Science Friday - Maine Offshore Wind Auction Draws Few Bids | An Artist Combines Indigenous Textiles With Modern Tech

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Two years ago, energy companies scrambled for offshore wind contracts. At a recent auction, the demand was significantly lower. Plus, artist Sarah Rosalena uses Indigenous weaving, ceramics, and sculpture practices to create art that challenges tech’s future, in a segment from earlier this year.Maine Offshore Wind Auction Draws Few BidsOffshore wind is coming to the Gulf of Maine. Earlier this week, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held an auction for eight leases to develop wind projects off the coast of Maine. But companies bid on only half of the available leases.Guest host Rachel Feltman talks with Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review about that and other top science news of the week including; bird flu found in pigs, AI’s electronic waste problem, what’s in your black plastic spatula, and giant rats fighting the illegal wildlife trade.An Artist Combines Indigenous Textiles With Modern TechWhen multidisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena looks at a loom, she thinks about computer programming. “It’s an extension of your body, being an algorithm,” she says.Rosalena, a Wixárika descendant and assistant professor of art at the University of California Santa Barbara, combines traditional Indigenous craft—weaving, beadmaking, pottery—with new technologies like AI, data visualization, and 3D-printing. And she also works with scientists to make these otherworldly creations come to life. She involved researchers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab to make 3D-printed pottery with simulated Martian clay. And she collaborated with the Mount Wilson Observatory to produce intricately beaded tapestries based on early-1900s glass plates captured by the observatory’s telescope, which women mathematicians used to make astronomical calculations.And that’s also a big focus for Rosalena: spotlighting the overlooked contributions women made to computer science and connecting it to how textiles are traditionally thought of as a woman-based craft. When she first started making this kind of art, Rosalena learned that the Jacquard loom—a textile advancement in the 1800s that operated on a binary punch card system which allowed for mass production of intricate designs—inspired computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace when she was developing the first computer program. “[They] have this looped history,” she says. “And when I weave or do beadwork, it’s also recalling that relationship.”Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.Transcript for these segments will be available 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 week, two companies secured rights to build offshore wind off the coast of Maine. Offshore wind is expensive and prices have gone up, and so any good news is great in the sector right now. It's Friday, November 1st, or as we call it around here, it's Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer D. Peter Schmidt. Offshore wind is coming to the Gulf of Maine. Earlier this week, the federal government held an auction for eight leases to develop wind projects off the state's coast. Bad news is, companies bid on only half of those available lease. leases. And it's the first day of Native American Heritage Month. Later in the episode, we have a

profile of an indigenous artist who's worked with NASA to create futuristic pottery out of Martian Clay, along with other science-inspired art. But first, here's guest host Rachel Feldman with the top science stories of the week. Joining me now to explain what this all means in the context of the wind energy sector and to discuss other top science stories of the week is my guest. Casey Crownheart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review, based in New York. City. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Always great to be here. So let's start with the basics of this auction. How many leases were given out and who got them and how much energy will that actually amount to? Absolutely. So like you said, this auction this week

was for eight potential leases off the coast of Maine. Four of those leases ended up being sold. a developer called Avondgrid won two of them and a developer called Invenergy, one, the other two. If all of these leases get developed, that means that we could generate up to 6.8 gigawatts of power. That's enough to power over 2 million homes. So what is this signal for the wind energy sector? Yeah. So like you said, it's kind of unfortunate that only four of these eight leases ended up selling, but it could have been a lot worse. So offshore wind has sort of been struggling over the past year, especially. We've seen major projects get canceled.

There were a couple of big projects in New Jersey that got canceled last year. And some other auctions recently haven't even gone this well. So one auction off the coast of Oregon got canceled recently, another one in the Gulf of Mexico. So experts are actually kind of happy that anything happened here at all. You know, offshore wind is expensive and prices have gone up. And so any good news is great in the sector right now. Yeah. And this project is a bit different than other types of offshore winds.

Could you tell me a little bit more about how? Yeah. So I was especially interested in this auction because, so along the East Coast, most offshore wind turbines are fixed into the ocean floor. Kind of makes sense, right? You stick them in the ground. The waters off the coast of Maine are too deep to do that, actually. So these projects will have to use floating turbines, which is kind of a newer technology. It's less common.

So it's really interesting and exciting to see developers jumping in. We'll also have to see floating turbines in project. off the coast of California. It's also really deep waters out there. So really interesting kind of development for the industry. Yeah, definitely interested to see how that continues to develop. And moving on to some troubling public health news, the USDA has confirmed that bird flu has been identified in a pig in the U.S. for the first time. Tell me more about this story. Yeah. So like you said, first time that we've seen bird flu in a pig, this was in a backyard farm in Oregon. There were a lot of birds on the farm that had. this strain of bird flu. And so out of an abundance of caution, officials tested the pigs that were on the farm. And one pig was found to have the H5N1 virus. And how concerning is it really for bird flu to cross over into pigs specifically? Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily cause for panic,

but researchers are definitely concerned about this. So this form of bird flu that's been spreading over the last few years has been responsible for the deaths of millions of birds. It's been really bad. We've seen it spread to dairy cows as well, and some people have gotten mild cases. The move to pigs is particularly concerning because pigs are one of the few animals where an avian virus can replicate and become more like a human virus. Pigs can be co-infected with bird and human viruses. The viruses can kind of like swap genes across them. And pigs were the source of the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009. So this is something that researchers are definitely keeping a close eye on. Yeah. Like you said, you know, not time to panic, but definitely

time to be very vigilant. So moving on from farm animals to artificial intelligence, you wrote a story this week about the electronic waste generated by AI. This isn't a part of the equation I've really heard a lot about. I've heard a lot about, you know, the sort of energy input. But yeah, tell me more about what you found. Yeah, this was, that's also why I was interested in this story because we've been talking a lot about the energy demands of AI, the water demand to cool equipment. But all of this kind of high-performance computing equipment will eventually become trash. And so a new study that was out this week tried to quantify just how much generative AI will add to our e-waste problem. E-waste is basically garbage from any old electronics.

You know, your iPhone and your refrigerator can both be e-waste. All of the computing equipment that it takes to train and run models often gets replaced pretty quickly because tech-moving. really fast. Companies want to replace what they have with the best models. Researchers said that this could all add up to about five million tons of e-waste in total by 2030. Wow. And I know that e-waste is in general a huge problem. I think about it all the time with like all of the gadgets that are becoming ever more popular on TikTok shop. You know, I don't think it's morally bad to want a new straightening brush, but I think we don't think of these as e-waste in the same way that we think of, you know, an old computer. So how big of a problem is AI, you know, as a fraction of the e-waste we're creating

globally? Yeah. It's honestly a small fraction. So I said five million tons from AI at max probably by 2030. Humans produce 60 million tons of e-waste each year right now. Wow. So that's a problem because only 22% of that is getting recycled through official channels. We're losing valuable metals like iron and gold and silver and rare earth metals. And e-waste can often contain hazardous materials as well, lead, mercury, chromium, stuff like that. I would say AI is not like the be-all-end-all villain of e-waste, but it's kind of just one more kind of block in this growing problem that we're starting to see. So the next story is actually somewhat related to e-waste. We're going to talk about black plastic, specifically the stuff that spatulas are often.

made from. So what's so bad and spooky about black plastic as opposed to other types of plastic? Yes, we're still celebrating spooky season here. There's a great story in the Atlantic this week about black plastic spatulas and why this is, you know, one particular piece of plastic that you might want to avoid. So basically, researchers have found some concerning levels of things called flame retardants in some black plastic products. One study this month, researchers looked at, you know, products like toys, cooking products, hair accessories as well, found that a small fraction of them contained bromine. And when they looked at those products that contained bromine, most of them contained brominated flame retardants. So these are chemicals that we use in products to, you know,

help them not catch on fire. It's very helpful. But those are chemicals you do not want anywhere near your food. These can mess with your hormones. They're linked to things like thyroid disease. And so black plastic cooking utensils that have these chemicals in them, we, you know, there's cause for concern there. Yeah, absolutely. And I know increasingly researchers are saying, like, don't have heated plastic near your food in general. You know, obviously, microplastics are impossible to avoid. But I've heard that that's one of the sort of like basic protective measures you can take. Absolutely. Yeah. And to kind of bring it back to e-waste, the idea that some researchers have is that e-waste is finding its way into regular recycling streams. And so that's often like, think of your TV or your computer casing. There's like plastic in there. And that's where these products might be

used. So like you said, it's impossible to avoid all plastic, but avoiding heating up plastic. So like don't put plastic in the microwave. And it might be time to replace that black plastic spoutchola with something like silicone or a steel one. Yeah. You would. eat a TV. So just... I personally would not choose to do that, yeah. So this next story definitely falls into the like, whoa category. Researchers found a lost Mayan city in Mexico. What exactly did they find? Yeah. So this was a complex of over 6,500 structures, a city that might have been home to up to 50,000 people at its peak. Researchers say they're not totally sure why the city was abandoned. It's only about a 15-minute hike from a major road in the area.

But it was kind of a really startling discovery that they were able to use with some interesting technology called a LIDAR survey that basically uses pulsed laser beams. And they found the city hiding in the jungle, basically. Very cool. Could this laser scanning technology help us discover more lost cities? Absolutely. So this is one of several cities that have been found using this technique. And what I think is really interesting about this one in particular is that this data was actually collected in 2013 through a different organization altogether. This researcher was going through this publicly available data and processing it and found evidence of the city. So we might even already have the data that reveals these cities and we just haven't looked that closely at it yet, which is really interesting. So finally, our last story is about sort of an unlikely hero that's really one, my heart.

I have to say. The African giant pouched rats who are being trained to help sniff out illegally trafficked plants and animals. Tell me more about what's going on here. I love them so much. Yeah, so like you said, these African giant pouched rats are being trained as the next line of defense in the illegal wildlife trade. People may have heard that these animals have been trained before to detect explosives in combat zones. And so researchers are now training them to detect things like elephant ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales, and wood from endangered or at risk of extinction trees. These are all kind of things that are often illegally trafficked. And these rats have a really great sense of smell. So researchers took a few rats. There were 11 in this study, introduced them to

different odors, as well as things like coffee beans and washing powder that are often used to distract from the smells of these illegally trafficked materials. And they found that Most of the rats were able to detect these sense, distinguish between them, and retain the information for months afterward. Wow, that is so impressive. And I love that they're helping, you know, sniff out pangolin trafficking, because I love those little sentient pine cones, too. I was looking at some photos of this. And first of all, like, these rats completely won me over. They are large enough that my brain reads them as like friend. You know, it's like dog and cat size. But I also noticed that they're in these adorable little custom vests. Could you tell me about how those factored into their training?

Oh, my gosh. I love them so much. Yes. So the, the really, the real thing. researchers made these little custom vests for them that have a little ball attached to it. And so the idea is that if, you know, they're able to actually use these rats in the field to detect these materials, that the rats would be able to pull on this little ball and it would make a beeping sound. So they would basically be able to alert people to what they had found. I highly recommend looking at the photos. It's very, very cute. Oh, man. They're such good boys, these rats. They really are. That's just about all the time we have. Casey, thank you, as always, being here. Thank you so much for having me. It was really great to be here.

Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review, based in New York City. When we come back, we'll learn how artist Sarah Rosalina combines indigenous textiles and pottery with modern tech like data visualization and 3D printing. The patterns woven in textiles can tell a powerful story, and Sarah Rosalina knows this well. She's a multidisciplinary artist who blends ancient mediums and indefinitely. Indigenous knowledge with data and new technology. Sci-Fry producer and host of our podcast, Universe of Art, Dee Petersmith, sat down with Rosalina to talk about her collaborations with scientists,

space colonization, and how she views technological advancements through an indigenous lens. Here's Dee. When Sarah Rosalina thinks about the loom, she thinks about computer programming. It's an extension of your body being an algorithm. Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm design for a computer, said she'd been inspired by the Jakarta Loom developed in the 1800s, which used a binary punch card to mass-produce intricate textile designs. And that approach, blending old mediums with new tech,

sums up Rosalina's approach to her own art. She's an assistant professor of art at UC Santa Barbara, based in L.A., and she's of Warwicka descent, indigenous people native to what is now parts of Mexico in the southwestern United States. She works in these old art forms, textiles and pottery, but uses AI and data-evales. visualization as part of the creative process. It's a way to process for feelings about how modern

society is progressing. We're at this point of the technological frontier, and that's actually terrifying for a lot of people, especially for people from my background and my Warraka background. We're living in the time of climate change, dispossession, the rise of AI. And I'm always interested in anticipating future forms of colonization, because it's progress for some, but it's not for all. Rosalina, who's a fourth generation Waraco Weaver, was taught indigenous textile work in part by her grandmother. It's something that really made her feel sane. I remember she used to always encouraged me to weave for mental health, but it was also good for exercising your mind. Rosalina later found herself in the Bay Area around the time of the tech boom of the late aughts and learned to code.

And there was a lot of interesting people that I met at that time were very similar to me. A lot of WIPOP people working in code. But at the same time, tech startups, really started to rise and displacing a lot of the people that I used to enjoy hanging out with. Frustrated, she moved back to L.A. and rediscovered her love for textile work. I saw so many relationships between, you know, the code that I was writing and actual designs that I was weaving that they couldn't help but intersect. It was very much like an aha moment. What happens when we bring traditional craft or indigenous techniques with emerging technology to think about current issues that we are facing. Digital technology.

They're always chasing after ways that we could simulate our reality, which also produces this way that we could re-envision our reality. And Rosalina doesn't just re-envision reality with herself. She often collaborates with scientists to make her art. It's a big role as an artist to work with scientists and engineers because we see the world differently, and there's a lot of value in that. One of those collaborations was with NASA JPL in Pasadena, and Rosalina learned that they had a mutual interest, Clay.

The space agency was experimented. with simulated Martian soil, also called Regolith, to potentially construct livable human habitats on the red planet without having to transport heavy building materials all the way from Earth. So they were doing a lot of research on Regulus, simulant, and clay to actually build some of the first elements out of basically Adobe, which made me giggle, because again, it's like how much space colonization is dependent on indigenous knowledge, even on another planet. Rosalina also teaches coil pot construction at UC Santa Barbara, an indigenous method of making ceramics. That's one of the oldest in the world.

Coil pots look like what they sound like. Coils of clay are layered on top of each other until you get your vessel. And she wanted to update that with a techie Martian twist. With the help of NASA engineers, she was able to make her own version of Martian clay, based off soil analyses from J.P. Hill's rovers like Curiosity. She modeled the vessels in the computer and then 3D printed them, using her Martian Adobe. The resulting sculptures look both futuristic and ancient. The ribbed, rust-tinged ceramics take a few shapes, the mouth of a black hole, a long cylinder that looks

like it's eating itself, a vaguely spherical shape that appears as though it was crushed by the forces of gravity. And Rosalina's passion for pottery even rubbed off on JPL's engineers. I actually made a lot of friends. Some of them got into ceramics at the time, which was also really interesting to have Martian cartographers who are guiding the rovers suddenly be interested in actually the chemical compounds of play. And we would talk for hours on end on making clay, finding native clay in Los Angeles. Located just a few miles away from JPL is the Mount Wilson Observatory, which Rosalina has also partnered with. It was an important observatory in the early 1900s. Edwin Hubble used a telescope to prove that the universe is expanding. But discoveries like that

couldn't have been made without the help of female computers. Women who analyzed the raw data from the telescope and performed complex math that made those discoveries possible. But when I got there, I realized that female computers were mostly cropped and edited out of the history of that observatory. Back then, the images from the telescope were exposed onto glass plates, which the female computers used to make their calculations. And I found textile was a unique way to approach it because it is a feminist or a female-based craft. So to shed light on these women's work, Rosalina took those plates and digitized them into a lower resolution where each pixel would become a bead on a tapestry, which she then assembled by

hand. But not all of these tapestries are neat rectangles. Some of them distort and fray as the beads progressed downwards, looking like a starry cosmic jellyfish. Rosalina hopes her art doesn't just serve as a form of protest, but also provides an alternative way of interpreting the world around us, one that places a much larger emphasis on indigenous knowledge. It is very important because a lot of the current crises that we're facing are a crisis of humanity in many ways. And I feel like artists really shine that light and also can see the world differently than what a scientist or engineer does. And we can learn quite a bit from one another. We aired that story earlier this year, and we wanted to let you know that Sarah's work

is part of a new exhibition at the L.A. County Museum of Art as part of the Getty PST exhibition, mapping the infinite cosmologies across cultures. It'll be on view until March 2025. And that's all the time we've got for today. A lot of folks help make the show happen, including Beth Rami, Santiago Flores. Diana Plasker. John Denkoski. Next week, continuing our coverage of how science is showing up on the ballot, we'll talk about what's on the line for gender affirming care in the upcoming election. I'm SciFRI producer, D. Peter Schmidt. Have a great weekend.