This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Her name was Lola. No, not “L-O-L-A, Lola,” from the Kinks’ song, but a Mexican Redhead.

Well, actually, not that either, it turned out.

“We don’t really say that anymore,” the avian veterinarian said as he helped Lola out of her carrier. “She’s an Amazon. A green-cheeked Amazon, Amazona viridigenalis. That’s what the scientific name means. Though most people just call them red-crowned parrots.”

That was my introduction to a bird species, one of whom I adopted 10 years ago from a friend of a friend, as these things go among people who live with pet birds. But it was only after I moved to Los Angeles that I found out about her feral cousins, the large wild flocks of red-crowned parrots that live in the San Gabriel Valley, just northeast of Los Angeles.

Parrots, of course, are not uncommon around Los Angeles: More than a dozen different species have established wild populations in the area, descendants of pet birds that escaped at some point and managed to make a home for themselves in some part of the sprawling metropolis. But for the red-crowned parrots, Los Angeles is more than an additional habitat. The city is a sanctuary for this endangered species.

In the 1970s and ’80s, tens of thousands of chicks and adults were poached from the red-crowned parrots’ original habitat in northeastern Mexico, in the states of Tamaulipas and San Luis Potosí, and brought to the United States to be sold in the pet trade. Because of the poaching and habitat loss from deforestation, their population dwindled in Mexico, and red-crowned parrots are now listed as an endangered species in Mexico and by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

In the meantime, however, their pet cousins in the United States escaped or were let go by owners who realized too late that wild-caught parrots make terrible pets, and that even tamed ones are demanding and noisy. Red-crowned parrots established sizable wild populations in Florida and California. In the Los Angeles area, there are about 2,000 to 3,000 individuals, a number that could at this point rival or exceed that of the remaining wild population in Mexico. Feeding largely on non-native nut and fruit trees, red-crowned parrots started to breed and became a permanent feature of the greater Los Angeles landscape over the course of the 1980s and ’90s.

In 2001, the California Bird Records Committee added them to the list of California state birds, where they joined species such as house sparrows, rock pigeons (the ones that perch on every urban power line), and starlings: species that are not native to the state, but have become integrated into California ecosystems over the last century.

I feel a small sense of wonder every time it strikes me that two of the birds who live with me are members of an endangered species whose members have become “naturalized citizens” of California. And I’ve been overcome with awe every time I’ve gone to see hundreds of red-crowned parrots come in to land in one of their night roosts in Pasadena.

But the implications of these parrots’ presence in the city goes beyond emotion and aesthetics. It makes me wonder, could Los Angeles become a sanctuary for other endangered species—even those who are not native to Southern California?

Some ecologists think so. Brad Shaffer, a biology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, notes that cities not only destroy habitat, but also create new living spaces for animals and plants. Some of these spaces work well for native species, while others don’t. Some of these modified landscapes could offer refuge to species that are struggling to survive in their original habitats elsewhere.

In the past, some of the new ecological niches that have been created in cities have been occupied by non-native species through sheer serendipity, by plants or animals like the red-crowned parrots that happened to land in town and know how to take advantage of the niches they found.

But what if we deliberately offered sanctuary to endangered species in our cities—those that are native, of course, but also those that are not?

Shaffer suggests that spotted turtles, for instance, which are endangered on the East Coast of the United States, might thrive in Los Angeles. Endangered geckos might find an ecological niche on and around parts of our buildings that are currently unoccupied by any native lizards.

Of course, any experiment along these lines would have to be carefully planned and closely monitored—both to protect the introduced plants or animals from being exposed to new risks, and to prevent them from becoming invasive and causing harm to native species we want to conserve. So a great deal of scientific, legal, and educational work would need to be done to make cities function as something like “urban arks” in our current era of a possible sixth mass extinction caused by humans.

This idea might seem counterintuitive. After all, aren’t introduced species, moved around by humans, one of the root causes of ecological crises? From eucalyptus trees to ring-necked pheasants and zebra mussels, introduced species often compete with native flora and fauna for habitat and food. In some cases, they outcompete native species and become “invasive”—a label we give to species that spread and cause harm to native ecosystems.

Examples leap readily to mind: Feral cats have eaten their way through much of Australia’s native fauna. The brown tree snake has driven at least half a dozen bird species to extinction on the island of Guam. Kudzu—an East Asian arrowroot originally introduced for erosion control—turned into “the plant that ate the South” in the United States.

These striking examples of environmental harm tend to make one forget that the majority of introduced species either disappear quickly, or integrate into existing ecosystems without triggering ecological disaster. And imagining an “urban ark” would not be the same as introducing new species into wild areas that retain intact native ecosystems, but instead into environments that are already fundamentally transformed from their earlier states. Cities are in effect largely novel ecosystems that offer quite different ecological opportunities—as well as risks—than the ecosystems they replaced. An “urban ark” would seek to take advantage of these opportunities rather than letting them occur by accident, as they usually do.

The fact that urban landscapes, like many agricultural landscapes, are such new ecosystems—complex patchworks of native and introduced species, some desirable, some not, some invasive, some not—has led to something of a split among ecologists today.

Restoration ecology, the effort to reconstruct ecosystems that existed in a place at a particular time in the past, and to get rid of species that did not form part of the landscape in the past, remains an important project, especially in areas that are not primarily designed to sustain human populations.

But other ecologists have suggested that where a species comes from matters less than how it functions in its contemporary environment, especially in human-designed habitats such as cities.

From this perspective, the most important question for thinking about urban biodiversity in a city such as Los Angeles is not “What species used to be here?” Instead we should ask, “What animals and plants should form part of our environment in the future?”

That question can’t be answered without taking into account the city’s social and cultural as well as biological diversity. Along with solid scientific research, we need forums for discussing what I like to call “multispecies justice”: the relationship between what it’s right to do by other people, and what it’s right to do by other species.

Multispecies justice aims to create better urban habitats for both humans and nonhumans—sanctuaries that encourage both biological and cultural diversity.

Some discussions are already underway on how we might translate such a vision into reality. We could reintroduce native oaks and sages, for example, while providing space for community gardens, full of plants brought to Los Angeles from around the world. Respect for the lives of feral cats ought to be reconciled with the protection of urban birds. The need for more affordable housing should be balanced with the desire for more green spaces in urban areas that don’t have enough of either.

Turning the city into a multispecies sanctuary should be part of these discussions, not only because the city is already functioning in this way for species like the red-crowned parrots, but also because humans and nonhumans might need our “urban ark” in the future.

This essay is presented in partnership with KCET and the Laboratory for Environmental Strategies (LENS) at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Call it the California Marijuanapocalypse of 2018. As of January 1, recreation cannabis has been legal in the state. A black market still runs underneath it all (Northern California alone supplies perhaps 75 percent of all marijuana across the United States), but cultivators and distributors are going legit, bringing themselves up to the rigorous testing and packaging standards mandated by the state.

This weekend, though, was a weekend of reckoning. For the first six months of the year, the state has allowed dispensaries to sell product that isn’t yet up to new code so manufacturers can adjust to the changes. Any of these noncompliant concentrates or edibles or simple flowers left on store shelves as of July 1 have to be destroyed. By one estimate, that could total $350 million in lost product.

So how exactly do you obliterate potentially tens of thousands of pounds of cannabis across the state? Not unlike how you get rid of yard trimmings.

The responsibility for destroying noncompliant cannabis products rests on the dispensaries, not the state—the government won’t be dispatching special trucks to pick up weed. So for a dispensary like the Apothecarium in San Francisco, it’s got to pull noncompliant marijuana immediately.

Which means an interesting trash day. “Noncompliant flower and prerolls will be composted,” says Eliot Dobris, spokesperson for Apothecarium. That is, rendered “unusable” by putting it in filthy, locked bins the public doesn’t have access to. Oils for vape pens go through an extra step. “Noncompliant cartridges will be rendered unusable with a hammer and then will be put in the landfill bin,” he says.

“And we have to do all of this on video,” Dobris adds, “so if there's ever a question, the state can have access to that video.”

The headaches are making their way upstream as well. The legal recreational cannabis supply chain, which packages and distributes product, is just coming into being. Flow Kana, for instance, is a cannabis brand that takes in marijuana from Northern California farmers and processes and tests it in accordance with the new laws.

Flow Kana workers saw the deadline coming and prepared as best they could. “We have product that has not made its way through our processing system that is still OK," says Cate Powers of Flow Kana. It’ll run the safety gauntlet on its way to market. "So the majority of our inventory is fine. It's only the stuff that was packaged and processed under the previous standards that is at risk."

Dispensaries statewide rushed to offload product with massive sales in the weeks leading up to July 1. But you can only offload so much weed. “Sacramento is seeing possibly up to 8,000 pounds of product that will need to be destroyed,” says Josh Drayton, spokesperson for the California Cannabis Industry Association. In the Los Angeles area—which houses the largest marijuana consumer base in the world—the number could run into the tens of thousands of pounds.

Really, it’s hard to tell for sure just how much cannabis is going to waste. Not all dispensaries have finished the licensing process. It’s not that dispensaries think they can hide off the grid—the transition to legal recreational cannabis is still unfolding. Accordingly, data is hard to come by. That’ll change as the supply chain matures and marijuana is more strictly tracked from seed to sale.

And the waste wasn’t for lack of trying on the cannabis industry’s part. “They've been having to multitask on many different levels,” says Drayton, “to build out business plans in municipalities that are allowing cannabis activities, they've needed to learn new compliance with staffing, with payroll.”

In the end, Californians want legal weed, which is why they voted for Prop 64. What they may not have realized is that the transition from illicit to legal comes with challenges that include the California Marijuanapocalypse of 2018. “We have to remember that, yes, that is going to be a growing pain we are going to have to deal with,” Drayton says. “But ultimately Prop 64 passed through wanting to prioritize public safety and public health.” The alternative is illegal, dirty cannabis that threatens not just people, but wildlife too.

California will get through this. Dispensary inventories might be low in the coming weeks as newly compliant products make their way onto shelves, but the market will even out as the industry adjusts to change. And on top of it all, the state is about to get a healthy helping of extra compost. How very California.

On Christmas Eve 2016, Andrew Seymour, an astronomer at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, kissed his 4-year-old daughter, Cora Lee, goodnight, telling her he was off to track Santa. He walked to the well-worn telescope, occasionally passing revelers riding horses through the empty streets—a common sight in Arecibo during the holidays. Sometimes a lonely firework would light up in the distance. Close to midnight, he nodded to a guard and entered the nearly empty complex.

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Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

The radio dish was on a break from its regular schedule, so Seymour decided to test out new hardware that he and his colleagues had been working on. Soon after he began recording his observations, an extremely powerful radio source, 3 billion light-years away, decided to say hello. Seymour didn’t find Santa that Christmas, but rather an unexpected twist in the tale of one of the most mysterious objects in the cosmos.

The object that Seymour caught that night was the only known repeating fast radio burst (FRB), an ultra-brief flash of energy that flickers on and off at uneven intervals. Astronomers had been debating what might be causing mysterious repeater, officially called FRB 121102 and unofficially the “Spitler burst,” after the astronomer who discovered it.

In the weeks following that Christmas detection, Arecibo registered 15 more bursts from this one source. These flashes were the highest frequency FRBs ever captured at the time, a measurement made possible by the hardware Seymour and his team had just installed. Based on the new information, the scientists have concluded in a study released this week in the journal Nature that whatever object is creating the bursts, it must be in a very odd and extreme cosmic neighborhood, something akin to the environment surrounding a black hole with a mass of more than 10,000 suns.

The new work helps to strengthen the theory that at least some FRBs might be produced by magnetars—highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars, which are the extremely dense remains of massive stars that have gone supernova, said Shami Chatterjee, an astrophysicist at Cornell University. In the case of the repeater, it could be a neutron star “that lives in the environment of a massive black hole,” he said. Or it might also be like nothing we’ve seen before—a different kind of magnetar ensconced in a very intense, magnetically dense birth nebula, unlike any known to exist in our galaxy—“quite extraordinary circumstances,” he said.

Too Extreme to Find

It wasn’t obvious at first that the repeating burst had to live in such an extreme environment. In October, 10 months after Seymour detected that initial burst at Arecibo, Jason Hessels, an astronomer at the University of Amsterdam, and his student Daniele Michilli were staring at the data on Michilli’s laptop screen. They had been trying to determine whether a magnetic field near the source might have twisted its radio waves, an effect known as Faraday rotation. There appeared to be nothing to see.

But then Hessels had an idea: “I wondered whether maybe we had missed this effect simply because it was very extreme.” They had been looking for just a little bit of a twist. What if they were to search for something exceptional? He asked Michilli to crank up the search parameters, “to try crazy numbers,” as Michilli put it. The student expanded the search by a factor of five—a rather “naive thing to do,” Chatterjee said, because such a high value would be completely unprecedented.

When Michilli’s laptop displayed the new data plot, Hessels immediately realized that the radio waves had gone through a hugely powerful magnetic field. “I was shocked to see how extreme the Faraday rotation effect is in this case,” he said. It was like nothing else ever seen in pulsars and magnetars. “I’m also embarrassed because we were sitting on the critical data for months” before attempting such an analysis, he added.

The discovery sent ripples across the community. “I was shocked by the email announcing the result,” said Vicky Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University. “I had to read it multiple times.”

Final confirmation came from a team searching for aliens. The Breakthrough Listen initiative ordinarily uses radio telescopes such as the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to scan the skies for signs of extraterrestrial life. Yet “since it’s not obvious in which direction they should point the telescope to search for E.T., they decided to spend some time looking at the repeating FRB, which clearly paid off,” said the astronomer Laura Spitler, namesake of the Spitler burst.

The Green Bank Telescope not only confirmed the Arecibo findings, it also observed several additional bursts from the repeater at even higher frequencies. These bursts also showed the same mad, highly twisted Faraday rotation.

What Powers Them

The extreme Faraday rotation is a signal that “the repeating FRB is in a very special, extreme environment,” Kaspi said. It takes a lot of energy to produce and maintain such highly magnetized conditions. In one hypothesis outlined by the researchers, the energy comes from a nebula around the neutron star itself. In another, it comes from a massive black hole.

In the nebula hypothesis, flares from a newly born neutron star create a nebula of hot electrons and strong magnetic fields. These magnetic fields twist the radio waves coming out of the neutron star. In the black hole model, a neutron star has its radio waves twisted by the enormous magnetic field generated by a nearby massive black hole.

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Researchers haven’t come to an agreement about what’s going on here. Kaspi leans toward the black hole model, but Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University, feels that it’s somewhat contrived. “In our galaxy, only one out of dozens of magnetars resides so close to the central black hole. What makes such black hole-hugging magnetars so special that they would preferentially produce fast radio bursts? Did we just get really lucky with the first well-localized FRB?”

And the debate may get muddier before it gets cleared up. Chatterjee said theorists are certain to soon jump on the paper and start producing a multitude of new models and possibilities.

Burst Machines

The Spitler repeater is still the only FRB source that has been nailed down to a particular galaxy. No one knows quite where the other bursts are coming from. To say with any certainty that some—or all—of these energetic radio flashes come from highly magnetized environments, researchers need more data. And data are coming in. The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), which is not yet officially complete, has already netted more FRBs than any other telescope in the world. With a tally of about 10 FRBs last year alone, it has proven to be “a remarkable FRB-finding machine,” said Matthew Bailes, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology—although none of them repeat.

Soon another telescope with a highly unusual design, called CHIME, will come online in Canada, and should spot many more FRBs—maybe 10 times more than ASKAP. Other next-generation telescopes, like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), with dishes in South Africa and Australia, will surely contribute as well. As we register more of these flashes, chances are that some of them will repeat. Once scientists can sift through such data, the Faraday rotation effect may help them understand whether all FRBs are powered by a similar mechanism—or not.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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Heredity is a powerful concept. It’s the thing that ties families together—that gives shape to their shared history of stories, of homes, of personalities. And more and more, it’s the way we understand families’ shared genetic inheritance. But that more modern biological notion of heredity comes with some new, technical baggage: It’s easier to talk about the high blood pressure that runs in your family than it is to discern the alleles that define it, all the meiotic divisions that had to occur before that trait was passed down to you. And misunderstanding the role DNA does or doesn’t play in determining one’s fate can have dangerous consequences.

Luckily, acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer is here to unravel the tangled history of the science and pseudoscience surrounding heredity, in all its many forms. In his expansive, engrossing, and often enlightening new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Zimmer takes readers on a tale through time and technology, from the inbred Holy Roman Empire to the birthplace of American eugenics to the Japanese lab where scientists are reprogramming skin cells into eggs and sperm. But Zimmer says it’s not a book about genetics. It’s a book about the question genetics was invented to answer. Namely, how did the past become the present, and how will the present shape the future?

Big questions, Zimmer. Now here are a few for you.

WIRED: You argue in this book that it’s time to redefine heredity, to get away from a DNA-centric notion of inheritance, right at a time when people are only just beginning to tap into their own genomes. What gives?

Zimmer: People have been trying to use genetics as a form of identification for a very long time. Of course they didn’t always call it that. DNA is just a modern substitute for the old idea of blood. But in many ways it hasn’t evolved much from the time we thought of ancestry as a pure substance. We still say “I’ve got some Irish blood in me,” but it’s not like you can take out just the Irish blood and fill a cup with it. It’s the same with the bits of DNA in your genome that came from people that once lived in that part of the world. We’re all an amalgam of fragments that have all traveled different paths and each only influences us in very subtle ways.

What we really want from heredity is an explanation of why we are the way we are, and genes alone can’t give us that. There are other things we inherit that matter just as much—like the chemical modifications to our DNA that turn genes on and off or the microbes that abound in our bodies or the human-made environments we’re born into. We literally pass down the whole world to our children, and right now our children are inheriting climate change.

So maybe people should spend less on spit kits and more on carbon offsets…

Look, the reason there’s demand for consumer genetics right now isn’t just because the costs are crashing. It’s also because humans have all these long standing traditions about heredity. On the one hand it’s important to find a connection with our pasts. Especially for people whose families have been severed by things like slavery and genocide. Because, we have to remember that for centuries heredity has been used as a weapon to dehumanize and erase some groups of people. For those people genetic testing can be one the most profound experience of their lives. But consumer genetics can only give you really rough estimates right now. It’s going to get a lot more powerful very quickly, it’s just not there yet.

You got your full genome sequenced a few years ago and uploaded it to a public genealogical database for scientific research. Given the privacy concerns that have emerged since then, particularly around the case of the Golden State Killer, do you ever wonder what kind of consequences it might have for your family?

Well when I first got sequenced I made the decision with my family that I wasn’t going to write about it until after we looked at the results with our genetic counselor. But since there wasn’t much in there to worry about in the end I did wind up posting the genome online along with the analysis, as a teaching tool for researchers. And yes, 50 percent of that DNA is also in my kids but nobody knows which 50 percent. I mean, these are hard questions, I don’t think there’s any one correct answer. I understand people who don’t want to share their DNA at all, and ultimately I think people should have autonomy over their own data. At some point people might be able to do some unpleasant stuff with my genome, but right now it’s mostly astrology. There’s a huge leap to go from sequenced DNA to certainty about what that DNA means. And another huge leap to changing DNA to get an outcome we want. We hardly understand any of it.

Changing DNA? Like with Crispr?

Yes, and other gene-editing tools.

Crispr gets a lot of coverage (including here at WIRED). But as you chronicle in the book, it’s certainly not the first technology that promised to alter the genetic inheritance of future generations of humans. Do you think this time will be different?

No, honestly it doesn’t feel that different. Not to diminish the importance of Crispr; it’s certainly going to be a mainstay for developing medicines and crops going forward, at least until the next better tool comes along. Working on this book I talked to a guy who was able to turn a wild plant into a domestic crop in one shot, a single generation with gene editing. So we are going to start taking control of heredity in really awesome, powerful ways. That being said, we shouldn’t indulge every fantasy and nightmare we might have about fundamentally changing human nature. We just have to look at human history to see how wrongheaded and dangerous that can be.

Consider the following physics problem.

Let's solve this simple problem two different ways. For the first method, I will use Newton's Second Law. In one dimension, I can write this as:

Using this equation, I can get the acceleration of the object (in the x-direction). I'll skip the details, but it should be fairly easy to see that it would have an acceleration of 1 m/s². Next, I need the definition of acceleration (in the x-direction). Oh, and just to be clear—I'm trying to be careful about these equations since they are inherently vector equations.

With a starting velocity of 1 m/s and an acceleration of 1 m/s² for 1 second, the final velocity (in the x-direction) would be 2 m/s. Great, right?

Now for the second method—using the momentum principle. This says that a net force changes the momentum of an object. The one dimensional momentum is the product of the object's mass and velocity (at least for speeds much slower than the speed of light).

The momentum principle can then be written as the following equation.

The initial momentum of the object is 1 kilogram-meter/second and with a force of 1 N for 1 sec, the final momentum is 2 kg*m/s. Dividing this momentum by the mass gives a final x-velocity of 2 m/s. The same as before.

OK, now you have a basic feeling for the momentum principle and Newton's 2^nd Law. Which method is better? Great question. Let me go over some of the key things to consider.

The Momentum Principle Works at High Speeds

I mean really high speeds. Not fast like a bullet, but fast like a cosmic particle that comes crashing into our atmosphere fast. If you want to model the forces on a particle moving near the speed of light (3 x 10⁸ m/s), then the plain version of Newton's 2^nd Law doesn't work. However, the momentum principle still works if you use a better definition of momentum. Instead of just the product of mass and velocity, momentum can be defined as:

In this expression, the c represents the speed of light. The cool thing is that this definition of momentum also works for super slow objects (like a rocket). If the velocity of the object is much smaller than the speed of light, all that stuff on the bottom in the expression is approximately equal to 1 and you get the previous definition of momentum.

Momentum Is a Conserved Quantity

In physics, we like to calculate things that are conserved. A conserved quantity is something that stays the same in a system if there are no external interactions. Yes, momentum is one of these quantities. If you have a system consisting of multiple particles that only interact with other particles in the system then the total vector momentum of this system is constant. Yes, it's a big deal.

In the introductory physics course, there are two other conserved quantities that we look at—the angular momentum and energy. So, by focusing on the momentum principle instead of Newton's 2^nd Law it emphasizes conserved quantities. I think that's a good thing.

Newton's Laws Are About Aristotle

Yes, Aristotle—you know, that Greek philosopher. If you like, you can think about Newton's Laws of motion as a response to the other common idea of motion—Aristotle's Laws of motion. Aristotle basically said that forces and motion worked like this:

• The natural state of an object is to remain at rest.
• If you push on an object with a constant force, it moves at a constant speed.
• If you stop pushing on an object, it will stop moving.

Newton's 1^st law says that the natural state of an object is to be at a constant velocity and the second law states that there is a relationship between the net force and the acceleration of an object. So, in a sense these are a response to Aristotle. With that being said, perhaps it's better to just skip the whole Aristotle thing. Oh, sure—many people still have the same ideas about force and motion that Aristotle had, but I like just starting over from scratch and using the momentum principle instead.

What's Wrong with the Momentum Principle

There is a problem with the momentum principle—it's not all unicorn dust and rainbows. The first problem is that of communication. A colleague recently pointed out that when someone uses the momentum principle, it's clear that person has used the textbook Matter and Interactions (Chabay and Sherwood published by Wiley). I've previously explained why I like this textbook so much, but one of the big differences is the use of the momentum principle.

By using the momentum principle for cases that could also be modeled with Newton's 2^nd law, we add a new set of vocabulary and terminology. If you aren't used to talking about physics in this way, it can sort of make other feel like it's a different language. Of course, it's not really that different—but initial impressions can make a big difference. This is especially true for people just learning about forces and motion. So, in a way you could say that using the momentum principle is like taking a step backwards when you are trying to explain some cool idea.

But still, in the end these two methods are essentially the same thing.

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This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a rainy day in New Orleans, people file into a beige one-story building on Jefferson Davis Parkway to sign up for the Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), a federal grant that helps people keep up with their utility bills. New Orleans has one of the highest energy burdens in the country, meaning that people must dedicate a large portion of their income to their monthly energy bills. This is due in part to it being one of the least energy-efficient cities in the country.

For many city residents, these bills eat up 20 percent of the money they take in, and the weight of the burden can be measured in the length of the line.

“We’ve got folks wrapped around the block,” said Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of a housing advocacy non-profit called HousingNOLA. “There are people here paying 300, 400, 500 dollars a month. Some are paying utility bills that are as much as their mortgage.”

These bills, as indispensable as rent or healthcare, have exacerbated the affordability crisis as cities become increasingly inhospitable to all but the affluent. Energy costs increased at three times the rate of rent between 2000 and 2010. This rise, paralleling a dramatic stratification of wealth in some American cities, has widened the disparity in energy burdens between low-income and well-off households.

A 2016 study by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) and Energy Efficiency for All (EEFA) set out to quantify what many already assumed: that low-income, black, and Hispanic communities spend a much higher share of their income on energy. The results were unsurprising, but stark. The researchers found that median energy burdens for low-income households are more than three times higher than among the rest of the population.

Utility bills are the primary reason why people resort to payday loans, and play an outsized role in the perpetuation of poverty. But the impacts of soaring energy bills go beyond finances. Living in under-heated homes puts occupants at a higher risk of respiratory problems, heart disease, arthritis, and rheumatism, according to ACEEE and EEFA. Then there are the tragedies, like that of Rodney Todd, a University of Maryland kitchen worker who died of monoxide poisoning, along with his seven children, while using a gas generator to power his home after his electricity was shut off by Delmarva Power.

One reason for the energy-burden gap is that the energy bills of the rich and poor aren’t in fact very different. “Energy is not discretionary,” said Anne Evens, CEO of Elevate Energy, an urban sustainability non-profit. No matter our income level, “We need energy to refrigerate our food, to heat our homes.”

Another cause, the 2016 study found, is that low-end housing is significantly less energy-efficient than other housing stock. People with less money aren’t just paying a greater proportion of their income for energy—they’re paying more per square foot. “Far from being an intractable problem related to persistent income disparity, the excess energy burdens [that low-income communities] face are directly related to the inefficiency of their homes,” the study authors concluded.

“What you’ll see is people finding cheaper rents in buildings because they’re older,” Morris said. “But their savings are offset, because their homes are so energy inefficient.”

There is a great amount of potential for energy savings in these older buildings. ACEEE and EEFA found that 97 percent of the excess energy burdens for renting households could be eliminated by bringing their homes up to median efficiency standards. And a 2015 study by the U.S. Department of Energy found that the value of energy upgrades is 2.2 times their cost. This figure is even higher for the most inefficient homes.

The question is how to find the capital to realize those gains, and whether the benefits can reach those who need relief.

Energy efficiency for some

Energy efficiency programs can go a long way to closing the energy burden gap, but they often do just the opposite.

A revolution in efficiency programs and home weatherization has opened the door to the world’s cheapest energy source: avoided energy waste. But for the most part, it is only accessible to people who can afford an upfront investment. Think of someone who’s renovating their kitchen and decides to replace the appliances with more energy-efficient ones, or a person who puts solar panels on the roof of his house, motivated less by cost savings and more by a bumptious desire to be the chief environmentalist on the block.

“Energy inequity is about the energy system as a whole,” said Evens. “As we make this transition to cleaner energy, who is really benefiting? As we become more energy efficient, is that benefiting all people? Who’s being left behind?”

Even programs that subsidize efficiency upgrades may be inaccessible to, or underutilized by, low-income households because they still require upfront investment and won’t yield benefits for years. For many, the need for aid is immediate.

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A growing network of programs, both private and public, is trying to correct the imbalance. Local housing authorities all over the country have upgraded their public housing units and designed affordable-housing tax credits that ensure a high degree of energy efficiency. Non-profits and utility companies are helping homeowners make upgrades to their homes by deferring upfront costs and using energy savings to pay down the debt.

But for all the good they do, many of these initiatives sideline a large and vulnerable group of low-income individuals: renters. The number of Americans who use HUD vouchers in the private market greatly outnumbers the public-housing population. And the number of urban renters is only increasing as home prices soar out of reach.

Renters are left out of the efficiency boom because they’re left to the whims of their landlords’ investment decisions. If a tenant pays their own utility bill, there isn’t much incentive for the landlord to make improvements. And renters are unlikely to make long-term efficiency improvements themselves, uncertain of whether they’ll be able to stay there long enough to reap the benefits.

Shrinking resources

Policymakers will continue to experiment with new forms of incentives and targeted funding. Whatever solutions they construct, advocates agree that success will require a bigger pot of money than currently exists. Unfortunately, funding for low-income energy efficiency is shrinking.

“There are so many different programs that have been cut, rolled back, or attacked,” said Michelle Romero, the deputy director of Green For All, a non-profit founded by Van Jones. “Without programs that invest in helping low-income communities afford energy efficiency, you’re going to see the disparity increase.”

LIHEAP is the government’s largest grant focused on low-income energy affordability. But it’s been cut by a third since 2009. Trump has threatened to eliminate LIHEAP entirely, along with similar programs like the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program. For now, the programs are still funded, but advocates remain uneasy. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Evens. “Predictability has kind of gone out the window. So we have to be really, really vigilant.”

As funding contracts, efficiency initiatives are the first to go. Only 14 percent of LIHEAP dollars go to energy-efficiency investment. The rest is used for direct bill assistance for those whose needs are too immediate to focus on long-term efficiency.

“You can’t tell someone, ‘We’re not going to help you pay your light bill this month, but in a year we can guarantee your apartment will be energy efficient.’ Well, they may not make it through the year,” Morris said. But prioritizing short-term fixes isn’t a real solution: “We can’t end up in these positions where we’re spending all this money on direct assistance so we can’t do anything else.”

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The robot apocalypse is nigh. Boston Dynamics’ robots are doing backflips and opening doors for their friends. Oh, and these 7-foot-long robot arms can lift 500 pounds each, which means they could theoretically crush, like, six humans at once.

The robot apocalypse is also laughable. Watch a robot attempt a task it hasn’t been explicitly trained to do, and it’ll fall flat on its face or just give up and catch on fire. And teaching a robot to do something new is exhausting, requiring line after line of code and joystick tutorials in say, picking up an apple.

But new research out of UC Berkeley is making learning way easier on both the human and machine: By drawing on prior experience, a humanoid-ish robot called PR2 can watch a human pick up an apple and drop it in a bowl, then do the same itself in one try, even if it’s never seen an apple before. It’s not the most complex of tasks, but it’s a big step toward making machines rapidly adapt to our needs, fruit-related or otherwise.

Consider the toothbrush. You know how to brush your teeth because your parents showed you how—put water and paste on the bristles and put the thing in your mouth and scrub and then spit. You could then draw on that experience to learn how to floss. You know where your teeth are, and you know there’s gaps between them, and that you have to use an instrument to clean them. Same principle, but kinda different.

To teach a traditional robot to brush its teeth and floss, you’d have to program two sets of distinct commands—it can’t use the context of prior experience like we can. “A lot of machine learning systems have focused on learning completely from scratch,” says Chelsea Finn, a machine learning researcher at UC Berkeley. “While that is very valuable, that means we don't bake in any knowledge. Essentially, these systems are starting with a blank mind every time they learn every single task if they want to learn.”

Finn’s system instead provides the humanoid-ish robot with valuable experience. “We collected videos of humans doing a number of different tasks,” she says. “We collected demonstrations of robots doing the same tasks via teleoperation, and we trained it such that after it sees a video of a human doing one thing, the robot can learn to imitate that thing as well.”

Take a look at the GIF below. A human demonstrates by pushing the container, not the box of tissues, toward the robot’s left arm, as the robot observes through its camera. When presented with the container and the box, only arranged differently, the robot can recognize the correct object and make a similar sweeping motion, pushing the container with its right arm into its left arm. It’s drawing from “experience”—how it’s been teleoperated previously to manipulate various objects on a table, combined with watching videos of humans doing the same. Thus the machine can generalize to manipulate novel objects.

“One of the really nice things about this approach is you don't need to very precisely track the human hand and the objects in the scene,” says Finn. “You really just need to infer what the human was doing and the goal of the task, then have the robot do that.” Precisely tracking the human hand, you see, is prone to failure—parts of the hand can be occluded and things can move too fast for a machine to read in detail. “It's much more challenging than just trying to infer what the human was doing, irrespective of their precise hand pose.”

It’s a robot being less robotic and more human. When you learned to brush your teeth, you didn’t mirror every single move your parent made, brushing the top molars first before moving to the bottom molars and then the front teeth. You inferred, taking the general goal of scrubbing each tooth and then taking your own path. That meant first of all that it was a simpler task to learn, and second of all it gave you context for taking some of the principles of toothbrushing and applying them to flossing. It’s about flexibility, not hard-coding behavior.

Which will be pivotal for the advanced robots that will soon labor in our homes. I mean, do you want to have to teach a robot to manipulate every object in your home? “Part of the hope with this project is we can make it very easy for the average person to show robots what to do,” says Finn. “It takes a lot of effort to joystick around, and if we can just show robots what to do it would be much easier to have robots learning from humans in very natural environments.”

To do things like chores, for instance. To that end, researchers at MIT are working on a similar system that teaches robots in a simulation to do certain household tasks, like making a cup of coffee. A set of commands produces a video of a humanoid grabbing a mug and using the coffee machine and such. The researchers are working on getting this to run in reverse—show the system a video of someone doing chores on YouTube and it could not only identify what’s going on, but learn from it. Finn, too, wants her system to eventually learn from more “unconstrained” videos (read: not in a lab) like you’d find on YouTube.

Let’s just be sure to keep the machines away from the comment section. Wouldn’t want to give them a reason to start the robot apocalypse.

Hunter Williams used to be an English teacher. Then, three years into that job, he started reading the book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The 1966 novel by Robert Heinlein takes place in the 2070s, on the moon, which, in this future, hosts a subterranean penal colony. Like all good sci-fi, the plot hinges on a rebellion and a computer that gains self-awareness. But more important to Williams were two basic fictional facts: First, people lived on the moon. Second, they mined the moon. “I thought, ‘This is it. This is what we really could be doing,” he says.

Today, that vision is closer than ever. And Williams is taking steps to make it reality. This year, he enrolled in a class called Space Resources Fundamentals, the pilot course for the first-ever academic program specializing in space mining. It's a good time for such an education, given that companies like Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are planning prospecting missions, NASA's OSIRIS-REx is on its way to get a sample of an asteroid and bring it back to Earth, and there's international and commercial talk of long-term living in space.

Williams had grown up with the space-farers on Star Trek, but he found Heinlein’s vision more credible: a colony that dug into and used the resources of their celestial body. That's the central tenet of the as-yet-unrealized space mining industry: You can't take everything with you, and, even if you can, it's a whole lot cheaper not to—to mine water to make fuel, for instance, rather than launching it on overburdened rockets. “I saw a future that wasn't a hundred or a thousand years away but could be happening now,” says Williams.

So in 2012, he adjusted trajectory and went to school for aerospace engineering. Then he worked at Cape Canaveral in Florida, doing ground support for Lockheed Martin. His building, on that cosmic coast, was right next to one of SpaceX's spots. “Every day when I came to work, I would see testaments to new technology,” he says. “It was inspiring.”

A few years later, he still hadn't let go of the idea that humans could work with what they found in space. Like in his book. So he started talking to Christopher Dreyer, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Space Resources, a research and technology development center that's existed within the school for more than a decade.

It was good timing. Because this summer, Mines announced its intention to found the world’s first graduate program in Space Resources—the science, technology, policy, and politics of prospecting, mining, and using those resources. The multidisciplinary program would offer Post-Baccalaureate certificates and Masters of Science degrees. Although it's still pending approval for a 2018 start date, the school is running its pilot course, taught by Dreyer, this semester.

Williams has committed fully: He left his Canaveral job this summer and moved to Colorado to do research for Dreyer, and hopefully start the grad program in 2018.

Williams wasn't the only one interested in the future of space mining. People from all over, non-traditional students, wanted to take Space Resources Fundamentals. And so Dreyer and Center for Space Resources director Angel Abbud-Madrid decided to run it remotely, ending up with about 15 enrollees who log in every Tuesday and Thursday night for the whole semester. Dreyer has a special setup in his office for his virtual lectures: a laptop stand, a wall of books behind him, a studio-type light that shines evenly.

In the minutes before Thanskgiving-week class started, students' heads popped up on Dreyer's screen as they logged in. Some are full-time students at Mines; some work in industry; some work for the government. There was the employee from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, an office tasked, in part, with making sure the US is obeying international treaties as they explore beyond the planet. Then there’s Justin Cyrus, the CEO of a startup called Lunar Outpost. Cyrus isn’t mining any moons yet, but Lunar Outpost has partnered with Denver’s Department of Environmental Health to deploy real-time air-quality sensors, of the kind it hopes to develop for moony use.

Cyrus was a Mines graduate, with a master’s in electrical and electronics engineering; he sought out Dreyer and Abbud-Madrid when he needed advice for his nascent company. When the professors announced the space resources program, Cyrus decided to get in on this pilot class. He, and the other attendees, seem to see the class not just as an educational opportunity but also as a networking one: Their classmates, they say, are the future leaders of this industry.

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Cyrus, the FAA employee, and Williams all smiled from their screens in front of benign backgrounds. About a dozen other students—all men—joined in by the time class started. The day's lesson, about resources on the moon, came courtesy of scientist Paul Spudis, who live-broadcasted from a few states away. Spudis, a guest lecturer, showed charts and maps and data about resources the moon might harbor, and where, and their worth. He's bullish on the prospects of prospecting. Toward the end of his talk, he said, "I think we'll have commercial landings on the moon in the next year or so." Indeed, the company Moon Express is planning to land there in 2018, in a bid to win the Google Lunar X Prize.

Back during Halloween week, the class covered the Outer Space Treaty, a creation of the United Nations that governs outer-space actions and (in some people's interpretations) makes the legality of space mining dubious. The lecture was full of policy detail, but the students drove the ensuing Q&A toward the sociological. Space mining would disproportionately help already-wealthy countries, some thought, despite talk in the broader community about how space mining lowers the barrier to space entry.

In this realism, and this thoughtfulness, Dreyer's class is refreshing. The PR talk of big would-be space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries can be slick, uncomplicated, and (sometimes) unrealistic. It often skips over the many steps between here and self-sustaining space societies—not to mention the companies' own long-term viability.

But in Space Resource Fundamentals, the students seem grounded. Student Nicholas Proctor, one of few with a non-engineering background, appreciates the pragmatism. Proctor studied accounting as an undergrad and enrolled at Mines in mineral economics. After he received a NASA grant to study space-based solar power and its applications to the mining industry, Abbud-Madrid sent him an email telling him about the class. The professor thought it would be a good fit—and Proctor obviously agreed.

After Thanksgiving-week class was over, students logged off, waving one-handed goodbyes. Williams had been watching from the lab downstairs, in a high-tech warehouse-garage combo. There, he and other students work among experiments about how dust moves in space, and what asteroids are actually like. Of course, they're also interested in how to get stuff—resources—out of them. An old metal chamber dominates the room, looking like an unpeopled iron lung. "The big Apollo-era chamber is currently for asteroid mining," Williams explained, "breaking apart rocks with sunlight and extracting the water and even precious metals."

While Williams closed up class shop downstairs, Dreyer and Abbud-Madrid hung out in Dreyer's office for a few minutes. Dreyer, leaning back in his well-lit chair, talked bemusedly about some of the communications they receive. “We get interest from people to find out what they can mine and bring back to Earth and become a trillionaire,” he said.

That’s not really what the Space Resources program is about, in part because it’s not clear that’s possible—it’s expensive to bring the precious (to bring anything) back to Earth. The class focus—and, not coincidentally, the near-term harvest—is the H₂O, which will stay in space, for space-use. “No matter how complex our society becomes, it always comes back to water,” said Abbud-Madrid. He laughed. “We’re going to the moon,” he continued. “For water.”

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