“This is a tape player, but we’ve got CD players, we’ve got it on mp3s,” says Andreas Pitsillides, who oversees crime operations at the Dhekelia military base on Cyprus’ southeastern coast.

Pitsillides says the recordings were seized from poachers, who play them to lure the birds into nets, more than a hundred at a time.

“The poachers remove the birds, they kill it, they remove the feathers, and then they sell them by the dozen,” Pitsillides says.

Pitsillides says a dozen blackcaps went for more than $80 last year. They’re sold to restaurants, boiled, and eaten as a delicacy called ambelopoulia.

For perhaps millions of songbirds migrating between Europe and North Africa, the illegal bird trapping here in Cyprus is the bitter end to a journey already fraught with peril, from severe weather, predation and fatigue to degraded and disappearing habitat.

Just last year, Pitsillides and his team confiscated a heap of trapping equipment, including 600 giant nets, 13 shotguns, and more than two miles of loudspeaker cables.

A few miles from the parking lot, police officer Panikos Mihael takes a visitor to a trapping site, where acacia trees have been planted to attract blackcaps. Mihael is usually on traffic duty. But when birds are migrating, he’s part of an all-hands-on-deck anti-poaching detail.

Mihael and his team hike out here in the middle of the night to sneak up on the poachers.

“They may see us either through spotters or if we make some noise because usually they work in groups,” Mihael says.

There’s no typical poacher, he adds. He’s seen men, women, kids, even the elderly. Forty-three people were arrested last year, each facing up to three years in jail and a $100,000 fine, yet the problem persists.

“Whatever you do, it’s never enough. I don’t think it’s a problem that can be solved very easily,” Mihael says.

Not long ago, it looked like the problem was being solved. Back in the 1990s, an estimated 10 million birds were trapped and killed here each year, according to the NGO Birdlife Cyprus.

That number fell to around one million a year in the early 2000s, when Cyprus was trying to join the European Union, which bans bird trapping.

“There was a real political pressure, and that’s where we saw the real sea change,” says Martin Hellicar, campaigns manager for Birdlife Cyprus. He says the pressure didn’t last.

“Cyprus is now in the European Union, so there’s been a relaxation.”

Hellicar estimates catch numbers climbed back to more than two million birds in 2010.

The nets aren’t the only culprit. Some poachers use another illegal tool called limesticks — twigs coated with sticky sap.

“If a bird gets caught on a limestick, it struggles, it often ends up hanging upside down, and the only relief comes when the trapper comes along and slits its throat,” Hellicar says.

But others see limesticks as an important part of Cypriot culture.

“This tradition from my father and grandfather,” says Tavro Nufidu runs a shooting club in southeastern Cyprus.

Nufidu says the limestick tradition dates back centuries, and he’s teaching his four boys how to hunt with limesticks. He figures he catches between 500 and 600 blackcaps in a season.

Limestick supporters also dispute charges that it’s cruel.

“The bird doesn’t stay on the limestick for hours and suffer – not more than three, four minutes,” says Antonis Kakoulis, president of the Cyprus Hunting Federation. “The trapper is there to catch it immediately.”

Kakoulis also dismisses concerns that limesticks kill millions of birds a year.

“When we hear this, we laugh.”

Kakoulis does condemn blackcap netting. But he says people should be allowed to use a few dozen limesticks on their own property.

However, conservationists argue against both methods. They also worry that it’s not just blackcaps that are dying. More than 100 types of birds get caught in the traps; sometimes non-blackcaps can amount to two thirds of the catch. And while the overall blackcap population is still healthy, some of the other casualties are members of endangered species.

That’s part of the reason delegates to a recent conference on illegal bird killing held in Cyprus voted to support a zero-tolerance approach. Boris Barov, a conservation manager with Birdlife Europe, says that means a wider crackdown.

“The most important thing they should do is to actually close down all those restaurants which serve illegally trapped birds and their owners fined,” Barov says. “That will be the only way to reduce the demand.”

That’s a tall order. Enforcement of anti-poaching laws can get people upset.

It’s the Mediterranean mentality, says Pantelis Hadjigerou, Cyprus’s Director of Game and Fauna. The guy who used to have this position was killed by a bomb in 1999. So Hadjigerou proceeds cautiously. Still, he says his agency is very active.

“We have taken in the last few years more than a thousand cases to court,” Hadjigerou says.

And yet, untold numbers of birds continue to die in Cyprus every year.

It isn’t migration season now, so the trees and fields of southeastern Cyprus are mostly quiet. But what happens with bird trapping here might determine whether that silence becomes permanent.

Elena Gonzalez -- a geneticist at the Natural History Museum in Madrid -- is finding ways to tell different populations of fish apart. (Photo: FishPopTrace)

Inspector Felicísimo Perez Fraile makes sure that nothing is being sold here that shouldn’t be, like undersized fish or endangered species. When a fish comes in all chopped up with no head, scales or fins, it can be hard to know what he’s looking at, but he can confirm what kind of fish it is by sending a sample off to the lab.

But is there any way to tell where the fish comes from – which sea? He shakes his head. For now, he says, that’s impossible.

It’s an important question because certain species are overfished in some places and sustainably caught in others. It’s hard for regulators to protect endangered populations when labels can be faked and the fish look the same.

So, in 2008, the European Union launched a program called FishPopTrace, which looks to science for an answer.

The 15 FishPopTrace labs are spread across Europe. One of them is just on the other side of town, at the Complutense University of Madrid.

The spots on this image are fish proteins visualized using a laboratory technique. (Photo: Elena Gonzalez)

Elena Gonzalez, a geneticist who did her PhD research at the university, has extracted proteins from the livers, brains, muscles and hearts of four commercial fish species found in European waters: hake, cod, sole and herring.

Gonzalez shows me the results of her research on a computer screen. A dark square is filled with glowing lights.

“It’s like stars in the sky,” she explains, describing the image. “It’s full of spots of different colors – green and yellow and red.”

Those spots represent fish proteins, visualized using a laboratory technique. The proteins come from the brains of two different hake – one from the Bay of Biscay, to the north of Spain, and one from the Mediterranean, to the south. A red or green spot means that one fish brain has more of a particular protein than the other.

So with just a glance, it’s possible to see that these two hake, although they belong to the same species, have different amounts of proteins depending on where they live, depending on which population they belong to.

These tools “are now able to identify the origin of a given fish,” says Complutense University biologist José Bautista.

Other labs in the FishPopTrace program developed additional forensic techniques to tell fish populations apart. Some used very small differences in DNA. Others looked at the chemistry and shape of ear bones.

The result is an array of techniques that can distinguish one population of fish from another – sustainably harvested fish from illegally caught fish.

Jann Martinsohn, a scientist with the European Commission’s Maritime Affairs Unit, says the research phase of FishPopTrace, which ended this summer, was just the first step.

“What we really aimed at is to develop tools which can readily be taken up to fight and support the fight against illegal fishing, which has a rather significant dimension worldwide,” he says.

Martinson says the next step is to develop strict guidelines for laboratories, so the techniques can be used in criminal investigations. He hopes that by integrating science and enforcement, it will be possible to reduce the illegal fishing of endangered populations of fish.

Lars Olave Lie, manager of the Lie Group Fishing Company in Norway, says he supports this forensic approach to ensuring that all fishermen follow the rules.

“You can lie about the paper label on the package. That can be changed,” he says. “But you can’t lie about the genetic testing.”

Lie’s family has been fishing the waters off Norway for 120 years. He says he’s in favor of whatever can be done to keep the fishery healthy, so his family can stay in the business for the next 120 years.

By Ari Daniel Shapiro

Kenichi Kojima complains that Japan’s young people seem to have lost their interest in science.

A retired physicist who used to work at Yokohama City University, Kojima points to his daughter, now in her thirties, who was good at math in school. He had hoped she would follow in his footsteps.

“I said to her, ‘You should go [into] science or engineering field,’” he recalled. “But she don’t like such a way.”

It is a complaint heard across Japan these days. Fewer and fewer young people are choosing careers in science, math, and engineering.

This phenomenon even has a name: rika banare. It means a turning away from science.

Yoshio Watanabe, a professor of electrical engineering at Kanagawa University, calls rika banare “a very, very big problem” for Japan, a country that built its economy on technological prowess.

Watanabe, who has written about the causes of rika banare, blames a relaxed education policy in the 1970s that meant fewer math and science requirements.

He also points to Japan’s economic collapse in the 1990s that caused many companies to outsource their research, development, and engineering jobs.

Test scores falling

Japanese 15-year-olds still perform well on international science and math tests, but not as well as they used to. At one time, they ranked first or second in the world, but by 2009, they had slipped to fifth place in science and ninth in math.

Watanabe said the quality of his engineering students has steadily declined over the last 20 years. “The students nowadays don’t want to think [for themselves],” he said.

Some in Japan are now trying to get young people reengaged in science. One effort is a new school, opened in 2009, called Yokohama Science Frontier High School.

The school has top-notch faculty, access to real-world scientists, and lab facilities rivaling some universities. Up on the roof there is an astronomical observatory at one end and a small honeybee colony at the other.

“Science is fun,” said sophomore Ryo Suzumoto, standing beside the apiary. “If students understood how wonderful science is, they’d study it, no matter how demanding it is.”

Spirit to save the world

That is the point of Yokohama Science Frontier High School – to cultivate scientific ability and passion. The school seeks to graduate students with “the spirit and strength to save the world.”

Some scientists hope the high school will serve as a model for districts throughout Japan, but it is not clear whether other communities can afford such a high-tech and high cost school.

Sophomore Lisa Tanaka said she loves being at the high school, but she has one complaint – only 25 percent of the students are female. “[The] science world needs more girls,” she said.

Junior Taketoshi Watanabe said he’s glad to be at a school that treats science seriously. He said that wasn’t the case at his elementary school, where he had to teach himself science by reading books and surfing the Web.

Yokohama Science Frontier High School is reaching out to today’s elementary students to make sure they get engaged in science too. Several times a year, young children visit the high school to tour the laboratories and classrooms and to meet the students.

“Our students, they look really cool,” said high school principal Takeshi Miyazaki. “So little children get motivated for studying science.”

• More about Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro
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The wildcat of Scotland (Photo: Peter Cairns)

Some of the world’s most endangered wildlife are obscure species, haunting far-flung corners of the planet, but other endangered creatures are much more familiar. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro recently traveled to Scotland, which is the last refuge of a small wild cat that has prowled parts of Great Britain since the last ice age. (Photo: Peter Cairns) Download MP3

Ari Daniel Shapiro produces the podcast One Species at a Time for the Encyclopedia of Life with Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• Highland Wildlife Park
• Cairngorms National Park
• Cairngorms Wildcat Project
• Scottish Wildcat Association

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: Some of the world’s most endangered wildlife are obscure species, in far-flung corners of the planet. Other endangered creatures are more familiar. One on them lives in the Highlands of Scotland. It’s a small wildcat that used to prowl far and wide throughout Britain. Ari Daniel Shapiro sent us this profile of the creature and the efforts to save it.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO:  Listen closely. It sounds like a housecat. And when you look up and see it crouched above you on a catwalk here at Scotland’s Highland Wildlife Park, you’d be forgiven for thinking it is a housecat. Just an especially fluffy and wary one. So what’s it doing at a wildlife park?

DOUGLAS RICHARDSON:  You really need to look at them a bit closer.

SHAPIRO: Because when you do, says the park’s animal collection manager Douglas Richardson, you’ll see a few telling differences.

RICHARDSON: That strong black banding on the tail. When a domestic cat gets annoyed and its tail fluffs out, Scottish wildcat, their tails are permanently like that. So that is the real giveaway.

SHAPIRO: The giveaway that you’re looking at a Scottish wildcat, an ancient resident of Great Britain that was here long before the domestic housecat, and even humans. I came here to see the wildcat because, well, they’re actually hard to find in the wild. The cats used to roam the entire island, but researchers believe there are now fewer than 400 left.

DAVID HETHERINGTON: We’ve had wildcats in Britain for about 9,000 years. But of course, the wildcat in the last few hundred years has faced quite a number of challenges.

SHAPIRO: David Hetherington is the manager of the Cairngorms Wildcat Project.

HETHERINGTON: There’s been a great deal of deforestation historically. Then there was very intense persecution so that actually by 1860, the wildcat existed only in the Scottish Highlands, and of course that’s the most wild, and most remote, most thinly populated part of Britain.

SHAPIRO: The Highland Wildlife Park sits on the edge of Scotland’s huge Cairngorms National Park. The park and the surrounding landscape are filled with gently flowing streams, rolling hills, and deep stands of pine. They’re one of the only places where the wildcats still roam free. But even researchers like Hetherington have trouble finding them.

HETHERINGTON:  Here’s hoping that we do actually get some wildcat photographs.

SHAPIRO: Hetherington uses camouflaged cameras to try to take photos of wildcats. He opens one of them and clicks through the images.

HETHERINGTON: Yeah, there’s a soay sheep.

SHAPIRO: The cameras are motion-activated, so other creatures often end up in the frame.

HETHERINGTON: There’s a roe deer and what appears to be a badger. So yet again, the Scottish wildcat eludes us today.

SHAPIRO: But the wildcat does occasionally pose for a cameo.

HETHERINGTON: We’ve certainly had it confirmed that we do have pure wildcats in the national park.

SHAPIRO: But there’s a problem. Turns out there are other cats here as well. Not Scottish wildcats, but domestic cats that have gone wild in Scotland. Confused? You’re not alone.

HETHERINGTON:  We also can tell from the photographs that we’ve got hybrids.

SHAPIRO: You see, Scottish wildcats and domesticated cats are closely enough related that sometimes even they can’t tell the difference. They can interbreed. And that’s the biggest threat to the Scottish wildcats today.

HETHERINGTON: Over time, what you see is fewer and fewer pure wildcats, and more and more hybrids, which of course are less well adapted to the environment.

SHAPIRO: Hetherington’s trying to get the local population of feral domestic cats under control. He’s also pushing for stronger legal protection of the true wild cats. And he’s trying to change cultural attitudes here. He and his colleagues have begun a PR campaign to rebrand the Scottish wildcat as the Highland tiger.

HETHERINGTON: It’s very much an animal of the Highlands. It’s one of us. It’s a tough animal living in a tough landscape, just like these Highlanders themselves. It’s not like some big southern pussycat that you might get elsewhere in the UK.

SHAPIRO: The wildcats are also an important part of the local ecosystem. They’re one of just a few remaining natural predators in the Highlands and they help keep the population of small mammals in check. You’ll see that conservation message on signs throughout the Highland Wildlife Park. Today, the furry wildcats here have drawn the attention of a group of schoolchildren in bright jackets.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s really hard to find a real wildcat, just like hanging around in the forest and all that. And it’s really easy to see them in like a zoo.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, cats are kind of like my favorite animal. And I like the wild, so putting them both together is just my favorite.

SHAPIRO:  It’s that uncanny combination of wild yet familiar that helps people here relate to the Scottish wildcat, and that supporters are hoping might preserve them in the end. Who wants there to be more wildcats in the wild and not just in captivity?

MALE SPEAKERS: Me, me, me, me…

SHAPIRO: For The World, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro, Cairngorms National Park, Scotland.

MULLINS: Ari’s story was produced with the help of the Encyclopedia of Life.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
• Photos: See images from the ESRF
• Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the AMNH

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: The dormouse might be faced with extinction, but in the movie Jurassic Park, you may recall that scientists brought an extinct creature back from the dead. Dinosaurs were re-created by extracting blood from a mosquito trapped in amber. That was, of course, fiction, but scientists have learned a lot about prehistoric life by studying insects in amber. And they’re learning even more, thanks to a new technique devised by researchers in France. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro has the story.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO:  In jewelry, amber’s beautiful. It’s made up of transparent polished golden orbs. But paleontologists who dig this stuff up will tell you most amber doesn’t look like that.

DAVID GRIMALDI:  This is pretty much what it looks like when it comes out of the ground.

SHAPIRO: That’s David Grimaldi. He’s a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Grimaldi opens a plastic bag containing a couple dozen chunks of amber. The amber is cloudy.

GRIMALDI: Most of the amber when it’s excavated is not beautifully clear and you can’t see through it very well. And it’s very frustrating to work with this stuff.

SHAPIRO: Frustrating because amber can contain hidden treasures. You see amber is fossilized resin that oozed from trees millions of years ago. And sometimes that resin captured insects before it hardened. But if you can’t gaze though the amber, then it’s hard to know where an insect might be. Grimaldi says one way of getting ‘round this difficulty is to actually slice into a piece of amber using a diamond saw. Naturally, this approach isn’t without risk.

GRIMALDI: So, when you’re doing this trimming, you could be cutting into an insect.

SHAPIRO: And you could end up destroying a rare sample. Now, paleontologists can look inside amber without damaging insects by using CT scans, but those images aren’t very detailed. Which is way scientists are excited about a new technique developed in Grenoble, France.

CARMEN [PH] SORIANO: I’m always saying that we are able to see the [INDISCERNIBLE] with a new kind of glasses, but we never used before.

SHAPIRO:  Carmen [PH] Soriano is part of the team that’s using those new glasses. She’s a paleontologist and she works at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. That’s a particle accelerator mostly used to study atoms and molecules. The Synchrotron is a half mile enclosed track. It’s packed with magnets to propel electrons at close to the speed of light. One by-product is high-powered x-rays. X-rays that can be used to study fossils, including amber, noninvasively and in exquisite detail. Paul Tafforeau is a paleontologist here as well. He opens his password-protected cabinet and pulls out a piece of amber. It’s opaque, but Tafforeau says it conceals a trove of prehistoric insects.

PAUL TAFFOREAU: She has more than 500 insects [INDISCERNIBLE], in that. [INDISCERNIBLE] without the Synchrotron.

SHAPIRO: But with the Synchrotron, that swarm of insects becomes very visible. Tafforeau uses the x-rays to create 3-D computer renderings of the insects all the way down to their wing veins and leg hairs. He can then create physical models of the insects. Tafforeau’s got an assortment of these models. He calls them 3-D prints. They’re gold and silver painted bugs. Tafforeau holds up a gilded beetle the size of a shoe.

TAFFOREAU: He’s not natural size. It is a giant beetle. The print is giant, but the original one is just 4 millimeters. So it gives you an idea of the resolution of details we can see.

SHAPIRO: And Carmen Soriano is peering even deeper into these insects. Past the hard outer body shell and into their stomachs. She’s using the Synchrotron Radiation to see what the bugs ate.

SORIANO: We find pollen, we found spores, we found different parts of the plants inside these insects. That means that we know what was the diet of some insects. This is great.

SHAPIRO: Soriano is piecing together an ancient ecology. How insects and plants evolved together during a crucial moment in Earth’s history, when flowering plants first emerged on our planet. This work is attracting collaborators from all over the world, including David Grimaldi from the American Museum of Natural History.

GRIMALDI: It’s brought the observation of insects and amber to a whole new level. You can see features that you hadn’t know existed.

SHAPIRO:  Grimaldi’s already worked with the team in France to study moths and ants in amber. And next up, termites. For The World, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Tales of Things
• Tales of Things and Electronic Memory (TOTeM)
• More on Chris Speed
• Fields: places, memories, people

Listen to the story with each ‘thing’ (photos: Tales of Things)

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Considering how much we love to shop, we generally know little about exactly what it is we buy. That’s even more true of things we purchase second-hand. But think about it. Everything you buy at, say, the Salvation Army or Goodwill has at least one previous owner and some history to go along with it. Ari Daniel Shapiro tells us about one store manager in Britain who turned the history of used items into a selling point.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO:  Oxfam is an organization committed to fighting poverty and injustice in the world. They raise money for their cause at charity shops all over the UK. In fact, there’s a big Oxfam shop in Manchester, England. It’s run by Emma Cooney.

EMMA COONEY:  Everything we sell is second-hand. I mean, everybody knows that people have worn the clothes before or used the items. Usually I guess people can use their imaginations or they might choose not to think about it at all. But I think it’s quite nice to know that things have had a life before and that you’re carrying them on. It all has memories.

SHAPIRO: Back in May, those memories, they came to life. Cooney was approached by Chris Speed, a digital artist at the Edinburgh College of Art.

CHRIS SPEED: They were great actually, and they, they let us keep a research assistant in the store for a week or two to ask people who came in and dropped objects off to simply tell a story into a microphone about what the object is, and where it’s come from, what it meant to them.

SHAPIRO: Stories like these.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I’ve donated this pink stripy jumper because I had it last year and I wore it to a barbecue. I met a boy at the barbecue and he was my boyfriend for a few months but we’re not together anymore so I thought I’d donate it.

MALE SPEAKER: I got given this piggy bank by one of my good friends, Tommy. It saved the money I spend on drink. We used to call him a pig at school, not ‘cause of his weight or anything, just ‘cause he has a snout.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I became friendly with the lady who owned the shop and she very kindly gave me the most delicious cup of hot chocolate. And I always associate hot chocolate with this handbag.

SHAPIRO: Each story was paired with its object in the Oxfam store using a couple different tags. One was a 2D bar code that shoppers could scan with their phones, and listen to the story in a rather intimate way. The other was a tiny radio frequency tag that, when tapped with a special remote control, would send the story over the loudspeakers in the store. Digital artist Chris Speed.

SPEED: It was a very public story as though suddenly someone touched an object and a whole store was woken up by this tale about where these objects had come from. What was amazing was that people wanted the damn objects. You could see them holding almost something as though it was in someone’s living room, and it changed the entire atmosphere of the shop. Everyone was fascinated, and they really didn’t want to let go of the stories, which meant they bought them. So as fast as we could get stories in, they were going out of the store like hotcakes.

SHAPIRO: Shoppers weren’t just browsing objects. They were browsing memories. Emma Cooney of Oxfam Manchester was delighted.

COONEY: This was just a kind of concrete way of showing that everything that we sell has a story. There was a really nice buzz in the shop and there were [INDISCERNIBLE] outside and we brought people into the shop that might otherwise not have come in, and we made a little bit more money than we normally would.

SHAPIRO: What took place at Oxfam was a real-world application of something called the Internet of Things, where the countless objects we interact with all the time, things like toasters, clothing, stickers, books…

SPEED:  Watches, things on mantelpieces, anything.

SHAPIRO: …are used to create an online catalog where each of these objects gets a unique tag, whether a 2D bar code or one of those tiny radio frequency tags.

SPEED: If we tag things with an individual code, then maybe you can find out where it was bought from, and where it ended up, and perhaps where it passed in between. The old adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss, well, we’re kind of hoping it does. Every time the object gets passed from one party to a next, it gains a bit.

SHAPIRO: Manufacturers are interested in this kind of thing to track their products. But Speed appreciates the possibilities of making visible the unseen connections between objects and people, tracking these relationships through time and space. It goes back to the project at Oxfam.

SPEED: Charity shops are all about slowing down the throw-away culture. But perhaps if we can foster more value, add more value, in artifacts, then actually it might slow it down even more.

SHAPIRO: Chris Speed’s using the Internet where information zips around to get us to slow down, if only for a moment, to eye that handbag or teddy bear right there in front of us. For The World, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro, Edinburgh.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Ari Daniel Shapiro produces the podcast One Species at a Time for the Encyclopedia of Life with Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
(Audio available after 5PM Eastern)

• Al-Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve
• René Mouawad Foundation Plant Nursery
• Encyclopedia of Life

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

KATY CLARK: Even if you’ve never been to Lebanon, you’ve probably heard of the country’s cedar trees. The cedar is the symbol of Lebanon. It’s even emblazoned on the flag. The trees embody strength and longevity since they can live for thousands of years. But forces both very old and very new are threatening Lebanon cedars. Ari Daniel Shapiro has our story.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO:  Lebanon today is a land of traffic jams, bustling shops and apartment blocks climbing slopes once covered by cedar trees. But stands of cedars can still be found if you know where to look.

NIZAR HANI:  Look at this. I would like to have a photo. I took this photo a hundred times before.

SHAPIRO: Nizar Hani stops his car by one of his favorite cedars. The tree is in the Shouf Cedar Reserve in the center of Lebanon. It’s about 25 feet high with a thick trunk and stout limbs that thrust outward. The cedar of Lebanon is an icon in this part of the world and for thousands of years, Hani says, its fragrant wood has been highly prized far and wide.

HANI: Everyone was cutting the cedar trees and transfer the wood through the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, to Egypt, to everywhere. It was a huge work. A long, long, long time ago the area of the cedar forest was 500,000 hectares. Imagine.

SHAPIRO: That’s about half the size of modern day Lebanon. But all of that logging came at a great cost. Today, less than 1% of Lebanon’s original cedar forest remains. Much of that forest is in this reserve, where Hani is the scientific coordinator. It’s a quiet green oasis covering 5% of the country’s area and containing a quarter of its remaining cedars.

ARABIC SPEAKING

SHAPIRO: [PH] Hassam Hanim is a guide here.

ARABIC SPEAKING

SHAPIRO: The cedar is not just a slogan for the Lebanese people, Hanim says. It’s our father, our mother, our sister, our brother and our friend. These ties run deep into the past. The cedars of Lebanon are described in the 8,000-year-old Gilgamesh epic and are oftened mentioned in the Bible. But preserving them isn’t just about saving Lebanon’s cultural heritage. Just below Nizar Hani’s feet as he walks through the reserve is a massive watershed. It’s protected in part by the forest.

HANI:  This is the importance of this reserve. Not to just to protect the cedar trees and to protect the birds and whatever, it’s to protect our life. It’s to protect our drinking water.

SHAPIRO: The Lebanese government officially recognizes the value of the cedars. Most of the remaining trees grow on public land where cutting is prohibited. But Nizar Hani believes the government should do more to protect the country’s cedars. Especially with a new menace threatening them. Hani picks up a small brown cedar cone.

HANI: It’s a very, very dry cone. This cone, it will not continue. Now we’re facing a new challenge which is the climate change.

SHAPIRO: Climate change poses many problems. Dry cones, more attacks from insects and a growing risk of forest fires. Then there’s what Hani says may be the biggest problem.

HANI: The life cycle of the cedar seed, they need to be under snow for two months.

SHAPIRO: It’s that winter weather that triggers germination. But warmer temperatures these days mean a shorter winter and fewer saplings. So it’s not enough to just protect the cedars in a reserve like this. Now new trees have to be cradled through the first years of their life. This refrigerated warehouse in the town of Zgharta is run by a local NGO. [PH] Carlos Nakkad is an agricultural engineer.

CARLOS NAKKAD: We are going now to the [INDISCERNIBLE] storage room in order to show you where I put the container of the seeds of cedars.

SHAPIRO: A heavy metal door locks out the summer heat. To produce saplings, Nakkad first has to chill the cedar seeds here for 40 days. The cavernous warehouse smells sweet from the apples he stores in it much of the year. After the seeds germinate, the trees grow at a nearby nursery where Nakkad tends to rows of young cedars. He sells them at cost to environmental clubs, boy and girls scouts, and local governments. More than 5,000 of his trees are planted each year. But planting cedars is only the beginning for Nakkad.

NAKKAD:  I don’t want a man to [INDISCERNIBLE] one tree and take off three others. Or plant them and not irrigated. The big challenge is to [SOUNDS LIKE] concern those trees.

SHAPIRO: Nakkad’s trying to cultivate a broader culture of stewardship for trees and the land in general. It’s tough work in a country without wide environmental consciousness.

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SHAPIRO: Hassam Hanim, the guide at the Shouf Cedar Reserve, faces a similar challenge. He often has to explain why many potentially destructive activities are banned in the reserve.

ARABIC SPEAKING

SHAPIRO: We face a lot of difficulties, Hanim says, but we started teaching people. We told them this reserve is being protected not from you, but for you. Hanim and his colleagues run educational programs and help local residents produce sustainable forest products. He says the efforts are starting to take root among local residents.

ARABIC SPEAKING

SHAPIRO: We preserve what we love, Hanim says. We love what we understand. We understand what we learn. And, Hanim says, for the endangered cedars of Lebanon, that learning can’t happen too quickly. For The World, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro, Chouf, Lebanon.

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DAVID BARON: Europe, and the United States, are where most advances in cloning and stem cells have taken place. But another country is quickly becoming a major player in the field. That’s China. As reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro explains, China’s efforts are starting to get some attention.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO:  If you want evidence of China’s rising status in stem cell research, look no farther than the State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Biology in Beijing.

ZHOU QI:  This is the main place for my laboratory.

SHAPIRO: That’s Professor Zhou Qi. His lab’s on the second floor of a new building just down the street from Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium. The facility’s teeming with Chinese biologists who’ve spent time abroad. Zhou used to do stem cell research in France, but he came back to China seven years ago.

QI: Now many, many people go back to China to work because the funding, the collaboration really become better than before.

SHAPIRO: And the return of Chinese scientists has begun to pay off in discoveries, including for Zhou. Now around the world, embryonic stem cells have sparked a lot of excitement. Scientists may someday use them to make replacement body parts and tissues to cure diseases and treat injuries. But the field’s also generated controversy because these cells have to be harvested from embryos. Zhou Qi wanted to sidestep the ethical concerns. Instead of taking stem cells from embryos, he wanted to make stem cells from bits of skin. Zhou did the experiment in mice, and it worked. His team took a skin cell from an adult mouse and converted it into a stem cell. They proved it could function just like an embryonic stem cell because they used it to grow an entire new mouse. Zhou’s graduate student Tong Man says when this mouse was born, it was a big day for the lab, and the field.

TONG MAN: We just, “Wow, wow,” you know? That’s the first one all around the world. During that time we know that there is no one, there is nobody could make this mouse.

SHAPIRO: Well, actually, there was someone who did essentially the same experiment and created a mouse from a skin cell. His name is Gao Shaorong.

GAO SHAORONG: When the first mouse was born, we know we made history, actually, in this field.

SHAPIRO: Gao also works in Beijing. He’s at the National Institute of Biological Sciences, just across town from Zhou Qi.

SHAORONG:  Our paper and his paper were published online the same day. Actually, I remember the exact date. July 23rd, 2009.

SHAPIRO: The fact that these two Chinese labs produced the same important finding and published on the same day in two high-impact science journals says a lot about the state of stem cell science in China today and the global competitiveness of the researchers.

DOMINIQUE MCMAHON: Chinese researchers are gaining traction in this field. Their publication numbers have gone way up, and they certainly have made some important discoveries in the field.

SHAPIRO: Dominique McMahon is a global health researcher at the University of Toronto who’s written about stem cell research in China. She says China now ranks fifth in the world in the number of stem cell studies published in peer-reviewed journals. But McMahon says the country still has a poor reputation among some Western scientists. That’s because in the past, much of China’s work with stem cells occurred in poorly regulated clinics that tested questionable therapies directly on patients.

MCMAHON: And so a lot of the researchers that I’ve spoken to in the West think these Chinese researchers are just injecting patients with stem cells, and not going through traditional scientific rigorous techniques. But that’s just not true.

SHAPIRO: China’s growing competitiveness in stem cell science is certainly evident to the Chinese. Tao Cheng works half the year at the University of Pittsburgh and the rest of the time as Science Director at China’s Institute of Hematology outside Beijing. He says it’s no surprise why China’s become such a major player.

TAO CHENG: The government has invested so much money for stem cell research, I think even more dramatically than other field.

SHAPIRO: That money from the Chinese government is funding research projects, scientist salaries, and new labs and clinics. As for the two Beijing labs that reported the same finding on the same day last year, they’re still working hard, this time to turn their basic research in mice into therapies for humans. Gao Shaorong is working on a blood disorder called beta thalassemia.  Zhou Qi hopes to develop a therapy for Parkinson’s disease. For The World, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro, Beijing.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Click on the image at right to view more of Ari’s photos from Indonesia.