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Erin McGuire spent years cultivating fruits and vegetables like onions, peppers and tomatoes as a scientist and later director of a lab at the University of California-Davis. She collaborated with hundreds of people to breed drought-resistant varieties, develop new ways to cool fresh produce and find ways to make more money for small farmers at home and overseas. Then the funding stopped. Her lab, and by extension many of its overseas partners, were backed financially by the United States Agency for International Development, which Trump’s administration has been dismantling for the past several weeks. Just before it was time to collect data that had been two years in the making, her team received a stop work order. She had to lay off her whole team. Soon she was laid off, too. Its really just been devastating, she said. I dont know how you come back from this. The U.S. needs more publicly funded research and development on agriculture to offset the effects of climate change, according to a paper out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month. But instead the U.S. has been investing less. United States Department of Agriculture data shows that as of 2019, the U.S. spent about a third less on agricultural research than its peak in 2002, a difference of about $2 billion. The recent pauses and freezes to funding for research on climate change and international development are only adding to the drop. Its a serious issue for farmers who depend on new innovations to keep their businesses afloat, the next generation of scientists and eventually for consumers who buy food. If scientists have reliable backing, they can keep improving crop varieties to better withstand perilous weather conditions like droughts or floods, find new uses for existing crop species, figure out how to protect workers, develop new technology to aid in planting and harvesting or create more effective ways of fighting pests. They can also investigate agricultures potential role in fighting climate change. This is terrible news for the U.S. agricultural sector, said Cornell associate professor Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, the lead author of the paper. Trump administration hastens funding cuts As the Trump administration pauses and shutters research programs funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, USDA and other agencies, Ortiz-Bobea and other experts have seen field trials stopped, postdoctoral positions eliminated and a looming gap forming between the reality of climate change and the tools farmers have to deal with it. The EPA declined to comment, and the USDA and USAID did not respond to Associated Press queries. Ortiz-Bobea and his team quantified overall U.S. agricultural productivity, estimated how much it would be slowed by climate change in coming years and calculated how much money would need to be invested in research and development to counteract that slowdown. Think of it like riding a bike into a headwind, Ortiz-Bobea said. To maintain the same speed, you have to pedal harder; in this case, R&D can be that extra push. Some countries are heading that direction. China spends almost twice as much as the U.S. on agricultural research, and has increased its research investments by five times since 2000, wrote Omanjana Goswami, a scientist with the Food and Environment team at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an email. Spending cutbacks have also shuttered agricultural research across almost all of the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, of which McGuire’s was one. Those 17 labs across 13 universities focused on food security, technical agriculture research, policy and various aspects of climate change. The stop-work orders at those labs not only disappointed researchers, but made useless much of their work. There are many, many millions of dollars of expenditure that will generate nothing now because the work couldnt be finished, said David Tschirley, a professor who had been directing another one of those programs, the Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Capacity and Influence at Michigan State University, since 2019. Finding new funding for agricultural research Some researchers hope that other sources of funding can fill the gaps: Thats where private sector could really step up, said Swati Hegde, a scientist in the Food, Land, and Water Program at the World Resources Institute. From an agricultural point of view, climate change is really scary, with larger and larger regions exposed to temperatures above healthy growing conditions for many crops, said Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, a multinational biotechnology and pharmaceutical company that invested nearly $3 billion in agricultural research and development last year. But private companies have their own constraints on R&D investment, and he said Bayer can’t invest as much as it would like in that area. I dont think that private industry can replicate” how federal funding typically supports early stage, speculative science, he said, because the economics don’t really work. He added that industry tends to be better suited to back ideas that have already been validated. Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, also expressed concerns that private research funding isn’t as trackable and transparent as public funding. And others said even sizeable investments from companies don’t give anywhere near enough money to match government funding. Researchers, farmers and consumers feel the fallout The full impact may not be apparent for many years, and the damage won’t easily be repaired. Experts think it will be a blow in other countries where climate change is already decimating yields, driving hunger and conflict. I really worry that if we dont really look at the global food situation, we will have a disaster, said David Zilberman, a professor at UC Berkeley who won a Wolf Prize in 2019 for his work on agriculture. But even domestically, experts say one thing is almost certain: this will mean even higher prices at the grocery store now and in the future. More people on the Earth, you need more productivity to prevent food prices going crazy, said Tom Hertel, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. Even if nothing changes right away, he thinks 10 years from now, 20 years from now, our yield growth will surely be stunted by cuts to research on agricultural productivity. Many scientists said the wound isnt just professional but personal. People are very demoralized, especially younger researchers who dont have tenure and want to work on international food research, said Zilberman. Now those dreams are on hold for many. In carefully tended research plots, weeds begin to grow. Melina Walling, Associated Press The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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When a couple decided to take their relationship further on the most recent season of Love Is Blind, the moment was soundtracked with a familiar song: Billie Eilishs Birds of a Feather. It wasnt a flash-in-the-pan musical surprise. The season was stacked with familiar needle drops Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball, Justin Biebers Holy, Ariana Grandes Into You, Selena Gomezs Lose You to Love Me a gesture away from the little-known, sometimes generic pop songs that used to meet the show’s most emotional moments. Show creator and Kinetic Content CEO Chris Coelen attributed the pivot to the show’s anniversary. We decided, in this Season 8, to coincide with our fifth anniversary, to really embrace popular music in a big way, he said. And so, we ended up using throughout the entire season and in every episode we used popular music cues. Love Is Blind isnt the only reality show that walks the line between what viewers have labeled real songs and unfamiliar music. Where does the unfamiliar music come from? Its not artificial intelligence, where nobody controls the copyright, says The Bachelor music supervisor Jody Friedman. Theres too much risk involved with using AI music in these projects. Excluding big-time pop records, the music used on television comes from a number of sources. It can be custom, original music by the shows composers. It can be licensed directly from artists, or from sync agents, production music libraries or a one stop, what supervisors call a company that has the rights to license both the master recording and the composition rights. Music supervisors might also turn to covers of well-known songs. On the most recent season of The Bachelor, Friedman used a cover of Phil Phillips Sea of Love, a classic 50s tune. Its more affordable to pay to license a cover than the original recording and creatively, its a modern take on an old song, he says. Love Island USA music supervisor Sara Torres also uses covers. That can bring in other listeners that may not necessarily be into pop, but if they hear the song in a different genre, it might pull them in, to go back and listen to the original version, she says. Music libraries companies that represent music catalogs for licensing purposes are key, too, because if a song is too expensive to license, a supervisor can instead find a song that evokes the feeling of BTS Butter without having to pay for it. The indie libraries, lets say, for TV, could be anywhere from $1,000-1,500 per needle drop use, says Friedman. Generally speaking, bigger commercial songs can range from $20,000 to upward of $100,000 depending on the use, he says. A history of using real songs on dating competition shows The use of instantly recognizable pop music differs from program to program. Love Is Blind has used popular music in the past, but sparingly. Coelen points out the use of Lee Ann Womacks I Hope You Dance in Bliss Poureetezadi and Zack Goytowskis story in Season 4. But the frequency of Top 40 hits in the most recent season is new. He says the benefit of using these songs, creatively, is that it elevates the experience, for the viewer: Emotions are so connected to certain pieces of music, and they can conjure up feelings that we relate to. Kinetic Content declined The Associated Press request to speak with the shows music supervisor, Jon Ernst. Love Island USA featured songs like Chappell Roans Kaleidoscope and Sabrina Carpenters Please Please Please in its most recent season. Executive producer James Barker points out that the original U.K. show has always used commercial music, and therefore the U.S. version has endeavored to do the same. The show is meant to feel like youre on vacation with your best friends. Of course, when youre on vacation, youre sharing music, he says. I think that translates into how we create the show. Torres agrees. She adds that the show typically uses more commercial music in the beginning of the season, and then again in the finale you want that big impact. Because the show has a quick turnaround time, with six episodes a week whatever happens in Fiji on Monday airs Tuesday in America, as Barker describes it the show team pre-clears over a thousand songs, just in case they work for a particular narrative moment. That means requests are sent out to publishers and labels ahead of time, but they’re not paid for until the tracks are selected. A show with more lead time, The Bachelor has long used commercial songs in its programming. This year’s season, the show’s 29th, had several memorable musical moments, including a Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin needle drop when I Like It played as the cast made their way to Madrid. This is my first season with The Bachelor, but historically theyve used Colbie Caillat, Boyz II Men, Backstreet Boys, lists Friedman. They used Billie Eilish last season. This season we used a David Guetta track, Dropkick Murphys for the episode in Boston. Theres a Karol G track. He adds The Bachelor does use a lot of recognizable pop songs, typically one or two per episode. Each episode does have a budget. So, while they may splurge on a pop song, the rest of the budget is spent on other music that comes at a lower cost, he says. So, will there be more real song drops in the future? For Love Is Blind, Coelen says simply: The answer is yes. Barker from Love Island USA agrees. Not only are you engaged with the characters, but the songs and artists that you care about listening to at home are being represented on television, he adds. Its just a bridge between us all. Maria Sherman, AP music writer
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Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time. Although its still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak. A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldnt speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial. It converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences, said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said. This is “a pretty big advance in our field, said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study. A team in California recorded the womans brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound. It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley. The implant itself sits on the speech center of the brain so that its listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. Its a streaming approach, Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech about half a syllable sent into a recorder. Its not waiting for a sentence to finish, Anumanchipalli said. Its processing it on the fly. Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech.” Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn’t affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with sustained investments,” it could be available to patients within a decade, he said. Laura Ungar, AP science writer The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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