RP150 Save Our Seas

 RP150 Save Our Seas

In August 2000, people in the Australian seaside town of Cairns found something very unusual on their beach: a whale. It was sick, and had come out of the ocean. It soon died on the sand.

When vets looked inside the dead whale, they found six square meters of plastic. The animal had eaten plastic bags that humans had thrown into the sea. Another whale died in Terschelling, in the Netherlands, in 2013. It had swallowed plastic bags, rope, flowerpots, and even a spray bottle. Turtles eat plastic bags all the time, mistaking them for jellyfish.

In May 2003, a platypus was found near a river in Tasmania, an Australian island. A plastic bag was wrapped around its body. It survived, and was named Lucky by its rescuers. Sadly, many other platypuses are not so lucky.

Animals are dying because of our trash. Plastic bags are a particular problem, because they last such a long time. While paper bags break down in months, plastic bags take a minimum of 10 years! But they are light and cheap, and people use them every day without thinking.

Many countries have tried to manage the problem of plastic bags. Bangladesh was the first country to ban them, and others, including China, have adopted full or partial bans. Governments have asked people to use cloth bags at the supermarket instead.

We cannot solve this problem overnight. There is already too much plastic in our oceans. However, we can stop producing more. Plastic comes from natural gas and petrol, which are bad for the environment anyway. Both humans and animals will benefit if plastic bags are banned everywhere.

RP149 The Shakespeare of Rock & Roll

RP149 The Shakespeare of Rock & Roll

In 2016, a songwriter won the Nobel Prize in Literature for the first time. But this is only the latest victory for the man often called the greatest American poet of the 20th century. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Bob Dylan!

Born in Minnesota in 1941, Robert Zimmerman changed his name and moved to New York in 1961 to make a career in music. Originally a folk singer, he played social and political songs in coffee shops for small crowds. He was soon noticed by Columbia Records, and his first album, Bob Dylan, was released in 1962. Although his early records weren't very big sellers, Dylan quickly found success as a songwriter. His famous protest song "Blowin' in the Wind" was a hit for the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary in 1963. Since then, countless other artists have covered Dylan's songs.

In 1965, Dylan shocked the music world by switching from soft folk to hard rock. While some of his old fans were disappointed, many new fans were created. The single "Like a Rolling Stone" reached number two in the United States, making Dylan a star. A couple of years later he changed styles again, writing and playing quiet country songs. Now the rock fans were upset, but Dylan just kept moving forward. 1969's Nashville Skyline was his fastest-selling album yet!

The end of the 1960s did not bring an end to Dylan's success. Hits such as "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"(1973) kept him in the public eye, and 1975's Blood on the Tracks remains his best-selling album. More than 40 years later, he continues to record and perform around the world. In addition to his Nobel Prize, Dylan has won 12 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and the US presidential Medal of Freedom. The man who began his career by attacking the establishment is now very well established! 

RP148 Victorian Art

RP148 Victorian Art

From 1837 to 1901, Queen Victoria ruled England. She ruled while the British Empire became the most powerful, most modern, and wealthiest nation in the world. For this reason, many people of that era were very positive. They believed science could solve the world's problems. They believed their Empire was changing the world for the better. Their new wealth and positive outlook led to an explosion of new artwork, as people had time to make, think about, and consume art.

The Victorian Age gave us new styles of painting. One was called Pre-Raphaelite. The Pre-Raphaelites believed that after Raphael and Michelangelo, art became too controlled. They believed emotion and rich details were more important than reason and rules of composition. They thought paintings should explode with color and feeling. Their paintings were richly colored and very detailed. Dante Rossetti and William Holman Hunt are typical Pre-Raphaelite painters.

Romanticism was similar to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in that it valued emotion over reason. The Romanticists were fascinated by nature— the heroic and beautiful and the dark and diseased. They used scenes from the Middle Ages because they believed that was a darker, more passionate time than the popular Classical period. They focused on amazing individuals rather than social rules.

Another important development in Victorian art was the beginning of photography. Queen Victoria was the first monarch to have her photo taken. This new technology was being used for science and art. Many early photos are composed like paintings, while others explore the differences between the art forms.

The energy and emotions of the Victorian Age brought many positive changes. People pushed the boundaries of their art and technology and created new styles and new ideas. They still influence us today. 

RP147 The World's Oldest Sports

RP147 The World's Oldest Sports

Soccer, baseball, volleyball, and golf—humans love sports. We play old ones. We invent new ones. We cheer for our favorite players and cry over our losses. But how long have humans been playing sports for fun? Which sports are the oldest?

Cricket, the English sport, is among the oldest. There have been international cricket matches since 1844, but the game is much older than that. There are references to a sport called "creckett" as far back as the late 1500s, when it was a children's game. It became popular among adults in the 1600s. The rules were officially recorded in 1744.

Tennis is also quite old. It began in Europe. Experts believe it was played in monasteries for entertainment in the 1300s. It was first played with a wooden ball and with hands instead of racquets, but it evolved over time. It became popular among French kings between the 1500s and the 1800s. That was when it got the name "tennis" and when official rules were established.

But by far the oldest sport comes from the New World. It's called "ulama", and it comes from what is now Mexico. Ulama was played on a long, narrow court, with two teams of four or five people at each end. Teams serve the balls to each other, and then team members try to move the balls along the court until they score by hitting a ball past the other team's line. They can only hit the balls with their hips and thighs. Ulama is not common now, but it is still sometimes played today in parts of Mexico. It began as far back as 1,500 BC, which means ulama has been played for 3,500 years! 

RP146 A Mixed New World

RP146 A Mixed New World

It's morning in the not-too-distant future. You wake up. You shoot some virtual aliens in your kitchen while eating breakfast. Later, you take your virtual pet dinosaur out for a walk in the park. And when you get home, you realize you don't like the way you' ve decorated your apartment. easily fixed. With a few waves of your hand, your home now resembles a grand European palace. That's better. Welcome to the exciting world of mixed reality.

Defining exactly what mixed reality (MR) is can be tricky. Is it the same as virtual reality (VR)? What about "augmented reality"(AR)? How is MR different from that?

Basically, VR shuts out the real world and wraps the user completely in a virtual one. AR, on the other hand, takes the user's view of the real world and adds digital information to it. (An example of AR is the game Pokémon Go. You can see the creatures against a real-world background, but they can't interact with it.) MR is somewhere in between. As in AR, digital images are placed over the real world. But in MR, these images can interact with that world as if they themselves were real. Imagine that the Pokémon you were hunting could hide behind cars or climb up trees.

To make this possible, the real-world environment first has to be mapped using 3D cameras. This allows the virtual images to "know" where they are in it. The user, wearing a headset, can then see the two worlds— real and virtual— as one.

MR is set to become the technology of the near future. And the possible applications are truly vast. Everything from gaming to communications to medicine will be changed by MR. So get ready. Reality as we know it is about to get a full virtual makeover! 

RP145 Parasites

RP145 Parasites

You probably don't want to think about this, but our bodies are full of tiny animals. They live off us. They' re called parasites.

A parasite is a creature that depends on another creature, called the host, to live. The host, without knowing it, provides food and shelter for the parasite. Some parasites can be very dangerous, even deadly, while others are harmless.

There are many hundreds, even thousands, of types of parasites that can live on or in humans. One of the most common is the hookworm. Hookworms live in the intestines and suck blood. They sound frightening, but in fact, about 50 percent of people in the world have hookworms, and most of them feel nothing at all. Hookworms only become a serious problem when you have too many. Then they can cause people to feel sick and lose weight.

There's a harmless parasite called a tooth amoeba that lives in our mouths. They live in holes and cavities in our teeth and eat tiny bits of food left behind. Dust mites are also usually innocent. They live on our skin and actually eat dead skin. There are parasites that can live in our eyelashes and eyebrows. You might have them and never know it!

Tapeworms, on the other hand, are very dangerous. They can grow more than 30 feet long, and they live by eating the food the human host eats. They can kill their hosts by causing them to starve. River blindness, a terrible disease, is caused by a parasite that gets into our bodies through black fly bites. The infection these parasites cause can leave people blind.

We humans think we rule the world, but perhaps we should pay more attention to the microscopic creatures that affect us every day. 

RP144 What Are Carbon Offsets

RP144 What Are Carbon Offsets?

As the idea of global warming gains more acceptance in the world, scientists are scrambled for a way to stop it before it's too late. One of these ways is by using carbon offsets (also called carbon sharing).

Carbon offsets were designed to help countries comply with their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries agree to reduce their carbon emissions by a certain percent—carbon emissions are measured in tons of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. But because these countries only have to reduce their total emissions, not every business or organization—or even every country—has to reduce their emissions by the same amount. They just have to reach the correct total reduction.

Some countries, companies, and organizations can reduce their carbon emissions more easily than others. Carbon offsets allow them to sell these reductions to other entities that are moving more slowly. So a country or company can buy carbon credits somewhere else. This prevents carbon from being emitted somewhere, but not by that particular entity.

Carbon offsets are controversial, because they allow polluters to avoid reducing their own carbon emissions. "I won't turn off my tap. I'll pay someone else £10 to pay someone else £2 to turn off their own tap," explain members of the environmental group Rising Tide, which opposes carbon offsets. Others, however, say that carbon offsets are a good way to reduce emissions overall while big countries figure out how to cut their own emissions without hurting their economies.

As the Kyoto Protocol is enforced and the world becomes more serious about greenhouse gas reductions, carbon offset programs will become widespread. Understanding this complex issue is very important if you want to stop global warming. Keep researching, and decide for yourself if selling carbon offsets will help or hurt us all.