More and more young women and girls are highlighting the importance of access and safety in the digital world. Marking International Girls in ICT Day, on Thursday, UN agencies have issued a call to action to ensure equal access to digital learning opportunities.
The International Girls in ICT Day is observed annually during the last week of April, and this year the focus is on ‘Access and Safety’ as key elements to engage the next generation with information and communication technology (ICT).
According to the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU), this year’s theme “reflects the world’s shared interest in empowering youth and girls to safely benefit from an active digital life.
The UN agency recognizes the need to ensure girls and women enjoy equal access to digital learning opportunities, particularly in least developed countries.
Worldwide only 30 per cent of tech science and technology professionals are women. And according to ITU’s latest data, globally, just 57 per cent of women use the Internet, compared to 62 per cent of men.
Furthermore, if women are unable to access the Internet and do not feel safe online, they are unable to develop the necessary digital skills and engage in digital spaces, which diminishes their opportunities to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related fields, ITU continued.
“Girls in ICT Day is a call to action to inspire the next generation of young women and girls to enter STEM careers,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao.
Calling on all government, business, university leaders and others, to do their utmost to support young women and girls, Mr. Zhao said that is essential to “give them the chance to achieve their dreams.”
Joining the call, UN Women reiterated the importance of ensuring every girl has safe and meaningful access to digital technology and ICTs.
In a statement marking the Day, the agency said they were inspired by young activists such as 18-year-old Ana Vizitiv from the Republic of Moldova, whose work promotes gender equality in ICT and STEM, and by role model and entrepreneur 20-year-old Yordanos Genanaw from Ethiopia, who participated in the African Girls Can Code initiative and is now developing a website and coaching others.
“These young women are using their skills to inspire other girls to pursue coding and basic IT skills, regardless of gender biases”, the statement continued.
Reminding that girls’ access to, and engagement in STEM subjects, is more crucial now than ever – especially after the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple crises in countries across the world have created repeated challenges to young women and girls to learn, earn and connect – UN Women reiterated the importance of technology as a solution to access essential services and information.
Technology also helps them communicate in school, keep in touch with friends and relatives and as a key aspect of their autonomy and future prospects.
A recent study by UN Women and ITU shows that girls access digital technology at a later age than boys, and that their use of this technology is more often curtailed by their parents.
In addition, young women and girls are disproportionately exposed to online and ICT-facilitated violence and harassment, which can negatively impact their physical, mental, and emotional well-being, and influence how they access and use digital tools for the rest of their lives, UN Women added.
Built upon the idea that “every girl has the right to be connected and safe, and to play her part in shaping a more equal, green and tech-driven future”, the UN Secretary-General has called for a global digital compact for improved digital cooperation.
The Generation Equality Action Coalition for Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality is bringing together governments, tech companies, the UN System, civil society organizations and young people, for a more equal and diverse digital transformation, including by preventing and eliminating online gender-based violence.
Marking the Day, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed called for an end to systemic barriers: “Girls continue to face cyber bullying and threats, and a lack of access due to digital divide”, she said on Twitter, asking for a transformation in tech and innovation, to be “equitable, safe and accessible”.
Across the UN system, agencies spoke up for gender equality in STEM. The UN cultural agency UNESCO called for the empowerment of young girls in ICT, so they can have a future lead in the workplace. The UN refugee agency mentioned the importance of not forgetting the digital access for refugees, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reiterated the need to guarantee better access to digital technologies, for rural women and girls.
The global celebration and associated worldwide Girls in ICT Day events underline ITU’s commitment to encourage girls and young women everywhere to consider pursuing STEM career paths.
To date, over 600,000 girls and young women have taken part in more than 12,000 celebrations of Girls in ICT Day in 195 countries worldwide.
“All over the world, girls and young women want to join the digital revolution. When we remove barriers of access and safety, women and girls can make remarkable contributions to, and be empowered by, ICTs. To put it simply: tech needs girls, and girls need tech,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau.”
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The current fusion technology emerging from Commonwealth Fusion Systems will provide a reason why coal will once again become a source of jobs and wealth in the United States. One of the elements needed to fuel the coming nuclear fusion reactor (called a tokamak), Helium-3 (He-3), will be a constraint on the development of sustainable fusion tokamaks. It will be necessary to mine the Moon for the estimated 1.1 million metric tons of He-3 that are on the far side of the Moon. CFS is estimating that its commercial sales of the ARC will begin in the early 2030s.
The advent of the space industry, to mine the Moon for He-3, will provide a lifeline to the struggling coal industry and provide thousands of coal mining jobs in the future.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is generally considered to be one of the best universities in the world. So, it is not surprising that Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) began at MIT at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Using their AlcatorC-Mod tokamak, the PSFC tried an experiment with a three-ion fuel instead of the traditional two-ion fuel. Using radio frequency heating to ignite two milligrams of helium-three, the helium-3 then ignited deuterium, which in turn ignited the third-ion fuel, tritium. In the new three-ion fuel scheme, all the RF energy is absorbed by just a trace amount of helium-3, and the ion energy is boosted even more — to the range of activated fusion products.
Helium-3 is not indigenous to Earth. It can be harvested from tritium when tritium reaches a half-life of 12.3 years. While tritium is not indigenous to Earth as well, it can be made in a fission reactor. All of the helium-3 in commercial use today is produced by this method. This presents safety and radioactive waste problems.
With helium-3 now a key ingredient in the new fusion process, the demand for helium-3 will become inelastic in terms of economic demand. To satisfy demand another way is needed to produce more helium-3. This can be accomplished by the increased production of tritium, or to mine the Moon where 1.1 million metric tons of helium-3 are estimated to be present in the Moon’s regolith. The current estimated value of helium-3 on the Moon is $1.543 quadrillion. This does not take into account the expected increase in demand for helium-3 once the fusion tokamaks from CFS become operational.
Solar Radiation and Its Dangers to Humans
Solar radiation storms occur when the Sun experiences a large-scale magnetic eruption, which causes a coronal mass ejection and accelerates charged particles into space, the solar radiation wave then bombards the planets in the Sun’s Solar System. A solar eruption takes less than 10 minutes to reach Earth. Fortunately, for the inhabitants of Earth, the Earth’s electro-magnetic shield protects the human race from the damaging effects of a solar radiation storm. However as the human race begins to venture into space, to the Moon, to Mars, and eventually to the Asteroid Belt, the human race will need protection from the deadly effects of a solar radiation storm.
The International Space Station (ISS) is currently in low Earth orbit, taking advantage of the Earth’s electro-magnetic shield to help protect the astronauts against solar radiation storms that happen periodically. The ISS is also heavily shielded, which also protects the inhabitants of the ISS. However, Inter-Planetary Vehicles, and individuals working on the Moon will not have the protection afforded to the astronauts on the ISS, and must have protection against solar radiation. When humans venture beyond the Earth, they will need to take hydroponic gardens with them as well, to provide food and a source of oxygen. They will probably need to take small animals to be used as a potential food source. Solar radiation will kill any vegetable life it encounters as well as small animal life.
The best way to fight off solar radiation is lead aprons, and lead-polyethene-boron composites, as well as Boron Nitride Nanotubes. Boron Nitride Nanotubes are still being evaluated as a possible radiation shield, while the Polyethylene shielding has been tested and found to be able to protect vegetable life, small animal life and human beings.
Raj Kaul, a scientist in the Marshall’s Center’s Engineering Directorate has worked with polyethylene before when constructing armor protection for helicopters of the United States military. Kaul has said that polyethylene …”Since it is a ballistic shield, it also deflects micrometeorites, since it’s a fabric, it can be draped around molds and shaped into specific spacecraft components.” Polyethylene is lightweight, half the weight of aluminum, and would only be needed for that part of the spacecraft that carries human, animal and vegetable life.
Polyethylene is Made Out of Coal
Karl Zeigler, from the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Germany invented linear HDPE, which is polyethylene. In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in developing linear HDPE.
Polyethylene is too soft to be used as a frame for rockets and the spacecraft launched into space. However, it is malleable enough to be made part of the infrastructure of the aircraft, and to be made into a mesh, which would be interwoven into an astronaut’s spacesuit offering protection while not in a structure or a space craft.
Future shelters on the Moon could be built just below the Moon’s surface, with a support roof of Polyethylene instead of burying shelters at a deeper level to protect the inhabitants of these structures from a solar radiation storm. It has been hypothesized to build the structures deep into the bedrock of the Moon to provide protection from solar radiation, but this carries with it an element of risk. Moonquakes can be as high as 5.7 on the Richter scale. A structure buried deep within the Moons strata could be damaged, perhaps causing multiple fatalities, and billions of dollars in damage.
With the human race increasingly venturing out into space, it is imperative that they be protected from solar radiation.
Using coal as a means of protecting the human race in space would give thousands of workers around the world meaningful employment, as well as protecting the inhabitants of this planet.
The statements made recently by Dr. Mohamed Ebrahim AI-Aseeri, chief executive officer of the National Scientific Space Agency of the Kingdom of Bahrain, give pause for thought, as more than five decades have elapsed since the first astronauts walked on the Moon. Since then, only one fleet of probes has visited the Moon, and they have done an extraordinary job in providing research centres with a huge amount of information about the lunar environment. Such research efforts have contributed to a deeper understanding of the Moon and paved the way for an afterthought, but this time for different purposes than before.
Over the past two decades, with the growing role played by the private sector in the space industry, investors have begun to think seriously about exploiting space in a way that can ensure a return on their investment. The idea emerged about mining on the surface of the Moon and expanding the implementation of scientific research, as well as promoting space tourism, including visits to the Moon.
In recent years there has been a positive shift toward returning to the Moon, as such an initiative has been announced by the United States of America, the European Union, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, Japan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). It is their ambition to explore the Moon through huge investment in major projects.
The most important of all has been the 100 billion dollar Artemis programme devised by NASA (Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon, was equated by the Romans with the goddess Diana).
The Artemis programme includes scenarios to stay on the Moon and its orbit for long periods of time, and establish a space base that would be used as a launch station for deep space missions since the Moon has lower gravity than Earth’s, thus enabling rockets to take off with ease. This also makes the venture more economically feasible, besides providing the possibility of mining, based on the scientific research results that have confirmed the presence of precious metals on the lunar surface.
One of the significant goals of the Artemis mission is to land men and the first woman on the surface of the Moon in 2025. The final Artemis programme will include 37 launches and establish a permanent base on the Moon. Traveling to the Moon, however, will still be expensive. Nevertheless the programme planners are very confident that benefits will outweigh costs. More importantly, the U.S. government expects a good return on investment. Comparing future Moon missions with Apollo missions will lead us to recognize the fact that Apollo‘s initial investment in technology, climate satellite systems, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and advanced communication devices created to support Moon missions, are now part of everyday life on Earth.
As previously happened, the new technologies developed to support future missions to the Moon will surely find their way into world economies, thus stimulating a good return on investment.
The People’s Republic of China and Japan are investing heavily in space missions and are looking quite seriously at sending missions to the Moon. China and Russia have announced a collaborative effort to build a lunar base before 2030. China has been very clear about its intentions and has good capabilities to carry out a long-term Moon mission. It is planning a crewed mission landing on the Moon and developing new spacecraft for such missions.
The People’s Republic of China is also planning to build a scientific research station on the Moon’s south pole within the next ten years. Efforts by other countries to reach the Moon and study it from its orbit, or to land on its surface, vary considerably.
Only a few States have so far succeeded in reaching the surface of the Moon as part of successful or semi-successful missions. Current scientific advances and technologies being developed for Moon missions will enable scientists to conduct more detailed studies of the lunar surface and subsoil. Scientists will also seek answers to the big questions about how the solar system was formed, as well as the formation of the Moon and its geology. Moon exploration missions will stimulate large-scale scientific research and innovation.
Much investment, research efforts and innovation are required to overcome the problem of Moon’s hostile environment and enable humans to establish colonies on the surface of the closest celestial body to Earth. Scientific evidence corroborates the abundance of a range of worthy natural resources with high industrial value that can be extracted through mechanical processes. This is one of the most important returns on investment in current Moon missions.
Studies based on the analysis of lunar soil and rocks collected during the six missions that landed humans on the Moon surface between 1969 and 1972 indicate the presence of valuable resources that can be used in other space missions. For example, NASA believes that liquid oxygen can be easily extracted from the Moon and stored for use in other space missions, particularly missions to explore Mars, since the aforementioned oxygen is an important component of the fuel needed for space missions.
We should not overlook the fact that, over the past two decades, NASA has deployed a series of probes to the surface of the Moon to measure the amount of water inside or under the rocks. What they found was surprising. There was much more water than previously thought. There is evidence of water ice at the lunar poles, hidden in craters not reached by sunlight. NASA plans to use this water to support the colonization of the lunar surface and for upcoming deep space missions.
Returning to the Moon is an important move in planning future missions to Mars that have been attracting increased attention in recent years. The hope is that humans can learn from their stay on the Moon how to live in a hostile environment before setting foot on more distant places like Mars. The experience gained and the solutions developed will therefore pave the way for missions beyond the asteroid belt as well.
The Moon is a treasure chest, which is the reason why several countries are investing many of their resources to visit the Moon as soon as possible in an undeclared space race. Scientists from different fields firmly believe that man’s expected return to the lunar surface in the coming years could help life on Earth and bring about a huge all-round change.
Besides the above mentioned benefits of returning to the Moon, here are some main examples summarized in the following points:
1) the Moon could be a source of unlimited solar energy for Earth, by collecting that energy through very low-cost panels and then transmitting it to Earth in the form of a microwave beam;
2) the Moon is rich in helium-3 that is used for clean and safe nuclear fusion energy, medical applications, etc.;
3) the dark side of the Moon could be used to build radio and optical telescopes to advance human knowledge of the Cosmos and search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations without any interference from Earth’s radio transmissions and frequencies;
4) the Moon could be an alternative place to store Earth’s hazardous industrial materials, waste and pollutants without worrying about their side effects on the environment;
5) the establishment of laboratories in lunar orbit will contribute to the implementation of numerous scientific tests and experiments that will have a direct impact on world progress and welfare. Such laboratories will also sustain human presence on the Moon surface for long periods of time and may help in the design of future similar laboratories in orbit around Mars;
6) colonization of the Moon surface cannot be done and sustained by a single State, and hence different countries sharing the same interests must work together; this will strengthen international collaboration for the benefit of all mankind, and joint efforts could lend significant support to peace on Earth.
The relationship between Earth and the Moon is fundamental to the existence of life on our planet. The Moon has been decisive in sustaining human existence on Earth for billions of years. A team of scientists from the University of Cologne analysed chemical signatures of rare elements in lunar rocks collected by the Apollo missions, dating their formation to about 4.51 billion years ago.
Today the Moon’s role is becoming increasingly important and will support human development and growth for many decades to come. With a view to achieving this goal, we need to return to the Moon, study it in situ, understand it well and make fair use of it to preserve its environment and ensure the sustainability of its natural resources.
While using the natural resources of the Moon, humans should avoid repeating the previous mistakes made on Earth. Future generations will be connected in an unprecedented way to the Moon, and this could be the source of great human achievements beyond our imagination.
Speech and language skills are unique to modern humans. While this ability evolved over millions of years, it is not possible to trace language in the fossil record because it leaves no direct imprint. Instead, re-examining the ways our nearest living relatives communicate is helping to unravel this mysterious capability.
The mystery is deepened by the fact that our closest living relatives, the great apes, do not talk. Some scientists now believe that the evolution of our language capabilities are more discernible in living primates than previously assumed.
‘The traditional view is that, even though great apes are our closest living relatives, they are not useful for studying how language and speech came about, because their vocal behaviour is so different,’ said primatologist Dr Adriano Lameira at the University of Warwick, UK. ‘It’s automatic and reflexive, guided by blind instinct.’
During his years spent in jungles studying orangutans in the wild, Lameria discovered that the range and novelty of vocal sounds in wild orangutans varies, and he recently reported that this depends on local population density. Novelty is at a premium when an individual needs to stand out, so that apes living in areas of high population density express their individuality through more distinctive and variable vocal sounds.
In Indonesia, Lameira experimented by crawling around the forest floor on all fours, disguised with a tiger-patterned sheet. Recording the responses of the forest apes, he discovered that orangutan mums holding an infant stay silent when they spot “a tiger,” which stayed within sight for two minutes. They suppress alert calls for up to 20 minutes after the tiger has gone.
From there, he reasoned that immediate vocalisation could endanger the young orangutan. ‘A Sumatran tiger can climb 10 metres up a tree in a second,’ said Lameira. ‘If you advertise your location, especially if you have an infant, it could be very dangerous.’
By vocalising after the tiger has moved on, the mother alerts the infant to the danger. This helps the juvenile to make the correct association. The remarkable thing about this is that the orangutan was communicating about a past event, rather than something in the here and now. ‘This was completely outside the box of what we had been thinking,’ said Lameira.
It opens up the possibility that orangutans communicate about past events, or perhaps even future events. If this ability exists, the possibilities for sharing information are endless. ‘This could well be a trait that was shared by our last common ancestor – this capacity of communicating about events that are not in the here and now.’
It may be that other apes are also able to do this to some degree. ‘Even if you communicate only about 20 minutes in the past, or future, you can accrue benefits,’ said Lameira. ‘Natural selection just needs a little bit of something to tinker with and improve upon.’ Perhaps apes can communicate that a certain tree has such-and-such fruit, though this suggestion remains speculative.
In the south of France, Dr Pascal Belin studies captive macaque and marmoset monkeys to investigate their perception of vocalisations.
‘The goal of the research is to better understand the way the human brain evolved,’ said Belin, a neuroscientist at the Aix-Marseille University in France. ‘We study humans and three other types of primates – marmosets, macaques and baboons – to try to better understand differences and similarities, especially in vocal communications.’
In one experiment, three macaques were trained to stay still in an MRI machine, which scanned their brains as they listened to dozens of sounds, including vocalisations from other macaques.
‘Like in the human brain, the macaques and marmosets seem to have regions that are particularly sensitive to conspecific (from the same species) vocalisations,’ said Belin. The MRI scans show which areas become active as the macaques listen to other macaques, but not natural or other sounds or marmosets. A very similar area is active when humans listen to human voices.
If the same area of the brain in macaques and humans lights up when they hear another member of their species, this points to this voice area having evolved before they diverged in the evolutionary tree.
Belin’s hypothesis is that the voice information processing part of the primate brain is quite similar and therefore evolved in a common ancestor, before ancient humans such as Homo erectus emerged in Africa 2-3 million years ago.
‘It would suggest that the last common ancestor of humans and macaques already had a precursor of this voice area in the brain 20 million years ago,’ said Belin.
Future experiments are planned to use surgically implanted electrodes in the monkeys to try to distinguish exactly which neurons become active when the macaques hear another macaque, but not other monkeys or other sounds or noises.
It may even be possible to then compare results from marmosets and macaques to humans, fitted with these electrodes for medical reasons. These are implanted in some epileptic patients, who don’t respond to treatments, to allow neurosurgeons to better see small areas of the brain that they may need to remove.
Such patients could be asked to listen to the same 96 sounds as the marmosets and macaques while being monitored in hospital, to study the brain’s response.
Yet it is not only the similarities that are interesting, but differences too. Great apes can make vowel-like sounds, as do monkeys, with their voice box. Yet only great apes and humans seem to make consonant-like sounds, which rely less on the vocal tract and more on the lips.
Orangutans have a rich repertoire of lip-smacking clicks and raspberries, which they combine with grunts and other vowel-like sounds. ‘They combine voiced calls with voiceless calls, so like vowel-like with consonant-like sounds,’ said Lameira. ‘We think there is something quite unique about this marriage between two distinct types of call, so powerful that every language was built on this formula of consonant plus vowel.’
This repertoire comprised critical starter blocks for our ancestors to begin developing what we today would recognise as human speech and language, Lameira suspects. Such shared traits, in Lameira’s view, is one way to trace back the path of human speech and language evolution and understand key steps forward that our ancestors took in terms of vocalisations and brain evolution.
He calls on scientists studying gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees to similarly look for shared traits, such as combinations of some consonant-like and vowel-like sounds, or evidence of communications about recent past events. By investigating our primate relatives, we may uncover vestiges of ancestral humans and the origins of our speech and language of today.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
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