Science Friday - Ballot Measures Passed To Protect Abortion Rights | New Largest Prime Number

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Abortion was on the ballot in 10 states, and seven of them passed constitutional amendments defending abortion rights. Also, this ginormous number has a whopping 41,024,320 digits, which isn’t very helpful for mathematicians but is certainly exciting for math nerds.Seven States Passed Ballot Measures To Protect Abortion RightsThis week, science was on the ballot in many states. Voters across the country weighed in on issues like drug legalization, money to fund climate programs, and, of course, abortion rights. Ten states voted on the issue, and in seven of them, voters chose to protect or expand abortion rights. Those states are Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New York, Colorado, Arizona, and Missouri. On the flip side, voters in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota rejected measures that would protect abortion rights.Ira Flatow talks with Tim Revell, executive editor at New Scientist, about the outcome of some sciencey ballot measures and what we can expect going into another Trump presidency. They also discuss the launch of the world’s first wooden satellite, what scientists learned when they put vampire bats on a treadmill, and more.Math Enthusiast Finds The Largest Known Prime NumberLet’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one.So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on are prime numbers. The number 12, for example, wouldn’t be prime because you can divide it by other numbers, like 2 and 3. And as you count up and up, prime numbers become more sparse.Math lovers are always competing to find the largest prime number, and just recently, an engineer discovered the largest one—so far. And you won’t believe how ginormous it is: It has more than 41 million digits.Ira talks with Jack Murtagh, math writer and columnist for Scientific American, about why prime numbers are so cool, and the quest to find the largest one.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've got big news for all you math nerds out there because someone has just discovered the largest prime number so far, which is maybe not so helpful for mathematicians, but thrilling for math geeks. If you want to understand numbers, then you need to understand primes. This is more a feather in the cap for the folks who care about this kind of thing. It's Friday, November 8th. Happy Science Friday. I'm sci-fri producer Rasha Iridi, discovering a new giant, prime number is hard work. I mean, we're talking about souped up computers and fancy processing chips and software running day and night, all to find the most ginormous prime number. So go ahead,

take your guesses on what that number is, and here's a tip. Maybe multiply it by a few trillion over and over and over again. That reveal is coming up soon, but first, let's check in on this week in science. Here's Ira Flato. This week, science was on the ballot in many states. Voters weighed in on issues like drug legalization, money to fund climate programs, and of course, abortion rights. Ten states voted on the issue, and in seven of them, voters chose to protect or expand abortion rights. Here with more of the news of this week is Tim Revel, executive editor at New Scientist. He's based in Mary Old London, England.

Welcome back, Tim. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. and happy 33rd birthday. Thank you very much. All right, let's start with these seven states that voted to protect abortion rights. What are they? Yeah, so those states are Arizona, Missouri,

Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New York, and Colorado. And there you had a combination of voters formally voting to enshrine existing abortion rights and also in the case of Arizona and Missouri actually expanding them too. And what about the states that rejected those measures? Yeah, so Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, they all rejected ballot initiatives. And South Dakota, of course, is the state with the most restrictive law in the country when it comes to abortion. And so, yeah, they voted against any protections of abortion rights undoing existing abortion laws in two of those cases as well. Can we draw any conclusions about what this all means in the context of a forthcoming Trump administration?

Yeah, so Trump's views on abortion are unclear. at best. I mean, he's previously bragged about his Supreme Court justice appointments and how they overturned Roe v. Wade, but he's also distanced himself to some of the more extreme statements that his vice president to be J.D. Vance has made. So J.D. Vance has spoken about a national ban on abortion, but then Trump has tended to dodge questions about if he had veto such a thing, if it came across his desk, saying that really it's a matter for the state. So it's a bit unclear exactly what it will mean. All right. Let's pivot to another ballot. issue, this one having to do with psychedelics. In Massachusetts, voters rejected a measure to legalize

medicinal psychedelics, and it failed to pass. Tim, tell me more about this ballot measure. Yeah, so this measure, it would have affected five natural psychedelics, including psilocybin, which is the active component in magic mushrooms. And it would have made it possible for these five psychedelics to be administered to people over the age of 21 under licensed supervision. Also for individuals to grow a small amount of psychedelic substances at home, and then it would have also added some taxes on psychedelics too. And this didn't go through, as I say, and in a nutshell, what were the arguments for and against it? So the arguments for this have been that there's a lot of excitement about the potential use of psychedelics for treating things like mental health conditions,

such as depression and anxiety, as well as things like alcoholism. And there is some evidence to back this up, that kind of initial studies that suggest it could be true. But I guess the main argument against this is that the evidence is still quite weak. It's yet to be definitively proven. And so the DEA, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration currently has these substances classed as Schedule I drugs, which means that according to them, they have no accepted medical use. But there are a couple of other states, right, that have voted to decriminalize psychedelics. Yeah, that's right. In the past Oregon and Colorado have passed ballots that have allowed psychedelics to become legal. And in Oregon, it's been the case since about 2023 that it's possible to legally get hold of psychedelics there. But how that's played out yet is still a bit uncertain. There are some people studying what those effects are, but actually across the whole state, it's still a fairly small amount of the drug that's been handed out. And people are still trying to understand, you know, what what benefits there have been and also where things have gone wrong. Okay, let's shift to another big issue

and I'm talking about climate change. There were also a couple of big climate wins this week. Let's start with Washington State. Yeah, so in Washington State, voters there backed up a carbon market. So there was a ballot measure that could have removed a carbon market that already exists in Washington State. This carbon market is a, it's called a cap and trade carbon market, but effectively what it's managed to do so far is raised $2 billion for green initiatives. And it does that by gradually reducing the amount of carbon emissions that industry is allowed to release. The result of that is that those industries are forced to invest in clean technology. And voters showed their support for this measure.

California also had a climate win this week. What measures did voters decide on there? Yeah, that's right. So California passed something called Proposition 4. and that's about issuing $10 billion worth of bonds to fund climate and environmental projects. And so amongst that there is nearly $4 billion for safe drinking water, drought, flood and water resilience programs, $1.5 billion from restoring the health of forests, and just over a billion to increase coastal resiliency and mitigate sea level rise.

And this is especially important right now, given that we expect the incoming Trump administration to roll back climate plans, right? Yeah, it's extremely important right now. I mean, COP 29 begins on Monday. That's one of these extremely important and big climate conferences. And, of course, it's still currently a Biden administration, and the Biden administration is sending plenty of delegates to COP 29, where they're meant to be discussing how rich countries can support poorer countries.

But given that Biden's administration now has got a very limited time left, it will be very hard for any agreement to feel like it's got staying power, given that Trump previously has signored that he will roll back many environmental protections and climate commitments. He did that last time he was in power and may well do it again this time. I don't know about you, but I could use a break from election time. So let's pivot to some fun science this week. And I'm going to start with Japan developing and launching the first wooden satellite.

Yeah, there's such an amazing story. I absolutely love it. So it's the world's first wooden satellite has launched into space. And it's really interesting. This satellite is called Lignosat, and it's what they call a cube satellite. So it's this really small 10-centimeter box that is made from the wood of a magnolia tree that's native to Japan. The construction used a traditional Japanese technique, meaning that there's no screws or glue at all in this satellite. So it's really quite amazing. And you know, I saw a picture of this satellite. It's like the size of a Tupperware. Yeah, it's really small. And the main thing this satellite is going to be used to test is just, you know, how useful is wood as a material off Earth. So it's currently on its way to the International Space Station. And once it arrives there, shortly afterwards, it's going to be released into its proper orbit around Earth. And it will be sending back loads of data to researchers on Earth to see how does this satellite hold up. really extreme if you're out orbiting Earth because once every 45 minutes, your temperature is swapping from between about minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit to 200 degrees Fahrenheit as you're in front of the sun and then hidden from the sun. So the material has really got to hold up well if it's going to stay there in its orbit. The positive news about this is that if and when it does return, it burns up in the atmosphere completely, as opposed to other space metabolism.

junk that might not. Yeah, that's correct. So normally satellites have got plenty of metal in them. And when they come back to Earth, many of the components burn up. But a lot of the metal forms these quite hard, solid balls that end up either existing in the atmosphere or heading down to Earth. Whereas a wooden satellite, it should burn up completely in the atmosphere, leaving almost no trace at all. All right. Let's round out this conversation with some critter news. There's a new study about chimps using computers. Yes. So this is a really cool study and it's really about performance anxiety and how that may have evolved before humans and chimps diverged. So in this study, there are six chimps who over the course of six years, they participated in a study where they had to complete three different tasks on a computer screen.

One was easy, one was medium and one was hard. And these tasks were repeated over the length of the study, but in front of different numbers of people watching the chimps, including people. people they knew and people they didn't. And what the team found, and this was true for every single chimp in the study, was that the easiest task, when the chimp's tried to complete that, having an audience actually made it harder, but with the hardest task, it actually made the chimps perform a lot better. Wow. Do we know why the chimps perform that way? We can kind of guess. We know that this kind of thing is called the audience effect, and we know it applies to humans too, which is when you end up performing better or worse when someone is

looking at you. And what seems to be happening is that for the easiest task, it's just not engaging enough for the chimps. And so they get distracted by the audience. They get a bit bored and maybe they start playing up to the audience and then they don't perform as well as they should on the test. But for the harder task, the audience acts as a kind of stressor making the chimps want to concentrate even harder and therefore perform better. Wow, that's something like humans do also. Yeah. It's a really cool. Yeah, humans do it as well. But what we don't know is if humans do it when chimps wants them, but we know that chimps do it when humans watch them. There's a test we have to perform.

Yeah, I'm happy to volunteer for that study. I'm going to volunteer. All right, let's also talk about something else funny in the realm of animal research, and it's a new study. Scientists looked at what happened when they had vampire bats run on a treadmill. Why vampire bats? I actually didn't know before I read about this study that vampire bats could even run. But it turns out that's something they actually do quite common.

when they're chasing after prey, they can run across the ground at about 30 meters a minute, which, you know, compared to Usain Bolt, who does 100 metres in 10 seconds, it's not that fast, but, you know, it's still surprisingly fast for a bat. Now, the reason researchers have been putting these bats on treadmills, and I must say the video of this is amazing, you must seek it out. These bats kind of look like part humans on crutches, part mini demon docks when they're running. But the reason researchers are interested in them is because they've got this very unusual diet of almost entirely fresh blood.

Most mammals get their energy for movement from fats and stored sugars. But there's almost no fat and sugar in blood. Instead, it's much, much higher in protein. And so that must have been what was providing the energy for movement by the bats. So to find out how this all worked,

researchers, they put these vampire bats on some treadmills, and they were able to monitor the carbon atoms in the food that they had eaten. And what that showed them was actually that these, vampire bats, they're not using energy from any fat stores or any energy stores when they're running. Instead, they're using the energy directly from the food they have just eaten, which is a very unusual way of getting energy for movement. You know, that does sound kind of risky, right, if you're a bat and you're depending on your energy from just your last meal?

Yeah, it means that vampire bats can actually starve extremely easily. So even within 24 hours of not eating is short enough period for bats to start. But they do have this kind of unusual social adaptation to compensate for this, wherever a bat hasn't eaten for a while, the other bats in the group will regurgitate some of their own food and give it to the bat who's in need. Wow, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having me. Tim Revel, executive editor at New Scientist based in London, England. After the break, how an amateur mathematician discovered the new largest prime number.

Let's go back to grade school for a moment, okay? you remember learning about prime numbers, those numbers that can only be divided by themselves or one. So, two, three, five, seven, eleven, and so on are prime numbers. The number 12, for example, wouldn't be prime because you can divide it by other numbers, like two and three. And as you count up and up, prime numbers become more sparse. They're spread out. And if you follow math at all, you'll know that math geeks are always competing to find the largest prime number.

And just recently, an engineer discovered the largest one so far, and you won't believe how ginormous it is. Here with the story is Jack Murta, math writer, and columnist for Scientific American based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Jack, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. All right, I'm going to give you a drum roll. You can hear that tapping it out. I want you to reveal just how large that new prime number is. So it's unfathomably large. It's 41 million digits long. It's totally beyond human comprehension, hope it is. So that's the number of digits, you know, not the size of the number. So for reference, I mean, a trillion is a decently big number, but that's only 13 digits long. And I mean, estimates for the number of atoms in the observable universe is something like 80 digits long. So 41 million digits is just too big to comprehend. Wow, wow. Tell me, as a, you know, someone who watches this go on all the time with math nerds, what's going on here with prime numbers being so cool in the first place and people are trying to get the largest one.

Yeah, so we care about primes. I mean, they're often called the building blocks of the numbers. And that's because every whole number can be broken down into the product of primes. So if you want to understand numbers, then you need to understand primes, much in the same way that a physicist who wants to understand primes. Much in the same way that a physicist who wants to understand. understand matter needs to understand atoms. It's sort of like the indivisible unit that underlies everything. And so they crop up all the time in pure math. They're like, you know, main characters in pure math. But they're even useful in practice too. So for example, primes play a critical role in widely used encryption algorithms that keep our digital transactions secure. So primes are everywhere. Primes are definitely cool. I will say this new 41 million digit prime is not likely to find real-world application anytime soon. This is more a feather in the cap for the folks who care about this kind of thing.

Right. And there are a lot of those folks. Yes. And you notice that when you talk about primes, they get pretty hard to find, right? The higher you go, the more uncommon they are. Exactly. And not only are they more uncommon, but it's just for an enormous number, it's very time-consuming to check whether or not it's prime.

So, like, some numbers are easy. Okay, if I give you a huge even number, then you know it's not going to be. to be prime because even numbers are divisible by two, and that's not just one in itself. But if I give you some arbitrary, massive odd number, how are you going to determine whether or not it's prime? One thing you could try is to divide it by every number smaller than it and see if any of them divided cleanly. But then, you know, enormous numbers come with an enormous number of cases to check, and that quickly becomes infeasible even for computers to manage this level of exhaustive search. So instead, you know, researchers design advanced algorithms and employ every clever little optimization trick they can to either speed up the process of checking whether a number's prime or to narrow the circus somehow.

Well, let's talk about that. I understand that an engineer named Luke Durant figured out this giant number. How did he go about it? That's right. So he was actually part of a broader initiative. And the key idea is to, you know, since these enormous numbers, it gets very time consuming and cumbersome, is to focus on certain types of prime numbers. So these numbers are called Mersenne Primes. I can explain what those are if you'd like. Sure. Okay. So a Mersen prime, they are primes that take a very special form. So you get one by taking the number two, multiplying it by itself, a bunch of things. at times, so 2, 4, 8, 16, you keep doubling. You do that some number of times, and then you subtract 1. So 2 times 2 times, 2 times 2, all minus 1. And when you do this, sometimes you get a prime number out, depending on how many 2s you multiply. So you don't always get a prime. You don't even often get a prime, but sometimes you do. And why this matters for prime hunters is that we know methods for checking whether numbers of this form are prime that are way faster than general methods

for checking whether arbitrary numbers are prime. So the bigger the number, the longer it takes to check. But since we have a super fast method for Mersenne primes, we can afford to go big with them. And there's a whole community of people, right, looking for these Mersenne numbers online. Exactly, yeah. So there's the great internet Mersen prime search, it's called. And this is an organization that began in 1996. And what's really cool about them is that they took a crowdsourced approach.

So anybody can go to Mersend.org and download free software to run on their computer at home and join in the hunt and maybe be the next discoverer. Luke Durant was one of these people, downloaded the software. But he did break a tradition in the community. So since the program began, they found 18 new prime numbers, and 17 of those were found on personal computers. So these are volunteers who maybe have a computer running in the corner of their office, hoping that. to make a discovery. And Luke broke that trend by just throwing an absolute barrage of computational muscle at this problem. He's strung a lot of computers together? Yes, exactly. So first of all, he used GPUs instead of CPUs. So GPUs are the specialized computer chips that are powering much

of the current AI boom. Luke formerly worked at Nvidia, which designs these chips. So he's very familiar with them. Enough said. Yeah. And did he spend a lot of money on this? Yeah, so when asked this question, he said, I think under $2 million. Oh, wow. That's serious stuff, just to find a prime number. Is there a prize for this effort? Yeah, so funnily, you do win a monetary prize for finding a Mersenne Prime, and that prize is $3,000. So this didn't exactly pay for itself.

Not good rate of return on that one. Is there going to be an end to this search, or does it just continue forever? Well, we know there are infinitely many prime numbers, and I don't think people are going to stop searching for them. Curiously, we don't know if there are infinitely many Mersenne primes. So that search could dry up. It is conjectured that there are infinitely many. But I think that this crowdsource project is not slowing down. You know, it is going to take more and more computational resources as we go unless there are algorithmic breakthroughs.

Right. Can any of our listeners join this Mersen search? Yeah, that's the cool thing. Anyone can do this. Go to mercend.org, download the software, and you might strike gold. You don't need two million dollars to do this. Right. Jack, as a math nerd yourself, do you have a favorite prime? Now, mine is three. Turns out three is my lucky number. Do you have something like that? You know, I don't think I do. I sort of like all primes. You know, maybe I'll pick two because two is special and that it's the only even prime number. Oh, I never thought about that. There's only one even prime number. It's the only one. Wow. Wow, you just blew my head away on that. All these years thinking about primes. You're also a puzzle maker, right? That's right. Do prime numbers ever make it into your puzzles?

I have not used prime numbers in a puzzle before. One of the main types of puzzles I make are crossword puzzles. And so for crosswords, People who make crosswords are always collecting, you know, little phrases in the language that maybe could be reinterpreted in some kind of wordplay type way. And so I've thought of the phrase prime real estate as a possible revealer in a puzzle that has to do with prime numbers and locations. You know, Fifth Avenue, for example, five is a prime number and maybe Fifth Avenue is where prime rink. Haven't fully worked out the kinks, but that's the kind of idea. You could have prime rib. Prime rib, yeah, why not? Yeah.

Well, Jack, good luck to you and everybody else searching for that prime. prime number. Thank you very much. Check Murta, Math writer, and columnist for Scientific American based in Jersey City. That's it for this week's show. Lots of folks help make it happen, including Santiago Flores, Volosa Mayors, Robin Kasmur, Annie Nero. On Monday's episode, The Signs Behind Traffic, and Why Wider Highways Don't Mean Less Traffic. Have a great weekend. I'm Rasha Auretti.