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To understand climate change, look at it from a mussel's perspective

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The phrase “climate change” triggers images of a huge, global phenomenon. Rising seas. Drought. Ocean acidification.

But it's actually experienced on a much smaller scale, by individual plants, animals and people.

And most of the world’s organisms experience it much differently than humans do.

“As humans, we have this really biased view of the world. Well over 95 percent of the organisms on Earth, they’re completely dependent on the ambient environment for their temperature,” says Northeastern University marine biologist Brian Helmuth.

Brian Helmuth, Northeastern University marine biologist. 

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler

Many of those organisms are stuck in one place for most of their lives and depend on ocean currents for food and oxygen.

Helmuth has built his career on trying to better understand how mussels experience temperature and other environmental changes, and he argues it’s essential to look beyond our own human perspective when thinking about climate change. If we don’t, he says, we’ll miss big parts of how our changing world will impact our food sources and surroundings.

“Unless we have a pretty good handle on how those nonhuman organisms are experiencing climate change, we’re not going to have any sense of how further climate change is likely to affect us,” Helmuth says.

Consider the mussel

Think about a mussel that's stuck to a rock in a tidal area for most of its life. It can’t move to find shade when it’s hot out. It can’t control its own body temperature.

When the tide is low and the sun is out, its dark shell absorbs heat just like asphalt on a summer afternoon.

“You are sitting there in the blazing sun, you’re not going to be able to move,” Helmuth says. “You can’t escape the heat, you can’t escape the sun, you can’t go into a crevice like something like a crab.”

Mussels can literally start to cook on the rocks if they get too hot.

They also have to wait for water currents to bring them plankton to eat and oxygen to breathe.

“The closest thing I can think of to describe what that’s like, is, if you reached down into your chest cavity, you rip out your lungs, and you hold them above your head,” Helmuth says, “and you hope to God that the wind blows because if it doesn’t you’re going to suffocate.”

Stationary creatures evolve to withstand a wide range of climatic conditions, but in some cases, global warming is bringing them closer and closer to their limits.

And it’s not only temperature that’s changing: Water currents in the Atlantic Ocean are changing, too. The ocean is getting more acidic, so it’s harder for mollusks to form the shells that protect them from predators.

All these stressors add up to a harder life for mussels in some parts of the world, including the United States' East Coast. Wild blue mussel populations have sharply declined in places like the Gulf of Maine in recent decades.

Why do we care?

Seafood is a major protein source, especially for the global poor. Farmed mussels are a $3 billion worldwide industry. Mussels, clams and oysters caught in the US alone were worth more than $400 million in 2015.

If we want the mussel industry and others to thrive, Helmuth argues we need to look at climate change from the right perspective.

Here’s an example: In the 1990s, Helmuth invented a gadget called a “robomussel,” which uses sensors to measure the temperature inside synthetic mussel shells designed to closely replicate the real thing.

Brian Helmuth's "robomussels" have been deployed around the world to measure the real temperatures experienced by mussels inside their shells. 

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler

Up until then, Helmuth says, scientists generally used to gauge mussel temperature by measuring surrounding air temperature. That is, after all, how we humans experience heat.

Helmuth worked with collaborators to plant these robomussels in mussel beds all around the world. And he made an important finding: Temperatures can grow much hotter inside mussel shells than outside of them, especially if the mussels are out of the water at low tide during the hottest part of the day.

“We can see animal temperatures of 100 degrees or more, even though the air temperature may be as low as 70 [or] 75,” Helmuth says.  

That means some cooler regions that may previously have been seen as hospitable to mussels in a warmer future might, in fact, grow too hot for them.  

“For example, we see places in central Oregon where they’ll really bake, even though it’s pretty far north because all the low tides are happening in the middle of the day,” Helmuth says.

In other places, like in Santa Barbara, California, summertime low tides tend to come in the middle of the night, so mussels there aren’t too stressed.

“If we’re only looking at the edges of species distributions, if we’re only looking at the southern distribution in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re probably missing a lot of the action, a lot of the damage,” Helmuth says.

Helmuth and his colleagues have used robomussel readings and other data to predict where mussels will thrive, and where they’ll likely die, in the future.

His methods are being used by scientists developing marine conservation plans on the US West Coast, and by collaborators working with the aquaculture industry in Italy.

Helmuth hopes that by shifting our perspective, we’ll be able to keep mussels in our waters, and on our menus, well into the future.


Coke and Pepsi, gardening together in Mexican mountains to preserve urban water

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The semiarid Mexican city of Monterrey has two major challenges with water: either there is not enough of it, or there's far too much.

Improving and fixing the area’s infrastructure could cost billions. But a US environmental organization has a far cheaper solution, and it’s getting rival corporations — like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo — to come together to pay for it.

Monterrey is Mexico’s industrial hub. It's also the country’s third-largest metro area, home to some 4 million people in the northern state of Nuevo León. To see the city’s twin problems — too much water or not enough — visit the Santa Catarina river, which runs right through the center of Monterrey. It’s a dry riverbed most of the year, a gully of dirt and grasses surrounded by businesses, factories, and hotels. It’s hard to imagine what it looked like seven years ago when Hurricane Alex tore through the area.

“In two days, we had [the] equivalent of one year’s rainfall in Monterrey,” says Colin Herron, director of fresh water programs in Mexico and Central America for The Nature Conservancy.

In Monterrey, water came gushing down from the jagged mountains that ring the city. Fifteen people in the area died. Floods destroyed bridges and roads and washed away cars. Zoo animals were swept away and hundreds of schools were damaged. A witness described the city as “beyond recognition.”

“That water came down and hit the city like a bomb, basically,” says Herron.

The Santa Catarina River in Monterrey runs dry most of the year. The riverbed used to be filled with stalls, vendors and athletic fields, prior to Hurricane Alex.

Credit:

Jason Margolis

It was devastating, but also curious. Monterrey had been hit by a stronger storm, Hurricane Gilbert, 22 years before, and that one didn’t cause nearly as much damage.

To understand why, you need to drive up into the mountains.

“So the real message behind that is that in the 22 years that intervened, the upper watershed here, which serves as a buffer to protect the city normally, had lost a lot of its forest cover,” Herron says.

Trees and plants in the mountains used to absorb a lot of rainfall. But fires and a pernicious bark beetle laid waste to many of them. Other areas were cleared for agriculture and development.

“A lot of people in Monterrey have weekend homes here where they go to, to get out of the city,” Herron says.

On the drive up into the mountains, we stop at the massive 350-foot Rompepicos dam, which was built 10 years ago. The cost: $27 million. It held back some of the waters during Hurricane Alex. But it can’t hold the volume that can run off during big rains.

“The dam is only in a particular channel, and this area is vast,” Herron says.

The Nature Conservancy’s Colin Herron, right, at the Rompepicos Dam. Water rose to near the top of the dam during Hurricane Alex.

Credit:

Jason Margolis

The government has a few choices. It could do nothing, take its chances. It could erect a bunch more barriers — that’s expensive. Or, it could try the cheaper approach that the Nature Conservancy is helping to develop: replant trees.

Dams still play a vital role, but Herron says with more trees, you don’t need so many barriers. Trees retain water in the soil, and in their roots and branches. And unlike a dam, a healthy forest serves other functions, too.

“It will also be improving air quality, and capturing, sequestering carbon as well,” Herron says. That helps to fight climate change, which is contributing to more intense storms.

Trees also help filter water and replenish the aquafers in a dry area with a growing population.

As we head higher into the mountains, the road of dirt and rocks gets bumpier. Calling it a “road” is being generous, in fact, but at least it’s dry.

“When hurricane Alex hit in 2010, this road spent about a week under the water,” Herron says.

After a couple of hours, we reach a tiny, isolated community: Ejido Canoas.

The leader of the community, Santana Arizpe, says 30 people live here. They’re subsistence farmers. The 61-year-old wears a cowboy hat and a child’s Spiderman backpack. He walks with a cane as we hike up a steep mountainside where we meet another older man swinging a pickaxe to break up the dry soil.

Community leader Santana Arizpe says money from trees has allowed his small village to make enough extra money to buy food and clothes and not rely on money from relatives in the big city. 

Credit:

Jason Margolis

Enrique García says he wakes up at 6 a.m. and works until 5 p.m. He’s planting tiny pine trees and cactus-like agave plants that are just a few inches high. He says he can plant up to 200 a day, and for every one of those, his village earns 20 to 30 cents. Last year, the villagers put 20,000 in the ground, earning about $6,000. It’s not much, but Arizpe isn’t complaining. He says they can buy food, clothes and shoes, and now they don’t have to rely on relatives in the big city.

And those checks they’re cashing, they’re not coming from the government. They’re being written by corporations like FEMSA, the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler.

FEMSA is working with the Nature Conservancy and has directly contributed $5 million to restore watersheds throughout Latin America and another $3 million for special research projects. It's in their interest; they’re a big water user.

“Because we rely on the aquifers for our supply of water,” says Mariano Montero, director of the FEMSA Foundation. “If we’re not taking care of those aquifers, we will not have access to the resource. We cannot do anything if we do not have the basic input, the water.”

PepsiCo and Heineken are on board, too. Montero says they’re putting competition aside and jointly bearing the costs.

Still, I asked Montero: Why not wait for the government to pay for a fix?

“The problems that we are facing in the 21st century cannot be solved with the paradigms of 20th century,” Montero says. “In the 20th century, we left the government to do a lot of things. And oftentimes, we find that it has not been efficient, it has not been the solution for these problems.”

He says the private sector is just more efficient. But he’s not saying corporations can solve these problems alone. The state government of Nuevo León is still going to have to do the heavy lifting.

The Nature Conservancy has raised a few million dollars from corporate sponsors in Monterrey. Ultimately, they need close to $50 million to plant perhaps 100 million trees in deforested areas, spanning more than 500 square miles.

Women in the Laguna de Sánchez community run a nursery growing baby pine trees to be used in the Nature Conservancy’s projects. The women harvest seeds from trees in the mountains.  

Credit:

Jason Margolis

Herron says corporate seed money is allowing them to fund pilot projects to show the government that this is a wise investment. “So what we’re doing with Heineken and Pepsi is really showing the government, ‘Hey, this scheme makes perfect sense and look at benefits this is providing for the city. Now what we need is for you guys to really put your hand in your pocket and invest in this in a sustainable way.’”

The Nature Conservancy is setting up similar “water funds" for troubled watersheds in 25 locations throughout Latin America and the US. It’s ultimately offering local governments this: a bargain. They’re using nature, and not huge infrastructure projects, to replenish groundwater, minimize flood risks, and fight climate change — for a fraction of the cost. 

Say what! Humans in America '115,000 years earlier than thought'

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High-tech dating of mastodon remains found in southern California has shattered the timeline of human migration to America, pushing the presence of hominins back to 130,000 years ago rather than just 15,000 years, researchers said Wednesday.

Teeth and bones of the elephant-like creature unmistakably modified by human hands, along with stone hammers and anvils, leave no doubt that some species of early human feasted on its carcass, they reported in the journal Nature.

Discovered in 1992 during construction work to expand an expressway, the bone fragments "show clear signs of having been deliberately broken by humans with manual dexterity," said lead author Steve Holen, director of research at the Center for American Paleolithic Research.

Up to now, the earliest confirmed passage of our ancestors into North America took place about 15,000 years ago. These were modern humans — Homo sapiens — that probably crossed from Siberia into what is today Alaska, by land or along the coast.

There have been several other claims of an even earlier bipedal footprint on the continent, but none would take that timeline back further than 50,000 years, and all remain sharply contested.

The absence of human remains at the California site throws wide open the question of who these mysterious hunters were, as well as when — and how — they arrived on American shores.

A genetic link

One possibility that can be excluded with high confidence is that they were like us. Homo sapiens, experts say, did not exit Africa until about 80,000 to 100,000 years ago.

But that still leaves a wide range of candidates, including several other hominin species that roamed Eurasia 130,000 years ago, the authors said.

They include Homo erectus, whose earliest traces date back nearly two million years; Neanderthals, who fought and co-mingled with modern humans across Europe before dying out some 40,000 years ago; and an enigmatic species called Denisovans, whose DNA survives today in Australian aboriginals.

In a companion analysis, Holen and his team argue that — despite rising seas 130,000 years ago due to an inter-glacial period of warming — the overseas distances to the Americas were within the capacity of human populations at the time.

Intriguingly, in light of the new find, recent studies have also shown a genetic link between present-day Amazonian native Americans and some Asian and Australian peoples.

The picture that emerges "indicates a diverse set of founding populations of the Americas," said Erella Hovers, an anthropologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who did not take part in the new study.

As for the early humans who carved up the bones at the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego, named for the paleontologist who discovered it, they likely died out, leaving no genetic trace in modern North Americans, the authors conjectured.

Previous attempts to accurately date artefacts at the site fell short.

Then, in 2014, co-author James Paces, a researcher with the US Geological Survey, used state-of-the-art radiometric methods to measure traces of natural uranium and its decaying by-products in the mastodon bones, which were still fresh when broken by precise blows from stone hammers.

Not-so-new New World

The prehistoric butchery, he determined, took place 130,000 years ago, give or take 9,400 years, and was may have sought to extract nutritious marrow.

"Since the original discovery, dating technology has advanced to enable us to confirm with further certainty that early humans were here signficantly earlier than commonly accepted," said co-author Thomas Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum.  

To strengthen the case, researchers set up an experiment to reproduce the stone-age food prep tableau unearthed from "Bed E" of the excavation site.

Using stone hammers and anvils similar to those found, they broke open large elephant bones much in the way pre-historic humans might have done. Certain blows yielded exactly the kind of strike marks, on both the hammers and the bones. 

The same patterns, further tests showed, could not have emerged from natural wear-and-tear, or from the deliberate crafting of the tools, called flaking.

"This is a very old technology," said Holen. "We have people in Africa 1.5 million years ago breaking up elephant limb bones in this pattern, and as humans moved out of Africa and across the world they took this type of technology with them."  

There remain nonetheless big holes in the narrative of human migration to the Americas, Hovers said, commenting in Nature.

"Time will tell whether this evidence will bring a paradigm change in our understanding of hominin dispersal and colonisation throughout the world, including in what now seems to be a not-so-new New World," she wrote. 

The world's most eligible bachelor likes to eat grass and chill in the mud

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Here's some news for the lovelorn.

If you’ve ever used the dating app Tinder to meet interesting people, then maybe you’ve come across a handsome devil named Sudan who describes himself as "the most eligible bachelor in the world.” He's one of a kind and “looking for love."

Tempted to find out more?

A closer look at Sudan’s profile will reveal that he also “likes to eat grass and chill in the mud.”

That's because he's a rhino. The last surviving male northern white rhino on the planet.

 "I don't mean to be too forward, but the fate of my species literally depends on me. I perform well under pressure. I like to eat grass and chill in the mud. No problems. 6 ft tall and 5,000 pounds if it matters." (from Sudan’s Tinder profile)

The problem is Sudan is having trouble finding a mate. So conservation scientists and Tinder have teamed up with a social media campaign to raise awareness and money to help save the species.

“The northern white rhino went extinct in the wild back around 2007,” explains Richard Vigne, who runs the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. The conservancy is home to the world's last remaining three northern white rhinos and is a sanctuary for just over 100 critically endangered black rhinos. Highly trained rhino protection squads and veterinary experts are on site to support rhino conservation in East Africa.

But Sudan and his female friends didn't seem interested in mating.

“So we hatched a plan [in 2009] with the Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic to bring him and three other reproductively active animals to Kenya in the hope that in a more natural environment, in a more natural social circumstance, they could be enticed to breed,” Vigne says.

In the weeks and months that followed, the animals showed a lot of mating behavior, but unfortunately the two females didn’t get pregnant. An ultrasound ultimately determined the rhinos were infertile, probably as a result of being in a zoo for a prolonged period. “So actually what we’re left with is an infertile old male and two infertile females, which puts the species on the brink of extinction.”

But conservationists don’t give up so easily. Vigne’s pinning his hopes on artificial reproductive techniques commonly used with domestic livestock such as cattle and horses. “But it’s never been done in rhinos,” Vigne says. “The challenge is to perfect the technique for rhinos, then to implement it successfully before the two remaining females die, using stored semen from Sudan in the hope that we can create embryos for implantation into southern white rhino female surrogates, hopefully then to give birth to purebred northern white rhino calves.”

The last surviving male Northern White Rhino named Sudan grazes at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia National Park, Kenya.

The last surviving male northern white rhino named Sudan grazes at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia National Park, Kenya.

Credit:

Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

That’s the ambitious plan that Vigne is embarking on along with a team of international experts. “It’s a tall order for sure," he says, "and even if we are successful in getting one or two calves on the ground, that’s not enough to save the species. We’ll have to do this many times and then we’ll have to set up a system whereby natural breeding can take place to build up hopefully a viable population of animals that one day could be reintroduced back into the wild.”

The cost to carry out this rhino recovery program is estimated to be around $10 million.

“By drawing attention to the issue with the Tinder social media app,” Vigne says, “and by people ‘swiping right’ then hopefully with small donations from lots of people we can raise a lot of cash and start making this really happen.”

.
Credit:

Coutesy of Ol Pejeta Conservancy 

Astronauts are baffled by Trump's space travel plans

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American astronauts may be walking on Mars in the next eight years, or ideally the next four, if President Donald Trump has his way. But the new timetable has baffled experts in space travel. 

The surprise announcement — or rather instruction — took place this week during a live video conference between President Trump and veteran astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is currently aboard the International Space Station.

During the conversation, Trump asked Whitson when it would be possible to send a human to Mars. She gave a careful and detailed answer explaining that a trip to the Red Planet might be possible sometime in the 2030s.

Not good enough for the White House. "Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed that up a little, OK?" Trump replied. There was awkward laughter from outer space. "We'll do our best!" Whitson promised, grinning. 

According to Professor Tom Pike of Imperial College London (who worked on the 2008 Mars Phoenix Lander), the NASA timetable cannot easily be shortened. "I wasn't quite sure whether [Trump] was mis-speaking. Maybe he meant the moon, [not Mars]?" Pike says. "He's got to do it on a realistic timescale, and with the budget that gives it the funding that it would require."

One of the biggest constraints is the return journey, according to Pike. Compared to the Moon, Mars has much higher gravity, and a substantial atmosphere. So a rocket for the return will probably need to be sent to Mars well in advance. That plan is still at an early stage. 

That is not the only matter to be overcome. "The issue is not just sending a man or woman to Mars," Pike says. "[Currently] even the space station is out of reach. The American astroanauts now there are there courtesy of the Russians, since the end of the shuttle program. So to go from essentially zero [to Mars] — this is a stretch."

Watch these majestic reindeer in Norway make their summer migration

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The annual migration of reindeer across Norway is a spectacle of nature. The majestic animals are currently moving from their southern winter grazing grounds to greener spring pastures.

This year you can watch it happen in real time — all of it.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) is following a herd of almost 1,500 reindeer on its Slow TV channel. Tune in and you’ll see reindeer, reindeer, and more reindeer. 

Slow TV got its start a couple years ago with a live broadcast of the eight-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo. Other shows have featured the knitting of a wool sweater, stitch by stitch; salmon fishing; and firewood being chopped and burned.

Live-streaming the reindeer migration is a more ambitious undertaking. It’s a continuous, weeklong broadcast that makes use of cameras mounted on drones, snowmobiles, and one lucky reindeer's antlers. Special antennae had to be mobilized on mountains along the way to route the broadcast signal from remote northern settings.

 

Jomfruelige hvite vidder , im a sami boy :-) #nrkrein # music im a sami boy :-) :-) :-)#samiboy #music

A post shared by grete (@gretesarautsi) on

“I think the idea behind the Slow TV is that in this stressful world we’re living in, it’s so good to just be able to sit down and put on the channel where it happens at a natural speed,” says Per Inge Aasen, one of the project managers for NRK. “The other thing that’s exciting is that it’s not people who decide what happens, it’s the reindeer and the weather.”

“Slow TV gives us a unique experience, the feeling of being present in real time and space,” echoes Rune Møklebust, of NRK. “Norwegians are not really slow … it’s more like a coincidence that it happened here in the first place. Give anyone a story they really care about and they will pay attention.”

The cameras are continuously focused on the reindeer as they trek from Šuoššjávri to Kvaløya in the country's far north, against a backdrop of breathtaking sunrises, snowy mountain plateaus, and northern lights displays.

The northern lights pictured over the Finnmarksvidda plateau – with the reindeer Slow TV inutt producers camped in a tiny hut.

The northern lights pictured over the Finnmarksvidda plateau – with the reindeer Slow TV inutt producers camped in a tiny hut. 

Credit:

Edmund Johannes Grønmo/NRK

The finale will be the herd’s impressive swim across the strait of Kvaløya to reach its summer pastures.

“This is a story that’s happening every year in our country. It’s a natural thing for our reindeer herders and we wanted to share this experience with people who don’t have the chance to be near the migration route,” says Aasen. "Wow! It's an amazing thing to look at."

Between Saturn's rings: The Cassini spacecraft is sending back amazing images

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Editor's note: This article originally appeared on NOVA Next.

It’s been 20 years since NASA launched its Cassini spacecraft into our solar system, with the mysterious gas giant Saturn as its destination.

Billions of miles later, this intrepid piece of machinery has finally grazed the tops of Saturn’s clouds.

After plunging into a small 1,500-mile gap between Saturn’s innermost ring and the planet itself, Cassini is closer to the planet than ever before. At 11:56 p.m. PDT on April 26, NASA’s Deep Space Network Goldstone Complex in California’s Mojave Desert received the signal that Cassini survived the descent.

It’s the grandest of grand finales. At times, Cassini was speeding up to 77,000 miles per hour relative to Saturn — a speed at which, along the way, an errant particle could have crushed the spacecraft at any moment.

Saturn hurricane cassini
One of the first images NASA received in the very early hours of April 27 was this close-up of a hurricane on Saturn.
Credit:

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

But thanks to top-notch engineering and a stroke of luck, that didn’t happen.

“I am delighted to report that Cassini shot through the gap just as we planned and has come out the other side in excellent shape,” said Cassini Project Manager Earl Maize in a statement.

Read more: This pressurized skirt-like machine helps keep astronauts fit

Before NASA engineers diverted Cassini’s course, sending it into the rings of Saturn, the spacecraft was engaged in a series of choreographed orbits around Saturn’s moon Titan — the mission’s main gravity assist and the only object that allowed for such a clean, calculated pivot toward the planet. “The last Titan fly-by is really what gave us the impulse to go into that tiny gap,” said Sonia Hernandez, a member of Cassini’s navigation team.

Cassini’s goals are different now than they were a week ago. Before the "grand finale"— what NASA is calling these last few months of the mission — it was focused on gathering images and data about Saturn’s 62 moons, particularly Titan and Enceladus. The latter, which was first studied up-close 11 years ago, spews plumes of salty water at its south sole — a sign of hydrothermal activity that could provide food for microbes if any exist deep in the moon’s icy seas. If scientists were to find evidence of life on Enceladus, it’s far more likely that it would have arisen independently of life on Earth than with Mars, which is close enough to Earth that life may have jumped the gap.

Cassini's days are numbered. But just because it's running out of fuel doesn't mean it's running out of fire.

From now until its final crash into the planet, Cassini will be collecting information about Saturn’s gravitational and magnetic fields, the composition of its upper atmosphere, the weight and age of its rings, the depth of its metallic hydrogen core, and more.

The manner in which particles and tiny moons accumulate in Saturn’s elegant rings, in particular, could tell us a lot. “That’s so key to understanding how Saturn formed,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist. Comparing these measurements to what NASA’s Juno spacecraft is collecting from Jupiter [also a gas giant] could help scientists put together a better picture of how solar systems form.

The team wants to know about the rings’ future, too. “We’re slowly losing the rings,” said Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science division director. “That material is filtering down into the planet. If you’ve ever eaten Jell-O, and you shake it, it shakes for quite a while before it settles down. Saturn was made 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s still shaking. We see that because the rings shift a little bit. So the seismic motion produced by the planet disturbing the rings produces the instability necessary for the rings to slowly fall into the planet.”

Saturn’s magnetic field is also an enigma; the Cassini team will analyze it from a variety of orientations to understand its source and depth. In addition, they’ll study Saturn’s dazzling pink aurorae. As particles rain down into the regions where we see aurorae, they emit radio waves, known as Saturn kilometric radiation, or SKR for short. These radio waves and the aurorae are complementary in that they’re both affected by the planet’s magnetic field.

By scrutinizing magnetic field data, the team hopes to be able to provide more info to scientists searching for and studying exoplanets. “The more we learn about our own solar system and under what conditions that happens, the more we’re going to be able to apply it all over the place,” Green said.

How is Green feeling after all of the excitement? “Watching it on the other side of all this, the tension and the build-up, it’s just an enormous relief,” he said. “We’re ready now for the next step.”

Spilker echoed the sentiment. “Probably the things we haven’t heard of will be the most spectacular,” she said.

How criminals could ‘eavesdrop’ on your phone’s motion sensors, and steal your PIN

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Modern smartphones are full of sensors that can make the devices more intuitive — counting your steps, for example, or detecting when you’ve tilted your screen. But according to a new study published in the International Journal of Information Security, those features could come at a price: your security.

“These sensors can provide us — or hackers — with much more than people would think,” says Maryam Mehrnezhad, lead author of the report and a research fellow in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University in the UK.

Mobile apps and websites generally need to ask for permission to access sensors like the camera and microphone. But as Mehrnezhad explains, there are actually more than two dozen sensors that come standard on many modern smartphones — and not all of them are as protected. 

In the study, she and her colleagues hacked smartphone motion and orientation sensors by embedding a bit of malicious JavaScript code into a webpage. When volunteers opened the webpage on their phones, the spy program eavesdropped on the phones’ sensors, gleaning information about touch-screen movement — including as users entered four-digit PIN numbers.

Then, using a machine learning algorithm, researchers analyzed the sensor data to guess the personal identification numbers that had been entered. The algorithm was startlingly precise — guessing PINs with more than 70 percent accuracy on the first try. “And it goes up to 100 percent in the fifth try,” Mehrnezhad says.

That’s not all that a smartphone sensor could divulge about its user, she adds. “These sensors are very accurate, so they can figure out various slight changes that happen on the device. So it could reveal a lot of information about the user, as we proved: PIN, touch actions.”

And then there’s our personal activity data: “People know about all of these fitness trackers, if you're sitting, walking, running and all those other physical activities,” she says. (According to a Newcastle University press release, her team is looking into the security of fitness devices next.)

The simplest solution would be to require that mobile apps and web pages ask permission to access any of a phone’s sensors. But that’s not likely, Mehrnezhad says — modern phones just have too many of them.

“It could be very unusable for the users to get notification for each single use, every time that they open a web application or when they install an app,” she says. “So it's a battle between security and usability, really.”

For now, she says, her team is working with the industry to figure out security patches. But until one emerges, she suggests that individual users take basic steps to keep their sensor data private. For one, change your passwords and PINs regularly, and close out apps or browser windows you don’t need, rather than letting them run in the background.

“You can also uninstall the apps that you no longer need,” she adds. “Also, keeping updated your operating system would help all the time, and installing applications from approved app stores would help out as well.”

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


This pressurized, skirt-like machine helps keep astronauts fit

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Many engineers spend their entire careers focused on a single area of research — say, the design of airplane components. Then there's Christine Dailey: Put simply, she's not your average engineer. 

Dailey has explored everything from fluids to electronics and has built an exercise machine for astronauts. She has designed autonomous vehicles and much more (some of which she's not allowed to talk about), all while finishing her PhD at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and working as a mechanical engineer for the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.

But Dailey wasn’t always sure she wanted to be a mechanical engineer. In fact, her first idea was to become a sports journalist. However, she found it a little repetitive. “After about five or six years, one team wins, one team loses,” she says, laughing. So she made plans to go back to school. “I happened to be kind of good at math, so I fell into it.”

Then, she says, she “fell right into the robotics lab” on her tour of Embry-Riddle. For her master’s project, Dailey tackled the problem of exercising in space.

As she explains it, astronauts have to use an array of machines to counteract the negative effects of zero gravity. “We have orthostatic intolerance, for example, bone loss, muscle loss. And so exercising is proven to one, create plasma ... red blood cells live in plasma, and red blood cells help move oxygen through the body.”

What’s more, Earth’s gravity creates natural resistance on our bodies. “So you’re exercising without even knowing it,” she says. But in zero gravity, our bones don’t have much to support. “So they don't need to be strong.”

Currently, it takes three separate machines — and a lot of time — for astronauts to counter the effects of space on their bodies. “It's a treadmill, and then a bicycle-type thing, and then a resistance device they call RED,” she says. “And [astronauts] have to split up their time, about two and a half hours a day, working on these machines.”

Therein, Dailey saw a problem. “Well, that's not really ideal,” she says. “I'm sorry, if I'm an astronaut, I don't want to spend two and a half hours a day exercising. I want to go explore. I want to go float around and have fun.”

So she built an “elliptical-type” exercise machine, housed in a negative pressure chamber. She explains that the waist-down chamber — which looks a bit like an enclosed, space-age hoop skirt — mimics the effect of gravity on our blood and other fluids, pulling them down toward our feet.

“So you're pulling the fluid down, and you're exercising,” she says. “You get the resistance for your muscle, you get the pressure for your bones. It's wonderful.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday, as part of a special live show on “Engineering the Future” at the Bob Carr Theater in Orlando, Florida.

A bold plan to slow the melt of Arctic permafrost could help reverse global warming

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Russian scientists Sergey Zimov and Nikita Zimov — they're a father-son duo — believe they can slow the thawing of the Siberian permafrost by bringing back grazing animals to a swath of land called Pleistocene Park.

Siberia’s melting permafrost has enormous implications for the Earth’s climate.

In some areas of Siberia, permafrost extends 5,000 feet below the surface. It contains vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. The top 3 feet alone is estimated to contain twice as much carbon as what’s already in the Earth’s atmosphere. As the carbon and methane are released over the coming decades, scientists say it could spell climate disaster.

Nikita Zimov believes he knows how to thwart that. “There is only one theoretical chance to prevent that from happening. We must restore the Ice Age ecosystem,” he says.

Pleistocene Park lies in a remote and desolate corner of Siberia a couple of hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Wintertime temperatures average around 17 degrees below zero. During the Ice Age, millions of animals roamed this territory. Back then, the Zimovs say, herds of bison, musk ox, reindeer, moose and woolly mammoths compacted the snow in the wintertime, which lowered the permafrost temperature.

Today, in the wintertime, the ground is covered by a meter-thick layer of fluffy snow, which acts much like a down comforter that insulates the ground from the cold air. So the Zimovs have begun the process of restoration by bringing in climate-adapted species, like stocky Yakutian horses, musk ox, wisent and European bison.

“When animals trample down the snow, they actually thin that layer of snow, making it dense, and this allows much deeper freezing during winter,” he explains.

Although the Zimovs’ research is still ongoing, early comparisons of soil temperatures below the compacted snow and ungrazed terrain indicate that trampling does cool the ground. Other research supports the basic idea.

Some scientists, such as Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University, worry that putting grazing animals back on the landscape might have unanticipated effects, however.

“Animals would also be there in the summertime, and another possible effect of increasing your animals is that they might disturb the moss and soil organic layer that exists on top of the active layer,” Schuur says. “In the summertime, that has sort of the opposite effect: If you disturb the surface layer, it actually exposes the permafrost to warm summer temperatures.”

The Zimovs have an answer for this: The summer is three months long and the winter is nine months long, and the winter is colder than the summer is warm. So, the effect of removing winter snow is greater than the effect of removing summer insulation, which will keep the temperature of permafrost lower and more stable.

The Zimovs also hope that the part of the permafrost known as the "active layer," just underneath the moss, will create another climate-friendly outcome to their experiment. Grazing animals will stimulate the growth of grasses that take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and return it to the soil.

Yakutian horses grazing

Yakutian horses, musk ox, and bison graze on the lush summer grasses at Pleistocene Park.

Credit:

 Pleistocene Park

When a horse or a bison or a mammoth eats a blade of grass, it quickly digests it and returns it to the landscape in the form of urine or feces, which fertilizes the plants and stimulates additional growth. When they roamed the vast steppes, mammoths contributed a lot of fertilizer. Their elephant cousins produce over 100 pounds of manure a day. Efforts are underway to bring back the woolly mammoth through genetic engineering, but Sergey Zimov wants to proceed with or without it. Nikita Zimov feels the same.

“I don’t care whether it has five legs or six legs. I just care that it eats the grass, cycles nutrients, reproduces and can survive an Arctic winter,” Nikita Zimov told a filmmaker who is documenting the Pleistocene Park project.

Another thing that works? An old Soviet army tank. Nikita Zimov drives it around, and its caterpillar treads flatten the snow and snap young larch trees, simulating the heavy footsteps of the huge woolly mammoths that once ruled this land.

The idea is that over time, the conditions in Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of permafrost across a wide band of the Earth.

“We’ve been hearing talk about global warming for decades, but still the problem gets only worse,” Nikita Zimov says. “In the place where I live, change has become evident to everybody. We are rapidly approaching a tipping point when warming becomes unstoppable. It is too late to wait for someone else to deal with it. We must take actions now.”

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

Harvey may have caught Texas by surprise, but other places have been getting ready for more extreme weather

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We don't know how much the epic flooding from Tropical Storm Harvey in Texas has been influenced by human pollution of the atmosphere, but the storm has likely been worse than it would’ve been generations ago, before we started pumping massive amounts of carbon into the air.

“Harvey was almost certainly more intense than it would have been in the absence of human-caused [global] warming,” writes leading atmospheric scientist Michael Mann, of Penn State University.

It’s a variation of an increasingly common story around the world, and it comes down to simple physics. Carbon pollution traps more of the sun’s heat — more energy — in the air and oceans. Warmer water leads to more evaporation. Warmer air can hold more water. And more water in the air “creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding,” Mann says.

The trend is similar with heat and drought.

“[Recent] heat waves in India, Pakistan, China, Europe, Africa, Americas — in almost every case now we see that our emissions are making the events more intense or longer-lasting,” says Katharine Mach, who runs the Environment Assessment Facility at Stanford University.

Bottom line, saysKevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, “climate change just makes all of the weather events a little more extreme than they otherwise would be.”

The calamitous events of this week in Texas might suggest that we’re at the mercy of this new era of supercharged weather. But Mach, who focuses on how countries and communities around the world can respond to the growing threats from climate change, says it doesn’t have to be that way. She says many places are taking the threats of increasing severe weather events very seriously and rising to the challenge.

The Netherlands, for example, “has a top-to-bottom risk management approach” to climate threats, she says. France responded to a deadly extreme heat wave in 2003 by developing an early warning system and setting up cooling centers, which Mach says helped the country better ride out another heat wave three years later.

And then there’s New York City after superstorm Sandy.

“That event in many ways was a trigger for building back better,” Mach says. The region has been “thinking about everything from flood insurance, retreat among some communities, raising up boilers in hospitals so that critical infrastructure is safe, and even reimagining what the cityscape might look like so that it's more resilient.”

But Mach says ambitious action on climate isn’t restricted to high income countries.

Bangladesh, for instance — among the world’s poorest countries — has responded to the growing threat from cyclones that regularly hit the country by “developing protective structures so that they can raise up livestock and keep them safe, and also tapping the power of communities to provide early warning when a storm is coming.”

Mach calls those changes “very compelling” and says they have made a big difference in storm mortality in the country.

She says similar strides are being made in parts of Africa.

“We ... see it in terms of community-based adaptation across the African continent,” Mach says. “Some of the most ambitious city-scale action, for example, has happened in Durban, South Africa. We see communities ... coming together to think about what does [climate change] mean for planning for increased risk of flooding in some places, increased risk of drought in others. And [these are] communities that are already more on the margin,” compared to here in the US.

A big theme in adaptation, Mach says, is that “not all poor people are vulnerable and not all vulnerable people are poor.”

And not all places that have the resources to respond well to the threat have been. Texas itself is a prime example. It’s one of the most vulnerable places in the country to the effects of climate change, from raging floods to searing heat. But the state’s leaders have generally rejected any concern about climate change, and the state has taken very little action to prepare for it.

“We're already too late in some respects,” former state environmental regulator Larry Soward told The Worldin 2014.

Soward served under former Texas governor Rick Perry, who while in office rejected the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused climate change, and who now leads the US Department of Energy. But Soward parted ways with the Texas Republican establishment on climate change.

“If we don't start doing something today, we are going to have significant costs, in economic damage, property, lives, environmental damage, that could have been avoided to some extent, ” he said at the time.

Texas’s reluctance up to now to squarely face the risks of climate change drives home another key lesson from Mach’s work: that the barriers to climate change adaptation aren’t just about resources.

“In some places it's very much [about] financial capital,” she says, “do locations have the money. In other cases, the barriers… are more social or ideological, for example not paying attention to the way that risks are changing even if the scientific capacity is there to evaluate them.”

And Mach says the US federal government is moving in that direction.

“President Trump just rolled back an Obama era effort ... to take into account flood risk for federal infrastructure,” Mach says. “That kind of backsliding it's not smart management or ambitious management in a changing climate.”

Neena Satija of the Texas Tribune contributed to this report

Related: Is climate change making hurricanes worse?

See all The World's coverage of the climate crisis

After Harvey, hundreds find refuge in Houston-area mosques

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President Donald Trump traveled to Texas on Tuesday to get an up-close look at the devastating damage caused by Tropical Storm Harvey.

Unprecedented flooding has driven thousands out of their homes throughout the region.

In the Greater Houston area, some of those displaced by catastrophic flooding are finding refuge inside local mosques.

“They’re not just people from the Islamic community. We are welcoming anybody and everybody,” says M.J. Khan, president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston. 

M.J. Khan is the president of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.

Credit:

Courtesy of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston

Khan says there are currently a dozen mosques in the Greater Houston area providing shelter, as well as food and other supplies to hundreds of people in need.

“It’s not just adults, healthy males and females who are there. There are elderly people. There are young kids, [and] everybody has a different kind of need.”

ISGH began organizing relief efforts early, before the storm descended on the state over the weekend. Using its large social media networks and other outreach, it solicited supply donations and called for residents in surrounding areas to volunteer their homes and time.

Khan says that those seeking help have been "overwhelmed with the love and care they're receiving" from volunteers — some of whom have been displaced themselves. And he says, he too, has been personally touched by volunteers' efforts.

When he suggested that some volunteers take a break from relief efforts to sleep, they told him, "we can't sleep until these people are in their homes," Khan explains, breaking into tears. 

“I've seen story after story where people are just putting out their hearts in these difficult days,” Khan says, his voice cracking. “It's amazing how much capacity human beings have to help and to love.”

Listen to the full interview with M.J. Khan on today's episode of The World.

Floods and landslides kill over 1,200 in South Asia

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More than 1,200 people have been killed by flooding and landslides in northern India, Nepal and Bangladesh as intense rainfall has slammed the region for weeks. 

Tens of thousands of homes, schools and hospitals have been destroyed by the monsoon rains, and the United Nations estimates that almost 41 million people have been affected in the three countries.

Matthew Marek, the head of disaster response in Bangladesh for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, says about half of the country’s 64 districts are flooded, but the water is finally starting to recede in some areas.

“Right now the focus is not on rescue,” Marek says. “The focus is on actually delivering aid — food, clean drinking water, as well as assistance in the form of hygiene items, et cetera.”

Marek says the Red Cross in Bangladesh has requested about $4.9 million from the international community to continue their immediate relief efforts.

The Bangladeshi government hasn’t released official estimates about the amount of damage caused by flooding, so it’s difficult to say how much it may cost to rebuild.

Farmland in Bangladesh has been particularly devastated. It’s a huge blow to the agriculture-dependent country, which already lost around 700,000 metric tons of rice in flash floods earlier this year.

You can listen to disaster response manager Matthew Marek’s full conversation with The World above. 

Louisiana braces for heavy winds and rain as Harvey strikes again

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Tropical Storm Harvey made a second landfall in Louisiana Wednesday five days after the monster storm slammed onshore as a Category Four hurricane, pummeling the US Gulf coast with torrential rains that turned neighborhoods into lakes in America's fourth largest city, Houston.

The storm's second landfall was just west of the town of Cameron, the National Hurricane Center said, with "flooding rains" drenching parts of southeastern Texas and neighboring southwestern Louisiana.

Louisiana residents braced for Harvey's ferocious maximum sustained winds nearing 45 miles per hour, with forecasters predicting another five to 10 inches of rain could pour on the region.

Related — How to help after Harvey: These groups are providing relief to Texans affected by catastrophic flooding

They expect Harvey will gradually weaken to a tropical depression by Wednesday night, meaning maximum sustained winds should slow.

But low-lying New Orleans was still girding for the storm, just a day after the 12-year anniversary of Katrina, which ravaged the vulnerable city famous for its jazz music and cuisine.

The New Orleans branch of the National Weather Service said a heavy rain threat remained over southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi through Thursday, when relatively drier weather is finally slated to arrive.

One night prior to the second landfall, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu tweeted to "remind #NOLA that we are not yet in the clear," urging residents to "remain vigilant and cautious."

Rescue teams scrambling

A military helicopter and personnel rescue a stranded resident from floods caused by Tropical Storm Harvey in east Houston.

Credit:

Adrees Latif/Reuters

In Texas emergency crews were still struggling to reach hundreds of stranded people in a massive round-the-clock rescue operation — but the National Weather Service tweeted that weather conditions there were to at last improve.

The storm had transformed roads into rivers in America's fourth-largest city, driving more than 8,000 people into emergency shelters.

Houstonians woke up Wednesday from a nighttime curfew declared by Mayor Sylvester Turner aimed at aiding search efforts and thwarting potential looting in the flood-ravaged city.

At least one bridge had crumbled, one levee had breached and dams were at risk in the Lone Star State.

The full scale of the catastrophe's impact — including the number of deaths and the extent of destruction — remained difficult for authorities to gauge, as rescue efforts were ongoing and much of the city remained flood-stricken.

Media reports indicated the death toll has risen to 30, and authorities feared confirming more once the worst had past and search teams could again travel roads.

A Houston police officer was confirmed the latest victim of the storm after the body of Steve Perez, who went missing after reporting for duty in the early hours of Sunday, was recovered by divers two days later.

Harvey was previously known to have left at least three people dead, with six more fatalities potentially tied to the storm.

'Overwhelming'

Everywhere, the figures from the storm are staggering. The National Weather Service said over six million Texans have been impacted by 30 inches or more of rain since Friday.

Residents living around a chemical plant in the county that includes Houston were evacuated as a precaution, over fears that some of the chemicals at the facility — which produces organic peroxides — might react or cause an explosion.

Andrea Aviles, 16, fled her home along with her family on Tuesday. She and some 30 extended family members were now crammed into a hotel in the small town of Winnie.

"I've never seen it like this," she said of the flooding. "All our yard is full of water."

Hugging the road's central median in their Suburban vehicle — water reaching halfway up the tires — they passed ditches full of abandoned cars.

"It was sad," she said. "It's overwhelming."

President Donald Trump toured the Harvey disaster zone in Texas on Tuesday as he sought to project an image of leadership in America's first major natural disaster since he took office.

On Air Force One bringing Trump back to Washington, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president will return to Texas Saturday and perhaps go to Louisiana, too, depending on the weather there.

The US leader and First Lady Melania avoided visiting Houston to avoid disrupting recovery efforts.

But the president was nevertheless seeking to make a political statement, learning from the mistakes of former Republican president, George W. Bush, whose response to Hurricane Katrina was widely seen as botched.

'Long way to go'

The National Weather Service tweeted Harvey appears to have broken a US record for most rain from a single tropical cyclone, with nearly 52 inches recorded in the town of Cedar Bayou.

The Texas bayou and coastal prairie rapidly flooded after Harvey struck the coast on Friday, but the region's sprawling cities where drainage is slower were worst hit.

Highways were swamped and homes were rendered uninhabitable, with power lines cut and dams overflowing, sparking massive floods across Houston and its wider metropolitan area of six million.

Federal officials estimate up to half a million people in Texas will ultimately require some form of assistance — but for now the focus remains immediate disaster relief, with many lives still at stake.

"Recovery is a slow process," Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said as he welcomed Trump in Corpus Christi along with Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

"We've got a long way to go."

by Brendan Smialowski/AFP

Photos: Mumbai recovers from floods after the most rainfall in a more than a decade

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Mumbai, a coastal city of more than 20 million people, is the latest to be hit by floods that have ravaged South Asia this monsoon season, affecting millions of people across India, Nepal and Bangladesh and killing more than 1,200 people.

The intense rainfall began Tuesday morning and continued for several hours, making roads impassable and briefly shutting the suburban rail network on which millions of commuters depend.

Cars were submerged and commuters waded through waist-deep water on Tuesday evening. "I could not find any mode of transport and spent my night on the streets instead of trying to reach home," said 62-year-old Gangadin Gupta.

A man carrying a bucket walks through a water-logged neighbourhood in Mumbai.

Credit:

Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

Mumbai has one of the highest population densities in the world, says BBC Mumbai reporter Sameer Hashmi. “That puts pressure on not just roads and railways, but even on the sewage system and drainage system.”

The lack of infrastructure in parts of Mumbai, particularly slums, only compounds the problem, said Hashmi. 

Residents of Dharavi, one of Asia's biggest slums and home to more than a million people, said much of the low-lying area was under water.

"Most of the shanties and houses in Dharavi were submerged in water and we lost all our valuables," said 45-year-old Selvam Sathya. "All of us took refuge on the first floor of different buildings and the water only started receding this morning. I lost all my belongings in the flooding."

A passenger bus moves through a water-logged road during rains in Mumbai.

Credit:

Shailesh Andrade/Reuters

The transport chaos forced the city's famed dabbawallahs, who take hundreds of thousands of hot lunches from commuters' homes to offices every day, to cancel their deliveries. More than 5,000 were left stranded in the city overnight, according to a spokesman for the Mumbai Dabbawallha Association.

The flooding brought back memories of 2005 when about 37 inches of rain fell on Mumbai in just 24 hours, killing more than 1,000 people.

Electricity, water supply, communications networks and public transport were totally shut down during the 2005 catastrophe, which was blamed on unplanned development and poor drainage in the western city.

India, Nepal and Bangladesh all suffer frequent flooding during the monsoon rains, which begin in June and last till September or October.

A woman is helped to move through a water-logged road after rains in Mumbai.

Credit:

Shailesh Andrade/Reuters

But the Red Cross has termed this year's floods the worst for decades in some parts of the region. It says entire communities have been cut off and many are short of food and clean water.

The east Indian state of Bihar has been particularly hard hit, with more than 500 people killed this monsoon season.

Around 1.7 million people were reportedly affected by the floods, which are now receding.

Back in Mumbai, the roads are now clear. Despite a chance of more rain, schools and businesses are reopening tomorrow and public transportation will return to the regular schedule. 

Agence France-Presse​ contributed to this report.

People are rescued from a flooded village in Motihari, Bihar state.

Credit:

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters


Workers trapped by Harvey at a Mexican bakery feed a hungry Houston

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Jorge Agundis was baking pan dulce on the overnight shift when the first rains of Hurricane Harvey began to fall. 

He says the water started to accumulate quickly — in 10 or 15 minutes. 

His thoughts turned to his wife and three young children. Would they be OK? In the four days since the storm landed, the kitchen manager at Houston's El Bolillo Bakery still hasn't been able to get back to the trailer park where he lives with his family.

But Agundis has done more than worry. 

Instead, he's baked. And baked. And baked.

He and two fellow employees at the Mexican bakery's Wayside branch found themselves trapped in the store on Saturday. By the time his night shift was over, the roads outside were impassable. He learned that the freeway to his family's trailer park was underwater.

That's when Agundis's children began calling his cellphone.

"My son's calling me, saying, 'Hey Daddy, where you at?'" Agundis recalls. "I'm worrying, worrying, worrying for my family."

So Agundis and his colleagues decided they'd get busy with the 4,000 pounds of flour they had on hand. They baked day and night for two days straight. 

They filled every shelf in the store's kitchen.

El Bolillo owner Kirk Michaelis saw his employees' handiwork when he was finally able to rescue his staffers Monday morning. 

"I was amazed," Michaelis says. "All the racks were full with bread, just stacked to the ceiling."

City officials picked up more than a thousand bakery items and distributed them to flood victims throughout the city.

Michaelis was amazed by his employees' dedication. 

"Jorge said, 'Well, I couldn't think about my family because it was killing me,'" Michaelis recalls. "He has small children in that trailer, and he was afraid it was going to float away. So he just immersed himself in baking."

In fact, floodwater had risen around Agundis's family home and was about 6 inches from reaching the trailer doors. But the water stopped there.

For the past two nights, Agundis and his colleagues have been staying in Michaelis's home. Agundis isn't as worried now because he knows his family made it through the storm. 

And his boss, Michaelis, says he's doing his best to unite the baker and his family. 

"I have a friend on that side of town that has an airboat. If we can't get [Agundis] there by car, we'll get there by boat and get his family," Michaelis says. "They're more than welcome to come and stay with me."

The Dutch have advice on how Houston can plan for future flooding events

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Tropical Storm Harvey made landfall again Wednesday in Louisiana, evoking painful memories of Hurricane Katrina's deadly strike 12 years ago, as more bodies were plucked from the subsiding floodwaters in neighboring Texas.

The fresh hit comes five days after Harvey slammed onshore as a Category 4 hurricane, pummeling the US Gulf Coast with torrential rains that turned neighborhoods into lakes in America's fourth-largest city, Houston.

As rescue missions and relief efforts continue, some are raising questions about whether Houston could have done more to prepare for the flooding that’s driven tens of thousands out of their homes.

“I don't think there's any city in the world ... that could have dealt with 51 or 52 inches of rain in a matter of 70 to 80 hours,” says Dale Morris, a senior economist at the Netherlands’ Embassy in Washington, DC, and director of the Dutch government’s water management efforts in the US. “With those volumes of rain, there would there would be flooding no matter.”

But Morris says Houston could learn some lessons from the Netherlands, a country considered a global leader in flood-management design and initiatives.

Related: Living with Rising Seas, an in-depth series

“Some of the issues … that Houston is confronting now, the Dutch have confronted too,” Morris says.

As part of his role directing water management efforts in the US, Morris has already been in touch with officials in Houston and other areas of Texas.

“They need to be prepared for coastal surge and surge protection,” Morris says. “This is the third major flood in Houston in the last three years ... so this condition is sort of becoming the new normal.”

What does Morris recommend?

1. Zoning

“You need to zone better … to make sure people don't live in the flood plains or, if they do, that they have houses that are elevated and can withstand floods.”

2. ‘Storage’ areas

“You need to make sure that there are storage areas where you can store … these massive amounts of rainfall, where you can add additional pump capacity to help drain the land where that is. … You need to create green spaces so that the water that falls … can be absorbed as groundwater, as opposed to running off down concrete or asphalt paved streets. … The initial reaction is always to fight the water, to channel it away, to stop it from coming in. ... You have to actually create a more resilient system so that the ground — the grass and your natural environment — become the place where water naturally gets stored, as opposed to having it again channeled on concrete paved streets where it can drain anywhere and thus you get backup flooding.”

He says this approach would require a “change in mentality” and financial commitment, but that Houston and other coastal cities can’t afford not to take action.

3. Lots of money

“The rest of the US depends upon Houston for its petrochemical output” among other things, Morris says. “I think asking whether it's worth spending $20 billion or $30 billion to protect a multi-hundred-billion dollar city — that's an easy answer to that question.”

Agence France-Presse contributed reporting to this story.

New research suggests wine first emerged 6,000 years ago — in Italy

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Researchers have discovered that the oldest wine in the world may have been Italian, after finding traces of 6,000-year-old fermented grapes off the west coast of Sicily.

A team of researchers studied residue in terra-cotta jars found in a cave on Mount Kronio near Agrigento, Italy. The site was "probably a holy site where offerings were made to the gods," Enrico Greco, a chemist at the University of Catania, told AFP.

"The fact that the jars were found in a cave saved them from being buried and allowed the contents to be preserved, even though it has solidified over the centuries," Greco said.

Several analysis techniques, including nuclear magnetic resonance, revealed the presence of tartaric acid, the primary acid in grapes.

"We ruled out fatty residues from meat or oil, and as there were no traces of grape seeds or skins, we concluded it was from fermented grapes," he said.

The archaeologists then dated the residue by comparing the pottery with other vases from nearby sites. 

The finding is significant, as it dates the fermented grapes back to the fourth millennium BC, some 3,000 years earlier than the first traces of viticulture previously recorded in Italy. 

"When we published our article, we did not imagine it could be the oldest wine ever discovered, but the information has led us to believe this may be the case," Greco said.

He was part of an international group of researchers led by Davide Tanasi, an archaeologist from the University of South Florida who made the discovery, which was published in the Microchemical Journal.

As to whether it is the oldest wine in the world, the scientists remain cautious.

"There have been discoveries from the same period in Armenia, but it seems to have been a drink produced from fermenting pomegranate, not grapes," Greco said, adding: "There are also older signs of rice fermentation in China."

Now largely dry, Houston begins the tough work of recovery

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Houston was limping back to life on Friday one week after Hurricane Harvey slammed into America's fourth-largest city and left a trail of devastation across other parts of southeast Texas.

"Most of the city is now dry," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told MSNBC. "And so we're turning to recovery and housing, especially for individuals whose homes were greatly damaged."

As flood waters receded in Houston and residents began slowly returning home other nearby towns such as Rockport, Beaumont and Port Arthur were struggling to get back on their feet.

Rescue workers were still scouring storm-ravaged southeast Texas by air and by boat looking for victims trapped in their flooded homes.

Harvey has been blamed thus far for at least 42 deaths and tens of billions of dollars of damage.

'We need the resources yesterday'

Turner estimated that around 40,000 to 50,000 homes in the Houston area had suffered damage after Harvey made landfall last Friday as a Category Four hurricane, and said federal assistance was needed urgently.

"We need the resources now," Turner told CNN. "In fact let me back that up. We need the resources yesterday."

President Donald Trump visited Texas on Tuesday and is scheduled to return to the Lone Star State again on Saturday.

"Texas is healing fast thanks to all of the great men & women who have been working so hard," he tweeted Friday morning. "But still so much to do. Will be back tomorrow!"

Turner, the Houston mayor, said providing housing is "critically important."

"People can't stay in shelters forever," he said.

An estimated 30,000 residents of the Houston area sought refuge from the storm in public shelters and many will be returning to homes that are now uninhabitable because of flood damage.

Besides their homes, tens of thousands of residents also lost their vehicles in a state where having a car is considered a must.

Debris removal a priority

Removing debris was also essential, the Houston mayor said.

"People returning to their homes, they're putting all of that debris out," he said. "You can't leave it out there. That will create a public health hazard."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told ABC his state was facing a "massive, massive clean-up process."

"People need to understand this is not going to be a short-term project," he said. "This is going to be a multi-year project for Texas to be able to dig out of this catastrophe."

"As the waters recede in Houston, of course they're still rising over in Beaumont," he said.

A major hospital in Beaumont began evacuating its 200-odd patients on Thursday after the city's water supply failed and a dozen premature babies were airlifted out on Friday.

The authorities in Crosby, Texas, were monitoring a chemical plant meanwhile where fires broke out Wednesday night.

Officials ordered residents living within 1.5 miles of the facility to evacuate amid concerns about the fumes emanating from the plant, which produces organic peroxides -- compounds that can combust if not cooled to the right temperature.

Rachel Moreno of the Fire Marshal's Office said there had been no further fires or smoke overnight at the chemical plant in Crosby, 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Houston

"We have been hearing popping noises, which is the organic peroxides decomposing," Moreno said.

Houston Astros coming home

In Rockport, where Harvey made landfall, the schools were closed and many residents were without power.

Telephone and electricity poles were down in many parts of the town of 10,000 on the Gulf Coast. Rockport's First Baptist Church was in ruins, its roof ripped off, and many homes were just piles of shattered debris.

Vice President Mike Pence visited Rockport on Thursday and promised to provide assistance to residents of the battered town.

In a sign of a return to normality in Houston, the city's Major League Baseball team, the Houston Astros, announced they would return home for games on Saturday and Sunday against the New York Mets.

The Astros abandoned their home stadium, Minute Maid Park, this week for three games in Florida against the Texas Rangers.

"We hope that these games can serve as a welcome distraction for our city that is going through a very difficult time," said Astros president Reid Ryan in a statement. "We hope that we can put smiles on some faces."

While baseball was coming back, schools in the Houston area were assessing when they could reopen with most looking at Tuesday of next week, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Schools had been scheduled to resume classes on Monday August 28 after the annual summer break but those plans were put on hold by the storm.

Richard Carranza, superintendent of Houston's largest school district, told the Chronicle that at least 35 schools had sustained water or wind damage or lost power during the storm.

So with school still out, many families with children headed instead to Houston Zoo -- which partially reopened -- and could be seen there early in the morning, strolling the grounds.

What happened to the moon’s magnetic field?

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The moon doesn’t have a magnetosphere, unlike Earth. The protective bubble shields our upper atmosphere from solar wind — and, it's what makes compasses point north. But billions of years ago, scientists say, the moon did have its own magnetic field. 

In fact, according to new research published in Science Advances, the moon’s magnetic field stuck around for at least 2 billion years — a surprisingly long time given the moon’s size, according to lead author Sonia Tikoo, an assistant professor of planetary sciences at Rutgers University. And as she explains, the findings raise new questions about what powered the dynamo, or generator, for so long, and when the moon’s magnetic field finally fizzled out.

In rocky bodies like the moon, magnetic fields are generated by liquid metal churning in the core — but that churning doesn’t last forever, Tikoo says. “Generally, the convection or the motion of liquid metal within the cores is tied to the cooling of the planet. So, you have hot metal rising within the core and cold metal falling as it cools off closer to the mantle.”

“And so, the idea is that on a smaller planetary body like the moon, the moon might cool off more quickly than say, a larger body like the Earth and that it might run out of energy earlier,” she adds. “And so, perhaps the moon's magnetic field turning off has to do with it running out of the power source.”

To study the moon’s ancient magnetic field, Tikoo and her team turned to the “magnetic record” frozen in lunar rock. “Whenever rocks form, they create minerals within the rocks that are like little compass needles,” she explains, “and these minerals align with whatever ambient magnetic field is around at the time that the rock is forming.”

“So, what we can do is, we can take the rock samples and measure them in a magnetometer and get the direction and intensity of the magnetic field in the rock,” she adds, “and then we can convert that to information about how strong the ancient magnetic field was that magnetized the rock initially.”

In the study, researchers examined just one sample, which was collected during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. It’s a glassy rock that likely formed when a meteorite crashed into the moon’s surface. “And this glass had these beautiful, small magnetic grains which were excellent magnetic recorders,” Tikoo says, “so, this was the best sample that we could have targeted, basically.”

The rock, which formed 1 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, recorded a magnetic field of roughly 5 microteslas. But 3.56 billion years ago, the moon’s magnetic field averaged around 50 microteslas, a Rutgers press release notes. According to Tikoo, that’s as strong as the Earth’s field is today. “So, we really need to learn more about the decline, what could have caused the decline, and whether that means something about different power sources operating in the moon at different times in its history.”

In the study, the authors suggest the dynamo may have been powered by “at least two distinct mechanisms” over the course of its existence. “The Earth's magnetic field is generally generated by convection in our core, but also it's supplemented by energy released during the crystallization or the solidification of the solid inner core,” Tikoo says. “And so, we think that that process might have also been occurring within the moon.”

Answering those questions could tell us more than just what happened to the moon’s magnetic field — it could give clues about the habitability of other bodies. According to Tikoo, Mars once had a magnetic field — and water. “We think possibly because Mars lost its magnetic field, it lost its shield and the solar wind was able to strip away much of the water from the atmosphere of Mars and leave it barren,” she says.

“Whenever we look at exoplanets or the moons of exoplanets that could be in the habitable zone, we can consider the magnetic field as an important player in habitability,” she added in the press release. “Then the question becomes what size planets and moons should we be considering as possibly habitable worlds.”

But to understand what happened to the moon’s magnetic field, Tikoo needs to analyze more moon rocks. “I would absolutely love it if we collected more rocks from the moon,” she says. “All the Apollo missions collected rocks from a relatively limited set of regions on the near side of the moon that faces us, close to the equator, and there's a lot of rocks that are missing.”

“In order to really learn about the moon's history, we have to fill in a lot of these gaps — both in terms of rock types as well as rock ages.”

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

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