President Joe Biden recently signed a sweeping executive order to promote the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence. VOA’s Julie Taboh reports on reactions by Washington-area AI experts.
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Month: November 2023
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will expand its traveler-based surveillance program to include testing for respiratory viruses, partners Ginkgo Bioworks and XWELL said on Monday.
The expansion, to be launched at four of the seven participating airports, comes ahead of the fall and winter months in the United States when viruses that cause respiratory diseases such as influenza and respiratory synctial virus (RSV) usually circulate more heavily.
CDC has warned that it expects hospitalizations from COVID-19, RSV infections and flu this year to be similar to last year’s numbers, higher than the pre-pandemic levels.
Ginkgo and XWELL said they will monitor over 30 new viruses, bacteria, and antimicrobial resistance targets including seasonal respiratory pathogens such as influenza A and B, RSV, and SARS-CoV-2 as part of the expansion.
The expansion will launch at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Boston Logan International Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport.
The surveillance program is a public-private partnership between the health agency, Ginkgo’s biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric, and XWELL’s diagnostic testing service, XpresCheck.
The agency conducts voluntary nasal swabbing and airport wastewater sampling as part of the program, aimed to help with early detection of new SARS-CoV-2 variants and other pathogens.
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When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle five years ago, it left boats, cars and trucks piled up to the windows of Bonny Paulson’s home in the tiny coastal community of Mexico Beach, Florida, even though the house rests on pillars 14 feet above the ground. But Paulson’s home, with a rounded shape that looks something like a ship, shrugged off Category 5 winds that might otherwise have collapsed it.
“I wasn’t nervous at all,” Paulson said, recalling the warning to evacuate. Her house lost only a few shingles, with photos taken after the storm showing it standing whole amid the wreckage of almost all the surrounding homes.
Some developers are building homes like Paulson’s with an eye toward making them more resilient to the extreme weather that’s increasing with climate change, and friendlier to the environment at the same time. Solar panels, for example, installed so snugly that high winds can’t get underneath them, mean clean power that can survive a storm. Preserved wetlands and native vegetation that trap carbon in the ground and reduce flooding vulnerability, too. Recycled or advanced construction materials that reduce energy use as well as the need to make new material.
A person’s home is one of the biggest ways they can reduce their individual carbon footprint. Buildings release about 38% of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions each year. Some of the carbon pollution comes from powering things like lights and air conditioners and some of it from making the construction materials, like concrete and steel.
Deltec, the company that built Paulson’s home, says that only one of the nearly 1,400 homes it’s built over the last three decades has suffered structural damage from hurricane-force winds. But the company puts as much emphasis on building green, with higher-quality insulation that reduces the need for air conditioning, heat pumps for more efficient heating and cooling, energy-efficient appliances, and of course solar.
“The real magic here is that we’re doing both,” chief executive Steve Linton. “I think a lot of times resilience is sort of the afterthought when you talk about sustainable construction, where it’s just kind of this is a feature on a list … we believe that resilience is really a fundamental part of sustainability.”
Other companies are developing entire neighborhoods that are both resistant to hurricanes and contribute less than average to climate change.
Pearl Homes’ Mirabella community in Bradenton, Florida, consists of 160 houses that are all LEED-certified platinum, the highest level of one of the most-used green building rating systems.
To reduce vulnerability to flooding, home sites are raised 3 feet above code. Roads are raised, too, and designed to direct accumulating rainfall away and onto ground where it may be absorbed. Steel roofs with seams allow solar panels to be attached so closely it’s difficult for high winds to get under them, and the homes have batteries that kick in when power is knocked out.
Pearl Homes CEO Marshall Gobuty said his team approached the University of Central Florida with a plan to build a community that doesn’t contribute to climate change. “I wanted them to be not just sustainable, but resilient, I wanted them to be so unlike everything else that goes on in Florida,” Gobuty said. “I see homes that are newly built, half a mile away, that are underwater … we are in a crisis with how the weather is changing.”
That resonates with Paulson, in Mexico Beach, who said she didn’t want to “live day to day worried about tracking something in the Atlantic.” Besides greater peace of mind, she says, she’s now enjoying energy costs of about $32 per month, far below the roughly $250 she said she paid in a previous home.
“I don’t really feel that the population is taking into effect the environmental catastrophes, and adjusting for it,” she said. “We’re building the same old stuff that got blown away.”
Babcock Ranch is another sustainable, hurricane-resilient community in South Florida. It calls itself the first solar-powered town in the U.S., generating 150 megawatts of electricity with 680,000 panels on 870 acres. The community was also one of the first in the country to have large batteries on site to store extra solar power to use at night or when the power is out.
Syd Kitson founded Babcock Ranch in 2006. The homes are better able to withstand hurricane winds because the roofs are strapped to a system that connects down to the foundation. Power lines are buried underground so they can’t blow over. The doors swing outward in some homes so when pressure builds up from the wind, they don’t blast open, and vents help balance the pressure in garages.
In 2022 Hurricane Ian churned over Babcock Ranch as a Category 4 storm. It left little to no damage, Kitson said.
“We set out to prove that a new town and the environment can work hand-in-hand, and I think we’ve proven that,” said Kitson. “Unless you build in a very resilient way, you’re just going to constantly be repairing or demolishing the home.”
The development sold some 73,000 acres of its site to the state for wetland preservation, and on the land where it was built, a team studied how water naturally flows through the local environment and incorporated it into its water management system.
“That water is going to go where it wants to go, if you’re going to try and challenge Mother Nature, you’re going to lose every single time,” said Kitson. The wetlands, retention ponds, and native vegetation are better able to manage water during extreme rainfall, reducing the risk of flooded homes.
In the Florida Keys, Natalia Padalino and her husband, Alan Klingler, plan to finish building a Deltec home by December. The couple was concerned about the future impacts global warming and hurricanes would have on the Florida Keys and researched homes that were both sustainable and designed to withstand these storms.
“We believe we’re building something that’s going to be a phenomenal investment and reduce our risk of any major catastrophic situation,” Klingler said.
“People have been really open and receptive. They tell us if a hurricane comes, they’re going to be staying in our place,” Padalino said.
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Building a robot that’s both humanlike and useful is a decadesold engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction.
While the latest artificial intelligence craze has sparked another wave of investments in the quest to build a humanoid, most of the current prototypes are clumsy and impractical, looking better in staged performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups from keeping at it.
“The intention is not to start from the beginning and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,'” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.”
Do we even need humanoids? Hurst makes a point of describing Agility’s warehouse robot Digit as human-centric, not humanoid, a distinction meant to emphasize what it does over what it’s trying to be.
What it does, for now, is pick up tote bins and move them. Amazon announced in October it would begin testing Digits for use in its warehouses, and Agility opened an Oregon factory in September to mass-produce them.
Digit has a head containing cameras, other sensors and animated eyes, and a torso that essentially works as its engine. It has two arms and two legs, but its legs are more birdlike than human, with an inverted knees appearance that resembles so-called digitigrade animals such as birds, cats and dogs that walk on their toes rather than on flat feet.
Rival robot-makers, like Figure AI, are taking a more purist approach on the idea that only true humanoids can effectively navigate workplaces, homes and a society built for humans. Figure also plans to start with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but aims for a commercial robot that can be “iterated on like an iPhone” to perform multiple tasks to take up the work of humans as birth rates decline around the world.
“There’s not enough people doing these jobs, so the market’s massive,” said Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock. “If we can just get humanoids to do work that humans are not wanting to do because there’s a shortfall of humans, we can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe.”
At the moment, however, Adcock’s firm doesn’t have a prototype that’s ready for market. Founded just over a year ago and after having raised tens of millions of dollars, it recently revealed a 38-second video of Figure walking through its test facility in Sunnyvale, California.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also trying to build a humanoid, called Optimus, through the car company’s robotics division, but a hyped-up live demonstration last year of the robot’s awkwardly halting steps didn’t impress experts in the robotics field. Seemingly farther along is Tesla’s Austin, Texas-based neighbor Apptronik, which unveiled its Apollo humanoid in an August video demonstration.
All the attention — and money — poured into making ungainly humanoid machines might make the whole enterprise seem like a futile hobby for wealthy technologists, but for some pioneers of legged robots, it’s all about what you learn along the way.
“Not only about their design and operation, but also about how people respond to them, and about the critical underlying technologies for mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence,” said Marc Raibert, the co-founder of Boston Dynamics, best known for its dog-like robots named Spot.
Raibert said sometimes the path of development is not along a straight line. Boston Dynamics, now a subsidiary of carmaker Hyundai, experimented with building a humanoid that could handle boxes.
“That led to development of a new robot that was not really a humanoid, but had several characteristics of a humanoid,” he said via email. “But the changes resulted in a new robot that could handle boxes faster, could work longer hours and could operate in tight spaces, such as a truck. So humanoid research led to a useful nonhumanoid robot.”
Some startups aiming for humanlike machines focused on improving the dexterity of robotic fingers before trying to get their robots to walk.
Walking is “not the hardest problem to solve in humanoid robotics,” said Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of British Columbia, Canada-based startup Sanctuary AI. “The hardest problem is the problem of understanding the world and being able to manipulate it with your hands.”
Sanctuary’s newest and first bipedal robot, Phoenix, can stock shelves, unload delivery vehicles and operate a checkout, early steps toward what Rose sees as a much longer-term goal of getting robots to perceive the physical world to be able to reason about it in a way that resembles intelligence. Like other humanoids, it’s meant to look endearing, because how it interacts with real people is a big part of its function.
“We want to be able to provide labor to the world, not just for one thing, but for everybody who needs it,” Rose said. “The systems have to be able to think like people. So we could call that artificial general intelligence if you’d like. But what I mean more specifically is the systems have to be able to understand speech and they need to be able to convert the understanding of speech into action, which will satisfy job roles across the entire economy.”
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Prince William arrived Sunday in Singapore for the annual Earthshot Prize awards, the first to be held in Asia, to support environmental innovators with solutions to battle climate change and save the planet.
Upon his arrival, dozens of people waving British flags welcomed him with loud cheers. William, 41, shook hands, signed autographs and sportingly took selfies with many of them during a walkabout.
“It’s fantastic to be back in Singapore for this year’s Earthshot Prize ceremony, after 11 years,” he said in a statement upon landing. “Singapore’s bold vision to be a leader for environmental innovation sets the standard for others to follow.”
“He has this charm,” said Johanes Mario, a Singaporean welcoming William at the airport. “He really fights for … the climate. I believe this is really a good cause for the future of our generation.”
At Singapore’s Changi Airport and before greeting the crowd, William stood on an upper floor for a stunning view of the 40-meter (131-foot) Rain Vortex, the world’s largest indoor waterfall, which was illuminated green to mark his arrival. He was also shown a tree planted in his honor in the indoor garden at the foot of the waterfall.
The heir to the British throne last visited Singapore with his wife, Princess Catherine, in 2012. Traveling solo this time, William’s focus is on the Earthshot Prize that he and his Royal Foundation charity launched in 2020 to promote innovative solutions and technologies to combat global warming and mitigate its impact on the environment.
15 finalists
Five winners will be named at an award ceremony Tuesday. Each will get a million pounds ($1.2 million) to help them scale up their projects for a wider global reach. Fifteen finalists representing six continents were selected from 1,300 nominees this year. The winners are from five categories: nature protection, clean air, ocean revival, waste elimination and climate change.
William will address the star-studded ceremony, to be hosted by English actress Hannah Waddingham. Renowned wildlife conservationist Robert Irwing and celebrities including Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and actresses Lana Condor and Nomzamo Mbatha are expected to attend the event.
The inaugural ceremony was held in London in 2021, followed by Boston last year. The prize’s name refers to the late President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “moonshot” speech, which challenged Americans to reach the moon by the end of that decade. That inspired the prince and his partners to set a similar goal for finding solutions to pressing environmental problems by 2030.
Singapore’s Foreign Ministry said William will call on Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and meet Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loon at The Istana palace — one of Singapore’s oldest heritage sites — during his four-day trip.
William, a keen sportsman, will also try his hand at dragon boating, a popular sport in Singapore and many parts of the world. He will also meet Singaporeans to see how local organizations are working to protect and restore the planet.
William’s office at Kensington Palace has said that Singapore was chosen to host this year’s awards ceremony because of its role as a “hub for innovation” in Southeast Asia.
William will also attend the United for Wildlife global summit, featuring representatives of law enforcement agencies, conservation groups and corporations working to combat trade in illegal wildlife products, estimated at $20 billion annually.
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The North American box office had one of its slowest weekends of the year, due in large part to “Dune: Part Two’s” absence from the lineup.
Moviegoers had many other options to choose from. The video game adaptation “Five Nights at Freddy’s” repeated its first-place ranking, followed by “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” still going strong. Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla ” expanded nationwide and “Oppenheimer” returned to IMAX screens. Several well-received indies opened as well.
But this was the weekend that Warner Bros. and Legendary’s ” Dune: Part Two” was supposed to open, before the SAG-AFTRA strike prompted many studios to shuffle release dates in anticipation of a lengthy dispute that has stopped movie stars from promoting their films. The “Dune” sequel starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya was pushed to March 2024, and no major blockbusters moved in to take its November 3 spot.
Even with “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” still bringing Swifties to the multiplex, and prestige offerings including Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” overall ticket sales are likely to be around $64 million for the weekend, making it one of the slowest of the year.
“It’s hard to reverse engineer, but ‘Dune 2’ would have certainly been the No. 1 movie and it would have been a bigger overall weekend,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “The strikes have had a profound impact on this marketplace. But this left a lot of opportunity for films like ‘Priscilla,’ ‘The Holdovers’ and ‘Radical’ to get more of a spotlight.”
In its second weekend, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” picked up an additional $19.4 million to take first place, according to studio estimates Sunday. It’s a hefty 76% drop from its first weekend. That’s not unexpected given that the movie is also streaming on Peacock and that viewership for films targeting intense and niche fandoms are often wildly frontloaded. But taking in $217 million globally against a reported $20 million production budget makes it a hit for Universal Pictures and Blumhouse.
“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” took second place, with fourth weekend earnings at an estimated $13.5 million for the AMC release. Playing only on Thursdays through Sundays, the film has made an astonishing $231.1 million globally to date.
In third place, “Killers of the Flower Moon” was down only 25% in its third weekend, with $7 million from 3,786 screens, which brings its domestic total to $52.3 million. The $200 million film was financed by Apple Original Films with Paramount overseeing its theatrical run.
After a healthy opening in New York and Los Angeles last weekend, “Priscilla,” based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, expanded to 1,359 screens where it earned $5.1 million over the weekend to take fourth place. Coppola’s well-reviewed film starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi attracted an audience that was predominately younger (75% under 35) and female (65%).
“The Holdovers,” a Focus Features release, also expanded slightly to 64 theaters this weekend, where it grossed an additional $600,000. Next weekend the New England-set period drama starring Paul Giamatti as a curmudgeonly prep school teacher will expand to over 800 locations.
A handful of smaller films made their theatrical debuts this weekend, including Meg Ryan’s “What Happens Later,” released by Bleecker Street; and Sundance gems “Radical” and “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.”
The biggest of the batch was “Radical,” which is based on a true story about a teacher in a Mexican border city and stars Eugenio Derbez. The warmly reviewed Pantelion release opened in 419 locations and made $2.7 million.
“‘Radical’ is a big winner this weekend and a big win for Eugenio Derbez,” Dergarabedian said. “He’s becoming a global superstar.”
“What Happens Later,” a rom-com starring Ryan and David Duchovny as exes stuck in an airport, made $1.6 million from 1,492 screens. Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” meanwhile, opened on three screens and earned $12,529, according to studio A24.
“The overall box office is rather quiet, but there are so many interesting films out there,” Dergarabedian said. “Independent film can really shine right now.”
The effects of the ongoing strike at the box office are not easily quantifiable. Up to this point, it’s mainly meant that stars without interim agreements haven’t been able to promote their films. “Priscilla” was one of the exceptions and Elordi and Spaeny have been able to do interviews and appear on talk shows to drum up awareness.
Next weekend will be an interesting test, as Marvel and Disney release “The Marvels” without months of appearances from stars like Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Lashana Lynch preceding it. It is possible a resolution between the actors’ guild and the major entertainment companies may come this week, but it’s unclear if that will have any impact on “The Marvels.”
“All eyes will be on ‘The Marvels,’ not only what it represents during the strikes, but what it means for Marvel as a whole, which is always compared to their past successes,” Dergarabedian said. “But the opening weekend isn’t everything anymore. Hopefully it’ll provide an infusion of that blockbuster feeling going into the holiday season.”
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
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“Five Nights at Freddy’s,” $19.4 million.
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“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” $13.5 million.
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“Killers of the Flower Moon,” $7 million.
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“Priscilla,” $5.1 million.
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“Radical,” $2.7 million.
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“The Exorcist: Believer,” $2.2 million.
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“After Death,” $2 million.
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“Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie,” $2 million.
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“What Happens Later,” $1.6 million.
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“Freelance,” $1.3 million.
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More than a dozen U.S. states have enacted or introduced legislation to restrict drag shows. The moves are the product of socially conservative momentum against shows where performers who are mostly men dress mostly as women. Gustavo Martinez Contreras reports from a unique show in New Mexico. Camera: Gustavo Martinez Contreras.
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Using sidewalks as exam rooms and heavy red duffle bags as medical supply closets, volunteer medics spend their Saturdays caring for the growing number of migrants arriving in Chicago without a place to live.
Mostly students in training, they go to police stations where migrants are first housed, prescribing antibiotics, distributing prenatal vitamins and assessing for serious health issues. These student doctors, nurses and physician assistants are the front line of health care for asylum-seekers in the nation’s third-largest city, filling a gap in Chicago’s haphazard response.
“My team is a team that shouldn’t have to exist, but it does out of necessity,” said Sara Izquierdo, a University of Illinois Chicago medical student who helped found the group. “Because if we’re not doing this, I’m not sure anyone will.”
More than 19,600 migrants have come to Chicago over the last year since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending buses to so-called sanctuary cities. The migrants wait at police stations and airports, sometimes for months, until there’s space at a longer-term shelter, like park district buildings.
Once in shelter, they can access a county clinic exclusively for migrants. But the currently 3,300 people in limbo at police stations and airports must rely on a mishmash of volunteers and social service groups that provide food, clothes and medicine.
Izquierdo noted the medical care gap months ago, consulted experienced doctors and designed a street-medicine model tailored to migrants’ medical needs. Her group makes weekly visits to police stations, operating on a shoestring budget of $30,000, mostly used for medication.
On a recent Saturday, she was among dozens of medics at a South Side station where migrants sleep in the lobby, on sidewalks and an outdoor basketball court. Officers didn’t allow the volunteers in the station so when one patient requested privacy, their doctor used his car.
Abrahan Belizario saw a doctor for the first time in five months.
The 28-year-old had a headache, toothache and chest pain. He recently arrived from Peru, where he worked as a driver and at a laundromat but couldn’t survive. He wasn’t used to the brisk Chicago weather and believed sleeping outdoors exacerbated his symptoms.
“It is very cold,” he said. “We’re almost freezing.”
The volunteers booked him a dental appointment and gave him a bus pass.
Many migrants who land in Chicago and other U.S. cities come from Venezuela where a social, political and economic crisis has pushed millions into poverty. More than 7 million have left, often risking a dangerous route by foot to the U.S. border.
The migrants’ health problems tend to be related to their journey or living in crowded conditions. Back and leg injuries from walking are common. Infections spread easily. Hygiene is an issue. There are few indoor bathrooms and outdoor portable toilets lack handwashing stations. Not many people carry their medical records.
Most also have trauma, either from their homeland or from the journey itself.
“You can understand the language, but it doesn’t mean you understand the situation,” said Miriam Guzman, one of organizers and a fourth-year medical student at UIC.
The doctors refer patients to organizations that help with mental health but there are limitations. The fluid nature of the shelter system makes it difficult to follow-up; people are often moved without warning.
Chicago’s goal is to provide permanent homes, which could help alleviate health issues. But the city has struggled to manage the growing population as buses and planes arrive daily at all hours. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who took office in May, calls it an inherited issue and proposed winterized tents.
His administration has acknowledged the heavy reliance on volunteers.
“We weren’t ready for this,” said Rey Wences Najera, first deputy of immigrant, migrant and refugee rights. “We are building this plane as we are flying it and the plane is on fire.”
The volunteer doctors also are limited in what they can do: Their duffle bags have medications for children, bandages and even ear plugs after some migrants wanted to block out sirens. But they cannot offer X-rays or address chronic issues.
“You’re not going to tell a person who has gone through this journey to stop smoking,” said Ruben Santos, a Rush University medical student. “You change your way of trying to connect to that person to make sure that you can help them with their most pressing needs while not doing some of the traditional things that you would do in the office or a big academic hospital.”
The volunteers explain to each patient that the service is free but that they’re students. Experienced doctors, who are part of the effort, approve treatment plans and prescribe medications.
Getting people those medications is another challenge. One station visit prompted 15 prescriptions. Working from laptops on the floor — near dozens of sleeping families — the doctors mapped out which medics would pick up medications the following day and how they’d find the recipients.
Sometimes the volunteers must call for emergency help.
Thirty-year-old Moises Hidalgo said he had trouble breathing. Doctors heard a concerning “crackling” sound, suspected pneumonia and called an ambulance.
Hidalgo, who came from Peru after having left his native Venezuela more than a decade ago, once worked as a chef. He’s been walking around Chicago looking for jobs, but has been turned away without a work permit.
“I’ve been trying to find work, at least so that I can pay to sleep somewhere, because if this isn’t solved, I can’t keep waiting,” he said.
To stay warm while sleeping outside, he wore four layers of clothing; his loose pants cinched with a shoelace.
The medics hope Chicago can formalize their approach. And they say they’ll continue to keep at it — for some, it’s personal.
Dr. Muftawu-Deen Iddrisu, who works Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, said he wanted to give back. Originally from Ghana, he attended medical school in Cuba.
“I come from a very humble background,” he said. “I know how it feels. I know once sometime back someone did the same for me.”
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One of modern climate science’s pioneers is warning that the world isn’t just steadily warming but is dangerously accelerating, according to a study that some other scientists call a bit overheated.
The work from former NASA top scientist James Hansen, who since leaving the space agency has become a prominent protester against the use of fossil fuels, which cause climate change, illustrates a recently surfaced division among scientists about whether global warming has kicked into a new and even more dangerous gear.
Hansen, who alerted much of the United States to the harms of climate change in dramatic congressional testimony in 1988, said Thursday that since 2010, the rate of warming has jumped by 50%. Hansen argues that since 2010 there is more sun energy in the atmosphere, and less of the particles that can reflect it back into space thanks to efforts to cut pollution. The loss of those particles means there’s less of the cooling effect that they can have.
Hansen said a key calculation used in figuring out how much the world will warm in response to carbon pollution shows much faster warming than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates. He called the international goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times “deader than a doornail” and said a less stringent goal of 2 degrees Celsius is on its deathbed. That matters because increases in average global temperatures lead to more frequent and intense extreme weather events.
“The next few years will show that we indeed do have an acceleration in the global warming rate,” Hansen said in a press briefing. “And it’s based on simple good physics.”
“The planet is now out of (energy) balance by an incredible amount, more than it ever has been,” said Hansen, who has been nicknamed the Godfather of Global Warming.
Several climate scientists contacted by The Associated Press expressed skepticism about Hansen’s study, tinged with respect for his long-term work.
Hansen’s study in Thursday’s journal Oxford Open Climate Change is broad-ranging “but has little by way of analytical depth or consistency checks when making claims quite far outside the norm,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London. “It seems primarily aimed at convincing policymakers rather than scientists.”
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who insisted that warming is steadily increasing but not accelerated, posted a rebuttal to Hansen’s claims and said climate change right now is bad enough and there’s no need to overstate the case. Mann said “it has always been risky to ignore (Hansen’s) warnings and admonitions” but when claims are made so out of the mainstream the standard for evidence is high, and he said Hansen hasn’t met them.
Yet a check of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data lends support to Hansen’s modeling.
Hansen’s study said from 1970 to 2010, the world warmed at a rate of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade, but projected that would increase to a rate of at least 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade after 2010. NOAA data shows that 0.27 degrees is the rate since September 2010.
That starting date is key because that’s when scientists could start to see the effect of clean air regulations that reduced aerosol pollution and the amount of sulfur in fuel used by ocean shipping, Hansen said. That type of more traditional sooty air pollution has a cooling effect that masks a fraction of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Hansen and many other scientists said.
When scientists try to figure out future and past warming one of the crucial variables is climate sensitivity, which is how much the world warms when carbon dioxide levels in the air double. These calculations have had a wide range and scientists have yet to settle on it, but the latest U.N. climate panel said it is within a range of 2 degrees Celsius to 5 degrees Celsius, with the likely range between 2.5 and 4 degrees and 3 degrees being a good midpoint.
Hansen’s study has it at 4.8 degrees Celsius. That’s within the widest range, but barely.
It’s that high because past research was based on wrong calculations of how fast the world warmed between glacial periods, Hansen said.
Past calculations were based on plant and animal fossil data, figuring microbiotic organisms wouldn’t adapt to warming, but would move to their preferred temperature range. Hansen said recent research shows that the organisms adapt and stay put, and when his team calculated past temperature changes based on chemical, not biological markers, it showed much faster warming for when carbon dioxide doubled in Earth’s ancient history.
Studies on climate sensitivity vary widely and are inconsistent, with another recent study showing 2.8 degrees not 4.8, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth and the tech company Stripe. He said Hansen’s calculations are “not implausible but not particularly well supported by the literature.”
Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, however, said “I tend to trust Hansen, despite his advocacy. I think his contention that the IPCC has underestimated climate sensitivity will prove out.”
Hansen said a more recent climate model — downplayed by the U.N. climate panel for running too hot – is actually more accurate than the ones mainstream climate scientists prefer based on cloud conditions in the southern ocean.
With a strong natural El Nino, which tends to temporarily warm the globe, and record heat in the air and in the deep oceans, scientists in the past month have split about what’s happening to the globe.
Mann said the warming the world is seeing is what has long been predicted and is not the indication of something unusual or acceleration. The increases reported, he said, are statistically insignificant.
Hausfather said the world is warming faster, but he calculated the rate at 0.24 degrees Celsius per decade instead of Hansen’s 0.27 degrees.
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The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardizing the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later.
The Danish wind energy developer Ørsted said this week it’s scrapping its Ocean Wind I and II projects off southern New Jersey due to problems with supply chains, higher interest rates and a failure to obtain the amount of tax credits the company wanted.
Together, the projects were supposed to deliver over 2.2 gigawatts of power.
The news comes after developers in New England canceled power contracts for three projects that would have provided another 3.2 gigawatts of wind power to Massachusetts and Connecticut. They said their projects were no longer financially feasible.
In total, the cancellations equate to nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.
Despite the setbacks, offshore wind continues to move forward, the White House said, citing recent investments by New York state and approval by the Interior Department of the nation’s largest planned offshore wind farm in Virginia. Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management also announced new offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Mexico.
“While macroeconomic headwinds are creating challenges for some projects, momentum remains on the side of an expanding U.S. offshore wind industry — creating good-paying union jobs in manufacturing, shipbuilding and construction,” while strengthening the power grid and providing new clean energy resources for American families and businesses, the White House said in a statement Thursday.
Industry experts now say that while the U.S. likely won’t hit 30 gigawatts by 2030, a significant amount of offshore wind power is still attainable by then, roughly 20 to 22 gigawatts or more. That’s far more than the nation has today, with just two small demonstration projects that provide a small fraction of a single gigawatt of power.
Large, ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of government plans to shift to renewable energy, particularly in populous East Coast states with limited land for wind turbines or solar arrays. Eight East Coast states have offshore wind mandates set by legislation or executive actions that commit them to adding a combined capacity of more than 45 gigawatts, according to ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm.
“I think very few people would argue that the U.S. will have the gigawatts the Biden administration wants” by 2030, said Timothy Fox, a ClearView vice president. “But I do think eventually we will have it and will likely exceed it.”
Offshore wind developers have publicly lamented the global economic gales they’re facing. Molly Morris, president of U.S. offshore wind for the Norwegian company Equinor, said the industry is facing a “perfect storm.”
High inflation, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of capital and building materials are making projects more expensive while developers are trying to get the first large U.S. offshore wind farms opened. Ørsted is writing off $4 billion, due largely to cancellation of the two New Jersey projects.
David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Ørsted, said it’s crucial to lower the levelized cost of offshore wind in the United States so Americans aren’t debating between affordability and clean energy. Hardy spoke at the American Clean Power industry group’s offshore wind conference in Boston last month on a panel with Morris.
“We’re probably a little bit too ambitious,” he said. “We came in hot; we came in fast, we thought we could build projects that were inexpensive, large projects right out of the gate. And it turns out that we probably still need to go through the same learning curve that Europe did, with higher prices in the beginning and a little slower pace.”
In May, there were 27 U.S. offshore wind projects that had negotiated agreements with states to provide power before the brunt of the cost increases hit, according to Walt Musial, offshore wind chief engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the Energy Department. The delay between signing purchase agreements and getting final approval to build allowed unexpected cost increases to render many projects economically unfeasible, he said.
Musial called Ørsted’s announcement a setback for the industry but “not a fatal blow by any means.”
On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced approval of the nation’s largest offshore wind project. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project will be a 2.6 gigawatt wind farm off Virginia Beach to power 900,000 homes. And even as Ørsted announced the New Jersey cancellations, it said it was investing with utility Eversource to move forward with construction of Revolution Wind, Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm, a 704-megawatt project.
The current outlook from S&P Global Commodity Insights is 22 gigawatts by 2030, though that will be revised due to the recent industry announcements.
New York state, meanwhile, recently announced the award of 4 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity as it seeks to obtain 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. That announcement came shortly after New York regulators rejected a request for bigger payments for four offshore wind projects worth a combined 4.2 gigawatts of power.
Any delay in offshore wind means continued reliance on fossil fuel-burning power plants, according to environmental advocates. “The quicker they come online, the quicker our air quality improves,” said Conor Bambrick, director of policy for Environmental Advocates NY.
New Jersey, under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, has established increasingly stringent clean energy goals, moving from 100% clean energy by 2050 to 100% by 2035. Murphy cast Ørsted’s decision as “outrageous” and an abandonment of its commitments, but the two-term Democrat said New Jersey plans to move forward with offshore wind.
The first U.S. commercial-scale offshore wind farms are currently under construction: Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts and South Fork Wind off Rhode Island and New York.
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A diver who spotted something metallic not far from Sardinia’s coast has led to the discovery of tens of thousands of ancient bronze coins.
Italy’s culture ministry said Saturday that the diver alerted authorities, who sent divers assigned to an art protection squad along with others from the ministry’s undersea archaeology department.
The coins dating from the first half of the fourth century were found in sea grass, not far from the northeast shore of the Mediterranean island. The ministry didn’t say exactly when the first diver caught a glimpse of something metallic just off shore, not far from the town of Arzachena.
Exactly how many coins have been retrieved hasn’t been determined yet, as they are being sorted. A ministry statement estimated that there are at least about 30,000 and possibly as many as 50,000, given their collective weight.
“All the coins were in an excellent and rare state of preservation,” the ministry said. The few coins that were damaged still had legible inscriptions, it said.
“The treasure found in the waters off Arzachena represent one of the most important coin discoveries,” in recent years, said Luigi La Rocca, a Sardinian archaeology department official.
La Rocca added in a statement that the find is “further evidence of the richness and importance of the archaeological heritage that the seabed of our seas, crossed by men and goods from the most ancient of epochs, still keep and preserve.”
Firefighter divers and border police divers were also involved in locating and retrieving the coins.
The coins were mainly found in a wide area of sand between the underwater seagrass and the beach, the ministry said. Given the location and shape of the seabed, there could be remains of ship wreckage nearby, the ministry said.
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Elon Musk unveiled details Saturday of his new AI tool called “Grok,” which can access X in real time and will be initially available to the social media platform’s top tier of subscribers.
Musk, the tycoon behind Tesla and SpaceX, said the link-up with X, formerly known as Twitter, is “a massive advantage over other models” of generative AI.
Grok “loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way,” Musk quipped, adding a laughing emoji to his post.
“Grok” comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1961 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, and means to understand something thoroughly and intuitively.
“As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers,” Musk said.
The social network that Musk bought a year ago launched the Premium+ plan last week for $16 per month, with benefits like no ads.
The billionaire started xAI in July after hiring researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Tesla and the University of Toronto.
Since OpenAI’s generative AI tool ChatGPT exploded on the scene a year ago, the technology has been an area of fierce competition between tech giants Microsoft and Google, as well as Meta and start-ups like Anthropic and Stability AI.
Musk is one of the world’s few investors with deep enough pockets to compete with OpenAI, Google or Meta on AI.
Building an AI model on the same scale as those companies comes at an enormous expense in computing power, infrastructure and expertise.
Musk has said he cofounded OpenAI in 2015 because he regarded the dash by Google into the sector to make big advances and score profits as reckless.
He then left OpenAI in 2018 to focus on Tesla, saying later he was uncomfortable with the profit-driven direction the company was taking under the stewardship of CEO Sam Altman.
Musk also argues that OpenAI’s large language models — on which ChatGPT depends on for content — are overly politically correct.
Grok “is designed to have a little humor in its responses,” Musk said, along with a screenshot of the interface, where a user asked, “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.”
“Step 1: Obtain a chemistry degree and a DEA license. Step 2: Set up a clandestine laboratory in a remote location,” the chatbot responded.
Eventually it said: “Just kidding! Please don’t actually try to make cocaine. It’s illegal, dangerous, and not something I would ever encourage.”
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Countries moved a step closer Saturday to getting a fund off the ground to help poor states damaged by climate disasters, despite reservations from developing nations and the United States.
The deal to create a “loss and damage” fund was hailed as a breakthrough for developing country negotiators at United Nations climate talks in Egypt last year, overcoming years of resistance from wealthy nations.
But in the past 11 months, governments have struggled to reach consensus on the details of the fund, such as who will pay and where the fund will be located.
A special U.N. committee tasked with implementing the fund met for a fifth time in Abu Dhabi this week — following a deadlock in Egypt last month — to finalize recommendations that will be put to governments when they meet for the annual climate summit COP28 in Dubai in less than four weeks. The goal is to get the fund up and running by 2024.
The committee, representing a geographically diverse group of countries, resolved to recommend the World Bank serve as trustee and host of the fund — a tension point that has fueled divisions between developed and developing nations.
Housing a fund at the World Bank, whose presidents are appointed by the U.S., would give donor countries outsized influence over the fund and result in high fees for recipient countries, developing countries have argued.
To get all countries on board, it was agreed the World Bank would serve as interim trustee and host of the fund for a four-year period.
Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special climate envoy, said in a post on X that Berlin “stands ready to fulfill its responsibility — we’re actively working towards contributing to the new fund and assessing options for more structural sources of financing.”
Others were less optimistic.
“It is a somber day for climate justice, as rich countries turn their backs on vulnerable communities,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at nonprofit Climate Action Network International.
“Rich countries … have not only coerced developing nations into accepting the World Bank as the host of the Loss and Damage Fund but have also evaded their duty to lead in providing financial assistance to those communities and countries.”
The committee also recommended that developed countries be urged to continue to provide support to the fund, but failed to resolve whether wealthy nations would be under strict financial obligation to chip in.
“We regret that the text does not reflect consensus concerning the need for clarity on the voluntary nature of contributions,” a U.S. State Department official told Reuters.
The U.S. attempted to include a footnote clarifying that any contributions to the fund would be voluntary, but the committee chair did not allow it. The U.S. objected to that denial.
Sultan al-Jaber, who will preside over the COP28 talks, said he welcomed the committee’s recommendations and that they would pave the way for an agreement at COP28.
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Sheryl Crow and Olivia Rodrigo kicked off the 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony Friday night, and Missy Elliott closed the show more than four hours later with a roof-shaking set, as the hall celebrated a strong representation of women and Black artists.
Chaka Khan, Kate Bush, “Soul Train” creator Don Cornelius, the Spinners and DJ Kool Herc were also inducted in a celebration of funk, art-rock, R&B and hip-hop, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Country music was represented by Willie Nelson, punk had Rage Against the Machine, the late George Michael repped pure pop and Link Wray defined guitar heroes.
The ceremony’s strong representation of Black and women artists this year came not long after the hall removed Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner from its board of directors. Wenner, who also co-founded the hall, had said that Black and female musicians “didn’t articulate at the level” of the white musicians featured in his new book of interviews. He later apologized.
The new inductees’ talent seemed to show how misguided Wenner’s initial stance was. Elton John’s songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, drew cheers when he slyly said he was honored to join the 2023 class with such “profoundly articulate women” and “articulate Black artists.”
Queen Latifah introduced Missy Elliott, who became the first female hip-hop artist in the rock hall, smashing the boundaries of fashion and style along the way. “Nothing sounded the same after Missy came onto the scene,” Latifah said. “She is avant-garde without even trying.”
Elliott then appeared onstage at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center as if beamed from a spaceship and with smoke machines pumping, a kinetic light show and a massive digital screen working overtime, performed “Get Ur Freak On,” “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” “Work It,” “Pass That Dutch” and “Lose Control.”
“Missy will wear you out!” Queen Latifah joked after the set. “This woman goes hard for the art.” Elliott, in a sparkly bucket hat, had her mother in attendance, the first time she saw her daughter perform live.
Elliott noted hip-hop’s anniversary, 50 years after its birth in New York. “To be standing here, it means so much to me,” she said. Of her fellow inductees, she said: “I’m honored just to be in a room with you all.”
The show kicked off when Crow and Rodrigo — both in black — traded verses as they played guitars. Stevie Nicks later joined Crow for a performance of “Strong Enough,” and Peter Frampton came out to help sing “Everyday Is a Winding Road.”
“This is a little bit like getting an Oscar for a screenplay you have not finished writing,” Crow said. She thanked her parents for unconditional love “and piano lessons.” She called music a “universal gift.”
Laura Dern inducted Crow, calling her friend “a badass goddess.” Dern said the music business initially had no idea what to do with a Southern female guitar-playing singer-songwriter. But it soon learned. “She mapped out the chapters of our lives,” Dern said.
John came out of retirement to perform and toast Taupin. “He became my best friend and my lyricist,” John said. “He is without doubt one the finest lyric writers of all time.”
John joked that the two never had an argument over their 56 years together. “He was disgusted by my behavior, but that’s a given.” John also revealed that the two have just finished a new album.
The two men hugged at the podium, and Taupin said he found in John when they met in 1967 someone “to inspire with their imagination and ignite your dreams.” John then sat at the piano to sing “Tiny Dancer.”
H.E.R., Sia and Common accompanied Khan for a medley of her funky hits that included “I Feel For You,” “Ain’t Nobody,” “Sweet Thing” and “I’m Every Woman,” the latter which brought nearly everyone to their feet.
At the podium, Khan called up guitarist Tony Maiden, a member of the band Rufus, which featured Khan in her early career. “Without him and the band, I would not be here today,” Khan said.
Nelson’s part of the ceremony took a fair chunk of the night, with Dave Matthews playing an acoustic “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and the legend joining Chris Stapleton on “Whiskey River,” dueting with Crow for “Crazy.” All three musicians combined with Nelson for a rollicking “On the Road Again,” which got a standing ovation.
Matthews said Nelson, 90, wrote his first song at 7 in 1940 and has put out more than 70 albums. He ran through the legendary musician’s career, including Farm Aid, IRS troubles and Nelson’s preference for pot. “It’s people like Willie Nelson who give me hope for the world,” Matthews said.
When it was his turn, Nelson thanked his wife, Annie, for “keeping me out here, doing what I’m meant to do.” He added: “Thanks for appreciating my music.”
Andrew Ridgeley honored his partner in Wham!, the late George Michael. “His music was key to his compassion,” Ridgeley said. “George is one of the greatest singers of our time.”
Michael attracted an intriguing trio of performers in his honor: Miguel, Carrie Underwood and Adam Levine, who each performed one of his hits — “Careless Whisper,” “Faith” and “One More Try.”
Another posthumous inductee was “Soul Train” creator Don Cornelius. A huge sign from his old TV dance show was lowered and the crowd danced happily. Snoop Dogg, Questlove and Lionel Richie in a video called the program a rite of passage and a pioneering show that elevated Black music and culture.
Big Boi inducted Kate Bush, telling the crowd he never knew what to expect from her music and comparing her insistence on producing her own work to being very hip-hop. “Who sounds like Kate Bush?” he asked. “If you were hearing Kate’s music for the first time, why wouldn’t you believe this was a current artist?”
St. Vincent took the stage to perform a solemn “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” the Bush song that bumped up her popularity after the TV show “Stranger Things” featured it. Bush didn’t make it to Friday’s ceremony.
LL Cool J presented inductee DJ Kool Herc, called the Father of Hip-Hop. “Arguably, no one made a bigger contribution to hip-hop culture than DJ Kool Herc,” LL Cool J said and then turned to the older artist: “You lit the fire, and it’s still blazing.” A visibly moved Herc was unable to speak for a few moments before thanking his parents, James Brown, Marcus Garvey and Harry Belafonte, among others.
The Spinners, who became a hit-making machine with four No. 1 R&B hits in less than 18 months, were honored by a velvet-jacket-and-fedora-clad New Edition, who sang “I’ll Be Around,” “The Rubberband Man” and “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love.” John Edwards and Henry Fambrough represented the Philadelphia five-member group.
Also entering the hall as the class of 2023 were Rage Against the Machine and the late guitarist Link Wray. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin honored Wray with a virtuoso performance of the late guitar god’s seminal “Rumble” with a double-necked guitar. The stage was later filled with singers including John, Crow and Brittany Howard belting out the Band’s song “The Weight,” in honor of the late Robbie Robertson.
Ice-T presented activist punk-rockers Rage Against the Machine — “rock rocks the boat,” he said — and guitarist Tom Morello urged the crowd to fight for a world “without compromise or apologies.”
Artists must have released their first commercial recording at least 25 years before they’re eligible for induction. Nominees were voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals.
ABC will air a special featuring performance highlights and standout moments on January 1.
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The New York City Marathon women’s record, which has stood for 20 years, could go down Sunday with one of the strongest fields assembled in the history of the race.
Reigning champion Sharon Lokedi looks to defend her title against a stellar group of female runners who include Boston Marathon champion Hellen Obiri, Olympic gold medalist and 2021 New York champion Peres Jepchirchir and former marathon world-record holder Brigid Kosgei.
“It was very life-changing,” Lokedi said of winning last year. “Very excited to be back here again.”
She’ll have some added support from her mother, who flew to New York from Kenya and will be waiting at the finish line in Central Park.
All will be aiming for the $50,000 bonus if they can beat the NYC event record of 2:22:31 set by Margaret Okayo in 2003. Obiri won the Boston Marathon in April, lowering her personal best to 2:21:38.
“The field will be very strong when I’m together with them,” Kosgei said.
Lokedi won in her marathon debut last year, taking the New York laurel wreath crown in 2:23.23. She pulled away in the final three kilometers of the race, winning in unseasonably warm temperatures in the 70s. It was one of the hottest days in race history since the marathon was moved to November in 1986.
The temperatures on Sunday are expected in the high 50s, considerably better for the 50,000 runners expected to start the race.
“I’m happy it will be cooler,” Lokedi said.
The four Kenyans all have a chance to win the race. There likely won’t be many American runners in contention because the U.S. Olympic marathon trials are three months away. Kellyn Taylor and Molly Huddle are the top U.S. runners in the race, returning after giving birth to daughters in 2022. Huddle finished third at the 2016 NYC Marathon in her debut at the distance.
“We’ve got a really strong group,” Taylor said. “When I look at the people seeded ahead of me, I’m like ‘holy moly.’ Their accolades are light years ahead of mine. But that’s the beauty of New York is that you can put all of that aside and anything can happen on that day.”
The current women’s world record is 2:11:53, set by Tigist Assefa of Ethiopia at the Berlin Marathon in September.
While the men’s field may not have the star power of the women’s side, there’s still a lot of intrigue. Defending champion Evans Chebet and two-time winner Geoffrey Kamworor pulled out of the race a few weeks ago, leaving it more open.
World Championship medalists Maru Teferi of Israel and Mosinet Geremew of Ethiopia could win the race, along with 2021 New York Marathon champion Albert Korir. There’s also marathon newcomer Edward Cheserek, who moved to the U.S. in 2010 and won 17 NCAA titles in his college career.
Ethiopia’s Tamirat Tola also hopes to improve on his consecutive fourth-place finishes in in 2018-19. He placed third in the 2022 Toyko Marathon and the London Marathon this year. He’s seeking his first major marathon victory.
Ticket to Paris
The New York City Marathon serves as the U.S. Paralympic Trials, with up to four wheelchair racers set to become the first athletes across all sports to make the team for the 2024 Paris Games.
The top two Americans in the men’s and women’s NYC Marathon will qualify, provided they also record a minimum qualifying time since last October and are ranked high enough.
Susannah Scaroni has already posted that time and ranking.
“It would mean a lot. So much gratitude,” she said. “Would love to make the team in one of those two slots Sunday. It would be incredible to know I’m going to the Paralympics.”
Daniel Romanchuk is an eight-time major winner, most recently in Boston in 2022. He has consistently been the top American in majors, only surpassed by Swiss Marcel Hug, who has dominated the sport.
Extra protection
The New York Police Department will implement heightened security measures for the marathon.
“As tensions rise around the globe, there is a growing concern over the impact it will have here at home,” said NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban. “There are currently no credible or specific threats to the marathon or to our city. But having said that, we will still implement a comprehensive security plan.”
There have been numerous protests in New York City since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last month.
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A new, permanent addition to the sprawling National WWII Museum in New Orleans is a three-story complex with displays as daunting as a simulated Nazi concentration camp bunk room, and as inspiring as a violin pieced together from scrap wood by an American prisoner of war.
The Liberation Pavilion, which opened Friday, is ambitious in scope. Its exhibits filling 3,065.80 square meters commemorate the end of the war’s death and destruction, emphasize its human costs and capture the horror of those who discovered the aftermath of Nazi atrocities. Films, photos and recorded oral histories recount the joys and challenges awaiting those who returned from battle, the international effort to seek justice for those killed and tortured, and a worldwide effort to recover and rebuild.
Underlying it all is the idea that almost 80 years later, the war’s social and geopolitical legacies endure — from the acceleration of civil rights and women’s equality movements in the U.S. to the formation of international alliances to protect democracy.
“We live in a world created by World War II,” Rob Citino, the museum’s Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian. said when asked what he wants the pavilion’s visitors to remember.
It’s a grim tour at first. Visitors entering the complex pass a shimmering wall of military dog tags, each imprinted with the name of an American killed in action, a tribute to the more than 414,000 American war dead. The first centerpiece exhibit is a large crate used to ferry the coffin of an Army private home to his family in Ohio.
Steps away is a recreation of the secret rooms where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Then, a dimly lit room of wooden bunks and life-size projected images of the emaciated survivors of a Nazi concentration camp. Nearby is a simulated salt mine, its craggy walls lined with images of centuries-old paintings and crates of statuary — representing works of art plundered by the Germans and recovered after the war.
Amid the bleakness of the pavilion’s first floor are smaller and more hope-inspiring items, including a violin constructed by an American prisoner of war. Air Force 1st Lt. Clair Cline, a woodworker, used wood scavenged with the help of fellow prisoners to assemble the violin as a way of fighting the tedium of internment.
“He used bed slats and table legs. He scraped glue from the bottom of bits of furniture around the camp,” said Kimberly Guise, a senior curator at the museum.
The pavilion’s second floor focuses in part on what those who served faced upon returning home — “the responsibilities at home and abroad to defend freedom, advance human rights, protect democracy,” said Michael Bell, a retired Army colonel and the executive director of the museum’s Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.
Black veterans came back to a homeland still marred by segregation and even violence against people of color. Women had filled non-traditional roles at home and abroad. Pavilion exhibits make the case that their experiences energized efforts to achieve equality.
“Civil rights is the ’50s and women’s equality is more more like the ’60s,” Citino said. “But we think both of those seminal changes in American society can be traced back in a significant way to World War II.”
Other second-level exhibits include looks at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the post-war emergence of the United States as a world superpower and the formation of international alliances meant to sustain peace and guard against the emergence of other worldwide threats to freedom.
“We talk about NATO or the United Nations, but I don’t know that most people understand that these are creations, American-led creations, from the war,” said Bell. “What our goal is, at least I’d say my goal, is to give the visitor a frame of reference or a lens in which way they can look at things going on in the world.”
The third floor includes a multi-format theater with moving screens and a rotating audience platform featuring a production of images and oral histories that, in Bell’s words, “really lays out a theme about freedom under pressure and the triumph of the American-led freedom.”
Museum officials say the pavilion is the final permanent exhibit at the museum, which opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum — a project spearheaded by two University of New Orleans professors and historians, Gordon Mueller and the late author Stephen Ambrose.
It soon expanded to encompass all aspects of the Second World War — overseas and on the home front. It is now a major New Orleans tourist attraction and a downtown landmark near the Mississippi River, highlighted by its “Canopy of Peace,” a sleek, three-pointed expanse of steel and fiberglass held roughly 46 meters over the campus by towers of steel.
The Liberation Pavilion is the latest example of the museum’s work to maintain awareness of the war and its aftermath as the generation that lived through it dies off — and as the Baby Boom generation raised on its lore reaches old age.
“World War II is as close to the Civil War as it is to us. It’s a long time ago in human lives, and especially our media-drenched culture. A week seems like a year and 80 years seems like five centuries,” said Citino. “I think the museum realized a long time ago it has a responsibility to keep the memory of this war, the achievement of that generation alive. And that’s precisely what Liberation Pavilion’s going to be talking about.”
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Called cover crops, they top the list of tasks U.S. farmers are told will build healthy soil, help the environment and fight climate change.
Yet after years of incentives and encouragement, Midwest farmers planted cover crops on only about 7% of their land in 2021.
That percentage has increased over the years but remains small in part because even as farmers receive extra payments and can see numerous benefits from cover crops, they remain wary. Many worry the practice will hurt their bottom line — and a study last year indicates they could be right.
Researchers who used satellite data to examine over 90,000 fields in six Corn Belt states found cover crops can reduce yields of cash crops — the bushels per acre. The smaller the yield, the less money farmers make.
“I don’t want to abandon it, but as far as just going whole-hog with planting cover crops, that’s a tough thing for me to do,” said Illinois farmer Doug Downs, who plants cover crops only on a sliver of his land in a relatively flat region of east-central Illinois.
Cover crops are plants grown on farmland that otherwise would be bare. While crops like corn and soybeans are growing or soon after harvest, farmers can sow species such as rye or red clover that will grow through winter and into spring. They stabilize soil, reduce fertilizer runoff, store carbon in plant roots and potentially add nutrients to the dirt.
The practice is key to government efforts to sequester carbon in farmland to help reduce climate change, since there’s general agreement planting the right off-season crops can pull carbon from the air and keep it underground in plant roots.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture promotes cover crops through several programs, starting with $44 million in payments during the 2023 fiscal year from the agency’s Natural Resources Conservation Service for over 4,700 contracts to plant them on more than 344,000 hectares. Additional funding was available for conservation practices, including cover crops, through the Inflation Reduction Act. Another program provided $100 million in extra benefits through federal crop insurance coverage to farmers who plant cover crops.
There’s heightened interest in cover crops for carbon storage, though the effectiveness depends on the soil, plant variety, temperature and other factors.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has put so much stock in cover crops that it recently launched a social media campaign with Nick Offerman, featuring the Parks and Recreation TV show actor buried in dirt while promoting the practice. The environmental group has encouraged Congress to give farmers more lucrative financial incentives to plant the crops.
The NRDC points to studies that have found cover crops don’t necessarily reduce cash crop yields and can boost growth. And Lara Bryant, the group’s deputy director of water and agriculture, notes that while the overall percentage of farmers planting cover crops is small, acreage increased by 50% to about 5% of U.S. cropland from 2012 to 2017, the most recent year USDA data is available.
“We have a long way to go but we’ve come a long way in a short amount of time,” Bryant said.
However, the 2022 satellite study found yields declined by an average of 5.5% on corn fields where cover crops were used for three or more years. For soybean fields, the decline was 3.5%. The declines varied depending on factors such as cover crop type, soil moisture and soil quality.
“I was surprised it was so negative,” said David Lobell, a Stanford University agricultural ecologist who worked on the study published in the journal Global Change Biology with researchers from Illinois and North Carolina. “We rechecked everything and were a little bit surprised.”
The study found that rye, the most frequently used cover crop, is especially prone to reducing yields, Lobell said. Rye is less expensive than many cover crops and grows well in many kinds of soil.
The study examined farm fields in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, using satellite images. Lobell said details from an individual field are less precise than on-the-ground study, but by examining thousands of fields, researchers can reach accurate conclusions.
The researchers said farmers need more technical help choosing and maintaining cover crops as well as more government or food industry payments to offset potential yield losses. The federal government and at least 22 states provide financial incentives to farmers — and food companies such as General Mills and PepsiCo pay more to farmers who plant cover crops.
Terry Cosby, chief of the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, acknowledged establishing effective cover crops can take time and some experimenting but said farmers who stick with them should see significant benefits. He noted the Biden administration’s allocation of $19.5 billion for climate smart programs over five years and that federal, state and university outreach services can provide technical advice.
“It’s going to take some trials and errors,” Cosby said. “It might fail but over the long term … it has been proven that you can be very successful with some type of cover crop.”
Downs, the Illinois farmer, has tried to incorporate cover crops into some of his operations, especially to control weeds. But he says it hasn’t been easy.
In 2019, Downs planted rye in one field but didn’t plant it on an identical field across a road. The spring was wet and the rye field was so soggy, he couldn’t get in for weeks to kill the cover crop and plant his soybeans, resulting in a smaller crop.
“Growing a cover crop cost me $250 an acre, and I spent $50 an acre doing it,” Downs said.
Farmers don’t typically harvest and sell cover crops; they frequently use herbicides to kill them before planting their principle crop.
Less than 32 kilometers away, fourth-generation farmer Curt Elmore has been “dabbling” in cover crops for a decade, planting varieties like oats and rye on parts of the 809 hectares he farms.
Elmore seeds cover crops by plane before harvesting his cash crop, but cover crop growth has been spotty, not worth the cost.
Elmore said he’ll keep trying, but it seems that in his area of Illinois, it will take more payments from governments or companies to convince many additional farmers to take up the practice.
“If this is an imperative, then somebody is going to have to pay for it,” he said.
Joe McClure, Iowa Soybean Association research director, said the Stanford study largely confirms his organization’s research, though he thought the university researchers should do field study to verify their satellite-based analysis.
McClure said more more financial support would help farmers avoid having to choose between planting cover crops and losing money.
J. Arbuckle, a professor in Iowa State University’s sustainable agriculture program, said it’s important to be open with farmers about possible yield reductions and how they can be mitigated over longer periods, such as six or seven years.
Even then, Arbuckle said, it can be hard to convince farmers to give cover crops a try because, despite the significant environmental benefits, a small drop in cash crop yield can mean a big cost.
“Even a one bushel hit, if you’re talking about a bushel an acre over a thousand acres, that’s a lot of money,” he said.
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A thick layer of toxic haze choked Indian capital New Delhi on Friday, and some schools were ordered closed as the air quality index plummeted to the “severe” category.
New Delhi again topped a real-time list of the world’s most polluted cities compiled by Swiss group IQAir, which put the Indian capital’s air quality index, or AQI, at 640, which is in the “hazardous” category, followed by 335 in the Pakistani city of Lahore.
Regional officials said a seasonal combination of lower temperatures, a lack of wind and crop stubble burning in neighboring farm states caused a spike in air pollutants.
Many of New Delhi’s 20 million residents complained of irritation in the eyes and itchy throats with the air turning a dense gray.
An AQI of 0-50 is considered good while anything between 400-500 affects healthy people and is a danger to those with existing diseases.
“In my last 24 hours duty, I saw babies coughing, children coming with distress and rapid breathing,” Aheed Khan, a Delhi-based doctor, said on social media platform X.
Fewer people came to the city’s parks, such as Lodhi Garden and India Gate, popular with joggers.
Residents snapped up air purifiers. One service center for the appliances said there was a shortage of new filters and fresh stocks were expected Monday.
Officials said they did not expect an immediate improvement in the air quality.
“This pollution level is here to stay for the next two to three weeks, aggravated by incidents of stubble burning, slow wind speed and cooling temperatures,” said Ashwani Kumar, chairman of the Delhi Pollution Control Committee.
Farmers in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh typically burn crop waste after harvesting in October to clear their fields before sowing winter crops a few weeks later.
This year, attention on the worsening air quality has cast a shadow over the cricket World Cup hosted by India, with financial capital Mumbai also suffering from a spike in pollution levels.
Delhi hosts a World Cup match Monday between Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
A concentration of toxic PM2.5 particles, which are less than 2.5 microns in diameter and can cause deadly illness, was 53.4 times the World Health Organization’s annual air quality guideline value in New Delhi on Friday, according to IQAir.
While junior schools in the capital were ordered shut for Friday and Saturday, they were open in the suburbs and children boarding school buses were forced to wear masks that had been put away since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Poor air quality also caused respiratory problems, irritation in the eyes and restlessness in pets.
“Breathing trouble can develop into pneumonia or other ailments in younger animals. If possible, avoid taking pets out on morning walks for a few days till the air improves,” said Prabhat Gangwar, a veterinarian at animal welfare NGO Friendicoes.
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