America’s Attempt to Bring Back Jaguars Will End With Trump’s Wall

With a scratch of a pen, President Trump could’ve very literally closed the door on any jaguars hoping to make a home in the American Southwest. The jaguar, extirpated from the United States since the mid-20th century, has been making some attempts at a comeback, with some gingerly creeping across the border from Mexico into Arizona and New Mexico.

Heartened conservationists have kept a close watch on this slow migration, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) released a conservation plan this past December aimed at restoring the jaguar in America. An anvil seemed to fall upon these efforts this week, however, with President Trump’s executive order to move ahead with construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.

Despite their popularity, big cats are a persecuted bunch. All seven species of big cats are classified as either threatened or endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

For jaguars, the largest feline in North America, the American experience has been particularly harsh. The spotted cats historically stretched all the way from Argentina up to the American Southwest, California, and even east to Louisiana. But habitat loss and systematic extermination intended to protect livestock wiped them out. The last female was shot in 1963. The last male was shot and killed in 1986.

After a decade of no jaguars, ambitious males started wandering across the border sometime around 1996. Seven individual cats have been spotted in the US since then. Some have crossed into the US and then gone back to Mexico. Some perished. But one loner is a permanent resident: a male nicknamed “el jefe” or “the boss,” that has been living in the Santa Rita Mountains in southern Arizona since 2013.

Excitement was palpable in early December too, when a possible new jaguar was photographed near Fort Huachuca in southeastern Arizona.

Jaguars are apex predators—top of the food chain—that provide irreplaceable functions to the ecosystem. The disappearance of apex predators around the globe has been a hallmark of humankind, but their loss is much more than aesthetic. Recent science has shown that ecosystems might in fact be driven top-down by these predators, and not bottom-up like previously thought. Animals like jaguars could influence processes as diverse as the dynamics of disease, wildfire, and even carbon sequestration.

These benefits are not lost on the USFWS. Last month, they released a full jaguar recovery plan that aims to make it easier for agencies and organizations in the US and Mexico to align their efforts at restoring jaguar habitat along the border—which includes keeping corridors intact so the cats can move back and forth freely. Mexico already has its own recovery plan for its jaguar inhabitants, so USFWS hopes to work closely with them.

There’s just one problem: President Trump’s plan to build a wall along the entire 2,000 mile border with Mexico. There are infinite logistical and financial obstacles still standing in the way of such a barrier actually being built, but if it did go up, that would be tantamount to a bullet in the head for jaguar restoration in the United States—and any hope of ever having jaguars in the US again for that matter. It would also be an ecological disaster—ripping populations and fragile ecosystems apart.

In order for jaguars to come back to America, they need to have suitable habitat available north of the border, and free movement to come and go as they please. Louise Misztal, biologist and executive director of conservation non-profit Sky Island Alliance in Arizona, told me that, “Jaguars are wide ranging and in an arid environment they need to be moving around to get to prey and water resources."

Read More: Trump's Mexican Border Wall Would Be an Ecological Disaster

What’s more, shutting the door on jaguars also limits their ability to adapt to a changing climate. A Trump wall would present, “Just another big barrier when they’re already faced with this threat,” she said.

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Rick Perry Doesn’t Really Understand the Department of Energy He’s About to Run

Climate Change Is Turning Canada into Margaritaville

The new reports are out: everything, from Thailand to Saskatchewan, is heating up. By the end of the century, people may be planning destination weddings in Canada, now poised to become a balmy getaway.

Last year was the hottest year on record—marking the third successive year that record has been broken, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) global temperature report. This means unprecedented global warming, and the both extreme and subtle weather changes within the next century.

Meanwhile, in the first ever study on how climate change will affect mild weather—the kind many of us experience the most—scientists from NOAA and Princeton University predict that patterns of mild weather are likely to shift away from the equator toward the poles. Our cities and daily activities are built around these days of mild weather, the days that are neither too hot nor cold to be outside, and losing them could have negative impacts on our economies and health.

The global prognosis is dim at best, with the number of mild weather days starting to fall even within the next couple decades. Mid-latitude regions like Canada might actually see an increase of mild weather days, whereas tropical areas like Southeast Asia could see a precipitous decrease in mild weather days as their hot days get hotter. These reports are the first to confirm that it’s not just extreme weather and storms that are changing, but our everyday climate.

“Extreme weather is difficult to relate to because it may happen only once in your lifetime,” said lead author and physical scientist Karin van der Wiel, of Princeton University, in a public statement. “We took a different approach here and studied a positive meteorological concept, weather that occurs regularly, and that’s easier to relate to.”

Using high resolution climate models, decades of Earth systems data, and the pixelated help of Gaia and Theia—two of NOAA’s high performance supercomputers—the team of scientists were able to build a data-based picture of how nice days are going to look on Earth in the coming decades.

Based upon their analysis the scientists predicted that golden weather days, between 64 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit, will decrease in frequency 10 to 13 percent by 2100. But geography will determine even more of what the next generation will experience.

“Predicting changes in mild weather is not only important to business and industry, but can also contribute to research on the future of physical and mental health, leisure and urban planning,” said Sarah Kapnik, physical scientist at NOAA and co-author of the paper.

Where you live will determine the kind of climate changes you experience. The tropical regions of the world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America could see precipitous drops in the number of mild weather days, and increased heat and humidity. These areas—many already suffering under climate change—could lose between 15 to 50 days of mild weather a year. This will be particularly painful in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa where climate-related drought and starvation have already hammered the continent.

Temperatures in the Arctic this fall were 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above the normal. In May, people in the town of Phalodi, India persevered through the hottest day in the country’s history—a sweltering 123.8 degrees.

Meanwhile, mid-latitude regions like the much of the United States, Europe and Canada, as well as mountainous areas scattered about the world, stand to gain more days of mild weather, a boon only in the short-term view. In the US, this gives the northern states bordering Canada the best weather, and the southern states a lot of sweaty heat. Canada, England and parts of Northern Europe could see an added 10 to 15 days of pleasant weather a year by 2100.

Image: Van der Wiel/NOAA/Princeton

But everything comes at a price: all across the globe summer will become the season to dread. Heat and humidity will likely claim its mild days. Any added days of nice weather will go to autumn, winter and spring. This means more drought, and more energy consumption as we scramble to stay cool.

This year may not be as hot as last year since 2016 included El Niño, the climatic influencing event caused by a hotspot in the Pacific Ocean. But the overall upward trend is an important take away.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a joint teleconference with Arndt from NOAA, that although 2017 will probably be lower in average temperature than 2016, it will “still be a top five year. I’m confident about that.”

Unfortunately, the US leadership will not be doing anything on human-caused climate change. President-elect Donald Trump believes climate change is a hoax and is currently trying to fill his cabinet with many other climate change skeptics. Even now, coastal communities in the U.S. are spending billions of dollars fighting tidal flooding, while Congress looks the other way.

Read More: Goodbye World: We've Passed the Carbon Tipping Point for Good

When asked by a reporter during a teleconference if he thought the incoming Trump Administration, chief of global climate monitoring for NOAA was blunt: “We prepared this for the American people.”

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A Guy Dances With Google’s VR Paintbrush and It’s Surprisingly Emotional

It turns out the only thing that would’ve made Radiohead’s music video for the song “Lotus Flower” better—which features a creepy, gyrating Thom Yorke acting like he just smoked meth—would be if Yorke had digital paint brushes in his hands so he could paint swirls of color with his twitching hands.

An artist by the name of Danny Bittman did just that, by donning an HTC Vive Virtual Reality (VR) headset and dancing, Yorke-style, with Google’s Tilt Brush 3D painting tool. Using mixed reality filming techniques, he filmed himself virtually painting and dancing in a performance art piece uploaded to Vimeo and titled “Scribbler.”

In his video, Bittman dances around with wildly waving hands and creating swirls of colored lines—all of different textures. Interspersed between these interesting artistic moments, however, are awkward periods when the colors are removed from the screen, revealing just a skinny dude in a white undershirt and a headset twirling around in front of his couch—a raccoon statue on the couch’s end table his sole audience member. Perhaps that’s the point though—to show the difference between the VR world and the real, drab one.

Tilt Brush is a painting tool currently available via Steam on the HTC Vive VR headset. The concept is simple: With the two Vive controllers in your hands acting as paintbrushes, you can paint and illustrate in three dimensional space, using “your room as your canvas,” according to the Tilt Brush website. Not only can you design room-scale art pieces that a person can walk around, but by painting in three dimensions, it’s also possible to bypass many of the scale translation problems that artists deal with when painting or sculpting.

Pittman is a filmmaker-turned-virtual-reality-artist based in Chicago and has created all sorts of colorful, futuristic or otherworldly landscape scenes with Tilt Brush—snow falling on a crashed spaceship, a human made of string falling through a spiraling vortex. But he’s now added performance art to his portfolio with the dance painting video “Scribbler.”

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British Scientists Have Tied the Tightest Knot Ever

You may think you tied the tightest knot ever achieved the last time you struggled to take your shoes off, but that accomplishment actually goes to a group of scientists at Manchester University in the United Kingdom.

By developing a new way of tying multiple molecular strands together, the scientists were able to create complex knots tighter than ever before. Their task was more than just a nerdy stunt, this technique could help weave polymer strands into newer and stronger materials than any that currently exist. Their research is published in the journal Science.

The 192-atom-knot is made up of eight crossings of molecular strands and metal ions, and was achieved through a special tying technique called “self-assembly.” Molecular strands of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon are wrapped around iron ions “forming crossing points at the right places—just like in knitting,” said chemist and leader of the study David Leigh. These, in turn, are wound around a chloride ion sitting in the very center of the knot, like the nucleus of a rubber band ball.

All that’s left in the process is to fuse the ends of the strands together with a catalyst to complete the loop, and voila, you’ve got the the almighty knot of knots. The whole thing is 20 nanometers—or 20 millionths of a millimeter—long.

All this knot tying of atoms helps scientists explore the strength and elasticity of different structures, which is a key component of developing new materials. If you can weave together polymer strands (that is, small molecules arranged in a repeating structure to create a larger molecule), instead of running them parallel to each other like plastics used in bulletproof vests and kevlar you can make infinitely stronger, yet lightweight and flexible, materials. Almost like the woven threads of a quilt.

"Some polymers, such as spider silk, can be twice as strong as steel, so braiding polymer strands may lead to new generations of light, super-strong and flexible materials for fabrication and construction,” said Leigh in a public statement.

The eight-crossings molecular knot, as it’s called, is so far the most complex woven molecule ever created by scientists, which is a landmark achievement. But one question remains: once you’ve successfully tied the tightest knot ever, can you untie it?

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Jeff Sessions Failed to Disclose Oil He Owns Under a Federal Wildlife Refuge

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, the controversial senator from Alabama who was denied the same federal judgeship in 1986 due to documented accusations of racism—started his confirmation hearing on Tuesday again amidst swirls of controversy.

Piled on top of lawmakers’ many profound concerns is the fact that the senator did not disclose that he owns subsurface rights to oil and other minerals on 600 acres of land in Alabama, as is required by federal ethics rules. Some of those holdings lie underneath a federal wildlife refuge—a glaring conflict of interest if Sessions were to oversee any drilling or environmental issues as head of the Department of Justice (DOJ), or legislation protecting this land.

Sessions’ 600 acres of subsurface oil and mineral reserves produce relatively small revenue—about $4,700 annually. They were not disclosed—as they are required to be—on the forms Sessions sent to the Office of Congressional Ethics, which reviews all Cabinet nominees’ assets for any potential conflicts of interest. According to the Washington Post, the senator’s assets were found in Alabama state records and reviewed by independent ethics lawyers. Sessions later disclosed this information in his hearing on Tuesday after lawmakers brought the omission to his attention.*

A lawyer assisting Sessions on the matter argued that the revenue was insignificant and assured the Post that “We are investigating these questions and looking carefully into the reporting forms submitted to be sure that they have accurately characterized the senator’s holdings.” He added, “To whatever extent that’s not the case, the forms will be amended.”

But the lapse has angered some Democratic politicians on the Senate Judiciary Committee which oversees the confirmation hearing for attorney general, particularly because some lie below federally protected land.

Sessions has also admitted that he owns thousands of dollars’ worth of bonds in the Brazilian state-owned petroleum company.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut and member of the committee, remarked that “I am troubled by any omissions, but this is particularly troubling because this ownership interest involves oil and gas holdings connected to a federal wildlife refuge.” When he was a member of the same committee, Sessions himself was vociferous in his criticisms of nominees he felt did not provide enough detailed information on their personal assets—he doesn’t seem to hold himself to the same standard.

As a US DOJ investigation into one of the largest international corruption scandals ever continues to unfold, Sessions has admitted that he owns thousands of dollars’ worth of bonds in the Brazilian state-owned petroleum company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, a suspected player in the scandal. The scandal was unearthed three years ago by a Brazilian internal investigation of Petrobras, eventually leading to the impeachment and removal of their President, Dilma Rousseff, last year. Bloomberg reports that Sessions’ bonds are worth between $16,000 and $65,000, but that the senator has told the Office of Government Ethics that he plans to sell them. Not having to fully disclose all of his personal assets up front is something that Sessions seems to arbitrarily apply only to himself.

This finding is all the more alarming to some when put in consideration with the senator’s known animosity towards climate change science and environmental regulation. As US attorney general, he would be responsible in guiding policy for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division—an arm of 400 lawyers responsible for enforcing federal laws on pollution and others concerning environmental regulation. If Sessions continues to hold oil assets underneath a federal wildlife refuge, it is unlikely he would be able to make unbiased decisions when it comes to drilling and environmental issues on protected lands.

“The fact that his oil is in a federal wildlife refuge means he should not be involved in DOJ policies concerning drilling or environmental issues” involving federal reserves, Trevor Potter, an ethics lawyer who has advised several GOP presidential candidates, told the Post. “Clearly he should have disclosed the asset.”

The 4,218 acre Choctaw Wildlife Refuge is a criss-crossing web of lakes, sloughs, creeks and moist soil lands populated by white-tailed deer, turkey, raccoons, beavers, opossums and alligators. It is also a favorite wintering spot for thousands of migratory waterfowl. Wood ducks and wading bird numbers can exceed 10,000. But Senator Sessions leased his oil rights under the refuge to Chief Oil and Gas, a Texas firm, in 2015.

*This story was updated to include that Jeff Sessions admitted his ownership of the land in Alabama during the course of the hearing on Tuesday after the story was published. He did not disclose this information in the ethics forms before. This was his full answer:

SESSIONS: “Sen. Feinstein, I believe that’s so. And the way it happened was that many years ago, at least 50 or more years ago, my family—ancestors—sold some land and reserve mineral rights. Later, there was a dam built on the river and a desire to take land that was going to be flooded and to add additional land for a duck preserve. And they negotiated, and the family sold land to the government and retained the mineral rights, per the agreement.

At least, that’s my understanding. By an odd series of events, the properties fell to me. I’ve never reviewed the deeds. I’ve never known how much land is out there that I own mineral rights on. Although, oil companies are pretty good at making sure they contact real owners before they drill a well. So you’re correct that we reported the income on my return as coming from the property that I own and the property where the oil well is. I did not note in that report specifically that it was all income—the blank said royalties but..maybe..— I would just say to you this. We absolutely—this is something I’ve taken no affirmative action in, it’s something I’m going to take affirmative action in. I have one of the simplest, clearest, fairest financial reports you can see. My assets and my wife’s assets are almost entirely vanguard funds and municipal bonds. I’ve owned no individual stocks, because I want to be sure I don’t have conflicts of interest. I want to adhere to high standards. We are going to find out what we did or didn’t do, and we are going to correct it.”

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This Giant Vertical Farming Robot Is Coming For Your Crops

In 2011, the number of people on Earth passed 7 billion and by 2050 that number is expected to jump up to almost 10 billion. Aside from trying to feed all these people, we'll still need to feed livestock as well (at least given current dietary needs and preferences). One efficient way to do this is through vertical farming—growing plants on trays indoors, which has the advantage of using far less space than traditional farming. But even this requires lots of human labor and equipment that farmers and ranchers can't always afford.

Enter California agricultural tech company FodderWorks (a division of Simply Country, Inc). FodderWorks has created a fully automated robotic fodder-growing system that can produce daily quantities of fresh, non-genetically-modified food for livestock. It takes a system that already greatly reduces water and land use, and maximizes it even further, by making it faster. You can watch the robot work in a dramatic video posted by Fodder Works on YouTube (above). It’s like Ridley Scott’s take on ag-tech.

"Really any type of cereal grain can sprout in the system."

Sprouts—known as fodder when given to livestock—are increasingly being used by farmers to feed their animals, because of the good health it gives them, and because of how economically beneficial they are to produce. This system can even be used to grow leafy greens and other produce for humans too.

The most commonly used grain to make fodder is barley, because of its high nutrient content, and its availability (it’s also the most popular grain for brewing beer). “Really any type of cereal grain can sprout in the system,” FodderWorks General Manager Kyle Chittock told Motherboard in a phone conversation. “But just from a nutritional standpoint, barley works very well for all types of livestock and actually if you look at research on growing sprouts for human consumption, barley is one of the healthiest things out there. A superfood.”

The process used to grow the fodder is simple, cheap and highly efficient. Grains are spread out on trays, the trays are stacked on shelves, and the trays washed in light and water from overhead lamps and sprayers. By the sixth day, the trays are each filled with a mat of bright green sprouts—that looks kind of like it could be on your front lawn. These squares of fresh, living sprouts are then given right to the animals for consumption. No extra fertilizers. No pesticides. Six cents a pound.

"If you take the average dairy in California, they have over a thousand cows, and they don’t want to have to hire a bunch of people just to produce feed."

The catch, however, has always been the amount of labor involved. “The largest system we’ve installed, that’s manually operated, is out there producing five tons a day,” said Chittock. “But at that scale there’s a lot of labor involved. If you take the average dairy in California, they have over a thousand cows, and they don’t want to have to hire a bunch of people just to produce feed. That’s not what they want to focus their time and energy on.” So the team at FodderWorks created the automated robotic fodder system to nix that labor cost for the average farmer, a move bound to come with some controversy amid the larger debate about the steady automation of human jobs in America.

Chittock contends that FodderWorks' robotic system isn’t taking away from any jobs, because this type of feed production simply hasn’t been done before. He also pointed out that not only can many individual farmers not afford to employ a large workforce just to create animal feed, but in fact, the robotic fodder system “allows our customers to be more efficient so they can grow their businesses, which in turn creates even more agricultural jobs,” Chittock said. “We sell a product with a benefit to the consumer,” he continued “which in turn employs a manufacturing team to assemble a product, employs the steel supplier, aluminum suppliers, the irrigation companies we buy parts from, electronics companies, designers, marketers, and numerous others.”

Working like a robot waiter, the machine slides along a track between the rows of sprouts, busily moving trays around on its forklift-like hands. It picks up an empty tray, fills it with grain, shuttles it back to its shelf home, and then returns six days later to harvest the little rug of sprouts growing on it. It drops the 7-pound square of fodder onto a conveyor belt, where a waiting tractor or person will be there to pick it up and take it to the livestock for lunch. “It basically does everything involved with the regular production of the sprouts” said Chittock.

FodderWorks will debut the machine at the World Ag Expo in California this February. Costs start at $233,000 for a system that produces one ton of fodder a day. The more a system produces, however, the cheaper the machine will be, because of the greater efficiency. For a 12-ton-a-day system, the robot would cost under $83,000 per ton.

Dry feeds have traditionally been used because they can be stored. “But they’re not the healthiest,” said Chittock, adding “If you look at it from a people perspective, it’s kind of a given that fresh fruit is better than dried fruit.” Now, a giant robot can help that along.

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The Coldest Town on Earth Wants You to Stop Complaining

We all grumble and grimace as we trudge through the snow, heads down, faces firmly looking at the ground to avoid the stinging wind. When you’re just trying to go about your daily life freezing weather is uncomfortable, it’s annoying, and you always find yourself wondering why the hell anyone decided to build a town in the town that you’re living in.

It’s important to remember, however—In an attempt at finding the silver lining of the situation—that there are places much, much colder. In fact, the only people who can truthfully have the last word on complaining about the cold are the citizens of Oymyakon, Russia. The coldest town on Earth.

Oymyakon is a remote village, population size between 500 and 800, tucked away in windswept Northeastern Russia that experiences average winter temperatures of -58 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest temperature ever recorded in this freezerbox of a town was -90 degrees Fahrenheit in 1933. To put things in perspective, the coldest temperature ever recorded on the ground was -128 degrees Fahrenheit, and that was in the inhospitable continent of Antarctica.

Oymyakon, Siberia. Image: Google Maps

Most of Oymyakon’s inhabitants are Turkic Yakut, indigenous to the Northeast region of Siberia. They are traditionally hunters and reindeer herders, and because the they live in part of the permafrost region of the globe where the soil is frozen as much as 1,640 meters down, they can’t grow crops and still rely heavily on meat. A local by the name of Bolot Bochkarev told weather.com that "Yakutians love the cold food, the frozen raw Arctic fish, white salmon, whitefish, frozen raw horse liver, but they are considered to be delicacy." In regular daily life, he said, "We like eating the soup with meat. The meat is a must. It helps our health much.”

Living in such extreme environments means other aspects of life that we generally take for granted are also affected. Wearing glasses, for example, is risky because they will freeze to your face. Indoor plumbing is a fool’s errand because of the frozen ground, so most toilets are in outhouses. Yes, this means you must run through -50 degree weather just to take a pee.

Heated garages are a necessity unless you want the axle grease on your car to freeze—and when you run errands, the engine’s got to keep running. Planes don’t fly into the area in winter. Period.

Living in extreme cold can bring its own set of health problems as well, particularly with regard to older people, like frostbite and body temperature loss. The Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety—a department quite familiar with cold—notes that exposed skin in temperatures of -50 degrees can freeze in 5 to 10 minutes. This means going outside in Oymyakon with exposed skin puts you at very high risk of getting frostbite and hypothermia—an overall drop in body temperature that can be fatal in severe cases. That kind of cold also constricts blood vessels, which can increase the risk of heart attack in older people.

A Yakutian horse in Oymyakon. Image Maarten Takens/Flickr

Being in a constant state of cold makes you hungry, too. To keep its body temperature up, your body needs lots of hearty fuel, or it can experience an unhealthy amount of weight loss over time. The meat-heavy diet of the Yakuts people in Oymyakon helps keep them warm.

So how do you live in a veritable freezer—colder than a freezer—actually? “Russki chai, literally Russian tea, which is their word for vodka,” photographer Amos Chapple told weather.com after a visit to the village. Another trick is bundling up, truly bundling up, with many layers and hats, scarves and gloves. No, “I’m only going to be outside for like 5 minutes so I don’t need gloves,” business. That, and staying inside.

Oymyakon is a two-day drive from the regional capital Yakutsk (risk lovers will be familiar with this city), which is itself, the coldest city on Earth. But, although the Sakha Republic (the autonomous region of Russia containing Oymyakon and Yakutsk) might hold the icebox crown, many other places in Northern Alaska, Canada, and Scandinavia experience needle sharp icicle boogers, too.

In the United States, for example, the town of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the U.S., boasts an average annual temperature of 11 degrees, and winter averages in the -20s. 5 degrees north of the Arctic Circle, Barrow also experiences polar night—that is, over 60 days of complete darkness (no, there aren’t any vampires though). This makes New York’s average January low of 26 degrees seem balmy.

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This Neural Network Designs Baby Names of the Future

What to name your newborn child is probably one of the oldest struggles of humanity. In the book Roots, by Alex Haley, we found out that newborns of Kunta Kinte’s tribe in the Gambia aren’t even allowed to be spoken to until they have been told what their names are.

So here’s a solution: shirk the anxiety and responsibility altogether and have artificial intelligence do it for you. Nate Parrott, a coder, designer, and student at Brown University created a neural network that mashes up thousands of the most common baby names into futuristic sounding interpretive takes on the current plebeian options. Not only will your child have a fresh, edgy new name, but they will also fit well into a Blade Runner future.

Parrott trained a neural network—essentially a computer system that attempts to mimic the human brain and nervous system—to learn 7,500 of the most common American baby names and give each one of them a numerical representation called an embedding. “Once I had a model that could translate between names and their embeddings, I could generate new names, blend existing names together, do arithmetic on names, and more,” he said in a Medium post describing how he made it.

Image: Github

With baby names now represented as numbers, Parrott could add or subtract them, or even multiply them, to create novel names that would fit well for a person wearing a uniform one piece suit and a Google Glass-esque pair of visors. Pruliaa, Miiirilid, Aloora, Deredrd, and the tantalizing Nitnis are just a sampling of the endless possibilities when naming your child with a digitized nervous system. His code is open-sourced, but you would need to do a little programming of your own to use it.

As funny as it is, parents get so stressed (and not unreasonably so) over naming their child that it’s not crazy to think some would take the help of a neural network in finding one. At the very least the baby naming A.I. could be used adopted by science fiction writers struggling to come up with new names for their characters. Think about it. “Aaort! Come and take your daily 2,000 calorie sustenance pill. Then will we go lobotomize the fluger.” It fits perfectly.

Meanwhile, Parrott claims that if his Medium post gets 1000 likes, he will use this to name if first child. That's pretty good incentive.

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A Passenger Jet in Mozambique Collided With a Drone

The Aviation Herald has reported that a Boeing 737 jet carrying 80 passengers in Mozambique collided with a drone on Thursday, causing significant damage to the nose cone. No one was injured, but the incident again raises concerns about the possibility of collisions between commercial aircraft and drones—a topic that in the United States continues to rankle both the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), who are adamant about public safety (and keeping control of the skies) and the enormously large drone hobbyist community, who are keen on flying their beloved robots in the sky the way they enjoy.

The Linhas Aereas de Mocambique (LAM) jet was on a routine domestic flight from the capital Maputo, in the south, to Tete, in the Northwest near Malawi. As the aircraft approached the runway in Tete, the pilots reported hearing a loud bang on the front of the plane. According to the Aviation Herald, no abnormalities followed, so the crew—believing it to be a bird strike—continued to proceed with the landing.

After the passenger jet was on the ground and its 80 passengers disembarked, authorities examined the damage and concluded that the crumpled side of the nose cone was in fact caused by a drone. The damaged Boeing aircraft is currently under repair and a replacement one was sent to Tete to perform the return flight to Maputo. What type of drone caused the damage, or who was piloting it is still unclear.

Surprisingly, this is only the second recorded occurrence of a drone colliding with a passenger aircraft. The other happened in April 2016, when a British Airways Airbus A320 collided with a drone around Heathrow Airport in London as it was flying in from Geneva. As with the most recent incident in Mozambique, however, no was was hurt.

Despite the lack of injuries and few collisions, there have been plenty of near-misses and airports across the U.S. regularly report incidents with drones flying in or around the port’s airspace. For example, in a five-month period from August 2015 to January 2016, the FAA received 582 reports of drones in what it considers to be dangerous flying areas. That is an average of 116 a month.

Deep confusion has swirled around drone regulations for a number of years in the U.S. with the commercial drone and hobby pilots flying under little or heavy handed supervision, depending, and the FAA stalling to release a report of rules and regulations on the matter until just this past June. When a drone operator was charged for dangerous flying behavior, it was under the careless and reckless distinctions used for large scale aircraft.

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A Giant Iceberg the Size of Delaware Is About to Break Away From Antarctica

A massive iceberg the size of Delaware is likely to crack off of an ice shelf in West Antarctica sometime soon, British scientists have confirmed.

This would destabilize the ice shelf, known as the Larsen C, and put it in a precarious position. Ice shelves act like floating buttresses to the mainland glaciers, so If the giant Larsen C were to collapse into the sea, glaciers from West Antarctica would end up sliding into the ocean, and ultimately raising sea levels—possibly by many feet.

Scientists from the MIDAS Project, an academic group that studies ice melt and its impact on shelf stability in Antarctica, have been following the progression of a giant crack in the Larsen C for the last two years. Scientists have been keeping a close watch because of past calving events and shelf collapses that have occurred in the same region.

Image: NASA/Wikimedia Commons

The project team has said that the rift, as they’re calling the huge crack, is a geographical event, and not one directly attributable to climate change, but it could hasten climate change-related effects when it breaks away, by weakening the Larsen C ice shelf as a whole.

If the Larsen C collapsed, it would cause glaciers from land to spill into the sea—which would in turn raise sea levels and perhaps contribute to increased Antarctic glacial melting.

This past December, satellite observations revealed that the rift grew 18km in just a matter of weeks. “After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18km during the second half of December 2016. Only a final 20km of ice now connects an iceberg one quarter the size of Wales to its parent ice shelf,” said the MIDAS Project on its website.

Read More: These Stunning Photos Document a Changing Climate in Antarctica

That 20km thread of ice is now the only thing keeping a 5,000 sq km iceberg from cracking off and drifting out to sea. When this happens—researchers say the breakup is inevitable—it will be one of the ten largest icebergs ever recorded to break away in a calving event like that. The iceberg itself won’t raise sea levels, but it will destabilize Larsen C.

The breaking away of this iceberg—10 percent of the Larsen C ice shelf—would make the whole shelf “less stable,” said project member Martin O’Leary, of Swansea University in Wales, in a public statement. “If it were to collapse there would be nothing holding the glaciers up and they would start to flow quite quickly indeed.”

Image: Adrian Luckman/MIDAS Project

The 80 km-long rift is currently about 100 meters wide, but slices down half a kilometer into the ice shelf. These shelves are typical hundreds of meters thick. Climate change has certainly aided in the growth of the rift. 2016 was the hottest year on record—by a significant amount—thanks to a one-two punch from greenhouse gases and an El Niño event.

The ice around the rift is being thawed from warmer air above and warmer water below, according to Andrew Fleming, the remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey.

Project Leader Adrian Luckman, also of Swansea University, told the BBC News, “If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed.”

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This Bionic Nerf Gun Can Be Fired Without a Hand

For the folks at Hackerloop, a collective of makers, tinkerers and engineers based in Paris, lots of things revolve around Nerf guns—and why not? There is a particular joy gained from shooting a friend with a foam projectile in the face. The Hackerloopers take this a step further though. Their Nerf guns are mounted on drones, robotic turrets—they’ve even rigged up a crazy one involving Google Glass. They’ve raised the bar with their latest Nerf creation, however: a bionic gun that can attach to an amputated or missing limb and be fired by muscle contraction.

Valentin Squirelo, co-founder of Hackerloop, said that the inspiration for the bionic nerf gun all came from a string of jokes involving a friend who had lost his hand. “It was too easy for us to win over him in Nerf battle,” he said in a Facebook Messenger conversation with Motherboard, half-jokingly.

While being competitive in a Nerf war probably isn’t the top of the priority list for those with amputations, Squirelo did point out that in all seriousness: “Being able to have fun with your friends with these wonderful toys is a real game-changer.” So he and his collaborators at Hackerloop set to work crafting a Nerf gun that could attach like a prosthetic hand to their friend’s arm, and that would also be able to fire on his command.

"We're just a bunch of hardware and software engineers, designers, and startup people who love making stupid stuff together."

It works like this. When their friend contracts the muscles in his forearm, a DIY myoware sensor made with a little Arduino circuit board evaluates the amount of electrical activity generated in his body. Electromyography (EMG), as this process is called, measures muscle activation via electric potential. It’s historically been used in the medical field for research and diagnosing neuromuscular disorders, but the advance of electronics has led to an explosion of EMG circuits and sensors in the fields of prosthetics and robotics.

When the electricity in their friend’s arm goes over a certain threshold, the Nerf mechanism, which is connected to the sensor, pulls the trigger and fires off a foam round. When the electricity from muscle activity dips below that threshold, the Nerf gun goes silent. A video of Squirelo’s friend emptying a nerf clip from a prototype of his new Nerf gun hand is on Hackerloop’s Instagram and YouTube. They plan on revealing a more complete version of the bionic toy gun online in February.

And you can expect Hackerloop to continue creating bizarre, yet awesome robotic Nerf creations, as well as other equally awesome but non-Nerf-related robots, like this grafitti drone. “We're just a bunch of hardware and software engineers, designers, and startup people who love making stupid stuff together,” said Squirelo.

In that vein, it’s worth mentioning another recent Hackerloop project of note: the “Nosulus Rift” a virtual reality headset that covers your nose, not your eyeballs. It allows you to smell things you experience inside of a videogame. So far, it’s exclusively compatible with the new South Park video game “The Fractured but Whole,” where you’ll intimately experience all of Cartman’s farts.

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Ebola Can Hide Out and Replicate In Your Lungs

From March 2014 into early 2016, West Africa experienced the largest outbreak of Ebola in human history—a viral disease that causes hemorrhagic fever in humans.

Throughout the medical calamity and political frenzy that took hold after the epidemic started gaining steam, officials scrambled to understand how the virus was transmitted from person to person. It is now widely agreed upon in the medical community that the deadly disease travels from body to body through fluids—spit, sweat, blood, tears, excrement etc.

But it’s also possible that the lungs could be playing a role in infection as well. Scientists in Italy have recently found the virus replicating in the lungs of a patient recovering from infection. This suggests that those organs could play a larger role in bodily infection than previously thought. The findings were published today in the journal Plos Pathogens. They could help scientists get a better understanding of how the disease develops in the human body and travels between individuals. Any deep knowledge of how the ebola virus works could also help in combating strange infectious diseases likely to pop up in the future.

The Ebola virus (EBOV) is a rare organism that causes hemorrhagic fever in humans and other primates. Some victims experience gruesome symptoms like extreme fever, vomiting, bleeding from the nose or anus, and diarrhea, among others. It’s also deadly. In the West African outbreak, two in five people who contracted the virus died. In all, almost 29,000 people were infected, and over 11,000 died.

During the crisis, doctors around the world observed in lab studies and in evacuated patients that EBOV might cause lung damage—in addition to the other devastation it wreaks on the human body—by replicating itself inside lung tissue. But no direct evidence of this replication was ever found.

Epidemiologist Giuseppe Ippolito and his colleagues at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases "Lazzaro Spallanzani" in Italy followed the life trajectory of the ebola virus in the blood and lungs of an infected healthcare worker evacuated from West Africa and treated in Rome. The patient recovered.

Throughout treatment and recovery, the team of medical researchers eyed viral RNA fragments responsible for EBOV replication in both the lungs and blood of the sick patient. They found that after recovery, the RNA fragments remained in the lungs of the patient five days after it had disappeared from the blood. In the paper, the authors state that “This suggests a major role of the respiratory tissues in the pathogenesis of Ebola virus disease."

Read More: This Math Model Is Predicting the Ebola Outbreak with Incredible Accuracy

As the climate changes, and humans continue to develop land deep into the jungles of the world, more rare infectious diseases like Ebola are likely to pop up, shaken and disturbed from their millennia of sleep deep in the forests. Anything we can learn from ones like Ebola are surely going to help us combat new pathogens in the future.

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The Mighty Hummingbird Can Perceive Motion From Every Angle

Image: USFWS Pacific Southwest Region

Hummingbirds live their lives at breakneck speed. They beat their wings 70 to 80 times per second—earning them the “humming” part of their name—and can reach flight speeds of up to 60 mph. They even eat fast. When drinking nectar from a flower they can get 13 licks inside of one second.

Such speedy living (and the ability to hover) also affects how they detect motion. Almost all vertebrates, including humans, are hypersensitive to forward motion that moves from back to front.But ecologists from the University of British Columbia in Canada, have found that hummingbirds see the world in a completely unique way. They detect and pick up on motion from all directions equally—at the same time. Their research is published in the journal Current Biology.

All animals have a region of the brain that detects motion. In mammals, this region is called the nucleus of the optic tract (NOT) and it is responsible for processing visual signals sent to the brain from the retina. Most of the neurons clustered within it are tuned to perceive motion from back-to-front. This means that we pick up more on things coming up from behind, like a predator or some kind of impending collision.

“There are other neurons that would prefer some of the other directions, but it’s more than 50 percent of the neurons prefer that forward motion,” lead author and zoologist Andrea Gaede explained to Motherboard.

But in hummingbirds, this same motion-detecting brain region—known as the lentiformis mesencephalic (LM) in birds—is instead clustered with neurons designed to pick up many directions of movement. “There wasn’t a preference for a specific direction,” Gaede said. Each neuron was tuned to something different. “This might make them more aware of motion in any direction around them while they’re hovering. This might be another flower or a predator.”

This makes sense when you think about the incredibly varied range of motions that hummingbirds perform when in flight. They can fly left, right, straight up, straight down, backwards, forwards, and even upside down. They are also the only vertebrate that can hover in place. And they do it all at a clip. Their high speed courtship displays must be the fastest and most exciting form of flirtation in the animal kingdom.

Gaede and her team discovered this unique ability by tracking the neural activity in the LMs of Anna’s hummingbirds and zebra finches as they watched dots move around on a computer screen. The Anna’s hummingbirds picked up each direction equally, while the zebra finches focused heavily on the forward direction vertebrates are most commonly attuned to.

Gaede also found that hummingbirds are most sensitive to fast paced motion. “Something moving a small distance, but that is very close to you will actually be a fast paced motion across your retina,” she explained—like a fluttering flower, or predator. This could also be a boon when they’re locked in aerial combat with other hummingbirds for nectar bearing flowers—a common occurrence amongst the highly antisocial and aggressive little birds.

Gaede hopes to eventually understand how the neural activity in hummingbirds’ LM translates into specific in-flight behaviors. You can imagine there’s some super fast paced signal processing going on in their little brains for them to be able to blitz through life and respond in kind to other living things of nature moving all around them. Hummingbirds, it seems, are Earth’s best candidate for podracing.

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If You’ve Ever Dreamed of Becoming a Fox, Here’s the Closest You’ll Get

You might think of them as animals of the countryside, but these days, some red foxes are as confident navigating cities as us humans. Thousands live in large urban centers, especially in Britain, hidden during the day, and active at night. Most people never see these masters of invisibility, who slink around in the dark corners and under cars, catching rats, or scrounging through trash bins.

City-dwelling red foxes got a special shout out recently on the BBC’s smash hit nature series Planet Earth II, but they get a starring role in a 360 video short on the BBC Earth YouTube channel. The video puts you into a fox’s perspective and takes you through the parks and back alleys of a major city, complete with narration from the wonderful Sir David Attenborough.

Cruising at ground level, you get spooked by dogs, the city fox’s arch nemesis, dodge the occasional car, scrounge trash, and call to other foxes in your distinctive, sometimes unsettling way that sounds an awful lot like someone yacking up a bone (the inspiration of a viral song). At the end of your city fox sojourn, Sir David reminds you of our furry neighbors, saying “You may never see a fox in the city, but they’re there alright, going about their lives while we’re sleeping.”

Planet Earth II is BBC Earth’s ten year anniversary follow up to one of the most acclaimed nature documentary series ever created. The original Planet Earth made waves in 2006 for being one of the first nature programs ever to be filmed in high-definition, and its follow up is continuing the trend of upping the ante, having been shot in 4K, or ultra-high definition resolution. It aired in the United Kingdom in November, and will hit US television screens on January 28th. It’s currently the most watched nature series of the last fifteen years in the UK.

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Cats Didn’t Exist In Australia Until Recently, But Now Cover 99.8 Percent of It

Australia is the only continent besides Antarctica to have never had any felines until the arrival of Europeans (specifically, those who came during the 17th through 19th centuries), and yet now it is completely overrun with them. An analysis conducted by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme involving 40 top Australian scientists and over 90 separate studies has revealed feral cats cover a staggering 99.8 percent of the continent, and 80 percent of the area of its islands. A grim prospect indeed for the many species of unique mammals and birds living there that are regularly destroyed by feral cats. The study was published last month online in the journal Biological Conservation.

Cats make great pets. They’re cute, furry, relatively easy to take care of, and make great alarm clocks— albeit ones that sock you in the face because they’re hungry. They also, however, are some of the most efficient killers on planet Earth. Good ol’ Sneakers might curl up on your lap like a dear, but if you let him outside, he’s guaranteed to be a cold-blooded murderer. On islands particularly, where feral cats are invasive, many species of birds have fallen victim to the claw. In Australia, now literally crawling with felines, cats are responsible for the extinction of 20 species of native mammals. And they don’t appear to be going anywhere.

"Australia's total feral cat population fluctuates between 2.1 million when times are lean, up to 6.3 million when widespread rain results in plenty of available prey," said ecologist and co-author of the analysis Sarah Legge, of the University of Queensland, in a press release. This is actually lower than previous estimates, as the authors note. Still, it's a pretty staggering number, and the fluctuation is equally interesting, as seen in the following map (the darker areas show higher cat-density following rainfalls):

Image: Biological Conservation

And the researchers found that cats were just as prevalent inside National Parks as outside them, directly undermining conservation efforts. They also, perhaps not surprisingly, found the furry raiders to be up to 30 times as dense in heavily urbanized areas as elsewhere—probably due to the availability of easily accessible food. Unfortunately, these city hubs create many of the feral cats that flee to the bushlands where they can kill freely.

“Feral cats have been devastating for our wildlife,” said Gregory Andrews, the Australian government’s Threatened Species Commissioner, in a public statement. "Australia is the only continent on Earth other than Antarctica where the animals evolved without cats, which is a reason our wildlife is so vulnerable to them. This reinforces the need to cull feral cats humanely and effectively,” he said.

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How to 3D Print Your Own Tractor Beam

In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the crew of the Millennium Falcon pops out of hyperspace only to find themselves right in front of the Death Star. It’s their first encounter with the famed evil weapon, and it doesn’t go over well. The ship is immobilized in a “tractor beam” and is gradually pulled into the Death Star.

In a case of real life mimicking fiction, scientists created a real life tractor beam last year that could push, pull, and levitate objects in thin air using sound waves. Improving on those designs, the same researchers have now created a 3D printable, do-it-yourself version of the handheld tractor beam—allowing the maker community to advance the technology even further. The designs were published today in the journal Applied Physics Letters and a “How to” video is available on YouTube.

The concept of the tractor beam originates in science fiction—often portrayed as an invisible grappling hook of sorts that could capture large spaceships and pull them in. Scientists have labored over the decades using all sorts of materials, including water, to try and create such a device with minimal success. But it wasn’t until 2015 that mechanical engineer Asier Marzo, and colleagues, crafted the first true tractor beam that traps and pulls objects from one direction. And he did it with sound waves. It works on a small scale right now, paralyzing plastic beads, and even insects, drawing them into its center like a mini black hole.

“The most important thing is that it can attract the particle towards the source," said Marzo in a press release. "It's very easy to push particles from the source, but what's hard is to pull them toward the source; to attract the particles.” That’s what makes it a true tractor beam.

This tractor beam, however, was of a complex construction, expensive, and overall not something easily replicated by any at-home maker. Marzo lamented that “It was very complicated and pricey because it required a phase array, which is a complex electronic system.”

So Marzo and colleagues at the University of Bristol reexamined their tractor beam construction and replaced phase array with a much simpler, structural material. Instead of altering the sound waves electronically, they did it mechanically using simple tubes that vary in length and shape. This drastically reduces the cost of making the device. The tubes can be 3D printed, and all the other materials can be purchased from places like open-source electronics supplier, Arduino.

“The components are very simple, like an Arduino and a motor driver, and everything can be bought on Amazon for less than £50 (about $70)” said Marzo.

Marzo’s acoustic tractor beam—including his replicable, 3D printed version—are both small. And because of the difficulty of suspending objects more than half the wavelength of sound, the beam can only trap objects around a few millimeters in size. In the lab, however, Marzo and his colleagues have been able to suspend some larger objects and liquids. A lot of work remains, however. And opening its architecture up to the maker community at large will bring all sorts of new ideas and creations sure to advance the its technology.

Strangely, the tractor beam also has applications to studying the effects of microgravity on biological material. "They discovered salmonella is three times more [virulent] when it's levitated,” said Marzo. “Certain microorganisms react differently to microgravity." Fittingly, a science fiction device turned reality could perhaps be used to help humans adapt to life in space—another element of science fiction turned reality.

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Sanitation and Running Water Make Mass Zika Outbreak in US Unlikely

The United States harbors a wide range of environments of various climatic conditions, many of which are favorable to mosquitoes and the transmission of disease. Even more temperate climates, like New England, have shown themselves to be suitable for the transmission of mosquito borne illnesses during the summer, yet the US hasn’t suffered greatly from mosquito borne diseases like some other countries in the modern era. Even so, many are worried that climate change and increased globalization could put the country at an increasingly greater risk of a mass outbreak—from Zika virus, yellow fever, dengue fever, or the like. A team of independent medical entomologists, however, has published a paper today in the Journal of Medical Entomology, that argues socioeconomic factors like access to clean water and air conditioning, make the odds of a mass outbreak low.

While the Zika virus has spread explosively throughout Brazil and South America since 2015, carried in the bellies of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, it has not done so in the United States, and likely won’t, the authors argue, because of distinct socioeconomic differences between them. The absence of air-conditioning, the absence of screened windows, and the prevalence of household water storage, say the authors—all uncommon in developed countries—perpetuate the spread of mosquitoes carrying disease. These played big parts in the proliferation of the disease in Brazil. While the disease itself is not severe, it’s been associated with microcephaly (tiny heads) in newborn infants, and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease that damages the body’s peripheral nervous system, sometimes causing paralysis.

"It seems clear that the main factors keeping outbreaks of these diseases from occurring today are socioeconomic such as lifestyle, housing infrastructure, and good sanitation,” write the authors in the paper. “While such conditions are maintained, it seems unlikely that large scale local transmission will occur, especially in Northern states.”

This does not mean, however, that localized outbreaks cannot occur in the United States, or that spread of the Aedes aegypti mosquito—which also hosts, yellow and dengue fever, and chikungunya in addition to Zika—doesn’t represent a danger to Americans. This should be of particular interest, say the authors, to Southern states—where longer warm seasons, travel to Zika infected countries, and more pockets of low socioeconomic conditions occur.

The authors warn, however, that to make sure a mass outbreak of a mosquito borne illness doesn’t occur, the United States needs to properly maintain and invest in the infrastructure and socioeconomic conditions that have protected its citizens up to this point. Strong healthcare, sanitation, and natural disaster relief are key. Natural disasters, for example, create situations where sanitation and clean running water are compromised—a perfect scenario for the spread of mosquito-borne illness—and if the infrastructure is not strong enough to deal with it, that could potentially open the door to a mass outbreak.

If weakened, developmental and socioeconomic protections in the United States will not hold up to the pressures of a changing climate and a globalized society—which will undoubtedly bring more diseases to the country in the future. This also puts it in the United States’ best interest to help solve some of these problems that plague developing nations, argue the authors. "The growing interconnection of our global society makes global public health-related issues, such as sanitation and the lack of a continuous supply of running water in developing countries, an important concern to developed countries,” they write, “as these developing countries may serve as a source of imported cases of disease."

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Watch Dudes in Jetpacks and Daredevil Wingwalkers Flying Over Dubai

Yves Rossy, the famous “Jetman,”—the Swiss aviation enthusiast who stages high profile flying events with his jetpack—and his partner Vince Reffet, recently teamed up with the Breitling Wingwalkers—daredevils that stand on the wings of flying biplanes—to perform a flashy formation flight over the only place you go when you need to perform aerobatic stunts for a highly expensive boutique product: Dubai.

The flight was filmed and posted on YouTube by XDubai, a group known for filming extreme sports in and around the desert city in 4K. Previously, XDubai filmed Rossy and Reffet, collectively known as Jetman Dubai, flying in formation with an Emirates A380 commercial airliner, the largest passenger aircraft currently in service.

Jetman Dubai was started by Yves Rossy, a former Swiss Air Force fighter pilot and inventor whose signature jetpack and carbon fiber wings have become recognizable around world. The wing-suit system is comprised of a backpack housing jet engines and a carbon fiber set of wings. He’s flown with his jetpacks over the Alps, and across the English Channel, and can knock on the door of speeds up to 189 mph.

For the current aerial showcase, Jetmen number one and number two locked into formation with the Breitling Wingwalkers, a UK based team of biplanes that perform aerial displays around the world. For their own shows, the wingwalkers carry out aerial loops, inverted flying, and other aviation tricks while daredevil women execute handstands and other acrobatic maneuvers strapped to the top wing of their Boeing Stearman biplanes. According to Breitling, the walkers on the wings experience 150 mph speeds and gravity forces up to 4Gs.

The Jetmen are not quite as agile in the sky as the biplanes, however, so for this high profile event the two types of aircraft simply flew in formation over the Palm Jumeirah, (the manmade island resort in the shape of a palm tree). It was all about aesthetics and great cinematography in ultra high definition for this one.

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Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, How Lovely Is Thy Climate Resiliency

Terry Brown, owner of Brown’s Tree Farm, welcomed me warmly into his modest farmhouse. We sat at the kitchen table in straight backed chairs, and looked out a large window at rows of fir trees outside, a red barn in the distance. The whole scene was awash in wispy, dry snow flurries. In the coming days and weeks, these trees would find themselves inside homes all over Chemung County, in Upstate New York. I had come to speak with him about the challenges of the Christmas tree business, and if he’s concerned that it will get harder due to climate change.

He recalled some of his greatest trials growing trees over the years. “A few years ago, I had this whole field—at least 2/3rds of it—full of Douglas fir. And they were beautiful. Then a virus came through—it was called,” he paused a moment to retrieve the name from memory, “the Swiss needle cast—and it wiped em right out.” And in his first year planting—some 40 years ago—he lost 4,000 trees in a drought.

But while he’s concerned about climate change on the whole, as a farmer, he’s experienced see-saw weather patterns firsthand his whole life and is not entirely sure that it’s going to impact the tree growing business anytime soon.

“Things have definitely changed, you know, worldwide, and I understand the science of it, but as a lifelong farmer you always bounce back and say well ‘jeepers, I’ve seen this before.’ My dad is 94 and he’s seen it all before.”

Christmas trees cover a wide spectrum of evergreens, with different species grown and sold in different regions of the US and world. Fir trees, like Balsam and Fraser fir, are the most popular here in the United States because of their soft needles and lush growth. Christmas trees are grown in almost every state in the nation with major centers of production in North Carolina, the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the Pacific Northwest. Despite competition from artificial look-a-likes (Most of which are produced in the Pearl River Delta region in China), Americans still love their all-natural trees. In 2015, 29.5 million trees worth $1.32 billion found their way into American households.

How the Christmas tree industry as a whole is going to be affected by climate change is unclear, but individual tree species and the farmers growing them are going to be affected in myriad ways that are likely to cause some amount of disruption.

Hotter and drier conditions are something most Christmas tree species will have to contend with all around the US. Whether these conditions change what types of species are grown and sold will depend on how severe they get, but it’s not hard to imagine some tree types getting taken out of the equation. “Some can take it and some can’t,” said Brown.

Dendrologist Donald Leopold, of the State University of Environmental Science and Forestry in Upstate New York explained to me via email that some evergreens like Scotch pine are able to withstand hotter conditions because of special features like thicker, waxier needles and deeper root systems that help them retain moisture. These types of conifers might make easier Christmas trees to grow in the future. “Fraser and balsam fir will always have a big fan club, but if they can’t be grown as abundantly in the US due to climate change,” he said. “Their price will likely increase and some people will simply not be able to afford them.”

If it gets particularly balmy in, say, the South, where a high percentage of Fraser firs are grown, Leopold surmised that “species rarely grown now, like Turkish fir, will become more common as this and other species are better adapted to warmer and drier conditions.”

A rising temperature also brings other, gnawing consequences to conifer trees: insect pests. “Most likely climate change will favor insects and diseases more than trees,” said entomologist Paal Krokene, of the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, in Norway. Selling Christmas trees is ultimately a cosmetic industry, and rampaging bark beetles and sapsuckers that deform trees are bad for business. Slight malformations on a tree usually mean the scrap pile. “Christmas tree farmers don’t tolerate much damage to their trees,” he said.

Jeff Owen, a Forestry Specialist from North Carolina State University, told me that farmers have been dealing with seasonal inconsistencies like drought and flood for as long as they can remember, and that they’re masters at problem solving. But the thing that concerns him is shifting seasons that could make trees vulnerable.

Taking a break from trimming Fraser firs to chat on the phone, he said “If we’ve had a really mild fall, growers get nervous and will delay harvest as long as they can to make sure the trees have had a chance to go dormant.” Dormancy is a kind of tree hibernation. If trees aren’t dormant when they’re harvested, they can die.

On the other side of winter, if early spring is particularly mild, “the trees can start trying to break bud one to two weeks earlier,” said Owen. But he warned: “if you have the trees starting to grow too soon and then you get a hard freeze, you can lose that new growth. That’s one of those things that is very hard for a grower to deal with.”

At his kitchen table, Terry Brown expressed a similar sentiment with me. “What is it going to do to the seasons?” he said, referring to climate change, his arms crossed. “If in April the weather is all of a sudden like June, that changes everything.” If the tree industry is to be hit hard by climate change in the future, that’s how, he thought. “Timing is everything in this business.”

Because of climate change, the most popular Christmas tree types could switch out for other hardier species—trading out some of the firs for more spruces, say. Perhaps live trees will even reach a price that causes some staunch real-tree-consumers to go against their morals and buy artificial trees (nothing says happy holidays like genuine PVC). Or maybe farmers will find a way, like they have so many times before, to overcome the challenges ahead and keep growing the species they’ve got.

Brown leaned forward in his chair and folded his hands upon the table, eyes looking out at the rows of Christmas trees outside. “One thing I do notice is our summers—the heat,” he said. “There is a lot of heat in that sun. I think more so than I can remember.” Clearing his throat slightly, he added “I trim all of these trees by hand, and while I’m not as young as I used to be, I’m just not able to do as many in a day as I used to, because it’s hotter than hell.”

“It’s a wait and see,” he said.

from Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, How Lovely Is Thy Climate Resiliency