It’s easy to believe, when you’re in Iraq’s southern marshes, that civilization really did begin there.

Sunlight sparkles as herons dart from the reeds to spear fish, while women in long wooden boats glide through the water. The wetlands span thousands of square miles in the middle of desert. Some students of ancient history believe the marshes, lined with reeds, teeming with fish and filled with birds, are the site of the biblical Garden of Eden.

On Sunday the UN cultural agency, UNESCO, added the marshlands and the ancient Sumerian cities that once flourished among them to its list of World Heritage Sites. The listing recognizes the area’s role in human development and its unique ecosystem. It also includes three Sumerian capitals, including Ur, believed to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham, revered by Christians, Jews and Muslims.  

Women gather reeds in Iraq's southern marshlands. Most people have added outboard motors to the traditional boats but there are few other conveniences here. Most are without electricity and there are few schools or clinics. 

Credit:

Jane Arraf

This region was the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, where the world’s first known cities sprang up near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Sumerian clay tablets from more than 5,000 years ago portray arched houses built from reeds — the same way they are still built today.

But the marshes that survived for thousands of years have taken a beating in recent decades. Iraqi governments since the 1950s began draining parts of the marshes to expand agriculture and drill for oil. In the 1980s, at war with Iran, Saddam Hussein sped up their destruction so the marshes couldn't serve as a refuge for fighters. A decade later he punished Shiites from the south for a failed uprising by driving them from their homes there.

The marshes today remain one of the poorest areas in Iraq. Residents living on tiny floating islands fish, tend water buffalo and gather reeds. There is almost no health care and few schools.

But since Saddam was toppled in 2003, there have been efforts to restore the suffering marsh ecosystems.

Iraqi American environmentalist Azzam Alwash and Nature Iraq, the group he founded, have set up an eco-camp in the heart of the marshes. Visitors can stay in modernized reed houses, go out on boats, and eat breakfasts of water buffalo cream and flatbread baked over reed fires. The marshlands are on a main migratory bird path from Africa. With the water and fish stocks restored, pelicans, flamingoes and marbled teal ducks fill the skies.

The marshes are in one of the safer parts of Iraq, just a few hours from Basra, but there are few foreign visitors.

“We have so much potential for archeological tourism and eco tourism but unfortunately this area of development has been stunted because of the reliance on oil,” says Alwash. “It is our curse as far as I am concerned.””

Inhabitants of the marshes - known as the Ma’dan - share the floating islands where they build reed houses with domesticated water buffalo, usually a household’s most valuable possession. Bufallo milk, a staple of the diet here, is also boiled over reed fires and turned into a thick cream to be sold. 

Credit:

Jane Arraf

There are still threats to the marshes — primarily from agricultural runoff as well as drought attributed to climate change. Turkey and Syria also limit water flowing into the marshes with dams upstream.

Alwash says he feels vindicated by the UNESCO listing. But he says more important than world recognition is the commitment made by the Iraqi government to protect the area.

“A few years ago, people were looking and laughing at me saying ‘why do you want to restore the marshes? These are backward people’ … and now all of a sudden people are saying ‘fantastic, marvelous.’"

Snapchat’s line of face-altering filters have undoubtedly sparked a selfie revolution. However, one journalist is using the app for something more: He’s enabling sexual abuse survivors to share their stories.

Yusuf Omar, mobile editor for the Hindustan Times, used Snapchat technology while covering India’s Climb Against Sexual Abuse earlier this month in Mysore.

“Here in India it’s actually illegal to identify someone who’s been sexually abused in a photograph or a video," Omar says. "So I needed to come up with a way to tell their stories without showing them.”

The answer? Snapchat filters.

Passing his phone to participants of the climb, survivors were able to choose the filter they felt most comfortable with. From dogs to dragons, Snapchat users have several options to mask their identities.

Sexual abuse survivors were able to speak openly about their experiences by masking their identity with different Snapchat filters. 

Credit:

Photo courtesy of Yusuf Omar

“I think they definitely did open up in a way that I could have never achieved if we had a big broadcast camera with a boom mic and lights in your face,” Omar says. “You’re trying to get somebody to tell the most intimate, personal, and probably a story they never want to have to remember or recount.”

Unlike the usual anonymity tactics, these women were able to tell their stories in the palm of their own hand.

“They had control, and they also gained an element of trust in me,” he says. “First hand, they got to experience what they would be represented as.”

This is an empowering first for many survivors, especially in India, where speaking about sexual assault is highly stigmatized.

Snapchat Allows Sexual Assault Survivors In India To Share Their Stories pic.twitter.com/mB6RYu6ouV

— Images (@vctv_images) July 12, 2016

Despite Snapchat’s fleeting qualities, Omar says posting to the app can actually reach more people than other social media platforms. While content often gets buried in Facebook and Twitter feeds, posting to a Snapchat story continues to push material to the tops of users’ feeds.

Being a chat app, users were also able to respond to survivors stories directly.

These voices have since gone viral.

While hacking is a serious concern, according to Omar, no one has been able to remove the masks from survivor’s faces. He hopes that remains the case.

“Ideally, I would love to be able to control those masks,” he says. “I would love to be able to tell the sexual abuse survivor that they can design their own filter to cover their faces.”

But until that day, Omar’s using what he has — and it's working. 

Researchers at Stanford are reviving a technique that can use uncontaminated, blood-forming stem cells to treat a patient with cancer, autoimmune deficiency and other diseases.  

Beginning in the 1960s, hematopoietic, or blood-forming, stem cells became the basis for bone marrow transplants used to treat cancer patients. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, scientists found a way to stimulate these stem cells to move from the bone marrow into the bloodstream for collection — a process called mobilization — which gradually lessened the need for bone marrow transplants.

According to a 1996 study, the use of mobilized blood cells in cancer patients had multiple benefits: It led to “lower morbidity, and greater cost-effectiveness compared with conventional bone marrow transplant …and the relative ease of obtaining large amounts of stem cells made multi-cycle transplantation a viable option in the treatment of malignancies, allowing further escalation of chemotherapy dose intensity.”

In 1988, Irv Weissman, a longtime stem cell researcher, developed a process that could create "purified" blood-forming stem cells from mobilized blood — that is, they could extract pure, uncomtaminated stem cells from all the other cells in the mobilized blood. 

This discovery became important, Weissman says, because of results found in a 1990 trial that treated women with metasticized breast cancer — cancer that has moved beyond the breast and the lymph nodes to the bones, the lung and the liver. These patients had no hope of any localized therapy to save them, but “you could give high-dose chemotherapy, and the more chemotherapy you gave the more cancer cells in the body you killed,” Weissman explains.

“[But] when we looked at the mobilized blood from those women, we saw that over half of the samples [still] had breast cancer cells in them,” he continues. “When we purified the blood-forming stem cell from the [full] mobilized blood, for the first time in medical history we could give back to those women cancer-free stem cells to regenerate their blood-forming system at doses of chemotherapy that, without return of cells, would kill them.”

The company Weissman formed after these clinical trials was bought by a larger company, which shut down the studies on purified blood cells. It is a complicated story, Weissman says, but the long and the short of it is: “They didn't want to go into this research. There’s no money to be made in this sort of thing … They told me it was a business decision.” 

Five years ago, Weissman and two other colleagues, retrieved the old data and found that one-third of the women who had received the cancer-free stem cells in the 1996 trial were alive, apparently without disease. Only 7 percent of the women who were treated with full mobilized blood — that is, cancer-contaminated blood — were alive.

Weissman had to give away any financial profit arising from his old company, but now all the materials are back at Stanford, where Weissman is the director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology in Regenerative Medicine. Thanks to California’s Proposition 71, which created the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine in 2004 and granted power to the state to fund stem cell research independent of any profit-making enterprise, Weissman will have sufficient funds to begin this summer a trial of transplants using purified stem cells.

The first transplants won't be for breast cancer patients right away, he says. He and his colleagues will focus first on patients with blood disorders — diseases like sickle cell anemia, Thalassemia or juvenile diabetes, in which the blood-forming system has genetically gone wrong. In these cases, Weissman says, they can give back purified blood-forming stem cells from a related donor who doesn't have the disease, effectively replacing the defective blood system with one that isn’t defective.

Weissman also plans to approach children with SCID (Sever Combined Immunodeficiency)— a disease in which no adult immune system develops — and transplant these patients with pure, blood-forming stem cells, either from their mother or from a sibling.

“With pure stem cells, we show in animal model after animal model, that we could have a platform for regenerative medicine,” Weissman says. “If you need a lung, you would get a blood-forming stem cell from the lung donor, along with the lung itself, and eventually a lung stem cell. This is the basis for regenerative medicine.”

Two other recent discoveries could advance the field even more, Weissman says.

The discovery of the Crispr enzyme, which can actually edit genetic code, could lead to an even better way to treat a child with SCID. Doctors could use the Crispr enzyme to remove the defective gene and replace it with a healthy gene, so patients get back their own blood-forming stem cells.

Pluripotent stem cell lines, “master” cells that can potentially produce any cell or tissue the body needs to repair itself, also show great promise. “We are working right now on the project, as are many other labs, to get every tissue-specific stem cell from these pluripotent stem cell lines,” Weissman says.

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

Peering out the window on a cross-country flight, you can watch the short grass prairies of the Midwest transition into the ragged ranges of the Rocky Mountains. But identifying the specific geological features with more precision can be much trickier.

Can you spot the signs of different crustal fractures? Can you tell a meandering river from a braided river? Well, no surprise, there is now an app for that. 

Geologist Amy Myrbo, co-creator of the Flyover Country app, says she was inspired by the view from her plane window. 

“The window seat was the Google Earth of the past,” Myrbo says. “It's an amazing view and this is really what got us started thinking about how we could use that window seat as a great way to get people engaged with the geoscience.”

The app, which is available for both iOS and Android, uses a combination of WiFi and GPS. Before taking off, Myrbo suggests loading your city of departure and destination. The app then pulls information about geographic sites within several hundred miles of your travel path and saves it to your phone so you can use the app without purchasing in-flight WiFi. 

“It uses your GPS, which is completely legitimate in airplane mode,” Myrbo says. 

Manmade objects are easier to see than geologic formations, according to Myrbo. 

“Irrigation and crop land and dams ... and you can see what what cities you're flying over," she says. "There are of course geologically a lot of fantastic things like volcanoes and glaciers and mountain ranges and huge rivers.”

The app also uses information from Wikipedia to give users some background information on the formations they can see. 

“There are a huge amount of articles about physio-geographic features and geologic features all over the world, really. Because the app works worldwide, it's not just not just US or North America and those articles are of course of varying quality, but they tend to be pretty good and they reference scientific literature and tell you a lot about the history and formation and connections between that geology and somewhere else.” 

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

Imagine going to fill up your tank and seeing a label on the pump that says what you are doing was causing climate change.

The city of North Vancouver in Canada is launching a new program to encourage drivers to think about being more energy-efficient when they drive — and that fossil fuels contribute to climate change.

The city council heard about the plan during a presentation last summer by teenage climate change activist Emily Kelsall.

At 18, she's already a seasoned climate change campaigner and public speaker. She learned about an effort by the climate activist organization Our Horizon to get warning labels on gas pumps.

Kelsall contacted Our Horizon founder Robert Shirkey.

Shirkey worked with the teenager to help her make a compelling case to the mayor and city council.

“She really got our interest, so we did some investigation and found out that, yes indeed, we do have the ability to do that,” says Darrell Mussatto, mayor of North Vancouver.

The council agreed in principle to put the labels on pumps at the city’s gas stations — all six of them. But then came the discussion of what the labels should actually look like.

Kelsall was hoping they would have a strong message.

“It's just like the cigarette labels,” says Kelsall. “If we can put those graphic cigarette labels that are terribly, nasty to look at, we can bring it upon ourselves to put this on something that will not only endanger our health, but the planet's health.”

One of the sample labels that Our Horizon designed bore a photo of children in a drought-ridden area. For obvious reasons, the gas companies weren’t so keen on the idea.

One of the sample gas pump labels created by Our Horizon.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

They wanted a set of messages about smart fuel consumption, like taking a roof rack off your car when you don't need it, WITH a sentence making the connection between fossil fuels and climate change.

"People, generally are quite well aware of that connection,” says Andrew Klukas, president of the Western Convenience Stores Association. He represents some of the owners. “We discussed that with the city and they wanted to have one sentence at the bottom making that connection, reminding people that yeah it is about helping the planet, we could do something here and we should do something."

Mayor Mussatto agreed that the gas pump labels shouldn’t be like warning labels on cigarette packs.

"We're not trying to sell death and gloom here," says Mussatto. "What we're trying to do is inform people and help support them make better decisions."

So the labels ended up with a positive message supplied by the gas stations. And a negative one reminding consumers that by squeezing that gas pump, they are contributing to climate change.

But Kelsall isn't discouraged by the compromise.  

"I'll admit, driving is a convenient thing. I think the most important thing is that we maintain a conscious awareness about what we are doing, which is what these labels will bring. So, yeah — don't eat meat, drive a hybrid, and take the bus when I can and advocate for the things I care about. I'm a human, just like everybody else though."

And she's getting her blunter message across in different ways — like a slam poem she wrote.

The new gas pump labels will appear in Kelsall's small Vancouver suburb in the coming weeks. Since North Vancouver adopted the idea, other Canadian cities have passed resolutions in favor of similar labels.

And in the US, Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Seattle are also considering the warning label concept.

A "hoax." A "con job.""Bull----." These are among the phrases Donald Trump has used in recent years to express his contempt for the science of climate change.

And while the new Republican presidential nominee is out of step with much of his own party on many issues, he's solidly in the GOP mainstream on this one.

We should be focused on clean and beautiful air-not expensive and business closing GLOBAL WARMING-a total hoax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2013

But former Republican representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina says his party and its new leader are wrong on the science, the politics and the economics of climate change.

"We're courting disaster," Inglis says of his party. "We're basically pulling defeat down upon us by taking on this retro affect that says that climate change isn't real... (It's) out of step with where the science is and where the smart money is. ... The smart money is already moving to act on climate."

Inglis aligns himself squarely with that "smart money. After losing a GOP primary to a Tea Party challenger in 2010, despite a 90+ percent conservative voting record, he formed an organization called "republicEn"— for "Energy" and "Enterprise"— that's pushing for what it calls free enterprise approaches to solving our energy and climate challenges.

Most Republicans, Inglis says, are dismissive of the scientific consensus on climate change because "they don't like the solutions. They assume that solution is a bigger government." But he believes there's "a small government" solution, based on free enterprise.

"What we have here is a problem of economics that has an environmental consequence," Inglis says. "And so if we fix the economics — which actually is acceptable to many people on the left and on the right — we can bring Americans together and solve this problem, and in the process make some money while we're serving customers with better energy sources around the world."

All that's needed to sieze that opportunity, he says, is "a little touch of government to make everyone accountable for their emissions."

But that "little touch" is something that's been a total non-starter among nearly all of Inglis's fellow Republicans, and many Democrats: a carbon tax, to make polluters pay for the environmental and social cost of their emission. The new Republican party platform explicitly rejects the idea, while simultaneously endorsing a revival of the sagging coal industry, arguably the worst single source of climate-warming pollution.

Inglis says the GOP's embrace of coal is "yet another sign of the death gasp" of what he calls the "Grumpy Old Party," which he says rejects innovation and new ideas.

In its place, he says, "we are hoping for the birth of the Grand Opportunity Party. It's a very different place, that says, 'Yeah, we can do this.'"

On climate change in particular, Inglis says his carbon tax proposal would unleash innovation in low-carbon energy technology. It would be revenue neutral, he says — meaning other taxes would in turn be reduced. And it would be "border-adjustable"— meaning it would be applied to imports and eased for exports to keep American products competitive.

Once that's in place, Inglis says, "then the government can step back and watch free enterprise fix the problem."

"We've got a better solution" to climate change that Republicans should endorse, he says.

But instead, he says his party is "shrinking in science denial because we don't like the [Obama administration's] solution."

It's among the reasons he's in a tough spot heading into November.

"It's impossible for me to vote for Donald Trump, of course, because he's just antithetical to everything that I believe as a conservative," Inglis says.

So will he vote for one of Trump's opponents, perhaps even Democrat Hillary Clinton or Green Jill Stein, both of whom take climate change seriously?

"I don't know yet," Inglis says. "It's really difficult."

The next time you’re tooling down the highway somewhere in America, take a look around: Those miles of medians and roadsides along our highways offer unexpected environmental benefits.

All those broad, green strips along the nation’s highways turn out be vital habitats for many small critters, as well as pollinators including bees, butterflies and birds.

The sum total of the area between the pavement and the right-of-way fence on county, state, and interstate highways is 17 million acres — all of it a conservation opportunity, says Bonnie Harper-Lore, a restoration ecologist for the Federal Highway Administration and now a member of the Commission on Minnesota Resources.

“I saw roadsides as an opportunity to benefit wildlife from the beginning of my career, 30 years ago,” she says. “Small wildlife, small birds, small mammals and migrating birds all use these same corridors. If they have places to find food and cover, they are all going to do better and their populations will continue to hold where we need them to hold.”

Roadside areas contain some surprising habitats, too, like remnants of North America’s original native prairie and old-growth trees. Harper-Lore would like see a complete inventory of the nation’s roadside vegetation. “I think we would be surprised at how many remnants of these old forests, old prairies and old wetlands do exist,” she says.

Up until recently, each state Department of Transportation has basically done its own thing and made its own priorities, Harper-Lore points out. But a new White House task force on pollinators and a law that specifically supports pollinators leads her to believe states will start moving in the same direction, especially if they know the public is interested.

A project along the I-35 corridor serves as a great model for what multi-state cooperation can achieve, Harper-Lore suggests. In 1993, a group of six states asked the Federal Highway Administration to work with them to get funding to support their effort to restore prairie along the I-35 corridor and to protect any remnants that still existed.

The corridor runs north-south between northern Minnesota and Mexico, which almost matches the route monarch butterflies travel on their migration. In addition to restoring prairie, an effort began several years ago to plant more milkweed along the corridor to help sustain the butterflies along the way.

“It's amazing,” Harper-Lore says. “When you're screaming by at 55 to 70 miles-an-hour, there are things happening out on that green strip that you probably will never, ever imagine.”

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

In June, a heat wave in the American southwest sent the mercury soaring over 115 degrees in parts of Arizona. At least four deaths were linked to that heat wave.

Considering that 2016 is predicted to be the hottest year on record worldwide, and that last month was declared the hottest June on record in the United States, how could climate change influence the number of heat-related deaths we see?

“It is difficult to predict,” says epidemiologist Elisaveta Petkova. “If we see an unprecedented heat wave, extremely high temperatures, longer duration, we may see a substantial number of people dying.”

Petkova says past heat waves have shown that heat poses a severe threat to public health, especially in urban areas. 

This map of the Earth shows surface temperature trends between 1950 and 2014.

Credit:

Wikipedia/Creative Commons

“There have been a lot of historical heat waves. Even in Chicago in 1995 there's been a heat wave that took over 700 lives, so I don't think we are protected from heat,” Petkova says. 

Petkova, who is project director at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness of Columbia University in New York, wanted to find out more about the potential for heat-related public health problems in the future. So she, together with experts on climate science, demography and statistics, put together a study to try and predict different scenarios for future heat waves. 

According to their most extreme scenarios, some 3,000 people could die each year from heat waves. 

“We have projections about population change, how many people would live in the city. We have projections about the different climate scenarios that were used — a higher and a lower greenhouse gas emission scenario, various climate models, and also different adaptation pathways,” Petkova says.

“This specific estimate [of 3,000 people dying annually] is a combination of being exposed to the higher greenhouse gas emission scenario, having a higher population in the city, not reaching a higher level of adaptation in the future ... it’s just a combination of different factors.” 

Many people don’t think of heat as a health threat, but Petkova says over-exposure can be deadly. 

“Heat exhaustion and heat stroke,” says Petkova. “But it is also important to remember that people with underlying health conditions may suffer from other types of diseases that are just exacerbated during the heat.”

Despite the dangers, Petkova says there are things we can do to prepare for even the worst-case scenario. 

“We have to think about our cities, just making sure that we're working toward a future where we have cities that are more resilient, cities that are more sustainable, where we really have access to various types of adaptations that make the life of people better at the same time and really help with addressing climate change,” Petkova says.

“And something that every one of us can do is, we all have elderly neighbors, we have parents, people we may think are susceptible [to heat]. ... We can all just pay attention to those around us who may be at high risk and make sure that they know what they need to do to avoid such impacts.” 

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

Researchers have found that Saturn’s moon Titan could have the right chemical conditions to create precursors to life, although the chemistry — based on hydrogen cyanide and a molecule called polyimine — wouldn’t lead to life as we know it here on Earth.

Rachel Feltman, editor of the “Speaking of Science” blog at The Washington Post in New York, says Titan — Saturn’s biggest moon — is one of the most exciting moons in our galaxy and it’s beginning to challenge our concepts of what life might be like outside planet Earth. 

“Titan is one of Saturn's moons … and it's a really exciting moon," Feltman says. "It has the only stable liquid on the surface of anything other than Earth in the solar system that we know of. It has lakes and rivers and oceans, but they're all full of methane instead of water. And has this really thick atmosphere, but it’s, you know, very different from our own. And there's a lot of hydrogen cyanide produced in that atmosphere when the sunlight hits it." 

Scientists have been conducting research to figure out what conditions might be like on Titan. 

“These researchers basically modeled how hydrogen cyanide might act in the super-cold environment of Titan and they think that it might form this polymer called polymine that under Earth conditions is not a very exciting polymer. But under Titan's conditions they think it might have some of the qualities that might make it an intriguing candidate for a building block of life. You know, the way certain polymers helped create amino acids on early Earth.

"So they don't know this for sure, they haven't even modeled exactly how it happened. But it's an interesting thing to look into, you know, how life might be completely unrecognizable to us on other planets. Because when the conditions are so different, the chemistry that goes into life will be so different,” Feltman says. 

Titan is not the only moon in our solar system that scientists are interested in studying to try to learn more about possible life outside planet Earth. Europa, the sixth closest moon to Jupiter is also intriguing to researchers. 

“A lot of planetary scientists would love to see us go to Titan,” Feltman says, “And there is the Europa mission coming up or tentatively coming up in the 2020s and you know that's a slightly different world because it's a subsurface ocean. But it's a very similar idea that these moons with oceans on them are probably really great places to look for life ... And Ganymede is thought to have an ocean under the surface. There’s really so many moons that we should be going to.” 

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

In June, House Republicans attached an amendment to the defense authorization bill that stopped the Defense Department from spending money to plan for climate change.

The amendments blocked funding associated with implementing executive orders — some of which go back to President George W. Bush — that resulted from bipartisan efforts to establish goals across the federal government for energy security, conservation, climate resilience and sustainability.

The measure was sponsored by Colorado Republican Ken Buck, who posted a statement on his website that reads, in part: “The military, the intelligence community [and] the domestic national security agencies should be focused on ISIS and not on climate change. The fact that the president wants to push a radical, green energy agenda should not diminish our ability to counter terrorism.”

Sherri Goodman, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, has little patience for this kind of thinking.

“It's simply a reflexive anti-climate vote, without understanding the detrimental impact it will have on our troops, training and our military readiness,” Goodman says. “I think if the members had a chance to hear from our military leadership about how [this planning] protects readiness, not undermines it, how it reduces cost, not raises it, I believe they would have a different view.”

Political officials and the public might understandably feel that the military needs to focus on ISIS and other terrorist groups, given recent events, but Goodman thinks this is too narrow a view of how the military needs to prepare.

“I don't think of it as spending money on climate change. I think of it as investing to protect our troops when they train, when they deploy and when they're stationed at our military bases," she says. “As a mother, I want my son or daughter to be protected from the health risks of higher temperatures that our troops are encountering when they deploy to places like the Middle East. ... I want my son or daughter to be projected when our military bases are affected by sea level rise and coastal subsidence.”

Taxpayers should expect their military to be energy efficient and energy resilient and to be prepared to protect the public from outages caused by increasingly powerful storms, Goodman insists. The GOP amendments prevent the military from doing this.

Goodman points to the risks of not understanding the implication of rising sea levels and coastal erosion at military installations around the country and not understanding the impacts of drought, which is already effecting the military's ability to train at key installations from Arizona to Colorado.

With a more aggressive Russia looking to operate militarily in the Arctic, a region that is changing faster than any region on the planet, our military and our Coast Guard need to better understand the environmental conditions there, Goodman says. “If we don’t, it's like going to sea with our eyes blind.”

While ideology certainly underlies the GOPs actions, terminology has a role, too, Goodman points out. The Navy, for example, has cut fuel costs by upgrading its energy program. But in their proposals they never wrote ‘climate change’ and they sailed right through Congress.

“Unfortunately, in our own country, the word ‘climate’ is a lightning rod,” Goodman notes. “If you re-frame the issue as one of improving military readiness, reducing risk and increasing resilience, I think you can achieve the same result.”

The Senate will also vote on the defense bill, so Goodman doesn’t see this as done deal.

“I do firmly believe that congressional defense leadership on Armed Services and Defense Appropriations will appreciate that our forces need to be able to understand how to operate at the risk of higher temperatures,” she says. “These findings are widely known. The Defense Science Board reports about them. There have been numerous intelligence committee studies. So, in fact, this is just responsible planning.”

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

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in California, which was built in an earthquake zone 30 years ago, is now scheduled to close by 2025. But not far from New York city, the operators of Indian Point, an even older reactor with a history of problems, are resisting calls to shut down.

The plans for Diablo Canyon and the conflict over Indian Point illustrate starkly different views about the future of nuclear energy in the US. One side continues to see nuclear energy as safe, clean and crucial to the nation's energy future; the other sees an outdated, dangerous energy source that can and should be replaced by renewable sources of energy.

In New York, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently extended Indian Point’s license to operate, and Entergy, the company that owns it, claims the reactor is still safe. 

Opponents of the plant disagree. Indian Point is only about 30 miles away from midtown Manhattan, they point out. A major accident at Indian Point would endanger millions of people and could become a trillion dollar disaster.

“It is the most precariously located reactor, from a demographic point of view, if there were an accident,” says Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “And Indian Point has had plenty of problems. It has had a history of tritium leaks. It has had a history of transformer fires. For a reactor situated like Indian Point, I think it's pretty egregious that it has had so many problems and is still operating.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to close the plant as part of his proposal for a clean-energy plan that would force the state to rely on renewables like solar and wind power for 50 percent of its electricity over the next 15 years.

Supporters of the plant, including local elected officials, as well as pro-business and labor groups, say the plant provides hundreds of jobs and generates millions of dollars of tax revenue. Recent hearings about the plant's future have been contentious and emotional.

Meanwhile, out on the West Coast, a different scenario is playing out. Pacific Gas & Electric has begun the process of shutting down its controversial Diablo Canyon reactors and replacing them with renewable energy sources by 2025.

“I have to congratulate them. I think this is a very, very historic achievement,” says Arjun Makhijani.

Diablo Canyon is located in a seismic zone and information about the geology of the region and the seismic activity continues to evolve. There are questions as to whether the reactors could withstand a worst-case-scenario earthquake.

“There's a fault much closer to these reactors — just offshore — than was previously known, and renewables and efficiency are cheaper — so they are seeing the handwriting on the wall,” Makhijani says.

In addition, California now is requiring its utilities to transition to 50 percent renewables, mainly solar and wind, by 2030. But unlike in New York State, there is no worry that California can replace the power from the Diablo Canyon nuclear complex with renewables.

“If you plan a shutdown the way the Diablo Canyon shutdown is planned, [in which] there are explicit targets in the agreement, then you can build up your efficiency, you can build up the jobs that go with that and you can build up renewables,” Makhijani says. “Planning a shutdown is the best way forward for what is really a 20th century technology.”

Indeed, Makhijani believes the future for all nuclear energy has passed. Existing plants will be phased out one way or another as they become more and more expensive to operate, while renewables, efficiencies and storage become so cheap in combination.

“In such a circumstance I think nuclear power will go away,” he says. “The question is how fast, and whether we can do it in an orderly way. I think the Diablo Canyon agreement is historic because it is showing an orderly way to go from an old, centralized, inflexible model to a new model that is more democratized, renewable, more dispersed and more resilient.”

Back in New York State, however, a coalition called "Upstate Energy Jobs"believes differently and is fighting to keep New York's upstate nuclear plants open.

Speaking at a recent hearing, Gary Toth, a member of the coalition, said the upstate nuclear power plants provide about 24,000 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll, according to a report in The Journal News.

“Nuclear generation is essential to New York as our only answer to a low cost, reliable, carbon free electrical production that would reduce carbon pollution in our atmosphere by 50 percent in the year 2030,” Toth said.

Clearly, the US has a long way to go before reaching some kind of agreement on this issue.

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

The honey bee gets all the headlines, but other species of bees pollinate our plants and help sustain food production. Take the squash bee, for instance.

There are 20 species of bees that specialize in squash pollination — and one of them, Peponapis pruinosa, is making headlines of its own lately.

Researchers have found that this squash bee expanded beyond its native range as humans spread the cultivation of indigenous squash throughout North America. Over a period of thousands of years, as ancestral farmers spread the cultivation of squashes through the Americas, the squash bee followed.

It’s the first time scientists have shown that cultivating a specific crop led to the expansion of a pollinator species.

North Carolina State biologist Margarita Lopez-Uribe, who co-authored the paper, says she and her colleagues theorized the bee had expanded its range as squash moved from Mexico into North America.

“If you look at the distribution of the bee today, they are mostly co-distributed with plants that were domesticated by humans,” she explains. “We looked for genetic markers to see if there were signatures at the genetic level that could corroborate this hypothesis, and that's what we found.”

Peponapis pruinosa specializes in pollinating just one plant genus: Cucurbita— the genus that produces squash, pumpkin and zucchini. Unlike the honey bee, who collects pollen in a kind of basket on its hind legs, the squash bee has long hairs on its hind legs, where the pollen gets stuck. Squash pollen has large grains that easily attach to these hairs.

The rapid expansion of the squash bee may have been good for humans planting the squash, but it may not be so great for the squash bee itself. The bees’ genetic markers had signatures of severe “bottlenecks,” Lopez-Uribe says.

A genetic bottleneck is an event that drastically reduces the size of a population, which also reduces a species’ genetic variability. Low genetic variability can make a species vulnerable to changes in the environment.

Squash bees have been in North America for thousands of generations, yet they still show very low genetic variability, Lopez-Uribe says. “I'm really curious to keep investigating this. I believe these bees are so tightly associated with crop management and agricultural systems because we're doing something with the crops the bees rely on that is keeping the genetic variability of these populations extremely, extremely low.”

Plowing and soil tillage could be the culprit. Squash bees nest underground, close to the plants they pollinate. Once a female bee has made a nest, it starts collecting pollen and nectar. It lays eggs, closes its nest and then dies off later in the summer. The following year, the eggs develop, emerge as adults and the cycle starts again.

“I think what’s probably driving some of the low genetic diversity in the populations is that agricultural systems of squashes and pumpkins include what we call crop rotation and soil tillage,” she says. “I think a large number of these bees die every year as a result of these agricultural practices.”

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

Nearly 47 years ago, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin emerged from Apollo 11 and became the first humans to set foot on the moon. In addition to leaving their iconic footprints, the crew left equipment and memorabilia scattered on the lunar surface. 

Archaeologist Beth O’Leary says that the landing area constitutes an archaeology site that should be preserved. 

“It's preserved now by the fact that it's so remote," O’Leary says. "We haven't visited it with any manned spacecraft in a long time. It's also pretty expensive to get there. but it lies in a very grey legal area because it's really governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which didn't address historic preservation — they just wanted to get there. So it is preserved by its remoteness, by its cost to get there, but … we will go back to the moon … and so how do we decide which sites are important?”

O’Leary thinks the Apollo 11 site should be preserved in the same way other historic sites on Earth are preserved.

“I mean I'd argue for Apollo 11 right off the bat because that is the first lunar landing and as an archaeologist we're very concerned with the first landing of Columbus in the Caribbean, the first footprint, for example in Tanzania, which is 1.6 million years old.”

Even though the moon is currently protected by its remoteness, Ann Darrin, managing executive of the Space Exploration Sector at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, says it won’t always be so difficult to get to outer space. 

“When space tourism happens, whether it's 50 years from now or 100 years from now, if we don't have some safeguards of how far away people can be or where they could go or where the rovers can go, then we stand to lose that heritage,” Darrin says. “We've lost a lot on Earth, so I think it's important that we we think about now, what do we want these early space sites … how well do we want these to be preserved so that in the future generations can visit and see them and study them?”

The site of the first lunar landing is not the only human artifact in space that archaeologists think about preserving, studying and possibly visiting in the future. There are some half million objects of “space junk” currently in orbit around Earth. Vanguard 1 for example, which was launched in 1958, is the oldest satellite still in space. O’Leary, however, says it might not be a good idea to retrieve that piece of history. 

“You don't think of museums floating around on Earth but very few museums have lasted 600 years or even 240 years,” O’Leary says. “So that locational integrity — that orbit in effect is preserving it, and if you take it down, if you grab it somehow, I think you lose part of that extraordinary significance … We also have models of Vanguard 1 in the Smithsonian.”

Both Darrin and O’Leary agree, however, that it’s necessary to establish some sorts of guidelines for preserving historic space sites. Darrin says NASA has already made a good start. 

“NASA in 2011 went ahead and issued a series of guidelines and that was a sea change from when I started in 2000 when I proposed to them to make the Apollo 11 lunar landing site a national historic landmark and they said no,” Darrin says. “They came up with a series of recommendations. They used a panel of experts — physicists and engineers … we wrote down really what people should do that come back to the moon to visit — and it was for commercial spacecraft and also for nations that come and visit the moon.

"And what they tried to do was look at the effects of landing on the moon — mostly robotics and how that would affect the heritage objects, the important significant objects left on the moon. And they set aside Apollo 11, the first one, and Apollo 17, the last one, and said within the radius of two kilometers you can't even go there. So essentially that is now in place from NASA.”

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

With nurturing, even a degraded backyard can yield a delicious bounty of produce — and maybe even true love. 

Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates have become accomplished permaculture gardeners in an unlikely place: a small, degraded backyard in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Permaculture is an agricultural system that is highly integrated, sustainable and self-sufficient. “Permaculture is meeting human needs while improving ecosystem health,” Toensmeier says.

The two men transformed the backyard of their gray duplex into an urban oasis. The yard is just 1/10th of an acre, but produces almost all of the fruits, vegetables and eggs two families need.

When they found the lot, it had three different kinds of terrible soil, Toensmeier says — sand, gravel fill and compacted clay with chunks of concrete and rebar in it.

The yard was a blank slate when Toensmeier and Bates bought the house.

Credit:

Eric Toensmeier

“We actually thought it was perfect,” Toensmeier says “We wanted to be somewhere where the scale at which we were operating was relevant to lots of people. So, we were looking to be in the city.”

“We also wanted a place that was as beat up as you can imagine,” he adds, with a laugh, “because we wanted to set the bar high and say, ‘If we can do it you can totally do it.’”

And perhaps most surprisingly: They wanted to use their garden as a chance to find love.

Now, each area of the lot mimics a natural setting where vegetables, fruits and other edibles grow.

Credit:

Eric Toensmeier

One small portion imitates the structure of a forest with trees, shrubs, herbaceous species, vines and fungi, that are edible and work together as an ecosystem, Toensmeier says. At the lowest level, there’s broccoli, ramps, ginger and violets. Above them grows a gumi bush, one of their many Asian species. The bush fixes nitrogen and produces berries that taste a bit like rhubarb. Shading over them all is an American persimmon tree.

In the back corner of the lot stands a bamboo grove and a mini-orchard that boasts an Asian pear tree with three different varieties grafted onto it — an early season fruit, a mid-season fruit and a late season fruit. The tree yields about 150 pears a year. In the same area grow blueberries, service berries, raspberries, hazelnuts, grapes, rhubarb, perennial leaks, elephant garlic and strawberries. “In just this tiny corner, which is about 20 by 25 feet, we have all those different plants fruiting and producing excellent food for us,” Toensmeier says.

Toensmeier recommends that anyone looking to have a garden like their's start with berries. “They don’t take up a lot of space. A lot of them can handle some shade. They’re beautiful, they taste good and they’re mostly very easy to take care of,” he explains. “And every year you can add another bed.”

The garden beds are bordered with old logs. They’re inoculated with spores to grow edible mushrooms, but Eric says they also form a critical habitat. All the creepy-crawly things you find when you turn over a log are part of the lot’s decomposer ecosystem and its pest control system, as well. A lot of predacious ground beetles, for example, live under the logs and eat pests and weed seeds.

The system works: In seven years Toensmeier and Bates have never had to use pesticides of any kind in the garden. Instead, they provide habitat for garden helpers like ladybugs and praying mantises.

Old logs serve as borders for garden beds, provide mushroom habitat and are home to beetles and other creatures that help reduce garden pests.

Credit:

Eric Toensmeier

Bates designed and built a small greenhouse, where they grow annual vegetables and tropical plants. He says walking into the greenhouse is like going on vacation.

“Instead of spending a couple thousand dollars going to Florida with a family for a week, we invested that money in building this greenhouse and now we’re living in northern Florida,” he says. “We have things like citrus, Chilean guava, fig and hardy avocado. We also have tree collards, which get to be 11 feet tall and are perennials.”

Recycled granite curbstones define a raised bed inside the greenhouse. There are also three large tanks containing an aquaponics system, with catfish and 800 gallons of water. Bates says the granite and the water collect heat during the day and radiate it back at night to make the greenhouse up to 10 degrees warmer.

Jonathan and Meg tied the knot at Paradise Lot.

Credit:

Eric Toensmeier

When Bates and Toensmeier started their project, they had simple goals: to walk out in the yard and get a handful of fruit each day of the summer, greens every day of the year, and to find the loves of their lives. Mission accomplished on all accounts. Both men are now married to women they met through the interest in their project.

Bates says he knew the garden was a success after five or six years, when the plants really took root and started to produce in abundance. “There’s an explosion of life, really, and at that point, this idea of mimicking a forest ecosystem really hit home. We really did it,” he says.

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

A city built on coal wealth is turning away from the fossil fuel. Or at least, its biggest university is.

Newcastle University has become the most recent UK university pledging to divest from fossil fuels. The university joins a growing number of UK schools that have moved toward investments in alternative energy solutions.

Newcastle’s decision comes on the heels of similar announcements last year by 10 other UK schools.

Phil Taylor, professor at Newcastle University and director of the Institute of Sustainability, contributed to the divestment campaign spearheaded by members of the Newcastle University Student Union. “The portfolio that is being divested by Newcastle University is relatively small on a global scale," Taylor says, "but it’s a big statement and many other organizations are moving in the same direction.”

According to the activist organization gofossilfree.org, $3.4 trillion has already been divested from fossil fuels globally.

Divestment from fossil fuel is still far from predominant in higher education. There has certainly been pushback among universities in the US, for example. Newcastle’s decision is not without complications of its own. The university’s press release commits to investing in “progressive companies that are working toward low-carbon solutions.”

This language allows some room for interpretation by the university. According to Taylor, Newcastle will continue partial investments in fossil fuels through energy companies as long as they are moving toward renewable energy, despite maintaining holdings in oil and gas.

DONG Energy is one such company that Newcastle University would consider “progressive,” despite large holdings in both oil and gas, because of its role in developing the world’s largest wind farm outside of London.

Such compromises are necessary in the divestment campaign, Taylor argues, because these “progressive” energy companies have the capital resources to fund large-scale renewable energy projects.

As Taylor makes clear, the work is far from over. Now Newcastle University will try to navigate its own previous investment commitments, while minimizing funding of companies that contribute to climate change.

“In space, no one can hear you scream” was the tagline of the 1979 box office film success Alien. And it’s true. Sound waves propagate mechanically as a vibration and therefore need a medium — solid, liquid or gas — to travel through. Although interplanetary (and interstellar) space is not completely empty, gas molecules and dust grains are so sparsely distributed that they do not form a continuous medium that would enable sound waves to be transmitted directly.

But there are many locations in the solar system where it might actually be quite noisy. Such places will have a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted — for example, an atmosphere or an ocean. And we have only started to explore what they sound like.

NASA announced that its next mission to Mars, the Mars 2020 lander, will carry a microphone so that the soundscape of the planet can be recorded. This is not the first time that a microphone has been sent to Mars — the US Planetary Society sponsored a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander mission in 1999. Unfortunately, the spacecraft crashed before any recordings could be transmitted. A microphone was also part of one of the instruments on the Phoenix Lander of 2008, but because of concerns about an interface problem with the landing system, the instrument was not switched on.

The tantalizing sounds of Titan and comet 67P

Titan

The point of an experiment like this is to use the sound to infer how the pressure of Titan’s atmosphere changes with depth. This can then be used to build a circulation model for Titan, similar to the ones we use on Earth to forecast the weather and understand changes in climate. Here's audio from Titan's haze:

And, at a time when ESA’s Rosetta mission is drawing to a close, we should remember that its target comet, 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, was singing out into the void as it approached the sun. We also heard the thud of the comet lander Philae’s arrival when it touched down on the comet in November 2014.

There are soundscapes of other solar system bodies including Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. But these are not direct audio recordings — they are a conversion of electromagnetic vibrations into audio signals. They sound pretty weird.

Music of Mars

You only have to imagine being in a desert to realize the variety of sounds a microphone on the surface of Mars could record — and how they can be interpreted. First of all, the wind, whistling across the planetary landscape — how fast is it travelling? How often does it vary in speed or direction? What does a dust devil sound like? Or a dust storm? What about the crack of thunder associated with a lightning bolt? Or the variation in pressure during an electric storm? Once the wind drops, the gentle sounds that break the silence can be heard: the settling of dust grains disturbed by the wind.

There are several engineering advantages to having a microphone carried by a rover on Mars. As the vehicle trundles across the landscape, we might hear the noise of crashing gears, and realise that sand had clogged the wheels. This would allow engineers to diagnose problems more efficiently, and work out strategies to ameliorate or avoid them.

We have heard some sounds of a rover on Mars already: NASA released audio from the Opportunity Rover’s 11-year marathon. But like the sounds of Jupiter and Saturn’s rings, these sounds were not recorded directly — they are a conversion of the vibrations of the rover into audio as it travelled across the surface. The microphone on the Mars 2020 mission will be the first to pick up the sounds of Mars directly and transmit them to Earth.

What is interesting about the proposal for the microphone is the instrument into which it will be incorporated. It’s not an accelerometer, as on Titan and the previous Mars microphones, but on an instrument that is designed to measure the chemical composition of the rocks and soil by vapourising them: a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer. This works by firing a laser at a target, which “explodes” as a plasma and creates a very sharp pressure wave — the acoustic signal of which is proportional to the mass of sample being destroyed. Using the microphone to set up, calibrate and focus the laser will help improve the instrument. But at the same time, a whole raft of new sounds from the surface of the Red Planet will be picked up.

So where else might it be interesting to listen? I’d like to hear Europa or Enceladus, the respective moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They both have an ice-covered surface, below which is a deep ocean. Imagine what a microphone might pick up as a spacecraft penetrated the ice. The groaning of the icebergs as they moved against each other. The suck and pluck of more mushy ice as it percolated up through the cracks. The sudden whoosh of an ice geyser. And then into the ocean below. Waves slapping against the base of the icesheet. Water of different temperatures mixing — what does that sound like? Will there be bubbles? And perhaps as the penetrator settles onto the ocean floor, we might hear an unexpected crab scuttle past.

Monica Grady is a professor of planetary and space sciences at The Open University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Sophie Scott is fascinated by laughter — and she thinks that cognitive science and psychology are missing out by ignoring it.

“It does seem to completely overwhelm your motor system,” Scott says. “You can't do anything else — you find yourself gasping for breath, you can't talk, it is trying to kill you, just squeezing air out of you. It is slightly sinister.”

A cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, Scott studies how we distinguish between “social” or “voluntary” laughter (the way you politely laugh at a co-worker’s jokes) and “authentic” or “involuntary” laughter (the kind that causes you to gasp for breath). She’s found that children are unable to tell the difference between the two, and our ability to discriminate doesn’t hit its peak until we’re in our 30s.

“That suggests that you’re learning about social laughter throughout your entire early adult life, probably because you can only learn about it in social interactions,” Scott says. 

Laughter, according to Scott, is more complicated than we think it is. 

“Nothing's ever simple with humans and I think one of the things that's very interesting about laughter is, in some ways pretty much everything we think we know about it — and this includes a lot of scientists — is wrong,” Scott says. “We think it's linked with jokes and humor, and it is linked to jokes and humor. But actually, most the time when you're laughing in a conversation with somebody, you're laughing to show that you know them, you like them, you might even love them, you agree with them, you understand them, you're part of the same group as them. You're doing all this kind of affiliative work with laughter.”  

When Scott studies the brain during laughter, she says there’s a big difference between social laughter and involuntary laughter. 

“What we see in the brain is there's actually more response to social laughter than there is to spontaneous laughter,” Scott says. “There's lots of activation to spontaneous laughter and it's strongly associated with auditory processing, probably because you hear sounds you never hear in any other context. But when you listen to social laughter, you get all these activations in brain areas associated with thinking about what other people think. And they're activated normally in very complex tasks where you ask people to work out problems about what somebody else knows. ... It's never neutral, it's always meaningful, and we're trying to work out what that meaning is.”

Scott has been putting her scientific knowledge of laughter to the test in new arenas beyond the lab. She recently joined her London university’s Bright Club and has been trying her hand at standup comedy. 

“It's also given me a whole different perspective on how laughter works,” Scott says. “It's actually been an incredibly helpful way of just thinking completely differently about laughter. So it's actually been very helpful for my science. ... I mean no one's under any illusion that I'm a professional comedian — I'm a scientist. They know I'm a professor, and they're very kind but I found it a very interesting discipline.” 

This story is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.

Critics have long argued that the royalties coal companies pay for mining on US public lands are well below fair market values. Now, the Department of the Interior has moved to close a major loophole to address this criticism.

Leasing public land for coal extraction is a three-step process — and two of those steps are problematic for the public, says Michael Greenstone, a former chief economist for the Obama White House who now teaches at the University of Chicago.

In step one, the federal government puts up for auction tracts of eligible public land and companies bid to have access to that land. This step is called the bonus bid. In step two, companies pay a rental fee of $3 per acre per year. Then companies pay a production royalty fee equal to 12.5 percent of the value of whatever they extract.

The problems begin in the bonus bid stage, Greenstone says. In theory, taxpayers are protected by the bidding process, because companies must compete with one another. In reality, according to a Government Accounting Office report, 90 percent of the leases granted since 1991 have had only one bidder.

“I'm not an expert at bidding on coal land, but if I didn't have to compete against anyone, I'm pretty sure I could get a good price,” Greenstone says.

The rental fee is straight forward: All companies pay $3 per year per acre. But the production royalties phase also smells a little fishy, says Greenstone.

Recent investigations suggest that companies are selling their coal at a very low price to a second company in which it has partial ownership, he says. The government collects its 12.5 percent on that low price. Then the second company re-sells the coal at the global price, which is considerably higher. So the 12.5 percent is being collected on a figure well below the fair market price.

A new Department of Interior regulation addresses this through a requirement that the 12.5 percent be collected on an arm's length transaction. That is, effectively, on the final price of the coal and not on what the original leaser can get for it by selling it to a subsidiary or related company.

In addition, the environmental impacts of coal extraction are not taken into account in the US leasing program at all, Greenstone says.

“The US government has something called the social cost of carbon, which is the monetary value of the damages associated with the release of an extra ton of CO2 into the atmosphere,” he explains. “The number that they use ... is $40 a ton. That is, an extra ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is expected to cause $40 worth of climate damages.”

The US government first set a social cost of carbon in 2009, with small revisions in 2010 and 2013. It is currently used in scores of regulations in order to incentivize reductions in CO2. It is not factored into the price of coal extraction on public lands, however. Right now, the ‘spot price,’ or the value of an MMBTU of coal, is about 66 cents. The climate damages associated with that same MMBTU are about $3.89.

“To put that in very plain English,” Greenstone says, “the climate damages are about six times the market value of the coal. I don't think one has to be a raving environmentalist to think, ‘Hey, maybe that's not a good deal.’”

The social cost of carbon could be incorporated into the lease prices by calculating it at the outset, during the bonus bid phase, Greenstone says. “In that phase, one could just set a reserve price that would be equal to the climate damages,” he explains. “If no one was willing to pay more than that reserve price, then the resource wouldn't be used. But if its use in the marketplace was [deemed] more valuable than the environmentally-determined reserve price, then the resource would be used.”

In the case of Powder River Basin coal, where most coal extraction on federal land occurs, the climate damages are much larger than the market value, on average, Greenstone says. Many tracts would therefore become uneconomical to use.

This change to the leasing process could also reduce coal exports, Greenstone says. Government and industry reports predict that when coal becomes too expensive to burn in the US, companies will simply choose to export it elsewhere. But CO2 emissions have the same effect on global climate, wherever they occur.

Embedding the social cost of carbon in the initial leasing price is a safeguard against simply transferring emissions from the United States to another country, Greenstone says.

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

Congress recently approved a bill that would require food processors to tell consumers which products contain genetically modified ingredients. Unfortunately, the new bill has done nothing to quell the controversy surrounding GMOs and the public’s right to know what is in their food.

According to supporters, the bill takes important steps to address GMO labeling concerns for consumers. The bill's opponents say it is full of loopholes and exceptions and is unenforceable.

The push for a national labeling standard gained speed when the state of Vermont passed its own, stronger GMO labeling law that went into effect July 1. The food and agricultural industries oppose labeling, but would prefer a national standard, rather than a patchwork of state standards, if labeling becomes law. The new federal legislation would pre-empt state measures entirely.

Patty Lovera, assistant director of the advocacy group Food and Water Watch, says this is only one of the reasons President Barack Obama should veto the legislation. “The requirement of how to disclose GMOs gives companies an option of putting words on the package, which we know that they don't want to do, or using things like a QR code, which we think is not acceptable, because lots of folks can't access that technology,” Lovera says.

A QR code is a type of barcode that is used primarily to provide access to information via a smartphone. Many people in poorer communities don’t have smartphones and would be unable to obtain this information.

A GMO label on a product sold in Vermont, in accordance with the state's new GMO labeling regulation.

Credit:

Patty Lovera

The law has no enforcement provisions, either, says Lovera. “Usually when you write a law, you say, ‘This is what the penalties are,’” Lovera says. “There’s no penalty discussion in here. In fact, it explicitly states that USDA could not order a recall of a mislabeled product.” Supporters of the bill say companies that improperly label their products could be sued for fraud under state law, but critics say that is simply a dodge that will have no practical effect.

In addition, the law has a “terrible definition” of what a GMO is, which would leave a lot of products and ingredients uncovered, Lovera says. Crops are engineered to have a specific trait, like resistance to herbicides, but an FDA rule states that a product must contain a bioengineered ingredient that has a trait that can't be found in nature. “Lots of traits can be found in nature, they just can't necessarily be found naturally in these crops,” Lovera points out. “So this definition is incredibly worrisome and ... may leave a lot of foods unlabeled in any useful way.”

A recent report from the National Academies of Science found that GMOs are both safe and "no different from other foods.” This official scientific seal of approval gave GMO supporters hope that the argument over labeling could be put to rest. Unlikely.

“We think that the debate on safety is not over yet,” Lovera says. “We actually had a number of critiques of the National Academies paper, including some of the folks who helped write it, many of whom had financial ties to the biotechnology industry. So, we think the science conversation is not over.”

Moreover, Lovera says, if no one knows which foods contain GMOs, scientists won’t be able to track them if they suspect they might be causing health problems.

“This is a different way of producing food, and there are lots of reasons people might want to know about it,” Lovera says. “They might [even] like it and want to seek it out, [but] they need to know where it is. This is a really big fight over a very basic concept of just saying, ‘We used it or we didn’t,' and then letting people decide for themselves.”

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

Extremist groups like ISIS have utilized social media platforms to extend their global reach and message. Even with companies suspending accounts affiliated with these groups — for example, since mid-2015 Twitter has closed 125,000 — extremist groups can still be found on various social media platforms.

In two studies, published in Science and Science Advances, a group led by physicist Neil Johnson tracked the growth and decline of extremist networks on social media platforms through mathematical models typically used to map complex systems in the natural world. 

Johnson began his research by studying terrorist networks on the Russian social network, VKontakte. He says the behavior of people online can be mathematically compared to the movements of marine life or galaxies. 

“It’s very interesting,” Johnson says. “Just like in marine ecology ... fish form into groups, and they form into bigger groups, and they fragment when any predator or any sense of danger is around. There are moderators on VKontakte, there are actual hacking groups out there trying to target ISIS, it’s almost like a natural ecology. And this is the key thing that, whereas agencies tend to take a very individual approach — I mean who is the leader, who is the person who's sending the orders — what we found is it's very much like an ecology. There is no one object driving the ecology. It is a collection of objects that together build the threat. And it's by understanding that, that we believe holds the key to moving forward.”

Johnson’s study has led to new ideas about how to break apart dangerous extremist groups. The key, he thinks is using viral internet strategies to spread counter-terror ideas. 

“One way we've been looking at is very much like one would look at, say, the spread of a meme, the spread of an idea,” Johnson says. “Once you have the mathematical model — which we have now of how the groups develop, the timescale at which they develop, how quickly, when they break up — we can detect, we can actually see what would need to be introduced into a group so that it would spread like a meme. ... What would it take to get that counter idea spreading quickly to all of these different component groups?” 

Johnson also thinks his mathematical models might be able to predict when an online group might develop into something more dangerous. 

“If we take a snapshot just today of our data, there are a number of individuals online that do not look like they're connected to these groups, but they have been in the past," he says. "That trajectory of where they have come from carries then the information that what might be going on in their mind, and ... what therefore looms on the horizon for them, and therefore what they might be, what they might have intent and capability to actually do.”

Johnson’s work has also uncovered unexpected findings about the role of women in online terrorist networks. 

“Definitely a majority are men, but the women, when you look at the network of users, the women are like the glue that holds this network together,” Johnson says. “The position of the women users we found was a very clever one. It had a particular property called betweenist centrality ... which is ... being the glue of the network rather than the visible face of the network.”

The modeling is still being developed, but Johnson says the potential to predict terrorist activity is there. 

“It's very much like, for example, if I go to heart doctor. I don't expect that doctor to tell me ... I definitely would have this happen on next Thursday, or it will be definitely in three years. It's a case of raised, elevated probabilities," he says. "But these are probabilities based on hard data, and backed up by a mathematical model.”