9.3.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI and to day I
will be reading National Geographic Magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the first article

(00:22):
titled the World's most Indomitable duck. The Madagascar pochard was
thought to be extinct until one local biologist accidentally stumbled
on a tiny flock in the unlikeliest of places a
century ago. The Madagascar pochard thrived in its only known

(00:44):
habitat Lake Eli Ultra, the country's largest lake, but over
time many of the bug filled marshes surrounding the shallow
lake were converted to cropland and the ducks started to
die off. The last flock was recorded in nineteen sixty.
A small group of scientists spent decades looking for the
poachard by hiking through torrential rains, paddling across wetlands and

(01:07):
dugout canoes, and even putting ads in the community paper,
with little to show for it. By the mid nineteen nineties,
the duck, known by locals as Photismaso or white eye
for the bright eyes of mature males, was thought to
have gone extinct, but in two thousand and six, Malagasi

(01:27):
biologists and National Geographic Explorer Lily Arison Rene de Roeland
chanced upon thirteen of the pochards on a remote volcanic lake,
far from their historic range. The sighting led to a
nearly twenty year collaboration among scientists, officials, and local companies
communities to revive the species, including an extensive effort to

(01:52):
breed the birds and release them into the wild. The
work is far from complete, but it's starting to pay off.
There are now some two hundred and thirty ho chyards
across Madagascar. This by Carol Hwang. Next The Hidden World
of Cave Dwellers by John Bartlett. For centuries we've sought

(02:14):
shelter underground. Today, this ancient way of life is under
a new threat. What can we learn from the last
subterranean societies before they disappear? Nearly a decade ago, documentary
photographer and National Geographic Explorer Tomorra Marino was driving a
camper van through the hot and seemingly desolate expanse of

(02:35):
Australia's Simpson Desert when one of her tires blew out.
The nearly seventy thousand square miles of barren red dunes
are not a place you want to have car trouble.
Summer temperatures push into the one twenties and water is scarce.
Marino coaxed her van down the road and began to
see signs of a town, but there was no one
in sight and the few buildings felt abandoned. Wandering the streets,

(02:59):
she spouted her rudimentary meatal cross on a hilltop. She
scrambled up to take a look and found that a
wide courtyard opened up below, forming the facade of an
underground Orthodox church. Marino soon discovered that she was in
an Opal mining outpost called kuber Peti. After a gold
prospector discovered an Opal in the area in nineteen fifteen,

(03:22):
miners flocked to the region to cash in. When soldiers
returning from World War One joined the craze, they began
living in dugouts excavated from the hillsides to escape the
extreme daytime temperatures. It was a novel idea that stuck,
and today much of the community of two thousand lives underground.
The people there are so deeply connected to their environment.

(03:43):
Marino says she stayed for a month, captivated by the
unusual way of life. The practice of humans living in
caves dates back millions of years to when our early
African ancestors began taking refuge in underground caverns. Over time,
they became more than that. As people added rock art
and held communal ceremonies, they became homes. After visiting kuber Peti,

(04:08):
Marino realized that in some places this ancient lifestyle still indoors.
Exactly how robust these communities are is hard to quantify.
In the early two thousand, some thirty to forty million
people lived underground in Yaodong homes carved into the hillsides
of shang Si Province in central China, but according to

(04:29):
a twenty ten estimate, that number has fallen to around
three million as the population urbanized. Some communities have abandoned
their subterranean homes entirely. In the thirteen hundreds, the Dogon
people lived in caves along the Bandiagara Cliffs in Mali
to escape religious conquests and slave raiders, but over the

(04:50):
centuries the threats receded, and they abandoned their rocky abodes
and moved into villages in the valley. Whatever the taily,
its clear, underground living is becoming increasingly rare. Over the
past two years, Marino traveled the world to seek out
the remaining practitioners of this dwindling way of life to
discover the advantages of their enduring tradition provides. The subterranean

(05:15):
world is a continuous lesson in sustainability and circular economy,
says Pietro Louriano, a climate focused architect and UNESCO consultant
who studied cave populations. It also teaches us a different
symbolic relationship with space. Today, we have forgotten the importance
of the hidden, the unseen, the underground, and indeed, from

(05:37):
a small pocket of Mormon fundamentalists in Utah to a
town of more than three thousand in southern Spain, Marino
found that while life in these communities seems more precarious
than ever, they have much to teach us about human
ingenuity and resilience. The holdouts staying cool as Tunisia heats

(05:57):
up for thousands of years. The Imazigen, also known as
berbers in southern Tunisia have built their homes by chiseling
into the low slung sandstone hill sides that run through
the wide plains of the Sahara. These cave shelters offered
a cool escape from the searing heat and harsh desert winds.
Then the national government suggested there might be a better

(06:20):
way to live. It all started when Tunisia gained a
dependence from France in nineteen fifty six, and the new president,
tabib Bourg Burguiba began pushing for the country to modernize,
which meant moving cave dwelling imbazigen into government built housing
above ground. The people were promised cheap running water and electricity,

(06:43):
though many who re located soon found that wasn't the case.
They lied to us, says Slimen ben Masoud, a seventy
year old who was born in a cave but moved
to one of the government settlements in the nineteen seventies.
They took everything from me and gave me nothing in return.
Other attempts at relocation have been somewhat more successful. After

(07:04):
a flood destroyed many of the homes around Matmat, Matmata
and Hadej in nineteen sixty nine, residents were offered land
at nearby Nu Matmata for three dnurs a dollar a
square meter. For many, it was an offer too good
to pass up. To day, there is one main road
through the town, lined by a string of packed coffee shops,

(07:26):
a butcher, and an arcade with a few gaming consoles
set up in front of flat screen televisions. But the
town still fails to address the one problem the cave
homes solved thousands of years ago. The heat. Tunisia, like
much of the rest of the world, is heating up
at an alarming rate, and temperatures are expected to rise
by as much as eleven point seven degrees fahrenheit by

(07:49):
the end of the century. You could have brought modernity
to our traditions, but you can't do the opposite, says
Ali Khayel fifty nine at his empty roadside cafe, staring
out over the moonscape of Hadej, where he was one
of more than a thousand people born and raised in
the hundreds of cave homes on the valley floor. He

(08:10):
remembers how when he was a child, the smell of
food drifted between the caves, which would house two or
three families each people started to move away in the
nineteen seventies, and the area has been abandoned since the
nineteen nineties. Khayal says that the state never contemplated protecting
his way of life, and many of those who moved
out of the caves came to regret it. Those who

(08:31):
have stayed have found clever ways to meld the benefits
of their ancient homes with modern living. Eight miles from
Niu Matmata, the ham Ha'amdi family live in five rooms
dug deep into the sandstone hillside of Beni Aissa. Their home,
one of just a dozen or so occupied in the town,
is accessed via an above ground brick foyer that bakes

(08:55):
in the Saharan sun, but the living areas beyond are
comfortable and cool. A complex system of water channels and
walkways engineered over centuries connects the two dozen homes, poked
across the desert. When it rains, the channel's flood gardens
of palm, almond, and olive trees. Inside the aha AMI's

(09:16):
house looks much like any other twenty first century Tunisian home.
The walls of a small pantry are adorned with shallots
and garlic. The flooras in the main living areas are
lined with pillows and throw rugs. When eldest son Salem twenty,
hooks up his phone to a copper antenna, the cave
as Petchy internet and Laylah fifteen, the youngest daughter, can

(09:39):
record tik tok videos in a whitewashed store room. Grandfather
Ali seventy three, the family's oldest member, was born in
the cave and has lost count of how many generations
came before him. I will never leave here, he says.
Leila and Salem aren't thinking of leaving either. They're making
plans to dig further into the forous rock, the tribe

(10:02):
preserving a connection to the land. The city of Petra
was carved into the sandstone cliffs and canyons of the
Jordanian desert over two thousand years ago as the dazzling
trading capital of the Nabatean Empire, but for more than
two centuries Bedouin have called its labyrinth of catacomb's passageways
and chambers their home. It was a bucolic and pastoral existence.

(10:26):
The slopes below the royal tomb were used for agriculture,
and the tribe herded their goats through the long canyon
into the city. It was the perfect spot until the
nineteen seventies, when the Jordanian government made plans to convert
the site into an archaeological tourist attraction. King Hussain bin
Tellal brokered an agreement for the one hundred forty Bedouin

(10:48):
families to leave, and officials built towns nearby to house them. Essentially,
it was justified as preservation of the monuments, as well
as establishing new employment and subsist distants opportunities, says Michael Vile,
a professor of ethnology at the University of Copenhagen and
author of Being Bedouin Around Petra. By nineteen eighty five,

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most of the tribe had vacated the ancient city, and
Petra was named a World Heritage Site. The Bedouin who remained,
some one hundred twenty of them, were moved from the
main archeological areas to a peripheral valley, where tribe members
have made use of whatever space they could find. What
were once Nabataean tombs have become store rooms and ancient

(11:32):
halls now house tractors, pickup trucks and camels. Rya who
sign Suleiman Samahin was born in the royal tomb when
her tribe had free reign over Petra. Now aged ninety,
she lives in a row of caves cut into the
red rock of the adjoining valley. A kitchen with a
wide fire pit and blackened walls, a bedroom dimly lit

(11:55):
by lights powered from a solar panel, and a wardrobe
cave or. Her clothes and scarves are hung on a
string suspended between two juniper tree branches on a dusty
hilltop several miles from the valley. The government recently built
a modern village with the intention of rehoming Petra's remaining residents.

(12:16):
Some cave dwellers are ready for a new way of life.
Haniya Suliman Ali Samahen, thirty seven, wants her eight children
to be closer to the school and have permittent access
to fresh water, which currently trickles out of a tap
on the valley floor just once every three or four days. Others, though,
will never leave Petra for life of concrete and modernity.

(12:38):
We like the open airs, as eighteen year old Suliman Samahin,
the nature and the freedom as the sun sets. Suleiman's
mother sits on a stone slab outside her cave home,
tending to a fire nearby, Suliman and his brother's cook
mansaf a traditional dish of lamb and yogurt in a
sand filled pit that once held nabatan wine. When nightfalls,

(13:01):
the family will lie outside on mattresses and animal pelts
underneath the stars. Taking the bedouin out of Petra is
like taking the spice out of a dish, says Raya.
Your left with nothing a home for the homeless, the
cave vet Ha Koma has always been a place of
last resort. In the early nineteenth century, a Basotho chief

(13:25):
named Koma led his tribe into the Melati Mountains, fleeing
a period of war that displaced millions of people throughout
Southern Africa and led to countless deaths. Komi came across
a vast east facing cave surrounded by steep valleys and
mountainous plateaus, and set up camp. The location was strategic
for security reasons during those times, says Joshua Chaikawa, a

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senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the
National University of Lisoto. Members of Komi's tribe, he said,
were able to shield themselves and critically their livestock from
the violence. Eventually, the tribe built individual homes within the
Kahoma Cave, molding six foot high domed huts from stick's

(14:10):
mud and during done before smearing orange clay around the
low doorways. Locals dubbed the cave the Mahalapana or palette,
imagining it as a huge open mouth. At the turn
of the twenty first century, thirty three of Come's tribal
descendants still lived in the huts beneath the rock. Over

(14:31):
the past two decades, nearly everyone has moved to a
cinder block village constructed on the bed rock above the cave,
where the homes are basic but provide little comforts like
glass windows, and are more pleasant than the huts within
a cave. But the mahalapan is still a place of
refuge and security for those in need. Ne Fane net

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Fane and forty one year old farmer can't afford to
build a home in the village, so he lives in
the cave, sleeping on a bundle of animal skins and
washing his clothes in the Thutiyatsana River, which flows past
the cave's mouth. He sweeps the dust out of his
house with a straw room and shovels it into a
small fire grate, where an old teapot sits over the flames.

(15:14):
Inside he is a few empty candle holders set on
a shelf in the corner, and three leather suitcases are
stacked beside buckets and wash bowls. Adjacent is Sebastian kuts
Sane fifty eight, who is using the one room hut
where he raised his children. It's a quick solution to
a temporary problem. His daughter in law is bidding visiting
from South Africa, and he's given her and her family

(15:37):
his home in the village. The men wake each morning
with the sunrise as copper pink light bathes the rock.
The only shade comes from a la Kassi tree, a
variety of wild peach, which, according to local lore, was
planted two centuries ago by Komme to ward off lightning strikes.
Soon Kuanes daughter in law will head back to South

(15:59):
Africa and he'll move up to the village, and Netafane
says he'll build a house of his own when he
can afford it. Until then, they do with their home
beneath the metal pane the dwelling that checks all the boxes.
The volcanic landscape of Cappadocia in central Turkey has eroded
over millennia to form mountain ridges, sandstone valleys, and rows

(16:23):
of gaudisque cones that the tourism industry likes to call
fairy chimneys. Over four thousand years, humans too have carved
the porous rock, excavating a warren of caves, tunnels, and passages.
Among two hundred five thousand acres of archaeological sites in
the region, there are dozens of abandoned underground cities. One, Kamakli,

(16:45):
is over four thousand years old and extends eight stories
below ground, complete with stables and wine cellars. Another, during Cuyu,
was vast enough to have housed twenty thousand people at once.
While these larger archaeological trees measures haven't been occupied in
more than a hundred years, many of the individual homes
carved into the area's rocks are still in use. Okte

(17:08):
seventy two and Hanifa Torun sixty four have lived in
their cave home in the hill top town of Ortahisar
since their wedding day more than four decades ago. They
are one of maybe ten families left living full time
in a cave in all of Cappadocia, and they love
it for a simple reason. It satisfies all their needs.

(17:28):
The home has plumbing and electricity, The living room stays
warm enough in winter, while the adjoining storage room, separated
by a thick rock wall, maintains a stable cool temperature
that allows them to eat summer crops all year round.
Rows of ampheri hold bulgar and lentils harvested five seasons ago,
and walnuts and fresh fruit are stacked on silver trays.

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While the Torans have always seen the value in their
cave home, the rest of the world has started to
take notice. Two nearly five million people visited Cappadocia in
twenty twenty three. This tourist boom has prompted many locals
to convert their cave homes into shops and hotels, and
ancient storehouses into underground restaurants and bars. Recently, one of

(18:12):
the turn's neighbors sold his cave to hotel developers, leaving
the couple completely surrounded by tourism projects. Now, when they
duck into their cave, they're met with a low throb
of a drill shaking the floor and trails of fine
dust dropping from the ceiling. Oktay and Hanif's son, Refat
forty five, grew up playing hide and seek in the

(18:35):
maze of carved churches and catacombs beneath the family home. Now,
like almost everyone here, he works in the hospitality industry,
driving visitors from all over the world from one attraction
to the next. The steady advance of tourism in or
Tahisar is likely to force the foam the family out
before too long. If we have to leave, we will

(18:56):
sell everything and end up living just like everybody else.
Hanifa tears welling in her eyes. Many of those who've
moved out of the caves around Cappadocia have ended up
in the city of Niveshir, where squat apartment blocks with
double glazed windows and enclosed balconies, crowded basketball courts and shops.

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Living in an apartment is like a jail, says Hanif,
as she rushes about her house, filling bowls with fruit
and vegetables from the store rooms, while she skins a
plate of green onions onto a tray fresh milk from
the families. Two cows bubbles on a stove to make cheese.
When I open the door, I need to breathe fresh
air and see the valley next. The future of data

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storage is DNA by Diana Marcus and Patricia Heally. Eons ago,
evolution invented DNA to store vast quantities of information. Now
scientists think a similar technology could offer a solution to
our fast growing data storage dilemma. The world produces a
tremendous mane out of data, some four hundred billion gigabytes

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every day, a number that's increasing rapidly. Most of it
is stored in the cloud, which is a pretty word
for a network of millions of computer servers in air
conditioned warehouses that transfer and save our data to cassettes
of magnetic tape. But the cloud demands huge amounts of
space and energy and has heavy impacts on the environment.

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The magnetic tape also degrades, needs to be recopied, and
requires frequent updates. Enter DNA, the tiny molecule that stores
our genetic information. Scientists have come up with a way
to mimic DNA artificially to meet our escalating data storage needs.
The secret lies in translating binary code of ones and
zeros into the chemical bases that make up our genetic code.

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As the future of innovation will require massively more data,
we will need more sustainable ways to store it. This
novel solution takes up almost no space and can last
for millennia, keeping human knowledge safer than ever. Will it
totally replace the cloud, not yet. For now, the technology
is being developed for long term storage of things we

(21:07):
don't frequently access, think medical records or library archives. But
costs and processing times are going down and experts are
working on scaling the technology. The revolution is expected to
accelerate over the next decade, upending data storage as we
know it. How DNA storage works, scientists and engineers can

(21:27):
convert entire libraries into microscopic threads with the help of
specialized laboratory equipment. Here, they build the word hello into
a strand of DNA and then turn it back into letters,
encoding bits into bases. Computer store each letter or pixel
of digital data in combinations of ones and zeros. Algorithms,

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then convert them into combinations of the four letters representing
DNA's chemical bases THAA, G, and C. Building a DNA
strand compounds called nuclear leotides that contain these DNA bases
are in a solution of chemicals or enzymes and bond
together to build a strand. Long term archiving. A strand

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can then be kept in a sealed vile glass bead
or even synthetic bone for preservation. DNA is stable if
stored away from light, water, and hydrogen oxygen. Retrieving files,
One of the several ways to retrieve a specific file
is to send in a probe with a tiny magnet
to attach to its ID tag another magnet that extracts

(22:33):
the tagged file reading DNA. After retrieval, strands that make
up a file are read via variety of methods, including
the two shown at right that revealed the order of
the bases, turning DNA back into data. The algorithms that
initially converted digital bits into DNA bases reverse the operation,

(22:54):
converting archived information back to digital ones and zeros, and
then back in next. Extreme Birding at the Edge of
the World by Tom Kleins how an abandoned military station
in Alaska became an unlikely hotspot for sea bird research
and approving ground for the young scientists who spend their

(23:17):
summers there. For decades. Middleton Island was little more than
a forgotten outpost, a flat sliver of land battered by
the restless winds and waters of the Gulf of Alaska.
In the late nineteen fifties, the U. S. Air Force
built a radar station on the remote island to scan
the skies for Soviet bombers during the Cold War. The

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facility was shuttered just seven years later, its squat buildings
and steel towers left to rust. Today, the qualities that
made Middleton perfect for military surveillance isolation, bird's eye views,
and the absence of human distraction have made it ideal
for a new kind of outpost. Amid the dilapidated Air

(23:59):
Force structures. Small crews of scientists arrive each summer by
air taxi to turn this ghostly military complex into a
frontline research station for seabird science. Where radar once scanned
the skies, cameras now monitor nests where airman once stood
guard researchers peer through observation ports, studying the delicate interplay

(24:23):
between marine life and climate, using birds as a window
into ocean health. Birds are a barometer, says wildlife biologists
Scott Hatch, who founded and directs the Institute for seabird
research and conservation. Sea birds, particularly kittiwakes, are sensitive to
environmental changes, so they reflect the conditions and health of

(24:45):
ocean ecosystems. Hatch first visited Middleton in nineteen seventy eight
with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and started the ISRC,
which partners with universities to run the monitoring program in
two thousand and nine. Changing ocean temperatures and currents can
reduce fish populations, making it harder for birds to find

(25:06):
food and successfully raise chicks. When food is scarce, birds
reproductive rates decline. Because sea birds accumulate pollutants like plastics,
heavy metals, and oil as they eat and preen, they
are useful indicators of contamination levels in marine ecosystems. Like
the birds they study. Graduate students and other budding scientists

(25:28):
arrive at this avian crossroads from different parts of the world.
Drawn by the opportunity to explore the mysteries of sea
bird behavior and ecology under nearly twenty four hours of daylight.
Researchers immerse themselves in the demanding work of documenting the
lives of birds and piecing together the deeper story of
the forces shaping life in Earth's oceans. The centerpiece of

(25:51):
the research is the old radar tower, repurposed as a
one of a kind's sea bird observatory. In nineteen ninety three,
Hatchet and his growing team began to outfit the tower
with artificial nesting platforms to house black legged kittiwakes and
pelogic cormorants. Observation ports allow scientists to monitor every stage

(26:13):
of the bird's development. The setup lets scientists conduct controlled
experiments that would be unfeasible elsewhere. By tracking differences in
feeding behavior and parenting success, they can gauge the impacts
of environmental changes on seabird populations. These long term studies
have turned Middleton seabirds into sentinels of ocean upheaval. When

(26:37):
the twenty fourteen through sixteen marine heat wave hit, seabird
diets revealed a crash in fish, triggering breeding failures and
the death of an estimated four million common moores, or
about half Alaska's population of the birds. The scale dwarfed
even the Exxon Valdez disaster, making it perhaps the las

(27:00):
largest single species wildlife die off ever documented, and a
stark arding that climate driven ecosystem shifts can be fast, brutal,
and possibly irreversible. While the Seabird Tower offers a bit
of luxury for its avan inhabitants, island life for the
researchers is decidedly more rugged. You're pooping in out hoses

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and bathing in pond water that you heat on the stoves,
as Morgan Benowitz Frederick's, a biology professor at Bucknell University,
who spent seven field seasons on the island, and you're
covered in bird poop and fish guts and blood all
the time. Despite or perhaps because of these challenges, the
researchers forage strong bonds. Evenings are spent together in the Chateau,

(27:44):
a former military building that serves as the island's kitchen,
office and living room. Meals are a shared ritual, with
spirited conversations around a long dinner table. In between the
many hours of field work, the researchers in joy moments
of play. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for

(28:05):
to Day. Your reader, husband Marsha, thank you for listening,
Keep on listening, and have a great day.