Tomorrow Is Too late

Grace Maddrell

The Indigo Press

鈥淲E YOUNG people are powerful. We deserve to be heard and listened to,鈥� writes 15-year-old Grace Maddrell in their first book, about the activism and work of youth climate strikers across the globe.

Based in Somerset, UK, Grace went to their first climate strike in February 2019. It sparked their passion for the environment and they have since become an activist, fighting for both environmental justice and LGBTQ+ rights, working for Fridays for Future, the youth-led movement that started with Greta Thunberg鈥檚 protests in 2018.

After they took part in the global climate justice strike in September 2019, Grace was inspired to collect the voices of other youths fighting climate change. They sent out a tweet, calling for young climate activists across the globe to tell their stories. Within hours, Grace was flooded with responses. is a collection of essays from some of those who responded.

With contributors aged between 8 and 25 years, from places including Brazil, Uganda, Australia and Palestine, this book provides a powerful snapshot of how climate change is affecting the world today. It also shows how the younger generation is fighting back, whether by giving speeches at United Nations summits about the effects of climate change or striking to raise awareness.

Each essay is given a short introduction by Grace, providing background on the person telling their story. Some of the writers are already seeing the effects of the climate crisis at first-hand. Michael B盲cklaund, a 17-year-old from Israel, says he has seen friends die because of more frequent floods. He also says the climate crisis is often ignored to focus on political conflicts: he was told by Israel鈥檚 minister of energy that it was for the younger generation to fix the climate problem.

Coming from an Indigenous background, 20-year-old Lucila Auzza from Argentina feared that she wouldn鈥檛 survive to adulthood because of a lack of drinkable water as a child. She says the media there aren鈥檛 showing what the government is really doing to the rainforests and how many lives have been put at risk as a result. 鈥淭hroughout 2017, 42 per cent of deforestation in the country took place where regulations did not allow it,鈥� she says. Auzza says that rich countries care more about their economies than the environment.

Many of the essays call for the leaders of the world to act now, rather than leaving it up to the next generation. 鈥淓nough of climate talks, what we need now is climate action,鈥� says 24-year-old Patricia Kombo from Kenya who started an initiative to get environmental education taught in schools.

鈥淲e should not have to take the hand of the adults and drag them towards the solution that will save our planet,鈥� says 19-year-old Fionnuala Braun from Canada. She says that, in her lifetime, she has experienced more frequent extreme weather conditions, and that every year more Canadians are losing their homes to forest fires.

Tomorrow Is Too Late is a remarkable book that shows how educated and passionate young people can be about saving the planet. It also makes it clear that climate change is very much a global issue. Hearing the voices of children experiencing the impacts is heartbreaking, yet empowering.

The strength and determination of such people show how previous generations have failed to care for the environment. But this book is inspirational, and will ignite the inner environmentalist of those who read it. It encourages and educates people of all ages to fight for the future of our planet because tomorrow is too late. 鈥淓ven a small action that you take is better than no action,鈥� says Grace.

A vast site in north-west Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 structures that date back more than 7000 years, making them older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge in the UK.

Named after the Arabic word for rectangle, mustatil structures were first discovered in the 1970s, but received little attention from researchers at the time. Hugh Thomas at the University of Western Australia in Perth and his team wanted to learn more about them, and embarked on the largest investigation of the structures to date.

Using helicopters to fly over north-west Saudi Arabia and then following up with ground explorations, the researchers found more than 1000 mustatils across 200,000 square kilometres 鈥� twice as many as were previously thought to exist in this area. 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 get a full understanding of the scale of the structures until you鈥檙e there,鈥� says Thomas.

Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,鈥� says Thomas.

In a typical mustatil, long walls surround a central courtyard, with a distinctive rubble platform, or 鈥渉ead鈥�, at one end and entryways at the opposite end. Some entrances were blocked by stones, suggesting they could have been decommissioned after use.

Excavations at one mustatil showed that the centre of the head contained a chamber within which there were fragments of cattle horns and skulls. The cattle fragments may have been presented as offerings, suggesting mustatils may have been used for rituals.

Radiocarbon dating of the skulls shows that they date to between 5300 and 5000 BC, indicating that this was when this particular mustatil was built 鈥� and maybe the others too. If so, the monuments would together form the earliest large-scale, ritual landscape anywhere in the world, predating Stonehenge by more than 2500 years.

鈥淭his could completely rewrite our understanding of cults in this area at this time,鈥� says team member Melissa Kennedy, also at the University of Western Australia. She says that further south, religious groups became focused in homes, with families displaying small shrines, but the opposite was happening in ancient Saudi Arabia with the mustatils.

There may also have been a relation between the construction of mustatils and the environment. They were built during the Holocene Humid Phase 鈥� a period between 8000 and 4000 BC during which Arabia and parts of Africa were wetter, and what are now deserts were grasslands. But droughts were still common, and Kennedy says it is possible that cattle were herded and used as offerings to the gods to protect the land from the changing climate.

Mustatils were typically clustered in groups of two to 19, suggesting that gatherings may have been broken up into smaller social groups.

鈥淭he mustatils themselves are probably associated with an annual or generational coming-together of people who would normally be out with their herds and cattle,鈥� says Gary Rollefson at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, suggesting that these rituals were important for bringing communities together. 鈥淏ut there鈥檚 no indication that these guys spent a lot of time around the mustatil.鈥�

鈥淭hese structures are enigmatic,鈥� says Huw Groucutt at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. He says they show that remarkable human cultural developments took place in the Arabian peninsula.

But despite all the new findings, there is still much to learn. 鈥淧eople are going to understand these structures even more in the future,鈥� says Thomas. 鈥淚t鈥檚 nice to be at the forefront, but we鈥檙e also excited to see what other people find.鈥�

Projecting white noise in the direction of oncoming birds could stop them from colliding with buildings or wind turbines.

Birds keep their heads down to streamline their bodies as they fly, says John Swaddle at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. So, visual cues may not be enough to warn them of oncoming structures. That is why billions of birds around the world, particularly those that migrate long distances, die in collisions with manufactured structures each year.

鈥淏irds fly a bit like texting while driving,鈥� says Swaddle. He and his team used white noise at around 70 decibels 鈥� about as loud as a vacuum cleaner 鈥� to try to get their attention when they are near tall structures. 鈥淭hese acoustic stimuli are like someone honking at them, making them more aware of their surroundings,鈥� he says.

The team used directional speakers around two communication towers along the Delmarva peninsula in Virginia, an area that millions of birds pass through going south during the North American autumn migration. The speakers were angled to only be heard by oncoming birds travelling from the north, and cameras recorded the flight paths of birds within a 500-metre radius.

The team broadcast two sounds within the frequency range that most birds can hear, playing them for 30 minutes at a time with 30 minutes of silence between them over a total of 3 hours. One sound fell between 4 and 6 kilohertz, the other between 6 and 8 kilohertz. The team played these sounds for six days between September and November 2019.

Compared with the periods of silence, bird activity decreased roughly 16 per cent around the towers when the 4-6 kilohertz sound was played, and 12 per cent while the sound at 6-8 kilohertz played.

When birds flew within 100 metres of the tower, they were considered at risk for a collision. But the lower sound frequencies caused them to slow down more and divert their trajectories further around the tower. Swaddle says this may be because birds hear frequencies between 4 and 6 kilohertz more clearly.

Swaddle says this suggests that certain frequencies of sounds may be more efficient at making birds aware of structures like communication towers and wind turbines. 鈥淭he technology is already out there to do this so the implementation shouldn鈥檛 be that difficult,鈥� he says.

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Males of a species of parasitic wasp can identify potential mates from chemicals they give聽off, even before the females聽have emerged from聽within their host fly.

Jewel wasps (Nasonia vitripennis) are found across North America. Females deposit eggs inside the cocoon-like casings of developing flies, using their ovipositors to inject each fly with a venom that paralyses it. The developing wasps remain in the host as they mature from egg to adult, only eating their way out to mate. Males emerge first, hanging around on the hosts to wait for聽females to appear.

鈥淢ales want to increase their聽mating success, so would benefit from finding hosts with聽females,鈥� says Garima Prazapati at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali.

It is possible for these wasps to up their chances. Males develop from unfertilised eggs and females from fertilised eggs, so some hosts hold all-male broods, while others house a mixture of males and聽females.

Prazapati and her team collected jewel wasps from the聽wild and bred them. They isolated some females, keeping them from mating so their eggs would go on to create all-male broods. Next, they individually presented 26 male wasps with two Petri dishes: one holding a聽host containing male and female adult wasps, and one with聽a host containing only adult聽males.

The researchers found that the males spent around four times longer on the host with the females inside.

Analysing the chemical compositions of both hosts, the聽team found that the one containing female wasps had聽a聽higher abundance of nine聽cuticular hydrocarbons聽鈥� compounds that cover the wasp聽exoskeleton聽鈥� than the聽host with males inside.

They then dipped adult wasps聽in a chemical solution that extracts these hydrocarbons and聽found that adult females also had a higher concentration of them than males.

Prazapati says this suggests that the males must be able to聽detect the abundance of female-specific chemical cues emanating from within the fly casings. 鈥淭his is the ultimate mate鈥慺inding strategy,鈥� she says.

They are certainly good at聽finding the female wasps, says team member Rhitoban Raychoudhury, also at IISER Mohali. 鈥淏ut males being attracted to females isn鈥檛 news.鈥�

Given the lifestyle of parasitic wasps, this strategy of searching for mates while they are still within the host is important for males to secure reproduction and may also be seen in other species, he says.

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We use what is known as inner speech, where we talk to ourselves, to evaluate situations and make more-informed decisions. Now, a robot has been trained to speak aloud its inner decision-making process, giving us a view of how it prioritises competing demands.

Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella at the University of Palermo, Italy, programmed a humanoid robot named Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics in Japan, with software that models human cognitive processes, as well as a text-to-speech processor. This allowed Pepper to voice its decision-making process while completing a task. 鈥淲ith inner speech, we can better understand what the robot wants to do and what its plan is,鈥� says Chella.

The software allowed Pepper to retrieve relevant information from its memory and find the correct way to act based on human commands.

The researchers asked Pepper to set a dinner table according to etiquette rules they had encoded into the robot. Inner speech was either enabled or disabled to see how it affected Pepper鈥檚 ability to do what was requested.

When instructed to place a napkin on a fork with inner speech enabled, Pepper asked itself what the etiquette required and concluded that this request went against the rules it had been given. It then asked the researchers if putting the napkin on the fork was the correct action. When told it was, Pepper said, 鈥淥K, I prefer to follow your desire,鈥� and explained how it was going to place the napkin on the fork.

When asked to do the same task without voicing the inner speech, Pepper knew this contradicted the etiquette rules so didn鈥檛 perform the task or explain why.

The 鈥渋nner speech鈥� is just a basic program at present, says Pipitone. 鈥淎t this moment, it鈥檚 a narrative of Pepper鈥檚 process,鈥� she says.

With the potential for robots to become more common in the future, this type of programming could help the public understand their abilities and limitations, says Sarah Sebo at the University of Chicago. 鈥淚t maintains people鈥檚 trust and enables seamless collaborations and interactions between humans and robots,鈥� she says.

However, this experiment only used a single human participant, says Sebo.鈥淚t鈥檚 unclear how their approach would compare across a wide range of human participants,鈥� she says.

Pipitone says hearing a robot voice its decision-making process increases the transparency between humans and robots. This could have implications for cooperative tasks, such as those with medical robots, and to get out of stalemate situations with robots. 鈥淚t can be very important to understand why a robot arrives at a decision instead of another,鈥� she says.