Plastic Wars: Industry Spent Millions Selling Recycling — To Sell More Plastic

For decades, Americans have been sorting their trash believing that most plastic could be recycled. But the truth is, the vast majority of all plastic produced can't be or won't be recycled. In 40 years, less than 10% of plastic has ever been recycled.

In a joint investigation, NPR and the PBS series Frontline found that oil and gas companies — the makers of plastic — have known that all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.

Here are our key takeaways from our investigation:

Plastics industry had "serious doubt" recycling would ever be viable

Starting in the late 1980s, the plastics industry spent tens of millions of dollars promoting recycling through ads, recycling projects and public relations, telling people plastic could be and should be recycled.

But their own internal records dating back to the 1970s show that industry officials long knew that recycling plastic on a large scale was unlikely to ever be economically viable.

A report sent to top industry executives in April 1973 called recycling plastic "costly" and "difficult." It called sorting it "infeasible," saying "there is no recovery from obsolete products." Another document a year later was candid: There is "serious doubt" widespread plastic recycling "can ever be made viable on an economic basis."

Supercomputers Recruited To Hunt For Clues To A COVID-19 Treatment

"The federal government is now adding supercomputers to its toolset in the hunt for ways to stop COVID-19."

"'ccording to an announcement by President Trump Sunday, a newly established COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium will bring together industry, academic institutions and federal laboratories to try to identify or create candidate compounds that might prevent or treat a coronavirus infection."

"The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (one member of the consortium) is using its supercomputers to look for compounds already on the market that might foil the virus."

"'We could get these calculations done in one day on the supercomputer, whereas a normal computer, it would take a month,' says Jeremy Smith, director of the Center for Molecular biophysics at Oak Ridge."

"To run the calculations, you need to know the physical properties of the proteins a virus makes — what they're made of and what their shape is."

"One key viral protein of the coronavirus is called the spike protein. Information about what it looks like came out in mid-January, so Smith asked people in his lab if they wanted to start looking through databases of existing drugs that would block it."

Oak Ridge's approach involves what's called computational structure-based drug discovery. Basically, that means they use a computer to calculate how drugs might work against germs like viruses.

It's Okay To Sleep Late (But Do It For Your Immune System)

Dr. Syed Moin Hassan was riled up. "I don't know who needs to hear this," he posted  on Twitter, "BUT YOU ARE NOT LAZY IF YOU ARE WAKING UP AT NOON." Hassan, who is the Sleep Medicine Fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, speaks to Short Wave's Emily Kwong about de-stigmatizing sleeping in late, and why a good night's rest is so important for your immune system.

William Gibson Says Today's Internet Is Nothing Like What He Envisioned

"William Gibson writes visionary stories — in his early work, he imagined an information superhighway long before the Web existed. But in a dozen novels over the last 35 years, Gibson has stalked closer and closer to the present."

"His latest, Agency, has a complicated plot that jumps between the far future and the immediate present; Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time and effort to understand. 'My greatest pleasure in reading books by other people is to be dropped into a completely baffling scenario,' he says, 'and to experience something very genuinely akin to culture shock when first visiting a new culture.'"

"Gibson imagined that sort of culture shock back in 1982 when he coined the word "cyberspace" in a short story. Two years later he popularized the term in his first novel, Neuromancer, about a washed up hacker hired for one last job."

"Neuromancer won a trio of major science fiction prizes — the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award — and launched the genre that became known as cyberpunk. It was also a major influence on the 1999 film The Matrix."

How The Novel Coronavirus And The Flu Are Alike ... And Different

"The fact that the novel coronavirus appeared in the middle of flu season has prompted inevitable comparisons. Is COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, pretty much similar to the flu or does it pose a far greater threat?"

"Although there are still many unknowns about COVID-19, there is some solid information from researchers that sheds light on some of the similarities and differences at this time."

Symptoms

"Fever, dry cough, fatigue and shortness of breath. These are the most frequent symptoms of COVID-19. Some patients might develop aches and pains; just 5% get the sniffles, according to data from China — indicating that COVID-19 is not usually an upper respiratory infection."

"These are all symptoms that overlap with flu. The Centers for Disease Control says that anyone who is experiencing these symptoms and who has been in direct contact with a confirmed COVID-19 patient, or who lives in an area where cases are circulating, should call their doctor for advice."

Transmission

"Flu and coronavirus are both thought to be spread primarily through close contact with droplets expelled from the nose and mouth of a sick person. So you can become infected by direct contact such as kissing but also by close talking with someone who's infected. The CDC recommends keeping a physical distance of about six feet away from others. You can also pick up flu or coronavirus if you touch a tabletop or phone that was coughed on, but not disinfected, in the past few hours or days, then touch your eyes, nose or mouth."

Spring Starts Today All Over America, Which Is Weird

"Spring begins today in America. Good."

"Perhaps you are mildly surprised to learn that March 19 is the first day of spring. Perhaps you learned as a child that the spring equinox — when day and night are roughly the same length — occurs on either March 20 or March 21."

"Indeed, the equinox has historically fallen on one of those dates. This is the first time in 124 years the first day of spring has occurred on March 19 nationwide, irrespective of time zone — even the graphics on the National Weather Service's website have yet to catch up with the new reality."

"So, how did we end up with an extra-early spring?"

"Defining spring: maybe not what you expect."

"The word "spring" refers to two things: the weather that happens between winter and summer, which is meteorological spring; and one portion of the Earth's oval-shaped journey around the Sun, which is astronomical spring."

"'They don't necessarily line up with each other, because the climate can change (as it is now, causing spring weather to arrive earlier) but the Earth's orbit basically' remains the same."

Museum's Collection Of Purported Dead Sea Scroll Fragments Are Fakes, Experts Say

"A months-long analysis of alleged pieces of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls that are on display at a privately funded museum in Washington, D.C., has revealed them to be clever forgeries, according to a team of researchers examining the fragments."

"Using 3-D and scanning electron microscopes and microchemical testing, a group of independent researchers concluded that all 16 fragments housed at the Museum of the Bible purported to be part of the collection of ancient Hebrew manuscripts were inscribed on leather rather than the ancient parchment used in the authentic scrolls, which date within a few centuries of the birth of Jesus Christ."

"'After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is the unanimous conclusion of the Advisory Team that none of the textual fragments in the Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic,' the researchers commissioned by the museum wrote in their report dated November 2019, but made public only in recent days."

"'Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the twentieth century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments,' they said."

Mouse Hunt: Lab Races To Grow Mice For COVID-19 Research

"Laboratories across the world are gearing up to develop vaccines that can stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus. They've got the funding; they've got the talent. But they don't have the mice."

"In order to test and ensure that vaccines are safe and effective, researchers typically conduct experiments on animals, usually mice. Though some labs are experimenting with ferrets and monkeys for this virus, mice are cheap and plentiful."

"But researchers can't use ordinary mice. That's because the coronavirus doesn't make mice sick. Humans have to genetically engineer them to be susceptible to the virus. But it seems there are no such mice to be found."

"The problem is that the genetically altered mice that researchers need have been on ice for the past few years, says Cat Lutz, senior director of the Jackson Laboratory Mouse Repository in Bar Harbor, Maine."

"It's not feasible to keep the thousands of varieties of engineered mice alive in cages, so instead, mice sperm and embryos are kept frozen in cryopreservation tanks. Lutz says it's similar to what you'd find in a human in vitro fertilization clinic."

A Spy Agency's Challenge: How To Sort A Million Photos A Day

"When the U.S. government took its first satellite photos in 1960, it wasn't easy getting those pictures back to Earth."

"After the satellite took the pictures, the film was dropped from space in a capsule attached to a parachute. A military plane with a large hook flew by to collect the capsule in midair over the Pacific Ocean."

"'They called the pilots who flew these missions 'star catchers,' because they were catching what looked like stars falling from the sky,' said Katie Donegan, with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA."

"She says all this effort might yield a few grainy, black-and-white shots of a Soviet military site."

"Fast-forward to 2011. The NGA scored a major coup by locating Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan. The NGA not only took detailed photographs at that time, but it even "went back in time" to look at earlier satellite imagery. This showed the compound under construction, before the roof was put on, and revealed the doorways, the staircases and bedrooms inside the house."

Australia's Fire-Ravaged Forests Are Recovering. Ecologists Hope It Lasts

"In the back corner of a burned lot in Australia's fire-ravaged South Coast stands a torched tree. It's uppermost branches reach into a cloudless sky, brittle and bare. Against its charred trunk rests half-burned rubble, remains from the gift shop it used to shade."

"But that's not where local resident Claire Polach is pointing. She gestures to the middle part of the tree, where lime green leaves sprout from blackened bark, as if the tree is wearing a shaggy sweater."

"To Polach, the burst of regrowth is a sign that despite a months' long assault of flame and smoke, the second-hottest summer on record and a multi-year drought, Australia's nature 'is doing it's thing.'"

"As for people like her, recovering from the same? 'We'll follow the nature,' she says."

Thrift Store Wood Engraving Print Turns Out To Be Salvador Dalí Artwork

"It's pretty much the thrift store dream; to find a rare, long lost treasure on a crowded tchotchke shelf, on sale for a bargain price."

"That's what happened at the Hotline Pink Thrift Shop in Kitty Hawk, N.C., when Wendy Hawkins came across an otherwise ignored piece of art."

"'One day I saw this, with a bunch of other paintings lined up on the floor, and I said 'this is old, this is something special,' ' Hawkins, who volunteers at the store twice a week, told WAVY TV."

"It was priced somewhere between $10 to $50 dollars."

"The item turned out to be a 1950s woodcut print that was created and signed by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. It is part of a series of 100 illustrations depicting Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, a 14th century Italian poem about the writer's fictional journey from the deepest circles of hell, up the mountain of purgatory and finally to paradise."

Protecting And Preserving Ancient Sites At Risk From Sea-Level Rise In Florida

"Long before condominiums lined the shoreline in Miami Beach, before air conditioning, many thousands of years before Columbus, people lived along Florida's coastline."

"Archaeologists say the remains of their settlements are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels as a result of climate change."

"In Florida's Palm Beach County researchers are planning how best to protect and preserve the ancient sites most at risk from rising seas."

"One of the sites is at a county park in Boca Raton where the playground and the public beach are the main attractions."

"Most visitors are unaware that it's also one of the oldest settlements in America."

"'Basically under our feet is where the site is,' archaeologist April Watson says as she ducks under branches and sweeps away leaves."

Thousands of years ago, this was part of an extensive village complex.

"'This particular spot is a shell midden,"' Watson says. 'Basically they were eating. They got a lot of shellfish, giant coquina which takes diving. They're about 18 feet down. And then as time went on, they were mostly going for oysters.'"

In A 1st, Scientists Use Revolutionary Gene-Editing Tool To Edit Inside A Patient

"For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to edit a gene while the DNA is still inside a person's body."

"The groundbreaking procedure involved injecting the microscopic gene-editing tool into the eye of a patient blinded by a rare genetic disorder, in hopes of enabling the volunteer to see. They hope to know within weeks whether the approach is working and, if so, to know within two or three months how much vision will be restored."

"'We're really excited about this,' says Dr. Eric Pierce, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Inherited Retinal Disorders Service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. Pierce is leading a study that the procedure launched."

"'We're helping open, potentially, an era of gene-editing for therapeutic use that could have impact in many aspects of medicine,' Pierce tells NPR."

"The CRISPR gene-editing technique has been revolutionizing scientific research by making it much easier to rewrite the genetic code. It's also raising high hopes of curing many diseases."

"Before this step, doctors had only used CRISPR to try to treat a small number of patients who have cancer, or the rare blood disorders sickle cell anemia or beta-thalassemia. While some of the initial results have been promising, it's still too soon to know whether the strategy is working."

How Computer Modeling Of COVID-19's Spread Could Help Fight The Virus

"Scientists who use math and computers to simulate the course of epidemics are taking on the new coronavirus to try to predict how this global outbreak might evolve and how best to tackle it."

"But some say more could be done to take advantage of these modeling tools and the researchers' findings."

"'It is sort of an ad hoc, volunteer effort, and I think that's something that we could improve upon,' says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious diseases modeler with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security."

"In her view, 'modeling plays a really important role in understanding how an outbreak is unfolding, where it might be going, and what we should be thinking through.'"

"But only a small number of the modelers of epidemics work for the federal government, she says. Most are in academia, and they don't have formal relationships with officials who have to make key public health decisions."

"Still, they are highly motivated to put their skills to use for the public good. They got to work almost as soon as the first reports of a new virus in China emerged in late December."

Physicist And Iconoclastic Thinker Freeman Dyson Dies At 96

"Acclaimed physicist Freeman Dyson, who pondered the origins of life, interstellar travel and many other topics, died Friday at the age of 96."

"His daughter Mia Dyson told NPR that her father died after a short illness."

"Freeman Dyson was known for groundbreaking work in physics and mathematics but his curiosity ranged far beyond those fields."

"'He never got a Ph.D.,' says Robbert Dijkgraaf, director for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Dyson worked. 'He felt he was an eternal graduate student, and so he had a license to be interested in everything.'"

"Dyson was born in Crowthorne, England, in 1923. He studied physics and mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he worked with physicists including Paul Dirac and Arthur Eddington. During World War II, he was a civilian scientist with the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command."

"After the war, he came to the U.S. to study physics. Together with physicist Richard Feynman, he was able to reconcile two competing theories of quantum electrodynamics, the study of how sub-atomic particles and light interact. 'He was able to show that all these different points of view were one and the same thing," Dijkgraaf says. "He was a great unifier of physics.'"

Get A Glimpse Of Labor, Leisure And Everyday Life In Paris' Belle Époque

"Between 1871 and 1914, Paris enjoyed a long stretch without war. 'It was a special moment — a particularly joyful and exuberant moment in Parisian history,' says Emily Talbot. She's the curator of a new exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., all about Paris' Belle Époque — or beautiful era."

"During the four decades before World War I, the Eiffel Tower was built, broad boulevards replaced shabby medieval paths, and France's largest city became the City of Light, as the streets were illuminated for the first time by electricity."

"In the "By Day & by Night" some artists report what was happening on the city's streets, and follows Parsians inside their homes, their workplaces, their cafes — and even to the circus."

"A lithograph by Pierre Bonnard shows a busy street corner in 1899. 'You have a woman holding a basket, a child and a dog, a laborer carrying a plank, another one pulling up a pushcart,' Talbot describes."

"Bonnard didn't have to leave home to make his 1899 lithograph House in the Courtyard. The view from his own window shows a woman across the courtyard, leaning out her window to shake out her laundry, or perhaps a rug."

Health Officials Warn Americans To Plan For The Spread Of Coronavirus In U.S.

"Federal health officials issued a blunt message Tuesday: Americans need to start preparing now for the possibility that more aggressive, disruptive measures might be needed to stop the spread of the new coronavirus in the U.S."

"The strongly worded warning came in response to outbreaks of the virus outside China, including in Iran, Japan, South Korea and Italy, which officials say have raised the likelihood of outbreaks occurring stateside."

'It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but more really a question of when it will happen — and how many people in this country will have severe illness,' Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters during a briefing."

"While aggressive measures such as travel restrictions and the first federal quarantine in a half century have probably slowed the arrival of the coronavirus in the U.S., Messonnier said even more intrusive steps will likely be needed.

"We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare with the expectation that this could be bad," Messonnier said.

"I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning. And I told my children that while I didn't think that they were at risk right now, we, as a family, need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives," she said."

"Those measures could include school closings, workplace shutdowns and canceling large gatherings and public events, she warned."

H1N1 Was The Last Pandemic. Here's Why COVID-19 Isn't Yet In That Category

"Despite worrisome new outbreaks in Iran, Italy and South Korea, the coronavirus disease called COVID-19 is not currently a pandemic, the World Health Organization said today."

"In fact, there are some encouraging trends, especially in Hubei Province, where most of the cases have been reported."

"The epidemic there appears to have plateaued in late January and is continuing on a good trajectory. Dr. Bruce Aylward led a WHO trip to China with a scientific delegation that just concluded. On Sunday, he told reporters in Beijing that trend is real."

"Aylward said that he'd spoken to a researcher in Wuhan who is testing potential drugs to treat COVID-19'and when I asked him what challenge they're finding in trying to implement the trial, he said the single biggest one is recruiting new patients ... because of the drop in cases.'"

"That's a good kind of problem. The message from China is that it's not hopeless, he says. It is possible to control this disease."

"'Now we're starting to see countries like Italy take extremely aggressive actions,' Aylward said. 'What China has demonstrated is you have to do this, and if you do it you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.'"

A Nomadic Start To Photographing Inuit Culture Across Countries

"Brian Adams has spent his photography career reconnecting with his own Inuit culture. Raised in Girdwood, Alaska, Adams is half Iñupiat but grew up largely disconnected from his indigenous culture. Iñupiat people are part of an Inuit group, which includes indigenous people in northern Alaska, arctic Canada, Greenland and Russia."

"'Since 2007, [I am] really just trying to reconnect to my roots, my family and my culture,' Adams said."

"Adams is based in Anchorage and has created two bodies of work, I AM ALASKAN, where he focused on Alaska's diversity, and I AM INUIT, where he photographed Inuit people in Alaska. Now he is going deeper."

"In Adams' latest project, Ilatka: The Inuit Word For My Relatives, he is planning to photograph Inuit people in many of the circumpolar countries — those located near Earth's poles — where they migrated and settled. He started the project in Alaska and Canada in 2018."

'Antarctica Melts,' NASA Says, Showing Effects Of A Record Warm Spell

"Where there was a white ice cap, there are now brown blotches of land; melted snow and ice have created ponds of water. Those are the effects of the recent record high temperatures in Antarctica, according to NASA, which on Friday released stunning before-and-after satellite images of the northern Antarctic Peninsula."

"The photos center on Eagle Island, part of the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that stretches toward South America. Satellites took the images just nine days apart, on Feb. 4 and Feb. 13. But dramatic changes took place in that time span. Two days after the first photo was taken, the area hit 18.3 degrees Celsius (64.9 degrees Fahrenheit) — matching that day's temperature in Los Angeles, NASA notes."

"'The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers,' the space agency says. 'Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until the 21st century, but it has become more common in recent years.'"

"On Eagle Island, the biggest loss of ice and snow came on Feb. 6, when an inch of snowpack melted, according to NASA's climate models. By Feb. 11, the island had lost 4 inches of snow."

"'I haven't seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica,' Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, said in NASA's news release about the phenomenon."

"The nearly 65-degree temperature was reported by Argentina's research station at Esperanza Base. Experts at the World Meteorological Organization are still verifying the record. The agency calls the Antarctic Peninsula one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth, with average temperatures rising almost 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past half century."