Fracking companies in Pennsylvania want to expand their network of pipelines for the export of liquid by-products of natural gas, such as ethane and butane, which are used to make plastics — and to achieve this they are using the legal principle of eminent domain to seize private land.

Industry executives and spokespeople argue that natural gas access is a public good, which permits them to invoke eminent domain if a landowner refuses to let them dig. But some of the proposed pipes would carry by-products of fracking to places outside the US, so a number of landowners are fighting back, insisting that the companies are not acting in the public interest.

Farmer Mick Luber is one of these landowners. He runs an organic farm in Harrison County, which is in eastern Ohio. Recent years have brought a compressor station and multiple well sites so close to his home that they wake him up at night. Now pipeline companies are knocking on his door.

“They wanted to come right down through this main field, and go up over the top of that hill,” Luber says. “There’s a spring right up there. That’s the most fertile part of this farm.”

The oil and gas giant Marathon is already building a pipeline on the southern border of Luber’s farm. In the area of the valley where pipes are lined up, waiting to be connected, the ground has been stripped bare. “This is what you end up with,” Luber says. “This was all woods.”

Shell is also planning a line here. So when Kinder Morgan showed up, Luber said no. No pipeline, not even a survey. Kinder Morgan sued.

One of the main arguments in Luber’s legal defense deals with how Kinder Morgan plans to use the pipeline — not to transport natural gas for home heating, but to send ethane to Canada for NOVA Chemicals to make plastics. Ethane, along with propane and butane, is known as a natural gas liquid. Some landowners are arguing that they shouldn’t have to give up their property rights for companies to transport these liquids to make plastics, especially if they’re being sent to foreign countries.

But Kinder Morgan spokesperson Allen Fore says, “Yes, they should. Plastics are in the public interest. You tell me anybody in this country that doesn’t use plastics in some way, and that plastics aren’t critical to their everyday lives, from cups to medical devices to automobiles."

One of the biggest headline grabbers on this issue has been Sunoco’s Mariner East project. It includes two pipelines, an older one that’s been repurposed, and a newer one, both carrying natural gas liquids. The new line begins in Ohio, near Mick Luber’s farm in Harrison County, and runs through Pennsylvania to the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex on the Delaware border near Philadelphia. From there, the propane is being shipped to Europe.

“That’s not a need of the Commonwealth,” says attorney Rich Raiders, who represents about a dozen landowners in Pennsylvania against eminent domain actions.

One might think the federal government would have a say in whether transporting these natural gas liquids to make plastics is important enough to usurp individual property rights, but that isn't always the case. If this were a natural gas pipeline, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would have authority over siting its route. But FERC "has no authority to regulate natural gas liquids in the United States at all,” Raiders says.

When FERC does have authority, such as siting for natural gas pipelines, landowners have a say in how they’re routed. “There’s a public, eyes-open discussion,” Raiders explains. “Whereas for a natural gas liquids line, that’s between the individual landowner and the pipeline operator, and no government entity is involved at all.”

Attorney Nicholas Anderson also represents a landowner in Harrison County, Ohio, who is fighting Sunoco’s eminent domain action. “The bottom line is that, when they’re approaching landowners in Ohio, they have this big stick called eminent domain,” Anderson says. “So they say, ‘Look, we’ll give you X number of dollars per linear foot. But if you don’t accept that, we’re just going to take your property.’ And that is where we have a problem.”

While the proper permits must still be obtained from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for large-scale Earth disturbances and for digging around bodies of water for pipeline routes, eminent domain cases get decided in state courts.

So far this process has produced conflicting results: The Kentucky Supreme Court recently let stand a lower court ruling that the pipeline company, in that case, is not a public utility, which means it does not have the power of eminent domain to site a natural gas liquids pipeline. But Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court sided with Sunoco, ruling in July 2016 that the company is a public utility whose authority extends to all 17 counties along its contested pipeline’s path.

Kinder Morgan recently announced they would reroute around Mick Luber’s farm, but Luber doesn’t see it as a victory.

“As long as these guys are still doing this stuff, what is the victory?” Luber asks. “You know, we can’t stop being vigilant. People have got to keep standing in their way.”

This article is based on a story reported by Julie Grant of the public media project, the Allegheny Front. The report aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

The United State and China, the two nations with the most global warming emissions, have now ratified the landmark Paris Agreement, with other countries expected to follow suit.

US President Obama and Chinese President Xi formally ratified the Paris climate agreement as heads of state gathered at the G20 meeting in China earlier this month.

Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says this is a huge step toward implementation of the Paris Agreement.

“To take effect, the Paris Agreement needs to be ratified by 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions,” Meyer explains. “The US and China bring us up to 26 countries who have taken an action. Most of the rest are small islands and vulnerable countries. But, importantly, they bring us up to nearly 40 percent of global emissions.”

Related: Obama seeks to cement a climate legacy with China before the US election

A number of countries are either taking action now or signaling they will take action by the end of this year, Meyer adds. These include Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Australia and Ukraine. “The latest estimate is that we'll have somewhere between 55 and 60 countries representing almost 60 percent of global emissions to push us over that finish line and have Paris take effect,” Meyer says.

The current state of the US presidential race has many other countries worried, however, Meyer says. Republican nominee Donald Trump has vowed to abandon the Paris Agreement if he wins the White House in November. If the agreement has already entered into force, it would be four years before the US could formally withdraw, under the terms of the agreement, Meyer explains. But that's not the big question. The big question is, would a President Donald Trump take any action to live up to the US commitments under Paris?

“The answer, from his statements, seems to be no,” Meyer says. “He would not push to decarbonize the US economy, to shift away from coal and other fossil fuels to renewables, and all the other steps that President Obama has been taking. ... So, it’s not whether he would formally withdraw the US from the agreement, it's whether he would lift a finger to live up to our commitments under it.”

Already, the United States is facing the prospect of not living up to its commitments: In February 2016, the Supreme Court issued a stay against President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a centerpiece of the administration's efforts to combat climate change.

“That was not a ruling on the merits [of the plan],” Meyer explains. “The Clean Power Plan will be up before the appeals court here in DC and the Circuit Court later this month. It's expected to survive that challenge and likely will go to the Supreme Court next year. There it partly depends on the outcome of the election, and who takes the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia. ... Most states are going forward with preparing to implement their obligations under the Clean Power Plan, which shows where their betting is.”

In terms of the current overall picture regarding climate disruption, Meyer says there’s good news and bad news.

“The good news is that there is unprecedented investment in clean energy, renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the costs of those technologies are coming down,” he says. “It looks like we may have reached a global peak in emissions and we are starting to bend the curve downward. The bad news, of course, is that there's still a fair amount of investment in conventional fossil fuels.”

“The real question is, will we decarbonize the global economy quickly enough to stay out ahead of the physical impacts of climate change,” Meyer warns. “There, the jury is out. We really are in a race with the physical climate system, and we're seeing mounting impacts of climate change by the week.”

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

Allyson Sisler-Dinwiddie took her first hearing test as a young girl and walked out of the doctor’s office with hearing aids. But she never thought she would end up completely deaf — until 2004, when a car accident following her first year of graduate school accelerated her hearing loss. Six months after the accident, her world went silent.

“I’ll never forget this day because it was a Saturday,” Sisler-Dinwiddie says. “I had a little dog. She went to the door like someone was there. I couldn’t hear her bark at all. And at that point I realized, there’s no more hearing left. This is it.”

Sisler-Dinwiddie went on to become an audiologist and now works in pediatric audiology at Vanderbilt University. Part of her job includes checking the integrity of cochlear implants before surgeons insert the device. And at Vanderbilt, breakthroughs in the implants’ technology are helping patients young and old recover their hearing after severe loss — including Sisler-Dinwiddie.

Rene Gifford, a hearing researcher and Sisler-Dinwiddie’s colleague at Vanderbilt, says that while hearing loss is a complex condition, it’s commonly caused by problems in the cochlea, the spiral-shaped chamber of our inner ear. 

“Within this cochlea are three small chambers that are filled with highly conductive fluids,” Gifford says. “And then you have a number of hair cells, and their vibration creates this electrochemical reaction through the auditory nerve and then ultimately up to the brain.”

When the cochlear hair cells are dysfunctional or destroyed, they don't vibrate anymore — and the brain stops receiving messages about incoming sound. That’s where an implant comes in, using an array of tiny electrodes to stimulate auditory nerve fibers from within the cochlea itself.

“When I got my first cochlear implant, I went from nothing to a world that’s so far beyond what my hearing aids were ever able to provide,” Sisler-Dinwiddie says.

And yet, Sisler-Dinwiddie says, at first she heard a “very different kind of sound” after getting her implant. Similarly, other patients say cochlear implants have brought progress, but not perfection, to their hearing: Some describe background noises that arise when they speak, while others struggle to perceive music or conversation after the procedure. None of this comes as a surprise to Gifford, who says that the implant’s broad electrical stimulation can “smear” incoming sound frequencies and pitches.

“Cochlear implants are a miraculous technology, but when you stimulate an electrode, even though you’re wanting to stimulate just a narrow population of cells, what happens is it spreads,” Gifford says.

Gifford and her team looked for a way to combat the muddled sounds patients were experiencing. They landed on an idea to deactivate some of the implant’s electrodes based on an individual’s anatomy. Using a 3D reconstruction of the patient’s inner ear, researchers could evaluate the distance between each electrode and the auditory neurons that needed to be stimulated, keeping the electrodes that maximized hearing capabilities and turning off others. Sisler-Dinwiddie was one of the first volunteers to test the technique.

“I had heard this research was going on — I was here on staff,” Sisler-Dinwiddie says. “But as a patient, to hear that we’re going to ‘turn stuff off’ — even though I knew it was going to be for the best, I was very nervous.”

The technique worked. Sisler-Dinwiddie’s word recognition had been about 38 percent at her baseline. But once Gifford disabled two electrodes in Sisler-Dinwiddie’s cochlear implant, her word recognition jumped to 88 percent — overnight. “It’s like you took a pillow off my head,” Gifford remembers Sisler-Dinwiddie saying.

That was four years ago, and since then, there have been other success stories like Sisler-Dinwiddie’s. Both Gifford and Sisler-Dinwiddie hope to continue broadening the implant technology’s reach — including to more children, who Gifford says can respond even better to the technology than adults.

“The number of patients that have been able to take part in this, it has gone on and on,” Sisler-Dinwiddie says. “And they’re not going to stop here.”

This article is based on a video from PRI’s Science Friday, the first in a new series called “Breakthrough: Portraits of Women in Science.”

The hills in this part of Burgundy are postcard-perfect. Around the villages of Chablis and Irancy, you see beautifully combed, lush green vineyards.

As winemaker Christophe Ferrari drives up his estate, he remarks that all the fine qualities of a wine are made in the vineyard itself. “If you can’t produce good grapes,” he says, “you can’t create good wine.”

There’s a stunning 360-degree view at the top, and plenty of healthy-looking leaves around. But underneath this greenery is a painful truth. It's something Ferrari hasn't seen in his 30 years of winemaking.

“This is a nine-acre vineyard, known as La Croix-Rouge,” he says, “and there isn’t a single grape.”

“Not even a single bunch?" I ask.

“Well, there might be one,” he says, “but we’ll leave it to the badgers, so that everyone gets something to eat. It’s not worth coming up here to get it.”

Ferrari says a harsh, winter-like frost over three nights in late April killed all the promising buds. The morning after it hit, he saw immediately there would be no harvest.

You can tell he is crushed to see all his painstaking work on the vineyard annihilated. He usually produces 20,000 bottles of Chablis a year, but he won’t make a single one in 2016.

And he is not alone. Most of the region’s 750 winemakers were affected by a succession of floods, frost and hail last spring.

The village of Irancy, where vineyards were hit by severe storms last spring.

Credit:

Adeline Sire

Frederic Gueguen is the president of the Chablis winegrowers association. He estimates the harvest will be down to about one-third of its usual size. Gueguen lives in the village of Prehy. He takes me around his vineyard at the back of his house.

“Here, no grapes, you see?” he says. “We walked about 15 yards into the vineyard and I saw just one little bunch of grapes. Usually we have 15 bunches per vine. This year, we may get two or three instead, but it may still be worth harvesting. That could be about a fifth of what we normally do, but that’s better than nothing.”  

This plot was almost completely destroyed by a brutal hail storm in May, which, eerily, followed one exactly two weeks earlier, at exactly the same time of day. Gueguen was just coming home when it hit. He watched through the kitchen window as the hail trashed his vineyard.

“I went inside the house and in a few seconds, I saw my vineyard going from a green leafy state with long twigs, to nothing, zero, with a thick layer of hail on the ground,” he says. “I told myself it would never end, it was hitting so hard. The ground was white as in winter. It was very violent, you get hit in the face with this, you have tears in your eyes, and you feel lost.”

Frederic Gueguen, president of the Chablis Winegrowers Association, is worried about this year's harvest.

Credit:

Adeline Sire

Even worse, Gueguen said a killer fungus also wreaked havoc after the floods. Fortunately, last year’s harvest was a generous one, which should help offset this year’s losses.

But just how many bottles of Chablis wines will be produced this year is still unknown. Gueguen says those wines are renowned for their terroir, that quality of the soil that contains limestone and fossils, which gives Chablis its DNA.

“One hundred and fifty million years ago,” says Gueguen, “there was a sea that evaporated. It was a shallow sea that left behind its sediments, seashells, oysters and all, which is what gave the wine that particular salty and briny taste.”

It's a distinctive taste that is prized by Americans. Gueguen sells about 30 percent of his wines in the United States, and his Boston-area importer, Hugh McPhail, says the Chardonnays of Chablis are very distinctive.

“It’s very much in fashion among young American wine drinkers now. The sommeliers love Chablis because it doesn’t taste like Chardonnay from any other part of the world,” he says. “Some people compare it to wet rocks, slate after the rain, things like that. The grape transmits that kind of flavor, that kind of slaty green apple flavor, very purely, so you can close your eyes and generally know that you are having Chablis as opposed to something else.”

Back in Burgundy, wine growers see the fresh green leaves in the vineyards as a hopeful sign that next year could be close to normal. But with harvests hitting earlier every year and freak storms getting more frequent, it’s clear to them there’s nothing normal about the climate these days. So Gueguen says winemakers here have turned to a defense known as cloud seeding — and some pretty wild weather contraptions.

“Today in the Chablis winegrowing area, we are going to set up anti-hail cannons,” he says. “What they do is spray silver iodide into the storm clouds to prevent hailstones from solidifying.” If they work right, the machines could turn hail to torrential rains instead.

Forty of the cannons will be set up in the Chablis area next year, and hundreds of winemakers here hope they will ward off widespread destruction.

Wine importer McPhail is dubious about this technology, but says the economic stakes are so high, it’s worth a shot.

“There are parts of Burgundy that have been hit by hail four years in a row now,” he says, “and with the change of climate, I mean, it’s some of the most expensive land in the world, and if you can't grow crops on it, it's a major economic impact.”

This email came into my inbox from a reader seeking advice about how to maintain privacy in this age of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other social media platforms, especially when it comes to those who are sick or may be dying:

“I read that a stand-up comic tweeted from her father’s deathbed as he fought lung cancer. I know people tweet about everything these days — but really, isn’t this crossing the line? Don’t the sick and dying have any privacy?”

A quick Google search confirmed that the comic in question was “Conan” writer Laurie Kilmartin, who in 2014 tweeted about her father’s last days from his hospital bed to her tens of thousands of followers. By turns, she was sacred and profane, funny and sarcastic.

Her tweets were laced with her trademark humor  and authenticity (“Hard to leave Dad’s side. I am drawn to him like a moth to a flame — that’s about to go out”). In my view they were loving and honest expressions of a very emotional experience.

For Valentine's Day, I got my Dad a gift card from JC Penney. I said, "Dad, I want this card to expire before you do."

— Crooked Laurie (@anylaurie16) February 20, 2014

Hard to leave Dad's side. I am drawn to him like a moth to a flame (that's about to go out)

— Crooked Laurie (@anylaurie16) February 26, 2014

When her father, veteran Ron Kilmartin, died from lung cancer following six rounds of chemotherapy and a week of radiation, she tweeted:

Hey all, Dad passed away about an hour ago. Thanks for all your messages, he was bowled over that so many strangers were thinking of him.

— Crooked Laurie (@anylaurie16) March 2, 2014

Many questioned Kilmartin’s humor, including one follower who posted that he was trying to "figure out what's funny about ur (sic) dad dying." Kilmartin, acknowledging her learning curve, responded: "I'm trying to figure out what isn't."

But now to the question: Of course the dying should have privacy, and family members must respect that — but each of us has a different definition of our “personal zone of privacy.” From all that I read, Ron Kilmartin knew and approved of his daughter’s real-time updates about his condition, and he gained solace from the heartfelt messages sent to him.

When I asked my Facebook followers what they thought, I heard plenty:

• “Communication about these difficult and private matters actually helps people because then they know what to expect. It’s not an uncommon situation to be in and this can help us all learn from each other, as well as support the woman tweeting (which is her way of saying she needs support!)”
• “Isn’t this just one more version of things like CaringBridge? People form their community of shared grief in myriad ways.”

Still others were not convinced, as evidenced by these posts:

• “If you need support (as anyone would at such a difficult time) reach out to your friends, not the Twitterverse.”

• “Who sits at their father’s deathbed and tweets? The man is in poor condition, not looking to recover, and this woman’s response is to ‘plug in’ and advise the Internet what’s going on?”

My advice? With the internet and social media times have changed, as have notions of privacy. In making a decision about how public to go about illness, intent, respect and permission must be your trump cards.

When used properly, social media can bring us together, teach us, and help us through difficult passages. 

When the Nobel Prize in physics is awarded next Tuesday, many in the world of science will be surprised if Rainer Weiss, an MIT professor emeritus, is not among those honored.

Weiss dreamed up the idea behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO. It's a sort of massive antenna so sensitive it detected faint invisible ripples in space from 1.3 billion years ago, a discovery made secretly last fall and revealed in September.

Weiss traces his love for science back to his European youth. His mother was a German actress. His father was a Jewish doctor, and a communist. When the Nazis rose to power, the family fled Germany. Weiss spoke about his childhood and his discoveries in physics.

On his family's flight from Slovakia in 1938 to America

"We got out for a very special reason. There was a family in St. Louis, they ran a department store, they gave bond to the American government. They said 'Look, we'll take 10,000 Jews, if they get in trouble we'll pay for them.' Which was remarkable. Just imagine such a thing. [In America] we were considered Germans. And I think my mother made a wonderful mistake, sending me to public school in lederhosen. And this was the day the Germans bombed Rotterdam. And the teacher and all the kids read the paper, and here's this damn German. That was the only time I ever sensed any hostility." 

On the beginnings of his scientific career 

"I was probably 12 or so, and the war was over, and the streets of New York, especially downtown New York, were loaded with stuff coming back as war surplus. And you'd go down to Cortland Street in New York, which no longer exists, it was near the World Trade Center. What would happen is you'd go here and you'd find a whole box full of transformers, another box full of capacitors, vacuum tubes, anything you could ever want — radar sets half disassembled. As a kid that was mind-boggling. You bought stuff for nothing at all. If you could lug it on the subway home, you got it. I started making all sorts of stuff, radio, hi-fi sets which didn't exist. And I was very lucky there was a movie theater in Brooklyn that had a fire behind the screen. If you went down there and unscrewed the loud speakers that were behind the screen you could have them. So I took them home, I got six or seven of them home, they were heavy, big loud speakers." 

On his earliest audio creations

"I had a wonderful setup because three things were happening simultaneously: FM radio was coming in, good amplifier circuits were around, I mean I copied other people's circuits — what did I know. I built something and I would invite some of the emigres, because they were very interested in music, to come over and listen. We would hear the New York Philharmonic, and these people were just blown away. Imagine, they said '[music] like in the concert hall!' And so they wanted one. And so little by little this thing grew into a business. If I had not gone to college, I probably could have made some money. 

But what got me to go to college was the problem that you raised: Everything was wonderful if you had an FM set, but vinyl wasn't there yet. It was shellac records that made that horrible [scratching], 78s. All you heard was that goddamn record scratch! So the thing was, how do you get rid of that? And that was a puzzle that was just beyond me. I couldn't do it. I didn't know enough math, I didn't know enough real electrical engineering, and effectively that drove me to college. Let's face it, I wanted to solve that problem."
 
On the mechanics of black holes

"A black hole is a place where if you were an astronaut and you approached it, very strange things begin to happen to you. Your feet get tugged away from your head, and you get stretched apart. And then the molecules that made you, they get stretched apart. And then even the inside of the molecules get separated into atoms and then into individual pieces. But that whole idea that the geometry is so curled up and the strength of gravity is so strong that it breaks up matter, it becomes the strongest thing in the world inside that black hole."

On creating LIGO

"It wasn't me alone that built that. You make it sound like I was this incredible person. There were a lot of other very good people. Let's take cognition of that.

What did we discover? We knew black holes existed. But we established that black holes live in pairs. The other thing that we found is we were able to detect gravitational waves directly. Now they had been seen before by indirect methods, very beautiful experiments had shown that there were gravitational waves. But the fact is that you could make an instrument that could detect them.

And then the most important thing to me, that may not be so important to others, is that the Einstein equations that he struggled over in 1915, and he really agonized over them, he didn't know anything about black holes, he didn't know about this. It worked for gravity, that he understood. But here is an extreme case where gravity is all there is, and things are moving damn near the velocity of light, and it still works! [Einstein's] equations are still good in that extreme regime. To me it's just spectacular!" 

On what he would like to have shown Einstein

"One of the dreams I would have, had Einstein been still alive, is to tell him about this. I would have loved to have seen what he would have thought, what his expression would be. We were able to measure very very tiny motions, smaller than he would have ever imagined. 

You look at the remarkable things we could do, and Einstein would have been tickled pink by them, I think."

For her latest exhibition, called “Deep Sky Companion,” artist Lia Halloran was inspired not by the accomplishments, but by the frustrations, of a celebrated astronomer.

Charles Messier was an 18th-century Frenchman who became known in his lifetime for meticulously recording a catalog of 110 celestial features found in the night sky. The thing is, he considered those features distractions from his main pursuit: comets.

“In those days, the way [astronomers] got really famous was if you discovered a comet — you would get it named after you. And England and France were competing over whose astronomers could find the most comets,” says E. Sterl Phinney, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where Halloran’s exhibit is on display. Messier thought finding a comet would help him secure a respectable job in astronomy, Phinney says.

In 1758, Messier was working under the tutelage of a French Navy astronomer, trying to locate a comet that had been predicted to return to Earth’s sky, when he came upon a bright patch of light in the constellation Taurus. Messier noticed that the patch wasn’t moving, as comets do, but he recorded it in his notebook anyway, seemingly frustrated that it wasn’t what he was looking for.

As he continued to search the sky over time, Messier encountered more and more cosmic interruptions, cataloging them, for all intents and purposes, as “objects to avoid while looking for comets.” The list grew to include a number of nebulae, galaxies, supernovas, and other astronomical formations—some that had been previously discovered by others, and some that Messier was the first to officially record.

Painting of M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), from “Deep Sky Companion,” by Lia Halloran.

Credit:

Lia Halloran

“If you had a catalog of fuzzy things in the sky that you’d already checked didn’t move, you could avoid wasting time re-observing fuzzy things that were already known not to be moving comets,” he says.

By 1781, Messier had completed a final record of coordinates, descriptions and some drawings for 103 non-comets that was later published in the annual astronomical publication Connaissance des Temps. His catalog eventually became known as “Messier’s objects.” (Seven more objects were added posthumously when they were discovered in his notebooks, bringing the total to 110.)

Scholars recognized Messier’s work for being reliable — even if others had discovered a celestial object, for example, Messier would double-check the coordinates when including it in his own lists.

While the catalog didn’t explain much about the objects beyond their location and layman’s descriptions, it remains an important touchstone for many astronomers even today, says Phinney. “Messier was the first guy to make a good catalog of the stuff people could discover with a telescope,” he says.

And his catalog included a number of bright astronomical objects that are still widely studied. That first patch of light Messier recorded is the Crab Nebula, also known as M1 (for Messier 1). Messier also recorded the Eagle Nebula (M16) and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).

Print of M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), from “Deep Sky Companion,” by Lia Halloran.

Credit:

Lia Halloran

As part of her research, Halloran compared Messier’s drawings and descriptions to modern photographs of the objects from NASA and other sources. Halloran painted each object using blue ink on semi-transparent, drafting film with a plastic feel to it.

She took the paintings into a dark room and imprinted them onto photosensitive paper, which she exposed to light to create photograph-like prints. The final prints, which are black and white, are essentially mirror images of the paintings, though sometimes certain features are more prominent.

Halloran sees her artistic process as “a nice mediator of the history and lineage of the rise of astronomy.” Before photography was invented, she explains, astronomers like Messier first relied on hand-drawn records of their observations. They later turned to glass plates coated with a light-sensitive emulsion to “print” the images they saw in their telescopes.

For the exhibition at Caltech, Halloran’s prints were cut into circles to represent the view seen through a telescope, and they’re arranged in a way that invites the eye to wander. The Cahill Center’s walls and ceilings are slanted and abstractly arranged, and Halloran took advantage of the striking architecture by placing some prints in obscured areas so that visitors might peek at a particular galaxy from afar, in the way that a person searching the night sky through a telescope might glimpse a star formation.

In fact, Phinney, who works in the Cahill Center, has used a telescope to take a closer look at some of the prints installed in hard-to-reach spots in the building. He says that, given his familiarity with the Messier objects, it’s fun to see them portrayed in a way that invites further contemplation. He’s noticed his colleagues and visitors alike regularly stopping to peruse the art, too.

Messier, by the way, did eventually get credit for discovering 21 comets. He even earned a medal from Napoleon and the nickname “the ferret of comets” from King Louis XV. Ironically, these days, Messier is most famous for those 110 objects he tried to avoid.

This story first aired as an interview on Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

If you think dogs are drawn to your winning personality then think again — the attraction may be genetic, according to a study released Thursday that pinpoints genes linked to inter-species amity.

Providing food and playing fetch, of course, also forge strong bonds.

But experiments involving several hundred dogs and a sweeping analysis of their genomes, uncovered a handful of genetic variants clearly linked to canines being friendly with humans.

The same genes, it turns out, help govern sociability in our species, and are implicated in neurological problems ranging from autism to ADHD.

"Our findings suggest that there may be a common underlying genetic basis for social behavior in dogs and humans," senior author Pers Jensen, a professor of ethnology at Linkoping University in Sweden, told AFP.

The first domesticated dogs — some 15,000 years ago — were probably wolves that had grown accustomed to the presence of humans in their habitat, most experts agree.

Since then, man's best friend has continued to evolve, a process likely influenced by our intimate co-habitation.

Indeed, one of the ways in which dogs diverged from wolves was by developing an innate tendency to seek our companionship, earlier research has shown.

Several experiments, for example, compared the behaviour of puppies and wolf pups raised as family pets. The baby wolves were taken from their mothers at about eight weeks old.

When confronted as adults — in the presence of humans — with so-called "impossible tasks" that they could not resolve, the dogs and socialized wolves behaved quite differently. 

"In general, dogs had a strong tendency to solicit human help, whereas wolves"— even those raised as pets "did not," said Jensen.

Jensen and colleagues performed a similar test with more than 400 beagles born and raised in a kennel that produced animals for laboratory tests.

Importantly, all the animals came to maturity under the same conditions and with the same level of human contact.

In the experiments, each beagle tried to lift clear plastic lids off three bowls in order to get an edible treat below.

A man arrives with his dogs to take part on a march with others against the legalization of gay marriage and to defend their interpretation of traditional family values near the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City, Mexico, on September 24, 2016. 

Credit:

Carlos Jasso/Reuters

Looking at wolf genomes

The first two tests were easy, but the third lid was impossible to move. 

The researchers recorded the dogs' reactions, especially to what extent they turned to a person in the room, as if to seek assistance.

The next step was to examine the DNA coding of each dog's genome to look for matches between its behaviour in the experiment and specific genetic variants, or mutations.

Jensen and his team found five genes that correlated strongly with the dogs most inclined to seek human help — the same genes related to sociability in humans. 

The two that stood out the most are known as SEZ6L and ARVCF.

It is still unclear exactly how these genes exert influence, or whether they are simply markers of some other process as yet undetected. That's a very difficult question to unravel.

There is another puzzler, however, that can be resolved: Did these genetic variants evolve during the domestication of dogs, or have they been there all along?

To find out, Jensen is now sequencing the genes of wolves to see if they have the same variants. 

If they don't, it would strongly suggest that these "sociability genes" arose recently.

But it is also possible, he said, that the first wolves to join the community of humans had precisely the same mutations that may have made some of the dogs in the experiment more likely to nuzzle up to a two-footed friend.

"My gut feeling is that there is the same kind of gene variations in the wolf population," Jensen said.

The kennel, by the way, went out of business, which means that all the beagles found homes, he added.

The Rosetta probe has been orbiting in space for years, sending information back to Earth.

But on Friday its mission came to an end.

The spacecraft, operated by the European Space Agency, crash-landed — as planned — onto a comet.

"Let’s not think of it as a crash landing. Let’s think of it as a graceful touchdown," says Monica Grady, who worked on the mission.

Grady is a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University in England. Friday evening, though, she was in Darmstadt, Germany, where the European Space Operations Centre is located, munching on comet-shaped chocolate cake with her teammates.

“It’s a celebration. It’s a wake," she said. "We said goodbye to a dear friend who has been with us for many, many years, with whom we have special memories, we shared special events. But they’ve gone now."

The Rosetta cake! @mggtTaylor about to cut into it, hope it tastes better than 67p smells! @ESA_Rosetta#CometLandingpic.twitter.com/eynVRT7p2m

— Monica Grady (@MonicaGrady) September 30, 2016

The team decided to crash-land the probe because it was solar powered, and had gone too far from the sun.

Grady says she could give a half-hour lecture on all she’s learned from Rosetta, and there would still be more to tell. But the photos that the probe sent back from the surface of the comet have proved particularly invaluable.

A compilation of the brightest outbursts seen at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera (white numbers) and Navigation Camera (red numbers) between July and September 2015.

Credit:

ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA; NavCam: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 / rosetta.esa.int

“If you imagine looking at the pebbles in the bed of a river, some of the pictures that we got of the comet look like that,” Grady said. “But they can’t possibly have formed in a river because there are no rivers on this comet. Never have been. So we have to come up with a new idea of how these features have formed. And that’s really exciting, seeing the birth of a new science."

The success of the mission, Grady, says, is a testament to the power of cooperation. "That’s one of the great things about the European Space Agency is that it brings nations together," she explained. "And you can say, we want to build this gizmo, and somebody from Germany wants to build that gizmo, and we exchange information. And we work together."

The party for the Rosetta probe wasn't even over yet when we talked to Grady. The music was still playing. But she and her team are already planning their next endeavors.  

"What should we do next, is the feeling," she said. "And that’s what it’s like with a space mission. You never stop. You build, and carry on, and do the next mission.”

When you hear a recording of Whitney Houston belting out a classic like “I Will Always Love You,” it’s impossible to miss her raw talent and refined vocal skill. What’s amazing is that anatomically speaking, there’s no difference between Whitney Houston’s vocal system and yours.

Extraordinary singers “have the same size lungs as other people,” says Linda Carroll, a voice rehabilitation specialist. Dr. Steven Zeitels, director of the Voice Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, points out that singers’ vocal muscles are also the same size as yours — that is to say, they’re tiny. “I can place all your vocal muscles into one corner of one facial muscle,” Zeitels says.

In fact, whether we’re famous singers or not, our key voice apparatus is a little area in our larynx called the vocal folds. The vocal folds are made up of white ligaments shaped like the letter “V,” covered in a membrane. And when we speak or sing, those ligaments vibrate to create our voice. Our vocal folds are so small that Linda Carroll says if you draw a triangle on the front of a penny, the lines are as long as they are.

“And the depth of the vibrating edge — it’s the depth of that penny,” Carroll says.

So what gives a voice like Whitney Houston’s its richness? Renee Fleming, the great opera soprano, likens our vocal folds to the strings on a violin or piano. Think of singing as plucking the strings.  

“If you do that with a rubber band, it just makes a twang sound,” Fleming says. “But if you put that string on a box, then it resonates and creates a beautiful sound. So for the voice, it’s the same thing. You're putting air through the folds. They vibrate, and the resonating chambers — which are your mouth, your throat, your sinuses — create the color.”

But just like other parts of the human body, our vocal system works best when we’re young. Steven Zeitels says this is because the tissues lose their elasticity. And the life of a singer can put additional strain on the vocal system: breathing dried-out air in airplanes or singing in places with unfamiliar allergens can have a negative impact. Fleming says that even different types of singing can affect vocal health.

“Pop and music theater singing, particularly with girls, and rock singing for men. That's very hard on the voice,” Fleming says.

In his medical practice, Zeitels frequently sees singers of all ages with vocal trauma.

“What singers more often than not sustain is ongoing collision forces and shearing stresses to that delicate layer, which has very tiny blood vessels,” Zeitels says. “And so if the blood vessels hemorrhage, you get bleeding in the vocal fold. If they repeatedly hemorrhage, they can scar.”

And trauma in the vocal system can have devastating results. Julie Andrews’ famous singing voice (of “Sound of Music” fame) was silenced after routine polyp surgery in 1997 left her with scarring. Not only that, she could barely speak.

And several years ago, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith was onstage singing the famous high note in “Dream On” when his voice suddenly cut out. After years of singing concerts at 105 decibels — colliding his vocal folds an estimated 780,000 times each show — Tyler had ruptured a blood vessel in his vocal fold, and the blood was now preventing the ligaments from vibrating properly.

Tyler went to see Dr. Zeitels, who had a novel treatment. Another doctor at Mass General had developed a new type of laser gentle enough to remove birthmarks from babies. And Zeitels had modified the laser method — called selective photothermolysis — to treat vocal hemorrhages.

“Essentially, an infant’s skin is like an adult vocal fold that has to maintain pliability,” Zeitels says.

Using the laser, Zeitels was able to seal the blood vessel that had ruptured, without burning Tyler’s vocal folds. Now close to 70, Tyler is back to hitting the high notes.

After her polyp surgery went awry, Andrews also went to see Dr. Zeitels. He removed some of the scar tissue from her earlier surgery, and stretched other tissue to restore a bit of elasticity. She still can’t sing, but has regained her speaking voice.

And there's more in store with "the stuff."

“The stuff” is PEG 30, made using polyethylene glycol. Currently, when doctors do vocal surgery, they have to hope that whatever tissues they don’t remove will still work. But in the future?

“In the future, we will inject a material that retains pliability, so that you can actually dial back in the pliability,” Zeitels says.

PEG 30 can make old skin and tissue pliable again. But it’s still experimental, mainly because the more elastic a material is, the faster it degrades in our bodies — and PEG 30 is pretty elastic. Zeitels, however, remains undeterred.

“I see a world where we've actually created super singers — where someone in their 80s or 90s will walk in and have an injection in the office, and walk out with a transformed voice,” he says.

This article is based on a storythat aired on PRI's Studio 360.

Ready for an underdog story?

In the early 1980s, personal computing was a winner-take-all industry, and IBM was king — to the point where Intel gave Big Blue early access to its newest processors. And in the highly proprietary market, software made for one company’s computers wouldn’t even run on others’.

But in 1982, three friends — Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Muerto — met at a House of Pies in Houston and walked away with a design for the first fully IBM-compatible portable computer, sketched on the back of a placemat. Their business became Compaq, and within five years, they were generating a billion dollars in sales per year.

Rod Canion, one of Compaq’s co-founders, says the story starts pretty simply. He and two friends had quit their jobs at Texas Instruments, and had nothing lined up.

“We bought an entrepreneur’s manual to try to figure out what the basics were,” Canion says. “And then we started trying to figure out, well, what do we really want to do now? The idea for a Mexican restaurant came up, because we had always joked about when we ought to go into a Mexican restaurant.”

Fortunately for everyone involved, Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Muerto did not go into the restaurant business. They knew the market for personal computers had expanded — and that there must be other opportunities in the field.

“We started down that path and that was really like stepping onto a rocket platform,” Canion says.

Other companies had already tried to snag a slice of IBM’s pie by building computers that were compatible with its software. But these competitors had all made a fatal mistake: Copying IBM’s code, at which point IBM would sue. Compaq, which was based in Houston instead of Silicon Valley or New York, flew under the radar. And instead of copying IBM’s code, they laboriously reverse-engineered it, avoiding copyright infringement.

Jason Cohen, who directed the new documentary about Compaq’s rise, “Silicon Cowboys,” calls it “a David versus Goliath story.”

“In the film, one of the guys says it was like playing baseball blindfolded, because they couldn't even look at the manual from IBM that had the code,” Cohen says. “If they had looked at it, then they would have been sued.”

That fall, Compaq released the Compaq Portable. Weighing 28 pounds, it came in its own handsome briefcase, sold for $2,995, and ran any software an IBM user might need — essentially founding the modern, open-architecture PC. In the first year, Compaq sold 53,000 units. The personal computing race was on.

The rivalry with IBM was far from over, however. In 1987, IBM released the PS/2 personal computer, which used a fast new data communication system called the Micro Channel. But the Micro Channel was incompatible with IBM’s previous software.

“Every company was going to be forced to buy everything new again,” Cohen says. “Billions of dollars of equipment, and they were selling to huge companies.”

That’s where Compaq, its reverse-engineering experience, and the “industry standard” system come in. Compaq teamed up with eight other companies to create a new data system that would maintain IBM compatibility.

“They offered this new standard for free to the whole industry,” Cohen says. “And it caught fire.”

As the '80s wore on, Cohen says the three-man startup that Canion, Harris and Muerto had nurtured grew closer to what they had earlier railed against: a large corporation with thousands of employees.

“You lose some of that [startup] culture,” Cohen says. “That's just something you can't sustain.”

But other aspects of Compaq’s compatibility-first business model live on. Take a closer look at your iPhone, if you have one.

“That portable was the first time people actually recognized that you could live in something closer to a mobile world,” Cohen says.

Rod Canion says because the accessible industry standard that Compaq helped develop stayed in place, other computing companies had room to iterate and innovate.

“If it had been controlled by IBM, they would not have allowed the technology to come out nearly as fast, because that's part of what they did — they brought it out when it was on their schedule, not whenever anybody else wanted to,” Canion says. “And so I'm absolutely sure that the technology would not have advanced as rapidly, and I don't think we would have had the technology needed for Steve Jobs to develop the iPhone in ‘07. Maybe it would have come 5 or 10 years later, but Steve didn't last that long. ... We had lots of smart phones, and we had PDAs. But it was the breakthrough that his vision created that led to everything we have today.”

Jason Cohen agrees. “This is a story that had an impact,” he says. “Things would look drastically different. And I don't think people realize that. I don't think people knew about this story. And it is just a great underdog story.”

Silicon Cowboys is now open in select theaters, and on demand. This story is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Science Friday.

Working out isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. But would you run a little faster if a pack of zombies were breathing down your neck on your morning jog? (Figuratively.)

An app called “Zombies, Run!” can help. And other app developers and device makers are also making bets on the best way to “gamify” your fitness routine. Fitbit’s bracelet buzzes with encouragement when you reach your step goal. Apps like Runkeeper and Strava let you log your miles, see how you stack up against your friends, and even compete against total strangers.

But do we really need a brush with un-death to get us into our running shoes?

Perhaps not, but the story — and other game elements — can keep things exciting when we do lace up. Margaret Wallace, CEO of the game development company Playmatics, calls “Zombies, Run!” a “milestone” application of narrative to fitness.

“It encourages me and keeps me active and not necessarily focused on how hard my run is,” Wallace says. “It's attempting to immerse me in a story. A lot of us ... are very tuned into what it means to be chased by zombies.”

Meanwhile, Wallace notes other runaway hits in gamified fitness may not have even been designed as such.

“It's remarkable the extent to which Pokémon Go created such a movement,” Wallace says. “I mean literally a movement of people, and I don’t know if that was an intended feature. That's what we call in gaming an ‘emergent feature’ — something that we may not have necessarily anticipated when we made a game, but something that came out of it naturally, because it's how the community likes to use it.”

But someone who’s simply interested in taking a walk around the block to hunt Pokémon, for instance, may not be motivated by an app that pits strangers together in a race against the clock. As the gamified fitness industry booms, Wallace says more apps and devices are finding ways to accommodate different types of players.

“Something that Fitbit has done that I think is really smart, is they've rolled out Adventures, which are these solo, non-competitive experiences where you can walk and experience what it might be to be on a trail in Yosemite,” Wallace says. “But they also have Challenges, which can incorporate up to 10 of your friends. And so if I'm more of that competitive type of player, I have that option.”

With companies rushing to create even more tailored, engaging activity trackers, some consumers are concerned about what’s happening to their personal and location data. Wallace cautions that the standards for how data are handled are evolving with the field.

“To really get down into how each company handles the data, you would really have to look at their terms and services, and maybe even follow up with customer service,” Wallace notes. And for users who take the same jog every Friday evening and post their times to Facebook, for example, “there are certainly privacy implications,” she says.

While some people may not feel comfortable sharing details of their workouts across social media, Wallace says other people do — and can gain from doing so.

“For a lot of us, we may not feel comfortable with sharing ‘Hey, today I only did 5,000 of my 10,000 steps. I blew it. I didn't make my goal,’” Wallace says. “But I think that there are ways, again — the Fitbit challenges allow you to customize. I want these 10 of my friends, or these five of my friends to work with me together on this goal. And I think that has more benefits than negatives in the long run.”

And whether we choose to spice up our workouts with a simulated hike in Yosemite or not, we’re probably already encountering gamification elsewhere in our daily lives. Wallace, whose background is in video game development, sees gamification design elements in everything from new hiring processes at big companies, to how some of our car insurance rates are calculated.

“We're seeing financial institutions use this,” Wallace says. “We're seeing HR departments use it for looking for skilled employees in different areas. We are seeing it built into hardware, so certain automobiles will have different game-like elements in their dashboard to show you how fuel friendly ... you're being with your driving. Insurance companies are starting to utilize this with their apps to show whether a driver has been compliant and is eligible for less expensive insurance. It's really taking over in terms of a design approach in a lot of areas.”

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

What’s the polite way to say “I can’t make it to your party, but my robot can”?

It’s not a question many advice columnists have considered, but it may soon be time for a definitive how-to. Most telepresence robots are currently marketed for use in offices, schools, hospitals and other places with smooth terrain and reliable Internet. But as Evan Ackerman recently found out, telepresence robots are quickly becoming capable of “standing in” for us in even more everyday environments — like a family trip to the zoo.

Ackerman, a Maryland-based contributing editor for IEEE Spectrum, sent a telepresence robot in his stead on a family outing to the Portland Zoo. From his home on the East Coast, Ackerman joined the group in Oregon using Double Robotics’ Double 2 telepresence robot — essentially a long-stemmed iPad case on wheels.

“You can log into this iPad from any computer with internet, anywhere in the world, and you’ve got full control over the robot,” Ackerman says. “You get a video feed of everything the robot sees, while your face takes up the whole screen of the iPad on top, so that people can see you and talk to you at the same time.”

To be clear, the Double 2 is not designed for off-road use on hot, ice cream-covered pavement — it’s one of the models marketed toward schools and offices — but Ackerman says it performed admirably at the zoo.

“It’s designed to be used where you have really good Wi-Fi,” Ackerman adds. But at the zoo, he skirted technical requirements by using an iPad with an LTE cellular connection.

“I wandered around with it and saw the elephants and talked to people, and it really worked pretty well. It wasn’t perfect all the time, but it was definitely usable, which is better than I was expecting,” Ackerman says.

And as with any flashy technology used in public, the robot drew gawkers.

“The most fun was just wandering around and having people who had never seen a robot like this interact with me,” Ackerman says. “I was talking to people in Oregon just like I was there, and I was explaining it as, ‘Look, I’m just sitting at home about 3,000 miles away from you, but I’m here to see the elephants, too.’”

Ackerman’s brother in Portland accompanied the robot, in part to make sure that Ackerman, navigating from Maryland, didn’t run into anyone. Despite the guidance, Ackerman says there were moments when the “out-of-body” experience proved unnerving.

“When my brother wasn’t right there minding me, I had this sense of ‘OK, there’s this robot that’s thousands of miles away from me. And it’s my body — kind of," Ackerman says. “But at the same time, someone could just pick it up and run off with it, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything. It’s a little bit weird.”

In the entire experiment, the robot’s network connectivity was the major drawback. But Ackerman thinks that with improvements to our network infrastructure — increased bandwidth, for instance — telepresence robots like Double 2 could reinvent armchair travel.

“I'm really excited for the future of telepresence,” Ackerman says. “Once we get this wireless infrastructure, you'll be able to take robots like these anywhere. And I'm imagining that at some point, there’ll be places where you can rent them. So you could decide ‘Hey, I want to wander around Singapore today,’ and you just get off the couch, get on the computer and log in, and suddenly you're in a robot. You can go explore Singapore and it's way easier than flying. And I'm not saying it's as good as being there, but you can do it from home and it's cheap. So why not?”

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

In the predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods of Baltimore, violent crime is all too commonplace along bleak asphalt and concrete streets. But there is now an effort to green these neighborhoods and uplift residents by putting them to work planting trees.

Nonprofits, in particular, are giving former inmates the opportunity to take ownership of their home turf while earning a living wage. Among them is Alex Smith, who spent 15 years in prison. Smith has turned over the proverbial new leaf and now works for the Baltimore Tree Trust.

“My official title is Field Operations and Outreach,” Smith says. “Essentially, I'm a foreman, and I work with fellas and ladies who come from rough backgrounds, and we go out and plant trees all over Baltimore. ... You put trees on a block, and it changes the whole environment. It’s not just concrete and asphalt and brick. And they definitely help our environment. They trap rainwater, and the tree pits and roots help filter out all the bad stuff that otherwise would go right into the Chesapeake Bay. But beautification and how it changes what people see when they look out their window, that's the most important part to me.”

Smith learned horticulture and started working with plants while in prison. Dr. Wayne Yoder of Frostburg University went to the prison to teach about plants, but “it was not like we could put it into practical application,” Smith says. “We were just learning about it. But when we approached the staff about it, this idea started growing that we could actually transform the grounds, and that we could use what we were learning in the classroom inside of the prison.”

When he got out of prison, Smith worked sporadically in construction, while doing landscaping on the side. Someone suggested he buy a pickup and not let his landscaping skills “just sit on the shelf.” He took the advice and began to show people at the Center for Urban Families, where he worked as a volunteer, some of the things he could do.

When Dan Miller, executive director of the Baltimore Tree Trust, came looking for somebody who could work for the organization, Smith’s name came up. Now, Smith recruits others who have had similar experiences and spent time in jail.

“Everywhere I go in Baltimore, I’m asked, ‘Are you hiring?’” Smith says. “So it's pretty easy, when I'm in the Baltimore Tree Trust truck, and I have a vest, and I'm out working, to find people who say they're interested in jobs. But mostly I come to the Center for Urban Families and get people that have come through the STRIVE program.”

STRIVE is an employment readiness program that sharpens or refreshes workers’ skills. The program helps them not only get jobs, but keep jobs, Smith says.

Smith’s work with the Tree Trust has support from the community, he says, and not just from people seeking employment, but from “normal, everyday people who just like to see trees, like to see people working,” Smith says.

Part of Smith’s job is to do outreach in the community, to dispel some of the myths about the trees and to teach people the skills to care for them.

“There are a lot of myths about trees — they bring rats, they strangle pipes. That’s the number one issue that we hear,” Smith explains. “Some people just don't want them because of bugs and mosquitoes. We get all kinds of things. When we are out in the community, we are definitely armed with information, but sometimes, even if you show people, they still don't want the tree.”

The Trust maintains the trees for two years after planting, so people in the neighborhood have a chance to see how Smith and his coworkers do their jobs. “Any chance I can, I'm giving people advice and giving them pointers and tips on how to take care of the tree,” Smith says.

“Some people have actually taken ownership of the trees — ‘That's my tree,’” he adds. “Some of the neighbors even squabble over whose tree it is. We get a pretty good response from people who care about the neighborhood and care about the way the neighborhood looks.”

Working for the Tree Trust has helped Smith turn his life around, and he hopes he is not an anomaly.

“I would hope that eventually this catches on, because every day that I'm out in the street I see opportunity.” he says. “While I'm planting trees, I see the tree pits that aren't being taken care of, I see the trees that have been planted years ago that aren't being cared for, I see the litter that is in the tree pits. All those are [employment] opportunities. If the government and the communities are just a little creative and can see the opportunities that I see while I'm out there in the street, I think it definitely can work out for other people.”

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

The view from the sleepy town of San Juanico, Mexico, is about what you’d see from any village along the Pacific coast of Baja California — craggy coves, turquoise waves, a couple of surfers and fishing boats. But 25 miles offshore, there’s something different. The sediment at the bottom of the sea out there is rich in phosphate, a mineral form of phosphorus that’s vital to the rest of the world.

You can’t grow food without phosphorus, which is why this stretch of sea floor has drawn the attention of a group of Mexican and foreign companies. They want to dredge up the phosphate off of San Juanico and use it to make chemical fertilizer.

Most of the phosphorus used for fertilizer currently comes from phosphate rock on land, but those supplies are dwindling, and most of what’s left can be found in just two countries, Morocco and China. That’s got a lot of people worried about a supply crunch and a cascading impact on global food supplies and prices.

“If phosphorus were to become more scarce,” says Dana Cordell of the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative in Australia, “it’s likely that food prices could rise, and there would be more hungry [people].”

Phosphate is vital to chemical fertilizers used to grow food around the world. With a growing demand for food and a diminishing supply from traditional sources, fertilizer producers are looking for new sources.

Credit:

Scott Audette/Reuters 

Hence the interest in undersea deposits like the one off San Juanico. The mine would be the world’s first underwater phosphate mine. None of the companies involved would agree to an interview, but the project’s website says it would allow Mexico to cut its dependence on phosphate imports and strengthen the country’s food security.

Tough to argue with, perhaps, except among folks who are worried about this stretch of Mexico’s coast.

“Everything would be finished here,” says fisherman Juan Luis Aguilar. He’s worked the waters off San Juanico for more than 30 years and is a member of a fishing cooperative that’s trying to stop the mining project.

Aguilar fears that the dredging will harm fish populations and kill lobster eggs. He’s afraid no one will want to come to San Juanico to surf or to see the whales that feed here. And, he says, “No one will want to buy our fish.”

Aguilar and his colleagues aren’t alone in their concerns. Scientists say there’s a lot of risks involved in a project like this.

The location of the proposed phosphate mining project is shown here. The area overlaps with a newly created sea turtle refuge. San Juanico, home to a local fishing community, is located in the cove due north of the site.

Credit:

Don Diego

Biologist Jeanneht Armendáriz Villegas of Baja’s Instituto Politécnico Nacional, who studies mines in protected areas, says there are a lot of unknowns about drilling underwater, but some things are understood.

Phosphorous deposits often come with dangerous contaminants like uranium and cadmium, Armendáriz says. Plumes generated from dredging can affect whole aquatic ecosystems. And the ecosystem off San Juanico is especially important because it’s a refuge for a population of endangered Loggerhead turtles.

Underwater mining proposals in other countries have been denied previously. In April, Mexico’s environmental agency SEMARNAT turned this one down too, specifically because of the threat to the sea turtles.

Since then, though, the project’s backers have revised their application to include plans to protect the turtles. That has opponents worried that the mine could ultimately be approved because the language establishing the turtle refuge doesn’t explicitly exclude industry.

What it does mention is the possible impact of fishing on the turtles, which complicates things for local residents even more.

On a recent day in San Juanico, Aguilar and other fishermen were hauling in their nets, possibly for the last time. Researchers have found evidence that fishing nets may be responsible for a recent surge in turtle deaths in the area, so the fishermen were told to stay off the water for four months to see how the turtle population would respond.

Fisherman Juan Luis Aguilar stands by his boat full of lobster traps and nets on the beach at San Juanico. He and other members of the local fishing cooperative fear the proposed undersea phosphate mine will put them out of business.

Credit:

Nina Feldman

Now the fishermen worry about an ironic outcome — that they might be pushed out of business, while the underwater mine is allowed to go ahead.

There’s another irony as well. If the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative’s Cordell is right, Mexico and the world may not even need this new source of phosphate.

Instead of digging for more phosphorus in sensitive places, she says we should focus on efficiently using the supply we already have.

“About 80 percent of the phosphorus we’re using is lost or wasted,” Cordell says, but she adds that it doesn’t need to be lost forever. “If we’re smart, we can capture and recover that phosphorus for reuse.”

This story was produced in collaboration with reporter Celia Guerrero and Round Earth Media.

Related: Deep sea mining: Economic bonanza or environmental boondoggle?

The Nobel prizes are being announced this week and next. At awards ceremonies in December, winners will receive their share of each nearly million-dollar prize and a gold medal.

According to a tradition dating back to 1901, most will also get something more obscure: a piece of original art meant to capture the essence of their work.

Nobel diploma for 2009 Peace Prize winner President Barack Obama. Original artwork by Per Fronth. 

Credit:

Photo by Thomas Widerberg. Courtesy of and copyright (C) The Nobel Foundation. 

The Nobel artists find out alongside the public who the winners are each year, so they have just a few weeks to create their works of art.

This year, that means the Swedish watercolorist selected to create the physics award art will have just a few weeks to wrap her head around the achievements of three British scientists being honored "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter."

Artists often find themselves deriving inspiration from complex topics as they create this bespoke art.

In 2013, abstract collagist Susanne Jardeback made the artwork for the pair of physicists who discovered the Higgs Boson. She alluded to the particle’s nickname of “The God Particle” with a collage in celestial deep blues and aquamarines and a hint of gold.

Nboel diploma for 2013 physics laureate Peter Higgs. Susane Jardeback created the collage to represent this Higgs boson and a 'holy' background fit for something called "the God particle". 

Credit:

Photo by Lovisa Engblom. Courtesy of and copyright (c) The Nobel Foundation. 

The next year, Swedish painter Hasse Karlsson created three two-tone watercolors of figures in dark overcoats, bathed in light spilling from storefront windows and streetlights, for the Japanese scientists credited with inventing blue LEDs.

Nobel diploma for 2014 physics laureate Isamu Akasaki. Hasse Karlsson sought to portray LED light "awakening humanity" in his watercolor.  

Credit:

Photo by Lovisa Engblom/Courtesy of and copyright © The Nobel Foundation.)

Winners of five of the six prizes, including physics, chemistry, literature, economics and peace get an original work of art as part of their prize. 

The winner in physiology or medicine does not.

Each year, the artists have as little as a week to send a sample of their work to a calligrapher so the color palate of the text on the Nobel certificate can be coordinated with the art. The final product is then sent to a book binder, who combines both elements into a custom-made leather folio.

This attention to detail is part of the Nobel Foundation’s mission to elevate scientists, economists and writers to celebrity status once a year with their red-carpet galas.   

Hurricane Matthew, the Caribbean's worst storm in nearly a decade, barreled toward the Bahamas Wednesday after killing nine people and pummeling Haiti and Cuba.

Far to the north, the first evacuations were ordered in the United States as coastal residents prepared to escape the approaching monster storm, expected off the East Coast later this week.

A woman walks down a street while Hurricane Matthew passes through Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Credit:

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

In Haiti, severe flooding and devastating winds caused untold damage to the Americas' poorest nation, where officials were still largely unable to communicate with the country's hard-hit south, where telecommunications had been disrupted.

Meanwhile, the collapse of a bridge cut off the only road linking Port-au-Prince to the peninsula that makes up southern Haiti, compounding the isolation caused by the storm.

A partial assessment of the damage in Haiti indicated that 14,500 people had been displaced and 1,855 homes flooded. Those numbers were expected to increase dramatically once communication is re-established with the area.

People inspect the rising water level of a river due to the rains caused by Hurricane Matthew passing through Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Credit:

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Next in line, Cuba was hit late Tuesday afternoon when Matthew made landfall on its eastern tip. The storm's center has since moved northeast of the island, and is heading north 10 mph toward the Bahamas, the US National Hurricane Center said.

Americans meanwhile girded for a taste of nature's fury, with Matthew forecast to strengthen again over the next couple days.

Florida and South Carolina, as well as parts of North Carolina and Georgia, have declared states of emergency. South Carolina said it would start evacuating 1.1 million people from its coast Wednesday and try to get them inland.

A man pushes a wheelbarrow as he wades across a flooded street while Hurricane Matthew passes through Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Credit:

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

A man fixes a roof of a partially built house after Hurricane Matthew in Les Cayes, Haiti.

Credit:

Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters

A man clears debris after Hurricane Matthew in Les Cayes, Haiti.

Credit:

Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters

A man cuts branches off fallen trees in a flooded area by a river after Hurricane Matthew in Les Cayes, Haiti.

Credit:

Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters

Residents amble through a flooded area after Hurricane Matthew in Les Cayes, Haiti.

Credit:

Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters

People wade across a flooded street while Hurricane Matthew passes through Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

 

Credit:

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

A man walks down the street while Hurricane Matthew passes through Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Credit:

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.

The wheels of international diplomacy usually turn very slowly, but things have moved fast this year on one major diplomatic effort — the global climate deal negotiated last December in Paris.

The agreement calls for countries to work together to keep the rise in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or about one degree C beyond the warming that's already happened.

It's a heavy lift, but the effort got a big boost Tuesday when the European Parliament formally approved the Paris deal.

The EU approval means that the Paris agreement will go into effect in just a few weeks — years ahead of what was originally expected.

“Today the world meets the moment,” President Barack Obama said after the vote by the EU. “And if we follow through on the commitments that this Paris agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet.”

The accelerated clock on the deal began with a late change to the text in Paris last December.

In earlier drafts, the start date for the agreement was January 2020, but that date was quietly dropped from the final version. Without an official start date, the default was for the agreement to go into effect 30 days after it had been formally adopted by enough countries — enough in this case being at least 55 countries representing at least 55 percent of global carbon emissions.

After Paris, outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made formalizing the deal one of his top priorities before leaving office at the end of this year. When the US and China — the two biggest carbon emitters — formally signed on this summer, it set off something of a mad dash for other countries to do it too, culminating with Tuesday's vote by the European Parliament.

There were at least a couple of reasons behind Ban’s urgency. One was the urgency of the climate crisis itself, which is getting worse and harder to roll back by the day. Another was the US presidential election. Republican candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed climate change is a hoax — despite his denial of that climate denial in the first presidential debate — and has vowed to repudiate the Paris deal if he's elected.

But with the US already officially signed on and the agreement going into effect before he takes office, the US is formally locked in for several years. As president, Trump could refuse to participate, a big wrench in the agreement’s works, but having it already in effect puts something of a brake on any US exit, providing time for perhaps a more sober reassessment of Trump's climate policy.

If, on the other hand, Hillary Clinton wins in November she's pledged to embrace the deal and forge an aggressive policy on climate change.

Of course all of this comes with a reality check. The Paris deal doesn't actually require countries to cut their emissions. Instead, it requires them only to make specific pledges to cut their emissions, and revisit those periodically, while allowing other countries to monitor each other’s progress. Essentially it puts in place what the drafters hope will be something of a race to the top on climate action, with countries competing to clamp down further on carbon emissions as the problems pile up and the costs of new technology come down.

In practice, no one knows exactly what lies ahead. Here in the US there’s a lot riding on the fate of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of his administration’s strategy to meet its Paris commitments. The plan would clamp down on carbon pollution from power plants, but it’s been held up in the courts.

If it’s ultimately struck down, a Clinton administration would have to virtually start over on climate policy. If it’s upheld, Clinton would have a running start.

A Trump administration likely would not mourn the demise of the power plan, nor look for another way to meet its goals.

Lurking on the margins of the debate, though, is the long-politically poisonous idea of putting some kind of price on carbon pollution, through either a carbon tax or a pollution cap and trade program.

Regardless of who becomes president, the climate crisis will continue to get worse, and the need for action will grow. The primary argument against a carbon price has long been that it would put the US at a competitive disadvantage, but that argument is quickly losing steam. Most of our biggest trading partners already have or have committed to some kind of carbon pricing mechanism — Europe, Mexico, Japan, even China has committed to experimenting with a carbon tax. And just this week our biggest trading partner, Canada, announced it would adopt a national carbon tax in 2018.

So just about everyone else is moving on climate action. And right now it's the US that's falling behind.

Related: The Paris climate deal won't save the world, but it does give us a chance

Invasive insects cause at least $77 billion in damage every year, according to a study released Tuesday that says this figure is "grossly underestimated" because it covers only a fraction of the globe.

Climate change is on track to boost the area affected by nearly 20 percent before mid-century, the authors reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Canvassing more than 700 recent scientific studies, researchers looked at the impact of non-native species on goods and services, healthcare and agricultural output.

Most of these studies applied to North America and Europe, which means the devastation wrought by crop-chomping and disease-carrying bugs from afar has not been adequately measured, the authors said.

The most destructive of the insects canvassed was the Formosan subterranean termite, which lives in huge colonies and feasts on wooden structures and living trees.

It has infected large swathes of the United States and has proven impossible to eradicate.

The diamondback moth, which originated in the Mediterranean region, has also spread worldwide and is a voracious consumer of so-called cruciferous crops: broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy and especially cabbage.

Also in the rogues' gallery of invasive insects are the brown spruce longhorn beetle (which ravages evergreen trees, especially in Canada), the gypsy moth (tree defoliation) and the Asian long-horned beetle (which attacks temperate forests).

Insects are "probably the costliest animal group to human society," a team of researchers led by Franck Courchamp from France's National Centre for Scientific Research concluded.

The global health bill attributable to invasive insects tops six billion dollars, in large measure due to the impact of Dengue fever, a tropical disease spread by mosquitoes.

The estimate does not include the impact of malaria, the Zika virus or economic losses in tourism or productivity, the researchers said.

Pesticides 'not the solution'

Global warming — which has seen average surface temperatures climb 1.8 degrees in the last 150 years — has pushed plants and animals towards the poles, especially northward.

"The distribution of many invasive species is today limited by temperature barriers, and climate change could allow them to invade regions that were inhospitable up to now, said Courchamp.

There are some 2.5 million insect species in the world. Only a tiny percentage — some 2,200 — have colonised new territories, but they have managed to wreak havoc all the same.

Only a tenth of insect species that wind up in another part of the world become established, and only ten percent of these qualify as invasive, the study notes.

The best way to combat this growing threat — spread mainly through international commerce -- is not more pesticides, said Courchamp.

"We've seen how well that worked," he told AFP.

Nor is it genetic manipulation such as gene drive, a technology that makes it possible to engineer local extinctions by releasing males into the wild that produce only male offspring.

"The solution is better 'bio-security'," said Courchamp.

"This includes inspection of [the] ship and air cargo from certain regions, legislation to ensure that high-risk imports must be treated and rapid eradication of new incursions."

All insects, including those in their native habitat, take a heavy toll on agriculture, consuming 30 to 40 percent of global harvests — enough to feed a billion people.

Mosquito-borne diseases, especially malaria, claim hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains a database of invasive species with nearly 900 species currently listed, including plants, animals, bacteria and fungus. 

The UN Convention on Biodiversity has said that "priority" invasive species should be "controlled or eradicated" by 2020.

California’s towering redwood trees are iconic symbols of its coastline — and so is the low, rolling fog that often blankets Route 1. And as it turns out, the two are linked in more than just imagery: The fog plays an important role in keeping the redwoods hydrated and healthy. It’s also giving us clues about how the trees might respond to more drastic climate changes.

For one, the fog helps blanket the redwoods in moisture. Todd Dawson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, says that when the air in California’s Central Valley heats up, it pulls in fog banks from the ocean.

“They come during the summer months where we don't have any rainfall here in California during our Mediterranean climate,” Dawson says. “And not only do they bring water when they come in off the ocean, they also bring other nutrients that are kind of dissolved in the fog.”

According to Dawson, redwoods can absorb fog through their roots, but also directly through their leaves. And the fog is particularly good as a source of nitrogen, which acts as a fertilizer. The nutrient mix brought in by summer fog is so unique that Dawson’s team has been able to identify in tree ring samples when a tree was fed by fog or rain.

“It was one of the coolest things,” Dawson says. “When we got some tree cores out of these trees, and we analyzed actually different parts of the single year’s worth of growth, we could see in the cellulose that’s being made by that tree a signature of either winter rainfall at one part of the year, or summer fog during the other time of the year.”

The findings mean that scientists have a trove of tree ring “signatures” detailing the relationship between drought, rain and fog, stretching back millennia. (The oldest coastal redwood tree is more than 2,500 years old, according to Dawson.)

But observations from even the past few decades of climate change are leading to new hypotheses about how redwoods respond to drought. In California’s fifth dry year, the coastal redwoods are still growing — and at a faster-than-usual rate. But Dawson says their growth may actually be linked to a decades-long tapering in the amount of fog rolling in over the California coast.

“One of the hypotheses that's out there that needs to be further tested is that as the fog has actually declined over the last 60, 70 years, the light has actually increased,” Dawson says. “And it may be that these trees are growing more because there is actually more light for them to grow on because that's what photosynthesis actually requires.”

Dawson notes that in the southern part of California, where there’s less rain, less fog, and it’s already hotter overall, the redwoods aren’t growing any faster than usual. And up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the giant sequoias, cousins to the redwood, are feeling the drought most of all.

“That's largely because not only has it come with warmer temperatures, but it's come with a lower snowpack,” Dawson says. “And that snowpack is really very important to the giant sequoia. And when they don't have it, they don't get the groundwater recharged. You contrast that to the coastal redwoods, and they have still been getting that summer fog, and so they don't seem to be as affected by this current drought as the trees that are growing up in the mountains.”

Coastal or not, the redwoods’ plight in California’s current drought has Dawson scrambling to envision their future. He’s seen climate change models suggesting that California will continue to get warmer, and rainfall patterns will change — particularly the proportions of moisture arriving in rain versus snow.

“Are they going to be able to keep growing?” Dawson wonders. “Will their ranges shrink? How will seedling recruitment and forest structure change as we march into a climate change future?”

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