Science journalist Miles O’Brien recently returned to Fukushima, Japan, for the sixth time since a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown there nearly six years ago.

O’Brien thought he would be reporting on the massive clean-up effort at the shuttered nuclear power plant, a decommissioning effort that requires 4,000 workers to suit up in Tyvek suits, three layers of socks, gloves and respirators every day.

Instead, O’Brien found himself chasing a very different story about nuclear power.

“If the Japanese had either closed or improved those plants in significant ways, we would not have had the meltdown,” O’Brien says. “So the important question is: Is nuclear the villain here, or is it inattention to iterating and improving the technology?”  

O’Brien reports in his NOVA documentary “The Nuclear Option,” which airs tonight on PBS stations, that 18,000 people died in the wake of the 2011 tsunami and quake in Japan, but no one has been killed by the radiation from the Fukushima meltdowns.  

Meanwhile pollution released by burning coal and other fossil fuel power sources sickens millions each year.

As fears over global warming continue to simmer, nuclear power is experiencing something of a renaissance even as the Fukushima clean-up continues.    

Solar and wind power hold promise, but storage problems mean neither can replace coal in the short term.

Solutions to those problems will emerge, O’Brien says, but “in the meantime we’ve got a problem that is immediate and we have some technology that could be available sooner.”

Reviving an old technology

Today, the nuclear fuel sources in most reactors are cooled by water. If the reactors lose power, as they did at Fukushima, those coolant pumps shut down, the water boils away and a nuclear meltdown ensues.

Reactors that can withstand a loss of power for longer are already being built in the search for better nuclear energy.  

But a new, potentially safer, generation of reactors is also being developed by engineers and energy startups around the country.  

According to O’Brien’s NOVA special, a DC-based think tank called Third Way found in 2015 that more than 40 startups across the US were developing advanced nuclear power designs.

These atomic business plans, they say, have garnered more than a billion dollars in investment.  

Some designs rely on liquid metal sodium as a coolant instead of water. The liquid metal is better at absorbing heat, less risky when cut off from power and doesn’t require building massive pressure chambers around the nuclear fuel, O’Brien says.

A liquid sodium reactor operated without incident for nearly 30 years at an Argonne National Laboratory testing site in Idaho. But nuclear power lost political support in the US after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and the Argonne reactor was eventually moth-balled by President Bill Clinton.

“We got scared in the '70s and we walked away from this technology,” O’Brien says.

Nuclear physicist Chuck Till at a control panel at what is now the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho. 

Credit:

Courtesy of WGBH 

Now, the idea of cooling a reactor with liquid sodium is being revived by a generation of nuclear scientists and entrepreneurs who see climate change as a bigger threat than nuclear power.

The highest-profile liquid sodium project is being developed by TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates and his former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.

“From a technical perspective, we’ve solved every technical problem that’s occurred,” Myhrvold says. “But I can’t tell you, 'Oh yes, we’ve already been successful.' It’s going to be many more years of hard work before we are successful.”

“So we made a crazy bet," he says, "and we’re going to keep making that crazy bet."

Next-generation nuclear reactors have their risks too, of course. O’Brien says that liquid metal can be volatile when it comes in contact with water. And sodium-cooled reactors generate plutonium as a waste material.

“There are issues to work through here, but there’s no free lunch,” O’Brien says. “If you want the lights to go on 24/7/365, you kind of have to pick your poison. Maybe this is one way to do it, if we look at adopting the proper safety measures.”  

The World has been reporting on stories about the human relationships at the heart of the atomic age. Read and listen to them here.  

Norway on Wednesday became the first country in the world to start shutting down its FM radio network in favor of digital radio, a bold move watched closely by other countries around Europe.

Supporters of Digital Audio Broadcasting say DAB offers better sound quality and more channels at an eighth of the cost of FM (transmission, which was first launched in the US in 1945.

Authorities also say DAB offers better coverage, allows listeners to catch up on programs they have missed and makes it easier to broadcast emergency messages in times of crisis.

"The big difference and the main reason behind this big technological shift is that we want to offer a better radio service to the whole population," Ole Jorgen Torvmark, the head of Digitalradio Norge, a company owned by public broadcaster NRK and commercial radio station P4.

Norway, generally a technology-friendly country, has been preparing for the switchover for years — DAB and FM have existed side-by-side since 1995. 

There are currently 22 national digital stations, along with around 20 smaller ones. The FM spectrum has room for a maximum of only five national stations.

The big switch-off began in Nordland, in the country's north, at 11:11 am (1011 GMT) on Wednesday and will expand to the rest of the country by the end of the year, making millions of old radios obsolete.

'It's too expensive'

But many think the shift is premature.

A poll in Dagbladet newspaper in December found 66 percent of Norwegians are against shutting down FM, with only 17 percent in favor.

While around three quarters of the population have at least one DAB radio set, many motorists are unhappy, as only about a third of cars currently on the road are equipped.

Converting a car radio involves buying an adaptor for between 1,000 and 2,000 kroner (110 to 220 euros), or getting a whole new radio.

"It's completely stupid, I don't need any more channels than I've already got," Eivind Sethov, 76, told AFP in Oslo.

"It's far too expensive. I'm going to wait till the price of adaptors comes down before getting one for my car."

So while the switch to digital will reduce the cost of transmission for broadcasters, it is listeners who will pick up much of the cost of the transition.

But Torvmark insists the time is right.

"It's clear that when there's a big technological change, some people ask difficult questions and are critical," but "most listeners are ready," he said.

"Every week more than 2.1 million listeners — half of the listeners — listen to stations that wouldn't have existed without this technological transition."

Part of the reason Norway is the first country to switch away from traditional analogue transmission has to do with topography — it is expensive to get FM signals to a small population scattered around a landscape riven with fjords and high mountains.

Closely watched

The process will be watched closely in Europe by Switzerland, Denmark and Britain, where listeners have taken strongly to digital radio and which all plan plan to shut down FM radio broadcasts at some point in the future.

The UK has not set a date but has said it will switch off the FM signal when 50 percent of all radio listening is digital — the figure is currently over 35 percent — and when the DAB signal reaches 90 percent of the population.

But other countries, including France, where neither commercial nor public broadcasters have been convinced by the new technology, are lagging behind.

"It's taken an awfully long time," said Simon Spanswick of the Association for International Broadcasting.

"Trying to persuade the public to invest in a new radio ... it's a tough ask." 

And some governments are naturally reluctant to upset voters by forcing them to buy new radios. Germany for example had set 2015 as the FM switch-off date, only to see it dumped by lawmakers in 2011.

Rex Tillerson told the Senate panel considering his nomination for secretary of state that he supported the United States remaining in the Paris climate agreement and that he has made his views known to Donald Trump.

The position, repeated several times during a day-long hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, puts him at odds with the president-elect's campaign vow to "cancel" the landmark global accord.

But Tillerson acknowledged that this advice would have to be squared with Trump's own promises to put "America first" in the new administration's energy policy, which heavily favors the unrestricted use of fossil fuels.

"We're better served by being at that table than leaving the table," Tillerson said in response to a question from Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, noting that more than 190 countries had come together to tackle climate change. 

Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil until two weeks ago, did not mention the accord or climate change in his nine-page prepared introductory remarks. But again and again in his wide-ranging testimony, he was pressed by Democrats to articulate his views on the climate crisis, because as secretary of state he would have to lead the country's climate diplomacy.

Though Tillerson cautiously backed the Paris agreement, mainly to ensure other countries are doing their fair share of climate action, on other climate change issues he was more doubtful. He pushed back against the growing scientific evidence that links global warming to severe weather events, habitat loss and spread of certain diseases. He also declined to answer questions about Exxon's ambitious in-house climate research in the 1970s and why it pivoted to funding climate denial campaigns afterward, telling senators to ask the company.

By Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr. and Marianne Lavelle for Inside Climate News. To read the rest of their article, click here. 

This is a detective story that started off as a love story. And it involves a nearly trillion-dollar-a-year industry — romance scams.

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, online romance scams account for higher financial losses than any other internet-based crime. It’s not uncommon for victims to lose tens of thousands of dollars.

Five years ago, an Austrian woman decided to give online dating a try. (She asked that I only use her internet handle, Firefly, for reasons that will soon become clear.) It had been about a year since Firefly got divorced. “My friends advised me to go online and try to find someone to share my life with,” she says via Skype.

Firefly spent a lot of time on her profile, thinking she needed to be entirely honest and open if she hoped to really connect with someone. Within 10 minutes of posting, she had a handful of virtual suitors — and one stood out. He suggested they ditch the dating site and switch to email.

Her new boyfriend had a complicated backstory: He was an American soldier serving in Iraq, and he had a son living in Ghana. But she had revealed to her new online beau how much she wanted children, and soon his 14-year-old son was emailing her. (I know; red flag.)

“He even called me, calling me ‘Mom’ a few times,” she says.

Then, after about a week of heavy correspondence, Firefly’s boyfriend announced his son’s birthday was coming up, and suggested she send him a gift.

So she wired a few hundred euros to Ghana. It was pretty gratifying, she says; the son was ecstatic.

But soon after, she learned that the son had had an accident at school and needed help paying hospital bills — urgently.

“Of course I was sending money again to Western Union,” Firefly says.

Scarcely had the boy recovered when he was struck by cholera, which required another expensive course of treatment. Within the space of about three months, Firefly wired the equivalent of about $1,000 to Ghana. She decided to do a little research online and discovered that, yes, cholera is a problem in Ghana, and yes, treating it can be expensive — except that Ghana actually has a free cholera treatment program.

“In that moment, something was not sounding right to me,” Firefly says.

She finally realized she’d been scammed. But she also realized something else: There were probably a lot of people, just like her, being victimized on dating sites, and Firefly was determined to do something about it.

One day, scrolling through an online forum, she met Wayne Mays (not his real name) from the UK. Mays is a romance scam-baiter, which means he hangs out on dating sites, posing as a naive love-seeker, with the goal of unmasking — and exhausting — confidence men and women.

“You pretend to be a victim and string them along, try to get them to waste as much of their time, money, and resources as you can,” he says.  

Mays would post any identifying details that scammers used online — from the email addresses they created to the back stories they recycled — to make them searchable. It’s a form of low-grade, guerrilla cyberwarfare. But for Mays, who co-hosts a scam-baiting podcast, “it’s also like improve comedy.”

Most people aren’t turning to him for comic relief, though. Five years ago, he and a small team of international volunteers, including Firefly, created Scam Survivors, a hotline and information resource center for victims of online scams — mostly, as it turns out, romance scams. The site tends to be a last resort for victims who are afraid to go to the police, or to tell anyone in their life what’s happened, because they’re ashamed.

“These people are not stupid at all. They're just trusting,” Mays says. “With the romance scam, it could be someone who's been married for a number of years. Their partner has either died or they've divorced and they've just started looking at online dating. So they have no idea that these scammers are out there.”

While Mays admits that they can’t get victims’ money back, they can help get victims out of scary situations, especially when romance scammers resort to extortion. The most common complaint Scam Survivors receive is for “sextortion,” where scammers make tapes of sexual encounters with their victims, then press them for money in exchange for keeping the video private. According to Mayes, they’ve handled more than 14,000 such cases in the past three years.

“We will advise them, first of all: Don't panic. Go deactivate all your social media accounts,” he says.

In Mays’ experience, romance scammers typically target 30 to 40 people a day, and will eventually move on to easier prey if they encounter resistance. Whatever you do, he adds, don’t ever pay them — that will only make a scammer more aggressive.

As for Firefly, she now refuses to date anyone she doesn’t meet the old-fashioned way, face to face. But on the internet, she’s still looking for love in all the wrong places — this time, with a mission.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet floated into space on his first-ever spacewalk Friday, and helped install three new, refrigerator-sized lithium-ion batteries to upgrade the power system at the International Space Station.

Wearing a white spacesuit with the French flag emblazoned on one shoulder, Pesquet and US astronaut Shane Kimbrough switched on their spacesuits' internal battery power to mark the official start of the spacewalk at 6:22 a.m. (1122 GMT).

"This is Pesquet's first foray into the vacuum of space," a NASA commentator said as a live broadcast from the US space agency showed Pesquet's booted feet dangling out of the airlock as he made his way outside.

Spacewalkers @Astro_Kimbrough and @Thom_Astro make good time completing a pair of "get-ahead" tasks. https://t.co/L8jk825P95pic.twitter.com/a96N0vckwZ

— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) January 13, 2017

The pair made speedy progress. About three hours into the spacewalk, they had finished their main goal of connecting adapter plates for the three lithium-ion batteries.

Then, they carried out a series of maintenance jobs, performing six extra tasks in all, before the spacewalk ended five hours and 58 minutes later at 12:20 p.m. (1720 GMT).

A NASA commentator described the outing as "completely successful," as the two men, clad in bulky white spacesuits and gloves, grasped hands and high-fived each other inside the space station.

Spacewalkers use tethers to stay attached to the station as they orbit 250 miles above Earth. https://t.co/L8jk825P95pic.twitter.com/L2HQ43JqKc

— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) January 13, 2017

New batteries

The new batteries weigh about 428 pounds each, and replace older, but far lighter, nickel hydrogen batteries.

The batteries store energy and supply the solar-powered orbiting lab when it flies in Earth's shadow.

The space station travels at a speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour, and circles the Earth about every 90 minutes, periodically moving through light and darkness.

Astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet finish spacewalk at 12:20pm ET (5:20pm GMT) after 5 hrs, 58 min. https://t.co/g4ukcRAvQmpic.twitter.com/TqU4QvdHqo

— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) January 13, 2017

After a spacewalk earlier this month by Kimbrough, 49, and veteran US astronaut Peggy Whitson, 56, a total of six lithium-ion batteries are now installed.

Eventually, all 48 of the old batteries on board will be replaced with new ones.

First outing for Pesquet

Pesquet, 38, is the fourth French astronaut to perform a spacewalk, and the 11th European.

It was Kimbrough's fourth career spacewalk.

The spacewalk was the 197th for maintenance and assembly at the orbiting outpost, a global science collaboration of more than a dozen nations including Russia, the United States and Japan.

Back at mission control in Houston, Texas, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano orchestrated the spacewalk, giving the men directions and asking them periodically to check their gloves and helmets.

The European Space Agency described Parmitano's role as lead communicator as "a recognition of ESA's expertise in station operations."

Parmitano went on two spacewalks during his six-month mission in 2013.

Shortly after the start of one of those spacewalks, Parmitano's helmet began filling with a water leak and he had to be rushed back inside the station for emergency aid.

Parmitano is also a friend of Pesquet. They trained together for six years in the European astronaut corps.

Parmitano said that ahead of Friday's spacewalk, he gave Pesquet some words of advice: go slow and take plenty of pictures.

When it was over, Parmitano told the men from his seat at mission control: "Thank you for your hard work. It has been a privilege." 

By AFP's Kerry Sheridan.

As snow, wind and rain kept many of us cozy inside our homes this December, thousands of bird-watchers grabbed their binoculars and headed out for a day in the elements.

Theirs was no average bird-nerd-devotion: They were on a mission to count every bird they saw or heard, as part of the National Audubon Society's 117th annual Christmas Bird Count.

The count, which begins every Dec. 14 and wraps every Jan. 5, is a census of local bird populations.

Taken at the end of the fall migration, the census provides a snapshot of “how many of which birds are where” — valuable data for scientists studying everything from climate change to the effects of West Nile virus. Results from this year’s tally are still pouring in, but last year, 77,000 birders recorded just under 59 million birds across the United States, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. The birds they counted represented roughly one-quarter of the world’s known bird species.

“The beauty of the [Christmas Bird Count] is that we really are getting a yardstick on everything that's out there on a continental basis at the same time of year, and we can actually really track what's happening over time with a lot of the species,” says Geoff LeBaron, Audubon's Christmas Bird Count director.

LeBaron explains that the Christmas Bird Count dates all the way back to 1900, when ornithologist Frank Chapman proposed counting birds over the holiday, rather than hunting them. In addition to collecting bird observation data, the count also tracks “effort data,” which helps scientists accurately interpret bird count results.

"So, in a year like this, where potentially, weather is impacting the number of people that are out there and how they can get around, [the count] is still valuable data because we're tracking 'birds per party hour,'" LeBaron says. “We can then sort of measure how much effort was expended to actually count all the birds that are tallied every year.”

While it’s too early to get the big picture on this year’s bird populations, local counts — each covering an area just 15 miles in diameter — have already yielded some surprises. In New York City's Central Park, counters spotted a killdeer, a shorebird that usually doesn’t hang around Manhattan this time of year, says Debra Kriensky, a conservation biologist at the New York City Audubon.

“We actually have a really amazing diversity of birds here in New York City, and even in our really small parks, our pocket parks, we get a lot of birds,” she says.

And LeBaron took part in a counting party in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, which spotted a northern waterthrush for just the third time in that area. Even stranger was the sight of a western tanager, which had never been recorded there before.

“It's a bird that shouldn't be [there] at all, let alone at this season,” he says, adding that the little tanager was a hatch-year bird, and may have headed east instead of south on its first migration. “But also there's been a series of strong storms that have swept right across from the Pacific Northwest over here, and that can also bring birds over. So we'll see how that bird fares.”

One avian species that the Christmas Bird Count has helped scientists learn more about is the bluebird. Decades’ worth of bird count data show that bluebirds have expanded their range northward “quite a bit over the last 50 years,” LeBaron says. It’s a shift that Audubon is digging into further with a new citizen science project.

“We have a new program called Climate Watch which we're testing out right now, and it's actually looking for areas where bluebirds are moving into during the winter in the north, and probably out of in the south,” he says. “So it's trying to track how the birds are responding to climate change.”

In fact, if you missed this year’s Christmas Bird Count, there are opportunities to observe birds for science all year long: Another, newer bird count, the Great Backyard Bird Count, takes place every February, attracting bird-watchers from around the globe. There’s even a program called Hummingbirds at Home: “The goal of that is actually to track what food sources the hummingbirds are using in people's yards,” LeBaron says.

Basically, as Kriensky says of the Christmas Bird Count, “everything counts.” Even the little brown sparrows that flock in droves across New York City.

“I think it's important to count the common birds while they're still common because then you can tell are there changes over time in those populations,” she adds. “And it's still pretty exciting, even if you get a high count of a really common bird. For example, we had in Central Park 1,300 white-throated sparrows. So they’re an abundant bird this time of year, but that's a lot a lot of sparrows, and it was really fun counting them all throughout the park.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday. You can watch this year’s Christmas Bird Count results roll in here.

Today we call it the “Big Dipper,” but in the year 75000, we may look up in the night sky and admire a constellation known affectionately as the “Big Spatula.”

As astronomer Dean Regas explains, that’s because the stars are moving relative to our position here. “And so you know, over thousands and thousands of years, the constellations we see today will actually change a little bit,” he says. “Where we saw the Big Dipper, they'll see something that looks like a big spatula. And who knows what kind of mythology will spring from that.”

Regas is an outreach astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory, co-host of the PBS program "Star Gazers," and author of the new book, "Facts from Space!: From Super-Secret Spacecraft to Volcanoes in Outer Space, Extraterrestrial Facts to Blow Your Mind!" It presents all kinds of trivia and other colorful facts about the universe. He shared a few of his favorite anecdotes from the book with Science Friday’s Ira Flatow.

For starters, here's a tip: When you smuggle snacks into space, open them carefully. Regas says that an astronaut, on a Russian mission, received a box of chocolates from his wife. When the astronaut opened it up, amid the weightlessness of space, the chocolates flew everywhere. “The report said it took them two hours to collect them,” Regas notes. “I think ‘eat them’ more likely would be the right answer.”

Secondly, Mercury is a great place to “catch the sunrise.” After all, Regas says, it’s the planet closest to the sun. But even better? “If you're on Mercury in certain places, you could watch the sun rise, and then it'll stop, turn around, go backwards, and set where it rose and then rise again,” Regas adds.

“It's based on Mercury's very slow day and it's very fast year. It's just a weird thing to see a sunrise, sunset, and sunrise right in the same place.”

And in his book, Regas shares even more about Mercury’s sun-viewing potential. He writes that if you were standing on Mercury during its closest approach to the sun — this point in its orbit is called "perihelion"— the sun “would look more than nine times larger and shine nine times brighter than your Earthly view of the sun during Earth’s perihelion.”

Finally, for the morbidly space-curious among us, Regas explains that there are several ways to die (quickly) on Venus. “This is probably the worst planet for humans,” he says. The first option? Bask in the heat.

“Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface — like, everywhere,” Regas says. “North Pole, South Pole, equator, daytime, nighttime — it’s 900 degrees. Then, why it’s so hot is because there are these clouds, this dense atmosphere that traps in the heat.”

If the heat doesn’t get you, Regas suggests the oppressive atmosphere would do you in. “That atmosphere, it would actually exert such force on you, it would squish you flat,” Regas says. “The air pressure on Venus would squish you like a tin can.”

Your third option for dying on Venus (although there are probably more) is to enjoy a "Venusian" rainstorm. “If the clouds open up and it starts raining, it doesn’t rain [water], it rains sulfuric acid,” Regas explains.

“So you would be a melted, squished, 'acidy' pile of goop on Venus.”

As parting trivia, Regas shares details about an astronomical event that hasn’t even happened yet. On Aug. 21, 2017, the continental United States will experience a total solar eclipse. Regas says the eclipse should be visible within a 100-mile-wide strip of land spanning from Oregon to South Carolina.

“We've been waiting for a total solar eclipse in the US for a long time,” Regas says. “Definitely mark your calendars, because, on that day, the sun will be covered over by the moon completely, covered over for a few minutes. And it is the most amazing sight you will ever see.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday. The full title of Dean Regas’ book, available now, is "Facts from Space!: From Super-Secret Spacecraft to Volcanoes in Outer Space, Extraterrestrial Facts to Blow Your Mind!" 

2016 is a wrap — and with it, likely the hottest year ever recorded. Temperatures weren’t the only anomaly: Louisiana, for instance, saw floods so severe they should only happen every 1,000 years.

According to Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, the two events are related: “The bottom line here is that the atmosphere is warmer than it was, [meaning it] holds more moisture than it used to,” he says. “When conditions are conducive to rainfall, you’re going to get more of it.” But the heat can be drying, too. Just talk to ranchers in Texas or Oklahoma who recently suffered through the worst drought on record, Mann says, or look to the drought currently baking California: “For all those people, catastrophic climate change has already arrived.”

But despite the evidence, many Americans still deny that global temperatures are on a devastating path: President-elect Donald Trump, for one, has called global warming a “hoax” on numerous occasions. Mann addresses this disavowal trend in his new book, “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving us Crazy,” which he co-authored with political cartoonist Tom Toles.

Mann says when they published the book last fall, “little did we realize how prescient the book would seem in the context of the way things have played out, in not just the UK election, the Brexit vote, but in the election of Donald J. Trump.” Suddenly, climate change denial is back in style, he says — and back in power.

“We now encounter climate change denialism, an agenda of inaction on climate change in all of our branches of government now, in the Congress and in the presidency,” he says. “It's worrying at a time when we need to be accelerating this transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels.”

Climate science shows that global temperatures are careening towards a critical checkpoint. The Earth shouldn't warm by any more than 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.   

“Some scientists will point to [that] … as the level of truly dangerous, irreversible changes in climate,” Mann says. “If we don't dramatically bring down our emissions over the next decade, then we will likely commit to warming the planet more than that amount.”

In “The Madhouse Effect,” Mann and Toles use basic science — and comedy — to dismantle common climate denial perspectives and give evidence for action.

“When you frame something in a humorous way, it leads to people dropping their defenses a little bit, sort of finding a side door,” Mann explains.

One chapter of the book, called “Geoengineering, or ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’” is dedicated to exposing the perils of large-scale climate intervention projects.

“What we're talking about here are massive interventions with the Earth system that involve shooting things into the atmosphere, particles up into the stratosphere or dumping iron into the ocean, or putting mirrors in space to reflect sunlight or interfering with the climate system … in some unprecedented and untested way,” Mann explains.

According to Mann, not only can these types of geoengineering projects be dangerous, they also involve a “kinder, gentler” form of climate change denial — insinuating that there can be a solution to climate change without quitting fossil fuels.

A cartoon from Toles drives the point home. Its caption reads, “Year 2060: The search for a breakthrough technology to solve climate change continues.” In the drawing, two scientists tinker with a contraption of tubes and wires, as one of them explains to an onlooker (dressed in stars and stripes) that “it’s a time machine we hope will take us back 50 years when we should have put a price on carbon.”

“It's a sort of gallows humor, I suppose, at times,” Mann says. “Tom Toles, in my view, has found a way to make delay and denial and despair funny, in an odd way. But without a message of hope, without an avenue forward, gallows humor alone doesn't lead us in the right direction.”

“And so one of the struggles in the book was to find a way to use the humor to go beyond just the exposure of hypocrisy of climate-change-denying politicians, but to try to paint a positive path forward at the same time.”

For Mann, hope takes several forms. For one, if the federal government fails to provide effective national climate policy (such as putting a price on carbon), he sees an opportunity for state and local governments to step in.

“I actually had a meeting with [California Gov.] Jerry Brown just a few days ago, who is really leading the way on this issue,” Mann says. “Jerry Brown actually said that he doesn't care what Trump does. If Trump starts to defund our climate satellites, California will build them and put them up there. California has the scientists, it has the lawyers. They're going to act. They're going to move ahead.”

And according to Mann, quick progress is of the essence because — here’s the other good thing — we still might be able to limit climate change to a scope we can survive within.  

“So we haven't yet committed ourselves to truly catastrophic irreversible changes in our climate that go beyond our adaptive capacity, but we don't have a lot of time left, and we do need to make progress over the next few years,” he says.

“We're going to need to find a way to make that progress even with a [United States] presidency which may end up on the wrong side of this issue.”

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

For activists Trisha Shrum and Jill Kubit, climate change isn't just an abstract concept. Rather, it has faces and names: Eleanor and Gabriel, their children. And through their time capsule project DearTomorrow, Shrum and Kubit are hoping you’ll connect the planet’s future to your loved ones, too.

DearTomorrow invites people to share letters, photos and videos about how they’re working against climate disruption — the idea being the notes will be seen decades in the future. Shrum got the idea for the project in 2014, on the flight home from a climate change conference in Iceland. At the conference, Christiana Figueres, then head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, had given a talk that ended with a haunting story:

“She has this dream where the eyes of these children who are living in the future are looking at her and saying, ‘You knew about climate change. What did you do about it?’" Shrum recalls. Hearing about it, she says, “Something kind of clicked for me.”

At the time, Shrum’s daughter Eleanor was 10 months old. “What would I say to her now?” Shrum remembers thinking on the plane. “And how could I capture this moment of how I feel today about climate change … in a way that she can relate to when she is my age?”

Shrum cracked open her laptop and began writing a letter to Eleanor. “The idea was that she was going to read it, I was going to send it to her, in the year 2050,” she adds. “And I was just writing in a very honest, open way, of everything that I’ve been doing on climate change,” she says.

But even as Shrum wrote about how she’d worked to make a difference, she found herself making excuses for why she hadn’t done more to fight climate change. 

“I’ve tried, but, to be honest, I haven’t tried all that hard,” she wrote. “Instead I’ve focused on my own life. I fell in love with your father and got married and had you. Normal, beautiful things. But I stopped trying so hard.”

For Shrum, it was a watershed moment. “When you try to give excuses to your child about why you didn’t protect their future, and why you didn’t enable the best possible world for them that you could, those excuses just fall flat,” she says.

And she began to wonder if the epiphany about her own “climate legacy” could be shared with others. Back at Harvard, where she was a graduate student in public policy, Shrum connected with Kubit, another student who was also interested in finding a way to talk about climate change with people, to show how it's meaningful on a personal level. 

By then, she had already spent eight years trying to frame the topic in a way that seemed relevant. “I had always felt like as a movement, as organizations, and as people, we weren’t always talking about it in a way that really, really got to the core of ‘Why are we doing this work?’”

“And the moment I heard this idea — Trisha was like, ‘I wrote this letter, it was a very powerful thing for me.’ I was like, ‘I’m on board, I’ll do anything.’”

Kubit became a co-founder of DearTomorrow. At the time, her son Gabriel was 18 months old, and she had been thinking a lot about what raising a child would be like “in this period of time which is very scary, and also potentially very exciting,” she says.

In a recent letter to him, she explained that the DearTomorrow project was “a small piece [in] trying to get people to take a step back, to reflect about what climate change means and to imagine what the world on the other side looks like.”

Letters, videos and photographs from people around the world are collected on the project’s website. Shrum says they’re looking for an institution to archive the trove of messages as a time capsule, to be exhibited “in 2030 and 2050, and potentially beyond.”

For now, DearTomorrow’s founders are hoping that the project will strike a chord with all types of people, from climate activists to people who may otherwise have a hard time connecting the perils of climate change to their daily lives.

“At the heart of it, this is a storytelling project,” Kubit says.

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

If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on.

Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.

“It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States … and was not effective,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of health care quality promotion.

Although this isn’t the first time someone in the US has been infected with pan-resistant bacteria, at this point, it is not common. It is, however, alarming.

“I think this is the harbinger of future badness to come,” said Dr. James Johnson, a professor of infectious diseases medicine at the University of Minnesota and a specialist at the Minnesota VA Medical Center.

Other scientists are saying this case is yet another sign that researchers and governments need to take antibiotic resistance seriously. It was reported Thursday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a journal published by the CDC.

The authors of the report note this case underscores the need for hospitals to ask incoming patients about foreign travel and also about whether they had recently been hospitalized elsewhere.

The case involved a woman who had spent considerable time in India, where multi-drug-resistant bacteria are more common than they are in the US. She had broken her right femur — the big bone in the thigh — while in India a couple of years back. She later developed a bone infection in her femur and her hip and was hospitalized a number of times in India in the two years that followed. Her last admission to a hospital in India was in June of last year.

The unnamed woman — described as a resident of Washoe County who was in her 70s — went into hospital in Reno for care in mid-August, where it was discovered she was infected with what is called a CRE — carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae. That’s a general name to describe bacteria that commonly live in the gut that have developed resistance to the class of antibiotics called carbapenems — an important last-line of defense used when other antibiotics fail. CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden has called CREs “nightmare bacteria” because of the danger they pose for spreading antibiotic resistance.

In the woman’s case, the specific bacteria attacking her was called Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bug that often causes of urinary tract infections.

Testing at the hospital showed resistance to 14 drugs — all the drug options the hospital had, said Lei Chen, a senior epidemiologist with Washoe County Health District and an author of the report. “It was my first time to see a [resistance] pattern in our area,” she said.

A sample was sent to the CDC in Atlanta for further testing, which revealed that nothing available to US doctors would have cured this infection. Kallen admitted people in this field experience a sinking feeling when they’re faced with a superbug like this one.

“I think it’s concerning. We have relied for so long on just newer and newer antibiotics. But obviously the bugs can often [develop resistance] faster than we can make new ones,” he said.

Doctors and scientists who track the spread of antibiotic resistance — the rapidly proliferating swarm superbugs — see this case as a big red flag.

“If we’re waiting for some sort of major signal that we need to attack this internationally, we need an aggressive program, both domestically and internationally to attack this problem, here’s one more signal that we need to do that,” said Lance Price, who heads the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University.

There is international recognition of the threat, which an expert report published last year warned could kill 10 million a year by 2050 if left unchecked. In September, the UN General Assembly held a high-level meeting on antibiotic resistance, only the fourth time the body had addressed a health issue.

The woman in Nevada was cared for in isolation; the staff who treated her used infection control precautions to prevent spread of the superbug in the hospital. Chen and Randall Todd, a health department colleague, told STAT testing was done to look for additional infections, but so far none have been detected.

Johnson said it’s likely, though, that other people in the US are carrying similar bacteria in their guts and could become sick at some point. “It’s possible that this is the only person in the US and she had the bad luck to go to India, pick up the bad bug, come back and here it is, we found her and now that she’s dead, it’s gone from the US. That is highly improbable,” he said.

“People have asked me many times ‘How scared should we be?’ … ‘How close are we to the edge of the cliff?’ And I tell them: We’re already falling off the cliff,” Johnson said. “It’s happening. It’s just happening — so far — on a relatively small scale and mostly far away from us. People that we don’t see … so it doesn’t have the same emotional impact.’’

Reprinted with permission from STAT, a Boston-based news site covering health & medicine.

In 1998, Slovenian toy company Mehano designed a line of children’s electronic typewriter toys with the ability to write secret messages.

Eventually, the company licensed the typewriter to another company that had something altogether different in mind for the toys. Slathered in pink, it was soon headed to market to appeal "to girls." Can you guess what brand was behind the refresh?

(Credit: Sophie Chou / PRI)

That’s right — none other than Barbie herself. But there’s a catch — the secret messaging feature was completely pinkwashed — never revealed as a capability of the new Barbie typewriter. Because girls would never be interested in writing secret messages — right?

The four encryption modes — each featuring a simple alphabet substitution cipher (or 1-to-1 encoding) — were left out of Mattel's instruction manuals and advertisements. Mattel is Barbie’s parent company. Even the latest model, produced in 2015, omitted this novel feature. You can try out the original typewriter’s encoding scheme in our app below.

It’s an all-too-common marketing assumption that continues to plague the “pink aisle” of girls’ toys. They often fail to encourage little girls to grow up to be engineers and scientists. A December report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology showed that boys were almost three times more likely to receive a STEM-themed toy for Christmas.

“STEM toys are by default for boys,” says Meryl Alper, professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. “We have to add ‘for girls.’” With over a decade of experience working in children’s media at Northeastern, Sesame Workshop and Nick Jr., Alper emphasizes the importance of representation and diversity in characters and storylines. Playtime matters.

“Children use the objects in their world to think through ideas,” she says. “If you have objects that signal to a kid that it’s not for them, either explicit or implicit, you reduce that opportunity to learn through manipulation.”

Yet the line between what is deemed appropriate for girls and what is deemed appropriate for boys remains a blurry one. Locked diaries and sewing kits may stock the shelves of the pink aisle, but cryptography and soldering are deemed less marketable.

In recent years, Mattel and other toy companies have made efforts to keep up with changing conceptions of gender and identity. Still, the path is not always straightforward. A 2010 children’s book, titled “Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer” resulted in public outcry when it featured a storyline where, ultimately, boys step in to get the job done.

Self-described feminist and geek Casey Fiesler countered by “remixing” her own version. A copyright law researcher and information science professor at the University of Colorado, she wanted to give Barbie a more empowering storyline. Her version went viral, along with other complaints, and eventually Mattel issued a public apology and pulled it from bookstores and online.

Still, Fiesler wonders about the role of Barbie and other brands’ attempts to appeal to girls. “Does it always have to be the case that we make science girly to make girls like it?” she asks.

Last year, the Earth sweltered under the hottest temperatures in modern times for the third year in a row, US scientists said on Wednesday, raising new concerns about the quickening pace of climate change.

Temperatures spiked to new national highs in parts of India, Kuwait and Iran, while sea ice melted faster than ever in the fragile Arctic, said the report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Taking a global average of the land and sea surface temperatures for the entire year, NOAA found the data for "2016 was the highest since record keeping began in 1880," said the announcement.

The global average temperature last year was 1.69 Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, and 0.07 degrees F warmer than in 2015, the last record-setting year, according to NOAA.

A separate analysis by the US space agency NASA also found that 2016 was the hottest on record.

The World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, confirmed the findings, and noted that atmospheric concentrations of both carbon dioxide and methane reached record levels.

"2016 was an extreme year for the global climate and stands out as the hottest year on record," said Petteri Taalas, the agency's secretary general.

Upward trend  

Each of the first eight months of the year "had record high temperatures for their respective months," NOAA said.

The main reason for the rise is the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas, which send carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants known as greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere and warm the planet.

The mounting toll of industrialization on the Earth's natural balance is increasingly apparent in the record books.

"Since the start of the 21st century, the annual global temperature record has been broken five times," between 2005 and 2016, said NOAA.

Another factor has been the Pacific Ocean warming trend of El Nino, which experts say exacerbates the planet's already rising warmth.

El Nino comes and goes. The latest episode became particularly strong in 2015 and subsided about halfway through 2016.

But El Nino was responsible for just a small fraction of last year's warmth, according to Peter Stott, acting director of Britain's Met Office Hadley Center.

"The main contributor to warming over the last 150 years is human influence on climate from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," he said.

Piers Forster, director of the Priestley International Center for Climate at the University of Leeds, agreed.

"Even if you remove the extra warming due to El Nino, 2016 was the warmest year ever recorded," Forster said.

"2017 will likely be cooler. However, unless we have a major volcanic eruption, I expect the record to be broken again within a few years."

Scenes from a warming world 

All of North America was the warmest since records began in 1910, breaking that region's last record set in 1998.

Europe and Asia each saw their third hottest years on record, while Australia marked its fourth warmest year since records began more than a century ago.

Unusual spikes in temperature were seen in Phalodi, India, which reached 124 F (51 C) on May 19 — marking India's hottest temperature ever.

Dehloran, Iran, hit 127 F on July 22, a new national record.

Meanwhile, Mitribah, Kuwait, hit an all-time high of 129 F on July 21, which may be the highest temperature ever recorded in all of Asia, NOAA said.

Planetwide, the heat led to more melting at the poles. In the Arctic, average annual sea ice extent was approximately 3.92 million square miles, the smallest annual average in the record, NOAA said.

"In the Antarctic, annual Antarctic sea ice extent was the second smallest on record, behind 1986, at 4.31 million square miles," it said.

"Both the November and December 2016 extents were record small."

Dangers 

Unusually hot years wreak havoc on the planet by increasing heavy rainfall in some parts of the world while leading to drought in others, damaging crops.

Fish and birds must migrate farther than ever to find suitable temperatures.

Diseases can spread faster in the warming oceans, sickening marine life and killing corals.

Glaciers and polar ice caps melt, leading to sea level rise that will eventually swallow many of the globe's coastal communities, home to some 1 billion people.

Experts say the only solution is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, in favor of Earth-friendly renewable energy such as wind and solar. 

"Climate change is one of the great challenges of the 21st-century and shows no signs of slowing down," said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London.

"The decarbonization of the global economy is the ultimate goal to prevent the worst effects of climate change."

Following Donald Trump’s election to the White House, world leaders rushed to rally around the Paris climate change agreement, indicating they would stick to their pledges to cut carbon even if the US withdrew from the international framework.

China quickly began to position itself as the new world leader in global climate policy.  

"Proactively taking action against climate change will improve China's international image and allow it to occupy the moral high ground," Zou Ji, deputy director of the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and a senior Chinese negotiator, told Reuters during the United Nations climate summit in Marrakesh last fall.  

Related: Donald Trump sees the future in coal. China sees the future in renewables. Who’s making the safer bet?

The European Union also voiced its commitment to the hard-fought agreement.

Absent from the public chorus of support was India, a silence that worried experts.

“India came to the Paris process later, their commitment seems to be weaker ... so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if India, looking at the United States, itself also backed off,” says David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has been watching international climate negotiations for decades.

India is the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter and is rapidly developing: The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pursued a massive effort to bring reliable electricity to the roughly 300 million Indians who don’t have it, and a growing middle class will boost energy demand even further in upcoming decades.

Right now, India is pursuing a “more of everything” energy policy, building small-scale solar installations in rural villages but also looking to increase the amount of power derived from coal, which currently provides about half of the country’s electricity.

Whether India leans more toward renewables or coal will have a huge impact on the country’s emissions, which in turn will contribute to global warming and sea-level rise.

Most watchers are optimistic that India will meet its current commitments under the Paris agreement: to increase the share of non-fossil-fuel energy sources to 40 percent by 2030.

“If you read India’s commitment document, it says it is doing things in its own interest and in the interest of its people,” says Lydia Powell, an energy analyst at New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation. “I have a feeling that it will not substantially change its position because most of the commitments are things that would probably happen anyway.”

There’s evidence Powell’s optimism, buoyed by finances that make sense for renewable energy in India, is warranted.

Last month, the Indian energy ministry projected the country will actually exceed its Paris commitment by meeting nearly 60 percent of its citizens’ energy needs with non-fossil-fuel sources by 2027. And it indicated the possibility that no new coal-fired power stations would be needed to meet energy needs until at least that year.  

But that’s just the beginning.

“None of the major emerging economies have made pledges that are much beyond, or at all beyond, what they were going to do anyway,” Victor says.

The initial pledges made under the Paris agreement, if they are all met, would allow for more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming. The international community has agreed that it needs to keep warming “well below” 3.5 degrees to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

“What matters in the Paris process is [that countries] make an initial pledge and then they do more and ratchet it down over time,” Victor says. “My concern is not that the current pledges are weak, it’s that if you don’t have countries like India seriously engaged, the process of deepening in confidence-building can’t really proceed as is required.”

Deep cuts will require countries like India to invest heavily in new carbon-capture technologies for coal-fired power plants, or large shifts toward additional nuclear, solar or wind energy capacity.

And if the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, isn’t making similar investments, Victor argues it’s unlikely that policymakers in developing countries like India will feel pressured to spend the money to keep up.

Ajay Mathur, a key climate negotiator for India and the delegation’s spokesman at the 2015 Paris summit, says the US could definitely stall the ratcheting up of ambition under the agreement.

“With the US leaving the climate change negotiations or being lukewarm to them, the urgency to agree on how we would step up our commitments would be lost,” Mathur says.

If new commitments get kicked too far into the next decade, “then I think we are playing with fire.”

One of the most sensitive aspects of the international climate change negotiations has been money.  

Developed countries have pledged billions of dollars a year to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of climate change and move toward greener energy sources. The financial pledges have been key in getting, and keeping, developing countries at the negotiating table.

The US pledged $3 billion to something called the Green Climate Fund, and in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama this week paid the second instalment of $500 million.

But the US still owes $2 billion, and with Trump pledging to “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs,” it is unclear if those funds will ever flow to UN coffers.

In Donald Trump's vision of America, some parts of the country's future look a lot like its past. Exhibit A: his promise to revive the flagging coal industry.

Meanwhile the world's other economic giant, China, which now uses more coal than any other country on Earth, is moving sharply in the opposite direction. China recently announced another huge new investment in renewable energy — $360 billion by 2020, which the Chinese government says will also create 13 million new jobs.

So which is the better bet on where the jobs and the energy of the future will come from?

“If you look at what people are saying across the energy industry, the future is in renewables, and natural gas and so forth,” says Mary Kay Magistad, The World's longtime China correspondent and now the host of its podcast "Whose Century Is It?"“The cost of renewables has come down so far so fast that in some places it's actually competitive with coal, and even beats coal. And the cost will probably continue to drop.”

Magistad says some of that cost reduction has actually come as a result of subsidies the Chinese government has been giving its solar companies to help figure out how to produce solar cells more cheaply.

So the big new push announced this month is hardly a brand new effort.

There’s “been a push to increase renewable energy in China, I would say for the past decade,” Magistad says. And it’s brought big results.

“In the first half of [2016], the solar industry increased production by 300 percent. It was actually more than all countries in the world except for the US, Germany and Japan. Ever. Solar and wind are increasing much faster in China in terms of capacity compared to coal use, and in fact by some estimates coal use in China peaked a couple of years ago and is starting to go down.”

Related: As Trump takes office, India remains a question mark in international climate action

As an exclamation point on that trend, China also announced this week that it has canceled 104 planned new coal-fired power plants.

And the trend is playing out more broadly. Coal use is in sharp decline in the US, mostly due not to government regulations but the glut in cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. And while coal use is still rising globally, the US Energy Information Agency says the industrial-age fuel is now the world’s slowest-growing energy source.

So with much of the world rethinking its commitment to coal, and China, the world’s biggest country and its second-largest economy, going ever bigger into renewables, is coal even a good bet for Trump and the US when it comes to putting people back to work?

“In the United States there aren’t even a million jobs in renewable energy” right now, Magistad says. “In China there about double that number already, and the Chinese government is saying it thinks it can get 13 million jobs in this sector by 2020.

“You could say, ‘Oh but the Chinese population is much bigger, China's energy needs are much greater.’ But generally, the United States could be assuming a leadership position in this industry and exporting” to fill the booming global demand.

Instead, Magistad says, China is using green energy, and Trump’s rhetoric extolling the virtues of fossil fuels and dismissing the reality and risks climate change, as another stepping stone in its push for global leadership.

“China very much sees its place in the century as being a prominent leader, if not the prominent leader, in the world. [Now,] with some of the policies that Donald Trump seems to be embracing, it gives China a chance to shine."

“If I were [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, I would look at Donald Trump up to this point as the gift that keeps on giving. ... Xi Jinping has taken a lot of flack for trying to strong-arm China's way into being a predominant player in the region, [but] over the last few weeks he's been able to come off looking very statesman-like — in terms of free trade, when he was at Davos, [and] in terms of climate change and protecting the global environment. ... Who could've seen that coming a decade ago?”

From gorillas to gibbons, about 60 percent of primates, the closest biological relatives to human beings, are threatened by extinction due largely to human activities, a study has found.

"This truly is the eleventh hour for many of these creatures," said University of Illinois anthropology professor Paul Garber, who co-wrote the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers reported that about 60 percent of primate species are threatened with extinction, while around 75 percent of species have declining populations.

Only a few thousand individuals remain in several species of lemurs, monkeys and apes, the report said.

Among these are the ring-tailed lemur, Udzunga red colobus monkey, Yunnan snub-nosed monkey and Grauer's gorilla.

Fewer than 30 Hainan gibbons, which live in China, remain alive, the report said.

Hunting, the illegal pet trade and loss of habitat to humans who continue to cut trees, build roads, mine and cultivate the land in primate habitats have contributed to the decreased numbers.

"These primates cling to life in the forests of countries such as China, Madagascar, Indonesia, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo," Garber said.

Just four countries are home to two-thirds of all primate species: Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia and Madagascar.

"Sadly, in the next 25 years, many of these primate species will disappear unless we make conservation a global priority," Garber said.

One solution, the researchers said, is easing human population growth, thereby keeping people from encroaching on primate territory.

Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, all mentions of the phrase “climate change” disappeared from the official White House website, whitehouse.gov. 

The site now outlines Trump’s “America First Energy Plan,” which promises to roll back clean water rules and efforts to fight climate change.

The plan echoes pledges Trump made during his campaign and after his election.

In the proposal, Trump commits to eliminating the Climate Action Plan, a sweeping set of policies aimed at cutting carbon pollution, inlcuding a number of President Barack Obama's executive actions. Trump also promises to eliminate the Waters of the United States rule, a technical document that defines which waterways come under the jurisdiction of federal regulators under the Clean Water Act. The 2015 rule is intended to protect smaller streams, tributaries and wetlands from development and has drawn sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers and from farm and manufacturing interests.

During his campaign, Trump also promised to lift moratoriums on coal leasing on federal lands and said he would “cancel” the 2015 UN climate change agreement.

Other rules thought to be at risk at the beginning of Trump’s tenure include the Bureau of Land Management Methane Rule and the Streams Protection Act. Those recent acts could be quickly overturned using the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to rescind a regulation within 60 legislative days of publication.

Many other rules, however, could take years to reverse.

“The announcements may come fast and furious, but actually rolling back regulations takes some time,” says Jody Freeman, head of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School and a former Obama energy and climate change advisor.

For example, Trump could announce that he would withdraw the US from the Paris agreement on Day One, but executing that withdrawal requires a legal process that takes four years.

Likewise, rescinding the Clean Power Plan that limits CO2 emissions could also require a lengthy legal process. (The legality of the rule is currently being challenged in court.)  

History as a guide

If history is a guide, sweeping environmental reforms could be blocked if they overreach the public’s appetite for deregulation.

President Ronald Reagan campaigned on a famously anti-regulatory platform. Once he took office he sought to severely cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget. He appointed Anne Gorsuch as the agency’s administrator. Gorsuch was opposed to the agency’s mission from the beginning, Freeman says, and hired like-minded staffers.

Gorsuch eventually was held in contempt of Congress.

“[Gorsuch] wound up creating such a backlash that Reagan was forced to ask her to resign,” Freeman says. “So I think this is some indication of how an administration can really go too far and overreach, and if they do, that there can be a real public outcry.”

One check on Reagan's power was a Democratic Congress, which held hearings to publicize the administration’s rollback of environmental protections.  

“I think the brakes in the system aren’t quite there this time, and so I think people are a little more concerned as a result,” Freeman says.

George W. Bush also came into office on a somewhat anti-regulatory platform, and attempted to block an arsenic standard for drinking water that had been approved in the final days of the Clinton administration.

“That resulted in such an outcry that in the end, they wound up adopting the very same standard that Clinton had put in place,” Freeman says.

Many Republican presidents have been good for the environment. Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. George H.W. Bush, Freeman says “wound up being one of our greatest environmental presidents.” He pushed for a stronger Clean Air Act to control acid rain and negotiated a key UN framework for international action on climate change.

“We have seen Republicans take the lead on environmental protection. I just don’t think that’s what we’re about to see from the Trump administration,” Freeman says.

The environment did not feature heavily in the campaign, and Trump is not viewed as having a mandate from voters to dramatically cut back on environmental protections.

A small online poll conducted in December showed that a majority of Trump voters support drinking water and air pollution regulations, as well as current climate change policies.

“I think he could be checked by public reaction, and I think that if he goes too far, he could well run into a public backlash,” Freeman says.

The price of solar photovoltaic panels is coming down, and it’s great news for consumers, solar installers and the environment.

But not everyone is happy about cheap solar: The price of solar photovoltaics is so low, that, according to Bloomberg, some manufacturers were likely selling at a loss in December 2016.

Ethan Zindler, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says that overall, the solar industry is “booming.” But as he explains, the current price of solar panels shines a light (pun intended) on a cutthroat market for manufacturers.

“If you're a consumer who's been thinking about putting solar on your roof, now it's cheaper than it's ever been,” he says. “You used to look at a system that would cost $30,000, and it may cost as little as $10,000-$15,000 now. And so there's great opportunities for consumers in the most developed countries, those of us who have nice houses that want to put them up on our roofs.”

Another type of consumer stands to benefit a great deal from cheap solar panels: “There’s about 1.3 billion people still on our planet with no real adequate energy access,” Zindler says. “A simple module or two on a thatched roof can provide a light for the first time. There are solar lanterns that are being sold at very inexpensive prices that can really make a difference in people's lives.”

But for photovoltaics manufacturers, current conditions aren’t so bright. The competition among manufacturers is intense right now. And with the collapse in prices, many manufacturers are operating at or just below their margins. “It’s hard to make money,” he says.

Nowhere are the pros and cons of cheap photovoltaics illustrated more clearly than in China. Zindler notes that many of the biggest players in solar technology — like Trina Solar, Jinko Solar and Yingli Solar — are Chinese companies that helped spur the market. Now, they’re in some ways, victims of the market’s success. But as he points out, China is the largest consumer — and supplier — of solar.

“There's a lot of attention that gets focused on China and the amount of coal that they burn, and their CO2 emissions,” he says. “But it should not be overlooked that they are the largest market right now.”

In fact, China recently pledged to spend more than $360 billion on renewable energy by 2020. “To put that in context, that industry has already in China been attracting about $100 billion a year,” Zindler says. “So it's great to have that long-term commitment, but that's basically the size of their market.”

And many other emerging markets “also happen to be countries with fantastic solar resources, great sun,” Zindler notes. “And so adding a new megawatt of capacity in these countries from solar can really be the lowest-cost way to bring more people onto the grid.”

So for solar manufacturers, the cloudy day isn’t likely to last.

“It's an interesting industry because it's still young, so it's facing pressures right now,” Zindler notes. “But overall … the percentage rates of growth that we've seen year on year have really been quite spectacular overall.”

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

With nearly 9 million hogs on farms across the state, North Carolina is the country’s second-largest producer, behind Iowa.

But all those hogs mean more than just delicious pork. Some varieties of influenza can infect both pigs and humans, and according to new research in “Clinical Infectious Diseases,” factory hog farms may actually influence the timing of the flu season for people living nearby. For Paul Lantos, the study’s lead author and an infectious disease specialist at Duke University, the findings underscore the need for “close cooperation between public health and the agricultural industry.”

To determine whether big hog farms influence the flu epidemic in nearby communities, researchers plotted four years’ worth of human flu data against a map of North Carolina’s swine CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations.

“What we found was that during 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, which were the first two years in which the H1N1 swine influenza virus was circulating, the epidemic seemed to peak earliest in counties that had the greatest number of swine CAFOs,” Lantos says.

But Lantos’ team didn’t observe early flu peaks near hog farms in 2008-2009 or 2011-2012 — years when the H1N1 virus was not prevalent.

“Our hypothesis was that starting in 2009, this novel [H1N1] influenza virus, one that was never before seen in our swine industry, began to infect a large population of susceptible pigs,” he explains. “When the virus was brought to North Carolina and the pigs were exposed, this very large population of susceptible animals effectively amplified the virus.”

“[The virus] probably went back to the community surrounding the CAFOs through the swine workers, and the epidemic, therefore, peaked faster in these communities.”

Despite the findings, Lantos says commercial hog farming isn't likely to change much — not their scale or concentration. “So long as a small minority of our population is responsible for feeding a very large proportion of our population, there will always be very large industrial agriculture,” he says.

One option would be to vaccinate pigs in large farms against the flu, but Lantos says this isn’t likely, either. “Trying to anticipate what will become predominant in pigs, then vaccinate them, is likely to be both ineffective and extremely costly,” he adds.

But Lantos thinks we do need to increase surveillance of animal viruses in CAFOs — and continue to fund research and public health projects around the annual flu epidemic. What’s more, he says we already have a major means of weakening the link between hog farms and human influenza outbreaks:

“I would certainly encourage [swine farm] workers and their families to get influenza vaccinations as soon as they become available each fall,” he says. “That is the best tool we currently have to protect workers and citizens in general against the annual influenza virus.”

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

Despite the medical advances of the past century, malaria is still a global scourge. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 429,000 people died of malaria worldwide in 2015, and there were over 200 million new cases.

Malaria’s continued toll is not for lack of prevention research: The most advanced vaccine, targeting a protein in the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, will be piloted in Africa next year. But in a Phase 3 trial, the vaccine’s efficacy ranged from just 27 to 39 percent in infants and young children.

“I would say that the main reason why we don't have an effective malaria vaccine is the complexity of the parasitic organism that causes malaria,” says Stefan Kappe, director of Translational Science at the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Seattle.

He explains that the parasite is nearly as complex as a human cell, with over 5,000 proteins. After entering the human body from a mosquito vector, the parasite first infects the liver, then multiplies to infect other cells in the body, changing at each stage of infection.

“It's kind of a turncoat parasite,” he says. “And so it has been extremely difficult to devise strategies to come up with an effective vaccine to prevent infection or prevent illness.”

But Kappe is the principal investigator on a promising new test pitting the malaria parasite against itself — “fighting fire with fire,” as he explains. By knocking out three genes in Plasmodium falciparum,his team created a weakened version of the parasite that can’t replicate in the body to pass on malaria, but still stimulates a human immune response.

Kappe says that in the first human trial, 10 volunteers (including himself) each received about 200 mosquito bites, delivering a total of about 100,000–200,000 of the genetically modified parasites. No one became ill — and he reports that even the itching wasn’t so bad:

“I’m not scratching any longer,” he says. “It has been a fun experience actually, sitting there with the volunteers and talking to them about the work, and they were so excited to do it.”

The strategy of using a weakened organism to train the body’s immune response against the full-strength version is similar to how we already vaccinate against viruses like polio. But Kappe says that weakening a parasite was a much bigger challenge than attenuating a virus. “The virus is a much less complex organism,” he notes.

Additionally, he says that traditionally, methods for weakening viruses like polio haven’t been very controlled. “[The viruses] were passed through tissue or tissue culture, for example, or through animals, and were just weakened in the process and then they were used as vaccines.”

In contrast, Kappe’s team used a “very, very designed” approach to weaken the malaria-causing parasites: “We pick genes that are important for the parasite to grow in the liver initially, and we delete those genes using genetic engineering and that renders the parasite unable to replicate after initial infection.”

Now, the next step for Kappe’s team is to test the vaccine’s efficacy, by repeatedly immunizing volunteers and then exposing them to “real,” or infectious malaria parasites, in a controlled environment. If the volunteers don’t develop malaria, it means that the vaccine works.

Kappe’s hope is that the whole-organism vaccine will not only work, but be more effective than vaccines targeting just one or a few of the parasite’s thousands of proteins.

“We have to get better than 30 percent [efficacy], and we hope with our approach we can get to 80 percent plus,” he says. “And there is good evidence that we can reach that.”

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

Seven years ago, Mark Chung took a three-week vacation. When he came home, his electricity bill looked more than a little off.

“Normally my energy bill is about $100 to $130,” says Chung. “This one was like $560.”

So he called his local utility and said there’s something wrong with my meter.

“And they’re like, ‘Oh, no, we’ve had these smart meters rolled out for a few years now. Everything is fine.’”

His response: “Well, can you tell where I spent the electricity?’”

The utility’s response: “On your house.”

Not the most helpful answer.

But Chung was trained as an electrical engineer at Stanford University. So what does he do? He goes to Home Depot.

“I bought these kilowatt meters that they had on the shelves, they’re like $10. We hacked them to be Wifi enabled, then I plugged them throughout my house. And I couldn’t find anything that was an anomaly,” says Chung.  

So, Chung took things to the next level and built an electrical map to monitor every appliance, every piece of machinery, every light in his house. And he found the problem: the pool pump had some broken rotor bars. 

“Even though it was running at the same schedule that it was before, it was just consuming a lot more energy to do the same amount of work.”

Problem solved. And business idea hatched.

If Chung could map his house, why couldn’t he scale things up and map a factory, a hospital, or a hotel that uses A LOT of energy. So, Chung left his day job and launched a company he named Verdigris. NASA was one of his early backers.

Verdigris founder and CEO Mark Chung shows off the latest version of his energy-sensing system. It’s called “Einstein.” 

Credit:

Verdigris 

Chung had high aspirations in creating Verdigris: combatting climate change.

To head off the worst impacts of climate change, to keep the temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels, scientists warn that we need to cut global carbon emissions by 40 to 70 percent by mid-century. There are two basic ways to get there: Replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. And/or, we can use a lot less energy. Verdigris focuses on that second solution by making buildings smarter.

Which leads us back to that pool pump: How did Chung isolate that as the electricity sucking source? How does Verdigris map every electron that a building uses?

In Scotland, about 15 miles west of Edinburgh in the city of Livingston, the company Jabil is using the Verdigris system in its 125,000-square-foot factory. Jabil is a worldwide company that builds electronics parts, the stuff that goes inside your brand-name radios, TV and computers. (Jabil is also an investor in Verdigris.) 

The factory’s facilities supervisor, Robbie Graham, opens an electrical panel box with dozens of wires. Each wire has a small clamp around it that can measure the flow of current around 8,000 times a second.

Sensors can measure the electrical output of machinery at the Jabil factory in Scotland. 

Credit:

Aaron Lubarsky

Graham knows which wire goes to which piece of machinery. For example, pointing at one he says, “These wires go to my air handling units on the roof.”

On the roof, Neil O’Loughlin, Jabil’s facilities lead in Scotland, picks up the tour.

The roof is littered with massive fans. The clamps around the wires downstairs collect information about these fans — how much electricity each of these units use — then sends that data to the cloud.

O’Loughlin says before Verdigris was installed, “We would have no idea, whereas now, you’re able to actually see which one is maybe being driven harder than the rest, and why. So we start to ask questions. Verdigris is never going to hand you the answer. It’s part of a detective story, to some degree, where you got to go and take the clues that’s it gives you, and you have to go and find out what that is.”

In this case, the system quickly identified an industrial-sized air conditioner that was using too much power. They fixed it and saved a lot of wasted energy. In another case, O’Loughlin says Verdigris showed big spikes in energy use in the middle of the night. He figured out that security guards were flipping on all the lights.

“That’s 300-odd lights that needed to be switched on just to do a walk around,” says O’Loughlin. “Whereas with smart lighting controls, we can say, well actually we’re only going to bring them up 50 percent so they’re going to use half the energy. And we only need to bring on certain lights, only bring on 30 percent of them.”

Put another way: Lots of little changes add up to big savings. Quickly. With Verdigris installed, the factory was able to cut its monthly electricity bill by 20 percent, saving the company thousands of dollars.

Verdigris can also use artificial intelligence to automatically phase out inefficient appliances, dial them down when nobody is in the building, or even predict when one is about to go kaput.

The goal at Jabil’s Scottish factory: eventually cut energy use by 80 percent. Turning off the lights at night and putting in energy-efficient LED lightbulbs … that was easy. Getting the rest of the way there though, that’s going take a lot more effort and capital investment.

But O’Loughlin thinks they can get there. Consider the air conditioners, which he calls chillers.

“We have chillers, they spit out heat. How can we reclaim that, how can we use it so that we don’t then burn fossil fuel to heat the building?” asks O’Loughlin.

There are a growing number of companies like Verdigris offering products that monitor how buildings use energy. So, here’s a question: Why isn’t every hotel, factory and hotel using this technology?

“I think it’s organizational, psychological and political. It’s not economics and it’s not technology,” says John Sterman with MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Sterman stresses that investing in energy-efficient buildings is the cheapest, fastest way to cut our energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. But many businesses don’t want to spend the money to fix what isn’t yet broken. Systems, like Verdigris, can identify problems like wasteful air conditioners, but then building owners have to pay big bucks for upgrades.

And when it comes to new technologies, using the cloud to monitor every electron spent, Sterman says, many hotel and hospital administrators ask this question: “Who else is doing this? And of course, at the beginning, not very many.

“So people are not willing to experiment, or, as they see it, take a lot of risk until they are sure there are lots of other folks who have done it. And that creates a barrier, a tipping point you have to get over,” says Sterman.

Hopping back to Silicon Valley, I asked Mark Chung: Let’s say I own a 20,000 square-foot factory, convince me to pay you a monthly fee to monitor my energy use.

“20,000-square-foot factory, OK, I’m just doing a back of the envelope calculation,” says Chung. “It’s probably going to be roughly a few hundred bucks a month, but you’ll probably save easily ten times that.”

Let’s repeat that — spend a few hundred bucks a month to save a few thousand. For a hospital, those savings could translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. For a company like Jabil, with more than 100 factories worldwide, savings could be in the tens of millions.

Now translate that across the globe into energy savings.

“Buildings consume about 2/3 of the world’s electricity and half of that is wasted. And that is probably about 15 to 20 percent of greenhouse carbon emissions today,” says Chung.

Good for businesses, good for the planet.

Verdigris is still a new enterprise, approaching its first 100 corporate clients. Chung says when the business really takes off, he wants to give away his technology to homeowners for free: “That’s the plan, we want to get it out everywhere, and we want to go all over the world.”

Chung has huge goals. But he’s modest about what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s says he’s just an engineer using his skills to help solve a problem.

And one footnote: If you’re curious about that name, Verdigris, it’s the bluish-green patina that forms on copper that’s left outside. Think: old French buildings.

“We thought it was a beautiful color,” says Chung. “But actually, copper is the elemental infrastructure of every single building in the world, what all of our electricity runs on. And what we have as a company mission is this desire to expose that to the world and make it green."