Millions of rocky and metallic leftovers from the formation of the universe orbit the same sun that we do, many of them found between Mars and Jupiter in what is known as the asteroid belt. And while most of these asteroids peacefully coexist with planet Earth, some of them end up on more hostile trajectories.

It may be terrifying to think that an asteroid could collide with Earth at any moment, but some of our planet's citizens have a plan for dealing with hazardous space rocks.

Dr. Carrie Nugent and her scientist colleagues are known colloquially as "asteroid hunters." She's devoted so much of her life to mapping the asteroids in our universe that she's even helped name a few.

“We named one after Sojourner Truth — that has the number 249521,” she says. “We named one after Harriet Tubman and one after Rosa Parks. And that's really delightful, and I'm happy we can honor them in this small, slightly obscure way.”

There are still plenty of asteroids yet to name. To date, Dr. Nugent and her team have mapped out 25 percent of the asteroids that would cause major damage if they were to ram into Earth. Though the still-unknown 75 percent may sound daunting to the nonscientists among us, Dr. Nugent's research has led her to conclude that asteroids don’t necessarily mean Earth-threatening natural disasters.

“The very interesting thing about asteroids is that their paths are very predictable around the sun,” says Dr. Nugent, a staff scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center and author of the new book "Asteroid Hunters."“It’s surprising to most people to learn that you can predict where an asteroid is going to be, a well-studied asteroid, every single day from now to 800 years from now.”

The system for tracking asteroids is simpler than tracking or predicting earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or hurricanes. Asteroids don’t change their orbits very quickly — at least when considering human timescales — which has allowed scientists like Dr. Nugent to map these objects sometimes hundreds of years into the future.

“Near-Earth objects are usually what a lot of people are really interested in because those are the ones that get close to us,” Dr. Nugent says. “Near-Earth objects have kind of three fates: They can end up hitting a planet, they can end up hitting the sun or they can end up getting ejected from the solar system entirely.”

At least for the next few hundred years, there are no known asteroids that currently have an impact trajectory towards Earth.

“What we’re really doing now is searching for things that may get close to Earth, but nothing known is going to get close,” says Dr. Nugent.

On the whole, asteroids contain a great deal of information about the earliest days of the solar system. By studying these objects, scientists can glean important information about what the cosmos were like before the solar system had planets.

If an asteroid were ever careening towards Earth, the human response would have to vary based on the object, Dr. Nugent says.

“Asteroids are really different, some are made out of rock, some are made out of metal. And they have different physical properties — some spin incredibly quickly and can make a full rotation in 20 seconds, which is amazing for something that is tens of meters across. Some spin very slowly, and so your exact response would definitely want to be tailored to the scenario,” she says. “And that’s why we’re looking now. We’d want to give ourselves as much lead time as possible if it does happen that there is something headed towards us.” 

Some small asteroids have crashed into Earth before. One such asteroid was 2008 TC3, which was 80 metric tons and about 13 feet long. The asteroid, which was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey, crashed into northern Sudan’s Nubian desert on Oct. 6, 2008.

“That was really exciting because it was discovered, it was tracked, and the impact location was predicted with enough time to warn the government of the Sudan, and also to give a heads up to a couple of pilots flying an airliner, and they were able to divert and actually watch it go down, which is pretty cool,” says Dr. Nugent. “That was a very small asteroid, there was no threat of injury to anybody, and so that asteroid broke up, it had a beautiful explosion, and then some scientists went down and later collected meteorite samples of it, which was really exciting. That was the very first time we were able to compare meteorites that we could hold in our hand to what we saw out in space.” 

This story originally aired on PRI's The Takeaway. 

Fifteen years ago, the center of London was densely populated — not just with people, but also with birds. Particularly pigeons.

Huge flocks of them would fill the capital's parks and squares. But something has changed. The pigeons are gone. One reason for the pigeon decline can be seen in Trafalgar Square at 7 a.m. every weekday. 

Not far from Big Ben, the square is the very center of the city. Even early in the day it bustles with commuters, tourists and school parties. But among all that activity there is a hunter on the loose. A silent killer. One who watches over every movement — from the National Gallery on the north side to Charing Cross Station on the south. Up close to him, you notice powerful shoulders, a penetrating gaze — and also a tendency to twist his head around to the back looking for prey.

That hunter's name is Lemmy, and he is a Harris's hawk. 

Hawks have been used to deter pigeons in London since the early 2000s

Credit:

Leo Hornak

Lemmy is employed by the Greater London Authority to ensure that places like Trafalgar Square remain free of pigeons, and therefore free of their waste. He works in a team: his handler, Paul Picknell, is employed by Hawkforce, one of London's leading avian security firms. 

Speaking to Picknell, there is no mistaking his love for his work buddy. "He's a work colleague, he's a friend. [But he is] essentially a wild animal. Never tame. In amongst all these people — he’ll totally ignore everybody apart from me," he says. "It’s almost a telepathetic communication."

Until the early 2000s, pigeons ruled Trafalgar Square and other open spaces in the center of London. You could buy food to feed them. Even Mary Poppins had a song advising Londoners to feed the birds.

Things changed in 2003, when the mayor of London declared war on the birds. So many pigeons produced a lot of ... waste. And that's not hygienic.

The pigeon feed stall was closed. If Mary Poppins tried to feed the birds now, she would be hit with a fine. But a humane and natural way to move the pigeons on was needed. And that's where Picknell and Lemmy come in.

As Picknell is talking, Lemmy suddenly gags and vomits up a small oily lump of yellowish paste onto the sidewalk. Picknell is relieved. "Oh. That’s what we’re waiting for," he says. "That’s the cast. It’s basically beaks, the feathers, the claws of the food he had yesterday that he can’t digest." 

He picks it up and rubs it carefully between his fingers for a diagnosis. It crumbles under his thumbnail. "That one’s quite normal looking. Nothing wrong with this bird. He’s ready to go now."

Although Harris's hawks do hunt birds like pigeons, the idea is not for Lemmy to kill while on duty. He is fed exclusively from a small plastic box of raw chicken scraps. Picknell takes a large handful and fills his pocket with these snacks at the start of every shift.

Instead, the idea is to use Lemmy's presence to deter and intimidate pigeons. "It’s a visual thing. It’s a presence," says Picknell. "The pigeons are aware there’s a bird of prey — there’s predator around, therefore they stay away."

There’s an air of "The Sopranos" when Picknell describes the effect Lemmy's presence has on pigeons. "I suppose he does intimidate them," he says. "The big kid's around. Keep yourself to yourself. Stay out the way."

Unlike other forms of pest control, such as poisoning or shooting, the use of hawks is environmentally friendly and ultimately humane. It is also popular: Picknell and Limmy are constantly pestered for selfies. Some hawks like the attention more than others, Picknell says. Lemmy is not too keen on having his feathers ruffled.

There was some backlash at first — a renegade pro-pigeon activist group is still rumored to carry out vigilante bread distributions somewhere nearby — but the square today is much cleaner. And almost completely free of pigeons.

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget marks a sweeping shift in domestic environmental policy and a decisive sign that US international leadership on climate change has ended.

The first draft of a 2018 budget, released by the White House on Thursday, would cancel funding for climate change research and United Nations climate programs. It would also chop funds for enforcing the Clean Power Plan, a rule that would have cut emissions from the electricity sector.

Both the UN funding and the Clean Power Plan — key measures from President Barack Obama's administration — are crucial to meet commitments the US made at the 2015 UN climate summit in Paris.

Large cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department laid out in the budget free up some of the funds for a $52 billion defense spending increase.

“A budget that puts America first must make the safety of our people its number one priority — because without safety, there can be no prosperity,'' President Trump said in a message accompanying his proposed budget.

Related: How big is Trump’s 10 percent defense increase? It’s three times Canada’s annual military budget, for one.

The Trump proposal says cutting climate change programs alone would save American taxpayers more than $100 million compared to 2017.

A section of the 2018 draft federal budget outline for the EPA. 

Congress has the final say over budgets, and White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney acknowledged to reporters that passing the cuts could be an uphill struggle.

He said the administration would negotiate over replacement cuts.

“This is not a take-it-or-leave-it budget,” Mulvaney said.

Still, the budget is important in signaling White House priorities and its message on climate change is clear.

Backing away from world climate leadership

US leadership was key in winning a hard-fought 2015 international agreement in Paris to cut climate-warming greenhouse gases worldwide.    

China and the European Union both said after President Trump’s election that they would step in to fill a climate leadership void during international climate negotiations. But the US backing away from the UN process may lead countries that came reluctantly to the Paris deal to question their own commitments.

“There are many other countries out there where they were quite divided,” says Andrew Light, a former State Department climate change negotiator in the Obama administration.

“There are folks still in those countries who think that they went too far out on a limb in joining the Paris climate agreement, and so these kinds of signals could reopen the debates in those countries about whether or not they’re still committed to this process.”

The US has also committed to pay billions of dollars into a UN fund for developing countries. The president’s budget would cease those payments, as well as funding for the Global Climate Change Initiative, an umbrella plan that funds dozens of international programs to help foreign countries develop sustainably and bolster defenses against climate change.

“This completely undercuts our influence,” says Light, who is now a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and a professor at George Mason University.

Climate change and national security

Climate change is not just a diplomatic concern, but a national security one, as well.

Drought, famine and rising seas contribute to instability that can trigger or exacerbate conflict.

Unlike some in the Trump administration, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is on record stating that he believes climate change is real and a threat to international security.

"Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today," Mattis reportedly wrote in testimony to senators after his January confirmation hearing.

"The effects of a changing climate — such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others — impact our security situation," Mattis added.

Mattis’s testimony was published by the nonprofit investigative news site ProPublica on Tuesday, two days before President Trump’s budget-slashing environment spending was released.

It’s unclear if, or how, environmental cuts might impact the Defense Department’s capacity for forward planning when it comes to climate change.

Andrew Light argues the changes will undercut US security.

“It basically eliminates the support we were giving to other countries, especially in unsecure parts of the world, to respond to climate change,” Light says.

Less research, global repercussions

US scientists produce much of the world’s science on climate change, and government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the EPA monitor and collect data that climate researchers all over the world use.

“When that goes away, we’re really undermining the global effort to respond to this problem,” Light says.

The EPA budget cuts are expected to cost 3,200 jobs at the agency. 

If President Donald Trump has his way, the Environmental Protection Agency will be downsized quite a bit: 31 percent, with more than 50 programs eliminated, as laid out in his budget proposal released on Thursday. But penny-pinching isn’t the only tool his administration and Republican lawmakers have at their disposal, to undermine the agency.  

As two environmental law experts explain, different congressional actions and executive orders can also be used to chip away at the EPA. Some already have.   

The president can't do away with the EPA altogether because “there are a bunch of statutes on the books that require EPA to do things: to issue regulations, to enforce laws, to clean up hazardous waste sites and so forth,” says Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles. “So, I think what they're basically trying to do is kill EPA through a thousand cuts, as opposed to actually abolishing it outright.”

Related: It's starting to look like 'Home Alone' at the State Department

In February, Congress invoked the rarely used Congressional Review Act to reverse a rule finalized under President Barack Obama late last year: the Stream Protection Rule, which kept the coal-mining industry from dumping waste into nearby waterways. Another repeal, of the Methane and Natural Gas Waste Prevention Rule requiring energy companies to reduce methane emissions from fracking, is awaiting Senate approval. Under the act, which allows Congress to roll back federal regulations within 60 legislative days, the rescinded rules can’t be adopted again.

House Republicans have also introduced the REINS Act (short for Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny), which would require the House and Senate to vote on any new regulation costing more than $100 million. The proposal isn’t limited to the EPA, but Carlson says it would affect “essentially any major environmental regulation,” including in future administrations.  

“I mean, just to give you one example, a rule that protects the population from mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants has costs of about $9 billion,” she says. “But it also has benefits in the tens of billions of dollars from the protection of public health.” 

What’s more, President Trump reportedly plans to issue an executive order instructing EPA head Scott Pruitt to dismantle the Clean Power Plan. 

“We expect that [the executive order] will say not just that EPA should repeal the existing rule, but also that it shouldn't even offer up a new rule to take its place,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, adding, “And that's fundamentally different than saying, 'We're going to repeal this rule, look at the policy preferences and choices that went into it and come up with something new,' that … would be maybe weaker.”

Draconian' cuts

President Trump’s proposed budget also calls for the elimination of approximately 3,200 positions at the EPA. Carlson says that if the budget passes, “there's going to be essentially no one left to administer the laws, to clean up the environmental messes that still remain, and to figure out how to move forward and continue to make environmental progress and clean the air, clean the water, and protecting the planet from higher temperatures.”

Related: President Trump, how can eliminating environmental regulations create jobs and still protect the environment?

And that’s to say nothing of the programs supported by the EPA. “These cuts are so draconian that we'd see the essential elimination of all kinds of programs that do things like clean the Chesapeake Bay, clean the Great Lakes, remove or clean up diesel vehicles which emit cancer-causing particulate matter,” she says.

But for now, President Trump’s budget is still just a proposal — and Burger senses that its cuts across numerous agencies could prove unpopular. For example, the administration wants to cut all funding for floodplain mapping, he says, which helps the Federal Emergency Management Agency forecast who’s at risk of flooding from storms and rising sea levels.

“They also want to cut funding for disaster planning and for disaster recovery,” he adds. “Now, you know, when we think about climate change, we often think about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But climate impacts are happening now.”

The Sabin Center has built a “Climate Deregulation Tracker” that follows the federal government’s movements on climate policy. Burger suggests that concerned citizens use the information they find there to engage directly with administrative agencies — like the EPA.

Related: Trump budget cements pivot away from US climate leadership

“When the agency pulls back on a final rule, they don't get to just say we're done with it,” he says. “They actually have to go through a regulatory process which involves providing public notice and allowing for public comment.”

And there’s work that can be done at the state level, Carlson adds. “A number of states are doing really innovative things in the clean energy sector, including not just the blue states but red states,” she says. “So get your state legislators to support renewable energy, other clean energy moves and also support environmental organizations — those nongovernmental organizations that actually can keep track of a lot of the regulation.”

Getting the public engaged is “a bright spot here,” she says. “I think people do care about the environment and they need to express how much they care about it.”

“And you know what? Congress listens to that.”

Related: How big is Trump’s 10 percent defense increase? It’s three times Canada’s annual military budget, for one.

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

The US military sees climate change as a national security threat. So, it’s finding ways to adapt to global warming, to make the armed forces stronger and more flexible. 

For starters, green technologies such as solar "blankets" and hybrid vehicles have improved operations within the Marine Corps and the Navy, according to Capt. Jim Goudreau, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. He spent over two decades in the supply corps and is now the head of climate at Novartis.

The US military burns over 1.25 billion gallons of fuel a year, and the Department of Defense is the country's single largest consumer of fossil fuels, according to Goudreau. “When you talk climate issues, you can talk mitigation or adaptation. Every single gallon of fuel that we burn is carbon going into the atmosphere," he says. 

That has an impact on the climate, which then "drives operational tempo as we respond to more disasters as a result of weather events [and] as we respond to regional insecurity and instability, which then, of course, drives greater fuel consumption, putting more carbon into the atmosphere."

It's a cycle that feeds itself. But at some point, "we've got to break that, and we've got to break our dependency on fossil fuels.”

Climate change itself doesn't create conflict or wars, but it is a “threat multiplier,” Goudreau says. “[Climate] changes conditions that will lead to greater chances of physical conflict and certainly will lead to tension over resource scarcity.”

“Given competition for resources, if that becomes an issue for your survival, that becomes conflict,” he continues. “And all too frequently, the US is involved in trying to help mediate that conflict or resolve that conflict, and so it changes where we operate and what conditions are.”

At one point in his career, Goudreau handled the logistics support for the US Navy’s amphibious 7th Fleet, which covers an area from Hawaii to Pakistan and Vladivostok down to the Antarctic. 

“Trying to move fuel to all of those ships and all those Marines in a theater that large is incredibly complex,” he says. “If everything goes perfectly well, it's a tough day, to make things happen on schedule. If the slightest thing goes wrong, then you miss replenishments.”

In 2010, the US Marine Corps created the Experimental Forward Operating Base demonstrations, which integrated renewable energy sources into three units in Afghanistan. The Corps was able to completely reduce the need for fuel resupply in two of those units, Goudreau says. “They carried mobile solar units and hooked up their computers, their radios and their artillery targeting software to solar arrays that had battery storage, and they were able to fight the fight on a daily basis without moving liquid fuel in." 

“In real terms, that means a young Marine didn't have to go into harm's way simply to move fuel to that forward operating base,” he explains. “The Marine Corps recognizes that the enemy knows that we need fuel and, if they can interrupt [our] supply, then that gives them an advantage … Renewables themselves give, in the Marine Corps’ case, greater agility, greater speed and greater self-sufficiency.”

Goudreau anticipates that the new Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis will continue to embrace the move toward energy efficiency. While Mattis was head of US Central Command, he “made a very strong push with his troops to focus on operational energy — to understand what they were consuming, what benefit they got operationally from it and to try to reduce vulnerabilities by using less fuel,” he says.

Goudreau believes that continued scientific research is “incredibly important” to the US armed forces.

“It's the foundation for our capability,” he says. “It serves as a foundation for forecasting into the future. Just simply technology development. Nuclear propulsion. We wouldn't have the fleet and the capabilities that we have today if the government had not made significant investments in basic science, basic research and development and applied science."

For example, without investing in satellites, "we wouldn't have the weather forecasting technology that we have today that's critical to safe operations at sea. We wouldn't have GPS, which is critical to operations all over the globe for the US military.”

“So, I would say that [science] serves as the foundation for our capability and will continue to serve as the foundation and absolute requirement for our continued operations,” he adds.

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

The mild winter weather in New England is bad news for the region's moose.

In northern New England, moose number about 70,000, but changing weather seems to be throwing the balance of nature off-kilter, giving an edge to one of the animal's most dangerous enemies — bloodsucking ticks.

This has alarmed moose researchers, including Professor Peter Pekins, who is the chairman of the Natural Resources and Environment Department at the University of New Hampshire.

For the past three years, New Hampshire and Maine — through the university — have been following well over a hundred moose that are captured each January. Researchers measure the mortality rate and the “productivity” of these animals. (Productivity refers to the number of calves produced per cow and the survival of those calves over time.) During those three years, both states have averaged around 70 percent mortality of calves and lower-than-expected productivity from adults, Professor Pekins says — and the cause is clear.

“The rise in mortality and drop in productivity have been 99 percent associated with extreme, heavy loads of the winter tick, a parasite of moose,” Pekins says. “The tick load the calves are carrying eventually results in their death. This death occurs in late March through mid-April — probably 85 percent of the deaths occur at that time — and that's directly associated with the adult female tick taking her blood meal, which can be 2 to 4 milliliters of blood per tick.”

Moose calves are most likely to succumb to ticks in late winter.

Credit:

 Pete Pekins

Researchers are finding extraordinarily high numbers of ticks on stricken calves: about 35,000 to 95,000 ticks per hide.

“In general, if you're over 30,000 ticks, you're going to have a problem,” Pekins says. “So, these animals die from acute anemia and massive weight loss, because they simply can't replace this blood loss volume that quickly.”

Adult moose are also not in optimal condition, Pekins says. Ten years ago, about 30 percent of yearling females were breeding. Now, almost none are breeding. “It’s my hypothesis that this is the physiological penalty they pay for a high tick load. They don't pay with their life, but they pay with their productivity, and this is all contributing to the decline in the population."

Pekins says two fundamental occurrences combine to create high mortality and low productivity: a very high moose density and “cooperative” weather — that is, weather that favors the ticks over the moose.

“Over time, as our weather patterns have changed, it's not surprising that we would have these [mortality] events,” Pekins says. “But to have three in a row was really unprecedented in our knowledge of this host-parasite system.”

Wildlife officials have few options available to them to change the situation.

“You can hope the weather changes,” Pekins says. “Some people have strong beliefs that climate change is not real, so the argument [from them] would be to have as many animals left on the landscape [as possible], so that a larger population would be there to respond when winter starts occurring around the first week in November again. [But] there’s a growing proportion of the human population that doesn't think winter begins in November anymore in New England. The change is very real.”

For Pekins, this basically means either accepting the current reality or taking the only practical proactive approach, which would be to “institute a higher harvest to bring down the density of moose.” That could effectively break the unhealthy host-parasite relationship, reduce the mortality of calves and increase the relative health and condition of the adult moose, he says.

The type of harvest Pekins envisions could be done "in a reasonably conservative manner, if a state or agency decided to go that route," he says. "I personally think that there would be a bit of a social outcry about that because it's a very counterintuitive approach to what is clearly a slow decline in a population."

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

NASA was big on the internet in late February, when it announced that scientists had discovered seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star, 40 light-years away.

The planets are closer to their cool star than Mercury is to the sun, and scientists think they could all be temperate enough to hold liquid water — a key ingredient for life. Not surprisingly, the scientific community is abuzz about what the planets hold, water and otherwise.

“Is there life on those planets? I'd say that's what I'm most curious about,” says Sara Seager, an exoplanet researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But that kind of science-fiction type of thoughts aside, really it's like, what are these planets?”

“I mean, are they like Mercury? Have they lost their atmospheres due to the craziness of the star? Or are they really just, you know, nice worlds like Earth, with oceans and continents and clouds and things like that. I think even just knowing the very nature of these planets is what we're itching to get at.”

The planets orbit a star called TRAPPIST-1, which lies in the constellation Aquarius. TRAPPIST-1 is much smaller than our own sun — just larger than Jupiter, actually — and its size made it a logical place to look for new planets, Seager says. “It's easier to find small planets around small stars than it is small planets around sun-like stars.”

Excitement about the planets began mounting last May, when scientists announced they had detected three of them orbiting the star. To find them, they used the “transit method,” looking for dips in the brightness of TRAPPIST-1 caused by a planet passing between the star and their telescope.

Then, scientists used the Spitzer Space Telescope to take another look at the system over a period of 20 days. This time, they counted not three, but seven Earth-sized planets in orbit around the star.

For the scientific community, detecting the planets is just the first step in a long process of discovery. “We have no idea whether they're going to be like Earth or not,” Seager admits. Determining whether any of them have water will tell us much more — which she says we can eventually test for, by examining their atmospheres for water vapor.

“If there are intelligent beings elsewhere that are looking back at us, perhaps they're on their own radio show today saying, ‘Hey, we just found three planets, three Earth-sized planets,’ and they'd be thinking of Venus, Earth and Mars,” Seager says.

“Mars is actually pretty small, but at this point, that would be the equivalent. It's like, ‘Wow, we found all these planets, they're all Earth-size, some are in the habitable zone.’ But we need a further look to really narrow it down.”

Scientists have already trained the Hubble and Kepler space telescopes on the TRAPPIST-1 system. According to NASA, they’re scanning it for puffy, hydrogen-packed planetary atmospheres, and even other planets. And when the James Webb Space Telescope goes online in 2018, it could reveal even more about the planets’ temperatures and atmospheric makeup.

In the meantime, there’s lots of work to be done. “In the short term, I'm sure there will be a flurry of speculative research papers on pretty much every topic — from how they formed, to whether or not they have atmospheres, to what the chances for life are,” Seager says.

There are also plenty more planetary systems to be discovered elsewhere in the sky — and that’s where we can help. Planet Hunters, a citizen science project from the online platform Zooniverse, is a treasure trove of data from the Kepler telescope. The project asks volunteers to scan stars using transit techniques, similar to those used to find the planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1.

“Whether you're a 5-year-old or a 95-year-old, our ability to recognize patterns is really sophisticated,” says Laura Trouille, director of citizen science for Zooniverse. “You can just go on to the site, look at a light curve, just how light changes over time and look for dips.”

According to Trouille, the project has already uncovered a few new worlds. “Through that process a couple of years ago now, some of the volunteers on Planet Hunters saw a four-star system with planets around it, and that was the first of its kind,” she says.

The volunteers, she adds, “were part of the analysis and very much co-authors on the paper.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday. More information about the Planet Hunters citizen science project is available at www.planethunters.org. 

Last month, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine released a report about the use of gene editing techniques like CRISPR on human embryos. The new report, coming from two globally respected scientific organizations, suggests the technique could be warranted in certain cases — not just in the laboratory, but in real life.

In an article for Science magazine, staff writer Jocelyn Kaiser called the report a “yellow light” for embryonic gene editing, which has long been off the table in the United States. That’s because when it comes to editing human embryos, there are thorny ethical concerns on both sides of the debate — and according to Kaiser, the report’s authors proceed cautiously.

“So, what the report says, is, there are many reasons why we need to be very careful about editing the human germline — that is, making changes to eggs or sperm or embryos that could be passed on to the next generation,” Kaiser says.

When might that yellow light turn green? 

“There are a few rare instances where we may want to do it,” she explains, “and that is families that have a severe genetic disease that they are going to pass on to their child, but they can't prevent it any other way, that we might want to allow [gene editing] to happen in those cases.”

Although genetic editing could protect embryos from devastating medical conditions, Kaiser says that many people worry its application wouldn’t end there.

“If we do let it happen, then it could sort of open the door to many other changes to embryos that we would not maybe feel so comfortable with,” she says. “Like modifying an embryo to make it a better athlete, or make it smarter, or have blue eyes, or whatever.”

Those potential “designer edits” bring up issues of access. “What about the people who didn't have the ability to do this?” Kaiser wonders. “Would they be left out?” Not only that, the effects of embryonic edits would ripple through generations.

“If you change the DNA of an embryo versus an adult or a child, that change will be passed on to that embryo’s descendants,” she says. “That's something you couldn't stop once you've done it. It's going to be passed on.”

“And so that's one reason why people are worried about doing this. Do you want to start tinkering with our genes in that way?”

We might not get much choice: Scientists in China have already reported genetically editing embryos. Ultimately, Kaiser says, the national academies’ report is not binding — it’s  just advice. “Not only to the United States, but to other countries. And they can decide if they want to follow the advice.”

“But … these are very respected bodies, and when they offer their advice on something, it will it will have a lot of influence.”

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

Here’s an unexpected story: Scientists are working on a drug to stimulate ear hair growth.

In this case, the ear hairs in question are actually tiny, sensory hair cells in our cochlea. We have about 15,000 of them in each ear, and they’re crucial to helping us detect sound waves. But the little cells are also very fragile.

“There's so many ways that these hair cells can be damaged from loud noises, and it really doesn't take a long exposure,” says Jeffrey Karp, an associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Noise isn’t the only culprit, he adds. Age, some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs and even heavy aspirin use are thought to contribute to hair cell damage, as well.

The cochlear hair cells don’t regenerate, so right now, damage to them is permanent — and common among people with some types of hearing loss. But that may not always be the case. A team of Boston-area researchers, including Karp, have developed a technique to stimulate progenitor hair cells in the inner ear — growing 2,000 times more hair cells than previously possible.

For Karp and his team, their research grew from a simple question: If some animals can regenerate limbs and teeth, why can’t we? “We were kind of envious of creatures like sharks that can regrow their teeth throughout life,” he says. “We were envious of salamanders, where you can cut off an entire limb and it regrows, or a tail. And we said, you know, why have humans been left out of this regenerative process?”

“And when we take a close look, we actually haven't been left out of this completely,” he says. Specifically, the lining of our intestines regenerates quickly, every four to five days. “It's really the most regenerative tissue in our entire body, so it was really a great place for us to start our work.”

Researchers isolated the stem cell in our intestinal lining that’s responsible for the snappy regeneration. “And so through trying to really understand the cues of how that cell is regulated, we were able to come up with small molecules ... that could regulate that stem cell, and grow it in almost unlimited quantities in pure form,” Karp explains.

In the laboratory, the team applied the molecules to progenitor hair cells from the inner ear — to great effect. “We were able to obtain very large populations of hair cells,” Karp says. “We demonstrated that they had functionality — you know, really bona fide hair cells. And we demonstrated this for tissue from mice, nonhuman primates and even human tissue.”

Now, a company formed by members of the team, Frequency Therapeutics, is readying the technique for clinical use. Karp says they hope to begin human clinical trials within about 18 months and eventually deliver the treatment as an outpatient procedure for hearing loss. He thinks the treatment could someday be as mundane as a simple injection.

“A lot of people have middle ear infections, and it's a very standard procedure for people to get antibiotics injected into the middle ear,” Karp explains. “And so we envision really just kind of piggybacking on that type of infrastructure that's already available.

“Really, the goal here is to get the molecules into the inner ear. So, we would just inject them into the middle ear, and allow them to diffuse across and it should be a relatively quick procedure.”

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

At a time when many modern farmers face problems like soil erosion, nutrient loss and drought, the black dirt on Doug Palen’s family farm is a field apart: Its health and texture just keep improving.

“Its organic matter continues to rise, and it just continues to perform even better than it did,” Palen says.

Palen’s soil secret? He doesn’t till the fields on his Glen Elder, Kansas, farm. Instead, when he plants each season, he seeds directly into the stubble of old, harvested crops. He also rotates crops across the fields; his farm’s website describes a rich mix of standard cash crops like wheat, corn, soybeans and sorghum, alternated with others like oats and sunflowers. And even after the harvest, he doesn’t leave the soil exposed.

“What we're constantly trying to do is mimic the native system, the natural system where there's always something growing,” Palen explains. “Always trying to 'armor' the soil, [as] we often talk about, is to protect it with the residues on the surface.”

Armor may sound like a strange thing for dirt to need — but the soil is precious, and it’s being washed or wind whipped out of fields across the country.

“Soil actually takes about 500 years to create a single inch,” says Miriam Horn, a writer at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of "Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland."

"It's a mix of eroded rock and organic matter. And … we still are losing in the US close to 2 billion tons of topsoil every year. In some parts of the country, that's the equivalent of about a foot or more of topsoil gone."

Palen, a fourth-generation farmer, began using no-till practices after he took over the family farm in 1993. “It looked like a good system to embark on, and one that would afford a young producer a lot of opportunities,” he says. And so far, it has.

He’s a founding board member of a nonprofit, No-till on the Plains, which educates farmers about no-till practices. And he’s seeing the benefits on his own farm. For instance, while water is a premium in the plains of Kansas — even more so with recent drought— Palen says his unirrigated farm does just fine.

“In my area, everything is done on dry land,” he says. “We don't have irrigation or natural water surface or subsurface to do so. Everything I get is what Mother Nature gives me, and so that's what we work with, and we get along well.”

Palen’s story doesn’t surprise Horn, the writer, who says untilled soil is much better at capturing water.

“It stays very porous, and so the water permeates very deep in the soil,” she explains. “There isn't nearly as much evaporation or water loss, and so [no-till farmers] are much more resilient to these extremes of weather.”

But she adds that for no-till farmers, the benefits go deeper than water. “They have to make many fewer tractor passes, which saves a lot on time and diesel, but they also frequently add much less nitrogen, because the crop rotations are doing that work. Nature is providing the nitrogen that they need.”

No-till farming can also counter what Horn describes as damage done to croplands by plowing. “A third of Earth’s organisms live in the soil,” she says, where they sustain photosynthesis, protect plants and humans from disease and hold nutrients and carbon in the soil. She likens a plow, twisting through the soil, to a tornado.

“You scramble these symbiotic communities, you collapse the homes that they live in and you overfeed them, really, with the residues,” she says, adding that in turn, bacteria feasting on the excess organic matter respire carbon dioxide. “So, you rob the soil of this vital nutrient, and you add it to the atmosphere, where it adds to climate change.”

While Horn says that the carbon held in American croplands “was pretty much stripped out by all the generations of plowing that followed on homesteading,” she’s hopeful about the radically simple practices of modern farmers like Palen and his colleagues. And they aren’t alone: The US Department of Agriculture estimates that in 2009, about 35.5 percent of the land growing our country’s major crops had no-till operations.

“If you farm well, if you leave the soil undisturbed, and you keep it protected in these ways and you care for your microbiome, you can start rebuilding that carbon back,” Horn says. “But this group of farmers that Doug is part of have seen the carbon levels in their soil building back up toward native prairie levels.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday. You can read an excerpt of Miriam Horn’s book, "Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland," on the Science Friday website.

This story was originally published on STAT.

BANA, Burkina Faso — This small village of mud-brick homes in West Africa might seem the least likely place for an experiment at the frontier of biology.

Yet scientists here are engaged in what could be the most promising, and perhaps one of the most frightening, biological experiments of our time. They are preparing for the possible release of swarms of mosquitoes that, until now, have been locked away in a research lab behind double metal doors and guarded 24/7.

The goal: to nearly eradicate the population of one species of mosquito, and with it, the heavy burden of malaria across Africa.

These scientists are planning to release mosquitoes equipped with “gene drives,” a technology that overrides nature’s genetic rules to give every baby mosquito a certain trait that normally only half would acquire. Once such an insect gets out into the wild, it will move indiscriminately and spread its modified trait without respect for political borders.

No living thing — no mammal, insect, or plant — with a gene drive has ever been set free. But if all goes as planned, it might happen here, in a remote village of about a thousand people, where the residents don’t even have a word for “gene.”

Despite such barriers, this is in some ways the most logical place to carry out the experiment. Nowhere does malaria exact a higher toll than here in sub-Saharan Africa, where hundreds of thousands die from the disease every year. And Burkina Faso already houses one of Africa’s highest-profile malaria research laboratories.

It may be six years before the gene drive mosquitoes are actually released in Burkina Faso, but scientists are already working around the clock to prepare the community for their release. Researchers in Mali and Uganda are also working toward the same goal under the banner of the “Target Malaria” project, propelled by $70 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and support from research laboratories in England and Italy.

Speaking through interpreters, residents across Burkina Faso told STAT that they are grateful for the scientists’ work, and are eagerly looking forward to eliminating the dreaded disease.

But scientists still face a challenge: making sure that people understand and accept the newfangled genetic technology behind it all. That means building trust and doing basic education — explaining not only the impact of genetically engineered insects arriving in their homes, but also what genetics is in the first place.

                                                               *****

Driving west from Bobo-Dioulasso, the sleepy regional capital that is Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, the pavement fades away into an undulating dirt path. Traffic dissolves into a trickle of motorbikes whose drivers wear surgical-style masks to protect them from the dust. Donkey carts plod along under the weight of flattened grass, outpacing camels weighed down by saddlebags.

At the height of the dry season in late December, eight scientists and social scientists pulled off the dirt road, carrying a box of a hundred adult mosquitoes and a 1-liter bottle filled with wriggling larvae.

For the past few years, the scientists from the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Sante (IRSS) in Bobo-Dioulasso, where the country’s Target Malaria team is based, have been teaching Bana residents basic mosquito facts, including that the bugs transmit malaria. Many in Burkina Faso believe that malaria can be spread by eating too many greasy or sweet foods, said Lea Pare, the anthropologist who is leading a national effort to engage local citizens in Target Malaria.

Beyond live mosquitoes, the team also uses pictures to help explain the complicated scientific information: a set of thirteen cards, laminated like giant placemats, which detail the different phases of the project. In Bana, they talk through the first four of these cards, which show gigantic female mosquitoes biting humans, with small red squiggles flowing through the proboscis and into the person’s body. On the fourth card, a scientist wearing a white coat is looking at those mosquitoes under a microscope.

White coats are very familiar to residents of Bana. For the last three years, a team of researchers has lived part-time in the village, sleeping in an old cement house retrofitted into a scientific base camp. These technicians, with the help of local volunteers, count the number of mosquitoes in the homes, observe the mating swarms at dusk, and dust mosquitoes with colored powder to track where they travel around the village.

They are gathering data on the mosquito population to feed into intricate computer models that will help them determine how the gene drive mosquitoes should be released.

When the technicians stepped into one home on a recent day, they laid thick sheets across the floor of a bedroom and filled it with acrid-smelling insecticide spray. After 10 minutes, they hauled the sheets out, opened them up, and crouched over a small pile of dirt specks: only one male mosquito.

For low mosquito season, it wasn’t surprising. During the rainy season, however, which starts in June, there might be a few hundred mosquitoes in each room, said technician Ibrahim Diabate.

Men living in the treated homes were excited, even jubilant, that the researchers were working in the village. They understood that the scientists had a longer-term plan to battle the mosquitoes, but they were also happy for the insecticide spray in the present moment.

“Since you started this work, praise God, malaria has been reduced, because mosquitoes don’t bite us anymore,” said Ali Ouattara, one elder in the community.

In the next phase of the project, scientists will have to explain to Ouattara why they’re actually releasing more mosquitoes.

Going straight from zero to gene drives would be too extreme, so scientists are planning to release “regular” genetically engineered mosquitoes first — either here in Bana or in one of two other villages nearby.

Those mosquitoes, which could be released next year, are “sterile males”: Most of them are male, and they cannot have offspring. A field release is not intended to reduce the prevalence of malaria; rather, it is to prepare the scientists and the locals for the eventual arrival of the gene drive mosquitoes, said Delphine Thizy, who directs the work of engaging local, national, and international leaders for the project.

The outreach teams have started talking about DNA with their flash cards. But they aren’t saying anything yet to the locals about the much more powerful, and complicated, idea of a gene drive.

Partly that’s because researchers didn’t want the residents of Burkina Faso to expect that a miracle solution to the malaria epidemic is just around the corner, Thizy said. Scientists in London haven’t yet created the gene drive mosquitoes that would be used, and field trials of such mosquitoes are years away.

Also, she said, gene drives are hard to understand.

“To be fair, even in Europe and in North America, it’s complex to understand gene drives in one shot.”

If gene drive mosquitoes arrive in Burkina Faso, it will be thanks to the vision of Abdoulaye Diabate, a soft-spoken medical entomologist with a singular mission: to stop malaria.

The disease is ever-present in this country — mosquito nets hang for sale by the roadside, and hotel proprietors lay out smoldering coils in the courtyards to ward off mosquitoes as dusk falls.

Diabate, who is deeply involved in malaria eradication efforts worldwide, became dismayed when, in the 1990s, he realized that mosquitoes were building up resistance against the insecticide used on bed nets here.

“If this is the only tool we have in hand, then forget about malaria elimination,” Diabate said.

But, in 2012, he received an invitation to a meeting about the Target Malaria project, which was focused on solutions involving genetic engineering. He jumped at the chance.

Today he is leading the Burkina Faso team, trying to get the whole world — from remote villages to international diplomats — on board with his ambitious research.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in the United Kingdom, geneticists at Imperial College London are working on designing the gene drive mosquitoes. Specifically, they’re studying two different ways to disrupt the reproductive system of one particular species, Anopheles gambiae: reduce the number of female babies (only females bite and spread the disease) or stop the mosquitoes from having offspring in general.

To make the population predominantly male, Austin Burt, Target Malaria’s primary investigator, and collaborators are studying an “X shredder” — a gene that destroys the X chromosome in sperm, making all offspring males. Alongside that, they’re looking at reducing the number of mosquitoes of both sexes by creating genes that make them sterile.

Either approach might lead to massive population collapse within two to eight years, according to Charles Godfray, a University of Oxford professor and biologist who works on modeling for the Target Malaria project.

But the insects wouldn’t go extinct, scientists say. The gene drive mosquitoes currently under consideration would only reduce the population of Anopheles gambiae enough to stop the transmission of malaria.

“The foundation is not interested in eliminating Anopheles mosquitoes,” said Dr. Scott Miller, who leads malaria research and development for the Gates Foundation. “We’re interested in eliminating malaria.”

It will take years to reach the point that scientists will be ready to test the gene drive mosquitoes in the wild. In the meantime, they are facing the challenge of winning over local residents who might be wary of these new creatures.

Mariam Pare was initially frightened. A commanding woman who teaches in a Koranic school, Pare lives across the street from the IRSS in Bobo-Dioulasso. She said that when she first heard about mosquito research going on at the lab, she feared that the scientists were breeding mosquitoes to let loose on the locals. But after meetings and discussions with project staff, she came to understand that they are instead trying to fight against the mosquito.

She even took a tour of the insectary that currently holds the gene-edited sterile male mosquitoes, and could eventually hold the gene drive ones. She saw fans that would suck away mosquitoes if they happened to escape from their cages, and a hot water bath where unnecessary mosquitoes go to die.

“Because I saw what was going on in there, I believe and trust the people that work in there,” she said.

Earning Pare’s trust was particularly important for the team — because she lives so close to the insectary, her consent was required to import the sterile male mosquitoes. That requirement isn’t a legal one, but one that the Target Malaria project has put in place. The Gates Foundation has also said that gene drive mosquitoes will only be released if the host country agrees.

Lassina Diarra, a tailor whose turquoise-walled shop is down the road from the research lab, also had to give his consent. Sitting on the corner of a table among scraps of fabric and hand-tailored suits, he said that he was impressed by the scientists’ transparency and reliability. Two outreach workers recruited him to serve on a group of 12 local leaders who communicate information about the project to the city’s residents, dubbed the “relay group,” along with a different committee to address community grievances. Every few weeks, he knocks on doors up and down the streets, updating his neighbors on the scientists’ progress.

In June, Diarra and Pare both signed off on the arrival of the sterile males. So did Kadidia Ouattara, one of the relay group members and the president of multiple neighborhood associations. She recalled a joyous gathering filled with dance and song.

“Ni fonyon douma ni bora mi?” they sang in Dioula. “Ni fonyon douma ni bora mi?”

The song translates to, “Where did this good air come from?” and, more colloquially, means, “This is too good to be true!”

Ouattara said that it is a traditional song commemorating good news — a wedding, the birth of a baby, the success of a student in her exams. And on that day, it was celebrating the impending arrival of genetically modified mosquitoes.

Burkina Faso has experience with genetically modified organisms. One of the first associations some residents make with genetic engineering is Monsanto, which has been selling genetically modified cotton seeds to Burkinabe farmers since the 2000s. But the country’s grower’s association stopped buying the seeds in 2016 in the wake of concerns about the cotton’s quality and country-wide protests against the company.

One resident of Bobo-Dioulasso complained that genetically modified food rots quickly, and said that he hopes the mosquitoes suffer the same fate: an early death.

“The fight against malaria is a big concern, but the solutions are sometimes scary,” said Sylvestre Tiemtore, the director of an organization that represents over half of the nongovernmental organizations in Burkina Faso. The group met with Target Malaria in July, a discussion which “was very heated,” he said.

“In movies” — he cited “Jurassic Park” — “we’ve seen some research that went out of control,” he said.

Scientists familiar with the effort here say defining the idea of “genetically modified” to residents here might be of limited use, because it won’t help people understand what the mosquitoes are or what they will really do, said Javier Lezaun, deputy director of the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society at the University of Oxford, who is not involved in the Target Malaria project. In fact, the phrase might just serve to distract and scare — he spoke of another community in Tanzania who thought that a swarm of mosquitoes that invaded a hospital were genetically modified (they weren’t), and of others in Brazil who thought that Zika arrived as a result of genetically modified mosquitoes (it didn’t).

“As long as you explain something about the specific capabilities of the mosquitoes, or the limitations of these particular mosquitoes and how they’re supposed to behave in the wild or in the facilities, I think that serves the purpose of explaining genetic modification,” Lezaun said.

And that’s what many people are curious about. At the July meeting with NGOs, hosted by the Secrétariat Permanent des Organisations Non Gouvernementales (SPONG for short), attendees wanted to know: What would happen to the local ecosystem? And might these engineered mosquitoes be able to transmit other diseases?

Some of these questions don’t yet have answers, but others do. A risk assessment commissioned by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, a US nonprofit that supports the federal agency, found that the risk of the sterile mosquitoes currently in Bobo-Dioulasso transmitting other diseases was incredibly low; the modified mosquitoes probably won’t spread more malaria than their wild cousins; and the genetic modification probably won’t spread from the mosquito to other animals.

Outside scientists, convened by the FNIH in May, had previously concluded that Anopheles gambiae is not a “keystone” species, meaning that if its population shrank dramatically, the ecosystem would not be substantially impacted.

But the meetings continue. Tiemtore, SPONG’s director, said that he would like to have a meeting with representatives of different health-related NGOs that are based in Burkina Faso’s 13 different regions, to educate them about the project. But that requires money — to bring them to the capital, and to cover the costs of the meeting itself.

“They might need to rent a room,” Tiemtore said. “They might need to offer some coffee breaks. That costs money. Who pays for that? If you don’t do all of those things, your mosquitoes are going to come out, but they won’t be released in the regions, because the people will not agree with it, because they didn’t have enough information on it, and they will have the right to be afraid.”

The development of powerful new genetic engineering technologies, often outstripping regulators’ ability to keep up, is forcing scientists to reckon with the ethics of their work in a new way.

Of course, humans have been making potentially irreversible changes to our environment for a long time: clearing forests for farming, building power plants that change the composition of the atmosphere, and producing untold tons of synthetic materials like plastic that will stay in the environment for hundreds of years.

But gene drives lend these questions a different sort of urgency. The genetic technology can quickly change the properties of an entire population of a species, undoing millennia of evolution in a handful of years. And once you let them out of the cage, there’s no going back — other world-altering technologies have not been self-perpetuating like gene drive animals would be.

So scientists are treading carefully and doing what they can to keep the rest of the world involved. This has led to difficult questions: Who needs to give them permission to do certain things? What does it mean for residents to be fully informed? In answering them, there aren’t a lot of models to follow. There are only a few gene drive projects underway in the world, and none has yet resulted in the release of the animals into the wild.

Academic research on how to effectively include non-scientists in global health decisions is also lacking, said Jim Lavery, an Emory University professor of global health and ethics who has worked with the Target Malaria project in the past.

Right now, Lavery said, scientists can count the number of phone calls they make and the number of people who show up at community meetings, “but we don’t even have an understanding at a proxy level of what those things are supposed to represent in terms of effectiveness of engagement.”

While researchers like Lavery are trying to determine how to measure success, research is plowing ahead. Some scientists are thinking about releasing gene drive mice halfway across the world, in New Zealand, to eliminate invasive species. And Kevin Esvelt, a gene drive guru based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is flying to Argentina in September to talk about using gene drives to get rid of flesh-eating flies.

He has said that gene drives are more important as a societal tool to change the way that science is done — it should be open to and inclusive of the people it will impact. To that extent, he praised Target Malaria’s community work. “I honestly don’t see how you could do it any other way,” he said, citing the language and cultural barriers that the project is working to overcome.

How the project is going to introduce gene drive mosquitoes, though, is an open question. National regulators and international organizations like the World Health Organization are still working on developing guidelines for introducing gene drive animals.

And in Burkina Faso, Thizy said she hasn’t even yet put a lot of thought into what it will mean for local leaders to understand a release of gene drive mosquitoes. She said it will probably include knowing that the modified mosquitoes will stay in the environment and grow in number, until some point at which the population of Anopheles gambiae will be reduced.

But, said Thizy, exactly how the gene drive works may matter less to the people than the impact it will have on them and their lives.

She pointed, by way of analogy, to her previous work as a consultant for a mining company in the Ivory Coast: It wasn’t “how big is the hole, how many holes, and how does the machine work” that the area residents were worried about, she said, but rather how they would be compensated and what jobs would be created.

On a dusty Wednesday morning earlier this year, Kadidia Ouattara arrived at an outdoor market, eager to chat with the vendors about genetically engineered mosquitoes.

Kadidia Ouattara talks to neighbors at a vegetable market in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso about research on genetically engineered mosquitos that might eliminate malaria.

Credit:

Ike Swetlitz/STAT

As a woman spooned tomato sauce from a gigantic aluminum can onto plastic sheets for individual sale, Ouattara told her about the insect lab just a few minutes’ walk down the street.

The researchers who work there are trying to reduce the population of mosquitoes, she said. Don’t be afraid — I saw the inside of the lab and all of the research. There are public meetings where they explain what they are doing, and if there is another one, I will let everybody know.

The woman was delighted. May God help the project be a success, she said.

Farther along, she came upon a butcher who she knew to be particularly recalcitrant. He thinks we’re getting money from the white people, Ouattara said. But that’s not true — she’s a volunteer.

Ouattara walked up to the man, who was hacking at a piece of meat with a foot-long knife, bits of gristle flying everywhere and flies swarming. Rivulets of blood ran along the dusty ground.

If there is a meeting about the project, I am begging you to come, she said.

Scarcely taking his eyes off of the meat, the butcher mumbled some kind of assent.

Ouattara’s enthusiasm was undimmed; she strode off to a woman selling onions. And she’d be back soon with more news to share.

Eric Boodman and Kate Sheridan contributed reporting.

Special thanks to Housmane Sereme and Steve Sanou for translation services.

Scientists have used genetics to alter mosquito populations for several decades, to try to eliminate diseases such as malaria and more recently Zika. But these efforts — when they've worked at all — have only partially addressed the problem.

Now scientists want to use a powerful new technology with the potential to change or wipe out an entire species of mosquito. The key tool is something called a "gene drive." These alter genes so that, when the insects reproduce, they actually change the entire gene pool. In some cases gene drives could successfully eliminate a species. This is one of the approaches being prepared by scientists in a small village in Burkina Faso called Bana, a place where malaria is a huge problem.

Read more: A revolutionary genetic experiment is coming to rural Burkina Faso

"What gene drive does is it takes advantage of the chemistry in the cell so that all of the offspring from a parent carrying that copy will inherit that gene," says Professor Gregory Lanzaro, director of the Mosquito Research Laboratory at the University of California at Davis. "So it allows us to introduce genetic material into a wild population and have the frequency of that material approach 100 percent." 

But — releasing a gene drive into the wild has never been done before. What could go wrong with this untested approach? And what might be the domino effects of eliminating entire species, even if they're pesky insects? Those are still big, open questions.

There are environmentalists and researchers who are worried about the risks. Last year, a ban on gene drives was proposed at a United Nations biodiveristy convention, but governments largely rejected the idea. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and GeneWatch plan to continue to challenge the use of gene drives in the wild, and to propose greater regulation of the technology.

Lanzaro, who does genetic experiments on mosquitos in Africa in an effort to combat malaria, says the research happening in Burkina Faso does have its risks — but he contends they are probably minimal.

"If we remove the mosquito from the environment there could be impacts on organisms that are feeding on those and the possiblity that the transgene could move into non-target species," Lanzaro says.

The artificial sweetener acesulfame potassium (ACE) can be found in everything from chewing gum, to baked goods, to the packets of sugar substitute on restaurant tables. But researchers at the University of Alberta recently made headlines with the announcement that they’d found ACE somewhere else: in 31 swimming pools and hot tubs.

The find is bittersweet for public health officials and swimmers alike, because it suggests one thing: “If we're finding it in swimming pools and hot tubs, the only logical explanation we can come up with [for] why it’s at elevated levels is because people have to be peeing in the pools,” says Lindsay Blackstock, a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta and first author on the paper.

Blackstock explains our bodies can’t metabolize ACE, “so it exits the same way that it goes in.” What’s more, she says, almost all of the acesulfame we consume is excreted in urine. As part of the study, published in the journal “Environmental Science and Technology Letters,” the researchers mixed together 20 urine samples to determine how much ACE the average Canadian excretes. Then, they estimated how much pee was in two Canadian pools, based on their concentrations of ACE. 

In a 220,000-gallon pool (about one-third the size of an Olympic swimming pool), the researchers found ACE levels suggesting almost 20 gallons of urine (75 L) could be present. Likewise, a 110,000-gallon pool contained enough ACE for nearly eight gallons of urine (30 L).

Blackstock cautions that the ACE test can’t tell us exactly how much pee is actually in a pool, because urine breaks down quickly. ACE, on the other hand, does not. Plus, “there could be people who are urinating in the pools that haven't had any of that artificial sweetener,” she says.

But the test could help public health officials combat a real concern in swimming pools. Compounds in urine can react with chlorine to create a chemical called trichloramine, which can irritate the eyes and lungs. According to Blackstock, the instrumentation needed to test for ACE is in most university chemistry departments.

“I suppose the good news is that we're able to take this opportunity of this really intense media attention we've gotten to promote public health and good swimming hygiene practices, because we don't want people to be afraid of swimming, that's for sure,” Blackstock says.

The bottom line?

“Don’t pee in the pool.”

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

If much of the US was transfixed by the sight on Monday of two of America’s top intelligence officials sitting in Congress, addressing allegations of Russian meddling in the US elections, the Kremlin claimed it had better things to do.

“We have many concerns in the Kremlin and following that [debate] isn’t one of them,” said presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

“New information we’re not hearing and doubtfully will hear,” said Peskov, who went on to compare the hearings to a “broken record” being played ad nauseum.

“It’s an internal American issue,” added Peskov. “Our relationship to all this hysteria is well known.”

Indeed, while a growing list of Trump administration officials have struggled to recall past contacts with Russian officials, the Kremlin has been consistent in its response to the hacking charges emanating from Washington.

In a word: deny.

There was Vladimir Putin in September insisting that “Russia on a state level has never practiced” cyber intrusions. (Putin also insisted that sharing the contents of hacked emails was a public service.)

There was spokesman Peskov, in October, calling allegations of Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer infrastructure simply “nonsense.”

And there was Putin, in his annual press conference in December, dismissing allegations Russian hacking tipped the election in Donald Trump’s favor, or that Russia colluded with Trump campaign officials along the way.

US Democrats who accuse Russia of such things, said Putin, “are looking for someone outside to blame.” The Russian leader went on to note that Democratic candidates lost big in election contests in the Congress and Senate as well.   

“Is that also our work, my work?” asked Putin.

Yahoo, too

Just last week, the Kremlin was at it again — denying charges by the FBI that its intelligence agents were involved in the hacking of millions of Yahoo users' email accounts.  

Spokesman Peskov said Russia had only learned of the indictments of its agents and two other men through the media, and hoped US officials would soon shed light on the charges.

Peskov added that Russia had never been involved in any illegal state-sponsored hacking — lest anyone need reminding. 

Better days

Donald Trump’s victory in the November election was heralded by many in Moscow as an opportunity: After years of deeply antagonistic relations with the Obama administration, a chance for a Trump White House to cooperate with the Kremlin on a host of issues, including Syria and the fight against global terror. Even sanctions relief over Russia’s actions in Ukraine was considered within the realm of possibility.   

Already, much has changed.

Under pressure from the multiple investigations into Russia’s interference during the US election, top Trump administration officials — from Vice President Mike Pence to the secretaries of state and sefense, as well as the ambassador to the United Nations — have all pulled back on suggestions of a quick pivot in relations with Russia.

Moreover, FBI Director James Comey’s testimony now makes clear the administration must deal with the fallout of an open-ended investigation into the Russia election issue, including questions over possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

On Tuesday, even Kremlin spokesman Peskov acknowledged the tough road ahead.  

"It's doubtful to consider [the hearings] constructive in the development of joint relations," noted Peskov, speaking to journalists in Moscow.  

Time and again, Russian officials have portrayed the congressional investigations as attempts by Trump's enemies in Washington to derail at any cost the president’s calls for improved US-Russian relations.

Even President Trump seemed to acknowledge the potential constraints the election scandal presented to détente with Moscow during his first official press conference last month.

"Probably Putin assumes that he’s not going to be able to make a deal with me because it’s politically not popular for me to make a deal,"Trump said.

Kremlin officials openly quote from President Trump’s own tweets on the matter, calling the continued congressional focus on Russia “paranoia,” and a “witch hunt” reminiscent of Sen. Joe McCarthy's Red Scare of the 1950s.

Tillerson to Moscow?

Given that perception, an announcement by the Reuters news agency that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would skip an April NATO summit in favor of meetings with his Russian counterpart in Moscow next month came as welcome news to Russian officials eager to at last engage with the White House.

Until it wasn't.

Confusion over the rollout of the announcement — with various US and Russian officials unable or unwilling to confirm the exact dates of Tillerson's visit — suggested the hacking scandal still looms large in the minds of the Trump administration and Kremlin officials.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharov noted that a State Department source had leaked the news to the American press, and echoed a common complaint from congressional Republicans during Monday's hearings: Leaks, rather than Russian interference, are the primary problem facing Washington.  

"We're absolutely surprised by the constant leaks of sensitive information coming out of Washington," Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page.

"It's time for the political elite of the USA to decide," she added. "Is it again 'Russian hackers' who've broke into State Department servers or does this threat to the information security of the USA come from an American source?"

Peru is expected to experience another two weeks of highly unusual torrential rains, which have already caused devastating floods along large swaths of its arid coast, destroying homes and crops and killing an estimated 75 people.

The precipitation has been caused by what scientists call a “coastal El Niño,” a localized version of the hemispherewide condition. Unusually warm waters just off the Andean nation’s Pacific shore — up to 50 degrees warmer than normal — have triggered the rains in the world’s second-highest mountain range.

The extreme runoff has, in turn, caused devastating problems, above all in Peru’s northern regions, particularly Piura, near the frontier with Ecuador. Downtown areas of several cities, including Piura, and Trujillo, which is Peru’s second-largest urban center, have been underwater for days now. 

Meanwhile, up to half a million people have been severely affected. They include some of Peru’s poorest, who made the fatal mistake of squatting on land beside gulches and canyons that open from the Andes onto the coastal plane.

These areas may have been bone-dry for years and even decades. In the space of a few short hours last week, they suddenly turned into raging torrents, sweeping away entire shantytowns, and, in some cases, their residents along with them.

In one memorable scene captured on a cellphone video, a woman emerged from a landslide covered in mud after being swept two miles from the field where she was working.

Evangelina Chamorro Díaz was subsequently released from the hospital with only minor physical injuries, although she was said to have been traumatized by the ordeal, during which she expected to die.

Ironically, in the capital, Lima, the problem ended up being too little water, rather than too much. SEDAPAL, the local water authority, saw its treatment plants overwhelmed by unprecedented volumes of water, heavy with sediment, debris and trash.

As a result, water supplies in this city of 10 million people were cut almost entirely, without notice, from Thursday evening to Monday afternoon. That prompted long queues in the 80-degree heat as municipal water trucks stopped at street corners to fill buckets, bottles and even plastic bathtubs for locals. There were some reports of scuffles and fights in some of the worst-affected neighborhoods.

There has also been a rush on bottled water in supermarkets while the prices of some food staples have soared, with roads into Lima and other major population centers along the coast having been cut off.

The government of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski appears to have responded well to the crisis, with ministers promptly fanning out to the affected areas. Meanwhile, the president, widely known here as PPK, has been sending out text messages to all of the country’s cellphone users.

Those messages implore people to use water responsibly and promise that both electricity and food supplies will be unaffected. “Stay calm,” the president urged on Tuesday.

Many more affluent Peruvians have also been donating clothing, food and bottled water for those who have lost their homes. As the rains continue, Peru’s ability to respond to this national crisis will likely be tested even further. 

Over President Donald Trump's first 100 days, we're asking him questions that our audience wants answers to. Join the project by tweeting this question to @realDonaldTrump with the hashtag #100Days100Qs.

#59. @realDonaldTrump, what’s your plan to preserve federal lands? #100Days100Qs

When Donald Trump was still vying for the Republican nomination, advocates for the federal protection of public lands had at least some reason to be hopeful if it turned out that the billionaire businessman should be elected to the presidency.

In January 2016, Trump told Field & Stream magazine that he didn’t “like the idea” of transferring control of the country’s 640 million acres of public lands to individual states, local municipalities or corporate interests.

“This is magnificent land,” Trump said. “And we have to be great stewards of this land.”

Trump’s position on keeping federal land under federal regulation stood in direct contrast to the Republican Party’s mainline position on the issue, which calls it “absurd” for the national government to oversee so many acres.

After winning the election, Trump tapped Republican Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke to run the Department of the Interior. Like Trump, Zinke bucked the party line during his confirmation hearing when he said that he, too, preferred that the federal government continue to manage the country’s public lands. However, in early January, he joined fellow Republicans in a vote on the House floor that set in motion procedures to make it easier for the federal government to let go of public land.

Zinke’s turnaround might have foreshadowed the lack of clarity that would arise around Trump’s plans for control of the country’s federal lands.

On Jan. 31, Republicans introduced a bill that would make more than 3 million acres of federal land — currently under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management — available for sale. Meanwhile, one of Trump’s first actions in office was to institute a temporary hiring freeze to the government’s executive branches, making it difficult for the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies to effectively manage the lands for which they are responsible.

And Trump’s 2018 budget proposes to cut funding to the Department of Interior by 12 percent, and specifically, it slashes $120 million set aside for the acquisition of additional federal land.

President Trump, you’ve said that the federal government should protect federal land. Yet your actions indicate otherwise. How, specifically, will you and the members of your administration be the “great stewards” that you believe our land requires? Click here to ask the president in a tweet. 

Ever since Antoni van Leeuwenhoek first observed “animalcules” through a microscope in the late 1600s, we’ve been finding bacteria all over. They’ve been discovered in deep sea vents, on human skin, and deep in Antarctic ice. There are even bacteria all the way up in the clouds. Strange and wonderful, no?

A recent study published in Nature Communications describes how Earthly bacteria can even catch rides on raindrops. When the raindrops burst, the bacteria are sent into the air — and under the right conditions, catch the wind.

But it doesn’t even take raindrops to send bacteria into the air, says Cindy Morris, research director at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. “Bacteria are very, very light and so almost any air movement can lift them up.”

Once in the air, she says, bacteria can catch upward currents, driven by the heat of the soil. “Most of the bacteria that are going upward are coming either from soil surfaces or mostly plant surfaces,” she adds. “So these bacteria lift off, sort of like dandruff, and float up into the atmosphere, and they can go all the way to the stratosphere.”

In fact, there’s an entire microbiome in the sky. Athanasios Nenes, an atmospheric chemist at Georgia Tech, has collected bacteria samples from the troposphere, 5 to 9 miles above us. (Neither Morris nor Nenes were involved in the Nature Communications study.)

“We collected DNA from these bacteria and we sequenced them and we identified somewhere around 100 classes of bacteria types,” he says. He explaines that the bacteria — sampled from air masses before, during and after two tropical hurricanes — were a mix of oceanic and terrestrial microbes.

What’s more, Nenes and his team found that 17 of the bacterial taxa they identified were present in all of the samples, indicating that they can survive in the harsh conditions of the troposphere. According to Nenes, scientists still aren’t sure how the bacteria manage it.

“Some bacteria are known to have mechanisms to help cope with UV exposure,” he explains. “Some are known to withstand drought. Some are known to withstand very high oxidant levels. So perhaps the [roughly] 20 types we saw, which you can find everywhere, have just the right sort of machinery to withstand the atmospheric conditions.”

Morris’ research has shown that bacteria may do more than withstand atmospheric conditions — they can actually influence the weather. She’s studied how proteins in some airborne bacteria can increase the freezing temperature of water, catalyzing precipitation from the clouds. In the process, known as ice nucleation, bacteria become nuclei for raindrops or ice particles.

“So in order to start the process that would get cloud droplets to aggregate and become heavy enough to fall, you generally need freezing,” Morris explains. “In the temperate regions you need a freezing process, where an ice crystal then will collide with droplets that are also cold but they haven't frozen yet. And this is how the heavy droplets can form.”

Scientists think that ice-nucleating microbes might also play a role in the formation of lightning, which is produced through the collision of ice and water particles. “We have colleagues in Brazil, atmosphere physicists, who actually injected into a model particles that had the properties of bacterial ice nuclei. And they generated more lightning with them than without them,” Morris says.

But she points out that for bacteria stuck floating in the atmosphere, there’s another benefit to ice nucleation. “We think it just basically helps the bacteria fall out of the clouds,” she says.

“The conditions up there are harsh, and if the bacteria remain too long in the clouds, they probably eventually will die. So this is a sure down elevator. The elevator is going down for them, and they need to get on it, because otherwise they won't fall on their own.”

Meanwhile, Nenes is learning more about the proverbial “up elevators” for bacteria, into the atmosphere. He’s been flying over Crete, looking for patterns in the types of bacteria blowing in from the desert, for example, or in gusts from the European continent.

“Each air mass has [its] own characteristic biological particles,” he says. “And so if you sit around there for long enough, you can actually get a very good idea of who is going to be there, which concentrations, which time of the year.”

“And then once you have a good idea of their properties — you know, how easily they make ice, what are the conditions they need, how much they can withstand the atmospheric stressors. You can get a much better idea of what’s the role of bacteria in cloud formation and precipitation.”

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

The sea ice cover in the Arctic and Antarctic hit new record lows for this time of year, marking the smallest polar ice caps in the 38-year satellite record, US government scientists said Wednesday.

In March, the Arctic ice sheet should be at its biggest, but on March 7 the ice cover reached "a record low wintertime maximum extent," said a statement by the US space agency NASA.

Data from the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, also showed that on March 3, "sea ice around Antarctica hit its lowest extent ever recorded by satellites at the end of summer in the Southern Hemisphere."

The disappearing sea ice comes as the planet has marked three years in a row of record-breaking heat, raising new concerns about the accelerating pace of global warming and the need to curb burning of fossil fuels which spew heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

The ice floating in the Arctic Ocean grows and shrinks on a seasonal cycle, reaching its largest size in March and its smallest at the end of the summer melt in September.

This year's Arctic maximum spanned 5.57 million square miles.

That is 37,000 square miles below the previous record low in 2015.

When scientists take account of the average sea ice extent for 1981-2010, this year's ice cover is 471,000 square miles smaller.

The Arctic sea ice maximum has dropped by an average of 2.8 percent per decade since 1979, NASA said. 

"We started from a low September minimum extent," said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. 

"There was a lot of open ocean water and we saw periods of very slow ice growth in late October and into November, because the water had a lot of accumulated heat that had to be dissipated before ice could grow," he added. 

"The ice formation got a late start and everything lagged behind — it was hard for the sea ice cover to catch up."

Antarctic lows

The ice in the Antarctic also follows a seasonal cycle but its maximum comes in September and its minimum around February.

In the Antarctic, this year's record low annual sea ice minimum was 815,000 square miles.

That was 71,000 square miles below the previous lowest minimum extent in the satellite record, which occurred in 1997, said NASA.

"Since November, daily Antarctic sea ice extent has continuously been at its lowest levels in the satellite record," said the US space agency.

For the past two years, however, Antarctica saw record high sea ice extents and decades of moderate sea ice growth.

"There's a lot of year-to-year variability in both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, but overall, until last year, the trends in the Antarctic for every single month were toward more sea ice," said Claire Parkinson, a senior sea ice researcher at NASA Goddard.

"Last year was stunningly different, with prominent sea ice decreases in the Antarctic."

Scientists still are not sure what this record low in the Antarctic means.

"It is tempting to say that the record low we are seeing this year is global warming finally catching up with Antarctica," said Meier.

"However, this might just be an extreme case of pushing the envelope of year-to-year variability. We'll need to have several more years of data to be able to say there has been a significant change in the trend."

By AFP's Kerry Sheridan in Miami.

Like many freelancers, Rochelle LaPlante is paid by the piece. “So, I have to balance doing it fast enough to make it worth my time, but also make sure I'm doing high-quality work,” she says.

But LaPlante’s job isn’t the writing or design work you might expect in today’s gig economy. She’s an independent content moderator, tasked with keeping unwanted, sometimes graphic content off the social apps and websites we use every day. “So, it's like modern-day piecework, but with the added layer of psychological stress,” she says.

There are human moderators like LaPlante all over the world, screening the user-generated content that swells across the internet every second — and doing so largely invisibly. While artificial intelligence can increasingly spot harmful content like child pornography or extremist messaging online, researcher Sarah Roberts says “the actual social media production cycle is much more complex” than automation can currently handle.

Roberts is an assistant professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, who writes about the work of content moderators. She explains that many are independent contractors like LaPlante — even some who work on-site at well-known social media companies.

“So, despite the fact that they're working at the headquarters in Silicon Valley for one of these major firms, they still may not have full employee status,” she explains. “And that can actually really matter when it comes to things like health insurance.”

Other moderators, she says, work in call center environments in places like the Philippines, Europe and even Iowa. “So, it's really a global practice, and it stands to reason since social media is a 24-by-7 operation.”

While it’s tough to quantify the number of workers involved in content moderation worldwide, Roberts points to the massive volumes of content we generate on social media to give a sense of the need. “In 2014, YouTube was reporting that it was receiving 100 hours of user-generated content to its platform per minute, per day,” she says.

LaPlante, who’s based in Los Angeles, finds her work through a freelance platform that many companies use to have their text, images and videos moderated. She inspects the content, which is usually user-submitted, to see whether it violates any of the company’s guidelines. The worst images she’s come across? “Child pornography,” she says — no question.

Some companies she works for (anonymously, since the platform doesn’t require companies to disclose their real names) pay her well. “Others just don't. Sometimes it's a penny an image, and I have to make the decision about whether I want to spend my time doing that.”

Two former content moderators at Microsoft are suing the company, claiming they developed post-traumatic stress disorder from the work. In a statement, Microsoft responded that its moderators are provided with filtering technology to distort images, as well as company-mandated psychological counseling.

Roberts says it’s not clear whether Microsoft’s filtering techniques and other mitigation practices had been in place for the workers all along — or alternatively, whether some of the content they encountered was too new to be in the filters' databases. But for her, the case is a reminder that we don’t know how much disturbing content is too much for a human moderator to bear.

“Is it the fact that you could see one too many videos, and that's too much for you to have been exposed to and then you become disabled from the work?” she says.

“Could it happen that you just see one particular video that's too much for you to take? We don’t know. I think that's what makes this case so novel. And some of these kinds of blanket statements about best practices and things being in place aren't clear to me that, you know, those are necessarily sufficient.”

LaPlante, who doesn’t receive health insurance or counseling through her work, says she turns to other moderators when the content takes a toll. Together, they’ve formed an informal support network. “It's just a lot of talking about, you know, what did you see today, and how is it difficult,” she says. “And sometimes it's just sharing cat photos and funny videos on YouTube to get through it.”

For her, the most important thing for other internet users to know is that her work isn’t done by computers or artificial intelligence. “When you're scrolling through your Facebook feed, your Twitter feed or whatever social media you're using, and not seeing those images, just to take a moment to realize that it’s humans that are doing that and making them appear that way,” she says.

“And it's not some computer system that's handling it all for you.”

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

Over President Donald Trump's first 100 days, we're asking him questions that our audience wants answers to. Join the project by tweeting this question to @realDonaldTrump with the hashtag #100Days100Qs.

#63. @realDonaldTrump, will you preserve the Endangered Species Act?

The Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, when the US Congress saw a need to protect certain types of threatened plants, wildlife and ecosystems because of their “esthetic, ecological, educational, recreational, and scientific value to our nation and its people.” The US Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service administer the ESA.

Though the ESA was signed into law by Republican President Richard M. Nixon, its future is uncertain under President Donald Trump.

Many Republicans believe the ESA overreaches and harms the drilling, logging and mining industries. Though about 1,600 plants and animals are currently listed as threatened or endangered, in February, the GOP-led Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing to discuss the possibility of changing the law.

Earlier this month, the Senate confirmed Ryan Zinke as the new secretary of the Interior. Zinke, who was previously a freshman congressman from Montana, has criticized the ESA in the past. Environmental advocates and groups have opposed Zinke’s nomination and confirmation, including Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Ryan Zinke has a dismal 3 percent lifetime environmental voting record,” Suckling said in a statement. “His brief political career has been substantially devoted to attacking endangered species and the Endangered Species Act. He led efforts to strip federal protections for endangered wolves, lynx and sage grouse, voted to exempt massive agribusiness and water developers from Endangered Species Act limitations, and opposed efforts to crack down on the international black market ivory trade."

This week, the Department of the Interior listed the bombus affinis, also known as the rusty patched bumblebee, on the endangered species list. It's the first time ever that a bumblebee from the United States has made the list.

The rusty patched bumblebee used to be one of the most common bumblebees in America. Now, due in part to pathogens, its population has dropped more than 90 percent in the past two decades.

But the bee made the list after some delay by the Trump administration.

“On January 11, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized the bumblebee’s listing as an endangered species,” National Geographic reports. “But on January 20, the bee got stung by the Trump administration’s efforts to postpone and review Obama-era regulations that hadn’t yet taken into effect. On February 10, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the bumblebee’s listing would take effect on March 21, more than a month after it was originally scheduled.”

In an interview with The Takeaway, Sam Droege, head of the Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab and the United States Geological Survey, said he hopes that placing the rusty patched bumblebee on the endangered species list will help save the insect.

“[Placing the bee on the list] focuses people's attention on it,” he says. “It galvanizes resources. Right now, we know that the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who has primary responsibility for the bee in terms of its recovery, is focusing survey efforts to see if they can find any more of these populations, and they're also focusing research on some of the causal factors. It also has meant that state agencies and private groups like the Xerces Society and others are putting together programs to try and find the bee.”

As Trump’s presidency marches on, we’re wondering if he will work to preserve the Endangered Species Act to ensure that wildlife like the rusty patched bumblebee are protected. If you’d like an answer to that question too, click here to ask the president in a tweet.