Category: Science & Tech

What Deckelmann means by “sustainability” is a pressing concern in the open-source space more broadly. When complex services or entire platforms like Wikipedia depend on the time and labor of volunteers, contributors may not get the support they need to keep going—and keep those projects afloat. Building sustainable pathways for the people who make the internet has been Deckelmann’s personal passion for years. In addition to working as an engineering and product leader at places like Intel and Mozilla and contributing to open-source projects herself, she has founded, run, and advised multiple organizations and conferences that support open-source communities and open doors for contributors from underrepresented groups. “She has always put the community first, even when the community is full of jerks making life unnecessarily hard,” says Valerie Aurora, who cofounded the Ada Initiative—a former nonprofit supporting women in open-source technology that had brought Deckelmann into its board of directors and advisory board. 

Addressing both a community’s needs and an organization’s priorities can be a challenging balancing act—one that is at the core of open-source philosophy. At the Wikimedia Foundation, everything from the product’s long-term direction to details on its very first redesign in decades is open for public feedback from Wikipedia’s enormous and vocal community. 

Today Deckelmann sees a newer sustainability problem in AI development: the predominant method for training models is to pull content from sites like Wikipedia, often generated by open-source creators without compensation or even, sometimes, awareness of how their work will be used. “If people stop being motivated to [contribute content online],” she warns, “either because they think that these models are not giving anything back or because they’re creating a lot of value for a very small number of people—then that’s not sustainable.” At Wikipedia, Deckelmann’s internal AI strategy revolves around supporting contributors with the technology rather than short-circuiting them. The machine-learning and product teams are working on launching new features that, for example, automate summaries of verbose debates on a wiki’s “Talk” pages (where back-and-forth discussions can go back as far as 20 years) or suggest related links when editors are updating pages. “We’re looking at new ways that we can save volunteers lots of time by summarizing text, detecting vandalism, or responding to different kinds of threats,” she says.

But the product and engineering teams are also preparing for a potential future where Wikipedia may need to meet its readers elsewhere online, given current trends. While Wikipedia’s traffic didn’t shift significantly during ChatGPT’s meteoric rise, the site has seen a general decline in visitors over the last decade as a result of Google’s ongoing search updates and generational changes in online behavior. In July 2023, as part of a project to explore how the Wikimedia Foundation could offer its knowledge base as a service to other platforms, Deckelmann’s team launched an AI experiment: a plug-in for ChatGPT’s platform that allows the chatbot to use and summarize Wikipedia’s most up-to-date information to answer a user’s query. The results of that experiment are still being analyzed, but Deckelmann says it’s far from clear how and even if users may want to interact with Wikipedia off the platform. Meanwhile, in February she convened leaders from open-source technology, research, academia, and industry to discuss ways to collaborate and coordinate on addressing the big, thorny questions raised by AI. It’s the first of multiple meetings that Deckelmann hopes will push forward the conversation around sustainability. 

Deckelmann’s product approach is careful and considered—and that’s by design. In contrast to so much of the tech industry’s mad dash to capitalize on the AI hype, her goal is to bring Wikipedia forward to meet the moment, while supporting the complex human ecosystem that makes it special. It’s a particularly humble mission, but one that follows from her career-long dedication to supporting healthy and sustainable communities online. “Wikipedia is an incredible thing, and you might look at it and think, ‘Oh, man, I want to leave my mark on it.’ But I don’t,” she says. “I want to help [Wikipedia] out just enough that it’s able to keep going for a really long time.” She has faith that the people of the internet can take it from there.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

Helpful hams and secret codes

By 1957,Admiral Byrd was recognized as the world’s foremost expert in Antarctic exploration and was leading America’s Operation Deep Freeze, a mission to build a permanent American presence on the continent. The US Naval Construction Battalions, known as the Seabees, were deployed to build McMurdo Station on the solid ground of Ross Island, close to the first hut built by Captain Robert Scott in 1901. 

Deep Freeze brought a massive military presence to Antarctica, including the most complex and advanced communications array the Navy could muster. Still, men who wanted to speak to loved ones at home had limited options. Physical mail could come and go on ships a few times a year, or they could send expensive telegrams over wireless—limited to 100 or 200 words per month each way. At least these methods were private, unlike the personal communications over radio on Byrd’s expedition, which everyone else could listen in to by default.

In the face of these limitations, another option soon became popular among the Navy men. The licensed operators of McMurdo’s amateur (ham) station were assisted by hams back at home. Seabees would call from McMurdo to a ham in America, who would patch them straight through to their destination through the US phone system, free of charge. 

Some of these helpful hams became legendary. Jules Madey and his brother John, two New Jersey teenagers with the call sign K2KGJ, had built a 110-foot-tall radio tower in their backyard, with a transmitter that was more than capable of communicating to and from McMurdo Sound. 

To save money, a code known as “WYSSA” offered a broad variety of set phrases for common topics. WYSSA itself stood for “All my love, darling.”

From McMurdo, the South Pole, and the fifth Little America base on the Ross Ice Shelf, ham operators could ring Jules at nearly any time of day or night, and he’d connect them to home. Jules became an Antarctic celebrity and icon. A few of the engaged couples he helped to link up even invited him and his brother to their weddings, after the men returned from their tours of duty in Antarctica. Many Deep Freeze men still remembered the Madey brothers decades later. 

In the early 1960s, continued Deep Freeze operations, including support ships, were improving communication across American outposts in Antarctica. Bigger antennas, more powerful receivers and transmitters, and improvements to ground-to-air communication systems were installed, shoring up the capacity for scientific activity, transport, and construction.  

Around this time, the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions were improving their communications capacity as well. Like other Antarctic programs, they used telex machines, sending text out over radio waves to link up with a phone-line-based system on land. Telex, a predecessor to fax technology, text messaging, and email, was in use from the 1960s onwards as an alternative to Morse code and voice over HF and VHF radio. On the other side of the line, a terminal would receive the text and print it out.

In order to save money on the expensive per-word rates, a special code known as “WYSSA” (pronounced, in an Australian accent, “whizzer”) was constructed. This creative solution became legendary in Antarctic history. WYSSA itself stood for “All my love, darling,” and the code offered a broad variety of predetermined phrases for common topics, from the inconveniences of Antarctic life (YAYIR—“Fine snow has penetrated through small crevices in the huts”) to affectionate sentiments (YAAHY—“Longing to hear from you again, darling”) and personal updates (YIGUM—“I have grown a beard which is awful”). 

By some accounts, the law has helped spur hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment into projects that could create nearly 200,000 jobs—and get this: eight of the 10 congressional districts set to receive the biggest clean-energy investments announced in recent quarters are led by Republicans, according to one analysis (and backed up by others). 

A disproportionate amount of the money is also flowing into low-income areas and “energy communities,” or regions that previously produced fossil fuels, according to data from the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group. 

As more and more renewables projects, mineral processing facilities, battery plants, and EV factories bring jobs and tax revenue to red states, the politics around clean energy are shifting, at least behind the scenes if not always in the public debate. 

All of which means some sizable share of Republicans will likely push back on more sweeping changes to the IRA, particularly if they would raise the costs on businesses and reduce the odds that new projects will move forward, says Sasha Mackler, executive director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, DC, think tank.

“Most of the tax credits are pretty popular within industry and in red states, which are generally the constituency that the Republican Party listens to when they shape their policies,” Mackler says. “When you start to go beyond the top-line political rhetoric and look at the actual tax credits themselves, they’re on much firmer ground than you might initially think just reading the newspaper and looking at what’s being said on the campaign trail.”

That means it might prove more difficult to rescind some of the hit-list items above than Trump would hope. And there are other big parts of the legislative package that Republicans might avoid picking fights over at all, such as the support for processing critical minerals, manufacturing batteries, capturing and storing carbon dioxide, and producing biofuels, given the broader support for these areas.

DC sources also say that clean-energy-focused policy shops and some climate tech companies themselves are already playing defense, stressing the importance of these policies to legislators in the run-up to the election. Meanwhile, if staffers at the Department of Energy and other federal agencies aren’t already rushing to get as much of the grant-based money in the IRA out the door as possible, they should be, says Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who advised Democrats on crafting the law.

Among other funds, the law appropriates nearly $12 billion for the DOE’s loans office, which provides financing to accelerate the development of clean-energy projects. It also sets aside $5 billion in EPA grants designed to help states, local governments, and tribes implement efforts to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. 

A delicate balance

The helium we use today formed from the breakdown of radioactive materials millions of years ago and has been trapped in rocks below Earth’s surface ever since. 

Helium is usually extracted from these underground reservoirs along with natural gas, as John Mattill explained in an article from our January 1986 issue: “Helium can be readily separated from the gas before combustion, but the lower the helium concentration, the higher the cost of doing so.” 

Generally speaking, helium concentrations must be at least 0.3% for gas companies to bother with it. Such levels can be found in only a handful of countries including the US, Qatar, Algeria, Canada, and South Africa. 

Helium shortages are not caused by a lack of helium, then, but the inability of producers in those few countries to deliver it to customers everywhere in a timely manner. That can happen for any number of reasons. 

“It is a very global business, and any time a war breaks out somewhere, or anything like that, it tends to impact the helium business,” says Kornbluth. 

Another challenge is that helium atoms are so light Earth’s gravity can’t hold onto them. They tend to just, well, float away, even escaping specially designed tanks. Up to 50% of helium we extract is lost before it can be used, according to a new analysis presented by Siddhantakar last week at the International Round Table on Materials Criticality. 

Given all this, countries that need a lot of helium—Canada, China, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, and the UK are among the top importers—must constantly work to ensure a reliable supply. The US is one of the largest consumers of helium, but it’s also a leading producer.

For decades, the global helium market was closely tied to the US government, which began stockpiling helium in Texas in 1961 for military purposes. As Howland wrote in 1975, “The original justification of the federal helium conservation program was to store helium until a later time when it would be more essential and less available.” 

Tal, who has been obsessed with infectious disease since losing an uncle to HIV/AIDS and a cousin to meningococcal meningitis, wondered what this striking diversity could reveal about our immune response to infection. According to one hypothesis, the wide array of these receptors is the result of an evolutionary arms race between disease-causing microbes and the immune system. Think of the receptor as a lock, and the “Nothing to see here” message as a key. Pathogens might evolve to produce their own chemical mimics of this key, effectively hiding from the immune system in plain sight. In response, the human population has developed a wide range of locks to frustrate any given impostor key. 

Wanting to test this hypothesis, Tal found herself walking the halls of Stanford, asking colleagues, “Who’s got a cool bug?” Someone gave her Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Previous research from Tal’s collaborator Jenifer Coburn, a microbiologist now at the Medical College of Wisconsin, had established that Lyme bacteria sport a special protein crucial for establishing a lasting infection. Knock this protein out, and the immune system swiftly overwhelms the bugs. The big question, however, was what made this protein so essential. So Tal used what’s known as a high-affinity probe as bait—and caught the Borrelia’s mimic of our “Don’t eat me” signal binding to it. In other words, she confirmed that the bacteria’s sneakyprotein was, as predicted, a close match for a healthy cell’s signal.  

Sex differences in Lyme infection

Until then, Tal says, she had never given Lyme disease much thought. But the more she learned, the more disturbed she grew. Even after timely antibiotic treatment, roughly 10% of all Lyme patients go on to develop chronic symptoms that can include crushing pain, debilitating fatigue, and cognitive changes that make basic tasks a struggle.  

Perhaps even more alarming than the disease has been the medical community’s response to it. “I realized that there’s this public health debacle around Lyme, and it’s, for lack of a better word, obscene,” Tal says. Chronic Lyme patients skew female, and for decades, clinicians have dismissed their symptoms as signs of mental illness. The medical establishment has “done nothing but call them crazy,” Tal says, “instead of admitting that they just don’t understand what’s going on.” 

Today, there is no objective way to diagnose chronic Lyme, and no medically accepted therapy. For some patients, lengthy treatments with high doses of antibiotics can ease symptoms, but these come with their own serious risks. (They can, for example, damage the microbiome, leading to significant negative effects on health.) And because the antibiotic used currently only prevents bacteria from replicating, Tal notes, it’s up to the immune system to actually kill off the invaders. If immune cells can’t tell friend from foe, the utility of antibiotics may be limited. 

Chronic Lyme patients skew female, and for decades, the medical establishment has “done nothing but call them crazy,” Tal says, “instead of admitting that they just don’t understand what’s going on.”

For Tal, these revelations were electrifying. She dove into the immunology of Lyme disease, focusing in particular on sex differences. In one mouse experiment, she discovered that Lyme bacteria “completely disfigured” the uterus. Yet after delving through decades of Lyme research, she could find only one other study that even documented uterine infection. 

This shortfall mirrors larger problems in medical research. “We’ve let men dictate the direction of research funding for so long,” Tal says. Traditionally, studies focused on male subjects, and a 1977 FDA policy barred women from participating in most clinical trials in the US in the wake of birth defects caused by thalidomide. It wasn’t until 1993 that federal law required studies to include women and minorities. This, coupled with other sex- and gender-based medical biases, means that many female-dominated diseases remain under-researched. “So much of this research is being done on males, male mice—male, male, male,” Tal says. “And I’m like, no.” 

Tal suspects that the sex disparities seen in chronic Lyme and other pathogen-­triggered chronic diseases might come down to the fact that men mount a more robust response to acute infection. This no-holds-barred approach is risky—“Your immune system has the power to kill you,” she notes—but it may mean that men, on average, can kill off more viruses or bacteria in the critical first week of infection. After that window closes, the immune system largely settles back down, Tal says. Pathogens that escaped the initial blitz could take up long-term residence in the body, potentially causing persistent symptoms. And women have a higher chance of chronic illness.

The judges pounced on what they called the “latent implication” of the defense’s argument. What about a baby growing in an artificial womb? Would it also not count as a person, they asked, just because it’s not “in utero”?

According to their ruling, the wrongful-death act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” and “no exception” can be made for embryos regardless of their age, even if they’ve been in deep freeze for a decade. Nor does the law exclude any type of “extrauterine children” science can conceive.

It’s common for judges to wrestle with complex questions as they try to apply old laws to new technology. But what’s so unusual about this decision is that the judges ended up ruling on technology that hasn’t been fully invented.

“I think the opinion is really extraordinary,” says Susan Wolf, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Minnesota. “I can’t think of another case where a court powered its ruling by looking not only at technology not actually before the court, but number two, that doesn’t exist in human beings. They can’t make a binding decision about future technology that is not even part of the case.” 

Bad law or not, the question the Alabama justices ruled on could soon be a real one. Several companies are actually developing artificial wombs to keep premature infants alive, and other research labs are working with fluid-filled bottles in which they’ve grown mouse embryos until they are fetuses with beating hearts. 

One startup company in Israel, Renewal Bio, says it wants to grow synthetic human embryos (the kind formed by stem cells) until they are 40 or 50 days old, in order to collect their tissue for transplant medicine. 

All this technology is racing along, so the question of the moral and legal rights of incubated human fetuses might not be hypothetical for very long. 

Among the dilemmas lawyers and doctors could face: If a fetus is growing in a tank, would a decision to shut off its support systems be protected under liberal states’ abortion laws, which are typically based on the rights of a pregnant person? Would a fetus engineered solely to grow organs, lacking a brain cortex and without sentience, also still be considered a child in Alabama?

Mariam, one of the mothers in the camp, has two girls, five and four years old, and her greatest wish is that they get an education. She herself stopped her schooling at the sixth grade. “Reading and writing,” she said through an interpreter, “is the most important thing in life.”

A focus on resilience

Sesame Street premiered in the United States in 1969 with a social mission born out of the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: to level the playing field for poor kids by bringing early learning into the home for free. 

The show debuted its first foreign-­language co-productions in Brazil and Mexico just three years later; there have been a total of 42 international co-­productions over the years. A meta-analysis of studies with over 10,000 children in 15 countries found that these programs have had significant positive effects on children’s mastery of reading and basic math concepts, as well as their social-emotional skills and attitudes toward out-groups.  

An Arabic version of the show (Iftah Ya Simsim/Open Sesame, which many of today’s parents in the region grew up with) ran from 1979 to 1989. But Ahlan Simsim is the first production created deliberately for children affected by crisis and conflict, and that necessitated some special sensitivity.

The social-emotional curriculum for the show had to be designed from scratch for the cultural context and needs of these children, says Shanna Kohn, the director of international education at Sesame Workshop. “We went in with the idea of a show that focused on resilience—a beloved Western concept. And we brought that to this team of academics and Arab advisors, and there was a lot of skepticism. There isn’t even a clear Arabic translation,” says Kohn. 

So the team backed up and started with the basics. They had to figure out how to present relatable stories—about Jad leaving home and feeling different from his friends—without introducing situations or concepts that might be triggering for young viewers. 

“Boats are usually a go-to for preschool children,” says Scott Cameron, who has been with the company for 25 years. “We avoided things like that, for obvious reasons.” They also avoided loud noises, like thunderstorms. They skipped nutrition lessons, because kids who are barely getting enough to eat can’t use reminders about fruits and vegetables. 

Kids who are traumatized often respond with an outward numbness; the research team found that the children were using only two or three terms—happy, sad, angry—to describe their feelings. To help them process these feelings and frustrations, the show defines the Arabic words for nine emotions: caring, fear, frustration, nervousness, hope or determination, jealousy, loneliness, and sadness. Jad and Basma model emotional coping strategies: belly breathing, counting to five, “moving it out,” “drawing it out,” asking for help, and making a plan. 

Note: PLOS is delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The awards program honors researchers who reflect rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency in their work. The Einstein Foundation received dozens of stellar submissions. We asked this year’s finalists to write about their research in the run up to the ceremony on March 14^th in Berlin. This is the second blog in our 5-part series.  

In recent years, a consensus emerged in the scientific community that evaluating scientific performance solely based on quantitative indicators (such as number of publications, number of first authorships, h-index, journal impact factors) is inadequate. The shift towards prioritizing research quality, transparency, robustness, and reproducibility is evident in initiatives like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

Despite these efforts, hiring and promotion procedures at universities as well as funding decisions still heavily favor easily measurable quantitative indicators over assessing scientific work’s quality. A survey within the German Psychological Society highlights the disproportionate emphasis on publication numbers and funding, neglecting crucial quality criteria (Abele-Brehm & Bühner, 2016).

Relying solely on quantity in assessing scientific performance is problematic due to its questionable validity (Brembs et al., 2013; Dougherty & Horne, 2022; Kepes et al., 2022; Opthof, 1997). For example, research has shown that the correlation between journal rank (as measured via journal impact factors) and the methodological quality of papers published in a journal is low or even negative (Brembs, 2018). Moreover, academia is a competitive work environment, and incentives in hiring and promotion processes can influence individuals to prioritize prolific publishing over crucial aspects like research transparency and leadership skills. These incentive systems can have undesirable effects on the entire science system, especially without effective mechanisms for quality control and self-correction (Vazire & Holcombe, 2022).

Dr. Anne Gärtner, psychologist and neuroscientist at Dresden University of Technology, aims to shift hiring and promotion procedures from a focus on research quantity to a robust consideration of research quality. She was awarded the 2023 Early Career Award by the Einstein Foundation Berlin and advocates for incentivizing quality in research through the Responsible Research Assessment Initiative. She plans to establish criteria incorporating qualitative aspects such as integrity, transparency, robustness, and methodological rigor using a scoring system (Gärtner et al., 2022; Schönbrodt et al., 2022). For example: Are all research data and materials documented in FAIR format and open accessible? Are statistical analyses accompanied by comprehensible meta-data and code that is publicly available? Can the research be replicated and independently verified? Was the research pre-registered and the methodology disclosed before publication? Do formulated theories adhere to the principles of formal logic?

Collaborating since 2020, the initiative published their proposal in several articles and received more than 40 commentaries from the academic community in response. Since then, the endeavor has turned into a community-driven effort, with multiple bottom-up working groups to work on field-specific expansion sets. The next goal of the initiative is to conduct interviews with experts and various stakeholders to refine the criteria and foster the way to their application in appointment procedures. Furthermore, the initiative is currently developing an online tool that integrates qualitative assessment with the responsible use of quantitative indicators to support hiring and promotion committees (see here for more information).

While the focus lies currently on research output assessment, Anne Gärtner’s long-term vision is to develop a more comprehensive set of metrics that also covers the remaining types of academic contributions commonly evaluated in hiring and promotion procedures: teaching quality, leadership skills, academic governance, and social impact. The shift away from metrics of publication quantity in hiring and promotion procedures could ultimately become a blueprint for the entire academic system and, for example, be transferred to the distribution of research funding, scholarships, and awards.

“Prioritizing quality in research requires a fundamental change in the incentives of the academic system.”

Anne Gärtner, Postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Psychology at the Dresden University of Technology

There is a dilemma faced by young scientists to either stick to the old system and publish as many papers as possible – or invest time and effort in producing high-quality research, which in turn negatively impacts the quantity, and thus, the career. Anne Gärtner hopes the project fosters a future where increased publication signifies more high-quality and valuable research.

“I hope that our project contributes to a future where we’ll see not just more research being published every year, but more high-quality and high-value research.”, says Anne Gärtner.

You can read more about the general principles of responsible research assessment in this preprint and a specific proposal for hiring and promotion in this preprint (these articles will soon be published in Meta-Psychology together with 15 commentaries). 

Here are some resources that may be of interest:

References:

Abele-Brehm, A. E., & Bühner, M. (2016). Wer soll die Professur bekommen?: Eine Untersuchung zur Bewertung von Auswahlkriterien in Berufungsverfahren der Psychologie. Psychologische Rundschau, 67(4), 250–261. https://doi.org/10.1026/0033-3042/a000335

Brembs, B. (2018). Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12, 37. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037

Brembs, B., Button, K., & Munafò, M. (2013). Deep impact: Unintended consequences of journal rank. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291

Dougherty, M. R., & Horne, Z. (2022). Citation counts and journal impact factors do not capture some indicators of research quality in the behavioural and brain sciences. Royal Society Open Science, 9(8), 220334. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220334

Gärtner, A., Leising, D., & Schönbrodt, F. D. (2022). Responsible Research Assessment II: A specific proposal for hiring and promotion in psychology [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5yexm

Kepes, S., Keener, S. K., McDaniel, M. A., & Hartman, N. S. (2022). Questionable research practices among researchers in the most research‐productive management programs. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 43(7), 1190–1208. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2623

Opthof, T. (1997). Sense and nonsense about the impact factor. Cardiovascular Research, 33(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0008-6363(96)00215-5

Schönbrodt, F., Gärtner, A., Frank, M., Gollwitzer, M., Ihle, M., Mischkowski, D., Phan, L. V., Schmitt, M., Scheel, A. M., Schubert, A.-L., Steinberg, U., & Leising, D. (2022). Responsible Research Assessment I: Implementing DORA for hiring and promotion in psychology. https://doi.org/10.23668/PSYCHARCHIVES.8162

Vazire, S., & Holcombe, A. O. (2022). Where Are the Self-Correcting Mechanisms in Science? Review of General Psychology, 26(2), 212–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680211033912

Biotech seeds have been a huge business for a while. In fact, by sheer mass, GMOs are probably the single most significant product of genetic engineering ever. Except most of us aren’t planting rows of cotton or corn that can resist worms or survive a spritz of RoundUp, the big gene-splicing innovations that companies like Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred first introduced in the 1990s.

What makes these new plants different is that you can buy them directly from their creators and then plant them in the yard, on a balcony, or just in a pot. 

Purple tomato

Starting off my biotech shopping spree, I first spent $20 to order 10 tomato seeds from Norfolk Health Produce, a small company in Davis, California, that created what it calls the Purple Tomato. The seeds have a gene introduced from a snapdragon flower, which adds a nutrient, anthocyanin, that also gives the fruits their striking color.

According to Channa S. Prakash, a geneticist and dean at Tuskegee University, the tomato is the “the first-of-its kind GMO food crop marketed directly to home gardeners.”   

The CEO of the company, Nathan Pumplin, was packing seeds when I reached him by phone. He claimed that anthocyanin has health benefits—it’s an antioxidant—but he agreed that the color is a useful sales pitch.

“I don’t need to make a label that says this red tomato is better for you than the other red tomato,” says Pumplin. “We can simply put out the purple tomato, and people say, ‘Oh my gosh, this tomato is purple.’ Its beauty is a distinguishing characteristic that people can just immediately see and understand.”

There is a plan to mass-produce the purple tomatoes for sale in supermarkets. But Pumplin says the company couldn’t ignore thousands of requests from regular gardeners. “It’s not the main focus of our business, but we are very interested in having people grow these at home,” he says. And “if home gardeners want to save the seed and replant it in their gardens for their own use, that is okay.”

Glowing flower

I next decided to shell out for the “firefly petunia,” so called because the plant is supposed to glow in the dark. It’s sold by Light Bio, a startup backed by the venture capital firm NFX .

At the turn of the millennium, he took a position at Princeton with the notion that the institutional pedigree might earn an audience for his “crazy” idea. Not long after he arrived, the chief of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came for a talk, and Wikelski asked whether the agency would benefit from a satellite system that could track birds. “He looked at me as if I came from a different planet,” Wikelski remembers. Still, he got a meeting with NASA—though he says he was laughed out of the building. By this time, the agency had apparently forgotten all about Monique. 

Undeterred, in 2002 Wikelski launched ICARUS, a half-joke (for fans of Greek mythology) at his own immodest ambitions. It aimed to use digital GPS tags and satellites that would relay the information to a data center on Earth nearly as instantly as the ARTS system had.

Wikelski’s big ideas continued to run into big doubts. “At the time, people told us technology-wise, it will never work,” he says. Even 10 years ago, when Wikelski was making proposals to space agencies, he was told to avoid digital tech altogether in favor of tried-and-tested Argos-style communication. “Don’t go digital!” he recalls people telling him. “This is completely impossible! You have to do it analog.” 

Moving away from the fringe

In the two decades since ICARUS was established, the scientific community has caught up, thanks to developments in consumer tech. The Internet of Things made two-way digital communications with small devices viable, while lithium batteries have shrunk to sizes that more animals can carry and smartphones have made low-cost GPS and accelerometers increasingly available.

“We’re going from where we couldn’t really track most vertebrate species on the planet to flipping it. We’re now able to track most things,” says Yanco, emphasizing that this is possible “to varying degrees of accuracy and resolution.” 

The other key advance has been in data systems, and in particular the growth of Movebank, a central repository of animal tracking data that was developed from Wikelski’s ARTS system. Movebank brings together terrestrial-animal tracking data from various streams, including location data from the Argos system and from new high-res digital satellites, like ICARUS’s antenna on the ISS. (There are also plans to incorporate CubeSat data.) To date, it has collected 6 billion data points from more than 1,400 species, tracking animals’ full life cycles in ways that Wikelski once could only dream about. It is now a key part of the plumbing of the animal internet. 

The field also had some practical successes, which in turn allowed it to marshal additional resources. In 2016 in London, for instance, where air pollution was responsible for nearly 10,000 human deaths a year, researchers from Imperial College and the tech startup Plume Labs released 10 racing pigeons equipped with sensors for nitrogen dioxide and ozone emissions from traffic. Daily updates (tweeted out by the Pigeon Air Patrol account) showed how taking a pigeon’s path through the neighborhoods revealed pollution hot spots that weather stations missed.

Diego Ellis Soto, a NASA research fellow and a Yale PhD candidate studying animal ecology, highlights an experiment from 2018: flocks of storks were outfitted with high-resolution GPS collars to monitor the air movements they encountered over the open ocean. Tagged storks were able to capture live data on turbulence, which can be notoriously hard for airlines to predict.