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With record-breaking heat, zoos are finding ways to keep their animals cool

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Extreme temperatures are taking a toll on zoo animals. Zoos throughout the U.S. are finding ways to help animals beat the heat.

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A World War I-era warhead and a dead blacktip shark attached to a metal hook are just some of the things magnet fishers have retrieved around the U.S. since the hobby spiked in popularity following the advent of the coronavirus pandemic.

The hobby, which involves people throwing powerful magnets into waterways in search of treasure and trash, became an excuse for some to get fresh air and for others to start businesses catering to these hobbyists.

Joshua Dunlap, of northern California, is one such entrepreneur who started Centurion Magnetics in January 2020.

"Little did we know that COVID was starting a few months after [we launched] and it actually kind of worked out perfectly," Dunlap told NPR over the phone. "It became a really popular hobby with people looking for ways to get outside to do something that was different. And magnet fishing happened to be one of those things. It's all over the world, but very specifically, definitely here in the U.S."

But the growth of these small businesses and the popularity of magnet fishing have become murky lately. They're running up against two problems: China's stranglehold on the rare-earth element used to make these magnets and the high demand these materials garner from electric vehicle makers and other green technology companies.

The element attracting all this attention is neodymium, a difficult-to-produce rare-earth metal mostly mined in China, said David Merriman, a research director who leads the rare earth market research at Wood Mackenzie, an energy research consultancy.

"The main growth areas for the use of the [magnets] is within the motors for electric vehicles. So any electric motor, which uses a permanent magnet, and also the generators for, say, wind turbines, as well," Merriman told NPR over the phone from the United Kingdom.

"So as these markets have been really growing quite significantly, there's a huge kind of transition towards green technologies, electric vehicles, renewable energy generation. The demand for these products is increasing quite significantly," he added.

How China developed its grip on neodymium mining

To understand why China has come to dominate the global production of neodymium you have to travel back to the 1980s and 1990s, Merriman said.

At the time, the U.S. and Australia were major producers of these rare-earth elements due to scientists from both countries developing the technology needed to mine these materials, he said. Unlike gold, which can be found in nature as pieces, neodymium is found within different minerals and thus requires a chemical process to "leech out the rare-earths from the mineral structures," Merriman said.

China soon realized that it had substantial rare-earth deposits "that were a byproduct of iron mining," Merriman said.

"It noticed this as an opportunity," he said of China at the time. "And it's because of more lax environmental [and] social regulation within the Chinese industry during that period, it was able to produce material very cheaply. So China started to undercut production of rare earths, within these other regions, running the price down, and basically taking market share globally."

In the decades that have followed, China has continued to out-compete other countries by extending its reach thanks to state backing and state control of mining operations, Merriman said.

"China now dominates the entire supply chain for rare earths and through to the production of rare-earth permanent magnets and high-quality permanent magnet materials," Merriman said.

"So it's been a long play, I suppose, from the Chinese government to take market share, and then extend its market share over different stages of the supply chain, through to the point where it's now a vital part of the supply chain for many kinds of high-technology applications, including some military applications as well," he said.

As of November 2021, China controlled 87% of the global neodymium market, according to a report from MacroPolo, a Paulson Institute think tank based in Chicago.

These magnets have been called "crucial inputs" for electric vehicle motors, MacroPolo added. The element can also be found in smartphones and guided missiles.

The demand for neodymium "is likely to grow at an estimated 18% per annum through 2030," MacroPolo said. This clamor is already being felt by small magnet fishing businesses in the U.S.

There are plenty of metal "fish" but not enough lures

Jose Torres was fed up sitting in his kayak failing to get any bites on his fishing line in southwest Florida.

The fledgling YouTube channel he launched in 2013 to chronicle his best catches was barely getting any attention due to bigger fishing channels with more resources and larger, more exciting, catches caught on video.

Then, last summer, Torres stumbled upon videos of magnet fishing and "it changed my YouTube channel tremendously," he said.

"I have access to thousands of boat ramps, thousands of fishing piers, thousands of sea walls, where pedestrians walk by or where people throw things in the water, accidentally drop things in the water from their boats," Torres said about why he decided to become a magnet fisher.

Torres' YouTube channel has grown from a few hundred subscribers to more than 3,000 today, he said. This has allowed him to monetize his YouTube channel with advertising.

He's also partnered with Centurion Magnetics as an affiliate, giving him a commission from each fishing magnet sale made using his unique code. This partnership was supposed to net Torres significant money but the reality has been anything but, he said.

"A lot of the issues that we were having, that I've experienced, is that my subscribers were sending me emails left and right saying, 'Hey, I've been trying to buy this magnet for the past month, two months, and it's out of stock, it's out of stock; when are you guys gonna get this stuff in stock?' " Torres said.

He said he's lost "hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in revenue from commission sales because of the lack of availability [and] their inability to get these magnets from China. So the industry has taken a big hit."

Keeping magnets stocked is one of the hardest parts of Dunlap's job as CEO of Centurion Magnetics.

The combination of China's control of the neodymium market, the high demand for these magnets and the global supply chain issues plaguing almost every industry due to the pandemic has caused numerous Centurion products to remain out of stock, Dunlap said.

"You know, just honestly staying in stock is still the hardest thing that's hitting us. ... Wewould keep building momentum and then we went out of stock," he said. "Even if you look on our website now, we're out of stock with an entire line of magnets. We're trying to get them back in stock; it's quite the feat."

Call the bomb squad

While the growth of magnet fishing as a hobby remains uncertain, fishermen like Jake Cowart, of Georgia, find themselves satisfied with the magnets bought at the start of the pandemic.

When COVID-19 shut down the movie business in Georgia, Cowart said his brother Adam - who are both set dressers - was bored and convinced him to try out magnet fishing after spotting a video of someone in the United Kingdom doing it.

The brothers have since pulled up relics dating back to the 1800s, safes, coins and dozens of weapons, Jake Cowart said. In July, Cowart said he fished out a 37mm World War I-era warhead that still had a fuse attached to it.

"I had to call a EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist] and bomb squad out to get them to take that thing and defuse it," Cowart told NPR over the phone. "I was scared, to be honest with you, because it's a warhead, and it can explode with any kind of impact. And it was stuck on my magnet on the explosive side. So I was really, really, really freaked out about it."

Cowart has yet to hear about what happened to the bomb after law enforcement officials and EOD specialists came to pick it up, he said.

Cowart and his brother have also pulled up guns that have helped solve cold cases, he said.

"No murders, but they were all gun store robberies and stuff that was stolen from some elder elderly people, you know, that closed some of the cases that were out in Athens, [Ga.]," he said. "It's just something good to get out there for everyone to see, you know that ... we're cleaning up stuff. We don't want to get a bad, bad reputation that people think and we're trying to try to catch all of these people. But ultimately, if they've done something wrong, they need to be caught."

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Magnet fishing got people hooked, but China and green tech are threatening its future

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A World War I-era warhead and a dead blacktip shark attached to a metal hook are just some of the things magnet fishers have retrieved around the U.S. since the hobby spiked in popularity following the advent of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Vulnerability of Northglenn Water Supply

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Vulnerability of Northglenn Water Supply

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Northglenn water gates on Berthoud Pass damaged, resulting in decrease of water flow

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Authorities believe a suspect purposefully damaged and destroyed Northglenn’s water gates on Berthoud Pass, resulting in a decrease in water output in the city.

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Amid a rapid worsening of Western conditions in 2020 and 2021, the dry spell that has gripped the Colorado River Basin for the last 22 years is now the region's worst drought since at least 800 A.D., researchers concluded in a study published Monday.

The research, conducted by scientists from the University of California Los Angeles and Columbia University and published in the journal Nature Climate Change, also found that human-caused climate change accounts for approximately 42% of the severity of the "megadrought" that the southwestern U.S., including western Colorado, has experienced since 2000.

"Had the sequence of wet-dry years occurred as observed but without the human-caused drying trend, we estimate that the 2000s would have still been dry, but not on the same level as the worst (of the) last millennium's megadroughts," the study's lead author, UCLA climatologist Park Williams, wrote on Twitter.

The study was conducted using both observed soil-moisture data since 1901 and reconstructed data based on tree-ring records covering the last 1,200 years. No 22-year period during that span was found to have been as dry as the West's current megadrought.

The study builds on previous research published in 2020, which found that the drought was, at the time, the worst since a prolonged dry spell recorded in the late 16th century. But the severely dry conditions experienced across the Colorado River Basin in the last two years mean that the post-2000 drought has now become the driest period in the available historical record.

"Exceptionally dry soil in 2021 was critical for the current drought to escalate and overtake the 1500s megadrought as the period with the highest 22-year mean severity," the study's authors wrote. "Both 2002 and 2021 were probably drier than any other year in nearly three centuries."

Due to rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, parts of Colorado - especially areas on the Western Slope - have warmed by an annual average of 4 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-1900 levels, temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show.

Amid record dry conditions, the three largest wildfires in Colorado history burned in 2020, and all of its 20 largest fires on record have occurred during the current megadrought.

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Climate-driven Colorado River 'megadrought' worst in 1,200 years, study concludes - Colorado Newsline

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Amid a rapid worsening of Western conditions in 2020 and 2021, the dry spell that has gripped the Colorado River Basin for the last 22 years is now the region's worst drought since at least 800 A.D., researchers concluded in a study published Monday.

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Agriculture Technology | National Institute of Food and Agriculture

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Modern farms and agricultural operations work far differently than those a few decades ago, primarily because of advancements in technology, including sensors, devices, machines, and information technology. Today's agriculture routinely uses sophisticated technologies such as robots, temperature and moisture sensors, aerial images, and GPS technology.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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For more recent findings on data privacy, read our 2023 report "How Americans View Data Privacy."
A majority of Americans believe their online and offline activities are being tracked and monitored by companies and the government with some regularity. It is such a common condition of modern life that roughly six-in-ten U.S. adults say they do not think it is possible to go through daily life without having data collected about them by companies or the government.

Data-driven products and services are often marketed with the potential to save users time and money or even lead to better health and well-being. Still, large shares of U.S. adults are not convinced they benefit from this system of widespread data gathering. Some 81% of the public say that the potential risks they face because of data collection by companies outweigh the benefits, and 66% say the same about government data collection. At the same time, a majority of Americans report being concerned about the way their data is being used by companies (79%) or the government (64%). Most also feel they have little or no control over how these entities use their personal information, according to a new survey of U.S. adults by Pew Research Center that explores how Americans feel about the state of privacy in the nation.

Americans' concerns about digital privacy extend to those who collect, store and use their personal information. Additionally, majorities of the public are not confident that corporations are good stewards of the data they collect. For example, 79% of Americans say they are not too or not at all confident that companies will admit mistakes and take responsibility if they misuse or compromise personal information, and 69% report having this same lack of confidence that firms will use their personal information in ways they will be comfortable with.

There is also a collective sentiment that data security is more elusive today than in the past. When asked whether they think their personal data is less secure, more secure or about the same as it was five years ago, 70% of adults say their personal data is less secure. Only 6% report that they believe their data is more secure today than it was in the past.

But even as the public expresses worry about various aspects of their digital privacy, many Americans acknowledge that they are not always diligent about paying attention to the privacy policies and terms of service they regularly encounter. Fully 97% of Americans say they are ever asked to approve privacy policies, yet only about one-in-five adults overall say they always (9%) or often (13%) read a company's privacy policy before agreeing to it. Some 38% of all adults maintain they sometimes read such policies, but 36% say they never read a company's privacy policy before agreeing to it.

Moreover, the practice of reading privacy policies doesn't necessarily guarantee thoroughness. Among adults who say they ever read privacy policies before agreeing to their terms and conditions, only a minority - 22% - say they read them all the way through before agreeing to their terms and conditions.

There is also a general lack of understanding about data privacy laws among the general public: 63% of Americans say they understand very little or nothing at all about the laws and regulations that are currently in place to protect their data privacy.

These findings point to an overall wariness about the state of privacy these days, but there are some circumstances where the public sees value in this type of data-driven environment. For example, pluralities of adults say it is acceptable for poorly performing schools to share data about their students with a nonprofit group seeking to help improve educational outcomes or for the government to collect data about all Americans to assess who might be a potential terrorist.

These findings come from a survey of 4,272 U.S. adults conducted on Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel between June 3-17, 2019.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

P revalence of tracking: 72% of Americans report feeling that all, almost all or most of what they do online or while using their cellphone is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies. Another 19% think some of what they do is being tracked. Close to half (47%) of adults believe at least most of their online activities are being tracked by the government.

When it comes to their offline behavior such as where they are or whom they talk with, 69% believe companies are tracking at least some of that activity. And 56% of Americans think the government is tracking at least some of their activities, like who they are talking to or their whereabouts.

Not feeling in control of personal data: Roughly eight-in-ten or more U.S. adults say they have very little or no control over the data that government (84%) or companies (81%) collect about them.

When it comes to different kinds of information, the picture varies by the specific type. While relatively few Americans feel as if they have a lot of control over who has access to everything from their physical location to their social media posts, there are experiences in which some Americans especially feel a lack of control. Roughly half of Americans (48%) say they feel as if they have no control over who can access the search terms they use, and 41% say the same about the websites they visit. By comparison, a smaller share of the public feels as if they do not have control over who can access their physical location.

Risks vs. rewards of data collection and profiling: 81% of Americans think the potential risks of data collection by companies about them outweigh the benefits, and 66% say the same about government data collection about them. Relatedly, 72% of adults say they personally benefit very little or none from company data collection about them, and 76% say this about the benefits they might get from government data collection.

One aim of the data collection done by companies is for the purpose of profiling customers and potentially targeting the sale of goods and services to them based on their traits and habits. This survey finds that 77% of Americans say they have heard or read at least a bit about how companies and other organizations use personal data to offer targeted advertisements or special deals, or to assess how risky people might be as customers. About 64% of all adults say they have seen ads or solicitations based on their personal data. And 61% of those who have seen ads based on their personal data say the ads accurately reflect their interests and characteristics at least somewhat well. (That amounts to 39% of all adults.)

Data collection and sharing for specific purposes: Despite their broad concerns about data collection and use by companies and the government, pluralities of U.S. adults say it is acceptable for data to be used in some ways. For instance, by a 49%-27% margin, more Americans find it acceptable than unacceptable for poorly performing schools to share data about their students with a nonprofit group seeking to help improve educational outcomes. Similarly, 49% say it is acceptable for government to collect data about all Americans to assess who might be a potential terrorist threat. That compares with 31% who feel it is unacceptable to collect data from all Americans for that purpose.

On the other hand, more find it unacceptable than acceptable for social media companies to monitor users' posts for signs of depression so they can identify people who are at risk of self-harm and connect them to counseling services (45% vs. 27%). The same pattern arises when it comes to companies that make smart speakers sharing audio recordings of customers with law enforcement to help with criminal investigations: 49% say this it is unacceptable, while 25% find it acceptable.

The public is more evenly divided when it comes to the acceptability of fitness tracking app makers sharing user data with medical researchers to better understand the link between exercise and heart disease.

Concern about how data is used: 79% of adults assert they are very or somewhat concerned about how companies are using the data they collect about them, while 64% say they have the same level of concern about government data collection.

Separately, Americans have mixed views about which groups concern them in getting access to their data: About four-in-ten are concerned a lot about the personal information social media sites (40%) or advertisers might know about them (39%). But only 9% of Americans worry a lot about the information family and friends might know and 19% have similar concerns about what their employers might know.

Still, the majority of Americans are not confident about the way companies will behave when it comes to using and protecting their personal data. Roughly seven-in-ten or more say they are not too or not at all confident that companies will admit mistakes and take responsibility when they misuse or compromise data (79%), will be held accountable by government if they misuse data (75%), or will use customers' data in ways that people would feel comfortable with (69%).

When it comes to data use for specific purposes, Americans have varying views depending on the purpose for the data use. For example, 57% of adults say they are very or somewhat comfortable with companies using their personal data to help companies improve their fraud prevention systems. But they are evenly split when the issue is their comfort with companies using their personal data in developing new products. About a third (36%) of adults say they are at least somewhat comfortable with companies sharing their personal data with outside groups doing research that might help them improve society, but a larger share (64%) say they would be uncomfortable with this practice.

Lack of understanding: 78% of U.S. adults say they understand very little or nothing about what the government does with the data it collects, and 59% say the same about the data companies collect. Only 6% of adults say they understand a great deal what companies do with the data collected, and a similar share (4%) say they know a great deal about what the government does with the data.

Some Americans also admit they struggle to understand the privacy laws that govern use of their data. Roughly six-in-ten Americans (63%) say they have very little or no understanding of the laws and regulations that are currently in place to protect their privacy. Only 3% of adults say they understand these laws a great deal, and 33% say they have some understanding.

How Americans handle privacy policies: Core parts of the current system of data collection and privacy protection are built on the idea that consumers are given notice about how firms collect and use data and ask for their consent to having their data used that way. Fully 97% say they are ever asked to approve privacy policies, yet only one-in-five adults overall say they always (9%) or often (13%) read these policies. Some 38% of U.S. adults maintain they sometimes read such policies, and 36% say they never read a company's privacy policy before agreeing to it. In all, about four-in-ten adults say they understand privacy policies great deal (8%) or some (33%).

In addition to the concerns cited above about how companies handle personal data, a majority of Americans (57%) say they are not too confident (40%) or not at all confident (17%) companies follow what their privacy policies say they will do with users' personal data.

Several other key findings in the survey:

Roughly three-in-ten Americans (28%) say they have suffered at least one of three kinds of major identity theft problems in the previous 12 months at the time of the survey: 21% have had someone put fraudulent charges on their credit or debit card; 8% have had someone take over their social media or email accounts without their permission; and 6% have had someone try to open a credit line or get a loan using their name.

A majority of U.S. adults (57%) say they follow privacy news very closely (11%) or somewhat closely (46%).

There are some differences by age on some privacy issues: People in different age groups have varying views on some key privacy and surveillance issues. Americans ages 65 and older are less likely than those ages 18 to 29 to feel they have control over who can access things like their physical location, purchases made both online and offline and their private conversations. At the same time, older Americans are less likely to think they benefit from data collection: Just 17% of those 65 and older believing they benefit from the data government collects about them, and only 19% think the same about data collected by companies.

There are also age differences on the issue of how data gets used once obtained. Americans ages 65 and older are more likely than younger adults to say it is acceptable for law enforcement to use customers' genetic data to help solve crimes, approve data collection to assess terrorist threats, and have smart speaker makers share users' audio recordings in investigations. By contrast, young adults ages 18 to 29 are more likely than older adults to find acceptable the idea that social media companies monitor users for signs of depression and to allow fitness tracking user data to be shared with medical researchers.

In addition, two-thirds of adults ages 65 and older say they follow privacy news at least somewhat closely, compared with just 45% of those 18 to 29 who do the same.

There are differences by race and ethnicity on some privacy issues: Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to say they believe the government is tracking all or most of what they do online or on their cellphone (60% vs. 43%). Similar gaps are present in views about offline activities: 47% of black adults think all or most of their offline activities are tracked by the government, compared with just 19% of white adults.

In addition, black and Hispanic adults are more likely than white adults to say they are concerned to some degree about what law enforcement officials, employers and family and friends know about them.

When it comes to identity-theft issues, black adults (20%) are roughly three times as likely as their Hispanic (7%) or white counterparts (6%) to say someone has taken over their social media or email account in the past year. Black Americans are also more likely than white and Hispanic adults to say someone attempted to open a line of credit or applied for a loan using their name in the past 12 months.
CORRECTION: In the chart, "Majority of Americans feel as if they have little control over data collected about them by companies and the government," the explanatory text for the findings related to "Risks outweigh benefits" was transcribed incorrectly. The correct text is, "Potential risks of ___ (companies or the government) collecting data about them outweigh the benefits."
At the same time, white adults also report feeling less control across several information types when compared with black and Hispanic adults. For example, 50% of white Americans feel they have control over who can access information about their on- and offline purchases, compared with 69% of black adults and 66% of Hispanic adults.

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Brooke Auxier, Lee Rainie, Monica Anderson, Andrew Perrin, Madhu Kumar and Erica Turner

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Americans and Privacy: Concerned, Confused and Feeling Lack of Control Over Their Personal Information

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Majorities of U.S. adults believe their personal data is less secure now, that data collection poses more risks than benefits, and that it is not possible to go through daily life without being tracked.

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Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States

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Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States

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The Unpolished Era: How Algorithm Awareness Is Rewriting the Rules of Social

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The pendulum has swung. Don't expect it to swing back

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Chemical Process Turns Plastics Into Fuels

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Chemical Process Turns Plastics Into Fuels

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New research may offer a way to keep single-use plastics such as grocery bags, bottles, straws and food containers out of landfills. But instead of transforming these hard-to-recycle products back into useful plastics, the new technique reduces the plastics back down to the petroleum oil used to make them in the first place, reports Molly Taft for . The resulting oil can then find a new life as fuels or lubricants.

Apart from keeping single-use plastics out of landfills, if implemented at a large scale the new method could reduce the world's oil demands. Per Gizmodo, plastic manufacturing is projected to comprise half of the world's oil demand by 2050.

Researchers say their process, described in a paper published last week in the journal Science Advances, works best on plastics called polyolefins, which are used to make products we are often told can't be recycled, such as plastic bags.

The basic concept is to heat the plastics to break their chemical bonds and reduce them down to their constituent parts. What's new is that the team behind this research has found a way to achieve this at much lower temperatures than ever before, which makes the process more energy efficient and cost effective.

"This is the first technology that's able to take the most difficult plastics and recycle them into something really useful," Dionisios Vlachos, a chemical engineer at the University of Delaware and co-author of the paper, tells Jordan Golson of . "It's the best way to recycle single-use plastics and packaging like polyethylene and polypropylene."

Using heat to break down plastics is called pyrolysis, and Vlachos tells Gizmodo that most prior research focuses on processes that require temperatures ranging from 752 to 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit to work. Vlachos says his team's technique can get the job done at just 437 degrees, and that the end result is "nearly ready-to-use fuels for cars, trucks, or airplanes and lubricants."

The special sauce in this new method is its catalyst, which is a combination of zeolites (minerals mostly made up of aluminum and silicon) and metal oxides including platinum and tungsten, per the paper.

"Alone these two catalysts do poorly. Together, the combination does magic, melting the plastics down and leaving no plastic behind," says Vlachos in a statement.

According to Inverse, the method can convert up to 85 percent of the original material into useful oil. Vlachos tells Inverse he estimates around 300 half-liter water bottles could produce enough oil to make a gallon of gasoline, and two pickup truck beds full of plastic bottles might fill a car's gas tank.

Vlachos and his co-authors have filed a provisional patent on their technique and its catalyst, but he says more work is needed to translate the method to industrial-scale use.

"We need to take action on the plastics problem and develop technologies and policies to eliminate it from the environment," Vlachos tells Gizmodo. "Research takes 10-plus years before it becomes useful. Investing in this field now is a priority."

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New Chemical Process Turns Single-Use Plastics Into Fuels

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Researchers say their method can break down hard-to-recycle plastics using half the energy of existing techniques

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There are growing concerns that COVID-19 vaccines do not offer sufficient protection against new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Israel has already started to offer booster shots of the Pfizer vaccine to at-risk adults, and the United States is in talks with Pfizer about introducing these shots for the most vulnerable.

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There has been talk of a third dose for some COVID-19 vaccines. Why might vaccine boosters be necessary, and what are the questions researchers are yet to answer about them? Image credit: Jens Schlueter/Getty Images

There is growing evidence that people who have received COVID-19 vaccines are less likely to become infected with the virus that causes this disease and that if they do, they are less likely to have symptoms of severe illness.

However, evidence is also emerging that existing vaccines may offer less protection against new variants of SARS-CoV-2, such as the delta variant.

One , for example, showed that 95% of people who received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine had a weaker immune response to the delta variant than to previous strains.

People who received just one dose of either vaccine had a very weak immune response, which suggests that a single dose of one of these vaccines does not offer adequate protection.

The Health Ministry of Israel also released a statement saying that the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 fell to just 64% at 6 months post-vaccination. It noted, however, that two doses of Pfizer are still able to prevent serious illness in 93% of cases.

As of yet, the U.S. has made no decision as to whether they will approve access to booster vaccines. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said in a joint statement that they are "prepared for booster doses if and when the science demonstrates that they are needed."

Vaccine boosters are additional vaccine doses that should provide extra protection against disease, as the effects of some vaccines may wear off over time.

Vaccine boosters are common for many viral infections, including the flu, which requires a booster every year, and tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (DTaP), for which a booster is necessary every 10 years.

For some vaccines, receiving smaller doses more often is more effective than getting a single large vaccine dose.
This approach allows the immune system to build its immune response sustainably. When the immune system remembers certain antigens that previously activated it, it can respond much quicker the next time it encounters them.
Although many vaccine boosters are identical to the previous doses, some are modified to enhance their efficacy. The flu vaccine, for example, changes every year to respond more effectively to new mutations of the influenza virus.

There are generally two reasons why people might consider vaccine boosters. The first is that immunity naturally wanes over time. Without repeated exposure to certain antigens, the immune system may become less able to prevent infection or disease. Vaccine boosters help the immune system maintain a protective response.

"Another reason we may need booster vaccinations is viral variants," a spokesperson from the COVID-19 Vaccine Team at the University of Oxford told Medical News Today. They went on to explain:

"Some variants have evolved to avoid some parts of our immune response, which means they can more easily infect those who have an existing immune response to the virus - i.e., those who have been previously infected or vaccinated. However, the virus cannot avoid all parts of our immune response. A booster vaccination is helpful, as it can improve the parts of our immune response the viral variant cannot avoid."

"Alternatively, we can use a booster vaccine that specifically targets the viral variant. This works by producing a new immune response to the parts of the virus which have changed from the original vaccine whilst also improving the existing immune response against the unchanged parts of the virus, which also should help protect against other variants," they added.

As national agencies such as the note, existing data indicate that most COVID-19 vaccines produce a strong immune response that offers sufficient protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

However, it remains unclear for how long COVID-19 vaccines - in the current dosages - continue to offer protection.

Nevertheless, booster doses might benefit older individuals or those with a weak immune system, as their bodies may not have generated a strong enough immune response after the initial vaccines.

"Based on current data, for people who respond well to the vaccine, it looks like immunity remains strong for over 12 months and works even against the new variants," Dr. Richard Stanton, a reader in the Division of Infection and Immunity at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, told MNT.

"My personal opinion is, therefore, that we don't need to be too worried about boosting them yet," he said.

However, he cautioned:

"Where we do need to be careful is in people who don't respond well to the vaccine. There are lots of vulnerable groups in society who fall into this category, and we know from other vaccines that older people sometimes don't have the same length of immunity as younger people. I think we should be looking carefully at whether it's appropriate to give them a boost."

"If that boost can be done with a vaccine that matches the newer strains, that will be even better - but that's difficult because the virus is constantly changing, and it takes time to generate the vaccine, so we're always playing catch-up. A boost with the older vaccine is still OK though - they do work against the new variants to prevent serious disease, especially if the immune response is strong," he also noted.
Dr. Jessica Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, further explained that "[b]ooster shots might be most beneficial for those who have medical conditions - such as some solid organ transplant recipients (e.g., kidney transplant) and some individuals with autoimmune diseases (e.g., lupus) - that prevent them from developing an effective immune response after the first round of vaccination."
However, she added, "[w]e would first need evidence that a booster shot for these individuals is safe and effective."

Other scientists say that the opportunity cost of not providing booster vaccines outweighs the lack of research underpinning their use.

In an interview with the Prof. Anthony Harnden of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation in the U.K. expressed the opinion that the U.K. is likely to roll out booster vaccines and that annual boosters might be necessary for some time.

"Scientifically, there is nothing controversial about additional booster vaccinations; they work in very much the same way as a second vaccine in a two-vaccine schedule," the Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine Team spokesperson told MNT.

"The debate around additional vaccines is whether they are needed at this stage or [whether] vaccine doses are better off being used elsewhere - particularly in poorer countries, as highlighted recently by Sir Andrew Pollard in an article in newspaper," they added.

Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, wrote that the main purpose of vaccines is to "keep people out of hospital."

As vaccines seem to reduce hospitalizations with COVID-19 significantly, and experts predict that vaccine supplies will be limited for the foreseeable future, Sir Andrew argues that it is important to prioritize those who have not yet had even a single shot before providing boosters to others.

Some people even question whether it is morally right to give booster shots to those who have already been vaccinated when many people, especially those in developing countries, have not received even one shot and are thus at a higher risk of infection.

Others question the need for a third vaccine.
In response to vaccination, T cells and B cells, which are part of the body's immune system, react by building up long lasting immunity to the virus. B cells are the immune system's "memory cells," and they produce antibodies that bind to the virus. T cells help B cells produce these antibodies. Some T cells also kill infected cells.
So far, one study - which has not yet undergone peer review but appears on an online preprint service - has suggested that people who have recovered from mild COVID-19 experience a lasting T-cell response.

Another study that features on a preprint service ahead of peer review found that, in people recovering from symptomatic or mild COVID-19, B cells can produce new antibodies that specifically target new variants of SARS-CoV-2.

The same lasting immune response to occur following a COVID-19 vaccine, some experts argue.

Research investigating vaccine booster doses is currently underway. Some early , however, suggest that although current vaccines offer some protection against existing variants, this may decrease as the virus mutates and new variants emerge.

For example, one study - shared online in preprint form - found that people fully immunized with the Pfizer-BioNTech or Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines had a weaker antibody response upon exposure to the delta and beta variants of SARS-CoV-2, which scientists first identified in India and South Africa, respectively. This, say the researchers, means that booster vaccines based on updated variants may be necessary over time to prevent infections.

Another study - which also appears online via a preprint service - found that after receiving the one recommended dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, people showed immunity against multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants, including the delta variant.

The researchers noted, however, that the immune response to the delta variant appeared to be weaker than that to previous variants of SARS-CoV-2.
On July 8, 2021, Pfizer and BioNTech released a statement saying that giving booster doses of their vaccine 6 months after the second dose produces an immune response to several variants of the virus that is 5-10 times more potent than that following the second dose. They state, however, that they are creating an updated version of the vaccine to target the delta variant.
Many clinical trials are underway to learn more about the duration of immunity in regular vaccine regimens, how it changes after a third dose, and what happens if that third dose is a better match for new variants. As most of these trials have just begun, results will not be available for some time, though.

For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a in June 2021 to determine the safety and effectiveness of a third vaccine dose from a different brand. Researchers will follow the participants for a year after their third vaccination, meaning that the results of this study will emerge by mid-2022 at the earliest.

The results of this trial will inform public policy decisions on whether booster shots are necessary to keep up with the virus as new variants emerge. Similar trials are also underway at the University of Washington and the University of Southampton in the U.K.

Until scientists collect and publish the results from these studies, whether booster vaccine doses are truly helpful in the fight against COVID-19 remains an open question. For now, experts recommend taking a full course of whatever COVID-19 vaccine is available in a person's country.

"We have learned a great deal about COVID vaccines in a very short time, but there's still plenty we don't know yet," Dr. Justman told MNT.

Some of the questions that remain unanswered, she noted, include:

"Is it better to boost with the same vaccine (a homologous boost) that was initially given or with a different vaccine (a heterologous boost)?

What is the best method to measure the different components of the immune response after vaccination?

For those who take immunosuppressive medications, would a brief reduction in these medications be better than or just as good as a booster?

What dose should a booster be, and at what time interval?

Is a booster safe in all age groups?

[Are there] any groups who may not do well with a booster?

What age group would benefit most from a booster?"

These are all questions that researchers are doing their best to address as soon as possible. This does not change the fact, said Dr. Justman, that: "[t]he most important booster is to vaccinate as many people as possible right now, both here in the U.S. and globally."

For live updates on the latest developments regarding the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, click here.

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COVID-19 vaccine boosters: Knowns and unknowns

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There are growing concerns that COVID-19 vaccines do not offer sufficient protection against new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Israel has already started to offer booster shots of the Pfizer vaccine to at-risk adults, and the United States is in talks with Pfizer about introducing these shots for the most vulnerable.

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Posted on by ASEE

(Courtesy the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education, Stevens Institute of Technology). Level: grades 6-12.

Overview

In this activity for grades 6-12, students design a seawall to protect a major coastal highway from erosion by ocean waves and address these questions: Erosion-can you fight it? How much energy is involved with waves and erosion? Can humans stop erosion of the shoreline? Should we? Is it cost effective?

Procedure

Problem Statement
Your engineering team has been charged to submit a bid for a design for a 600 meter seawall to protect a major coastal highway. Your team must design the wall right at the edge of the water. The structure must be able to withstand the impact of the ocean waves. You cannot spend any more money on the project than is necessary, so it is crucial that the team know what materials can be used in construction and how much each material will cost. It is also important to know that there will be no funding available for beach nourishment (replenishment) in the future. Your team will have to give a 10 minute presentation on the seawall design and submit the bid to the Project Manager (teacher).

1. To determine the amount of wave energy, use an equation to calculate the amount of energy based on the height of a wave. First, determine the amount of energy for every square meter of wave, the energy (joules) is equal to 1260.6 times the square of the wave height.

Wave Energy = 1260.6 (Wave Height)2

2. To determine the Total Energy in a wave, calculate the total surface area of the wave and multiply that by the wave energy.

Total Energy = Wave Energy (surface area of wave)

For example, calculate the energy for an average open water wave that is 2 meters high, 7 meters wide and 500 meters long:

Wave Energy = 1260.6 (Wave Height)2
Wave Energy = 1260.6 (2)m2
Wave Energy = 1260.6 (4)m2
Wave Energy = 5042.4 Joules/m2

Total Energy = Wave Energy (surface area of wave)
Total Energy = Wave Energy (7 meters x 500 meters)
Total Energy = 5042.4 Joules/m2 (3,500m2)
Total Energy = 17,648,400 Joules or 1.76484 x 107 Joules

3. For this activity, the waves will be 8 meters wide, and the section of the seawall that the waves will hit is 300 meters long. Determine the highest water height for this month for this location.

4. Calculate the Total Energy of the wave.

5. Using the table of materials below, your team must design a wall to withstand the wave energy calculated above.

Note: The strength represents how much energy the material can absorb PER WAVE before it structurally fails. The Amount Needed column represents how much material needed to supply the stated strength. For example, a wall of 2,000 cubic meters of wood can absorb a maximum of 4 million joules from each wave that hits it.

6. One of the highest waves in recorded history for this site was 5 meters high. This wave occurred during an exceptionally large storm. Would this information change your design? If so, explain.

7. The following links may be of assistance for research: NOAA pictures of shoreline types; NOAA Beach Nourishment.

8. Using all of this information, create a bid for a design for the seawall project described in the Problem Statement.

Your team must create a 10 minute presentation on the seawall design and submit the bid to the Project Manager (teacher).

When preparing your project, your group might also want to consider if the project will be cost effective, possible alternatives, tourism dollars, etc.

Any mix of materials is allowable, but remember that your bid and presentation will be judged according to:

calculations

structural integrity

projected longevity

aesthetics

environmental concerns

cost

Additional Activity

Erosion Comic Strips: Choose one agent of erosion, and allow students to create a comic strip ( handout) that shows the cause of the erosion, the results of the erosion, and the effect this has on humans. (combining art with science, using alternate literacy practices, valuing
creativity) Thanks to Christopher Young, a Robert Noyce Teacher Scholar at the University of Rochester

Filed under: Class Activities, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12

Tags: Marine engineering, Math Lesson Plans, Mathematics

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eGFI - For Teachers " Activity: Prevent Shore Erosion

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Posted on by ASEE (Courtesy the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education, Stevens Institute of Technology). Level: grades 6-12. In this activity for grades 6-12, students design a seawall to protect a major coastal highway from erosion by ocean waves and address these questions: Erosion-can you fight it?

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Algal Blooms linked to Climate change. Are there solutions? 

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Algal Blooms linked to Climate change. Are there solutions? 

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https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/climatehabs.pdf

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When a team of Chinese scientists beamed entangled photons from the nation's Micius satellite to conduct the world's first quantum-secured video call in 2017, experts declared that China had taken the lead in quantum communications. New research suggests that lead has extended to quantum computing as well.

In three preprint papers posted on arXiv.org last month, physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reported critical advances in both quantum communication and quantum computing. In one of the studies, researchers used nanometer-scale semiconductors called quantum dots to reliably transmit single photons-an essential resource for any quantum network-over 300 kilometers of fiber, well over 100 times farther than previous attempts. In another, scientists improved their photonic quantum computer from 76 detected photons to 113, a dramatic upgrade to its "quantum advantage," or how much faster it is than classical computers at one specific task. The third paper introduced Zuchongzhi, made of 66 superconducting qubits, and performed a problem with 56 of them-a figure similar to the 53 qubits used in Google's quantum computer Sycamore, which set a performance record in 2019.

"It's an exciting development. I did not know that they were coming out with not one but two of these [quantum computing results] in the same week," says Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. "That's pretty insane."

All three achievements are world-leading, but Zuchongzhi in particular has scientists talking because it is the first corroboration of Google's landmark 2019 result. "I'm very pleased that someone has reproduced the experiment and shown that it works properly," says John Martinis, a former Google researcher who led the effort to build Sycamore. "That's really good for the field, that superconducting qubits are a stable platform where you can really build these machines."

Quantum computers and quantum communication are nascent technologies. None of this research is likely to be of practical use for many years to come. But the geopolitical stakes of quantum technology are high: full-fledged quantum networks could provide unhackable channels of communication, and a powerful quantum computer could theoretically break much of the encryption currently used to secure e-mails and Internet transactions.

Tensions between the U.S and China are currently at their highest point in decades, with the countries clashing over trade, human rights issues, concerns about espionage, COVID and Taiwan. After China's demonstration of the Micius satellite in 2017, American politicians responded by pushing hundreds of millions of dollars into quantum information science via the National Quantum Initiative. It was an eerie bit of déjà vu. About 60 years earlier, the U.S. was similarly spurred to fund another pie-in-the-sky initiative-space exploration - because of fearmongering over a little Soviet satellite named Sputnik.

But this struggle for quantum advantage need not be a perfect mirror of the space race. Zuoyue Wang, a science historian at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, notes that China and the U.S. are intimately intertwined in many areas-science among them-that could prevent a hostile new competition in the quantum realm. Today hundreds of thousands of students travel from China to study in the U.S., and scientists in both countries collaborate closely on research ranging from agriculture to zoology. In spite of rising geopolitical tensions between the two countries, "they're each other's biggest international collaboration partners," Wang says.

Qubit by Qubit

Forty years ago physicist Richard Feynman made a straightforward proposition: Classical computers trying to simulate a fundamentally quantum reality might be outdone by a computer that, like reality, is itself quantum. In 2019 a team at Google led by Martinis realized this so-called quantum advantage by demonstrating that the company's Sycamore system really could perform a specific, limited task exponentially faster than even powerful classical supercomputers (though a competing team at IBM disputed that Google's achievement represented a true quantum advantage). A year later USTC researchers performed a similar experiment with a quantum computer made from photons.

Why can rudimentary quantum computers beat classical supercomputers at specific tasks? The common refrain goes something like this: Instead of classical bits that are 0 or 1, a quantum computer uses qubits, whose state is somewhere in between 0 and 1 prior to measurement-a so-called quantum superposition. To work together within a computer, qubits must also be entangled, or quantum correlated with one another.

It might be more intuitive to consider the task Zuchongzhi and Sycamore have performed. "It's almost embarrassingly simple," Aaronson says. "All you do is a random sequence of quantum operations." This chaotic set of instructions entangles all the qubits into one big, messy state. Describing that state is easier for qubits than bits. Describing two entangled qubits requires four classical bits. (There are four possible outcomes: 00, 01, 10, or 11.) The state complexity scales exponentially, so what takes 50 qubits requires 2 ⁵⁰, or about one quadrillion, bits to describe. Photonic quantum computers create a similarly entangled messy state but with photons instead acting as qubits.

This is why even a small 50-qubit quantum computer can beat a massive classical supercomputer. "If you look at the West-the U.S., Europe-there haven't been a lot of people talking about repeating [Google's 2019] experiment," Martinis says. "I admire, in China, that they want to do this seriously."

With 56 qubits and 113 detected photons, the USTC systems detailed in two of the new preprints are now technically the most powerful quantum computers in the world-with two big caveats. First, neither quantum computer can do anything useful. (Photonic quantum computing is not a universal computer platform, so even scaled up, it would not be a conventional programmable computer.) Second, it is not clear exactly how much of a quantum advantage they actually have over classical computers. Over the past few months, several studies have claimed the ability to approximate that messy entangled state, especially for photonic quantum computers.

Despite the difficulties of working with photonic quantum computers, USTC researchers have good incentive to master the platform because photons are the medium of China's emerging quantum network. Already, thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic cables have created an initial quantum link between Beijing and Shanghai. The link is not a fully realized quantum connection: it is divided up by nodes because photons can only go so far without succumbing to noise in the fiber. A bona fide quantum network could have a variety of applications, but the two main ones are precision synchronization and unhackable communications.

To fulfill that promise, quantum networks will require-among other things-entangled single photons that can be used for quantum key distribution or other operations that require entanglement. Quantum dots are thought to be ideal sources for single photons. Until now, quantum dots had never sent single photons through more than about a kilometer of fiber. (Typically, the longer the fiber, the greater the noise.) But the USTC team managed to increase the transmission distance while also decreasing the noisiness of the single photon. Its success came from taking strenuous measures, such as stabilizing the temperature of the 300-kilometer fiber to within a tenth of a degree Celsius.

Racing in the Quantum Realm

Is China ahead of the U.S. in quantum information technology? The answer depends on how you measure it. While estimates vary, both countries appear to fund the research to the tune of more than $100 million per year. China has more total patents across the full spectrum of quantum technology, but U.S. companies have a dramatic lead in quantum computing patents. And of course, China has a more sophisticated quantum network and now claims the top two quantum computers.

"It's such a new problem for the U.S. to be facing," says Mitch Ambrose, a science policy analyst at the American Institute of Physics. "It was ahead for so long, and in so many areas, that it hasn't really had to do much thinking about what it means to be behind."

Broadly speaking, quantum research in China is almost entirely state driven-concentrated into a few universities and companies. Research in the U.S., in comparison, is much more disparate-spread across dozens of funding agencies, universities and private companies.

"The Chinese government is thinking about science technology very seriously, probably more than the U.S. administration" Wang says. "No one else will pick up the tab."

Currently, the U.S. government is determining how to fund the future of quantum information science in proposed bills such as the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which would provide $1.5 billion for communications research, including quantum technology. In response to security concerns about China, the bill also prioritizes semiconductor manufacturing and includes a provision that would restrict cooperation with China on nuclear energy and weaponry. This is not the first restriction on scientific collaboration between the two countries. Since 2011 NASA has been under the thumb of the Wolf Amendment, which bans any cooperation with China's space agency without a waiver. Conversely, China and the U.S. have also spent more than four decades cooperating officially on scientific matters, because of the U.S.-China Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology of 1979.

As tensions between the two nations continue to rise, quantum research occupies an awkward spot: although it remains basic research with limited current applications, its future strategic potential is clear and immense. "What are the rules of the road for scientific exchanges going forward in any field, let alone quantum?" Ambrose asks. Hawkish funding of quantum technology could further inflame relations, but it could also stimulate more cooperation and transparency between competing countries seeking to prove their quantum prowess.

During the cold war, the U.S. and the Soviet Union sought to demonstrate parity with, if not supremacy over, each other in nuclear weaponry, spaceflight and other strategically important technical pursuits. Olga Krasnyak, an expert in science diplomacy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, argues the resulting U.S.-Soviet scientific exchanges helped end the cold war. "Science diplomacy has this advantage-it uses science, which is universal," Krasnyak says. And just as importantly, it uses scientists-who historically have leveraged their common humanity and shared quest for knowledge to overcome the strain of any ideological differences. Quantum computing and communications may indeed have the power to reshape the world. But, Krasnyak says, "I believe in the power of human communication, too."

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China Is Pulling Ahead in Global Quantum Race, New Studies Suggest

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When a team of Chinese scientists beamed entangled photons from the nation's Micius satellite to conduct the world's first quantum-secured video call in 2017, experts declared that China had taken the lead in quantum communications. New research suggests that lead has extended to quantum computing as well.

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Got Beef? Here’s What Your Hamburger Is Doing To The Climate

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Got Beef? Here’s What Your Hamburger Is Doing To The Climate

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For some, tucking into a Big Mac is a guilty pleasure. But what's the true cost of beef?
picture alliance via Getty Images

To the omnivores out there: If push came to shove, could you quit eating steak?

The ethics of killing animals for their meat have been debated for centuries. But in recent years, the looming specter of climate change has given meat eaters an additional dilemma to consider: cattle and dairy farming, climate scientists have warned, is unsustainable, generating high levels of greenhouse gases at every stage of the production process. For many vegetarians and vegans, the climate factor has provided yet another powerful argument for leaving meat behind.

To illustrate the climate impact of beef, last month U.K. climate change website Carbon Brief released an interactive Q&A that laid out exactly how much more harm the meat does than other foods. According to the data presented, the meat and dairy industries create 7.1 gigatons of greenhouses gases annually-that's 14.5% of total man-made emissions. But beef is by far the biggest offender, generating 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat produced-that's more than twice the emissions of the next most polluting food, lamb.

According to data presented by Carbon Brief, beef production emits more than twice the CO2 ... [+]
carbonbrief.org

One reason for this high level of emissions is that cows and sheep produce large quantities of methane as a byproduct of the ruminant digestive process, relying on specialized bacteria that can break down grass. As a greenhouse gas, methane is up to 34 times more potent than CO2.

Another way meat contributes to climate change is via the destruction of forests and other habitats to make way for pasture, and for the growing of fodder to be eaten by cattle. With a rise in the eating of beef in large countries that have witnessed increasing prosperity, such as China, cattle farming has become extremely lucrative. In pursuit of profits, ranchers have destroyed hundreds of thousands of square miles of rainforest around the world-vital, biodiverse ecosystems that, when undisturbed, capture millions of tons of CO2. As new research published today in Nature Communications shows, 40% of South America's Amazon rainforest is in danger of turning into savannah as a direct result of deforestation.

Walter Willett, a nutritionist at the public health school of Harvard University, told Carbon Brief: "Eating beef raised on grain produced in the Amazon is like coal-fuelled power plants-the worst thing you could possibly do."

Yet far from falling, global consumption of meat is still on the rise: worldwide meat production has quadrupled since 1961, and as countries get richer, so meat consumption has risen further still.

MORE FROM FORBES China Just Promised To Go Carbon Neutral By 2060. How Important Is That?

Writing in The Lancet Planetary Health last year, a panel of climate scientists called on the international community to "declare a timeframe for peak livestock"-the point at which meat production from animals would begin to decline. Yet demand for beef in countries such as China is likely to continue to grow unabated.

In this context, what is to be done? Must we all say bye-bye to the burger if we are to curb climate change? And how many people would need to give up beef in order to make a significant impact on emissions?

"Next to flying less, it is probably right to say that, as individuals, reducing beef consumption is the most significant contribution directly under our control," says Alexandre Koberle, research fellow at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at The Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London.

But for the millions still out there who are yet to be convinced they can live without that quarter pounder, what should they do? It turns out where that beef comes from is a big factor.

"Knowing the origin of the meat you buy is the first step to demanding it be produced sustainably," Koberle says. "As Carbon Brief has shown, meat production varies significantly and this variation impacts how much GHGs [greenhouse gases] it emits in the process."

The problem right now, Koberle says, is it can be hard for meat eaters to make the right choice. "There's not enough information to enable consumers to decide, so they should demand that grocery providers put pressure on producers to give more information about their meat."

Deforestation, both legal and illegal, is being carried out on a massive scale to make way for ... [+]
Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images

To this end, campaigners and institutions have been rolling out strategies to identify companies and regions that profit from destructive farming methods, and hold them to account. One such initiative, the Trase platform, founded by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, is attempting to spearhead a movement to bring transparency to food supply chains. Standing for Transparency for Sustainable Economies and using publicly available data, Trase maps the links between food importing countries and the places where the food is produced in detail, covering foodstuffs from soy and palm oil to beef and pork. Visitors to the site can select any importer nation and trace food imports back to the precise municipality where that food was produced, complete with information on deforestation activity in that area. But the scale and complexity of the challenge remains enormous: even when supply chain data are laid out and visualized, consumers can find the resulting complex web of links difficult to comprehend, and there is scant legislation to tell food retailers that they must clean up their supply chains.

At the sharp end of the wedge, cross-boundary bodies like the Igarapé Institute, with the cooperation of Interpol and NGOs, track environmental crimes in the Amazon basin, with a view to bringing legal cases against those responsible. But as far as prosecuting environmental crimes is concerned, campaigners and legal groups can count on little in the way of regional cooperation when it comes to bringing the culprits to justice.

This being the case, Koberle says, the best option available is to reduce demand among beef-hungry nations.

"If demand goes down, then the scale of the industry will as well," he says. "But I think that meat is much too cheap. If the cost of producing it sustainably were included in the price, it would help bring down demand. I think people take meat for granted-although that is beginning to change."

Koberle indicates that as consumers, we are too far removed from the process of meat production and its harmful effects, and that greater awareness of the environmental costs of meat is needed.

"Meat consumption should be done with a lot more respect for what it is and valuing it accordingly," he says. "There is room for livestock in a low-carbon world to be sure, but it would not be produced or consumed like it is today."

Are such messages catching on? While global meat consumption shows few signs of slowing, in some regions there are indications of a growing appetite for meat-free options. That's being reflected by the major retailers: this week, for example, the U.K.'s largest supermarket chain Tesco committed to increasing sales of "meat alternatives" by 300%, along with measures to improve the "availability and affordability" of such products. Sporadic surveys suggest both Britons and Americans are reducing their meat consumption for a variety of reasons, from financial to health.

Koberle sees this as a step in the right direction. "Reducing meat intake as much as possible is already a significant contribution. We shouldn't think of it as a vegan-or-nothing proposition: if a person already consumes little meat, further reductions may not have such a high impact."

The meat-free product market is booming in North America and in Europe, as consumers cut back on ... [+]
AFP via Getty Images

In fact, he says, demanding people make the switch to strict veganism could prove counterproductive. "I fear that pushing that agenda [veganism] too hard is likely to alienate a sizeable portion of society," he says. "It may be more beneficial to have a modest amount of meat if that gives you the willpower to strive towards flying less, or turning off the lights, or not commuting in an SUV."

Among unrepentant carnivores committed to wolfing down their nightly T-bone or chateaubriand, the moderation message is unlikely to change habits any time soon. But for most meat eaters, cutting down on red meat while making an effort to find out where that meat was grown ought to be an effective way to lessen their individual emissions. As it happens, such guidance also coincides closely with health research suggesting that cutting red meat intake to a maximum of three portions per week can reduce the risk of cancers.

"The main thing to remember is that there is no one single action that will deliver the required greenhouse gas reductions," Koberle concludes. "Rather, every sector will have to contribute. If all of humanity turned vegan but continued to use fossil fuels the way we do today, the effort would be vain."

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Got Beef? Here's What Your Hamburger Is Doing To The Climate

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To the omnivores out there: If push came to shove, could you quit eating steak? The ethics of killing animals for their meat have been debated for centuries. But in recent years, the looming specter of climate change has given meat eaters an additional dilemma to consider: cattle and dairy farming, climate scientists have warned, is unsustainable, generating high levels of greenhouse gases at every stage of the production process.

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How to use AR to improve reading comprehension

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How to use AR to improve reading comprehension

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You currently have no access to view or download this content. Please log in with your institutional or personal account if you should have access to this content through either of these. Showing a limited preview of this publication:

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Engaging Children's Reading with Reflective Augmented Reality

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This study explored the integration of mobile augmented reality (AR) into reading in elementary schools. With the reflective messages designed using AR (termed as reflective AR), children were guided to process the story content through preview, reading, and review of the content.

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Many Native Americans Can't Get Clean Water

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Many Native Americans Can't Get Clean Water

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For many people, turning on the tap or flushing the toilet is something we take for granted. But a report released Monday, called "Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States," shows that more than 2 million Americans live without these conveniences and that Native Americans are more likely to have trouble accessing water than any other group.

The nearest water station for Darlene Yazzie is 9 miles away at the Dennehotso Chapter House - a community center - in the Four Corners region of the Navajo Nation. On Tuesday, she counted her dimes and nickels to pay for water. It costs $1.10 plus gas money to fill up two 50-gallon barrels, and she has just been told the price is going up next month.

Yazzie lugged a T-shaped key as tall as her out to the well, where she dropped it down into the hole and turned the crank to open the valve.

Water gushed into the plastic barrel. A cool mist from a leak in the hose rained over her. This is Yazzie's drinking water. For her animals, she usually drives to a windmill, but on this day it was empty and the sheep were thirsty.

"There's no water in the windmill," Yazzie said. "It's dry because it's not blowing. The only way they have water is if it's blowing."

Yazzie said the windmill water isn't safe for humans anyway. Officials told her arsenic and uranium levels are too high. Yazzie and many others give the water to their animals, even though they plan to eat them.

"A lot of people died of cancer around here," Yazzie said. "I noticed that more are being diagnosed. I'm pretty sure it's because of the environment and the water."

The groundwater in some areas has been contaminated by the 521 abandoned uranium mines. The new report, by DigDeep and the U.S. Water Alliance, says gastric cancer rates doubled in the 1990s where uranium mining occurred. Unregulated drinking water sources are the greatest public health risk on the Navajo Nation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Fifty-eight out of every 1,000 Native American households lack plumbing, compared with 3 out of every 1,000 white households, according to the report. This disparity has implications for public health. Native Americans experience more deaths, poverty and higher unemployment rates.

"We knew the problem was much bigger, but when we went out to look at the data, it didn't exist," said George McGraw, the founder of DigDeep, a nonprofit that has helped build water systems on the Navajo Nation. "No one could tell us, from federal to state agencies to other nonprofits, just how many Americans still don't have running water or a working toilet where they live."

So McGraw commissioned experts from around the U.S. to piece together the data they did have and come up with the water gap report. What he found was that race is the strongest predictor of water and sanitation access.

A century ago, water-borne illnesses were a leading cause of death. The U.S. government invested in modern water and sanitation systems and nearly eradicated those diseases. But some communities were passed over.

"Our nations didn't have access to funding for infrastructure in the same way that it's federally allocated for cities and states overall," said Mahrinah von Schlegel, an anthropologist from San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico.

She said that in the Southwest, it's expensive to build pipelines across such remote sparsely populated tribal nations.

"It's been a struggle, one, to get the access to that infrastructure capital, and then, two, it's really expensive to develop some of these remote areas," von Schlegel said.

In Mexican Water, the next town over from Dennehotso, Richard Nelson helped his elderly mother haul water.

Nelson has been asking community leaders when his mom is going to get clean running water.

"A chapter official told me, 'Yeah, we're going to have running water,' " Nelson said. " 'We're going to start laying the pipe.' It took another two whole years to do the piping system. Then they said we're going to have water in a year. And that was two years ago."

Today federal funding for water infrastructure is a small percentage of what it once was. Across the country, 44 million people are served by water systems that recently had Safe Drinking Water Act violations. The Indian Health Service estimated that it would cost $200 million to provide basic water and sanitation access on the Navajo Nation.

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Many Native Americans Can't Get Clean Water, Report Finds

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A new report from DigDeep and the U.S. Water Alliance found race is the strongest predictor of water and sanitation access. This has implications for public health.

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If Plastic Recycling is Lie, What can be done about it. 

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If Plastic Recycling is Lie, What can be done about it. 

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https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

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Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. Listen to the episode here.
Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.

"I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."

But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic - the nation's largest oil and gas companies - have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work - that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled - all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.

"The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome."

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.

It could be because that's not what they were told.

Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.

"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."

These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.

It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.

Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.

Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.

Many of the industry's old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the first DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.

At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.

Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.

"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.

It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.

"A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process," the report told executives.

Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."

And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "can't yet be justified economically."

Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives.

He's retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry.

"I did what the industry wanted me to do, that's for sure," he says. "But my personal views didn't always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job."

Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.

In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

"The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate," he wrote. "We are approaching a point of no return."

He told the executives they needed to act.

The "viability of the industry and the profitability of your company" are at stake.

Thomas remembers now.

"The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire - we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," he says.

At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.

"The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren't doing enough - we need to do more," Freeman says. "I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it's been ... and it was what we need to do is ... advertise our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out."

So began the plastics industry's $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.

"Presenting the possibilities of plastic!" one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bike helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.

"This advertising was motivated first and foremost by legislation and other initiatives that were being introduced in state legislatures and sometimes in Congress," Freeman says, "to ban or curb the use of plastics because of its performance in the waste stream."

At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.

Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.

NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco's project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.

None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.

Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.

"There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle," Thomas remembers. "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot."

Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people's homes and outside on their curbs with blue bins.

The industry created a special group called the Council for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a man from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.

Liesemer's job was to at least try to make recycling work - because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.

"I had no staff, but I had money," Liesemer says. "Millions of dollars."

Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to start local plastic recycling programs.

But then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn't making economic sense: There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted down together. They have to be sorted out.

"Yes, it can be done," Liesemer says, "but who's going to pay for it? Because it goes into too many applications, it goes into too many structures that just would not be practical to recycle."

Liesemer says he started as many programs as he could and hoped for the best.

"They were trying to keep their products on the shelves," Liesemer says. "That's what they were focused on. They weren't thinking what lesson should we learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today's problem."

And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.

"I can only say that after a while, the atmosphere seemed to change," he says. "I don't know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up."

But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get past the crisis, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.

In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry's new initiative.

Back then, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.

But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.

"The symbols start showing up on the containers," he explains.

Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows - known as the international recycling symbol - with a number in the middle. He knew right away what was happening.

"All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what's on their soda bottle and they're looking at what's on their yogurt tub, and they say, 'Oh well, they both have a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both go in,' " he says.

The bins were now full of trash he couldn't sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same problem.

Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic - even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.

Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.

"The consumers were confused," Smith says. "It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C."

But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.

"The code is being misused," it says bluntly. "Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool."

The code is creating "unrealistic expectations" about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.

Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.

"We don't have manpower to compete with this," Smith says. "We just don't. Even though we were all dedicated, it still was like, can we keep fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive industry that clearly has no end in sight of what they're able to do and willing to do to keep their image the image they want."

"It's pure manipulation of the consumer," he says.

In response, industry officials told NPR that the code was only ever meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.

Without question, plastic has been critical to the country's success. It's cheap and durable, and it's a chemical marvel.

It's also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.

And if there was a sign of this future, it's a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. It's so new that it's still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains.

This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion investment in new plastic.

"We see a very bright future for our products," says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant.

"These are products the world needs and continues to need," he says. "We're very optimistic about future growth."

With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.

Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn't hesitate.

"Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic," he says. "We've got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. That's going to be a huge effort."

Fix recycling is the industry's message too, says Steve Russell, the industry's recent spokesman.

"Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we've got to get it right," he says. "I understand there is doubt and cynicism. That's going to exist. But check back in. We're there."

Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn't true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled.

Russell says this time will be different.

"It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today."

But plastic today is harder to sort than ever: There are more kinds of plastic, it's cheaper to make plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of it than 30 years ago.

And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.

Russell doesn't dispute that.

"And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that have brought us where we are today," he says. "We are going to be able to make all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic."

Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation's largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. There's even a new ad.

"We have the people that can change the world," it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center.

Freeman, the former industry official, recently watched the ad.

"Déjà vu all over again," he says as the ad finishes. "This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the '90s. I don't think this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all."

Larry Thomas said the same.

"I don't think anything has changed," Thomas says. "Sounds exactly the same."

These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone.

And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along.

He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.

"You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material," Thomas says. "Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material - that's their business."
Cat Schuknecht contributed to this report.
And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.

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How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

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An NPR and PBS Frontline investigation reveals how the oil and gas industry used the promise of recycling to sell more plastic, even when they knew it would never work on a large scale.

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How can we trace the origins of materials needed for clean energy production for ethical supply chains?

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How can we trace the origins of materials needed for clean energy production for ethical supply chains?

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LEILA FADEL, HOST:

You've probably been hearing about polysilicon recently. That's because in June, the U.S. government banned it from China's western region of Xinjiang over human rights concerns. It's the main material in solar panels, and nearly all of it comes from China. How did China become the world's dominant polysilicon producer? NPR's Emily Feng has been looking into this and brings us this story.

EMILY FENG, BYLINE: It was 2005, and Shi Zhengrong was flying high. He had founded China's first major solar panel company, Suntech, and it had just listed on the New York Stock Exchange. But he had a problem.

SHI ZHENGRONG: And, you know, we raised a lot of money, over $400 million. And with this cash, I thought I could buy polysilicon. They're all sold out.

FENG: There was a global polysilicon shortage. So Shi flew to the U.S., then the world's top producer. But this is what companies there said to him.

SHI: They say, OK, Dr. Shi, you have to prepay us. Then we expand our production facility, and we expand our production, you know, material maybe in a year or two

FENG: Businesses like Shi's could not wait that long. So incentivized by crazy-high prices, China began to create its own supply chain. And at the beginning, things were rough.

JENNY CHASE: The factories to make them were running full time. They were doing some pretty - sometimes pretty ridiculous things to make more silicon.

FENG: This is Jenny Chase, an analyst at research firm BloombergNEF. She says one idea Chinese makers had was to extract polysilicon out of a toxic waste product. But there was one small problem.

CHASE: A lot of companies didn't have the recycling, so they would - they were basically just dumping the silicon tetrachloride waste material in tanks and keeping them in hope of figuring out recycling in future. It was just wild.

FENG: So how did China get from hoarding vats of acid to leading the world in polysilicon production? Well, in 2006, it put out its 11th five-year economic plan. Solar executives around the world immediately took notice, including Mark Widmar, the CEO of First Solar, an American panel company. He noticed that...

MARK WIDMAR: Renewables and clean energy and solar in particular was going to be a strategic focus. You know, what happens from there is once the decision, the strategic decision is made, the machine goes into motion.

FENG: Here's how the machine went into motion. Chinese local governments began wooing startups to fill industrial parks, where they paid no taxes for the first three years and were offered land for free. Polysilicon was prioritized for public research funding, and state banks wrote loans for tens of millions of dollars to solar startups with no proven track record. Dozens of companies popped up.

MILAN NITZSCHKE: And nobody, simply nobody in the world was able to compete with that tremendous amount of state funding.

FENG: That's Milan Nitzschke, then an executive with one of the world's biggest solar panel makers, Germany's SolarWorld. But China had not yet cracked the code for how to make high-quality, cheap polysilicon. It's made with a complex, sometimes dangerous chemical method called the Siemens process. Solar expert Johannes Bernreuter explains.

JOHANNES BERNREUTER: Yeah, initially, it was a kind of secret recipe held by Western manufacturers.

FENG: Specifically manufacturers of polysilicon equipment. Here's Nitzschke.

NITZSCHKE: So there were in those days also German companies, manufacturing equipment OK, we can sell them simply anything. Whatever we can produce, we just send it to China. That's great. And that's what they did.

FENG: This was a mistake because selling the equipment meant also selling bits and pieces of the Siemens process. Here's Bernreuter again.

BERNREUTER: But as equipment suppliers and engineering companies provided the equipment and know-how to Chinese manufacturers, the secret sauce wasn't secret anymore.

FENG: One Chinese company benefited hugely from this - Daqo Group, or Daquan in Chinese. It made electrical gadgets, but it sensed a real fortune in solar, so it began trying to buy polysilicon know-how with no luck. Here's what Daqo Chairman Xu Guangfu wrote in a company blog from these days.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) China has always wanted to import the most cutting-edge American, Japanese and German polysilicon manufacturing technology. But we always encountered international restrictions.

FENG: But in 2005, Daqo's chairman learned a European company was finally willing to help. And in August 2006, Daqo signed an exclusive technology transfer agreement for what Daqo calls the core of its expertise. And the next month, Daqo broke ground on its first major plant. NPR identified the previously unreported European company, Poly Engineering SRL, an Italian consultancy. Its founder, Dr Giovanni Marangoni, was once a director at an American silicon wafer maker. And he told NPR that he taught Daqo the polysilicon making know how and how to set up a plant. Marangoni wrote NPR in an email that without his support, Doqa would, quote, "not have been able to reach its current capacity." Today, Daqo is one of the world's biggest producers of solar polysilicon. And it's based in Xinjiang, a Western region that is perfect for the energy-intensive polysilicon industry. Here's entrepreneur Shi Xhengrong, who you heard at the beginning of this story.

SHI: The reason, for example, some companies have been built in the West is because they have a lot of cheap electricity. There's so much land, so much sunshine.

FENG: But Xinjiang is also where China has detained and arrested hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, a Turkic minority. Government documents suggest some are then forced into government work programs, as well. So in June, the U.S. banned Xinjiang polysilicon from five companies, including from Daqo. That's made polysilicon, once the reason for U.S.-China industrial competition, now an ethical hot potato, as well. David Dunlap is vice president of a New Mexico solar installation company, BayWa r.e. Solar Systems. He's now trying to figure out how to detect whether a panel has Xinjiang polysilicon in it.

DAVID DUNLAP: So if the rules are it has to be third-party verified from the source but the Chinese company that is the source won't report that, then nobody is going to get a clean bill of health.

FENG: Which means there's no way to guarantee where that polysilicon is from, a huge headache and raising the question, can solar panel companies even buy it legally from some of the world's biggest polysilicon makers? So while China has come to dominate solar over the last decade, whether they can continue to do so is now in question. Emily Feng, NPR News, Shanghai.

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How Did China Become The World's Dominant Polysilicon Producer?

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LEILA FADEL, HOST: You've probably been hearing about polysilicon recently. That's because in June, the U.S. government banned it from China's western region of Xinjiang over human rights concerns. It's the main material in solar panels, and nearly all of it comes from China. How did China become the world's dominant polysilicon producer?

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Plastic Waste

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Plastic waste is one of the most urgent environmental issues of our time. Less than 10 percent of the plastic we use is recycled, and there's currently an estimated 100 million tons of plastic in oceans around the world. But what would happen if we stopped thinking of plastic as waste, and instead as a valuable renewable resource?

Scientists around the world want to find out. The plastic "end-of-life challenge" calls for new ways to recycle and reuse plastics endlessly in a closed loop system, so they never become waste. Innovation on that scale would convert the current "make-take-dispose" linear economy into a circular economy, where recycling plastic for eternity is possible.

One scientist has made a significant advancement. John Layman, head of material science at Procter & Gamble and chief technologist and founding inventor of PureCycle Technologies, developed a revolutionary process to remove color, odor, and contaminants from polypropylene plastic waste and transform it into a "virgin-like" resin, which is the basis for plastic products. PureCycle's technology presents a major development in recycling capabilities, and focusing on polypropylene is especially notable. It's the second-most used plastic in the world, yet only 1 percent is currently recycled.

Layman's colleague and former classmate Scott Trenor, a senior polymer scientist at Milliken & Company, contributed a key set of plastic additives to increase the viability of PureCycle materials. Additives are chemical substances that modify the properties of plastics so they can be used in different types of products. For example, a car bumper would need to be more durable and impact-resistant, while a yogurt cup would need to be more flexible. Now Milliken and PureCycle are working together to scale and advance the technology, with plans to start commercial-scale production at PureCycle's first plant, in Ohio, in 2021.

Trenor says the collaboration is a natural fit, partly because "both companies have a very strong environmental purpose." Milliken's first recycling policy dates back to 1901, and the company just launched ambitious sustainability goals that include creating circular economies and zero waste to landfill by 2025. PureCycle's technology supports P&G's vision of using 100 percent recyclable or renewable materials in its packaging.

Trenor's motivation is closer to home. He often takes his 4-year-old son to ride mountain bikes near his home in South Carolina, and he's been disheartened to see an increase in plastic litter in natural spaces. "It's not the way I want to leave things for the future generation," he says.

Layman agrees. While studying plastics in graduate school, he was amazed at the volume of material being produced, and horrified by how much was ending up in the environment. "Since the day you were born, there's a pile of trash with your name on it," he says. "The first diaper you wore as a newborn is likely still on this planet somewhere."

He got interested in recycling in 2008, when he was tasked with buying plastic waste from recyclers and surveying its usefulness for P&G's products and packaging. "You quickly realize there's a lot of issues when it comes to the quality of recycled material," he says. Currently, only two kinds of plastic, PET and HDPE, are economically viable for recyclers, and even those are hard to upcycle into high-quality products.

Layman focused on polypropylene because it's one of the three largest plastic resins used in the world. Its super powers include flexibility and impact resistance. It's found in most caps on most bottles. It's in luggage and carpets, computers and phones. In the grocery store, it's everywhere-yet it's hardly the favorite of recyclers looking to make a profit. It holds onto pungent smells and contaminants, and it can only be made into black or gray products. For those reasons, the little that's recycled is usually made into park benches or car bumpers-important but limited applications.

To recycle polypropylene into higher-value products, Layman knew he would first have to purify the plastic waste, and in an energy-efficient way. He worked on the discovery phase with financial backing from an internal seed fund program at P&G. The resulting PureCycle technology relies on a physical solvent-based process that uses less energy than a chemical process because it doesn't have to break down and build up the molecule. "It's the combination of the solvent choice, plus specific process steps, that enable us to purify this material in a way that nobody's been able to do before," he says.

Once the material has been purified, the question is what to do with it. Trenor explains that when scientists create plastic products from scratch, "they have a lot of knobs they can turn to select the exact set of properties they need for a certain application." Working with recycled material is more challenging.

That's where Milliken's additives come in-they can modify PureCycle's polypropylene resin for use in a diverse set of applications. For the first time, recycled polypropylene doesn't have to become a car bumper. Purified and modified, the resin can be molded into different products with different properties in a closed loop.

The first PureCycle plant is expected to purify and recycle 119 million pounds of polypropylene and produce 105 million pounds each year. Those numbers sound huge, but Layman puts it in perspective by pointing out that 120 billion pounds of polypropylene were produced globally in 2018 alone. "You can see we have a long way to go," he says.

He compares PureCycle with wind and solar energy technology before they scaled up. "We have an ambition to build 25 plants around the world, each one bigger than the last," he says. "This is plant number one." Eventually, he hopes to PureCycle at least 10 to 20 percent of all polypropylene plastic.

"For all of these technologies, it's really more of a marathon than a sprint," says Trenor. He also notes that the plastic end-of-life challenge doesn't concern technology alone. For PureCycle or any other initiative to succeed, consumers need to change their behavior and recycle more, and recyclers need the ability and financial incentive to process more than PET and HDPE.

Trenor says that U.S. recycling facilities are part of the problem. "A lot of the separation capabilities in their infrastructure was built 20 or 30 years ago when there wasn't as much plastic," he explains. "So they were built for paper, cardboard, steel, and glass. As those materials have decreased in volume and plastics have increased, the technology and infrastructure hasn't kept up."

Meanwhile, demand for recycled plastic is high. Consumer goods manufacturers are committing to using minimum percentages of recycled content in their packaging, and new legislation in California and Europe requires it. The Association of Plastic Recyclers reported in 2012 that in North America alone, there was demand for 1 billion pounds of recycled polypropylene.

Supply, however, can't keep up. "Recyclers are screaming for more material because they can't fill their current orders," Trenor says.That's mainly because people just aren't recycling enough. "Once it's in the consumer's hand, there needs to be some personal responsibility to put it in the right bin, sort it in the right way, and make sure it doesn't end up in a landfill, or even worse, on a beach or in the forest somewhere."

Trenor is excited about his role in new innovations that have the potential to curb plastic waste, but he knows it will take more than science. "Milliken isn't going to solve this problem alone. PureCycle isn't going to solve this problem alone," he says. "We need a diverse group of people, companies, NGOs, and governments to work together to solve the problem of plastic waste."

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Plastic waste is one of the most urgent environmental issues of our time. Less than 10 percent of the plastic we use is recycled, and there's currently an estimated 100 million tons of plastic in oceans around the world. But what would happen if we stopped thinking of plastic as waste, and instead as a valuable renewable resource?

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mentorship program

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Once selected for the program, youth request resources to support their business (physical materials, software, etc.) and work to make it a reality.

At VentureLab, we know entrepreneurship is more than starting a business. It's a way of thinking and doing.

Youth will also work with VentureLab educators to identify their entrepreneurial strengths as well as areas they'd like to improve. Along with working on their business idea, youth will complete activities, self reflection, and even talk with a real entrepreneur about how to grow their mindsets and skills!

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VentureLab Spark Program - Youth Entrepreneurship

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Once selected for the program, youth request resources to support their business (physical materials, software, etc.) and work to make it a reality. At VentureLab, we know entrepreneurship is more than starting a business. It's a way of thinking and doing.

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Recovering emotionally and academically from COVID

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Recovering emotionally and academically from COVID

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Resources for School Recovery after COVID-19 Closures | Texas School Safety Center (txstate.edu)

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We're on the verge of a new school year, but "back to school" as we know it has been off the table for some time now. We still have more questions than answers. When will schools reopen? Should they reopen? If and when they do, how will students and educators be safe? What will instuction even look like? How will students, educators, and parents adjust to the "new normal"?

These questions are eerily familiar to Louise Smith, band director at Gautier Middle School in Jackson County, Mississippi. She remembers August 29, 2005, like it was yesterday. That was the day Hurricane Katrina slammed into Mississippi's Gulf Coast, devastating her community. Smith, who was living with her mother at the time and was about to enter her third year of teaching, temporarily lost her home, and schools in her district were heavily damaged.

"It was devastating," Smith recalls. "We were out of school for more than a month. My students had lost so much-their homes, [and] families couldn't pay bills. Parents were trying to keep their kids safe."

So when the coronavirus shut down schools this spring, many of her students felt the same fear and grief Smith remembers so vividly from after the storm. "The crisis is different, but the trauma is in many ways the same: The sense of loss and the emotional and economic hardships, the threat of illness, uncertainty about what the future is going to bring."

No one wants students to safely return to classrooms more than parents and educators. The health and safety of students and staff, however, should be the primary driver behind the decision to reopen. Even if every safeguard and protocol is properly planned and executed, teaching and learning can't just pick up where educators and students left off when the school doors closed some five months ago.

This isn't just about academics and "catching up." School leaders must first rebuild safe spaces for students that will help them and educators navigate the trauma they've experienced.

Kathy Reamy, a school counselor in La Plata, Md., and chair of the NEA School Counselor Caucus, says that if distance learning continues into the fall - as appears likely in many states - anxiety and stress may be exacerbated, making it essential to implement stronger systems to meet the social and emotional needs of students and educators.

And even if school doors open in some communities, "we need to recognize that this pandemic will change people forever," Reamy cautions. "Some members of the school community will be mourning the loss of loved ones, while others will be mourning the loss of something else-their lives as they knew it."

Learning Without Support Systems

The COVID-19 pandemic forced 48 states and the District of Columbia to close their schools through the end of the 2019 - 2020 school year. Students were cut off from friends. Other familiar faces-a favorite teacher, the bus driver who greeted them every morning, the counselor who helped them through the hard days, the cafeteria worker who served their lunch-were also suddenly absent from their daily lives.

The loss and isolation caused by the closures affected every student. But for many, school is a safe haven away from problems at home or other stressors. Being stripped of that sanctuary during the pandemic undoubtedly increased their anxiety, and many withdrew from online learning and communication with counselors during the closures.

The pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color, exacerbating not only existing economic and health care disparities, but also the stress and trauma experienced by many students in those neighborhoods.

"We've had so many students who have fallen through the cracks who will be returning to school without any support," says Kristine Argue-Mason, instructional resource and professional development director for the Illinois Education Association (IEA), which offers trainings on trauma-informed practices across the state. "They don't have the buffers - stable home lives, steady food supplies, outside support systems - that prevent stress and anxiety from becoming toxic and a major obstacle to learning. That's what we really need to be concerned about as we head back to school."

Soon after schools closed, Lindsey Jensen-an English teacher at Dwight Township High School in Illinois and the 2018 Illinois teacher of the year -feared the COVID-19 pandemic was also a trauma pandemic in the making.

She understands how adverse childhood experiences-poverty, racism, violence, instability at home-fuel toxic stress in students and can jeopardize their emotional well-being and their academic success.

"I was up at night thinking about my students living in abuse and neglect, our LGBTQ+ students who are living in homes where they aren't accepted for who they are," she recalls. "I was thinking about students who don't have access to basic needs, such as food."

These concerns also weighed on Lee Starck, a K-4 school counselor for Stevensville Public Schools in Montana. During the spring, Starck immersed himself in trying to connect with his students through Zoom calls and other methods, but he couldn't help but look ahead to the new school year with some degree of trepidation.

"We may not yet know the intensity of the trauma and anxiety," he says. "We may not be getting a really accurate picture of what they've been experiencing. That's unsettling to me."

Educators In a 'Dark Place'

Students aren't the only ones in the school community who are coping with trauma. As a counselor, Starck is also an advocate for the emotional support needs of educators. "We can't be neglectful of our staff feeling whole as well," he says.

Teaching is already one of the most demanding and stressful professions. Educators have had to manage distance learning - a shift that occurred practically overnight - while facing the same stressors everyone else is navigating. "Most educators would admit feelings of loneliness and isolation, as well as helplessness," says Jensen.

During an April webinar on covid trauma and educator resilience, co-sponsored by the National Education Association, José Vilson, a middle school math teacher in New York City, talked about the stress and anxiety he was experiencing living in what was then the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

"I listen at the ambulances as they drive by my window. You hear them every day and I sometimes can't help but think, 'Is it soon going to be my turn?'

A few weeks after schools closed, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI) invited educators to describe the emotions they were experiencing. More than 5,000 educators responded. Over and over, the same words bubbled to the top. Stressed. Anxious. Worried. Overwhelmed. Confused.

Teachers were in a dark place, says Christina Cipriano, director of research for YCEI. "It's a daunting reality ... the requirements for distance teaching and learning, simultaneously supporting all our students and their own families, managing waves of loss on a scale unimaginable, all the while under a veil of ambiguity about the future."

In recent years, district and school leaders have generally become more conscious of and sympathetic to teacher stress and burnout, as well as its adverse impact on the profession and students.

This awareness shouldn't fade when schools reopen. But with the Trump administration and many lawmakers pushing for a return to full-time, in-person learning this fall, Jensen wonders where the high praise for educators, so prevalent in the first few months of the pandemic, has gone. As the pandemic shows few signs of abating, educator concerns over reopening - shared by most parents - are being largely ignored in many communities.

"The lack of respect at this time is astounding," said Jensen. "What if a student or educator dies? Are we going to receive the resources we need to provide extra social workers and counselors to help students and staff navigate that unimaginable trauma?"

In May, s many as 2 million educator jobs - the U.S. House of Representatives passed the HEROES Act which provides critical funding to help schools reopen more safely and help alleviate budget cuts that could affect countless educator jobs. The U.S. Senate, however, has so far refused to do its part. According to an NEA analysis, a many of them school counselors and psychologists - could be lost over the next three years if Congress doesn't act.

Prioritizing Social-Emotional Learning

Too much of the current debate around reopening, Cipriano says, has been marred by "mixed and inconsistent message that are having devastating effects on the emotional well-being of teachers, students, and families." And merely putting students back into their classrooms, sitting at desks ignores the other conditions that create safe and productive learning climates.

"We need warm, welcoming environments, where students feel connected and safe, and teachers feel supported and valued...and where we can focus on building and sustaining meaningful relationships that transcend the physical walls of classrooms," she says.

And that means prioritizing social and emotional learning (SEL). "It is next to impossible to expect teaching and learning to occur in a crisis without attending to our emotions," says Cipriano.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines SEL as "how children and adults learn to understand and manage emotions, set goals, show empathy for others, establish positive relationships, and make responsible decisions."

Long before the pandemic, SEL had already graduated from mere "buzzword" status to being an indispensable fixture in a growing number of classrooms. But the impact of the COVID-19 crisis underscores the potential value of a more systemic implementation of SEL strategies - and not just for students.

"The emotional strategies that help our kids can work for us as well," says Louise Smith.

CASEL recently surveyed 37 state education agencies to gauge any heightened interest in SEL. The results were very encouraging (see chart above). The states also identified the various obstacles to implementation, including the exclusive focus on academics, lack of staff training, and lingering confusion over what SEL really means.

It's well worth the time, effort and resources to navigate these challenges. Paying attention to the SEL needs of students and educators alike will be essential as schools begin to open their doors (or even if they don't), says Kathleen Minke, executive director of the National Association of School Psychologists. "These skills are so important because they build trust, and that will help put kids in a space where they can begin to achieve academically again,"

During the school closures, Jensen was frustrated at what she regarded as a myopic focus on academics at the expense of emotional support for students. In the upcoming school year, she'll be transitioning into a new hybrid position that she hopes will create a larger space for students to address their emotions. Jensen will spend half of her time as a classroom teacher and the other half creating professional development opportunities for her colleagues. Her number one priority: Training for her colleagues on social-emotional learning.

"We will be infusing SEL into everything. It's the most important thing we can be doing right now."

Building that Familiar Community

Schools may want to reserve time as school begins to beging addressing the emotional well-being of students and educators, according to NEA's guidance on reopening schools, released in June.

"Consider suspending academic instructional activity for two weeks to start school with a focus on social-emotional learning activities that includes trauma screening and supports to help students and adults deal with grief, loss, etc.," the guidance says. "Social-emotional supports should then be continued throughout the school year and be integrated into students' regular learning opportunities."When she's back in the classroom, Smith says she will talk about grades and achievement, but not before she can provide a place where students feel comfortable.

She reminds herself that "moving forward" with grief or loss is better than just "moving on." Smith recalls that despite how resilient students were when they returned to school after Hurricane Katrina, they looked to the adults in school-the teachers, the cafeteria workers, the school custodians- to see if they should be afraid.

"I want to be able to ask them, 'What do you need to tell me? I may not have the answer, but it can help to talk. You're not alone.' We need to re-establish those bonds and help build those safe places, that familiar community," Smith says.

Without the attention to new programs to better serve the emotional needs of the school community, the educational progress of students will suffer, counselor Reamy warns.

"We are going to need more counselors in schools, more clubs and activities that address social-emotional health. And more training for the staff to help them recognize and address the difficult emotions experienced by both students and staff."

Although students will crave the community and sanctuary schools provide, they are probably not aware of how difficult the transition is going to be, adds counselor Lee Starck. "We have to make them feel safe again. They'll want that structure and sense of normalcy, but we have to understand how challenging it will be given what they've been through, what we've all been through."

NEA and its affiliates are finding ways for schools and educators to address the issue of trauma and its implications for learning, behavior, and school safety. Resources
Learn more about adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed schools.

In July, CASEL released Reunite, Renew, and Thrive: Social and Emotional Learning Roadmap for Reopening School. The result of a collaboration with 40 partners, including NEA, the document serves as a roadmap for school communities to embed social and emotional competencies and foster more equitable learning environments.

The Treatment and Services Adaptation Center offers online resources produced by a team of clinicians, researchers, and educators who are respected authorities in the areas of school trauma and crisis response.

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Helping Students and Educators Recover From COVID-19 Trauma | NEA

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We're on the verge of a new school year, but "back to school" as we know it has been off the table for some time now. We still have more questions than answers. When will schools reopen? Should they reopen? If and when they do, how will students and educators be safe?

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Native Americans: The forgotten minority in police shootings

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Native Americans: The forgotten minority in police shootings

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native americans: the forgotten minority in police shootings - cnn

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The forgotten minority in police shootings

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Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to data from the CDC.

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How might we increase access to extracurricular activities for ALL of our students?

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How might we increase access to extracurricular activities for ALL of our students?

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sidewalk to each community
-research how Oglala got theirs

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Help the US Government solve problems big and small

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Help the US Government solve problems big and small

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Here, members of the public compete to help the U.S. government solve problems big and small. Browse through challenges and submit your ideas for a chance to win.

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Companies looking for solutions to problems.

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MindSumo | Crowdsourcing for Innovation and Insights from Millennials

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MindSumo is the leading crowdsourcing platform for insight and innovation from Millennials and Gen Z consumers. We harness the power of the crowd to generate ideas and solve problems for companies.

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Stephanie Woodard still remembers the weight of a roll of pennies in her pocket, hoping it would be enough to pay for lunch.

The professional learning specialist for Fort Bend International School District recalls sneaking into her father's bedroom and digging through his green can of spare change.

And when there wasn't enough money, she remembers being handed a saran-wrapped peanut butter and honey sandwich.

"I didn't want to eat peanut butter and honey, and I didn't want to be the one kid at the table who didn't have a real lunch," she said. "It made me feel terrible."

Woodard didn't qualify for free or reduced lunch because both of her parents had full-time jobs. But her father struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and so there wasn't always money for lunch.

Decades later, Woodard, who was a middle school teacher from 2005 to 2010 in the same district where she grew up, noticed that schools were still participating in "lunch shaming." When students hit a negative lunch balance, typically the equivalent of a few lunches, cafeteria workers would print out the balance on a neon sheet of paper and place it on the lunch tray.

"The kids would hate to get it, and they would hate to take it home," Woodard said. "When you don't have money, every little thing is a way to draw attention to the fact that you don't have money."

To address this issue, legislators are proposing bills, nonprofits are launching campaigns, and powerful individuals are speaking up to help end lunch shaming.

THE SHAMEFUL ACT OF LUNCH SHAMING

Lunch shaming is a direct consequence of meal debt. If students have meal debt that's not paid off, the burden falls on the school to cover it.

Here's how meal debt happens: Schools receive federal reimbursement from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for students who qualify and enroll in free or reduced lunch and breakfast. If the total income of a family of four falls below $32,630, the student qualifies for free lunch and breakfast. If it's below $46,435, the student qualifies for reduced breakfast and lunch.

For each child who qualifies for free meals, the school receives $3.41 for every one of their meals. For those who receive reduced meals, schools receive 32 cents. Students are automatically certified for free lunch and breakfast if their family receives assistance program benefits, such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

"That $3.41 has to pay for not only the food - which is a milk, a fruit, a vegetable, a grain and a protein with every lunch - but it also has to pay for labor, and benefits, and supplies, and electricity, and water and everything," Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations for School Nutrition Association ( SNA), told NationSwell

But the one thing it can't pay for is meal debt. The USDA forbids schools from using that money to cover what it deems "bad" debt. The agency requires schools to attempt to collect debt for unpaid meals, but if those attempts to recoup the debt do not work, it falls on the school to pay for it.

Where might this money come from? Perhaps from sales of a la carte items sold in cafeterias, charitable organizations or from the school's general funds, said Pratt-Heavner.

But even if schools could use money from the federal government, "there's just not enough funds available to cover unpaid meal debt," Pratt-Heavner said.

Schools are motivated to get that money back. So they've turned to lunch shaming practices like stamping children's hands with "I need lunch money" or making them clean tables when lunch is over. Schools have even sent debt collectors after families.

"In our view, school meals are just as important to learning as textbooks and pencils and paper." - Diane Pratt-Heavner, director of media relations for School Nutrition Association

Some policies were two sentences, while others were two pages.

ENDING LUNCH SHAMING

According to school advocates, like FRAC, creating a consistent approach across all school districts is key to ending the practice of lunch shaming. So some government officials are leading the way through legislation.

In 2017, legislators in passed an anti-lunch-shaming bill and became the first state to outright ban lunch shaming. Since then, other states, like West Virginia and California , have followed suit.

But some politicians want to take that ban nationwide.

In June, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Sen. Tina Smith introduced the No Shame at School Act in Congress, which would set a standard for what schools can and can't do to a student who carries lunch debt. This follows New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall and New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland's Anti-Lunch Shaming Act of 2019.

Omar's bill is the more comprehensive of the two, and if it were to pass, schools would be required to communicate directly with the parents about any lunch debt.

The bill would also require schools to attempt to certify children with debt and allow schools to receive retroactive reimbursement for the meals for up to 90 days. Finally, it would ban debt collectors from seeking overdue fees.

FitzSimons said schools should never let students be the messenger. Instead, schools need to communicate directly with parents and guardians. "We recommend not having any practices that overtly identify or stigmatize these kids whose families are carrying unpaid school meal debt," she told NationSwell. "So that's the first and most important thing."

Other communities are working on the problem at the district and individual school levels. Dozens of GoFundMe pages have been launched to collect money, and a few nonprofits have been created as a direct response to lunch debt.

HEALTHY, HAPPY CHILDREN

Lunch-shaming bans are steps in the right direction. But it doesn't address the root cause: Not every student can afford lunch.

"It's not like it's just one thing that is driving the debt, and it's not just one kind of parent," FitzSimons said.

Students going into debt can often be a flag that something more is happening in the household, FitzSimons said. It's important schools recognize and quickly address why a student might be accruing debt. FRAC encourages schools to reach out and see if the families are eligible for free or reduced lunch when something like this happens.

The only thing currently like a universal free lunch program is the federal Community Eligibility Provision ( CEP). This program offers free breakfast and lunch to all students in the nation's highest poverty school districts. If 40% of students in a district automatically receive free meals, the schools can participate in the program. This makes sure every student eats, while also eliminating paperwork and the potential for school meal debt.

Under CEP, schools are reimbursed using a formula based on the percentage of students who automatically qualify for free school meals, i.e. families who participate in programs like SNAP or Medicaid, for example.

Schools where that percentage is 62.5% or higher, the government reimburses the school for meals consumed by any student at that school. If the percentage of students who would automatically be enrolled with free lunch is between 40% and 62.4%, the schools are fully reimbursed for that percentage and partially reimbursed for the meals of students who do not qualify. This will cost the district some money, FitzSimons said, but the district will also save money and time by eliminating paperwork.

"That not only eliminates the unpaid meal debt issue, it also eliminates any stigma with participating in free meals," Pratt-Heavner said.

Schools hovering slightly above the 40% are more hesitant to participate because the composition of their student bodies could change. "If you've been participating in CEP and providing these free meals for families for a few years, and then suddenly you lose your eligibility, then you're going to have some disappointed parents on your hands," Pratt-Heavner said.

However, for schools that hit the 62.5% mark, CEP has been a success. "It is definitely the best solution. It puts everybody on a level playing field, it makes sure that all kids in the school have the nutrition they need to learn and focus and concentrate," FitzSimons said. School districts in cities like Detroit, Baltimore and New York have enrolled in the program, and report higher school attendance rates with happier and better-focused students.

Students need to be fed nutritious meals, Pratt-Heavner said. "In our view, school meals are just as important to learning as textbooks and pencils and paper."
More: A New Funding Model Might Change the Game for Public School Teachers and Students Nationwide

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Schools Are Shaming Kids Who Can't Afford Lunch, but There Are Ways to Stop It

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Stephanie Woodard still remembers the weight of a roll of pennies in her pocket, hoping it would be enough to pay for lunch. The professional learning specialist for Fort Bend International School District recalls sneaking into her father's bedroom and digging through his green can of spare change.

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How to reduce stress among high achieving students

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How to reduce stress among high achieving students

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Welcome to our special section, Thrive on Campus, devoted to covering the urgent issue of mental health among college and university students from all angles. If you are a college student, we invite you to apply to be an Editor-at-Large, or to simply contribute (please tag your pieces ThriveOnCampus). We welcome faculty, clinicians, and graduates to contribute as well. Read more here.
When I talk to students from high-performing schools across the country on the topic of student balance and well-being, I often ask them to reflect on how they define success. Many students answer in the same way: money, admission to a prestigious college, high grades and test scores. They believe this very narrow view of success defines their lives, and they often feel like they have to sacrifice their health and happiness to reach these goals.

Data from student surveys we administer at Challenge Success, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization I co-founded at Stanford University, clearly show that this narrow notion of success is taking its toll. In our recent survey of 43,000 students from high-performing schools, 75% of high school students and 50% of middle school students reported "often or always feeling stressed" by their schoolwork, while more than two-thirds of high-schoolers reported being "often or always worried" about getting into the college of their choice. Students also reported sleep deprivation, headaches, stomach problems, and missing school and other activities due to overwhelming stress. Other research shows that adolescents under academic achievement pressure have high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide ideation - so much so that recent reports have classified students from high-achieving communities as an "at-risk" population similar to those living in poverty and foster care. While some stress is necessary and good for healthy adolescent development, we know that an undue amount of pressure placed on kids at school, home, or via peers can be detrimental to their well-being.

The good news is that the undue stress these kids are facing is preventable. Challenge Success partners with schools across the U.S. to support changes such as adjusting the student schedule to allow for later start times and longer block periods, reducing homework load without sacrificing rigor, and creating a climate of care through initiatives like advisory and wellness campaigns that can increase students' sense of belonging and healthy coping strategies.

But the schools alone cannot make all the changes necessary to improve student health; parents must play their part as well.

One mantra I often share with parents is the importance of PDF - which stands for Playtime, Downtime, and Family time. Research on protective factors for teens shows that engaging in PDF every day can support better mental and physical health. Playtime for teens means unstructured time for social interactions and playing informal sports, games, and other activities for fun. Structured extracurricular activities are great and can lead to positive development, but kids also need time for unstructured play, as well as downtime where they can relax and rejuvenate, and time with family - approximately 20 minutes per day, five times a week - where they are eating together or participating in family activities such as game nights or service projects. Protecting PDF for kids isn't easy, but we know that it is effective.

Here are three actions to take immediately to help support teens to get the PDF they need:
1) Prioritize Sleep
According to experts, adolescents need 8-10 hours of sleep per night. There's extensive research about the connection between sleep and learning, memory, emotional regulation, and physical well-being. To support sleep, limit caffeine and late-night activity, take all devices out of the bedroom at night, and enforce a strict bedtime routine.
2) Support a healthy and balanced schedule
Challenge Success offers two time management tools - a Time Management worksheet and a Time Wheel activity to help students see how much time they are spending on homework, extracurriculars, paid work, community service, family time, and social media. Use the tools to check for a healthy balance. Teens might need to limit the number of advanced classes they take, reduce media use, or drop an activity to make time for sleep and PDF.
3) Broaden your definition of success
Success is measured over the course of a lifetime, not at the end of a semester. Consider how your words and actions communicate your values. For example, if the first question asked at the end of the day is "How did you do on the history test?" you may be sending a signal that you care more about grades than anything else in your teen's life. Be sure to praise kindness, effort, curiosity, and authenticity, and try hard not to micromanage your teen's academic life. By over-focusing on grades or performance, you may be perpetuating the narrow view of success that the kids describe above.

Though it may not be possible to control the intense achievement pressure that comes from such a narrow definition of success, parents who commit to making these three actions a part of their family routine can help make positive shifts in health and well-being and prevent more teens from becoming "at-risk."

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More on Mental Health on Campus: What Campus Mental Health Centers Are Doing to Keep Up With Student Need If You're a Student Who's Struggling With Mental Health, These 7 Tips Will Help The Hidden Stress of RAs in the Student Mental Health Crisis

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How High-Achieving Students Can Redefine Success

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Welcome to our special section, Thrive on Campus, devoted to covering the urgent issue of mental health among college and university students from all angles. If you are a college student, we invite you to apply to be an Editor-at-Large, or to simply contribute (please tag your pieces ThriveOnCampus).

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How to increase student diversity in schools

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How to increase student diversity in schools

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The State of Diversity on College Campuses: a Snapshot

20% of Hispanic adults have a postsecondary degree, compared with 36% of all adults.

33% of LGBTQ students have "seriously considered" leaving college due to issues surrounding their sexual orientation, including harassment.

In 2013, 77% of adults who came from families in the top 25% in income got a bachelor's degree by the time they turned 24. However, only 9% earned their bachelor's degree by the time they turned 24 if they were from the "lowest income bracket."

While not a statistical minority, women have historically been underrepresented in higher education. Today, they actually equal or surpass men when it comes to college enrollment and graduation at college and graduate levels. However, for certain academic disciplines, women remain a minority, especially in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The reasons for this vary, and range from stereotypes of biases and overall inertia to change.

Those who are disabled face unique challenges that are often overlooked or simply misunderstood by their peers, as well as by faculty and staff. Understanding the limitations and providing ways for the disabled student to be fully included in the college experience is a worthy challenge for schools to tackle.

Being in a new and strange country can be stressful enough. Having to deal with a hostile or unwelcoming school while studying abroad can make things that much more difficult and inhibit any learning experience. Having an inclusive atmosphere that accepts and encourages those of different cultures, languages and races will be very beneficial to foreign students.

Those who come from low income or impoverished backgrounds might not have the resources that allow them to live a comfortable college life. As a consequence, they may not be able to participate in some activities. Low income students can benefit from a school that limits situations where a student's income becomes a determining factor.

Only 59% of students who begin a 4 year college degree will complete it within 6 years.

The college graduation rate for black students is 42 percent, but it's slowly creeping upward.

60% of college dropouts had no financial help from parents to pay for tuition.

For individuals born in the 1980s, 80% of the wealthiest went to college by age 19 and 68% graduated by age 25. However, only 29% of the poorest individuals went to college and only 32% of those students finished by age 25.

Any high school student - whether in a minority or not - can benefit from brushing up on the basic academic concepts prior to college. Free tutoring sessions may be available to some, but self-study can also help, as well as requesting additional help from teachers. When choosing classes, students can go with the more challenging ones, such as Honors, International Baccalaureate (IB) or Advanced Placement (AP), which are more rigorous and cover subjects likely to be needed in college. The student may be able to get college credit for those classes, which can mean a lighter academic course load while in college and/or saving money on tuition.

To better succeed in college, students should reduce financial stress wherever possible. One way to do this is to obtain college credit while in high school. Another option is to apply to as many scholarships or grants as possible. Many scholarships or grants (which don't have to be repaid) are offered to students because they are in a racial, cultural, religious, sexual or other minority. By applying for these scholarships and grants before entering college, minority students can potentially save a great deal of money, and be more secure economically as they begin their higher education journey.

College is a stressful time for all students. For marginalized students, stress in college can be worse due to increased challenges, especially social ones. To help alleviate this, students can take steps to establish relationships with other students, faculty and staff before enrolling in a given school. Either on their own time, doing an official visit or through the Internet, minority students can connect with other incoming students and school personnel (minority or not) before starting their first class. These relationships can also provide support should discrimination or other unwelcoming events occur.

With so many educational opportunities out there, how can a student spot a truly inclusive school?

Jennifer Michael

Read and understand the colleges nondiscrimination policy and look for other policies online; housing policies that include gender blind housing, transgender housing policies and ways to classify yourself outside the binary. Look at the activities and leadership pages of the website for clubs that represent a diverse range of interests and lifestyles. Commonly those will advised by campus faculty and staff that work to build an inclusive campus environment. Most importantly, look at the college's mission and goals. Often the mission and goals of an institution can be the first look at what the institution values and how that will be lived out during you time there.

The best way to know is to ask students themselves. As a campus administrator I know and appreciate the value of student voice in our efforts to recruit students and want all new students to know the truth about Wells and what we stand for. When you visit campus and have a chance to talk with Admission tour guides, ask really good questions, they are truly your best resource.

What can students do to help further inclusiveness at their chosen school? Many schools are striving to become more diverse - what are some of the challenges to that goal, and how might they be overcome?

Jennifer Michael

First we need to recognize that diversity comes in all different ways; socio-economic, race, religion, sexuality, gender and many more. As educators we always want our environments to expose all students to varying perspectives and ideas.

To diversify a campus in specific ways college and university administrators need to be aware of the resources that group may need on your campus and be ready to put money towards them. Are faculty development programs offered to keep the in class educators in line with the colleges mission and goals? Do faculty use texts from varying perspectives and voice? Are staffed trained to given access to professional development on new topics and trends in higher education as it relates to diverse populations?

With increasing campus diversity comes an increased need to hiring folks in the faculty and staff that represent diverse perspectives as well. We want our students to be able to see themselves in us so institutions need to work hard to incorporate diverse perspectives in their hiring and recruitment work.

This is a national civil rights organization which exists to fight racial discrimination. The Youth & College Division consists of college chapters where students can organize to advance the NAACP's mission. Anyone who is under 25 and is currently enrolled at a college or student is eligible to join.

Black Student Alliance (BSA)

(search for your local chapter web link)

This student organization exists to promote African-American heritage, advocate on behalf of African-American students at the school and increase the presence of African-Americans at the school and in the community.

The GSA organizations found on campus is made up of all students, in addition to those identifying as LGBTQ, with the goal of creating acceptance and positive attitudes among the community.

International Student Association (ISA)

(search for your local chapter web link)

This student organization represents the international students currently attending a given school. The ISA hosts many events open to all students with the goal of creating a better awareness of cultural diversity.

Women in Physics

(check your school for an affiliate organization)

Women have been traditionally underrepresented in science fields, and physics is no exception. This organization hosts special physics-themed events to get women excited about the field.

Women's Student Association

(search for your local chapter web link)

This organization has the broad goal of empowering women to be the world's next group of leaders. Open to men as well, the Women's Student Association also aims to promote women's rights, both locally and around the world.

Thai Society

(search for your local chapter web link)

The Thai Society's goal is to educate and inform others about the culture, history and experience from Thailand. This is just one example of the numerous societies available on college campuses that focus on one particular area of the world and bring valuable knowledge to the student body.

United World Club (UWC)

(search for your local chapter web link)

The UWC brings international awareness and education to college campuses. Additionally, the UWC fosters understanding among different nations through the hosting of many cultural and social events and conferences.

Women's Leadership Project

(search for your local chapter web link)

This organization empowers women to be leaders by offering educational and informative activities that help develop and promote female leadership. It also provides support and encouragement for women looking to make a difference.

Made up of those who are disabled and their supporters, the Disability Alliance aims to provide a voice for the disabled as well as promote change that benefits those who are handicapped. This organization works toward everything from getting accommodations set up on campus to making society more accepting of the disabled and much more.

Branching Out: Community Involvement

The college campus is an important part of the larger community around it. In fact, many colleges and universities have seen whole cities grow up around them to meet the needs of the student population, and those in the larger community might take their cues on how to act from the way the college as a whole approaches various situations. Getting involved with the world beyond the college campus can help spread diversity and inclusiveness, as well as a large measure of acceptance.

Here are some ways that students might be able to move out into the large community and spread the good word about diversity.

Developed by the Bonner Foundation, this multi-year program selects students who are enthusiastic about working with non-profit organizations during the school year. Students will provide about seven community service hours per week in the areas of social justice, diversity, community building, civic engagement, international perspective and spiritual exploration.

America Reads Challenge

(check your school for an affiliate organization)

This national campaign encourages all Americans, including college students, to help children learn to read. The focus is particularly on English Language learners and students with disabilities. Colleges have partnerships with elementary schools and youth centers where students can participate in after school programs to help tutor students.

The Boltwood Project

(check your school for an affiliate organization)

This civil engagement program at University of Massachusetts Amherst is a good example of projects that might be available at campuses across the nation. Over 100 students work with The Boltwood Project on weekly activities held at 14 local organizations which serve those with disabilities.

Poverty Awareness Marathon

(check your school for an affiliate organization)

This annual marathon is hosted by Eastern Connecticut University's Center for Community Engagement, which aims to encourage long-term volunteering. The marathon always brings in numerous food items for a local soup kitchen.

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How to Promote Student Diversity & Multiculturalism in School

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The State of Diversity on College Campuses: a Snapshot 20% of Hispanic adults have a postsecondary degree, compared with 36% of all adults. 33% of LGBTQ students have "seriously considered" leaving college due to issues surrounding their sexual orientation, including harassment.

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Digital Divide- Mesh Networks in Urban School districts. 

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Digital Divide- Mesh Networks in Urban School districts. 

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We have access issue to equitable internet for all students.

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Technology Solutions That Drive Education

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Low cost and easy deployment make Wi-Fi mesh networks a great alternative.

Traditionally, campus Wi-Fi networks are deployed with each access point having a direct connection into the wired network. This approach tends to create networks that are inflexible, a result of the expense and rigidity of deploying electrical and network cabling to each AP. It also makes it tough for IT administrators to respond to changing network requirements, particularly in spaces where a high level of connectivity is not always required or where cabling installation is difficult.

To address these issues, a growing trend in wireless networking is a Wi-Fi mesh design. Here, a system of APs cooperate in a peer-to-peer manner to create a Wi-Fi network. The APs communicate with each other to dynamically determine the best path through the system at any given instant, and data transmits step by step through the wireless portion of the network.

It's easy to deploy additional APs to strengthen the Wi-Fi signal in areas of interference, to increase the coverage area and to expand the range of the network. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, one or a few APs connect to the wired portion of the network, passing data from wireless clients on to the ultimate destination.
MORE FROM EDTECH: Check out how universities are using data analytics to improve their networks.
Let's look at some of the factors that may influence the decision to deploy Wi-Fi mesh networks.

Fact (Mostly): Mesh Networks Reduce Cost From Less Ethernet Cabling

In a traditional Wi-Fi network, each AP must be connected to the wired portion of the network. A mesh network, on the other hand, requires considerably fewer wired connections. That lowers cost, reduces complexity and increases the speed of deployment.

In an outdoor setting, mesh networks have another benefit, and that's the ability to avoid the expensive optical fiber links that may be required to achieve the required distance between APs and network electronics. Indoor areas where it is difficult or impossible to run new Ethernet cables - in historic buildings, for example - are also good candidates for mesh networks.

Fact: Small Power Requirements Make Alternatives Possible

Traditional electrical power connections are certainly the common way to deploy APs. However, the relatively small power footprint of an AP (less than a typical lightbulb) makes it possible to use alternative power sources. A few square feet of modern solar cells and an uninterruptible power supply can easily suffice.

Fact: Data Sent Between APs Use Bandwidth on Dedicated Spectrum
MORE FROM EDTECH: See how better wifi can open the doors for smart campus tech.
It's true that there is a limit to the bandwidth available to Wi-Fi clients in a given area. Just how much depends on the capabilities of the client devices and the APs. For instance, 5-gigahertz networks have more bandwidth than 2.4GHz networks, for instance. Good Wi-Fi mesh APs will use multiple radios to provide dedicated high-bandwidth wireless links between themselves while avoiding adverse impact on client devices.

Fallacy: Wi-Fi Mesh Networks Are Difficult for Staff to Maintain

In large part, a Wi-Fi mesh network will configure and optimize itself, distributing configurations to APs from a central location and passing user traffic along the most optimal path back to the wired network. Mesh networks are also an excellent choice when rapid deployment is needed, such as preparing event spaces for workshops or symposia.

Rather than permanently installing APs to provide coverage to low-utilization spaces, staff can rapidly provision a mesh network and expand if needed. With appropriate visibility into event scheduling, this reduces the total number of APs required to cover all these types of spaces on campus.

$9.1 billion

The projected size of the global wireless mesh network market in 2024, up from $3.8 billion in 2017

Source: Zion Market Research, "Global Wireless Mesh Network Market Will Grow USD 9.08 Billion by 2024: Zion Market Research," July 13, 2018

Staff can reduce or eliminate single points of failure by deploying a few additional APs so that each is within range of multiple others. That way, if an AP becomes inoperable, data can flow around the failure and maintain connectivity for user devices.

Fact: Wi-Fi Mesh Networks Are a Great Fit for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things deployments frequently feature two things: a multitude of devices and a wide coverage area. Such projects also tend to grow quickly in terms of number of devices and the area in which they are deployed. Fortunately, in many situations, IoT devices also have low (or at least predictable) bandwidth requirements. These properties make mesh networks a great fit for IoT.

Imagine upgrading a building management system based on IoT devices that includes lighting and temperature control, door controllers and digital signage. Connecting all these devices in the traditional manner would require a significant installation of network and/or electrical wiring. Deploying a mesh network to which all these devices connect would save substantial time and expense. Similarly, connecting an asset management system based on RFID sensors to a Wi-Fi mesh network allows for easy expansion of the sensor network in areas of interest, while facilitating expansion of the Wi-Fi network.

carloscastilla/Getty Images

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Fact or Fallacy: Mesh Networks Are the Next Model for Campus Wi-Fi

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Low cost and easy deployment make Wi-Fi mesh networks a great alternative. Traditionally, campus Wi-Fi networks are deployed with each access point having a direct connection into the wired network. This approach tends to create networks that are inflexible, a result of the expense and rigidity of deploying electrical and network cabling to each AP.

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Pollution Runoff

Many Riverside County residents are unaware of the storm water pollution (polluted runoff) problem, and the threat it poses to the local Santa Ana river, lakes and streams. In fact, many people don't realize that storm drains connect to local waterways so whatever ends up in the storm drains flows directly - without treatment - to our rivers, lakes and streams.

Another misconception is that storm drain pollution happens only when it rains. Actually, throughout the dry part of the year, pollutants such as motor oil, antifreeze, trash and grease accumulate on streets and parking lots. When rain finally does fall, the rain water carries these pollutants into the storm drain. Even common activities such as over watering lawns and landscaped areas, car washing and hosing down driveways or pet waste droppings cause pollutants to make their way into the storm drain.

The storm drain pollution protection program encourages everyone to find out what YOU can do to help keep our precious waterways clean and to protect our natural resources.

Common contaminants found in polluted runoff:

Heavy Metals - metals and toxic contaminants from vehicle exhaust, tire compounds, motor oil, and weathered paint.

Restaurant oils and grease - fuels and lubricants enter storm drains from leaks and spills of automobile engines, transmissions, radiators, and improper dumping of oil into storm drains.

Pesticides, Herbicides and Fertilizers - chemicals that are over-applied during yard care enter storm drains from watering landscaped areas.

Solvents and Household Chemicals - paint thinners, oil and water based paints, degreasers, detergents, bleach, drain cleaners, and other household products enter local waters if dumped into storm drains or onto streets.

Bacteria and Plant Nutrients - bacteria from sewage, animal waste, litter, decomposing vegetation, and septic leaks cause serious health problems.

Since preventing pollution is much easier and less costly than cleaning up after the fact, we should all learn what we can do to help keep our water clean! Please visit the Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District website http://rcflood.org/stormwater to download several FREE brochures and materials that provide simple pollution prevention activities that you can easily incorporate into daily activities.

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Many Riverside County residents are unaware of the storm water pollution (polluted runoff) problem, and the threat it poses to the local Santa Ana river, lakes and streams. In fact, many people don't realize that storm drains connect to local waterways so whatever ends up in the storm drains flows directly - without treatment - to our rivers, lakes and streams. Another misconception is that storm drain pollution happens only when it rains.

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A friend of mine recently told me about an incident involving students at Berkeley High School. On the first day of classes, African-American juniors and seniors were being asked by their honors course teacher to show him their schedule when they entered the classroom. The teacher, who was white, apparently assumed the black students were lost and in the wrong room, and his gesture made them feel unwelcome and humiliated.

This is an example of implicit bias-a behavior that arises from subconscious associations, which may even contradict someone's explicit values. Implicit racial bias plays a role in many classrooms and schools with potentially devastating effects. In one recent experiment with preschool teachers, researchers found that when teachers were primed to look for behavioral problems while watching a classroom video with black and white children (none of whom were misbehaving), teachers gazed much longer at black children than white children, as if anticipating the behavioral problems would come from the black children.

In another experiment from the same study, teachers read a vignette about a behavioral problem with a preschooler randomly identified as a black boy, black girl, white boy, or white girl, and then were given details about the child's background or not. Providing the background information on the child increased the severity of suggested disciplinary actions when the race of the teacher didn't match that of the child, supporting the idea that we are more inclined to punish those who look different from us.

In fact, disciplinary actions are more likely to be perpetuated against African Americans-boys and girls alike-than any other group of students, regardless of the infraction. And while it's understandable that teachers would want to prevent disruptions in the classrooms and take actions to avoid them, some seem to have little idea of how to do that without turning to ingrained biases.

Of course, teachers are not alone in having racial biases. Their behavior reflects how social messages are hard to escape, even for people of color. But studies like these show how racial disparities can be perpetuated in classrooms, too. If left unchecked, this kind of biased treatment can haunt a student well into elementary school and beyond, making the promise of "schools as the great social equalizers" a false one.

The good news is that teachers can learn to combat their prejudice, even the implicit kind, if they become more aware of it and take steps to actively fight it in themselves. Here are some of the ways that might help educators treat all of their students with dignity and care.

1. Cultivate awareness of their biases

Teachers are human and therefore influenced by psychological biases, like the fundamental attribution error, when we assume that others who behave in a certain way do so because of their character (a fixed trait) rather than in response to environmental circumstances. In-group bias leads us to assign positive characteristics and motivations to people who are similar to us.

Biases like these are natural, used as cognitive shorthand for making quick social judgments in ambiguous situations, especially those involving people from unfamiliar ethnic or social groups. They become a problem when we're not aware of their impact on other people. And if we're part of a majority group with more social, economic, or political power than a minority one, then accumulated unconscious bias can be extremely destructive, limiting the life opportunities and hurting the well-being of the minority group.

Many researchers believe that becoming more aware of our biases can help us improve our interactions with others, decrease our sense of unease in interracial contexts, and make better decisions. Though most of this research has been done with other professional groups or the general public, the same lessons are likely to apply to teachers.

However, many teachers feel pressures not to cop to those biases, perhaps out of fear they will be accused of racism. This leaves them blind to the ways that biases work at an unconscious level. Pretending to be colorblind is not helpful and in fact adhering to a color-blind philosophy has been shown to increase implicit bias, at least in college students. Admitting that we are all subject to biases creates a safer space to examine them more carefully and to take steps to fight them.

2. Work to increase empathy and empathic communication

Empathy -the ability to understand another's perspective and emotions-is important in all human social encounters, including teaching. Yet, often teachers have little understanding of the communities where their students live and have trouble understanding their perspectives, leading them to treat these students more harshly.

One solution: learning about the lives of students and showing that you care. At least one study has found that actively trying to take the perspective of another person-as opposed to trying to be "objective"-increased one's ability to not fall prey to stereotypical views of others. Actively inducing empathy for another person has been tied to a willingness to consider environmental circumstances more closely when handing out punishments for misbehavior. And, one recent study has found that training teachers in empathy cut down student suspension rates in half.

Though perhaps more research has been done on empathy in other professionals (such as physicians and police officers), teachers may want to take note of the ways that they have learned to increase their empathy through a combination of stress reduction, learning how to manage difficult emotions, and practicing empathic communication. Treating students with kindness and consideration is a sure way to bring out kindness in them, too.

3. Practice mindfulness and loving-kindness

Mindfulness practices-such as paying attention in a nonjudgmental way to one's breath or other sensations-has been shown to decrease stress in teachers, which can indirectly have an effect on reducing bias. But according to some research, mindfulness may also have a direct effect on bias reduction as well.

In one study, young white participants who listened to a 10-minute audiotape with instructions in mindfulness showed less implicit bias towards blacks and older people than those who listened to a 10-minute discussion of nature. This suggests that nonjudgmental awareness, even when not specifically focused on reducing prejudice, can help reduce unconscious biases.

Loving-kindness meditation-a practice that involves consciously sending out compassionate thoughts toward others-may also help. In a recent study, the random assignment of a short-term loving-kindness meditation reduced implicit bias toward a targeted group, though it didn't decrease implicit bias for other groups not targeted by the meditation.

4. Develop cross-group friendships in their own lives

While it's important to take steps in the classroom, the relationships we form outside of the classroom can also have an impact on bias.

Cross-group friendships have been shown in several studies to decrease stress in intergroup situations, to decrease prejudice toward outgroup members, and to decrease one's preference for social hierarchy or domination over lower-status groups. These findings alone might encourage teachers to seek out cross-group friendships in their lives so that they can be more receptive to the diverse students they find in their classrooms.

Another reason for teachers to consider developing cross-group friendships is that they may influence their students to do the same. When people see cross-group friendships working out in positive ways, they tend to be more willing to engage in cross-group friendships themselves.

In addition, positive cross-group friendships can have contagion effects in other people within social groups, turning whole communities into warmer, more receptive spaces for cross-group interactions. All of this bodes well for teachers role-modeling the kind of behavior they want to see in their students.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean teachers should indiscriminately approach someone just because they are from a different racial group. Instead, teachers can reach out to colleagues at work, or get involved in activities or perhaps attend events where people with different backgrounds and perspectives come together for a common cause. Developing friendships can be one of the best ways to break down barriers of prejudice, and it's more easily done when people have some common interests.

Is this a lot to ask, given all the burdens our society heaps on teachers? Perhaps. Teachers should get more support than they do, and, ideally, school districts should make reducing implicit bias a priority backed up with money, policy, and training. Individual teachers can only do so much.

Luckily, the teaching profession tends to attract altruists who want to teach in a way that helps their students. By working at countering implicit bias in themselves, they can truly make a difference in the lives of their students, making them feel safe, cared for, and welcome in the classroom.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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Four Ways Teachers Can Reduce Implicit Bias

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We're all subject to bias. Here are tips to help teachers treat all of their students with dignity and care.

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Rise in scooter accidents in NEW York City

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Rise in scooter accidents in NEW York City

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How do we reduce them?

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When it comes to hiring diverse candidates, good intentions do not necessarily lead to good results. Often well-intentioned hiring managers end up inadvertently weeding out qualified candidates from underestimated backgrounds because of unconscious bias. There are several things managers can do to r…

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CLOSE

If you're getting ready to fire up the grill for the summer, get ready to pay more, too.

Those juicy burgers and steaks are going to cost you.

Food prices have risen sharply, 4% during the last 12 months, to levels not seen in decades.

As the global coronavirus pandemic forced Americans to stay home beginning in March, they stocked up on groceries and cooked more meals.

Prices for ingredients, especially beef, pork and chicken, became costlier.

Small independent markets like Lafayette Foods in Detroit, photographed on April 14, 2020, is the lifeblood of local communities. Lafayette Foods prides itself on full healthy groceries, meats and take out hot food and is taking all precautions during the Coronavirus pandemic. (Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly Consumer Price Index report, released Wednesday, showed the food index increase was up 0.7% in May for all food.

What's hitting wallets hard is beef prices. Consumers paid 10% more for beef in May, the largest monthly increase ever.

Overall meat, poultry and fish prices rose 4.3% in May.

Americans paid 2.6% more in April than in March for groceries - the biggest monthly increase in nearly 50 years, according to the Labor Department.

While the overall CPI for goods and services declined 0.1% in May, the increase for groceries was 1%.

For metro Detroit, grocery prices rose 3.3% from February-April, according to the BLS bimonthly regional report. During the last 12 months, metro Detroiters paid 5.3% more for groceries.

Cooking more often

Lisa Sokol, 46, of South Lyon, is working from home and cooks more at home. Sokol prepares breakfast, lunch and dinner for herself and her husband nearly six days out of the week.

Lisa Sokol of South Lyon (Photo: Lisa Sokol)

At the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, she spent about $130 a week for groceries. Now, she says, she's spending upwards of $200.

"Meat is crazy expensive right now," Sokol said. "It's $6.59 for 80/20 ground beef."

Along with ground beef, Sokol noticed the prices for roasts have soared.

Ground beef prices rose 7.2% in May and are up 16.8% for the year. Beef roasts increased nearly 20% from April to May and were up nearly 27% for the year.

The supply chain

David Ortego, food economist and professor at Michigan State University, said the May price increase for meats, poultry, fish and eggs was the largest increase in more than 15 years.

"These are significant price increases, and there is no doubt consumers are feeling the pinch at the grocery store, especially given the unemployment situation," Ortega said.

What's driving the meat prices up are plant closures and disruptions in the supply chain because of the pandemic.

Meat-processing plants reduced capacity or completely shut down for weeks because workers were infected with the coronavirus.

As of June 9, according to the Midwest Center for Investigating Reporting, there have been at least 24,000 reported positive cases of COVID-19 tied to meatpacking facilities in at least 232 plants in 33 states, and at least 86 reported worker deaths at 38 plants in 23 states.

A JBS meat processing plant in Plainwell (near Grand Rapids) had 86 cases and one worker death as of April.

In the middle of these disruptions, Ortega said, processing plants operated at only 60% capacity - a significant decrease.

"This led to a decrease in the supply of meat," Ortega said. "They (plants) were either shutting down altogether or for two weeks or so, or reducing capacity. There was also a backlog of meat not moving through the supply chain.

Shuttered plants led to supply chain bottlenecks and nationwide shortages in beef, pork and poultry. Burger chain giant Wendy's, famous for its 'Where's the beef?' slogan, ran out of burger patties at some locations.

Grocery stores began to put limits on what consumers could buy, also in part because of people stockpiling, so that there was enough to go around.

Certain cuts were not available. Kroger has lifted its limits on how much meat and poultry products customers can buy. Costco, according to its website, is only restricting poultry purchases.

Wholesale prices for meat, primarily beef and pork, saw a peak in mid-May with monthly increases of 100% and 60% respectively, Ortega said.

While those increases, Ortega said, don't translate one-to-one to what consumers see at the grocery stores, retailers are able to absorb some, and there was meat already in the supply chain.

"It's a very significant shock and it was inevitable that it would trickle down to the consumers and what they are paying at the grocery store," Ortega said.

Since May, production capacity has been restored.

"We are at 95% processing capacity compared to last year, a significant increase," Ortega said. "And the wholesale prices have come down significantly since the middle of May."

But the timing couldn't be worse as people are eager to get out, enjoy the summer season and peak grilling season.

"You have these price increases and then you have record high unemployment, furloughs and layoffs, people are really feeling it," Ortega said.

Relief for consumers, Ortega said, will take some time, but there's hope.

"The shock to the supply chain and how the industry and market is responding, it's temporary," he said. "At some point it will pass and we will come back to a new equilibrium.

With the increases in beef prices, Sokol said she's using more chicken.

If prices continue to rise, she may look for someone to share the purchase of a cow.

"In the long run, it might be cheaper," Sokol said. "I think it's just going to go up if we get a second wave. Things will skyrocket, meat-wise. "
Contact food writer Susan Selasky: 313-222-6872 or sselasky@freepress.com. Follow @SusanMariecooks on twitter.
Read or Share this story: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/06/15/beef-prices-summer/5345126002/

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Beef prices up 10% just in time for summer grilling

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CLOSE If you're getting ready to fire up the grill for the summer, get ready to pay more, too. Those juicy burgers and steaks are going to cost you. Food prices have risen sharply, 4% during the last 12 months, to levels not seen in decades.

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New Faces of Hunger

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Millions of working Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from. We sent three photographers to explore hunger in three very different parts of the United States, each giving different faces to the same statistic: One-sixth of Americans don't have enough food to eat.

Osage, Iowa

Hunger in
the Land of Cars

Houston, Texas

Hunger in
the City of Plenty

Bronx, New York

On a gold-gray morning in Mitchell County, Iowa, Christina Dreier sends her son, Keagan, to school without breakfast. He is three years old, barrel-chested, and stubborn, and usually refuses to eat the free meal he qualifies for at preschool. Faced with a dwindling pantry, Dreier has decided to try some tough love: If she sends Keagan to school hungry, maybe he'll eat the free breakfast, which will leave more food at home for lunch.

Dreier knows her gambit might backfire, and it does. Keagan ignores the school breakfast on offer and is so hungry by lunchtime that Dreier picks through the dregs of her freezer in hopes of filling him and his little sister up. She shakes the last seven chicken nuggets onto a battered baking sheet, adds the remnants of a bag of Tater Tots and a couple of hot dogs from the fridge, and slides it all into the oven. She's gone through most of the food she got last week from a local food pantry; her own lunch will be the bits of potato left on the kids' plates. "I eat lunch if there's enough," she says. "But the kids are the most important. They have to eat first."

The fear of being unable to feed her children hangs over Dreier's days. She and her husband, Jim, pit one bill against the next-the phone against the rent against the heat against the gas-trying always to set aside money to make up for what they can't get from the food pantry or with their food stamps, issued by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Congressional cuts to SNAP last fall of five billion dollars pared her benefits from $205 to $172 a month.

On this particular afternoon Dreier is worried about the family van, which is on the brink of repossession. She and Jim need to open a new bank account so they can make automatic payments instead of scrambling to pay in cash. But that will happen only if Jim finishes work early. It's peak harvest time, and he often works until eight at night, applying pesticides on commercial farms for $14 an hour. Running the errand would mean forgoing overtime pay that could go for groceries.

It's the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. "We have to eat, you know," she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. "We can't starve."

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don't summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. "This is not your grandmother's hunger," says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York. "Today more working people and their families are hungry because wages have declined."

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult-typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced "hunger" with the term "food insecure" to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn't have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012-a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country; today there are 50,000. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

To witness hunger in America today is to enter a twilight zone where refrigerators are so frequently bare of all but mustard and ketchup that it provokes no remark, inspires no embarrassment. Here dinners are cooked using macaroni-and-cheese mixes and other processed ingredients from food pantries, and fresh fruits and vegetables are eaten only in the first days after the SNAP payment arrives. Here you'll meet hungry farmhands and retired schoolteachers, hungry families who are in the U.S. without papers and hungry families whose histories stretch back to the Mayflower. Here pocketing food from work and skipping meals to make food stretch are so common that such practices barely register as a way of coping with hunger and are simply a way of life.

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you're really hungry, then how can you be-as many of them are-overweight? The answer is "this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin," says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, "people making trade-offs between food that's filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity." For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage-an unintended side effect of hunger itself.

As the face of hunger has changed, so has its address. The town of Spring, Texas, is where ranchland meets Houston's sprawl, a suburb of curving streets and shade trees and privacy fences. The suburbs are the home of the American dream, but they are also a place where poverty is on the rise. As urban housing has gotten more expensive, the working poor have been pushed out. Today hunger in the suburbs is growing faster than in cities, having more than doubled since 2007.

Yet in the suburbs America's hungry don't look the part either. They drive cars, which are a necessity, not a luxury, here. Cheap clothes and toys can be found at yard sales and thrift shops, making a middle-class appearance affordable. Consumer electronics can be bought on installment plans, so the hungry rarely lack phones or televisions. Of all the suburbs in the country, northwest Houston is one of the best places to see how people live on what might be called a minimum-wage diet: It has one of the highest percentages of households receiving SNAP assistance where at least one family member holds down a job. The Jefferson sisters, Meme and Kai, live here in a four-bedroom, two-car-garage, two-bath home with Kai's boyfriend, Frank, and an extended family that includes their invalid mother, their five sons, a daughter-in-law, and five grandchildren. The house has a rickety desktop computer in the living room and a television in most rooms, but only two actual beds; nearly everyone sleeps on mattresses or piles of blankets spread out on the floor.

Though all three adults work full-time, their income is not enough to keep the family consistently fed without assistance. The root problem is the lack of jobs that pay wages a family can live on, so food assistance has become the government's-and society's-way to supplement low wages. The Jeffersons receive $125 in food stamps each month, and a charity brings in meals for their bedridden matriarch.

Like most of the new American hungry, the Jeffersons face not a total absence of food but the gnawing fear that the next meal can't be counted on. When Meme shows me the family's food supply, the refrigerator holds takeout boxes and beverages but little fresh food. Two cupboards are stocked with a smattering of canned beans and sauces. A pair of freezers in the garage each contain a single layer of food, enough to fill bellies for just a few days. Meme says she took the children aside a few months earlier to tell them they were eating too much and wasting food besides. "I told them if they keep wasting, we have to go live on the corner, beg for money, or something."

Stranded in a Food Desert

Jacqueline Christian is another Houston mother who has a full-time job, drives a comfortable sedan, and wears flattering clothes. Her older son, 15-year-old Ja'Zarrian, sports bright orange Air Jordans. There's little clue to the family's hardship until you learn that their clothes come mostly from discount stores, that Ja'Zarrian mowed lawns for a summer to get the sneakers, that they're living in a homeless shelter, and that despite receiving $325 in monthly food stamps, Christian worries about not having enough food "about half of the year."

Christian works as a home health aide, earning $7.75 an hour at a job that requires her to crisscross Houston's sprawl to see her clients. Her schedule, as much as her wages, influences what she eats. To save time she often relies on premade food from grocery stores. "You can't go all the way home and cook," she says.

On a day that includes running a dozen errands and charming her payday loan officer into giving her an extra day, Christian picks up Ja'Zarrian and her seven-year-old, Jerimiah, after school. As the sun drops in the sky, Jerimiah begins complaining that he's hungry. The neon glow of a Hartz Chicken Buffet appears up the road, and he starts in: Can't we just get some gizzards, please?

Christian pulls into the drive-through and orders a combo of fried gizzards and okra for $8.11. It takes three declined credit cards and an emergency loan from her mother, who lives nearby, before she can pay for it. When the food finally arrives, filling the car with the smell of hot grease, there's a collective sense of relief. On the drive back to the shelter the boys eat until the gizzards are gone, and then drift off to sleep.

Christian says she knows she can't afford to eat out and that fast food isn't a healthy meal. But she'd felt too stressed-by time, by Jerimiah's insistence, by how little money she has-not to give in. "Maybe I can't justify that to someone who wasn't here to see, you know?" she says. "But I couldn't let them down and not get the food."

Of course it is possible to eat well cheaply in America, but it takes resources and know-how that many low-income Americans don't have. Kyera Reams of Osage, Iowa, puts an incredible amount of energy into feeding her family of six a healthy diet, with the help of staples from food banks and $650 in monthly SNAP benefits. A stay-at-home mom with a high school education, Reams has taught herself how to can fresh produce and forage for wild ginger and cranberries. When she learned that SNAP benefits could be used to buy vegetable plants, she dug two gardens in her yard. She has learned about wild mushrooms so she can safely pick ones that aren't poisonous and has lobbied the local library to stock field guides to edible wild plants.

"We wouldn't eat healthy at all if we lived off the food-bank food," Reams says. Many foods commonly donated to-or bought by-food pantries are high in salt, sugar, and fat. She estimates her family could live for three months on the nutritious foods she's saved up. The Reamses have food security, in other words, because Kyera makes procuring food her full-time job, along with caring for her husband, whose disability payments provide their only income.

But most of the working poor don't have the time or know-how required to eat well on little. Often working multiple jobs and night shifts, they tend to eat on the run. Healthful food can be hard to find in so-called food deserts-communities with few or no full-service groceries. Jackie Christian didn't resort to feeding her sons fried gizzards because it was affordable but because it was easy. Given the dramatic increase in cheap fast foods and processed foods, when the hungry have money to eat, they often go for what's convenient, just as better-off families do.

It's a cruel irony that people in rural Iowa can be malnourished amid forests of cornstalks running to the horizon. Iowa dirt is some of the richest in the nation, even bringing out the poet in agronomists, who describe it as "black gold." In 2007 Iowa's fields produced roughly one-sixth of all corn and soybeans grown in the U.S., churning out billions of bushels.

These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier's kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They're also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure "specialty crops"-the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.

Those priorities are reflected at the grocery store, where the price of fresh food has risen steadily while the cost of sugary treats like soda has dropped. Since the early 1980s the real cost of fruits and vegetables has increased by 24 percent. Meanwhile the cost of nonalcoholic beverages-primarily sodas, most sweetened with corn syrup-has dropped by 27 percent.

"We've created a system that's geared toward keeping overall food prices low but does little to support healthy, high-quality food," says global food expert Raj Patel. "The problem can't be fixed by merely telling people to eat their fruits and vegetables, because at heart this is a problem about wages, about poverty."

When Christina Dreier's cupboards start to get bare, she tries to persuade her kids to skip snack time. "But sometimes they eat saltine crackers, because we get that from the food bank," she said, sighing. "It ain't healthy for them, but I'm not going to tell them they can't eat if they're hungry."

The Dreiers have not given up on trying to eat well. Like the Reamses, they've sown patches of vegetables and a stretch of sweet corn in the large green yard carved out of the cornfields behind their house. But when the garden is done for the year, Christina fights a battle every time she goes to the supermarket or the food bank. In both places healthy foods are nearly out of reach. When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples. "They love fruit," she says with obvious pride. But most of her food dollars go to the meat, eggs, and milk that the food bank doesn't provide; with noodles and sauce from the food pantry, a spaghetti dinner costs her only the $3.88 required to buy hamburger for the sauce.

What she has, Christina says, is a kitchen with nearly enough food most of the time. It's just those dicey moments, after a new bill arrives or she needs gas to drive the kids to town, that make it hard. "We're not starved around here," she says one morning as she mixes up powdered milk for her daughter. "But some days, we do go a little hungry."

Crops Taxpayers Support With Subsidies

How Subsidized Crops Affect Diet

Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Photographers Kitra Cahana, Stephanie Sinclair, and Amy Toensing are known for their intimate, sensitive portraits of people.

The magazine thanks The Rockefeller Foundation and members of the National Geographic Society for their generous support of this series of articles.

Maps and graphics by Virginia W. Mason and Jason Treat, NGM Staff. Help for the Hungry, sources: USDA; Food Research and Action Center; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Stranded in a Food Desert, sources: USDA; City of Houston; U.S. Census Bureau. Crop Subsidies, research: Amanda Hobbs. Sources: Mississippi Department of Human Services; Environmental Working Group; National Cancer Institute.

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Why are people malnourished in the richest country on Earth?

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Plastic pollution to weigh 1.3 billion tons by 2040

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Plastic pollution to weigh 1.3 billion tons by 2040

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Victoria GillScience correspondent, BBC News

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Plastic pollution to weigh 1.3 billion tonnes by 2040

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An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic is destined for the environment by 2040 unless global action is taken, scientists say.

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When Laura Fritz's felines play with her iPad, her fat cat loses the urge to eat, her scaredy-cat loses his fear and her youngest just loses interest.

If you've had enough time to play with the tablet you got for the holidays, try turning the device over to your tech-savvy cat. Every cat app, no matter the maker, has something for felines to electronically track, stalk or hunt, such as mice, bugs or laser dots.

"Cats are attracted to things that move, and that is the 'magic' for most of the apps," said Dr. Bonnie Beaver, a professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine and executive director of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists.

"The motion in most apps is jerky and quick, much like an insect," she said, adding that any sound component would quickly be eclipsed by the draw of movement.

Every cat is different, but if they're like two of Fritz's, they will love pawing the screen to catch critters, which breaks anxious Maxie out of his shell and gives hefty Mr. Brutus a way to exercise, said Fritz of Waltham, Massachusetts. But they may be like her youngest, Pansy Rose, who couldn't care less.

Maxie and Brutus work together on the app "Paint for Cats," chasing a mouse and leaving a trail of splattered paint where they have pawed, rubbed, jumped or made other marks with their movements. Many cat owners see the results as art worthy of sharing on social media, so the app allows people to email the creations.

It is among three popular apps created by T.J. Fuller and Nate Murray's Los Angeles company Hiccup. The company also features a mouse-chasing game called "Game for Cats" and monster-crushing game dubbed "Catzilla."

There are several cat apps on the market. "Pocket Pond" for Android tablets allows cats to follow fish or dragonflies with their paws. Friskies' "Cat Fishing" also taps into the fish theme for Android and Apple devices.

Some people worry about damage to the devices, but claws won't hurt the screen, said Fuller, who ran many tests. But nobody has tested for teeth, and Karen Rittmuller of Salem, Massachusetts, found a problem with a bite.

Rittmuller tried to get her calico cat Pixel to live up to her high-tech name, so she downloaded "Game for Cats," but her pet will only stalk, pounce and bite the iPad, so she took it away.

"I did not want the device ruined or her hurt from biting too hard," Rittmuller said.

Even cats at shelters are joining the tech trend.

When the SPCA Los Angeles received a couple of used tablets two years ago, the shelter decided to see if any of their homeless cats were hiding inner artists.

Two of them, dubbed Pawblo Picasso and Frida Catlo, created abstract art that looked like fuzzy circles, and the organization turned it into sellable notecards.

Those trading up to a newer model tablet should consider donating used devices to shelters, said Ana Bustilloz, spokeswoman for the organization. People give food, kitty litter and blankets, but many don't think of animal shelters when it comes to tech equipment, she said.

Back at the Fritz house, the cats work out their problems with the tablet. The 21-pound Brutus is only motivated by food and refuses to exercise, so "Paint for Cats" gets him to move, Fritz said.

"Maxie is scared of everything that moves. But when he's painting, he becomes a different cat ... and really gets into it," she said.
Critical thinking challenge: Source URL: https://www.tweentribune.com/article/teen/got-cat-there-s-app/Why are tablet-based apps better for cats that desktop-based programs?

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When Laura Fritz's felines play with her iPad, her fat cat loses the urge to eat, her scaredy-cat loses his fear and her youngest just loses interest. If you've had enough time to play with the tablet you got for the holidays, try turning the device over to your tech-savvy cat.

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It’s time to make code more tinker-friendly

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It’s time to make code more tinker-friendly

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Back in ye olde days of the information superhighway, curious newbies had an easy way to see how websites worked: View Source.

If they clicked that option in the browser, presto! It would display the HTML and bits of Javascript that created the page. Cut and paste that code into their own domain and they could produce their own version of the site, altering and morphing it to their taste and learning along the way. That's how many of today's midcareer coders learned: They peeked behind the Wizard of Oz curtain.

But the world they enjoyed has nearly vanished. Websites have evolved into complex, full-featured apps; click View Source on Google.com and behold the slurry of incomprehensible Javascript. This increasingly worries old-guard coders. If the web no longer has a simple on-ramp, it could easily discourage curious amateurs. We don't want the field to de-democratize and become the province solely of those who can slog through a computer science degree.

So we need new tools that let everyone see, understand, and remix today's web. We need, in other words, to reboot the culture of View Source.

The good news? A renaissance is approaching. This spring, New York's Fog Creek Software launched Glitch, a site that hosts hundreds of simple web apps-everything from Tetris clones to databases and to-do lists-written using Javascript. The code for each is visible and usually helpfully studded with creator comments, so noobs can grok it. You can easily spin off your own copy of the app, tweak it, and publish it. (Full disclosure: I'm friends with Fog Creek's new CEO and former WIRED columnist, Anil Dash.)

"As programmers, we've become a priesthood, and I wanted to smash down the walls," says Daniel Moore, Glitch's lead developer. The goal, he notes, was to make it as easy to publish a web app as a blog post-no need to wrestle with backend server code.

I think Glitch succeeds. I know a bit of Javascript and had always wanted to write a Twitter bot, but when online tutorials veered into the incantations for Node-Javascript for running server code-I stalled out. On Glitch, I found Twitterbot code by web developer Stefan Bohacek. In barely an hour I remixed it into a bot that tweeted haiku-like poems based on lines from poets like Sappho and Basho ("have i been here before? / i can almost hear your song / o planets"). Surprised by how easy it was, I started remixing videogames and chat apps. After a couple of days, I realized that, whoa, I was beginning to absorb the logic of Node.

Glitch joins several View Source efforts that help people recombine code in useful ways. In Milwaukee, Chris Coyier has amassed roughly 1.1 million users for his CodePen service, which features about 12 million reusable frontend demos. "I've been in plenty of rooms with Girl Scouts learning to code, and when they can see they can take a project, change a few bits of code, and see those changes immediately, it's powerful," he says.

And why stop there? I'd argue we need View Source tools for every phylum of software-like, say, the thicket of impenetrable mathematics that is machine learning. Google has taken a stab at this, creating TensorFlow Playground, a simple classification neural net in your browser. I spent an hour changing the features being fed into the net, adding or subtracting neurons, and watching the AI's performance improve or degrade. I can't say I became an expert, but I began to get an intuitive feel-an almost tactile appreciation-for these AI mechanics.

Hands-on tinkering works-as educators and hackers have long known. And as tech gets increasingly complex, we have to make sure tinkering is not only possible, but also encouraged. Let people twiddle the knobs and you demystify the world.
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.

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It's Time to Make Code More Tinker-Friendly

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Back in ye olde days of the information superhighway, curious newbies had an easy way to see how websites worked: View Source. If they clicked that option in the browser, presto! It would display the HTML and bits of Javascript that created the page.

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A GoPro for Beetles: Researchers create a camera backpack for insects

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A GoPro for Beetles: Researchers create a camera backpack for insects

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In the movie "Ant-Man," the title character can shrink in size and travel by soaring on the back of an insect. Now researchers at the University of Washington have developed a tiny wireless steerable camera that can also ride aboard an insect, giving everyone a chance to see an Ant-Man view of the world.

The camera, which streams video to a smartphone at 1 to 5 frames per second, sits on a mechanical arm that can pivot 60 degrees. This allows a viewer to capture a high-resolution, panoramic shot or track a moving object while expending a minimal amount of energy. To demonstrate the versatility of this system, which weighs about 250 milligrams -- about one-tenth the weight of a playing card -- the team mounted it on top of live beetles and insect-sized robots.

The results will be published July 15 in Science Robotics.

"We have created a low-power, low-weight, wireless camera system that can capture a first-person view of what's happening from an actual live insect or create vision for small robots," said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "Vision is so important for communication and for navigation, but it's extremely challenging to do it at such a small scale. As a result, prior to our work, wireless vision has not been possible for small robots or insects."

Typical small cameras, such as those used in smartphones, use a lot of power to capture wide-angle, high-resolution photos, and that doesn't work at the insect scale. While the cameras themselves are lightweight, the batteries they need to support them make the overall system too big and heavy for insects -- or insect-sized robots -- to lug around. So the team took a lesson from biology.

"Similar to cameras, vision in animals requires a lot of power," said co-author Sawyer Fuller, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. "It's less of a big deal in larger creatures like humans, but flies are using 10 to 20% of their resting energy just to power their brains, most of which is devoted to visual processing. To help cut the cost, some flies have a small, high-resolution region of their compound eyes. They turn their heads to steer where they want to see with extra clarity, such as for chasing prey or a mate. This saves power over having high resolution over their entire visual field."

To mimic an animal's vision, the researchers used a tiny, ultra-low-power black-and-white camera that can sweep across a field of view with the help of a mechanical arm. The arm moves when the team applies a high voltage, which makes the material bend and move the camera to the desired position. Unless the team applies more power, the arm stays at that angle for about a minute before relaxing back to its original position. This is similar to how people can keep their head turned in one direction for only a short period of time before returning to a more neutral position.

"One advantage to being able to move the camera is that you can get a wide-angle view of what's happening without consuming a huge amount of power," said co-lead author Vikram Iyer, a UW doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering. "We can track a moving object without having to spend the energy to move a whole robot. These images are also at a higher resolution than if we used a wide-angle lens, which would create an image with the same number of pixels divided up over a much larger area."

The camera and arm are controlled via Bluetooth from a smartphone from a distance up to 120 meters away, just a little longer than a football field.

The researchers attached their removable system to the backs of two different types of beetles -- a death-feigning beetle and a Pinacate beetle. Similar beetles have been known to be able to carry loads heavier than half a gram, the researchers said.

"We made sure the beetles could still move properly when they were carrying our system," said co-lead author Ali Najafi, a UW doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering. "They were able to navigate freely across gravel, up a slope and even climb trees."

The beetles also lived for at least a year after the experiment ended.

"We added a small accelerometer to our system to be able to detect when the beetle moves. Then it only captures images during that time," Iyer said. "If the camera is just continuously streaming without this accelerometer, we could record one to two hours before the battery died. With the accelerometer, we could record for six hours or more, depending on the beetle's activity level."

The researchers also used their camera system to design the world's smallest terrestrial, power-autonomous robot with wireless vision. This insect-sized robot uses vibrations to move and consumes almost the same power as low-power Bluetooth radios need to operate.

The team found, however, that the vibrations shook the camera and produced distorted images. The researchers solved this issue by having the robot stop momentarily, take a picture and then resume its journey. With this strategy, the system was still able to move about 2 to 3 centimeters per second -- faster than any other tiny robot that uses vibrations to move -- and had a battery life of about 90 minutes.

While the team is excited about the potential for lightweight and low-power mobile cameras, the researchers acknowledge that this technology comes with a new set of privacy risks.

"As researchers we strongly believe that it's really important to put things in the public domain so people are aware of the risks and so people can start coming up with solutions to address them," Gollakota said.

Applications could range from biology to exploring novel environments, the researchers said. The team hopes that future versions of the camera will require even less power and be battery free, potentially solar-powered.

"This is the first time that we've had a first-person view from the back of a beetle while it's walking around. There are so many questions you could explore, such as how does the beetle respond to different stimuli that it sees in the environment?" Iyer said. "But also, insects can traverse rocky environments, which is really challenging for robots to do at this scale. So this system can also help us out by letting us see or collect samples from hard-to-navigate spaces."

This research was funded by a Microsoft fellowship and the National Science Foundation.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=115BGUZopHs&feature=emb_logo

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insects (including butterflies); extreme survival; invasive species; batteries; robotics research; solar energy; artificial intelligence; robotics; photography

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A GoPro for beetles: Researchers create a robotic camera backpack for insects

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In the movie "Ant-Man," the title character can shrink in size and travel by soaring on the back of an insect. Now researchers at the University of Washington have developed a tiny wireless steerable camera that can also ride aboard an insect, giving everyone a chance to see an Ant-Man view of the world.

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New mathematical idea reins in AI bias toward unethical and costly commercial choices

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New mathematical idea reins in AI bias toward unethical and costly commercial choices

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Researchers from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, EPFL (Lausanne) and Sciteb Ltd have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business manage and police Artificial Intelligence systems' biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging commercial choices-an ethical eye on AI.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed in commercial situations. Consider for example using AI to set prices of insurance products to be sold to a particular customer. There are legitimate reasons for setting different prices for different people, but it may also be profitable to 'game' their psychology or willingness to shop around.

The AI has a vast number of potential strategies to choose from, but some are unethical and will incur not just moral cost but a significant potential economic penalty as stakeholders will apply some penalty if they find that such a strategy has been used-regulators may levy significant fines of billions of Dollars, Pounds or Euros and customers may boycott you-or both.

So in an environment in which decisions are increasingly made without human intervention, there is therefore a very strong incentive to know under what circumstances AI systems might adopt an unethical strategy and reduce that risk or eliminate entirely if possible.

Mathematicians and statisticians from University of Warwick, Imperial, EPFL and Sciteb Ltd have come together to help business and regulators creating a new "Unethical Optimization Principle" and provide a simple formula to estimate its impact. They have laid out the full details in a paper bearing the name "An unethical optimization principle", published in Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday 1st July 2020.

The four authors of the paper are Nicholas Beale of Sciteb Ltd; Heather Battey of the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London; Anthony C. Davison of the Institute of Mathematics, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; and Professor Robert MacKay of the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick.

Professor Robert MacKay of the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick said:

"Our suggested 'Unethical Optimization Principle' can be used to help regulators, compliance staff and others to find problematic strategies that might be hidden in a large strategy space. Optimisation can be expected to choose disproportionately many unethical strategies, inspection of which should show where problems are likely to arise and thus suggest how the AI search algorithm should be modified to avoid them in future.

"The Principle also suggests that it may be necessary to re-think the way AI operates in very large strategy spaces, so that unethical outcomes are explicitly rejected in the optimization/learning process."

More information: An Unethical Optimization Principle, Royal Society Open Science (2020). URL after publication: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200462

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New mathematical idea reins in AI bias towards making unethical and costly commercial choices

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Researchers from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, EPFL (Lausanne) and Sciteb Ltd have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business manage and police Artificial Intelligence systems' biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging commercial choices-an ethical eye on AI.

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New connection between the eyes and touch discovered

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New connection between the eyes and touch discovered

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Tiny eye movements can be used as an index of humans' ability to anticipate relevant information in the environment independent of the information's sensory modality, a team of scientists has found. The work reveals a connection between eye movements and the sense of touch.

"The fact that tiny eye movements can hinder our ability to discriminate tactile stimuli, and that the suppression of those eye movements before an anticipated tactile stimulus can enhance that same ability, may reflect that common brain areas, as well as common neural and cognitive resources, underlie both eye movements and the processing of tactile stimuli," explains Marisa Carrasco, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.

"This connection between the eyes and touch reveals a surprising link across perception, cognition, and action," adds Stephanie Badde, an NYU post-doctoral researcher and first author of the paper.

The study asked human participants to distinguish between two kinds of vibrations ("fast" -- high frequency vs. "slow" -- low frequency) that were produced by a device connected to their finger. The researchers then tracked even the tiniest of their involuntary eye movements, known as micro-saccades. These small, rapid eye-movements are known to occur even when we try to fixate our gaze on one spot. Here, participants were instructed to focus their vision on a fixation spot on a computer screen. A cue -- a tap elicited by the device at their finger -- would announce the next imminent vibration. What the participants did not know is that the time interval between that cue and the tactile vibration was a central part of the experimental design.

The manipulation of that interval allowed participants in some blocks to predict with more accuracy precisely when the vibration would happen. Notably, when they had that precise information, the researchers could see not only how the participants' microsaccade rates would decrease just before the vibration stimulus, but also how their ability to distinguish between fast and slow vibrations was enhanced by the suppression of micro-saccades.

The paper's other co-authors were Caroline Myers, an NYU graduate student, and Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg, an associate professor at Tel-Aviv University.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01-EY019693 and NEI R21-EY026185) and by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (2015201).

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perception; intelligence; psychology; memory; social psychology; neuroscience; child psychology; caregiving

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New connection between the eyes and touch discovered

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tiny eye movements can be used as an index of humans' ability to anticipate relevant information in the environment independent of the information's sensory modality, a team of scientists has found. The work reveals a connection between eye movements and the sense of touch.

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What will astronauts need to survive the dangerous journey to Mars?

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What will astronauts need to survive the dangerous journey to Mars?

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On movie missions to Mars, getting there is the easy part. The Martian's Mark Watney was fine until a dust storm left him fending for himself. Douglas Quaid's jaunt to the Red Planet in Total Recall was smooth sailing until he came under fire at Martian customs and immigration.

But in real life, just getting to Mars and back will be rife with dangers that have nothing to do with extreme weather or armed gunmen.

"The mission to Mars is likely going to be four to six individuals [living] together in a can the size of a Winnebago for three years," says Leticia Vega, associate chief scientist for the NASA Human Research Program in Houston. Time on the planet will be sandwiched between a six- to nine-month journey there plus the same long trip back.

Once outside of Earth's protective gravitational and magnetic fields, microgravity and radiation become big worries. Microgravity allows fluid buildup in the head, which can cause vision problems, and adventurers cruising through interplanetary space will be continually pelted with high-energy charged particles that zip right through the metal belly of a spacecraft. Researchers don't know just how harmful that radiation is, but lab experiments suggest it could raise astronauts' risk of cancer and other diseases.

The length of the mission brings its own dangers. "The moon was like a camping trip when you think about going to Mars," says Erik Antonsen, an emergency medicine physician and aerospace engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Setting aside the social and psychological problems that could arise among people trapped together inside an interplanetary mobile home ( SN: 11/29/14, p. 22), three years offers a lot more time and opportunity to get sick or injured than a dayslong Apollo mission. And Mars is about 600 times farther from Earth than the moon is. Even light-speed communications will take about 20 minutes to reach Earth from Mars. Phoning Houston for help in an emergency is not an option.

"The reality is, when we do the first missions to Mars, there's a high likelihood that somebody may die," Antonsen says. "If someone goes out and they get an abrasion on their eyeball and it's not responding to whatever [is] on the vehicle, they're coming back one-eyed Jack."

Despite those dangers, the United States, Russia, China and other nations have all voiced their intentions to send people to the Red Planet. NASA is gunning for a mission to Mars in the 2030s. With that deadline in mind, researchers are developing a suite of medical devices and medications to bring on a trip to Mars.

The items on this packing list are in the very early stages of development, and in some cases, still pretty impractical and unproven. Universal diagnostic wands are a distant dream. But researchers are devising artificial-gravity suits, anti-radiation medications and miniature medical tools that scientists hope will be ready in about a decade to keep the first travelers to Mars safe and healthy.

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Faking gravity

For something that looks so relaxing, floating in microgravity is surprisingly bad for you. When the body doesn't have to pull its own weight, muscles and bones weaken. This was a big problem in the early days of spaceflight. When the Soviet Soyuz 9 crew returned from a record 18 days in space in June 1970, one cosmonaut was so weak that he couldn't carry his own helmet when he stepped out of the landing capsule ( SN: 6/27/70, p. 615). Today, astronauts on the International Space Station keep up their strength by exercising for a couple of hours each day. But other problems with life in microgravity remain unsolved.

In space, bodily fluids that Earth's gravity normally keeps in the lower body drift toward the head, increasing intracranial pressure. "If you were to sit down in a chair and put your head between your knees ... that's a bit what it feels like," says NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn, who completed a five-month stint on the space station in 2013.

NASA

Researchers suspect that constant elevated pressure behind the eyes is to blame for vision problems, such as farsightedness, that about half of astronauts develop in space. "I had a harder time reading the keys on the laptop," Marshburn recalls.

Weightlessness also confuses the gravity-sensing vestibular organs in the inner ear that play a role in balance and motor control. Upon returning to Earth, "I could walk in a straight line pretty easily by the end of that day, but it took me a few days before I could start to walk around a corner" without running into the wall, Marshburn says.

To make sure astronauts can walk straight and see what they're doing on Mars, a spaceship could be outfitted with artificial-gravity machines. One such machine is a lower body negative pressure, or LBNP, chamber. The device applies vacuum pressure to the lower half of the body while a person is sealed in from the waist down. The vacuum re-creates the downward pull of gravity, planting the person's feet firmly on the floor of the chamber and drawing bodily fluids toward the legs.

NASA

In one experiment, 10 volunteers who already had medical devices implanted to measure intracranial pressure sealed their lower bodies inside an LBNP chamber. Participants had to lie down for the experiment to bring their intracranial pressure closer to what it would be like in space. When someone on Earth goes from standing to lying down, their intracranial pressure rises from around 0 millimeters of mercury to about 15 mmHg - closer to what astronauts are thought to experience in space. As the researchers slowly increased the device's vacuum pressure, participants' average intracranial pressure dropped from 15 to 9.4 mmHg, the researchers reported in 2019 in the Journal of Physiology.

"We really don't know right now how much time [in LBNP] we need to protect the body" from the harmful effects of fluid shifts in space, says Alan Hargens, a space physiologist at the University of California, San Diego. But in case LBNP becomes a significant part of the day, Hargens' team built a prototype LBNP suit that can be worn during daily activity. The suit consists of a pair of overalls with built-in shoes and a seal around the waist. Vacuum pressure pulls the wearer down onto the shoe soles. "These lower body negative pressure devices are an early form of artificial gravity," Hargens says. Such devices may be easier to send into space than alternatives being tested, such as centrifuges.

A centrifuge simulates gravity through centrifugal force - the effect that keeps water in the bottom of a bucket when you swing it over your head. A centrifuge designed to help astronauts in microgravity looks sort of like a carousel, but with beds instead of ponies. The rider lies on a bed, head pointing toward the center of the carousel, which spins to exert a horizontal centrifugal force out toward the feet that's as strong as the downward pull of gravity. A room-sized centrifuge would be a lot harder to launch in a spaceship than an LBNP suit. But some researchers think the whole-body-centrifuge experience may combat microgravity issues that LBNP doesn't, such as the inner ear problems.

To investigate the effects of a centrifuge on sensorimotor control, Rachael Seidler, a motor control researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and colleagues kept 24 volunteers in bed for 60 days to mimic life in microgravity. Sixteen of the participants spun in a centrifuge for a total of 30 minutes each day, while the other eight got no centrifugation. Before and after bed rest, participants were tested on their balance and were put through an obstacle course. "We've just had a very preliminary peek" at the data, Seidler says, but "it does look like the artificial gravity was helpful" for motor control.

German Space Agency

Bracing for radiation

Life in microgravity may be a problem for a Mars crew, but at least it's a familiar challenge to astronauts. Chronic exposure to deep space radiation, on the other hand, is a hazard that no space traveler has faced before.

The solar system is awash in charged particles called galactic cosmic rays that travel at nearly the speed of light. These particles tear through metal like it's tissue paper and can kill cells or create mutations in the DNA within. Astronauts on the space station, like folks on Earth, are largely protected from these tiny wrecking balls by Earth's magnetic field. But a Mars-bound crew will be totally exposed. En route to the Red Planet, astronauts are expected to receive almost two millisieverts of radiation daily - roughly equal to getting a full-body CT scan every six days.

The only people ever fully immersed in deep space radiation were those who went to the moon, but they were exposed for less than two weeks. On a Mars mission, "we really don't know exactly what's going to happen to humans when they get these types of exposures," says Emmanuel Urquieta, a space medicine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. But judging by lab animal and cell experiments, this radiation won't be giving astronauts any superpowers.

In tests on animals and in human tissue, beams of particles designed to mimic space radiation degrade heart and blood vessel tissue, suggesting a Mars crew may be at higher risk for cardiovascular diseases, according to a 2018 report in Nature Reviews Cardiology. Similarly, observations of rodents exposed to radiation suggest that space radiation impairs cognitive function, researchers reported in a review article in the May 2019 Life Sciences in Space Research.

"There's also a good amount of data on radiation's ability to induce cancer" in the lungs, liver and brain, says Peter Guida, a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., who studies the biological effects of radiation.

Scary radiation effects seen in lab animals or cell cultures should be taken with a grain of salt. A mouse is not a person, and brain cells in a dish do not make a brain. Also, animals and cells typically get the entire Mars mission-level dose of radiation in a single session or in a series of radiation exposures over weeks or months, which is not the same thing as getting constant, low-level exposure. But the warning signs from these experiments are worrying enough that researchers are testing various anti-radiation medications.

"The biggest and most promising field for countermeasure development is antioxidants," Guida says. High-energy charged particles can cause damage by splintering water molecules in the body into toxic compounds called reactive oxygen species. Priming the body with antioxidants could help neutralize some of those reactive oxygen species and curb their effects. Options include vitamins A and E, as well as selenomethionine, an ingredient found in some dietary supplements. "All these have shown at various levels to decrease the negative effects of radiation," he says.

Medical problems astronauts are at relatively high risk of developing while in space:

T. Tibbitts

Even harnessing the natural antioxidant powers of berries might help. In one experiment, rats fed food laced with freeze-dried blueberry powder for four weeks seemed to perform slightly better on a memory test after exposure to high-energy charged particles than rats fed normal chow before exposure. In the test, the rats were shown two objects: one they had seen before radiation exposure and one they had not. Blueberry-fed rats spent almost 70 percent of their time exploring the new object, as expected of animals that recognized the old object. But the other rats spent about half their time exploring each object, suggesting that they'd forgotten the object they'd seen before, researchers reported in 2017 in Life Sciences in Space Research.

Antioxidants, on their own, may not be enough protection, says Marjan Boerma, a radiation biologist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Boerma and colleagues are testing whether aspirin and other anti-inflammatories, including a form of vitamin E called gamma-tocotrienol, can help reduce cell damage from high-energy particles. It may take a medley of pharmaceuticals - or perhaps a carefully blended smoothie. Scientists are still far from hammering out the exact ingredients of that anti-radiation regimen, she says.

Astronaut, heal thyself

Pulling shifts in artificial gravity and swallowing antioxidants may become part of an astronaut's daily routine. But Mars visitors will also have to deal with any unexpected illnesses and injuries without mission control to talk them through an emergency.

A Mars crew may include a physician. "But that person could also get sick," Urquieta says, "and that physician is not going to be board-certified in 10 different specialties." Ideally, the Mars spaceship would be equipped with artificial intelligence that could consider an astronaut's symptoms, recommend medical tests, make diagnoses and assign treatments. But a reliable "Dr. AI" is nowhere close to reality.

Measuring up

About 30 nonphysicians learned first aid from a software system designed to help astronauts. Months after training, the novices did pretty well, except for inserting a breathing tube and an IV.

Source: D. Ebert et al/NASA Human Research Program Investigators' Workshop 2020

Right now, the most sophisticated symptom checkers are tools like VisualDx, diagnostic software used by health care workers in hospitals and clinics. The user answers questions about a patient, such as symptoms and demographic features, to winnow down possible diagnoses. For skin conditions, VisualDx can also analyze photos of a patient's skin; it's now being expanded to help users assess ultrasound scans.

Art Papier, a dermatologist and chief executive officer at VisualDx, and colleagues designed a version of the system for use in deep space that works on a laptop without internet. The software doesn't have to account for every possible diagnosis, like infectious diseases from the tropics. Instead, the focus is on medical conditions that astronauts have a fairly high chance of developing, like rashes or kidney stones.

To help walk astronauts through first aid and medical exams, spaceflight physiologist and space medicine scientist Douglas Ebert of KBR, Inc. in Houston and colleagues are developing a tool called the Autonomous Medical Officer Support, or AMOS, system. An early version of the software uses pictures and videos to teach novices how to perform an eye exam, for example, or insert a breathing tube.

The researchers tested an AMOS prototype with about 30 nonphysicians, who learned how to perform several medical procedures. Those people came back three to nine months later to do the procedures again, using the software for guidance as necessary, to mimic how an astronaut would use AMOS for preflight training and in-the-moment support during an emergency.

Around 80 percent of participants accurately performed eye exams and ultrasounds and about 70 percent correctly inserted an IV. When it came to a tougher task - inserting a breathing tube - just about half pulled it off, Ebert and colleagues reported in January in Galveston, Texas, at the NASA Human Research Program Investigators' Workshop. In April, astronauts on board the space station successfully used the software to perform kidney and bladder ultrasound scans without help from ground control.

When performing medical exams, astronauts won't have the starship Enterprise 's sick bay at their disposal. They'll need miniature medical devices that fit on the spacecraft.

For medical imaging, space medicine researchers have their eyes on a new ultrasound device called the Butterfly iQ that replaces the variety of transducers usually needed to image different body parts with a single probe the size of an electric razor. Standard ultrasound machinery is around 15 times heavier than the Butterfly iQ, which displays images on a mobile app.

Butterfly Network

The company 1Drop Diagnostics, which is developing credit card-sized chips to detect chemical markers of different diseases in blood samples from a finger prick, is working on portable blood tests for astronauts.

The medical kit that astronauts use to patch each other up will have to be lightweight and compact. To decide what goes in a spaceship first aid kit, researchers use NASA's Integrated Medical Model, which forecasts which health problems the astronauts on a particular mission are most likely to have.

Researchers plug in mission details, like where the crew is headed and astronauts' genders and preexisting conditions. The model then runs thousands of mission simulations to gauge the risks of that specific crew having anything from constipation to a heart attack so that planners can prioritize medical kit supplies.

1Drop Diagnostics

Ebert and colleagues have already used this system to build a preliminary first aid packing list for a crewed lunar flyby mission that NASA has planned for 2022. For this three-week trip, the first aid kit is pretty simple: medication for back pain, motion sickness and the like.

Packing for Mars is going to be a whole new ball game, Ebert says. But researchers still have at least a decade to shrink their equipment down to size and figure out what mix of medical supplies will give Mars astronauts the best chance of surviving their epic voyage.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

A version of this article appears in the July 4, 2020 issue of Science News.

Citations

NASA Human Research Program. Five hazards of human spaceflight.
NASA's Plan for Sustained Lunar Exploration and Development
D. Ebert et al. Medical training support for autonomous missions. NASA Human Research Program Investigators' Workshop, Galveston, Texas. January 28, 2020.

F. Kiffer, M. Boerma and A. Allen. Behavioral effects of space radiation: A comprehensive review of animal studies. Life Sciences in Space Research. Vol. 21, May 2019, p. 1. doi: 10.1016/j.lssr.2019.02.004.

L.G. Peterson et al. Lower body negative pressure to safely reduce intracranial pressure. The Journal of Physiology. Vol. 597, January 1, 2019, p. 237. doi: 10.1113/JP276557.

R.L. Hughson, A. Helm and M. Durante. Heart in space: effect of the extraterrestrial environment on the cardiovascular system. Nature Reviews Cardiology. Vol. 15, March 2018, p. 167. doi: 10.1038/nrcardio.2017.157.

S.M. Poulose et al. Neurochemical differences in learning and memory paradigms among rats supplemented with anthocyanin-rich blueberry diets and exposed to acute doses of 56Fe particles. Life Sciences in Space Research. Vol. 12, February 2017, p. 16. doi: 10.1016/j.lssr.2016.12.002.

Maria Temming is the staff reporter for physical sciences, covering everything from chemistry to computer science and cosmology. She has bachelor's degrees in physics and English, and a master's in science writing.

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What will astronauts need to survive the dangerous journey to Mars?

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On movie missions to Mars, getting there is the easy part. The Martian's Mark Watney was fine until a dust storm left him fending for himself. Douglas Quaid's jaunt to the Red Planet in Total Recall was smooth sailing until he came under fire at Martian customs and immigration.

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A new album turns the sounds of endangered birds into electronic music

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A new album turns the sounds of endangered birds into electronic music

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An international collective of electronic music DJs and composers is taking beats from the dance club to jungles and forests and back, all to help save nature's greatest singers. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean is a new album that samples the sounds of endangered birds and whose proceeds go directly towards efforts to save them.

Robin Perkins is a 33-year-old DJ, composer and producer originally from Glassup, England. He goes by the name El Búho or "the Owl." Perkins produced the first volume of this project in 2015, A Guide to the Birdsong of South America.

"The whole project," Perkins says, "was born out of this idea of taking the songs of endangered birds and challenging musicians to make a piece of music from them, and so trying to marry these worlds of activism of conservation, birdsong and electronic music."

Perkins invited artists from each of the endangered or threatened birds' homelands to build their own songs around the birds' songs. Electronic music, he says, allows artists to do that in a special way.

"The beautiful thing about electronic music is that it opens up this whole toolbox of things that you couldn't otherwise do, right?" he says. "So you can take a sample of a bird song and do 5 million things to it. You can turn it into an instrument itself. You can reverse it, you can add effects, you can sample it."

Perkins has just finished the second project, A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. One of the musicians who responded to his call is Nicaraguan sonic artist Tamara Montenegro. She chose the turquoise-browed motmot, or Guardabarranco.

"To me it was a very clear choice," Montenegro says. "As a child, I would see this bird freely flying around and meeting his partner - they travel in pairs most of the time - in my backyard for sunsets. It was a beautiful, mystical moment every day."

The Guardabarranco is threatened by loss of habitat primarily due to deforestation. It's also Nicaragua's national bird.

"This bird represents a lot of symbology in my area of the world because it represents freedom," she says. "And these Central American countries have been striving for political, social, economic freedom for a long time."

The idea of freedom was also part of the impetus for Al Ovando's choice. Ovando is a member of the renowned group The Garifuna Collective that also includes musicians from Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. For the collective's contribution to the album, Ovando chose the endangered Black Catbird. Like the Guardabarranco, the Black Catbirds's freedom is threatened by loss of habitat. Ovando feels his people have a special kinship with the bird and its struggle for survival.

"You just imagine us coming all the way from the coast of West Africa into the Caribbean, ending up in Belize and still continuing the struggle and trying to be part of what the world is today," he says.

Ovando also happens to be a devoted birder. He even convinced the band to add a technical rider to its contracts when the group performs at festivals.

"If there is anybody at the festival who would like to go birding," he says, he wanted it to be known that they "would love to go birding with them, or if they would know some places, some hotspots we could check out some birds."

As with the first album, all of the profits from the new release will support specific organizations, including Birds Caribbean. Its executive director, Lisa Sorensen, explains how A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean will not only help her efforts but may also yield extended benefits.

"There might be a beautiful place to go see birds but there's no trail, there's no interpretive signage there to tell you about what you're seeing," Sorensen says. "So we're envisioning that funding from this project will help us advance both those efforts: building the supply and building the demand for sustainable bird and nature tourism."

That's project founder Robin Perkins' wish too.

"Hopefully people will come away from the album feeling inspired and feeling the need to listen again to the bird song around them," Perkins says, and "to do something to protect the natural spaces that we need to survive."

A Guide to the Birdsong of Central America, Mexico & the Caribbean is out now via Shika Shika. All proceeds generated from album sales go towards Fundación Txori, Aves de Costa Rica and Birds Caribbean.

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A New Album Turns The Sound Of Endangered Birds Into Electronic Music

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An international collective of electronic music DJs and composers is taking beats from the dance club to jungles and forests and back, all to help save nature's greatest singers. A Guide to the Birdsong of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean is a new album that samples the sounds of endangered birds and whose proceeds go directly towards efforts to save them.

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KFC working on 3D printing chicken nuggets

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KFC working on 3D printing chicken nuggets

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KFC is trying to create the world's first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets, part of its "restaurant of the future" concept, the company announced. The chicken restaurant chain will work with Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to develop bioprinting technology that will "print" chicken meat, using chicken cells and plant material.

KFC plans to provide the bioprinting firm with ingredients like breading and spices "to achieve the signature KFC taste" and will seek to replicate the taste and texture of genuine chicken.

It's worth noting that the bioprinting process KFC describes uses animal material, so any nuggets it produced wouldn't be vegetarian. KFC does offer a vegetarian option at some of its restaurants; last year it became the first US fast-food chain to test out Beyond Meat's plant-based chicken product, which it plans to roll out to more of its locations this summer.

Bioprinted nuggets would be more environmentally friendly to produce than standard chicken meat, KFC says, citing (but not linking to) a study by the American Environmental Science and Technology Journal it says shows the benefits of growing meat from cells, including reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption compared to traditional farming methods.

"3D bioprinting technologies, initially widely recognized in medicine, are nowadays gaining popularity in producing foods such as meat," Yusef Khesuani, co-founder of 3D Bioprinting Solutions said in a statement announcing the KFC partnership. " In the future, the rapid development of such technologies will allow us to make 3D-printed meat products more accessible and we are hoping that the technology created as a result of our cooperation with KFC will help accelerate the launch of cell-based meat products on the market."

3D bioprinting is a slow, laborious process. although there have been some promising developments toward its use in medicine. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley working on a process to bioprint human organs for transplantation noted last year that biological materials tended to deteriorate before the process was completed. Their method called for freezing the biological material as it was being printed. Experts believe there's still a long way to go before 3D bioprinting will be able to create functioning organs for transplant patients, however.

KFC says its bioprinted nuggets will be available for final testing in Moscow this fall. The announcement didn't detail how the process it's testing in Russia differs from other 3D bioprinting efforts, but said "there are no other methods available on the market that could allow the creation of such complex products from animal cells." No word on when or if the printed nuggets might be available for KFC customers to sample.

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KFC is working with a Russian 3D bioprinting firm to try to make lab-produced chicken nuggets

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KFC is trying to create the world's first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets, part of its "restaurant of the future" concept. It's working with Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to develop bioprinting technology that will "print" chicken meat, using chicken cells and plant material.

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People who live alone face higher chance at dementia

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People who live alone face higher chance at dementia

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People who live alone are facing a higher risk of dementia

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Don't use it, lose it. This old saying applies to so many areas of life, but also your mental capacity. You need to stimulate your brain in order to protect your cognitive ability from the horrors of aging. And you know what stimulates brain?

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High school student saves for over 2 years to buy his friend a new wheelchair

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High school student saves for over 2 years to buy his friend a new wheelchair

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(Compiled from KTHV, NY Post and CNN) -NORMAN, Ark. - Navigating high school just got a little easier for one Montgomery County senior, thanks to his friend who surprised him with a gift he could only dream of.

Roaming the hallways of Caddo Hills High Schools is now one of Brandon Qualls favorite things to do.

"It's awesome, I may hit a few doors but it's worth it!" Brandon said.

But getting around was not always this easy for Brandon. For years, he used a manual wheelchair to get to class.

"My arms would get really tired and I would have to stop and take rests," he said. "It's been my dream to just have one of these. And my dream came true."

Brandon's friend, Tanner Wilson, saved up his own money to buy Brandon his own electric wheelchair. He worked part-time at a local car mechanic shop to save up for the purchase. It took him two years to save enough money. He did not share the price of the wheelchair, but they typically cost several thousand dollars.

"He's just been a really good friend and I wanted to do him a favor," Tanner said. "I just felt like I needed to do it and I wanted to do it. Brandon, he's just always been there for me."

Tanner surprised Brandon during class on Feb. 26. Brandon said he was completely shocked when he rolled it in.

"They came in and my face just blew up...crying everywhere...just like 'Wow, can't believe he did that for me!'" Brandon said.

Tanner said the look on Brandon's face was unforgettable. "Kids ask me was it worth it was it worth it? Yeah, 100 percent," Tanner said.

"There's many people out here that have troubles and need a little bit of help. Sometimes they can't do it for themselves," Tanner said.

Wilson's mom, Colleen Carmack, told CNN that her son is grateful that his kind act is getting attention on social media.

"They both deserve the attention because they're both great and wonderful kids," Carmack said.

Is she surprised at her son's behavior? Not at all. "That's him. He's always been about everybody else and not himself."

She said Tanner has "had some bad experiences over the last year, so him being able to help somebody else has really brought him out - being able to know that he made a difference. And I can see a difference in him - like wanting to get out and do more."

Tanner and Brandon have been friends for years, Carmack said. "They talk about cars a lot and trucks and that kind of stuff. I'm really proud of both of them."

Tanner said he searched for the right wheelchair for about a year, before finding this one for sale on Facebook.

The chair will remain at school for Qualls until the family can get a car to accommodate the chair.
Compiled from articles at KTHV and by Alexandra Klausner at NYPost .com. and Thom Patterson, CNN. Reprinted here for educational purposes only.

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High school student saves for over 2 years to buy his friend a new wheelchair

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(Compiled from KTHV, NY Post and CNN) -NORMAN, Ark. - Navigating high school just got a little easier for one Montgomery County senior, thanks to his friend who surprised him with a gift he could only dream of. Roaming the hallways of Caddo Hills High Schools is now one of Brandon Qualls favorite things to do.

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A rise in depression among teens could be linked to social media use

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A rise in depression among teens could be linked to social media use

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(by Patti Neighmond, NPR) - A study published Thursday in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology finds the percentage of U.S. teens and young adults reporting mental distress, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions has risen significantly over the past decade.

While these problems also increased among adults 26 and older, the increase was not nearly as large as among young people born from the early 1980s to the late 1990s.

The study findings suggest a generational shift says San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, who headed the study. To see a significant increase in negative psychological states "among our vulnerable population of teens and young adults is absolutely heartbreaking," she says.

Twenge and her colleagues analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a government survey that tracks mental health and substance use in individuals age 12 and over in the U.S. They looked at survey responses from more than 200,000 adolescents ages 12 to 17 and almost 400,000 young adults ages 18 and over between 2005 and 2017.

They found the rate of individuals reporting symptoms consistent with major depression over the past year increased 52 percent in teens and 63 percent in young adults over a decade. Girls were more vulnerable than boys. By 2017 one out of every five teenage girls had experienced major depression in the last year.

Rates of psychological distress, which Twenge describes as "feeling nervous, hopeless or that everything in life is an effort" rose by 71 percent among people aged 18 to 25. Suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts also increased. Death from suicide increased by 56 percent among 18- to 19-year-olds between 2008 and 2017.

Understanding exactly why these trends are on the rise is always a challenge, says Twenge, since researchers can only point out correlations, not causes. But, she says, since the trends are "pretty large in a fairly short period of time, that helps us narrow what the likely cause might be."

She thinks the rise in smartphone and social media use is a significant factor. By 2012, smartphones had become widespread, she says, and it's around that same time that social media began to dominate young people's lives. For example, in 2009 about half of high school seniors visited social media sites every day. That's climbed to about 85 percent today, with Instagram and Snapchat replacing Facebook as the main "go to social media site," she says.

It's not just the phone or social media itself, says Twenge. It's the amount of time teens and young adults spend with it. As Twenge found in earlier research, the more time they spend, the greater the risk of depressive symptoms. Twenge says it's known from a body of research that in-person social contact is good for mental health. She questions whether spending that same amount of time on Instagram and Snapchat is just as beneficial, and says "it seems clear the answer is 'No.' "

"Spending time on social media tends not to be in real time," she says. "You're not having a real time conversation with someone - usually you're not seeing their face and you can't give them a hug; it's just not as emotionally fulfilling as seeing someone in person."

The findings of the new study ring "completely true" for clinical child psychologist Mary Fristad with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study. Fristad, who treats children from age 10 through to college age, says her patients are concerned "not about how much fun they look forward to having over the weekend, but about what event can they post on Snapchat so that other people will know they have friends."

Fristad says kids are developmentally more worried about peer status and approval during pre-teen and teenage years. Social media exaggerates that process, she says, because it's so public, available, and highly visual. It's like "taking what happens in typical adolescent development and putting it on steroids," she says.

For example, as opposed to "going to school with 'meh' hair suddenly there's a picture of you with 'meh' hair. Everybody's going to see it, can comment on it, make fun of you," she says. These experiences resonate enormously during adolescence and can deeply affect teen's confidence and sense of self.

In order to better understand the impact of social media on this age group, Fristad organized a focus group of college students at Ohio State. The students had all received smartphones when they were 13 or 14. What they told her was was in line with current study's findings. The students described "another realm of things to worry about, pressure to build your brand, sharing too much and making unrealistic comparisons to other kids ... being constantly on the phone and not engaging in face-to-face interactions."

"There's just a lot of heightened tension around this," says Fristad. And the advice from [the students who participated in the study]? "Phones Off, Friends On."

...Researcher and clinical psychologist Steve Ilardi, with the University of Kansas tries to help anxious and depressed kids feel better. The good news, he says, is that it's clear that they "intuitively grasp that how we live now is not ideal for us." Teens get that spending hours surfing, bringing their phones to bed, "this relentless cascade of stressful notifications and images is not good for them and they get it."

Ilardi developed a treatment approach, based on cognitive behavioral therapy, that helps young people make lifestyle changes, focusing on better diet and nutrition, exercise, exposure to sunlight and getting a good night's sleep, all of which have been shown to reduce depressive symptoms.

"Kids buy into it," says Ilardi, "when you lay it out for them and explain they can be empowered to make changes themselves that can make a big difference in how you feel, how your brain, mind and body functions."

He says behavior change can "help kids get unstuck from their perpetual sense of anxiety, stress and depression."
Published at NPR .com on March 14. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from NPR.

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A rise in depression among teens could be linked to social media use

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(by Patti Neighmond, NPR) - A study published Thursday in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology finds the percentage of U.S. teens and young adults reporting mental distress, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions has risen significantly over the past decade.

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Next year, the US will export more energy than it imports. That hasn’t happened since 1953

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Next year, the US will export more energy than it imports. That hasn’t happened since 1953

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(by Matt Egan, CNN Business) - The United States, long beholden to foreign oil, is poised to become a net energy exporter starting next year.

Thanks to the shale oil and natural gas boom, the United States will export more energy than it imports in 2020 for the first time since 1953, according to a forecast published Thursday by the Energy Department's statistics division. That's two years earlier than what was previously expected.

And it won't be a one-off achievement. The United States is likely to be a net energy exporter through at least 2050, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said.

"It's a big deal. We're not as reliant on foreign oil as we were," said Michael Tran, managing director of global energy strategy at RBC Capital Markets.

The seeds for this milestone were planted by the shale revolution that began last decade. New technology unlocked vast amounts of natural gas and crude oil in the United States. Production of both skyrocketed, which reshaped the global energy landscape.

The end of the 40-year ban on oil exports in late 2015 really changed the game. [Republicans in congress championed the proposal. Reluctant Democrats supported it because in exchange they were able to negotiate an additional five years of tax credits for wind and solar power, which they are keen on.] US shipments of crude have exploded since then.

According to the scenario the EIA thinks is mostly likely to happen, the United States should become a net exporter of petroleum liquids - oil and products like gasoline - after 2020. It's a milestone that was briefly achieved late last year. For one week in November, US exports of crude oil and petroleum products exceeded imports, the EIA said. It was the first time that happened on a weekly basis since the EIA began tracking in 1991.

"US crude exports are wildly disrupting the global oil trade. And US shale continues to grow at an unbridled pace," Tran said.

Fueled by shale hotbeds like the Permian Basin of Texas, the United States surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia in terms of monthly oil production last year. US output spiked from about 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to a record 10.9 million barrels last year, the EIA said.

The International Energy Agency said the 2 million barrel-per-day jump in US production last year was the biggest jump ever recorded by any country.

The growth is likely to continue, albeit at a more moderate pace. According to the EIA's most likely scenario, US oil production is expected to keep setting annual records through 2027, and remain greater than 14 million barrels per day through 2040. ...

Even though the United States is shrinking its reliance on foreign oil, it won't be able to credibly declare energy independence in 2020. "You're not going to be fully insulated from geopolitical risk or decisions that OPEC makes," RBC's Tran said.

That's in part because of the makeup of America's refinery complex, which requires a healthy dose of medium and heavy crudes found overseas. Refineries can't operate solely on the very light crude found in domestic shale oilfields.

While becoming a net energy exporter is a "tremendous development," the United States wouldn't be "completely self-sufficient," said Joe McMonigle, a former Energy Department official under President George W. Bush who is now senior energy policy analyst at Hedgeye Potomac Research.

"Until the US refining sector is able to process more lighter crudes, we're never going to have energy independence," McMonigle said.
CNN Business' Ivana Kottasova contributed to this report. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from CNN Business.

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Next year, the US will export more energy than it imports. That hasn't happened since 1953

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(by Matt Egan, CNN Business) - The United States, long beholden to foreign oil, is poised to become a net energy exporter starting next year. Thanks to the shale oil and natural gas boom, the United States will export more energy than it imports in 2020 for the first time since 1953, according to a forecast published Thursday by the Energy Department's statistics division.

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Google CEO denies any bias in the company

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Google CEO denies any bias in the company

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(by Crystal Woodall and Amber C. Strong, CBN News) WASHINGTON - GOP lawmakers pressed Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday over allegations of employees' anti-conservative bias and how that may unduly influence the company's business practices. ... Pichai told House Judiciary Committee members he runs the corporation without partiality toward any ideology.

During the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) noted:

"By ranking pages, Google's search always favors one page over another. This process, however, turns much more sinister with allegations that Google manipulates the algorithm to favor the political party it likes."

...California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren also had some questions for Pichai on how Google's search engine works.

"If you Google the word idiot under images, a picture of Donald Trump comes up - I just did that. How would that happen?" she asked the Google CEO.

"We try to rank and find the best results for that query." Pichai replied.

"So it's not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we're going to show the user?" Lofgren said.

However, a study from Pew Research reveals concerns of bias are bipartisan. Researchers found that 85 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats believe social media companies intentionally censor viewpoints they find objectionable.

Even so, Pichai denied the charges.

"I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way," Pichai said in his opening remarks. "To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests. We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions - and we have no shortage of them among our own employees."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was equally dismissive, calling the notion a "delusion" and a "right-wing conspiracy theory." ...

Critics say there's so much evidence, in fact, that there's now a whole movie about the controversial issue. It's called "The Creepy Line" (see video under "Resources" below)

In the 80-minute documentary, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explains that "Google policy on a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

Furthermore, a leaked video published by Breitbart showed some Google executives seemingly lamenting the 2016 election results.

"We saw how upset some of the top people in Google were, and for you to come in here and tell us, 'There is no political bias in Google,' tells us you're either being dishonest - I don't wanna think that - or you don't have a clue how politically biased Google is," Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) charged.

Meanwhile, in a National Review op-ed, Kyle Smith explains how the tech giant keeps track of users both on and offline using what he calls a "surveillance business model."

"Google knows more about you than your spouse does," he wrote. "It even has drafts of emails you didn't send. Oh, and they have the power to block information from reaching you, too."

"Just by bumping undesirable stuff to the second page of search, Google can more or less make it disappear," he continued. "Hey, good thing Google doesn't have any overt political or cultural preferences you might not agree with, right?"

The Google chief also faced tough questions over whether his company was planning to build a search engine for China. The tech giant pulled out of that country in 2010 in a high-profile dispute with its communist government's policies.

Pichai indicated Google had no plans to do so "right now."
Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from CBN.

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Google CEO denies any bias in the company

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(by Crystal Woodall and Amber C. Strong, CBN News) WASHINGTON - GOP lawmakers pressed Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday over allegations of employees' anti-conservative bias and how that may unduly influence the company's business practices. ... Pichai told House Judiciary Committee members he runs the corporation without partiality toward any ideology.

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CA law allows college athletes to be paid for endorsements

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CA law allows college athletes to be paid for endorsements

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(by David K. Li, NBC News) - [Defying the NCAA, California's governor signed a first-in-the-nation law Monday that will let college athletes hire agents and make money from endorsements - a move that could upend amateur sports in the U.S. and trigger a legal challenge.].

The legislation, which takes effect in 2023, allows student-athletes to sign endorsement deals and prohibits the governing body of college sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and the schools from [revoking scholarships or] banning those compensated athletes.

NCAA rules strictly prohibit athletes from profiting in any way from their sports, and the law would still bar schools from directly paying athletes.

"Colleges reap billions from student athletes but block them from earning a single dollar. That's a bankrupt model," Gov. Newsom tweeted after signing the bill.

The NCAA acknowledged in a statement Monday that its current regulations on amateurism will need to change, but said California's new law won't help.

"As a membership organization, the NCAA agrees changes are needed to continue to support student-athletes but improvement needs to happen on a national level through the NCAA's rules-making process," the governing body said. ...

Newsom signed the bill while appearing on NBA icon LeBron James' HBO show, "The Shop: Uninterrupted." [James' 14-year-old son is a closely watched basketball prospect in Los Angeles and will be 18 when the measure takes effect.]

The governor predicted it would prompt dozens of other states to pass similar legislation and force the NCAA's hand.

"It's going to change college sports for the better by having now the interests finally of the athletes on par with the interests of the institutions," Newsom said. "Now we're re-balancing that power arrangement.

James, who went pro straight out of high school, urged the NCAA to come to the bargaining table and find a way to compensate athletes who generate millions of dollars, especially in football and basketball.

...While the NCAA is the governing body of college sports, membership is voluntary. So conceivably, if schools are forced out of competition by the NCAA, they could simply opt out to form their own new leagues.

Lisa Masteralexis, who teaches sports management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the upcoming battle on this issue could embolden high-revenue, so-called "Power 5" leagues - the Big Ten, Southeastern, Pacific-12 [see "Background" below], Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conferences - to create their own athlete compensation packages.

And if they did so, those big-money schools and leagues could break away on their own, bumping the NCAA from the business of big-time college sports altogether.

"The power conferences have leverage," Masteralexis told NBC News shortly after Newsom signed the bill. "If you look at the Power 5 conferences, they have enough money and media attention, some with their own TV networks, they can drive the bus."

Legislation signed Monday by Newsom seemed to fall in line with the public's general view of compensating college athletes.

A Morning Consult poll published this past spring showed that Americans oppose direct school-to-athlete pay, 45 percent to 32 percent.

But when asked if student-athletes should be able to sign deals with brands, respondents said yes by 47 percent to 35 percent.

And asked if college athletes should be allowed to profit off their names or images on video games and other products, respondents again said yes by 52 percent to 31 percent.

The Golden State is home to dozens of schools that play top-flight Division I sports, including Pacific-12 Conference institutions such as the University of Southern California, Stanford University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.
[The NCAA, a non-profit organization, reported $1.1 billion in revenue in 2017. It's president Mark Emmert received a salary of $2.4 million in 2016]. Published at NBCNews .com on September 30, 2019. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from NBC.

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CA law allows college athletes to be paid for endorsements

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(by David K. Li, NBC News) - [Defying the NCAA, California's governor signed a first-in-the-nation law Monday that will let college athletes hire agents and make money from endorsements - a move that could upend amateur sports in the U.S. and trigger a legal challenge.].

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Georgia’s new paper ballot voting system

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Georgia’s new paper ballot voting system

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(Compiled from reports at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marietta Daily Journal and ThinkProgress) - The first Georgia voters to test the state's new voting machines cast their ballots last Monday, with some voters praising the addition of a paper ballot and others saying the voting equipment was more cumbersome than what they're accustomed to using.

Election officials rolled out the new voting system in six counties for local elections as in-person early voting began October 14. The $107 million system, which combines touchscreens and computer-printed paper ballots, will be used by all voters statewide on March 24 for the presidential primary.

Georgia is replacing its 17-year-old digital voting system, which didn't include a paper ballot.

As they did with the old system, voters will make their choices on touchscreens. But with the new system, each touchscreen is attached to a printer that produces a paper ballot. Voters can then review their selections before inserting their ballots into a scanning machines.

In August, a federal judge ordered the state of Georgia to stop using paperless touchscreen voting machines ahead of the 2020 election, citing security concerns.

In a 153-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg said that hand-marked paper ballots must be used if a new system wasn't in place by next year's presidential primaries.

Election integrity advocates argued in a 2017 lawsuit that paperless touchscreen voting machines in use since 2002 were vulnerable to hacking and could not be audited.

However, in a decision on the 2017 lawsuit issued last year, Judge Totenberg determined that switching to a paper ballot system for the 2018 and 2019 elections would have proved to be too complicated logistically.

Voters who cast ballots in the first few days of the early voting period generally had a "positive experience" using new machines the state government was testing in Bartow County in this year's municipal elections, elections officials said.

The Georgia Secretary of State's office is testing the new Dominion Voting Systems machines in Bartow and five other counties this year before using them statewide in Georgia's Presidential Preference Primary in March 2020.

The machines feature a ballot-marking device into which voters insert a "smartcard." They then make their choices on a touch screen tablet, review them on the screen, print a paper ballot and place it into an optical scanner for counting.

The paper ballots are used for verifying and auditing results, according to the Georgia Secretary of State's office.

Assistant election supervisor Cheryl Billard of Bartow County Elections and Voter Registration said Bartow elections office staff members generally had not needed to assist voters with the new machines "once they understand the basic premise."

"The only thing that's really different is that they now get a printed ballot that they then scan," Billard said. "But, as far as the touch screen, it's so similar that they seem to be very happy with it."

Election Supervisor Joseph Kirk said voters he saw using the new machines appear "to understand the new system intuitively."

"The only thing "we have to remind them of is to remove the voter card from the ballot marking device," Kirk said.

Compiled from articles by Mark Niesse, AJC .com (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) on Oct. 14, Tom Spigolon, MDJOnline .com (Marietta Daily Journal) on Oct. 17 and Rebekah Entralgo, ThinkProgress .com on Aug. 15, 2019.

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Georgia's new paper ballot voting system

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(Compiled from reports at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marietta Daily Journal and ThinkProgress) - The first Georgia voters to test the state's new voting machines cast their ballots last Monday, with some voters praising the addition of a paper ballot and others saying the voting equipment was more cumbersome than what they're accustomed to using.

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Addicted to cellphones, South Korean teens enter government-run detox centers

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Addicted to cellphones, South Korean teens enter government-run detox centers

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(by Sophie Jeong, CNN) - It was 4 a.m. when 16-year-old Yoo Chae-rin realized she had been on her phone for 13 hours. In less than three hours, she had to be up for school.

The South Korean high school student knew she had a problem, so she enrolled in a government-run camp for teenagers who can't put their phones down.

"Even when I knew in my head I should stop using my smartphone, I just kept going," Yoo said. "I couldn't stop, so I'd be on it until dawn."

South Korea has one of the highest ownership of smartphones in the world. More than 98% of South Korean teens used one in 2018, according to government figures - and many are showing signs of addiction.

Last year, around 30% of South Korean children aged 10 to 19 were classed as "overdependent" on their phones, according to the Ministry of Science and Information and Communications Technology (MSIT). That means they experienced "serious consequences" due to their smartphone use, including a decline in self-control.

It's those children - like Yoo - who qualify for a place on government-run camps to treat internet addiction. The program started in 2007 and expanded in 2015 to include smartphones.

This year, South Korea's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family held 16 camps across the country for about 400 middle and high school students. For some parents, it was a last resort.

"I think they send kids here because of their desperate desire to get an expert's help," said Yoo Soon-duk, Director of Gyeonggi-do Youth Counseling & Welfare Center, which runs a camp for teens in the northern Gyeonggi province.

Yoo had been an average student in middle school, but by high school she had sunk to the bottom of the class. She would stay up late, scrolling through her Facebook feed, playing with South Korean camera app Snow and talking with friends on instant messaging service KakaoTalk.

"I felt like my sense of reality was fading," said Yoo. "Even when I had a fun and productive day (with my friends), it felt like a dream."

Her father, Yoo Jae-ho, became increasingly worried about her. "There wasn't much conversation among the family," he said. "If I talked to her about her phone, there would be an argument."

He set a time limit of two hours a day for smartphone use, but his daughter still found ways to get around it.

It was Yoo Chae-rin's idea to join the camp in July. At the gate, she handed in her phone for the first time in years and started a 12-day detox.

South Korean internet addiction camps are free, aside for a 100,000 won ($84) fee for food. Boys and girls are sent to separate camps, and each caters for around 25 students.

At camp, the teenagers are encouraged to participate in scavenger hunts, arts and crafts activities, and sports events. They also have to attend compulsory one-on-one, group and family counseling sessions to discuss their phone usage. Then, for 30 minutes before sleep, the campers meditate.

Many of the camps are held in youth training centers, away from the city, in green, leafy settings to help the young addicts switch off. Yoo's camp was held in the city of Cheonan at the National Youth Center of Korea, which has an indoor swimming pool and sports ground.

Camp director Yoo Soon-duk said for the first few days the teenagers have an "agonized look" on their faces. "From the third day, you can see how they change," she said. "They (start to) enjoy hanging out with friends."

...While this camp is for teenagers, there are separate camps for elementary students, and the National Center for Youth Internet Addiction Treatment offers programs during the semester.

South Korea is not the only country where teenagers are hooked on phones - worries are growing about excessive smartphone use worldwide.

In 2015, 16% of 15-year-olds in OECD countries spent more than six hours online each day outside school hours, according to a report published in 2017. On weekends, the figure rose to 26%. .....
CNN's Lee Ji-su, Park Ji-min, Kim Na-yeong and Shin Jae-eun contributed reporting. Published at CNN .com. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from CNN.

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Addicted to cellphones, South Korean teens enter government-run detox centers

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(by Sophie Jeong, CNN) - It was 4 a.m. when 16-year-old Yoo Chae-rin realized she had been on her phone for 13 hours. In less than three hours, she had to be up for school. The South Korean high school student knew she had a problem, so she enrolled in a government-run camp for teenagers who can't put their phones down.

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Why you should stop using TikTok. It’s not what you think.

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Why you should stop using TikTok. It’s not what you think.

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The lawmakers urged US intelligence officials to investigate possible threats the app poses, its data collection practices, and if the Chinese government influences what content American users see on the app.

The letter is part of government efforts to review the potential security threats of Chinese technology.

"With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore," wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, (D-NY), and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).

"Given these concerns, we ask that the Intelligence Community conduct an assessment of the national security risks posed by TikTok and other China-based content platforms operating in the U.S. and brief Congress on these findings," Schumer and Cotton wrote in the letter, which was made public Thursday.

Schumer and Cotton warned Thursday that the Chinese government may compel TikTok to give it the data TikTok collects, which includes "user content and communications, IP address, location-related data, device identifiers, cookies, metadata, and other sensitive personal information."

"Without an independent judiciary to review requests made by the Chinese government for data or other actions, there is no legal mechanism for Chinese companies to appeal if they disagree with a request," the senators wrote. Even though TikTok says that it operates outside China and keeps U.S data in the United States, [TikTok parent company] ByteDance must follow Chinese laws and turn over any data requested by the government, they added.

"TikTok reportedly censors materials deemed politically sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party," they said. This included "content related to the recent Hong Kong protests, as well as references to Tiananmen Square, Tibetan and Taiwanese independence, and the treatment of Uighurs."

"Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free-expression values," Zuckerberg said in an address at Georgetown University last week. "There's no guarantee these values will win out."

TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based tech company ByteDance, launched in 2016, and has been downloaded more than 1 billion times worldwide. TikTok lets users create short, looping clips - usually music, dance or comedy videos. The app spawned an entire industry of viral stars and influencers, and it is even used by several Democratic presidential candidates and major U.S. news organizations.

The [China]-based company acknowledged the lawmakers' concerns in a lengthy statement Thursday afternoon "to set the record straight."

"At TikTok, we take these issues incredibly seriously as well," the statement reads. "We are committed to transparency and accountability in how we support our TikTok users in the US and around the world."

The statement continues, "We store all TikTok US user data in the United States, with backup redundancy in Singapore. Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law."

As for concerns the Chinese government has a say in the app's content, the company said:

"TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period."

But Schumer's not buying it, tweeting:

"It's owned by a Beijing[China]-based tech company. It's required to adhere to Chinese law. That means it can be [forced] to cooperate with intelligence work controlled by China's Communist Party."

Compiled from reports at New York Post, Bloomberg News, CBS News, LA Times, Reuters on October 24, 2019.

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Why you should stop using TikTok. It's not what you think.

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The lawmakers urged US intelligence officials to investigate possible threats the app poses, its data collection practices, and if the Chinese government influences what content American users see on the app. The letter is part of government efforts to review the potential security threats of Chinese technology.

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N.J. schools install detectors to stop kids from vaping in bathrooms

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N.J. schools install detectors to stop kids from vaping in bathrooms

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(by Brianna Kudisch, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) - In the latest effort to stop students from [vaping] between classes, some New Jersey high schools are turning to a new form of security to act as a deterrent: vaping detectors.

South Plainfield High School installed "several" detectors in the bathrooms and other locations on Friday, Jan. 24, according to interim principal Robert Diehl. He declined to say exactly how many detectors are being installed or the specific locations, but said the bathrooms are a priority.

"What we're doing is we're trying to create a comfortable environment and a safe environment for all students," Diehl told NJ Advance Media. "This maximizes our efforts to keep our students healthy and safe."

The HALO vape sensors are highly sensitive and pick up different elements in the air, including humidity, temperature, and several chemicals, Diehl said. He said they wanted to keep the specifics of the detectors confidential, but essentially, they pick up chemicals in the air and send notifications to multiple administrators.

The detectors-which cost $1,000 each and were bought from A+ Technology & Security Solutions-are also tamper-resistant, according to Diehl. If someone attempts to tamper with them, a sound alert goes off and a notification goes out.

"They're hard to tamper with," he said. "If you touch them, there's an alert that goes out immediately and the location is specific."

The money for the detectors came from the district's security budget, he said.

Both Diehl and Noreen Lishak, the district's superintendent, emphasized South Plainfield doesn't have a specific problem, but is looking at solutions for the general problem of vaping.

"Although only a handful of students have received consequences for vaping in school, we believe even a few is too many," Lishak wrote in an email to NJ Advance Media. "Our intention is for the vape detectors to serve as a deterrent so that we can continue to foster good health and wellness in our student body."

Other districts are doing the same. Sparta High School installed detectors earlier this year in two of its bathrooms, and plans to add more, principal Ronnie Spring said.

Spring echoed Lishak's view that the detectors are meant as deterrents, and he said they've been "extremely effective" in reducing the amount of vaping in bathrooms.

Glen Rock High School is also planning to install the detectors later this spring, but more as a pilot program, with the option to add more detectors if proved effective. The district plans to buy the FlySense detectors from Soter Technologies, the other major company that sells vaping detectors, principal John Arlotta said.

The school district in Cranford started installing the detectors in the high school the first week of January and anticipates finishing installation by late February, Superintendent Scott Rubin said.

"The hope is that if they're successful in stopping /deterring vaping," Rubin wrote in an email. "The Cranford Board of Education will look to budget for additional detectors throughout the District."

.....
Published at NJ .com by NJ Advance Media. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from NJ .com.

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N.J. schools install detectors to stop kids from vaping in bathrooms

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(by Brianna Kudisch, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) - In the latest effort to stop students from [vaping] between classes, some New Jersey high schools are turning to a new form of security to act as a deterrent: vaping detectors. South Plainfield High School installed "several" detectors in the bathrooms and other locations on Friday, Jan.

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No Cell Signal, No Wi-Fi. Growing Up Inside America’s ‘Quiet Zone’

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No Cell Signal, No Wi-Fi. Growing Up Inside America’s ‘Quiet Zone’

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No Cell Signal, No Wi-Fi. Growing Up Inside America's 'Quiet Zone'

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(by Dan Levin, New York Times) GREEN BANK, W.Va. - ...High school senior Charity Warder has an iPhone, but she uses it mostly as a clock and a calculator. She makes phone calls from a land line, and she rarely texts her friends. Texting and driving? "It's not a thing here," she said.

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Media Outlets Mislead Readers about COVID-19 Data

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Media Outlets Mislead Readers about COVID-19 Data

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Example of Media Bias:

(by A.G. Hamilton, May 7) - The public overwhelmingly relies on the press to provide them with accurate information and proper context. When it comes to COVID-19, many press outlets are consistently failing to do that. In fact, the reporting on data related to the epidemic has increasingly led to conclusions that aren't accurate and an audience that is misinformed.

The perfect example was an article from The Hill that told readers Texas was seeing "thousands of new coronavirus cases days after state's stay-at-home order lifted." Seems rather obvious that The Hill started with a view that moving into a re-opening phase is a mistake and things are getting worse, and then looked for a way to support that conclusion. This claim managed to mislead readers in two key ways:

(1) Given the incubation period and a lag in testing, new cases that are identified on a certain day are unlikely to have any relationship to policies implemented days earlier.

(2) "New cases" is a very misleading metric because it does not account for increases in testing. The rate of positive tests in Texas has declined significantly.

Mainstream outlets have attempted to tie new cases and deaths to recent re-opening actions in Florida, Georgia, and Texas, despite it being clear that any spike in cases or deaths would not be apparent for weeks after such policy changes. Such actions could lead to a spike in new cases, but trying to tie them to those seen right now is clearly incorrect.

In addition, members of the press continue to [combine] reporting of new cases with a growth in the rate of new cases.

The New York Times and Axios have both recently published charts showing large increases in new cases around the country when New York is excluded from the data (though the latter has since updated its article containing such a chart to account for criticism similar to my own). Those outlets and other members of the press then wrongly used the charts to justify claims that the number of new cases is not going down and the "U.S. curve isn't bending."

These charts do not account for massive increases in testing throughout the country. Charting the same data (Chart 1) relative to testing increase (Chart 2) and in the form of positive testing rates (Chart 3) makes it clear that the rate of new cases is actually decreasing.

The same outlets that raised concerns about the United States lacking sufficient testing are now interpreting the data in a way that punishes testing increases.

The result is that many readers have been misinformed into believing that the situation is getting worse, which has the unintended consequences of feeding into false claims that the actions we have taken so far were ineffective.

In attempting to find support for a narrative that things are getting worse and red states (Republican majority, as opposed to blue states [Democrat majority]) are making a mistake in considering moving to a re-opening phase, these outlets have resorted to misleading their readers.

If media outlets expect to be trusted on this subject, they need to present the data in an accurate way and with proper context instead of looking for ways to support their pre-determined conclusions. (by A.G. Hamilton, May 7, National Review)

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Media Outlets Mislead Readers about COVID-19 Data

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Example of Media Bias: (by A.G. Hamilton, May 7) - The public overwhelmingly relies on the press to provide them with accurate information and proper context. When it comes to COVID-19, many press outlets are consistently failing to do that.

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(by John Stossel, New Hampshire Union Leader) - Recently, many politicians were in such a hurry to ban plastic bags.

California and Hawaii banned them, then New York. Then Oregon, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont passed laws against them. More than 400 cities did, too.

Why? Because plastic bags are evil, didn't you know?

"Look at the damage done by plastic bags! It is everywhere!" complained New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

A Washington state senator cited "videos of animals choked by plastics, tangled in garbage!"

So what should we use instead of plastic? Cloth bags! They're reusable! "Certainly the way to go!" said New Jersey's assembly speaker.

But now, suddenly, politicians are canceling their bans. Instead, they're banning the once praised reusable bags.

It's because of COVID-19, of course.

Reusable bags already brought bacteria into stores. We're supposed to wash them, but almost no one does. Studies found reusable bags crawling with dangerous bacteria. After plastic bags were banned in San Francisco, food poisoning deaths increased sharply.

But environmental groups, like Greenpeace, call those disease fears "misinformation."

"There are no studies or evidence that reusable bags are transmitting viruses," says Alex Truelove of the Public Interest Research Group, in my new video.

He's right. There are no human studies, but COVID-19 is so new. Millions of piglets died from swine coronavirus. The agriculture department concluded that reusable feed bags were probably the cause.

Still, even now, some politicians can't wait to ban plastic again. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says "as soon as this crisis is over we'll go back to all paper bags and reusable bags."

"Politicians are always just looking for something to do," complains supermarket executive Andrea Catsimatidis.

She points out that paper bags cost five times what plastic costs. "When you're talking billions of bags, it really adds up!"

And paper bags don't hold as much. They rip.

Plastic is more convenient. Why must politicians take away what's convenient?

"Over two-thirds of everything we use is not recycled or composted and ends up in a landfill," complains Truelove.

So what?

People think America is running out of room for landfills, but that's not true.

"All America's trash for the next century would fit in one landfill just 18 miles square," says environmental economist Ross McKitrick. Landfills take up so little space that "if you look the air you wouldn't even be able to see where landfills are."

And modern landfills hardly pollute. They're surrounded by layers of clay and plastic that keep nasty stuff in the garbage from leaking out.

But what about all that plastic in the ocean?

Plastic bags are sometimes eaten by animals. Some sea turtles mistake the bags for jellyfish and then starve. Islands of floating garbage have formed in the Pacific Ocean.

Green groups have convinced Americans that we are to blame.

But we aren't! Even if you litter-and today, fewer Americans do-your litter is unlikely to end up in an ocean.

Almost all the plastic in oceans comes from Asia and Africa. Less than 1 percent comes from North America.

In other words, banning plastic bags in America will accomplish roughly ... nothing.

What it will do is inconvenience Americans and make some of us sick.

Truelove says, "We should ... set an example for the rest of the world."

"That's posturing," replies McKitrick. "The rest of the world isn't looking to see what you do with your Starbucks cup.

"If we are concerned about other countries' waste going into their river systems," he adds, "there are better things we can do. We can share technology with them so they process their waste better. That's better than imposing on consumers' tiresome inconveniences in hopes that it will somehow change behavior on the other side of the planet."

Politicians "looking for something to do" routinely do more harm than good.
John Stossel is an Award-winning news correspondent and best-selling author. His latest book is "No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed."Published May 7, 2020 at unionleader .com. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced on other websites without permission from the New Hampshire Union Leader.

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(by John Stossel, New Hampshire Union Leader) - Recently, many politicians were in such a hurry to ban plastic bags. California and Hawaii banned them, then New York. Then Oregon, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont passed laws against them. More than 400 cities did, too. Why? Because plastic bags are evil, didn't you know?

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Store makes clear face coverings for hearing-impaired manager

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Store makes clear face coverings for hearing-impaired manager

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(by CBS 21 News Tuesday, May 12th 2020) - When a manager of a Pennsylvania Best Buy learned that the company would require face masks for employees as a COVID-19 safety measure, he grew concerned.

Dennis Parry of Easton, PA is hearing impaired and relies on reading lips to communicate with employees and customers in his role as a Best Buy general manager. Face coverings would make that nearly impossible for Parry.

"When I first heard about the change, I felt like I was going to be a hindrance to the team," he said. "I wanted to make sure I'd be able to communicate with my staff."

Best Buy says they immediately began working to find a solution that would meet Parry's needs while keeping employees and customers safe.

"As soon as I saw the request, I connected with Dennis." said Shannon Albu, senior manager of field brand strategy. "I told him that his simple request would inspire a completely new perspective, and no matter what it takes, we'd find a way for him to feel connected and have the ability to communicate."

After some research, Albu learned that others were making a clear window by using vinyl to fill a cutout in the face covering.

Employee volunteers and Sarah Cox, Best Buy's retail operations associate director, made the first batch of masks and sent them to Dennis and his team.

The masks made it to Dennis' store just a few days after his initial request and they immediately made it easier for him to communicate with his team.

"While I wear hearing aids, I rely on the ability to see people's lips to communicate," he said. "The masks help me be a leader who works side by side with his staff."

Watch a similar story from San Diego, CA:

For further information, watch a May 11 interview with audiologist Renee Koffend of Guam Hearing Doctors:

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Store makes clear face coverings for hearing-impaired manager

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(by CBS 21 News Tuesday, May 12th 2020) - When a manager of a Pennsylvania Best Buy learned that the company would require face masks for employees as a COVID-19 safety measure, he grew concerned. Dennis Parry of Easton, PA is hearing impaired and relies on reading lips to communicate with employees and customers in his role as a Best Buy general manager.