--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020, aka Earth Day 50-50. I'm Sean Rameswaram for Today Explained, and this is your coronavirus update.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We thought the first COVID-19 deaths in the United States occurred in Seattle in late February, but on Tuesday night, officials in Santa Clara County, California, announced that they had one in early February and another in mid-February. This new information might shift our understanding of when and how the virus spread in the United States.
--:-- President Trump: [audio clip] No more green cards, but appears to be okay with guest worker programs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: President Trump appears to be backing down from the sweeping and painfully unspecific immigration ban he announced on Twitter the other day.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Department of Education has barred hundreds of thousands of DACA students from receiving emergency funds from the stimulus package passed by Congress. Over $6 billion were set aside for college students, but evidently not those who were brought to this country as children without documents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A reminder that DACA is the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program President Trump is trying to end.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the LA Times reports more than a million U.S. citizens have been blocked from receiving stimulus checks because they are married to immigrants who don't have social security numbers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Lebanon has confirmed the first COVID-19 case in a Palestinian refugee camp. According to the United Nations, the news has amplified existing fears of how this virus could tear through camps that house hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In cancellation news, they've come for the running of the Bulls, Oktoberfest, and the National Spelling Bee here in the United States. But running with Bulls can kill you too. There's beer at the store down the street, and your kids can spell from just about anywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Speaking of kids, we got a voicemail on our listener voicemail line from a kid named Beatrice in South Korea. But Beatrice did not leave a callback number, and we want to get in touch. So Beatrice, if you're listening or the parents or friends of Beatrice hear this, we want to get in touch with her. Call us back and leave us a callback number at 202-688-5944 or email todayexplained at vox.com.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 50 years ago today, millions of Americans got together for demonstrations, celebrations, and cleanups to mark the very first Earth Day. Later that same year, President Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency, and we got the Clean Air Act of 1970.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Since then, we haven't done the best job of protecting the planet. We have rules regulating industrial pollution, but President Trump just suspended them. We recycle, but it sort of depends on where you live, and chances are most of our plastics are ending up in the trash, or worse, the oceans.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have more fuel-efficient vehicles, but we've pumped trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the original Earth Day in 1970.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's never too late to stop treating the planet like trash. And in honor of that, today we're going to mark Earth Day 50 with Umair Irfan and Brian Resnick, both write about the planet for Vox.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And every year they get together on Earth Day to talk about what we've learned about our planet in the preceding spin around the sun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to start with Umair. We learned a lot of things about the species that we've lost. We also got some stark examples of how climate change is playing out on this planet.
--:-- Umair Irfan: We're also learning a lot about how trees are fighting against climate change and protecting us. And we're learning how quickly that air pollution can be reduced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we discovered a lot of new things about life on this planet.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Well, that sounds positive. I guess let's start with the sad stuff. Which species do we lose this year?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, in the past year, we lost organisms like the Chinese paddlefish and the cryptic tree hunter bird. And other species like the Sumatran rhino were declared locally extinct, meaning that they were no longer found in some of their ancestral habitats and are now only found in a very few scattered places around the world.
--:-- Umair Irfan: Well, let's hear a bit about the Chinese paddlefish, cryptic tree hunter, and Sumatran rhino. What are their greatest hits?
--:-- Brian Resnick: The paddlefish is native to the Yangtze River in China, and they can grow pretty big up to 23 feet in length.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh yeah, I just pulled up a photo. It's like it looks like a shark almost but like with a gnarly long spear for like a nose. It's I think it's more of a paddle than a spear, hence the name.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But I guess we can dispute that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they've been... it does not look in my defense it does not look like a paddle, it looks like a spear.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Well, if you discover a fish, you can call it whatever you want.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. So, I mean, RIP Chinese paddlefish. I'm sorry, do we lose it to overfishing?
--:-- Brian Resnick: It looks like the kind of thing that someone would want to eat. Well, that, but also like the Yangtze River has also had issues with pollution and other kinds of industrial waste seeping into the water. And so it could have had its habitat choked out by that as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it hasn't been spotted for a long time either. There was hope that it might have been surviving in some isolated pockets. But in the past year, they just decided at this point, call it quits and label it as an extinct organism.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And how about the cryptic tree hunter? This dude sounds hard to wrap your head around.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's a bird that's found in Brazil, and it's found in the humid forests around there. And it's been missing for a very long time, and then scientists decided to declare it extinct because there was no evidence that it was still around.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Could it be hiding somewhere? It's cute. It's like a robin with not such an orange chest almost, but similar looking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Could it still be out there? Potentially, but scientists have been holding out hope for a long time, and they still have yet to find it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And I think at this point, they're calling off the search.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And is this because of us? Do we do this too? Is this deforestation or is this potentially, you know, natural causes?
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's hard to say. I mean, you're right that there are natural extinctions that constantly happen, but the Amazon rainforest has also been experiencing a high rate of deforestation as well as human encroachment and settlement and things like agriculture in its vicinity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's causing disruption to that ecosystem, making it harder for many of the native species to survive. And this could be a casualty of that.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Huh. And the Sumatran rhino, I mean, I assume it looks like a rhino still around, but on the brink?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's a rhinoceros. You know, it's got the pointy nose, and it lives on islands in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. But it was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And last year, the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia died. And right now, there's only about 80 left, but they all live in Indonesia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But over the past year, we also learned a lot more about the pace at which we're losing animals.
--:-- Brian Resnick: There was a study that found that we lost more than a quarter of all North American birds since 1970.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there was another important study that looked at the kind of biodiversity we lost. This is how unique the species are that have gone extinct.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And they found that if you look at all the mammal species alone that have gone extinct since humans have walked the Earth about 200,000 years ago, it would take between three and seven million years worth of evolution to restore that level of diversity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's a sign of just not how much we're losing, but the uniqueness of what we've lost.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Okay. So from bad news to bad news, climate change is getting worse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes. And we got a pretty stark example of that with the fires we saw in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Right. They came amid Australia's hottest year on record.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, Australia has a notoriously volatile climate. It often goes between extremes of heat and cold and wet and dry.
--:-- Brian Resnick: When you see this volatility on top of the warming that the planet has been seeing due to human activity, it makes an extreme situation even more extreme.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these fires, they went on to burn more than 27 million acres, destroy more than 3,000 homes, kill more than 29 people.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And the smoke that they created went all around the world, literally circled the planet.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in Australia, it's pretty alarming because these ecosystems are some of the most fragile and unique in the world.
--:-- Brian Resnick: There are animals in Australia that you don't find anywhere else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think the fires in Australia are still fresh in our minds, but how is this going to replicate around the world?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Well, it's true that other countries don't have the same kind of notoriously variable climate, but other countries should pay attention because as the climate changes, more extremes will start coming toward them as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there are other parts of the world, particularly those around the Mediterranean region, that have some overlapping climate bans similar to Australia.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And they are going to eventually struggle with things like drought and more extreme heat and things like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that kind of volatility will start to come to them as well. So what we saw in Australia could be a sign of things to come.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And a small silver lining here is that trees are getting better at dealing with climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I would say that we learned a lot more about how trees are helping us fight climate change in the past year.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Trees help cool the air around them. They also take in carbon dioxide and store it in their biomass.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then as they die and decay, they store it in the soil. So over time, these forests take carbon dioxide out of the air and help mitigate some of the emissions that we're putting out there.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And we learned last year, like there was some research that came out that showed that if we were to restore forests, basically bringing them back to where they were before humans started cutting them down, we could offset a huge amount of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, that particular study, some researchers were questioning the scope of its findings, but a lot more people do agree that trees and restoring ecosystems and forests are an important part of fighting climate change.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And there's now been a global effort to help enhance these things, like the United Nations Green Climate Fund, which is helping subsidize forest restoration projects in developing countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even Donald Trump, who has been hostile to acting on climate change, touted his plans to plant more trees during his State of the Union address this year.
--:-- Brian Resnick: So this might be one place where the whole world can find common cause.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nice. And you said we discovered some new things about life on this planet?
--:-- Brian Resnick: While we did lose a number of species, we found some more too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are more electric eel species that were recently discovered.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah. There was a debate about whether there was one, and I think researchers came out and decided that there were now more than one of this one type of electric eel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this has nothing to do with CRISPR?
--:-- Brian Resnick: No, they did not create this in a laboratory. This is just basically researchers looking at the distinctions between the ones that they've found so far, and they decided that they're actually different kinds of species.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I mean this discovery that we have more electric eels is shocking quite frankly.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I see what you did there, Sean. Good one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anything else?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Well, there was also a recent discovery that there are 10 apple varieties that were once thought extinct that were rediscovered in the Pacific Northwest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wait, that's amazing. They're still discovering new apples?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah. I mean, like, we're not eating all the apples that are out there. And there were some that were historically known and that are now lost, but now researchers have reported that those have actually not been lost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And potentially they could be recultivated and introduce new varieties.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Cool. Well, can't wait to download some of that OS.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anything else before we go?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Well, in general, we've been noticing that nature is quite resilient and it can bounce back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the most stunning examples of that that we've seen recently has been in flowers. They're much more robust and way less fragile and delicate than we once thought.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I think your colleague Brian wrote about that one, huh?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He did indeed. We'll talk to him after the break, Amir.
--:-- Brian Resnick: All right, you do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Brian Resnick: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Brian Resnick: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up. And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Brian Resnick: You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry.me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's strawberry.me slash unstuck.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Today, Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian Resnick, Vox. You wrote a story recently about the study that Umair Irfan, Vox, our colleague just told us about, this flower study, this study that says flowers aren't as fragile as they seem.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Yeah, I wrote about that one. You know, maybe it's just the lockdowns, and maybe it's just like the state of the world where everything seems so fragile and like it's such a panicked moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a great point. I saw this study that in normal times would be something simple and you know maybe it's like a little cute study but like this one really hit me very hard emotionally.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's a study about what happens to flowers after they have accidents and like the study references like this idea that like sometimes a tree branch falls on a flower.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what is the flower to do after it gets misaligned? Because there's this delicate nature of evolution where the flower needs to be oriented just perfectly so a bee can come and land on it and pollinate it and continue the flower lines.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It was really kind of like a touching story for me to hear the scientists talk about how they did this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this has never been documented in the scientific literature before.
--:-- Brian Resnick: The scientist I spoke to about this was telling me, like, he went through all of Darwin's writings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Darwin was a huge botanist himself. He, like, did this huge internet search. And he couldn't find any reference to this, like, really simple, small thing flowers do, which is, you know, when they get knocked down, they try to write themselves up.
--:-- Brian Resnick: This scientist, he told me a story about 10 years ago when he was in Australia and he came across a trigger plant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A trigger plant? Yeah, a trigger plant is kind of like a snapdragon here in the U.S. where it has like a tall stalk that goes up and down vertical.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And then all around the stalk, flowers are pointing outwards, like towards the horizon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It looks like this kind of jewel-encrusted stalk.
--:-- Brian Resnick: He went out and he saw a trigger plant that had fallen down, like a branch had fallen on top of it, and pushed it over.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that a problem for the trigger plant because the flowers they point outwards because when the flowers are oriented like that there is a landing pad for a bee to land on so it can pollinate that flower.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And when the plant is knocked over, the bee has nowhere to land. The bee can't go upside down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And sometimes, too, it's not just like the bee giving the pollen that's messed up. It's the bee receiving the pollen that's messed up, too, when the plant has suffered an accident when it falls down.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And so this scientist just observed that after this flower was knocked over, he saw the flowers on the stalk reorient themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They twisted into the right position.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And he just took note of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And for the last 10 years, he and a co-author have just been, whenever they can notice a flower that has turned around after they've either tied it down or after a branch falls on it, they've made note of it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And 10 years later, they have this remarkably small, beautiful finding in a paper that's just flowers try to save themselves after an injury.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh. But, you know, it just feels sort of intuitive that that would be the case.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It's incredibly intuitive. It's incredibly small.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing about plants is that they stay put in one place their whole existence. They don't move, but yet they've evolved these evolutionary mechanisms to survive.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And they're just trying to deal with the worst that the world gives them with very limited tools.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so, yeah, this is a really small study. And in most times, I probably wouldn't have noticed it.
--:-- Brian Resnick: But I feel like these days I've been noticing a lot of things about it's springtime and just noticing the resilience of nature and appreciating that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And knowing that this is a common attribute of all life, that when you knock a flower over, it wants more life. It's going to fight.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Even like a little tiny flower will try to, you know, restore itself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then also, like, I also appreciate, like, these scientists who just spent 10 years noticing the tiniest movements of flowers and for the first time ever and documenting that in a scientific journal.
--:-- Brian Resnick: When, like, even, you know, Darwin and all sorts of great botanists and evolutionary biologists never bothered to write this down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So scientists, after all this time, have just bothered to publish this study that says when you kick a flower over, it's going to try and get back up again.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And it isn't just the trigger plant.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, they looked at species in South America and Australia and North America and the UK.
--:-- Brian Resnick: They would do an experiment where they would just simulate a plant being knocked over without killing it by just tying it to the ground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they would notice that within a day or two, most flowers will reorient themselves.
--:-- Brian Resnick: To make it a little bit more interesting scientifically, there's some flowers that don't do this. Certain flowers that are just open and are easily accessible even when they are knocked down. They don't reorient themselves as much.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that's a clue like this serves like a real evolutionary function.
--:-- Brian Resnick: I guess we can't go outside anymore to enjoy all the spring blooms, but are you looking at your houseplants differently during this pandemic after reading this study?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, like throughout this lockdown experience, I've been keeping some plants here.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And like a real weird inflection point for me was I had taken this fresh basil I bought at Trader Joe's and I cut its stem and I put it in some water hoping it would root.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then like this one morning I woke up and I saw in the little glass vase there was these little two-inch roots and in that moment I just got some absurd joy of like watching these little this little plant root.
--:-- Brian Resnick: It was like this is not an ideal situation for a basil plant, but yet it started to put out new roots.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kind of just like how flowers reorient themselves after, you know, they get knocked down.
--:-- Brian Resnick: And I think there's like a great comfort in noticing the resilience of small things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian Resnick writes about science for Vox.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Umair Irfan focuses on the environment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can find the article they wrote about all the things we've learned about earth this year over at vox.com.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Support for this show comes from Macy's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fall is right around the corner, and that means layering season is too.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Macy's Fall Fashion Guide can help you get a pulse on all the latest trends and must-haves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Try a romantic look with a sheer top from INC or mix it up with some fun textures like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Brian Resnick: No matter your vibe, you can explore the Macy's Fall Fashion Guide and find the perfect look for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Shop in-store or online at nacy's.com.
--:-- Brian Resnick: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, yikes.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ouch.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Level up and invest smarter with Schwab.
--:-- Brian Resnick: Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Learn more at schwab.com.
