JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, a deadly wave of Russian strikes on Ukraineús capital city Kyiv as Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Florida for talks with President Trump.

Then, the connection between a company in landlocked Nebraska and efforts to combat plastic pollution in oceans and how scientists in Yellowstone national park are using AI to try to decode the language of wolves.

MAN: Not only can we hear them here and record their howling 24/7, 365 days a year, but we often can link behaviors of wolves by observing them when they are vocalizing.

What is the cause and effect of howling?

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

Iúm John Yang.

Russia attacked Ukraineús capital city Kyiv overnight with a barrage of ballistic missiles and drones.

It came just a day before President Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy are to meet in Florida to talk about prospects for peace.

On his way to the U.S., Zelenskyy met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Halifax.

He said Russiaús attack was revealing.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, Ukrainian President: This attack is again Russiaús answer on our peace efforts and itús really showing that Putin doesnút want peace and we want peace.

JOHN YANG: In Kyiv, residents and first responders assess the damage from the attacks.

Several apartment buildings and key energy infrastructure facilities were hit.

At least one person was killed and nearly 30 others were injured.

A quick moving winter storm swept across the Great Lakes and Northeast overnight, dumping snow and ice that snarled post-Christmas travel in the air and on the roads.

More than 1,500 flights have been canceled since last night and thousands more delayed.

The National Weather Service warned people to stay off the roads.

The storm had largely wound down by this afternoon.

California has dropped its lawsuit against the Trump administration over the cancellation of more than $4 billion in federal grants for a high speed rail project.

Plans for a high speed rail train between San Francisco and Los Angeles have been in the works for more than 15 years.

The California High Speed Rail Authority said the federal government is no longer a trustworthy partner and that theyúll move forward with its own funding.

Earlier this month, a report from the Pew Charitable Trust and its partners predicted that plastic pollution will more than double over the next 15 years.

Thatús the equivalent of dumping nearly a garbage truck full of plastic waste every second.

In the middle of America, hundreds of miles from an ocean, Kassidy Arena of PBS Nebraska visited an innovative company that wants to turn plastic pollution into something constructive.

KASSIDY ARENA (voice-over): When people walk into this crowded warehouse in Omaha, Nebraska, the first thing theyúll see are bags of what looks like garbage piled floor to ceiling.

But Firstar CEO Patrick Leahy explains this is not trash.

Itús his companyús treasure.

PATRICK LEAHY, CEO, First Star Recycling: What makes First Star Recycling unique is then we take hard to recycle plastics.

We take those recycle them in house.

We donút ship them out to another place and we make plastic lumber or pellets with it, depending on what.

KASSIDY ARENA (voice-over): Leahyús company has long been a leader in plastic waste management in Nebraska, and itús now trying out a new type of recycling, taking plastics called from oceans around the world and turning them into building materials.

Leahy says his company is one of the few in the U.S.

that processes trash considered too hard to recycle.

Things like gum wrappers, plastic silverware, and grocery bags.

4,000 miles across the Pacific, word of Leahyús innovative business impressed the center for Marine Debris Research, or CMDR, at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

It specializes in cleaning the oceans of plastics, including discarded fishing gear.

Every year, they collect nearly 200 tons of it.

And the trash is not just from the waters off Hawaii.

It comes from all corners of the globe, including a debris field known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Located roughly midway between Hawaii and California, itús the largest accumulation of floating ocean plastic in the world.

JENNIFER LYNCH, CMDR Co-Director: The plastic pollution problem in the ocean is transboundary.

Itús impacting every single ocean.

KASSIDY ARENA (voice-over): Jennifer Lynch is the co director of CMDR.

She says itús going to take many more efforts like this one in Nebraska to turn this plastic crisis around.

JENNIFER LYNCH: Plastic pollution has traveled the entire globe and every single human on the planet is experiencing some exposure to microplastics.

KASSIDY ARENA (voice-over): That blanket exposure comes after more than 50 years of nationwide recycling efforts which have failed to keep pace with the surge of plastics.

Patrick Leahy acknowledges the business heús building faces hurdles.

The lumber itself needs to prove it can meet real world construction standards.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is sustainability.

Do the upsides of recycling plastic in Nebraska justify the costs and carbon footprint of shipping from Hawaii?

Leahy believes the answer is to one day bring the solution closer to the problem.

PATRICK LEAHY: The hope being if we can show that this is successful, we can start a similar kind of plant there in Hawaii where they can just process it on site.

KASSIDY ARENA (voice-over): Leahyús dream is that the synthetic boards heús making can one day help rebuild Maui, which was nearly destroyed two years ago in devastating wildfires.

PATRICK LEAHY: Itús always about the quality of the products.

Even though recycling sustainability is a great story, if the product is not superior either by quality or price, then people wonút want to use it for whatever project they have.

KASSIDY ARENA (voice-over): He told us his quest for now is to prove his lumber is up to the task and that a state from the Great Plains can play a role in cleaning up the worldús oceans.

For PBS News Weekend, Iúm Kassidy Arena in Omaha, Nebraska.

JOHN YANG: Still to come on PBS News Weekend, a cutting edge study to try to better protect Yellowstoneús wolves.

And in our weekend Spotlight best-selling author Mitch Album.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: In movies and literature, a wolfús haunting howl can signify danger or untamed nature.

In real life, researchers in Yellowstone national park are analyzing those howls with cutting edge AI technology to better monitor and track wolves.

Matt Standal of PBS Montana explains 653.

MAN: The wolves that have crossed the river are howling.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Here in Yellowstone National Parkús Lamar Valley, wolves from one of the parkús nine packs have made a kill.

MAN: Letús go ahead and feel free to take a look through there.

Thatús the Junction Butte pack.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Itús the end of August, the peak of bison rutting, or mating season, and a time when wolves increasingly prey on bison.

Many become injured or weakened during the fierce competition for a mate, and the wolves take advantage.

Park wolf technician Jeremy Sundaraj is monitoring the pack as they feed and teaching curious tourists about wolves.

JEREMY SUNDERRAJ, Wolf Technician: So what weúre trying to do here is just kind of count how many there are, record their behavior.

If we can see, like what the carcass is, this is almost certainly a kill just based on how theyúre behaving around it.

And if weúre quiet, we can actually maybe hear them howling.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Their howls have become central to a new cutting edge conservation project, using artificial intelligence to decode sound recordings.

This development in the field of bioacoustics could redefine how wolves like these are monitored in the wild.

MAN: You got it.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Since 1995, when gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone, park biologists have used airplanes to spot them, helicopters to track them, and dart guns to tag them so they can be fitted with radio and GPS collars.

MAN: And you can see most of the wolf talking is happening in the night.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Now Bioacoustics is offering a new, less invasive way to study them, using sound and advances in artificial intelligence to one day potentially decode wolf communication by matching their howls with specific behavior.

DAN STAHLER, Senior Wildlife Biologist: Not only can we hear them here and record their howling 24/7, 365 days a year, but we often can link behaviors of wolves by observing them when they are vocalizing.

What is the cause and effect of howling?

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Dan Stahler is the senior wildlife biologist for Yellowstone National Park, a job that includes gathering the data from sound recorders like this one hidden in a tree near park headquarters.

DAN STAHLER: One more Jeremy.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Stahlerús team has been recording the barks, yips and howls of Yellowstoneús nine wolf packs, more than 100 wolves, for the past year.

DAN STAHLER: Thatús another goal of ours, is can we detect unique pack signatures and use that?

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): He says, Theyúve collected over 7,000 wolf sounds and have been able to identify the acoustic signatures of several wolf packs in the park.

In the future, Stahler thinks this bioacoustic work could partially replace the hazardous duty of capturing and collaring wolves.

DAN STAHLER: And so what I could envision down the road a decade from now is that we may not have to collar certain packs or put collars out in certain areas of the park.

And then with new cutting edge AI tools we hope.

Weúre not sure yet, but we hope we can answer really interesting questions about what are wolves actually saying or can we count wolves?

Can we identify unique individuals?

JEFFREY REED: Good morning, everybody.

My name is.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Linguistics researcher and software engineer Dr.

Jeff Reed has been experimenting with AI to study wolves near his home just north of Yellowstone.

Heús lending his technical expertise to the Yellowstone Wolf Project.

JEFFREY REED: This is a wolf chorus howl and weúre using AI from Google to see if we can count the number of wolves a chorus howl.

So this is a group of wolves.

Itús like you walking into a bar and all the people are talking and you can pick out a particular person in the room.

Wolves can pick out other wolves that they know in this cacophony of sound.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): The key to the technology is pattern recognition.

According to Reed, these colorful patterns are whatús called a spectrogram of wolf howls, representing their strength and frequency over time.

Artificial intelligence, he says, can pick out the patterns and identify individual wolves much faster than any human could.

JEFFREY REED: These battery operated devices use AI.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Reed leads a company that makes the high tech AI enabled field cameras and audio recorders that Yellowstone is using to monitor its vast space.

But these cameras, called Griz cams, donút just listen to wildlife.

They can also pick up human conversations and activities from hundreds of yards away.

Animal science and human privacy in Yellowstone could soon be on a collision course.

25 of these cameras will be installed in a grid across the park, thanks to a large donation from a company called Colossal Biosciences.

MATT JAMES, Colossal Biosciences: For me, the moonshot with bioacoustics and wolves is can we reduce the conflict between wolves and humans?

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Matt James is the chief animal officer at Colossal Biosciences.

He says AI recording technology can be used to protect wolves from humans.

MATT JAMES: And can we explain that these are empathetic, emotionally complex animals that arenút mindless hunters and they deserve the ability to coexist with us.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): Colossal is funding $175,000 of Yellowstoneús bioacoustic study.

Plus the company has hired a team of AI scientists to analyze the data the griz cams are collecting.

MATT JAMES: Weúre really hopeful then that they can collect tons and tons of data that our team can then begin to distill and train the AI to move on from just classifying wolf calls to classifying individual calls.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): As weúve mentioned, all that data could include sounds and activities from people in the park.

The technology is so new that ethicists are still trying to understand the implications for human privacy in wild places like Yellowstone.

CHRISTOPHER PRESTON, University of Montana: This is all data that can be collected.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): University of Montana philosophy professor Christopher Preston studies the ethics of human interactions with the natural world and how technology can shape those interactions.

CHRISTOPHER PRESTON: I mean, if you ask me, would I rather a wolf gets darted from a helicopter and have a radio collar put on it or a wolf gets listened to by a 24/7 recoding device?

Itús pretty clear to me that Iúd rather have the wolf be listened to by the recording device because thatús a noninvasive technique, much less likely to cause any sort of harm to the animal involved.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): But Preston worries the cameras could inadvertently vacuum up human sound and images without people knowing theyúre being recorded.

CHRISTOPHER PRESTON: We do have a different sort of ethic for the human world to the one that we have for the wild world.

You go into landscapes like that to not be part of a system where people are looking at you, where people know what youúre doing and youúre certainly not getting away from it all if there is the potential for your movements to go into a database somewhere.

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): As Yellowstone experiments with this controversial new technology, biologist Dan Stahler is eager for more Griz Cams to be installed in the coming months.

He believes AI powered bioacoustics will help his team better protect these iconic animals as they learn more from every howl and that reverberates across this majestic landscape.

DAN STAHLER: Weúre going to keep this study going.

Thereúll be new emerging questions.

But the fundamental question will be why is Yellowstoneús wildlife community important to this landscape, important to Montana, and important to the world?

MATT STANDAL (voice-over): For PBS News weekend, Iúm Matthew Standal in Yellowstone National Park.

JOHN YANG: Finally tonight, a weekend spotlight encore.

Our visit with Mitch Albom, newspaper columnist, author, benefactor.

He puts love and hope at the center of nearly everything he does.

MITCH ALBOM, Author, "Twice": This is the big that Hudson New Hudson building.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): Spending the day with Mitch Albom in Detroit is not a leisurely experience.

MITCH ALBOM: We try to keep everything happy.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): At Detroit Water Ice Factory, the nonprofit dessert store he started to help fund his humanitarian work, he whips up a Motown twist with his namesake Mr.

Mitchús chocolate peanut butter.

Then a stop at say, Detroit Play, a one-time abandoned city rec center that Albom transformed into a multimillion dollar learning center for hundreds of school students where academics come before play.

MITCH ALBOM: Weúre not going to build something thatús good enough for a poor neighborhood in Detroit.

Weúre going to build something thatús good enough for the best neighborhood in all of Michigan.

If you deliver high expectations, youúll get high performances.

If you come in with low expectations, oh, this is good enough.

Thatús exactly the performances youúre going to get.

And all I did was kind of, you know, kind of get it going, you know, but they take the ball and run with it and itús, you can see itús a lot of joy there.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): While there, the one-time professional musician shows us his talents on the piano.

Heús never had a lesson.

MITCH ALBOM: Got to know your Flintstones.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): In between stops, he takes a call from the orphanage heús run in Haiti since after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

MITCH ALBOM: This is actually my second time around in life.

JOHN YANG: All of that is before or two hours behind a microphone for his long running daily afternoon radio show on Detroit station WJR.

And after the three hours every morning that he devotes to writing.

Albomús books have sold 42 million copies.

His latest, a novel entitled "Twice," was published this week.

Itús about a boy who can go into the past in order to have a second chance at things, except when it comes to love.

So your protagonist, Alfie Logan from Philadelphia, youúre a Philly boy.

You started out as a musician, turned to writing.

Are there other similarities?

MITCH ALBOM: Yes.

Most of Alfieús screw ups with girls were based on personal experience.

JOHN YANG: And Alfie has the power to go back in time, redo things.

MITCH ALBOM: So thereús a scene in the book where he goes up to this cute blonde girl who he kind of has a crush on, and he starts talking with his hands and hits a glass of milk and knocks it into her lap.

And she looks up with that, oh, my God.

And he just says, look at that, and walks away.

And that is exactly what happened to me.

If you want to write about a teenager with embarrassing moments in his romantic life and you already have them in your own life, why not use them?

Why make up something else if they work?

JOHN YANG: Tell us how he discovers heús got this.

MITCH ALBOM: Yeah, theyúre living in Africa.

And he is supposed to sit with his mother, whoús sick, and sheús in one of those mosquito netting beds.

And he goes and sees that sheús sleeping and his fatherús out, and he says, well, sheús sleeping.

Iúll just go out and play.

And he realizes his mother died while he was out.

And heús so upset by this that when he wakes up the next morning, itús the day before, and his father says, go sit with your mother.

And he goes, what do you mean, go sit with your mother?

And he walks in and sheús there again, and itús replaying all over.

But it was a very poignant scene for me because my mother had a stroke and then a series of strokes that robbed her of the ability to speak for the last several years of her life.

And so I never had that last conversation with her because I didnút know the stroke was coming.

And then I had gone out to see her and I flew back home.

And when I landed, I got a phone call that she had died while I was in the air.

And thereús a line in the book that says Alfie, who was running around with a cape, a Superman cape on, just jumping up and down.

And he says, my mother died while I was trying to fly.

And I donút think most people will know him, maybe Iúm telling you, but my mother died while I was flying.

And so, yeah, that scene kind of choked me up a little bit.

Set the stage for the book, though.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): It was as a Detroit Free Press sports columnist in the 1980s that Albom first gained prominence.

His 1997 worldwide bestseller, "Tuesdays with Morrie," brought broader recognition.

An account of his weekly visits with a beloved former professor who was dying.

Itús one of the bestselling memoirs of all time.

MITCH ALBOM: I just start with what I want to write about and then I create a story around it.

So, for example, the five people you meet in heaven, people have always thought, oh, you want to write about heaven after Morrie.

And that wasnút really true.

I wanted to write a story about people who think they donút matter.

So I kind of picked themes before I start.

And theme for this one was the "Grass is Always Greener."

And I wanted to write a book that showed that even if you had the ability, the magical ability to go back in time and change it, you might find a whole new set of problems, and you might find that you miss what you learned from what you thought was a mistake.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): While not all love stories, many of Albomús books have lessons about love, hope, and optimism.

JOHN YANG: So many of my friends I told I was coming to do this said, what they love about your books is the sense of hope and optimism that runs through all of them.

MITCH ALBOM: Yeah.

JOHN YANG: In America today, with so much division, so much -- so many troubles, is it hard to keep that hope and optimism?

MITCH ALBOM: No, I actually find itús more necessary and itús somewhat easier because itús almost a counter to whatús going on.

I think that everybody wants hope and everybody wants inspiration.

When people take out their wallets, they pull out a picture of their grandson or their child or whatever.

They donút pull out a picture of their woe or their misery or how awful life is.

Here, let me show you how awful, how dark life is.

They aspire to hope.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): Since 2010, Albom has been giving hope to hundreds of impoverished orphans in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

He and an army of volunteers rebuilt an orphanage heavily damaged by the earthquake.

He spends a week there every month.

MITCH ALBOM: I did not know what I was doing.

Iúll admit that at the beginning, I didnút have children of my own.

I didnút even know diaper changing or a lot of that stuff.

But I learned it.

And the kids are the absolute joys of our lives and the purpose for myself and my wife.

Iúm sure that were put on this earth.

JOHN YANG (voice-over): Albom and his wife of 30 years, Jeanine, became parents to two children from Haiti.

Just one instance when he says heús been given a second chance.

MITCH ALBOM: So thereús more to this than just a love story in a novel.

I have come to realize that my life has been the embodiment of second chances.

If you look at it from 30,000 feet, you know, I was a musician, and I thought, thatús all I want to do.

And I failed at it.

And I kind of took up writing because there was nothing else to do.

But look at what writing has given me.

We donút have children.

We get married late.

Doesnút happen for us.

We figure out weúre not going to -- weúre going to be a couple that doesnút have children.

And then this little.

Then an orphanage comes into our lives.

And then this little girl named Chica needs our help because she has a brain tumor, and she becomes our daughter for two years.

And then we lose her.

And we figure, oh, my goodness, you know, that was our chance.

That was our child.

And then a few years ago, a little girl is brought to us who weighs six pounds at six months and has had nothing to eat but sugar water.

And I hold her in my hand, and she fits in one hand and her eyes are closed and she canút speak and she can barely move.

We donút think.

We just say, well, we have to save her life.

Sheús our little girl.

And we have the second chance with another beautiful little child full of life.

What did I do to deserve all these second chances?

Whoús watching over me thatús saying, youúre on this way, but weúre going to take you this way.

So this is kind of a celebration of what life can be like if you understand what went wrong with the first time and you try to make it right the second time.

And I am a walking example of that.

JOHN YANG: And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

Iúm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.