New story in Science and Health from Time: Hidden Figures Hero Katherine Johnson Reminded Us That Space Was Never Safe From America’s Worst Impulses Hidden Figures Hero Katherine Johnson Reminded Us That Space Was Never Safe From America’s Worst Impulses

Katherine Johnson performed what might have been the most important job of her life backwards—because backwards was exactly the right way to do it. The job was figuring out how to ensure that John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, would splash down in the Atlantic as close as possible to the recovery team that would be awaiting him. So Johnson—the legendary NASA “computer,” or mathematician, who was made famous by the book and movie Hidden Figures and who died at 101 on Monday—simply reverse-engineered the entire mission, from desired landing point, back through three orbits and onto the launch pad.

“Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start,” she told NASA in a 2008 interview. “I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”

Johnson, of course, was only one of a host of great mathematical minds who made NASA’s early history such a success, but it was both her race and gender—she was an African-American woman, working in a white, male field—that helped make her tale both compelling and best-selling. She started at NASA five years before it even became NASA in 1958, having taken a job with the precursor National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) back in 1953. John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Al Shepard, Gus Grissom? All newbies and novices when they finally joined, compared to the likes of Johnson.

President Obama recognized her work in 2015—the year before Hidden Figures became a phenomenon—by awarding her the Medal of Freedom. The medal, the movie and the book ensured that an African-American pioneer who might have lived and died in obscurity finally received the notice she had earned. But not all such often hidden figures have enjoyed such good fortune. From the very beginning, America’s most soaring enterprises—its achievements in space—have not escaped the stain of its primal crime: slavery, and the legacy of racism and institutional injustice that began here in the 17th century and continues into the 21st.

In the same week Johnson died, TIME will release its virtual-reality recreation of the 1963 March on Washington, and the Smithsonian Channel is airing Black in Space: Breaking the Color Barrier, a documentary exploring the halting progress the nation that denied African-Americans their freedom has made in extending that freedom into the realm of space.

The idea of integrating the space program began with good intentions and a surprisingly proactive President. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Pentagon to choose an African American to join the third class of astronauts, following the so-called New Nine class, selected in October of that year, and the Original Seven, named in 1959. The Air Force complied, recommending Captain Edward Dwight, a 29-year-old pilot with a degree in aeronautical engineering and 2,000 hours of flight experience. He was slight of build, in keeping with the model of the mid-century astronaut, who had to fit comfortably into spacecraft little larger than phone booths. He was fiercely competitive, which fit the model even more so, and he was a gifted flier.

But none of that meant he was actually going to space.

Dwight thrived in his astronaut training and flight qualification classes, easily making the cut to be included in the group of 26 finalists sent to NASA in 1963, for the next astronaut class. But then, with little explanation, he effectively disappeared from contention.

“I did not dream that I was going to be the first black astronaut,” Dwight, now 86, told Smithsonian. “That never entered my mind because there was a big obstacle standing in my way. I knew there was going to be a racial component to that obstacle but I didn’t know it was going to be as sophisticated and determined as it was.”

As he himself predicted, Dwight did not go to space—and even at the time, his conspicuous absence was noted. At a press conference after the third class of all-white astronauts was named, a reporter put the question of Dwight’s candidacy directly to Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut office. In footage from the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, the exchange goes as follows:

“Was there a Negro boy in the last 30 or so that you brought here for consideration?” the reporter asked.

“No, there was not,” Slayton answered, erroneously.

It would take another 20 years before an African American would fly in space, when Air Force Colonel Guion Bluford and the rest of the crew of the shuttle Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 30, 1983. Bluford’s fight came five years after the Soviet Union launched Cuban cosmonaut Arnoldo Tomayo Méndez, the first space traveler of African descent, aboard the Soyuz 38 spacecraft.

It would not be until 1989 that Frederick Gregory would become the first African American to command a NASA mission. And it would not be until 1992 that Dr. Mae Jemison would become the first African-American woman to fly in space. And only in the last few years that Johnson got the recognition she long deserved.

Smithsonian’s Black in Space documentary, TIME’s March on Washington Project and, most poignantly, the death of Katherine Johnson, are vital reminders—and, as in space flight itself, useful course corrections—as America continues its four-century fight for equality. The NASA of now is very different from the NASA of the past, and today’s space agency is a diverse group of multi-cultural men and women better reflecting the equally diverse nation they represent. The agency’s new Artemis program may or may not succeed in its goal of returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, but whenever it happens, the first crew and the ones that follow will look very different from the ones who went before them—the 24 white men who still represent the only human beings who have ever visited another world.

New story in Science and Health from Time: NASA Mars Lander Confirms ‘Marsquakes,’ Frequent Seismic Activity on Red Planet NASA Mars Lander Confirms ‘Marsquakes,’ Frequent Seismic Activity on Red Planet

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA’s newest Mars lander has confirmed that quakes and even aftershocks are regularly jolting the red planet.

Scientists reported Monday that the seismometer from the InSight spacecraft has detected scores of marsquakes.

A series of research papers focus on the 174 marsquakes noted through last September. Twenty-four were relatively strong — magnitude 3 to 4 — and apparently stemmed from distant underground triggers. The rest were smaller, with uncertain magnitude and origin. Even the stronger quakes would not have posed a hazard to anybody on the planet’s surface, researchers said in a press conference.

The overall tally has since jumped to more than 450 marsquakes, most of them small, InSight’s lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an email.

The basic cause of Martian quakes is a long-term cooling of the planet, which makes it contract, fracturing its brittle outer layers, Banerdt told reporters. But it’s not clear what detailed mechanisms bring on specific quakes, he said.

While the team cannot rule out meteor impacts, the source of the tremors appears to be underground, according to the researchers. Nevertheless, Mars-orbiting spacecraft are on the lookout for signs of recent impacts, and InSight’s cameras scan the night sky for meteors. So far, they’ve come up empty.

Banerdt said he had hoped to find more larger quakes, which are useful for probing deeper under the planet’s surface. In an email, he said “another year of observations will be needed to complete the goals of the mission.”

InSight landed in a small crater in Mars’ Elysium Planitia in November 2018. Its French seismometer was placed directly on the volcanic plain the following month.

This region has especially turbulent weather, with dust devil-like vortexes.

The lander still has another year of geologic observations for a total of two years, or one full Martian year. There likely are more quakes occurring than the seismometer is registering; interference from wind and other weather conditions can mask the measurements.

And while no marsquakes with magnitudes greater than 4 have been detected, that doesn’t mean they aren’t occurring, according to Banerdt.

Banerdt describes Mars as moderately active from a seismic standpoint, more than the moon but less than Earth. The findings are close to initial predictions. The moon’s seismic activity is known thanks to instruments left behind a half-century ago by the Apollo astronauts.

“Knowledge of the level of seismic activity is crucial for investigating the interior structure and understanding Mars’ thermal and chemical evolution,” Banerdt wrote in an overview article in Nature Geoscience. The journal as well as Nature Communications feature four papers from the InSight team.

Other key findings: The first magnetic measurements from the Martian surface show a local magnetic field that’s 10 times stronger than detected from orbit, and weather instruments have found a surprisingly dynamic atmosphere around the spacecraft.

While the French seismometer is exceeding expectations, a German-built probe has had trouble burrowing into Mars, barely penetrating a couple feet (50 centimeters). Scientists have not yet given up on the mechanical mole, which keeps popping out of the ground.

The mole was supposed to bury 16 feet (5 meters) into Mars to measure the planet’s internal temperature.

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Science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Whose Work Inspired the Film Hidden Figures, Dies at 101 Katherine Johnson, NASA Mathematician Whose Work Inspired the Film Hidden Figures, Dies at 101

(HAMPTON, Va.) — NASA says Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who worked on NASA’s early space missions and was portrayed in the film Hidden Figures, about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died.

In a Monday morning tweet, the space agency said it celebrates her 101 years of life and her legacy of excellence and breaking down racial and social barriers.

We're saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers: https://t.co/Tl3tsHAfYB pic.twitter.com/dGiGmEVvAW

— NASA (@NASA) February 24, 2020

Johnson was one of the so-called “computers” who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits by hand during NASA’s early years.

Until 1958, Johnson and other black women worked in a racially segregated computing unit at what is now called Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Their work was the focus of the Oscar-nominated 2016 film.

In 1961, Johnson worked on the first mission to carry an American into space. In 1962, she verified computer calculations that plotted John Glenn’s earth orbits.

At age 97, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

New story in Science and Health from Time: ‘Your Workday Is Easier Thanks to His Revolutionary Ideas.’ Computer Scientist Who Created ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ Dies ‘Your Workday Is Easier Thanks to His Revolutionary Ideas.’ Computer Scientist Who Created ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ Dies

(NEW YORK) — Larry Tesler, the Silicon Valley pioneer who created the now-ubiquitous computer concepts such as “cut,” “copy” and “paste,” has died. He was 74.

He made using computers easier for generations as a proponent and pioneer of what he called “modeless editing.” That meant a user wouldn’t have to use a keyboard to switch between modes to write and edit, for example.

“The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler. Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas,” Xerox said in a tweet Wednesday.

Tesler was born in New York and attended Stanford University, where he received a degree in mathematics in 1965.

In 1973, he joined Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a division of the copier company that worked on creating computer products. There, he pioneered concepts that helped make computers more user-friendly. That included such concepts as moving text through cut and paste and inserting text by clicking on a section and just typing.

He continued that work when he joined Apple in 1980. At Apple, he worked on a variety of products including the Lisa computer, the Newton personal digital assistant and the Macintosh.

After leaving Apple in 1997 he co-founded an education software company and held executive positions at Amazon, Yahoo and the genetics-testing service 23andMe before turning to independent consulting.

In 2012, Tesler told the BBC that he enjoyed working with younger people.

“There’s a very strong element of excitement, of being able to share what you’ve learned with the next generation,” he said.

New story in Science and Health from Time: NASA Could Get a Raise Next Year to Help Fund a 2024 Human Trip to the Moon NASA Could Get a Raise Next Year to Help Fund a 2024 Human Trip to the Moon

For decades, NASA has been the kid politely asking for a raise in its allowance. Time was NASA’s pocket money was huge. Go back 54 years, to 1966, and the space agency was getting $5.9 billion a year—which would be a tidy $47 billion in 2020 dollars. That represented 4.1% of America’s annual household budget. But in 1966 there was also a bully on the block, whose mailbox at the time read “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” They were racing the U.S. to be the first to leave the block altogether and fly to the moon, so the States were willing to spend whatever amount of money it took to beat them there.

Then, in 1969, the U.S. did beat them. And that’s when NASA’s allowance began to crash, dropping to $4.2 billion that year, or just 2.3% of the family budget; to $3.2 billion in 1974 (1.2% of the budget), and on down from there. In the current fiscal year, the space agency’s $22.629 billion budget represented just 0.48% of annual federal outlays.

But now comes a bump. The scientific community has made no secret of the fact that it finds little to love in the Trump Administration—especially in its rollback of environmental protections. But President Trump has been a champion of space. For example, he revived the National Space Council in 2017, putting back in play a presidential advisory group that had existed intermittently from 1958 to 1973, then again from 1989 to 1993, and often had an influential role in keeping space exploration a priority item for presidents who often felt they had more immediate needs to address. And Trump’s Space Force has made a lot of headlines—even if it will likely amount to little more than a new flag, a new insignia and a lot of money wasted on bureaucracy, with the work the ostensible sixth branch of the military will be doing already being handled perfectly well by the Air Force.

But when it comes to the idea of returning Americans to the moon, the Trump Administration does appear to be delivering on a popular promise: laying down a 2024 marker for NASA. The space agency has embraced the challenge, promising that sometime that year the country will land “the first woman and the next man on the moon.” The first-woman piece is a significant (and very worthy) part of NASA’s marketing campaign and the program itself is appropriately named Artemis, after the sister of Apollo.

The budget has crept up accordingly over the past three years, and last week the White House announced that it would be asking Congress for another NASA raise in 2021, with the budget increasing 12% to $25.2 billion. The lion’s share of the new funding is earmarked for Artemis.

For space enthusiasts, this is the rare story out of Washington that is all good news. NASA’s heavy-lift rocket, the blandly named Space Launch System (SLS), has been in start-stop development for a preposterously long 14 years, hamstrung by flat budgets and ever-changing policies from ever-changing Administrations. (By contrast, it took NASA little more than four years to invent and build the Saturn V rocket, launching the first one in 1967 and a dozen more by 1973.) At last, however, the SLS is close to completion, as is the Orion spacecraft—the Artemis version of the Apollo orbiter. The lunar landing vehicle is less far-along, but the new cash infusion will help and while NASA has not yet chosen a private contractor to design and build the spacecraft, the smart money is on Blue Moon, a lander that is already nearly four years into development by Blue Origin, the space company established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Whether NASA can actually stick a lunar landing by 2024 is not remotely a sure thing—not least because a presidential election is just nine months away and a change in administrations could mean yet another change in NASA policy. But a return to the moon has popular appeal, a woman on the moon has even more, and with the lunar hardware so close to completion, mothballing it due to budget fights or politics would be an embarrassment on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Indeed, politics can actually help ensure Artemis’s future—thanks in large part to the electoral map. Florida, remains the swingiest of swing states and Texas is trending purple. Between them they have 67 electoral votes, or nearly 25% of the total needed for victory. Would you like to be the presidential candidate telling the good folks of Houston and Cape Canaveral that their moon dreams have to be shelved again?

It takes smarts, brass and courage to get to the moon. But it takes money too. At this point, NASA’s funding—while still modest by 1960s standards—could be just enough to put the moon mission over the top.

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A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s Space newsletter. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Sandra the Orangutan, Granted Legal Personhood by Judge in Argentina, Celebrates 34th Birthday Sandra the Orangutan, Granted Legal Personhood by Judge in Argentina, Celebrates 34th Birthday

(WAUCHULA, Fla.) — A orangutan named Sandra, who was granted legal personhood by a judge in Argentina and later found a new home in Florida, celebrated her 34th birthday on Valentine’s Day with a special new primate friend.

Patti Ragan, director of the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, says Sandra “has adjusted beautifully to her life at the sanctuary” and has befriended Jethro, a 31-year-old male orangutan.

Prior to coming to Florida, Sandra had lived alone in a Buenos Aires zoo. Sandra was a bit shy when she arrived at the Florida center, which is home to 22 orangutans.

“Sandra appeared most interested in Jethro, and our caregivers felt he was a perfect choice because of his close age, calm demeanor, and gentle nature,” Ragan said in a news release. “Sandra still observes and follows Jethro from a distance while they are in the process of getting to know and trust each other. But they are living harmoniously in the same habitat spaces as they continue to gain confidence in their relationship.”

Judge Elena Liberatori’s landmark ruling in 2015 declared that Sandra is legally not an animal, but a non-human person, and thus entitled to some legal rights enjoyed by people, and better living conditions.

“With that ruling I wanted to tell society something new, that animals are sentient beings and that the first right they have is our obligation to respect them,” she told The Associated Press.

But without a clear alternative, Sandra remained at the antiquated zoo, which closed in 2016, until leaving for the U.S. in late September. She was in quarantine for a month at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Kansas before arriving in Florida.

On Friday, Sandra celebrated her birthday, complete with pink signs and wrapped packages. Jethro, who was once in the entertainment business, attended the party.

Ragan said that Sandra and Jethro will “sit in the vicinity of each other,” but not close enough to touch. Sandra weighs 129 pounds, and Jethro, 260.

“Sandra does like to watch Jethro eat,” Ragan said. “Some adult male orangutans will advance an introduction forcefully, but Jethro has been patient and calm giving Sandra more confidence in his presence.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: A Group of Big Businesses is Backing a Carbon Tax. Could It Be a Solution to Climate Change? A Group of Big Businesses is Backing a Carbon Tax. Could It Be a Solution to Climate Change?

The long list of big companies backing a carbon tax as a solution to climate change grew this week with financial giant J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. endorsing a legislative plan billed as a centrist approach to reducing emissions.

The announcement comes as the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), the organization behind the proposal, which was first released in 2017, redoubles efforts to promote the plan before an expected introduction in Congress as the conversation around various climate solutions heats up in Washington.

The CLC announced new backers—including former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres—and released internal poll numbers showing bipartisan voter support for the plan. Supporters now include a broad coalition of companies, from oil giants like ExxonMobil to tech behemoths like Microsoft, major environmental groups like Conservation International, and a range of economists and political leaders.

“The markets can and will do much to address climate change,” David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, a founding member of the CLC, told TIME in an emailed statement. “But given the magnitude and urgency of this challenge, governments must put a price on the cost of carbon.”

The thinking behind the plan is straight forward. Economists have long argued that a carbon tax, which makes companies pay for what they pollute and gives them an incentive to stem carbon emissions, is the most efficient way to reduce such emissions. But carbon tax proposals have been met with opposition in the past from across the political spectrum, including from some Democrats, in large part because they increase energy costs. The CLC proposal would give the money collected by the tax back to taxpayers in the form of a quarterly dividend, an effort to make it more politically palatable.

On Feb. 13, the CLC provided additional details about the plan, including introducing a new mechanism that would rapidly increase the price on carbon if targets are not met. Backers say the plan will cut U.S. emissions in half by 2035. “We think it has a compelling economic logic,” says Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve and a backer of the plan, in an interview.

But despite the growing coalition, actually passing the plan remains a challenging uphill battle. While more and more Republicans have stopped denying the science of climate change, many continue to insist that they would never support anything resembling a carbon tax. Meanwhile, many leading Democrats, including presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have downplayed the role a carbon tax might play in future climate legislation. Many Democrats argue that the time has passed for such a market-driven approach to climate change, arguing that they are too little, too late and that a corporate-backed plan shouldn’t be trusted.

Still, big corporations increasingly see a carbon tax—especially a proposal like the CLC plan—as the simplest solution to a thorny problem. With clear science, activists in the streets and voters experiencing extreme weather events in their own backyards, business leaders see new climate rules as all but an inevitability, if not at the U.S. federal level then in states or other countries where they have operations.

The CLC proposal offers a business-friendly approach: nixing many existing climate regulations, a “border carbon adjustment” that would create a fee on imports from countries without a carbon price, and a dividend system that pays out the revenue collected by the carbon tax back to taxpayers. “If we do one without the other,” says Shailesh Jejurikar, CEO of Procter & Gamble’s Fabric & Home Care division, “it doesn’t work.”

Still, even as more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms support the legislation, many other businesses and influential business groups continue to either oppose a carbon tax or haven’t taken a position at all. That’s particularly true of the fossil fuel industry’s trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute, which officially has no position. Even though major oil companies like ExxonMobil and Shell have joined the CLC initiative, independent oil companies, oil refiners and other related companies remain largely opposed.

One of the biggest challenges to this measure—or any carbon tax for that matter—is the growing interest in other approaches to climate legislation. Republicans this week pushed legislation to plant trees and expand tax incentives for capturing carbon, measures that wouldn’t match the scale of the challenge but allow Republicans to offer a different message on the issue. Earlier this month, Representative David McKinley, a Republican from West Virginia, and Kurt Schrader, an Oregon Democrat, called for legislation that would lead to an 80% reduction in emissions from the power sector by 2050 using a combination of regulation and funding for innovation and infrastructure. And more than 30 Democratic senators introduced a bill to require the Environmental Protection Agency to come up with a plan for the U.S. to eliminate its carbon footprint by 2050. “This is the quickest way we can jumpstart government-wide climate action,” Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, who introduced the legislation, said on the Senate floor.

None of these measures are likely to become law anytime soon, and any legislative approach to addressing climate change will involve intense debate on Capitol Hill.

Even some backers of the carefully crafted CLC plan acknowledge it’s not likely to pass in its current form. “Inevitably, Congress will have some of its own ideas in terms of the implementation,” Moniz, who endorsed the CLC proposal this week, tells TIME.“ “I would welcome seeing that negotiation start in earnest.” Indeed, even having a discussion in Congress indicates a new climate for climate in Washington.

New story in Science and Health from Time: New Study Shows That When it Comes to Pesticides and Kids, the EPA Has Looked the Other Way New Study Shows That When it Comes to Pesticides and Kids, the EPA Has Looked the Other Way

It’s easy to lose count of all of the pesticides that are sprayed on crops in the U.S., and well-nigh impossible to know all of the names (dichloropropene and pyraclostrobin and spinetoram and on and on). But it’s not hard to guess who gets hit hardest by all of these chemicals: kids, whose brain, nervous and hormonal systems are still developing at the time of exposure. What’s more, a new pesticide introduced today will have fewer years to build up in the tissues of, say, a 50-year old, compared to a child who will accumulate a lifetime load of the stuff.

That’s the biggest reason that, in 1996, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA). The legislation represented one of the most effective crackdowns on pesticides in the food supply to date, requiring the Environmental Protection Agency not simply to establish a safe threshold of exposure for the population as a whole, but to limit permissible levels much further—10-fold further in fact—to ensure that children are protected too. The legislation benefits everyone of course: Ten times less pyraclostrobin on your apple is a good thing no matter how old you are, but it’s children who are the most important beneficiaries.

But a law is only as good as its enforcement and a new study conducted by the Environmental Working Group, —a nonprofit advocacy organization—and published in the journal Environmental Health found that when it comes to the FQPA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is laying down on the job. The group surveyed 47 non-organophosphate pesticides—a category that tends to persist in soils—and found that the 10-fold safety standard was being applied only to five of them.

“The FQPA was a revolution in how we think about pesticides’ effects on children,” said Environmental Working Group president Ken Cook in a statement accompanying the release of the study, “but it does no good if the EPA doesn’t use it.”

As of publication, the EPA has not yet responded to questions sent by TIME.

The study looked back at FQPA enforcement from as early as 2011, during the Obama administration—generally seen as an environmentally friendly presidency—and saw the same spotty pesticide enforcement even then. But the Obama White House did take some proactive steps, seeking to extend the 10-fold standard to organophosphate pesticides as well, which break down relatively quickly, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but while they are around can be even more toxic than other varieties of pesticides, affecting the nervous system in much the way sarin and other nerve gasses do.

Under the Trump Administration, however, the Obama ruling was reversed for the most widely used organophosphate, known as chlorpyrifos. Nonetheless, Corteva Agriscience, the nation’s largest manufacturer of the chemical, under pressure from multiple states that are banning its use, announced on Feb. 6 that it would voluntarily agree to stop producing it.

It’s a manifestly good thing that in that one case, market forces were sufficient to stop a bad chemical from getting into the food supply. But it’s a manifestly bad thing that in a far larger share of cases, apparently the health of America’s children does not have the same power in Washington.

“With the FQPA legislation, Congress clearly gave the EPA the power to protect children’s health from pesticides,” says Olga Naidenko, vice president of science investigations at the Environmental Working Group, and lead author of the paper. “The EPA should be able to fully use this authority without waiting for additional instructions, if the EPA leadership decides to do so.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Climate Change is Decimating the Chinstrap Penguins of Antarctica Climate Change is Decimating the Chinstrap Penguins of Antarctica

Chinstrap penguins are exquisitely adapted to their environment. They live and breed in some of the world’s harshest conditions, nesting in the windblown, rocky coves of the Antarctic Peninsula, a strip of land comprising the northernmost part of the frigid continent. In water they are precision hunters, darting after krill, the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that are their sole food source, utilizing barbed tongues engineered for catching the slipperiest of prey. On land, these 2-2.5-foot-tall flightless birds are prodigious mountaineers, able to scale rocky escarpments in spite of their ungainly waddle. Their perfect adaptation to local conditions makes them the ideal barometer for the future of the region. If anything changes in the marine environment, the health of chinstrap penguins will be one of the most reliable indicators. They are the canaries of the Southern Ocean.

And these endearing, black and white emissaries from Antarctic waters are starting to disappear.

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEScientists Noah Strycker and Steven Forrest from Stony Brook University counting penguins on Snow Island in the South Shetlands of Antarctica, on Jan. 31, 2020.

Scientists conducting a chinstrap census along the Antarctic Peninsula have discovered drastic declines in many colonies, with some seeing population reductions of up to 77% since they were last surveyed, about 50 years ago. The independent researchers, who hitched a ride on a Greenpeace expedition to the region, found that every single one of the 32 colonies surveyed on Elephant Island, a major chinstrap outpost, had declined. Overall, the island’s total chinstrap population had dropped by more than half, from 122,550 breeding pairs in 1971 to 52,786 in January 2020. “Such significant declines suggest that the Southern Ocean’s ecosystem is fundamentally changed from 50 years ago, and that the impacts of this are rippling up the food web to species like chinstrap penguins,” says Heather J. Lynch, associate professor of ecology & evolution at Stony Brook University in upstate New York, who designed the study.

“There is something broken in the Southern Ocean,” adds ornithologist Noah Strycker, a member of the penguin census team, and the author of the 2015 book The Thing with Feathers. “Our best guess on why that could be is climate change, which we know is hitting the Antarctic Peninsula region harder than…practically anywhere else in the world except the Arctic.” Warming waters reduce the sea ice and the phytoplankton that krill depend upon for feeding and survival. Ocean acidification, a side effect of increasing global carbon emissions, also impacts their ability to reproduce.

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEA chinstrap penguin nesting at Spigot Peak, in Orne Harbor on the Antarctic peninsula, on Feb. 6, 2020.

For the past five weeks Stony Brook scientists have joined forces with robotics and drone specialists from Boston’s Northeastern University to survey relatively unstudied chinstrap penguin colonies along the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Chinstraps prefer rocky, windblown sites for nesting, because they provide the best conditions for keeping eggs safe and dry. Those conditions make research difficult: the scientists endured freezing temperatures, wind, rain and snow to reach the coastal rookeries by small inflatable motorboats, then scrambled among the colonies counting penguins by hand. The robotics team backed up the survey with drone footage. When they return to the lab, members of that team will use the findings to teach computers how to identify nests using artificial intelligence for help in future surveys.

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEYang Liu and Vikrant Shah, from North Eastern University, launch a drone from a Greenpeace inflatable. They will later use machine learning to do an automated count of penguin colonies on Elephant Island. The drone counts are later compared to the manual counts done by another team of scientists.

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEScientist Noah Strycker from Stony Brook University Scientist uses a clicker to count chinstrap penguins on Quinton Point, Anvers Island in the Antarctic, on Feb. 4, 2020.

The researchers surveyed 56 colonies in 37 days. So far, they’ve only released numbers from the Elephant Island sites, which were the first to be surveyed. The final report will be published in a few weeks. But those initial findings appear to be consistent across most colonies. “From whatever limited data we have from the 1980s, chinstrap populations appear to be down by over half,” says biologist Steve Forrest, the team lead on the expedition.

On Jan. 31, 2020, 26 days into the expedition, Forrest motored around the President’s Head promontory on Snow Island to scout for potential survey sites. Some 30 years ago, researchers documented a colony there, but Forrest had heard rumors from passing boats that it had disappeared. The sea was too rough for a census that day, but it didn’t matter. Peering through a pair of binoculars, Forrest saw no evidence that there were any penguins left on the island at all. “I was hoping that we might find the colony after all,” he says. “But not finding one is more along the lines of what we expected.” Some of the older surveys in the more difficult-to-reach areas are unreliable — conducted at a distance, by boat — so an exact assessment of how much has changed in the last three decades is impossible. Still, Forrest says, he is confident that chinstrap populations are declining, particularly in the South Shetland Islands (including Elephant Island) off the coast of the Peninsula. “I saw a lot of abandoned nesting places, so I am inclined to believe that it is a real decline, but the precise extent is uncertain.”

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEA chinstrap penguin colony on Elephant Island, Antarctica on Jan. 17, 2020.

While the numbers of chinstraps may be on the wane, the researchers saw a marked increase in gentoo penguin populations. Gentoos, which have red-orange beaks and lack the distinctive black band around the throat that gives chinstraps their names, are much more flexible about what they eat and the conditions under which they breed. This means that they can more easily adapt to changes in their environment. Forrest calls them “climate change winners” for their ability to thrive in conditions that threaten chinstraps— at least in the short term. Strycker calls the process by which the upstarts take over chinstrap areas “gentoofication.”

Strycker, a committed birder who chronicled his attempt to spot more than half the planet’s bird species in a single year in a 2017 book called Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World admits that ultimately, it’s not even about the penguins. It’s about krill. Krill are the foundation of the marine food system — the fish that eat them are the fodder for the fish on which almost every ocean predator relies. The fish that we humans eat also primarily rely on krill as a food source. If krill populations are unhealthy, it means trouble down the line for everyone else. But krill, in their krillions, are hard to study.

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEthe fluke of a humpback whale at Anvers Island, Antarctica, on Feb. 3, 2020.

Christian Åslund —Greenpeace and TIMEIcebergs outside the coast of Anvers Island in Antarctica.

That’s where the chinstraps come in. Like certain whale species, chinstraps are krill specialists, but they are relatively easier to track compared to whales, with their erratic migration patterns. Chinstrap penguins reliably return to the same rookeries year after year to breed, so by assessing colony health over time, scientists can get a better idea of how the krill they depend on are doing. Which is “why we should care about a bunch of penguins going missing from a remote island that no one’s ever heard of,” says Strycker. “Penguins give us an idea about what is going on in the ocean around us. The ocean processes that are changing in the Antarctic are similar to the processes that are changing everywhere else in the world.” Humans may not have evolved to catch krill the way chinstraps do, but our fate is tied to the tiny crustaceans all the same.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Solar Orbiter Blasts Off to Capture a First Look at the Sun’s Elusive Poles Solar Orbiter Blasts Off to Capture a First Look at the Sun’s Elusive Poles

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Europe and NASA’s Solar Orbiter rocketed into space Sunday night on an unprecedented mission to capture the first pictures of the sun’s elusive poles.

The $1.5 billion spacecraft will join NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, launched 1 1/2 years ago, in coming perilously close to the sun in order to unveil its secrets.

While Solar Orbiter won’t venture close enough to penetrate the sun’s corona, or crown-like outer atmosphere, like Parker, it will maneuver into a unique out-of-plane orbit that will take it over both poles, never photographed before. Together with powerful ground observatories, the sun-staring space duo will be like an orchestra, according to Gunther Hasinger, the European Space Agency’s science director.

“Every instrument plays a different tune, but together they play the symphony of the sun,” Hasinger said.

Solar Orbiter was made in Europe, along with nine science instruments. NASA provided the 10th instrument and arranged the late-night launch from Cape Canaveral.

Nearly 1,000 scientists and engineers from across Europe gathered with their U.S. colleagues under a full moon as United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket blasted off, illuminating the sky for miles around. Crowds also jammed nearby roads and beaches.

The rocket was visible for four full minutes after liftoff, a brilliant star piercing the night sky. Europe’s project scientist Daniel Mueller was thrilled, calling it “picture perfect.” His NASA counterpart, scientist Holly Gilbert, exclaimed, “One word: Wow.”

Within an hour, the satellite separated neatly from the upper stage and was flying on its own.

Solar Orbiter — a boxy 4,000-pound (1,800-kilogram) spacecraft with spindly instrument booms and antennas — will swing past Venus in December and again next year, and then past Earth, using the planets’ gravity to alter its path. Full science operations will begin in late 2021, with the first close solar encounter in 2022 and more every six months.

At its closest approach, Solar Orbiter will come within 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) of the sun, well within the orbit of Mercury.

Parker Solar Probe, by contrast, has already passed within 11.6 million miles (18.6 million kilometers) of the sun, an all-time record, and is shooting for a slim gap of 4 million miles (6 million kilometers) by 2025. But it’s flying nowhere near the poles. That’s where Solar Orbiter will shine.

The sun’s poles are pockmarked with dark, constantly shifting coronal holes. They’re hubs for the sun’s magnetic field, flipping polarity every 11 years.

Solar Orbiter’s head-on views should finally yield a full 3-D view of the sun, 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from our home planet.

“With Solar Observatory looking right down at the poles, we’ll be able to see these huge coronal hole structures,” said Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. “That’s where all the fast solar wind comes from … It really is a completely different view.”

To protect the sensitive instruments from the sun’s blistering heat, engineers devised a heat shield with an outer black coating made of burned bone charcoal similar to what was used in prehistoric cave paintings. The 10-foot-by-8-foot (3-meter-by-2.4-meter heat shield is just 15 inches (38 centimeters) thick, and made of titanium foil with gaps in between to shed heat. It can withstand temperatures up to nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (530 degrees Celsius).

Embedded in the heat shield are five peepholes of varying sizes that will stay open just long enough for the science instruments to take measurements in X-ray, ultraviolet, visible and other wavelengths.

The observations will shed light on other stars, providing clues as to the potential habitability of worlds in other solar systems.

Closer to home, the findings will help scientists better predict space weather, which can disrupt communications.

“We need to know how the sun affects the local environment here on Earth, and also Mars and the moon when we move there,” said Ian Walters, project manager for Airbus Defence and Space, which designed and built the spacecraft. “We’ve been lucky so far the last 150 years,” since a colossal solar storm last hit. “We need to predict that. We just can’t wait for it to happen.”

The U.S.-European Ulysses spacecraft, launched in 1990, flew over the sun’s poles, but from farther afield and with no cameras on board. It’s been silent for more than a decade.

Europe and NASA’s Soho spacecraft, launched in 1995, is still sending back valuable solar data.

Altogether, more than a dozen spacecraft have focused on the sun over the past 30 years. It took until now, however, for technology to allow elaborate spacecraft like Parker and Solar Orbiter to get close without being fried.

Fox considers it “a golden age” for solar physics.

“So much science still yet to do,” she said, “and definitely a great time to be a heliophysicist.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Record Temperatures Hit Antarctica as Region Experiences ‘Dramatic Changes’ Record Temperatures Hit Antarctica as Region Experiences ‘Dramatic Changes’

The temperature at one research base in Antarctica reached a record-breaking 18.3 degrees Celsius (65 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, almost a full degree above the previous high set five years ago.

Argentine scientists on the Esperanza base who confirmed the reading said that wasn’t the only record broken this week. The nation’s Marambio site registered the highest temperature for the month of February since 1971. Thermometers there hit 14.1 Celsius, above the previous February 2013 reading of 13.8 Celsius.

The reports are shocking, but not surprising, said Frida Bengtsson, who is leading a expedition to the Antarctic for the environmental group Greenpeace.

“We’ve been in the Antarctic for the last month, documenting the dramatic changes this part of the world is undergoing as our planet warms,” she said in an email. “In the last month, we’ve seen penguin colonies sharply declining under the impacts of climate change in this supposedly pristine environment.”

Antarctica is among the fastest-warming regions in the planet, with the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Argentine bases are located, warming particularly quickly, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Average temperatures on the continent have risen almost 3 degree Celsius over the past 50 years, and during that time glaciers along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated.

WMO experts will now investigate whether the warm event recorded by Argentine scientists is a weather phenomenon known as foehn. That is a common event in Alpine regions that often involves high winds at altitude and the rapid warming of air as it heads down slopes or peaks, driven by significant air pressure differences, the WMO said in a statement.

The WMO will also determine whether the temperature extreme is a new record for the entire Antarctic landmass. The Signy island in the Antarctic region, which includes everywhere south of 60 degrees latitude, recorded an all-time high temperature of 19.8 Celsius in January 1982. The average annual temperature ranges from about -10 Celsius on the Antarctic coast to -60 Celsius at the highest points of the interior.

—With assistance from Thomas Mulier.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Wuhan Coronavirus, Climate Change, and Future Epidemics The Wuhan Coronavirus, Climate Change, and Future Epidemics

A previously unknown strain of coronavirus has dominated headlines in recent weeks, and alarmed public health officials with its rapid spread and virulent nature. But it’s really no surprise to the scientists who study infectious disease: it’s just one of several pathogens that have the potential to reach calamitous status.

I have no evidence that climate change triggered this particular virus to jump from animals to humans at this particular time, or that a warmer planet has helped it spread. That said, it’s pretty clear that, broadly speaking, climate change is likely to lead to an uptick in future epidemics caused by viruses and other pathogens. Scientists have understood for decades that climate change would change the way diseases spread, but, as the planet warms, those hypotheses are being tested and scientists are learning in real time. There are many links between climate change and infectious diseases, but I’m going to focus on one particularly novel—and concerning—area of knowledge: how rising temperatures are making our natural immune systems less effective.

Our bodies are amazing disease-fighting machines. One adaptation goes a long way: our warm body temperature can by itself shut down all sorts of unwanted invasions. When a pathogen enters our body, we often get a fever, warming us up even more to fight off disease. Fevers stimulate the immune system and, ideally, the heat creates an environment where it’s difficult for pathogens to survive.

But, as pathogens are exposed to gradually warmer temperatures in the natural world, they become better equipped to survive the high temperature inside the human body. “Every time we have a very hot day, we have a selection event,” says Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. The pathogens that survive—and reproduce—are better adapted to higher temperatures, including those in our bodies. And, with that, one of our body’s primary defense mechanisms diminishes in effectiveness.

This is not a theoretical, far-off concern. Last year, Casadevall and colleagues documented in the journal mBio how Candida auris (a fungus that gets into the bloodstream, leading to a range of ailments) emerged simultaneously in patients in three different isolated places—southern Asia, Venezuela and South Africa—between 2012 and 2015. In our globalized world, diseases are often transported by human carriers who hop on planes, but in this case the scientists concluded that similar changing climatic conditions in each of these places likely drove the simultaneous development. It’s hard to say how widespread this effect could be, Casadevall says, but there’s no reason to think that it would be limited to fungi like Candida auris.

The strain of coronavirus that’s spreading now is different than Candida for many reasons, but its likely animal vector—bats—provides an interesting example of how temperatures relate to the spread of infectious disease. Like humans, bats are mammals that maintain a warm body temperature that protect them from disease. But while our body temperature rests around 98.6°F and spikes a few degrees when we’re sick, bats’ body temperatures can regularly jump to as high as 105°F. That means they can carry a whole slew of pathogens without suffering from them. In the near future, as global temperatures inch up, bats will continue to be protected by their body heat, while the pathogens they carry are better able to harm us.

For decades, scientists have recognized that climate change would lead to a range of public health consequences. A 1992 report from the National Academy of Sciences, for example, cited a number of ways climate change could lead to the spread of infectious disease and described the lack of resources devoted to studying the impact of climate change on disease as “disturbing.” Four years later, a widely-cited paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association warned that climate change could increase the spread of everything from malnutrition to malaria, and called for concerted study between doctors, climate scientists and social scientists. That same year the World Health Organization published a 300-page tome on the topic, looking at a slew of ties between climate and health, but at the same time noting that the links are “complex and multifactorial.”

We know more today than we did then, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. When Arctic permafrost melts, what pathogens that have been buried for millennia will be released into the atmosphere—and can we combat them? What will the loss of entire communities, countries and ways of life do to the human psyche? How far will disease-carrying mosquitoes currently isolated to the tropics roam as their range shifts?

Scientists are scrambling to find answers to these questions and many other “known unknowns,” but many unknown unknowns undoubtedly remain—and, in some ways, that’s what I find most terrifying.

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A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s climate newsletter, One.Five. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.