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1) Post the link to the Science Friday podcast that you chose for this week.
2)Share details about your podcast and include at least ONE interesting fact you learned from the podcast. Be sure to share why this podcast was interesting to you.
3) OPTIONAL: Comment on other student's posts

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STUDENT EXAMPLE: What’s The Charge… For An Electric Car Charge?

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STUDENT EXAMPLE: What’s The Charge… For An Electric Car Charge?

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This podcast is about electrical car charging and the price of the the charge. Before charging stations charged on time. They would charge based on how long the cars charge but different cars charge at different times. The podcast talks about what the people who run the chargers are doing to stop the complaining. The people who are running the chargers have charge the price of the car charge. Instead of charging by time they charge by the kilowatt hour(1,000 Watts an hour). The easier way of saying this is people who run the chargers are turning the charging stations into a gas station because gas stations charge by the gallon and the charging stations have a similar concept. the podcast also explains the business of the car charging company’s and how hotels are getting more visitors. The podcast explains that hotels with charging stations can get their guests to come. People who have electric cars want to stay in a hotel with a charging station instead of driving somewhere just so they change their car.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: Now we're going to move on to check in on the state of science.

SPEAKER 1: This is KERA News.

SPEAKER 2: For WWNO.

SPEAKER 3: St. Louis Public Radio.

SPEAKER 4: Iowa Public Radio News.

IRA FLATOW: Local science stories of national significance. Many states are trying to get more drivers to use electric cars, but here's something we haven't quite figured out yet. How should drivers be charged for a charge? A new law in North Carolina will change how electric charging stations in the state operate to make them more like gas pumps.

David Boraks is an environment and energy reporter at WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. He's here to fill us in. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

DAVID BORAKS: Hello, Ira. How are you?

IRA FLATOW: Fine. Let's talk about this. Before the law, how did the price of electric charging stations work now in North Carolina?

DAVID BORAKS: Well, the way it works right now is that owners of electric vehicle charging stations, if they want to get paid for this, they have to charge users by the amount of time it takes to fill up your battery with electricity. And that's a little bit of a problem because not all cars charge at the same speed, and there are lots of variables there.

IRA FLATOW: So there's really- so if I have a fast speed charging car, I'll get more electricity in the same time, and that's not equitable, basically.

DAVID BORAKS: That's right. And folks who run these charging stations in the industry say it's not fair to charge that way, and that includes Tesla, which is kind of the big guy in the field right now.

IRA FLATOW: Mhm. All right. So how's charging going to work from now on?

DAVID BORAKS: Well, the law in North Carolina and many other states now is changing to allow them to charge by the kilowatt hour. And you could think of that as much the same as charging per gallon of gas the way it comes out of the pump for your gas guzzler right now. So that should change the picture entirely, and that will be much more lined up with the amount of energy that you use to charge.

IRA FLATOW: So are there any concerns about how well this will work, whether it's going to be rolling out smoothly or not?

DAVID BORAKS: Well, there's a lot to be done before we get here in North Carolina. There are a few places around the country that already have charging stations that are metered by the kilowatt hour. But in North Carolina, all the stations up until now have had to operate according to the time.

And so the owners of these stations now, their next task will be to update their equipment or get new equipment to do this. And then there's the whole question of how much we'll pay for this.

IRA FLATOW: Mhm. So this actually could work for gas stations, let's say, who want to put a charging station in there because they know that there are more Tesla's than other cars on the road. I mean I have one. I'm sure a lot of people are buying them. But they could start to make money from the charging, right?

DAVID BORAKS: They could. And actually, it's a great question. Why haven't we seen this yet? Why haven't some of the big gasoline chains put in at least one charging station there?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. So but now, if you give them an incentive that they can make some money, right, and they can charge by the gallon, so to speak, or the kilowatt hour.

DAVID BORAKS: Yes.

IRA FLATOW: This is a way for them to make some dough also.

DAVID BORAKS: And that's really why North Carolina legislators decided to change the law and why the governor signed the bill. There are a lot of companies lined up to compete in this area, so we're going to see a lot of evolution in the next few years. But we could see separate stations. We could see existing gas stations doing this. And of course, there's all the places where you find a charger right now, which are everywhere from your grocery store parking lot to your company office garage.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. I know I stayed at a hotel recently because I had to travel 200 miles to get there. And I picked that little hotel because they had a charging station, right, as part of the hotel. I guess that could be more of a trend here because you could not only have gas stations, but you could have hotels that could charge for it.

DAVID BORAKS: Absolutely. And some of the companies that are active in the charger space, they're actually selling chargers to anybody who wants to install them. And so it has become popular for some businesses to offer this as an add on. And oftentimes, at these places, it's free. I don't know what you paid at your hotel there. But oftentimes they do that as an extra service, as an add on. I think we'll more and more begin to see this as a moneymaking opportunity for people who operate chargers.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, mine was free. I mean, they actually put their own real Tesla charger in there, a couple of them. I mean, that's the way they got people in there. Let's move on to another aspect of this because you've reported on how there's such a demand for electric cars, and North Carolina is reopening its lithium mines.

DAVID BORAKS: Yeah, that's right. There's a company that has been looking in Western North Carolina at a site that used to be a lithium mine. Back from the 1940s up to the 1980s, there were lithium mines about 30 miles west of Charlotte. And that was at a time when the main uses for lithium were as like an industrial grease, as an additive to ceramics to make them stronger. And everybody's familiar with lithium as an antidepressant drug.

But that industry looked elsewhere to South America and Australia for lithium until we got to this point now where everybody has a lithium battery in all their devices and their automobiles. And so that's caused some investors to take a look at these old mines in this area west of Charlotte and begin testing.

And there's a company called Piedmont Lithium that I have written about, which is looking at an area that stretches from the tip of one county all the way to the South Carolina border. And they have acquired about 2,200 acres of land or contracts on land. And they foresee about a 25 year supply of lithium here. And they're talking it up as the biggest supply in North America right now of traditional lithium deposits.

IRA FLATOW: Wow, because it is very rare, David. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is interesting stuff. We'll have to have you back soon. Thanks for taking the time.

DAVID BORAKS: All right, thanks.

IRA FLATOW: You're welcome. David Boraks, environment and energy reporter at WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Copyright © 2019 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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What's The Charge... For An Electric Car Charge?

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Segment Transcript IRA FLATOW: Now we're going to move on to check in on the state of science. SPEAKER 1: This is KERA News. SPEAKER 2: For WWNO. SPEAKER 3: St. Louis Public Radio. SPEAKER 4: Iowa Public Radio News. IRA FLATOW: Local science stories of national significance.

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STUDENT EXAMPLE: What is the best way to recover after a workout?

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STUDENT EXAMPLE: What is the best way to recover after a workout?

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/topics/health/page/2/

If you are someone who enjoys working out outside or at the gym, you have to get used to the aches and pains that follow. Even though many of us have experienced soreness and tight muscles, we always have something to go to to relieve that pain. Maybe you use foam rollers or massage to help your tight muscles or maybe you ice. However, recent studies have shown that these things don’t actually help the recovery process at all! Although you may feel better for a short time after these things, it is your brain subconsciously telling you that it worked. Science writer Christie Aschwanden explains that most of things we do after the workout slows down the process of healing. For example, icing doesn’t help, all it does is help numb the inflammation, but inflammation is an important part of the healing process. Also, however I disagree, she says that stretching doesn’t help! I personally can feel the difference if I stretched one day and not the other, but she says that you can see or feel a-difference if stretch. So the next time you workout, you may want to rethink what you’ll do after you get home.

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gym abs full body chest flat stomach fitness home leg cardio female

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STUDENT EXAMPLE: Our Ancient Obsession With Capturing the Moon

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STUDENT EXAMPLE: Our Ancient Obsession With Capturing the Moon

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/moon-art-history/

My article is about our ancient obsession with the moon.  Since the beginning of time with wondering about the mystery of space but we’ve also wondering about one specific thing, the moon. The moon enforces gravity and pushes and pulls the tides.  It’s one of the many wonders of the world that we’ve seeked answers about since ancient times.
One of the very first movies was about the moon, it was extremely inaccurate,  but about the moon none the less.  Galileo and 1609 made his own conception of what the moon was like after looking through a telescope. Since then people at the side of the moon as a perfect, unblemished orb.  Until scientist proved them wrong of course.  The moon helped understand when to harvest, plant crops, etc…  it’s stirred fascination.  This article was interesting to me because the moon influence the imagination of humans and I wanted to know why.

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How Dogs are Helping Scientists Build a Smell Detector for Cancer

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How Dogs are Helping Scientists Build a Smell Detector for Cancer

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This podcast was about how there is a possibility that dogs will now be able to sense cancer. They explained how dogs can sense cancer because of the odors the body releases. When your body has cancer, it starts producing chemicals from cancer cells that are released through your bloodstream and sweat. The process goes like this: scientists put samples from patients in little containers that they line up in a room for a dog to smell. The dog then comes in and if they sense cancer, they usually stick their nose in it a little longer. With practice, dogs can detect the cancer in a snap! The cancer that these dogs mostly detect is ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is actually the fifth most deadly cancer for women (14,00 deaths per year.) One interesting fact I learned from this podcast was that ovarian cancer usually doesn't have symptoms until stage 3 or 4. This means it's hard to detect it in the early stages and when they do, it's too late and their only source is chemotherapy. However, dogs can sense and catch the cancer earlier. This podcast was so interesting to me because I never knew how smart and reliable dogs can be. I also learned more about what happens to our bodies when we can have cancer.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: Dogs have aided people for centuries. Search and rescue dogs save human lives in disasters, and they are certainly helping many of us stay calm at home. Of course, there are bomb-sniffing dogs and drug-sniffing dogs. And now there is a cancer-sniffing dog. Yeah? Dogs can sniff and detect deadly hidden ovarian cancer.

A team at UPenn and Monell Chemical Senses Center is using data from dogs to build a device to make previously undetectable cancers a thing of the past. SciFri video Producer Luke Groskin and digital producer Daniel Peterschmidt visited this dog research lab, and they tell the tale in our methods project, which using video and pictures, brings you into the field alongside the people working to answer big questions. You can watch the videos and read about their trip at sciencefriday.com/smellingcancer. And now they're here with us. Hi, Luke and Daniel,

LUKE GROSKIN: Hi, Ira.

DANIEL PETERSCHMIDT: Hey, Ira. How's it going?

IRA FLATOW: Pretty good. Let's talk about it. This research takes place in a few labs. What does the dog lab look like?

LUKE GROSKIN: Well, it doesn't exactly look like a lab. It's certainly not the dog type of lab, no pun intended. But it looks a little bit more like a kennel than anything else. You have a whole bunch of dogs that have very well-tended cages as well as a workout room and several rooms where they can sniff out different sort of chemicals or substances. And then there's, of course, you know, an obstacle course, a rubble pit where they can go digging and looking for hidden things for the rescue dogs.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. I've heard stories, all kinds of stories, about dogs being able to detect epileptic seizures or panic attacks and alerting their owners. How did these researchers know that the dogs would be able to pick up the cancer?

DANIEL PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, the head of the Penn Working Dog Center, Dr. Cynthia Otto, she told us that she always suspected dogs could do this type of work. You know, as you were just saying, you've probably heard stories of people whose dogs who would keep whining at them or continually nudging their stomach, or something, as if there was something wrong. And then they would get it checked out, and a tumor would end up being there. And then all these research papers kept popping up that different cancers had specific odors, and dogs are amazing smellers. So Otto had a pretty good hunch that they could be taught how to smell ovarian cancer.

IRA FLATOW: So could my daughter's pug smell cancer?

LUKE GROSKIN: Technically, biologically, yes. The structure of its nose and its brain is able to pick up on all the vivid colors and smells of the world, as it were. But in terms of its training, probably not. Most dogs aren't trained the way that these dogs are trained. These dogs, Ira, are incredibly well trained. They are elite, Olympian-class dogs. [IRA CHUCKLES] They are bred and raised from being puppies just for these sorts of tasks.

So the Working Dog group at Penn Vet- this is all they do. They work with their dogs day in, day out. They have these huge blackboards all over the place that show what the dogs' schedules looks like. And they are kept to a very rigorous schedule. So could your daughter's pug do it? Probably not. They probably couldn't tell you that there's cancer there, although they probably could actually smell it. They wouldn't know what it is.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of what it is, that's my next question. What exactly does a dog detect when they're smelling cancer?

LUKE GROSKIN: Oh, that's a great question. So when you think of what's going on inside your body and what gets kind of exuded out of your body in the form of smell, it's a very rich tapestry, especially in the nose of a dog. So the cancer cells, if you had cancer inside your body, would be producing all sorts of chemicals just like any other cell in your body would be producing chemicals.

The only difference is that in cancer, they're producing a specific amount of those chemicals. And they're getting released into your bloodstream, and then eventually some of them are you going to get released out of your body through either your urine or your sweat. And in this case, the dogs actually aren't smelling people. They're actually smelling blood plasma samples from cancer patients, and these are all collected from patients at a hospital. Some have benign growths. Some have more malignant growths.

And they also take samples, you know, a control sample where the people are healthy. They place those samples in jars around what looks like the little spokes that come out of a wheel, and they put them in these little containers. And the dog goes into this room, and it walks around this wheel sniffing at each of the different samples. And when it spots one that it thinks it believes has the cancer sample, it puts its nose right up against it and stays there. And just kind of focuses heavily on that sample.

It gets a little bridge click, [CLICKS] and then it comes back, and it gets a little reward if it got the right answer. And once the animals are trained to identify the specific cancer, they can do this very quickly. I mean, we watched them, and they do it like [SNAPS] that. It's very quick. They go around, and they immediately can spot these sorts of cancer samples.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. I'm Ira Flatow, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. But the point is not to have to create a whole bunch of dogs, service dogs, that would go into doctor's offices and sniff patients.

LUKE GROSKIN: No.

IRA FLATOW: That's not what they're doing here.

LUKE GROSKIN: No, these dogs are never- I mean, they made a very explicit point about this. These dogs are never going to see a patient. That is not a very reliable way to diagnose somebody, because the patient could be cueing them. The doctor could be cueing them. These dogs don't get any cues when they do these tests.

So they have no intention of bringing the dogs into a clinical setting. They're a diagnostic tools. They are the gold standard of cancer detection. They are far better than any sort of equipment. There's another lab that's working with them- Monell Chemical Senses Center. And what they do is they're trying to isolate the specific odors that the dogs are picking up that represent cancer.

Is it all of the different chemicals from the blood sample that represents cancer when there's cancer in there? Or are there very specific odors in there? And then what they can then can do is they can build a sensor equipment, a apparatus, a device that actually can detect those specific chemicals in the very specific quantities for different types of samples.

IRA FLATOW: The team is starting with ovarian cancer. Why start with this type of cancer?

DANIEL PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, yeah. So the oncologist on this research, Dr. Janos Tanyi- he called ovarian cancer a mean, mean disease. It's the fifth most deadly cancer in women. It has close to 14,000 deaths per year. And partly why that is is that it has no noticeable symptoms until it gets to stage three or four. And at that point, the chemotherapy doesn't have a lot of effect.

And those symptoms are just incredibly normal. It's like a little bit of bloating or discomfort, which happens to everybody. And even if you suspect you have something up and you go to the doctor, often, they can't find anything that's wrong. So there's no way to detect it early. And that's why the team is building this device. They know ovarian cancer has a smell.

They're pretty sure the dogs can smell it at early stages. And if dogs can smell it, as one of the researchers put it, they can definitely smell it through instrumentation if there's something chemical going on. And hopefully what they learn from making this device is that they can build these odor profiles for other hidden cancers and apply the same methodology to them.

IRA FLATOW: Hm. Daniel, you and Luke visited these smell research labs?

DANIEL PETERSCHMIDT: Yeah, yeah. So we traveled down to Philadelphia last year. We interviewed and filmed these researchers in their labs. And from that trip and some other reporting, we put together a documentary video and a long-form article that takes a deep dive into the people and the dogs behind the project. And in that article, we have those videos sprinkled throughout it. And, you know, there's dogs in it. [LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: Well, I got a sneak preview of it. I started reading the article. It's terrific. You can see the piece, watch the videos, if you want to do that. Both of those at sciencefriday.com/smellingcancer. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Luke. Thanks, Daniel.

LUKE GROSKIN: Thank you, too.

DANIEL PETERSCHMIDT: Thank you, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: You're welcome. SciFri video Producer Luke Groskin and digital producer Daniel Peterschmidt.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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How Dogs Are Helping Scientists Build A Smell Detector For Cancer

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Researchers are using dogs' heightened sense of smell to build a device to sniff out the chemicals produced by cancer cells.

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What Will Happen When the Universe Collapses?

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What Will Happen When the Universe Collapses?

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If another Big Bang happened, the planets in that system would probably spread out through the universe, and in different solar systems. Some planets may go into black holes depending on how strong the force would be. The reason this would happen, is because of the force the Big Bang will have, it will push the planets in that solar system out. The real question is, will WE survive if there was another Big Bang?

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This podcast talks about hope that corals in the years ahead. They tell you that for the past years coral has been slowly shrinking in numbers. As of now in 2020 there has been special developments in reproducing these corals. The podcasts explains that we can sexually restore coral. Depending on the sexual maturity of these coral can the coral actually reproduce. One interesting thing that the podcast talks about is that cutting through coral can "heal" the coral. They used the comparison that coral being cut and healed is like a humans skin. It can grow back by itself. In doing this we can make decades of corals in just a few years. This podcast interested me because I didn't even know coral was an endangered in the wild.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Over the past few years, news about coral reefs around the world has not been good. Coral populations have been declining dramatically, with climate change remaining a big threat. But this month, we got some good news about corals in the Florida Keys. Here to tell us about it is Dr. Hanna Koch, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida. Welcome, Hanna.

HANNA KOCH: Hi, thank you for having me.

IRA FLATOW: All right, give us the good news. What's the good news?

HANNA KOCH: Oh, well, the great news is that we have documented for the first time worldwide restored corals of a slow-growing mountainous star coral species to be sexually reproductively viable and spawn for the first time in nature.

IRA FLATOW: Where was this done? Tell me exactly what you did.

HANNA KOCH: So Mote has pioneered this technology called micro fragmentation fusion, which is where we will take a colony, we will cut it up into small replicate pieces, grow it in our land nursery, and then we will out-plant those pieces onto a degraded coral head. And those replicate pieces will grow and fuse. So that's the fusion part of that methodology.

And essentially, they will form a larger colony faster. And the reason why that is so important is because for many stony coral species, sexual maturity is a condition of size, not age. So you can think of it like puberty. And so it just means that they have to reach a minimum size in order to produce the next generation of baby corals.

And so with this breakthrough, we've basically been able to show that with this methodology we can create reproductively viable corals of a slow-growing mass of species within only a handful of years instead of decades. Because in nature, wild corals would take about 10, to 20, 30, and so on, decades, to reach sexual maturity and produce the next generation.

So the fact that we can cut that down significantly to just a handful of years is really a breakthrough for coral restoration science in general, and bodes well for the faster recovery of our reefs and of our restored populations.

IRA FLATOW: Have you tried to repopulate a dead coral reef with these new babies?

HANNA KOCH: Yes, so Mote engages in multi-species coral reef restoration, also resilience-based restoration. And so we out-plant thousands of fragments of different species, species that are all key reef building species. And what that means is that these species are foundational species. They're the ones that create the backbone of our reefs. And we have been carrying out coral reef restoration for several years now for a number of different species. And this year was really exciting because it was the first year that we had multiple populations of different species that we restored to the reefs actually become sexually mature and spawn.

IRA FLATOW: And what were the major hurdles that you had to jump over?

HANNA KOCH: Well, one thing is that corals grow slowly in general. And then we have to deal with the stressors that are happening naturally in the environment. So, for example, these corals that spawned, we out-planted them in 2015. And in 2015, there was a global bleaching event. In 2017, the Florida Keys experienced a category 4 hurricane, Irma. And in 2019, that site was hit by the stony coral tissue loss disease, which is the deadliest coral disease outbreak ever recorded on a contemporary reef, and certainly for Florida's coral reef.

So we are doing our best to restore these corals and these species, and use a variety of science-based strategies, but we always have to deal with natural, unpredictable events that happen in nature. But the fact that our corals are surviving these natural stressful events, and able to have enough energy to put toward sexual reproduction is great. It gives us optimism, and hope, and shows that what we're doing is working, and that it should continue to work as we move forward.

IRA FLATOW: These are really resilient corals it looks like. Did you have to go find this species or this kind of coral that you would expect to be able to overcome these hurdles?

HANNA KOCH: We'll find them in nature. So because Florida's coral reef has already experienced a number of stressors over the last decades, many of the corals that are out there today are already considered resilient. They've already gone through stressful events. And so they're survivors for a reason. And so we can use those survivors to propagate more corals.

Another method is that we will expose these corals to different stressors or different combinations of stressors, like high temperature or different diseases, find the strains that are resilient or resistant to these stressors, and then propagate them. And when we out-plant and restore corals, two ways that we can ensure resilience is, one, making sure that we put out high genetic diversity.

So we're not putting out just a few of what are considered the best or the top performers, because the environment can always change. So we put out high genetic diversity, but we also put out corals and strains that we have tested in the lab, using controlled experiments to identify those strains that are resilient to the different stressors. So we can make sure that we're putting out corals that have a higher chance of surviving.

IRA FLATOW: I'm sure you'll be keeping an eye on these out-planted corals for a while. That's a term- out-planted- that I hadn't heard before. What will you be looking for?

HANNA KOCH: So moving forward, part of my job as a coral reproduction scientist is to continue to monitor the health, the survival, the growth of our corals as part of our restored populations. Also to monitor the sexual maturity of these populations, looking at what proportion become sexually mature over time. Are they continuing to reproduce sexually and produce the next generation of offspring every year?

Also, we conduct multi-species restoration. So I will apply these monitoring assessments to all the species that we out-plant. And also, monitor for other critical developmental milestones. So spawning is only one aspect of the sexual cycle. You still have to have fertilization and settlement, meaning the larvae will settle back down onto the reef, undergo metamorphosis, and develop into a coral that becomes a part of the adult population. And so every one of these aspects is critical to becoming a self-sustaining population. And so moving forward, I will monitor for those other critical developmental milestones.

IRA FLATOW: I want to bring on another coral expert so that we can talk a little more about the state of corals in 2020. Dr Holly Putnam is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Welcome to Science Friday.

HOLLY PUTNAM: Hi, thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Good news that we're hearing out of Florida to you?

HOLLY PUTNAM: Yes, I think it's fantastic news. I think in these times, any positive news is good, and any positive news for corals is definitely great.

IRA FLATOW: And do you think that you and other coral scientists can apply this specific method for coral populations around the world?

HOLLY PUTNAM: Definitely. I think that these kinds of restoration approaches are growing in capacity, growing in scale, and growing in the science-based nature of them. And that's where really our work is focused, in the science-based nature of these, to not only grow corals out in the wild, but track many of these features that Hanna is talking about, to track their physiology, track their performance, track the generations as they move through. So being able to fragment corals, have them grow quickly, be out-planted, or be housed in nurseries and then out-planted provides this aspect for a variety of species and a variety of locations.

IRA FLATOW: We've been hearing so much bad news about corals over the past few years, how are they doing in 2020?

HOLLY PUTNAM: That's a great question. I think, sadly, a lot of this bad news is correct and it's continuing. I think as we watch climate change continue to occur, as seawater temperatures increase, as we get more heatwaves occurring, as we get more tropical storms, we are seeing negative effects on corals. We're seeing those negative effects that are removing these large adult colonies from the populations.

That makes it harder for corals to make a comeback after these perturbation or disturbance events. And so overall, though, we still have thriving reefs around the globe. We definitely have hard-hit areas, and we definitely have global trajectories that are in a negative decline.

IRA FLATOW: Hanna, what about in Florida where you are? As a scuba diver, I've gone back to places that I used to scuba dive in, and there's so many dead and dying corals in those areas. Give us an idea of what the population is doing in Florida, in your region.

HANNA KOCH: So, as Holly already mentioned, there are certain regions that have been especially hard hit. And Florida's coral reef is definitely one of those regions. Some of the key reef building species in this area have experienced greater than 90% population declines and are now facing functional extinction. Which basically means that the populations are so small that they can no longer provide critical reef habitat structure or shelter for other important marine organisms, like fish.

It also means that their populations are so small that they cannot effectively undergo sexual reproduction and produce the next generation of corals that can replenish depleted adult populations. So we have a number of species that are facing this level. And we do have a species that are considered locally extinct. And I have to say that, despite the sad state of corals here, I have to say that I think 2020 has provided a lot of hope, a lot of optimism.

We've seen a number of organizations come together, state, local, federal, to engage in the NOAA seven iconics reefs mission. They're putting $97 million over a 15-year period to restore seven key cites along Florida's coral reef. So Mote is a part of that initiative. As I said before, we documented for the first time that many of our restored populations are sexually mature and spawning.

And then I also want to add that for the mountainous dark coral species that we documented for the first time to spawn after the micro fragmentation fusion methodology, some of the plants that we did observe to spawn last week, were out-plants that I observed to contract the stony coral tissue loss disease last year. They were treated with antibiotics, and we're able to recover from this deadly disease, and still be reproductively viable the following year.

And I have to say that that provides immense hope for us, that we can make a difference. And if we just continue to work together and engage in these science-based restoration strategies that we will make a difference. And hopefully, in a short amount of time than what we may have initially expected, that we will see greater accomplishments for population recovery for these critical species.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow and this is Science Friday from WNYC studios. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about the state of corals in 2020 with Dr Hanna Koch, postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr Holly Putnam, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Dr Koch, what was your secret sauce for getting these corals to grow so quickly and being able to collapse something that might take a decade or more into just a few years?

HANNA KOCH: That's a great question. And we are still investigating the mechanisms behind this increased growth response we see once we cut a coral. But when we take these colonies and we cut them into smaller pieces, it elicits this growth response that allows them to grow faster. So if you think about a cut on your arm or something like that, you tend to heal quite fast. So it will heal over a few days. And your cells will regrow and cover that wound.

And so we are looking into what it is that really drives that response in terms of faster growth when you do cut a coral, using appropriate techniques. And basically, we've shown that through this micro fragmentation fusion process, that when we do cut the coral, it elicits a growth response that allows them to grow 25 to 50 times faster than just a natural coral in the wild would grow.

And so for a species that grows anywhere from half a centimeter to a centimeter a year, we're able to actually produce decades sized colonies within only two to three years.

IRA FLATOW: That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. Dr Putnam, tell us what the big issues we need to keep an eye on that are going to impact coral health around the world.

HOLLY PUTNAM: Yes, I would say the biggest issues at this point are at the global scale. So the biggest issues we're seeing that are causing mass mortality are things like increased sea water temperature and marine heatwaves. And these are driven by increases in atmospheric CO2 and greenhouse gas concentrations, obviously that are driving the warming of the atmosphere, which is translating to driving warming of the ocean.

And this change in the overall climate is creating these marine heat waves and creating greater high-frequency and larger storms. So we have overall disruption to the environment that the corals are growing in. And the reason why heat is such a big deal for corals is because it can break down this relationship or this symbiosis that the corals have with their single-celled algae living inside them. The coral expels, or that algae leaves the coral. And you can see through the coral tissues. And that that's what we call coral bleaching.

And when the corals are bleached, they're essentially starving. Because they don't have that energy that's being generated by the single cell, the algae inside the coral. And so that's how we can get basically a lower overall health of the coral. They can be more sensitive to things like disease, and to pollution, and to local effects.

So the overarching driver of increases in temperature are driving coral bleaching and driving loss of corals on the reef, when this heating and this bleaching is prolonged. In addition to that, we have the concern of ocean acidification. The overall impacts on the reef are more variable. While scientific studies show sensitivity for corals growing under ocean acidification, which is the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere into the oceans that's driving a decline in the pH of the oceans, making it energetically harder for them to calcify and to get these building blocks of their skeletons.

We see these declines in experiments in the lab. But there's a lot of variation there in different species out on the reef. So we're keeping an eye on ocean acidification and it contributes to the decline of coral calcification. So I would say at this global scale, we're talking about ocean warming and ocean acidification.

And then the local scale, we're talking about local human impacts. So nutrient runoff onto the reefs that can disrupt the balance of coral growth versus algal growth that can disrupt that, such that are taking over all the space that's usually taken up by corals and can be smothering them. We can have other pollutants running off on the coral reefs. And all of these things together are contributing to increases in diseases.

So basically, we're seeing this higher sensitivity because of both global and local stressors coming together. And so if we can take care of these global stressors, we have a better chance at dealing with local stressors, the corals dealing with local stressors. And we can actually take action again at a local level and mitigate those local stressors. So really, global action is critical and local action is crucial.

IRA FLATOW: Well, at least we got some good news today out of Florida and the restoration of the reefs there that might be applied to the rest of the world. I would like to thank both of you for taking time with us today. Dr Hanna Koch, postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr Holly Putnam, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

HANNA KOCH: Thank you so much.

HOLLY PUTNAM: Thank you so much. And thank you for highlighting corals.

IRA FLATOW: You're Welcome. One of my favorite topics.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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After years of bad news for the aquatic icons, some good news out of Florida.

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Scientists Discover Potential signs of life on Mercury

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Scientists Discover Potential signs of life on Mercury

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/radio/ This podcast talks about how scientists have found  the chemical building blocks of life on Mercury. They found Volatiles (stuff that can be liquid, solid or gas) that reside in the craters at the poles of the planet that never see sunlight, so therefore it’s cold enough for the volatiles to not evaporate. They evaporate if they are in sunlight. The side of Mercury that is facing the sun, or the day side, can get up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and the side facing away from the sun, or the night side, is extremely cold. I thought it was interesting how the craters at the poles could stay cold always. The craters are deep enough that they are always cast in shadow, and ice even forms there.
-Isabel Taylor

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An Argument for the Benefits of not Bathing

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An Argument for the Benefits of not Bathing

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This podcast talks about how bathing with no products such as soap, shampoo, conditioner, facial cleaner etc. is good for you! One interesting fact I learned from this podcast is that when you wash your body to much it takes away the good oils for your body. which can make your skin really dry and unhealthy. Thats why some people don't shower with products!

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. These days, now that I'm working from home, my morning shower routine is really the only thing that gets me feeling like the day has begun. I mean, one day to the other feels like all one day, right? So without the daily ritual, I risk kind of feeling unmotivated and unclean.

But for some, staying home during the pandemic has them rethinking their hygiene routines, including not showering.

JAMES: Hey, there, Sci Fri. I want to say that I do shower less often, which I think is a good thing. And I don't wear deodorant as often as I used to.

MARGARET: I'm showering less because I don't go so many places. I also changed my hair routine to using baking soda and apple cider vinegar. I'm very happy with the results. My hair is soft and feels even more clean.

Thanks to listeners James from Denver and Margaret from California for sharing their stories with us via the Science Friday VoxPop app. If the idea of not showering every day makes you feel icky, how about not showering for years? Writer James Hamblin says he stopped showering five years ago. Imagine the gook and the grime caked on the skin after all that time. Not to mention the smell. But no, Hamblin says his skin has never been better, thanks to his healthy, well-functioning skin microbiome. So, joining us now to talk about the benefits of not showering and the future of medicinal products for our skin is James Hamblin, staff writer for The Atlantic, author of the new book, Clean, The New Science of Skin.

James, welcome to Science Friday.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Thank you so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: I have to admit that this is a strange topic to be talking about right now, with all the focus on handwashing and sanitizing. But you were questioning the benefits of these hygiene rituals for years, before the coronavirus hit. Your first line in the book is actually how you stopped showering five years ago. When and why did you stop showering?

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah, it's something that I have been dabbling with for a very long time. And I started working on the book years ago. So I should say, I never stopped washing my hands. That's very important. That is an evidence-based behavior that saves lives. And that's not part of anything I'm questioning here. And I still occasionally rinse off with water. But showering in the traditional sense- washing your hair, using a bunch of body wash, using moisturizers and deodorants and anything else- has gone away.

And that came together in my life for complex reasons, part of which was just reporting on the science of it, on the skin microbiome, which, about five years ago, I started seeing a lot of scientific papers on just how many microbes were all over us, very similar to what's in our gut. And that kind of made me question what is the point of a lot of what I thought was good and necessary. And what of it could possibly be left behind and save time and money and water and plastic bottles and just simplify things.

IRA FLATOW: You have a medical and public health background, so tell us why using soap and other products on our skin, they don't help us very much, as much as we think they do?

JAMES HAMBLIN: Well, it's a tool, like anything else, like a medication or like a hammer. On your hands, it's an excellent tool. And if you have something grimy or greasy, you know, some oil on your skin, that you need to get off, soap is a great tool for that. But just like everything in medicine and health, more doesn't mean better. And just because it's good on your hands doesn't mean it's good everywhere. If you suggest to someone that they put hand sanitizer all over their entire body, you would find that ridiculous. And I think of soap similarly.

I think most people probably have fine, healthy relationships to showering. But there are also people who overwash and strip the oils from their skin to a degree that dermatologists recommend that they cut back.

IRA FLATOW: The first thing that people talk about- I'm sure you've been asked this- the first thing that people want to know is, how much do you smell after not washing for five years?

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah, that is a concern. I wash. I rinse off. I just don't use soap on my body or shampoo on my hair or deodorant. I think- it's a gradual process. So everyone that has the experience of having gone a day or two or three without showering, and people- that's the gut reaction, is, yeah, I know what that's like. I feel gross. I look gross. I smell gross. Doesn't work for me.

But in my experience- and I'm far from alone on this. Everyone who has gone the minimalist route, it happens gradually. You just sort of wean yourself off. Either people are taking shorter showers using less products, using fewer products, using less of those products. And over time, over the course of months and years, your body just sort of adapts. And the idea, at least, is that you are reaching a steady state with the oils that your skin is secreting, the microbes living on your skin, wherein you just sort of- the whole environment is less volatile. So you do smell. Humans naturally smell. But you don't smell objectionable. You don't have a classic body odor-type smell.

IRA FLATOW: Let's talk about the microbes on our skin. Because you're right that, like the microbes that fill our guts, the microbes on our skin rarely cause disease. If anything else, they may help protect us from disease. Tell us more about that.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah, I think it's a similar concept. And this is very much emerging science. But the basic theory is that- I always used to think, if there are germs on your skin, microbes, you just want to get them off. And then the point of showering is to just remove them all, as many as possible. And once we got this sequencing technology to begin to learn about the microbiome, we saw that the skin is never without microbes. There are many, many microbes all over us all the time.

And so, the point can't be to sterilize ourselves. You'd have to bathe in iodine, something like that. And even right when you got out, you'd be repopulated again. So, similar to the gut microbiome, we don't know how to do that exactly, but you ideally want a diverse, harmonic, well-balanced system in you. And we do know that simply trying to eradicate the microbes in your gut or on your skin categorically is not the best approach.

IRA FLATOW: And so that's why you say we're overwashing ourselves. We're too concerned with having these microbes on our skin, when we don't realize that some microbes are good for us.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah, I think not everyone is overwashing, certainly. But that we should think more strategically about it. It's like saying, we're taking too many medications. Obviously, many people are taking medications that are lifesaving and important to them. And we just need- many of us could be more strategic about why exactly we're doing what we're doing, and are our hygiene practices really necessary, or are they things that if we don't enjoy them, if they don't bring us joy, could we do less or go without?

IRA FLATOW: Let's talk about efforts to turn bacteria on our skin into drug delivery systems.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah, that's one of the exciting things. Toward the conclusion of the book, I tried to figure out where this is all going. We have basically had the idea for 100 years that you just want to get all the microbes off your skin. Now we're just starting to understand that maybe the goal should be to have a healthy balance of non-disease-causing microbes on your skin.

So how do you do that? And some people are- this is not supported by evidence yet- but selling skincare products that are labeled as probiotic or prebiotic, similar to the products you see for the gut. And drug companies are actually working on selling what would technically be probiotic, bacterial creams or sprays, topical drugs that are essentially genetically modified bacteria that can deliver drugs like you might want to help you modify, say, eczema, such that- and this is all still very hypothetical- but that if the skin is populated with these microbes, they would stick around longer and deliver an active compound to the skin in a way that would make the person not have to be constantly reapplying something.

IRA FLATOW: But we're talking about GMO bacteria here. How do you convince people?

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah. When you talk to people who have lived with severe eczema or other inflammatory skin conditions, there's a lot of frustration right now. People are pretty open-minded to approaches, because we have really not proven able to cure eczema, acne, psoriasis, things that for some people are major deals in their life. And so, the science is not there yet to say that this will definitely happen, but the basic concept of shifting our microbes, of trying to shift the ecosystems, repopulate, move things around, is a conceptual change in how we will approach these diseases that is exciting.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any evidence that we are washing away some of the beneficial bacteria that might be overcoming some of these skin illnesses you're talking about?

JAMES HAMBLIN: I think it is more likely that what we're doing when we aggressively wash- and people who are fighting bad acne, as I have, tend to get into cycles of just really doing more and more, using more products, and washing and washing- is you're at least changing the amount of oil that's on the skin, which serves as sort of soil that feeds the microbes, on which they live. So when you change that, you change the ecosystems. You're never getting all of the microbes off of you, but you can shift their balances and change the soil in which they grow. And we know that changes in the proportions of microbes do correlate with flares of these skin conditions.

IRA FLATOW: Is it possible that the biome on our skin is also interacting with the microbiome that's inside our gut?

JAMES HAMBLIN: Nothing would surprise me at this point.

IRA FLATOW: I mean, you'd think you might be exchanging them back and forth, right? We wash our hands. We wipe ourselves after we touch our mouths. We go to the bathroom. We exchange bacteria all the time. You would think that somewhere, there's some sort of conversation going on.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally possible. And one of the things that we overlook, often, when we're talking about skin health, is we tend to think that it has to be addressed or created with topical products or by doing things that are modifying just the skin itself. But we know that when people change their diets, when you're feeling less stressed, when you are sleeping better, these things affect the functioning and appearance of our skin. So it is really all one complex, dynamic system, the body.

IRA FLATOW: There's a scary part in the book that I had not heard about, and that's something called a super fungus, you write, that "no one even knew existed until a decade ago, but has emerged as one of the CDC's top concerns." Candida oris- did I pronounce that correctly?

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah, that was something that was starting to get a fair amount of attention for being picked up in the bloodstreams of people just before the pandemic of coronavirus. And now has kind of taken a back seat. But the idea that we- this is not to suggest that the microbes that populate our skin are good or bad or that we should give up on trying to identify and eliminate the disease-causing ones. But that the microbes evolve as we are taking more antibiotics and we are trying to treat things, and new pathogens are arising constantly. And so it's an area of science where, unfortunately, we can't just say skin microbes are good or bad. And there will always be new challenges. And we'll have to be vigilant.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with James Hamblin, staff writer for The Atlantic, and author of the new book, Clean, The New Science of Skin. And this is a great read. It's got all kinds of historical stuff about soaps and the evolution of the soap industry. I didn't ever realize how far back soap goes and how the meaning of what it means to be clean has changed over the years. And you say that the skin care industry is growing, not shrinking. So why do you expect people will eventually discover the benefits of doing less with their skin?

JAMES HAMBLIN: I'm not certain we will. The industry has successfully sold us more and more products and grown year over year for a long, long time. In the middle 20th century, it was just normal for a family to just have one bar of soap that would do everything for every member of the family. And now showers and bathrooms are lined with many, many different products. And we have products segmented by gender and age and skin type and what colors and scents we like.

The shift that's happening recently is that people are wanting products that are milder or have fewer ingredients or more quote, unquote natural. So it does seem like- these are often expensive, luxury products. And the fact that people are investing in them means that the industry grows. But it doesn't mean that people are taking the same clear cut the forest approach to the skin that we were in recent years.

IRA FLATOW: Do you think that COVID-19 and people who have changed their habits due to being at home all the time, and changed their cleanliness habits- washing, showering, whatever- do you think these things will last past the pandemic?

JAMES HAMBLIN: I wouldn't be surprised. I think it's a time when people are being more vigilant about where they're direct their breath and how we're covering our faces, and not going out when we're sick, and washing our hands. And that is the sort of thing that is really important. We should've been doing all along. The idea of being on an airplane with someone who's coughing right next to you is terrifying right now. And that probably should have been the case before, that we just stayed home when we were sick. And we were really vigilant about handwashing in the way that we are now.

And at the same time, people are working from home. They're feeling comfortable discarding a lot of the practices that they might have been doing just because they felt it was necessary in order to go to the office or because everyone does it. So that includes showering. And people getting to a place where they're really just doing what they find to be beneficial to them.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I have to tell you that after reading your book- I've been reading it for about a week- and I have changed my showering habits.

JAMES HAMBLIN: You have?

IRA FLATOW: I have. I mimicked something that you said in your book, in that people were washing only their private parts and leaving the soap off their large major areas.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Yeah. And once we start talking about those things, it turns out, that's kind of what a lot of people do. The billboards, with people whose bodies are fully lathered from head to toe, are made to sell us soap. And when you get down to it, a lot of people are just the armpits, groin, maybe the feet.

IRA FLATOW: The book is called Clean, The New Science of Skin. James Hamblin, staff writer for The Atlantic and author of the book. You can check out an excerpt of the book on our website, ScienceFriday.com/clean. James, good luck with the book, and thank you for taking time to be with us today.

JAMES HAMBLIN: Thank you so much for talking with me.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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An Argument For The Benefits Of Not Bathing

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We've all been treating personal hygiene differently during quarantine. Writer James Hamblin discusses breaking the rules around cleanliness.

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Understanding Our Inevitable Cosmic Apocalypse 

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Understanding Our Inevitable Cosmic Apocalypse 

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The podcast I chose talked about the possible ends to our universe. It listed several ways a cosmic apocalypse could happen. One of these ways is called The Big Rip. The Big Rip is a theory where dark energy, which is the force that is always expanding our universe, starts to rip planets from their solar systems, thus ripping atoms apart. This would lead to nothing being left in our universe. I found this interesting because I wanted to learn more theories about earth and how it will be in the future.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: One day the universe is going to end, not just the Earth, not even just our galaxy, all of it, every star, every nebula. Nothing we have ever done will remain. My next guest is someone who has spent a lot of her time thinking about the end, more specifically how will that ending happen. There are, it turns out, a lot of possibilities for the end of something as infinitely large and massively energetic as our universe.

Try the big crunch, or the big rip. How about a heat death? Or my favorite, vacuum decay.

But which will it be? Will it be fast or slow? How soon could it happen?

Would we get a new big bang at the end of it all and a new universe of stars and planets? The jury is still out. But telescopes and particle colliders are giving us clues to what may come.

And here to help us wrap our head around the finite nature of our infinity is Doctor Katie Mack, who tackles our universal demise in her new book, The End of Everything. Dr. Mack is a cosmologist, an assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Welcome, Dr. Mack.

KATIE MACK: Hello, thanks. Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: So tell me- I've got to say this. This is an awfully cheerful book about the end of the universe. Is that how you feel?

KATIE MACK: I think I'm just excited about big things happening in the universe. And I guess I have some professional remove from the idea of everything really ending. Although, there are some points of the book where I do sort of wrestle with that idea that we will have no legacy in the cosmos ultimately. And that is a scary idea. But it's fun to think about these big powerful, destructive forces.

IRA FLATOW: Does that bother you that we're not going to have any legacy? I mean, do you think about that as a scientist?

KATIE MACK: I do think about it sometimes. And sometimes I think that's fine. We're just doing our thing. And someday that'll be over. And that's how it should be.

And other days, it's a little bit unsettling. I mean, I'm not fully comfortable with the idea that I'm going to die. And I'm certainly not comfortable with the idea that the whole universe is going to die. But it seems like that's the way of things.

IRA FLATOW: Give us a short tour of what could possibly go wrong to end our universe.

KATIE MACK: Well, there are several possibilities based on different ways that we look at the data and how we extrapolate what's happening now in the universe into the future. So in the book, I talk about the big crunch was just this idea that the expansion of the universe that's currently happening now could reverse and everything could come crashing back together. That's probably not how it's going to happen. But that's an idea that's been kicked around for decades as one of the possibilities.

IRA FLATOW: Let me stop you there. And tell us why that's probably, you as a scientist, know or feel it's probably not going to happen that way.

KATIE MACK: Well, when we look at the expansion of the universe, one of the things that we can observe about it now is that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. That means that the distant galaxies that are moving away from us are moving away from us faster and faster all the time. And that suggests that there is something in the cosmos that's accelerating the expansion of the universe.

We don't know what that is. We call it dark energy. But in the presence of dark energy, it's hard to imagine that accelerated expansion stopping and turning around and everything coming back.

Now we don't know for sure because we don't understand dark energy. But based on what we do know about it, it looks like it's probably something that's just going to keep going the way it's going. And the universe will continue to expand forever.

IRA FLATOW: OK, let's go to option door number two.

KATIE MACK: Well, that's the heat death. This is what we think is probably the most likely based on how we see the universe evolving now. Again, this is just the universe keeps expanding forever. And the end result of that is that everything gets more and more isolated.

So galaxies get farther apart from each other. Everything gets more and more contained in its own little space. It's harder for things to interact with each other over these increasing distances.

And so over time, the universe just gets more and more diffuse, darker, colder. There are no new stars forming after a while. And particles decay and everything kind of fades and decays away. And ultimately, you're left with basically just the waste heat of the cosmos.

IRA FLATOW: OK, let's go to option number three.

KATIE MACK: Well, this is a dramatic one. This is called the big rip. And this is based on the idea that maybe dark energy is not what we currently think it is. So our best guess about dark energy right now is that it's something called a cosmological constant. Basically, just a property of the cosmos that spacetime has this expansion built into it.

And so if you have some space, it'll have a tendency to expand. We think that that's probably what the dark energy is. We're not entirely certain.

If it's something else, if it's something that isn't just a property of space but some kind of field in the universe that changes over time, it could be something that gets more powerful over time. And if that's true, then it could actually, instead of just moving galaxies away from each other, it could start pulling galaxies apart and pulling stars away from the planets, then pulling apart planets and stars themselves, and eventually ripping apart atoms and tearing space itself asunder.

IRA FLATOW: Very interesting. I love talking about dark energy, dark matter. I mean, we talk about we don't know what 96% of the universe is made out of, right?

KATIE MACK: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Dark energy and dark matter. So then how can we make predictions about anything if we don't know what most of the universe is made out of?

KATIE MACK: Well, we don't know what it is. But we know a lot about how it acts. For dark energy, it's- whatever it is, it's something that's making the universe expand faster. And we can see the expansion of the universe. We can see how galaxies are moving apart from each other.

And because we can see into the past in the universe by looking at very distant things, we're looking at things as they were billions of years ago. We can see how that expansion has changed over time. And so we can deduce what dark energy is doing to our universe from those observations.

We can survey galaxies all over the universe and see how they're moving and how they're relating to each other. With dark matter, dark matter is a very different phenomenon. Dark matter is some invisible matter.

So it's something that has gravity. It has mass. But we can't see it.

And it seems to be the stuff that's holding galaxies together. It's this extra gravity where there are clumps of this invisible matter. And galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on are embedded in these clumps of this invisible dark matter.

Now we don't know what dark matter is made of. But we can map it out. We can figure out what it's doing and where it is by how it affects the regular matter of the stars and the galaxies that we do see in the universe.

So we might see stars at the edges of galaxies moving around faster than we would expect. And we can say, oh, that must mean there's extra gravity holding them in. We know a lot about where it is and how it acts. We just don't know what it's made of.

IRA FLATOW: Now we have an option number four that we- is a relatively new comer, is it not?

KATIE MACK: Yeah, yeah, so my personal favorite, cosmic apocalypse, is called vacuum decay. It's been around since maybe the 70s or 80s. But it's gained a lot of prominence recently because as we've learned more about particle physics, and as we've done things like discover the Higgs boson, which is this particle associated with the Higgs field, a kind of energy field that pervades all of space, it's allowed us to understand our model of particle physics a little better. And what we found is that it looks like maybe particle physics or maybe the physics that governs the universe isn't quite as stable as we thought.

What we're predicting now is that the way that physics works in our universe is not really the only option. And the Higgs field, which is this energy field, it can have different properties. And it can change.

And so there is a possibility that somewhere in the universe, there will be a quantum event that changes the Higgs field in that point, in some single spot in the universe. And that would create a bubble of a different kind of space where physics works differently inside that space. And that bubble would expand outward at about the speed of light and just destroy everything in the universe.

And it would be an unpredictable event. We wouldn't know when or where it would happen. But it would be a totally inescapable bubble of doom.

Now there are reasons that we're not convinced that that's definitely going to happen because first of all, it depends on the idea that we really understand all the particle physics. And we're not quite that arrogant. We know that there are pieces missing to our puzzle. And so it may be that something will come up that will prove that vacuum decay can't happen. But the current equations point that way, which is a very interesting consequence of the calculations people have been doing recently.

IRA FLATOW: If there's a bubble that bubbles up inside our universe, could there be a bubble that bubbles up outside our universe, too, and have another universe?

KATIE MACK: Well, outside of our observable universe, the region of space that we can actually see with telescopes and so on, we have no idea what's going on out there. There could be vacuum decay happening there. There could be new universes popping up out of the larger space we're embedded in.

There could have been many universes being created around the same time as ours, or popping out of some larger space. There's a lot that could happen beyond the realm of our observable universe, which is this volume about 46 billion light years across that we can actually get any information from.

IRA FLATOW: So what we visibly can see is not what might be out there. There might be a lot of other stuff out there that is beyond our horizon.

KATIE MACK: Yeah, and our horizon is defined by how far away something can be where the light from that thing can have reached us by now in the age of the universe. So if there was a galaxy 46 billion light years away, and the light left that galaxy at the moment of the creation of the universe, it would only just be reaching us now. So that defines the distance we can see. Because anything farther away from that, there just hasn't been enough time for the light to reach us.

Turns out that because the universe is expanding faster and faster, we're actually never going to be able to see things that are beyond that point because they're being carried away from us faster than light can travel by the expansion of the universe. So there's this real hard edge to what we can see. There's a lot of interesting mysteries around what might be beyond our horizon.

IRA FLATOW: Now I know as a theorist, you're not just inventing these ideas out of thin air. You've mentioned that there's data guiding everything in those theories. And my question is, where does the data come from that's most useful and important to you?

KATIE MACK: Well, there are a lot of different things we can study. We can look at how galaxies are moving through the cosmos. And during the expansion of the universe, we can see galaxies moving apart.

And we can look at very distant galaxies and see how they're different from galaxies that are nearby. And that tells us something about how the cosmos has been changing over time. And we can look at actually the background light from the Big Bang itself.

One of the most important pieces of data we have about the early universe, about the evolution of the universe comes from the fact that we can see the afterglow of the Big Bang. So if we look at a galaxy that's 5 billion light years away, we're looking back billions and billions of years. If we look farther away than that, if we look as far out as we can see, we can see the universe as it was at the very beginning because it took 13.8 billion years for the light to get to us from that point.

We can see it as it was in the very, very early stages of the cosmos. And what we see when we look as far as we can see is we see this glowing light. This light from a universe that is so young.

It's just finishing up the Big Bang. And it's still in that primordial fire stage. So the early universe was hot and dense and sort of roiling with plasma. And we can see that because we can look so far away that we're looking so far back in time that we see that hot, early young universe.

And that light has in it patterns of little blips of higher density here and lower density over there. And it tells us what the seeds of the structure of the universe looked like and how the universe went from being this fiery, roiling plasma state to this big, cool cosmos with galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on in it.

IRA FLATOW: We're going to take a break. And when we come back, more cosmology and deep thoughts with Dr. Katie Mack, Cosmologist and Author of The End of everything. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flatow. If you've just joined us, we're talking this hour about the end of the universe with my guest Dr. Katie Mack, author of the new book The End of Everything. You know, I like the way you write in your book.

KATIE MACK: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Because you write just like a regular person, sort of speaking in language that we can understand. And you write that there's a point- you're describing the heat death of the universe. And you put it in all caps. But it gets even stranger, right? You go on to say the universe is frickin' weird.

KATIE MACK: Yes.

IRA FLATOW: You're a cosmologist. How do you think the universe is weird if you understand it so well?

KATIE MACK: I mean, I'm a cosmologist. But I'm also a person who lives a day-to-day life. And I get used to things making sense in my normal existence. And when you start to study these concepts in cosmology and these really deep time things that particle, physics, and quantum mechanics, it really is very different. And it really is very weird.

And sometimes you have to step back and say, this is strange. This is not our usual experience. And you have to take notice of that and just give yourself a chance to experience the oddness and the wonder of how weird physics really gets.

IRA FLATOW: Well, how do people react to you when you say that you don't know something? I mean, does the public is- you speak to the public a lot. Can they accept scientists saying I just don't know? It's freaking weird.

KATIE MACK: So what I try and do is I try to emphasize what we do know or what we have good evidence for versus what we're still trying to figure out. Science is always a process of trying to get better and better approximations to what's really happening out there in the universe. We come up with theories.

We come up with models of how things fit together, how everything works. And then we try and test those theories. We test those models. And we try and get a better and better approximation.

We are developing tools to understand and describe our universe. But we don't know for sure every time we develop a new tool, every time we come up with a new theory if that's the ultimate answer or not. And we don't fool ourselves by saying we're definitely describing true reality. We're just trying to get an idea of how we can think about this, how we can model this, how we can find useful ways to describe it.

And so I try and say like, sure, there are things we don't know. There are things we're figuring out. But we do have very good useful theories that predict a lot of the data that match what we see. And we can use those. And we can understand our universe better by further developing those and further testing and verifying what we know.

IRA FLATOW: When do you give up on a theory that you can't collect enough data for? I'm thinking of string theory. It's entering middle age now. Or any other theory that you want to universe, when do you just say well, we can't test it out, we have to go to something else?

KATIE MACK: I think it's very hard to fully set something aside and say, I'm not going to think about that. There are areas of physics where it's very, very hard to get data because you would need to take a particle collider and do collisions in energies we can't possibly reach. Or we'd have to- you'd have to take data like right at the edge of a black hole. And we can't get there.

There are all sorts of things like that where we're trying to understand something about the universe that really only shows up in places we can't really test easily. But what we can do is we can come up with models that are consistent, that mathematically fit together well in all the places we can test. And we can see what those consequences are for other areas where we can't test it.

We're always trying to find new creative ways to look at the data where maybe we wouldn't need to build that solar system sized collider. Maybe we could look very carefully at the data we have and test the theory that way. So I don't think we're at the point where we give up trying to describe things.

But it is important, I think, to always keep in mind that if you come up with a new model, you need to be able to compare that to other models and do some testing that tells you at least if it fits the data a little bit better than another model or not. So it's always about taking what we have and saying, is this a better fit than this other idea we have?

If so, we'll maybe move toward that one. If not, then we'll stick with what we have and try and come up with something new. So I haven't given up on understanding these things. But I do think that ultimately what we want is a picture of the universe that is useful and that tells us something new.

IRA FLATOW: Albert Einstein was asked many times whether the human mind has the ability to actually comprehend the universe. And he once said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible.

KATIE MACK: I think that I'm constantly fascinated by how much we can know. We can see the Big Bang. We can see the background light from the time when the universe was still on fire.

We can see the parts of the universe that, from our perspective, still are on fire. We can study that. And we can see the little variations in the temperature of that primordial fire and use that information and put that into simulations and come out with a whole universe full of galaxies in our numerical simulations.

We can watch the expansion of the universe. We can calculate to very high precision how much matter and energy and dark matter and dark energy and all that stuff is in the cosmos. It's astonishing how much we know and how well we know it. Whether or not we'll ever get to the point of ultimate truth of exactly how the whole cosmos is put together, we're working on that. But it is fascinating how much we do know.

IRA FLATOW: I'd like to get one more listener in, Harriet in Hawaii, who asks, what if the end of the cosmos is just the end of the story we've been telling ourselves about the cosmos? How do we know the universe isn't capable of many big bangs?

KATIE MACK: Well, it's very possible that there could be cycles in the universe where the universe goes through an ending and then a new beginning of a different kind of phase of the universe. You can even have regions of the universe that are beyond our observable universe or beyond our horizon, where the universe is beginning again or a new universe is popping out over there somewhere.

You can have regions of space where the universe continues even after ours is over. So it's very possible that there are larger spaces and that there are more things before and after the timeline of our observable universe. When I talk in my book about the end of the universe, what I'm really talking about is the process by which everything, all structure inside our observable universe is ultimately destroyed. And that's pretty- we're pretty sure that's going to happen. But what happens beyond that, or before that, or after that, we don't know.

IRA FLATOW: Well, it's not like quite ending on a sad note because we know how it's going to end. But it's all part of great stuff in your book, Dr. Mack. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today.

KATIE MACK: Thank you. It's always fun to talk about ultimate destruction.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Katie Mack, Assistant Professor of Physics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and author of the new book The End of Everything. I highly recommend it. It's a great read. And you can see an excerpt of it on our website sciencefriday.com/theend.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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Understanding Our Inevitable Cosmic Apocalypse

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The universe will eventually end, writes cosmologist Katie Mack in her new book. But how? Will we get a cold lifeless soup, a bubble of doom, or matter tearing itself apart?

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Could A “Marsquake” Knock Down Your House?

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Could A “Marsquake” Knock Down Your House?

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This podcast was very interesting to me because I've always been interested in astronomy. This podcast talked about Marsquakes and explained how they happen. An interesting fact that I learned from this podcast was that if you were on Mars while there was a Marsquake, you wouldn't even be able to feel it. All of the Marsquakes that have been recorded are all very small. The biggest one ever recorded is a 4.0, and it would have to be at least a 5 for you to feel it on Mars. I usually worry about things that I really shouldn't because they are really ridiculous, and so it's nice to know that I wouldn't feel a Marsquake on Mars, let alone Earth.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. If you stay around for later in the hour, we're going to coach you on your application to be an astronaut. And we're going to talk about whale migration. It's good stuff coming up.

But first, on April 26, 2019, NASA's Mars insight Lander recorded a sound researchers had been waiting for for months to hear.

[WHOOSHING SOUND]

Did you hear it? To me, it sounds like someone just turned up the volume on some Martian wind. But no. To NASA researchers, it was the unmistakable sound of a Mars quake. NASA's Insight lander was launched in the spring of 2019 with a suite of instruments for studying what's happening deep within the Martian surface, including an ultra sensitive seismometer for detecting suspected Mars quakes.

NASA recently published data from the first year of Insight's mission. And it's telling us things about these seismic activity of Mars and how it compares to Earth. Here to tell us more about this is Dr. Suzanne Smrekar, deputy principal investigator for the NASA Mars Insight Mission. Welcome to Science Friday.

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Sure sounded like wind to me. Is that what a Mars quakes sounds like?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: It is one of Mars quakes sounds like a sped up a bit. In fact, if you played it at its natural frequency, it would be super hard to hear. You'd have to have really good speakers to get that bass sound. So that was sped up a little bit to make it easier to hear.

IRA FLATOW: And what is the quake actually? What is happening there that causes that sound?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Right. Well, a quake is motion of a fault- so strong rock that's broken, sliding past each other. And that generates a wave that was recorded in that sound.

IRA FLATOW: Is it generated differently than the way earthquakes are made here?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Well, most of the quakes that we've heard on Mars- detected on Mars we believe are due to motion of rock. Now we have some that are very mysterious. And we are still trying to interpret really what is causing them.

It could be some kind of coupling of the wind or other atmospheric processes into the subsurface. So you know, about maybe 60% of the roughly 500 or so quakes- seismic events that we've recorded fall into this mysterious category. And so we're still working to interpret really what the source of those particular quakes or seismic signatures are. But a lot of them, we believe, are due to fault motion, similar to fault motion on the Earth.

IRA FLATOW: And why are you so interested in seismic activity on Mars?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Seismic activity gives us a window into the inside of Mars that we can't get with any other kind of data. Really, what we want to do is understand things like, how thick is the crust? How thick is the mantle? What are the layers inside the planet?

And that really takes us back to the very early formation of Mars. All those layers were formed, we know, probably within tens of million years of the planet's formation. So it kind of gives us a glimpse into that really early formation process.

IRA FLATOW: So we really don't know what's in the heart of the planet, what it's made out of?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: We know it has a core. We know it has a crust. But determining how thick those are gives us much, much more information about what is made out of.

For example, there's a big uncertainty in how big the core is. Being able to nail that down will tell us things about- maybe it has significant amount of sulfur in the core. And again, that tells us a lot about how the planet originally separates from a molten mass into these solid layers.

IRA FLATOW: Does it still have a molten mass inside?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Well, we believe it does have a liquid core. But we don't really know for sure. The measurements that have been made so far are ambiguous. And so we really want to be able to distinguish- does it have a partly solid core? Does it have a partly liquid core? And we'll be able to do that as we acquire more data, both seismic- and for that particular question, we're also taking other kinds of data to help us answer that question.

IRA FLATOW: Isn't one of the big mysteries on Mars what happened to all that water on the surface? And doesn't that have something to do with what the planet is made out of?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: It has to do with how the history of the water has evolved and also, you know, how can we see into the inside of the planet and get a sense of whether or not there's still water in the inside. You know, the big question has been, is there still water at depth on Mars? Or has it all been lost off the top of the atmosphere?

And we hope maybe to be able to provide some information on that eventually. But you know, right now it's still a bit ambiguous. We need to collect more data about the interior of Mars to really try to address that question.

Basically, water in the interior helps- it kind of helps disperse the seismic waves. And so we're just beginning to get a handle on how that dispersion is happening. You know, is it because the upper part of the crust is very fractured by impact craters? Or you know, is there a real signature of [INAUDIBLE] down there?

So we're kind of in the early days. And it's hard to say, unequivocally, are we seeing that signature?

IRA FLATOW: Mhm. The Insight was launched in the spring of 2018, right? Not last year- I think I got it wrong in the intro.

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Yes, '18. And we landed November 26.

IRA FLATOW: Mhm. If you were standing on Mars- like you would be on the Earth- and there was a little bit of a Mars quake, could I feel it standing on the ground?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Not any of the quakes that we have recorded so far. We've recorded up to about magnitude 4. You know, it would have to be a significantly bigger one to be able to feel it if you were on the surface.

IRA FLATOW: And why haven't we seen any big quakes? Why only the little ones?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Excellent question. We wish we knew. Yeah, we made predictions of the number and size of quakes that we would expect to see. And so far, it is largely within our predictions, except for those bigger ones.

And you know, we are, of course, hoping that we will also see a larger quake- a magnitude 5 or so. But we haven't so far. Does that mean that Mars is just operating in a way that we didn't expect?

You know, it has a much stronger, thicker, strong layer than the Earth does. Maybe that is making it harder for us to- for deformation to occur and generate those larger quakes. But that's an open question as well. And we're hoping that, with more data collection, we'll be able to get a better sense of, are the processes different, have we just not gotten lucky yet? But it's a open and important question.

IRA FLATOW: Well, speaking of data collection, I know the Insight is slated to end its two-year mission soon. Couldn't you extend it at all?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: We are busy writing a proposal to ask NASA for more money to keep the mission going. This is something that is done routinely with missions. They all, you know, start with an initial plan for the mission. And if things go well, we all ask for more money. So yeah, we're hoping to keep going.

IRA FLATOW: The problem is you make them too well. You build the stuff too good. You know, look at the rovers, though. it went on for decades, you know?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Yes. Yes, well, what can I say?

[LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Let me ask you while we have a couple of more minutes. There are other planetary bodies that have quakes, like the moon. Can you compare a seismic activity on Mars compared to what goes on the moon, let's say?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Sure. Yeah. So the moon is the only other place besides Earth and Mars where we've had seismometers. And they were deployed by the Apollo astronauts.

And in fact, they weren't sure that they were seeing quakes until, you know, something was artificially crashed into the planet and generated a quake. So we knew exactly what time that quake formed.

And the reason is that, on the moon, there's been impact craters going on there for billions of years. And the outer part is super fragmented. And we just didn't realize that this would have such a huge impact on what we were seeing in the seismic signature.

So we see some element of that on Mars. And so, you know, fortunately we had the example of what quakes look like on Mars to kind of give us some information about what to expect from that that scattering, broken up layer that we see to a lesser extent on Mars but see some aspects of that in the seismic record.

IRA FLATOW: Cool. So if we have a molten lava below the surface of Mars like you would suspect, why are there no volcanoes spewing out some of that stuff?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: Right. Well, you know, most of the surface is billions of years old. But there are a couple of areas- one, in particular- where volcanism has occurred in the last two to 10 million years.

And from a geologist's standpoints, that's like today. And so we have located a couple of quakes in that area. And you know, there could be magma tens of miles underneath the surface. And so, you know, it could still be hot and cooling and generating those quakes. But just because there's magma deep down doesn't mean you see it at the surface today.

IRA FLATOW: You covered this a little bit at the beginning, and a couple of people are asking the same question, does Mars have tectonic plates the way the Earth does?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: No. You know, on the Earth, tectonics is pretty much synonymous with plate tectonics because most of the deformation is caused by these rigid plates sliding past each other.

Mars doesn't have that same series of plates that define different areas on the surface. It's all effectively one giant plate. But it can still deform and generate quakes.

IRA FLATOW: So there are no like cracks in the surface like we have in the plates on the Earth.

SUZANNE SMREKAR: There are cracks, but they don't go all the way through that strong layer. They don't have boundaries that form plates. But there are certainly cracks, things that people would recognize as faults on the surface.

IRA FLATOW: All right. In 30 seconds, give me what you want to know most about Mars.

SUZANNE SMREKAR: I want to know most is, you know, what about this area where we are seeing quakes linked to relatively recent volcanism on the surface. You know, I would really love to understand why that volcanism is still there. Because most of the surface is so old, and it's really a mystery as to why we still have quakes in that area and we may have magma at depth.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Smrekar, you'll come back after the launch and landing and all that stuff and talk more?

SUZANNE SMREKAR: I'd be happy to.

IRA FLATOW: OK.

[LAUGHTER]

That's all the time we have. Dr. Suzanne Smrekar is deputy principal investigator for the NASA Insight Mission.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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Could A "Marsquake" Knock Down Your House?

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What studying seismic activity on mars tells us about the red planet.

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Should We Conserve Parasites? Some Scientists Say Yes.

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Should We Conserve Parasites? Some Scientists Say Yes.

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This podcast came interesting to me as I'm pretty fastinated of many species. This talks about parasites and gave an explanation of how we should preserve/conserve parasites because they can have an impact on our future. Also, the scientists from the podcast explained that there are theoretically over 1 million species of parasites which I found pretty intriguing. The reason this came intriguing to me was because these parasites are so small yet they help us in so many ways, although there are unhealthy parasites.

--Ethan--

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Science Friday & WNYC Studios - Science Friday

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Should We Conserve Parasites? Some Scientists Say Yes.

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Should We Conserve Parasites? Some Scientists Say Yes.

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I thought this podcast was very interesting. I used to think that parasites were only harmful, but some actually help us! An example of one was parasitoid wasps. They help control the population of agricultural pests. Another example was  parasitic Braconid wasp. It lays its eggs on something called a tobacco hornworm  pest. This is good because tobacco hornworm pests eat things like tobacco, tomato, and potato crops. The parasitic braconid wasp lays it's eggs on the tobacco hornworm pest's back. When the egg's hatch, the babies feed on the tobacco hornworm.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Parasite won the Oscar for Best Movie last year and why not? Movies have always played on our fears of parasites. Whether it's an alien cocooning inside your body and bursting out, chasing us around a spaceship, [Movie Audio] or pods ready to snatch your body when you fall asleep. [Movie Audio]

Despite the horror of the parasites in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Hollywood representations, a group of scientists says real parasites in nature get a bad rap and we should even consider protecting and conserving them. That opinion was published this month in the journal Biological Conservation, which outlines such a plan.

My next guests are here to make the case for parasites. And they're both authors on that article, Skylar Hopkins is an assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and Kayce Bell is assistant curator of terrestrial mammals at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Welcome both to Science Friday.

SKYLAR HOPKINS: And thanks for having us.

KAYCE BELL: Thanks. It's good to be here.

IRA FLATOW: Skylar, so you think that parasites don't deserve a bad rap?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yes, so of course everyone thinks that parasites are gross, and that's OK. A lot of people think that earthworms are slimy, but most people probably realize that we need some earthworms in our gardens because they're good for the soil, right? So we know that parasites are kind of gross and yucky but they're playing important roles in ecosystems.

IRA FLATOW: Kayce, I imagine you agree?

KAYCE BELL: That's right. I think parasites, they might have a bad rap but they have a lot of things that they can contribute. So it's important to keep them around.

IRA FLATOW: Has anyone ever tallied up how many parasites are out there?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: It's something that's hard to estimate because there are many species that we haven't identified yet. And so our best guess is that there are probably millions of parasite species. Alone there are parasites that are distributed across 15 different animal phyla, so it's this really hyper diverse group and we're not exactly sure how many parasite species are out there.

IRA FLATOW: Skylar, your group came up with a 12 point plan for conserving parasites. Please give me your reasons why we should conserve parasites.

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Sure, so you can use two different arguments, one would be about intrinsic value. So if we're going to argue that species have intrinsic value and so they should be conserved, then we should be conserving parasite species. So something like 40% to 50% of all animal species are parasitic. So that's a really big portion of global biodiversity. And so that has a lot of intrinsic value on its own.

There's also the utilitarian argument, which is that parasites do things for us which are important. So for instance you know that parasitoid wasps are parasitizing and controlling insect pest populations. And as adults they also do some pollinating. So they are saving us billions of dollars per year in the agricultural sector.

IRA FLATOW: But can you make a case for parasites that do affect human health and cause disease the same way you're talking about those parasites?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: No, so we certainly don't advocate for conserving human parasites. So there's a list of about 1,400 parasites and pathogens that are known to infect people and that is just a tiny drop in the bucket of total global parasite biodiversity. And so we think that those parasites that infest people should certainly be controlled and we're talking about parasites in wildlife that don't infect people.

IRA FLATOW: So you have to determine the difference between a bad and a good parasite and choosing what to conserve?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yeah. I would say that that's true.

IRA FLATOW: How does a conservation plan work and what does it look like. Do you go pick parasites and put them in jars or do you leave them on their hosts or what do you do with that, Skylar?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yeah, so our overall plan has 12 different steps and they're divided into these four different themes or categories and so one of those themes is just data collection and synthesis. So we just need to know more about the parasite species that are out there and we need to do a better job of using that data to understand the threats that parasite species are facing.

The next part of that is risk assessment and prioritization, so once we know what parasite species are out there, which ones really need our conservation efforts. For instance, we know that parasite species are really specialized to use host species that are endangered are probably also endangered because if their host species decline and go extinct then they're likely to decline or extinct as well. So how do we figure out which parasite species are at risk and then can we put them on Red Lists like the IUCN Red List.

And then once we know what parasite species we're trying to protect, developing conservation practice to do that. So can we develop protocols so that when we are dealing with endangered host species. We don't accidentally wipe out the parasite species that use that host species. So that's something that we accidentally did with the California Condor. When we brought it into captivity we deloused it, we probably drove one of its louse species extinct. So one of the protocols that we had developed to avoid doing that in the future.

And then finally, there's education and outreach. So we just need more people to know that parasites are playing important roles in ecosystems. And so, we can do a better job through museums, and K-12, and college education and also just educating conservation practitioners that parasites are gross and they do harm their host species in many cases, but they are important parts of ecosystems.

IRA FLATOW: Educate me why delousing the California Condor was a bad idea. If you're getting rid of a parasite that's attacking a bird?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: I think it really depends on what the parasite is doing. So in many cases even though a parasite is using some of its host resources, it's not really using enough resources to cause noticeable harm to that host species. And so in the case of the California Condor louse, that louse, might not really have been doing anything to the birds. But we got rid of them anyway just in case. And so that might have been a just in case step that we didn't need to do.

It's also important to note that getting rid of all of an organism's parasite species isn't necessarily a good thing for that organism. So we know that every animal evolved to interact with parasites, that's why we have immune systems. And if you take away all the parasite species, that immune system might not be functioning properly or maybe when you put that host species back out in the wild again it's going to have problems because its immune system isn't working properly or because it doesn't have any parasite species and suddenly it's being exposed to a lot of parasites in the wild.

IRA FLATOW: Kayce Bell, I know you studied ground squirrels along with parasites. Please tell me what the relationship is between these two organisms.

KAYCE BELL: Yeah, so lately my research has mostly been on chipmunks, which are a type of ground squirrel, and there are ectoparasites, so the sucking lice that live on the outside of them and there are endoparasites, the nematodes that live on the inside.

And my interest in this is studying how they have co-evolved or how easy it is for parasites to move among different host species. And this is kind of coming back to some of what Skylar was talking about in trying to understand these natural relationships that have evolved and if things have co-evolved over long periods of time, they've probably evolved to this level of tolerance almost. While they might not be good for the chipmunks or OK, they're probably not actually inflicting that much damage.

So sucking lice are actually similar to the head lice that humans have and they feed on the blood, and yes if you have a whole lot of sucking lice they can cause problems, but if there's only a few sucking lice on there, they're probably not actually doing that much damage to the host.

IRA FLATOW: What can the parasites tell us about the environment that the host is living in? Does it tell us about how healthy it is or it's in trouble or anything like that?

KAYCE BELL: Absolutely. So one of the things that's really interesting that we're trying to get the message out there with this paper is there's a lot of those things we actually don't know. And so it would we're trying to learn as much information as we can before some of these parasites go extinct. But one of the really important things that we can learn from parasites about the environment often has to do with what other species may be around.

So a healthy functioning ecosystem requires a lot of different players and a lot of different types of parasites actually require multiple different host species. So it will go for example like through a snail and then maybe another snail and then a fish and then a bird. Well, for that parasite to be in the ecosystem all of those other host species have to be present, otherwise it can't complete its lifecycle. So just finding a parasite can often tell you a lot about what other species are there and the fact that the food chains are actually functioning the way that we think they are supposed to.

And so to study them I work in museums and we take whole animals, we take a whole specimen and we examine it for ectoparasites, which we save and we also examine it for endoparasites and all of these things go together in the collection so they can be archived to learn more about these interactions and where different things are occurring.

IRA FLATOW: Well, Skylar, let's talk about some of the different strategies that parasites use. I understand there is a tongue eating isopod that is really weird. Tell me about that.

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yeah, so I don't study this parasite but I think it's very cool. It is an isopod that you can find within a fish's mouth and it literally chews off the tongue of the fish and you see it sort of replaces the tongue. So the fish no longer has a tongue. If you open up its mouth you will see an isopod inside of that and it's very large. It's not a teeny little parasite. It is a very big parasite inside the fish's mouth.

IRA FLATOW: Does it take the place of what the tongue is doing or is the fish going to die because it has no tongue anymore?

KAYCE BELL: Yeah, actually they do seem to take the place of the tongue and function. There are some studies that suggest that actually fish with that parasite may actually be more efficient at feeding but I'm not sure that's been well supported. I just know that there's been some research looking into how well fish fare with those parasites and they seem to do OK.

IRA FLATOW: You know if you look at the movies that are out there, whether it's my favorite, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or any other movie where the parasites take over, one of the things that parasites do is that they take over your brain or they change your behavior. Do they have a type of mind control? Are there parasites that can do that Skylar?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yes, so nematomorph parasites, which are sometimes called horsehair worms or Gordian knot worms, are these remarkably large worms that are stuffed inside the tiny body of a cricket. And they manipulate the cricket's behavior and cause the cricket to jump into bodies of water, which is not something a cricket would normally do, they're not aquatic, right? When the cricket gets in the water the worm will leave its body and actually you become free living. So it can swim through the water and it's looking for other adult worms to mate with and continue its life cycle.

And actually, those crickets that jump into water bodies turn out to be pretty important. So we know that in Japan those crickets are eaten by these endangered Japanese trout. I think they actually make up something like 30% of the trout's diet and because the trout are eating these crickets, which are subsidizing a stream environment, they eat fewer of the invertebrates that are living in streams, which means that there are more of those invertebrates, which can do more consumption of leaf litter and nutrient cycling and things like that in the stream ecosystem. And so this one parasite manipulating cricket behavior has these rippling effects through the entire ecosystem.

IRA FLATOW: Kayce, there's a parasite that can influence an ant to change the color of its body?

KAYCE BELL: Yeah, that's right. So there's a nematode or a type of roundworm that infects ants. And what it does is it gets into the abdominal region of the ant and it turns it bright red so it looks like a berry and then these ants actually will hang out in places that they're really visible to birds and then birds think they're berries, come along and eat them, so then the nematode gets passed on to the bird, so it can complete its life cycle. There's a lot of great examples like that where parasites make a host make itself more available for the next host.

IRA FLATOW: Pretty tricky. Skylar, parasites have a complex life strategy I understand. Lots of animals have symbiotic relationships, but how does an organism evolve from symbiotic to parasitic?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yes, that's a great question as to does something become symbiotic first and then become a parasite? That it's not necessarily the same sequence of events for all parasite species. We actually know that parasitism has evolved independently many, many times in the animal kingdom. So like I mentioned there are 15 phyla within the kingdom animalia that contain parasitic species. And then within those 15 phyla, parasitism has cropped up again and again.

And you might think that these things might start from a mutualism, so two species are benefiting each other and then one species starts to cheat and be a parasite, but that doesn't really seems to be the case actually. It seems like cheating can just evolve on its own pretty commonly.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Our bodies are filled with bacteria and viruses that live off our bodies. Should we consider a microbiome to be full of parasites?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yes, so we know of course that our microbiome can consist of both beneficial species and detrimental species, but there is a gray area where it can be really hard to tell if an individual microbe, or even a larger sort of ectosymbiotic organism is really good or bad for the host.

So there are examples with like staph, where a relatively high proportion of the human population has this potential pathogen on them all the time but it is not hurting them and for some reason, once in a while these infections end up being very detrimental. And so in general, the line between parasite and not parasite, is a little grainy, can be hard to determine.

IRA FLATOW: You know, I started out our discussion by talking about how parasites have been a source of inspiration for Hollywood. Skylar, what are some other parasites that have invaded pop culture?

SKYLAR HOPKINS: So you talked a little bit about the zombie parasites. There is a whole video game called The Last of Us, which is about Cordyceps fungi basically taking over the human population and turning us into zombies. Also, I'm not a huge Pokemon fan. I don't know all the details. But I do know that there are Pokemon characters like Parasect, which are based on parasite species.

IRA FLATOW: Kayce, why do you think we're so fascinated in our culture and when we talk about by this particular host-parasite relationship?

KAYCE BELL: I think some of it comes from being interested in things that we perceive that there is a little bit of a yuck factor. A lot of us are interested in things that others perceive as gross. But also I think it's kind of the same reason we're fascinated with horror movies, right? There is this like intrigue to these things that are mysterious and potentially dangerous. So at least from my perspective there's a lot of different reasons that people can become interested in studying parasites or even just from a pop culture perspective, understanding how these foreign things could potentially impact our lives or the lives of animals or something.

IRA FLATOW: Well, we've run out of time. A fascinating discussion. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Skylar Hopkins, assistant professor of applied ecology, North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Kayce Bell, assistant curator of terrestrial mammals, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Again, thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

SKYLAR HOPKINS: Yeah. Thank you so much.

KAYCE BELL: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: And we've got an article that shows some of the parasites we've talked about plus some parasite inspired anime by parasitologist Dr. Tommy Leung. It's on our website at ScienceFriday.com/Parasite.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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Should We Conserve Parasites? Some Scientists Say Yes

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A group of scientists are building a defense for parasites-and have put together a plan to conserve species.

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Air Pollution Costs More Than Switching To Clean Energy

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Air Pollution Costs More Than Switching To Clean Energy

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/pollution-clean-energy-costs/

Clean energy is half the cost, death rate, and we could benefit from it. I was interested by this podcast because global warming is a big topic and when I saw the title of this podcast I was like, why haven't we switched to clean energy if it is cheaper and we could benefit from it. Is it less efficient?

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/hubble-anniversary/

The Hubble Space Telescope has been in Earth's orbit for 30 years. It is better than telescopes on Earth because the light going into the telescope isn't filtered by Earth's atmosphere whereas telescopes on Earth are. One thing I learned is that the Hubble Space telescope finds a lot of exo-planets, which are planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. There have been 5 service missions to the Hubble Space Telescope and scientists estimate that it has at least 10 years of life remaining.
-Alex Euhus

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Think about the breathtaking images you've seen of space- swirling, multicolored galaxies, shining star clusters, far-off planets. There's a good chance these photos were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has helped us better understand space mysteries, like black holes, warped space, exoplanets, and the expansion of the universe.

30 years ago today, Hubble was launched into space. And through multiple repair jobs right from its very beginning, it's the orbiting observatory that just keeps on going. To celebrate this anniversary, we're joined today by Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope in Greenbelt, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Do you remember the beginnings of Hubble when it was launched in 1990? You were studying to become an astrophysicist, right? It must have been exciting times.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Oh, it was exciting. I was studying for a graduate degree in astronomy up at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And we were all very excited about this new idea of having a telescope on a space-based platform. So it would be above the Earth's atmosphere and would provide much clearer views of deep space. We were in high anticipation.

IRA FLATOW: Tell me what the anticipation was like. What were you expecting to get out of this new telescope?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, we weren't sure, actually. We were excited because we didn't know exactly what it would bring us. We just knew it would bring us more, better information, perhaps even change the kinds of questions we'd be asking about the universe.

Now, I myself was studying a different kind of astronomy. I was using radio telescopes, the big dish kinds of telescopes that collect low-energy radiation from regions where stars are forming. But all of us, no matter what kinds of astronomy we were specializing in, were really excited about this new that was going to open up vistas and new questions.

We were particularly interested in what the telescope would tell us about deep space, very distant, faint galaxies that had been impossible, really, to see up to that point. But we were also curious about what it would tell us about our own solar system and nearby star systems as well.

IRA FLATOW: You know, to me, Hubble is one of NASA's greatest triumphs because it brought outer space closer to everybody here at home. And some of the images- virtually all of the images- were just fantastic things we had never seen before. Do you have a favorite Hubble achievement or discovery or an image?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: I have many favorites. That's like asking someone which child is your favorite. But I think the one that actually always stirs my soul when I look at it is something we call the Ultra-Deep Field. Now, this is an image that was taken by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope in a direction of the sky where there aren't many nearby stars to drown out the image and just collecting light for many days so that the faintest objects would show up in the resulting image.

This resulting image is basically a collection of thousands of galaxies, these smudges of light that when you look at them you see spirals. You see sphericals. You see all kinds of galaxies in this tiny little field in the sky and realize that our universe is magnificent. It's enormous.

If you can extrapolate in your mind that image over the whole sky, you realize visually what it means when we say there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our observable universe. And I like to imagine being able to suddenly blink my eyes and travel to any one of those galaxies and look around. If we were that far away looking back, our own Milky Way would look like one of those spiral smudges of light.

And then, of course, some of those galaxies are more distant than others. So one of the big challenges of astronomy is to measure distances to different things in space. And astronomers have very carefully been mapping out the distances to these various galaxies and finding out how the universe has changed over time because, of course, we're looking at these galaxies as they were when the light left them to begin its journey across vast distances of space to get to our telescope.

And so some of these galaxies are millions of light years- a light year is the distance that light travels in one year. Some of these galaxies are shining to us for millions of years in the distant past. And some are shining from billions of years, really toward the very beginning of our universe when galaxies were first starting to form.

So we can compare those very distant galaxies and the way they look and their compose- their nature with galaxies like our own and really see how the universe has changed over time. And that, to me, is fascinating.

IRA FLATOW: The idea of putting a telescope in space- an observatory in space, I guess, offers advantages over having one on the ground here.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Of course. So the whole idea of putting this telescope in orbit around the Earth is not to get it closer to the things we're observing, but to get it above the Earth's atmosphere. It's only about 340 miles above the surface of the Earth. But it's high enough to get it above most of our atmosphere and above the clouds. And we can get much sharper images.

Light coming through the turbulent atmosphere of Earth can get blurred. And also, our atmosphere actually filters out some types of light that we would like to receive for astronomy. That's good for us. The ultraviolet light cannot get through the atmosphere, and that's helpful for our health.

But we want to see ultraviolet light in astronomy. A lot of objects in deep space emit interesting radiation in the ultraviolet range of light. And Hubble can see that above the Earth's atmosphere. So that's what's been the transformational change that we've had with the Hubble Space Telescope and subsequent space telescopes.

IRA FLATOW: What are the questions that Hubble is still investigating now?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, that's a great question because some of the questions that Hubble was originally tasked to address are still being investigated. One of those is, for example, the expansion rate of the universe. The namesake of Hubble, Edwin Hubble, helped us understand that the universe itself is expanding. Space itself is stretching.

But what is the rate of that expansion? And how long has this been going on? How old is the universe? That was one of the original goals of Hubble. And Hubble did, in fact, refine our understanding of that expansion rate of the universe. And we're still measuring that and refining that with Hubble to this day.

In fact, Hubble helped provide us with a surprise, along with some telescopes on the ground, when it deduced that in the last few billion years that expansion rate of the universe has been increasing. The expansion is accelerating. We didn't expect that because matter tends to pull things together, not push things apart. But there's something we call "dark energy" accelerating that push of the universe's expansion. So that's something we're still studying with Hubble.

And we are also doing things with Hubble now that we didn't anticipate or even imagine when Hubble was designed, such as studying exoplanets. These are planets not in our own solar system, but planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system. These exoplanets were not known when I was starting graduate school. But now we know of thousands of these systems because our technology has improved.

They are generally detected by other kinds of telescopes, telescopes on the ground and space telescopes like NASA's Kepler and test observatories. But then Hubble is the pioneer at studying the composition of the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets.

And right now we're using Hubble to look at many of these exoplanets to discern what's in their atmospheres. And we're finding even water vapor in some of them. So these are early steps toward really understanding what other star systems are like. Those are just a couple of examples of what we're using Hubble for these days.

IRA FLATOW: Speaking of exoplanets, there's this story about a spooky exoplanet that Hubble found and now is not there anymore. It wasn't what we thought it was. Explain that one.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Oh, this is just a great story of how science is dynamic. We discover things. But when we keep studying them, we find out more and more. And this is a really intriguing exoplanet or what we thought was an exoplanet system around the star Fomalhaut. And Fomalhaut is a star that has a ring of debris around it. It's always shown some evidence of having material, perhaps planets, orbiting that star.

But Fomalhaut B, which was, we thought, and might still think is one of these planets in the Fomalhaut system, was detected some years back with Hubble. It was observed in an image. And it's very hard to image exoplanets because they're generally very faint around other stars. We typically detect exoplanets in more indirect ways.

But this one we had an image from Hubble. And it's a really beautiful and striking picture of an object orbiting a star, or so we thought. But over the years, a team of astronomers have been looking at the data and looking at more Hubble observations and seeing that this object seems to be fading over time, dissipating in a sense. It's always been a little unusual because it didn't shine as brightly in infrared light as we would have expected for a true exoplanet.

So this new team is hypothesizing that what we might be seeing is actually the result of the debris, if you will, of a collision in that system of two smaller planetesimals. And that dust cloud that was kicked up by that collision is what we were seeing. And it's now dissipating over time.

And so that is a very cool finding. And of course, we'll be looking at this system more and more just to see what's happening and to further understand what's happening in that other dynamic star system.

IRA FLATOW: A lot of technology has changed in the 30 years that Hubble's been up there. Is Hubble still good enough for 2020?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, this is the amazing thing. We've had Hubble for three decades now. And yet, truly, Hubble is more scientifically powerful and productive now than ever before in its mission. And we anticipate Hubble will keep giving us cutting-edge science for the next decade, maybe beyond.

The reason for this good news is at least twofold. One is that we've had a series of astronaut servicing missions over the years. You may remember the dramatic launch of Hubble, which was via the Space Shuttle back in 1990, and then its dramatic first servicing mission that corrected some errors in Hubble's optics in 1993.

Since then, we've had wonderful vision with Hubble. And we've had several servicing missions with astronauts repairing equipment or putting in new and improved cameras and instruments on Hubble. That's kept Hubble at the forefront of capability. So it's like getting a new observatory every time.

The last time we did a Space Shuttle servicing mission was in 2009. And this mission was extremely successful. We had new refreshing batteries and gyroscopes. A couple of science instruments were repaired. And then we had two new science instruments installed. So we have a wonderful observatory now that's still in fantastic technical shape.

And also, astronomers are using those instruments in the observatory in new, clever ways to get better and better science out of it. So because of that, we're getting new and more interesting results, perhaps, than ever before. We're getting more professional, peer-reviewed science papers out of Hubble than ever before. And we have a real positive sense of what we're going to learn from Hubble in these coming years.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Many more years do you think Hubble can operate for?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Well, that's the question of the hour. And that's hard to give a firm prediction. NASA has committed to supporting Hubble as long as it's being scientifically productive. And right now, it's very productive. We are entertaining proposals from astronomers around the world every year. We think that the batteries and gyroscopes are in good shape.

And we have a real clever, wonderful team of engineers and technical experts on the ground here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and also at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore that are constantly monitoring these instruments and using them in the most productive ways. And from the rough predictions of looking at how healthy these components seem to be, we're hopeful that Hubble will be giving us a very good scientific return for throughout this decade and maybe beyond.

And this is really good news because Hubble is terrific on its own. But it's also very powerful when used in complement with other observatories and probes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which is another space facility with different capabilities that we anticipate launching in 2021.

IRA FLATOW: Why do you think with all the wonderful telescopes around the world that Hubble is the one that people talk about?

JENNIFER WISEMAN: That's a great question. So the Hubble Space Telescope has really become a household a friend for people around the world. And I think there are several reasons for that. One is its dramatic beginning back in the early 1990s. Its launch from the Space Shuttle was momentous.

And then it was quickly realized that at first, Hubble's images were disappointing. There was a realization that the magnificent 2.4-meter mirror inside Hubble was slightly misshapen. It was beautifully ground but slightly misshapen in its formula. And so this was kind of embarrassing for NASA. It was a disappointment to astronomers. And this was a bad way to get your name known around the world.

But because of that, its dramatic repair mission in 1993 was watched by people around the world. And when the results of that mission were so successful, people were cheering around the world. So that, again, reinforced the name of Hubble around the world.

And then the early images after that first repair mission were surprising and dramatic. One of them was when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. It fell apart into this series of fragments that impacted Jupiter one by one. And the Hubble Telescope caught this dramatic impact. And how memorable is that? That's something that really only Hubble could capture in that kind of detail. So that reinforced the name of Hubble.

And then the most dramatic images that are of most interest to the public are easily accessible also in the galleries on our websites. And I think that people appreciate that. They're able to share in the awe and wonder of looking at these images of galaxies, of stars, of these beautiful, colorful nebulae where stars are still forming. And I'm pleased that the mission has set a standard for making these observations and data easily available and enjoyable worldwide.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. We have run out of time. There's so much stuff to talk about with the Hubble. I want to wish you and congratulate you and wish everybody a happy 30th anniversary for the Hubble.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: Thank you. Check us out on social media, @NASAHubble. A lot going on there.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Jennifer Wiseman is the senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope in Greenbelt, Maryland. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

JENNIFER WISEMAN: My pleasure.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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After 30 years, the Hubble Space Telescope still offers sharp insight into space.

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Ketchup sauce and it's name actually originated from China. Westerners brought it back to their own country and altered the texture and flavor of ketchup. It originally did not have tomato in it, but in 1812 tomato was added into ketchup. The recipe for ketchup with tomato in it sustained and is now currently used by millions and is one of the most iconic American sauces. This podcast really interested me because I never knew the sauce originated from China. Even the name it self was originally from China.

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The New Season Of ‘Science Diction’ Podcast Brings You ... Ketchup

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Science Friday & WNYC Studios - Science Friday

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The New Season Of ‘Science Diction’ Podcast Brings You ... Ketchup

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An Argument for the benefits of not bathing(Jerry again)  Jeremiah Tannehill 

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An Argument for the benefits of not bathing(Jerry again)  Jeremiah Tannehill 

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I have been taking a lot more baths lately and I wanted to see how it is more beneficial to be bathing more often. When I listened to the podcast I heard that there lots of little tunes microbes on the skin, and that you can get rid of most of them by bathing and washing. But that might be an issue since some microbes have bacteria that prevent our skin from getting harmful bacteria that gives the warts and the disgusting pimples. I also learned in the podcast that companies are using anti bacterial products which apparently get rid of all the fungi and harmful bacterial on the skin, but there modified in a way that might not be healthy to the skin. But if the companies manage to succeed in getting pass the hurdle of preventing your skin from getting worse and less deficient in looking healthier then I would get those.  I’m only going to shower every two days from now . Link: to the podcast https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/benefits-no-bathing/

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The word and sauce “Ketchup” originated from China. The word ketchup comes from the Hokkien word kê-tsaip which literally meant fish-sauce. Ketchup was a brown-ish liquidy sauce that actually did not contain tomatoes. Ketchup was brought to the U.S and people tried to recreate the sauce with oysters, mushroom and many other ingredients. The first recipe made with tomatoes was made  in 1812 and it was called “A Recipe for Love Apple Ketchup.” Ketchup spoiled easily so people added preservatives. A group of people tested preservatives that were in ketchup and they had nasty side effects. One man paid attention to these trials and created a new and improved ketchup that we still use today. His name was Henry J. Heinz. I found this podcast very interesting because I would have never thought about where ketchup came from. The most interesting fact I learned from this podcast was that the word ketchup actually meant fish-sauce.

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The New Season Of ‘Science Diction’ Podcast Brings You ... Ketchup

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Science Friday & WNYC Studios - Science Friday

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The New Season Of ‘Science Diction’ Podcast Brings You ... Ketchup

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Fossil Records Show Hell Ants Had “Mad Max” Style Mandibles

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Fossil Records Show Hell Ants Had “Mad Max” Style Mandibles

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This podcast talks about Hell Ants (Haidomyrmex cerberus) which in a way interested me because of it's headgear. It talks about why they had their headgear like that and how they were different from the modern ant. Also they explain their habits and how there was a wide variety of their species. This intrigued me because of how their special headgear lead to their demise.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. And now it's time for another Charismatic Creature Corner.

[JUNGLE SOUNDS]

[BIRD CAWS]

[LION ROARS]

[MEOW]

Joining us today is our Charismatic Creature Correspondent, Kathleen Davis. Hi, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Hey, Ira. I am here to plead the case that a certain critter is worthy of the title of a Charismatic Creature in the eyes of the Sci Fri community. So if you remember, our other Charismatic Creature Corners, you know that by creature, we mean just about anything. We have argued for slime molds being called charismatic. And by charismatic, we mean something that is as worthy of our interest and enchantment as, say, a little baby sloth.

IRA FLATOW: Ooh, that is a high bar.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Of course, because who isn't delighted by tiny sloths?

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS]

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Part of the challenge, though, is that this week, I am not bringing you a baby sloth because that would just be too easy. Ira, are you familiar with the hell ant, by chance?

IRA FLATOW: You know, I can't say that I have ever met one.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Right off the bat, do you think this sounds like a charismatic creature?

IRA FLATOW: With the name Hell in it, I don't know, you know. You're here to convince me. So go ahead and do that.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So how about if I add dinosaurs to it?

IRA FLATOW: Well, now you've gotten my attention.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So Hell Ants are a subspecies of ants that lived in the Cretaceous period. That's when T rexes and velociraptors were running around the earth. The biggest hell ants were about a centimeter and a half long, which isn't much different than what we get from modern ants.

But what makes hell ants so cool is that they have pretty wild headgear. So they have these jaws that kind of look like mammoth tusks that stick out of their faces and go up and down in the same motion that our jaws do. Hell ants also have these horn-like protrusions that come out of their foreheads. Experts say all these things going on the hell ant's face probably helped them catch and eat prey.

So I can tell that you're not quite convinced yet that hell ants are charismatic creatures. So to help me out, I've got Dr. Phil Barden. He's an assistant professor of biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark.

Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Barden.

PHIL BARDEN: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Hi, Phil. Good to have you.

PHIL BARDEN: Hi there.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So can you explain to us why hell ants are called hell ants?

PHIL BARDEN: I can. Yes. You know, we came up with a common name, hell ant, a few years ago because we sort of got tired of saying these bizarre ants with these funky appendages that were a hundred million years old. And the reason why we came up with the name hell ants specifically is because the first species that was described, the scientific name for it was Haidomyrmex cerberus.

And so Haidomyrmex meaning haido, as in Hades, and myrmex is sort of Greek for ant. Then cerberus, if you're familiar, is sort of the hound that guards hell. So this researcher named the first ant Haidomyrmex cerberus back in the mid '90s because of the animal's really striking bizarre appearance.

IRA FLATOW: I want to hear more about that headgear that Kathleen mentioned earlier. Why would an ant need to have such a strange face? Why would it have evolved this way? I need to know more.

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, one of the reasons why it's so strange is because there's so many ants that we know about today. So on the planet currently, there's about 15,000 known ant species. And they have all kinds of funky things going on. They have really strange mouth parts. Some of them are highly specialized, but none quite like what we see in hell ants.

So what we think is happening here is this kind of interesting pattern called evolutionary integration. So what happens is when you have this innovation in the way that different features on a body move, it might allow two different features to interact for the first time. And that opens up this new kind of evolutionary pathway to new adaptive space.

And what we think is with hell ants, first of all, this ability to move their mandibles up and down. And then that put the head and the mouth parts together in this integration style for the first time. And that is what kind of generated this crazy range of adaptations that we don't see today.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: There are different, types of hell ants. Headgear, is that right? It sounds like they can be a little bit different.

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a wide variety in the horns that we see in these ants. Some of them are just tiny teeth. They're almost kind of cute. It's just a little nub. And then some of them are these huge elongate unicorn-like horns.

Some of them are serrated. They look like chainsaws. Some of them are bifurcated and really lobe-like. And you know, some also have these spoon-like projections so they look like these giant lobe-like paddles that come right out of the forehead.

And it really does make you wonder how and why this evolved, because it's something that we just never see today.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Ira, did you hear that, that some of them had cute little teeth?

IRA FLATOW: I like the spoon. I mean, I've never heard of an animal with a spoon-like projection coming out of their head. So you're sort of winning me over on this one.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, Phil, you've got this whole lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology that studies social insects, including the hell ants. How do you know that hell ants were social?

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah, that's a great question. So hell ants are right at the base of the ant evolutionary tree. So the first time that we see ants in the fossil record about 100 million years ago, some of them are hell ants. And so one of the first questions we had was whether or not these were social in the same way that modern ants are, if they have a social society and a structure. We have queens and workers.

We know that hell ants are social because we have multiple different castes of the species. So we have workers and queens from the same species. And the reason we know that is- you have to learn a little bit about how modern ants start colonies. So if you look at a modern ant colony, what you'll see is that there's a queen and a variety of workers. All the workers are female, by the way. And the queen is also female, of course.

And so what happens is the queens have wings. And when queens start a new colony, they actually fly off and they tear off their own wings to dig out a new colony. And that gives you an idea of where at in the kind of social development these species are.

And we have hell ants that have wing scars, indicating that they were queens starting new colonies. They chewed off their own wings, and they were in the process of starting a colony. We also have workers and we have queens with wings. So we have the whole kind of ensemble of social caste members way back in the Cretaceous with these hell ants.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Phil, I don't know if this is going to help or hurt our case here. But I have to ask you about this one particular hell ant your lab has studied. It's trapped in amber, as many of these hell ants are. And this one in particular is in the process of eating an ancient cockroach. I would imagine that this was a pretty exciting find for a hell ant researcher, was it not?

PHIL BARDEN: It really was. Yeah. I mean, this specimen was kind of the final puzzle piece in this mystery, because the first time it was dug up about 100 years ago. And it's been a really kind of open question about how and why it is that we have this ancient diversity in the fossil record.

And your dinosaur analogy is accurate because hell ants really are the dinosaurs of the ant world. They're this group of animals that have specializations that we no longer see today. So we speculated for a while about why it is they have these funky features.

And one of the things that we proposed was that it was this specialized feeding mode, that they were grabbing prey by moving their mouth parts up and down to basically pin them or pierce them against their own head. And we proposed this maybe in 2012 or so.

And people were a bit skeptical then. And by people, I mean the scientists who tend to be skeptical about these kinds of things. And so this fossil conclusively says that these ants had to have moved their mouth parts in this way and that they did use this strange variety of adaptations to capture their prey.

And then Ira, I'll just mention to you. You said that you thought that the spoon bill ant was particularly interesting. That ant we actually think would have impaled prey with its mouth parts against that spoon, basically like a backstop, and then would have drank the blood of the insects, which is called hemolymph.

IRA FLATOW: This is getting better and better as you- [LAUGHS] -keep descibing it.

PHIL BARDEN: It depends on what your definition of charismatic is. That's for sure.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So we talked about the cockroach that was in the specimen with the hell ant. But what else existed in the hell ant circle of life as far as we know? What else would it have preyed on?

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah, that's a cool question. So yeah, this extinct cockroach relative is called Caputoraptor. And it has this funky thing where it has basically a serrated back of the head and serrated shoulders. And people have been kind of asking why that would've been the case. And because this hell ant had its mandibles around, essentially, the neck of this cockroach, we started to speculate that maybe those serrated features were actually to defend against hell ants.

Outside of that Caputoraptor thing, we have a lot of early members of lineages that we know about today, so other early wasp relatives, beetles, for example. And in fact, in this time period, there were beetles that were specialized to live specifically just within ant colonies. So we know that ants were ecologically kind of impactful enough to have species that were specialized to live among them. And then I guess if we have to do the boring stuff and pan out outside of insects, you know, there are all kinds of interesting dinosaurs and pterosaurs and things that are lumbering around above the ants.

IRA FLATOW: So you have an ant that was alive during the time of the dinosaurs. And we have ants that are around today. Is there any connection, relationship, descendancy between the two?

PHIL BARDEN: So the short answer is no, that these hell ants are not the ancestors of modern ants. They're kind of like the distant cousins. So in the same way that Tyrannosaurus rex is a relative of the pigeons you see outside- the pigeons you see outside aren't the descendant of tyrannosaurus Rex. The hell ants are this early lineage offshoot that kind of did its own thing for a while.

But that leads to an interesting question, which is why is it that the hell ants went extinct, whereas modern ants are so ubiquitous, you see them in your kitchen counter. You see them on the sidewalk. Pretty much anywhere you go on the planet where there's land outside of Antarctica, you find ants.

And so one open question we're working on now is, why is it that some early ant lineages kicked the bucket, whereas other groups became really kind of highly successful?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. You know, I was wondering what happened to them. If they're such great hunters and they have such great weapons on their head, what- you know, was it climate change, or was there something that wiped them out?

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah. We don't know exactly the time where we lose hell ants. So the last window into the fossil record that we have hell ants is about 78 million years ago. And then the next time that we have a fossil deposit that we have ants is actually after the K-Pg extinction event 65 million years ago, where we lose non-avian, non-bird, dinosaurs.

So we suspect that hell ant loss could be related to that last mass extinction event. And one thing that we've kind of speculated about is this is a highly specialized adaptation, and it's- I mean, it's really a way to commit to this strategy. There's no backing out from developing these really highly specialized horns and mandibles.

So it could be that this extreme specialization led hell ants to be susceptible to extinction. We found that many of the groups that do really well around extinction periods tend to be generalists, jacks of all trades, that can maybe live in a variety of environments or feed on a variety of different things, because there's a lot of uncertainty in times of extinction. So it could have been that hell ants really just didn't have this generalist strategy. And so this highly specialized strategy was really tricky for them and led to their ultimate demise.

IRA FLATOW: You know, you're not only making a good case for a Charismatic Creature, but you're making a case that we should be seeing these hell ants along the other dinosaurs in museums, right?

PHIL BARDEN: That's right. Yeah. I really do think that people maybe could use some extinct insect analogs. I push for hell ants because, you know, I happen to study fossil ants and I think they're great. But there are a lot of fossil insects that people don't really think about.

We don't see lunchboxes with fossil insects on them. People might know that there were maybe giant dragonflies way back when. But outside of that, people tend to not think about fossil insects. And I think that that could be room for improvement because people see insects in their everyday life. And so if they are more inclined to think about insects going extinct, maybe they think that extinction is a little bit more familiar and a little bit closer to them than if it's something like a tyrannosaurus rex that they might see once every few years or something in a museum.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you just joined us, we're talking with Dr. Phil Barden, assistant professor of biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. Also talking with Charismatic Creature Correspondent, Sci Fri producer Kathleen Davis.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, I am fully onboard that hell ants are charismatic creatures. But before we wrap things up, Phil, have we missed any other aspects of hell ants that make them particularly charismatic, in your opinion?

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah, that's right. So it depends on your definition of charismatic. I will say that one kind of interesting fun thing is that the first hell ant that I worked on a few years ago now actually had those wing scars I was talking about before. And so what that means is that if you go from the perspective of her as a new queen, she is off to found a new colony, so she's chewed off her own wings.

And then she would have founded a new colony. She would have dug out a hole. And many modern art species, once they dig out this hole and they start living inside of it, they never leave. They actually have enough fat stores in their thorax to basically produce the first generation of young. So they never leave the nest again.

This hell ant had the wing scars and was still trapped in amber, which strongly suggests that she was out hunting, probably for her own young. And so maybe that's something that's a little bit charismatic and maybe endearing about hell ants is, of course, they would have cared for their offspring, just as all modern ants do. And they would have had this social structure that we may admire in some ways, although they do often do some terrifying and horrifying things. So maybe that's something that we can kind of take away that might be a little bit charismatic, is they would have cared for their offspring and each other. And I think that's always something that's nice.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, Ira, before I get your verdict, here's a review of some of the things that we have learned about hell ants today. As Phil just told us, they were social creatures. They cared for their offspring. They cared for each other. They had this rich community within their colonies.

They have got some wild-looking headgear. You can't argue with that. And hell ants are part of this murder mystery, of this gap in the ant timeline. So learning more about hell ants can potentially help us learn more about the ants that you may find in your cupboard, perhaps.

So Ira, what is your verdict- charismatic or not charismatic?

IRA FLATOW: Well, you sort of hit the trifecta of ants here. I mean, you have ants that lived during the dinosaur period. Whoever heard of those kinds of ants? And the headgear, crazy headgear, including a spoon-like projection used to attack their enemies.

And what did they attack? Cockroaches. How can you not like an ant that devours cockroaches? I wish we could do a Jurassic Park-y thing, with the amber and bring these ants back, although I may be sorry later on if they get out. But yeah, they're definitely charismatic, in my opinion.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Phil, I don't even know if I have to ask you this question. But do you think these are charismatic creatures?

PHIL BARDEN: Oh, I absolutely do. Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I do appreciate you teaching me about hell ants today. I want to thank you, Phil, for taking time to be with us today.

PHIL BARDEN: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on and for the chance to talk about these weird things.

IRA FLATOW: I hope we have advanced the case for hell ants being charismatic and maybe showing up in a science museum someplace. Dr. Phil Barden is assistant professor of biology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. And he was here teaching us all about hell ants.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So Ira, I do have a question for you before we go. Are there any creatures that you want to learn more about for future Charismatic Creature Corners?

IRA FLATOW: You know, I've learned about these creatures in the past, but I can never get enough of them. And they are the tiny tardigrades. They're just so unique that I would like to know as much as I can about them.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I don't think you're alone on that one. And we're taking ideas for future Charismatic Creature Corners on the Science Friday VoxPop app. And we will take just about anything. We have featured slime molds, Tasmanian tigers, and now hell ants. So we want to know what is next. Listeners can nominate the next Charismatic Creature on the Science Friday VoxPop app. And you can find that wherever you get your apps.

IRA FLATOW: Thank you, Kathleen. Our Charismatic Creature Corner Correspondent Sci Fri Producer, Kathleen Davis.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Thanks, Ira.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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Fossil Records Show Hell Ants Had "Mad Max" Style Mandibles

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In this installment of Charismatic Creature corner, we look at an ancient that might have used its horn to pin down prey.

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EAST AFRICA BATTLE A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS BROUGHT ON BY CLIMATE CHANGE

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EAST AFRICA BATTLE A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS BROUGHT ON BY CLIMATE CHANGE

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I take this topic because my mother is from Kenya which is part of the three countries that make East Africa.
Locust is a form of grasshopper, The locusts that migrated to East Africa are there to stay, they migrated from the desert due to climate change. When it rained all the eggs harshed  and that's why the locusts are plenty. The eggs were there for many generations.The locusts  are so many equivalent to the size of a city.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/east-africa-locusts-climate/

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A New Hope For Corals

This podcast talks about how a company called Mote Marines has created a way to reproduce corals faster. Because of a disease that is very harmful to corals, many corals died and it takes decades to reproduce. So this reproduction product should help corals reproduce.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Over the past few years, news about coral reefs around the world has not been good. Coral populations have been declining dramatically, with climate change remaining a big threat. But this month, we got some good news about corals in the Florida Keys. Here to tell us about it is Dr. Hanna Koch, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida. Welcome, Hanna.

HANNA KOCH: Hi, thank you for having me.

IRA FLATOW: All right, give us the good news. What's the good news?

HANNA KOCH: Oh, well, the great news is that we have documented for the first time worldwide restored corals of a slow-growing mountainous star coral species to be sexually reproductively viable and spawn for the first time in nature.

IRA FLATOW: Where was this done? Tell me exactly what you did.

HANNA KOCH: So Mote has pioneered this technology called micro fragmentation fusion, which is where we will take a colony, we will cut it up into small replicate pieces, grow it in our land nursery, and then we will out-plant those pieces onto a degraded coral head. And those replicate pieces will grow and fuse. So that's the fusion part of that methodology.

And essentially, they will form a larger colony faster. And the reason why that is so important is because for many stony coral species, sexual maturity is a condition of size, not age. So you can think of it like puberty. And so it just means that they have to reach a minimum size in order to produce the next generation of baby corals.

And so with this breakthrough, we've basically been able to show that with this methodology we can create reproductively viable corals of a slow-growing mass of species within only a handful of years instead of decades. Because in nature, wild corals would take about 10, to 20, 30, and so on, decades, to reach sexual maturity and produce the next generation.

So the fact that we can cut that down significantly to just a handful of years is really a breakthrough for coral restoration science in general, and bodes well for the faster recovery of our reefs and of our restored populations.

IRA FLATOW: Have you tried to repopulate a dead coral reef with these new babies?

HANNA KOCH: Yes, so Mote engages in multi-species coral reef restoration, also resilience-based restoration. And so we out-plant thousands of fragments of different species, species that are all key reef building species. And what that means is that these species are foundational species. They're the ones that create the backbone of our reefs. And we have been carrying out coral reef restoration for several years now for a number of different species. And this year was really exciting because it was the first year that we had multiple populations of different species that we restored to the reefs actually become sexually mature and spawn.

IRA FLATOW: And what were the major hurdles that you had to jump over?

HANNA KOCH: Well, one thing is that corals grow slowly in general. And then we have to deal with the stressors that are happening naturally in the environment. So, for example, these corals that spawned, we out-planted them in 2015. And in 2015, there was a global bleaching event. In 2017, the Florida Keys experienced a category 4 hurricane, Irma. And in 2019, that site was hit by the stony coral tissue loss disease, which is the deadliest coral disease outbreak ever recorded on a contemporary reef, and certainly for Florida's coral reef.

So we are doing our best to restore these corals and these species, and use a variety of science-based strategies, but we always have to deal with natural, unpredictable events that happen in nature. But the fact that our corals are surviving these natural stressful events, and able to have enough energy to put toward sexual reproduction is great. It gives us optimism, and hope, and shows that what we're doing is working, and that it should continue to work as we move forward.

IRA FLATOW: These are really resilient corals it looks like. Did you have to go find this species or this kind of coral that you would expect to be able to overcome these hurdles?

HANNA KOCH: We'll find them in nature. So because Florida's coral reef has already experienced a number of stressors over the last decades, many of the corals that are out there today are already considered resilient. They've already gone through stressful events. And so they're survivors for a reason. And so we can use those survivors to propagate more corals.

Another method is that we will expose these corals to different stressors or different combinations of stressors, like high temperature or different diseases, find the strains that are resilient or resistant to these stressors, and then propagate them. And when we out-plant and restore corals, two ways that we can ensure resilience is, one, making sure that we put out high genetic diversity.

So we're not putting out just a few of what are considered the best or the top performers, because the environment can always change. So we put out high genetic diversity, but we also put out corals and strains that we have tested in the lab, using controlled experiments to identify those strains that are resilient to the different stressors. So we can make sure that we're putting out corals that have a higher chance of surviving.

IRA FLATOW: I'm sure you'll be keeping an eye on these out-planted corals for a while. That's a term- out-planted- that I hadn't heard before. What will you be looking for?

HANNA KOCH: So moving forward, part of my job as a coral reproduction scientist is to continue to monitor the health, the survival, the growth of our corals as part of our restored populations. Also to monitor the sexual maturity of these populations, looking at what proportion become sexually mature over time. Are they continuing to reproduce sexually and produce the next generation of offspring every year?

Also, we conduct multi-species restoration. So I will apply these monitoring assessments to all the species that we out-plant. And also, monitor for other critical developmental milestones. So spawning is only one aspect of the sexual cycle. You still have to have fertilization and settlement, meaning the larvae will settle back down onto the reef, undergo metamorphosis, and develop into a coral that becomes a part of the adult population. And so every one of these aspects is critical to becoming a self-sustaining population. And so moving forward, I will monitor for those other critical developmental milestones.

IRA FLATOW: I want to bring on another coral expert so that we can talk a little more about the state of corals in 2020. Dr Holly Putnam is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Welcome to Science Friday.

HOLLY PUTNAM: Hi, thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Good news that we're hearing out of Florida to you?

HOLLY PUTNAM: Yes, I think it's fantastic news. I think in these times, any positive news is good, and any positive news for corals is definitely great.

IRA FLATOW: And do you think that you and other coral scientists can apply this specific method for coral populations around the world?

HOLLY PUTNAM: Definitely. I think that these kinds of restoration approaches are growing in capacity, growing in scale, and growing in the science-based nature of them. And that's where really our work is focused, in the science-based nature of these, to not only grow corals out in the wild, but track many of these features that Hanna is talking about, to track their physiology, track their performance, track the generations as they move through. So being able to fragment corals, have them grow quickly, be out-planted, or be housed in nurseries and then out-planted provides this aspect for a variety of species and a variety of locations.

IRA FLATOW: We've been hearing so much bad news about corals over the past few years, how are they doing in 2020?

HOLLY PUTNAM: That's a great question. I think, sadly, a lot of this bad news is correct and it's continuing. I think as we watch climate change continue to occur, as seawater temperatures increase, as we get more heatwaves occurring, as we get more tropical storms, we are seeing negative effects on corals. We're seeing those negative effects that are removing these large adult colonies from the populations.

That makes it harder for corals to make a comeback after these perturbation or disturbance events. And so overall, though, we still have thriving reefs around the globe. We definitely have hard-hit areas, and we definitely have global trajectories that are in a negative decline.

IRA FLATOW: Hanna, what about in Florida where you are? As a scuba diver, I've gone back to places that I used to scuba dive in, and there's so many dead and dying corals in those areas. Give us an idea of what the population is doing in Florida, in your region.

HANNA KOCH: So, as Holly already mentioned, there are certain regions that have been especially hard hit. And Florida's coral reef is definitely one of those regions. Some of the key reef building species in this area have experienced greater than 90% population declines and are now facing functional extinction. Which basically means that the populations are so small that they can no longer provide critical reef habitat structure or shelter for other important marine organisms, like fish.

It also means that their populations are so small that they cannot effectively undergo sexual reproduction and produce the next generation of corals that can replenish depleted adult populations. So we have a number of species that are facing this level. And we do have a species that are considered locally extinct. And I have to say that, despite the sad state of corals here, I have to say that I think 2020 has provided a lot of hope, a lot of optimism.

We've seen a number of organizations come together, state, local, federal, to engage in the NOAA seven iconics reefs mission. They're putting $97 million over a 15-year period to restore seven key cites along Florida's coral reef. So Mote is a part of that initiative. As I said before, we documented for the first time that many of our restored populations are sexually mature and spawning.

And then I also want to add that for the mountainous dark coral species that we documented for the first time to spawn after the micro fragmentation fusion methodology, some of the plants that we did observe to spawn last week, were out-plants that I observed to contract the stony coral tissue loss disease last year. They were treated with antibiotics, and we're able to recover from this deadly disease, and still be reproductively viable the following year.

And I have to say that that provides immense hope for us, that we can make a difference. And if we just continue to work together and engage in these science-based restoration strategies that we will make a difference. And hopefully, in a short amount of time than what we may have initially expected, that we will see greater accomplishments for population recovery for these critical species.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow and this is Science Friday from WNYC studios. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation about the state of corals in 2020 with Dr Hanna Koch, postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr Holly Putnam, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Dr Koch, what was your secret sauce for getting these corals to grow so quickly and being able to collapse something that might take a decade or more into just a few years?

HANNA KOCH: That's a great question. And we are still investigating the mechanisms behind this increased growth response we see once we cut a coral. But when we take these colonies and we cut them into smaller pieces, it elicits this growth response that allows them to grow faster. So if you think about a cut on your arm or something like that, you tend to heal quite fast. So it will heal over a few days. And your cells will regrow and cover that wound.

And so we are looking into what it is that really drives that response in terms of faster growth when you do cut a coral, using appropriate techniques. And basically, we've shown that through this micro fragmentation fusion process, that when we do cut the coral, it elicits a growth response that allows them to grow 25 to 50 times faster than just a natural coral in the wild would grow.

And so for a species that grows anywhere from half a centimeter to a centimeter a year, we're able to actually produce decades sized colonies within only two to three years.

IRA FLATOW: That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. Dr Putnam, tell us what the big issues we need to keep an eye on that are going to impact coral health around the world.

HOLLY PUTNAM: Yes, I would say the biggest issues at this point are at the global scale. So the biggest issues we're seeing that are causing mass mortality are things like increased sea water temperature and marine heatwaves. And these are driven by increases in atmospheric CO2 and greenhouse gas concentrations, obviously that are driving the warming of the atmosphere, which is translating to driving warming of the ocean.

And this change in the overall climate is creating these marine heat waves and creating greater high-frequency and larger storms. So we have overall disruption to the environment that the corals are growing in. And the reason why heat is such a big deal for corals is because it can break down this relationship or this symbiosis that the corals have with their single-celled algae living inside them. The coral expels, or that algae leaves the coral. And you can see through the coral tissues. And that that's what we call coral bleaching.

And when the corals are bleached, they're essentially starving. Because they don't have that energy that's being generated by the single cell, the algae inside the coral. And so that's how we can get basically a lower overall health of the coral. They can be more sensitive to things like disease, and to pollution, and to local effects.

So the overarching driver of increases in temperature are driving coral bleaching and driving loss of corals on the reef, when this heating and this bleaching is prolonged. In addition to that, we have the concern of ocean acidification. The overall impacts on the reef are more variable. While scientific studies show sensitivity for corals growing under ocean acidification, which is the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere into the oceans that's driving a decline in the pH of the oceans, making it energetically harder for them to calcify and to get these building blocks of their skeletons.

We see these declines in experiments in the lab. But there's a lot of variation there in different species out on the reef. So we're keeping an eye on ocean acidification and it contributes to the decline of coral calcification. So I would say at this global scale, we're talking about ocean warming and ocean acidification.

And then the local scale, we're talking about local human impacts. So nutrient runoff onto the reefs that can disrupt the balance of coral growth versus algal growth that can disrupt that, such that are taking over all the space that's usually taken up by corals and can be smothering them. We can have other pollutants running off on the coral reefs. And all of these things together are contributing to increases in diseases.

So basically, we're seeing this higher sensitivity because of both global and local stressors coming together. And so if we can take care of these global stressors, we have a better chance at dealing with local stressors, the corals dealing with local stressors. And we can actually take action again at a local level and mitigate those local stressors. So really, global action is critical and local action is crucial.

IRA FLATOW: Well, at least we got some good news today out of Florida and the restoration of the reefs there that might be applied to the rest of the world. I would like to thank both of you for taking time with us today. Dr Hanna Koch, postdoctoral research fellow at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr Holly Putnam, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

HANNA KOCH: Thank you so much.

HOLLY PUTNAM: Thank you so much. And thank you for highlighting corals.

IRA FLATOW: You're Welcome. One of my favorite topics.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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After years of bad news for the aquatic icons, some good news out of Florida.

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Jack McCroskey
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/good-coral-news/ I found this article really interesting because I learned like five new things. It’s also really cool to know corals have a huge light being shown on them this year, after a Micro Fragmentation Fusion was discovered. It’s a really neat thing where scientist spice up a healthy resistant coral, and then they grow those little pieces and then finally put them on dead or small corals to bring them back to life or grow them to a sexually mature size. Another thing I learned was that coral don’t become sexually mature based on how old they are, it’s based on how big they are. That is why MFF is so important, as it can grow corals much faster than they would normally grow, and get them to a sexually mature size so that they can reproduce and create the next generation of coral. Overall it was a great podcast and I learned a lot.

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I learned lots of new and interesting things when I was listening to this podcast! I learned that Texas has about 600 different species of birds, that’s the most species of birds in the entire US! San Antonio, which is a city in Texas, is the confluence of 3 different eco-regions. Grassland birds love a diversity of different landscapes. Some grassland birds like tall grass, some like short, & others like dense grass. Cattle play a huge role in this because cattle can create a diversity on the landscape. 1400-3800 birds are negatively impacted by wind-farms and buildings. I also learned that hunting can be important sometimes because it helps manage populations of deer and other wildlife. This podcast was really fun to listen to!

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow, coming to you from the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas.

San Antonio is a great place for birds. You've got the Edwards Plateau to the Northwest, the Gulf Coast to the Southeast, the hill country nearby, and a great intersection of ecosystems that make the area either a good place for birds to live or to stop over on their way to somewhere else. And maybe you like watching birds, or you even put out food for them. Maybe you do that in your feeder.

But have you considered all the many different ways that human actions can affect bird ecology? That's what we'll be talking about, including some ways that you may not have thought of. So let me introduce my guest. Iliana Pena is Director of Conservation Programs for the Texas Wildlife Association based here in San Antonio.

She's also former director of the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center just south of town. Welcome to Science Friday.

ILIANA PENA: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Jennifer Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Ecology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Welcome to Science Friday.

Iliana, for those of us not from here, and I'm looking at myself, what makes San Antonio such a good place for birds?

ILIANA PENA: Well, you mentioned at the beginning, San Antonio is the confluence of three different eco regions. So you get a beautiful assemblage of birds that come into this area. We've got at Mitchell Lake, we have wetlands. We have hill country. We have South Texas plains. So it's just a really diverse environment. And so it welcomes lots of birds.

IRA FLATOW: Now I understand that you have a special fondness for shorebirds.

ILIANA PENA: I do. In my other job before I moved to Texas Wildlife Association, I did a lot of work with Texas Audubon on coastal bird species. A lot of people in Texas don't know, but there are all these tiny islands along the Texas coast that are nurseries for all of your brown pelicans, reddish egrets. That's where they're all born. So yeah, I have a affinity for that little bit.

IRA FLATOW: Can't claim you. Can't blame you. I love shorebirds myself. Jennifer, I couldn't help but notice that your accent might not be from around here. Are there local bird species that now you have come to admire locally?

JENNIFER SMITH: Yeah, for sure. And that's one of the things which attracted me to come to Texas for this job, was I teach ornithology and avian ecology. And this is a great place not only to do research, but to teach. And yeah, of course the road runners, it's our school mascot. Go, runners.

So, you know, and a wide range of other species. I mean, Texas is home to 600 species.

IRA FLATOW: How many?

ILIANA PENA: A little over, yeah.

JENNIFER SMITH: 600.

IRA FLATOW: 600 species.

JENNIFER SMITH: So it's the state with the biggest number of birds in the entire US.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

JENNIFER SMITH: And so-

Yeah, and so not only am I an academic ornithologist, I'm a birder, too. And so this is an awesome place to be.

IRA FLATOW: So you say. Everybody knows that Texas does things big, and they do things big with bird species.

JENNIFER SMITH: Yeah, true.

IRA FLATOW: Too. Now Iliana, I know that you're a bird person, but you spend a lot of time these days thinking about cattle and ranching.

ILIANA PENA: I do.

IRA FLATOW: Tell us why.

ILIANA PENA: Ironically. Well, because Texas is a private land state. So I imagine many of you have heard that we are 95% privately owned, and there are cattle all over this state. So when you're talking bird conservation, you've got to be talking to landowners.

IRA FLATOW: Give me an idea of what you mean by that. How do you deal with the two?

ILIANA PENA: So I think many of us know that bison used to roam the central part of the United States into Canada and other grazers. And so our grasslands, our environments kind of evolved with grazing animals. And so today, we have cattle on our landscapes.

But we use those cattle sometimes in maybe not the most appropriate way. So more and more landowners are beginning to understand that you can use grazers or cattle as a tool to improve habitat. So we are working with landowners to encourage what we call regenerative grazing or ecological grazing.

IRA FLATOW: Now we have a couple of slides that we're going to show right now that talk about their before and after pictures of the habitats. What are we seeing up here?

ILIANA PENA: So most often, people that graze will sometimes do what we call continuous grazing. So you have 1,000 acres. You may put out 200 cattle, and they just kind of do what they want to do, right? So they may make the impacts on that landscape kind of over and over again. Well, what we're encouraging landowners to do is to do rotational grazing or regenerative grazing.

And what you see in the first picture is a property just outside of Marfa, Texas that was continuously grazed for years. And when the new landowner purchased it, they implemented this rotational grazing, which, more than anything, is all about rest period, right? So the cattle will come and graze really hard. But then they'll leave, and they can leave that area for more than three months, six months. And this is what you see afterwards. So you don't want to see bare ground. Ideally, you want to see fords or vegetation cover on the ground.

IRA FLATOW: And you also see not just the plants. You see that it affects the soil-

ILIANA PENA: Oh, yeah.

IRA FLATOW: -itself too, right?

ILIANA PENA: Don't get me started on soil.

IRA FLATOW: Go ahead. I'm getting you started. There's a couple of pictures for you to talk.

ILIANA PENA: No, it's absolutely fascinating. Like, I had one of these, like, [EXPLOSION] moments, right? And cattle are these amazing little biological creatures. If you use them as a good tool, they're dropping feces and urine, hair, saliva on the ground. They're trampling it all up. They're putting it in the soil. Then you take them away, and they improve soil. And if we improve our soil health, you guys, we actually improve soil's ability to capture water, to improve water quality. And in a state like Texas, that's- and all over the United States- that's important.

So here what you're seeing, the first one is like a brick, right? Does it look like a brick? That soil is not doing what it can for the landowner. It's not doing what it can for wildlife. If you look on the one on your right, it's very porous. It has organic material in it. It's actually able- see all those little porous areas that allow water to filter through and be captured? It's acting like a sponge like it's supposed to. So good soil health is key to a land manager doing what they would like on their land. Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: But what does this all have to do with the birds, though?

ILIANA PENA: Well, so grassland birds s a guild a birds love a diversity of different landscapes, right? So some like short grasses. Some like tall grasses. Some like real dense grasses. Some don't. And when you've got cattle doing good work on the land, they're creating a diversity on the landscape. And so you begin seeing bird populations benefit from good grazing.

IRA FLATOW: One of my favorite things about Texas besides a lot of good food here in town and being San Antonio is the wind energy that you have, the wind power that you have in this state. Jennifer, you've done work on how wind farms affect prairie chickens. For those of us who don't know what a prairie chicken is.

JENNIFER SMITH: Yeah, so I did this work up in Nebraska. But even though I did it in Nebraska, it's really relevant to Texas. I worked on the greater prairie chicken up in Nebraska, but we have lesser prairie chickens here. We also have the endangered [INAUDIBLE] here. And obviously, Texas, again, is ranked number one. So Texas, being big again, ranked number one in wind energy development in terms of install capacity.

So the work I did is completely irrelevant to Texas. But yeah, so we did a really big project led by [INAUDIBLE] Powell. He's a professor at UNL. And it's a big team of us, and we looked at lots of things. We looked at the effects of pre-existing 36 turbine facility on nest survival, female survival, [INAUDIBLE] survival, and numerous things that we can look at in terms of population growth. And the wind farm had no effect on any of those things. Yeah.

And then some of the other things we looked at were- we asked the question, do the wind farms affect the behavior of male prairie chickens? So something about prairie chickens is what's really cool is that in the breeding season, at the beginning of the breeding season, the males congregate at known sites, which we call [? boomer ?] grounds or [? lex, ?] where a bunch of males- think David Attenborough's show, like a wide number of males come to these booming grounds, and they perform elaborate displays for females. And the females come, and then they pick the best male with whom to mate. And then after that, the male has nothing to do with the rest of the raising with chicks or incubating.

So yeah, so we looked at the behavior. And we did actually find that the wind farm did affect the behavior of these males at the [? lex. ?] So we found, interestingly, that the males at sites closest to the wind farm spent more time in breeding, so courtship behaviors, than individuals further away. So that was one of the only kind of effects that we saw of the wind farms and prairie chickens.

IRA FLATOW: When you hear wind farms and birds, you probably think of birds smacking into the turbine blades, right? But that's not what you look at mainly.

JENNIFER SMITH: Right. So when we think about wind farms and birds, we probably all think about those direct impacts. That's what we see a lot reported in the news. And those do exist. We know that between 140,000 and 328,000 birds are impacted directly through collisions on wind farms, but that's not what we considered. So we looked at what's known as indirect effects. So for example, do wind farms cause habitat loss, which could have an effect indirectly on birds? Or do they act as barriers to their movements?

IRA FLATOW: And coming from the east where we have these giant buildings, I know how many birds are affected by those buildings that no one talks about very much.

JENNIFER SMITH: Right. And so estimates in the literature suggest that there's a number of things affecting birds potentially. And I say potentially because we're still very at the infancy of this research. But it looks like buildings are actually having quite a large impact on birds more so than wind turbines.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Let's go to the floor here. Yes, first question.

AUDIENCE: You spoke about the large land owners. What about the small land owners that maybe have less than an acre? What can we do besides sticking out a bird feeder or sticking out a hummingbird feeder or a birdhouse?

ILIANA PENA: I think actually our smaller landowners are wonderfully able to help us with pollinators. Pollinators need a lot of help. And you have the ability to make a choice about what kind of yard you choose to have. And so I would encourage small landowners. Like you said, you mentioned about an acre, but encouraging you to help pollinators. Because that supports insects. That supports birds and the like, so.

IRA FLATOW: But you also are studying bird feeders.

JENNIFER SMITH: Yeah, and so at the moment I'm starting a big project here in San Antonio, which actually is integrating citizen scientists. So if anyone is interested in doing some really cool citizen science here in San Antonio, get in touch. Awesome, I see some fingers. Brilliant.

But this project here in San Antonio is running on from some of my PhD work that looked at the effects of garden bird feeding in the UK. So we found that bird feeding actually decreased clutch size, so the number of eggs that a bird produces, which is actually kind of opposite to pretty much any other study that's been done.

But that really highlights a really important point that you can do one scientific study on a question. But you often have to replicate it because these results can be site and species specific. So we found that. We found- and this is kind of a consistent finding across studies- we found that feeding on birds advance when they lay their eggs and when they initiated building their nests. So that basically in a nutshell means that they bred earlier.

And that can have important consequences because birds, at least in some species, birds that are able to leave the nest earlier in a season have a higher likelihood of surviving over the winter. Because they've kind of got more time to build up their fat reserves, for example. And then we found some slight changes in some other behaviors. So for example, we found- and I should say this work was done on two species closely related to chickadees, blue and great tits.

And we found that they spent longer in incubation behavior compared to birds which weren't fed, which allowed them to shorten the amount of time that it took for the eggs to hatch. And again, this is important because it was shorter incubation period, and those birds hatched sooner and could leave the nest earlier.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Iliana, let's talk about hunting. I know quail hunting is very popular here. Give us an idea of the interplay between hunters and the quail and how hunting affects the quail population.

ILIANA PENA: So hunting is a huge major contributor to conservation. I mean, yeah. Honestly, hunting is used to help manage populations of deer and other wildlife. So hunting used as a part of a management plan is very appropriate and important to manage some species.

Regarding quail, our hunters and our conservationists are the biggest contributors to conservation dollars for studying bobwhite quail and research. And so, yeah. And a lot of people aren't aware of this, but our model of conservation, if you are impassioned about protecting the environment, hunters and hunter dollars actually contribute to over 69% of the conservation dollars that support our wildlife.

And unfortunately, we're seeing less and less hunting. But I have to say there's a bit of an uptick. More and more people are beginning to say, you know what's better than organic? Wild game. Anyway, as it relates to quail, the interesting thing about bobwhite quail is as we do good for bobwhite quail, we do good for a slew or a guild of grassland birds.

And so it's funny. It's an iconic bird. People- I don't know. Raise or by applause, how many have ever scared up a covey of quail in your lifetime?

Isn't that amazing? And sadly, bobwhite quail are in decline. And Texas is in one of those places, South Texas and in the panhandle, in which those areas where those birds are doing OK. But it's a challenge, and it's sad to think that my six-year-old daughter may never get to experience that. But as I said, what we do for quail is good for other grassland birds. And so that's why quail and hunter dollars are important.

JENNIFER SMITH: I just want to add a little bit there. The project that I spoke about on wind farms and great prairie chickens, that's actually funded through what we call Pittman-Robertson dollars. That's excise tax on hunting equipment. So we were awarded that money through in Nebraska. Again, parks commission. And even if you don't hunt, you can go out and buy a duck stamp. And that money goes towards conservation.

IRA FLATOW: I want to thank Iliana Pena, director of conservation programs for the Texas Wildlife Association. Jennifer Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Ecology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Again, thanks to both of you for being with us today.

Still feeling a little bird crazy? Our Science Friday Book Club has been reading Jennifer Ackerman's The Genius of Birds and learning about how smart birds are. Pick up the book, and check out ScienceFriday.com/BookClub to join the discussion. Taking us to the break, our musical guests for the evening, [INAUDIBLE].

[MUSIC PLAYING]

After the break, we take you inside the world's most dangerous bio lab safely after this.

[SINGING IN SPANISH]

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.
Copyright © 2019 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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How human actions-from bird feeders to wind farms-can affect the health of bird populations.

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Pie is a delicious pattern but very challenging make. To make a flakey and yummy pie that is perfect you'll need flour, sugar, butter, salt, and shortening. There are three phases when making the dough. The first phase it pockets of fat. The next phases is flour and water turning into gluten, and lastly the fat melt and separates the flour and water creating a flakey pie crust to enjoy.

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The science behind baking consistently tasty, flaky pie crust.

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https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/amazon-rainforest-fire/

The Brazilian rainforest is burning. The Amazon is experiencing an insane record number. There was 70,000 fires as of 2019. It’s an 83% increase. The size of the fires are about a size of a soccer pitch. The fires in the Amazon is create by climate change.

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Andrew's Podcast: Can Video Games be Used as Teaching Tools?

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Andrew's Podcast: Can Video Games be Used as Teaching Tools?

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In this Science Friday podcast, Ira Flatow is joined by Zach Klein, CEO of DIY.org, and educational psychologist Bruce Homer to discuss the educational benefits of games like Minecraft. I learned that some teachers are using Minecraft as a teaching tool in the classroom. One teacher said that he made a Minecraft world where students had to solve math puzzles or science trivia questions.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/can-video-games-be-used-as-teaching-tools/

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A Mysterious Gas Is Discovered In The Milky Way

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A Mysterious Gas Is Discovered In The Milky Way

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Recently Scientists have discovered a new type of cloud/gad in the center of the galaxy(galactic center). The center of our galaxy is 27000 light years away. The new gas is called defused light. Scientists found this by pictures taken from the biggest telescope Hubble. The gas is leaking over time and will run out in a couple million years. I found this podcast very interesting because I learned a lot of details about our own galaxy that I did not even know, such as how far away the center of the galaxy is.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, we'll hear how indoor ventilation is impacting the spread of COVID-19 and why hardly anyone is talking about it. And we'll talk to a researcher studying connections between the microbiome and cancer immunotherapy.

But first, the Milky Way. It's a swirling galaxy of billions of stars, including our own. But what is going on far away from our little celestial neighborhood at the center of the galaxy? With help from the world's largest ground-based radio telescope, scientists recently looked there and uncovered something strange. Science Friday producer Katie Feather has more.

KATIE FEATHER: When I first heard the news researchers had discovered mysterious clouds of dense gas at the center of our galaxy, I realized that I don't know where the center of our galaxy actually is. Do you?

So we asked Dr. Enrico Di Teodoro, one of the scientists behind this discovery, to help us answer some fundamental questions about what is happening at the center of our own Milky Way. Dr. Enrico Di Teodoro is a researcher in astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Di Teodoro, welcome to Science Friday.

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Thank you very much for having me.

KATIE FEATHER: So the first question I have is actually a deceptively simple one. Where is the center of our galaxy located?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Yeah, that's actually a very good question. Because, as you probably know, our sun and ourselves, we live in a spiral galaxy that we call the Milky Way. And you can imagine our galaxy as a thin rotating disk of some several hundred billions of stars and lots of gas, mostly hydrogen gas.

And our sun is located quite far away from the center of this disk because we are at a distance of about 27,000 light years from it, which means that life takes 27,000 years to travel from the galactic center to us.

And this also implies that when we look at the center of our galaxy, we are looking at events that happened 27,000 years ago. And if you want to see the center of our galaxy at night, you should look in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. And if it is dark enough, you will notice a clear patch of diffused light. And that's exactly the center of our Milky Way.

KATIE FEATHER: Oh, wow. So you can actually see it from outside at night if it's dark enough.

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Exactly, yes.

KATIE FEATHER: What does a clear patch of diffused light look like? Like, what exactly am I looking for?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: I mean, when you look at the night sky, you see all the single stars. But there is also what we call the Milky Way. I mean, and it's like a diffused emission, so diffused light that goes across the sky. And the most luminous part of this diffused emission is the center of our galaxy.

KATIE FEATHER: OK, so that's what it looks like if we were standing outside at night looking up at the sky. But if we could travel to this spot, the center of our galaxy, what would you actually see there?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Yeah, I mean, the galactic center is like the downtown of our galaxy. So there are a lot of very interesting things happening there. So, first of all, the galactic center is a very crowded place in terms of stars. So there are millions of stars all packed together in a very small volume.

And the night sky for any particular inhabitant in the galactic center would be absolutely spectacular. Because there would be a million stars, very bright with brightness greater than the brightest stars in our sky, which is serious.

And this also means that you could easily read a newspaper at midnight, just relying on the starlight alone. So it's a very different environment from where we are. And beside the stars, the galactic center is also interesting because there is a supermassive black hole, which is four million times more masculine than our sun.

And however, it's also very dangerous because all these stars are very young and very massive. And they can easily explode as supernovae. And they can release a lot of energy. And the black hole as well can release a huge amount of energy when the matter falls onto it.

KATIE FEATHER: So you recently used a ground-based telescope to look at the center of our galaxy. And you noticed this weird type of gas emitting from it. What was strange about it? What caught your eye?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: So, basically, all this energy is like a huge bomb that creates a shockwave that blasts away everything, and in particular, gas, which is light and easy to move around. And this gas can be even pushed out the galaxy and escape if the shockwave is strong enough.

So this is what we call a galactic point, OK? And for an analogy with winds here on Earth. But this particular wind moves with velocities of a few million miles per hour, so it's very fast. And it extends for several ten thousands of light years.

So, yes, as we said, for this particular study, we used a telescope in the mountains of Chile in South America. This is called apex. And this particular telescope can see microwave light. But this light is coming from the coldest place in the universe. In particular, we observed carbon monoxide gas, which is very abundant in the universe. And this gas looks exactly like the clouds that we see here on Earth.

KATIE FEATHER: So mixed in with this hot galactic wind that we already knew about, you've now discovered these clouds of colder gas. What does that mean? What are you expecting is happening there?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Yeah, exactly. As you said, this galactic wind is very hot plasma gas, and I'm talking about temperatures of millions degrees. And this is what we call the Fermi Bubbles, which are exactly that. There are two enormous bubbles filled with fast-moving, hot gas.

And now we have discovered that within these hot bubbles, there are a bunch of cloudlets of cooled and condensed gas with temperature of minus 449. And these clouds are floating around and moving with a hot flow. So this is what we call molecular gas because it's the only gas cooled enough to contain complex molecules.

And the existence of these cold gas islands within the hot gas motion was very surprising and puzzling because it is like to see ice cubes floating in all kind of lava. You wouldn't expect them to last a very long time without melting.

And also, another very puzzling aspect is how those bands of gas clouds got there. Because hot gas is light and very easy to push, but cold gas is not. It is very heavy. And it is like if you blow on a bowling ball, and you try to make it move.

So we think that the energy released by our galaxy is not enough to easily push this dense gas out. Therefore, we do not know yet how this happened. This is a second mystery that we are still trying to actually investigate with new observation.

KATIE FEATHER: Do we know how long this gas has been there?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Well, we don't know exactly for how long this wind in the center of our galaxy has been active. But we think it's at least 10 million years, probably much more. And, of course, the condition of the center of the galaxy can change with time.

And the black hole can become more or less active. The star formation can be more or less advanced. Therefore, we expect that the strength of this galactic wind also can change with that.

KATIE FEATHER: So why do we think this gas is there? I mean, what's it doing there? What's it used for?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: OK, this gas is outflowing from our galaxy. So it's just being pushed out. But what is very important about this discovery is that this gas may have a strong impact on the future of our galaxy.

That's because the cold condensed gas that we have observed flowing from the Milky Way center is the same kind of material that galaxies used to form stars. And if a significant amount of this gas is lost because it's driven out with this wind, like our data suggests, you can imagine that at some point, our galaxy will run out of the fuel that it needs to assemble new stars.

And it is like when gas is leaking from the fuel tank, and there is no replenishment of gas, at some point, we finish it and we stop it. And if the Milky Way stops its star formation, well, this would have very important consequences for the future of our galaxy. Because the life of a galaxy that actively forms stars is very different from the life of a galaxy that doesn't form stars anymore.

But, anyway, this is not going to be a problem for us human beings because this transformation of the Milky Way would not happen earlier than several thousand years.

KATIE FEATHER: Wow. So the center of our galaxy is like a fuel tank leaking this star-forming gas that it needs to form more stars. When it's leaking this gas, where is that gas actually going? Is it getting blown away out into the galaxy? Or is it affecting other things in our galaxy?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Yeah, the fate of the gas in this wind depends on how strong the wind actually is. So if this wind is strong enough, all this gas will be just pushed out of our galaxy and just escape. And it will go in the space in between galaxies, just hanging out there.

But if the wind is not strong enough, then, at some point, the outflowing gas will lose its momentum. And because of the gravity of our galaxy, it will fall back onto the galactic disk. And it will be recycled again to form your stars. So it's kind of a cycle. And the weird thing with in the Milky Way, the current wind may be strong enough to blow away this gas. But we are not 100%.

KATIE FEATHER: Are there other galaxies we know about that have stopped making stars that we can kind of study to see where we're headed in about 10 million years or so?

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Yes, there are many galaxies in the universe, actually, that do not form stars anymore. And astronomers broadly classify galaxies in two categories. So, on the one side, we have galaxies like the Milky Way, which have active star formation, a lot of gas, young blue stars. And these galaxies look like flat, rotating disks.

But on the other side, there are galaxies that have stopped their star formation a long time ago. And these galaxies are more spherical. They do not rotate. They do not have gas. And they are just made up of old, red-looking stars. So these galaxies are kind of dead. And we think that they represent a late stage in the evolution of a galaxy.

So, and the Milky Way may actually be in a transitional phase between these two stages because it is still a disk forming stars, but its star formation is declining with time.

KATIE FEATHER: Well, I'm sort of glad that we don't have to worry about this for another 10 million years. But I hope that you are able to solve these mysteries of the dense, cold gas at the center of our galaxy soon. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about this.

ENRICO DI TEODORO: Thank you very much to you for having me.

KATIE FEATHER: Dr. Enrico Di Teodoro is a researcher in astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University.

IRA FLATOW: Science Friday producer, Katie Feather.
Copyright © 2020 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday's programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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A Mysterious Gas Is Discovered In The Milky Way

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Segment Transcript IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, we'll hear how indoor ventilation is impacting the spread of COVID-19 and why hardly anyone is talking about it. And we'll talk to a researcher studying connections between the microbiome and cancer immunotherapy.

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The Tangled Lives Of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider

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The Tangled Lives Of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider

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Spiders are interesting insects and from this part of the podcast tells many things about the silk of an spider, there is also other that they use silk for other then webs like homes and how females wrap their eggs in them. There is also some spiders live, like how they’re some spiders live in families where most spiders are independent, but the spiders that live in a family actually do better than spiders that are independent. There many more fact about spider in the podcast link as well.

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The Tangled Lives Of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider

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From web weaving to silk-slinging physics, spiders are full of secrets. Meet the scientists trying to unwind them.

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Through out the past few months because of the covid pandemic and BLM Movement, the climate crisis has increased dramatically. Because of the pandemic a lot of people have had time to think about things going on in this world including climate change all of the things happening are now entwined  together now this year and there is evidence that pocs care more about or talk and speak more about climate change and poc need to be at the front line of climate change.

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The chaos of 2020 made conversations about the climate crisis more difficult—and more important than ever.

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In the last year, the amazon has lost more than 50% of its trees. Why is this happening? The trees are being cleared to make way for cities and freeways. Fires rage across the amazon as well, due to climate change. These fires release carbon dioxide, which increases the world's average temperature, which creates more fire. It's a whole cycle of madness. Climate scientist warn that deforestation will destroy the Amazon's ecosystem, but nobody listens.

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Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, do you know what's in your sunscreen, and that it moves from your skin into your blood? We'll talk about that. But first, the Amazon rainforest is often called the planet's lungs. In the process of growing and breathing, its trees suck up a quarter of the Earth's carbon and produce a fifth of the world's oxygen.

So new data from the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil is of great concern. Researchers monitoring satellite images of Amazon tree cover found an alarming spike in the Amazon's deforestation. In the first seven months of 2019, the rainforest lost 50% more trees than during the same time last year.

That spike in tree loss coincides with Brazil's new president, [INAUDIBLE] Jair Bolsonaro, taking office. And since January, he's slashed environmental productions and has reportedly called the new deforestation data a lie. But climate scientists warn deforestation is pushing the Amazon rainforest to a tipping point that would disrupt both its ecosystem and the global climate. Dr. Carlos Nobre is a climate scientist at the University of Sao Paulo's Institute of Advanced Studies. He joins us via Skype. Welcome to Science Friday.

CARLOS NOBRE: Thank you very much.

IRA FLATOW: So put this in perspective, would you? How alarming are these new numbers on deforestation?

CARLOS NOBRE: The numbers are very worrying because Brazil, with most of the other Amazonian countries, for about 10 years, from 2004 to 2012, 2013, they were declining, over 70% deforestational rates. They were really moving towards almost a zero deforestation. And still, the production of agricultural products were increasing. So deforestation has nothing to do with agricultural production. So everybody was happy.

But after 2014, deforestational rates started to climb back again. And this year, the last 12 months, have seen a spike, have seen a surge, a very troublesome serge. Very likely the last 12 months, we will see increase of 40% to 50% in deforestational rates in Brazil. Also, deforestational rates in Colombia are increasing.

So this is a sign that we might be closer to the tipping point for the Amazon. If we deforest more than 25% of the forest in the Amazon basin, we might really ruin the Amazon forest with the move to a new system in which it becomes irreversible to maintain the forest, over 56% of the basin.

IRA FLATOW: And now this spike in deforestation has happened under Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro. Does he understand this, that this is a danger?

CARLOS NOBRE: I'm not sure the current president and his mostly- the ministers associated, particularly the Minister of Environment, have a full understanding of the risks that Brazil and the Amazon countries are under. Because you see the Amazon forest provides a lot of ecosystem service, for instance, recycling water vapor and increasing rainfall, keeping temperatures 2, 3 degrees cooler than without the forest.

So these are all benefits, even for agricultural production south of the Amazon. And solely for the forest, it disappears. The life, the agricultural, the life of the people will be much worse without the forest. So I don't think the president and his Minister of Agriculture understand the full consequences of continuing to deforest the Amazon. I think that their policies are aimed at the very short term gains in pushing the agricultural frontier, cattle, farms, and also soy plantations, into the Amazon.

IRA FLATOW: So is it all about the money then?

CARLOS NOBRE: It's about short term gains. It's about, really, seeing opportunities to increase production of those agricultural goods. But this is very short term because without the Amazon forest, even the productivity of cattle farms or crops will be diminished up to the point that you might not have suitable agricultural crop lands or grazing lands for cattle in the near future, and lasted 20, 30 years.

IRA FLATOW: And what about the indigenous communities and their land in the Amazon? What are his policies on their rights?

CARLOS NOBRE: Actually even when he was a House member for 28 years- the president was a House member- for a long time, he has defended the idea that the indigenous lands are too large in extent. They should not be demarcated anymore. And also now as the president, he's tried to convert indigenous cultures into a different culture, into, let's say, our culture- farmers, cattle ranchers.

But that really goes very much against the cultural inheritance of these more than 300 different indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. They want to keep their culture, which is a steady force culture, which is not only good for them, for their culture, but it's also very important for the maintenance of climate stability for the planet. If the Amazon forest disappears, we will almost impossible to reach the targets of the Paris Agreement to keep the temperature of the planet less than 2 degrees warmer.

IRA FLATOW: Well, is there going to be a tipping point in the rainforest where that happens?

CARLOS NOBRE: A lot of scientific studies- and I've been involved in those studies for almost 30 years- they indicated that if we exceeded 20% to 25% of deforestation in the whole Amazon, or if we keep global warming unchecked and that the temperature in the Amazon region increased 4 degrees Celsius, we might really exceed and tip this balance and to transform 50%, 60%, up to 70% of the forest into a degraded savanna, with much less carbon, with much less biodiversity.

So we are now currently at total deforestation is about 50%, 60% in the basin. And the Amazon is about 1.5 degrees warmer. So if we continue the deforestation rates as they are in the last few years, the tipping point will be exceeded, reached in something like 20 years.

IRA FLATOW: And do you find anything, besides President Bolsonaro, in your way or in the way of making sure that doesn't happen?

CARLOS NOBRE: Well, we hope that he will listen to the voices of the people, of the Brazilian people, the Amazonian people. Because all polls conducted in the last 20 years, including polls conducted after he was elected, 90% of the Brazilians are against Amazon deforestation. So we hope democracy will have the last word. Every Brazilian, almost all Brazilians, nine out of 10, are against Amazon deforestation. So I hope eventually democracy will prevail, and he will listen to the voice of the people, including his electors, his voters, also against Amazon deforestation.

IRA FLATOW: Well, let's talk about it. If the rainforest does become a savanna, what does happen to the global climate?

CARLOS NOBRE: Well, initially, there will be over the course of this transition, which might take between 30 and 50 years, a tremendous loss of carbon. The forest stores a lot of carbon underground, in the trunks, branches, et cetera. It's a lot of carbon. It's about 120 to 150 pounds of carbon per hectare. There are 10,000 square meters.

A degraded savanna that might replace the forest is store something like 30 to 40. So we lose 70 to 80 tons of carbon per hectare that will end up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, again, complicating the global climate crisis. So if all this carbon ends up in the atmosphere, keeping, meeting the targets of the Paris Accord will become much, much less difficult, perhaps even impossible. So this is a very important fact.

And also degraded savannas contain much less biodiversity. So we are talking about extinction of tens of thousands of species that exist only in the tropical forest. And the last but not less important, is the fact that perhaps one million people living in indigenous lands with their culture or their forest culture might be at the risk of losing the forest.

IRA FLATOW: Are you hopeful about this? It seems very scary.

CARLOS NOBRE: Well, I'm hopeful that first, of course, Brazil and all other Amazonian countries that are democracies, so people go out and vote. So I hope because this issue became so urgent, so critical with the increase in deforestational rates in the last few years, particularly in the last 12 months, that the voice of the people will be heard by all politicians, not only Brazil, but all Amazonian cultures, and that they will eventually start thinking harder and find ways of developing our countries without deforestation.

IRA FLATOW: All right, we have to leave it there. And we hope we share your optimism. Dr. Carlos Nobre, climate scientist at the University of Sao Paulo's Institute of Advanced Studies.
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Where The Amazon Rainforest Stands In 2019

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Segment Transcript IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, do you know what's in your sunscreen, and that it moves from your skin into your blood? We'll talk about that. But first, the Amazon rainforest is often called the planet's lungs.

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This was incredibly interesting to me because of my animals, dogs pant to cool off, most people knew that. But did you know that so do horses? Horses main way of cooling down is actually by panting! They do sweat, but their sweat is nothing like humans sweat, it isn't water. It has a little bit of water but it is mainly proteins, fiber, fat, etc. Reptiles don't sweat either, they usually go to a shady spot and open their mouths to evaporate some of that water, and cool off. That is also why dogs pant. They are letting moisture evaporate and that is how panting actually cools them down. Humans on the other hand, are able to have their way of cooling down accessible at all times, probably why humans are such good endurance runners. Unlike horses, when going at full speed, they cannot pant, so they sweat, although sweating doesn't do as much for them as it does for us.

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Why A Medium-Sized Black Hole Is Surprising Physicists

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Why A Medium-Sized Black Hole Is Surprising Physicists

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This podcast is about black holes and how we cant really estimate anything about them, we know how to estimate the sizes but we really cant estimate anything else, they could be white and not black, this is the complexity of the universe. Scientists have found a black hole that is 88 solar mass when their estimate was that no black hole could go over 85 - 120 solar mass. Now they have to calculate the max solar mass a black hole can be. Black holes might become big because 2 smaller back holes merged or they may have grown over millions of years. Scientists heard 2 black holes merge but it was 15 billion light years away so it happened when the Milky Way was half the size it was today. This shows how unpredictable black holes and the universe can be.

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Why A Medium-Sized Black Hole Is Surprising Physicists

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The discovery of a medium-sized black hole offers new insights into how black holes form and grow.