PRI's The World - Tech Report
The World's weekly Technology Podcast brings you all the latest and greatest news from the field of global technology.
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'Dazzling and mystifying' new features detected on the surface of Pluto
Newly released high resolution images of the surface of Pluto ...
Newly released high resolution images of the surface of Pluto have revealed an unexpected "rippled" geography covering large areas of the dwarf planet’s surface. The high-definition images are the latest to be released from NASA’s New Horizons mission, which has described the newest discoveries as “dazzling and mystifying.” New Horizons’ Bill McKinnon said that the newly discovered features were “a unique and perplexing landscape” which stretch over hundreds of miles: “It looks more like tree bark or dragon scales than geology.” The ripples are not the only details added by the latest images. Other photographs have revealed that apparently smooth areas of the planet are in fact dippled with dune-like formations several hundred meters across. According to Professor Monica Grady of Britain's Open University, the images are changing and deepening our understanding of the dwarf planet in new ways, particularly regardings its large ice plains. “It’s really strange. You don’t see any craters — so the ice looks as if Pluto has been resurfaced. And that means the ice has been melting or changing in some way. Pluto should not have any heat source in it to allow these things.” New Horizons continues to send back data, and is also preparing for its next encounter: a meeting in 2019 with "PT1," a rocky object up to 25 miles across in an area known as the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt.
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A short story about the long history of the Popemobile
Pope Francis is in America. He arrived at Joint Base ...
Pope Francis is in America. He arrived at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington Tuesday, on an Alitalia flight from Cuba. Waiting for him on the ramp wasn't an elaborate limosuine or even the trademark Popemobile, but rather a humble 2015 Fiat 500L, on lone from the Vatican's Apostolic Nunciature (essentially the Vatican's embassy in the US). The vehicle also took him to the White House Wednesday morning to meet with President Barack Obama. But later, he started touring the nation's capital in the 2015 incarnation of the Popemobile: a custom-made, open-sided white, Jeep Wrangler. The pope has come a long way from the days when he was carted around town on a sedan chair carried on the shoulders of a dozen loyal servants. In the 19th century, a gilded horse and carriage was the thing. Horsepower — of the four-legged kind — was the preferred mode of transportation into the 1920s. “The first car was actually given to the Pope in 1909,” says Emily Rueb, who put together a special feature on papal transportation for the New York Times. “And it was given by the archbishop of New York. But he turned it down. He wasn’t ready for motor transportation.” Pope Francis waves from the popemobile during a papal parade in Washington September 23, 2015. Pope Francis is making his first visit to the United States. Credit: Alex Brandon/Reuters “So it wasn’t really until 1929,” adds Rueb, “when Pope Pius XI received another car, by Detroit-based auto-maker Graham-Paige, and that was sort of the beginning of motorized Papal transportation.” The big changes came in the 1950s, when popes started to travel internationally, starting with John XXIII. He had the first car with an elevated throne seat at the back of an open-top car: a Mercedes-Benz 300D. “But what’s more recognizable for us as the Popemobile,” says Rueb, ”are these all-terrain vehicles that started appearing in the 1970s, and that was with Pope Paul VI.” Paul was first pope to fly, and the first to leave Europe. “It was really a response,” adds Rueb, “to the need for the Catholic Church to respond to its larger audiences. When the pope started traveling internationally and holding large processionals through the streets, especially here in New York and other cities around the world, vehicle makers and the Vatican needed to create cars that would allow the Pope to drive through the streets, wave to his people, creating more of the Popemobile experience we think of today where you see the Pope standing in the back and waving.” But it was under Pope John Paul II that the Popemobile came into a form we would recognize today. He was famously shot and injured while riding in a white 1980 Fiat 1107-Nuova Campagnola. After that, the pope was typically encased in bullet-proof glass. But Francis has ended that tradition. The Wrangler he’s riding in through Washington is open on three sides. Francis says he does not like being inside what he calls a ‘sardine can.’ An illustrated history of popemobiles, from horse-drawn carriages to bulletproof 'pope boxes' http://t.co/H1QyZ1KLvn pic.twitter.com/o0vz7rgpG6 — Post Graphics (@PostGraphics) September 21, 2015
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Volkswagen didn't engineer a fix to its dirty diesel fumes: It faked out regulators
Volkswagen has done for diesel engines what Lance Armstrong did ...
Volkswagen has done for diesel engines what Lance Armstrong did for competitive cycling. And regulators, as with Armstrong's cycling competitors, are asking: Have other automakers cheated as well? The world's biggest carmaker could face $18 billion in penalties from the Environmental Protection Agency for an amazing evasion of the law: Designing software for its diesel cars that tricked emissions inspectors and made it seem like the cars were far more environmentally friendly than they actually are. Forty times more environmentally friendly for still dirty, still noxious emissions. "Just to put this in perspective — this is like that 215-calorie Snickers bar having 2,150-8,600 calories instead,'' wrote University of California Berkeley professor Maximillian Auffhammer. "This is not one student cheating on an intermediate microeconomics exam and thinking (s)he would get away with it. This is the world’s largest car manufacturer intentionally deceiving the federal and state governments by gaming their enforcement strategy." In addition to fines, the automaker is facing a massive recall and the Department of Justice also announced its own investigation into Volkswagen's actions. Late Monday, the Detroit News reported the diesel investigation was expanding to the 3-liter V6 diesel engine used on Audis and the Porsche Cayenne.. Consumer lawsuits are also expected. “It appears that they used something that’s being described as a defeat device,“ says automotive reporter Paul Eisenstein, who’s written about this story at DetroitBureau.com. “Its not an actual device, it not like they put some black box under the hood. But what they did was they wrote in software into the engine controller that operates the engine and all the pollution control technology. As a result it was able to figure out when the cars were being tested and when they were, it toughened up the emissions control system so it put out less particulates and less oxides of nitrogen, which are related to smog, and then when the cars were back on the road apparently a lot of those control systems were deactivated.” The result is a lot of pollution that doesn’t get picked up during annual inspections and emission testing. The illegal software was specifically made and installed in vehicles with 2.0-liter diesel engines from 2009 to 2015 in the Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat models, as well as the Audi A3, according to the EPA. The announcement sent Volkswagen's stock price tumbling 20 percent Monday, it's biggest-ever one day decline. Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn apologized on Sunday. "I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public. We will cooperate fully with the responsible agencies, with transparency and urgency, to clearly, openly and completely establish all of the facts of this case," he said. "We at Volkswagen will do everything that must be done in order to re-establish the trust that so many people have placed in us, and we will do everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused." The company said it launched an internal investigation. But there's a question now whether other automakers used the same trickery. Eisenstein says federal and state investigators are “looking at the software used by all sorts of manufacturers to make sure this sort of deception isn’t more prevalent than we realized.”
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Sudanese American parents look at Ahmed Mohamed and think of their own kids
Motasim Elhassan is a Sudanese American semiconductor engineer in Sacramento. ...
Motasim Elhassan is a Sudanese American semiconductor engineer in Sacramento. Elhassan says he cried when he first heard the news about the Sudanese American teenager in Texas, Ahmed Mohamed, who was detained for bringing a digital clock he made to school. “I was surprised it hit me that hard actually." Elhassan says it’s probably because his 20-month-old son is also named Ahmed. He’s also a Sudanese Muslim boy in America, and already loves electronics like daddy. And Ahmed Mohamed’s story of being falsely accused of making a bomb jolted him awake to how society may see his son when he’s a little older. “The first thing you see is a black kid. Then you learn about his name,” Elhassan says. He adds that being black in America, and being Muslim after September 11 potentially raises uncomfortable questions about certain professions, like pilot or engineer. “Is there going to be a limit or red line depending on your religious background; you’re not going to be able to get into that field?” he asks. Another Sudanese American scientist, Mohamed Awad Elhassan (no relation), knows that feeling. He’s a senior device engineer in Oakland. And he also worries about his daughter, Sameira, who’s just a year old. “Both her mother and I want to introduce her to STEM fields throughout her life. But even beyond that, I just wonder how she will be perceived, what stereotypes she will have applied to her because of her name and appearance,” Mohamed Elhassan says. “It makes me so incredibly sad to think that the place I moved to because I thought she could grow up and be judged on her own merits may be sliding towards the same awfulness as in the 'old world.'" Mohamed Elhassan adds that the Texas teenager, whose tinkering got him in trouble at school, reminds him of himself when he was younger. “I had that insatiable desire to learn how things worked and got excited when I did. That's the part that really got me: he was so obviously proud that he'd figured out something and wanted to share that with his teachers and schoolmates.” Many have wondered if Ahmed Mohamed would have been suspected of bringing a bomb to school, had he been white or Asian, instead of African American with an Arabic name. Mohamed Elhassan says probably not. “My mind went to the young [white] fellow who was trying to build a fusion reactor in his garage and would order nuclear material. That kid isn't in jail; he's not getting humiliated and hauled off in cuffs in front of his colleagues and teachers.” Mohamed Elhassan says the quotes in the news stories from the teachers and the police in Texas only reinforced his certainty that it wasn't just the clock. “It was the black Muslim boy with the clock that was the problem.” Motasim Elhassan and his son, Ahmed, who's already interested in electronics like his dad. Credit: Courtesy of Motasim Elhassan Part of the problem, says Motasim Elhassan, is that the common perception in the US is that the smart science nerd is white or Asian or South Asian — not black. And as a black engineer, he admits there’s some truth to that. “I’ve been in this industry for 18 years,” he says. “I can count on one hand the number of African American engineers I met.” After the clock story and the hashtag #ISTANDWITHAHMED went viral on social media this week, Sudanese from around the world began online conversations about raising kids in America. It was like a giant online support group, Motasim Elhassan says. “Technology is amazing! It enabled everybody from every corner to put their two cents [in] and make a difference — your voice along with your community and across the world on the other side of Earth, you can join them. They can feel your emotions, your support.” Motasim Elhassan was especially heartened by the outpouring of support from leading American figures. “Seeing the president, the CEOs of Facebook and other companies, I couldn't watch because my eyes were welling with tears.” To him, it was validation. As an immigrant, what he believed was a great country was still that. So what will Motasim Elhassan tell his Ahmed as he grows up? “I’m going to try to basically give him a realistic idea about his situation. He lives in a great country, part of a minority group being a Muslim, being African American, and he has to stand on his own feet. He cannot make excuses — even if he has to work harder than the average person, he needs to do that,” he says. “I’ll try not to scare him.” Motasim Elhassan goes on to say the success of Sudanese-American boys and girls in the community around his son will inspire him, too. “We have one kid just joined MIT, a couple in Harvard. It’s amazing,” he says. “The Sudanese American families are doing more than fine. And I'm glad because my son is going to see those examples. When you show the kid that he can do it or she can do it, that's the biggest motivation I think. They see that, and it's all good.”
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Philippines project turns 'ghost' fishing nets into carpets
Just off the coast of tiny Guindacpan island in the ...
Just off the coast of tiny Guindacpan island in the central Philippines, a half dozen men in torn T-shirts and homemade flippers hold their breath and dive off a wooden boat to the sea floor 20 feet below. They’re fishermen, raised to live off the sea like generations before them. But when they pop up to the surface every few minutes, it’s not with their usual catch. On these dives, they’re bringing up old fishing nets, dripping in mud and tangled with broken corals and dying crabs. Lost and discarded nylon fishing nets like these are a huge problem around the world, estimated at roughly 10 percent of the millions of tons of plastic trash in the world’s oceans. And the Philippines is one the worst offenders. But these fishermen may be helping to turn the tide. Nylon nets like these on a modest fishing boat on Guindacpan are crucial to the fishing economy of the Philippines, but when they tear away or are abandoned in the sea they can become deadly for marine life. So-called "ghost nets" are a global problem but especially problemmatic in the Philippines. Credit: Aurora Almendral “The nets that get thrown in the sea, it turns out they have a severe effect on the ocean,” explains fisherman Julius Sabal. “We sea people didn’t know before what these nets did.” What they now know is that these ghost nets, as they’re often called, sit on the ocean floor and snag and kill marine life, including some of what would be the fishermen’s catch. It’s competition they can’t afford. The Philippine government estimates that subsistence fishermen already catch only ten percent of what they did 40 years ago. The ghost nets also have a big indirect impact on the coral-based ecosystems that the fish depend on. “The fish are also disappearing because the nets are killing the coral reefs,” Sabal says. “Because it turns out the coral reefs can’t breathe when this is piled on top of them.” Sabal and his fellow fishermen learned all this from the Zoological Society of London, a conservation group active in the Philippines. But their new understanding hasn’t made the fishermen decide just to pull up the nets in their free time. They’re getting paid for hauling up the old nets, as part of a program called NetWorks, run in part by the ZSL.' Like many of the Philippines more than 7,000 islands, Guindacpan is a tiny speck of land whose residents are highly dependent on the sea for their livelihoods. The Philippine government says the average catch of subsistence fishermen in the country has fallen by 90 per cent since the 1970s. Credit: Google Maps NetWorks tries to cut into the ballooning volume of marine debris worldwide by cutting fishermen a deal to turn old fishing nets into plastic carpet tiles. It spans the globe from the Philippines to Europe and the United States, but Amado Blanco, the program’s Philippines project manager, says the payments to fishermen are its most important element. Blanco says he’s often seen people’s enthusiasm for volunteer conservation projects lose out to the more pressing needs of daily life. But what can motivate people to support models like NetWorks in the long term, he says, “is that they can clean the environment and earn at the same time.” And the money to pay the fishermen ultimately comes from the nets themselves. The ghost nets recovered from the waters off Guindacpan are baled up and shipped off to become part of the global plastics supply chain — first to a recycling facility in Slovenia, then to factories in the US and Italy where they’re turned into carpeting tiles. Blanco says the program works because it feeds into a market that already exists, not because it makes people feel good to recover the nets or buy the carpet, or because some foundation supports it. You could call it a kind of conservation capitalism. “We don’t have to be dependent perpetually on funding from abroad or locally,” says Blanco. The goal of the program, launched here in the Philippines in 2012, is to become a self-sustaining business, and it has already been successful enough that it’s expanding across the Philippines, into nearby Thailand and Indonesia, and even to a lake in Cameroon, in Central Africa. Georgia-based carpet maker Interface, the company at the end of the pipeline, hopes it’s all just a start. Interface Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer Nigel Stansfield believes the NetWorks model can ultimately help solve the global plastic trash problem. “In my dreams I see us mining the plastic soup in the North Pacific and the Atlantic with a group of like-minded organizations and industries and recycle that soup back into a variety of different sources,” Stansfield says. “It's not beyond the wit of mankind to be able to do that. It's about will.” Stansfield says it’ll take time to work out a business model that would be able to operate on such a large scale. And even here in the Philippines, the problem is much bigger than just old fishing nets. The sea here is full of plastic: shopping bags, water bottles, raincoats, children’s toys, toothbrushes, cell phone cases, potato chip packets. NetWorks' Philippines director Amado Blanco says the key to the program is that local people "can clean the environment and earn at the same time." Fishermen and others on Guindacpan are paid for their work salvaging, cleaning and baling up the ghost nets out of the income from the sale of the nets to be recycled into carpeting. Credit: Aurora Almendral For now, the ghost nets hit the sweet spot for this new approach. They’re a bad problem, many are relatively easy to recover, and they can be recycled into marketable products. The people who buy and use the carpets the nets get turned into may never know they’re helping restore a working ecosystem halfway around the world, but the impact is tangible for the families of fishermen like Julius Sabal. “The money helps us buy school supplies,” Sabal says. “Pencils, pens, this helps out for our kids.” The effort also employs local women, who help collect and clean the old nets before selling them to the recyclers. The women have in turn set up savings and loan clubs to pool the money they earn from the work to disburse loans to help start small businesses or fund other short-term needs. And then there’s the impact on the sea itself, and the generations-old livelihoods people here have earned from it. “We’re taking the nets back from under the sea so that we can bring back the fish that used to be here,” Sabal says. “Because if we continue to neglect it, the oceans will be even worse for our children.”
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A deadly sandstorm is sweeping across the Middle East
A thick cloud of dust is passing through parts of ...
A thick cloud of dust is passing through parts of the Middle East. It's a sandstorm that's been blowing around since Monday. What a difference a day makes. Tremithousa, Cyprus before & after the #sandstorm. Photos by Gary Thomas. Dija pic.twitter.com/ROrRvrzAyL — BBC Weather (@bbcweather) September 9, 2015 A day after sweeping across Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, the storm reached Beirut on Tuesday. There have been reports of several deaths and hundreds who have gone to the hospital with breathing difficulties. Residents have been advised to stay indoors as the storm passed through the region. But there are photos of people who ventured on to the streets wore surgical masks. A pedestrian walks with a covered face during a sandstorm in Jerusalem September 8. Clouds of dust have engulfed Israel, Jordan and Cyprus. Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters Great picture from @NASAGoddardPix's @NASANPP satellite showing the extent of the #duststorm in the #Mediterranean pic.twitter.com/Edrka5OorR — Simon Proud (@simon_rp84) September 9, 2015 Staying indoors is not easy for residents of Lebanon's refugee camps — many of them from Syria. This sandstorm is making life more miserable for them than it was already. "Their living condition are already very bad and precarious," says Paul Yon, the head of Doctors without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières in Lebanon, "Since this sandstorm arrived, we have been seeing young children suffering from different respiratory infections because of the storm." He says MSF staff ahave been handing out face masks especially for children and pregnant women, and that on Thursday the orange colored dust clouds were starting to disappear as the sandstorm moves on. Hand in hand we can tackle all storms no matter how big @Refugees #Azraqcamp @UNHCR_Arabic @UNHCRJo pic.twitter.com/aAl8vjmh0c — ayman bino (@aymanbino) September 8, 2015
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Her 4-foot-10 frame helped her discover a new human ancestor
Who is behind the discovery of a new human ancestor? ...
Who is behind the discovery of a new human ancestor? People like Becca Peixotto, whose slender 4-foot-10 frame enabled her to squeeze through a tight South African cave to find and carefully pack and carry back bones to archaeologists on the surface. "There are things that I can do that other people can't," Peixotto, an American University doctoral student, said in an interview Thursday morning. "I might not be able to reach the things on the top shelf at the grocery store but I can sure go in a cave and find some fossils for you.'' Peixotto was one of six skinny researchers — dubbed ''underground astronauts" — chosen to slip into a crack in a limestone wall deep in the South African cave. The discovery, announced Thursday, came from deep inside that chamber, after shimmying through that crack and squiggling across a floor in a maneuver they called the "Superman crawl'' and climbing near a perilous dropoff. In blue jumpsuits, with a headlight on (and a backup light across their necks), the researchers found a dark chamber for the dead of a previously unidentified species of the early human lineage — Homo naledi. They were acting on a tipoff from two local cavers, expecting perhaps bones of a body or two of some sort. "It became clear pretty quickly that ... we were dealing with something we hadn't expected'' — the remains of many, many people. At least 15 individuals, more than 1,550 fossil elements — the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site. Sixty scientists were watching the work below ground of Peixotto and her team as they used toothpicks to wrap the fossils, pack them in a plastic bag and put them in a Tupperware-like container to carry back. "The lead scientist, Lee Berger, would have loved to go in the hole, but he just didn't fit,'' she said. She said the pressure came from knowing their moves were being watched by many. "If anything, I was scared that with so many eyes watching ... that I would do something wrong.'' But she didn't. And she found she was just the same size, though a little skinnier, than the human ancestor she was discovering. Their hands, she said, were even the same size. Here's more on the expedition from NOVA:
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After the floods come the human traffickers, but these girls are fighting back
The Sundarbans — a collection of densely populated islands in ...
The Sundarbans — a collection of densely populated islands in India’s sprawling Ganges delta — are so remote that the only way to get there is by boat. But human traffickers still manage to get in, and that's left many families with missing daughters. The combined effects of climate change and extreme poverty make it easier to lure women and children into forced prostitution, marriage and labor. Trafficking in this part of northeastern India’s West Bengal has gotten so bad, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports a 25-fold increase in missing women and children since 2001. It’s the worst rate in the country. Fifteen-year-old student, Rojina Khatun, was forced to drop out of school in order to work after floods damaged her family’s home. She’s now studying again and educating her peers about human trafficking as part of a Save the Children India children’s group in Dholkhali. Credit: Sam Eaton I visited a small village called Dholkhali a few miles from India’s watery eastern border with Bangladesh. Life here has always been a struggle. Save the Children India’s Sunil Banra says climate change is causing human trafficking rates to soar in the Sundarbans. A recent UN report stated a 25-fold increase in missing women and children in West Bengal since 2001. Credit: Sam Eaton But now constant flooding from rising seas is making things much worse. “They are at the mercy of God, mercy of environment, or you can say climate,” says Save the Children India’s Sunil Banra. He says human trafficking has always been a problem here. But it wasn’t until Cyclone Aila slammed the Sundarbans in May of 2009, displacing more than a million people, that the rate of human trafficking really began to rise. As we walk along an earthen dike, past homes made of mud and sticks straddling the river, Banra points out how vulnerable island inhabitants are to even the slightest rise in sea level. “You see the water level and you see their house, they are almost equivalent. And during rainy season their entire house is flooded with water,” he says. That flooding is not only eroding people’s land and livelihoods. It’s eroding the social fabric of these communities. Banra says families need money to repair damaged homes and to buy food after the floods — which now happen every year, sometimes caused just by high tides. The dire circumstances give families no choice but to send their children away, as young as 10 or 11 years old, to work in factories or in cities. “It’s now a culturally- and socially-accepted practice in the village,” Banra says. The fact that child labor is so common here has made it easier for human trafficking rings to set up shop in the Sundarbans. A woman and her daughter roll Beedis, the local cigarettes, for extra income in Dholkhali. Credit: Sam Eaton The traffickers pose as job scouts or use local boys to lure girls away with the false promise of marriage. Once abducted, the girls are sold into prostitution, marriage and domestic help, sometimes as far away as the Middle East. Most are never heard from again. That’s why Save the Children India and its local partners are trying to stop the trade at its most vulnerable point: with the children themselves. We visit a small classroom where about 30 kids, mostly girls, recite the day’s lesson. Every one of them was a dropout until this children’s group was formed as a way to catch them up on their studies and eventually re-enroll them in formal schooling. But 15-year-old Rojina Khatun says that’s only one part of the program. They’ve also learned to keep an eye out for human traffickers. If an unknown person enters the village, they confront him to find out why he’s there. And if he seems out of place, she says, they report him to their teacher, who contacts authorities. Collectively the children serve as a kind of vigilante group for their peers, checking in with kids’ families when they don’t show up for school and looking out for children talking to strangers, or leaving their homes wearing new clothes, something they wouldn’t do unless they were leaving town, possibly with a trafficker. In the 80+ villages where the program now operates, trafficking rates have dropped nearly to zero. But challenges remain for the students. With the Sundarbans coastline retreating about 650 feet a year and an average elevation of only three feet above sea level, scientists predict much of the Sundarbans could be underwater in 15 to 25 years. Credit: Sam Eaton Khatun says her dream now is to go to college and to get a good job. A dream that wasn’t possible before, because her parents had pulled her out of school to fish and earn extra income. And they still don’t support her going to school. get involved Save the Children India Her teacher, Mithu Mondal, says says she can empower the girls through education, but not financially, because there’s no vocational training at the school. Not to say that she isn’t trying. Mondal has been teaching the children how to make Beedis, the local cigarettes, in order to sell them for extra money as an added incentive. Mondal says she tries to convince parents that if they give her at least three hours a day to teach their children, they can then make Beedis for the rest of the day to sell and earn money for the family. It shows just how complicated the solution is for a problem that’s equally complex. Sunil Banra says the children’s groups are just the beginning. Save the Children India is also working to create community banks into which families pay a small amount every month in order to provide loans after the floods. And they’ve set up Child Protection Committees with adults from the village serving liaisons with the police and government officials on the mainland. Most of the Sundarban islands in West Bengal are only accessible by boat despite being home to more than four million people. Credit: Sam Eaton Banra says if “the survival things are not addressed, unless the education for children is not well addressed, unless the basic necessities of daily life are not addressed, they give up before these traffickers and do whatever they ask them to do.” The Indian government recently announced it would scale up Save the Children’s pilot program beyond the initial 80 villages. But the scope of the problem they’re trying to address has become a moving target. Scientists predict much of the Sundarbans will be underwater in as little as two decades. And as one village elder I spoke with put it, it’s no longer a matter of improving their situation. They’re just fighting to keep it from getting any worse.
