Passing through the aged faded gates into Gorongosa National Park, it's difficult to imagine you've just entered Mozambique's largest wildlife sanctuary.

Bled dry by a long civil war that ravaged Mozambique from 1976 to 1992, the park has seen a remarkable turnaround in the last decade.

But even as it rises from the ashes, a fresh bout of conflict and a devastating drought threaten to undermine its revival.

Big mammals like elephants and buffalos are still rare in this 1,544 square-mile reserve, but a restoration project launched by American philanthropist Greg Carr in 2004 has seen the return of species once on the brink of extinction.

"Before the launch of this project, we were heading towards extinction," Gorongosa conservation head Pedro Muagara told AFP.

"Now, in terms of reproduction, there are very positive signs. The numbers are growing."

Today, the park has more than 72,000 animals from 20 different species, mainly antelopes and zebras.

But even as wild life returned to Gorongosa, political tensions were growing.

Since 2013, sporadic fighting has broken out between government forces and rebels from the main opposition Renamo party.

Refusing to accept the results of the 2014 national vote, Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama has holed himself up in the mountains bordering the park.

For villagers fleeing the unrest, the unfenced Gorongosa has proved an easy refuge and food source.

Decked out in his khaki ranger's uniform, Muagara is one of the 150 armed rangers protecting animals from poachers and illegal hunters.

"With the fighting, the park has become a real target because the communities can no longer sustain themselves, so they hunt the animals instead," he said.

Tourists scared

An ongoing regional drought sparked by the El Nino weather phenomenon that has ravaged southern Africa for two years has also presented a new challenge, drying up several rivers in the park.

Animals desperate for water now congregate around the few remaining water sources, making them easy targets for poachers.

Faced with the unrelenting scourge of poaching, the park dedicates much of its rehabilitation programmes to educating local communities.

"We're trying to offer them alternatives, like farming options, for example," Gorongosa director of human development Manuel Mutimucuio told AFP.

At the end of the long track cutting through the thick forest is a glistening blue swimming pool at a luxury hotel completely renovated in 2012.

But  today the facility stands empty, deserted by tourists frightened by the conflict. Only a few researchers remain in the luxurious rondavels.

In 2012, Gorongosa received 7,000 registered visitors. Today, even with the fighting confined to the park's extreme north, that number has plummeted to less than 1,000 — mostly expatriates living in the capital Maputo, and South African tourists.

"Unfortunately, today we have just four tourists — everybody else here works either directly or indirectly for the park," said hotel manager Paolo Matos, who took up the position just weeks before tensions escalated in 2013.

"We're losing a lot of money."

With Gorongosa's turnaround once again threatened, park employees want to believe in the promise of better days, drawing hope from ongoing peace talks between Renamo and the government.

"During the civil war, everything was destroyed and we rebuilt," sighed Menesses Sousa, a park employee since 1974, before the war.

"But today it's starting again, and I don't what will happen."

Throughout its 100-year history, US National Parks have served as a model for other countries trying to set up their own networks of protected spaces.

Now China is quietly planning its own national parks system.

And, like Costa Rica and India before them, the Chinese are looking toward America.

“They've visited several locations in the US, and they're basically trying to get ideas on how US parks are managed,” said Beijing-based science journalist Kathleen McLaughlin.

China currently has what McLaughlin called in an article for Science magazine a “mishmash of national reserves, semi-protected forests and provincial parks.”

In 2013, China signaled an intention to develop a national park system in a Communist Party planning document.

About two dozen national parks are planned, ranging in size from small urban parks like the National Mall in Washington, DC, to a park in northeastern China more than twice the size of Yellowstone aimed at protecting Siberian tigers and leopards.

You can join The World's discussion about the US National Park Service on Facebook here.

Credit:

Facebook.com/PRITheWorld

“They’re really trying to protect the natural state of the forest and get the forest to come back,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin says tiger experts estimate that if the government protects the land it has set out to, it could eventually create habitat for up to 150 Siberian tigers.

Three other parks mentioned by state media so far will aim to protect Asian elephants, giant pandas and Tibetan antelopes, McLaughlin said.

“China was catching up economically for the past 30 years in so many ways that national parks were a luxury that it didn’t have the time or the money to plan,” McLaughlin said, “and now they finally do, and they’ve recognized the importance of setting aside wild spaces.” 

In particle physics, failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can generate as much excitement and curiosity as success.

As if to prove this point, two teams of particle hunters, one from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and the other from the IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica, recently reported they had not found signs of new particles, as they had hoped.

“To be honest, I’m really excited about this IceCube result, because it was not actually what we expected,” says Janet Conrad, a professor of physics at MIT. “I see this as a real opportunity to go on another expedition. So I am really happy about it. I realize it’s hard to explain that to the world.”

IceCube was on the lookout for a theoretical particle called the sterile neutrino. After collecting five years of data, scientists now say with 99 percent confidence that the particle does not exist.

“The sterile neutrino would have been a profound discovery,” says physicist Ben Jones of the University of Texas, Arlington, who worked on the IceCube analysis. “It would really have been the first particle discovered beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.”

The Standard Model of particle physics “explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces,” says the CERN website, the laboratory that is the one of world’s major hubs of particle physics and home to the Large Hadron Collider. The Standard Model has been the beating heart of particle physics since the 1970s, but still can’t explain some of the most profound mysteries of the universe, like the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Scientists at CERN were responsible for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle described as the last piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model. They confirmed their discovery a second time, which was fantastic news in the physics world. But, like IceCube, they recently announced that another exciting discovery had, in fact, been an anomaly.

“We were over the moon when we discovered the Higgs boson,” says James Beacham, a post-doctoral researcher at Ohio State University who is also part of the ATLAS team at CERN. “Anything we find beyond that is going to be completely revolutionary, because it will be the first evidence we've seen of a fundamental particle outside of the wildly successful Standard Model. So, it's a really good example that both of these experiments happened, because we've both published ‘no results,’ in a sense, at around the same time. The message from the [CERN team] last week was not so much that this diphoton bumplet faded away — it was more that we have just recorded our initial findings at this kind of thing.”

The “bumplet" Beacham refers to was detected in 2015 in a number of experimental locations around the world and greeted with enormous excitement. It opened the possibility of a whole new kind of physics.

“The suggestive thing about it was that both us and the ATLAS experiment and the CMS experiment saw the same little bumplet at around the same place,” Beacham explains. “The theory community sort of ran with that and then the news media got in on it, so it became the topic of a lot of attention. Then we took about five times more data this year and it turned out that this little, not-so-suggestive bumplet turned into a nice smooth one. So, no new physics there.”

But the search goes on. Beacham likens it to exploring an alien planet.

“[W]e don't know what we're going to find,” he says. “We have probably two decades worth of research to do on this data, and we just got here. So it's our job to report back to home base, in a sense. If we go to an alien planet, we instantly look around to see if there are any big, fuzzy, easy-to-spot monsters. We don't see those, but we don’t just stop. We spend the next decade or two decades combing through the sand trying to find the hidden stuff that could be there.”

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

In 1953, during experimental brain surgery aimed at curing his epilepsy, doctors removed several key portion’s of Henry Molaison’s brain. The operation left him in a persistent amnesiac state.

For the next four decades, neuroscientists conducted study after study on Molaison to determine the extent of the damage, and he became one of the most famous cases in neuroscience for his contributions to our understanding of memory.

When Molaison died in 2008, his brain was sliced thin and digitized by a team at UC San Diego, to be studied in depth — leading to one of the more bizarre scientific ownership battles in recent history.

Journalist Luke Dittrich has written a new book, Patient H.M: A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets, examining the details of Molaison’s life as a patient, research subject and man, and how his story fits into the era of lobotomies and other highly experimental human brain surgeries.

As it happens, Dittrich has a unique perspective on the events: His grandfather was the surgeon who removed the critical parts of Henry Molaison’s brain, transforming him into the anonymous Patient H.M.

“When I began working on this book, it quickly became clear that there was an entire chunk of my family history that I was entirely unaware of, that also had strange implications for memory science,” Dittrich says. “My grandmother was mentally ill and she was institutionalized in the 1940s. My grandfather became, in part as a result of her mental illness, a very passionate practitioner of and advocate for psychosurgery, which is what we usually think of as the lobotomy.”

Lobotomy is a surgical treatment that was based on the belief that doctors could treat all sorts of mental illness by removing certain parts of the brain. The technique was inspired by research performed on chimpanzees at Yale University.

Scientists lesioned the frontal lobes of these animals and found that, when faced with difficult tasks afterwards, they couldn't perform them as well as they had before the operation. But even more intriguingly, the chimps no longer got as upset when they failed to execute the tasks properly. They exhibited less so-called "experimental neurosis."

A Portuguese neurologist named Egas Moniz wondered whether humans with lesioned frontal lobes would also exhibit less neurosis or would be less anxious or troubled. He began performing the first lobotomies on humans in the late 1930s. The idea quickly crossed the Atlantic Ocean and an American neurologist named Walter Freeman began performing a variation of Moniz’s lobotomy. Others, like Dittrich’s grandfather, refined the procedure further.

“I was constantly struck by how this was not a fringe procedure,” Dittrich says. “This was embraced ... and pushed not just by doctors and researchers, but by the mass media. The New York Times was running articles about the lobotomy and talking about how suddenly it was as easy to remove madness as it was to pluck a diseased tooth. There was a lot of general mainstream excitement about this.”

During his research, Dittrich came to believe that it was impossible to understand the case of Patient H.M. without understanding this campaign of psychosurgical experimentation that his grandfather had participated in.

This was an era when modern notions of informed consent really didn't exist, Dittrich points out. John Fulton, a prominent scientist at Yale University, encouraged a fellow researcher to spend time with Dr. Scoville — Dittrich’s grandfather — because Scoville had been given “unlimited access to the psychiatric material of [his] institution.”

“I had to read it twice before I realized ‘psychiatric material’ meant human beings,” Dittrich says. “That sort of attitude, the blurring of the lines between medical research and medical practice, was prevalent at the time.”

H.M.’s operation, even though it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a psychosurgical procedure, was identical to a procedure known as orbital under-cutting, which Scoville had developed in the asylums, and had then decided to see whether it could be modified or adapted as a treatment for epilepsy, Dittrich explains.

Using this procedure, Scoville levered up Molaison’s frontal lobes, probed deeper into the region known as the medial temporal lobe, and removed most of his patient’s hippocampus, amygdala, uncus and entorhinal cortex.

“At the time, nobody knew exactly what these brain structures did, which doesn't excuse it, because you would think maybe it's best not to remove them,” Dittrich says. “My grandfather hoped that this operation would alleviate Molaison’s seizures; H.M. did suffer from devastating epilepsy. In a sense, there was this, once again, strange straddling of the divide between medical practice and medical research.”

For Molaison, the results were catastrophic. From that moment forward, he lived the rest of his life in, basically, 30-second increments. “The present would just sort of slide off of him constantly,” Dittrich says.

From a scientific perspective, the operation was revelatory. Dr Scoville had been performing similar operations on psychotic patients in the back wards of asylums, but their minds were so muddied by mental illness that the actual effect of the operation was difficult to glean, Dittrich explains. Apart from his epilepsy, Molaison was psychologically sound, so it became immediately apparent what he had lost after the operation, whereas it hadn't been so apparent in the asylum patients.

In 1955, Dr. Scoville and a neuropsychologist at McGill University named Brenda Milner collaborated on a paper centered on H.M. that became “the cornerstone for the skyscraper that is modern memory science,” Dittrich says.

“It had a very simple, but revolutionary conclusion: that Henry clearly could no longer create new long-term memories,” Dittrich says. “They knew, more or less, exactly what had been taken from his brain, and so they knew those structures must be required to create new long-term memories — and that was a revelation.”

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

In the Pacific Northwest, a nautical hub for ships and naval training, endangered orcas and other marine life are struggling to be heard over the noise.

While orcas are not endangered globally, the orca population near Seattle is. To communicate above the din of ocean traffic and industry, orcas must increase the volume of their calls. This extra effort requires them to eat more, and could be stressing the whales, according to new research at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

“The question is, OK, they do it, but so what? What are the biological consequences of them doing this,” asks Marla Holt, a NOAA biologist. To answer that question, Holt and her NOAA colleague, Dawn Noren, studied captive bottlenose dolphins.

In an experiment, a dolphin swims into a floating, plastic, helmet-like device positioned over its head. Then the trainer asks it to make its normal whistling call for two minutes in order to claim a fishy reward.

A dolphin trainer records orca vocalizations at different volumes to help scientists understand energy expenditure in the presence of underwater ship noise. According to the lab, all procedures were approved under U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service permit No.13602.

Credit:

Terrie Williams' Mammalian Physiology lab, University of California, Santa Cruz

Dawn Noren measured how much oxygen the dolphin used during those two minutes. “By knowing oxygen consumption, you can determine metabolic rate — or how much it costs you to work, or work harder,” Noren explains.

Then the trainer asked the dolphin to pump up the volume. Making the louder call takes more energy. Holt and Noren found that when the dolphin was whistling harder and louder, its metabolic rate rose by up to 80 percent above normal resting levels. Like people, when their metabolic rate goes up, they burn more calories, so they have to eat more.

“If you have multiple incidences in which you’re increasing your vocals to compensate for a noisy environment, you could have some increased need to find more fish,” Noren says. According to Noren and Holt, when wild orcas are around loud ships, they increase the volume of their calls by the same amount, or more, than the dolphins in their lab. This could mean that wild orcas need to eat more salmon to make up for the calories they’re burning to vocalize more loudly around big ships.

“For animals that are maybe just getting by, or not really getting by, we could say how much more fish it would cost an animal if it was disturbed that much more,” Holt says.

As the region considers proposals to expand coal and oil shipments, as well as Naval training activities, this research could be used to calculate specific impacts on marine mammals like endangered killer whales. There are just 81 of them left along the Seattle coastline.

This article is based on a report by Ashley Ahearn of Earthfix. The story aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

Living on Earth's explorer-in-residence Mark Seth Lender visited Iceland and found Black-Legged Kittiwake daring to nest right on the cliffs, despite the wild waves lashing the shore below. These are his impressions:

Lava works its way down, steams and smokes and spits as it meets cold water. Then, wears away, retreating inland till only the core remains: Black basalt crystalized in octagons like giant’s teeth, a long wall grinning and gnashing towards an ancient sea, while the sea grins back.

Waves are its teeth, its tongue spray and foam. It puts the bite like Viking iron upon the stone, chafing and gnawing. Pebbles that would bed rock leap as the breakers crash, roll like rainfall into the trailing spume: husssssh as the sea flows out; wusssssh, as the sea flows in.

Small and small the ocean grinds volcanoes into sand. Ashes to ash, smoke to dust. Until once more the molten rock, and the landward side puts its shoulder to the task. Above this maelstrom, white traces the midnight rock like paint.

Kittiwake, clinging to their narrow ledges, where the basalt cleaved away, their dark eyes, their black feet joined to this black place, until they spread their wings.

Black-legged Kittiwake perch on basalt ledges above Grundarfjörður, Iceland’s turbulent sea on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula.

Credit:

Mark Seth Lender

Swooping like reckless kites down toward the gaping hunger of the sea. Then up, and through the surge on a rollercoaster of thin air, a pleasure in the peril. What else could it be?

They cannot fish when the water is angry like this and here it is angry all the time. They take a risk. The ocean reaching beyond its reach will knock them down. The fishes, coming from a line that is older (older than any of this), wisely lie beyond the turbulence. Kittiwake, though they know where fish hide and where to find, instead put self (and therefore progeny) in harm’s way.

Maybe risk is what it’s all about, and the birds are only reminding themselves: Life does not belong here. Iceland, hovering over the howling place where the Earth to its innards is split in two, the fire, patient, waiting for the break-through, flexing its molten fingers until it reaches out, as the sea reaches for sea birds.

How beautiful, the way life hangs on. How brave it is to live.

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

It's been a common dilemma since the dawn of the industrial age, machines taking jobs away from people.

We call it automation. And while you likely won’t hear this spoken aloud amid all the semi-factual rhetoric of an election season, most experts say that many more jobs have been lost in the last 25 years to automation than to trade policy.

And it’s not likely to stop. Speakers at the World Economic Forum this year said about seven million jobs will be lost and two million gained by the year 2020 as a result of technological change in the 15 major developed and emerging economies.

So, does the future of work look grim?

“It depends on what we're trying to solve for,” says James Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company and a director of the McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco.

“On the one hand, if we’re trying to solve for work — meaning, are there things for people to do? — I think there will be plenty of things for people to do,” Manyika says. “But if we’re trying to solve for incomes and standards of living and so forth, that becomes much more problematic. We may have to think about: When much of the work driving output in the economy is being done by machines, what do wage models look like in that world? And that's a big question.”

Manyika co-authored a recent article analyzing which industries are using automation. The paper took an “activity-level analysis” of about 800 occupations across the US economy, Manyika explains.

“We found that, if you take an activity view, about 45 percent of activities in the economy could be automated with already demonstrated technology,” he says. “But if you ask, ‘How many whole jobs could be automated,’ we found that the estimate for the near future was about 5 percent.”

Beyond the next decade or so, however, Manyika projects that 30 percent of activities in about 60 percent of jobs will be automated. In other words, he says, while jobs may not be eliminated, they are going to change dramatically. In many cases, people will likely not be totally replaced, Manyika says. Instead, machines will complement their activities.

“People are going to need to be competent, or the machines are going to have to be designed in such a way that people can work with them,” he says.

As for the roughly 5 percent who may find their occupations entirely automated, most of these workers will be in what Manyika calls the “middle-skill category.” Middle-skill jobs typically involve data processing, data collection, and/or they are performed in a highly structured environment — a worker on an assembly line, a clerk who spends hours capturing accounting records. These jobs are very easy to automate, Manyika says, so rates of automation may actually be as high as 15 to 20 percent.

Howie Choset, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, understands the anxiety and also sees great potential in automation.

“I see a future with robots creating jobs, empowering the American workers in today's jobs,” he says. “I think we have only begun to see the true potential of what technology can do for employees and for productivity.”

Choset cites companies that are working to create "collaborative robots"— robots that work in close proximity to people or directly with people, in order to help them carry out tasks. Robots will allow workers to carry out tasks more quickly, with better attention to quality, fewer errors, better safety and a more ergonomic working environment for the person, as well.

“Workers on a production line often have to reach into configurations that are just hurtful to their bodies,” Choset says. “With a robot that's both a tool and a partner, they can carry out the task and have it be ergonomic. They're not going to get hurt; they’re going to be safer.”

What’s more, robots can get into hard-to-reach, dangerous places to do tasks that people shouldn't be doing in the first place, like in the aftermath of a nuclear power plant disaster, Choset says.

Robots will likely never take over jobs in which the human touch is fundamental, like in caregiving, nursing and teaching, but Choset says robotic tools may provide a useful complement.

“I do see us developing intelligent technology, robotic tools that can do some of the more mundane tasks that a caregiver may not want to deliver, nor the patient want to receive from a person,” Choset says. “Certain kinds of bathing and cleaning, for example.”

In addition, robots and technology require designers and software developers — jobs that require higher-level thinking and creativity.

“In that regard, not only are we creating jobs, because we’ve empowered the American worker, but we're also creating jobs for people to deploy, maintain and perhaps operate these robots — and these are fine jobs to have,” Choset says.

The broader question, as automation continues to progress, is how we are going to restructure our world so it works for everybody.

“I think that gets to some fundamental, ideological questions about work, wages and incomes that are being debated in this political season,” Manyika says.

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

A US software firm which chose Singapore for the world's first public trial of driverless taxis hopes to be operating in 10 Asian and US cities by 2020, an executive said Monday. 

Doug Parker, nuTonomy's chief operating officer, said the firm is eyeing tests by early next year in three other Asian countries which he declined to name.

He said an announcement of the test venues would be made within the next month or so.

The company last week kicked off the world's first driverless taxi service in a limited trial for invited people in a Singapore research campus.

Parker, 41, said nuTonomy was also considering trials in the Middle East, the United States and Britain.

More than a dozen people in Singapore have already experienced a ride in the "robo-taxi" within the confines of one-north, an enclave of technology and science research institutes outside the central business district.

'Pretty excited'

"I think people are pretty excited that the car is driving itself. I would say they start apprehensive and scared but by the second block they start to enjoy it," Parker said.

The current test car — a modified Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric vehicle — plies a 2.5 square mile area with set pick-up and drop off points. Trips must be booked through the company's smartphone app and are currently by invitation only.

Five other test cars — Renault Zoes — will be added to the fleet next month.

Data from the experiment will feed into the rollout of driverless taxis across Singapore in 2018, said Parker, adding that by 2020 "we would like to be in 10 cities in Asia, the United States and maybe Europe."

He also said a number of real-estate developers from Asia and the United States have contacted the company "about how they can use autonomous cars in their eco-friendly communities."

Parker said the vehicle, equipped with sophisticated laser, radar and cameras, has so far experienced navigating among buses, slowing down at pedestrian lanes and adjusting to unplanned street scenes.

"One day we pulled out of here and literally five buses of schoolchildren pulled up on this very narrow street. And the buses were trading positions," he said

"We've seen forklifts, we've seen people with wheelbarrows just right here on this one street."

Parker said nuTonomy chose Singapore for the public tests rather than Silicon Valley because of the presence of a "loyal technical talent"— including people with doctorates in robotics — whom it does not have to share with other companies like Ford and Apple.

The company also has the full support of the Singapore government and the city-state's flat terrain, well-marked roads and disciplined drivers make it well suited for driverless cars, Parker said.

A "strong signal" detected by a radio telescope in Russia that is scanning the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial life has stirred interest among the scientific community.

"No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study," said Paul Gilster, author of the Centauri Dreams website which covers peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration.

The signal originated from the direction of a HD164595, a star about 95 light-years from Earth.

The star is known to have at least one planet, and may have more.

The observation is being made public now, but was actually detected last year by the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia, he said.

Experts say it is far too early to know what the signal means or where, precisely, it came from.

"But the signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target," wrote Gilster.

The discovery is expected to feature in discussions at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on September 27.

"Working out the strength of the signal, the researchers say that if it came from an isotropic beacon, it would be of a power possible only for a Kardashev Type II civilization," Gilster wrote, referring to a scale-system that indicates a civilization far more advanced than our own.

"If it were a narrow beam signal focused on our Solar System, it would be of a power available to a Kardashev Type I civilization," indicating one closer to Earth's capabilities.

Gilster, who broke the story on August 27, said he had seen a presentation on the matter from Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone.

"Permanent monitoring of this target is needed," said the presentation.

Nick Suntzeff, a Texas A&M University astronomer told the online magazine Ars Technica that the 11 gigahertz signal was observed in part of the radio spectrum used by the military.

"If this were a real astronomical source, it would be rather strange," Suntzeff was quoted as saying.

"God knows who or what broadcasts at 11Ghz, and it would not be out of the question that some sort of bursting communication is done between ground stations and satellites," Suntzeff said.

"I would follow it if I were the astronomers, but I would also not hype the fact that it may be at SETI signal given the significant chance it could be something military."

The discovery of sophisticated spyware to infiltrate and remotely take control of iPhones without leaving a trace has put a spotlight on Israel's secretive surveillance industry, considered among the world's most advanced.

Apple rushed out a security update last week after researchers said a prominent Emirati rights activist was targeted by "Pegasus" spyware attributed to Israeli firm NSO Group, based in Herzliya in the country's "Silicon Valley."

NSO Group, now owned by US private equity firm Francisco Partners Management, has flown far under the radar, without even a website.

It is among some 27 surveillance firms headquartered in Israel, according to a recent report from British NGO Privacy International — putting the country of 8 million people at the top of the list of such companies per capita.

According to Privacy International, Israel has 0.33 such firms per 100,000 people, while the United States has 0.04.

For the firms involved, the technology is meant to fight crime and terrorism through legal means. Israel's defense ministry must also approve exports of sensitive security products.

But activists question whether enough attention is paid to the potential for abuse of such invasive technology, including whether governments will simply target opponents.

"Opposition activists, human rights defenders, and journalists have been placed under intrusive government surveillance and individuals have had their communications read to them during torture," Privacy International said.

"State agencies are also utilizing technologies used for surveillance for offensive and military purposes as well as espionage."

'Spy in his pocket'

An investigation by Lookout mobile security firm and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found the spyware that forced Apple's update last week to be rare and powerful.

Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor's phone "would have become a digital spy in his pocket, capable of employing his iPhone's camera and microphone to snoop on activity in the vicinity of the device, recording his WhatsApp and Viber calls, logging messages sent in mobile chat apps, and tracking his movements," they said.

He was targeted by a simple text message that asked him to click on a link for information on detainees tortured in the United Arab Emirates.

Targeted by cyber attacks in the past, he became suspicious and forwarded it to Citizen Lab.

NSO did not confirm that it created the spyware used to target Mansoor.

But it said in a statement that it "sells only to authorized governmental agencies, and fully complies with strict export control laws and regulations."

"Moreover, the company does not operate any of its systems; it is strictly a technology company."

Israel's defense ministry, for its part, did not respond to a request for comment.

Code-crackers

Daniel Cohen, a cyber-terrorism expert at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, said the country's expertise in such products stems in part from its military, which puts a premium on cyber-warfare training.

Most Jewish Israelis are required to serve in the military, whose Unit 8200 for signal intelligence and code-cracking is considered an incubator for future start-ups.

"Israel is among the world leaders in everything involving the cyber sector," Cohen said.

"After leaving the military, such experts take advantage of their knowledge to create start-ups or get hired at exorbitant salaries by existing firms."

Cohen said there are more than 300 cyber-related firms in Israel, though most create products to protect institutions against cyber attacks.

"Less than 10 percent of firms in the cyber sector have pursued an offensive niche, meaning technologies allowing the infiltration of computer systems," he said.

Companies with Israeli roots have provided technology to monitor Internet and phone communication to secret police in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as well as Colombian security forces, according to Privacy International.

They have also reportedly exported to Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Panama and Mexico, it said.

One case drew particular attention in 2011, when Internet-monitoring technology by Allot Communications was reportedly sold on by a distributor to Iran, Israel's arch-enemy.

Citizen Lab said: "Clearly, additional legal and regulatory scrutiny of the 'lawful intercept' market, and of NSO Group’s activities in relation to the attacks we have described, is essential."

"While these spyware tools are developed in democracies, they continue to be sold to countries with notorious records of abusive targeting of human rights defenders."

The European Union ordered tech giant Apple to pay a record 13 billion euros — $14.5 billion — in back taxes in Ireland, a move Washington warned could damage hugely important trans-Atlantic economic ties.

Brussels said Apple, the world's most valuable company, avoided virtually all tax on its business in the bloc by illegal arrangements with Dublin, which gave the company an unfair advantage over competitors.

Apple and the Irish government immediately said they would appeal against the European Commission ruling, with the iPhone maker warning it could cost European jobs.

Ireland has attracted multinationals over many years by offering extremely favorable sweetheart tax deals to generate much-needed jobs and investment but Brussels said it broke EU laws on state aid.

"This decision sends a clear message. Member states cannot give unfair tax benefits to selected companies, no matter if European or foreign, large or small," EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.

"This is not a penalty, this is unpaid taxes to be paid," Vestager said, as she presented the findings of a three-year investigation.

The announcement comes amid growing tensions between Washington and Brussels over a series of EU anti-trust investigations targeting other giant US companies such as Google, Amazon, McDonald's, Starbucks and Fiat Chrysler.

Credit:

Reuters

'Devastating blow'

Apple has had a base in the southern city of Cork since 1980 and employs nearly 6,000 people in Ireland, through which it routes its international sales totaling billions.

Apple chief Tim Cook said he was "confident" the EU ruling would be overturned, adding that the Silicon Valley giant was the biggest taxpayer in Ireland, the United States and the world.

"The most profound and harmful effect of this ruling will be on investment and job creation in Europe," he said.

Cook also warned that the ruling was a "devastating blow to the sovereignty of EU member states over their own tax matters," echoing the concerns of Dublin over the decision.

Ireland's Finance Minister Michael Noonan described the ruling as "bizarre" and "an exercise in politics by the Competition Commission."

Dublin, which suffered from harsh austerity measures after it was bailed out during the eurozone debt crisis, has vigorously defended its low tax rates as a way of boosting the economy.

"If you look at the small print on an Apple iPhone, it says designed in California and manufactured in China and that means any profits that accrued didn't accrue in Ireland and so I can't see why the tax liability is in Ireland," he said.

But Vestager said Apple's Irish operation was a sham — Apple's "so-called head office in Ireland only existed on paper. It had no employees, no premises and no real activities."

Apple paid an effective corporate tax rate of just 0.005 percent on its European profits in 2014 — equivalent to just 50 euros for every million, Vestager said.

The Apple tax bill dwarfs the previous EU record for a state aid case — 1.3 billion euros for the Nurburgring race track in Germany. 

US anger

Washington has made increasingly angry comments over the case in recent weeks, and on Tuesday it echoed Apple's warnings that the tax bill could hurt the European economy.

The US Treasury said the ruling "could threaten to undermine foreign investment, the business climate in Europe, and the important spirit of economic partnership between the US and the EU."

The Apple decision may also complicate struggling EU-US talks on what would be the world's biggest free trade deal, meant to be completed before US President Barack Obama steps down in January.

French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday said he doubted an agreement could be reached by then.

Tax avoidance has moved sharply up the political agenda since EU governments adopted tough austerity policies to balance the public finances, driving public resentment that the rich paid relatively little tax.

The issue was highlighted close to home by the LuxLeaks scandal which revealed that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's native Luxembourg gave companies huge tax breaks while he was prime minister.

In October Brussels ordered US coffee giant Starbucks and Italian automaker Fiat to each repay up to 30 million euros ($34 million) in back taxes to the Netherlands and Luxembourg respectively.

By AFP's Danny Kemp in Brussels.

A few years ago, entrepreneur Vik Kachoria was spending a lot of time up in the clouds flying from Boston to Europe to Asia. He had plenty of time to ponder this question: “Why aren’t we flying any faster?”

Computers have gotten faster, trains are faster, everything is faster. “In every industry we look at, except for aviation,” reasoned Kachoria.

In fact, you could argue that aviation technology has gone backwards: We used to be able to fly twice as fast on the Concorde not long ago. That sleek plane with the pointy nose — which primarily shuttled passengers from New York to London and Paris — was designed in the 1960s. The Concorde shut down in 2003 largely due to a lack of customers. It was a money loser.

Kachoria, who began his career with NASA, figured it shouldn’t be that hard to create a new-and-improved supersonic jet, and, at a fraction of the cost.

“The software has gotten to the level where we can do things in hours for a few hundred thousand dollars. Just 10 years ago, it would’ve cost hundreds of millions of dollars because you would’ve had to fabricate test aircraft. Now we can do it with computer simulation.”

Kachoria is the CEO of Spike Aerospace and now has a team of engineers in Boston working on a new 18-passenger plane geared at business travellers. (The Concorde carried between 92 and 128 passengers.) He'd like to sell his planes to existing airlines as well as individual operators. 

A handful of other companies are also working on supersonic models. They’re all promising big things, a return to the days of sipping champagne at more than 1,000 miles per hour. It’s a romantic image, but John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, says there’s a reason it hasn’t happened again: “The problem is the physics are hard to beat, because it’s just fundamentally difficult to go faster than the speed of sound.”

Hansman teaches some of the smartest university students on the planet, but I asked him to explain flight and the sound barrier as if he was talking to a ninth grade science class.

“When something goes faster than the speed of sound, be it a bullet or an airplane, or anything, it creates basically a pressure wave. So the speed of sound is the fastest something can propagate through the atmosphere,” says Hansman, pausing mid-sentence. “No, that’s too complicated.”

Complicated indeed. To over-simplify matters, the faster a plane goes, the more drag it creates. This means specially-built engines need to work harder to punch through the sound barrier. It’s achievable, but only at a very high cost.

“You have to burn a lot more fuel than you would burn in a conventional airplane,” says Hansman. The plane also has to climb higher, burning even more fuel. 

That’s partly why, back in the day, round-trip tickets on the Concorde, New York to London, cost about $12,000.

Even with all the odds stacked against supersonic travel, Vik Kachoria claims that a seat on one of his planes will cost the same as a business ticket today on a commercial airline, about $5,000 to go from Boston to London, for example. He also wants to transform the flying experience: Make the seats comfier, reduce outside noise and get rid of windows entirely to actually give you a better view of the outside.

“Inside you put a very flat screen, digital screen, that we all have in our homes, and you make it the entire length of the fuselage, and you put cameras all around the aircraft. So you can look left or right, up or down. At night you can look at the stars; you get the best view of the starry night inside this cabin,” says Kachoria.  

A interior rendering of one of Spike Aerospace’s planes — windows would be replaced by flat panel displays showing images captured by outside cameras. 

Credit:

Spoke Aerospace

Who wouldn’t want a seat on that plane? Speedy jets could also transform the very nature of business travel,

“It’s appealing to me to think that I could fly over to Europe, have a meeting and fly back,” says Amy Cohn, who focuses on aviation scheduling and logistics at the University of Michigan. “I have actually, occasionally, spent 12 hours flying to spend six hours there. ... And that’s not fun.”

Still, she questions if there will be enough demand to support supersonic travel, especially in this day and age: “Today vs. the time of the Concorde, the technology to be doing remote business meetings is a whole lot more sophisticated.”

But if people like the idea of face-to-face meetings assisted by supersonic jets, there will also be a much bigger environmental cost — burning huge amounts of fuel would generate more greenhouse gasses. And flying at higher altitudes, around 50,000 feet, would greater pollute the ozone layer.

And then, there’s that tricky sonic boom thing. The Concorde couldn’t fly over land because of the noise disruption it would have created below. Even if a new jet could cut the LA to New York flight time to three hours, the pilot could get busted for speeding.

“We literally have a speed limit in the US,” says John Hansman. “And unless you’re a military airplane, you will get violated if you fly faster than the speed of sound.”

It’s not that Kachoria with Spike Aerospace doesn’t see all of these challenges, but he also sees something else. “Two years ago, 3 billion people took a flight somewhere,” says Kachoria. “Right now, there’s 100,000 aircraft up in the air at any one time.”

That’s a lot of potential customers. Kachoria hopes to be serving some in about seven years.

If you’re wandering around, say, Sao Paulo, Brazil, or Athens, Greece, or San Francisco, California — you just might stumble upon a weed grown as tall as a building … on the building, that is.

Mural artist Mona Caron uses city walls all over the world as canvases for her magnified portraits of wild plants. She says they represent what survives at the margins of society. And she wants us to pay closer attention. 

Caron lives in San Francisco, but hails from the Italian part of Switzerland. She started out her career doing sweeping bird's-eye views of cities, and has been known as the cityscape artist for a long time.

But then something happened a few years ago. She began doing the opposite — painting tiny things large. Specifically, weeds, the little wild plants that grow in cracks of sidewalk everywhere, the plants that people step on. "The less attention we pay it," Caron says, "the larger I’m gonna paint it!"

"I don’t paint dainty little grandmotherly botanical illustrations," Caron says. To her, weeds are plants that have power.

Mural artist Mona Caron uses city walls all over the world as canvases for her magnified portraits of wild plants. 

Credit:

Andrea Laue | http://www.sparebeauty.com

And she has painted her giant weed murals now in dozens of cities worldwide. There’s a dandelion on the rooftop of a mosque in San Francisco, another giant dandelion in Switzerland, a stinging nettle in Barcelona. She even painted an unidentified weed that she found in one of the largest slums in Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat.  

"And so it’s kind of funny," she points out, "how this idea seems to have no borders just like weeds themselves." Weeds are plants that have spread internationally because of globalization. Similarly, says Caron, this project has taken hold everywhere "because you don’t need much language to explain it."

From a motorized scissor lift 25 feet up in the air, Caron scratches charcoal lines on a bumpy beige wall, then sprays green paint from a can between the lines. She’s working on a Ribwort plantain — Plantago lanceolata — on a four-story office building in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood. 

Towering off to the left you see the Transamerica pyramid. When she saw it, Caron thought, "You know what? I’m gonna rival that! I’m gonna put a plant there!"

She uses the word "weed" kind of provocatively. She knows it’s a derogatory term that can refer to invasive species or simply plants we didn’t cultivate or don’t want around.

Caron also knows that weeds often have medicinal or edible properties. But she says that’s not the reason she highlights them in her murals. "Really what I try to highlight," she says, "is this transgressive act of bringing life back to something that seemed to be dead."

Credit:

Andrea Laue | http://www.sparebeauty.com

For example, in Union City, California, she picked the very first flowering plant that came back to the devastated terrain of a former superfund site. She said "Ok you’re the one. You’re the one who’s gonna be seven stories tall."

People often tell Caron that her plants look realistic. But she insists that they are not. She paints them from below at a heroic angle to make them more imposing. And she says people have stopped to ask her, "Wow what is that amazing plant? Is that some kind of orchid or something incredible?!" She tells them, "No, you just stepped on it." 

Because in the end, Caron says, "any little bit of nature is actually incredibly beautiful if you take the time to look at it."

Watch Mona Caron stop-motion animation of her painting:

Life on Earth is even older than we thought, Australian scientists said Thursday as they unveiled fossils dating back a staggering 3.7 billion years.

The tiny structures — called stromatolites — were found in ancient rock along the edge of Greenland's ice cap, and were 220 million years older than the previous record holders.

They show that life emerged fairly shortly — in geological terms — after Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago, said lead researcher Allen Nutman of the University of Wollongong.

And, he added, they offer hope that very basic life may at one point have existed on Mars.

"This discovery represents a new benchmark for the oldest preserved evidence of life on Earth," Professor Martin Julian Van Kranendonk, a geology expert at the University of New South Wales and study co-author, said in a statement.

The structure and geochemistry of the rock in which they were found provided clues to a biological origin for the microfossils, he said, which in turn "points to a rapid emergence of life on Earth."

The 0.4-1.6 inch high Isua stromatolites were exposed after the melting of a snow patch in the Isua Greenstone Belt of Greenland.

Stromatolites are formed when microorganisms, such as certain kinds of bacteria, trap bits of sediment together in layers. These layers build up over time to create solid rock.

These rocks themselves were never alive, but their existence suggests that the very simple single-cell organisms that made them were present on Earth hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, said the team.

Life on Mars?

Another scientist was more skeptical.

Structures that look just like stromatolites can form without the presence of any living organism, Abigail Allwood of the California Institute of Technology wrote in a comment on the study.

"The interpretation of stromatolite-like structures has been notoriously difficult in Earth's oldest rocks," she wrote, and predicted the study findings would "spark controversy."

"The case for a biological origin of the Greenland structures is limited by the information available in the tiny outcrop," she argued.

But Vickie Bennett from the Australian National University, who also worked on the study, said the research "turns the study of planetary habitability on its head."

"Rather than speculating about potential early environments, for the first time we have rocks that we know record the conditions and environments that sustained early life," she said.

The discovery could help the hunt for life on Mars, considered the most likely location for microbial life-forms among other planets in the Solar System.

The Red Planet is believed to have once run with water and had an atmosphere, which together with warmth, could provide the right conditions for bacterial life.

"The significance for Mars is that 3,700 million years ago, Mars was probably still wet and probably still had oceans and so on, so if life develops so quickly on Earth to be able to form things like stromatolites — it might be more easy to detect signs of life on Mars," Nutman told AFP.

"Instead of looking at just the chemical signature, we might be able to see things like stromatolites in images [from Mars] sent back to Earth."

The earliest evidence of life on Earth ahead of the Greenland discovery came from near-3.5 million-year-old stromatolites found in western Australia in 2006.

The new findings were published in the journal Nature.

The results of a three-year aerial survey of Africa's elephants published Thursday have revealed a dramatic 30 percent decline in savannah elephant populations, largely due to poaching. 

"We completed a successful survey of massive scale, and what we learned is deeply disturbing," says Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist who spent $7 million funding the census.

The first-of-its-kind survey is the largest wildlife census ever and involved flying over 18 African countries with scientists and conservationists counting live elephants and carcases to establish a baseline for future studies of elephant populations and how to protect them better.

"Armed with this knowledge of dramatically declining elephant populations, we share a collective responsibility to take action," Allen says. The results were published Thursday at a meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Hawaii.

Named the Great Elephant Census, the three-year program began in December 2013 and involved 81 airplanes and 286 crew flying 463,000 kilometers over 18 countries, says James Deutsch, of Allen's Vulcan Inc. investment company.

A total of 352,271 elephants were counted during the survey, representing a decline of 30 percent between 2007-14 equivalent to 144,000 elephants. Currently savannah elephant numbers are declining at 8 percent a year, the study said.

Poaching hotspots identified include Angola, Mozambique and Tanzania where "staggering population declines" were found. Other populations face "local extinction" in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Cameroon and southwest Zambia.

However, populations were found to be stable or even increasing in South Africa, Botswana, Uganda, parts of Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and the W-Arli-Pendjari conservation area that spans the borders of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso.

"If we can't save the African elephant, what is the hope for conserving the rest of Africa's wildlife?" says Mike Chase of conservation organisation Elephants Without Borders, who led the census.

Two countries are still to be surveyed: Central African Republic and South Sudan, where conflict has made access tricky. Allen now also plans to launch a similar survey of Africa's forest elephants, which are thought to have also suffered badly from poaching.

When most Americans were asleep on Wednesday night, President Barack Obama was speaking to a small group of domestic and foreign scientists and dignitaries in Hawaii.

“Welcome to Hawaii. Aloha!” Obama said beginning his brief speech. “It’s not often I get to welcome folks to my home state.”

The president spoke on the eve of one of the world’s largest gatherings of environmental policy makers. Representatives from more than 170 nations will be meeting in Hawaii over the next 10 days to discuss a wide range of topics at the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress.

Many of the headlines are bleak; the conference has been named "Planet at the Crossroads." But environmentalists have found a few bright spots, including a spirited competition among nations to protect the largest swaths of the world's oceans.

On Wednesday night, Obama talked about how rising temperatures and sea levels are threatening many Pacific island nations. He spoke about the need to develop more clean energy and waste less energy overall. He also talked about conservation.

Using the power given to presidents under the 1906 National Antiquities Act, Obama has now set aside more than twice as much land and water as any president before him. His latest national monument is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in waters near the Hawaiian islands.

The president is quadrupling an area first protected by President George W. Bush 10 years ago. It’s called the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

“This is an area twice the size of Texas that’s going to be protected, and it allows us to save and study the fragile ecosystem threatened by climate change,” Obama said.

The White House said the expanded marine sanctuary will protect swaths of black coral as well as 7,000 marine species, including whales, sea turtles and bigeye tuna, commonly called “ahi.”

The new marine sanctuary is a huge deal not just for what it accomplishes, but for the signal it sends to the rest of the world, “Because the United States has said, ‘We’ve not just spoken with words, we’ve spoken with action,'” said Jeff Watters with the group Ocean Conservancy. “And that elevates the conversation to a whole new level of seriousness that is crucial and that really makes me excited and hopeful for the future.”

Matt Rand, who directs the Global Ocean Legacy Project with the Pew Charitable Trusts, says expanding Papahanaumokuakea keeps the momentum going in a big way.

“Before President Obama expanded it, it [Papahanaumokuakea] had fallen to the 10th largest marine reserve, which is actually great news,” Rand said. “That means 10 other countries, and 10 other marine reserves, went and one-upped the original Papahanaumokuakea.” 

Once again, it’s the largest marine sanctuary in the world.

“Our hope is that President Obama’s bold action now starts another race to protect the ocean,” Rand said.

But that’s sure to be met with stiff resistance from the fishing industry. Paul Dalzell, a senior scientist with the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council in Hawaii, said they’ve set up their own protections to maintain healthy fish populations with things like catch limits. He said the new marine sanctuary is arbitrary and ignores the latest science.

“These environmentalists are going to try to protect something whether that protection is warranted or not,” Dalzell said. “They’re professional advocates, and it’s their job to find something to protect.”

Sea turtles listed under the Endangered Species Act will soon have areas of their fully protected habitat greatly expanded near Hawaii. 

Credit:

Lee Gillenwater/The Pew Charitable Trusts

Environmentalists argue that marine sanctuaries can actually help the fishing industry. Setting up marine protections strengthens ecosystems. This, in turn, promotes more productive fisheries outside of protected areas.

Dalzell sees things another way. He said limiting the areas where they traditionally fish will allow foreign fishermen to take away some of their market share.

“How would you like to be told, ‘We’re going to take away 10 percent of your income, but you’re free to go find other work that will make that up?” said Dalzell.

Watters, with Ocean Conservancy, understands those concerns. “Yeah, of course, they would like as much freedom as possible as they go about doing their jobs. But the fishing industry isn’t the only voice out there that needs to be listened to, and they’re not the only consideration when it comes to these global environmental issues. There’s a much, much bigger picture at play here.”

Even with all the new marine sanctuaries, the scales still tip heavily in favor of fishing interests.

“We’re still at a little less than 3 percent of the ocean fully protected, and scientists are calling for up to 30 percent of the ocean to be protected,” said Rand. “So, there’s quite a ways to go.”

That said, just 10 years ago, almost none of the world’s oceans were fully protected.   

Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows share a common trait: They are exceptionally driven to succeed in a unique way that they feel benefits America the most.

In that way, they follow in the path of their creator. Paul Soros was a young Jewish man who came of age in Nazi-occupied Hungary and survived using a false identity. He later defected from Russian-occupied Hungary by concealing an ankle injury to get on the country's Olympic ski team, which was going to the 1948 Winter Games in Switzerland.

Paul used his passport instead to go to Austria, and spent nearly a year there becoming a tennis pro before his student visa to the US came through. He arrived with less than $20 and a camera. Paul was accepted to MIT and Stanford, but decided on a school in Brooklyn, because he didn't have enough money. 

“He always told me if somebody just would have kind of given him $10,000 at that time his whole life would have been totally different,” Daisy says. “He lived like on $8 a week, which means for lunch you had an apple and, you know, it was just a very hand-to-mouth existence. Which he wasn’t necessarily used to. And he lived in Brooklyn in the rented room, which he decided must have been a bordello. Because it had red velvet on the walls and mirrors on the ceiling.”

Paul, whose younger brother is the well-known George Soros, always regretted being limited by money at that time in his life, even after he met Daisy, married, had sons and made a fortune building shipping ports around the world. In 1997, when Daisy said to Paul over breakfast that they should do something philanthropic with their money, he responded with the idea of fellowships to pay for graduate school for immigrants and kids of immigrants. Fellows wouldn't be chosen by race or financial need.

“It's just I think more a philosophy than anything else because if it's based on need, it's a sob story,” Daisy says.

There are now 550 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows, many of whom are friends or have married. They’re a community, Daisy says. And they share a gratitude to their parents for bringing them to America, and a gratitude for being American.

“I think that is something that unites the immigrant experience,” says 2000 Soros fellow Andrei Cherny, the youngest White House speechwriter ever. “The idea that we are so blessed to become part of the United States and that with that opportunity comes a set of responsibilities.”

Soros fellows have that sense of responsibility across race, age and profession, says law professor Jeannie Suk, a 2001 Soros fellow and the first Asian American woman tenured at Harvard University.

“It's very difficult for me not to fixate sometimes on the contingency of life even as I'm putting all my effort into making the most out of the things that I have,” she says.

The sense of responsibility, and the “contingency of life,” drives Suk to write articles in the New Yorker about controversial issues like transgender bathrooms and campus sexual assault, despite wrathful responses from people on the internet. Her friend Pardis Sabeti, across the Harvard campus, pours her life into her students.

“Pardis is is beloved by her students,” Suk says."She just gives her soul and her life to training students and supporting them and bringing up people who need to be mentored.”

Sabeti loves to “drop truth” on her sudents and help them “self-actualize.” But that’s actually selfish of her, she says. “That's how I believe I will actually have a lasting impact — just by investing in the people who are smarter and better and more creative than I am.”

And that’s coming from someone who is said to have revolutionized the way people think about genetics. In 2002, Sabeti defied people who thought she was crazy and discovered a radically different way of charting development in genes — basically through an algorithm. Overnight, she was famous. Harvard gave her her own lab and her own team of researchers. Her discovery led her to more breakthroughs about how pathogens evade destruction by the human immune system.

In 2014, during the Ebola outbreak, Sabeti went to West Africa and found the virus was spreading from person to person, not through contact with insects or animals. It was a crucial victory, even as Sabeti lost friends and colleagues to the illness. She recorded a song in tribute to them with her band, Thousand Days. A year later, Sabeti was in Montana giving a speech on the future of genetics when she took a tour in an ATV. It hit a curb, ran into some trees and flipped her into boulders. She waited 45 minutes for rescuers.

Sabeti had shattered almost every bone in her body. She spent months staring at a wall, recovering, and thinking how eerily reminicent her accident was to one her father had when she was a child. A car flew across a highway median and hit him head-on. Sabeti’s mother became her father’s full-time caregiver. But Sabeti never really understood the extent of what her father went through, because he never complained.

“Whereas, I'll be honest with you, I was like ‘why me.’ Like, I was crying to anyone ‘how did this happen to me,” she says. “I mean, I have some weak moments.”

They were both “the luckiest of the unlucky,” Sabeti says — lucky and unlucky enough to be among the rare people who live through their injuries. 

Sabeti's father had a been a high ranking official in the Iranian Shah’s government, and fled with his family two years before the revolution. At the time, Sabeti was 2. She grew up in Florida, a weird little kid who liked math and loved sharing a room with her aunt and grandmother. She was the kind of kid who cried when boys in her neighborhood killed crickets.

“Why would anyone kill crickets, like what are they doing and why is this happening?” she remembers writing on the tear-stained page of a rarely used journal. “My sister often says that kind of explains me.”

So like anyone who feels a lot, Sabeti is still processing what comes after an accident that made her question her purpose in life.

“What doesn't kill you — it doesn't make you stronger, but it gives you empathy and it gives you perspective and it gives you this humility and gratitude,” she says. “Any of these kinds of  humbling experiences are really powerful.”

Pardis still retains the gratitude she’s had her whole life that she got to grow up in America and become the person she wanted to become. The accident, and the long, long recovery, have only reinforced her resolve to live up to that opportunity by — as corny as it sounds — giving back.

For more stories like this, subscribe to Otherhood on iTunes— or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Look for Otherhood on Facebook and tweet to Rupa, @RupaShenoy.

The G-20 summit of industrialized and emerging-market nations kicks off Sunday in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, China.

Ahead of the conference, President Barack Obama will sit down with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping.

Amid international tensions — over China’s claims on the South China Sea and activist pressure on the US to address China’s human rights record — one bright spot in US-China relations during this visit is likely to be agreements on climate change.

At or before the conference, Obama and Xi may announce that the two countries have taken the final steps needed to accept the international climate change agreement crafted in Paris last December.

These two superpowers issuing their final acceptance is key in ensuring the Paris agreement goes into effect.      

“It is unthinkable that we would solve this problem unless the US and China are part of the solution,” said Orville Schell, head of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.

Together, the two countries emit about 40 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide.

More nations will still need to accept the Paris agreement after the US and China do for it to go into effect. To be exact, at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions need to give their final ratification or acceptance for it to enter into force.  

The White House hopes that will happen before the end of the year.

But the US and China accepting the agreement themselves will still be a big deal, both because they’re responsible for a large chunk of global emissions and because of the shift that move will represent.

Schell points out that even five or six years ago, China saw climate change very differently than it does today.

“China tended to view climate change as sort of a plot foisted on them by the West to slow down their development,” Schell said — development the country felt it had a right to.

“The West, after all, had its industrial revolution, why shouldn’t China?”

Schell credits an amped up US focus on China and the environment after failed 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen with helping change the country’s thinking.

“Because of the tremendous efforts that the United States made through universities, through national labs, through environmental NGOs, China did slowly come around and began to recognize this was a threat to China too,” Schell said.

China and the US then became tandem leaders in the international push for countries to agree to curb carbon emissions.  

An agreement to cut emissions between the word's two largest economies announced by Obama and Xi in China in 2014 paved the way for an international deal nearly 200 countries adopted in Paris in December of 2015.

As the deal inches through national and United Nations protocols toward implementation, it’s not clear whether this tag-team approach toward limiting carbon emissions will continue past January.

Climate collaboration hinges on election

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said she would largely continue Obama’s climate policies.

But Republican nominee Donald Trump has said he doesn’t believe in man-made climate change.

Trump tweeted this in November 2012: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Trump has since said that was a joke, but last December he told Fox News that he thought climate change is a “big scam for a lot of people to make a lot of money,” and singled out China as a beneficiary.

“China is eating our lunch because they don’t partake in all the rules and regulations that we do,”  Trump told Bill O’Reilly in December 2015,“and then they compete because they’re spending a lot less money to build their products.”

In an energy speech in May, Trump pledged to “cancel” the Paris agreement. A single world leader couldn’t do that, but if Trump becomes president, he could pull the US out.

Which begs the question: If the US reneges on its promises, would China do the same?

Probably not, said Alvin Lin, climate and energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China program.

“Policymakers in China are watching what’s happening in the US,” Lin said. “But really China is committed to fulfilling its goals under the Paris agreement regardless of what happens in the US or any other country. This is really for their own benefit.”

Lin said choking smog in China’s major cities and money to be made in green energy are motivation enough to cut pollution.   

“China has the world’s largest wind and solar industries; they are really pushing on electric vehicles, these are all sectors they see as future growth areas,” Lin said. “I don’t think they’re going to be turning around just because of the results of the election.”

But US leadership will inevitably have other impacts on China’s carbon emissions.  

China and the US work together on electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings, and carbon capture techniques, according to Ranping Song from the World Resources Institute.

Song argues if US support for that work drops off, “that [research] may actually slow down a few years down the road.”

Meanwhile, scientists say countries can’t afford any slowdown in efforts to cut carbon pollution.

In fact, emissions must continue to reduce in the upcoming years in order to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.  

Just after noon on Thursday, a shadow passed in front of the sun, and the skies above East Africa dimmed. It was the middle of the day, yet it looked like evening.

As the solar eclipse began, I was in a tiny Tanzanian village called Lupiro, with a group of Danish and Swedish laser scientists and local experts on the behavior of malaria mosquitoes. We were joined by a throng of excited children who lived nearby. Together, with the help of dark tinted plates of glass, we stared up at the sun.

Solar eclipses are rare, but rarer still are “annular” solar eclipses like this one. They occur when the moon passes in front of the sun, close enough to the Earth to cast a large circular shadow, but not close enough to fully block the sun's rays.

Thanks to the unusual celestial arrangement, people in central Africa and Madagascar saw the star at the center of our solar system reduced to a fiery ring. Inside the ring was the dark shadow of the moon.

From my perch in Tanzania, the sun became a thin crescent. When it passed behind clouds, both the sun and moon were clearly visible, surrounded by bright white. Europeans and Tanzanians alike were moved by the sight.

“I haven't seen this for such a long time, maybe since I was born,” said Yermoin P. Mlacha, a medical entomologist based at Tanzania's Ifakara Health Institute.

Mlacha said he looked forward to the day that his sons learned about astronomy in school. “When they come home, like, 'Dad, what is this kind of solar eclipse?' I'll be saying, 'I've witnessed this. It really happened, it's not only written in the books.'”

Yeromin P. Mlacha, a medical entomologist at Tanzania's Ifakara Health Institute, watches the solar eclipse through a plate of tinted glass — the same type that welders use to work with very bright torches.

Credit:

Daniel A. Gross/PRI

“It's a really strange phenomenon,” added Flemming Rasmussen, a Danish engineer who works for Fauna Photonics, in collaboration with researchers from Sweden's Lund University. “You understand clearly why people in older times thought that something was completely wrong — gods punishing them, or whatever.”

Rasmussen, Mlacha and their colleagues converged on Lupiro to conduct an unusual experiment. Their aim was to determine if the solar eclipse had any effect on the behavior of mosquitoes that carry malaria. Unfortunately for those who live in Lupiro, the village is a perfect place to study malaria. The main local crop is rice, which requires pools of water that also serve as breeding sites for mosquitoes. That's one reason malaria affects around 40 percent of locals.

The scientists gathered in the village to combine the deep knowledge of Tanzanian entomologists with the technical know-how of Danish and Swedish laser physicists. By shooting a laser across the landscape, the physicists are able to capture data about flying insects that cross the beam. In the coming weeks, they'll analyze many terabytes of information, in hopes of separating out different insect species. 

As the crescent of the sun grew in the minutes after the peak of the eclipse, the skies slowly brightened. The eclipse itself felt dramatic — but because our eyes adjusted to the lower levels of light, we barely noticed the gradual return to normalcy.

At one point, the sun passed behind a cloud, and I asked Mikkel Brydegaard Sorensen what he thought of the sight. He started by describing the way the moon and sun seemed stacked, like two dishes.

Then the sun came out again, and Brydegaard cut the interview short by running off to take pictures. We can talk anytime, he seemed to say, but you only get one chance to see a solar eclipse like this.

Earlier this year, scientists in the UK concluded that a morning flu shot may actually be more effective than the same vaccine administered in the afternoon, suggesting that our immune responses may shift throughout the day.

Now, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has illuminated another link between immune response and our circadian clocks, the biological process that governs the body's cycles of sleep and wakefulness: Herpes infections, it turns out, can vary in severity depending on the time of day infection — at least in mice.

The key, it seems, is that the body responds less well to infection when it is time to rest. Rachel Edgar, a University of Cambridge researcher who led the new study, explains that her team observed a tenfold increase in the amount of herpes virus when it was administered in the morning — the onset of the mouse’s rest period — compared to when the same dose was administered at night. The virus also spread more effectively throughout the body when it was administered to a resting mouse.

“I was quite surprised that it was that dramatic, because the dosing was the same,” Edgar says.

As a control, her team also infected mice that had genetically disrupted circadian clocks, and found high levels of infection across the day — no matter whether the mice were active or at rest.

The study’s findings, Edgar is careful to note, go beyond a system-level response to infection. Her team observed that individual cells infected outside the body can respond differently to infection based on the time of day. 

“Every single cell in [the] body has a molecular clock,” Edgar says. “And viruses need to infect cells in order to replicate. What we went on to do was to take cells outside the body, so there’s no immune system at that point. And in fact, in those cells …we [saw] a similar pattern of variation in how well the virus replicate[d] over the time of day. So it looks to be that every cell in your body could potentially be contributing to this time-of-day effect we see in infection, not just the immune response to that infection.”

Mice are mammals, we’re mammals — how much about circadian immune responses can we extrapolate to ourselves from this study? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Cambridge researchers say the findings may explain why shift workers — whose body clocks are often disrupted and in flux — are prone to infections and chronic disease.

“What we think is likely is that people would have a more severe infection if they’re infected at the onset of their rest period, at night,” Edgar says. “And actually the [earlier flu vaccination] study goes some way to support that, because what you see with the vaccination in the morning is a stronger immune response — and that vaccination is just an inactivated influenza virus particle.”

Edgar hypothesizes that to save energy, the immune system evolved to be on highest alert when the body is active and thus more likely to encounter disease. She hopes that with more testing, medications will someday be prescribed for a certain time of day, to maximize their effectiveness.

“There is an emerging consensus that we should employ chronotherapies — using the therapies we have more effectively, depending on our body clocks,” Edgar says. “This has actually been trialed for chronic diseases. It’s been trialed for cancer drugs. If you administer the exact same drugs that we already have, but you administer them at specific times when the body is best able to utilize them, you do see a marked increase in their efficacy.”

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