Science Friday - Clean Energy Bill, Heatwave Infrastructure, Etana Teen Innovator. August 5th, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

What’s Inside A Sudden, Second Chance At A Climate Bill Last week, climate activists received a surprise gift from Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin. It turns out they had been in secret negotiations to put out a spending package that might tackle some of the same climate mitigation projects as last year’s failed Build Back Better initiative. The $369 billion dollars for climate mitigation in the Inflation Reduction Act covers tax credits for renewable energy, methane leak reduction, and the largest environmental justice investment in history. But will it pass before Congress goes on recess? Ira talks to University of California-Santa Barbara political scientist Leah Stokes, who helped advise Senate Democrats during the bill’s crafting, about what the bill might do, and some of the politics shaping climate action.   Engineering and Infrastructure In A Collapsing Climate Roads buckling. Power grids flickering. Roads washing out and basements flooding. Climate change brings new hazards for both human health and the infrastructure that keeps our communities functioning. So how do we build for the conditions that are coming–and in many ways already here? Arizona State University engineer Mikhail Chester talks to Ira about the physical alterations we’ll need and, perhaps more importantly, the way the process of building must change too. Plus why building things to fail—but with less deadly consequences—may be necessary in an uncertain future.   A Teen Inventor Builds A Fingerprint Scanner for Gender Equity The World Bank estimates that around one billion people worldwide don’t have official proof of identity. Without legal identity verification, opening bank accounts, voting, and even buying a cell phone is challenging or even impossible. This issue disproportionately affects women—around half the women in low-income countries do not have proof of identity, which limits their independence and the resources they are able to access. Looking for a solution, 16-year-old Elizabeth Nyamwange invented Etana—an affordable fingerprint scanner that could provide women with a form of digital identity. Her project to close the gender identification gap earned her first place in HP’s Girls Save the World challenge. Ira speaks with Nyamwange, based in Byron, Illinois, about her innovation.   Remembering Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek’s Pioneering Lieutenant Uhura Actress Nichelle Nichols died this week at the age of 89. She was known to people throughout the galaxy for her role as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, the communications officer on the Starship Enterprise. Her casting as a Black woman in a highly skilled, technical position on a major television program in 1966 was crucial representation—and helped many viewers see science and technology careers as something within their grasp as well. When Nichols considered leaving Star Trek to return to Broadway, a meeting with “her biggest fan”—the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr—helped convince her to stay on to contribute to the civil rights movement. Later, Nichols became an ambassador for NASA, working to help recruit people to the space shuttle program, especially women and minorities. In this remembrance, astronaut Leland Melvin helps tell her story, and Tarika Barrett, CEO of the STEM organization Girls Who Code, talks about the importance of role models and representation. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. Later in the hour, we'll talk about how to engineer infrastructure to weather global warming and a 16-year-old inventor who's using blockchain technology to help women in developing nations prove their identities. But first, even as more heat waves ripple across the country, congressional Democrats are racing to pass the Inflation Reduction Act before the August recess. And if passed, it would be the big, pot of money for climate change efforts in U.S. history. So far, the bill includes nearly $370 billion for a slew of provisions you may recognize from last year's failed and much bigger build-back better bill. Here to help us break down what's in the bill and help us peer at the

politics of climate change mitigation is Dr. Leah Stokes, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She helped advise Senate. Democrats on the bill, and she hosts the podcast A Matter of Degrees. Welcome back to the program. Oh, thank you so much for having me on. Nice to have you. Okay. Why is there climate change money and a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act? That's a great question, Ira. And it turns out that 41% of inflation is actually driven by fossil fuels directly. You know, just think about the price at the pump. People have been paying four or five, six dollars a gallon to fuel day. car. And the good news is that if you have an electric vehicle, it only costs a dollar a gallon

to fill it up with electricity, of course. So what this bill is going to do is save Americans' money by helping them get access to all these clean energy technologies that reduce their energy bills. You know, one analysis from rewiring America, one of the groups I work with, suggests that an average American household that adopted the clean energy technologies this bill is going to make more affordable, things like heat pumps, electric vehicles, solar panels, induction stoves. If they adopted those technologies, they could save $1,800 a year on their electricity bills. Wow. And that's every single year.

Yeah. So this really is going to fight inflation when it comes to energy bills for everyday Americans. You know, until last week, I don't think most people had any idea. This was even in the works. What happened? How did this bill all come together? Well, nobody had any idea except. for Senator Manchin and Senator Schumer. You know, Senator Manchin walked away from the deal a few

weeks ago. It was devastating. A lot of folks spoke up about just how terrible this is. You know, climate change is not an issue that can wait another decade for when we finally have a, you know, majority in both houses once again. We, you know, we already waited a decade since the last climate bill. So it seems that some of that public pressure worked. Senator Manchin went back to the negotiating table, and he came back with Senator Schumer surprise a week ago with a new bill. And, you know, as somebody who felt, you know, the loss looked into the abyss of no climate policy at all, this entire Congress, you know, even if it's not a perfect deal, to me, this is an absolutely huge win for the planet and for Americans. All right. Let's look at why you think that.

Let's get into the specifics of the provisions. First of all, we see tax credits. and other incentives for people and corporations to use renewable energy, including electric vehicles, more than $100 billion worth. This isn't new. Are they enough to make a difference, though, in people's behavior? Absolutely. These tax credits are the really bedrock policy that has been deploying wind and solar for decades since 1992, in the case of one tax credit. But every time we pass them, they only last for so long, a couple of years here, couple years there. And this bill is actually going to extend those policies for 10 years all in one go. That's going to create a lot of certainty for the industry and they're going to be able to build huge amounts of wind and solar. And that's really what we need in order to decarbonize our grid

to clean up our electricity system. You know, President Biden set a goal for 100% clean power by 2035. And this bill will help get us on track to actually meeting that goal. Wow. There's also substantial investment in environmental justice communities, communities that have been either marginalized economically or that face a higher pollution burden because of historic discrimination, can compensating for injustice also reduce emissions? I think that's part of what they're trying to talk about. Absolutely. You know, communities of color are really on the front lines of the pollution crisis. When we talk about dirty air, it's overwhelmingly in communities of color. And so that's why this bill includes $3.5 billion to clean up ports.

Ports are often located near communities of color and they're really dirty facilities. So that's going to help a lot. There's also $27 billion for something called the Clean Energy Accelerator. It's basically like a green bank that will lend out money at a really low cost to folks to help them get, you know, solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles, you know, maybe retrofit, a public housing facility, those kinds of things. things. And that's going to really help in terms of making sure that we're cleaning up pollution in every single zip code in this country. Now, there I'm sure had to be compromises to get this

bill passed. Was money taken out of, let's say, one particular pot of money that was taken out or that you believe should be bigger than it is? Of course, I think we have to invest even more money in climate change. You know, $300 and almost $70 billion is huge. It is four times the next biggest climate package we have ever passed in Congress. That was the Recovery Act back in 2009. This is a game changer. But the bill that the House passed, billed back better, it had $555.5 billion. And you're right. There were some programs that fell out altogether. For example, support for electric bikes. That was something I was excited about. I have an e-bike and I want a lot of Americans to get one. But a lot of what happened is actually that the programs just got smaller.

So they didn't sort of kill total provisions, total programs. What they did was just make things a little bit smaller at the margins. You know, I've seen some estimates that this bill would help drive carbon pollution down below even 2005 levels, as much as 40 percent by 2030. How do you begin to calculate the carbon impact of a bill like this? Well, the good news is that there are some amazing modeling groups out there, including energy. innovation. This is an independent group. You know, they, they just look at the numbers and they make an analysis. And what they found is that the bill will cut carbon pollution, just like you said, it will probably get us 40 percent below those 2005 levels. And remember, President Biden's goal is to cut

carbon pollution in half, cut it by 50 percent by 2030. So this bill will get us 80 percent of the way there. And, you know, there are some things in the bill that are not great that Senator Mansion added at the last minute. But the other thing that energy innovation found in their modeling work was that there is 24 times more good stuff in the bill when it comes to cutting carbon pollution than there is bad stuff. One thing people might not understand is that this bill has over $60 billion to invest in clean energy manufacturing in the United States. That means that we'll be making everything from solar panels to wind turbines, heat pumps, batteries, electric vehicles. The list goes on.

We'll be making all of those technologies here in the United States. That isn't just important in terms of creating good paying and hopefully unionized jobs in the clean energy economy. It's also important to change the politics because that means next time when we come back to say, hey, the climate crisis is really important. We need to do this. There will be jobs and employers and people working in the clean energy industries in every district and every state across this country. And that's going to make it a lot easier for us to finally be able to find some Republican votes for climate legislation. You mentioned earlier that there were some pieces that were added back to the bill so that Senator Mansion would be able to feel comfortable with it. And one in particular is upsetting activists.

And I'm talking about a requirement that the U.S. sell leases for oil and gas drilling on public lands. Yes, that is a Senator Mansion provision. it's not something that I would have written, and it doesn't really make a lot of sense. But it is in the bill, and it has to stay in the bill if we want to pass this overwhelmingly positive package. So what does it do? It says that each year the federal government needs to auction at least 2 million onshore acres and 60 million offshore acres of public lands and waters. What does that compare to the historic average? Well, in the 10-year period before the pandemic, we auctioned about 5 million onshore and 80,

million offshore on average. So this is a bit lower than what we've been doing, but it's still not good news because the fact is we don't need any new fossil fuel developments. They make no sense for communities. They make no sense for the planet. And quite frankly, they're an economic loser because you're going to have to shut down those projects way before they're finished operating. So this is not a good proficient. But remember, it's just an auction. It means that companies could buy leases. In general, only one to three percent of lease acres are actually bought. And then those companies have to propose a project. They have to go through environmental review.

It takes a lot of time, energy, money, before there's even a project developed. So the climate movement has got to be there every step of the way to try to stop those projects from being developed because we can't have any new fossil fuel projects. All right. One last question. Let's say this bill passes just as it is. No iffy, tricky amendments come up. What's next for climate politics? What bills would you want or what executive actions this seems so complete could the president put forth?

Well, you know, this bill is really a lot of carrots. It's incentives to build clean energy industries here in America. It's incentives to help make it cheaper for everyday Americans to get access to clean energy technologies. But apart from that methane fee that we talked about, there aren't a lot of sticks in this package. you know, things that say, thou shalt do X, you know, it's really a spending bill. That's what reconciliation, this arcane process that allows us to only have 50 votes, that's what that is about. It's a budget bill. So what we need next is for President Biden to step up with a broad range of executive actions that accelerate the transition to 100% clean electricity, to cutting carbon

pollution in half by 2030. And in many ways, the Biden administration has been holding itself back because they know how important getting this bill across the finish line to President Biden's desk to be signed. They know how important that is. But I have a hunch that right on the heels of this bill, we are going to see the Biden administration step up in a big way when it comes to executive actions on climate. And that is exactly what we need to happen, as well as we need states and cities and everyday people to keep moving ahead with everything they can do on the climate crisis. Because really, this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. We'll have to hold our breath and leave it there. Thanks for joining me, Dr. Stokes.

Oh, thank you so much for having me on. Dr. Leah Stokes, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She was an advisor on the Inflation Reduction Act, and the host of the podcast will have to all go listen to that now, a matter of degrees. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, global warming is dangerous for human life and destructive to infrastructure. So how can we engineer our rules, roads are power grids and stormwater systems for what's certainly coming up, the new normal. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's another week from hell, almost literally, in many parts of the country. Last week, we talked about the toll the hot weather takes on the human body,

how it turns deadly for people without access to air conditioning. This week, we're going to talk about another casualty of extreme heat, the health of our infrastructure. We're talking the power grid in Texas, taxed to the max, trying to keep life-saving AC on. Roads and train tracks buckling under this summer's inferno. We've watched runways melt in the UK, not to mention the heartbreaking floods, overwhelming humid attempts to contain them. So can we prevent infrastructure from failing and endangering lives as conditions change? And how do we build for an uncertain climate-changed future? With me to talk about this is Dr. Mikhail Chester, a professor of civil, environmental and

sustainable engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe. Welcome to the program. Greetings, Ira. Great to be on with you. And, you know, I just mentioned some examples of infrastructure problems we've seen in the extreme heat recently. But can you explain on a physical level why a power grid has a harder to? and hot weather. I mean, it's not just that everyone has the AC on, is it? That's right. So when you think

about the relationships between infrastructure and their environments, there are normative choices that are made about how much environmental exposure or environmental extreme events in a particular asset or a larger system can be able to tolerate withstand, you know, any of those words, I think, are reasonable. So in the case of power systems, you can think of a power system, a giant heat management set of technology. So, for example, as we generate electricity and thermoelectric power plants like nuclear coal, you're managing heat. You're transferring energy around in the form of heat. When you're talking about something like power lines, you have electricity that's flowing through them, and that electricity is generating heat. And that heat has to go somewhere.

and we have engineered assets in our systems, for example, power lines to be able to give off heat fast enough, for example, under certain conditions. If those conditions change, for example, at the peak of the summer, or if temperatures continue to rise, we have a heat wave, then the line in this case would not be able to give off heat fast enough. So at that point, several things might happen. The line is warming up. It might expand or sag. In the case of a power line, we might be concerned about it coming into contact with a tree. Or what might happen is recognizing that temperatures are at their highest and exceeding what the system is designed for, engineers might make decisions about actually reducing the flow of, in this case, electricity

through the power line so that it stays within its safe operating conditions. And the reduction of that electricity at a time when a lot of people are demanding more and more electricity for, in this case, air conditioning can be problematic. So, you know, at a material level, there's a number of things going on in terms of how we've designed the infrastructure. And then there's also the operations of that infrastructure. All of these things come into play when infrastructure are confronted by extreme events. You know, that's really interesting explanation because I don't think most people understood why the power is cut back, right?

Just when you need it most, it's to save the power lines. Yep, that's right. And if you look at when historically we've had major outages of, in this case, the power system, not coincidentally, it happens at the peak of the summer. For example, the 2003 northeast blackout in the U.S. happens right in the middle of August, happens sort of at the worst time. And the reason for this is because that's where you've pushed the system to its capacity. There's no fat in the system, so to speak. So as soon as something goes offline or multiple components go offline or, you know, climate change pushes the extreme even further beyond what the system was designed for,

then you start to have serious problems. That's really interesting. And of course, that goes on. We're talking metal, right? The power lines are made out of metal. You have the railroad tracks that, just like the power lines, they expand, but they have no place to go. So they buckle. That's right.

You're starting to see lots of stories emerge in places like the UK and even northern regions of the U.S. that are being hit by this heat wave where you're seeing issues around track buckling. And again, it's sort of a similar narrative. The tracks are, of course, designed for heavy heat periods. But as we see extreme heat events become that much more severe or even prolonged, we're starting to exceed what those particular systems were designed for. In the case of rail, an interesting dynamic that we're seeing emerge is even if the tracks have not buckled, train operators are often told to slow down because simply there's a risk of buckling.

So even if the tracks themselves have not buckled, the train schedules are. disrupted. And of course, people who rely on, you know, mass transit in that case are going to be impacted. The heat isn't the only issue of climate change is exacerbating. We just saw historic devastating floods in Kentucky and Missouri. We've had dozens of people die in New Jersey in New York last fall when the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped rain at like at a rate of three inches per hour. And one of the problems here is that we have stormy. water systems that can't handle it. They're not made to handle this kind of flow, correct? In many cases, that's indeed correct. And this goes back to how we design. And I think it's

important to recognize sort of the challenges of how we've been designing infrastructure through present day relative to the challenges of how we need to design infrastructure for an uncertain climate future. So in the case of water, we often are designing around historical data that tells us how much precipitation or water has passed through a particular area. You might size a stormwater pipe underneath the road given the historical data that has been collected for your particular region. So an engineer does this all the time. If we then recognize that climate change is creating conditions that are in many cases, in many places, producing more extreme precipitation events and more extreme flooding, but also the challenge

of uncertainty associated with how bad climate change might get. The combination of those two puts us in a challenging position. We don't quite know how big to make the pipe under the road. We can't necessarily afford it. And we're not quite sure how extreme these conditions are going to be, say, you know, 30, 50, 100 years from now. Right. You know, I'm almost having a deja vu all over again moment here because I've been following these issues for so many decades. And it always seems to me that we already know everything we need to make the roads and the power grids and the stormwater systems more resilient to changing climate. And it doesn't seem like we need to invent anything really new? At some scale of the problem, when we talk about how do we harden or strengthen or even

armor a particular asset, we absolutely know how to do that. If you are a stormwater engineer, for example, in a city in the U.S., and somebody says to you, the forecasts or the climate models are showing that precipitation is going to be 10% worse or 20% worse, the engineer will know in that situation, how to size their pipe appropriately for that condition. At the other scale of the problem, when you put all of the assets together across a country as large as the United States or many other countries in the world, there we have cities, states, a nation that have legacy infrastructure that are massive in scale. They go everywhere in the state or there's just lots of roads, lots of power lines, lots of water pipes, and so on.

And if we then say we have to rehabilitate all of that, we have to make all of that stronger, then we have a problem. There's severe limitations to do that, not simply financial. They might be political. There might be nimbism. There might be technological limitations.

You know, how big should that levy be? You know, we may not be able to build it as big as that worst case climate model forecast shows. So there we have a different mentality that needs to kick in to sort of deal with this challenge of we simply aren't going to rehabilitate everything fast enough. So give me some concrete ideas, no pun intended, a vision of what we need to do now and a pathway to getting a more resilient system. The first is that where we can armor, strengthen, and harden our assets, we should do. do that. However, also recognizing the kind of limitations that I provided. So next, what I would recommend is a number of strategies that embrace the uncertainty of climate change and the reality of

our inability to rehabilitate all of this infrastructure. So one strategy that we often think about is what's called safe to fail. And this is the idea that infrastructure have so far, over the past century, let's say, largely been designed as fail safe. We don't want them to fail. When they do, it generally becomes somebody else's problem, like FEMA, for example. Safe to fail is this idea that we allow at some point the environment to come in, recognizing that that's going to create disruptions. We need to manage those disruptions or be prepared to manage those disruptions proactively. Give me an example. Give me an example of that. In the Netherlands, for example, there is the room for the river project.

So the Netherlands is fairly low-lying across most of the country. And with sea level rise and storm surges, there was serious coastal flooding and inland flooding, riverine flooding risk. The Netherlands for a long time were building levees trying to hold it back, but couldn't keep up with the changing conditions that they had to respond to. So they decided to change their approach and allow room for the river for riverine flooding. They essentially gave space for the river to flood. And they said, farmers, you're allowed to plant crops in this flood prone region.

If you do so, every so often, there's a high risk that your crops are going to flood. As such, we're going to reimburse you for those crops. And the cost of reimbursing you when they're lost is far less than the cost of the cost of building bigger and bigger levees, maintaining them in perpetuity. Other strategies might include green infrastructure that, for example, might attenuate flooding. So if we, instead of trying to hold back that flooding with, you know, for example, concrete walls or levees, we might allow that flooding to come in but provide a barrier that is green infrastructure, excuse me, that would absorb some of that flood, observe some of the energy of that flood, and ultimately provide some

attenuation of the impact as it comes through. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Dr. Mikhail Chester about how we engineer infrastructure for climate change. Can you do something similar with, let's say, heat waves? Can you really let the heat in in a controlled manner without hurting human health or infrastructure? A lot of the discourse around heat focuses on rehabilitation of buildings for air conditioning. What's particularly concerning is not necessary places like Phoenix where virtually all buildings have some form of air conditioning, but instead places in the north that simply have building stock that hasn't needed air conditioning and therefore doesn't have all that much

air conditioning. The problem is that if you're trying to, again, hold back the environment, in this case heat, by deploying air conditioning everywhere, you have an energy problem, right? The footprint of that energy might be absolutely massive and you simply, you know, can't deploy enough energy generating technologies to keep up with that. There are, you know, lots of great examples of letting the heat in. And I'm not saying that this is always what we want to do, but I live down the road from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West campus, which does not have air conditioning. And, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright designed in innovative, passive cooling designs into the buildings, strategic placement of windows, even construction of a neighborhood in the placement of buildings and how they're integrated with green infrastructure. For example, trees, shading, grass, and so on can have huge impacts on the overall temperature experienced.

by that community. So there are ways in which you can allow the heat in, although, you know, we have to be careful about, you know, when we're going to do that, where we're going to do that, and, you know, how we protect those who are most vulnerable. Right, right. Now, one last thing, because this is, to me, the obvious question is, who's going to pay for this? Are we going to be watching these as local projects, one city, one county, one state, taking this project or the required changes on by themselves? Or are we going to wait for the federal government? Like, you know, they built the interstate highway, thanks to generalize it in Europe. Are we going to see it that way? Or how do you see this all playing out? Somebody will pay for this. And,

I don't have an answer of who that's going to be. What I can say is that, you know, again, evidence continues to accumulate that the costs of being proactive and maybe building in resilience earlier is going to be far less than the cost of waiting until these systems fail and paying for not only the infrastructure rehabilitation at that point, but also absorbing the economic damages that come along with it, which often are several orders of magnitude larger than the cost of rebuilding the infrastructure. To an engineer in the field,

the issue of climate change in infrastructure is in some ways apolitical. If I'm tasked with building a stormwater pipe under the road that can handle a certain amount of precipitation, at the most extreme, and my job is to prevent my community from flooding, I simply at this point can no longer ignore climate change. It's already playing out to some extent, and the evidence is there in front of me that it's probably going to get worse in my community. I simply have to absorb that information and make those decisions. And in our work, we continue to interact with

engineers who are looking for answers, who are looking for help, who are looking for the resources to make sure that our infrastructure stay reliable. Not only that, but our communities and our nation thrive under this climate impacted future. Well, let's hope that the politicians listen a little bit more to the engineers. I concur. I'm sure you will. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much, Ira. Dr. Mikhail Chester, of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe. We have to take a break and when we come back, we'll check in with a 16-year-old inventor who's using blockchain technology to help women in developing nations prove their identities.

Pretty impressive, right? You'll find out if you stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be bringing you stories from game-changing young innovators who are taking on big problems. To kick us off, a teenage inventor combining blockchain technology and social justice. Here's the background. The World Bank estimates that one billion people in the world don't have an official proof of identity. That means that opening bank accounts, voting, and even buying a cell phone is challenging and sometimes even impossible. And this is very much a gendered issue.

Around half the women in low-income countries don't have IDs. My next guest saw that challenge as an opportunity. Looking for a solution, 16-year-old Elizabeth Nyimwanga invented a device called Etana. She recently won first place in H.P.'s Girls Save the World Challenge, in which more than 800 teams submitted their ideas on how to better the world. Elizabeth joins me now from Byron, Illinois to tell us more. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for having me.

Elizabeth, I didn't realize how huge the global identification issue is. One billion people is bewildering. How did you learn about it? So I really started becoming interested in kind of the gap between women and men and digital identification post-COVID-19. I think seeing a lot of the effects or kind of the gender gap being exacerbated by the pandemic and women were staying at home. And the form of gender and kind of inclusivity took a very different approach in other countries as opposed to the United States.

So that's kind of how I started looking at it in specific. I'm from Kenya. So I have a lot of family back home. And we'd always talk about how a lot of girls were forced out of school, put into work early, things like that, didn't have bank accounts. And those numbers, COVID-19, just made so much bigger. So whenever I was kind of doing research on gender, post the pandemic, this is the kind of stuff that I would find. And identity was just something that really, really interested me because I saw how it impacted so many different sectors and kind of shaped these women's lives. So the root of inequality, the root of the problem is not financial. You need an ID before even considering, let's say, banking. Yes. You need an ID for basically

everything. And I think it's something that we in the states take for granted, but to even receive judicial protection to receive health care a lot of the times, open bank accounts, even work in the formal economy, you need some form of identification. So women have very limited freedom to do what they'd like without having these IDs. Yes, exactly. The reason it's such a big problem in these areas is because the concept of gender and kind of the cultural restraints that it hold mean that a lot of people don't necessarily think women should have or want them to have these IDs because obviously it opens up a different sector and kind of a different world for them to start to experience. And a lot of people, maybe governments, family members think that they

don't need it so they don't prioritize it. And that's kind of what also makes this such a big crisis because if people in their areas aren't prioritizing it, then no one else is really going to know that there's even a problem to begin with. What made you take on this idea? What was the catalyst that finally said to you, I have to work on this problem? I had initially actually started with finance, looking at kind of how to give these women different types of banking. And I had seen or attended a lot of hackathons that were working with in the financial sector, working to provide bank accounts for women in remote areas or for refugees in crisis, basically humanitarian situations. And from that, I started researching then, what are the constraints that women already don't

have that are stopping them from getting these bank accounts? And from that is where I started looking into identification itself, which at the basis of all of this again, kind of was my family. I do talk to them a lot quite constantly, actually. And oftentimes, I hear a lot of stories. They tell me a lot of things that they like, a lot of things that they don't like. And maybe while it's not in the intention for me to try and change something, when I hear things like repeatedly, and I know it's something that I may be taking for granted, perhaps, I want to see if there's a way that maybe I can use the resources. I have to change it a little bit. And so when I ultimately started working with using blockchain to build digital wallets and things like that, I then made the move over to

identification when I realized that that was kind of the root of the problem. And I, even if I would do something with finance and banking, perhaps later on, these women first needed to have identification to even start to think about, you know, collecting any money to their name at all. Very interesting. So where did the idea for the Tana come in? Yeah. So this was a little bit later after I'd come up with the idea of working with biometrical and identification. I initially was just going to kind of see if I could find a nonprofit organization that was doing what I was interested in and then maybe like see if I could help out there. But for all the tech startups that I looked at, I found that most of them were, let's say,

trying to kind of bridge that gap of digital identification, but they were doing it through smartphones and apps and Android devices and things that a lot of the woman just necessarily we didn't have. A lot of these women don't have any sort of internet electricity, and those are the women that need identification the most. So from that was where I developed this code for it, which was ongoing before. And then afterwards, that's when I decided I wanted to make a device itself that would be able to give these women identification without a need for internet or electricity. So that's kind of where it all came from. So what does the Atana look like? Is it like a device we would recognize? It looks almost like if you would think of a phone maybe 15 years ago, pretty bulky,

because a lot of the technology technically had to go a little back in time to figure out what exactly would work in these remote situations. It functions almost like a 2G phone, but it looks much, much bigger and it has a screen, like some other attributes on the side for if everyone use any different type of biometrics, but I think of it as kind of like a bigger, bulkier phone. So how do you work it? And so the device itself would prompt the woman to enter her fingerprint, enter her identification. And from that, that's all basically front end stuff, like kind of the same way you would use an app. From that, it takes the fingerprint and the Tata itself converts it into a cryptographic hash.

And that hash is then uploaded to a public blockchain server. The reason specifically we use blockchain is because it's immutable, is to centralize it keep the identification there, but no one can alter it, no one can change it. and that was really important for these women specific. And from there, for countries that are able to use digital identification, you can then pull the identity basically from the central database, and it's logged as identification. Elizabeth, talk about this cryptographic hash. What does it do? What's it for? The cryptographic hash is it could never be duplicated or replaced, because it's honestly just a bunch of binary numbers, so ones and zeros, but organized in such a way that,

it's individual to every single person. So there's never one that could be duplicated between people. And then the way that it's also kind of sent, think of it like SMS messaging. So the cryptographic hash is the biometric fingerprint converted into binary. And that is what's sent through SMS to the public blockchain, which then is altered a little bit, but it keeps the same components of what was then the fingerprint. And it keeps the same exact identification kind of stable and there and secure. So this is really interesting. So you store your fingerprint up there in blockchain, which is a really, really secure server up there in the cloud. That's really a cool idea. And how do you use it to prove your identity then? For countries that can use digital identification, all you need is something that's basically verifying that you are who you are. So some type of biometric footprint. And in this case, we use fingerprints. But you can also use something like this is a little bit more. more complex, but facial recognition, iris sensors, also voice recognition, things like that.

So in countries that you can use digital identification, all of these are stored in a database, which then they can access and verify in their own way or just look at and see, you know, you are who you are. But then there's where other startups can technically help out because they're implementing different ways to verify identification in these low resource settings, but obviously not create identification. So this can be verified in a multitude of different ways. The biggest problem, I guess, was just making sure that these women had identification that could be verified in the first place.

This is really cool. Do you have a prototype yet? We do have a prototype. I guess from the money that I've won within the past, I think six-ish months, we've been working basically entirely on prototyping since the code was almost entirely developed before. And from that, right now what we're trying to do is create a prototype and then hopefully do a research and like small pilot in Kenya the end of this year. And then how do you go about distributing the device?

How do you get the women to use it? This is a big part of what our research is going to be when we kind of go and visit these areas in specific. Well, we are looking for hotspots, places where these women would be able to go a lot. So like churches, schools, markets. And in this, it would be easier for women within a specific community to go, use this device. The device itself was only $50. That's kind of the price we're looking at right now. So in that, it wouldn't be too difficult if you have a large, you know, pool of money to be able to spread it out throughout separate different areas. But we want to make it pretty accessible.

So every woman has an opportunity to see it at least one of where they venture out locally. Well, Elizabeth, we wish you great luck and good fortune and congratulations on winning your prize. Okay. Thank you so much again. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Niamwanga invented a device called Itana, and she was joining us from Byron, Illinois, to tell us about it. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Actress Nichelle Nichols died this week at the age of 89. People around the galaxy knew her as Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura, communications officer of the Starship Enterprise. Progress report. I'm connecting the bypass circuit now, sir.

It should take another half hour. Speed is essential, Lieutenant. Mr. Spock, I haven't done anything like this in years. If it isn't done just right, I could build the entire communication system. It's very delicate work, sir. I can think of no one. Better equipped to handle it, Miss Oura. Please proceed.

Yes, sir. Right away. She was rarely in the foreground, not one of the show's big characters, but she was efficient, unflappable, and an equal within the crew. And as a black woman, when the show aired in 1966, that made a difference. This week, members of the science and engineering community remembered her as a role model. You know, I grew up in the 70s and, you know, certainly watched more than my fair share of television. And to see, you know, Lieutenant Uhura, Michelle Nichols on the screen was really everything.

I was immediately one of those kids that fell in love with science fiction. I would read every book I could get my hands on, watch every show that I could. And this one was absolutely iconic. And the minute that I saw her, this black woman, you know, starring in the science fiction series, I fell in love. even if she didn't have, you know, a ton of speaking parts, and even if, you know, she didn't have a ton of action, her presence, her poise, the fact that you knew that she, you know, had an actual ranking among these folks on the deck. Like, it was everything to see that. That was Dr. Tarika Barrett, the CEO of the STEM organization Girls Who Code.

Even though I was like, okay, I'm not trying to be a NASA astronaut. I never contemplated that. But the fact that she was doing this thing meant that you really could do anything. There were no boundaries. And, you know, at our organization, Girls Who Code, we always say that you can't be what you can't see. And Nichols embodied that sentiment in every possible way. Nichelle Nichols Azuhura represented an inclusive future in science, a future where everyone could explore strange new worlds.

In 2017, astronaut Leland Melvin told me the story of an encounter when Nichols was considering leaving Star Trek after one season to return to a career on Broadway. She was going to quit the show and go back to theater and dance, and she gave her resignation. He said, just think about it over the weekend. Over that weekend, she went to an NACP meeting in L.A. And this guy told her that her number one fan was right around the corner.

So she walks around the corner and it's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sitting there like a little kid, like looking at his star, you know, his idolized star. And he tells her, he says, Nichelle, you cannot quit this show because you're doing what I'm trying to do with the civil rights movement right now. So she stayed on the show. Later on, NASA asked Nichols to represent them more overtly touring the country to help to recruit. for this shuttle program. Now, the shuttle will be taking scientists and engineers, men and women of all races, into space, just like the astronaut crew on the Starship Enterprise.

So that is why I'm speaking to the whole family of humankind, minorities and women alike. If you qualify and would like to be an astronaut, now is the time. This is your NASA, a space agency and barrenica. A space agency embarked on a mission to improve the quality of life on planet Earth right now. And people listened to the call. Former NASA administrator Charlie Bolden and astronaut Mae Jamison both cited Nichols as an influence.

Here's astronaut Leland Melvin. All these people were kind of recruited through her efforts to inspire people that didn't have, you know, white skin and crew cuts. Back in 1998, Leonard Nimoy, who played the famous half-volcan Spock, spoke with me about the influence the program had. It's my life. I'm either teaching science or I'm an engineer or I'm... And for many, that influence was Lieutenant Uhura. Dr. Tarika Barrett says she still makes a point of saluting Nichols every year. I still wear my Lieutenant Uhura costume every Halloween. and their folks are like, shouldn't you get something new?

And that's true. Except for me, I would just wear it with so much pride. And I would make sure that my kids, you know, now teenagers, that they would get how important Lieutenant O'Hura was for me. Remembering the Shell Nichols dead at 89. Hailing frequencies closed. And that's about it for this hour. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again,

subscribe to our podcasts or ask. Ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can say hi to us on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Send feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Here's Diana Montana with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira.

Charles Berkwist is our radio director. Kyle Marion Viterbo is our community manager. Daniel Dana is our executive director. And I'm Diana Montana, Experiences Manager. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Am I Refleado?