Science Friday - Cloning for Conservation, Cubesats, Queer Ecology, Henry Petroski. June 30, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

How Fungi Are Breaking The Binary: A Queer Approach To Ecology As Pride month comes to a close, many people are reflecting on the past, present, and future of the LGBTQIA+ community. An interdisciplinary group of scientists, researchers, and artists are using queerness as a lens to better understand the natural world, too. It’s a burgeoning field called queer ecology, which aims to break down binaries and question our assumptions of the natural world based on heterosexuality. For example, there are plenty of examples of same-sex animal pairings in the wild, like penguins, chimps, and axolotls. There are also plants that change sexes, or have a combination of male and female parts, like the mulberry tree. But perhaps the most queer kingdom of all is fungi. Mushrooms are not easily forced into any type of binary. For example, the Schizophyllum commune, or the split gill mushroom, has 23,000 sexes, making it somewhat of a queer icon in the field of mycology. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Patty Kaishian, incoming curator of mycology at the New York State Museum, about how fungi might help us expand our understandings of sexuality, identity, and hierarchy. They also discuss how queer ecology can help people of all sexualities reconnect with the natural world.   Scientists Think Cloning Could Help Save Endangered Species Earlier this year, a baby Przewalski’s horse was born at the San Diego Zoo. But this foal isn’t any ordinary foal, he’s a clone. He’s the product of scientists aiming to save his dwindling species using genetics. This endangered horse species once roamed Europe and Asia, but by the 1960, threats like poaching, capture, and military presence drove the horses to extinction in the wild. Conservationists raced to save this wild horse through captive breeding programs, but with a population so small, there just wasn’t enough genetic diversity to grow a healthy herd. But with careful genetic management, the Przewalski’s horse’s population is now nearly 2,000 horses strong, and this new foal will one day help boost his species’ genetic diversity even more. Producer Kathleen Davis talks with Dr. Oliver Ryder, conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, about cloning Przewalski’s horse, and how doing so will infuse genetic diversity into the small population. Then Davis talks with Dr. Sam Wisely, professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida, about how cloning can help other endangered species, like the black-footed ferret, and the ethics involved in cloning.   Twenty Years On, The Little CubeSat Is Bigger Than Ever The story of the CubeSat started with a big problem for one Cal Poly professor. “It was actually a critical problem for us, but it was a problem that nobody else cared about,” said Jordi Puig-Suari, an Emeritus Professor from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He co-invented the CubeSat with Bob Twiggs from Stanford. Puig-Suari is now retired and has spent the last four years sailing around the world with his wife. I talked to him over Zoom from somewhere along that journey. He takes me back two decades to his time as a professor at Cal Poly where he was hired to develop their aerospace engineering department. Read the rest of this article at sciencefriday.com.   Remembering Engineer And Author Henry Petroski Last week the world watched as rescuers from across the globe searched for a tiny experimental submersible that had disappeared, carrying five people on a dive to the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic. That search turned out, sadly, to be in vain. The Titan submersible is believed to have imploded in the North Atlantic, killing all aboard. The intersection of design, engineering, and human risk-taking is a recurring theme throughout modern history. One of the finest chroniclers of those tales was Henry Petroski, who died earlier this month at the age of 81. He was a professor of engineering and history at Duke University, and author of many books. Petroski was known for his critical eye and insightful view of various missteps and faults in pursuit of progress—from improving bridge designs for safety to the tragic loss of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. Some called Petroski the “poet laureate of technology” for his prolific writings on everything from the design of bridges to the fabrication of pencils. In this recording from 2012, Ira Flatow spoke with the late professor Petroski about engineering failures, and humanity’s follies.   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.

This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk about why scientists are cloning species on the edge of extinction. Plus, remembering engineer and historian Henry Petrovsky, who chronicled our designs and our engineering failures. But first, a conversation about expanding our ways of thinking about the natural world. As we close out Pride Month, many of us are reflecting on the past, present, and future. of the LGBTQ community. But what if we extended our understanding of queerness into the natural world, too, into ecology? You've likely heard about same-sex animal pairings. Penguins, baboons, axolotls, that's just naming a few.

Not to mention plants that change sex or have a combination of male and female parts, like the mulberry tree. But perhaps the most queer kingdom of all is fungi. Joining me now to tell us about how fungi might help us expand our understandings of sexuality, identity, and hierarchy in nature is my guest. Patty Kachian, the incoming curator of mycology at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the basics here.

I mean, this is a new kind of thinking for me and I'm sure a lot of other people out there. So tell me what is queer art? ecology. And how does this help us understand this whole field of ecology? Yeah, so you're not the only one, certainly, that this type of thinking is new for. So queer ecology is an emerging interdisciplinary field. I'm approaching the field as an academic scientist, as a mycologist, and I'm interested in exploring lots of aspects of ecology through what we would call a queer lens. So I'm going to break down the parts of this term queer ecology. So starting with ecology, which more people are probably familiar with, you know, this is

the study of organisms and their interactions with each other and within their habitats. And then queer is sort of an umbrella term that describes all manner of behavior or identity that is outside of what we would call at the heteronormative box. So queer ecology is a way of exploring how organisms, from across the tree of life, are interacting and behaving in ways that we would consider not heteronormative. So this could mean same-sex couples, sexuality that is changing or fluid throughout the lifetime of an organism. It could also be ways in which organisms just don't fit in the box that we have set in terms of their reproductive biology. So I want to clarify a little bit here

that when we're talking about queer ecology, we're not necessarily taking our human understandings of gender and putting them on animals, plants, and fungi. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. And to a certain extent. For example, the word, the term gender, that is a social word. That's a word that we talk about in the context of human behaviors and our social orientations. So gender is sort of the relationship you have to your own sexual identity and expression. And that inherently is something that we can't extend to other organisms without having a conversation with them about it. But what we do know in studying all sorts of organisms from fungi to birds to lizards and algae is that the way in which all sorts of organisms are moving

throughout the world, there's so much variation in their reproduction and in their sexuality. So it's not actually us extending our human perceptions of these things onto those organisms. These are just actually really observable, biological, realities for them. And there's this notion that we hear from scientists that anthropomorphizing animals and plants is bad. You know, using our own human ideas to understand them kind of misses the point. How do you feel about this?

I think it's a really interesting conversation because on one hand, yes, I think it can be irresponsible as a scientist to project onto another organism, you know, aspects of our own lived experience as human beings. The flip side of the coin is that if we don't allow the possibility that other organisms are as dynamic and complex as we are, if we don't believe that they can, for example, feel pleasure or pain, that's also not really scientific, because that would be to suggest that humans are so exceptional that we are just set apart from the entire tree of life, right? And so over time, we've learned more and more about how different organisms are capable of things beyond what we could previously comprehend. And, you know, the fact that we've set our expectations so low is a bit of a problem.

And that's a cultural sort of artifact of how we approach science. I want to get into some examples. And let's talk about your field of study, which is fungi. Let's start with their biology. Sure. So fungal biology is really complicated because there are so many different fungi out there. There's actually millions and millions of species. There are estimates that there are about three million species, but a new paper came out

even more recently proposing that there could be as many as 22 million species. So regardless, there's just an incredible number of fungi, so you can't even neatly summarize all of the ways that they behave. But we do know that within the kingdom, there are a number of examples of fungi that really don't have a binary conception of sex, or we can't apply one onto them. We can't project, we can't anthropomorphize a binary idea of sex onto fungi. For example, there's a fungus, this is sort of considered a queer icon within mycology. The fungus Schizophrenm commune, that's its Latin name, and its common name is the split gill, which is a mushroom that has as many. is maybe 23,000 different sexes or mating types.

What? Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I mean, that's incredible. Are there other fungi that sort of challenge our views on sex and gender? Absolutely. So I study this group of parasitic fungi. It's an order, a taxonomic order called the Labol Benialis, which is sort of a mouthful. But they are another really diverse group of fungi.

there's, we think, tens of thousands of species of them, and they are insect-associated parasites. Some of those fungi have their reproductive structures in the same fruiting body, in the same sort of thallus, we would call it. And then others have, like, there are multiple sexes and different types of fruiting bodies. So they can basically have the same structures in one, or multiple structures in different fruiting bodies. Then we also know of other lineages of fungi that are totally asexual. And then there's other types of combinations as well. There's sort of many different ways of being and reproducing and finding partnership within the fungal kingdom. I mean, one really cool thing about fungi is that they challenge this idea of what it means

to be an individual, right? Does that aspect of fungi fit into this lens of queer ecology? So one thing I would like to just explain a little bit more is the queer dimension of the term queer ecology. So the project of queer ecology is about sort of examining what gets taken for granted as knowledge in science. How do we, for example, how is it that we've been documenting queer behavior in biology for over 100 years, but why is it that we are only really just starting to talk about it commonly now? And why does it come as a surprise to people that, you know, other organisms can be queer as well? You know, that is sort of a function of power, right? That's sort of who gets to make determinations in science and who gets to publish their data

and how does their data get talked about. All of these things are, of course, very much social and constructed. So queer theory is sort of pushing us as scientists to examine these boxes that we've made and ask questions about their validity and can they be understood differently. The individual is a very powerful unit in scientific understanding, right? especially in like taxonomy, which is what I study, which is the naming and describing of species. And it's all about sort of delineating the difference between different species. We can better understand them. And that, of course, is very functional. That gives us a lot of information.

But it might not tell us the full picture, right? How can we understand, for example, a species of tree that is entirely dependent on a partnership it has with a fungus? If the tree simply would not have evolved without this fungal partnership, does it make sense to fully think of it as an individual? And so fungi are doing these types of interactions around us all the time. They're all inside our bodies. There's more fungal and bacterial species in our bodies than there are human cells. fungi are forming these intricate partnerships with 90% of plants, terrestrial plants. And so they kind of make us think about, well, what does the term individual even really? mean and how useful is it in understanding biology or other things beyond biology as well. So the answer is

not to get away, do away with the concept of individual, but to complicate it a little bit and to try to imagine what could we learn if we de-emphasize that, if we thought about webs of interaction a bit more. What are the benefits of opening our minds and thinking about nature as a little bit queer. So I think everyone can learn from queer theory and from queer ecology, regardless of your own identity. And so I think what queer ecology teaches us is that we are, A, we are not so apart from nature as we might have been taught. B, we have the capacity to learn a lot from the organisms around us and their myriad diversity of form and use that as inspiration for better and more equal societies. And also, I think we can learn how to be more in love with the natural world

also and less rigid about how we extend our care to organisms. I want to end with a way that people can appreciate and maybe reconnect with nature a little bit more than maybe we're used to doing. And this is this idea of a sit spot. Can you tell me what a sit spot is? Yes, I love this idea. I learned of it when I was an undergrad where you would go usually into the forest, but it can be done in an urban setting, like a park or, you know, a desert environment, just any place that you can routinely access near your home. And I teach my students to go once a week for about 30 minutes to an hour, and you simply start to observe all of the life forms that you see. It's essentially a meditative observational practice of naturalism, and it starts to change your level of attention to the

environment around you. The more you go, the more you start to see. And it's not just because you have more encounters with more organisms. It actually starts over time to change the way your brain functions, right? You start to actually notice more things. And then over time, over weeks or months or hopefully even years, you might start to see, and you'll very likely start to to see your relation to that place become very personal. Patty Cachian is the incoming curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. I love being here.

After the break, can cloning help bring back species on the brink of extinction? And what are the ethics surrounding it? We'll talk about it. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. Earlier this year, a baby Shavalsky's horse was born, but this foal isn't an ordinary foal. He's a clone. He's the product of scientists aiming to save his species using genetics. Let's go back in time for a moment. This endangered horse once roamed Europe and Asia, but by the 1960s, threats like poaching, capture, and military presence drove the horses to extinction in the wild.

conservationists race to save this horse through captive breeding programs. But with a population so small, the horses experienced in breeding, and there just wasn't enough genetic diversity to grow a healthy herd. But with careful genetic management, the Shivalski's horse population is now nearly 2,000 horses strong. So how does cloning fit into all of this? Here to talk us through it is my guest, Dr. Oliver Ryder, Conservation Geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. He works on Chivalski's Horses. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for

joining us. Nice to be with you. So you've helped clone two Shavalski's horses. Can you walk me through the ABCs of how you do that? Our big contribution has been to bank cells. The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has a biodiversity bank that includes the frozen zoo, which contains reproductive cells and cells that are established from skin biopsies from birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including from Chivalsky's horses. So we start from frozen cells and thaw them, and then those cells are fused with a domestic horse egg that has had its genetic material removed. This work, which was done by Viagin Pets and Equine, and in collaboration with Revive and Restore, involved are sending cells to their facility.

They're having the domestic horse eggs on hand and then removing the genetic information from the domestic horse egg and fusing a cell that we provided from the frozen zoo with the horse eggs so that quite remarkably, quite in a fascinating way, that is sufficient to allow the development of an embryo that can grow into a foal and be born and produce a normal horse. This has been done with domestic horses. It has never been done with Shavalsky's horses. This baby horse that was born, this fall that was born recently, is a clone of an animal that was alive when? The animal who was cloned was originally given the name

Kuporovich. And he was born in 1975 in the United Kingdom. Wow. In 1980, we obtained a cell culture from him and grew it up and banked it, determined he had the normal number of chromosomes for Chivalski's horses, which is 66. And by the way, it's a different number. All domestic horses have 64. And those cells sat in the liquid nitrogen freezer at 290 degrees below zero for 40 years. and before they were brought out and produced the first successful clone of a Shavalsky's horse. So why clone these horses in the first place? I mean, what can cloning accomplish that other genetic techniques can't? Well, because in small populations and all Shavalsky's horses trace their ancestry to only 12 animals that came out of the wild.

And there's been over 100 years of breeding and managed facilities and the decline of populations, for example, during the Second World War, a substantial proportion of the genetic diversity that was available from the dozen Shavalsky's horses has been lost. And that is not something that can be reversed by just breeding more animals that are descended through the pedigree.

But if one can go back into the pedigree, and if you will, say, bring an animal back that was alive a long time ago, it would have the genetic diversity of the population at that previous time, which was larger than it is today. So it's actually a way to restore genetic variation that's been lost. And that's a really new opportunity. That's a really new paradigm. I would imagine it's very exciting to be working on cloning a species and to see it actually work.

I mean, can you tell me what your reaction has been to successfully cloning these horses? Well, it just sort of takes my breath away when I think about it because conservation geneticists have been dealing with the challenges of preserving genetic diversity in small populations. And in efforts to prevent extinctions, human society typically doesn't intervene until the populations are already small. So we've been trying to minimize the loss of genetic variation. but now that we can restore lost genetic variation, we can ameliorate or mitigate the process of loss that was otherwise a fact of life. Gene pools can only shrink over time

unless you can use a technology like this. So it's very exciting in that regard. So these horse clones that we've been talking about are living at a zoo. How are they going to help reestablish this population of Chivalzky's horses in the wild? Well, at the San Diego Zoo's Safari Park, we have a herd of Shavalski's horses, and the cloned individuals will have a chance to reproduce when they are fully matured, both in terms of stature and in terms of their sexual maturity, and in terms of their behavioral maturity, they will be introduced into a herd of females, a band of females, and then they can reproduce normally. And when we have those foals, they will be very special animals

because they will have one parent who's a Shavalsky's horse mayor who's living now. And they will have, as the sire, a Spivalski's horse, who was a clone of an animal that lived 40 years ago. Dr. Oliver Ryder is a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance based in San Diego, California. Thanks so much for joining us. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Cloning for conservation is complicated. Not just the science of it, but the ethics involved, too. Scientists have to consider the goals of cloning, how it's done, and if all of this time, energy, and money actually pays off. Ultimately, it begs the question. Just because we can do something, does that mean that we should? My next guest is Dr. Sam

Wisely, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida. She's based in Gainesville, Florida. She's been involved with the cloning of the endangered black-footed ferret. And she also penned an ethical analysis asking, is this justifiable? Sam, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. So tell me a little bit about this black-footed ferret. Why are they getting this special cloning treatment? Black-footed ferrets are an iconic endangered species. They were the first species to be put on the endangered species list. They were the first species to be brought entirely into captivity in order to rescue them, to reintroduce them back into the wild. And throughout their conservation history, they've really been a key species in applying new biotechnologies for the

conservation of a species. So what can cloning do that other more traditional conservation methods can't. In the case of the black-footed ferret, we're cloning this species in order to conduct what we would call genetic rescue. And genetic rescue is actually not a new term or a new management technique. It's using the cloning to enable genetic rescue that's new. So in a traditional genetic rescue, you might physically transplant an individual from one population that has genetic uniqueness and physically transported, meaning fly it in a helicopter, and put it in the population that needs genetic rescuing.

So that unique individual would breed with individuals in the population that needs rescuing, and that's how genetic rescue would ensue. This has happened before in species like the Florida Panther. But we don't have the luxury at this point of live, unique individual black-footed ferrets. We do, however, have cryopreserved cells of unique individuals. So this seems like a really intensive process. Is cloning always a last-ditch effort? I would say it is, and you're absolutely right.

It is incredibly technically complicated. It's complicated from multiple perspectives and sort of regulatory perspectives as well as ethical perspectives. And if we had unique individuals live black-footed ferrets that could provide additional genetic diversity, absolutely those would have been the individuals we would have chosen rather than conducting cloning. So I'm wondering in this case of the black-footed ferret, has cloning helped really? restore the species and, you know, has it been worth it? Well, we certainly hope so. We have produced one black-footed ferret that's a clone. Her name is Elizabeth Ann. She was born in December 2020. And she's currently being assessed for her health and her ability to reproduce on her own. And the

goal would be to create a lineage of her descendants that could then be incorporated in into the captive population of black-footed ferrets to enhance their genetic diversity. Elizabeth Ann is a very dignified name for a ferret. So give us a sense of numbers here. I mean, how many black-footed ferrets are actually left now? So in the captive population, there's more than 200, but less than 300. In the wild, Estimates can range anywhere from 600 to 900 individuals in the wild. And that is spread over a very large geographic range from Canada to Mexico in dozens of reintroduction sites. And how many genetic ancestors do they actually have? So all blackfooted ferrets are descended from seven biological founders. Wow.

So when they pulled all of those individuals from the wild into captivity, they were able to capture the last 18 individuals that were on Earth. They were only able to get seven of them to breed. And as soon as they did, that captive population flourished. But it still means that all of the genetic diversity that's available to that species, the maximum amount is represented in seven individuals. That's why adding an additional founder, which is essentially what Elizabeth Ann and her descendants could be, would be so valuable. Yeah, I mean, just thinking, I would assume that inbreeding would be a huge issue here, right? It is very much an issue. And the captive breeding program works very hard to minimize that inbreeding, but it's inevitable. And so all blackfooted ferrets today are about second cousins.

Okay. And we do see indications of what we would call inbreeding depression, meaning physiological changes that are likely due to inbreeding. That's why it's so important to add an influx of genetic diversity. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm speaking with Dr. Sam wisely about cloning for conservation. From an ethical perspective is cloning these ferrets just. defiable. That was exactly the question that we set out to answer. And ultimately, we came up in our analysis that we did think so. And part of that is because the goals of this, like I said, are actually

pretty traditional, pretty traditional conservation reasons, and that being genetic rescue for conducting this. So it's using a new technology to do what we would consider. a traditional conservation management action. That's very different from using cloning for, say, a new application of technology, say gene editing, for instance. That's not what is happening here. There's this argument out there that cloning is a waste of resources. I mean, we've talked about how it's very expensive. It, you know, it takes a lot of resources to do this and that we could be saving a species that has a better shot of surviving. How do you pick that argument apart? So you're absolutely right. And we did analyze that. In this specific case, there are a lot of donors

that are outside of the federal system. So U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not picked up the cost for a lot of this. There are a lot of not-for-profits that are interested in incorporating biotechnology into conservation. So the research and development end of it has not had a significant cost to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now, that doesn't mean that there won't be costs in the future associated with managing these clone species, trying to reintegrate them or integrate them into the captive population. However, I think that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, And the technical team that supports U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in making these decisions, that's the Blackfeited Ferret Recovery Implementation Team, all agree that the future of Blackfooted ferrets is much more certain because of this cloning effort. Why do you care so much about saving the Blackfooted ferret?

For me personally, I think the prairie ecosystem, which these guys come from, is really one of the most changed ecosystems in North America. And it was humans that changed it. And I think as a conservation biologist, I feel like I have a moral obligation to try and restore these prairies because it was people who changed these prairies in the first place. There's been some buzz around resurrecting long-gone species. There are some biotech companies that want to bring back the woolly mammoth, for example, using cloning. Ethically speaking, do you evaluate cloning differently when it comes to an extinct species versus one that is still alive? Well, I think you use the same bioethical principles. And your very first question at the beginning of the beginning of the species, this segment asks it, you can do it, but should you do it? And what are the goals that you have for doing it? Why do you want to resurrect a woolly mammoth? Do you want to restore the prairies to a Pleistocene or Holocene

environment? Restoring the environments to 50,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago. Are you doing it to make a Splash. Are you doing it to make money? I think those need to be evaluated. So I think it is incumbent on people who are trying to resurrect dead animals and extinct animals to go through this bioethical process. Dr. Sam Wisely is a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida. That's based in Gainesville, Florida. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. After the break, we'll celebrate the 20th anniversary of of the CubeSAT, a satellite that made space research cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday, and I'm Kathleen Davis. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News. For W.WIS Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local stories of national significance. 20 years ago today, professors and students from Cal Poly in San Francisco, Louis Obispo, California, sent an invention into space for the very first time. It's called

a CubeSat, a very small satellite that changed space research forever, and it's what many people call the cheapest way to access space. The technology has become so ubiquitous in rocket launches that it's sometimes hard to keep track of just how many CubeSats are sent into space every week. Reporter Michelle Loxton followed the history of the CubeSat for a recent episode of her podcast, The 101. That's out of KCLU Public Radio in Thousand Oaks, California. Welcome back to Science Friday, Michelle. Thank you, Kathleen. So describe the CubeSat for me. I mean, what does this look like and what does it do? So a CubeSat is the shape and size of a squared tissue box. From the outside, it looks like this miniature metal box or cube, and it contains all the things you'd find in a

satellite, electronic, sensors, and all sorts of systems. In terms of what, what it does, this is so diverse. It all depends on what science a CubeSat is sent into space to do. Take imagery, send communications, or perhaps even test new technology. They all look like these tiny cubes when they're sent into space, but once they're pushed out of the rockets, they were hitching a ride on, they transform. They can be these solar panels opening up. They can be solar sails. When they're in orbit, they all look different. So when the CubeSat was created 20 years ago, What problem was it meant to solve? It all starts with Jordi Pugsuari, a now retired professor from Carl Polly San Luis Obispo.

He was teaching students who wanted to be aerospace engineers. But the problem was that the space hardware they were working on was not ending up in space. You see, none of the rocket owners were very keen on putting student satellites on their billion-dollar rockets. And if an opportunity did come up, it was just too expensive. So Pookswari, with the help of another professor, Bob Twigs at Stanford, said, we need to solve this. The students who will be the future aerospace engineers need to work on space hardware. So they said, what if we create something super small? They thought there must be like a tiny space on a rocket we can fit our satellite.

And being so small, it won't be as expensive. Then they had to quell the fears of the rocket owners who didn't want this tiny, satellite being a risk to their whole mission. So they made a satellite a risk containment mechanism, meaning all the risk is contained within the cube. If something goes wrong, it won't come out of the cube. And that is how the CubeSat was born. And it's important to point out that when they invented the CubeSat, they invented the cube part, the specs that you need to follow when you want to make your own CubeSat. It doesn't tell you what needs to be inside the satellite. It just tells you, you how it needs to be contained if you want to send it into space.

Now what kind of research has actually been done with CubeSats in space? CubSats have done so much. For many countries, the CubeSat was their first ever satellite. That includes Colombia, Switzerland, Hungary, Vietnam and more. When you're seeing imagery on the news, say of Ukraine or a natural disaster somewhere, it will often say images by planet. Planet put a telescope on lots of cubesats, and now they're a super successful company. Cubsats have been deployed by NASA to study the moon. There was the Marco Mars CubeSat 1, which was the first interplanetary CubeSat. There are even CubeSat ride share companies now.

I visited one in San Luis Obispo called Maverick Space Systems. So if you want to get your CubeSat into space, they'll find you a ride on, say, you know, the Rocket Lab or SpaceX Rockets. Wow. Do we know just how many have been sent into space? So it's estimated about 2,000 cubesats have been launched over the last 20 years, but the industry has grown so much. On average, it's expected that more than 300 cubesats will be launched every year from now until 2029. So we've talked about the legacy of the CubeSat. Any idea what's next for this technology?

For me, when I think about the future, I think about what the CubeSat has actually done for the industry, and that's all about access. If you have an idea or are a small startup, you can probably make it happen because of the CubeSat. Before the CubeSat, satellites would cost a few billion dollars to build. Today, you're looking at as little as $200,000 for a CubeSat. Also, you used to need huge buildings and facilities to build satellites. Now you can just build this CubeSat on a tabletop and take it in some carry-on luggage.

And they solved the original problem. At universities across the country, because KubeSat labs now exist all over the U.S., students are finally getting their hands on actual space hardware. I'll leave Jodi Pugzwari with a last thought about the impact. Nobody believed these things could do anything when we started. But we were okay because we wanted to train students and that's all. Although we needed, the thing that was very interesting is that those same people were building CubeSats a few years later.

Michelle Loxton is host and producer of the 101, a podcast out of KCLU in Thousand Oaks, California. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Last week, the world watched as rescuers from across the globe searched for a tiny submersible. It had disappeared carrying five people on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic. That search turned out, sadly, to be in vain. The craft is believed to have imploded, killing. everyone on board. The intersection of design, engineering, and human risk-taking is a recurring

theme throughout modern history. One of the finest chroniclers of those tales was Henry Petroski, who died earlier this month at the age of 81. He was a professor of engineering and history at Duke University, and he appeared on this program many times. In 2012, Ira Flato spoke to the late Professor Petrosky about engineering failures and humanity's follies. My next guest says that it's important to look at structural failures, whether we are talking about the sinking of the Titanic, a spatial disaster, a smartphone malfunction, look at them in a larger context as a system that includes people who both maintain and use the structure. Dr. Henry Petroski is the author of To Forgive Design, Understanding Failure. He's Professor of Civil Engineering and History at Duke University. joins us from Durham, North Carolina. Welcome back to Science Friday, Henry.

It's always good to have you. Thank you, Ira. It's always good to be here. You must be getting a lot of questions, but the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic about whose fault it really was. Well, that's very difficult to pin down to one or two people. This is a system. This is a big ship, a big piece of machinery,

going out into waters that are dangerous with a lot of people on board, with insufficient lifeboats. There are so many dimensions to the Titanic story, and I think that's one of the reasons that we keep hearing new things about it, and we sometimes change our minds about what we think. One thing seems to me to be sure, and that is that the ship was marketed as unsinkable, and as we know, that was simply not true at all. The chances of hitting an iceberg were slim, let's just say for the sake of argument that the chance of hitting an iceberg was one in a million,

And everybody may have known that, at least implicitly. But that doesn't tell you when an iceberg is going to be hit. It could be hit on the first one in a million sailings or the last. Things like probability are funny. They don't give us very precise ideas about what's going to happen or when it's going to happen. In the case of the Titanic, the fact is that there were some overconfidence, hubris involved on the part of the captain who had the ship going, trying to break a speed record,

whereas he was going through waters that were dangerous and known to be dangerous. He had been warned about icebergs. So it was a concatenation of all these things that came together, some chance, some deliberate. And, you know, a lot of this seems to be the theme of your book. Yes. That there are a lot of things going on here.

Give me some examples of other great failures that we have to understand the design and the failure. Well, you were talking with the people up in the space station. I talk about NASA failures with the space shuttle, and these are familiar. These are examples that are not unlike the Titanic, actually. The Challenger was not an accident that was not foreseen. The engineers warned the managers that it was a little too cold to launch. that ship on that day with a complete confidence that it would return. And they were proven to be right. The seals had been leaking. The engineers knew that, and they expected that they would be leaking

on that day, too. The Columbia, which came back in 2003 and disintegrated upon re-entry, there were also warnings about that, questions of foam flying off the external tank and hitting the shuttle as it took off as it launched from Earth, the engineers again said, well, you know, some of that debris has hit the shuttle's wing and we really should investigate it to see whether it's been damaged terribly or not and whether we should have to repair it. But again, basically management overruled the engineers and had an overconfidence. The difference between the perspective of managers and engineers with regard to safety and failure is very interesting. Before the shuttle missions took off, the engineers were asked, what did they think the likelihood was that there would be a failure of the kind that we now know happen?

The engineers said, oh, about one in a hundred. The managers, on the other hand, predicted one in a hundred thousand. Now, that's quite a difference. And we know that the engineers were proven to be right. Myra Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Tell us the Brooklyn Bridge story that I thought was also fascinating about Roebling, who sort of built in extra stuff. He built in a safety factor into the bridge.

That's right. What responsible engineering does is it specifies the quality of the materials that go into a structure like the Brooklyn Bridge. Well, in the case of that bridge, the Roblings owned their brand, their own wire, making factory, and they would have liked to have provided the wire for the bridge's cables because they would have had a high level of confidence that it was high quality. But on a basis of a business decision, the board of directors said, no, no, you can't use your own wire. You're the engineer. It's a conflict of interest. So the contract for the wire went to

someone else who Roebling mourned was not a good producer of wire. Well, everything seems to be going fine until one day after many deliveries of these reels of wire, it was discovered that there seemed to be some bad wire getting into the bridge's cables. And how was that happening? Because every shipment of wire was tested before it was passed on to go ahead and be put into the bridge. Well, it turned out that the wire supplier was not only had bad workmanship, but also had bad morals.

the rejected wire was snuck into the construction site, and it found its way into the bridge. Well, Robly, this was Washington, Roebling. His decision was crucial at this point. What would he do? Would he take all the bad wire out? Now, that would not only cost time and money, but it would also be very dangerous for the workers. What he decided to do was, estimate to the best of his knowledge, how much bad wire was actually in the bridge already. And then he added additional wire beyond what was originally designed to be in the bridge of high quality and completed the project that way.

To this day, that bad wire is in the bridge. So if you're going to buy it, beware. Get a discount. You know, we've talked about the Titanic a bit, but you have a really interesting take on an aspect no one has talked about when we talk about the sinking. And that is, what would have happened if the Titanic did not sink? Yes, that's a very interesting thought experiment, I think. If the Titanic had not sunk, and in fact, if it had reached New York and then went back and forth across the Atlantic many times, the likely results of that would have been, in my opinion, that competing steamship companies would have wanted to better the Titanic. They would have wanted to build larger ships, faster ships. They would have wanted to build them more economically to make more profit. They would have probably used thinner and thinner steel over time. They might have put fewer rivets in. They would have maybe wanted to get rid of lifeboats altogether because after all, the

Titanic was unsinkable. We're following the design of the Titanic, only we're making it bigger and better. Eventually, chances are one of those ships would have struck an iceberg or had some kind of incident in the ocean. And since it had all the inherent flaws of the Titanic, it would have sunk and probably because it was bigger with a greater loss of life. This is what happens with the cycles of success and failure. When we have a success, a prolonged period of success, we tend to become more complacent. We tend to become overconfident that we're doing it right.

We've got it figured out finally. And then, of course, a failure occurs and wakes us up out of our dream. The failure, the wake-up call, then, causes us to look more closely at what we've been doing and we discover that, in fact, we haven't been building perfect machines or systems. We've been building them with inherent flaws. Is there one system, bridge, tunnel, anything that's waiting to fail that you can warn us about? I think the history of bridges is very interesting. Over the past century and a half or so, there's been a major bridge failure about every 30 years. So right now, we're looking ahead to

about the year 2025, 2030, oh, not too much more than a decade from now. If things follow as they have proceeded in the past, we can expect some kind of big surprise. It'll be a bridge type that hasn't failed before. It'll be something that will seemingly come out of the blue, but then in retrospect, looking at it and fitting it into the pattern, it's something we will say. We should have seen that coming. So it'll be a combination of human error and design error? Yes, generally that's right. You could almost say that a design error is a human error

because after all, it's we humans who do the designing. Yeah, I recall I covered Three Mile Island at nuclear accident in many, you know, 1979, and the investigation showed such a combination of design and human errors there. Yes, that's fairly typical. Most systems, most machines, structures are designed to be somewhat robust so that if some little thing goes wrong, the whole thing doesn't fall apart all of a sudden or blow up or anything like that. But then when humans react to this small irregularity, they sometimes make it awfully worse. Henry, I want to thank you very much for taking time to be with this. It's a fascinating book.

It's to forgive design, understanding failure, talk. about all kinds of engineering designs and famous failures and Henry Petroski's unique way of looking at them and explaining it. Thank you, Henry. Good luck with the book. Thank you, Ira. Thank you. Bye-bye. Ira Flato in 2012, talking with Henry Petrosky, who died earlier this month at the age of 81. Our condolences to his friends and his family. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. Say hi to us

on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send us feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover too. I'm Kathleen Davis. We'll see you next week.