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• SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

• Can Satellites Help Identify Extreme Poverty?

• January 13, 2019

• FILE - A nighttime view of Europe and North Africa is seen in a global composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite in 2012.

• The fight against poverty is getting help from faraway objects: satellites orbiting the Earth.

• Satellite images are helping researchers map areas of extreme poverty. Those pictures may help officials quickly identify when development policies and programs are working, and when they are not.

• Ending extreme poverty by the year 2030 is the first of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

• Experts usually measure poverty by using official census records and other studies. But population counts are costly, slow and labor intensive. Countries usually organize such studies once every several years.

• But satellites can map the Earth’s surface with great detail every few days. The imagery is getting better and less costly as a growing number of public and private satellite systems go into service.

• What satellites see

• Researchers have used the brightness of lights in nighttime images to estimate an area’s economic activity. Others have used machine learning to identify richer and poorer villages from satellite imagery.

• One group used building density and vegetation cover to identify wealthy and poor neighborhoods.

• One new study has taken the most detailed look ever. Within a single village, it attempts to identify the poorest individual households. It was correct 62 percent of the time.

• Four different filters identify, from left to right, features corresponding to urban areas, nonurban areas, water, and roads). (Source - Sciencemag.org)

• The study involved the village of Sauri, in rural Kenya. Sauri was part of the Millennium Villages Project, a poverty alleviation experiment that was launched in 2005. As part of the project, detailed information was collected on the earnings and valuables of each home in Sauri.

• In satellite images of the village, researchers measured the size of each house and studied the agricultural land surrounding it.

• Not surprisingly, smaller homes usually housed poorer people. But the researchers also noted other findings. For example, poorer homes often have bare farm fields in September. In rural Kenya, that usually means farmers are preparing their land for a second crop.

• Gary Watmough is a geographer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the lead writer of a report on the study. Watmough notes that late-season rains do not always come to this part of Kenya. In fact, they fail to arrive up to half the time.

• Watmough added that late-season planting is done by poor people “because it’s a necessity.”

• “They either don’t have enough land or they need to have that insurance, just in case something else goes wrong,” he said.

• Satellite imagery also found poorer households' fields were growing crops for shorter periods of time. They also were not planting their own crops as early as others.

• Watmough said, “That was because they were contracting themselves out to plant other, wealthier households’ crops first.”

• The money they earned from such work went toward buying seeds. But that meant their own crops had less time to grow.

• ‘Scary…but exciting’

• The study demonstrates the possibilities “for satellite data to distinguish between the wealth of you and your neighbor," said David Newhouse, an economist with the World Bank. He called such possibilities “scary...but also somewhat exciting.”

• Newhouse was not involved with the study.

• The markers of poverty in Sauri will not be the same everywhere. The methods would need to be changed for other areas.

• Experts also say it is not the best idea to use only information from satellite images.

• The aid group GiveDirectly used satellite images to target donations to people in villages with a high number of thatched roofs on homes. These villages were considered poorer than those with metal on top.

• But people learned what was happening. So some claimed to live in thatched-roof structures next to their metal-roofed homes so they could receive donations.

• GiveDirectly has since changed its methods.

• Damien Jacques is an expert in remote sensing - the use of satellites or high-flying aircraft to collect information about the Earth. He said there is power in combining satellite data and on-the-ground information.

• Jacques said, "Using the two types of data, one that is cheap to collect and very frequently available to complement traditional data that are expensive to collect and not frequent, you can get the best of the two."

• It is not known whether changes in poverty can be measured from space. That is something Watmough and other researchers will be investigating. They have survey records from Sauri from 2005 and 2008. The next step is to look for differences in the imagery.

• "Nobody has ever looked at how poverty has changed over a time period and looked at how a satellite image has changed over that same time period," Watmough said.

• I’m Ashley Thompson.

• Steve Baragona reported this story for VOA News. Ashley Thompson adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

• ________________________________________________________________

• Words in This Story

• sustainable - adj. involving methods that do not completely use up or destroy natural resources

• density - n. the amount of something in a particular space or area

• alleviation - n. the process of reducing the pain or trouble of (something) : to make (something) less painful, difficult, or severe

• bare - adj. not covered by leaves, grass, trees, or plants

• insurance - n. protection from bad things that may happen in the future — usually + against

• distinguish - v. to notice or recognize a difference between people or things

• scary - adj. causing fear

• thatched - adj. made of dried plant material (such as straw or leaves)

• roof - n. the cover or top of a building, vehicle, etc.

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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

US Carbon Emissions Rise in 2018 Because of Industry, Fuel Demand

January 13, 2019

The American flag flies on a towboat as it passes Mitchell Power Plant, a coal-fired power plant, on the Ohio River in Moundsville, West Virginia, U.S., Sept. 10, 2017.

After falling for three years, carbon emissions in the United States rose in 2018.

That information is based on early estimates from an independent research group.

The Rhodium Group studies U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas linked to rising temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere. Its new report estimates that the country’s carbon emissions increased 3.4 percent last year. This would be the largest yearly increase since 2010, when the nation was recovering from a financial crisis known as Great Recession.

The research also suggests that the American coal industry continues to struggle because of low-cost, plentiful natural gas.

Bad news for coal

The Rhodium Group reports that coal-fired power stations that produced a total of 11.2 gigawatts of power had closed by last October. Even more were expected to have closed over the following months. If confirmed, that would make 2018 the biggest coal plant closure year on record.

Natural gas is now by far the energy of choice in the United States. The report credited gas for an increase of 166 million kilowatts an hour through October.

American power consumption - and carbon emissions - increased in 2018. The transportation industry was largely responsible for the nation's record emissions.

Demand for gasoline -- the fuel used in most motor vehicles -- decreased. But increases in the demand for other fuel, such as diesel and jet fuel, made transportation the industry most responsible for U.S. carbon emissions.

The report said another big producer of carbon emissions is the constructionindustry. Emissions from buildings and homes also were up last year, partly because of very cold winter weather in parts of the country.

The Paris question

The Reuters news agency reported last week that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency did not answer its questions about the report.

Trump administration officials have said that carbon emissions can change from year to year because of economic conditions. They said the country could both cut emissions and enjoy a strong economy at the same time.

Environmentalists say the Trump administration needs to speed up development of renewable energy, manufacturing power from wind and the sun’s energy.

The country’s carbon emissions had been decreasing year by year since 2015, as the nation worked to honor the Paris Agreement on climate change. But even with those reductions, the United States was unable to meet reductions agreed to by the administration of former President Barack Obama.

Officials from almost 200 countries gathered at United Nations’ headquarters in 2016 to sign the climate agreement. Under the deal, the United States promised to cut its carbon emissions by at least 26 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2025.

But in June 2017, President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the deal. The U.S. will officially withdraw in 2020.

I’m George Grow.

Kevin Enochs reported this story for VOA News. George Grow adapted his report for Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section.

___________________________________________________________ 

Words in This Story

emission – n. the act of producing and releasing something, such as gas or radiation

diesel – n. a heavy oil used to power diesel engines in trucks

jet – adj. related to or involving a fuel used to power airplanes

consumption – n. the process or act of using something

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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

DNA Technology Helps Famers Identify Crop Diseases

JANUARY 14, 2019

It is often difficult for farmers to identify diseases quickly enough to protect their crops and those on neighboring farms. Now, some farmers are using a simple device directly in the field to find viruses before they spread.

In Tanzania, several viruses are a threat to cassava crops. Farmers struggle to identify the diseases in an urgent effort to avoid severe crop damage.

The disease identification process is often difficult when farmers are acting on their own. If they do not know what is attacking their crops, they cannot decide the best way to fight the disease.

A device from British technology company Oxford Nanopore is changing that. The device extracts deoxyribonucleic acid, better known as DNA, from plants. DNA is the carrier of genetic information in nearly all living things.

The device helps farmers identify what is harming their crops so they can change to more resistant crops.

Laura Boykin is with the University of Western Australia and also works with the Cassava Virus Action Project. She brought the device to a Tanzanian farm owned by Asha Mohamed.

“We are here collecting leaf punches from infected material to test. To do a DNA extraction and then start sequencing in the field.”

The testing identified a number of viruses in the cassava fields near Mohamed’s farm. The process also discovered that plants considered resistant to disease had a very low viral level.

“So what would have normally taken six months to a year, has just happened in a couple of hours. And that's possible because of amazing technology that exists, that is able to give farmers results real-time.”

Once the viruses were identified, Asha Mohamed was given two kinds of seeds that are resistant to the diseases.

In another case, DNA was collected from a pawpaw tree farm in Kenya. With that test, the technology was able to identify diseases affecting Naomi Mumo’s crops.

“All my pawpaw were affected by a disease, and I didn't know what kind of disease it was. But now, I have people who have identified the disease using new technology, and within a very short time. So I'm very happy.”

Laura Boykin says she and other researchers returned to Mohamed’s cassava farm nine months later. She said the new plants were very healthy and had produced a large, successful crop.

“After nine months of her growing the improved varieties, we are back here, and today we harvested her cassava plants and she went from zero yield to 35 tons per hectare, which is massive.”

The speed at which farmers identify diseases can mean the difference between the success or failure on large areas of crop land. Now, the use of such simple and easily transportable DNA sequencing devices is making that possible.

I’m Bryan Lynn.

Faith Lapidus reported this story for VOA News. Bryan Lynn adapted her report for Learning English, with additional material from online sources. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

extract – v. to take something out

leaf – n. part of a tree or other plant

sequence – v. arrange in a particular order

variety – n. many different kinds of things

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