coal refuse pile — basically a hill made of coal mine tailings — looms over houses.

Resident Julie Bundy lives literally across the street.

“When we talk about where we live, [we say], ‘We live across from the slate dumps.’ Everybody knows where that is. I think it’s just something that people have accepted as being a part of the community,” Bundy says.

When Bundy was a girl, her parents wouldn’t let her near the dump. Now she has little kids of her own. “My neighbor told me at one time it was a farm,” Bundy says, “and there were apple orchards and everything on that property, and it was very beautiful at one time — and then this happened.”

“They had a big conveyor and they just dumped it,” says Eric Cavazza, head of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection's Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program. “And the material erodes off here into the river, gets into small streams and blocks storm sewer system in the towns.”

The pile was created before modern environmental regulations required mines to clean up their mess. Decades ago, companies left piles like these behind when a mine stopped making money. Pennsylvania has been left with hundreds of these sites — the most of any state in the country.

Cavazza would like to clean up the pile in Fredericktown, but his funding keeps shrinking. The budget sequester a few years ago took millions of dollars out of the state’s cleanup program. And there’s also this fundamental problem: The federal government pays for abandoned mine cleanup by assessing a fee on current coal production. As current production takes a nosedive, there’s simply less money coming in.

“I definitely think had we continued to get the grants of the size we were getting about three or four years ago, this project would be done probably within the next couple of years,” Cavazza says. “But we're at the reality now where we're probably only going to be able to tackle one of these really large dollar projects per year — and there are a lot of them.”

Mining exposes rocks like iron pyrite and shale to oxygen. When water flows over these rocks, it creates an acidic stew that leaches metals into waterways, and lowers the pH of streams to the same level as vinegar, explains Paul Ziemkiewicz, a water scientist at West Virginia University.

“A lot of these refuse piles are in fairly remote areas, up in headwater locations, [but] because the acid is so concentrated coming out of these refuse piles — even though the volume is not gigantic — they can wipe out many miles of headwater streams,” Ziemkiewicz says.

By simply grading the pile, capping it with soil, and seeding it with grass, the state could dramatically improve the water quality coming off of it, Cavazza says. Cavazza’s group did just that with a nearby pile last year.

Julie Bundy says the pile across from her house isn’t so bad during the summer. The leaves on the trees make it so you almost can’t see it. Still, Bundy thinks her neighborhood would be beautiful again if someday the big pile across the street simply goes away.

This article is based on a report by Reid Frazier of the Allegheny Front. The report aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.


Zika is a window into a much bigger story in Brazil

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As the country where doctors first noticed a suspected link between the Zika virus and serious birth defects, Brazil is the epicenter of the Zika-related global health emergency.

But Zika is only part of a much bigger story in Brazil. It's a story about mosquitos, public health, water and women, which is why The World has sent its Across Womens' Lives team to Brazil for the next two weeks. They’re there to report on how Zika fits into the story of Brazilian women’s struggles to improve their lives in a time of rapid and often disturbing environmental change.

Zika, of course is grabbing the spotlight because of its sudden emergence in the country and its suspected but still unconfirmed link to the shocking rise in the prevalence of microcephaly, a congenital condition that causes babies to be born with small heads and brains.

“The messaging is all about Zika” right now, says The World’s Carolyn Beeler, “because there’s so much news out there” about it. Even in São Paulo, far from the hardest hit areas in Brazil’s northeast, Beeler says soldiers are handing out pamphlets instructing people on how to reduce standing water in which mosquitoes can breed around their homes.

But the Zika virus is carried by the same mosquitos that can carry other, sometimes much more virulent and deadly viruses, such as dengue, Chikungunya and yellow fever. Other mosquitos found in Brazil can carry malaria. And those diseases are often as big or bigger problems these days in Brazil than Zika.

“We were in a favela (in São Paulo) and they're still concerned more about dengue,” Beeler says, “which is sort of right, because dengue killed more than 800 people in Brazil in 2015, about double the number that (it) killed in 2014.” The Brazilian government is also very worried about Dengue. It reports that the country logged more than 1.5 million cases in 2015, nearly twice as many as 2014, and that cases were up nearly 50 percent in January this year over last January.

The stark rise in dengue and the sudden surge in Zika are both likely tied to an increased presence of the Aedes aegypti, or yellow fever, mosquito in Brazil. And that in turn is likely tied to a rise in standing water — water pooling both haphazardly in trash and purposefully in things like cisterns, widely deployed to catch water in areas without indoor plumbing or hit by a recent record drought. When the drought broke as the current El Niño brought downpours to much of the country, the amount of standing water surged, likely leading to a mosquito population explosion.

But while they share common sources, Beeler says the focus on Zika control right now makes sense, even if that virus might be less problematic overall. “They're carried by the same mosquito,” Beeler says, so “any work to reduce the spread of Zika is also going to help reduce the spread of dengue” and other diseases.

Over the next two weeks the Across Women’s Lives team will be reporting on the lives of women effected by Zika and other mosquito-borne viruses. They’ll be looking at efforts to control the insects through public health initiatives and cutting edge genetic research. And they’ll be exploring the changing picture of water in Brazil and how women in the country are affected by and working to address a range of problems — too dirty, too little, and even too much.

As for how they’re protecting themselves from the same mosquito-borne threats they’re reporting on, Beeler says The World’s team has gone to Brazil well-armed. They’ve gotten their shots, “we’re spraying ourselves with repellent before we go out into the field, (and) we have some long sleeve hooded shirts that have built-in insect repellent,” all resources that many Brazilians don’t have access to.

And, Beeler adds, “one important thing to note is that this disproportionally effects the poor, who have open windows because they don’t have air-conditioning, and might have standing water because of trash in their neighborhood. So for some people it's much more of a risk than others. We’re pretty confident that we can keep ourselves safe.”

What India can teach us about producing clean water

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Access to clean water has become a global crisis, but in India, that problem is particularly acute: 99 million people there do not have access to clean water. The World Bank estimates that unsafe water is responsible for 21 percent of communicable diseases in India, world's second-most populous nation.

Along with his colleagues, Thalappil Pradeep, a professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, has developed a pioneering water filter that uses nanotechnology to rid drinking water of both microbes and chemical contaminants.  

“It is quite important to make sure that affordable clean water is not a distant dream in several parts of the world,” he says. “We are indeed in a position today to deliver affordable solutions to people.”

Pradeep says his filter, which requires no electricity and is already providing contaminant-free water to 400,000 people in West Bengal and seven other Indian states, also provides a good solution for the environment at large.

“If you look at the overall energy consumption, the environmental impact of this, and the raw materials, our methodology is green,” he says. “Let’s say you use a liter of water for the production of these materials, we create 500 to 1,000 liters in the process of consuming these materials. So, essentially, we produce a water positive product, which is quite unique in comparison to many other products on the market.”

For just $16, the filter — the first such device to both kill microbes and remove chemicals like lead and arsenic — could provide a family of five with clean water for an entire year.  Though this breakthrough technology has helped thousands, Pradeep says that education is the key to its success. After all, using a filter incorrectly does little to protect public health.

“It is important to implement the solutions and gradually educate people as we go along,” he says. “Arsenic contamination is something that people are generally aware of, but you cannot see arsenic, you cannot taste arsenic, you cannot smell it — you can only see the effects over a long period of time. So it is important to make sure the people are educated about the importance of clean water, about the importance of keeping their filters clean, and about the importance of backwash and such things to ensure [safety] — especially in a poor community where everyday living itself is so difficult.”

While Pradeep’s filter is already being used across India, he has big hopes for the future. He says such a filter could even be used to address the ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan.

“With this technology or similar technologies, we can ensure that the world is arsenic free, that the world is fluoride free, that the world is mercury free,” he says. “Why should people suffer from any of these contaminants? We can provide water free. Clean water for all can actually be given affordably. That would be my dream.”

This story was cross-posted from The Takeaway. Check out The Takeaway’s hourlong special on America’s water crisis here.

The rise and fall of Argentina’s real-life X-Files unit

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Even at the best of times, Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was controversial.

Accused of populism, corruption, mismanaging the economy and un-statesmanlike mood swings, she also, apparently, had an interest in extraterrestrial life.

In fact, in May 2011, she launched a new agency within Argentina’s air force specifically to research reports of UFOs on national territory.

Called the Commission for the Study of Aero-spatial Phenomena, or CEFAE in Spanish, it included both military and civilian experts, and aimed to get to the bottom of a spate of sightings across the South American nation. 

Amid great fanfare, Brigadier Ernesto Omar Paris, of the Argentine Air Force, said at the time: “This commission will carry out a scientific study of aerospatial phenomena. With this achievement, we have reached an important goal for our institution.”

Now that Fernandez de Kirchner’s leftist administration has made way for new president Mauricio Macri’s center right government, many of her pet projects are being wound down, and some are even being investigated to see how they spent the public funds they were assigned.

That includes CEFAE, whose track record of following through on its stated purpose appears underwhelming, to say the least.

According to its final — and only —report, which has just been published, the agency investigated just 10 reports of UFOs during its nearly five years of activity. 

And if that sounds unimpressive, then its conclusions are even more so.

The meager 12-page report found that nine of the 10 UFO sightings reported were in fact a soccer ball, a helicopter, a bird, the red lights on top of an antenna, the planet Jupiter, the moon, a star, an airplane and, in one case, a combination of a satellite, a Russian part of NASA’s International Space Station and a star. In the 10th case, the report noted: “Unfortunately, it has not been resolved due to the witness not providing any photo or video to accompany their report.”

One of the images provided to the body for investigation, which was determined to show airplane lights.

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One of the images provided to the body for investigation, which was determined to show airplane lights.

Nevertheless, the study conjectures that based on the witness’s account, what they had seen was someone shining a red laser onto a wall.

The report also notes drily: “Although the totality of the cases analyzed here have turned out to be compatible with causes of a known origin, they nevertheless constitute very valuable testimony from the point of UFO research, especially in corroborating the existence of an overwhelming percentage of IFOs (Identified Flying Objects) that turn out to be from honest but erroneous interpretations, in which ordinary objects have been confused with extraordinary ones.”

This story is crossposted from our partners at GlobalPost.

We're not sure if Zika is causing all those microcephaly cases. But there's no evidence it's pesticides.

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The Zika virus isn't the only thing that seems to be spreading quickly in Brazil. Rumors about the surge in microcephaly cases are, too.

The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Zika is responsible for at least some of the cases of the severe birth defect. It’s a plausible one, given what we know about the geography and timing of the stark rise in reported cases of microcephaly, as well as what we know about viruses — some others have been definitively linked with the condition.

But the Zika link is still unproven, and wouldn’t account for all the reported cases even if it were, leaving lots of room for alternate theories, however far-fetched.

One circulating widely in Brazil blames the rash of microcephaly reports on vaccines. Another claims that the real culprit isn't mosquitos carrying Zika, but the pesticides used to control those mosquitos.

Dr. David Morens, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, says the vaccine rumor is easy to dismiss.

"I would say that that is beyond extraordinarily unlikely," he says. “I never want to say ‘impossible,’ but this is about as close to impossible as things can get.”

But Morens doesn’t completely dismiss the pesticide claim.

"It's certainly plausible," he says, “but we haven't heard enough scientific information to weigh in on whether it's real."

And like some viruses, he says some toxins have been associated with microcephaly, "So the theory that a pesticide could do it is not totally out of line."

On the other hand, he says there's no scientific evidence for it and the chemicals being used for mosquito control in Brazil "have been tested for their ability to cause birth defects, and nothing's been found."

What’s needed to know for sure, he says, is a lot more study.

But Morens says the same is true for the Zika hypothesis.

"I can say that what we've heard about these cases of microcephaly and the epidemic of Zika, and now the possible chemical or pesticide exposure, are claims and statements that don't yet have scientific backing," Morens says.

"My sense is that even some scientists are confused … What we really need is more scientific information that looks at cause and effect, rather than just association."

Scientists around the world are scrambling to do just that.

But in the meantime, Morens suggests that the uncertainty about the cause or causes of the microcephaly surge doesn’t mean they’re equally likely.

"I think the way the evidence is falling out is that some of these cases may actually be caused by the [Zika] virus, but other cases may result from other causes — background causes, or from an increase in reporting, an increase in diagnosis," he says.

Morens co-authored a recent article on what’s known and not known about Zika and microcephaly.

Because microcephaly “has been associated with many different RNA and DNA viruses… a causal link between Zika and microcephaly is plausible,” Morens and his co-author Anthony S. Fauci of the NIH wrote.

But, Morens told The World, “the question is not, ‘can a virus like Zika cause microcephaly?’ The question is whether all these cases of microcephaly are caused by Zika.”

There is evidence of Zika in the brains of kids with microcephaly, Morens says, but that makes a connection so far in only a "very small" number of babies or fetuses.

"We can't assume that because in two or four or six or 10 or 15 babies we find this association, that it explains all the rest of them," or even proves causality, Morens says. "You can't prove a scientific reality by compiling different anecdotes, no matter how true they are."

The only way we can really get an answer to all these questions, he says, is through epidemiological studies — carefully crafted studies following real people in the real world for months or years.

But, he says, those things can’t be done quickly. So the uncertainty about what’s causing Brazil’s microcephaly surge — and to what degree it may grow into a real concern elsewhere — is likely to linger for quite a while. As is the room for lots of competing hypotheses.

Maria Murriel contributed to this report.

Scientists in the UK are now allowed to edit the genes of human embryos. Are designer babies next?

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Recently, the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority gave scientists the green light to use the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique in human embryos. The scientists will not be using the method for any direct therapeutic purpose, but instead will investigate the genes that guide human development. 

George Q. Daley, a Harvard Medical School professor and director of the stem cell transplantation program at Children’s Hospital Boston and Dana Farber Cancer Institute says CRISPR is basically a bacteria's immune system, adapted to human cells. 

"Just like we are bombarded with viruses, bacteria has developed a way of fighting off viruses," Daley says. "They recognize the invader and chop it up. So scientists have been able to adapt this to human cells in a way that allows us to very specifically identify a gene, recognize it, and either chop it up, deleting its activity, or repair it. [This is] a process we call gene editing. What [we] now want to do is employ this very powerful method for gene editing in human embryos." 

Gene editing has already been done in mice, but Daley says the results of those experiments can't provide enough insight into the problems of human health. 

"We really can't answer the critical questions about human development [using] mice," Daley says. "It turns out that mice develop differently. The principles we've discovered in mice don't seem to work in humans. ... This is going to shed important light on questions like infertility, miscarriages and birth defects."

CRISPR is currently illegal in the US, and Congress has banned all funding for the FDA to even consider doing this sort of research. But Daley is an enthusiastic supporter and wants to see it in the US. 

"It's now swept the international biomedical community. I mean virtually every laboratory is taking advantage of this. It's so powerful, so efficient and so easy to use that it's finding all sorts of very exciting new applications," Daley says. "We do hope that this work gets done in the United States. It'll have to be done with private funding, but it's essential. It's going to teach us a tremendous amount about the earliest days of human development."

Still, there are some who are calling into question the scientific, legal and ethical aspects of editing the genetic material of human embryos. Some critics have called it the first steps toward designer babies. 

"The longer term question [that] arises is whether this technique could ever be used to eradicate disease in an embryo, that is to prevent a baby from coming into the world with a particular disease. Could we treat it at that embryonic stage?" Daley says. "There are some who think that's a very laudible goal. But it also raises this thornier question of modifying human heredity. You know, if we intervene in an embryo and and cure a disease in an embryo, that means that that person's offspring has to carry this genetic change. It's very controversial."

Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford and the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford, hopes the obvious ethical and legal implications of bringing a genetically modified child into the world will prevent scientists from doing something inappropriate with CRISPR.

"Really, when you think about trying to make a baby using a previously unknown technique, the potential downside is enormous," Greely says, "The idea of bringing seriously disabled or deformed or dead children into the world is a serious constraint. There are legal ramifications, there are medical licensure ramifications. The woman who's a necessary part of it would have to consent to it. It doesn't mean that it's impossible, that in some strange corner of the world somebody might try something inappropriate. But I think it's not very likely dealing with humans."

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

Apple's scuffle with the FBI could affect privacy and freedom of speech worldwide

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On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the tech giant Apple to help the federal government break into an iPhone. The phone in question belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters — making this case a vivid example of the conflict between national security and personal privacy.

“The phone is password protected, and Apple does not keep the passwords,” says David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “The FBI is essentially asking for access to the contents of the phone.”

According to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, who published a critical response to the court order, Apple would have to design new software in order to comply with the FBI’s demands. Such software would help the government bypass the iPhone’s security features.

“In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession,” Cook wrote.

Kaye, who serves as the UN Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, has some serious concerns too. He says the question isn’t whether the FBI would benefit from Apple's help. “The question, rather, is whether the tools that they’re using will undermine security for all users.”

Kaye adds that the court’s explanation doesn’t seem particularly up-to-date. “We’re talking about the government using a law, the All Writs Act, that is from the 18th century,” he says. He says it's important to debate and adapt past laws so they address the challenges posed by new technology.

Cook’s post emphasized the importance of Apple's encryption technology, which scrambles the contents of communication so it’s only readable by the sender and recipient. In many parts of the world, says Kaye, encryption helps protect journalists and dissidents who could face threats from their own governments. Governments can use unencrypted Internet access, for example, to track the search history of their own citizens.

“In our digital age, our ability to search in some privacy is, in a way, a function of our ability to express ourselves, to develop our opinions,” Kaye says.

In other words, the scuffle between Apple and the FBI is much more than a question of national security. It could have implications for privacy and free speech across the world.

“While people in the United States may not see that as a real, concrete threat,” Kay says, “it’s a threat to billions of people around the world — who are in situations where the government really wants to know what you’re searching, who you’re talking to. That’s a risk, actually, everywhere.”

New research reveals how our own voice influences our moods

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Our voices are a critical part of human communication, but it turns out there’s still a lot we don’t know about how our brains perceive and produce the emotions in our voice.

A new study focuses on the one voice that most people hear all the time — your own.

“You can’t escape it,” laughs Jean-Julien Aucouturier, a researcher with the French National Centre for Scientific Research at the nstitut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, France, and a lead author of the paper. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the emotions carried in your voice can influence your overall emotional state.

For this experiment, about 100 participants were asked to answer simple questions about their emotions — whether they felt happy or sad or afraid — and then read a short story out loud. They could hear their own voice through headphones as they were reading. Afterwards, they were asked to rate their emotions again using the same questionnaire. Participants were not told that reporting their emotions and reading the story were part of the same experiment.

What participants didn’t know is that the pitch of the voice they were hearing in their headphones was actually slightly modified to sound happier, sadder, or more fearful (the higher the pitch, the happier someone sounds, for example, while a tremble in the voice conveys fear or anxiety). The researchers found that participants whose voice had been modified to sound happy reported significantly more positive moods than controls, and those whose voice was modified to sound sadder reported corresponding sad moods.

The findings suggest that not only do we use our voice to communicate emotions to others, but we actually listen to our own voice to glean information on how we’re feeling.

“Normally, you sound like how you feel. Here, we created a strange, otherworldy situation where people sounded different than how they originally felt,” Aucouturier wrote in an email. “You could have expected that people could say, ‘wait, that’s not how I’m supposed to sound,’” but instead, the participants in this study ended up changing their feelings to match what they had heard.

“This is a completely novel finding,” says Aucouturier, and it could inspire future research avenues. “Voice is amazing in terms of the amount of information it conveys." For example, perhaps our voice channels traits and attitudes, such as confidence or disdain, that can influence the way we behave.

Aucouturier and his colleagues developed a new audio platform specifically for this experiment, in which they could input a participant’s voice, modify it, and then play it back to the person — all within a moment’s time — to create the illusion that the participant was hearing their normal voice speak through headphones.

It usually takes just 1 or 2 milliseconds for us to “hear” our own voice; in this platform, the voice modification takes about 20 milliseconds, but that’s still fast enough that few participants seemed to notice — only 16 said they could tell that their voice had been modified, and their results were removed from the final findings, according to Aucouturier.

“What really blew us away is the potential of the tool,” wrote Aucouturier. In experiments designed to study behavior, there’s a risk that participants will notice the methods being used to manipulate their behavior, which can affect results. But in this experiment, the majority of participants were unaware. Where psychological research is concerned, “we could be looking at the ultimate tool for emotion regulation here.”

The researchers have made the platform open-source so that anyone can experiment with it.

This story was first published by our partners at Science Friday with Ira Flatow.


Don't panic about this hairy panic. Seriously.

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There's panic in southern Australia! And not just any panic — a "hairy panic."

Imagine tumble-weeds blowing, swirling and piling up six feet high outside your front door. That's what residents of the small town of Wangaratta are facing in the state of Victoria.

"It almost looks like big clouds in front of some of the houses," reporter Teegan Dowling says.

She adds that people's houses and yards are literally blanketed by the fluffy stuff.

"And it's really started to impact on their lives," she says. "They can't get in or out of their houses at the moment. And, they're spending up to about eight hours a day — it's almost like a full time job — picking up all this hairy panic. It's been happening every day since Christmas."

Hairy panic is actually a type of grass native to Australia.

"The grass grows a panicle of flowers on the top. And its generic name is panicum and that's why it's called the panic," says Richard Barley, chief horticulturalist at Kew Gardens in London.

So the panic has nothing to do with the plant's propensity to drive Australians crazy. But, Barley says the grass — aka Panicum effusum — has to be managed carefully.

"It's to do with land management it appears in this case," Barley says. "A farmer, who no doubt is very unpopular locally, has appeared to let the grass grow. These tumbleweeds, when they get to a certain size and the seeds set, they detach themselves at the base and become wind-borne."

Looking at images from this town in Australia, it's totally reminiscent of those old Hollywood westerns. And by the way, Barley says that kind of tumbleweed we used to see on the big screen wasn't even native to North America.

"There's a classic example of a Russian fissile — as you can imagine comes from Eurasia — and it was introduced into North Dakota in about 1870 and contaminated flax seed," Barley says. "And when you look at westerns now, you see tumbleweeds blowing around the scenery. That's often giant Russian fissile. Its become a very invasive and damaging weed. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so interested in the weeds, when they get out of their natural place they can become very invasive."

Residents of Wangaratta are being urged not to panic about their hairy panic problem. Because, the tumbleweeds last a while, but then gradually break up.

Until then, folks in Wangaratta will just have to have their brooms — or better yet their leaf blowers — at the ready.

Did a group of photo-taking tourists really kill an endangered dolphin in Argentina?

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The photo above has been circulating in some international media, presented as an ugly display of humans' obsession with photographing and posting everything to social media.

It's a mass of tourists in Santa Teresita, a beach town in a Buenos Aires province, crowding around a man holding a young Franciscan dolphin for others to pet and take pictures of.

The dolphin was later found dead on the shore.

The Buenos Aires blog Infozona first posted about the incident, berating the tourists for killing the animal, which is one of an estimated 30,000 Franciscan dolphins along that province's coast. 

The story caught the attention of several tabloids that have attributed the dolphin's death to the tourists' manhandling. One caption read, "The dolphin was passed around like an object."

But Argentine newspaper El Clarín reported the country's Fundación Mundo Marino said in a statement it wasn't clear whether the dolphin was alive when tourists found it.

Infozona later shared this YouTube video. At around the 1:15 mark a woman says "We have to put it back in the water!" and a man says "It's dead! It's dead!"

But even at the start of the clip, some four men examine the mammal, arguing "it's dead," or "it's dying." Then they carry it out of the water, and the horde forms.

Despite the aparent cause, the dolphin's death elicited outrage from readers and a statement from Argentina's Fundación Vida Silvestre, an environmental group, says two of the animals were picked up, and at least one died.

Franciscan dolphins live exclusively in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. They're small, growing to no more than five feet in length. The foundation says they're a species vulnerable to extinction.

If the calf in Santa Teresita was dead when the tourists found it, then they didn't kill it. But even so, they'd have been petting and photographing a dead wild animal.

In response to the incident, Vida Silvestre has started this campaign, encouraging people to stay away from the fragile species.

Is water the next resource crisis?

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While most of the northern US has been walloped by snow and rain this winter, many cities around the world have spent years facing a devastating drought. Places like Beijing, Northern India, Tokyo, and San Paulo are sitting on top of rapidly draining groundwater resources. 

In an attempt to save water, there have been campaigns to turn off the faucet while we brush our teeth. In California, Governor Jerry Brown advocated adopting a brown lawn. 

But who is making the biggest dent in water usage? Even if you turn your lawn into a rock garden, or keep a bucket in the shower to collect extra water, it’s agriculture that uses the majority of our water. In California — despite the fact that 38 million people draw on the state’s resources — agriculture still chugs down a whopping 80% of the water. 

Jay Famiglietti, a UC Irvine earth systems scientist and senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says a big part of the West's water crisis is due to a lack of oversight: a burden he believes falls on the food industry

“What I mean is the lack of oversight and the lack of management. I think that the major challenges for us as a … global society will be food production. In some sense, water use in cities can be sustainable if we separate out the need to use water to grow food.” 

Indeed, cities do a very good job of conserving water, as well as adopting technologies to desalinate and do storm water capture. 

According to Famiglietti, dealing with the consequences of climate change and droughts means working together quickly in order to make effective infrastructures that improve water availability and monitor usage. 

“This is not an "us" versus "them" thing, because we love to eat, right?” He says, “We've forgotten as a society how much water it takes to grow food.”

This story originally appeared on Innovation Hub. 

The trolls are winning. GamerGate case will not go to trial.

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In the battle over online harassment, it looks like the trolls are winning.

In the summer of 2014, Zoe Quinn, an online game developer and reviewer, went through a breakup with her boyfriend. He retaliated by publishing intimate details about her online. Mobs of Internet users got involved and started to harass and threaten Quinn in an affair that has become known as "GamerGate."

Last year, Quinn filed a lawsuit to prevent her ex from commenting on the controversy and stirring up more harassment against her. But this week, she asked the Massachusetts district attorney to withdraw the criminal case.

“I don't think the courts are ready to deal with this quite frankly,” Quinn told The Washington Post.

But Quinn’s experience is not unique. Brianna Wu, a game developer, journalist, and podcaster, was forced to leave her home in October 2014 after harassers published her address and made threats against her online.

“Zoe is kind of the spark that started this in the public consciousness, but she’s also part of a trend that had been happening to women in the gaming industry throughout most of 2014,” Wu says. “I had been speaking out and seeing some of my friends targeted, and eventually they went after me as well.”

In the last year and a half, Wu, CEO of the game development studio Giant Spacekat, says she has received more than 200 death threats, adding that she gets rape threats “constantly.” However, she feels that the larger GamerGate movement goes beyond individuals, arguing that it is connected to the role of women in gaming.

“I think the average person can look at video games and understand that we have some extreme problems in the way that we represent women,” Wu says. “What has happened is, for the last 30 years, video games are perceived by a certain portion of gamers to be their club house. Now that the video game industry is changing, and we have a lot more women developers, women journalists, and women CEOs like me, that is very, very threatening to a certain portion of gamers.”

She adds: “Our crime is simply being a woman in this field and speaking to our lived experience, and asking the industry to do better.”

While most states have passed legislation to prevent cyber harassment, Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, says the law often breaks down and fails to protect targets of online harassment.

“If you’re going to be convicted of harassment, the state’s got to prove that someone intentionally, repeatedly, [and] persistently targeted the person with speech that we can punish,” says Citron. “Some of the problem when you have a huge collective of people targeting a specific person is that it may be that any given person in the mob may contribute a little to the abuse, but not one person is responsible for persistent, targeted abuse.”

Taken together, a wave of online harassment from many different people can be intimidating and threatening. Yet, it presents a huge barrier for law enforcement looking to bring charges against any one individual.

“The law has great potential here, but as we’ve seen it’s a blunt instrument — sometimes it fails us,” says Citron. “What we saw in Zoe’s case, she gave up because it just became too much for her and her loved ones to bare.”

Citron, author of the book “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” says part of the problem lies in education. Many police officers and other law enforcement officials do not know how to investigate cyber harassment, or recognize the scale of the problem. Between 2010 and 2013, for example, about 2.5 million cases of cyberstalking occurred, yet federal prosecutors pursued just 10 cases.

“They need a lot of training to understand the real significance of this kind of behavior and its real world impact,” Citron. “That really presents problems, not only if you have all the evidence and you can trace all of the posts to specific individuals, even if they all are engaging in prescribable conduct like a true threat, it may be that law enforcement feels outgunned.”

In addition to education, Citron says that social attitudes among law enforcement officials is also a problem.

“In my book, I document how law enforcement will tell victims, ‘Eh, turn your computer off,’ [or] ‘Boys will be boys — it’s no big deal,’” she says. “I think we’re making a little bit — I’ll say very modest progress. We’ve seen top cops like [California Attorney General] Kamala Harris take on this issue, and really think hard about ways in which law enforcement can be better trained.”

Sweden's capital is on its way to becoming fossil fuel free by 2040

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At the recent Paris climate summit, world leaders set an ambitious global target: no net carbon emissions by mid-century. That means all of the carbon we burn from fossil fuels must be absorbed by the world’s forests and oceans. Achieving that — well, easier said than done.

Yet, in the city of Stockholm, city leaders are looking to blow past that goal — they want to be a completely fossil fuel free city by the year 2040. That presents a major transportation and urban planning challenge, but the city is already well on its way. It's getting there through a series of carrots and sticks.

First, the sticks.

Drive into the center of Stockholm during rush hour, and you’re going to pay for the privilege, about $4. This idea, called “congestion pricing,” had been kicking around Sweden for some three decades before policymakers finally agreed to give it a try — but only for a brief trial 10 years back.

Gunnar Söderholm, director of the city’s environmental and health administration, said they had to convince the public that this wasn’t simply another tax.

“We told people that this is not for the money. We want to improve the air quality and to reduce the climate impact from the city,” Söderholm said.

Still, a majority of the public wasn’t in favor of the idea. Until they were. 

“It was sort of judged as inconceivable before it happened,” said transport professor Jonas Eliasson with the Royal Institute of Technology. “And once it happened, no one really wanted to go back. And then suddenly they said, ‘OK, so why on earth didn’t we do this earlier?’” 

With congestion pricing in place, air quality quickly improved by as much as 10 percent. Traffic fell by roughly 20 percent.

“And you saw, I shouldn’t say the ‘empty’ streets, but you suddenly realized it’s possible to drive," Eliasson said.

I went for a walk during rush hour with transport planner Yusak Susilo, also with the Royal Institute of Technology. 

“For Stockholm level, this is congestion,” said Susilo pointing at a couple of cars waiting at a light.

We did see a bit more traffic as we walked, but Atlanta, this is not.

Besides congestion pricing, Stockholm has other sticks to keep people out of their cars — parking is expensive and gas is heavily taxed. But city planners offer plenty of carrots too. Susilo has lived and travelled all over the world. He describes public transport in Stockholm as “marvelous.”

“Because the bus is actually so frequent, you don’t actually need to check the timetable because you trust the system that it will actually come,” said Susilo.  

The buses, subways, and trains are also clean and nice. I rode a city bus with tables so commuters could work. Allow me repeat that: a table on a public bus.

Stockholm's subways are clean, efficient, and run so frequently that passengers almost always get a seat. Even in rush hour, the crowds are manageable.

Stockholm's subways are clean, efficient, and run so frequently that passengers almost always get a seat. Even in rush hour, the crowds are manageable. 

Credit:

Jason Margolis

“Customer satisfaction is something that is really, really high,” said Susilo, confirming my feeling.

Public transportation also burns clean in Stockholm. The trains run on electricity, almost all it from hydro, nuclear and wind sources. Swedish leaders worked to cut back on oil use in the 1970s, and now only a small percentage of the country’s electricity is generated by fossil fuels. The country has become a model for its energy policy — overall, about 20 percent of Sweden's energy mix comes from oil. 

As for Stockholm's buses, which are off the electricity grid, they can be powered by table scraps or animal waste. On the side, many read “Biogas Bus.”

Let’s dig into that fuel source a bit further. This video, from the Swedish company Envac, shows an underground vacuum system for food waste, garbage, and recycling. It’s currently being used in the Stockholm neighborhood of Hammarby Sjöstad.

All the food waste gets swept off to a big biogas digester where it’s converted to fuel. This system also keeps garbage trucks off the road, another small way to make Stockholm’s air cleaner, cut climate pollution, and make the streets less crowded. It all ties into Stockholm's spatial development plan for the future of the city.

“’Promenadstaden’ is the name of Stockholm’s new city plan, and it translates as ‘The Walkable City,’” said Daniel Firth, a native Englishman who is the chief strategy officer with Stockholm’s transportation department, Trafikkontoret.

Firth said in Stockholm, they’re continuing to build dense urban environments with work, housing and shopping all close together. He said the city thinks about climate change a lot in its urban design, minimizing pollution, and building a city of tomorrow not for vehicles, but for people.

“What attracts people is other people, and what attracts those people is walkable environments, cycle-able environments, access to services, access to entertainment possibilities, access to nice parks. It’s basically all about people, cities are people.”

Stockholm's historic core, the island of Gamla Stan, isn't entirely vehicle free, but it comes close. 

Credit:

Jason Margolis

The same goes for Stockholm’s suburbs where dense urban cores surround train stations.

Urban planners have clearly worked hard to make Stockholm more people and climate friendly. But they’re also lucky — they started with a compact, medieval, core.  

With the pressure on all of us to cut carbon emissions, I asked transport professor Jonas Eliasson how a sprawling 20th century American city, without an extensive rail system, could possibly replicate what Stockholm is doing. He said, consider his city 10 years ago when congestion pricing was first introduced.  

“What happened in Stockholm was not so much that 10 percent of the individuals changed, what happened was that almost everyone changed 10 percent of their trips,” said Eliasson.

“Roughly half of the disappearing car trips went to public transport. But the other half, that went to other things like changing departure times, reducing your number of car trips and combining trip purposes, for example. So in a different place, there might be other kinds of options.”

Do the math: if we all make small changes how we commute, just two times a month, it could make a big difference in traffic, pollution and our quality of life. And perhaps we'd achieve a level of success similar to Stockholm.

This is your brain on lead, and lots of other nasty pollutants

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The water crisis gripping Flint, Michigan has exposed thousands of the city’s residents to dangerous lead levels, triggering a federal emergency declaration and a national conversation about basic public health protections. Lead can be toxic to the brain, and the developing brains of children can be particularly vulnerable.

The Flint example is hardly unique, though. Many other American cities have faced lead-contaminated water. And an expanding list of common substances, including some pesticides and flame retardants, may also be linked to significant developmental and neurological conditions such as ADHD in children.

On Friday, from noon-1 pm EST, The Forum at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, PRI’s The World and WGBH present a live conversation and webcast on Chemical Exposures and the Brain: The Flint Water Crisis and More.

Moderated by The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson, the forum will examine those links and the implications for both children and adults, while exploring public policy successes and failures in safeguarding the public’s health against neurotoxicants.

Panelists will include Jeffrey Griffiths, Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and former chair of the US EPA Drinking Water Committee, Science Advisory Board; Philippe Grandjean, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Marc Weisskopf, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and Kimberly Gray, Program Director of Children’s Environmental Health at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Global temperatures rise to scary new levels

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Suns out. Guns out. You know, as in sleeveless shirts. That might be the next big style in the Arctic.

Because last month, it was warmer than usual up there — a lot warmer.

NASA says January 2016 recorded the "greatest departure from average" of any month on record.

That's globally.

But the spike in temperatures last month was particularly pronounced in the Arctic.

“When we have an El Niño event like we’re currently having that’s just an assist and that kind of pushes you into record breaking territory,” says Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But we would have had a record warm year, even without the El Niño, and temperatures are not going to go back to the 1970s when its finished.”

Does it matter? I mean, it’s up north. And we’re down south.

Schmidt says yes.

The warming temperatures are melting ice in the Arctic. That’s changing sea levels in coastal areas. “We’re also seeing changes in circulation patterns,” he adds. “The wind patterns seem to be affected by the reductions in sea ice in the Arctic and that is changing the patterns of storm tracking.”

But making people care about it is tough. It’s thinking in a long-term way. That’s why Schmidt feels like we need a sustainable conversation about it that goes on for years and decades. The Paris Climate talks are a good start. But he says it will take more. “How those pledges to reduce emissions are actually going to be implemented and how they are going to be maintained and perhaps even enhanced ... that still needs to be decided.”

And the hotter the weather, the more pressure it applies for such change to happen. 


This giant stick insect is so rare only three females have ever been found in the wild

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Seeing this giant Australian stick insect species, Ctenomorpha gargantua, in the wild would be a little like hitting the jackpot.

Males are spotted here and there, but only three of the much-larger females — like the one pictured here — have ever been seen, according to Maik Fiedel, coordinator of live exhibits at the Museum Victoria’s Melbourne Museum.

Fiedel came across the third female two years ago. He was on an annual collection trip in Cairns, Australia, with colleagues from the museum when he spotted the 50-centimeter-long (approximately 19.6 in) insect hanging upside-down from a bush (it had probably fallen from the tree canopy). Upon realizing what it was, “I started screaming,” he says. The team collected it, and the museum dubbed it “Lady Gaga-ntuan,” a play on the American pop star and the insect’s large size.

“It was pure coincidence that we came across it, but we always have our eyes open for this species in particular, because everyone basically wants it [for their collection],” Fiedel says. Ctenomorpha gargantua is considered the longest stick insect species in Australia, and the second largest in the world. But so far, “almost nothing is known about the biology or ecology of the species in the wild,” says Fiedel.

Researchers think these stick insects spend their life high up in the tree canopies of the Australian tropics, and that could be why spying them in the wild is uncommon, Fiedel explains.

Ctenomorpha gargantua is distinctive for the fork shape of its large cerci, the leaf-shaped appendages that protrude from the end of the abdomen. “No other species in the world has got cerci that long [compared] to its body size,” Fiedel says.

Maik Fiedel holding a captive-reared female gargantuan stick insect.

 

Credit:

Museum Victoria

Females tend to be a third longer than males, and their cerci are about four times longer than males'. Males sport long wings that allow them to fly while females, bearing shorter wings, can’t take flight.

The species is also the only one known to have a black patch on the underside of its thorax that looks like a bullseye, though no one knows what its function is, according to Fiedel.

The Museum Victoria’s Lady Gaga-ntuan specimen proved even more precious when she began laying eggs soon after she was gathered from the field. This was only the second time C. gargantua eggs had ever been collected, to the best of Fiedel’s knowledge.

Lady Gaga-ntuan died after two weeks in captivity, but her 12 eggs produced seven babies, or nymphs — four females and three males (the museum suspects the mother was at the end of her natural lifespan and the other eggs weren’t viable). All of the female offspring grew to be larger than their mother, measuring 56.5 centimeters (approximately 22.2 inches).

With his starter nursery, Fiedel began a captive breeding program, mating the offspring with each other after they reached maturation. Now those females have begun laying eggs.

Eggs of “Ctenomorpha gargantua,” held by the Museum Victoria.

 

Credit:

Museum Victoria

And they’ve been laying surprisingly few. Fiedel says that more common spiny leaf stick insects usually lay 500 to 800 eggs over their adult lifespan, but the museum’s C. gargantua specimens have each laid perhaps a few dozen per week, though the number varies. The low output could be due to the conditions of captivity, or it could be a trait unique to the species itself.

“That could explain why there’s not many animals [that have] ever been seen of this species, because they might not lay a lot of eggs,” Fiedel suggests.

For now, the museum has all its live specimens on display and is hoping to maintain a stable population in its captive breeding program. That way, it can eventually share specimens with other institutions, such as museums and zoos, around the globe so “people never ever have to take [these insects] out of the wild again,” says Fiedel.

This story was first published by Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

A new agreement protects most of Canada's Great Bear Rainforest from logging

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After decades of negotiation, an agreement has been reached that will protect 85 percent of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia from logging. The agreement was hammered out among environmental activists, the timber industry, First Nations and the BC government.

The Great Bear Rainforest covers an area of 6.5 million hectares (about 21 million acres) between the top end of Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle and is the only place in the world where one can see the Kermode (Spirit) bear, a sub-species of black bear noted for its white fun. The rainforest is usually described as the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world — a very lush, mossy, moist, year-round ecosystem.

Fights over the rainforest go back at least 30 to 40 years, says Andrew Macleod of the Vancouver-based magazine, The Tyree. The region used be known as the Mid-Coast Timber Supply until environmentalists renamed it in 1997 as the start of a campaign to save it.

The environmental movement in BC is strong and healthy, Macleod says. “This is the birthplace of Greenpeace; David Suzuki and the Suzuki Foundation are here, Sierra Club is strong. A group called Forest Ethics were involved [in the agreement], as well.”

But British Columbia is politically divided, Macleod says. The BC government itself is part of the logging industry. BC Timber Sales is a government company and is one of the license holders in the rainforest.

“There are a lot of people working in resource industries who are all for logging and paving it, and the government, for the most part over the history of the province, has been involved in encouraging that,” Macleod says. “And there a lot of people who are here because it's beautiful — people who don't directly depend on resource jobs, but are here because they like the place.”

After years of fighting for the rainforest “valley by valley,” Macleod says, “environmentalists sat down and said, ‘Well, what's the next big battle and how do we fight in a way that makes sense?’”

So they started what Macleod calls a markets campaign. “There are five main forest companies that hold licenses up there, and they went to their customers and basically said, ‘We’ll make it uncomfortable for you if you want to take trees from here and turn them into toilet paper and books and such. We'll make it clear where they're coming from and what the destruction is like on the land.’”

Macleod believes the threat of the markets campaign gave industry and government the incentive to negotiate. “It gave forest products from British Columbia a bad name,” Macleod says. “We were the Brazil of the north. I think the logging companies didn't want to go through that again.”

Adding to that, he says, Canada’s First Nations have in recent years seen their rights re-established. “There have been some precedent-setting cases just in the last few years that have recognized that aboriginal title does exist,” Macleod explains. “The first iteration of those court rulings said that First Nations people had to be consulted — the government could [no longer] just circle parts on a map and say, ‘Yeah, that's open for logging.’”

On the other hand, Macleod says, there are lots of people from First Nations who today are working in the logging industry, as well. In fact, an initial agreement, which involved BC’s First Nations in the negotiations, leaned heavily toward protection. But when the First Nations negotiators went back to their communities with the draft agreement, Macleod says, “a lot of the reaction they got was, ‘Wait a second, we need jobs here as well.’ They weren't necessarily all for protecting everything.”

And now, after 20 years of discussion, 10 years of serious negotiation involving 26 First Nations, five logging companies, three environmental groups, the provincial government and some local governments, an agreement has been reached. And while the agreement has been widely hailed as a model of collaboration, not everyone is happy with the outcome.

One of BC's leading environmental voices, Vicky Husband, told Canada's Globe and Mail that while "it is impressive that environmental negotiators were able to get so much when the government wanted to give so little ... she is dismayed the deal has allowed the government to cast itself as green, when it is still allowing ancient forests to be logged and grizzly bears to be shot."

“The way they describe the agreement is ‘working forests,’” Macleod says. “It’s sort of open for logging, [under the] same kinds of standards as the rest of the province. The forest industry will tell you that that means protecting viewscapes, protecting old-growth, protecting habitat for species at risk. In this case, it will mean protecting bear dens. Critics will tell you that the logging industry always says that kind of thing and it will be destructive and damaging to the ecosystem.”

“On the other hand, the trade-off is that something like 85 percent of the remaining forest is being protected,” Macleod concludes. “The idea is that they have come to some kind of a balance that everyone can live with.”

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

Why we don't fix anything anymore

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About five years ago, Apple made a change to the iPhone. A tiny change. One that you probably wouldn’t think is that important.

Apple changed the phone’s screws. Specifically, they shifted from Phillips to Pentalobe screws.

These new pentalobe screws mean that if you want to get into your iPhone to repair it, well, that’s really difficult. (Physically get into it, that is. This is completely unrelated to the San Bernardino/lock screen controversy.)

Kyle Wiens, the founder and CEO of iFixit, says this troubles him:

“This is crazy. This is like the car company saying, when you take your car in for service: ‘When we’re done, we’re going to weld the hood shut so you can’t get back in.’ It’s preposterous. We should have a presumption that we can get inside anything we own. It’s our product, not theirs, we paid them for it. They’ve made their money; we should be able to extend the product’s life if we need to.”

And Wiens says that new gadgets are getting harder and harder for us to modify and tinker with. (Even farm equipment is now difficult to repair.) And if you want your phone to last for five or ten years, that’s an issue. But Wiens thinks it’s not an issue that big tech companies are particularly concerned about.

Wiens says it’s possible “that this is a strategy to either force us to use their repair options, or to force us to buy a new product. When you talk with manufacturers, they’ll throw out all these straw man arguments, they’ll say ‘well it’s not safe for you to go in and repair your phone.’ Fixing phones is an extremely safe endeavor; I’ve never ever heard of anybody hurt from fixing a phone.”

And with the amount of materials and waste that goes into making a new gadget, the fact that they don’t last doesn’t just hurt consumers, Wiens feels it hurts the Earth itself.

But the impact goes beyond environmental degradation. Wiens thinks that these new products discourage tinkering. And tinkering is important:

“We have a built in system in our culture where we’re telling people it’s not OK to tinker, we put a special screw on the phone, it’s not OK to get inside this thing. And I think that’s exactly the opposite of the sort of society we want. We should be designing products that encourage tinkering, that encourage people to go into engineering, that encourage the next generation of innovators.”

A version of this story first aired as an interview on PRI's Innovation Hub. Subscribe to the Innovation Hub podcast.

Despite low gasoline prices, automakers are moving ahead with affordable electric cars

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Back in 2011, when gasoline prices in the US were close to $4 a gallon, President Barack Obama called for automakers to put a million electric cars on the road in America by 2015.

So far, Americans have bought only 400,000 — and with such low gas prices, the whole effort is doomed, right? Maybe not.

For consumers, range and price are the biggest obstacles to purchasing an electric vehicle: a $30,000 electric car barely goes 100 miles on a charge — even less in cold weather. And if you want to go 300 miles on a charge, you have to shell out $100,000 for a Tesla.

But now, both Tesla and General Motors say they will soon sell electric cars that will go 200 miles on a single charge for about $35,000. The Tesla is the Model 3 and Chevy is marketing the Bolt.

According to Jim Motavalli, an environmental writer who specializes in green transportation, when Tesla “drew a line in the sand” and announced it was going to come out with its Model 3, a 200-mile range car for about $35,000, GM decided it would beat Tesla to market — and that’s essentially what happened. The Chevy Bolt was just unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show and the Tesla will debut the Model 3 soon.

And these are just the models getting all the press, Motavalli says.

"The automakers are starting to put out plug-in versions of their cars just as a matter of course — mostly plug-in hybrids with maybe 30 to 40 miles of all-electric range — and they're not making a big deal out of it,” Motavalli says. “It's just becoming part of the background.”

In addition, Tesla is introducing new battery and charging technology that may change how people view electric vehicles.

The new Tesla, for example, will have the ability to connect to Tesla's Supercharger network — stations across the country that are 480 volts and can charge the car in about half an hour. A robust charging network is the key to the success of EVs, Motavalli says.

Tesla has also come out with a new product they call the Powerwall, a battery array that can be used at home. The Powerwall “makes total sense for Tesla,” Motavalli says, because of its close relationship with SolarCity.

“The batteries in the Powerwall are the same as the batteries in the Tesla cars, and they can also serve as backup for the solar panels from SolarCity,” he explains. “There’s a total synergy there. ... We’ve long been talking about how the grid will need battery back-up, and this device is essentially a seven kilowatt-hour battery array that you'd have in your house.”

It's a little expensive at $7,000, Motavalli says, but he says the relationship between electric cars and the electrical grid is the wave of the future.

“Vehicle to grid communications is what we’re talking about,” he explains “Essentially, the car can be a rolling battery depository that can plug into the grid and, in times of peak power demand, return power to the grid.”

If just one electric car does that, it's not a big deal, Motavalli says, but imagine 100 cars, all with 40 kilowatt hour batteries connected to a smart utility that can turn on the batteries when it needs them.

“People may not have to turn on, say, a backup generator or what might be a coal power plant that is in reserve,” he says. “The vehicles will still end up being charged when their owners get into them and people will get paid for that. It has the potential to be a pretty good load leveler on the grid.”

In fact, Motavalli envisions cars moving totally away from fossil fuels within the next five to 10 years.

“I think we're headed towards an all-electric fleet on the road,” he says. “We’ve basically reached the point where range is no longer an issue. That was probably the biggest objection. But once you have 200 miles routinely at an affordable price, I think it's inevitable. I think at the same time we are also heading for a renewable energy grid. It's going to be hard to make it work, but I think we'll have an international effort to make that happen.”

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

Germany's second largest city just says 'nein' to coffee pods

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First comes knowing that Keurigs and other single-use coffee makers are wasteful. Then comes refusing to buy one even though they are extremely convenient and allow for more variety than your average drip coffee maker.

Finally comes not having access to one at work. That's about where Hamburg is.  

Last month, Germany's second largest city launched a new green initiative that includes a ban on single-use coffee makers in government buildings. 

Hamburg officials said the ban was based on the fact that coffee pods "cause unnecessary resource consumption and waste generation." They are hard to recycle given that they are made of a combination of plastic and aluminum, and moreover: 

"It’s 6 grams of coffee in 3 grams of packaging. We in Hamburg thought that these shouldn’t be bought with taxpayers’ money," Jan Dube, spokesman of the Hamburg Department of the Environment and Energy, told media.

To be fair, the ban includes bottled water, beer, plastic plates and cutlery, among other items. But more than any of those other items, the ban has highlighted once again the fact that single-use coffee makers are bad for our planet — which, granted, is something we have known for quite some time.

The Atlantic reported last year that if you lined up all the used Keurig pods sold in 2014, they would encircle the globe nearly a dozen times.

More from GlobalPost: 8 ways you are killing the environment that you probably didn't even realize

That's bad. Even Keurig inventor John Sylvan said as much when he essentially apologized for inventing the contraption in the first place.

“I don’t have one," Sylvan said of the Keurig. "They're kind of expensive to use. Plus it's not like drip coffee is tough to make.”

Despite these overt and glaring negatives, the market for single-use coffee makers has been growing. Since 2011, it has tripled in Western Europe and the US, where coffee pods make up about a third of all coffee sold.

According to Quartz, pod-machine sales outpaced drip-coffee makers in Western Europe for the first time in 2013.

Hamburg may be the first city to take matters into its own hands, but it likely won't be the last.

This story originally appeared on GlobalPost.

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