We are in the middle of a mass extinction event, says Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky, and, this time, it’s our fault.

“It’s called the Anthropocene Era because it’s being caused by humans,” says Karnovsky, who specializes in the study of seabirds. “The warming of our planet, the destruction of habitat, pollution and other contaminants are causing widespread extinctions. It is really grim. I don’t think I would be able to cope if I didn’t try every day to do something to ameliorate this overwhelming thing that’s happening around us.”

Paying attention is one way to make a difference, says Karnovsky, who assigns her students to keep journals and record their observations.

“It’s extremely important to be a great naturalist and to keep track of what you’re seeing around you, and to notice and document that,” she says. “If you aren’t really noticing the change in the species, then you won’t notice when they’re gone.”

In fact, many species that we didn’t know about are already lost, says Karnovsky. It’s not just about climate change, but habitat destruction, harvesting, oil spills and other things that are causing a “vortex of extinction.” And when a population gets impacted and can’t recover, that affects other species, including humans.

“It’s not esoteric. It’s a social justice issue,” says Karnovsky. “There isn’t enough food to eat because the ice has changed; the marine mammals aren’t coming into the fjords where they used to come and people used to hunt them. So for these communities, this is life or death.”

Compounding the problems in identifying and studying endangered species are cuts to research made by the current administration, making it harder for researchers to keep up sustained studies, where they return to the same locations to test for changes that show a species has become more vulnerable.

For Karnovsky, the warnings are clear and call for some big decisions about what direction we’re going. “We need to tell our leaders, and it has to be a multi-pronged approach.” She says. “We have to be active on political fronts, but also in our daily lives.’

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Pomona College’s mascot, the sagehen—the sage grouse in the real world—needs a “lek” up.

A rare collaboration between conservation and energy interests came together to protect the sage grouse’s mating habitat—known as leks. But the U.S. Interior Department led by Secretary Ryan Zinke is now re-examining the plan in order to prioritize energy development, leading to an uncertain future for our beloved mascot.

Jessica Blickley ’02, an ecologist at Pasadena City College, studied the sage grouse as a graduate student at UC Davis and lays out the history, present and potential future of Cecil’s brethren.

Historically, the sage grouse’s habitat spanned the western United States, but as grazing land overtook wild land, as invasive grasses crept over native sagebrush, as wildfires grew in ferocity and frequency, and as natural gas, oil and wind developments popped up, the sage grouse’s domain has shrunk. And with shrinking domains, explains Blickley, there’s less space for the sage grouse to puff up their chests and attract mates. That means shrinking populations.

That’s why, a few years ago, a diverse group of concerned stakeholders, from state governments to private landowners, came together to craft a large-scale sage grouse conservation plan focused on protecting the bird’s natural habitat. In 2015, this multi-state effort led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to keep the sage grouse off the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a decision the Audubon Society saw as a nod to the ongoing success of the plan.

“The conservation plan seemed to be working well until 2017 when Zinke decided he was going to put this conservation plan under review and change it,” says Blickley. “In addition, there is currently a bill in Congress that would specifically prevent future listing of the sage grouse under ESA. Due to these federal actions, the future of the sage grouse is much less certain than just a few years ago.”

But Blickley hasn’t lost hope. “My hope comes from the state level. In the state of Wyoming, where 40 percent of the sage grouse are found, the Republican governor believes strongly in the collaborative conservation plan, so hopefully many of the state level regulations will go into place.”

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Science museums are not just science lessons for kids any more.

As president and CEO of the Science Museum of Minnesota, Alison Brown ’80 says science museums are becoming something more—more contemplative, more thought-provoking, more people-oriented. “I’m leading a team that is helping us move away from the idea that museums curate only the facts and tell you what’s what,” says Brown, who is also a vice chair of the Board of Trustees of Pomona College. “We will always do real science. We also want our museum to be the place where you’re having two-way conversations and contributing your experience to the collective understanding—all while you’re having fun.”

In the ‘70s, she says, science museums were noisy with hands-on interactives and gadgets. “As people start seeing science museums not just as places for pushing buttons and pulling levers, but as places where they’re engaged in conversation and joining us in creating experiences that are worth their time—that’s an exciting future.”

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As we near the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk, Colleen Hartman ’77 believes the next chapter in human space exploration is not far away. “When I talk to high-school and younger groups, I always tell them that I’ll be alive when the first human puts her foot down on Mars, and they always laugh,” she says.

But what brings Hartman to work each day as director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is the extraordinary science that continues to be done through spacecraft with no astronauts aboard. As an example, she points to a couple of new spaceborne telescopes that are likely to kick the search for exoplanets—planets circling other stars—into high gear.

Although the number of confirmed exoplanets has exploded into the thousands since the launch of the Kepler spacecraft in 2009, we still know next to nothing about them. With the launch of TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) in April 2018 and the planned launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2020, NASA hopes to change that, Hartman says. “Whereas Kepler looked at only a tiny fraction of the sky,” she explains, “TESS will look for extrasolar planets all around our closer neighborhood, where hopefully, we can have follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope.” Those observations, she says, should give us our first detailed analysis of the chemical makeup of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

Other upcoming NASA missions of particular note include:

• The Parker Solar Probe (Planned launch: August 2018)—This probe’s orbit will carry it to within 3.8 million miles of the sun, which is actually inside the sun’s corona. Able to withstand temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the probe will study such things as the solar wind and mass ejections. “This mission will help us understand the relationship between the sun and the Earth in ways we never could before,” Hartman says.
• The Wide Field infrared Survey Telescope or WFIRST (Planned launch: 2020)—WFIRST will join in the search for exoplanets, but it will also play a key role in the effort to solve the most baffling mystery in astrophysics today. “Approximately three quarters of the universe is made of something we call dark energy, because it doesn’t interact with anything and we don’t really understand what it is,” she says. “WFIRST will be looking for clues about dark energy as well.”
• The Europa Clipper (Planned launch: sometime in the 2020s)—This probe will investigate the habitability of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. “To me, this is one of the most exciting things at NASA,” Hartman says. “When we’re looking for life on other planets, we’re looking for water, but it turns out that here in our own solar system, you can have a frozen icy moon, and under the frozen surface, a liquid ocean. That’s Europa. I like to joke that if there’s life in that liquid ocean, they’re not going to be very good astronomers.”

One thing Hartman says she can’t predict is the practical benefits that will accrue from continued exploration of the solar system and beyond, but she’s sure there will be many of them. “There’s plenty to discover and investigate, and I do think there’ll be a lot of practical output from some of these investigations, but you don’t necessarily know beforehand what the spinoffs will be. It’s serendipitous, and that’s part of the joy.”

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When he’s traveling, Eric Oldrin ‘95 likes to make his kids laugh by connecting with them on Facebook Messenger with bunny ears and a cute little bunny mask on his nose. Of course, Facebook’s head of emerging platforms doesn’t really put on a bunny mask—it all happens in cyberspace, using augmented reality (AR).

AR is the digital technology that made Pokémon Go such a sensation. Today, it’s bringing a touch of fantasy to the world of social media, and Oldrin thinks we’ve only skimmed the surface of what’s to come. For instance, a variety of brands—from Sephora to Nike—are using AR in their marketing, for both playful and practical reasons. As an example, he cites a new Messenger experience that allows potential drivers to see what a car from Kia might look like in their driveway. The possibilities, he believes, are wide open

And then, of course, there’s virtual reality (VR), which requires a bit more equipment, such as Facebook’s newly released Oculus Go—a headset that allows you to step into a digitally created world. Oldrin is intrigued by VR’s potential to make people feel like they’re in a room together, even when they’re actually oceans apart.

“In VR, there’s an incredible opportunity to defy distance and to create a sense of presence across borders,” he says. “Let’s say, you and I decide we’re going to go see U2 in Sao Paulo together. We’ll be able to do that by being there at the same time in this virtual space. I probably would never go to Sao Paulo to see a concert in real life, but in virtual reality, I’ll have that opportunity.”

Indeed, for Oldrin, that’s what the future of Facebook and other social media is all about—the ongoing search for better and more compelling ways to bring people together.

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When Professor of Media Studies Mark Andrejevic started writing about what he calls “the surveillance economy” back in 2001, “I was considered to be a very angry, cranky, dystopian naysayer,” he recalls. “But recently—and especially in this past year—it’s become a commonplace that we live in a surveillance society in which our information is leveraged for profit. And so, it’s a weird feeling of vindication and, also, helplessness.”

Vindication because his dire warnings have clearly come true as companies and institutions comb our interactive lives to build bigger and more intrusive profiles.

Helplessness because he thinks it may already be too late to do anything about it.

That’s partly because sites like Amazon and Facebook have become a way of life, and partly because new technologies are creating bold new ways for information to be gathered, marketed and leveraged—not just to anticipate what we might buy, but to parse how we think, what our vulnerabilities are and how they can be exploited.

One concern, he says, is the proliferation of “smart” devices—from speakers that answer our queries and play our favorite music to appliances that know how we like our toast or coffee. “These are very convenient devices,” he admits. “At the same time, they are a new frontier in data and information collection. There are already patents floating around for how to use the information that can be picked up through smart speakers in the home in order to anticipate consumer desires and craft marketing campaigns. And as those interfaces become increasingly interactive, they generate new forms of monitoring and surveillance. Do we really want our washing machines and microwaves keeping track of the rhythms of our daily lives?”

Another assault on our privacy, he says, involves advances in such technologies as facial recognition, gait recognition and license-plate reading. “We’ve always thought of public space as being associated with the anonymity of the crowd,” he says, “but that’s fast eroding. You’re no longer moving in a space where your identity is largely unknown and the traces of your activities ephemeral. Soon every action you take walking down the street will be linked to your identity.”

How might that look? Consider the times you’ve searched for something on a website, then found ads for it everywhere you went online. Now imagine that happening as you pass signs in a mall or even billboards on the highway.

One device that Andrejevic worries about in particular is the fitness tracker, which is constantly gathering information about your health and storing it online. Sounds great, until you think about that information in the hands of your insurance company. “As Obamacare gets dismantled, which seems to be the case, insurers will be able to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions again,” he says. “And, you know, this type of information is very useful for companies who want to do that type of screening.”

Meanwhile, in the world of politics, the use of voter profiles to manipulate the vote is the wave of the future. “Now campaigns know so much about voters that they can custom-tailor messaging, both to rally supporters and to attempt to suppress the participation of opponents’ supporters,” Andrejevic notes. “I don’t believe that Cambridge Analytica had anywhere near the influence they claim for themselves, but the political model they embraced will continue to get more sophisticated.”

To date, Andrejevic says, many of his dystopic predictions have come true, which makes him deeply pessimistic about the future. “But working with the students here actually makes me quite optimistic because our students are wonderful,” he says. “If there’s any hope, it’s the students. I have those moments when I’m thinking, ‘Can you guys take over now? Because we need you.’”

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Imagine a future in which robots screen job candidates, universities introduce artificially intelligent tutors into classrooms and news services use a combination of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) to roll out breaking news.

Well, that future is now.

Preliminary success and our fascination with computers are leading to the exploration of a myriad of applications for artificial intelligence. Such is the interest, that the French government will spend $1.85 billion over the next five years to support research in the field.

But, there are some serious limitations to AI, says Gary Smith, Pomona’s Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics and author of the upcoming book The AI Delusion. “Thus far, artificial intelligence is designed to perform narrowly defined tasks, and it does it really well,” says Smith. “But moving outside of those tasks, computers have a lot of trouble. It is particularly evident when it requires knowledge of what you’re doing.”

Smith argues that artificial intelligence still lacks integrative thinking and has trouble deciphering meaning or patterns without context. He adds that in order to improve AI, researchers are studying how to get computers to think more like human brains, including research into how children learn.

“Our fascination with computers has led us to believe that artificial intelligence can make smarter decisions than humans,” says Smith.

This is worrisome when AI may be used for algorithmic criminology, for example. Courts all over the country are using computer models to make bail, prison-sentence and parole decisions based on statistical patterns that may be merely coincidental, but cannot be evaluated because they are hidden inside black boxes.

“At this point of development of AI, we should be very skeptical of turning important decisions to computers,” says Smith.

“The danger is not that computers are smarter than us. The real danger is that we think computers are smarter than us. And that’s not the case.”

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At the dawn of the digital age, storage was measured in kilobytes. Over the years, we’ve gotten used to megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes. But have you heard of petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes?

You will soon, says Asya Shklyar, Pomona’s first director of high performance computing. Those terms—each indicating a capacity 1,000 times larger than the one before—will become more and more common in the years ahead. And here at Pomona, that future may be nearer than we think, she says, as the College is already gearing up to provide the kind of computing speed and memory needed to support faculty research using such state-of-the-art and memory-hungry processes as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Pomona faculty are already doing research that can benefit from that kind of memory and speed, Shklyar says. “Like climate modeling—that’s one subject we’re pursuing. And the volcano in Hawaii—we have a model in geology, with the magma and the plates and how the tension works and liquid modeling—a lot of very interesting things.”

So what comes after yottabyte (which is defined as a trillion terabytes)? “That’s the last one that’s officially recognized,” Shklyar said. “There are suggestions, like ‘hellabytes,’ but we don’t know yet.”

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Two words: Killer nanobots.

Two more words: Just kidding.

Many of us got our introduction to nanomaterials through science fiction, where visions of lethal microscopic robots were once in vogue. Since then, the fictional outlook has gotten less bleak. “Now it’s gone from killer robots to the things that give superheroes and supervillains their powers,” jokes University of Washington research scientist Lewis Johnson ’07.

But if you’re waiting for killer nanobots, you’re likely to be disappointed, according to both Johnson and Pomona Professor of Physics David Tanenbaum. If you look closely, however, you’ll find that the real world of nanomaterials is already here—from the flash memory in your computer to the coating that makes your clothing shed spilled wine to the sunscreen you wear when you go to the beach.

And that’s just for starters.

As for what to expect in the future, Tanenbaum points to the fraudulent case of the startup Theranos, which claimed to use nanosensors to do a complete blood analysis from a single drop of blood. “That was a big boondoggle and an awful sham, but the reason they were able to pull it off is because that technology is coming,” he says. “The ability to use  micromachined devices and sensors to do health care will happen, and the fact that there were some charlatans out there doesn’t mean that it’s not real.”

In fact, Pomona Professor of Chemistry Mal Johal believes nanomaterials will have a major impact throughout the practice of medicine. “For example, you may see nanovehicles that can specifically target a tumor and deliver whatever agents into that tumor and destroy it in a very highly directed manner,” he suggests. “I think medicine is where we’re likely to see a lot of the big advances.”

But whatever the next big thing in nanomaterials turns out to be, Johnson believes it is likely to be the result of a convergence of research in chemistry, physics, biology and engineering. For example, he says, his own post-doctoral work was in a cross-disciplinary technique sometimes called “biological mimicry.” In this case, he was looking at the enzyme nitrogenase, which certain bacteria use to take nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. “If we want to replicate what nitrogenase can do industrially, it needs to be put in a material that could be scaled for use in large factories,” Johnson says. And since the current industrial method of producing nitrogen fertilizers requires such high temperatures that it burns up about two percent of the world’s energy supply each year, creating a thriftier process would have a huge impact worldwide.

Johnson also believes that a similar convergence of disciplines is coming on the educational front. He got his own introduction to the field as a first-year student at Pomona, in Tanenbaum’s first-year seminar class, Nanotechnology in Science and Fiction. And he recently joined his mentor Johal to co-author an expanded new edition of the chemistry textbook Understanding Nano- ma­terials, which now crosses over into related areas of biology and physics. “It’s probably the first undergraduate book written at that level, where a sophomore student can take this with just general chemistry, general biology, general physics preparation,” Johal explains.

So will nanomaterials be a hot new interdisciplinary field at the undergraduate level? “We’re starting to see universities forming programs specifically in nanomaterials, but as to whether it’s going to become a stand-alone field, that seems to be an open question,” Johnson says. “But as far as people getting degrees in nanomaterials at the undergraduate level, I think that’s something that would be plausible in the near term.”

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Artificial Intelligence? Think again.

Business proposals for technology on artificial empathy are already on the desks of venture capitalists and technology investors such as Melish “Matt” Thompson ’96 who are always looking for the next big thing to invest in.

Thompson is the senior vice president for private equity and venture capital at Skyview Capital where he has his finger on the pulse of Los Angeles investing. Currently, the focus is on FAMED, an acronym describing the areas in which L.A. investing is concentrated: fashion, autonomous technology (artificial intelligence or AI, drones, self-driving vehicles), media, e-sports/gaming (watching people play games and sports online) and dating startups.

While AI is still a hot and growing industry, Thompson says they’ve recently invested in a company developing artificial empathy technology that can help you with a problem and think about your feelings.

And you can forget about Bitcoin—that’s old news, says Thompson. “The new thing is blockchain. The underlying technology can be used to do a range of applications in healthcare and media—using blockchain as a secure database not just for currency.”

Lastly, Thompson says he’s already receiving business plans for mining asteroids—yes, you read that right: “Space exploration, asteroid mining… It might be sooner than you think.”

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