Science Friday - A Small Meteor Blazes Over New York City | Tornado Science From ‘Twisters’

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

The foot-long meteor passed through the Earth’s atmosphere near the Statue of Liberty. Don’t worry, it was fine. Also, the follow-up to the 1996 movie “Twister” is a whirlwind of tornado science. A weather expert decodes its lingo—and real-life tornado trends.A Small Meteor Blazes Over New York CityTuesday morning, some New York area residents heard a loud boom and saw a daytime fireball streaking overhead. According to observers, a small meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere over New York City, passed by the Statue of Liberty, and proceeded west to New Jersey, moving at some 38,000 miles per hour. Meteor experts said that the object, estimated to be around a foot in size, posed no threat, as debris from an object that small would have burned up before reaching the ground.Science Friday’s Charles Bergquist joins guest host Rachel Feltman to talk about the overhead display, and about other science news from the week, including a newly planned mission to fly by a near-Earth asteroid. They’ll also talk about a new pool of data for human genetics research, efforts to predict rogue waves, and the challenges of making food taste right in orbit.The Tornado Science To Know Before Seeing ‘Twisters’“Twisters,” the long awaited follow-up to the 1996 movie “Twister” drops in theaters today, July 19. It’s about a scientist (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who goes back to her home state of Oklahoma to try and stop a massive tornado outbreak from wreaking havoc on its citizens. On the way, she meets a quirky cast of storm chasers, and butts heads with a band of unorthodox “tornado wranglers” led by a YouTube personality (Glen Powell). “Twisters” delights in name-dropping tornado jargon, and its science advisory team said they hoped to make the movie as accurate as possible.The movie makes science thrilling, but it also shows the ways that tornadoes affect people’s lives in the real world. For example, earlier this week, the Chicago area was hit with multiple tornadoes during a night of extreme weather, leaving thousands without power, and four tornadoes hit upstate New York, killing one person. This comes after a powerful, and some say unusual, tornado season in the Midwest. But just how tornadoes will continue to change is still unknown.Digital producer Emma Gometz talks with Dr. Bill Gallus, a meteorology professor at Iowa State University, to decode some of the science from “Twisters” and understand how real-life tornadoes are changing.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We're watching the new movie Twisters and asking, is it scientifically sound? You thought you could destroy a tornado. We never had a chance. You want one? It's Friday, July 19th, also known as my favorite day of the week, Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Shoshana Bucksbaum. In a bit, we'll decode the science behind the summer thriller Twisters with a meteorologist. We'll walk you through the basics of

tornado science with a real-life storm chaser. But first, here's guest host Rachel Feltman with the top science stories of the week. Friday morning dawn with computer glitches around the world, affecting scores of industries. Here to explain that and with other stories from the week in science is Science Friday's senior producer Charles Bergquist. Hi, Charles. Hey, Rachel. How's it going? For me, it's okay, but it's been a messy morning for a lot of people. It has. It has. Why don't you tell us? more. Yeah. So it's been a morning of blue screen computers, not a great day if you needed to go to the airport or visit the bank or do a lot of other things. On a more serious note, this has affected 911 services in a bunch of states, and some medical centers are reporting problems too.

So do we know what actually happened? Yeah, this appears to be an outage affecting some business computers that are running Microsoft Windows, but it's caused by a faulty software update pushed by the global security company CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike says it, doesn't appear to be the result of like a cyber attack or anything, rather just a bad patch that has caused all these problems. Yeah, definitely a new level of a blue screen of death dread, but definitely something to keep following. Yeah. You know, it really just shows how interconnected all these systems are and also the problems of being reliant on just one or two services, right? Like everyone using the same platform is great when it lets your airlines talk to each other and

share information more seamlessly. But it's not great. when a bunch of the major airlines all go down together. Yeah. Well, speaking of things going down, I guess. Earlier this week, some New York City residents heard a boom and saw a flash. What was up with this explosion? Yeah, Tuesday morning, a small meteor entered the atmosphere over New York City. It flew over the Statue of Liberty and into New Jersey.

And personally, I'm sad because, according to the maps, it pretty much passed straight over my house. I didn't see or hear it at all. Same here. I think maybe I assumed it was a construction noise, if anything. But is this something we should be worried about in addition to being excited? Yeah, NASA says even though it was an impressive boom and a cool daytime fireball, this is a really small object, maybe like a foot in size or using science's standard international appliance units, the size of a toaster.

They say it's pretty much impossible for something that size to have debris that reaches the ground. but they do estimate it was moving around 38,000 miles an hour. Wow. So do we have anyone keeping track of all these flying toasters? Yeah, not at this size. You really can't. So NASA and other space agencies do keep track, of course, of larger near-Earth objects. But the only way they usually learn about smaller stuff like this is when it enters the atmosphere like this and someone sees it.

Yeah. Well, I know you have another story about an object that astronomers are tracking. Yeah, this week the European Space Agency announced that they're planning a mission to fly by the asteroid Apophis. That's a much larger object that's supposed to come very near the Earth in 2029. It's supposed to pass around one-tenth of the distance from Earth to the moon, so super close. The track of the asteroid appears. It won't be a threat to Earth either now or any time in the future. But they're planning to send a mission called Ramsies to fly by this asteroid before and after that close.

Earth encounter in 2029 for science. Well, 20209 sounds super fast, at least for a space mission. Maybe not for almost anything else, but for space, very fast. Yeah, very fast. To get into position for this flyby, they'll need to launch by April 2028, which is like tomorrow in space terms. Yeah, yesterday in space terms. Yeah, especially considering they don't exactly have all the funding put together yet for

this, but the Osiris Rex spacecraft, which you remember brought back the Asteroid samples from Benu is also going to be headed for this flyby, but because of where it is, it won't get there until after the asteroid passes Earth. But, you know, we'll have a second chance to at least get a peek at that object if we don't make it in time. But hopefully we do. Moving on to another kind of threat, there's new work this week on rogue waves in the ocean. Tell me more.

Yeah. These are waves that are at least twice the size of other waves in the area. but they can be much, much larger, like dozens of feet high, swallow up your boat larger. And they're very unpredictable. So this can really be a threat to ships or exposed structures like lighthouses. In work this week, researchers have developed a computer system that used machine learning, plus tons of measurements from ocean buoys to try and predict when these waves are going to come up. And they say that their system can correctly predict 73% of these abnormally large.

waves, something like five minutes before they occur, which, you know, really could be a big deal. It will give people time to take some action. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of destruction here. Let's talk about something a little less catastrophic for a bit. What do you have for me? So there's a cool paper out this week looking at the genetics of human traits. This is one of those papers that sifts through thousands and thousands of genomes, looking to find bits of the genome that seem to be connected to specific characteristics. So this won't give you like, this is the gene for X. But it can be a place for researchers to start looking.

Yeah, so what's new about this study? Because I feel like we see headlines like this all the time. Yeah, so these GWA studies, genome-wide association studies, are really only as good as a sample set that they've been searching through, right? A lot of those older studies involve samples that really over-emphasized Europeans. Right. This new paper makes use of a different biobank, which is data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, million veterans program. And the military tends to have a lot more diversity in its members. So

this study was able to find new associations that didn't turn up in some of those older studies, including a bunch of things that only show up when you do add in all that non-European data. They do caution, though, you know, the military data set tends to skew male and older. So it's still not a perfectly representative sample for us. Right, but inching in the right direction. So very cool. Yeah. In other biology news, there's new work on where we all came from. Is that right? Yeah. So, you know, normally when people use that phrase, they're talking anthropology, like ancient hominids or something. But this is looking at an organism called Luca, the last common ancestors, something that would have given rise to every living thing, even before the tree of life started to split into like bacteria, archaea, and eukaria. I've always thought Luca was such a great name, but do we know what this thing was yet?

No, not really. But the work here is trying to estimate when it was, right? So you track the rate of mutations backwards. How long would it have taken to pile up all the billions of mutations that led to all the different species of life? And they come up with an answer of 4.2 billion years ago, which is about 400 million years after the formation of Earth, which is like geologic time. that's a blink of an eye. Earth was still like a complete hellscape then. Yeah, it's such a cool way for them to look back in time,

just being like, how weird have we gotten? And how long would that take? I love that. How long would it take to get us all this messed up? Exactly, yeah. Staying on biology for a minute, there's a new, important finding about bees. Yeah, so, I mean, we all know that bees can be really good defenders

when they feel threatened, right? Yeah. But, you know, beyond that basic sting response, there are a bunch of other behaviors that they have to protect their hives. And this week, researchers studying the Asian or Japanese honeybee report that they've observed a defensive maneuver that they had not known about before. I can't wait to hear what that is. It is slapping. What? They have this video, which is really worth a watch, of this small ant walking up to the entrance of the hive.

And the bees guarding the entrance kind of pivot around and just give the ad a good bop on the head with its wing. flick it away from the nest. Wow. You know, this, this technique doesn't always work for them, but at the very least, that slap seemed to kind of like stun the ant and left it open to some kind of follow-up defense. I mean, I'm stunned, and I'm not even the one the bee slapped. So incredible. Back of it to orbit, I think you have a story about research into space flavors, which sounds delightful. Please tell me more. So, I mean, we've probably have the experience that food, Food on an airplane even doesn't quite taste right, even if you make exceptions for like the stoop waffles and stuff. But it turns out that, you know, astronauts on the International Space Station experience some of those same issues.

Food is just too bland and doesn't taste the same in orbit as on the ground. And researchers are trying to figure out why that is. Yeah, I've definitely heard astronauts raving about hot sauce in space as being really vital. So what did this new study find? Yeah. So in the past, part of this blandness effect has been attributed just to congestion. Apparently, when you go to space, the fluids in your head can move around and you kind of get a stuffy nose, which, as we know, leads to decreased odors.

But the weird thing is that that swelling goes down after you've been on the space station for a while, but that taste effect remains. And so that can't be the whole story. One thought is that the loneliness and isolation of the space station can have an effect on perception. Here, researchers tested a bunch of odors on people wearing VR headsets and in a simulation of the ISS, and they found that this effect was different on different odors. Vanilla and almond smelled stronger in simulated space station environment than in the control environment.

But weirdly, the lemon aroma stays the same. Huh. Wow. Fascinating. Also, why do we care? You know, we're entering a period of longer duration space flights, and beyond people just wanting to have a good experience working and living in space. If your food doesn't taste right, you might not be eating as much as you need to, and that can be a health issue. Yeah, that makes sense. I think we have time for one last space story, and this one is about a song. Yes.

So this week, NASA's Deep Space Network system beamed a Missy Elliott track, the rain out to the planet Venus. It took about 14 minutes to get there from Earth. Amazing. Is there any science here to talk about it? out? Not really. Maybe it's a technology story. Who cares? You know, Venus does supposedly have rain from sulfuric acid clouds, but mainly, you know, this is just a cool thing to do. The last song they officially set out like this was the Beatles across the universe in 2008. That's all the time we have. Charles, thanks so much for coming to do the news roundup in reverse

with me today. Always a pleasure, Rachel. Thanks for having me. We have to take a break. And when we're we have to take a break, and when we're we come back, an FDA panel voted overwhelmingly against MDMA therapy for PTSD. We'll talk about what happened. Stay with us. The movie Twisters, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1996 movie Twister, drops in theaters today. It's about a tornado scientist who goes back to her home state to try and stop a massive tornado outbreak. On the way, she meets a quirky cast. of characters who are mega enthusiastic about tornado science. You thought you could destroy a tornado.

We never had a chance. You want one? The movie is definitely fun, thrilling, and features a love story, but it also shows the ways that tornadoes can affect people's lives in the real world. This premiere comes after an unusual and powerful peak tornado season in the Midwest, according to experts, with additional tornadoes touching down in Chicago, in upstate New York this week, killing at least one person. But just how tornadoes will continue to change is something we still don't know.

Sci-fry digital producer Emma Gomez saw the movie and spoke to a meteorology expert to decode some of the science from twisters and talk about how real-life tornadoes are changing. Joining me is Dr. Bill Gallis, a meteorology professor at Iowa State University. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Gallis. Well, hello, Emma. It's nice to be here. So before we start, could you just give us like a brief elevator pitch about what it is that you study? I study thunderstorm systems in general and ways to try to improve the forecasts. I also have an avid interest in severe weather.

So I do some research related to tornadoes, assisting engineers in the development of large tornado simulators so we can understand how they impact structures. And hopefully within a decade or two, find better ways to build structures to withstand. more tornadoes. So you study tornadoes, but I've heard that you also been storm chasing, and you've even taken your students on storm chasing trips. That's not your average field trip, right? So what are those like? So I have chased tornadoes for 37 years, but this is the first year at Iowa State. We developed a course called Field Observations of Thunderstorms, and part of the course was an eight-day field trip where we took 13 students out across the Central United States for this eight-day period in late May. And we actually got very lucky because this was probably the most

active eight-day period that the United States has seen for severe weather in many years. So it was quite the experience. And I felt very good for the students because we did get to see tornadoes on three of the eight days. Wow. That is super interesting. And so, you know, Twisters, the movie, there's a lot of storm chasing in that. And you just saw that movie. What did you think of it? I have to say, you know, technology available to storm chasers has improved immensely since the first Twister movie in 1995. And likewise, it's obvious when you see this new movie that the technology available to Hollywood to recreate very accurately the skies, the thunderstorm structure, and the various shapes and colors within tornadoes has also improved drastically. So I thought it was quite

quite the thrill ride because it was so realistic in terms of how it portrays the actual weather conditions. Right. And did you see it in 4D? Am I right there? Yes. I did not know that until I arrived at the theater. And I had never seen a movie that way. And I have to say, if there is a movie to see in 4D, this is the one. Wow. Okay. So, I mean, when I saw the movie, speaking from the perspective of somebody who's not a tornado or severe weather expert, I thought that it took a super like information heavy approach to tornado science. There was just a lot of like jargon in it that I really need you to help me understand. So are you game to talk about that? Yes. In fact, as a scientist, I love to hear what you just said. And they did an excellent job of getting the

science correct in this movie. Amazing. Okay. So let's start with a basic one. They use something called an EF scale in the movie to determine the severity of tornadoes. They talk about that a lot. So what is the EF scale and how does it work? So everybody wants to know how strong a tornado is. But unfortunately, they're so violent and full of debris that even if they did hit a weather instrument, they would likely destroy it. So we really never get measurements of the actual winds in tornadoes, which forces us instead to rape them based on the damage that they do. For many decades, we had used a scale developed by Fujita, which was known as the F scale. In the late 2000s, there were modifications made to the scale to provide really more accurate rating across the country. And this is called

the enhanced Fujita scale or the EF scale. And it still goes from zero to five like the old Fujita scale did. Okay. Got you. So like an EF zero is like a week, low speed, and then EF5 is the most severe? Yes. You have that exactly right. Okay. So when the characters are describing the conditions for tornadoes in the movie, they use a lot of words, wind shear, updraft, mesocyclone, things that I was kind of Googling after I saw the movie. Can you describe the ingredients that make up a tornado and maybe define some of those words for us along the way? Right. So tornadoes come from thunderstorms, but tornadoes also need another key ingredient, which we call wind shear. And all wind shear means is that, that the wind directions or the wind speeds or both are changing as you go up in the atmosphere. And why wind shear is important is it gives you a rolling motion in the atmosphere that you can actually see for yourself if you put a pencil in one of your hands, lay it in that hand,

and you'll notice that as you take your top hand and move it along the top of the pencil, the pencil rolls. So that is why wind shear is important because when you have the thunderstorm Uptraft, it's as though it is taking one end of the pencil and tilting it upward and you'll find that now you have the same kind of rotation that we see in tornadoes. Also, the updraft in the thunderstorm leads to the ice skater effect. If you've ever watched a figure skating performance, at the end, the skaters usually want to end with a bang, with a nice finale, and so that they bring their arms in and they spin much more quickly. This is what is happening then in the thunderstorm, as the air is rushing into the storm at low levels, it takes that rotation, and it can really concentrate

it, which helps us to get a tornado. Oh, wow. Okay. I love the pencil analogy. That makes a lot of sense to me. So we'll move on to one of my favorite moments in the movie, which was when one of the characters sees two tornadoes at the same time, and he yells. We got twins! Twins! So is that something that actually happens? It does happen. And it is rare enough that the screaming that you heard, I have to admit, I did the same thing last year when I ended up in a similar situation. I think most storm chasers get extremely excited if they see two on the ground at the same time because it is rather rare. That's great. So the National Weather Service confirmed that there were at least 11 tornadoes during Monday night storms in the

Chicago area. How do groups of multiple tornadoes come about like this? So there are different ways that that can happen. You can have a family of tornadoes, many tornadoes from multiple storms close together. You can even have one rotating thunderstorm. We call it cyclic tornado genesis. So you're producing one tornado for several minutes. It lifts. Another tornado touches down very soon after. So you can get a lot of tornadoes from the same storm. And the Chicago event was very interesting because those tornadoes came from a line of thunderstorms. And when the conditions are right, a system like the one that affected Chicago can produce many different tornadoes fairly close together all at the same time. They tend to not be as violent, as intense as if they were coming out of a rotating thunderstorm by itself.

But as we all saw this week, they can still do a lot of pretty significant damage. Yeah, definitely. And I've been seeing some reporting about how the places where tornadoes are likely to hit are shifting or that tornadoes are clustering into these groups when they hit. is climate change to blame for these shifts? Or what do we know about why this is happening? Everybody always wants to know how climate change is impacting different weather extremes. And that can be very challenging. That's also true for tornadoes. Because the warming climate is supplying more instability, which, of course, is something tornadoes want. But it also tends to weaken wind shear, at least in a global sense across the planet, which would reduce the chances of tornadoes. We have noticed in the last 10 or 20 years that we seem to have these bigger gaps where the United States gets very quiet and then periods with a lot of action. And this year, for instance,

has been extremely active, the second most active year after 2011. But we've had a lot of very quiet tornado years as well. So we are noticing that it seems tornadoes are happening on fewer days, but on the days where we maybe do get enough wind shear, because we have more energy, we're seeing more tornadoes tend to touch down. So the tornadoes are getting concentrated into fewer days, which means in the net, you can't say that climate change is causing more tornadoes. It's just changing the distribution of the tornadoes that we see. And so, I mean, in the movie, they throw chemicals into a tornado to try and stop it in its tracks. I don't know what you think of, you know, that idea. But how do scientists think about minimizing the risks tornadoes pose to the public

in real life? So I felt the movie did an excellent job on the science. The one thing that maybe it was ahead of its time, I should say, is I am not aware of any researchers trying to find ways to actually dissipate tornadoes. So what we instead try to do is improve our ability to forecast them and to give warning to people so that we can save more lives that way. But at the moment, I think our attitude is we're stuck with them. I thought the movie did a good job of showing how dangerous they actually are

and the really terrible impacts they have on people. The movie did not shy away from having the tornadoes cause damage and injury and death. In addition, we scientists have a very difficult time getting the information we need about what the winds are doing in or very close to a tornado. and one of the reasons is it is indeed very dangerous. And so I thought the movie conveys that even for the experts, the storm chasers, there is a lot of danger when you get close to a tornado. Well, that is all the time we have for now.

I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and for braving the storm in 4D on our behalf. Well, thanks, Emma. That was easy to do. Well, that is Dr. Bill Gallus, meteorology professor at Iowa State University. To read Emma's breakdown about the science terms used in Twisters and sign up for her science movies newsletter, visit ScienceFriiday.com slash twisters. That's sciencefriiday.com slash twisters. And that's just about all the time we have for this week. Lots of folks help make the show, including John Dancosky. Kathleen Davis. Dee Petersmith. Robin Casmer. Next week, the FDA advisory panel recently rejected MDMA as a true. treatment for PTSD. We'll unpack the flaws in the methodology of that research. Thanks for listening. I'm SciFRI producer Shoshana Bucksbaum. Catch you next time.