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Demand for electricity is surging globally — and it’s projected to grow even more as society shifts away from gas-powered cars and heating to electric systems, and as intensifying heat waves drive the need for more air conditioning.

This spike is so significant that the International Energy Agency has dubbed this the “Age of Electricity.“

Accompanying this trend is increasing interest in small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs — a new generation of nuclear power plants that have long been hyped as a climate-friendly way to meet electricity demands without the intermittency of renewable technologies.

Canada is set to become the first country in the G7 with civilian SMRs. The government of Ontario has approved a $15 billion plan to build four of these reactors outside Toronto. But while small modular nuclear reactors are a functioning technology — they power nuclear vessels, and Russia has used them on barges — they have yet to be successfully deployed for civilian use.

The World’s Carolyn Beeler spoke with Chris Bataille, a fellow at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, about the state of SMR technology and the perspective of nuclear power among the Canadian public.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length.

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By the time the Kosmos 482 spacecraft launched in 1972, the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States had been in full swing for about 15 years.

It began in 1957 when the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into Earth’s orbit. About four years later, astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth.

In the early ’60s, the Soviet Union seemed to be winning the space race — until NASA’s Apollo 11 became the first crewed mission to land on the moon in 1969.

The next frontier in the early 1970s for the US-Soviet competition was exploring planets using unmanned spacecraft. In 1972, the Soviet Union’s Kosmos 482 probe was intended to reach Venus, however, it never got to its destination. Instead, it’s been circling Earth since 1972, and gradually descending.

Now, Kosmos 482 is expected to come hurtling back to Earth this week after being stuck in orbit for more than 50 years.

Anatoly Zak, a journalist, and the author of a book, “Russia in Space,”  said that predicting the timing and the location of the spacecraft’s crash landing won’t be possible until just hours before it comes pummeling down.

“When you’re flying with this tremendous speed, even a few seconds difference can have a huge geographical change because it affects your trajectory by hundreds of kilometers,” Zak said. “So, it’s notoriously hard to predict. Of course, oceans are covering a big part of this area, so the probability is very high that it’s going to end up in the ocean.”

Russian space expert and journalist Vitaly Yegorov, said that the spacecraft successfully launched into Earth’s orbit, but because of a technical problem with one of the rockets, it couldn’t blast off toward Venus.

That’s why it’s been stuck in orbit for all these years.

Yegorov said that whenever a Russian spacecraft wouldn’t reach its destination, it would essentially be renamed. So, what was supposed to be known as Venera 9 was called Kosmos 482 because it never made it to Venus.

Yegorov said that the Soviet Union didn’t want to publicize its failures, so it would simply rebrand, and say that it successfully launched a satellite into orbit.

Author Zak explained how the Kosmos 482 fit into the US-Soviet space race.

“Both the United States and Soviet Union at that time were very actively exploring the planets, using the robotic probes. For example, the Americans were the first who delivered very clear images of the Martian surface. So, the Soviet Union focused on Venus as a sort of counterweight to the exploration of Mars.”

Zak said that there was a lot of prestige in space exploration but also political pressure and that led to many Soviet achievements big and small.

“They were the first who were able to penetrate the very dense atmosphere of Venus, very hostile environment of Venus, to reach the surface, and actually transmit useful data, from the surface of Venus, all the way back to Earth.” 

Since the early 1970s, a lot has changed in the relationship between the US, Soviet, and now, Russian space programs.

Zak said that in the ’70s, after years of competition, space became an area of cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

“Right now, we almost came full circle, because, of course, it’s exactly the time now where we are marking almost three decades of a cooperative space program, which is now unraveling, and turning back into the competition.”

And that competition isn’t limited to Russia and the United States.

Other countries, like China, have also entered the competition along with many private companies that are leading the way in the new space race of the 21st century.

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The AP-7 is one of Spain’s busiest roads. It’s also among the country’s most dangerous.

Last year, there were 700 accidents with victims recorded on the highway, which stretches along the Mediterranean from Valencia to the border with France, a record for the last decade.

One of the most shocking accidents occurred last March when dense fog caused a 40-car pileup, killing one man and injuring several others.

During the day, the AP-7 can come to a standstill with bumper-to-bumper traffic — especially around Barcelona, and especially on holidays.

Now, traffic officials in Catalonia are trying to make the highway safer and less congested with artificial intelligence. The new system will take in real-time data from the roads — such as the number of cars, whether there’s an accident, and the weather — and choose a sensible speed limit.

If there’s a backup in one spot due to a wreck or sudden fog, AI technology will lower the speed limit for cars approaching the area in hopes of preventing a sudden jam.

“So, these cars are delayed to arrive in the section that problems,” said Òscar Llatje, the coordinator of safety, traffic and mobility at the Catalan Traffic Service.

There will still be a top speed limit, but Llatje said officials plan to eventually do away with permanent signs and replace them with the changing digital signs.

Traffic safety experts have been pushing for a system like this — called variable speed limits — for decades.

“They’ve been found to lead to reductions in road deaths,” said Ellen Townsend, policy director of the European Transport Safety Council, a nongovernmental organization in Brussels dedicated to reducing road deaths across Europe. 

“The main evidence that’s been reviewed is from the UK, from the M25, which is quite a well-known road, because it’s the one that goes around London,” she said. “That was introduced in 1995, and there was a 15% drop in injury crashes.”

What’s different about the new Catalonian system is the introduction of artificial intelligence. Examples of that can be found outside of Europe.

Last year, Tennessee rolled out a speed limit program similar to what’s being tested in Spain, where AI monitors road conditions and changes speeds in real time to reduce congestion and prevent wrecks along the I-24 “Smart Corridor,” a popular, 24-mile portion of Interstate 24. 

According to Diego Manzanas Lopez, a research scientist at Vanderbilt University, which partnered with the state on the project, the system has reduced crashes by 14%. And that’s not all.

“It actually significantly decreases traffic congestion,” he said. “It helps with fuel consumption, and it also helps reduce accidents. So, I think it’s great that Spain is implementing that. And I hope that is the future for most roads in Spain.”

That future is still a ways away, though. According to Catalonian officials, it will take about two years to fully implement the new artificial intelligence system.

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Researcher Jack Terwilliger looks at a video feed in his lab — a cozy room with a couple of tables and computers. He’s not just watching animal videos for amusement but examining a unique method to determine language patterns in dogs and other animals.

He’s part of a global study that originated at the University of California San Diego’s Department of Cognitive Science and that has now extended to 47 different countries around the world.

“Berlin, New York, Chicago, Phoenix,” he pointed to the different videos on the screen. “I think that might be Baja [California], Paris, Edmonton, Melbourne, so, all over.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began — a time when many crazes emerged out of mass boredom — owners have been training their dogs to “tell” them what they want by mashing buttons with their paws to express words in various human languages.

A vast spreadsheet records all the dogs in the study. Data points show where in the world they are, the date and time when they press a certain button and the word on that button.

Some of Terwilliger’s research shows animals on TikTok hitting buttons that play words like “outside,” “food” and “treats.”

The purpose of the global study is to determine whether the animals are actually communicating or if they’re just forming behaviors to secure treats for themselves.

The talking dog buttons, as they’re called, are scientifically known as augmentative interspecies communication (AIC).

“I think we’ve sold over 2 million of these buttons at this point,” said Leo Trottier, a PhD graduate from UCSD and the founder and CEO of FluentPet, the company that makes the button devices.

“We created a community of people where they could find common ground and they could see that they weren’t the only ones doing this and they could relay their incredible stories — which 99% of their friends didn’t believe [at the time] — but which were very evident to the people who they were meeting with on Zoom,” Trottier said.

One video that went viral online showed Christina Hunger’s dog, Stella, a Blue Heeler-Catahoula mix.

One afternoon, around the time for her daily trip to the beach in San Diego, Stella started mashing several buttons on her device.

She first pawed at the void where the missing button for “beach” would normally be and then went on to push the buttons for “help,” “water” and “outside” in succession — essentially creating a phrase that summarized her wish to go to the beach.

“She was able to generalize the concept of water, from being just, ‘Oh, water in my bowl’ to water as a more general thing that can exist at the beach and be much larger than four inches in diameter,” Trottier explained. 

The excitement this video garnered online was a starting point for gathering more people from around the world to participate in wider scientific research. Trottier said that thousands of people signed up in just a few weeks.

“I was like, well, we’re a small company, a tiny company,” he said, “but I believed that no self-respecting cognitive scientist would turn down this opportunity to understand non-human minds in a way that had never been understood before.”

One such person was Federico Rossano, an associate professor in the cognitive science department at UCSD.

Since 2021, Rossano had been researching non-human communication — primates and dogs — but by answering questions that scientific reasoning sent his way, rather than from viral online trends.

He admitted that he initially didn’t see the value in the button-pressing type of study, thinking the trend would soon pass, until he realized that people were embracing it anyway, and in large numbers.

“It’s now 10,000 participants from 47 countries, currently the largest animal communication studies ever conducted longitudinally, and we have people signing up weekly,” Rossano said.

He explained that, to determine if the dogs were interacting as communicative partners or treating their owners as vending machines, “we tried to create a situation where, basically, you present them with a container that has a treat, and they really want the treat, and they try to open it, but they can’t.”

The owners were instructed not to respond to attempts to seek attention through normal dog behaviors, like barking or scratching their legs.

In one video from his own research study, Rossano saw a dog named Parker give up on trying to get a treat out from under a clear plastic box. After being ignored by its owner, Parker went over to the soundboards and pressed the button sequence, “Help, look, look.”

“At the very least, this tells me that they understand what those buttons mean because they could have pressed anything else and that they are capable of understanding that the human needs to perceive what’s going on in order to respond and to communicate about what they need, which I think is amazing,” Rossano said. “It’s like a child telling you that they’re hungry versus just crying. And I think being able to communicate your needs and what you want, I think it’s very powerful.”

In France, the button systems have words like jouer, which means “play” in French, or dehors, “outside.”

Paris resident Héloïse Chevalier and her dog, Tantrum, have also been part of the UCSD study since she adopted him just over a year ago. Her cat, Flint, has been in a similar study for four years. Chevalier posts animal training videos on her Instagram account, where she has more than 21,000 followers.

“Flint tolerates Tantrum and Tantum thinks he’s his best friend,” she said.

Chevalier explained that she already believes animals can communicate with humans by combining separate concepts to build phrases or sentences, and that she joined the study just to confirm the theory.

Leo Trottier of FluentPet even believes that dogs are capable of putting together more than two concepts — three, four or more.

“Previously, humans have thought language was maybe something akin to an inborn sense or something like an organ, like an eyeball or the nose, we have this language faculty, like we have an opposable thumb,” Trottier said.

In fact, Trottier said, language might be more like a bicycle, a collectively evolved artifact that has been iterated on for many, many, many hundreds of thousands of years.

“And if it’s an artifact that’s external, then the fact that a dog can’t ride a bicycle is actually not that interesting,” he said.

“The fact that it’s been difficult for non-human animals to learn what we call human language, the fact that that hasn’t happened, it might be for very contingent reasons that, with design, could potentially be overcome.”

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Broadway musicals often try out in cities like Boston and Philadelphia before debuting in New York. But a new show has traveled a much farther distance. “Maybe Happy Ending” has been produced six times in South Korea over the past decade.

The performance opened on Broadway last fall and has established itself as a stealth hit. That means, unlike many current shows, it’s not based on well-known intellectual property, and it doesn’t feature big Hollywood stars.

“Maybe Happy Ending” is an intimate science fiction story about two retired robots who fall in love. Their situation is an attempt to shed light on the human condition in this digital age.

When director and choreographer Michael Arden was approached to work on the production, he said the basic premise of the idea didn’t appeal to him.

“It’s not a great elevator pitch,” he recalled. “When I first received the script and read the tagline, I thought, ‘Oh no.’ And then, by the time I finished reading and listening to it, I was completely devastated and overcome with emotion.”

The show’s authors, South Korean-born Hue Park and American Will Aronson, began working on the script over a decade ago. Park, who has written lyrics for Top 20 K-Pop hits, said he was inspired by Damon Albarn’s song “Everyday Robots” while sitting in a Brooklyn coffee shop.

The song started with, “We are everyday robots on our phone in the process of getting home,” Park explained. “And I was like, ‘Oh, I want to see a little quiet, intimate show about who we are becoming in this digital era.’ But the protagonists are human-like robots.”

He texted his writing partner, Will Aronson, and they got to work. The pair has premiered several musicals together in South Korea, and Aronson also speaks Korean fluently.

“Maybe Happy Ending” is set in Seoul, where the show had a tryout production in 2015, with several subsequent productions since.

“Shows in Korea don’t do open runs generally,” Aronson explained. “They’re usually two- to three-month runs. And then, if it’s going well, it’ll come back a year or two years later. We’ve been very fortunate that the audience did respond and it’s come back consistently.”

Even as the show became a hit in South Korea, Aronson said the team had plans to perform in the United States. There was a reading of the English language script in 2016. “And at that point, we paired with our current producers,” Aronson said. “And there are several new songs. We took some Korean songs out and put some new songs into this version.”

The Korean version is about 15 minutes longer, but the story is basically the same: A pair of retired Helperbots — humanoid servants Oliver and Claire — embark on a surprising romantic relationship.

Darren Criss, who starred in the “Glee” series, plays Oliver in the Broadway production. He draws on everything from Commedia dell’arte to Kabuki styles and even silent film stars like Buster Keaton to create his mechanical man.

“In order for me to make it seem like this person is clearly not a human being, it has to be over-expressive,” he explained. “Overexaggeration, like you would with a child: This is happy; this is sad; this is scared.”

Helen J. Shen made her Broadway debut as Claire. “I have found since opening, since previews, my portrayal of Claire has really evolved,” Shen said, “and gotten more ‘roboty’ [or] less ‘roboty’, kind of seeing how going through that spectrum can help tell the story better.”

The two robots discover they really need each other. Claire has to borrow Oliver’s charger since hers is on the fritz. They eventually go on a road trip to an island off the coast of South Korea.  

Composer Will Aronson added that sometimes the characters’ emotions come out in the music that’s not actually sung.

“We knew that because they were robots, they couldn’t really sing, say, power ballads because it just would not be in character,” he said. “It would break the world of the show. But of course, we want big moments in theater, right? The show has several big musical sequences that have no dialog that are purely staging and music.”

One example is a magical moment where Claire and Oliver see fireflies — which they call tiny robots. And despite themselves, they fall in love. Co-author Hue Park said writing “Maybe Happy Ending” was a “self-meditative journey.” He started it after breaking up from a long-term relationship, losing a close friend to cancer and turning 30.

“It was around the time of my life, I was sort of like growing up or coming out of a certain age,” Park recalled. “And I got to thinking … ‘Why am I putting myself in that situation, depending on my significant other or sharing my life with a friend?’ Because it’s really painful when they inevitably have to end.”

But robots, like humans, have a shelf life — their batteries run out, their components wear out.  And, after having a romantic, goofy love affair, Oliver and Claire decide to wipe their memories. Or do they?

“There’s nothing cynical about this piece, and I think that’s key to it,” said director Michael Arden. “That actually, I think we’re desperate to go to the theater to feel things that, hopefully, when we leave, cause us to kind of make the more loving, more hopeful, more generous choice. And I think I have to believe that that’s what’s happened here.”

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In the town of Barichara, deep in the Andes mountains, Julio Leon is building a three-room house. It’s made mostly out of earth.

To make the walls, Leon shoves dozens of pounds of damp earth in between two wooden panels. Then, he climbs on top of the 3-foot-tall pile and pounds it repeatedly with a wooden stick, turning his mound into a sturdy wall.

“These walls will last for generations,” said Leon, who has been working with earth buildings for the past four decades.

The construction technique Leon uses is called Rammed Earth, or tapia pisada in Spanish. It was one of the more popular ways of building homes in rural Colombia until the mid-20th century when houses made of brick or cement became more common.

But homes with earthen walls are making a comeback in Colombia and elsewhere in the world, as engineers and architects look to make houses that are comfortable but less carbon intensive.

“Bricks or cement must be burned in big furnaces and that leads to greater carbon emissions,” said Santiago Rivero, a civil engineer in Barichara who promotes the use of rammed earth.

Walls made of earth have a minimal environmental impact because they basically dry out in the sun. 

Earth walls are also good at keeping homes cool during the day and storing heat at night, making them more energy efficient.

“With earth walls, you need 50% less fuel for heating in the winter,” Rivero said. “And you also reduce the need for air conditioning.”

But making houses from rammed earth is slower and more labor intensive. And it also requires more space. Walls made from rammed earth have to be at least 15 inches thick to hold up.

“It’s a technique that is better suited for rural areas and for small towns like Barichara,” Rivero said.

But there are other ways in which architects are introducing earth construction into urban areas.

In Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, the TierraTEC factory makes small blocks of earth on a large scale. They look like bricks, and they’re used to make the walls of homes or apartment buildings that have cement or iron frames. 

Workers make the 12-inch-long blocks by dumping a mix of damp soil and a little cement into a press to make the blocks more resistant. The blocks are covered in a plastic tarp and left to dry under the sun.

“Because these blocks have not been cooked they can absorb humidity and help to regulate temperature,” said Dario Angulo, TierraTEC’s owner.

Angulo said it has been hard to convince some constructors to buy these blocks of compressed earth, because many see the material as “dirty” or associate earthen walls with poverty. But demand for compressed earth blocks has been growing slowly over the past 10 years. 

TierraTEC’s blocks are currently being used to make a large housing development  in a wealthy suburb of Bogotá that has more than 100 homes. 

“I have builders who return for more blocks,” Angulo said. “Because they realize that this material gives comfort to their customers.”

In the small town of Barichara, meanwhile, tourism has been largely responsible for boosting interest in earth homes.

The cobbled stone streets in Barichara are lined with rammed earth buildings covered in white limewash paint, which have breezy courtyards and large windows that date back to the 18th century.

Many people who move into the town to retire or buy a vacation home are asking for their houses to be built in this style, said local architect Natalia Rey. 

“Now, there is more value for this type of architecture because more people are demanding it,” Rey said. “It has become an economic alternative, so young people really want to learn these techniques.”

Rey moved to Barichara 10 years ago from Bogotá and specializes in buildings made mostly out of earth. She recently finished a luxurious hotel with a swimming pool in its courtyard and a rural home that has large decks looking out into the forest.

“We are developing a modern kind of rammed earth architecture,” she said. “It’s like a mix between the traditional way of looking at the houses, but also with the comfort of the new houses.”

Some architects say that if regulations in Colombia change, and the construction sector is taxed more heavily for its carbon emissions, buildings made of earth and other sustainable materials could also start to make a comeback in other parts of the country.

Rey said that while rammed earth may not be suitable for all climates or places, its revival in Barichara provides a lesson to those seeking more environmentally conscious ways of making homes and buildings.

“We need to find local solutions to global problems,” she said.

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WhatsApp — which millions of people use for text messaging and voice and video calls — boasts of its end-to-end encryption, giving users privacy and peace of mind. But on Friday, Meta, the owner of both WhatsApp and Facebook, notified around 90 users to tell them that their phones had been hacked.

Malware sold by a company called Paragon Solutions was used to get into those devices. Paragon Solutions, like Pegasus before it, is an Israeli spyware company. The victims of the hack are reported to include journalists and members of civil society.

The World’s Host, Marco Werman, spoke with John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada, about the continuing threat of sophisticated spyware and Meta’s response to the latest hacking incident.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Since the crackdown against independent media in Russia began, many of the country’s journalists have flocked to YouTube. The platform quickly became a space rich with Russian-language news programs, podcasts and interview shows.

It wasn’t just traditional media. 

Russian comedians, vloggers and politicians were also on YouTube, and their videos racked up millions of views. Perhaps the most popular Russian YouTuber is a journalist named Yury Dud. He interviews significant figures in the Russian-speaking world. Lately, at the top of each video, he shares this message: “Subscribe to our Telegram channel. While they’re blocking YouTube in Russia, this way, it will be easier for us to stay in touch.”

During his end-of-year marathon press conference in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked about the YouTube slowdown and said, “In this case, there are more questions for YouTube than for us.”

Putin blamed YouTube for providing low-quality services in Russia due to sanctions and not following  Russian law.

“They explicitly said that YouTube is to blame,” said Andrey Mima, a Russian information technology professional. “So, they wanted to create this notion that it’s not them blocking and censoring stuff, but it’s actually the YouTube itself that became not useable, and you should switch to the local platforms.”

Mima used to work for a major Russian social media company called VK. He left Russia in 2022 and is now based in Serbia. He said the Russian government tried to push content creators to post on Russian platforms like RuTube, VK and Yandex, but people still gravitate to YouTube.  

“They were looking for the information there,” Mima said. “Some were watching independent media, others were just subscribers to some YouTubers, just bloggers, but those bloggers also spoke freely, but they don’t [speak] freely on the local platforms, because the video will be taken down quickly if they criticize the government.”

Many observers have wondered why the Russian government didn’t cut off access to YouTube years ago.

Andrei Soldatov is an expert on Russian security services and co-wrote “The Red Web,” a book about the Russian internet. He said the government is hesitant to shut down YouTube because of its widespread use in Russia.

“It’s also about kids, it’s about families,” Soldatov said. “They watch on YouTube lots of stuff which has nothing to do with politics, and the Kremlin — people in the Kremlin are not completely stupid.”

Soldatov said the Kremlin has shut down Facebook, Twitter and other social media apps with  Russian equivalents. However, according to Soldatov, the Russian versions of YouTube are much worse, and many people would be up in arms if YouTube were to go. 

So, over the last six months, the Kremlin has taken a gradual approach.

“It was very important for Vladimir Putin to isolate the country from the West,” Soldatov said. “He’s always seen the West as a big and existential threat. Not only militarily but also in terms of ideas and values. The internet, of course, is part of this fight.”

For Soldatov, Kremlin internet control isn’t just about slowing down YouTube. It’s a personal story in which his family has been the target of government repression. Soldatov’s 73-year-old father, Alexey, has been in a Russian prison since July.

“He was once dubbed as the father of the Russian internet because he had built [a] significant part of the internet infrastructure in the country,” Soldatov said. “He believed and believes the idea of the internet which should not be under government control, and well, apparently, that was not what the government wanted to hear from him.”

This isn’t just about his father’s case; other people are caught in a similar situation.

‘At some point, my father met in his prison cell, a guy who had started the only and biggest Russian company involved in producing supercomputers, and they met in prison,” Soldatov said. “Again, I think it was a signal and a message to the IT industry: Behave or else you will be in prison.”

These warning signs have worked to a degree. People in Russia are much more cautious on the internet. Many people have turned to virtual private networks to access blocked websites and apps, though the Kremlin has begun blocking VPNs.

“Walls are coming in, definitely. Because, unfortunately, some IT guys went to the dark side,” said Alexander Isavnin, an IT professional and an internet rights activist based in Moscow.

Isavnin said that many IT workers left Russia after the full-scale invasion began. Those who stayed were highly demanded; some are now building the Kremlin’s internet censorship infrastructure. 

Isavnin said there is still some internet freedom in Russia, but the walls are closing in, and he worries that the backsliding will continue.

“I was a child, a young boy scout in [the] Soviet Union, I remember [those] times,” he said. “I definitely do not want to go back. People have seen a piece of freedom, and we don’t want to go back.”

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In a high-ceilinged lab room at the Lviv Polytechnic National University in western Ukraine, a high-tech Leica laser scanner whirred to life. It spun on a tripod as it mapped its surroundings.

“We use it on our trips 3D-scanning Ukrainian wooden churches — 17th and 18th centuries,” said Illia Lytvynchuk, an assistant in the department of architecture and conservation, who demonstrated the tool. 

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainians have been evacuating and safeguarding works of art and museum pieces. But among these objects of vital cultural importance are many buildings and objects that can’t be moved. So, a team of conservators and students are working to scan Ukraine’s unique wooden churches, creating permanent, 3D records of its cultural heritage, in case they’re ever damaged or destroyed. 

Lytvynchuk is part of the team that has been going into the field to ensure there is an architectural record of Ukraine’s wooden religious heritage. Sometimes that work takes them to dangerous areas. One church he hopes to scan is in the Kherson region.

“It’s only five kilometers between Beryslav and the frontline,” he said.

Scanning a church in its entirety can take a full day. The team must set up the Leica dozens of times — once it had to be done as many as 70 times. They usually do it in black and white to save time so they aren’t in dangerous areas for too long.

Once they’re back in the lab, it all must be processed, Lytvynchuk said. On a large screen, he virtually walked through a completed scan of a Ukrainian wooden church, or tserkva. 

“My work is to register this raw data from scan stations,” he said. 

But that’s not where the job ends. Ultimately, the goal is to create detailed architectural plans for every church that’s scanned, according to project leader Mykola Bevz, who is head of the architecture and conservation department. Bevz was part of the team that in 2013 helped get UNESCO World Heritage recognition for 16 wooden churches in the Carpathian region of Ukraine and Poland. That’s just a tiny fraction of Ukraine’s well over 2,000 wooden tserkvas. 

In his office inside the impressive neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque Lviv Polytechnic building, Bevz pulled up detailed drawings and church scans on his computer.

“So far, we only have models and not all the architectural drawings,” he said. “But this is very important, because if there was a fire in this church now, or a shell hit it, for example, and the Russians destroyed a part of the church, we already know exactly what was destroyed, what it looked like before, and we can use it to rebuild.”

In 2023, the team scanned 11 churches, including the nine-domed Tserkva of the Holy Trinity in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region that dates back to 1775. The high-resolution scanning means there’s detailed documentation of the building’s structure — which could potentially be used in legal proceedings — as well as the religious artifacts and artwork inside, in case any are looted.

“We can scan all sorts of monuments even if they’re not on the frontlines,” Bevz said. “Today, the war is going on all over Ukraine. So, it would be good to scan all the most prominent churches.”

More than 140 religious sites have already been damaged in the war. But Bevz says that, so far, all the churches they’ve scanned remain standing.

Bevz’s colleague, Professor Yaroslav Taras, is an architect and ethnologist who has written several books on Ukraine’s sacred wooden architecture, which is full of different styles and elements across different regions.

“Ukrainian sacred architecture is different from all the others because it is one of the markers of Ukrainian identity,” Taras said.

The churches are breathtaking in their craftsmanship. The wooden structures are almost reminiscent of Japanese pagodas, but with huge domes and cupolas. No two are alike. Many contain colorful religious iconography and carved wooden details.

A storage room at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Museum in Lviv is piled high to the ceiling with such treasures. Standing in the midst of this trove, Father Sebastian Dmytvurh, who works on the preservation of architectural monuments, said he has collected more than 6,000 items from across Ukraine. His specialty is sacred art. 

There is a dark history of the Soviets destroying Ukrainian wooden churches and priests being arrested, he said, adding that Ukrainian sacred architecture and art show the spirituality, history and culture of the country.

“That’s why, in our time, we need to protect sacred artworks very carefully,” he said. “Our libraries, our icons, our churches, because they are unique masterpieces of architecture and art.”

Yuri Yanchyshyn, a conservator of wooden artifacts and a researcher and scholar, has been volunteering with the project. He recalled being “dumbfounded” the first time he entered a wooden tserkva. The churches are an example of vernacular, or folk architecture, he said, built by local parishioners and craftsmen. Many have no nails and are held together with either pegs or mortise and tenon joinery.  

“These churches are distinguished by their tripartite, which means three sections design,”  Yanchyshyn said. “And they have varied, and in some cases, very bold architectural features, especially when the bell towers are incorporated into the structure of the church itself.”

Art and architecture professor Carolyn Guile studies wooden vernacular architecture in the region. She’s also the president of the nonprofit, Red Arch Cultural Heritage Law & Policy Research, that donated the scanner to Lviv Polytechnic. According to Guile, it’s a shame these spectacular churches aren’t better-known around the world — but she said there’s a reason for it.

“Where does this region fit into specializations in academia?” she said. “It hasn’t even risen to the surface. Until fairly recently, of many of these departments and programs that purport to work on or showcase this area of the world, it’s often been done through the lens of how these relate to Russian history.”

She added that these churches are more than just physical marvels. They’re places of community, fixtures in the fabric of Ukrainians’ daily lives.

“It’s important to understand cultural heritage in general is more than just a kind of static repository of human activity,” she said. “These are living things.”

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