Have you ever wondered whether your milk carton caps can be recycled? Or what happens to your recycling after it gets picked up from your curb? Science Friday video producer Luke Groskin decided to explore the mysteries of recycling further. He visited a recycling facility in Brooklyn and came back to report on it.

According to Groskin, the inside of a recycling facility looks like it might look like if you were “inside the digestive track of a robot that eats recyclables. It's really really mechanized.”

And the smell? 

“It was musky,” Groskin says, “but mostly the overriding smell, the smell that pervaded everything, was the three-day-old beer smell.” 

Darby Hoover from the Natural Resources Defense Council says the US falls somewhere in the middle of developed countries in terms of how well it does at recycling. 

“In the US we're recycling about 34.3 percent of what we throw away at the municipal level,” Hoover says. “We're not doing that well. We're recycling about a third of what we dispose of. That puts us about halfway in between other developed countries. In Europe you've got countries that are doing much better — over 60 percent. Some of the rest of the world is doing a little bit worse, we’re right about in the middle worldwide.”

When it comes to specific questions about what can and cannot be recycled, Hoover says the answers vary depending on where you live. 

"Anything that we talk about being recyclable or not recyclable has to be caveated by saying you should go to the website of your local city government and check to see what is accepted for recycling in your community and how they like to prepare it,” she says.

1. When it comes to greasy pizza boxes, though, there’s a pretty widely accepted rule-of-thumb. 

“For the most part, communities don't want pizza boxes in the recycling. If you've got paper that has grease or oils in it, that can complicate the paper recycling process. It's hard to remove the oils from the fibers, so for the most part you can't put those pizza boxes in with your other paper recycling.”

2. Some people wonder what the numbers surrounded by a triangle of arrows that are printed on plastics mean. Hoover says it’s a system that may or may not be helpful in in trying to determine whether or not a certain material can be recycled. 

“You'll see it on the bottom of almost every plastic container. ... Most people look at that and think, ‘Well, that means it's recyclable.’ It doesn’t,” Hoover says. “All it does is tell you what type of plastic it is. It’s there to just help identify the polymer but it's not something that for the most part can tell you if it's actually recyclable in your community or not.”

3. For those who might be agonizing over how much they need to fully rinse out or scrub their recyclables, Hoover says not to worry. 

“You're going to not be surprised that I'm going to say the answer varies from community to community,” Hoover says. “You want to get it as empty as you can, practically speaking. If you can use a little excess dishwater to shake it up and get it a little bit cleaner, that's great. You don't have to have it be sparkling clean. The issue is less usually with contaminating that container itself and more about having that food or that beverage that's in the container transferred to paper and other materials in the recycling bin that then become contaminated.”

Recycled material doesn’t just end up at recycling facilities, however. Hoover says the recycling facility is just the first stop for recycled materials. After the plastics, papers and glass get sorted, they’re then loaded onto trucks to be sold and shipped to others who will further wash them, clean them, break them down and turn them into new products. 

“A lot of our plastic recycling does get shipped overseas to China and other countries,” Hoover says. “That's part of a global market for recycling and that's true for many of our materials. Wastepaper is one of our largest exports from the US.”

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

The Cosmic Campground lies just off a two-lane highway in New Mexico's largest and mostly rural county, where traffic lights don't exist and the US Census counts half a person per square mile.

"The thing of it is you can see a 360 [degree view] here. You can see the last star of the Big Dipper come up over the edge of the Gila Wilderness," says Annie Grauer, a writer who's been married to an astronomer for the past 40 years.

She and her husband, Al Grauer, were part of the team effort that created the Cosmic Campground. The couple traveled to a spot in the Gila National Forest and used special instruments to measure the darkness of the sky.  

"We would come about once a week and we did that for about three months or four months," she says. They sent the data to the International Dark Sky Association, a group dedicated to protecting places with little or no light pollution. IDA reviewed the data and in January designated the site as a dark sky sanctuary, only the second in the world. The other is in the Elqui Valley of northern Chile. 



“This sky is so dark and there are so many stars up there, it's actually lighter than you would imagine," Grauer says. "One night we were up here and … I was scared by my own shadow. I could see my shadow by starlight.”



On a recent summer afternoon, a crowd of amateur astronomers and science nerds gathered at the Cosmic Campground to celebrate the sanctuary designation.

Next to the potluck table, Deborah Calkins and her son Michael wrapped red cellophane on a flashlight to help dim its intensity at night.  



“We got our star wheels, we got our flashlights, I think we’re ready for sunset," she says.

Michael had just gotten a telescope for his 12th birthday. He’d wanted one ever since he saw the International Space Station fly over his house in Silver City, just an hour south of the campground.

“I like science and I'm interested in the stars," he says. 


Michael Calkins, 12, became interested in the stars when he saw the International Space Station fly over his home in Silver City, New Mexico. 

Credit:

Mónica Ortiz Uribe

Michael is lucky. Scientists estimate that 83 percent of the world’s population lives under light-polluted skies. Among other things, people need darkness to help maintain a healthy hormone balance. Animals such as nocturnal birds and sea turtles need it to migrate, reproduce and find food.

As more scientists recognize the benefit of limiting illumination, more places are working to reduce light pollution. France passed a law in 2013 that requires businesses to shut off their lights late at night. In October, the IDA recognized the first Dark Sky Park in South Korea, its first designation in Asia. The Grand Canyon is currently redesigning thousands of light fixtures within the park to create a more natural nighttime experience for its visitors.

After sunset the Cosmic Campground lies beneath a twinkling canopy of stars. Al Grauer, the astronomer, sets up his telescope and invites fellow campers to take a peek at Saturn.

One woman likens the ringed planet to a UFO.

Nearby, Cindy Neely, a retired nurse, helps her 3-year-old granddaughter, Veda Werber, on to a stool so she could peer into the family telescope. Werber excitedly counts Jupiter's moons out loud. 



For Grauer and his wife these are the moments that make their efforts worthwhile. They hope to spread the word about the Cosmic Campground to kids in urban areas via their website and a podcast called "Travelers in the Night."



“Astronomy has ignited kids’ imaginations and humans’ imagination from the beginning," Grauer says. "So what's the price of imagination? Where does the next generation of poets and scientists and engineers … come from?”

The Popocatepetl volcano spewed ash on swaths of Mexico City and its suburbs on Monday, leaving a thin coat of dust on streets and cars.

Ash from the volcano, which is 34 miles southeast of the capital, dropped on eight southern boroughs of the mega-city and six of its suburbs, according to the National Disasters Prevention Center.

"I had cleaned the car yesterday and today it was gray and dirty when I woke up," said Luis Carlos Carranza, a 27-year-old driver for ride-sharing app Uber, who lives near the international airport.

Activity at the volcano in central Puebla state, popularly known as the "Popo" or "Don Goyo," intensified late Sunday before returning to normal at around 3:30 am on Monday, the center said in a statement.

The explosions launched white-hot rocks as far as 1,800 feet on its northeastern slope while emitting ash and water and gas vapors.

Civil protection authorities urged residents to remove ash from roofs and streets, and put the dust in trash bags to keep it from clogging drainage systems.

Officials also advised people in the affected areas to close their windows and stay home as long as possible.

Other tips include covering their noses and mouths with a wet towel, cleaning their eyes and throats with clean water, and avoiding wearing contact lenses.

The alert level remained at Yellow Phase Two, two steps under preventive evacuations of homes.

The 12,887-foot volcano, Mexico's second highest summit, regularly spews ash but it rarely reaches the metropolitan area of 21 million people.

Maria Elena Gonzalez, a 43-year-old lawyer, was taking her two children to summer school when they noticed the dust.

"They were surprised to see the gray layer on the car and they started drawing on the windows with their fingers," she said as she cleaned her car with a wet cloth in front of her house in the borough of Alvaro Obregon. "I have to hurry to clean it. I can't go to the office like this."

Scam letters in Nigeria are nothing new.

They’re commonly known as the 419, says Sam Olukoya, a journalist based in Lagos.

Part of the reason why the malware-hacked emails are so popular in Nigeria is because they’re inexpensive to construct. With almost 61 percent of the Nigerian population in poverty, it also makes for easy money.

“There are so many people trying to make a business out of this. It’s quite a thriving business. One, it’s so easy to establish you just need a few hundred dollars to buy a computer, to buy internet, to buy data and that’s business,” Olukoya says.

Despite the frequency of scamming emails in Nigeria, one skillful con artist stands out. The head of a multinational network was arrested Monday in the capital of Nigeria’s River State, Port Harcourt.

The network was headed by a 40-year-old Nigerian known as "Mike." The network, composed of over 40 individuals spread across Nigeria, Malaysia and South Africa, was behind global scams worth more than $60 million.

“You can understand how elaborate this type of scam is, if somebody has made $60 million, that doesn’t come easy,” Olukoya says.

“He’s believed to have hacked into the accounts of some medium- and small-scale establishments and using that to ask people to pay money to accounts which he controlled,” Olukoya explains. “These people were assuming that these accounts belonged to the companies they have been dealing with.”

His operations used malware to take over systems, fake email accounts to ask businesses for money and romance scams. According to Interpol’s website, it is believed that one fraudulent transaction by Mike and his associates landed them $1.5 million.

Even though Nigeria isn’t the only country to conduct advance-fee frauds, 51 percent of it comes from the western African country, according to a Microsoft report.

Across the internet, these scamming emails are known as the subject of a meme: the Nigerian Prince, a common type of social engineering scheme that includes a so-called Nigerian royal figure soliciting the reader to transfer thousands of dollars with the promise that they will reward them with a larger sum in the end.

Nigerian Prince meme.

Credit:

Google images

Here’s how one would start, according to the Washington Post:

DEAR SIR, I am Prince Kufour Otumfuo the elder son of the late King Otumfuo Opoku ware II whose demise occur following a brief illness. Before the death of my father, King Otumfuo Opoku ware II, I was authorised and officially known as the next successor and beneficiary of my father's property according to African Traditional rite. …

Olukoya receives these types of emails every day. One text message asked him to call a number to "reactivate" his ATM card for a bank account he didn't own. He recognized it as a scam, but others aren't so lucky.

"I imagine that so many people would have called the same number. What he would have done was he would have been able to get the details on the card," Olukoya says. "When he gets the details, he will definitely empty their bank account."

In Greece's depressed economy, a few companies have latched onto a new hope: Pokémon.

Restaurants and merchants all over Athens have started working together to host events to entice players of Pokémon Go. “I was considering the value of a Pokémon event to be quite enough right now, because there are about 70 million players right now around the world,”

Explained George Kourakos, the founder of gaming site gamespace.gr: “So this is the idea, make an event.”

Kourakos organized one such event this past Saturday at Internet café Bits and Bytes in Athens. A DJ blasted music from inside the café, while cellphone service providers, restaurants and local merchants set up tables on the sidewalk outside. Over the course of the afternoon hundreds of young gamers loitered on the sidewalk.

“I love it,” said gamer Paulina Jowita, “Because they open a lure, and you know there’s so many people here. You meet people, you make friends, and also you catch some Pokémon.”

Combining capitalism and gamers in the cradle of democracy.

Credit:

Moira Lavelle/PRI

A Pokémon Go lure causes new and sometimes rare Pokémon to appear in a one spot. Players can purchase lures using in-app coins, or businesses can buy them using real-world currency. “Actually for lures you have to pay real money. But the amount is not so much,” said Kourakos, “For example for a five-hour lure we spent 10 Euros only, which means about $12.”

Chris Papagiannis, an employee at Bits and Bytes, said that the café often had events centered on video games such as League of Legends, but they did not have nearly the same success.

“With the League of Legends tournaments and these things, many people don’t come that don’t play League of Legends. But Pokémon Go, everyone plays, it’s easy to download. I think it’s very good for business.”

Organizers hope the virtual lure will also entice customers in a tight economy. Greek board game shop Kaissa had a table at the Bits and Bytes event.

“Today we came here to show people that don’t know about the [Pokémon] card game, and get them used to it,” said Kaissa employee Vasilis Kirlis. “It is quite good because the guys that play Pokémon Go are used to board games, so we attract people who play to see what Kaissa is.”

The Bits and Bytes event also had free pizza, an energy drink called Hell, and a booth from cellphone service provider Vodafone, offering free data for select gamers who uploaded pictures to Instagram using a certain hashtag. Vodafone used the same hashtag the following day as it helped sponsor a Pokewalk event in Monastiraki Square with news site neolaia.gr.

The week before food delivery service E-food organized an event in Athens’ central Syntagma square using the hashtag #GottaEatEmAll. “I saw it on a Facebook page," explained a 19-year-old student named Costa. "In Pokémon Go groups, they post events and things. Normally they have coupons for food, it's really fun."

It’s unclear yet if these events will in fact turn a profit. Longtime Pokémon fan Nektarios Ndreu was both at the Syntagma event, and Bits and Bytes. But Ndreu said he had not had any of the pizza or energy drink at Bits and Bytes, and gestured to a coffee he had bought elsewhere.

"I don’t come here to spend money, just to meet people and to catch Pokémon.”

Gamer Chris Konstantakopoulos agreed: “They use food to bring people. For me it doesn’t matter, I’m not hungry right now.”

However, he said he had many friends who had participated in Vodafone’s Instagram contest, and would certainly go to more Pokémon events himself.

Organizer George Kourakos admitted that perhaps his event hadn’t created sheer profit but argued that it was not the only purpose, citing the number of attendees, and focusing on what created the best event for gamers and fans.

“Sometimes you go after the profit, and sometimes you go after the people, and you try to connect them into one.”

He currently has plans for several other events in the works, crisis or no economic crisis.

"Gamers are everywhere," Kourakos said. "This is something Greeks have, even if they don’t have so much money they will go out to get a coffee, they will go to get dinner, they will play Pokémon.”

A group of researchers at New York University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are helping to track the nighttime migratory patterns of birds by teaching a computer to recognize their flight calls.

The technique, called acoustic monitoring, has existed for some time, but the development of advanced computer algorithms may provide researchers with better information than they have gathered in the past.

“We want to make as many different kinds of measurements as we can,” says Andrew Farnsworth, of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “The intro point to go from human to computer is about thinking of these sounds in terms of frequency and time, and figuring out how to measure that in increasing detail and feed that information into the machine’s listening models.”

“On the sensors, there is a spectral template detector that scans the audio as it comes in, checking for potential matches,” explains Justin Solomon of NYU, one of the collaborators on the project. “When a potential match is identified, it snaps roughly one second of that audio centered around the detection and sends that through the server.”

Flight calls are distinct from birdsong. Birdsong is made up of many different notes strung together. Flight calls are single notes, almost exclusively less than one hundred milliseconds long. The researchers ‘teach’ the machine to recognize these calls by giving it a large collection of recordings.

Then they use what's called ‘unsupervised feature learning,’ which means that they don't tell the algorithm what to look for. Rather, by giving it a large number of examples, the computer builds a statistical model of the specific patterns that are representative of a certain species.

The eventual goal is to be able to put names to these nocturnally-migrating species and do it in an automated way in real time, in order to understand the biology — the acoustic communication — and apply it to conservation.

Right now, scientists use two sources of information when trying to understand migratory patterns. The first is bird watchers — many people watching birds all across the country. Cornell has been good at gathering information from citizen scientists who help categorize the occurrence of certain species by location and time. But those observations are mostly made by day, and migrations often occur at night.

The second source is surveillance radar, but this can show only the volume, the speed and the direction of a migration. Radar says nothing about the species composition of a given migration. Acoustic monitoring could reveal the missing piece of this puzzle, telling researchers something about the precise species composition of a migration at a specific time and place, says Juan Pablo Bello, an associate professor of music technology and electrical and computer engineering and the director of the Music and Audio Research Lab at NYU.

“Biologists in the project are interested in better understanding migratory patterns for bird species across the continental US,” Bello explains. “Specifically they are looking at two things. The first is to understand precisely the onset of the migration across the different seasons; and also to understand the compositions of migratory flights that are started during those periods of time.”

Acoustic monitoring of birds flying at night is kind of the audio equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. The computer must discern the bird’s flight call within all the background noise and separate it our from other similar sounds. The call of a spring peeper, another bird or even a mechanical sound like a battery alarm, can all have very similar frequency patterns that blend together in one recording,.

It’s a much more difficult task than asking Siri for directions to the nearest Starbucks. “Speaking sources and speaking content are a fundamentally different problem than putting a microphone outside, where you have a signal that is probably very, very far from the microphone and is a very tenuous occurrence in the acoustic environment,” Bello explains.

“Then you have all sorts of background conditions — noise from the wind, from rain, from other species, from human activity,” he adds. “Being able to pick out the sounds in these very complicated and complex environments is a challenge your phone cannot address right now, and that we're trying to address with this technology.”

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

Love them or hate them, ring-necked parakeets have invaded Europe and they’re here to stay. Already a staple of many urban parks and gardens around the UK, some of these charismatic bright green birds are now so comfortable in their new surroundings that they will happily sit and feed from your hand.

Parakeets are Britain’s fastest growing bird population and are on a trajectory to global domination. Outside of their native southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, breeding populations are now established in at least 65 cities around Europe, and more than 30 countries across five continents.

Such non-native, or “invasive” species are one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss in the world today, and can cause severe economic damage. Understanding these species is incredibly useful for any attempt to design environment policy and prevent further invasions. Populations of invasive ring-necked parakeets (Psittacula krameri) provide an excellent case study, owing to their patterns of rapid growth and spread.

These parakeets were introduced into the UK in the late 1960s and now number well over 32,000 birds. They were originally concentrated around Greater London and nearby Kent, but these areas are now saturated which has resulted in parakeets spreading around the country, reaching as far north as Inverness in Scotland.

Many popular stories exist to explain how these exotic parakeets came to live in the UK, including their escape from the film set of the African Queen, and my personal favorite: their deliberate release by Jimi Hendrix to inject some psychedelic color into the streets of London. More likely it is a result of the popularity of keeping ring-necked parakeets as pets.

The global transportation of wild ring-necked parakeets in addition to in-country breeding, has led to their successful establishment outside their native range. Between 1984 and 2007 a staggering 146,539 ring-necked parakeets were imported to Europe, before an EU ban on the trade of wild birds. The UK alone imported more than 16,000.

We know how they got to Europe’s cities, but what makes ring-necked parakeets so good at adapting to new environments? The climate is likely to play a strong role in their ability to survive outside of their native range. Despite their incredibly large native range, spanning two continents, the parakeets found across Britain and Europe originate predominately from across the colder foothills of the Himalayas, largely in Pakistan.

The distinct lack of parakeets from warmer areas in Africa suggests similarities in temperature and rainfall between the native and invasive ranges made life easy for them. It seems the parakeets were already well adapted to survive in northern Europe.

Interestingly, back in the late 1800s wild ring-necked parakeets were observed in the UK, but they failed to survive. So what’s different now? Perhaps warmer winters due to climate change, in combination with our love of feeding birds thus giving them a year-round supply of energy, have provided ideal conditions for parakeets to thrive around the country.

Let’s also not overlook the lack of natural predators outside their native range. Unsurprisingly, Asian black eagles aren’t a concern in London’s parks. However, it seems Britain’s urban peregrines and sparrow hawks have now started to notice the exotic new meat on the menu. Yet despite native falcons' success at preying on wild parakeets, they’re unlikely to make a dent on the growing numbers of invasive parakeets.

Despite parakeets being well established in the UK, we still don’t fully understand their potential impact, good or bad. Do they affect native wildlife by competing for nest holes and food? Preliminary reports show some level of competition for nest sites with European native nuthatches, and that they displace garden birds from bird feeders. Back in Asia and Africa ring-necked parakeets are severe crop pests, but we don’t yet know if they’ll damage British fruit crops and cause economic damage.

Many scientists are also curious about the impact they are having on people. Does living near large roosts cause noise pollution? Does seeing exotic parakeets in parks and gardens around the UK improve human wellbeing? These are just some of the questions we’re aiming to answer through ParrotNet, a pan-European group of researchers dedicated to understanding the challenge of invasive parrots (ring-necked parakeets are just one of 13 species of parrot established across Europe).

Despite their abundance, surprisingly, many British people remain unaware that wild parakeets are living among them. As these vibrant birds are now spreading around the country, in time they will become commonplace in all the UK’s urban areas. While we may still regard these colourful and exotic parakeets as something of an exciting novelty, I suspect our children and their children may simply consider them no more exciting than a common pigeon.

Hazel Jackson, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Kent

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In the summer of 1993, everyone I knew was chaining themselves to something. And where I grew up, on the west coast of Canada, the fight was over trees.

Environmentalists and aboriginal communities united to stop a company from logging in a remote place called Clayoquot Sound, on the far western edge of Canada.

More than 12,000 people blockaded a logging road into Clayoquot. Some chained themselves to bulldozers, others to trees.

Almost 1,000 people were arrested in the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

Clayoquot Sound protesters in 1993.

Credit:

clayoquotaction.org

Australian rock band Midnight Oil even played a concert in Clayoquot that summer to support the protesters.

It was the start of what became known as the "War in the Woods."

And if it was war, Valerie Langer was a general.

"Oh, I’ve been arrested several times," says Langer. Langer is a lifelong environmental campaigner. She currently works for STAND.

"I served time in jail for peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience," Valerie Langer.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

She helped organize the blockades back in 1993.

"I served time in jail for peaceful, non-violent civil disobedience,” says Langer.

Along with three months of daily roadblocks, Langer and her fellow activists launched a second attack — this one aimed at the wallet of forestry company MacMillan Bloedel.

“We were going around to their customers, getting contract cancellations so hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts were cancelled," says Langer. "So it was a very bitter conflict.”

The campaign discouraged international companies from buying timber from British Columbia.

For the logging industry, it was bad for business. For the government, it was a fiasco.

The BC government finally agreed to halt logging in Clayoquot. Seven years later, the area became a UN Biosphere Reserve.

But the logging war that began with that road blockade was hardly over.

The next battlefield was an even more remote place called the Great Bear Rainforest, farther north on the BC coast.

Map of the Great Bear Rainforest.

The Great Bear is massive — almost 16 million acres.

It is part of the world's largest temperate coastal rainforest and it’s home to thousand-year-old cedar trees and some of the rarest animal species in the world — like the white Kermode bear that aboriginal people call the "spirit bear."

Kermode bear or 'spirit' bear in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Credit:

Jon Rawlinson/Wiki Commons

Twenty years ago, forestry companies held licences to log 95 percent of the old growth forest in the Great Bear.

But the BC government didn't want more blockades and boycotts — so it brought the environmentalists, aboriginal leaders and forestry companies to the bargaining table to try to figure out together how much of it would be logged and how much would be preserved.

It was an almost unprecedented approach. And almost no one involved thought it would work.

"I remember walking in and being faced by at least three or four really large middle aged men, usually with large bellies, who were just really imposing in a room,” says lead environmental negotiator Jody Holmes.

Holmes was one of the negotiators who worked on the Great Bear Forest deal from the beginning.

Forest industry negotiator Patrick Armstrong was there too. He says the animosity was thick.

“He thought that this man was going to grab him by the neck. It got that tense," Patrick Armstrong.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

Dallas Smith was also there at the start. Smith represented 15 Native American groups at the talks.

"I got there before the rest of my First Nations colleagues, so I grabbed a coffee and sat down at the table,” he says. “And one of the stakeholder reps sat down beside me and just as my chiefs walked in the room the stakeholder rep leans into me and says, I can't believe they let these goddamn Indians into this planning process.”

So that's how it started. Stereotypes and prejudices. Forestry guys are fat and greedy. Environmentalists are dangerous radicals. And then there are those goddamn Indians.

Holmes says the group worked with a mediator to try to steer away from the stereotypes.

The mediator had them eat meals together after meetings. He encouraged them to talk about their kids, their spouses, their lives beyond the negotiating table. To build relationships that might bridge their differences.

Smith says a major breakthrough came when the negotiators got fogged in and couldn't fly home after a meeting in a small, remote town.

“The local tavern had a $2 a drink night. Everybody, all the stakeholders, government, local government, we all just got shnuckered together. And the next day when we got back into the meeting room, everybody was so hung over but had fun the night before dancing and just having a good time that we're able to just sort of get past some of the crap that always started every meeting.”

"Just as my chiefs walked in the room the stakeholder rep leans into me and says, I can't believe they let these goddamn Indians into this planning process," Dallas Smith.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

The mediator encouraged them to leave their egos at the door, to see each other as human and respect each other's interests.

Forestry companies want to make money. Environmentalists want to save forests. First Nations groups want to have a say about the land where they live.

So they talked. And fought, and stormed out and came back. For thousands of hours and 20 years.

And then on Feb. 4 of this year, BC Premier Christy Clark formally announced the Great Bear Rainforest agreement.

“This decision protects 85 percent of the old growth and second forest growth. It preserves land in cultural and ecological and spiritual ties, which are vital to the people who have lived there for millennia and it includes more protected areas for freshwater eco-systems and species as diverse as the grizzly bear and the tailed frog.”

Going into the talks 20 years ago, 95 percent of the Great Bear was going to be logged. By the end, 85 percent was protected from logging. The deal is seen as a huge win for environmentalists.

But industry negotiator Patrick Armstrong says that it’s a recognition that times have changed.

“The outcome is actually a pretty good outcome for the industry. As important as having areas to log, is where those areas are, and what kind of forest are on those areas so I think it's a good deal for the industry but it is a major win for conservation.”

"It's like childbirth — If you knew what was ahead of you when you started you would never do it," Jody Holmes.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

The War in the Woods that began in Clayoquot Sound, has ended —  at least for now — in the Great Bear.

But the 20 years of negotiation produced more than a landmark deal for one place.

Campaigner Valerie Langer says it’s also a template for what could be done elsewhere.

“In the Amazon, the Boreal of Russia, in Indonesia, you have big companies, indigenous groups, environmentalists and government all in these same kinds of conflicts over the same kinds of issues — you are logging too much, you are mining too much, you are taking too much water out of that river, these are common problems," says Langer. "So the model of the solution is the biggest victory, I think, out of the Great Bear.”

Smith says he's already been consulting with other aboriginal groups about the deal.

"We've been able to work with other indigenous groups in the South Pacific, the Boreal forest here in Canada, some of the work that's been done in the Himalayas where we can talk about some of these things. And hopefully the time can be a little shorter now that somebody's actually broken the ice."

For Langer, it's been a long road since those days on the Clayoquot blockade in 1993.

She's still a big believer in civil disobedience. Just recently she was arrested for protesting a pipeline expansion in BC.

And she says all the effort is worth it when you get to save a place like the Great Bear Rainforest.

“It just goes on and on and on," Langer says. "And you fly over one fiord and over the valley and into the next valley, the archipelago of islands is sparkling off in the western sunlight. Everywhere you look, you're just looking at beauty.”

Flying over the Great Bear Rainforest archipelago.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

The president of the Philippines doesn’t dispute the apocalyptic nature of global warming. After all, his homeland is among the countries predicted to suffer most from the coming heat waves and hellish storms.

But he wants to make one point abundantly clear. These horrors of climate change are the fault of big nations, such as China and India, and rich ones such as the United States.

So President Rodrigo Duterte is now issuing an ultimatum to nations that have been “destroying the climate.”

You can pay poor countries (like the Philippines) to forego cheap, dirty fossil fuels. Or, he says, our politicians will chuck your United Nations-brokered climate change treaty in the trash.

“China, America, Europe, they continued to emit their poisonous fumes in the name of prosperity,” Duterte says, according to the Philippine Star. “There really is climate change. But who caused it? Not us.”

Duterte delights in shocking statements. His ability to rile up media — with his wild takes on rape, drugs, guns and his own sexual prowess — is positively Trump-like.

But even against this backdrop of outrageous commentary, Duterte’s ongoing views on climate change are startling.

Remember that UN climate change agreement signed by nearly 200 countries? All of them agreeing at a Paris summit late last year that the rise in average global temperature, compared to the 1800s, should not exceed 2 degrees celsius?

Duterte says that treaty is “stupid.” And he claims to have said as much to an ambassador’s face. (The diplomat, whom he did not name, hails from a country Duterte described as a highly industrialized polluter.)

Duterte contends that the Philippines, without proper funding from top polluting nations, must junk the treaty and turn to dirty but cheap energy.

It’s a mistake to write this off as bombast from an impoverished island nation that churns out less than 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.

When it comes to climate change diplomacy, the Philippines has clout. It leads a league of 40-plus countries that are highly vulnerable to global warming. The country is known for appealing to the morality of top polluters: China, Russia, the US and India.

Moreover, the Philippines “was a true prizefighter for the Paris agreement,” says Malini Mehra, chief executive of GLOBE International, an association of lawmakers in more than 80 countries focused on sustainable development.

At the negotiations — which preceded Duterte’s late-June inauguration — the Philippines showed “extraordinary and articulate leadership,” Mehra says. “This is why President Duterte’s remarks have been puzzling and come across as jarring to many.”

“They’re a throwback to a time when blame games characterized the climate debate,” she says, “and political polarization along the north-south lines was the norm.”

These days, Mehra says, the vibe between big polluters and vulnerable countries has become less divisive and more “we’re in it together.”

Still, Duterte is tapping a visceral frustration felt in less-developed nations, which sometimes chafe under more powerful countries’ demands.

The former head of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, has said that poorer countries are “putting the richest to shame” by demanding 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 — a goal that would require massive funding from the West.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth International has previously accused top polluters of trying to “water down proposals [at UN talks] that were nowhere near strong enough to begin with. It is preposterous.”

And even Duterte’s scorn can’t top a Sudanese negotiator who, in 2009, compared a climate change deal to a “suicide pact ... based on values that funneled 6 million people in Europe into furnaces” — an allusion to the Holocaust.

During treaty negotiations, much of the wrangling ends up centering on how much wealthy, polluting countries should spend on climate-related projects in smaller, less affluent countries.

The current agreement: by 2020, at least $100 billion per year. So far, as of 2014, donor countries were spending $62 million each year on this cause.

Officials from South Africa to Brazil to India have all previously stated that this isn’t nearly enough.

Unlike Duterte, they use the stale language of diplomacy. They register “disappointment” over rich countries’ “lack of any clear road map” and failure to provide a “flow of technical support.”

But their message to nations like the US is similar. If you don’t pay us to stay green, you’re driving us toward more cheap, dirty energy.

As for the Philippines, its goal is to cut carbon emissions by 70 percent — but only if it receives foreign cash and guidance. And while UN circles find Duterte’s comments brash, even environmentalists in his own country seem receptive to parts of his message.

The Philippines shouldn’t scrap the latest UN treaty, says Frances Dela Cruz of the Philippines-based Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities.

But, she says, “We understand President Duterte’s sentiments ... to instead put the spotlight on the hypocrisy of industrialized nations.”

The Philippines may be able to skip the coal-belching phase and head straight to a future powered by renewable energy, she says. But not without wealthier nations offering aid with a “sense of urgency.”

When astronomer Frank Drake organized the first SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) conference back in 1961 in Green Bank, West Virginia, only a dozen people attended.

“I invited everyone in the world I knew about who was interested in the subject or who had written something about it — so all 12,” Drake remembers fondly. “All [were] very enthusiastic, because they’d all been in a situation I’d been in — that they were very interested in this subject, but it was taboo. They really couldn’t pursue or even talk about it, so it was just a joy to be with other people who were as eager as they were.”

It was at this meeting that Drake introduced what became known as the Drake equation, a formula intended to estimate the number of intelligent and communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Drake claims he had “no idea” how much of an impact it would have on people’s conceptions of the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Indeed, much has changed in the 55 years since that first conference.

“Now I go to giant meetings where [SETI’s] the main subject. I walk in a room and see 300 people sitting there,” Drake says. “Here are all these really talented people, and they’re now all working on this same thing and don’t feel like it’s a bad thing at all.”

Drake, 86, is still passionate about the hunt for extraterrestrial life. He’s currently participating in Breakthrough Initiatives, a new program backed by entrepreneur Yuri Milner that’s searching for interstellar life through radio and optical signals. And thanks to the recent findings of more exoplanets and more possibilities of Earth-like worlds, Drake says he remains optimistic that we’ll find something out there.

Science Friday recently spoke with Drake about how he got interested in extraterrestrials, misconceptions about SETI, and what excites him about the future.

How did you first get interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life?
I was a little 8-year-old kid living in Chicago, and my father one day told me there are other worlds in space, which astounded me. I had no idea that such a thing was a possibility—I thought Earth was it. It was a medieval attitude. So that just really catalyzed me, and I wondered, Oh, what are they like? Are the people the same as us, do they look the same way we do? What’s their planet like? And of course, at that time, there was no way those questions could be answered in the slightest.

Later on, I was very interested in engineering, and when I was in college, I took a required general science course. I chose the elementary astronomy course. While I was taking that course, we went to the local campus observatory, and one of the things we observed was the planet Jupiter. Even through a small telescope, it is just very clear that you’re seeing another world, that it’s different from ours, that it’s got colors and clouds, and it’s got four moons. And I looked at that and thought, This is real. These aren’t pictures in a book or something. There really are things like that out there. And that converted me.

Did you have any major influences, people who inspired you?
There were two people that were running the [astronomy] program at Harvard [where Drake earned both a master’s and a Ph.D.]. One was a traditional astronomer named Bart Bok. He’s famous in astronomy for being one of the great students of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. He was a very enthusiastic scientist, and his enthusiasm rubbed off on all the students, including myself.

But there was a second person who was sort of a wild man. His name was Doc Ewen. He had gotten a Ph.D. at Harvard in physics, during which he discovered this famous thing in astronomy: the radio emission line from the hydrogen atom, which allowed us to observe hydrogen all through the universe, and is very central in astronomical work to this day. He had done that by building a small radio telescope all by himself and sticking it out a window, actually at the physics building at Harvard University. He was the technical leader in the teaching of the graduate students at Harvard, and he was just an amazing person. He was brilliant and extremely active and energetic and willing to try anything, and he acted as a good model for people who wondered whether it was really a good idea to be daring. He showed you could be daring and succeed, and if you fail, that’s all right — you could try again.

In 1960, you launched the experiment called Project Ozma, the first attempt to search for signs of extraterrestrial life through interstellar radio waves. How did that come about?
When I finished at Harvard, I took one of the first positions at a new observatory being built in West Virginia, which was to be a major national observatory to provide radio astronomy facilities to Americans. This was 1958. The first thing we did there was to build what was to us a big telescope, but it really wasn’t — it was an 85-foot-telescope. Still there today. That was very exciting to build that and put it into operation.

One of the first things that came to my mind was, could this telescope be used to detect other civilizations? So I did the calculations as to how far away a civilization could be that was sending out radio signals at the same level we were at that time, and we could detect the signals. It turned out to be about 10 light years. Well, that got interesting. If it had been a tenth of a light year, we would have had to say forget it, there’re no stars within that distance. But within 10 light years, there are almost a dozen stars. It was not a crazy idea to search for radio signals from those nearby stars, because if any of them were just like us—it didn’t have to be a super civilization, just another civilization using no better technology than we had—then we could find them. And of course, this was exciting, because to me, finding another world is something I’d wanted to do all my life at that point.

Fortunately, the director there at that time [named Otto Struve] was one of the world’s most eminent astronomers, and he was actually a great believer in extraterrestrial life, so he was very enthusiastic about me doing this project, and he said go right ahead. So I did.

Did you otherwise receive a lot of criticism for trying to search for extraterrestrial life?
No, people humored me. When I did [Project Ozma], there were a few protests, because we did use a few hundred hours of telescope time at Green Bank in West Virginia, and a few people said that’s not a good use of the taxpayers’ money. But it cost so little — the equipment cost $2,000. If it had been a million-dollar project, I think there would have been an outcry. As time has gone on, all the criticisms have gone away. [SETI]’s now considered a very legitimate subject to pursue.

Soon after Project Ozma, you introduced the Drake Equation at the SETI meeting. Were you nervous when you presented it?
No, because I didn’t think it was a big deal. That’s the thing that totally amazes me now is that I see it everywhere. People send me photographs of where they’ve had it tattooed on their arms. One guy has it tattooed across his forehead. When I give lectures, about one in five times, somebody comes up to me and shows me where the tattoo is on their arm or their leg.

It [the equation] came about because I was running the three-day meeting, and I realized we should put down kind of an agenda. So I thought about what things needed to be discussed, what was important. The goal of the meeting was to get a feel for how difficult the search was going to be, and how we should search. So I just asked myself: What is important in understanding how many detectable civilizations would be out there? I realized there were seven factors involved, such as how many habitable planets there are, how often life arises and how often it evolves intelligence, and how many intelligent creatures have the technology that we can detect across interstellar distances. Out of the factors, to this day, the really difficult one is: How long do they remain detectable? I realized, well this is neat, I can use these factors as the subject for a morning discussion, then an afternoon discussion with a different factor, and so on, and go through all seven in three days. So I wrote them all down, and I realized—what you do is just multiply them all together, and what you get is what we’re after, which is the number of [intelligent and communicative] civilizations in the galaxy.

What do you imagine when you think about extraterrestrials? What do they look like?
I can imagine some forms. I’m sure there are places where the planetary circumstances were such that they would not favor an anatomy or physiology like ours, where the creatures would be very different. It could be carbon-based life, but it could be something like an octopus. An octopus is very different from us but yet has a very large brain and acts almost like an intelligent creature if you fool around with them. Dolphins are another example of a life form that is nearly as intelligent as us but is different. When I was an 8-year-old kid, I thought they would all just be like us; they’d be indistinguishable. What we know now is that nowhere will there be duplicates of us.

But then, on the other hand — and this is my own thinking about this — we are a good design, because we are optimized for the place we live in. We evolved into a life form that can exist and prosper in a place with temperatures we have now; access to bodies of water; access to plants for food; and, as a predator, to creatures that we can capture and eat. And so, where there are planets much like Earth — with bodies of water but also solid surface available, and where plants thrive — I think we may find creatures that are a lot like us, because we are a good design. We stand upright, which frees our forelimbs to manipulate tools and to build structures and use technology. Having a head with eyes on top is a good thing, because it’s easier to see predators, to see over the grass where the danger is and where you should go to find the food. So, my image of what a lot of the extraterrestrials would look like is what I just described to you—a creature like us.

What are the biggest misconceptions about SETI?
Well, one of them is that we have searched and failed. People say that all the time: ‘You’ve been searching for 60 years, and you haven’t found anything, so doesn’t that say that intelligent life is very rare?’ But that’s wrong, because the amount of searching that we’ve done has hardly touched the number of possibilities that are out there — that is, stars and radio frequencies and channels and all of that. We’ve only covered a tiny, tiny fraction of all the possibilities.

Another one, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to die, is that the evolution of intelligence is very rare. This is one that is held by some very senior paleontologists. The argument is that in the history of the earth, there have been something like hundreds of thousands of species of animal, and only one became intelligent, and doesn’t that mean that the chance of intelligence is 1 in hundreds of thousands? That of course kind of sounds good, but it’s a specious argument, because what we know from evolution is that the complexity of living creatures continuously increases with time—they have more abilities, they get larger brains, and that’s well-documented. And eventually, because intelligence is a very valuable trait, you’ll get an intelligent creature. [Drake defines “intelligence” in this context as the brainpower and understanding to develop high-power technology such as radio transmitters.]

What happens is, species don’t all evolve at the same rate, so not every species becomes intelligent at once. Given a longer time, some other creatures will become intelligent, which will probably happen on Earth unless we prevent it, which we’ve been good at doing.

What might be the next best ‘candidate’ on Earth for gaining intelligence?
There’s an obvious one, the chimpanzees. Or the bonobo — that’s the closest thing in physiology and social life to humans, so the bonobos are the prime candidate for our successor, if we ever wipe ourselves out or allow ourselves to be wiped out. If the planet gave them a million years to evolve, they would become us.

Another creature I always cite, which is half-joke and half-serious, is squirrels. If you look at the fossil record, our own most ancient ancestor 65 million years ago was a small mammal that was almost like a squirrel; it was the same size, it ran on four legs on the ground. And then 65 million years later, that became us. Squirrels are very smart—they can get at any bird feeder; you can’t hide food from them; they stand on their rear legs and their front paws as hands to manipulate things just the way we do; and they’re always watching us. You can see they’re saying, ‘Just give me time, I’m going to take over.’

What is your favorite accomplishment so far?
Well, just getting the search started [with Project Ozma]. Demonstrating that it could be done, and that it was reasonable and it didn’t require anything special [that is, extraterrestrial life doesn’t necessarily have to be more advanced or staring us in the face for us to find it]. There have been about 100 SETI projects in the last 56 years, and now they’ve been superseded by the Breakthrough Initiative Project. So all that grew out of that one-channel search 56 years ago.

What do you still want to accomplish?
I just want to find ’em! If we could find one, that would be terrific. Once you find one, you can figure out how to build a telescope that would actually allow you to find out what they’re like and learn about them. Of course, that would be a huge turning point for our whole civilization. To have access to all that information from another world would just be life-altering for everybody on Earth, I think.

This story was first published by Science Friday with Ira Flatow.

The small outboard boat I'm in is floating along the estuary of the Nekite River.

It's a cloudless morning and just beyond the bow there's rustling of trees and the sound of branches snapping.

I'm holding my microphone as far out as I can — so that I can record the sound of a male grizzly, on the shore about 15 yards away. 

A grizzly local guides call Bo Diddley swimming across the estuary in pursuit of a female bear.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

My guide here is Tom Rivest. "That is the sound that is called either chuffing or huffing. It sounds a little bit like bellows expelling air,” says Rivest. “The bears do that when they're stressed — or excited, or a little both — which they probably are."

The reason this bear is excited is that it's mating season and he's following a female and her two cubs.

A female grizzly with her cubs on the Nekite River in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

Rivest co-owns a floating lodge here and has been taking tourists to this spot for 15 years.

So he knows this bear. He calls it Bo Diddley.

A male grizzly Bo Diddley's size would be a prime target for hunters..

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

"Bo and I go back 10 years,” says Rivest. “So he was just a little scrawny thing back then. And now he's quite large — probably an 800-pound bear."

Bears like Bo Diddley are a big draw for tourists paying top dollar to see them. But there’s another type of tourist looking for bears here. Before I came here, I called up another guide to see what draws his customers.

"They're world class as far as size and weight — and skull measurement."

Skull measurement is one of the criteria for guide outfitters like Peter Klaui.

He owns a hunting license for a huge swath of the Great Bear Rainforest and runs a guiding company.

A grizzly killed by a trophy hunter in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

Klaui's current license allows the hunting of 23 bears over five years, with a maximum of 7 per year.

Hunters pay him upwards of $20,000 for a trip here. But the hunting culture here may be winding down.

Earlier this year, the British Columbia government officially endorsed the practice of conservation groups buying hunting licenses from guides like Peter Klaui.

“Previously we just went and did it,” says Chris Genovali, head of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

In cooperation with Coastal First Nations, an alliance of aboriginal groups, Genovali’s foundation helps raise the millions of dollars needed to buy the hunting license tenures. They already own rights to about a third of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Genovali is no fan of trophy hunting in general, but he says it's particularly cruel to hunt grizzlies here because they’re out in the open, grazing in estuaries or following a salmon run.

"It's like someone walking into your kitchen or your dining room as you're eating your breakfast or dinner and shooting you,” says Genovali. “It's obscene. It's becoming viewed by an overwhelming majority of the public as a fringe behavior."

Genovali points to a poll in which only 10 percent of those who responded supported trophy hunting.

But there’s sort of a wink and a nod in conservationists’ deal with the government. In order to buy the hunting licenses, his group has to use them.

"We've had to show what's called commercial activity,” explains Genovali. Once a year, they take out tourists for a fake hunt.

“We take clients on hunts in our guide outfitting territories and we look for bears — the difference is we shoot them with cameras."

The BC government has agreed to an outright end to commercial grizzly bear hunting in some native territory in the Great Bear.

So the pressure is clearly on hunting guides. But Klaui says he isn’t worried about his business.

"Nothing has changed since that announcement and I don't expect it to change,” says Klaui. He says he’s still getting calls from hunters. But Klaui also says he’s planning to retire at some point soon and might sell his license.  

And he might even sell it to a conservation or aboriginal group if they offered him the most money. "If they want to eliminate or slow down hunting of carnivores in the Great Bear Rainforest, they can do like anybody else and offer to buy out the business, just like on Wall Street.”

As for the grizzlies grazing on sedge grass on the Nekite River, they are safe from the crosshair of a rifle.

Raincoast Conservation Foundation owns the commercial hunting rights here. The area is also off limits to local resident hunters.

Rivest says that’s important because these bears have become used to humans.

"The biggest issue with viewing and hunting is that bears get used to being around people and they no longer have that innate fear so it is really not fair to hunt them."

A grizzly cub on the shore of the Nekite River.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

And that’s what the debate about hunting here really comes down to — fairness, and values.

The BC government estimates there are around 15,000 grizzlies in the province. And hunters kill between 250 and 300 grizzlies per year in BC.

So they’re not endangered. It's more that the social clock seems to be running out on commercial trophy hunting.

For the grizzlies along the Nekite River, humans certainly don’t seem to be a threat.

A female grizzly and cubs heading towards the trees to avoid a large male grizzly.

Credit:

Andrea Crossan

If Bo Diddley was afraid of us he didn't show it. He seemed more concerned with where that female grizzly was headed.

In the ongoing struggle to understand the biology of depression, there's been a promising new breakthrough, thanks in part to a popular at-home DNA test. Gene-testing company 23andMe and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals collaborated to explore the DNA of roughly half a million people, nearly 10 times more people than similar studies.

23andMe collected and sequenced DNA samples of more than 141,000 people diagnosed with depression and compared it with other crowd-sourced DNA samples of those unafflicted. This unprecedented wealth of genome data for depression research has led researchers to 15 specific regions in the human genome that could signal a risk of clinical depression.

Dr. Ashley Winslow headed the research team. She's the neurogenetics director at the University of Pennsylvania's Orphan Disease Center, and she worked as a neuroscientist at Pfizer during the study. She notes that there’s still plenty of work to do, trying to pick apart the 15 landmarks.

“Now we need to identify within those regions the specific mutations or genomic changes that cause disease,” says Winslow, “then identify the genes that are involved in that process, and then understand the biology — what goes awry, how do these genes alter the gene function?”

Because depression is considered a complex disorder, the “add-on effect” must be considered in research. “It’s hard to use genetics in a vacuum,” says Winslow, but examining how the genomes interact with each other and potentially environmental risk factors, like stress and light, results in a more holistic picture. The researchers haven’t yet looked at potential evolutionary factors, but different types and subtypes of depression may point to different underlying biological and environmental causes, which would lend itself to various forms of treatment.

Winslow says that because depression is so widespread, it’s “very common compared to other neurological diseases,” and seems to affect all kinds of people. The study pulled data from all ages, varying from early 20s to folks over 60 all afflicted by depression.

“Because depression is heritable, we would expect to see in studies there is a genetic component,” says Winslow, but this is the first study that has been able to identify points in the genome that are associated with risk of depression.

This study is just the beginning of how science can conduct research with the aid of crowd-sourcing technologies. Genes for Good is conducting similar research, and on a grander scale, Apple is working with researchers on a system for collecting health data from iPhone users. 23andMe continues to research and study diseases, often in partnership with academic institutions and pharmaceutical companies.

The more accessible and far-reaching medical information has gotten in this new age of technology, the deeper researchers can go in trying to address afflictions.

This story was first published as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.

Researchers from Harvard and Colorado State have found that Americans would be willing to pay 30 times more than the current annual appropriation in order to preserve and maintain the US National Park system.

According to the study, the US public would pay more than $90 billion a year to sustain and protect America’s iconic places. Yet the US National Park system currently receives less than $3 billion a year from Congress and suffers from a multi-billion dollar backlog of corroded and broken infrastructure.

Nearly 95 percent of citizens who participated in the study said national parks are important to them. Is there anything else Americans agree on nearly unanimously?

“I think that there are very few entities and public assets that command this kind of respect — and really, love — that we heard in this survey,” says Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “We already knew that those who visit the parks typically love them. ... Beyond that, we were trying to understand how people who didn't necessarily visit the parks felt about the parks and the programs.”

Not only is the park service’s annual budget insufficient for its current needs, it is about 15 percent lower, in today's dollars, than it was in 2001, Bilmes notes. In addition, the service has a maintenance backlog of about $12 billion for infrastructure projects, such as campgrounds, trails, bridges and roads. “In other words, the National Parks as they're currently funded are decaying, because we're not maintaining them,” Bilmes says.

Bilmes, a former assistant secretary of commerce, says she was prompted to do the study after serving on the Second Century Commission, which was made up of a group of prominent Americans, including former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and a number of senators and congressmen. 2016 is the National Park System’s centennial celebration and the commission was tasked with thinking about how to protect it over the next 100 years.

Developing a plan to create a more sustainable financial structure for the national parks required establishing a baseline for what the parks were actually worth, something no one had done before, Bilmes says. This led her to begin thinking about how one could estimate the total economic value of the National Park Service and to do it in time for the centennial.

But how does one place a value on a priceless asset? Economists do this by asking what one would pay not to lose that asset, Bilmes explains.

She and her colleagues at Colorado State University used a methodology similar to that used by US agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and OSHA. They conducted an economic survey in which they asked households what they would pay not to lose the National Park Service units and programs.

The surveys gave the respondents a choice of several levels of support. They found that at higher levels, fewer people would be willing to pay, even if they love the parks; but practically everyone was willing to pay $10 or $15 in higher taxes to support their national parks.

The researchers are not advocating higher taxes, Bilmes says. Instead, Bilmes says, “we are urging Congress to give a birthday present of some amount of money to begin tackling the maintenance backlog for the parks.”

That still leaves unsolved the long-term financial stability of the park system, however. Clearly, the government will never close the huge gap between what the public is willing to contribute and the current appropriation, Bilmes says. This is where private philanthropy comes in.

Private philanthropy has already played a role in shoring up many individual parks, and a National Park Foundation has operated for a number years, but the park system doesn’t currently have a long-term philanthropic funding structure. So Bilmes and others are pushing for an endowment for the parks, similar to the common funding mechanism used by universities, museums hospitals and others institutions.

“The mission of the parks is to protect these special places, unimpaired, forever,” Bilmes says. “The only way they can do that is if they have an endowment which they can tap into to make the investments and keep up with the long-term maintenance, repair, and stewardship.”

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

Pollution from power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania caused up to 4,400 premature deaths across the country in 2015, according to a new study.

Residents closest to the plants, near Pittsburgh and Cleveland, had the highest premature death rates, but particulates and other pollutants from those power plants increased mortality and morbidity as far away as Maryland, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Poor and disadvantaged communities shouldered most of the burden of this environmental risk, which included an estimated $38 billion in health costs and impacts.

The study was conducted by researchers at the think tank Physicians, Scientists, Engineers for Healthy Energy and at NextGen Climate. It had three main components, according its lead author, Elena Krieger.

First, the researchers examined demographic, socioeconomic and existing environmental and health burden data on communities living near power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Then they looked at existing environmental hazards at those plants, such as on-site releases of toxic chemicals and coal ash pits where the plants dispose of leftover ash after coal combustion.

In the third part of the study, they looked at emissions from the power plant stacks and particulate matters associated with these emissions, which can have health impacts not only within the state, but well into neighboring states and far beyond, Krieger says. The highest impacts were in counties in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, but the top ten 10 counties with the highest health impacts included counties in Maryland, New York and New Jersey. The researchers also found effects as far away as Maine and North Carolina.

To calculate how these power plants cause health effects that result in premature death, the researchers used an EPA model called COBRA — Co-Benefits Risk Assessment Model. They took existing historic emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are measured at every power plant every hour, and combined this data with an atmospheric model that looks at how those pollutants react in the atmosphere to form particulate matter and maps where the pollutants go in relation to population centers. Based on how many people live in each county, they estimated how much particulate matter individuals living in those areas inhale.

“The health impacts are based on modeling work, so we cannot say, ‘This person specifically had a heart attack because of pollutant emissions at this plant,’” Krieger explains. “What we can say is that we know that high concentrations of particulate matter are associated with a whole range of health impacts leading up to premature death, particularly for vulnerable populations like the elderly and those with underlying diseases.”

Ohio and Pennsylvania have 77 power plants between them, but two of the plants are among the highest emitters of sulfur dioxide in the country, Krieger points out — Homer City in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh; and Avon Lake, near Cleveland, Ohio. Avon Lake is situated in a county where concentrations of particulate matter and ozone exceed federal standards. The county also has some of the highest asthma rates in the state.

The per capita health impacts tend to fall heaviest on the counties where the plants are located and areas downwind from the plants. The majority of the Ohio and Pennsylvania plants are in low-income communities.

“Half of the power plants in Pennsylvania are located within or near communities that are designated as environmental justice areas by the state of Pennsylvania.” Krueger points out. “These are places that have high levels of low-income populations, minority populations, populations with low access to health insurance and high levels of background health burdens and disease.”

Krueger believes the Clean Power Plan advanced by the Obama administration might reduce the health damages associated with these plants. The Clean Power Plan sets targets for carbon emission reductions for the power sector in United States, which is the highest source of carbon pollution in the country. Each state has its own individual target for carbon emission reductions, based on an existing list of gas plants, of coal plants, of whatever is generating electricity in that state, Krieger explains.

The plan might achieve higher benefits if it focuses on cutting carbon emissions at some of the plants with high rates of co-pollutants like sulfur dioxide emissions, rather than at plants with lower emissions of co-pollutants, Krieger believes.

“So, we hope this information can be a tool for people to push for special policies that will actually lead to a cleaner, healthier power sector in their state,” Krieger concludes.

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

In 1969, the world watched as Neil Armstrong marked his historic achievement with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” His now-famous transmission was heard around the globe thanks to NASA’s Deep Space Network, which made communication from outer space possible.

That network was built by a woman named Susan Finley. She was part of an all-female team of coders whose work was integral to the success of the Apollo 11 mission, but went largely unheralded. Science writer Nathalia Holt, who has written a book about Finley and her all-female team of coders, says this unique group of women was brought together by the efforts of a woman named Macy Roberts. 

“Macy Roberts was made supervisor of this unique group in 1942 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” Holt says. “They were known as computers — before all of the devices we have today it was humans that were actually hired to do the calculations for laboratories. And so Macy Roberts decided that she wanted to make it an all-female group because she worried that, if she hired a man, they just wouldn't listen to her because she was a female.”

This all-female department played a crucial role in the early NASA lunar missions.

“We had six failures of these Ranger spacecraft before we finally were able to land a spacecraft on the moon,” Holt says. “And [that success] was the work of these women — they were in mission control, they were plotting the trajectories, they were a critical part of making this happen.” 

Finley was one of the women in this group and she spent a long time working on the Deep Space Network — a communication system that made Neil Armstrong’s famous transmission back to Earth possible. 

Another woman in the group, Margaret Hamilton, wrote the code that actually made the lunar landing possible. 

“Just three minutes before the eagle is going to land, Buzz Aldrin who was following his checklist, turns on the rendezvous radar, and when this happens, the CPU on the computer just becomes overloaded,” Holt says. “It's important to remember here how little memory this computer had compared to the systems we have today. ... So the alarm goes off because the computer is just having trouble doing so many different functions. ... And so they and Mission Control have to make a very difficult decision: Are they going to abort? Or are they going to trust the software to get them through this? And listening to all of this, at MIT, is a woman named Margaret Hamilton and she's responsible for the Apollo on-board flight software. She's director of the software engineering division at MIT's instrumentation lab and it is actually her code that saves the day — it’s able to override all of the other functions and make landing the priority.” 

The network this group of women worked on is still used today for all of NASA’s space communication, and Holt says Finley is still employed at NASA — the organization’s longest-serving female employee. 

The way women like Finley, Hamilton and Roberts are treated at NASA has changed over the years, says Holt, but there is still work to be done to attract more women to scientific and engineering fields. 

“They had wonderful relationships with their male colleagues, even though for a long time they were paid less and were in a position of computer instead of being called engineers. But despite that, they had these wonderful working relationships with the men and they really loved their careers at NASA,” Holt says. “[Now] we have a very exciting thing that's happened this year, where half of the 2016 astronaut class is women. So women today are very important of course at NASA. But we can do more. Only 23 percent of scientists and engineers in our space agency are women.” 

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

Thousands of natural gas wells dot the landscape in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, and a growing number of pipelines transport gas throughout the Northeast. But all of this infrastructure comes with a downside: leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane at all stages of production and delivery.

A few years ago, northeastern Pennsylvania was one of the hottest drilling spots in the country. Most of the drilling rigs are gone now, forced out by the crash in prices, but the hills and dairy farms around the region are now criss-crossed with pipelines, compressor stations and other infrastructure siphoning gas away from those wells.

One of the benefits of natural gas is that when it burns it produces far less carbon dioxide than coal. But, here’s the problem: Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas, and if natural gas is not burned, then pure methane gets released into the atmosphere. Methane has a much higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide, and lasts for 25 years.

Researchers have found that the EPA has been underestimating methane leak rates for years. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University travels areas of Pennsylvania in vans equipped with high-tech methane sensors, trying to locate and measure leaks. The data is helpful, but researchers are still not sure exactly how much methane escapes Pennsylvania's, or the country’s, natural gas system; each step of these networks contains hundreds of places where gas could escape.

Southwestern Energy, one of Pennsylvania’s largest natural gas producers, has worked with the Environmental Defense Fund on several studies to better understand methane pollution. Mark Boling, a vice president for the company, says spending money on equipment that can prevent methane leaks is just good business. Methane they can sell by keeping it in their pipelines will help defray the cost of working to prevent leaks, Boling says.

Some natural gas producers are also contracting with high-tech satellite companies to help find and reduce leaks in their systems. NASA has used satellites to measure greenhouse gases for years, but as sensors improve, they may become an even better tool in the search for methane leaks.

GHGSat, a Montreal-based company, recently launched a satellite called ‘CLAIRE,’ which is equipped with high-resolution methane sensors. The company’s clients include ExxonMobil and Shell

“Industrial operators would be financially motivated to better understand their emissions, so that they can control and ultimately reduce them — because really what they’re doing at that point is reducing their own financial risk,” Germain says.

Daniel Jacob, a Harvard climate scientist, agrees that satellites could work as an early warning system to help on-the-ground teams find and fix leaks. “Satellites can provide you with detection,” Jacob explains. “They can tell you, ‘Aha! You’ve got a hot spot here.’ And then, once you’ve figured out from space that you have a hotspot, you can dispatch ground-based instruments or maybe low-flying aircraft to figure out where the methane is coming from.”

Jacob’s last research project used satellite data with a resolution of 10 square kilometers; his current project uses CLAIRE, which has a resolution of just 50 square meters. CLAIRE is scheduled to start sending methane readings back to Earth this fall.

This article is based on a story by Reid Frazier of the Pennsylvania public radio program, The Allegheny Front. The story aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

Today, the federal government spends about $60 billion a year on research. That research gets published in scientific journals that institutions, researchers and the public have to pay in order to access.

Many have argued that the government should make this taxpayer-funded research freely available. And now Congress has drafted a piece of legislation that would do just that.

“If you're a taxpayer, money goes to pay for research, you definitely should have a right to be able to see what that research has produced and you shouldn't have to pay again,” says City College of New York physics professor Michael Lubell. “There's another part to it. ... There are many entrepreneurs, small businesses, startups who don't have the money to pay for subscriptions. And if they could read the the results free, it would help innovation and stimulate the economy, create jobs.”

But, Lubell admits it’s not that simple. There are costs associated with reviewing and publishing research, even online.

“The problem is, basically, somebody's got to pay for it,” Lubell says. “Very simply put, if a researcher writes an article, somebody's got to vet it. We don't want to read things that are wrong. We want to make sure that the science is correct. ... It takes money and, for high-quality research publications, that’s the cost associated with publishing. So if the reader isn't going to pay for the the publication, then the author is going to have to do that and that sounds simple, and if there were money to do that nobody would worry. But ... the cost of running the scientific publication business for the federal government, if it were to simply support the authors, would amount to another $3 to 4 billion. That's not chump change.”

In other words? If the government pays for the publishing, that could negatively impact federal budgets, grant awards, and the quality of future scientific research.

There is, however, a possible solution. 

“Members of Congress who are interested in this issue and interested in seeing the open access proposition continue and become a reality — there’s a cost and there's nothing wrong, I believe, in adding another $5 billion to federal research budgets to accomplish this. I think, in the last analysis, it would be helpful — it would help the scientific enterprise and it would make the public believe that they really got their money's worth,” Lubell says.  

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

Scientists have long known that electric eels can send out short pulses of electricity to sense their environment and also to paralyze their prey. But one researcher has recently discovered that eels can also use powerful electric pulses to attack or defend themselves while leaping out of the water. 

Neurobiologist Ken Catania has been studying eels for several years. In fact, he keeps at least two tanks of eels in his lab for observation. One day, while he was moving one of his larger eels — a three-foot eel — from one tank to another, the eel turned around and started aggressively swimming toward him and trying to leap up at him out of the water. 

This was behavior Catania hadn't ever seen before, so he decided to study it further. He gathered a series of props — a fake crocodile head, a fake human arm — and rigged the props with LEDs that would light up when the eels attacked. 

Video producer Emily Driscoll visited Catania’s lab to learn more, and filmed video of Catania’s eels attacking various props. 

“It’s very dramatic footage,” Driscoll says, “because the lights are going off and also the slow motion — you can really see how it climbs up. ... One thing I was afraid about — I got to use the special Science Friday GoPro camera and we weren't sure if that would survive 600 volts of electricity.”

As Catania studied the phenomenon of attacking electric eels further, he uncovered some interesting historical precedent. 

In 1800, there is an account from German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who set out for an Amazonian lake to collect electric eels for his experiments, aided by a team of horses. As the animals entered the lake, Humboldt wrote the eels leapt up the legs of the horses to shock them. There were some 30 horses in the lake, and Humboldt said several of them were killed, likely after being stunned and then drowning. Humboldt wrote his account in 1807, and even then people didn't believe it. 

Now, Catania is able to prove the account was at least possibly true (and there's video to illustrate it.)

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

Seven years ago, Winthrop, Minnesota, population 1,400, decided it needed an internet upgrade.

Most local residents were served by companies like Mediacom, which Consumer Reports consistently ranked among the country’s worst internet providers. Slow connection speeds made work difficult in local schools and businesses, but farmers outside of town, who increasingly rely on connectivity to do business, experienced the worst of it.

Fourteen miles from Winthrop, in Moltke Township, population 330, one soybean- and wheat-farming family reported its sluggish DSL connection often made it impossible to upload reports to business partners.

Organizers in Winthrop knew they were too small to fund a major internet infrastructure-building project on their own, so they reached out to other neighbors, the town of Gaylord, population 2,305.

And the towns attracted 25 more municipal allies. 

Today, in this sparsely populated swath of Minnesota, a grassroots, member-owned cooperative spanning more than 700 square miles and four counties is poised to expand high-speed broadband access—without relying on federal funding. After seven years of development led by local leaders and volunteers, RS Fiber, now in its first phase of construction, is expected to deliver high-speed broadband internet to more than 6,000 rural households by 2021. And unlike companies like Mediacom, the co-op is owned by local customers who have a say in rates and how it’s operated.

Attracting investors to build a high-investment network in low-density communities wasn’t easy. To help raise seed funding, 10 local governments issued bonds that covered half of the approximately $16 million required for the project’s first phase. This model got local banks interested.

As long as local demand meets projections, revenue from the broadband network will more than repay government loans, and taxpayers won’t owe a dime. 

“That’s the win-win,” said Chris Mitchell, director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, who has studied the project. “It’s a model in which local governments can take on the risk if they’re willing, and local banks can get a very reasonable return.”

High-speed internet has become as critical to economic development and quality of life as electricity was a century ago — a reality that’s sparking community broadband investment from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Independence, Oregon, to Cedar Falls, Iowa, where President Obama traveled last year to announce his plans to scale up broadband.

“We’re going to clear away red tape. We’re going to foster competition. We’re going to help communities connect,” he said to the crowd in Cedar Falls. “And the good news is we know it works because of you.”

That's an asset that has attracted businesses that might otherwise have settled in larger cities with high-speed broadband networks. This distinction as a “Gigabit City” has helped turn Cedar Falls,  population 40,500, into a Midwestern tech hub with unemployment below 3 percent. The early bet on broadband has helped the city attract and retain high-tech firms like Spinutech, a web design and digital marketing company, and host events like Product Camp Iowa, a conference for entrepreneurs and startup leaders.The president’s highlighting of Cedar Falls was an obvious choice. Thanks to investments Cedar Falls made in community broadband two decades ago, the city’s residents and businesses now have access to internet speeds faster than 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)—nearly 100 times the national average.

“From an economic development standpoint, fiber optic high-speed Internet is the fifth utility,” after electricity, gas, water, and sewer, said Lisa Skubal, vice president of economic development for the Cedar Valley Chamber of Commerce. “We live in such a globalized society right now that having broadband connectivity is imperative for businesses.”

But even as the Gigabit City movement has caught fire, “Gigabit Farmtowns” — rural areas and very small towns with high-speed internet — are difficult to find.

Last summer, Politico reported on the failure of dozens of rural broadband projects that received grants under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the stimulus package that Obama signed in 2009, because of alleged mishandling of funds by the federal Rural Utilities Service (RUS). Meanwhile, projects without government support face even rockier odds of survival because utility companies and banks often consider it too risky to build expensive broadband networks in sprawling rural counties, where small populations don’t support the same kind of market.

As a result, about half of rural residents still don’t have access to high-speed broadband Internet.

“Those projects generally haven’t done well,” Mitchell said. “They couldn’t crack the code for how to get them financed.”

“It’s an incredible [approach] because it doesn’t rely on states or the federal government,” said Mitchell, who co-authored a case study about RS Fiber. “It allows communities to tap into their existing financial resources and borrowing capacity.” However, the RS Fiber project in rural Minnesota could soon flip that script, Mitchell says, because unlike other rural broadband co-ops, RS Fiber relied primarily on county and city bonding authority — not federal loans or grants — to finance the $45 million project. These local government partners then agreed to be repaid last if financial projections don’t pan out, making it easier to recruit secondary investors, such as community banks.

The stakes for RS Fiber’s success are high in southern Minnesota, where access to broadband service is becoming increasingly critical for farmers using “smart” machinery, local businesses with e-commerce operations, and even students trying to keep up with their homework. One school district in RS Fiber’s coverage area, for example, recently spent $335,000 to buy iPads for every high school student — only to find that inconsistent broadband access severely limited their use.

“We’ll see students outside our local libraries or on the steps of school after hours, trying to find places to get access to the internet and do school work,” said district superintendent Tami Martin.

District officials hope RS Fiber can help close that connectivity gap, though it’s still not clear whether the co-op will offer a service option that’s affordable for low-income families in the district. Under existing plans, the least expensive plan would cost $49.99 per month.

Still, Martin says she’s optimistic, in part because the co-op and its leaders have roots in the community. “RS Fiber is out there asking us what we could use,” she said. “It feels like more of a team effort than when you’re trying to work with a big corporation.”

Construction on the fiber optic network is already underway, but RS Fiber still faces some potential stumbling blocks, including the threat that rival internet Service Providers will lower their prices to siphon away demand. If that happens, the venture could end up losing money, leaving taxpayers on the hook to repay government bonds.

But Mitchell thinks that’s unlikely. “People who don’t care about their quality of access might take service from Frontier or Century Link at rock-bottom prices,” he said, referring to the fact those companies don’t offer high-speed fiber. “But I don’t think either of those ISPs are likely to engage in a round of updates to be at all competitive on speed.”

“There’s a lot of need out there,” said Brandon McBride, who took over as administrator of the then-embattled Rural Utilities Service in 2015. “There’s a great opportunity to work in these local communities and build out the infrastructure.”

The service is helping expand broadband access to places like McCreary County, Kentucky and Burnsville, North Carolina, but its annual budget is nowhere near enough to make broadband access universal. Once complete, the RS Fiber network is expected to match the 1 gigabit top speeds of cities like Cedar Falls, a milestone that would make southern Minnesota the envy of rural America. According to recent data, only 55 percent of rural residents have access to broadband internet faster than even 25 Mbps (compared to 94 percent of urbanites). Moreover, the investment already holds promise for boosting the local economy. In May 2015, the Minnesota College of Osteopathic Medicine announced plans to set up services in an old school building in Gaylord—a decision officials said was because of RS Fiber’s infrastructure investment.

That’s why experts like Mitchell are excited about RS Fiber, which could offer other rural communities a framework for financing rural broadband networks without government support. “I don’t want to say that everyone can do this, but a lot of places could do it if they had this effort,” Mitchell said. “And I don’t think anyone’s going to have to go through the same level of challenge again, because now there’s a model.”

Ben DeJarnette wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Ben is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. His work on rural economic issues has been featured in print and online for InvestigateWest, High Country News, Oregon Business and others. Follow him on Twitter at @BenDJduck

Waving hand emoji. Victory hand emoji. Flamenco dancer emoji. Princess emoji. Bride with veil emoji? Woman with bunny ears emoji. Disappointed face emoji. Weary face emoji. 

Women, girls and femme-presenting people are more than flamenco dancers and brides. And thanks to a a new update by Apple and a freshly approved emoji proposal from Google, they may finally be able to see that reflected in their keyboards. 

Earlier this year, four Google employees — Rachel Been, Nicole Bleuel, Agustin Fonts and Mark Davis — went before the Unicode Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee and proposed 13 new emojis.

They include a doctor, scientist, chef, graduate, coder, factory worker, mechanic and musician. Last month, 11 were approved. The approved emojis will be soon be availble in both masc- and femme-presenting versions, and in all coded skintones.

The only existing non-plainclothes female-presenting emoji at press time.

"The global women’s equality movement is growing, so the time to create these emoji is now," reads the proposal. "We believe this will empower young women (the heaviest emoji users), and better reflect the pivotal roles women play in the world."

The Unicode Consortium is a 25-year-old non-profit organization that works to encode every language on Earth, existing and defunct, so they may be read uniformly across all computers. In 2009, emojis — invented by designer Shigetaka Kurita in Japan in 1999 — were formally adopted and have since seeped into our universal digital "language."

The tiny characters are so ubiquitous and game-changing that they've sparked furious debate among linguists. Some consider emojis a new universal language, others liken the tiny images to body language, processed through the same syntax, grammar and cultural bias attached to the readers' first language. Other still claim that this return to pictographs (hello, ancient Egypt!) is "destroying our language."

These digital hieroglyphics are shaping the way we see the world.

In the UK, emoji is the fastest growing language. Nearly half of all Instagram text contains emoji and — because it's been deemed NSFW due to its, um, shape — searches for the eggplant emoji have been banned by the Facebook-owned social network.

Canadian rapper Drake has Praying Hands Emoji tattooed onto his forearm. Miley Cyrus has the crying cat emoji inked on her inner lower lip. Wikipedia recognizes emojis in URLs. Tears of joy emoji is the most used emoji on Twitter. Last year, a teenager in Brooklyn was arrested after a Tweet with handgun emoji and a police officer emoji was deemed a serious threat. Even ISIS' female recruiters use emojis. 

Then there's Fred Benenson's famous crowdsourced all-emoji edition of Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick — Emoji Dick. It was catalogued into the Library of Congress. Benenson is also the author of "How to use emoji for men," a 2013 Esquire article that got some people wondering, "Are emojis gender-biased?"

Three years and countless pictoral missives later, everyone is talking about emoji sexism. And for good reason. According to a study by Procter & Gamble, 82 percent of of girls ages 16 to 24 use emojis on a daily basis.

If humankind is, in fact, witnessing the birth of a living, breathing universal language, shouldn't its creators be conscious of any societal implications they're setting the stage for? After all, equality is intentional.

Jennifer 8. Lee, former New York Times journalist and founder of the literary studio Plympton, thinks so. Lee made headlines last year when she lobbied for an official dumpling emoji. It was then that she joined the Unicode Consortium's official Emoji subcommittee. Almost immediately, she began to hear chatter about the instrinsic gender bias of the emoji keyboard. 

"It’s extremely limiting when the only professional roles for women are bride, princess and playboy bunny," says Lee. "It becomes part of the coded vocabulary in the global visual language. When you create words and concepts — how people think is shaped by the language. People see reflections of themselves in emojis."

All this in mind, and considering the fact that girls send more than a billion emojis every day, Apple recently announced 100 gender-variant emoji updates, set to debut in September with iOS 10. The new Apple emojis include an LGBT pride flag, single-parent families and a woman with a turban.

Smashing gender roles, Apple is will also allow for gender variances accross the board. Soon, in Emoji-land, a man will be able to get a massage and a haircut before dancing alongside a friend in a leotard and matching bunny ears. And Emoji women and femmes will be represented as police officers, detectives, weight lifters and cyclists.

These changes have been a long time coming. Earlier this year, Always' Like a Girl campaign took on the emoji fight. More than half of girls surveyed by the company reported feeling that female emojis are stereotypical. Seventy-five perfect of girls expressed hope for more progressive representation, calling specifically for professional female emojis.

In their emoji proposal, the Google employees cite the Always ad, as well as Amy Butcher's op-ed in the New York Times, "Emoji Feminism," as inspiration.

"We are told we are the new generation of American women; no longer a minority, we are, in fact, the majority of breadwinners in American homes," wrote Butcher. "And yet the best we can get is the flamenco."

Google determined its depicted professions by looking at the primary, secondary and tertiary categories that compose the global GDP: Agriculture, Industry and Services. They also took pitches from the #LikeaGirl emoji campaign, a series of suggestions from FLOTUS herself, and existing efforts to promote women in STEM into consideration.

Why does any of this matter? Language shapes the way people experience the world. There are hard-coded gender biases in everyday interactions, right down to spoken and written words used to communicate. If a language is inherently gender-biased, chances are the culture surrounding it is as well.

Last year, a study by the University of Warsaw found that countries with gender-neutral languages have more narrow gender wage gaps. Whether it's the assigment of certain nouns to a gender, a la French or Spanish, or the politically charged practice of encoding the gender binary into entire cultures utilizing separate pronouns for men and women, it's can seem impossible to avoid the gender binary and refrain from reinforcing gender stereotypes.

"From a policy perspective, the major message of our study is that the gender wage gap may be driven by some deep societal features stemming from such basic social codes as language,"concluded the researchers. "Education on gender equality is needed at early stages of education, when language characteristics are absorbed by children and translated into social norms."

And it's not just the Romance Languages. In China, the female radical, 女, is used in stigmatized words that, when attributed to women as default, can reinforce the gender binary and infect its speakers with a priori sexism.

"There are different concepts that reflect underlying principles of how a society thinks about themselves," explains Lee, who is first-generation Chinese American. "I grew up reading a pictographic language. The word 'good' is represented by a woman with a son. That is the definition of good. I found that very problematic as a girl growing up. It hard codes the gender bias into the language. 'Jealous' and 'gossip' also have the woman in their symbols."

In 2009, another study asked high-school students to read a passage in English, Spanish or French. The students who read Spanish and French, languages that assign genders to nouns, responded to a subsequent questionnaire with increased levels of sexism, compared to those who read in English, a less gendered language.

This proposed evolution of emoji may seem trivial, even opportunistic. “It’s about time professional women got the same distinction as cartoon saxophones," The Onion chimed in in the spring. Fem-vertising, is very real, after all, and every corporation seems hell-bent on empowering women and commodifying equality, just to sell them more pink. 

But, as emojis quickly become our universal second "language" (64 percent of Millennials communicate with them regularly), it's time to take these little yellow characters seriously. Like Jenny 8. Lee, people all around the world see themselves in emojis.

Just as the feminization of madness affects the way we see and experience femininity, the bride emoji undoubtedly seeps into the subconcious of the men and women using it, affecting who they become, how they navigate the world — what's expected of them.

Gendered digital vocabularies are already so deep in our cultural psyche that we may not even notice the institutional system through which we see the world: A system created by the Unicode Consortium and companies like Apple. 

Luckily, with these new updates, there's hope. And the fact that Apple and the Unicode Consortium are breaking down gender roles is huge. Because an invented language in 2016 demands more than the gender binary.

For gender non-conforming and non-binary people, the battle against gendered languages is very visible — and a daily struggle. Generation Z is the most genderqueer in history. Gender matters to them. Asking new acquaintances what pronouns they prefer to go by is commonplace. Boys wear skirts and some girls present as boys. Xe, they, he, she have taken ownership of their sexual and gender identities like no generation before. Queer Spanish-speakers are breaking down the barriers built into their gendered language by replacing the male and female -o and -a ending with a reclamatory -x. Latin-X.

These are the people who need to see themselves in a Graduate emoji. 

Even the Google proposal acknowledge the importance of moving past the gender binary. "However, as this is not the focus of this effort," the team wrote, "we suggest decoupling the gender-neutral representation of emoji from this proposal. We would encourage other members of Unicode to join us in creating a system of emoji design that can accommodate a broader gender spectrum."

--

It's time to think about the way we construct our modern modes of communication, and make sure that they enable and empower all unique identities. With the evolution of emojis, people are literally coding representation into their lives. 

According to Lee, while most emoji proposals take 18 months to pass, Google's proposed emojis will most likely make their public debut by the end of 2016. After that?

"I know they are working on hand signs and gestures," shares Lee. "Animals, musical instruments. Different hair colors." 

When asked what she thinks the next emoji frontier is, Lee stops to think.

"A woman in a hijab," she says. "Or Superwoman. A female superhero."