A newly-published study believes that the dinosaur currently known as Apatosaurus excelsus should be restored to its original name of Brontosaurus. Painting of Brontosaurus excelsus by Charles R. Knight, 1897

After more than a century of extinction in the scientific community, the name Brontosaurus may be ready to return to the ranks of its dinosaur brethren.

A study published on Tuesday by the open-access journal PeerJ concluded that the dinosaur currently known as Apatosaurus excelsus — known as Brontosaurus until the year 1903 — possesses enough differences from others within the Apatosaurus genus to be returned to its own separate genus and name.

The Brontosaurus name originated during the era known as the “Bone Wars” in the late 1800s, when competing teams of paleontologists and fossil hunters competed to find dinosaur fossils in the western United States. A team led by Othniel Charles Marsh discovered two dinosaurs belonging to the Diplodocidae family — specimens that could be described as possessing short legs and the famous long necks. Marsh named the first Apatosaurus, or “deceptive lizard,” and the second Brontosaurus, or “noble thunder lizard.”

However, in 1903, paleontologist Elmer Riggs contested the idea that the two dinosaurs belonged to separate genera. Wired described how the Brontosaurus name lost out:

The mistake, he said, was in the number of sacrum bones (where the tail attaches to the spinal cord). The Apatosaurus sacrum was made of three bones, while the Brontosaurus had five. Rather than being different species, Riggs contended the Brontosaurus was just a younger version of the Apatosaurus, and the sacrum bones would have fused together as the dinosaur aged (bone fusing happens in many species, including humans). According to Riggs, the two skeletons were the same species. And scientific decorum dictated that older name should stick.

More than 100 years later, a team of European scientists, while cataloging various features in Diplodocidae dinosaurs using a statistical method to quantify differences between genera and species, noticed that the fossil formerly known as the Brontosaurus wasn’t as similar to the Apatosaurus as originally thought.

“We found that the differences between the genus Brontosaurus and the genus Apatosaurus are so numerous that they should be kept apart as two different genera,” lead researcher Emanuel Tschopp said.

However, don’t expect the Brontosaurus name to reappear so quickly. According to Live Science, the restoration of the Brontosaurus genus will not only require more debate among the scientific community, but also a ruling by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

“For sure, there will be other researchers that are maybe not convinced or have their own evidence against the separation of the two,” Tschopp said to Live Science. “In the end, this is how science works.”

The post After 100 years, Brontosaurus name may be making a comeback appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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GWEN IFILL: The most recent West African Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone sickened nearly 25,000 people and killed 10,000. Medical professionals are particularly vulnerable, as they work closely with infected and highly infectious patients.

But changes in the equipment they use to see the infected may make it easier to protect workers from the disease.

NewsHour special correspondent Mary Jo Brooks reports.

MARY JO BROOKS: Jill Andrews is normally busy this time of year.

JILL ANDREWS, Wedding Dress Designer: I thought that would be really cute.

MARY JO BROOKS: Sowing silk, lace and beads to create elaborate wedding gowns in her Baltimore studio.

JILL ANDREWS: You like that?

MARY JO BROOKS: But for the last five months, she’s been making an elaborate creation of a different sort, an Ebola protection suit made of bright yellow Tyvek fabric.

JILL ANDREWS: It was all-consuming. It was definitely — you’re thinking about it all night long. I’m playing like origami in my mind with Tyvek. You’re solving problems. It’s just about constantly solving problems and thinking about what needs to happen next.

MARY JO BROOKS: Andrews was among 60 people who took part in a grand challenge at Johns Hopkins university. Participants included doctors, engineers, public health experts and grad students. The goal?  To devise better ways of protecting health care workers from the deadly Ebola virus.

WENDY TAYLOR, U.S. Agency for International Development: What we do is, we define the problem and put that challenge out to the world and get some of the brightest minds to come forward and think about new ways to tackle these problems.

MARY JO BROOKS: USAID’s Wendy Taylor was responsible for creating the Grand Challenge competition.

MAN: I come from Malawi.

MAN: Raised in Baltimore.

MAN: Canada.

MARY JO BROOKS: For the past several years, she’s put out the call for people from all walks of life to help solve difficult global problems.

WOMAN: It’s human-powered.

MARY JO BROOKS: The first challenge, issued in 2011, resulted in new ways to reduce infant mortality.

WENDY TAYLOR: It’s really opened up our eyes to new ways to solve some of these tough development challenges that we haven’t really been able to crack.

MARY JO BROOKS: Last fall, USAID decided it need a new way to think about fighting Ebola.

WENDY TAYLOR: We started to see health care workers on the front lines face some real obstacles in providing care to their patients, and we thought it was an area that was ripe for innovation.

MARY JO BROOKS: Johns Hopkins responded by holding a weekend-long hackathon.

YOUSEPH YAZDI, Johns Hopkins University Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design: Frankly, I was skeptical of what would come out of it. How can a group of novices address a problem and come up with solutions that are, you know, better than what the established players have come up with?  But we decided to just give it a try.

So what’s the plan?

MARY JO BROOKS: Youseph Yazdi, who spearheaded the effort, said they assembled a wide variety of materials to test their ideas.

YOUSEPH YAZDI: We raided fabric stores for everything you would need to test out your own ideas on the way to design a suit, cooling equipment, chocolate syrup, sewing machines.

MARY JO BROOKS: Why chocolate syrup?

YOUSEPH YAZDI: Because you want the see if you can protect yourself from contamination. So you rub the stuff all over yourself and then try to take off the suit and then see if any of it got on your skin. That’s — it’s a poor man’s simulation.

MARY JO BROOKS: The working group divided into eight teams, each trying to deal with a different problem with the existing protective suits. They’re hot. The goggles fog up. It takes too long to put on and take off, and there are too many places where infection can put in.

MATTHEW PETNEY, Johns Hopkins University Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design: Right. But it’s a big problem. There is skin showing. You can’t have any skin showing when you are treating Ebola.

MARY JO BROOKS: So that — the multiple pieces was one of the problems you had to solve?

MATTHEW PETNEY: Absolutely.

WOMAN: Started to fog up.

MATTHEW PETNEY: And this is — it’s 60 degrees and not humid.

WOMAN: Right.

MATTHEW PETNEY: So you can see how much worse it would be.

MARY JO BROOKS: The prototype they built eliminates the need for separate goggles and creates an air channel in the hood to prevent fogging.

MATTHEW PETNEY: It’s very different from the neck up. Right?  You see all of the face. As he breathes, as he exhales, the fogging is limited to this area. And all of the exhale leaves here. So you’re constantly bringing in fresh air from above, from these inhale vents.

MARY JO BROOKS: The new suit is cooler, which means workers can wear it twice as long. Instead of 45 minutes, they can wear it for an hour-and-a-half.

MATTHEW PETNEY: We have moved the zipper to the back, because the front is generally the most contaminated. And, hopefully, by moving it from the front to the back, we can reduce the need for an apron which they wear, which is heavy and adds to the heat burden.

MARY JO BROOKS: The new suit is also easier to put on and take off with less chance of contamination. But not all of the ideas at the Grand Challenge were good ones.

JILL ANDREWS: One of the first things that I was really interested in was using magnets, but that got nixed.

YOUSEPH YAZDI: Plenty of bad ideas, plenty of really bone-headed, stupid ideas. But that’s what we love. Even if it’s a crazy idea, we encourage people to write it down. And then, as a leadership team, we filter through them to see which ones were feasible and fit within the constraints.

MARY JO BROOKS: Enough good ideas were generated to design a prototype suit that was then one of 15 projects chosen by USAID to be funded. That was out of 1,500 ideas submitted by individuals, labs and universities all around the world. The prototype is now being further refined and many of the changes will appear in suits that will begin manufacture this summer.

MAN: Replacing the idea of tubing.

MARY JO BROOKS: Professor Yazdi says he’s become a big believer in the idea of grand challenges.

YOUSEPH YAZDI: The more of this type of approach that the government takes of other organizations, like Gates Foundation, et cetera, I think it’s a wonderful model to rapidly solve problems. The old approach of having people spend years in the lab developing stuff is great to develop new science and technology.

But when it comes to solving problems, to bridging between science — between human knowledge and human need, this approach is really, I think, a very good one to take.

MARY JO BROOKS: In Baltimore, Maryland, I’m Mary Jo Brooks, reporting for the PBS NewsHour.

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GWEN IFILL: Now to Minnesota, where one part old technology, and several new ideas from retired workers, are creating a recipe of hope for many in the developing world.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro has the latest story in our Breakthroughs series on innovation and invention.

WOMAN: I promise you a perfect cake every time you bake. That’s right, perfect. You be the judge. Or write General Mills, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and get your money back.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Minnesota is where the idea of making things easier in the kitchen became an industry, the birthplace of such fictional legends as the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant and Betty Crocker.

WOMAN: A perfect cake every time you bake, cake after cake after cake.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Perfect?  Maybe not. But convenient and efficient?  No question.

ERV LENTZ, Volunteer: Some with nuts, some without.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And that’s the idea behind a nonprofit company in Saint Paul called CTI, or Compatible Technology International. Different kind of cakes, though.

ERV LENTZ: Just plain trash.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Erv Lentz is squeezing discarded peanut shells, trying to make fuel briquettes. He’s 83, one of dozens of retired engineers, agronomists and other with ties to the food business who volunteer here.

They’re now working on conveniences for a very different kitchen and customer, millions of mostly women in developing nations who toil for hours to provide food or to collect water for their families.

VERN CARDWELL, Volunteer: If you want to do the cranking there, get her up to speed.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Seventy-eight-year-old Vern Cardwell is working on a hand-cranked thresher that could save hours of labor and extract grain far more efficiently than the manual methods used now.

VERN CARDWELL: We’re obviously stripping all of the florets off that contain the grain.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: This test was on stocks of pearl millet, a staple in parts of Africa.

ERV LENTZ: Just blows your mind when you think how overnight, we can, for instance, help their useful pearl millet from 30 to 35 percent to darn near 90. The impact here is endless in terms of the impact on people.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: At least in theory. Over the years, they have learned hard lessons about the reality in a Minnesota lab and that in a village in, say, Malawi or Tanzania.

Steve Clarke says they went to try out one invention in those African nations.

STEVE CLARKE, Volunteer: We had this great tool here called the grinder, which we knew could grind peanuts into peanut butter very, very well. But when we got over to those countries, we found out they didn’t make a lot of peanut butter.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: What they needed was a peanut sheller. Diet, social traditions and general all play a role in how a product is received, says CTI’s director, Alexandra Spieldoch.

ALEXANDRA SPIELDOCH, Director, Compatible Technology International: Tools that are designed in a void are largely not going to be adopted. The whole process of design needs to be about really understanding the context.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: One device they have had some success with is a water chlorinator. Unlike those used in rich countries, this one uses no electricity or pumps.

Wesley Meier is one of few paid staffers at CTI. He heads this program in Nicaragua.

WESLEY MEIER, Compatible Technology International: Simple device, designed by an engineer based out of Saint Paul. So this is just the container for the tablet. This is the actual chlorine tablet. There’s five of them in here.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Dozens have been installed in remote mountainous communities in this Central American nation.

The water supply in this area is mostly driven by gravity. It comes from natural streams up the mountain and flows by gravity into tanks like this one. The tiny community of Las Animas is having a CTI chlorinator installed. When it’s done, the 380 residents of the village will have safe water at almost no additional cost.

The device costs just $150. Its plastic pipes and chlorine tablets are available locally.

MAN (through interpreter): At this point, the water passes through the chlorine tablet and mixes with the water. As it mixes, it eats up the bacteria and cleans the water.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Community leaders like Emili Juarez are instructed to monitor chlorine levels and to change the tablets periodically.

EMILI JUAREZ (through interpreter): We really didn’t have potable water, and we really needed to install this system. We know that unclean water can lead to diseases like diarrhea and hepatitis.

ERV LENTZ: When we go to play bridge at the club, people will often times come along and, it’s about once a month, the thing, and, “Well, how’s the water system doing?”  And I usually put a little needle in and say, well, we could do a lot better if we had a little more money, you know.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Does that end the conversation there?

ERV LENTZ: No.

(LAUGHTER)

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: CTI’s annual budget is $750,000, mostly from charitable donations. But that doesn’t include thousands of hours volunteers like Erv Lentz put in pursuing the perfect pedal-powered potato slicer, grinder or pepper shredder.

Vern Cardwell did manage to come up with a peanut sheller and got to see it demonstrated in Malawi.

VERN CARDWELL: By hand they can get two pounds of nuts shelled an hour, and with our disc peanut sheller we can do 50 to 60 pounds of nuts an hour.

And the women look at that, and they’re just giggling, and they’re all excited about this piece of equipment, and everybody wants — you’ll leave it here?  You’ll leave it here, so we can use it?

And that kind of excitement is very infectious.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It’s what’s kept him and the other coming here almost full time for years.

This is Fred de Sam Lazaro for the PBS NewsHour in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

GWEN IFILL: A version of this story aired on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.”

Fred’s reporting is a partnership with the Under-Told Stories Project at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.

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I test drove a pair of indoor sunglasses that claimed to correct colorblindness. A Mountain Dew product was among the many items that caught my eye. Photo by Ariel Min

Not long ago, I learned that a company called EnChroma had developed glasses that claimed to correct colorblindness for red-green colorblind people like myself. So I sent for a pair. They arrived, nestled in a black carrying case, a couple days later.

Before their arrival, I had laid out a plan. I would thrust myself into colorful situations. I would stroll through botanical gardens, peruse the color swatches at my local Home Depot and study a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

I never expected I’d get emotional over a Mountain Dew can.

The can was half-empty, directly in my line of vision as I put on the glasses for the first time. I found myself fixated on the Mountain Dew logo, studying all the different shades of green it contained. I was awash in awe. You might call the design garish, but to me, at that moment, it looked magnificent. Elsewhere on my desk, a red ball and a red pen called for attention.

On the left, is a photo of Venice as seen by someone with colorblindness wearing the EnChroma glasses. On the right is the same scene as seen with someone with colorblindness. Image courtesy of EnChroma

As a kid, I was forced to sit out science experiments that involved color. There was the embarrassing time my graphic design professor described my business card as “flesh-colored.” And don’t even get me started on green-colored paper. When teachers printed assignments on green paper — and they do more than you’d think — I’d have to tilt the paper so the black ink reflected in the light.

I never felt deprived by being colorblind. I had no plans to be a pilot or a wedding planner. Instead of labeling my clothes as many colorblind people do, I opted to own only one green shirt. Usually, I rely on another set of eyes — a friend, a co-worker or a stranger — to avoid minor embarrassments in our highly-coded world.

The term “colorblindness” suggests that the colorblind shuffle through life in a black-and-white reality. And while such a condition exists — achromatopsia — the majority of colorblind people have a mild form of color vision deficiency. In other words, we have difficulty distinguishing certain colors.

Colorblindness affects about 14 million Americans, mostly men, and ranges from mild to severe. Although in rare cases, people have trouble with blues and yellows, the most common form is red-green colorblindness. About eight percent of males are born with the inherited color deficiency, while fewer than one percent of women, who are normally the carriers for the genetic anomaly, have it, according to the American Optometric Association.

In the back of our eyes are cones in the retina that allow us to see a vast range of colors. Pigments in these cones absorb specific wavelengths of light and transmit signals to the brain. These signals help us identify color. In the case of colorblind individuals, the red and green cones overlap too much, sending muddied information to the brain, said EnChroma co-founder Donald McPherson, who is also a glass scientist.

“When the brain does the calculation to figure out a color, it comes up with the incorrect sensation,” McPherson said.

Before EnChroma would send me the glasses, I was asked to take a test. It turns out I have a particular type of red-green color deficiency known as Strong Deutan. Symptoms for that include “significant color confusion,” according to the results of the test. “Green, brown, yellow, orange, and red may appear confusingly similar. This makes ‘naming’ the color difficult. Blue and purple are frequently confused. Pink can be very ‘muted’ so it looks essentially gray.” I nodded in agreement at every instance listed.

EnChroma’s sunglasses, then, act as a filter by carving out specific wavelengths along the visible spectrum that enable the photoreceptors in the eye to distinguish between red and green, thus reducing the overlap. EnChroma said the sunglasses works for four out of five people.

The manual suggests that the wearer observe the colors of things during a so-called “adaptation period.” While some people immediately notice real differences, McPherson said, others experience a much more delayed response.

As an extreme example, McPherson relayed the story of a retired Berkeley neuroscientist who took the glasses on vacation to Hawaii. He reported finding the experience underwhelming. Then he saw a green traffic light.

“[He] said he had to pull over because he had this epiphany that he has finally seen [green],” McPherson said. “He had been receiving the right information, he just hadn’t been able to process it.”

After that first day, I test drove the sunglasses in many situations. The first thing I noticed at the botanical gardens was the moss. Without the glasses, the moss appeared to me as one shade — a dull greenish-brown. With them, I saw many different shades of yellow, green and brown. With them, I saw where the patches of green ended and the brown and yellow ones began. This was one of the most striking effects of the glasses. It wasn’t just colors I’d been missing, but the nuances within the colors.

While visiting the local botanical gardens, I took pictures of every plant that jumped out at me while wearing the EnChroma glasses. Photos by Joshua Barajas

The glasses worked best in strong sunlight. The color-boosting effect diminished on cloudy and rainy days and other low-light environments. And although indoor models have to work with less light, I could still see a co-worker’s busy tie come into better view.

Through all of this though, a question nagged me. Was I truly seeing reds and greens as people with normal color vision do?

EnChroma says yes, promising “color for the colorblind” with its products. In an email, McPherson insisted I was “really, truly seeing the correct colors.”

But not so fast, said Dr. Karl Citek, chair of the AOA Commission on Ophthalmic Standards, a group of experts that deals with standards and product claims. The enhancement from the EnChroma sunglasses and other iterations of these specially-tinted eyeglasses are impressions of the real thing, but likely fall short.

“Perhaps a better word is ‘compensate,’ but I see where EnChroma is coming from,” Citek, also a college professor of optometry at Pacific University, said in an email. “By the same token, the glasses I wear because I’m nearsighted don’t ‘correct’ my nearsightedness, only compensate for it (even though all medical professionals will call my prescription a ‘correction.’)”

I may never have an answer to my question. But I now have a gateway to a richer, eye-catching world — and a Mountain Dew can as my guide.

The post What it’s like to see colors for the first time appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Amazon has officially won the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval to test delivery drones in the United States.

In a letter posted on the agency’s website, the FAA gave the green light as long as the drones fly within the height and speed requirements: No higher than 400 feet and no faster than 100 miles per hour.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s Vice President of Global Public Policy, hailed the announcement:

We’re pleased the FAA has granted our petition for this stage of R&D experimentation, and we look forward to working with the agency for permission to deliver Prime Air service to customers in the United States safely and soon.

The approval is a major victory for the e-commerce giant which has previously expressed frustration with the FAA’s slow pace in approving commercial drone testing.

Drones for delivery have been criticized by opponents concerned about potential threats to public safety and privacy.

FAA administrator Michael Huerta told PBS NewsHour’s Miles O’Brien in January that the agency is moving slowly because of the safety challenges posed by commercial drone use.

“A bedrock principle of aviation is see and avoid. And if you don’t have a pilot on board the aircraft, you need something that will substitute for that, which will sense other aircraft, and we can ensure appropriate levels of safety,” Huerta said. “We have the opportunity to do it quickly, or we have the opportunity to do it right. We’re very focused on doing it right, so that we don’t in any way compromise safety.”

Amazon’s last request for drone tests in the US was in limbo for over six months and the company subsequently developed a test site in Canada. When the FAA issued approval in March, the company stated that the prototype drone had already become obsolete, Reuters reported.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos first announced the drone-delivery venture in 2013. Amazon’s Prime Air service seeks to use self-piloted drones to deliver packages to its customers over distances of 10 miles or more within 30 minutes.

What do you think of the idea of delivery drones? Share your thoughts in the comments below or join the conversation on Facebook.

The post Feds OK Amazon’s delivery drone tests (for real, this time) appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Scientists at Stanford University say they have developed an ultrafast aluminum battery that can be charged in as little as one minute.

Researchers say the long-lasting and inexpensive prototype could also become a safer alternative to other batteries in wide use today, such as environmentally unfriendly alkaline batteries or lithium-ion batteries, which are flammable.

“Our battery has everything else you’d dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life,” said Stanford chemistry professor Hongjie Dai, in a press release. “Our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it.”

The prototype is also bendable, meaning pliable electronic devices could become a possibility.

The technology for making the commercially viable aluminum battery, something that has eluded scientists for decades, was discovered when scientists paired graphite with aluminum.

This resolved a key durability issue, allowing the Stanford battery to last 7,500 charging cycles without weakening.

Past aluminum batteries developed in other laboratories died after only 100 charging cycles, and lithium-ion batteries, which are used in the majority of electronic devices, typically last only 1,000 cycles.

The post A battery that could charge your phone in one minute? Ask Stanford. appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Environmental chemist David Stone builds a greenhouse using a “green” material he invented. Photos by Vicki Nordness and David Stone

When environmental chemist David Stone decided to build a “green” greenhouse for his wife, he chose a material he’d invented, an environmentally friendly substitute for cement he calls Ferrock.

For a greenhouse, it’s fairly large, measuring 16 feet by 8 feet by 10 feet. It’s the first and only full structure with a roof and walls that Stone has built so far with his new material.

Monday on the NewsHour, we examine Stone’s discovery, an innovative alternative to a product — cement — that accounts for 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Stone started with a wire mesh frame, the same method he’s used to create benches on the Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona — demonstration projects funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Then, he filled in by hand with Ferrock troweling the walls 8 inches thick. Separate wire tubes allowed him to pipe in carbon dioxide. At first, he used pure, compressed CO2 in tanks but that was expensive. He turned to exhaust from a small combustion engine. That, said Stone, showed “exhaust from an engine or any combustion source like a cement kiln or a coal-burning power plant could also be used” making larger-scale operations possible.

The roof is a thin shell structure, just 1.5 inches thick, but it’s reinforced with steel and wire making it very strong. Eventually, it will be covered and will support shallow rooted plants, yet another environmental feature.

His greenhouse is buried into the ground and never gets below freezing. In fact the temperature hovers around 60 degrees Fahrenheit all winter, even though the building is near the Canadian border, in a small town in the northern part of Washington state.

Sunlight enters through windows on the south side allowing Stone to capture light in the early morning and late afternoon. He gets a head start on his garden, sometimes planting seeds as early as March.

Stone said the greenhouse “remains the biggest, most complicated and most successful thing” he’s built so far. He hopes the technology will one day have potential for commercial uses.

In the meantime, his wife has a very unusual greenhouse.

The post It may look unusual, but this greenhouse is actually green appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

NASA has released a stunning sequence of footage from two GoPros accompanying astronauts on a February spacewalk. The two astronauts, Barry Wilmore and Terry Virts, were reconfiguring the external port on the International Space Station in preparation for the arrival of new astronauts.

One video they captured shows the Space Station’s incredible views of earth, while the other video followed the astronauts along the underbelly of the massive structure. Both videos show a little of what it’s like to be in a sound vacuum (the video is virtually silent) and the difficulties of working in zero-gravity — one of the astronaut’s belt strap keeps floating into his view.

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GWEN IFILL: Climate change has prompted scientists to search for new ways to reduce greenhouse gases in all kinds of fields.

Now an Arizona inventor has discovered an alternative to the unlikely cause of fully 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery has the story, part of our Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.

DAVID STONE, Inventor: I have here the last surviving bit of an experiment that went wrong.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Thirteen years ago, David Stone was a Ph.D. student studying environmental chemistry.

DAVID STONE: It was the corner lab right up here.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: In a lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson, he hunted for a way to keep iron from rusting and hardening up.

DAVID STONE: It got hot. It started to steam. It was bubbling and spitting. And I thought, well, that — that didn’t work. The next day, when I came in and I found it and rescued it from the garbage, I realized, this just didn’t get hard. It got very hard, glassy hard.

This one was cast by hand.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Stone — that’s his real name — began to think his discarded rock just might be a substitute for a very common product: cement.

It’s been called the foundation of modern civilization. Portland cement, the generic name, is the glue that allows concrete to harden. And concrete is everywhere, in highways, bridges, sidewalks, buildings of all sizes, and much more. Four billion tons of cement are manufactured each year worldwide, a half-ton for every person on Earth. It has a huge carbon footprint.

Steve Regis is senior vice president at CalPortland, one of the nation’s top 10 cement producers.

STEVE REGIS, CalPortland Company: This plant, if it’s making about a million tons a year of cement, will emit roughly 800,000 tons a year of CO2 carbon greenhouse gases.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: One reason is the extremely high heat, about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, needed to process the limestone used to make cement.

STEVE REGIS: In making cement, we actually make new minerals. And that uses a lot of heat to cause that chemical reaction to occur. This plant here, when they’re making a million tons a year, is burning on the neighborhood of 20 tons per hour of coal.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: David Stone uses a very different formula.

DAVID STONE: This is the basic recipe, if you will.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: One that doesn’t require high heat and recycles materials from other industries.

DAVID STONE: The whole process is green.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: A key ingredient is iron, something he gets from steel mills.

DAVID STONE: I discovered that there was this material called steel dust that is not recycled. So, it typically goes straight to the landfill.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Silica is added to the mix, and that comes from ground-up glass. Finding that wasn’t hard either. Stone connected with the community college at the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American reservation the size of Connecticut in Southern Arizona.

There, he met Richard Pablo, a recovering alcoholic looking to turn his life around. Pablo knew where to find plenty of used glass.

RICHARD PABLO: Cleaning the desert and picking up those bottles, it kind of gave me an energy, a positive outlook. And then I started thinking about that there’s a power behind that, a spirit behind that, even behind that bottle.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Stone’s material, called Ferrock for the iron, has another environmental plus.

DAVID STONE: You can say we are walking on trapped CO2.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: It’s a kind of carbon sponge. Stone adds CO2, which makes it harden, for example, into concrete paving slabs like these.

DAVID STONE: We’re stepping down on climate change. This is a carbon-negative process that helps trap the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: That caught the eye of the Environmental Protection Agency. Then EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson came to the reservation and she, too, walked on Ferrock…

DAVID STONE: This is a steel wire support structure.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: … and gave grants of more than $200,000 to build demonstration projects, which employed tribe members like Pablo.

The prospect of jobs on the reservation has made Stone’s work attractive, says Casey Thornbrugh, project director for the Land Grant Office of Sustainability at the community college.

CASEY THORNBRUGH, Tohono O’odham Community College: As projects come up, such as campus buildings, homes, businesses that want to use the material, that’s where the jobs come in.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Stone won a prize for his invention while a student. The University of Arizona helped him secure a patent and later licensed the technology to him. And now he’s formed a company called Iron Shell.

Experiments on Ferrock’s strength are under way at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

Professor Narayanan Neithalath, a civil engineer who develops sustainable materials, is testing Ferrock.

NARAYANAN NEITHALATH, Arizona State University: When you talk to anybody about concrete, the first thing that they will ask you is, what’s the strength? We have found out in our work that this is about five times tougher than your conventional Portland cement concrete.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: That strength might help protect a building from an earthquake, a tornado or even a bomb, like the one that brought down the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

NARAYANAN NEITHALATH: What happened in Oklahoma City bombing was the explosion demolished all the columns of the building and the building crashed because of the weight of it and the columns not being able to support them.

But if I have a blast-resistant material, so something made out of this material, what you will have is the — the columns will still become weaker. But it won’t collapse just like that, and you will save loss of lives and loss of property.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: At CalPortland cement, officials say their product has stood the test of time for more than 100 years. They have won Energy Star awards from the EPA for 11 years running for their energy-saving efforts.

Among the achievements: using alternative fuels such as old tires and recouping some of the CO2 emissions.

Steve Regis says his company is always on the lookout for new ways to make cement, but says Ferrock isn’t practical for a large-scale operation.

STEVE REGIS: Dave’s idea, I think it has a good niche market for — for nonstructural block, yard art, benches. But consider the scale of that compared to a 200-mile six-lane freeway eight inches thick or a runaway.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: Stone is well aware he’s David to a very big Goliath, but he thinks there will be a market for Ferrock eventually.

DAVID STONE: I’m doing my part, as best I can, to respond, so that when the time comes and the world wants to build with new materials that are carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, I will be able to step forward and say, yes, I have such a material.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: A material he hopes will one day make a lasting impression.

DAVID STONE: Here it is.

KATHLEEN MCCLEERY: I’m Kathleen McCleery for the PBS NewsHour in Tucson, Arizona.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Scientists have announced the creation of the largest map yet of the invisible material that helps make up the universe, what’s known as dark matter.

Jeffrey Brown explores some of the very cosmic questions around this story.

JEFFREY BROWN: That’s worth saying again: We can’t see it, but we can apparently map it. What’s called dark matter is, in fact, everywhere, and it’s believed to play a crucial role in forming and holding together galaxies with its gravitational pull.

In findings announced Monday, researchers used a dark energy camera and a large telescope in Northern Chile to create this color-coded map, showing a small piece of the visible sky. Orange and red areas represent denser concentrations of dark matter. Blue areas are less dense.

And Sean Carroll joins us now to tell us about it. He’s a cosmologist and theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

Thanks so much for joining us and helping us here.

Can we start with a basic question?  What is dark matter?

SEAN CARROLL, California Institute of Technology: Sure.

Dark matter is some kind of particle. It’s just some — like — just like ordinary matter. You and I are made of atoms. There’s some other kind of particle, not anything we find in atoms, not anything we have ever found here on Earth. It’s dark, it’s invisible, but it’s most of the matter in the universe.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, how do we know it exists?

SEAN CARROLL: Well, because of gravity. Gravity is universal. Everything that exists creates gravity and is affected by gravity.

So the dark matter, which is most of the matter in the universe, creates a lot of gravity, and then it pushes around the things in the universe, including light from distant galaxies as they pass by the dark matter concentrations.

JEFFREY BROWN: And I referred to it as somehow holding together galaxies. That’s through its gravitational pull?

SEAN CARROLL: Well, that’s right.

Even without dark matter, the galaxies would still be held together, but they would be moving much more slowly. A stronger gravitational field together by the dark matter is what dominates the gravity inside the galaxy and sort of sets it spinning with the speed that it has.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. We’re talking here about the latest thing, which is mapping this stuff that we can’t see. Sounds strange. How do you map it?  What are they actually looking at?

SEAN CARROLL: Well, what they’re looking at is actually the part that we can see.

You can see the light from galaxies that fill the universe. Our universe has over 100 billion galaxies. And so this new image has looked at about two million of those galaxies. And they have looked for slight distortions in the images caused by the fact that the light from those galaxies passed through more or less dark matter on its way to us.

JEFFREY BROWN: And that’s done through this — describe — the camera that I was referring to, a dark — dark energy matter — dark energy camera — excuse me — right?

SEAN CARROLL: It’s confusingly called the dark energy camera.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

SEAN CARROLL: It’s not made of dark energy.

JEFFREY BROWN: It’s not the first — perhaps the first confusion here, but let’s stay with that one.

(LAUGHTER)

SEAN CARROLL: It’s one of the confusions that we can clear up.

JEFFREY BROWN: OK.

SEAN CARROLL: There is this thing called dark energy. It’s not matter, as you might guess.

Dark matter, like we said, is actually kind of understandable. It’s just some particle that we can’t see that’s invisible, but nevertheless gives rise to gravity. Dark energy is something that isn’t even a particle. It’s something that’s intrinsic to space itself. It’s some field of energy that’s smoothly distributed throughout the universe and is pushing it apart.

So, the dark energy camera, its whole design purpose is to measure properties of the dark energy. But, as a bonus, along the way, we get an unprecedentedly good map of where the dark matter is.

JEFFREY BROWN: I like how you took us from the really understandable stuff to the completely, completely obscure stuff, right?

SEAN CARROLL: That’s my job description. That’s my expertise right there.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes. I appreciate that.

All right, why is this important?  I mean, why should the rest of us care about this?

SEAN CARROLL: Well, you know, the 1990s will go down in human history as the decade in which we figured out the inventory of the stuff from which the universe is made, 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter.

Only 5 percent of the universe, by mass, is the ordinary stuff out of which you and I are made. So, if you care about understanding the universe, 95 percent of it is dark matter and dark energy. If you want to know how the universe works, you have to understand that stuff.

JEFFREY BROWN: And in terms of what’s next, I know this map was just a very small — it’s huge. It covers a lot of ground, a lot of space, but still very small.

SEAN CARROLL: Well, what we’re trying to do is to figure out more about the physics of the dark matter.

It’s very annoying to us, as scientists, because we know it’s there. We know how much of it is there. We know where it is. But we don’t know what it is. We don’t know what is actually making up the dark matter. So the more we can study its properties, how it collects, how it evolves over time, the more of a hope we get to understand what it is made out of and why there is dark matter at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Sean Carroll, thank you so much.

SEAN CARROLL: Sure. My pleasure.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Next: the possibilities of getting more energy through water.

Humans have long harnessed the power of water to perform work. In modern time, hydroelectricity, generated by the power of water flowing through turbines at the base of dams, has been a small, but key source of renewable energy.

But experts say there is a lot of potential for new sources of hydropower. A startup in Portland, Oregon, has developed one system that may one day be in cities around the country.

Hari Sreenivasan has our report. It’s the latest story in our ongoing Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Industrial engineer Susan Priddy takes advantage of rare sunny days in Portland to ride her Harley to work. And in her job as director of operations for Lucid Energy, she takes advantage of the regions’s abundant water supply. This small start-up has developed a new technology.

SUSAN PRIDDY, Lucid Energy: How’s it going today?

MAN: Very well.

SUSAN PRIDDY: What is our energy coming out today?

MAN: Right now, we’re running about 40 kilowatts.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Priddy and Lucid engineers were monitoring the energy generated by drinking water as it flows through turbines integrated into these pipes. Lucid has designed the first hydroelectric system designed to harness the energy in gravity-fed drinking water pipes found throughout Portland and in many municipalities around the country.

We dropped in recently for a tour.

SUSAN PRIDDY: So, here we are down in the vaults. We have got water flowing this direction. The turbine is right here. And the flow of the water, because it’s a lift-based system, just turns the turbine. And then the turbine is connected to the generator. And from the generator, it goes through some power electronics across the street to the grid.

HARI SREENIVASAN: How much energy is this thing generating?

SUSAN PRIDDY: Our nameplate is 200 kilowatts, so roughly enough energy for — to supply electricity for 150 homes.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The system was installed in Portland late last year and recently began operating at full capacity. Unlike some parts of the country, there’s no shortage of water here. The city’s well-known downtown fountains and most homes and businesses are supplied with gravity fed drinking water from a pristine forest watershed near Mount Hood.

GREGG SEMLER, Lucid Energy: There’s no mystery to what we’re trying to do. We’re just recovering energy that’s embedded in the flow of the water.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Gregg Semler is president and CEO of Lucid Energy. The privately funded company currently employees a handful of bike-riding engineers who spend their days thinking of new ways to tap liquid energy flowing through pipes.

MAN: Is that actually something that was just floating in space?

MAN: This one right here?

MAN: Yes.

MAN: It’s mounted to the wall.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Their office is based in a Portland incubator called Hatch, with other small environmentally and socially focused start-ups.

GREGG SEMLER: The advantage of the Lucid pipe system is that we produce electricity all the time, around the clock, without any environmental impact. So, it’s very unusual to find sources of energy that you can produce electricity without any environmental impact in today’s world.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And how does it compare to the renewable energy sources that most of us are familiar with today, solar and wind?

GREGG SEMLER: When you compare the cost of the Lucid pipe power system with other traditional sources of renewables, like wind and solar, to generate the same amount of energy that Lucid is generating would cost three of four times more for the same amount of energy.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The 60-foot pipe and four turbines inside cost nearly $2 million to build and install, far more than a conventional section of water pipe. But a group of private investors are taking the risk, so it costs the city nothing to try.

The city’s power utility, Portland General Electric, PGE, has agreed to buy the energy at the same price as other renewable energy sources for the next 20 years. The plan is for Lucid Energy, the city’s water bureau, and the investors to share profits.

WOMAN: This is the first check for us delivering energy and being paid for it. So we are very excited.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Representatives from PGE recently meet with the Lucid team to see how the new system is working.

MAN: Those two units over there are meters that really get to the power purchase agreement. And that’s where the money is.

MAN: Yes. We want to see the cash register go up.

MAN: You want it to spin, right?

MAN: We want to produce as much energy as possible.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Charlie Allcock is PGE’s business development director.

CHARLIE ALLCOCK, Portland General Electric: Here in Oregon, we have a renewable portfolio standard, where we have to meet, and — by the end of this year, 15 percent of our customers energy use with renewable sources. We have been doing it mostly with wind and some solar. But, if this technology performs well, it will be on our list.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Oregon isn’t alone. Hydroelectric power is getting new attention from scientists and investors.

Several East Coast companies are developing turbines to harness the power of tides in New York’s East River and off the coast of Maine.

Portland State University vice president Jonathan Fink studies urban sustainability issues. We met him at one of Portland’s ubiquitous food truck lots.

Can we get two minted lemonades?

As we began to chat, Portland’s notorious wet weather began to create streams of potential energy all around us.

This is awesome.

Fink sees Lucid’s technology contributing to a broader effort by communities to move away from non-renewable energy sources.

JONATHAN FINK, Portland State University: In Portland, as an example, we get a lot of our energy from coal-fired power plants 200 kilometers east of here. That’s not great.

So how do we replace that? We’re not going to replace it with one big nuclear power plant. We’re going to replace it with a lot of conservation, a lot of smaller steps like what Lucid is doing, with solar, with wind.

What has to happen nationally and globally is, each city does these experiments, figures out what works, and then they have to exchange that information. And then you add it all up, and cities can really save a lot of energy.

HARI SREENIVASAN: CEO Semler says the focus is now on developing turbines that could be placed in smaller drinking water pipes found closer to homes.

GREGG SEMLER: They might be able to power, like, an electric vehicle charging station essentially with free energy.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The company is currently negotiating agreements with several cities in the U.S., including San Antonio and New York, as well as in other countries. And they hope to have more pipes and turbines in place in Portland over the next few years.

For the PBS NewsHour, this is Hari Sreenivasan in Portland, Oregon.

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Some people are born believers. Fake surgeries have been shown to relieve traumatic knee pain; “dummy pills” have wiped away migraines. A new report from Harvard University describes how certain genes predispose people toward believing placebos, or experiencing the “placebo effect.”

It also tackles corresponding ethical questions. For example, could knowing who’s prone to placebos one day determine who is first in line to receive cutting-edge medicine? The report was published on Monday in the journal, Trends in Molecular Medicine.

The placebo effect extends beyond how a patient’s body reacts to a sugar pill or an otherwise inert treatment. The phenomenon starts the moment a patient walks into a doctor’s office.

“Everything from your physician’s mood to their office décor to whether or not they wear a stethoscope can have a profound influence on how some patients respond to treatment,” says co-author Kathryn Hall, a senior fellow at the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Though a placebo won’t stop cancer or a virus, being duped benefits a wide spectrum of disorders.

The million-dollar question is knowing who will exhibit the placebo effect. Over the last four years, Hall and other scientists have turned to genetic screening for clarity. They have found genetic traits – dubbed “the placebome” – that make certain people more prone to the placebo effect, according to the report.

But genetic screening for placebo response raises ethical questions. If the placebo response is innate, then it likely varies by gender, age, ethnicity and other demographics. In clinical trials, placebo takers represent a blank canvas against which researchers can compare people receiving actual treatment. Is it ethical then to deny access to an experimental, potentially life-altering drug if a person’s placebo predisposition could cloud the results?

Take, for example, irritable bowel syndrome. Nearly 40 percent of IBS patients elicit a reaction to taking placebos. In 2012, Hall and her colleagues examined a trait that may explain why. They looked at a brain enzyme, catechol-Omethyltransferase (COMT), which influences the human perception of pain. COMT does so by controlling the production of dopamine within parts of the frontal lobes that govern motivation and our experience of rewards. The gene for COMT comes in two different forms – “met” and “val”, based on mutations in its DNA sequence. People who inherit two copies of the “met” gene from their parents live with extra dopamine in their rewards circuits and, as a consequence, are more sensitive to pain. Those with “val” harbor less dopamine and are more resilient to pain.

In Hall’s study, patients with irritable bowel syndrome received a placebo — fake acupuncture where the needles were pressed but didn’t pierce the skin – or they sat for three weeks on a “waitlist” without treatment. Patients with “met” had a bigger reduction in pain symptoms, scoring an average of 50 points lower on a 500-point scale of discomfort when compared to those with “val.” The contrast between the genetic groups was twice as dramatic if doctors augmented the placebo effect by being extra nice to their patients.

Still unknown is whether these placebo genes generalize to other conditions. “[Some] people with irritable bowels have a [placebo] susceptibility in the frontal lobes that may not happen for someone with chronic lower back pain,” says Jon-Kar Zubieta, a psychiatrist and radiologist at the University of Michigan.

Some people’s brains react differently to natural painkillers – endorphins – levels of which have been implicated as a source of chronic pain.

Zubieta’s team showed last October that a single mutation in a protein responsible for recognizing endorphins can intensify pain relief after receiving a placebo. In this case, the placebo effect was mediated by activity in a different brain network relative to the one for irritable bowel syndrome. And in 2008, a team from Sweden uncovered how a gene involved with serotonin production could predict if a sugar pill would help a patient with social anxiety disorder.

In these cases, the placebo effect hijacked natural pathways that are typically affected by real drugs. That’s a conundrum, says Zubieta, because if you have a disease where the power of suggestion hits the same nerves as your experimental drug, then how can you tell if the new meds are working?

“That’s possibly why placebos have such a high effect in people diagnosed with depression and why so many clinical trials with antidepressants have failed,” Zubieta says.

It remains a mystery how drug companies will respond to the discovery of placebo genes. For instance, should white Americans be excluded from clinical trials for irritable bowel syndrome, given they are four times as likely to be a “met” and experience a placebo effect relative to black Americans? A young biotech company Biometheus is already working on a genetic test to capitalize on COMT variants and streamline clinical trials for drug companies.

“Excluding people from trials is a concern, but I’m skeptical if it will happen in the near future,” says Frank Miller, a retired bioethicist with the National Institutes of Health. Most of the placebo-related mutations identified so far are common, so screening would remove larges swaths of potential patients, he said. Plus, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could restrict who can ultimately purchase the remedy if it’s only tested on a subset of people, Hall says.

“If the problem is that drugs don’t beat placebo, then we need better drugs,” says Miller.

Still, drug design is increasingly moving toward personalized medicine where people keep tabs on their genetics. (Just ask Angelina Jolie.) Placebome screening could ensure that whether a new medication works well for a niche population, allowing a drug manufacturer to corner the profits.

For instance, placebo responders may need a lower dose of real drugs to experience the same benefit. A lower dosage reduces the chance of side effects, meaning better knowledge of the placebo effect may fine tune and improve treatment for many individuals, Hall says.

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MEGAN THOMPSON: A crowd paraded recently outside the courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.  Kids, teachers, parents … there were even singing grandmas.  All hoping to draw attention to what this young woman was doing inside.

CHRIS WINTER:  Your honor, I have counsel table with me this morning, this afternoon, Kelsey Juliana, one of the plaintiffs.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Kelsey Juliana is only 19 years old, but she’s suing the State of Oregon, claiming it’s not doing nearly enough to stop climate change and prevent the effects it will have on her generation and those to come.

KELSEY JULIANA: If the state does not act now, we are facing irreversible, catastrophic crises.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Juliana – who delayed her first semester of college last fall to participate in a climate walk across the country – has been active on the issue for years.

KELSEY JULIANA: I’ve been doing climate activism work since 5th grade. And, you know, that started with me, you know, getting my friends, my soccer team together and spending a day marching and holding up signs.

MEGAN THOMPSON: In 2011, Juliana and another plaintiff teamed up with a local environmental activist group, Our Children’s Trust to file the lawsuit against the state.  Juliana was just 15.

But it’s not only her age that’s drawn attention to this case …. It’s also the legal approach that’s being used. …. All started by university of Oregon law professor Mary Christina Wood about a decade ago.

MARY CHRISTINA WOOD: It was really the moment when Hurricane Katrina hit and I recognized that climate crisis had not been addressed properly by government and the crisis was worsening with great urgency.

And environmental law had largely failed to address many of the most significant problems we face. So, to me, the Public Trust Doctrine was the logical response.

MEGAN THOMPSON: The Public Trust Doctrine is a legal theory that essentially says, government should hold certain natural resources in trust for the public.  It can be traced back to ancient Roman law and English common law.

In the US, it’s mostly been used to guarantee public access to waterways, and became part of American case law back in the 1890’s in a Supreme Court ruling that private developers in Chicago couldn’t prevent public access to Lake Michigan.

But in the 1970’s, environmental lawyers began arguing that the Public Trust Doctrine should be extended to other resources, like wildlife or even the air – and that it should compel governments to protect these resources, too.  And now, Professor Wood says, it should be extended to protect the atmosphere as well.

MARY CHRISTINA WOOD: It obviously applies to the atmosphere because the atmosphere controls the climate system we all depend on for survival.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Wood thought, if the atmosphere could be considered a resource covered by the public trust doctrine, then maybe courts could force governments to take additional steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. She called her idea, “atmospheric trust litigation” and worked with well-known climate scientist James Hansen.

He says we need to reduce emissions by at least six percent a year … and proposed specific remedies like a carbon tax to help get there.  Wood started giving talks about the plan … and eventually wrote a book.

MARY CHRISTINA WOOD: The problem with climate is that there is mind-blowing urgency and we have now Nature’s laws to contend with.  And so, what atmospheric trust litigation asks is that government have a plan.

JULIA OLSON: And so, I heard a talk that Mary Wood gave at the University of Oregon about using the Public Trust Doctrine to compel governments to protect our climate system for future generations…

MEGAN THOMPSON: Environmental attorney Julia Olson was so inspired that she decided to put Wood’s ideas into practice.  In 2010, she co-founded Our Children’s Trust – the group that backed Juliana’s case in Oregon.

But it’s not just happening here – kids backed by the group have brought lawsuits against the federal government and in 14 other states, although the case in Oregon has gotten the furthest along.  And the idea’s catching on globally, too – similar lawsuits have been filed Ukraine, Uganda, the Philippines and the Netherlands.

It’s all been done with the help of an army of attorneys and scientists working pro bono.

JULIA OLSON: We’re trying to spread the message that people everywhere, all over the world, hold these fundamental, inalienable rights to have their essential natural resources protected for themselves and for future generations, for their children and great-grandchildren.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Lawsuits, including the federal suit, have been dismissed.  And while a couple of state judges have been receptive to the idea that the public trust could include the atmosphere, none has forced state governments to take action.

Richard Stewart is a professor of environmental law at New York University, and explained the plaintiffs in Oregon will have an uphill battle, too.

RICHARD STEWART: It’s an interesting and intriguing idea, but– there are a number of problems.  One, it goes way b– beyond what any state court has done thus far.  Secondly– the atmosphere is global and greenhouse gases mix globally. So Oregon can by no means solve the problem, even the problem in Oregon.

The third problem is providing a remedy. And many courts in– there have been cases brought in other states that have said, “This is really for the political branches, this is beyond the capacity of the judiciary to manage.”

MEGAN THOMPSON: In fact, the circuit court judge in Oregon originally tossed out Juliana’s case on procedural grounds based on that very argument.  But last year, an Oregon appeals court gave our children’s trust one of its biggest wins so far: ordering the case back to the lower court for a decision on the merits.

MEGAN THOMPSON:  Four years after the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit, they finally got their day in court, on April 7, here at the Lane County Circuit Court in Eugene.

MEGAN THOMPSON: People lined up 2 hours before the hearing to watch Kelsey Juliana’s case against the state of Oregon.  But interestingly, the state itself doesn’t dispute many of the basic underlying facts of the case.

PAUL GARRAHAN: The State of Oregon agrees that climate change is a serious problem.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Paul Garrahan is an attorney with the Oregon Department of justice and was part of the state’s legal team at the hearing.  The state of Oregon for decades has been an environmental policy leader.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Oregon is already one of the lowest greenhouse gas emitters in the country, and is about to shut down its only coal-fired power plant.  The state even has a global warming commission and is adopting a clean fuels program.

Garrahan says, the state shares many of the plaintiffs’ goals, but using the public trust doctrine to sue in court isn’t the right way to go about achieving them.

PAUL GARRAHAN: We think that as a fundamental issue of democratic government, those decisions should be made by the legislature and by the executive branch.

MEGAN THOMPSON: But the plaintiffs argue there’s no time for a debate about the role of various branches of government, and point to a report issued by the state itself showing its proposed plans don’t put it on track to achieve its own emissions goals.

MEGAN THOMPSON: The plaintiffs acknowledge that the state is taking lots of steps to address this, but they say it’s just not enough.

PAUL GARRAHAN: Well, we agree that the state can do more. And we’re aggressively pushing policies to do more.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Judges have said, “I’m a judge and it’s not my job to tell democratically elected legislatures and state officials what to do.” How do you overcome that?

JULIA OLSON: It’s actually pretty simple. So, we have three branches of government. It goes back to 5th grade civics. And one branch of government – the legislature doesn’t get to both interpret the Constitution, write the laws, and then police themselves. That would be a real concentration of power in one branch of government. And so, what we’re asking the court to do is do its job and interpreting our public trust rights and then also be the police on the legislature to determine whether it is upholding its duty to make laws that protect our rights.

MEGAN THOMPSON: You haven’t gotten any state governments to do this. And other people have, you know, called this a bit of a stretch. Why keep going with this?

JULIA OLSON: We haven’t had a choice but to keep going and I think one of the important things for people to recognize is the urgency of the crisis. And it’s only our generation that can deal with this problem and stop the irreversible impacts that we’re causing.

MEGAN THOMPSON: Olson and her team at our children’s trust aren’t slowing down.  They plan to file three more state lawsuits and another federal lawsuit…and new lawsuits are also expected in India and Pakistan.  The judge in Oregon says he will make his ruling in the next couple of months.

KELSEY JULIANA: I hope that the judge will rule in our favor. I hope that he will look me in the eye and understand that, you know, I am running out of time.

The post These teens are suing Oregon to force action on climate change appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: And now to Viewers Like You, you’re chance to comment on our work.

Here’s what some of you had to say about last week’s signature segment from Hawaii, where some residents who tried to switch to solar power were told by the utility company to slow down.

Dave Wiggins said: Utility companies state side are really worried. So much so that they are starting to change tariffs. Quietly. Technology is changing the game.

Mike Lee took issue with those who had made the switch to solar: This is what happens when you have too many liberals living in the same place.

Candid One warned: If its condition’s inadequacy was so prominent at the turn of the millennium–and hasn’t received more than token attention since, the US doesn’t have much leeway toward an enhanced grid option. Hawaii’s example is school time.

MikeAThinker had this to say about the solar industry: …the rooftop solar industry made a (bad) assumption that they could just shove all the rooftop generated power back up the grid at any time and everything would be sweetness and butterflies. As someone who worked early in my career in the power industry – that is decidedly NOT how it works, and the system is largely not ready for that kind of ‘backflow’, particularly because it is so erratic and unreliable.

ProudLiberalAmerican had some advice: Better that these producers stay on the grid and continue to pay a small charge to help maintain it and have the excess they produce offset this cost and provide power to help replace outdated, inefficient, and polluting centralized power plants.

Shane Algarin added: Anybody who remembers Enron, the rigging of electricity markets, artificial blackouts, people dying because their medical equipment depended on electricity, knows why it’s good to escape the tentacles of the utilities.

As always, we welcome your comments. Visit us at pbs.org/newshour, on our Facebook page, or tweet us at @NewsHour.

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A Snail Kite, one of Florida’s iconic breeding bird species, perches on a branch at J. W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area near West Palm Beach, Florida. Pres. Obama plans to celebrate Earth Day by visiting the Florida Everglades. Credit: REUTERS/Mike Baranski/FWC/Handout via Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to celebrate Earth Day by visiting the Florida Everglades.

In his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, Obama says “there’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change.”

He says he’ll visit the Everglades on Wednesday to talk about how global warming threatens the U.S. economy. He says rising sea levels are putting the “economic engine for the South Florida tourism industry” at risk.

Polls consistently show the public is skeptical that the steps Obama has taken to curb pollution are worth the cost to the economy. So Obama is aiming to put a spotlight on the costs of climate change.

Obama held an event in Washington earlier this month linking climate change to health problems like allergies and asthma.

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A couple sits under an umbrella in La Jolla, California on May 12, 2014. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday that last month was the hottest since record keeping began in 1880. Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters

Last month the average global temperature was the highest recorded for March since record keeping began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Friday.

Average global temperature, including both land and ocean surfaces, was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit (0.85 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average.

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“Record warm temperatures continued to dominate in the northeast Pacific Ocean and were also notable in the southwest Pacific and parts of the Arctic Seas to the north and northwest of Scandinavia,” NOAA said in its report. “Overall, every major ocean basin had at least some areas with record warmth and large areas with much warmer-than-average temperatures.”

The first quarter of this year, from January to  March, had already broken records. It was the hottest such period in the administration’s 136-year archive.

Last year was the hottest ever recorded in modern history.

If current trends continue, 2015 will likely surpass 2014’s record.

“It seems quite likely that Earth will continue to see record or near-record high temperatures over the next several months,” NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden told Climate Central.

With the exception of 1998, the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.

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Hubble captured this mountain of dust and gas rising in the Carina Nebula. The top of a three-light-year tall pillar of cool hydrogen is being worn away by the radiation of nearby stars, while stars within the pillar unleash jets of gas that stream from the peaks. Photo by NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

The world’s first space telescope celebrates a quarter century this week. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope launched into orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery 25 years ago Friday, on April 24, 1990.

Hubble’s contributions to space exploration are countless. Its images, explains Hubble Space Telescope Senior Project Scientist Jennifer Wiseman, have shown the first definitive detection of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. They also have provided measurement of the expansion rate of the universe, and detection (along with ground-based telescopes) of acceleration in that expansion, caused by mysterious “dark energy” that appears to be pushing the universe apart.

“Hubble will go down in history as having changed the textbooks by totally revolutionizing humanity’s view of the universe, and our place in it,” Wiseman says. “It has also shown us exquisite beauty in the universe, in everything from galaxies to glowing nebulae to planetary atmospheres in our own solar system.”

Jupiter, with its trademark Great Red Spot, photographed by Hubble on May 15, 2014. Photo by NASA, ESA and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)

Currently weighing 27,000 lbs. (almost twice the size of a large African elephant), extending 13.3 meters (the length of a large school bus), Hubble has captured more than 1.2 million images. The low-orbit telescope does this with two mirrors that are tucked into the apparatus. Powered by the sun, it takes a mere 95 minutes for the telescope to complete its orbit around the earth, traveling about 17,000 mph at an altitude of 340 miles.

All week, NASA is marking the anniversary with events showcasing the telescope’s achievements in space exploration. Images taken over the past 25 years will be broadcast all week in New York’s Time Square; The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington will host a panel Saturday featuring NASA astronauts, scientists and engineers; and the IMAX movie “Hubble 3D” is now showing at select theaters across the U.S.

Enjoy some of the telescope’s most iconic images, including its very first, from May 20, 1990.

This May 22, 2008, image reveals a third red spot alongside its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. The new red spot was previously a white oval-shaped storm. The change to a red color indicates its storm clouds are rising to heights like the clouds of the Great Red Spot. Photo by M. Wong and I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley)

At left, Hubble revisited its iconic “Pillars of Creation” image with this sharper and wider view of pillars in the Eagle Nebula. The towering pillars are about five light-years tall. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust. At right, a near-infrared view of the pillars. Read more from NASA on the Pillars of Creation. Photo by NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team

On the left, the seeds of a Martian storm are brewing in the giant Hellas Basin (oval at 4 o’clock position on disk) and in another storm at the northern polar cap. On the right, the storm after two months, which obscures all surface features. Both images are in natural color, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. See more information on Mars’ perfect storm on Hubblesite.org. Photo by NASA, James Bell of Cornell University, Michael Wolff of Space Science Institute and The Hubble Heritage Team

Hubble details a star birth in Galaxy M83. Photo by NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team

Gas released by a dying star races across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour, forming the delicate shape of a celestial butterfly. This nebula is also known as NGC 6302 or the Bug Nebula. Photo by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

At left, Saturn’s rings in ultraviolet light, from NASA and E. Karkoschka from the University of Arizona. At right, as Saturn takes its 29-year journey around the Sun, its tilt allows us to see its rings from different perspectives. Saturn’s tilt also gives it seasons. The lowest image on the left shows the northern hemisphere’s autumn, while the uppermost right image shows the winter. Photo by NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team

The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known, several more than 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovae in a few million years. Photo by NASA, ESA, F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters where astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, where the warping of space by the cluster’s gravitational field distorts and magnifies the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This is manifested as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies. Photo by NASA, ESA, the Hubble SM4 ERO Team and ST-ECF

A pulse of light from a star’s outburst traveling through the surrounding space, illuminating material ejected by the star at a much earlier epoch. This is one of a series of “snapshots” of the ongoing phenomenon that took place over many months, and provided an unusual opportunity to follow a rapidly changing subject and the rare ability to tease out its full 3D structure. Photo by NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay

This is the first visible-light image ever taken of a planet around another star, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut. The inset at bottom right is a composite image showing the planet’s position during Hubble observations taken in 2004 and 2006. Astronomers have calculated that Fomalhaut b completes an orbit around its parent star every 872 years. The region around Fomalhaut’s location is black because astronomers used the Advanced Camera’s coronagraph to block out the star’s bright glare so that the dim planet could be seen. See more information on Fomalhaut and Fomalhaut b on Hubblesite.org Photo by NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Where it all started: on May 20, 1990, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field/Planetary Camera takes its first image, right. As a comparison, it is shown next to a ground-based picture from Las Campanas, Chile, Observatory of the same region of the sky. The Las Campanas picture was taken with a 100-inch telescope. The first Hubble image was intended to assist in focusing the telescope. It was a 30-second exposure. Read more on Hubble’s first image at Hubblesite.org. Photo by NASA, ESA, and STScI

Photo captions are provided by NASA. You can see more photos on NASA’s Hubblesite.org.

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Forty-three dinosaur egg fossils were excavated in Heyuan, China, on Monday afternoon. Video by CCTV.

The city of Heyuan in the Guandong province of China is considered the “Home of Dinosaurs.” Since 1996, nearly 17,000 dinosaur eggs have been discovered beneath the city’s mountain terrain. On Sunday, that number grew when construction workers unearthed, by happenstance, 43 fossilized dinosaur eggs.

It’s too soon to tell which species of dinosaur these eggs belong to. The largest was 5 inches in diameter, and 19 were fully intact. According to The Verge, previously found eggs were 65 to 89 million years old.

The Heyuan Museum holds the city’s collection of dinosaur eggs, 11 fossilized skeletons and almost 200 footprint fossils. But museum deputy director Huang Zhiqing told CNN that this was the first time fossils were unearthed in the city center.

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A pelican leaves its nest as oil hits the shore of an island in Barataria Bay on May 22, 2010. Five years after Deepwater Horizon blowout, marine chemist David Valentine has led eight oceanographic expeditions studying the affect of the resulting oil spill on the Gulf. Photo by Associated Press/Gerald Herbert

The Deepwater Horizon event was a national tragedy: 11 workers killed in a blowout, an ecosystem inundated with oil and the livelihoods of many in the Gulf states disrupted. In a response effort of unparalleled scale, a diverse group of independent scientists ventured into the domain of spill responders and affiliated decision-makers. Despite some friction and missteps, both sides saw benefit to the interaction. Responders gained access to state-of-the-art instrumentation, expertise, and trained personnel. Scientists gained the opportunity to study the sort of large-scale environmental assault that they could never ethically perform.

As a university professor studying the oil-ocean nexus, I actively sought opportunities to participate on-scene in the “response science,” with support from the National Science Foundation and other agencies. I hoped to use my scientific expertise to help the public grasp the complexities of the disaster. I also hoped to extract useful discoveries from this unplanned experiment, to provide some small counterbalance against the many grave costs. The work I and others conducted has led to vigorous and ongoing debate, accompanying thousands of scientific publications. Five years on, here are five key lessons from my foray in response science, distilled from collaborative work with close colleagues.

Lesson one: Natural gas is good food if you are a bacterium. Propane and its closest chemical relatives, ethane and butane, are well known for their uses as fuel in lighters, outdoor grills, and buses powered by liquid natural gas. Collectively, these three compounds made up about 10 percent of the total discharge from the Macondo Well. Instead of evaporating to the atmosphere as expected, they dissolved into the deep ocean, never to reach the sea surface. Present in such large quantities, they rapidly caused bacterial populations to bloom and oxygen levels to decline. Surprisingly, some of the same bacteria that came for the natural gas may have stayed to help break down select components of the oil.

Lesson two: The ocean has a memory for oil. A mile deep, water flows and circulates very much as it does at the surface, but more slowly. During the early stages of the Deepwater Horizon event, pristine waters flowed over the ruptured well and became contaminated with the discharge. The currents then carried the contamination away from the well, forming what became known as subsurface plumes. With the contaminants as a food source, bacteria multiplied within the plumes. Sometimes the currents carried previously contaminated water back over the well, injecting a new dose of contaminants into water that now harbored a dense and hungry population of bacteria. Analysis of the pattern of recurring inoculation indicates that this bacterial boomerang acted repeatedly and accelerated the rate at which many hydrocarbons were consumed by bacteria.

Lesson 3: Hydrocarbons may be gone, but tar is not forgotten. Oil is a complex mixture that contains thousands of individual hydrocarbons; tracking its removal in the environment is a complicated proposition. This problem is made harder by the use of antiquated technologies that detect only what they look for. Much of the oil from Deepwater Horizon floated in slicks at the sea surface and some washed ashore. While a fraction of the hydrocarbons disappeared, evaporated, dissolved, or were respired by bacteria, some of them simply underwent subtle chemical transformations, becoming invisible to the tracking technologies but no less present in the environment. That is, the oil became tar. These findings highlight the limitations of available tools and underscore the difficulty in balancing the influx of oil with its destruction, factors which must be taken into account before proclaiming the oil gone.

Lesson 4: Sometimes oil sinks. Oil sprayed from the Macondo Well formed droplets, about half of which were trapped at great depth because they were too small to achieve buoyant rise. These micro-droplets moved with the currents until something unexpected happened: they coagulated and sank. Though the process of coagulation remains enigmatic, the resulting fallout splattered the sea floor with oily particles over an area exceeding 1,000 square miles. While the stain of oil on the sea floor is clear, the ecological effects to the deep ocean remain uncertain because the splatter was patchy and the environment difficult to adequately sample.

Lesson 5: Chemical dispersants can linger, when used at great depth. Faced with a flood of oil, Deepwater Horizon responders chose to use chemical dispersants to protect workers and sensitive environments from inundation. In the deep ocean, dispersant was added directly to the oil as it flowed from the ruptured well, with the goal of promoting formation of micro-droplets and thereby halting the oil’s buoyant rise to the surface. Dispersant application proceeded with the expectation that it would accelerate oil’s degradation by bacteria while also being degraded itself. Surprisingly, the active ingredient of the dispersant lingered in the deep ocean for months, traveling hundreds of miles on the deep currents. This persistence in the deep sea was unanticipated and contributes to ongoing policy discussions as to whether or not dispersant use provides a net benefit to this environment. The jury is still out.

These are only a few of many lessons to come from the Deepwater Horizon scientific response. The engagement of so many scientists in this event and the continued emergence of their discoveries provide a compelling rationale for an expanded community of scientific responders that engage broadly with the disaster-response community. These communities work at different speeds and scopes, and can easily disagree on the best way to use limited resources. Bridging the gap can be challenging, especially in the middle of an emergency. Emerging projects such as Scientific Partnerships Enabling Rapid Response (http://sperr.us/) are presently developing the framework to overcome such obstacles, and Deepwater Horizon offers a model by which responders and scientists can provide mutual benefit.

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Professional poker player Doug Polk takes on Carnegie Mellon University’s poker-playing computer program Claudico in the opening day of the”Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence” poker competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. Claudico will take on Polk and three other poker professionals in 80,000 total hands of Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold’em.

How much would you be willing to bet that a computer program could go toe-to-toe with professional poker players?

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have taken that wager. Computer science professor Tuomas Sandholm, alongside researchers Sam Ganzfried and Noam Brown, are dealing their poker-playing artificial intelligence, Claudico, into a “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. Starting today, Claudico will be taking on poker professionals Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les in 80,000 hands of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em over a two week period.

“Poker is now a benchmark for artificial intelligence research, just as chess once was,” Sandholm said. “It’s a game of exceeding complexity that requires a machine to make decisions based on incomplete and often misleading information, thanks to bluffing, slow play and other decoys. And to win, the machine has to out-smart its human opponents.”

The competition, funded by Rivers Casino and Microsoft, will see each of the four pros play poker against Claudico on laptop computers, which are connected to a computer at Carnegie Mellon that will be running the software. Each of the players will play 1,500 hands per day against Claudico over 13 days, totaling 20,000 hands each.

The event has taken precautions to eliminate the role of luck as much as possible. In addition to rotating players between the casino’s main floor and an isolation room to prevent comparing of cards, “players will be paired to play duplicate matches — Player A will receive the same cards as the computer receives against Player B, and vice versa,” the university’s press release describes.

“I hope we can stand up for humanity and take this computer down,” Polk, who has earned more than $3.6 million in live tournament earnings, said. “I know computers will eventually be able to beat humans. But I hope we can make them go a few more rounds after this before they do, like Kasparov did.”

Live streams of the games, plus an updating scoreboard, can be followed on the Rivers Casino event page.

Watch live video from Claudico_Extra on www.twitch.tv

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