Science Friday

Did ‘Soylent Green’s’ Predictions About 2022 Hold Up?

In the spring of 1973, the movie Soylent Green premiered. The film drops us into a New York City that’s overcrowded, polluted, and dealing with the effects of a climate catastrophe. Only the city’s elite can afford clean water and real foods, like strawberry jam. The rest of the population relies on a communal food supply called Soylent. There’s Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow… and a new product: Soylent Green.

The year the film takes place? 2022. And spoiler alert: Soylent Green is people.

While the 2022 the film depicts is—thankfully—much darker than our current situation, the message still holds up. When the film premiered, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Clean Air Act were very much in the country’s consciousness. 50 years later, warmer temperatures, soil degradation, and social inequality are more relevant than ever.

Joining Ira to talk about the importance of Soylent Green 50 years later is Sonia Epstein, associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Also joining is soil scientist Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in Madison, Wisconsin.

The South By Southwest festival in Austin this year was the site of at least one unusual event: a press announcement by the head of the National Science Foundation, the primary federal agency tasked with funding and supporting fundamental research and investing in the education of young scientists in those fields.

NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan announced he was creating a new directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) to focus on “use-inspired” research that can be brought to commercial markets, in partnership with businesses and entrepreneurs. The goal, Panchanathan said in a press release in March, was to “accelerate the development of new technologies and products that improve Americans’ way of life, grow the economy and create new jobs, and strengthen and sustain U.S. competitiveness for decades to come.”

Panchanathan talks to Ira about what this new chapter means for the NSF, the future of basic research with no immediate commercial uses, and the challenges of persuading the public that failure, as much as success, is inherent to science.

High in the Rocky Mountains, under thin air and bluebird skies, the Colorado River basin is slowly filling its savings account. Craggy peaks become smooth walls of white and piles of snow climb conifer trunks, covering even the deepest, darkest corners of the woods with a glimmering blanket.

The snow that accumulates in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming will eventually become water in the Colorado River. Some of it will flow as far south as Mexico, running through kitchen faucets in cities and suburbs along the way, or watering crops that keep America fed through the winter.

Year by year, those piles are getting slightly smaller and melting earlier — slowly exhibiting the sting of a warming climate. The way we measure the snow is changing too, as a shifting baseline for what counts as “average” paints a somewhat deceptive picture of how much snow is stored up in the mountains.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Planetary scientists monitoring how the outer planets change over time have made a surprising observation of springtime on the planet Neptune. As the planet moves towards summer in its southern hemisphere, one might expect it to get warmer—but in data taken over 17 years, researchers observed that the average temperature actually seems to be declining. One theory involves the conversion of atmospheric methane, which traps heat, to ethane or other hydrocarbon compounds that release heat more readily, but more research is needed.

The researchers also spotted the rapid formation of a hot-spot at the south pole of Neptune, with an increase of some 11 degrees C over just two Earth years. Models had predicted a temperature swing of perhaps 15 degrees over the entire seasonal cycle.

These findings were reported this week in the Planetary Science Journal. Scientists don’t know very much about Neptune—it’s over 30 times Earth’s distance from the sun, and gets only one nine-hundredth of the sunlight. It takes around 165 Earth years to complete an orbit, meaning that the researchers’ 17 years of data account for only a small fraction of one season. Because of the planet’s tilt and its long orbit, the last time the planet’s north pole was visible from Earth was in the 1960s. And we’ve only visited once, via the Voyager spacecraft, over 30 years ago.

Michael Roman, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in the UK, and one of the authors of the report, joins Ira to talk about the strange springtime on Neptune—and the planet’s many remaining mysteries.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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The Future of Sustainable Farming Could Be Cold Plasma

Plasma is a fascinating medium. It’s considered the fourth state of matter—alongside solid, liquid and gas—and it’s everywhere. In fact, more than 99.9% of all matter in the universe is assumed to be in plasma form.

You may be most familiar with plasma as the material inside those glowing novelty lamps found in museum gift shops, but it’s naturally found in the sun, lightning, and the northern lights. Research into plasma and how it intersects with various industries has been increasing, especially in the area of agriculture.

Cold plasma specifically is being tested as a way to speed up plant growth and make fertilizer that’s better for the environment. And it works: Lots of research has shown that exposure to cold plasma makes seeds germinate faster. While this sounds like a sci-fi concept, farmers have seen for decades that plants grown on the site of lightning strikes grow faster.

The strangest part? Scientists don’t know why this works, only that it does. Joining Ira to talk about cold plasma and its possible future in the agriculture world is Jose Lopez, professor of physics at Seton Hall University, based in South Orange, New Jersey. Lopez is also program manager for plasma physics at the National Science Foundation.

Teenagers have a reputation for being moody, making rash decisions, and maybe even being a bit lazy. Turns out, lack of sleep may be partly to blame for some of this stereotypical behavior.

Contrary to popular belief, teens actually need more sleep than adults—about 9 to 10 hours a night—to help support critical brain development. But American teens are getting less sleep than they ever have before due to a perfect storm of biology, increased homework, early school start-times, and technology. Over the past three decades, the average American teens’ sleep has shrunk to just 6.5 hours a night.

Ira talks with Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright, psychotherapists and sleep specialists. They’re co-authors of the new book, Generation Sleepless: Why Teens and Tweens Are Not Sleeping Enough and What We Can Do to Help Them.

The teen voices you heard during this segment were: Zion, Ro’Shell, LaRon, Aleathia, Zahriah, Trysten, Londyn, Jairus and Cix. All are 8th grade students at Manchester Academic Charter School, and recorded by SLB Radio at its Youth Media Center, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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FDA Convenes Panel On COVID Boosters And New Vaccines

This week, the FDA convened a panel of independent experts to discuss COVID-19 boosters and possible variant-specific vaccines. This comes after last week’s authorization of a second booster for people over the age of 50, and some immunocompromised people.

Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, about the latest on boosters and other science news of the week, including a new particle measurement that might shift our understanding of physics, fish who can do math and why Mars has two different speeds of sound.

In most parts of the U.S., it’s time to get the garden going for the year. From readying your soil to picking your plants and getting seeds started, April can require a lot of decision-making to set the stage for a successful growing season.

Have questions about choosing containers, hardening your seedlings, or dealing with excess water? Our panel of expert gardeners is here for you. Ira talks to Cornell University Extension’s Elizabeth Buck and Oregon State University Extension’s Weston Miller about common spring troubleshooting, chemical-free pest management, and even how to brace your garden against climate change.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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This week, the FDA convened a panel of independent experts to discuss COVID-19 boosters and possible variant-specific vaccines. This comes after last week’s authorization of a second booster for people over the age of 50, and some immunocompromised people.

Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, about the latest on boosters and other science news of the week, including a new particle measurement that might shift our understanding of physics, fish who can do math and why Mars has two different speeds of sound.

In most parts of the U.S., it’s time to get the garden going for the year. From readying your soil to picking your plants and getting seeds started, April can require a lot of decision-making to set the stage for a successful growing season.

Have questions about choosing containers, hardening your seedlings, or dealing with excess water? Our panel of expert gardeners is here for you. Ira talks to Cornell University Extension’s Elizabeth Buck and Oregon State University Extension’s Weston Miller about common spring troubleshooting, chemical-free pest management, and even how to brace your garden against climate change.

Can You Read A Bar Graph?

Bar graphs seem like one of the simplest ways to represent data. Many people assume that the longer the bar, the bigger the number it represents. Sometimes bar graphs represent an average not a total count, which is trickier to understand.

And because bar graphs are everywhere, psychologists from Wellesley College wanted to determine how well people can actually read and interpret bar graphs. Turns out, one in five people in their study misunderstood the data the bar graphs intended to show. And sometimes simple-looking graphs actually make it harder to understand the data they are based on.

Ira talks with Jeremy Wilmer, associate professor, and Sarah Horan Kerns, research associate, at Wellesley College’s department of psychology, based in Wellesley Massachusetts about their bar graph research and curriculum to improve data literacy.

Two decades ago, scientists announced they had sequenced the human genome. What you might not know is that there were gaps in that original sequence—about 8% was completely blank.

Now, after a years-long global collaboration, scientists have finally released the first fully complete assembly of the human genome. Researchers believe these missing pieces might be the key to understanding how DNA varies between people.

Six scientific papers on the topic were published in a special edition of the academic journal Science this week.

Ira talks with Karen Miga and Adam Phillippy, co-founders of the Telomere to Telomere Consortium, an international effort that led to the assembly of this new fully complete human genome.

Karen Miga is an assistant professor of bimolecular engineering and the associate director of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, based in Santa Cruz California. Adam Phillippy is head of the Genome Informatics Section and senior investigator in the computational and statistical genomics branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, based in Bethesda, Maryland.

After a month of non-stop Mars science, what questions do you still have about the Red Planet? SciFri producer Christie Taylor and co-host Stephanie Sendaula interview planetary scientist and Sirens of Mars author Sarah Stewart Johnson. Plus, they take your questions about the planet’s poles, its magnetic field, and the progress of the Perseverance rover.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Why Another Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapsed

On March 15, the Conger ice shelf, a piece of ice half the size of Rome, collapsed in eastern Antarctica. It’s the first time that side of the continent experienced a major loss of ice in the 40-year history of satellite observations. Previous collapses of shelves have until now occurred in western Antarctica. Meanwhile, researchers are reporting temperatures more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average, while parts of the Arctic are beating averages by 50 degrees.

Scientific American’s Sophie Bushwick explains why warming at the poles is both more likely than other parts of the globe, and is also exacerbating the likelihood of collapses like this. Plus, new insights into strange radio circles in space, the Hubble telescope sees the most distant star yet, and a look at the statistical likelihood of basketball “hot hands.” And an April Fool’s Day quiz on some new inventions that may or may not be real.

Several early Phase 1 human trials of vaccines using mRNA technology are now under way. The approach—which uses mRNA to induce the body to manufacture specific parts of a viral structure that then trains the immune system—was famously successful in the COVID-19 pandemic, and the basis for both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

Now, researchers are wondering if the mRNA approach might be a solution to diseases like HIV, which have thwarted vaccine researchers for years. The NIH has supported three trials, other trials from IAVI and Moderna are also under way in Phase 1.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joins Ira to talk about the challenges of developing vaccines against HIV, the path through the clinical trials process, and why researchers are very cautiously optimistic about the new vaccine trials. They also discuss the state of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for continued vigilance and funding.

President Joe Biden and U.S. lawmakers are ramping up their efforts to mine, manufacture and process more battery materials at home — and that’s drawn praise from the company exploring a large lithium deposit in southeast Oregon. Jindalee Resources Limited, the Australian company with lithium claims at a Bureau of Land Management site in Oregon’s Malheur County, says the growing push for U.S. critical minerals production is a positive sign. “You’ve seen bipartisan support for the development of critical minerals projects growing,” said Lindsay Dudfield, Jindalee’s executive director. “Jindalee is advancing a critical minerals project, and so we’re very encouraged by these developments.”

The Intercept reported Thursday that Biden is preparing to invoke the Defense Production Act to expedite production of batteries for electric vehicles, consumer electronics and renewable energy storage. The Defense Production Act was recently used to increase supply and hasten delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. Lawmakers in recent weeks have urged the president to use his authority under the law to do the same for batteries. “The time is now to grow, support, and encourage investment in the domestic production of graphite, manganese, cobalt, lithium, nickel, and other critical minerals to ensure we support our national security, and to fulfill our need for lithium-ion batteries — both for consumers and for the Department of Defense,” wrote Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Joe Manchin,D-W.Va.; Jim Risch, R-Idaho; and Bill Cassidy, R-La., in a letter to the president last week. The Biden administration published a report last June that found the American battery supply chain to be extremely vulnerable as demand for batteries increases. For decades, the U.S. has relied on foreign imports of minerals needed to make those batteries, especially lithium.

While the U.S. has large lithium reserves, it only produces about 1% of the world’s supply. Demand for lithium and other materials is expected to skyrocket as the U.S. seeks to transition away from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. The Biden administration’s report says lithium could be a good candidate for new domestic mining and extraction, which would reduce American dependence on foreign sources like Russia and China. But as the rush for critical minerals like lithium speeds up in the U.S., environmental groups, Native American tribes and others have urged caution, especially when it comes to new mining. The extractive industry remains enormously destructive to frontline communities as well as land, water and wildlife.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

The Tawny crazy ant (sometimes called the Rasberry crazy ant) is an invasive species originally found in South America. Over the past few decades, it has found a home in U.S. Gulf states and parts of Texas. The ant, named “crazy” for its erratic movements, can outcompete native ant species when it takes hold, and can overwhelm small animals with sheer numbers.

In 2013, Science Friday spoke with Edward LeBrun, a research scientist at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory of UT Austin, about the ant and its ability to outcompete fire ants in the southern U.S. Now, LeBrun returns to share news of a possible biological control for the ants, a form of fungus that can cause infected nests to collapse over a period of years. It’s a good news, bad news situation—while most insecticides and baits don’t work to control the ants, the fungus can produce local extinction.

However, it takes years to work, and currently requires transferring hundreds of infected ants into a nest—not exactly something you can pick up off the shelf at the local hardware store.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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