A ship moves through the Panama Canal past geological deposits containing fossils from 20 million years ago. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

A multi-billion-dollar expansion of the Panama Canal is proving a boon to scientists. The construction has revealed a trove of fossils, revealing a wide array of creatures that lived at the southern end of North America 20 millions years ago. Ari Daniel Shapiro of our partner program NOVA reports.

Eldredge Bermingham, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“You couldn’t read the history anymore – you didn’t know where to look for fossils,” says Eldredge Bermingham, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama City. “As a result, our understanding of the history of Panama was sort of frozen in time in 1914.”

Now, though, the canal is being widened, and what lies beneath this slab of Earth is once again being revealed.

Unearthing the Past

Next to the canal, on a slope that has been graded by heavy machinery, Tony Singerhouse chisels away at the soft rock. Singerhouse is a field assistant with the Florida Museum of Natural History, and he just found a small fossil.

Tony Singerhouse of the Florida Museum of Natural History holds up his latest find – a jaw of a protoceratid, an extinct relative of cattle and goats. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“So we will take it back to the lab and we will glue it together,” he says.

This fossil comes from 20 million years ago. At that time, North and South America were separated by about 150 miles of salt water. Panama was the southernmost extent – the edge – of North America.

That makes Panama an interesting place for scientists to learn about the animals that were living here before the land bridge between the continents was formed – before crossing over into South America became possible.

Many of the fossils turning up in Panama come from species that were known to live much farther north – as far north as the Dakotas. A discovery of a specimen here can mean a doubling of an animal’s known range.

University of Florida paleontologist Aaron Wood says, “That’s why this particular locality is important. We’re seeing a record of animals that were able to adapt to a diverse range of habitats.”

Life at the Edge

Recent digs have revealed a rich array of animals that lived here 20 million years ago, including miniature horses and tiny camels just a couple of feet tall. There was also a fearsome predator the size of a black bear, called a bear dog.

Over the last several years, scientists have taken the number of species they used to think lived here and multiplied it by a factor of ten.

Federico Moreno, a geologist from Colombia, stands beside Las Cascadas formation on the edge of the Panama Canal. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Scientists are now filling in a detailed portrait of the animals and plants that were here at the moment when North and South America finally made contact.

But Eldredge Bermingham of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute says this burst of discovery will not continue much longer.

“[What will] happen is the expansion is going to finish, there’s not going to be new digs, those landscapes will overgrow just as they did 100 years ago,” he says. “And as a result, we’ll pretty quickly see a dramatic reduction in new discoveries.”

The canal expansion project is scheduled to finish by the fall of 2014, which is when this window on Earth’s history will begin to close.

It is not uncommon for Rodrigo Medellin to start his day at night.

At the moment, he has a headlamp switched on and is walking into the Cueva del Diablo – the Devil’s Cave – near Tepoztlán, Mexico.

Suddenly, Medellin stops. The ceiling of the cave, just eight feet above his head, is furry and moving.

“There’s a lot of Mexican long-nosed bats over here,” he says.

About 2,000 Mexican long-nosed bats are making soft, high-pitched noises. But looking up at a colony like this is just asking for trouble.

Medellin grimaces. “Ffffft! I’m getting pee on my eyes.”

He turns away to clear his eyes. But, before long, he looks up again and points.

“They’re mating,” he says. “Just look at pairs forming. A male is grabbing a female from behind.”

Click to enlarge.

Medellin is a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and he has been coming to this cave for three decades. It was just a few years ago that he and his students first saw Mexican long-nosed bats mating here, or anywhere.

“From then on, we’ve been trying to find other caves where this endangered species mates,” he says. “And we haven’t found any.”

That makes this cave incredibly important. He figures there are about 4,000 of these bats here in all. That is down from maybe 8,000 a decade ago. He fears that people are disturbing the bats.

Medellin shakes his head as he notices fresh footprints in the cave, probably from locals. “They’re not supposed to come in for anything at this point in the year, which is when the bats are mating,” he says.

A Lifelong Love of Animals

While many types of bats are doing just fine in Mexico, Medellin says humans threaten the survival of certain species. People often unintentionally destroy bat roosts and habitat, and in some places villagers intentionally kill bats.

Medellin has made it his mission to help these animals, by studying them and fighting for their protection.

Back in his lab in Mexico City, Medellin says his passion for bats – indeed, for all animals – started early in life.

“My first word was not mama or dada – it was flamingo,” he says.

He read about flamingos and other animals nonstop as a kid. When he was 11, he appeared on a popular national TV quiz show. He was able to choose which subject he would be quizzed on, and he selected mammals.

“I did not win,” Medellin says, “but in the process of spending six or seven weekends on TV, a lot of people saw me – including the people at the University of Mexico that, at the time, were the experts on bats.”

Those scientists invited him to help in the lab and the field.

Medellin was amazed that bats came in such a wide variety of shapes and sizes – “long snouts, short snouts, small eyes, big eyes, huge ears, rounded ears, pointed ears, colorful as can be,” he says.

Click to enlarge

Medellin was hooked. He says everyone should appreciate bats and be grateful to them.

Bats play an important ecological role. They eat massive amounts of insects, disperse seeds, and pollinate plants.

But convincing the public that bats are worth protecting is not always easy. Medellin says he has to persuade people that doing so is in their own best interest.

Engaging Locals to Save Bats

In Mexico, Medellin has hit on something he thinks could be a winning argument.

“Our own Mexican identity’s very closely linked to tequila,” he says.

Tequila is made from the agave plant.

“We would not have tequila if it wasn’t because of the bats pollinating agaves for millions and millions of years,” he says, and contends that if Mexicans want tequila in the future, the country has to protect its bats.

Medellin has started a program to offer a special consumer label to tequila producers who farm their agave plants in a bat-friendly way.

Medellin is also working to save bats in more than a dozen other countries. He says in each place he has to modify his pitch so that it resonates with the local residents.

“If you want to do effective conservation, the leaders have to be the locals because they know the context, the culture, everything.”

Fledging New Researchers

Medellin, 55, says to save bats in the long run, there has to be a younger generation of conservationists ready to take on this fight. So he has been training a small army of researchers. He rarely enters a cave alone.

Rodrigo Medellin treats his students as collaborators, and they often accompany him into the field. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Back at the Cueva del Diablo, Medellin is accompanied by Rubén Galicia, who is working on his master’s degree. He says he loves being around bats.

“I enter a cave and shut off my light,” he says. “Then it’s silent, except for the sound of the bats.”

Today, Medellin’s students have set up a net in front of the entrance to the cave. It is not long before they catch a bat. Medellin untangles it from the net.

He hands the bat – a female – to a student who weighs and measures it.

Medellin and his team want to know when the bats are reproductively active so they can determine the best time periods to restrict visitor access to the cave.

Click to enlarge.

Medellin takes the animal back. He holds it in his hands and prepares to release it.

He says, “We’re going to recharge its batteries, giving it a little bit of guava juice there.” The bat laps it up.

Medellin holds out his hands.

“Okay,” he says. “One, two…”

The bat waits for a moment.

“And three.”

The bat flies off, back into the night.

The Ajusco district at the southern edge of Mexico City is part of Mexico’s surging capital, but you would never know it. It is almost rural. Aside from the occasional car or motorbike on a dirt road, the only sound is a radio playing somewhere in the neighborhood.

And there is another, less obvious sign of Ajusco’s isolation from the rest of the metropolis. Most homes here have at best only intermittent access to the city water system.

Eusebia Santa Ana Gutierrez in her backyard on the outskirts of Mexico City. Her home receives only intermittent water from the city. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Gutierrez’s situation is typical of tens of thousands of people here on the outskirts of Mexico City. But even in the more developed urban areas, roughly 30% of the city’s residents have only sporadic access to water. That means millions of people.

The main problem is that as the city’s population continues to surge – now beyond 21 million residents, the aquifer beneath the city is being depleted.

And that is where Enrique Lomnitz comes in.

Isla Urbana

Lomnitz is the director of Isla Urbana, a local environmental group that is pushing what it says is a simple solution to at least part of Mexico City’s water crisis — rainwater harvesting. Lomnitz says, “As the water situation gets worse and worse, our proposal gets stronger and stronger.”

He explains that rainwater harvesting is a natural fit in Mexico City, since over a million homes already have tanks, or cisterns, for storing water from either the intermittent city water system or delivery trucks.

Isla Urbana director Enrique Lomnitz says rainwater harvesting decentralizes access to water, and is a simple solution to at least part of Mexico City’s water crisis, since over a million homes in the city already have cisterns for storing water. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Lomnitz says water from the rainy season in the summer and fall can supply a household for up to six months. And with tanks already in place, he says Isla Urbana’s system is quick and easy to install. All that is required are some new gutters to channel the rainwater, new plumbing to draw off the first flush of water in a rainstorm, which is often contaminated with air pollutants, and a couple of special filters. The total cost is no more than six hundred bucks per household.

He and his team have already installed close to a thousand systems in Mexico City, split between the rural outskirts and the urban center.

Rainwater Skeptics

Not everyone is convinced of the benefits, however.

Victor Carrillo lights a blowtorch in his workshop to weld two copper pipes together. He used to be a bus driver, but now he works for Isla Urbana, training plumbers to install rainwater systems. He says it can be a tough sell.

Carrillo says in Spanish that plumbers sometimes make fun of the program. They do not understand the culture of rainwater harvesting.

But after the training, he explains that most of the plumbers eventually come around, and they see the benefits.

That is not the case, however, for city officials.

“It is not a solution,” says Ramón Aguirre Díaz in Spanish, the Director General of Mexico City’s Water System. “It sounds intelligent and ecological. But that is it – it just sounds good.”

Aguirre Díaz says the cost and the extra technology put rainwater harvesting out of reach of the vast majority of Mexico City’s homes.

And he says the problem this giant city has with its water cannot be fixed with a single approach. They need to rely on many ideas, like reducing demand and increasing water reuse, fixing leaky water mains, and bringing more water in from outside the city.

Enrique Lomnitz and his colleagues at Isla Urbana agree that rainwater harvesting is not going to fix Mexico City’s water problems entirely, but he believes it has much greater potential than the city gives it credit for. And he says their approach is already making a big difference for people who have installed their systems.

Water from the Sky

A small storage tank captures rainwater from the roof of Eusebia Santa Ana Gutierrez’s Mexico City home. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Gutierrez casts a bucket down into her water tank, still half-filled, even though it has been two months since the last rain. She can see her reflection in the water below.

She shows off the water she uses to wash her clothes and her dishes. She even drinks it, though Isla Urbana does not advise it. She says, “It is crystal clear, this water that came from the sky.”

Gutierrez is relieved that she has not had to worry about her water for the past few months. She also says she is saving enough money from not having to buy water to build a little extension onto her home. Once it is complete, she plans to collect even more rainwater from her expanded roof.

She is proud of her setup, here on this dirt road at the edge of Mexico City. And the name of that road is Tlaloc – the Aztec god of rain.

Costa Rica does not have a lot of hunters, but if you talk to some environmentalists, they will tell you that hunting has caused problems in certain parts of the country.

Take Tapantí National Park, a patch of tropical rainforest in the heart of Costa Rica.

“Purisíl is a town close to the national park,” says park ranger Leonel Delgado Pereira. “[It] has many, many hunters.”

Leonel Delgado Pereira works as a ranger at Tapantí National Park. He says illegal hunting occurs inside the park. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Delgado Pereira says recently a group of hunters blamed the disappearance of their dogs on a rare black jaguar, and in retaliation, the men killed the jaguar.

These types of activities have caused a noticeable decline of animals within Tapantí and in other protected areas, says Delgado Pereira.

Progression of Environmental Laws

In the last few decades, Costa Rica has enacted a series of laws to safeguard its environment.

For instance, the country has locked up nearly a quarter of its land for conservation purposes, and inside these protected areas, sport hunting and trapping have been banned.

But throughout the rest of the country, hunting has been permitted under the country’s wildlife protection law, which passed in 1992.

A number of environmental groups have been frustrated with that law. Gino Biamonte, president of the Association for the Preservation of Flora and Fauna (Apreflofas), says his group and others lobbied the Costa Rican legislature to ban hunting.

“It’s completely anti-democratic to allow an activity that goes against the good of most of the population [to benefit] the very few,” he says.

Gino Biamonte is president of the Association for the Preservation of Flora and Fauna, a Costa Rican environmental group. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Environmentalists took advantage of a new “popular initiative” process in Costa Rica. Apreflofas and its partner organizations collected 177,000 signatures in support of a new wildlife management law that bans sport hunting and trapping across the entire country, both inside and outside the national parks.

That bill went before Costa Rica’s Congress this month. It passed unanimously and is expected to be signed into law by President Laura Chinchilla.

The hunting ban – the first of its kind in the Americas – would go into effect early next year, but it would take another 12 months for all currently valid hunting licenses to expire.

The Hunters Push Back

Costa Rica’s hunters plan to fight the new law.

Ricardo Guardia, president of the Costa Rican Hunters Association and an attorney who wrote the national gun law, says he will contest the ban on sport hunting all the way to the constitutional court.

Guardia contends that the Congress did not follow proper procedures in passing the law, and he argues that hunting is a reasonable use of natural resources that doesn’t harm the general public.

Attorney Ricardo Guardia, president of the Costa Rican Hunters Association, plans to fight the new anti-hunting law. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The new law does allow hunting in two special circumstances – subsistence hunting by indigenous groups and culls to control overpopulation. But Guardia says with virtually no legal hunting, the law could cause a poaching free-for-all in protected areas and cause wildlife numbers to plummet.

“Why would people poach outside the national park if there’s more game inside the national park?” he says. “People will not respect [the law].”

Costa Rica’s Minister of the Environment, René Castro, stated in an email that the government will redouble its efforts to keep poachers out of national parks when the hunting ban takes effect.

But, given the country’s limited resources, some say enforcement will be a challenge.

Alonso Villalobos, a political scientist at the University of Costa Rica, says even if the hunting ban is not implemented perfectly, the law is symbolically important.

Costa Ricans think of themselves as “people who are in a very good relation with the environment,” says Villalobos. “And in that way, we have made a lot of progress. We have a stronger environmental consciousness.”

Ask Kevin Warwick to look ahead a hundred years and predict where we are headed as a species, and he does not hesitate.

“The only future I can see,” says the cybernetics professor at the University of Reading, England, “is one where there are perhaps humans as we know them today, but we also have the cyborg entity – the part human, part machine, with all different varieties.”

Kevin Warwick’s vision for the future is bold. In it, he says, humans and machines will be one. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“Let’s move forward,” he says. “You know, let’s not stay as we are.”

Warwick feels particularly trapped by our five senses, because there are so many signals out there – for instance, radio waves and X-rays – that, as humans, we just cannot detect. As he puts it, we are looking at the world through a tunnel.

“We’re hardly seeing anything that’s there,” he says. “So I think we can use technology to give the brain a much, much better perspective of what’s going on.”

This philosophy has propelled Warwick into the realm of sensory enhancement – adding new senses to the human experience.

And Warwick is not alone in this desire.

Rebecca Davey crouches behind a series of security scanners at the University of Manchester library. She can detect their magnetic field with her implant. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“I got the implant about two months ago,” says Rebecca Davey, an undergraduate at the University of Manchester. “A small cut was made in the side of my fingertip. It took about ten minutes, tops.”

She had a tiny magnet implanted, one about the size of a sesame seed. It is tucked into the tip of her left ring finger.

Davey is part of a small community of people who have had magnets inserted into their bodies. She had hers implanted by a body modification artist in Berlin. It cost about $200.

“Often people are quite shocked by the idea of having – of almost butchering – your body to put things in, but it’s not really like that,” she says. “If people are willing to get things like piercings or even contact lenses, it doesn’t seem to me such a huge step to then go on to things like magnetic implants.”

The magnet implanted in Rebecca Davey’s ring finger overwhelms the magnetic sensor on her cell phone. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

She demonstrates by turning on her microwave oven. She probes the air with her finger to sense the appliance’s magnetic field.

“It gets very strong as you go to the side of the microwave, and then sort of dies off as you go over the middle, and then very strong at the other side,” she explains, tracing an invisible shape.

Putting New Senses to Use

Back in Reading, in the lab of cybernetics researcher Kevin Warwick, graduate student Ian Harrison is studying people who have gotten these magnetic implants. In fact, he is one of them – he has tiny magnets in two fingers on his left hand.

Ian Harrison’s magnetic implants in his two fingers allow him to attract small metal objects in his environment, like these magnetic discs. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

He has crafted a simple device – a small coil of copper wire that is connected to the audio output cable from his computer. He turns on some music and sticks one of his magnetic fingers into the center of the coil.

Even with the speaker turned off, he says he can feel the music. “Every single time you hear that bass… you can feel the sensation quite strong coming through.”

Harrison’s professor, Kevin Warwick, wants to do more than just put magnets inside fingers so people can experience music in a different way.

Warwick is especially excited about neuronal implants – small computer chips that interact directly with our nervous systems. He had one connected to the nerves of his left wrist a few years back. Once there is a direct connection to the nerves, it is possible to hook them up to all sorts of contraptions.

Two of the devices that Kevin Warwick had implanted into his body: the neuronal implant (above his wrist) and an RFID tag (in his palm). (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“So the closer an object, measured by the ultrasonic sensor, the more pulses went into my nervous system,” he explains. Warwick says he was able to move around his lab – blindfolded – without bumping into anything.

“It didn’t feel like heat or touch,” he says. “We had, if you like, opened up a new route to the brain.”

Upgrading the Human Body

Warwick kept the neuronal implant in his body for only a few months, but he sees no reason why these devices could not become permanent parts of ourselves.

He says the devices could be used for therapeutic purposes, “helping somebody who’s blind, for example, so they can detect objects as they move around ultrasonically.”

Kevin Warwick shows off an electronic baseball cap that allowed him to navigate his lab like a bat – with a kind of echolocation. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“It’s using the technology to provide something extra,” he says. “It is enhancing. It’s upgrading.”

Wendell Wallach, a bioethicist at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s just not clear to me why I would want to put these sensors into my body, and whether it would undermine some of my other capabilities,” he says.

Wallach says we humans are not good at multi-tasking with our technology – for instance, talking on the phone while driving. He is concerned that if we are able to gain additional senses, they might distract us from our other, natural senses.

“I think one of the difficulties with all of these new trajectories in terms of how science can alter us is that it tends to aggrandize what these technologies bring into our life. At the same time,” he says, “it demeans a little bit how remarkable we are as human beings.”

But Kevin Warwick wants to be more remarkable. For him, the sensory enhancement technologies of the future – the ones that he thinks may help facilitate our transition to cyborgs – are as much a personal quest as a professional one.

“I want to experience things for myself. I want to know what it’s like, and I want to find out what’s possible if we push things a little bit further.”

“That’s what I’m about,” Warwick says. “This is what I live for.”

We’re looking for a British city where a cool recycling project is about to get underway. A team of architects and recycling experts is planning to build a house — entirely out of trash.

And they’re doing it to make a point about all the perfectly reusable stuff we normally throw out. Construction waste, old video cassettes and even old toothbrushes are being collected to build this house of trash.

The building site is in a city on the south coast of England in the county of East Sussex.

The city’s seafront bars and restaurants — not to mention nudist beaches — are all just an hour’s train ride away from London.

Name that coastal city.

Next week, a construction crew at the University of Brighton in England will begin work on a house that will contain virtually nothing new at all.

It’s being made almost entirely out of waste material — garbage from homes, and discarded items from other building sites. It’s located in the city of Brighton which is also the answer to our Geo Quiz for Monday.

The project is meant to show that using trash as building material is good for the environment and can reduce the cost of construction.

Ari Daniel Shapiro of our partner program NOVA got a preview of what’s planned. He produced this audio postcard from the future site of the Brighton Waste House.

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In the rolling hills of Lower Austria, a sleek black-and-white dog winds its way up a grassy slope. It tenses and darts. Then it pauses before darting again.

This is Pip, a young male border collie.

“He’s looking for the sheep,” says Pip’s owner, Christa Veits. “He’s trying to find them because he knows that they must be somewhere over there.”

Veits has trained Pip to work with sheep. She has a small flock of 35.

At last, the sheep come into view. Pip dashes off, circling wide around them, and then slowly advances towards them. The flock scurries away.

Pip, a border collie, focuses his body on a flock of sheep. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

About 15 miles away – in the heart of Vienna – another dog is showing off a few tricks. This is Nessie, a tan terrier mix.

“Her favorite trick is to walk around me backwards,” says her owner, Ulli Stangl.

Sure enough, on command, Nessie leaps around Stangl in a tight circle, facing backwards. Nessie watches her owner intently.

Stangl says Nessie rarely strays from her side.

“She likes to be very close to me,” says Stangl. “If I am in my bed, she’s mostly next to me. If I am sitting in my camping chair, she’s under it or on my lap.”

Dogs Volunteering for Science

Pip, the sheep-herding country dog, and Nessie, the trick-performing city dog, live very different lives, but both spend time at the Clever Dog Lab, an unusual facility at the Veterinary University of Vienna.

Biologist Friederike Range helps run the Clever Dog Lab. She sometimes comes to the lab with her son and dog. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Range says the main goal of the lab is to investigate how dogs understand their world. “This includes, of course, their social world [i.e., other dogs and people] as well as their physical environment.”

The lab has been around for five years. It is one of a small number of research centers around the world devoted to studying how dogs think and behave.

Scientists say this is an important field of study because domesticated dogs have evolved to live with humans, meaning they may have a lot to tell us about our own brains and behaviors.

To do its work, the Clever Dog Lab relies on pets as volunteers. Over 600 dogs in and around Vienna participate in the experiments.

One of the main research interests here is canine personality. The scientists run the dogs through tests to measure traits like extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and dependency.

Testing Canine Personality

The Clever Dog Lab runs on hot dogs. In a typical week, about 150 are used as treats for the dogs involved in experiments. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Lisa Wallis, a Ph.D student in the lab, sets up the experiment. She places a battery-powered stuffed toy on the floor and switches it on. The toy giggles and starts rolling around.

Nessie approaches the toy to investigate but quickly returns to her owner for the rest of the minute-long experiment.

Wallis says the way an animal responds when it sees something new in its environment reveals aspects of its personality.

“A very bold individual would probably immediately approach in a confident manner with a confident tail position [and] body position,” she says. “And a very shy dog might not approach or might need more support from the owner before it would come closer.”

On this particular scale, Nessie rates somewhere in the middle. She is fairly dependent on her owner.

Nessie, a terrier mix, participates in a personality test at the Clever Dog Lab. For this experiment, her owner, Ulli Stangl, is present. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The trial starts with his owner looking on as Pip plays ball with the experimenter, graduate student Stefanie Riemer.

Riemer uses a tennis ball to play fetch with Pip. He runs all over the room, his tail wagging furiously. He cannot get enough.

Riemer then asks the dog’s owner to leave the room. Pip does not even register her departure. He keeps on playing.

Next, Riemer leaves the room. Only Pip remains inside.

Riemer goes to a neighboring room and watches how Pip responds through a live video feed.

“Actually, [he’s] still quite happy as long as he has a ball,” she says. “He doesn’t mind that he’s on his own now.”

The results are clear – Pip is a very independent dog. He can entertain himself, which is somewhat unusual for a dog.

Practical Applications

The animals that come through here are run through dozens of tests like this.

One thing the lab is trying to work out is the role of genetics versus the environment in shaping canine personality, so sometimes multiple dogs from the same breed are compared.

The scientists are also studying how personality changes as a dog ages – just as it does in humans.

“Because our dogs are living longer and longer because they’re getting better veterinary care, we’re getting an aging population of dogs,” says graduate student Lisa Wallis. “And what people are realizing is that old dogs suffer from [a] doggie version of human Alzheimer’s, which they call canine cognitive dysfunction.”

Wallis hopes to pinpoint which personality changes in dogs are a natural part of aging, and which ones are not – to determine the best way to care for older dogs.

Some of the work being done in the lab has implications for dogs that are used as service animals. Stefanie Riemer says for these dogs, personality is key.

“A good guide dog has to be quite self-confident,” she says. “They have to say to the owner, ‘No, we stop here,’ if there’s some danger that the blind person doesn’t see.”

Christa Veits owns five border collies. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

There is a personality test trainers use to help predict which puppies will work out best as service dogs, but Riemer says that test has not been fully validated. Part of her work is to see whether a puppy’s performance has any bearing on its performance as an adult.

This work could also be useful in helping place pets from shelters – finding the right match between a dog and a new family, for instance. That may require taking the personality of both the dog and the owner into account.

Pip’s owner, Christa Veits, would agree. She has five border collies and says they have five different personalities.

“I [chose] those dogs because I could see that there’s something in them that I have in my character,” she says. “Every dog is a part of me.”

And every dog of hers volunteers at the Clever Dog Lab. She says it provides a chance for them to exercise their brains.

At the end of the session at the lab, Veits secures her five border collies in her van and heads back to the countryside. The sheep await.

Let’s start with something familiar – an orange.

David Edwards, an inventor and engineer at Harvard University, slices one open.

“Now look at that,” he says, pointing to the pulp. “Obviously the orange is full of water and moisture… And then you’ve got the orange peel.”

The peel is a kind of durable, biodegradable packaging. Few people eat an orange peel, but it is edible. And, of course, we do eat the peels of other fruits, like peaches and apples.

The fact that these fruits come in their own built-in packaging is convenient. It means they do not have to be sold in boxes or bags.

This idea is the inspiration behind a company that Edwards has founded. He wants to change the way we package and eat food.

Making His Own Peel

This is where things start to get less familiar.

Edwards fetches a plate of what look like red rubber balls. He picks one up between his thumb and forefinger.

David Edwards holds up a ball of yogurt enclosed in an edible skin. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“I’m going to bite into it just to show you what’s going on here,” he says.

Edwards bites it in two and holds up the half still in his fingers. Greek yogurt sits inside. He squeezes the yogurt out.

The innovative part is what is on the outside. It is a protective, biodegradable skin – like an orange peel. And it’s edible.

“That skin keeps moisture inside, and it keeps germs and other things outside,” Edwards explains.

He won’t reveal the exact recipe, but he says in this case the raw ingredients come from raspberries and algae.

And it is not just yogurt that Edwards is wrapping in this kind of edible peel. His vision is that one day you will go to the supermarket and, instead of buying cartons of juice and cans of soup, you will fill your cart up with balls of food and drink.

Imagine this scenario. “I get home, and I hand [the food] to my son, and he hands it to his friend,” Edwards says. “And then the friend says, ‘But did you wash your hands?’ At that point, I clean it as I do fruit and vegetables today. I can run water over it, and it doesn’t dissolve, actually. And it can be cleaned, and then I can eat it.”

A Curious Display of Food

It may sound like something from Star Trek, but Edwards is already trying these products out on the public. His company recently organized a tasting at its test kitchen in Paris.

Balls of cheese (foreground) and yogurt (background) await the public taste test. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Just before the event, the company’s research and development manager, Heloise Vilaseca, was eager to hear what the taste testers would say. “Would they like it?” she wondered aloud. “Would they understand the product? Would they want to share it with friends?”

On this day, four volunteers had arrived to try the new foods. Maëva Tordo was one of them. She works in business innovation, and her eyes were wide with anticipation.

“I’m really, really curious about it because I always dreamed about being able to eat the cap of my yogurt,” she said. “So I can’t wait.”

Before long, the group was brought into a room where the food had been laid out. White spheres of frosty ice cream and brown orbs of mousse rested in shallow bowls. Yellow and green cheese marbles huddled on little plates. The gelatinous balls of yogurt were on display, as well.

Chris Tallec looks on as Nettra Pan tries an orb of ice cream. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The taste testers plucked them up with their fingers and popped them into their mouths like grapes. They seemed to be loving it, though someone did mention that the ice cream could be improved by making it smaller.

Perhaps the strangest things on the table were the beverages – colorful globes of liquid. Some contained orange juice. Others held a cocktail made with blue Curaçao, wrapped in a transparent spherical skin flecked with orange rind and placed in martini glasses.

Chris Tallec, a designer, poked a straw through the skin of his turquoise cocktail and slurped the liquid inside. Then he held up the skin and ate it.

“It’s really tasty because it has the flavor of the orange around [it],” he said. Tallec added that he was enjoying this new way of eating. “It’s playful. Also, it’s seducing – you know, you’re curious about it.”

Evan Samek tries one of the cocktails containing blue Curaçao. It is wrapped in its own edible packaging. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Before the tasting ended, Maëva Tordo’s curiosity got the better of her. She reached for one more ball of yogurt, but the contents had warmed up to room temperature. So when she bit it in half to admire how it was created, the yogurt squirted out and splattered her hair.

“That’s what happens when you play too much with food,” she said, laughing.

The Future of Edible Packaging

The taste testers seemed to be sold on the concept, but is the general public really ready to buy edible balls of soda or coffee at the grocery store and from vending machines? Is it realistic to think we can bundle much of our food into this kind of packaging?

The product’s inventor, David Edwards, thinks so. “Interest from leading multi-national food and beverage companies has been great,” he says.

Still, there is a lot to do before he licenses this technology to major food brands. He has patent applications in the pipeline, and he has to make sure the technology can scale easily from a small test kitchen to mass production.

As Edwards continues to refine this new kind of food, he is relying on the public to tell him what works and what doesn’t. In fact, he calls his company WikiCell Designs (as in Wikipedia) because, as he sees it, it is a collaborative effort.

The next step in that collaboration will come soon when the world’s first Wiki Bar opens, in Paris. Consumers will be able to purchase these balls of yogurt, mousse, and juice, and offer feedback. Edwards says if all goes well, he plans to roll out his products in the United States next year.

Sam, a 14-year-old in southern England, strums his guitar effortlessly. The music just flows out of him.

“I don’t really have to think about it,” he says. “When I play guitar, my brain just works, like, super well. I can learn new things really quickly and remember them for a long amount of time.”

But math is not like that for Sam.

“I don’t understand it,” he says. “It’s like speaking Chinese to me. I don’t know what the heck it means.”

14-year-old Sam plays guitar. Music flows out of him. Math does not. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The basics of math – adding, subtracting, multiplying – come naturally to Sam, but anything more advanced is hard. Several years ago, his performance in class slumped. Sam was giving up. And his parents, who asked that their last name not be used, were worried.

“You feel kind of helpless,” his mother, Cathy, says. “You want to do the best you can to try and get the best out of your child.”

His father, Dan, agrees. “As a father, you want to see your son really reaching and aspiring and really wanting to try. You want your son to believe in himself,” he says.

So Cathy and Dan started looking into how to help Sam. They tried dietary supplements, tutoring, and biofeedback. None of it worked. Then Dan stumbled upon a study out of Oxford University.

An Electrical Boost

Oxford neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh conducted the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology.

“We did several experiments showing that if we stimulate the [correct] brain area with the right protocol, we can actually improve mathematical abilities,” he says.

In his study, Cohen Kadosh used something called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). He put electrodes on each subject’s scalp and delivered a trickle of current – about a milliamp – to the brain.

“By giving this tiny electricity, we can change the responsiveness of the neurons and make them more prone to fire and to participate in a certain cognitive task,” he says.

Roi Cohen Kadosh of Oxford University holds the device that produces mild electrical brain stimulation. The two sponges in his hands are placed on the subject’s scalp. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Cohen Kadosh applied this electrical current while teaching his subjects certain mathematical tasks. These sessions were repeated multiple times over the course of a week. Those who got the treatment performed better on these tasks compared with those who didn’t receive the treatment. And this effect lasted upwards of six months.

This kind of electrical brain stimulation is not new. For over a hundred years, scientists have tried tDCS on everything from treating pain to helping patients who have suffered strokes.

Lately, though, there has been a flurry of interest in using the technique to boost learning. For instance, the US Air Force recently tested tDCS as a way to enhance the training of those who pilot unmanned drones. Researchers found that the electrical stimulation accelerated learning and improved the ability of pilots to identify enemy targets in complex radar images.

An operator in the Air Force receives transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) while locating targets in radar images. (Photo: United States Air Force)

Not Just for Lab Use

The general public may soon have wider access to tDCS technology. Although the devices are regulated as medical equipment, you can find instructions for do-it-yourself kits online. And a Spanish company has just launched an inexpensive version for use in doctors’ offices.

Uri Fligil, marketing director for Barcelona-based Neuroelectrics, displays his company’s product, called Starstim. He fits a snug neoprene cap on his head and fastens it beneath his chin. The electrodes can be inserted into any of the twenty or so holes in the cap, depending on which part of the brain requires stimulation.

The caps come in different sizes. “You have different sizes of head, like you wear clothes – so you have small, medium, large caps,” he says. “We design, as well, caps for kids in different ages.”

The device is intended for medical use – for instance, for treating pain – but Fligil says his company cannot control if doctors decide to use it off-label for other purposes, like enhancing learning.

Most of the studies that have looked at tDCS to improve learning, including the Oxford study of math abilities, have been conducted on adults. Very little is known about the effects – and side effects – of this kind of brain stimulation on kids.

Despite those unknowns, some parents are eager to get their hands on this technology.

“I am now prepared to mess with my son’s neurochemistry to allow him success,” says Gloriana (not her real name), a mother of two who lives outside London. “You know, plug him in in the morning, plug him in in the afternoon, and then rewire the brain.”

Depending on which doctor they’ve seen, Gloriana’s 14-year-old son has been diagnosed with ADD, Asperger’s, or dyslexia. He is actually quite good at math, but he has trouble with other subjects. Gloriana wants to see if tDCS might help him succeed in school.

“We just have to give him the best chance of having a normal life,” she says.

From Adults to Children

Gloriana is one of many parents who have reached out to Roi Cohen Kadosh – the Oxford researcher – asking if he could test his device on their kids.

In fact, Cohen Kadosh has just started recruiting children for a new study, to see if tDCS can improve math abilities in kids, the way it does in adults.

“My job is to be frank with the parents and to tell them what we know at the moment. Like any other treatment, there is a risk,” he says.

“I don’t think that the risk here is high,” he adds. Still, no one knows if the device might cause subtle harm to a child’s developing brain.

Dan and Cathy, the parents of 14-year-old Sam, are trying to decide if they should enroll their son in the new study at Oxford. They are torn.

To Dan, the idea of using a tiny electric current “sounds radically safer than allowing my son to have some of these other drugs that are so commonly used right now with nobody batting an eye,” he says.

But Cathy expresses concern that tDCS could be habit-forming. “When you see results suddenly go up, does a child suddenly want to use it more and more?” she asks. “That’s possibly where I might have to draw the line.”

The prospect of this kind of brain enhancement also raises big questions for society.

Would a device like this give an unfair advantage to wealthy kids, whose parents can afford the brain boosting technology?

Might tDCS discourage kids from simply trying harder in school?

As for Sam, who finds music easy but math hard, he says he does not want to be a lab rat.

“When you attach something to your head, you don’t know what’s going on inside it,” he says. “That might freak me out just a bit. I’d rather know it’s been proven to help people than be the first one to try it.”

It turns out Sam will not be the first to try it.

Roi Cohen Kadosh has identified a volunteer to kick off the new study of tDCS in children. He and his team at Oxford are planning to get started by the end of this year.

Lesley Chesson opens a cardboard box inside her office at IsoForensics, a Salt Lake City-based company that uses science to fight crime. She pulls out a bulging manila envelope.

“That one definitely has hair in it,” she says with a chuckle.

A senior scientist at the company, Chesson reaches into the envelope and removes a mass of brunette hair. Her colleague, Luciano Valenzuela, looks over a list to see where it came from.

“It’s hair from Shawnee, [Oklahoma],” he says.

Lesley Chesson holds up one of nearly 2000 human hair samples stored at the company IsoForensics. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Another 2,000 envelopes and vials stored here also contain human hair, collected from across the United States and around the world. “Guatemala, Japan, Newfoundland, Thailand,” says Valenzuela, rattling off some of the countries.

Thure Cerling (left) and Jim Ehleringer (right) have been collaborating on science projects for the last three decades. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

In fact, the scientists have hair from every continent, even Antarctica. They are using all this hair – from regular, everyday people – to perfect a technique to help solve murder cases.

Hair as a Tape Recorder

Both Chesson and Valenzuela were mentored by a professor at the University of Utah: Jim Ehleringer.

Ehleringer was trained as a plant biologist, but about a decade ago, he became curious about animals and whether he could develop a new technique for addressing a question that wildlife biologists commonly ask: where do animals eat and drink, and does the location of their watering hole, say, change over time?

“I could find out by being in the field every single minute of the day,” he says. “Or I can let nature do the recording for me.”

Ehleringer realized that what an animal eats and drinks does get recorded – in its tissues.

Every chemical element comes in different forms – known as isotopes – with some slightly heavier than others. Take the hydrogen and oxygen that make up water (H2O). These different isotopes are found in different concentrations depending on where the water comes from. And that mixture of heavy and light atoms gets laid down in the growing tissues of the animals that drink the water. These tissues include hair.

“The hair becomes a linear tape recorder,” says Ehleringer. “So it tells us a little story about the history of what an animal was eating or drinking.”

Ehleringer suspected the same thing would apply to humans and our hair. So he and his colleagues collected hair from local barbershops across the US to test a hypothesis. They wanted to determine if it was possible to tell where hair came from based on an analysis of the hydrogen and oxygen in the local water supply.

Thure Cerling, a geologist at the University of Utah and another collaborator on this project, says the vast majority of the water in our diet is local.

“People often say, ‘Well, oh, I don’t drink water. I drink Coke,’” he says. “[But] where was the Coke or the Pepsi bottled?” It’s usually at a local bottling plant, using local water.

A Map of Hair

Sure enough, the scientists found that hair (and water) look different in different parts of the US They can display that variation on a map with rainbow colors.

Different isotope levels in tap water across the United States are depicted using different colors. (Credit: IsoForensics, Inc. 2012)

“It looks like the temperature map that you see during the news that will show you where [it’s] hot and where [it’s] cold,” says Luciano Valenzuela.

Red colors flare in Texas and Florida. The Midwest is yellow. And blue coats states like Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.

With this information, it is possible to examine a single strand of hair, compare it to the map, and get a pretty good idea of where someone was when that hair grew. And by looking at how the isotopes change along the length of the hair, scientists can determine if someone has traveled.

In other words, our hair acts like a timeline – recording where each of us has been, and when we were there. It soon became clear that this tool could be valuable in solving crime.

In general, hair grows at a rate of 1 centimeter per month, as Lesley Chesson and Luciano Valenzuela demonstrate. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Tracing the Dead

At about the same time that the Utah scientists were developing this technique, a team in the United Kingdom was working on the same approach.

Wolfram Meier-Augenstein, a chemist at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, has examined the isotopic composition of hair and water in Europe and the Middle East, and he has used that information to help police in the UK, United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere with about a dozen murder cases.

He is not at liberty to talk about most of those cases, but in one case he can discuss, a man was found dead in Wales several years ago. The man appeared to be Asian, but police did not know where he came from or when he entered the UK.

The man’s hair was almost six inches long. Meier-Augenstein explains that was long enough to determine where the man had lived in the year before he died.

“The person lived in the Ukraine for three months, moved then to Germany for six-and-a-half months, and then to the United Kingdom prior to his untimely death,” he says.

The police knew of an organized crime gang that was shuttling illegal Vietnamese immigrants into Britain via Ukraine and Germany. The police suspected the murder victim had been smuggled into the UK by that gang.

Once the clue from the hair analysis had confirmed that suspicion, the other bits of the puzzle came together. The police learned that the man was originally from Vietnam and had been killed in a dispute over marijuana.

“In any homicide investigation, knowing who the victim is, is critical – who they associate with, where they’ve been,” says John House, head of the criminal investigative division at the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, in Canada.

House has used this type of forensic analysis of hair and says it can offer a starting point for murder cases that would otherwise go cold fast. “Without that information, we’re really at a standstill,” he says.

By examining isotopes in hair, scientists can also learn other things about a person’s diet – including whether someone was a vegetarian or vegan, preferred fish to chicken or beef, or had gone through a sustained period of starvation. All of these details might prove helpful in identifying a murder victim.

Collecting More Hair

Back in Salt Lake City, Luciano Valenzuela pulverizes a hair sample in a machine that looks like a small version of a paint can shaker. This is one of the first steps the staff here at IsoForensics uses to analyze hair isotopes.

Human hair samples at IsoForensics. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The company gets requests from law enforcement agencies once or twice a month, and the demand is growing. Meanwhile, the scientists continue to refine the technique by gathering more hair from other parts of the world.

“Obviously, everywhere we go and every time we get a chance, we continue to collect samples,” says Lesley Chesson.

She looks over at Valenzuela, who is from Argentina. “Luciano,” she says, smiling, “maybe we should send you home for Christmas – send you on a collecting trip.” They both laugh.

That chance will come soon enough. Valenzuela returns to Argentina next year to start his own lab. His goal is to create a detailed map of the invisible variations in hair and water across his own country.

On a warm afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few dozen kids and adults have found refuge on a shaded playground. Victoria Wobber – an anthropologist from just down the road at Harvard University – stands off to the side.

Anthropologist Victoria Wobber, at a playground near her office at Harvard University. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The scene is so familiar that it’s hardly remarkable. And yet, Wobber is here to point out something fundamental about who we are as human beings, and who we grow up to become.

“Look at the boy using a shovel to get the sand into that container,” she says.

The kids on this playground – even the ones who are too young to speak – are already little engineers, using tools to build structures out of sand. But where does this ability to understand our environment and then manipulate it so successfully come from? And why are our closest primate relatives unable to do it as well as we can? In other words, what sets us apart?

An elegant experiment

Wobber came up with a way to unravel these questions as part of her Ph.D. work at Harvard. She decided to challenge little kids and little apes of the same age – between two and four years old – with the same simple tasks.

Wobber teamed up with scientists in Germany to study the kids, and she went to Africa to study the apes: 25 chimps, and 17 pygmy chimps (also called bonobos).

To study bonobos, Wobber visited a wildlife sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In one experiment – which she videotaped – you can see her inside a tiled room. A metal grill separates her from a 3-year-old male bonobo named Kubulu.

Wobber holds up two pieces of pipe. The pipes are designed so one can attach to the other. She tries to put them together three times, and she fails on purpose each time. Kubulu watches the pipes intently.

The point of this experiment is to see whether Kubulu understands the goal of the experimenter (i.e. to connect the pipes) by doing it himself. In the video, Wobber hands the tubes over to Kubulu.

Rather than putting the pipes together, he plays with them. Kubulu pops one in his mouth, climbs the wall, leaps down, jumps on top of the pipes, and then pushes them across the floor.

“And so that’s typically what most chimps and bonobos did,” Wobber explains. “They said, ‘Great, you’ve given me a great toy. Thank you, I’ll go play with this.’ Rather than, well, here the goal was to put the two ends of the tubes together.”

Wobber has a second video – this one recorded at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany – which shows the other half of the experiment.

In the video, a 3-year-old German boy sits across a table from a woman. Just like in the experiment from Africa, the woman tries to put the two pipes together three times, and fails. No words are spoken.

Wobber explains what’s happening. “The kid here is really watching very carefully what [the experimenter is] doing,” Wobber says. “But you can see he’s looking at her face as a source of her intentions – what she’s doing with these strange pipes.”

The woman then slides the tubes across the table to the boy. Within a few seconds, he successfully inserts one tube into the other. As soon as he is done, he looks up at her face for approval – to see how he did.

Over the course of the study, not all the kids were successful at this task, and not all the apes failed. But, in general, the kids got it and the apes did not, in this and about a dozen other experiments – including ones involving tangible rewards for succeeding (balloons for the kids, bananas for the apes).

Reading intentions

So what do the results mean?

“I think the study’s critical finding is that human children are very sensitive to the goals of another [person],” says Amanda Seed, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who studies the evolution of human behavior. She calls the new research groundbreaking.

“This is something that we’re not seeing in the young chimpanzees and bonobos. The chimpanzees and bonobos focused on the objects, and on the enjoyment of the objects,” she says. “The child is focused on the experimenter – and on pleasing the experimenter.”

In her office, Wobber displays pictures of some of her favorite chimps and bonobos. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

But the children in this experiment were constantly watching people. Amanda Seed says kids learn a lot from others – even without language. Children look into the eyes and faces of adults to understand what those adults intend to do. She says these subtle cues provide humans with a rich source of information about our world, and give us an advantage over chimps and bonobos.

Seed does raise some concerns about this study. For instance, it was always a human experimenter doing the demonstrating. “The challenge for the chimpanzees and bonobos is that much greater,” she says. “They have to read through the behavior of another species to appreciate the goals that that species is trying to perform.”

But Seed says this new study adds to a growing body of evidence that our primate cousins are not as focused as we are on the actions and intentions of others. She says the new research provides an elegant demonstration that our ability to manipulate our physical environment – a hallmark of what it means to be human – comes in part from our social skills.

A new view of the playground

Back at the playground in Cambridge, there is a lot more going on here when viewed through the lens of Victoria Wobber’s study. The kids are not just playing on slides and in the sand. They are watching others closely – and learning from them.

Wobber looks over at a boy in a blue-and-white striped shirt. He is about 2-years-old.

“He’s pointing out something for his mom there,” she says, as if providing color commentary. The boy picks up a rag. “[He’s] trying to show that to his little friend over there in the bathing suit.”

The boy’s mom picks her son up and moves him to a different part of the playground, where he soon finds a new toy. Rather than playing with it by himself, he holds it up, shows it to his mom, and then – looks into her eyes.

The AntWeb trio examines Lazius niger, one the local species of ants in London. From left to right: Ryan Perry, Zach Lieberman, Liam Ericson. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“These little ants [belong to] the genus Lazius,” Lieberman says. “You’ll find them anywhere that you go in London.”

Liam Ericson crouches beside him. “They’re very adaptable,” he adds. “They’re everywhere in this city.”

Ericson and Lieberman are part of a three-man team from California now touring Europe to look at ants.

But these two are not here to collect ants on the streets. They have come to explore what stands behind them – London’s famed Natural History Museum and its vast collection of ant specimens from all over the world.

The Natural History Museum sits in the heart of London, just south of Hyde Park. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Hidden Beauty

Zach Lieberman steps into one of the massive climate-controlled collection rooms at the museum.

“For an entomology nerd, it’s an honor to be able to work with a collection like this,” he says. “It’s heaven. Just thousands upon thousands upon thousands of specimens.”

Lieberman pulls out one of the 600 drawers filled with ants – each one pinned and labeled. He points to a species from South America that can grow one-and-a-half inches long.

“Oh yeah, Dinoponera – the largest ants in the world,” he says.

Zach Lieberman points to a specimen from the genus Dinoponera, the largest ants in the world. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“Sometimes there [are] ants that you literally can’t see,” he says, “and then you get them under the microscope and it just opens up this whole world. That’s where a lot of the really hidden beauty is.”

And that is why this team of young entomologists is here – to reveal and document that hidden beauty using a special kind of camera.

Ants the Size of Housecats

The third member of the team – Ryan Perry – places a caramel-colored ant specimen under a microscope. He swivels a knob and brings the head of the ant, Camponotus circumspectus, into view on his computer screen. He is about to take a high-resolution photograph.

The trouble is that only the front of the head, where the antennae are, is in focus. The back of the head is blurry. So he takes a series of photographs, front to back, changing the focus slightly with each image.

Perry adjusts the zoom and focus knob of his camera and takes a series of high-resolution images of an ant specimen. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The result is a single image where every part of the ant is in sharp focus – and can be enlarged on the screen.

“We’re basically taking an ant, a tiny little ant, and making it the size of a housecat,” Perry says.

He points to his screen where the ant head has just been rendered.

“There’s the mandible, the hairs around the face, the antennae, the antennal sockets, the eyes,” he says. “All these are very important for ID purposes, so it’s really important that we get each one of these little hairs to actually show up in focus.”

For each species of ant, Perry takes at least three high-resolution photos: the headshot, a side shot, and one from above.

His team then sends the images back to the California Academy of Sciences, which posts them on a website called AntWeb. The goal is to document every ant species on Earth.

All of the photographs are merged into a single high-resolution image where every part of the ant is in sharp focus. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

A Resource for the Masses

One reason for the online project is that many of the museum specimens are fragile, and physical collections degrade over time. Digital photographs are more durable and reduce the need to transport and handle specimens.

Images can also tell you a lot about an ant species’ behavior and biology.

“By looking at the way their bodies are shaped, you can sort of guess,” says Zach Lieberman. “You know, if they’ve got particularly long trap-jaw mandibles, they’re probably ambush predators.”

Similarly, ants that are slender and eyeless are probably adapted to living underground.

The project’s organizers say they are democratizing access to ant specimens. Researchers and lay citizens, regardless of how close they live to a natural history museum, will now have a means of entering the great ant collections of the world.

But taking pictures of all these ants is time-consuming. The trio in London has photographed more than 2500 specimens already, and still has over a thousand to go. The team works long days and often comes in over the weekend.

The team’s survival strategy involves caffeine.

“I drank more tea, I think, since I’ve been here, than I have in my entire life,” says Perry.

“I’m a diehard coffee fan,” says Lieberman. “We make it strong and we make it plentiful.”

And it looks like they will need a lot more caffeine.

The Americans first came to London in May and expected to be done by September, but there are many more ants here than they anticipated, so the time in London has been extended.

The team will then head to Genoa and Geneva, and possibly Germany and Russia. That will take about a year.

The World Ant Tour organizers will then regroup, check their finances, and plan the next trip – probably to Brazil and Australia.

I had just switched on the GPS in my rental car and the computerized voice was talking to me in Dutch. Dutch!

I’d landed at the Nice airport in the south of France an hour earlier, as the sun was setting and the darkness was settling in for the night. My goal was to drive a couple hours north of Nice — which hugs the Mediterranean coast — up into the Mercantour National Park at the base of the Alps.

I had an interview planned for the next day, where I’d be accompanying a handful of ecologists and entomologists into the park to talk to them about the search for new species in the old world. My B&B was located in a small village in the park, there were very few buses that made their way up there, and so I’d rented a car with the hopes of arriving in a reasonable amount of time.

I’d written down directions ahead of time but rapidly found them to be of no help since the roads were numbered slightly different from what I’d found online. The maps I picked up at the rental agency were zoomed out too far to be useful.

And so I’d turned on the GPS, naively expecting it to be of some help. Since I don’t speak Dutch, I didn’t know how to change the language to English or even French.

Somehow I managed to to punch in the town name where I was heading – St Dalmas – but the GPS found a different location with a slightly modified spelling a few hours due west of my current location, and was directing me there. But I had to go north! The Dutch GPS was of no help.

I stopped a couple of cars on the road in Nice and they got me on the right track, but I soon found myself hitting a couple of dead ends, wandering across an empty parking lot, and staring at road signs that were confusing at best and hieroglyphic at worst. I really should have looked up what they meant before arriving.

The roads were deserted — it was 10 at night and the sky was dark. At last I found a couple taking off their roller blades on the side of the road. I explained my predicament and they kindly guided me to a small hotel, where the man behind the desk showed me a much better map. I realized that I’d actually been traveling on the correct course, and that I just had to continue along.

I put a different town name into the GPS adjacent to where I was going — Valdeblore — and this time it found the right location. I proceeded along, gradually making my way higher and higher along tight switchbacks and narrow lanes. I was somewhat glad it was dark since I didn’t want to see just how far up I was, and how steep the mountain was that I was climbing up.

Slowly, slowly, the remaining distance on the GPS shrank, and at last I arrived in St Dalmas. Miraculously, I found the B&B since there were no signs indicating its whereabouts and the front stairs weren’t complete. I had to hoist myself up onto the porch, and I knocked on the glass door to be let in.

It was 11:30 p.m. I slept soundly that night.

The next morning when I woke up, the first thing I did was go to the window to see where I was. The scene was stunning — peaks of green and gray rising up on all sides of us, the sunlight pouring into the valley.

It was worth all the trouble. Or as the Dutch say, “In drie honderd meter gaat u linksaf.” (“In 300 meters, turn left.”)

Mercantour National Park, taken during my reporting trip. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

She points to the space in between the stones. That’s where the firewood goes.

“We make the fire so that it can burn and cook,” she says.

The inside walls are black with soot. “There is no pipe to take out the smoke,” she explains.

A woman in Ghana cooks over a traditional, open fire. (Photo courtesy of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves)

The black soot is also bad for the climate; it’s a greenhouse pollutant that helps warm the planet. And because these stoves are inefficient, they require a lot of firewood, which contributes to deforestation.

One solution that’s being promoted here and elsewhere is a cleaner cookstove.

Clearing the Air

Confrio Nsubuga works for an environmental group in Uganda called JEEP (Joint Energy and Environment Projects). It’s one of many organizations in the developing world that are promoting more efficient cookstoves.

An example of the efficient cookstove being promoted by the Ugandan environmental group JEEP. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“What makes it efficient is the way it is constructed,” he says.

The stove is nothing fancy. In fact, Nsubuga’s organization doesn’t sell the stoves. It teaches people to build them.

The stove is made from clay. It’s squat and rectangular. A couple of pots sit on top, and there’s a hole at the base where the firewood goes.

“As you see now, there is only one piece of firewood,” he says.

A single piece of firewood can heat up the whole unit, so the stove is energy-efficient, and no smoke wafts into the kitchen. It’s all diverted through an aluminum chimney.

This stove may be better for the environment, but it’s different from what locals are accustomed to, so getting people to use it can be a challenge.

“There may be well-intentioned individuals and organizations that have developed good, clean, efficient stoves, but they haven’t taken into account how those stoves may be used on a day-to-day basis,” says Radha Muthiah, executive director of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.

Some people resist switching to the new stoves because they believe that food tastes better when cooked over a traditional, open fire.

Less Wood, More Security

In Uganda, Confrio Nsubuga has noticed that people can be reluctant to adopt his clean cookstoves, so he’s trying a different tactic to convince women to make the switch. He’s pitching the clean cookstoves not as a way to protect the environment, but as a way for women to protect themselves.

To explain, he escorts me into the forest behind his home at dusk.

“This is where people get firewood,” he says.

The forest is dark and filled with the sounds of insects. We peer through the trees and can just make out someone using an axe to cut down branches and tree trunks.

Nsubuga says it’s usually women and children who collect firewood in the forests, and this can be a dangerous place for them.

The greenery is so thick, someone could easily hide and watch you. And the din of the forest masks even nearby sounds.

Inside forests like this, rape and sexual assault are common. In one region of Uganda, 20 to 30 percent of gender-based violence incidents are estimated to occur when women are out collecting firewood.

“So if you have a more efficient stove, then that certainly reduces the number of times that the women have to go out and make that trek,” says Muthiah of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.

And this is one way the Ugandan environmental group JEEP is promoting its clean stoves. It says they translate into less time in the forest, which means a lower risk of rape and sexual assault.

Jane Nambuli (back, center) stands in front of her home with her daughter and four granddaughters. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“I used to go in the forest to fetch the firewood,” she says, “but I thought that I might be raped because most of the women, we are raped.”

Now Nambuli has one of the new stoves, and she says she feels safer. In fact, she uses so little wood that she’s able to grow most of what she needs in her own yard.

Nambuli smiles as she lifts a cover made of banana leaves off a pot on her new stove. Inside there’s rice and sweet potatoes, which she and her family have just eaten for lunch. The food is hot, the air inside her home is clean, and she didn’t have to venture into the forest.

It was a mock funeral at which protesters said they were mourning the “death of evidence.” They charged Prime Minister Stephen Harper with muzzling government scientists and slashing environmental research. [Hear more about the shifting politics of science and environmental protection in Canada in this interview with reporter Peter O’Neil of the Vancouver Sun.]

One of the triggers of Tuesday’s protest was a high-profile fight over an unlikely place – a little-known research facility deep in the Canadian forest. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro of our partner program NOVA went there and filed this story.

John Shearer points out Lake 646 -- currently part of a climate change study -- in the Experimental Lakes Area. Shearer worked in the ELA for almost 40 years. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

The “restricted area” is an outdoor laboratory where Shearer worked for almost 40 years. He retired recently as the senior biologist and operations manager at this government facility. It’s called the Experimental Lakes Area.

“There are probably close to a thousand lakes within a twenty-mile radius of where we’re standing now,” he says after stepping from the car.

Scientists know these lakes incredibly well. They’ve all been numbered. Shearer points to Lake 626, just beyond a culvert. Down the road and through the trees is Lake 442.

These lakes have been the sites of numerous experiments. In fact, some of the most influential environmental research in recent decades has been done in the Experimental Lakes Area.

Much of what we know about the effects of acid rain comes from experiments here. Scientists slowly poured acid into one of the lakes and watched what happened.

Another study showed that adding phosphorus to lakes triggers massive blooms of algae. That led to a ban on phosphates in detergents in the US and Canada. (Shearer is quick to add that researchers always clean up the lakes once an experiment is finished.)

A sea curtain divided Lake 226 into two basins in 1973. Scientists added extra phosphorous to one side (the lower half in this image), which resulted in a massive bloom of algae. This experiment led to the ban on phosphates in detergents in the US and Canada. (Photo: Fisheries and Oceans Canada)

But after more than four decades, this unique outdoor laboratory may soon shut down. The Canadian government announced recently that it would cease operating the facility as of next spring.

Shearer says that when he heard the news, he was astonished. “It’s hard to believe that any facility that has led the world in freshwater research could not be important to the federal government of Canada, [which] has so much freshwater within its boundaries.”

Many scientists are angry about the impending closure, but those most directly involved can’t talk about it publicly. Government scientists have been instructed not to speak with the media, and non-government scientists have been threatened with the loss of their research permits if they escort a journalist here.

Shearer agreed to take me to the facility because he’s retired; he has nothing to lose. But others say they have a lot to lose if the Experimental Lakes Area shuts down.

“There will be no jobs for me as a scientist,” says Diane Orihel, a University of Alberta graduate student who studies water pollution. “I’m going to leave the country.”

Orihel has founded a coalition of scientists and citizens who are lobbying to save the Experimental Lakes Area. She says her team has gathered 17,000 Canadian signatures.

Orihel believes the planned closing of the Experimental Lakes Area is part of a larger shift in her government’s attitude toward science.

“I think that the government is shutting down ELA because it does not want the information that ELA generates,” she says. “It gets in the way of economic development.”

As Orihel sees it, the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is intent on rolling back environmental protection and research while it promotes the extraction of natural resources, particularly Canada’s oil sands.

For its part, the government says its decision to close the ELA was simply a matter of finances. Canada is hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, and the facility was one of a number of programs sacrificed as a deficit-reducing measure. Operating the ELA costs about $2 million a year.

“This is not a decision that reflects on the quality of the science that has been done,” says Dave Gillis of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, one of the agencies that operate the ELA.

In fact, he says, the ELA may yet remain open. The government is hoping another institution – perhaps a university – will take over operations.

“Our energies right now are focused on identifying an alternate operator for the ELA site,” he says, “so that that type of research can be conducted on into the future under new management.”

But critics find this plan vague and unrealistic. No institution has stepped forward, and the expected closure is now less than nine months away.

A map showing the Experimental Lakes Area. The lakes colored in dark blue are the ones used for experimentation. (Photo: Ari Daniel Shapiro)

“The Experimental Lakes Area is the only place where you can do that kind of work,” says Metcalfe. “It’s invaluable.”

It’s not only the looming closure of the Experimental Lakes Area that has scientists frustrated.

The government has decided to stop funding Canada’s northernmost research lab, the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), which has been used to study ozone loss over the Arctic. As a result, the lab has had to shut down year-round operations.

Last month, the Canadian Parliament passed a law that scaled back environmental assessments and the protection of endangered species.

All of this is what led to yesterday’s protest in Ottawa, where hundreds of scientists gathered.

“I know that most of you would much rather be in your labs doing what you do best, but we’re at a critical point in Canadian history,” said Katie Gibbs, a PhD student and one of the organizers of the protest, who addressed the crowd. “If we don’t stand up for science, nobody will.”

The government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a written statement yesterday. It said: “While the government is returning to a balanced budget, science, technology and innovation remain a strong priority.”

This story was originally broadcast in a sequence followed by an interview with Peter O’Neil of the Vancouver Sun. More on that story here: Government vs Greens in Canada