Journalism

Are Extraterrestrials Listening In On Our Phone Conversations?

For the past century, we’ve inadvertently broadcast our presence to an estimated 75 nearby star systems. About a quarter of those stars have confirmed exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone. A few may be harboring intelligent life capable of receiving our long-ago leaked transmissions. But what kind of emissions are seeping into space now? To figure out our latest leakage, a radio astronomy team is building a model of Earth’s technosignatures, the technological byproducts we radiate into space. The last time scientists simulated Earth’s emissions, Farrah Fawcett chased TV criminals on Charlie’s Angels, and ABBA debuted on Top of the Pops. Today, billions of mobile devices stream gigabytes of content across continents, beaming an undulating pattern of broadband signatures as our planet cycles through night and day. Read the full article at IFL SCIENCE, September 2023

Will the US Stop Hiding the World’s Dirty Money?

The United States is a financial haven for hidden money, accounting for 17 of the world’s 20 least restrictive tax jurisdictions, according to the recently released Pandora Papers. The leaked documents reveal that 15 US states are home to more than 200 registered offshore trusts. South Dakota emerges as the most popular state to hide wealth accounting for 81 foreign-held trusts with a combined worth of $360 billion. Nearly 35% of those trusts are tied to alleged criminal activities that include money laundering, environmental pollution, and human trafficking. As Yehuda Shaffer, a former head of Israel’s financial unit, puts it, “The US is a big, big loophole in the world.” Read the full article at WHO WHAT WHY, October 2021

Savoring A Superstar with Madhulika Guhathakurta

In Netflix’s recent disaster thriller Leave the World Behind, a series of catastrophic events plague the film’s characters while on vacation. A tanker ship rams into the coastline, self-driving cars go amuck, and there’s no internet to watch that final episode of your favorite show. As local tragedies unfold, calamities occur further afield — all provoked by an unknown instigator. Has artificial intelligence or a rogue country hacked into cyberspace? Or consider an extreme solar eruption blasting toward Earth, wreaking havoc around the globe? Fear not too much about this latter plot, as we are living in a golden age of heliophysics. And while a 1967 solar storm nearly provoked a nuclear war, we are more advanced today in our ability to predict the temperments of our Sun and avoid any end-of-the-world scenario from severe space weather. Read the full article at STARBLOG, April 2024

Navigating A Brave New Digital Earth World

Agnieszka Lukaszczyk is Vice President of Government Affairs at the Earth-imaging satellite company, Planet. Her job is to help international leaders embrace a satellite constellation’s view of the world. When I first spoke to her, she was pregnant with plans to give birth in her home country Poland. A borderland away, Russian forces had just invaded Ukraine. “I know I’m hormonal, but I was sobbing, wondering what kind of world am I bringing my child into?” If someone had a pragmatic answer to her existential question, that person would be the expectant mother herself. Read the full article at STARBLOG, April 2023

Proposals

The Bone Lady︱A Limited Podcast Series

A car plunges into a river. The driver’s gone missing. Who’s called in to investigate? The crime-fighting dog handler Sandra Anderson and her trusty cadaver search dog Eagle. Regarded by law enforcement top dog investigators, Anderson and Eagle prove their crime-fighting worth once again. Sniffing out forensic evidence along the muddy riverbank, the duo discovers a severed big toe! Case solved? Not quite. A few days later, the driver’s body is found downriver. Oddly, he’s wearing a pair of boots. And what’s inside those boots? Ten toes, fully intact. PODCAST, August 2018

Mind Over Matter︱A Four-Part Mind Bending Documentary Experience

A house is burning down. It’s the communal home and experimental lab of the unorthodox research scientist Andrija Puharich. Throughout the 70s, the house was frequented by radical intellectuals, like quantum physicist Jack Safartti and counter-culture guru Ira Einhorn, along with a hodgepodge of entertainment types including the spoon-bending Uri Geller and Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry. Sure, the avant-garde psychedelic parties made neighbors uneasy, but it was the odd rumors of clandestine experiments on young hippie kids that raised eyebrows in the upstate New York community. DOCUMENTARY, April 2018

A Modern Day Pocahontas︱Are Corporations the New Conquistadors?

Corporations are the new conquistadors in today's battle for indigenous land. Can a modern day Pocahontas mediate between our drive to exploit resources and our passion to protect them? Resource extraction in the Amazon has gone unchecked for decades, and its consequences have a direct impact on the livelihoods of its inhabitants, many of whom are un-contacted and living much like their ancestors hundreds of years ago. The Amazon, with its immense biological diversity and carbon absorption capabilities, is under threat. About 75% of Peru’s Amazonian forest is contracted out to oil and gas concessions, despite a pledge to cut net deforestation to zero by 2020 during last year’s climate change conference COP20 in Lima. DOCUMENTARY, June 2016