Science Friday - Ancient Human Footprints & 'Ring Of Fire' Eclipse

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

A new analysis of ancient footprints in New Mexico adds to the debate about when humans arrived in North America. Plus, astronomer Dean Regas offers tips for safe viewing of Saturday’s eclipse. New Data Support Human Arrival In North America 22,000 Years AgoIn 2021, scientists uncovered ancient human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. Dating of the footprints suggested that people arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than anthropologists had thought. It sparked fierce debate among researchers, some of whom raised concerns about the radiocarbon dating process used in the original study. Now, a new study provides additional data supporting humans’ arrival in North America 22,000 years ago.Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, editorial lead at Carbon Plan about the latest in this debate about the peopling of North America and other top science news of the week including how solar storms affect bird migration, why ants are getting ensnared in plastic, and how climate change is improving Bordeaux wine. This Weekend’s ‘Ring Of Fire’ EclipseThis Saturday, much of the continental United States will be treated to an astronomical event—an annular solar eclipse. In this type of eclipse, the apparent sizes of the moon and sun don’t align perfectly to Earth-bound viewers, resulting in a solar “ring of fire” shining around the edges of a moon nestled inside the boundaries of the sun.The best viewing will come in a 125-mile-wide band known as the path of annularity, which will stretch from Eugene, Oregon to San Antonio, Texas, and then on into Mexico and Central America. Viewers outside that band will still be able to see some parts of the eclipse, with the percent coverage depending on how far they are from that central line.    Even though the sun will be partly covered, it is NOT safe to look directly at the sun without eclipse glasses. If you don’t have glasses, you can look at a projection of the sun through a pinhole onto the ground or another surface—but don’t look through the pinhole at the sun. Astronomer and author Dean Regas joins Ira for an eclipse preview, and to offer viewing tips on when, where, and how to best view the solar event.  To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week 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.

Keep your eyes on the sky on Saturday for an astronomical event visible across much of the U.S. So this one is like the little rehearsal eclipse. We'll tell you how to see it safely. It's Friday, October 13th. Ooh, spooky. But don't worry, today is Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Charles Bergquist. This Saturday, it's an annular solar eclipse.

That's one where the apparent sizes of the moon and sun don't match up entirely, letting a ring of fire shine around the edge of a moon. nestled inside the sun. Astronomer Dean Regis joins Ira to tell when, where, and how to see it safely. But first, we'll check in on the week's news and science. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Remember that study from a couple of years ago when scientists found human footprints in White Sands in Mexico, the footprints suggesting that humans arrived in North America some 22,000 years ago? Thousands of years earlier than, and anthropologists originally thought.

Remember that? Well, now there's a new study that provides additional data supporting this earlier arrival of humans to North America. And in science, of course, we always welcome new data. And sometimes, though,

interpreting it means not, well, not so straightforward to do that. Joining me now to put this find in perspective, along with other science news of the week, is Maggie Kerth, editorial lead at Carbon Plan, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Maggie, welcome back to Science Friday.

Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Okay. Can you parse this for us? What's in this new study about when people arrived in North America? Yeah. So this study is kind of a, like you say, a redo, sort of meant to appease some critics and offer a little bit more context. And the key change is that they are doing a couple of new dating techniques for these footprints. The first paper had done radiocarbon dating on seeds from an ancient plant that were found embedded in the footprints, but critics had pointed out that that technique could give you incorrect results if the lake that the plants once sat in had contained a lot of carbon that dissolved out of nearby rocks. The rocks could be really old, but the plants might not actually be. So this new paper is trying to date the footprints with two completely different methods.

First, they're dating grains of pine pollen that were also found embedded in layers of soil in the footprints. and pines don't go in water, so bada being no carbon contamination. Then the second thing they're doing is taking these grains of quartz crystal from a layer of clay just above the footprints. And they're using a dating technique that basically measures when the crystal structures were last exposed to sunlight. Wow, this is sort of very creative. It's interesting to hear. Is this going to, well, give us, end the debate about when humans arrived in North America? Well, both of them got about the same kind of age range. Like they're both in that 22,000 year age range.

But it's probably not actually going to end the debate. What it does do, I think, is sort of highlight where the debate stands. You know, this is something that's really been changing and growing in evidence over the last 30 or 40 years. And you're kind of in a space now where you've got some people who already believe that humans were in North America a lot longer. than previously thought. And you have some people who will never be convinced that humans were in America longer than previously thought. And you've got a lot of people in the middle who are looking at this kind of evidence and

seeing it build up. Yeah, well, we'll wait for some more evidence to come in. And until that, time does happen. Let's move on to birds. Right now, we're in the midst of fall bird migration. In the past, we've talked about some of the things birds are up against as they migrate south for the winter. like tall buildings, but there's potentially another interesting obstacle in this bird's way,

solar storms? How does that fit in here? Well, those birds are using magnetic field of the Earth to guide them when they migrate. So when space weather disrupts Earth's magnetic field, you end up with the birds getting messed with a little bit as well. And the weather that we're talking about here is, of course, metaphorical. It's not wind and rain in space. It's the movement of charged particles, radiation, plasma through the solar system. And Earth's magnetic field is our interplanetary umbrella. The space weather hits that so it doesn't hit us personally. But when that weather is bad enough, it can distort the magnetic field in ways that people don't notice. But now there's some evidence that maybe birds do notice.

Because they're navigating by this magnetic field, and in the magnetic field is being influenced by the solar storm. Right, yeah. So, like, these scientists were tracking 23 years of bird migrations in the spring and fall. And kind of ironically, they did this using the actual Earth weather radar systems that pick up large amounts of birds flying into the air. So they used that information and combined it with data about when big space weather, was happening, and they found that when the night is dark in space stormy, the birds tend to just sit out and not fly. Well, that is cool.

They're smart enough to know to stay home. Yeah, and we don't exactly know what's going on. This is just a correlation that's been found at this point. We don't know why space weather grounds the birds, and we don't even actually know if it does. This could be like a false correlation that we just haven't figured out yet. But it looks like space weather. weather maybe plays a role in what these birds decide to do and when they decide to fly.

Really cool. That's cool. Let's go from the sky down into the dirt, and I'm talking about ants. Scientists recently discovered ants that were wrapped in plastic, and I'm not talking about something you buy in the museum shop. Tell me more about what they actually found. Yeah. So, obviously, scientists have known for a long time about the way that plastic can affect sea life and water birds. they get all tangled up. But this is the first documented evidence of terrestrial insects getting trapped in plastic, like a kind of sci-fi substitute for amber. So these researchers were studying ants in the Canary Islands. And in the course of this other research, they found two that were tangled up in these red and black fibers that were woven around their legs and their bodies.

And the fibers turned out to be plastic. These ants are still alive. The paper says, says they are still somehow mobile. So unlike these other situations where researchers have documented injuries or illness caused by plastic pollution in animals, it's not clear that these ants are being harmed as much as they're just being deeply inconvenienced. Ants that are being annoyed. Are they trying to lift up their legs like we would if we're stuck in something and try to get out of it? I wonder if that's happening. I mean, I have to assume, right? Like, I'm imagining a cat with like tape on its paws. like high stepping around. But, you know, this is still a really important finding because it's documenting just how ubiquitous plastic has become in the environment. We're talking about these

ants in a remote pine forest on a mountain and there's plastic there. Yeah, yeah. Let's stay in the animal kingdom for a bit longer because this next story is about how researchers successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a monkey. Now, they have done that before, but there's something significantly new here, right? Yes, yeah. So like you said, this is something that's been done before, and it's been done before because chronic kidney disease is on the rise, and Americans are seeking these new kidneys at a rate that donations just can't match.

You've got 104,000 Americans on a national transplant waiting list, and 86% of them are waiting for kidneys. So this idea of getting to cross-species organ transplants is a big deal. And what they did in this case is gene editing pig kidneys. So they took these donor pig kidneys and they stopped them from producing sugars that would normally tell the human body that the organ isn't one of our kind. And then there was a bunch of other edits they did as well, including ones that adding human genes that would prevent organ rejection.

These altered kidneys went into 15 monkeys and eight of the monkeys lived more than five months. one of them made it past the two-year mark. Wow. And in contrast, monkeys that got non-edited pig kidneys tended to die in less than a month. So that's good news then. I mean, making progress with that. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely the longest that there has been a successful cross-species transplant like this.

Like you say, it's been done in the past, including with brain-dead human patients, but most of the time they haven't lasted as long as this. Right. And speaking of genetic data, the company, 23 and Me, which provides that at-home genetic testing kit, it announced last week that they had been hacked. What happened here? Well, so the bad news is that someone got into a bunch of people's 23 and Me accounts, and they used that access to download information about hundreds of thousands of other users, and they're now selling it online for $1 to $10 a pop. But there is some good news here as well because it doesn't look like 23 and Me's actual databases were hacked. The information being sold doesn't include raw genetic data. And the hackers seem to be playing it up as a bigger, more professionally targeted deal that it actually is, according to an article from Wired. So the basic gist is that hacking is a strong word for what happened.

It's more like these attackers guessed some account passwords based on credentials that have been compromised in, attacks on other websites. And so once they were in there, then, they scraped data that 23 and Me users had chosen to make visible to other 23 and me users. So it's things like sex, age, and broad ancestry categories. And these attackers were claiming that this was a targeted attack on people of Ashkenazi Jewish origin. But the data that's for sale seems to include a lot of people of Chinese descent as well. And they also said they had celebrities. profiles, but some of those celebrity profiles seem to be cut-paste of each other. So this was a lot more sloppy and a lot less really impressive of a hack than they were trying to make it sound when they were

telling people that they'd done it. Well, I got about a minute left, but I want to end with some good, I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Some unexpectedly good news. Typical climate change stories aren't really good news, but this one, the changing climate may be a boon for wine growers in Bordeaux, France. Tell me about that. Turns out wet winters and hot dry summers are becoming increasingly common in southwest France. And that is the ideal kind of situation for making an award-winning Bordeaux wine. And there you go. Wow, I guess there's some good news. Maggie, always great to have you on the show. We can toast to the future. I'm opening a bottle right after the show is over.

Maggie Kerth, editorial lead at Carbon Plan based in Minneapolis. For the rest of the hour, an astronomical highlight. for your weekend, an annular solar eclipse that hopefully a lot of you might be able to see. Joining me now to talk about it is Dean Regis, astronomer and author based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Welcome back, Dean. Glad to be with you on Eclipse Eve here. Nice to have you. Tell us what is an annular eclipse and how is it different from a total eclipse? Yeah, so an annular solar eclipse happens when the moon is too far from the Earth,

so it doesn't appear big enough to block out the entire sun. So I think a lot of people remember the total solar eclipse from 2017. This one is going to not quite block out the entire sun. So if you're in the right place at the right time, the moon seems to nestle right inside the sun's disk, leaving this ring of fire around the moon. It is so cool. Is it safe to look at it or do we still need those special glasses? It is absolutely not safe.

I'm glad you said that because this is a partial solar eclipse. Whenever any little bit of the sun is shining, you definitely need those glasses. So, you know, see if you can get some eclipse glasses. Connect with your local astronomy clubs, science center, observatory planetarium. They should be doing something. If you don't already have the glasses, check with them. But yeah, don't stare at this, please. And you won't really notice any difference in the brightness of the sky.

So you wouldn't even know this is happening unless you, you know, were ready for it and had those glasses. Is that right? Because there is so much of the sun still coming through the sky. that ring of fire there? Absolutely. Even when there's just a few percentage of the sun shining on you, it is still blazingly bright. So for people that are in the path of annularity, that's this narrow swath of land between Oregon and Texas. It will dim a little bit around that time. You'll see a little dimming. It'll probably feel a little cooler outside. The light might be a little weird, But I think the best thing is to actually watch the shadows, light coming through like leaves and trees onto the ground because it'll cast little mini eclipses onto the ground that you can see.

And what if we've lost our glasses for this eclipse? What are our options for viewing it? Yeah, that is tricky because I know a lot of people might have their glasses from 2017 and that eclipse. Right. You want to check those out to make sure they're still safe. Shine a really bright flashlight through them. make sure there's no pinholes or distortions or anything like that. Just test those out.

But if you don't have glasses, then you can do the pinhole method where you let the light come through a hole in a piece of paper onto the ground. And you look at the projection on the ground. You can do this with a colander, a trucker hat, ritz crackers, anything with a little hole in it. And it'll make little shapes. And you'll see the eclipse sun on the ground. But just don't look through the hole.

Let the light come through the hole. onto the ground. Okay, now for the good stuff, give us the ABCs of where you have to be living to see the annual eclipse. Well, a couple cool places that you can try to get to if you can get there real fast. Crater Lake National Park out in Oregon is going to be a really nice place to go, but then the path will go from Oregon into Nevada, Utah, so Arches National Park is close to that, then down through New Mexico, where you can go to Albuquerque, where the balloon fiesta is happening, And then Roswell, New Mexico, which is where I'm planning on viewing from, with all the aliens and whatnot, and then down through Texas and out. So that's like this narrow band where you have to be to see the annularity.

The closer to that band, the more of the sun will be blocked out. The farther away you are, then the less will be blocked out. So people in the Midwest will see about 50% of the sun blocked, and then people in the northeast will see a little bit less than that. And what time should we be out there looking? Well, this varies. It varies greatly depending on where you are. So when the annularity begins in Oregon, it'll be there first. So right around Crater Lake, annularity will be about 9-17 to 921. Down here in New Mexico, it'll be about 1038 to 1045. And if you're in Texas, 1152 to 1156, but definitely check your local time because it will vary quite a bit. And as you said before, if you're not right along the exact track of this eclipse, a lot of people will be able to see at least something, right? Yeah, that's the thing about this eclipse is it's visible almost over the entire United States. So everybody will see a little bit of something.

And I'm really trying to hype this one up because I think that maybe people have another date circled on their calendar for an astronomical event. April 8th, 2024. That's the date of the next total solar eclipse, which is, is by far the best most amazing astronomical thing you ever see. And so this one is like the little rehearsal eclipse. It's the warm up. The warm up act. It is the warm up eclipse. This is the one where you can like practice. Make sure you have your safety equipment. Practice that you can do some viewing safely. And even better than that, practice taking pictures. Because if you get some good pictures of this eclipse, you'll be all ready for April. And man, I can't wait for that one. Dean, sounds like you're excited. Thank you for cluing us in on this.

My pleasure. Keep looking up. And that's it for today. Lots of folks helped make the show this week, including Beth Rami. Santiago Flores. Diana Plasker. John Dancosky. Robin Kasmor.

And many more. Next time, how advances in MRNA technology could improve vaccines for more than just COVID boosters. Trials are underway for vaccines against conditions and diseases from Lyme disease to diabetes and cancer. Have a great weekend. You'll see you soon on Science Friday.