Science Friday - Coastal Flooding, Elephants and Cancer, Yosemite Bears. August 17, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

More than five years after the devastating 14-foot high waters of Superstorm Sandy flooded New York and New Jersey, the Army Corps of Engineers is studying methods for reducing the damage of future high waters in the New York Bay and Hudson River estuary—whether with levees, seawalls, beach nourishment, or even a gate that would span from Sandy Hook to the Rockaways. But would such barriers be sufficient as sea levels rise? Is building big structures—like those protecting the Netherlands—the best use of resources?  Cancer happens when a cell picks up a mutation that causes it grow and divide out of control. Statistically, you would think then that larger-bodied organisms would have more cells and therefore more opportunities for mutation—increasing the risk of cancer. But for some bigger animals, this idea doesn’t hold true. This conundrum was first observed by epidemiologist Richard Peto and has become known as Peto’s Paradox. The elephant is one animal that falls under this paradox and has a lower cancer risk despite its large size. Scientists investigated the elephant genome to try to understand why this might happen—and identified a “zombie” gene, which is dormant in most mammals, but in elephants identifies and kills cells with damaged DNA.  People love seeing black bears when they visit Yosemite National Park in California. But encounters don’t always go well. The park has come up with a new way to keep humans and bears safe. But tracking data from the past few years points to a new trend: Bears are being hit by cars, and speeding is now their biggest threat. Leahy says 28 were hit in 2016, and many of them died. In 2017, 23 bears were hit and four died. “You’re talking about 10 percent of our bears potentially being hit by vehicles each year,” said Yosemite National Park wildlife biologist Ryan Leahy in 2017. “Just slowing down a little bit will give you that stopping distance required to prevent a collision.” The key, he says, is education. His team has created an interactive map-based website where the public can track the lives of selected bears and see general areas where they’re hit the most. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. On Tuesday, a highway bridge collapsed in the city of Genoa, Italy, and at least 39 people died in the collapse and its aftermath. The failure of the bridge is making people take a second look at engineering safety across Europe and around the world. And joining me now to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science, Sophie Bushwick, senior editor at Popular Science. Always good to see you, Sophie. You too. Let's talk about how much do investigators know about why this bridge collapsed? So this bridge was concrete reinforced with steel. And right now they're not positive what caused the collapse,

but it could have been steel inside the concrete where they couldn't look at it corroding, or it could have been the concrete itself wearing away. There's actually a twin of this bridge that had structural issues back in the 60s when a tanker hit it. So there's consideration about that. So this design is commonly used in other parts of the world. Concrete and with steel reinforcement is commonly used, yes, all over the place. And it's kind of, it's scary because a lot of these, when they build new bridges, they can build sensors into the structure itself, which can kind of give you an idea of how healthy that bridge is.

But when you have older ones, you kind of have to put the sensors on the outside, and they're not as good at giving that read. So when the concrete, when the steel goes into the concrete, you lose track of the steel. You don't know it might be rusting or corroding. Right, exactly. And on the new bridges, they actually can keep track of that better. Right. Sensors are becoming a lot cheaper and easier to put into bridges.

All right. The closer to home this week, federal judges ordered the EPA to ban a pesticide. I'm going to try to pronounce it. Chlorperyphos. Okay. I've been working on that one. Clopiraphras. Cloriparifos.

And tell us the story on that one. This is actually the latest step in an 11-year epic battle, basically. So chlorpyrifos is an insecticide, and it's also a neurotoxin. In large enough amounts, it can cause muscle spasms and paralysis, and it can shut down the heart and lungs, which was primarily thought to be concerned for people living in rural or agricultural areas. But it turns out that exposure to trace amounts of chloropiraphos over a long time can cause developmental problems in children.

And so in 2007, environmental groups first sued the EPA to get them to ban this insecticide. And it went back and forth and there were reviews. And in 2016, the EPA concluded that, yes, there were trace amounts on the food that we're eating that isn't within safe levels. But then they were within two days of a court-ordered ban in 2017, and they reversed course on it. The EPA reversed course. EPA reverse course, and they said they weren't going to ban it. And so now the latest thing is a federal court has said, look, you have 60 days to ban it. And if they do have another choice, which is to petition the Supreme Court to fight this decision.

But if they don't do that, then they have to ban it. Wow. Wow. It's, you know, the EPA has been overturning things, but the courts are getting involved in these things. In other regulatory news, the FDA has approved a contraceptive app. That's right. For that now. So there are apps that have people have been using to track fertility and your period and ovulation cycle, but this is the first time the FDA has approved one of these apps as a form of contraception. This isn't a new method.

People have been using this for at least hundreds of years to know what days you're fertile and what days you're not. But what's different is that this one basically takes the calculations and puts it in the hands of the algorithm. So does it give you a little signal? a good day? Is it keeping track? Yeah, it's got a red light, green light signal. It does. The problem is that so in general, fertility tracking is considered by the CDC to have about a 76% effective rate. Now, the people who manufactured this app say they've got a 93% effectiveness. But some critics have said that with the study that they used, they recruited people who already used the app. And the critics say, well, if somebody accidentally got pregnant while they were using the app, they wouldn't

keep using it and they wouldn't want to participate in a study about how effective it is. So you might have a sort of self-selecting group that could be giving you a higher rate of efficiency. I'm sure there'll be more apps coming out. Yes, I'm sure this is not the first, this is not the only one that the FDA will be looking at. You have a story about the health effects of an ingredient in marijuana. That seems kind of intriguing because we're seeing marijuana being used now for more and more health problems.

Right. So this is a case of it being used with inflammatory bowel disease. So a lot of people who have Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis have been taking cannabis to treat it. And anecdotally, they say it feels better, but scientists didn't know what the mechanism was until they kind of stumbled on it accidentally. So researchers were looking at mice and they were looking at the epithelial cells in their gut. This is sort of like a passageway between the body and the white blood cells and the immune system versus the kind of microbial zoo living in your gut. And there's all these chemical pathways that mediate whether your immune system can get into your gut and how many of these cells can. And they found that one of the chemicals that regulates this pathway is an endocannabinoid.

And cannabinoids found in marijuana could substitute for it. So it's sort of identical to cannabis. It can bind to the same receptors, yes. So that would then explain why some people say, hey, this works when I... Right, exactly. If the same thing that happens in mice is also happening in humans, then that could definitely be it. Yeah, there's so much more we don't know about. Absolutely.

It's tough when you're studying it in animals and then trying to apply it out to us. And finally, Sophie, there's a new pterosaur in town? What's a terasaur? And where is it? A terroar. You might have heard of it as a pterodactyl. Ah, there you go. But yeah, this is a flying dinosaur.

The latest species is called Celesteventus Hensene. Celesteventus means heavenly wind. So this is a terrorist from the Triassic. So that's the period from 200 to 250 million years ago. And it was actually, we don't have a ton of terrosaur remains from that long ago because a lot of them, they have hollow bones like birds. And their bones just got, the remains just got crushed as marine sediment landed on them. But this fossil was found in the desert in Utah at the Saints and Sinners Quarry. And so it was relatively intact.

They got part of the face, the skull, the jaw. They even have a bit of the wing. They think it had a five-foot wingspan. And they found details like they think it had a flap of skin hanging under its chin. But maybe it used it to hold food like a pelican beak or maybe it was just decoration, like a bird's plumage. And these are pretty rare, right, having something like this? Yes. They've only found about 30 remains.

of pterosaurs from this period. And they've got a lot more from more recent ones. So in, say, in more like 66 million years ago, a lot more recent, these animals got up to, you know, they could have a 30-foot wingspan. They could be enormous. But back in the day, we have fewer remains of what they were like during the Triassic. And we know they were a little smaller and a little waddlier, I guess. Well, we'll now have to go see if we can see it somewhere on an example.

I hope so. Thank you, Sophie. Sophie Bushwick Senior Bushwick Senior Editor at Popular Science. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News.

That's local science stories of national significance. And our story this day comes from Yosemite National Park. You know it. It's more popular than ever. In 2017, there were 4.3 million park goers. That's about a million more than just a decade ago. But, as you know, with more visitors, comes more traffic, more hikers, more search and rescue operations. A busier park means park statistics are trending upwards across the board, except in one category.

And that's the number of human encounters with bears. Here to talk about what Yosemite does to curb the number of bear human conflicts in the park is Ezra David Romero, Environment Reporter for Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, California, host of the station's Yosemite Land podcast. Ezra, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. Now, we've all watched, you know, those cute movies on TV. Bears have been historically interacting with people, but they've become a problem in the park, right? Yeah, you know, everyone loves these cute little black bears in Yosemite National Park.

In 1998, there were about 1,600 bear interactions in the park. And today, there's about fewer than 100 a year. And it's all thanks to this program called Keep Bears Wild, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And there were so many for a good reason. Like people used to feed bears in the park. They'd set up bleachers in Yosemite and put trash in the middle and watch bears eat them 50 years ago. Yeah. 50 years ago or so these bears got used to eating human food.

So there's this big campaign to have bears stop eating human food and keeping bears wild. So, okay, give us the formula. How have the Rangers been able to get the numbers down, even when they park attendance? at what, highest rate ever? Yeah, so there's about three to 500 bears in Yosemite at any given time. You know, they don't know the bounds of the park or the map of Yosemite per se. They use a number of things. They have bear boxes, campgrounds along trails where people can put their food and smelly items,

and that's to discourage bears from, you know, eating human food or deodorant and things like that. And they also put GPS collars around some bears, and they tag them. And then the park service actively monitors. bears, they have a computer system on iPads, they can see where these bears are at, and then they can go and say if a bear gets near a campground or near

Yosemite Valley, like the lodge or something like that, they can go and try to get that bear out of that area by using non-violent tactics or loud noises or they can shoot like sandbags, or ultimately they can capture the bear and move it to another area of the park.

So this has been successful, no? Yeah, really successful. You know, with four million visitors in the park every year and a growing bear population, they're bound to have these encounters. But the number of bear encounters has decreased, and the number of bears killed because of these encounters have decreased as well. And last year in 2017, there were 23 bears that were hit by cars in the park. Cars and us humans entering this island, per se, in the middle of Yosemite,

are the biggest threat to bears. And so four of those bears last year died. And this year so far, four bears, as of June, were hit by cars and we're unsure exactly about how many bears have died so far. So cars, have they taken any special measures for cars in the park? Yeah, tons. They have this red bear, dead bear program. So as you're driving on the roads and the highways into the park,

you'll see yellow signs with black riding that say, speeding kills bears with a red bear on them. And when you see that, that means a bear was killed there. And so they're actively trying to get people to slow down. And they're using these speed tracking signs in the park starting this year. And they're also increasing ticketing to get people to slow down because they don't want bears to die. Yes. Pull off the road and listen to Science Friday on the side there. All right. Thank you, Ezra, David Romero, Capital Public Radio's Environmental Reporter and a host of the station's Yosemite Land podcast.

We're going to take a break and talk about, you know, it's six years. after Superstorm Sandy? Can New York prepare for another 14-foot flood? One idea that's been floated by the Army Corps of Engineers is to build a high wall, put a giant wall around New York Harbor. Is that a good idea? We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. When Superstorm Sandy inundated New York and New Jersey, the water rose as high as 14 feet in places. You had your nine foot of storm surge atop. an unusually full moon high tide. And the Army Corps of Engineers began looking at options for building defenses against the new wave of storms as sea levels, you know,

sea level rises now the new norm. And on their list of things to research for the New York Harbor, an assortment of levees, surge barriers, and even a sea gate that would span the five miles between Sandy Hooker, New Jersey, and Breezy Point in Queens. That's a line that goes all the way up from New Jersey, up through New York Harbor, follows through Long Island up into Queens. And if constructed, this gate would not be the first such structure.

You look to the Netherlands where multiple gates keep the ocean at bay, or even the levees protecting New Orleans. But as communities around the country look to hold back the rising and occasionally fitful ocean, what can we say about the most effective, cost-effective, durable ideas? And what about the environmental costs and just the cost of actually building these? Well, that's what we're going to be talking about if you'd like to join our discussion. Our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri.

Let me introduce my guests. Dr. Klaus Jacob, geophysicist and special research scientist at Columbia University's the Montaurety Earth Observatory in the Palisades. He was a member of the 2015 New York City panel on climate change. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Dr. Rob Young, director of the program for the study of developed shorelines

and a coastal geology professor at Western Carolina University in Cullochee, North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Young. Hi, Ira. Great to be with you. Thank you. Klaus, let's start with New York and New Jersey. From a disaster management perspective, is this an area to protect from storm surge? The answer, if you are only concerned over the next few decades, would be yes. But declaring the war to a rising ocean requires an exit strategy.

How do we get out of declaring the war against the ocean? And that's where the problem lies. As sealable continues, those barriers would have to be closed, not just. just when storms come in as right now, but they would have to be permanently close. But that means the Hudson River and Passaic River and lesser rivers can't get out to the ocean. So you get actually flooded from behind. So the functionality of those proposed barriers is limited for decades, maybe half a century, maybe a little bit more, but not for a century.

So this is one of the options that the Army Corps of Engineers has decided to look into, and we actually asked them to come on the show and talk about it. But they said, well, they would not now because the study is still in the fact-finding stage, and all the details are preliminary. But there's a commentary period, a comments period, still open, right, Klaus? Yeah, they extended actually the comment period to September 20 because there was an outrage for a very short time window to comment on. So if you have comments, use that time.

Yeah. Klaus, what do you think about a rabbi? I mean, what do you think about Klaus is saying, you know, this is sort of just a band-aid. You build a barrier, but it's going to fill up with water and create a lake behind you and flood everything else behind it? Yeah, I don't disagree. You know, certainly heavily urbanized important cities like, you know, the New York City metropolitan area and those nearby portions of New Jersey are areas of the country that one would imagine as a nation we would prioritize for providing some level of protection from future storms and, you know, at least as long as we can from sea level rise.

It's a complex system and, you know, they even the Corps admits that. that the solutions they're proposing would not guarantee complete protection. So, you know, I hope that this process will really take an honest look at what they can and can't achieve and, you know, how long that the system would actually practically function. And so what would you think? Is there a better remedy that you would suggest? Well, you know, if we're just talking about the New York City metropolitan area, then, you know, it may be worth it for us to spend federal and state tax dollars to provide, you know,

decades of protection. And, you know, this is assuming that they can get this project completed within the next decade or two, which that's open to question. You know, the questions that are more important to me are, you know, what we do outside of those major metropolitan areas because, you know, we've got thousands of miles of shoreline in the United States, including a wide variety of different kinds of communities. And New York City is sort of one of those end members. There's not a lot of people that are going to argue that we should be walking away from

there or not thinking about ways to protect that. But it's all the other places that are between New York City and Miami and New Orleans where it gets really complicated. And so for them, what do you suggest? You're not going to build seawalls and all those places or gates in all those places. Absolutely not. And this is the big issue, really, is that we can't hold every shoreline in the U.S. in place forever. We can't guarantee protection for all of these communities forever. You know, we can't even guarantee that protection for this year. And right now we're sort of acting like we can. And we spend a lot of money on coastal protection.

The Corps got $6 billion after Sandy, and they got almost $16 billion after. Irma and Harvey in the last appropriations bill. And they get that money, but there's actually no national plan or vision for how we should be approaching our nation's long-term coastal protection and long-term coastal adaptation planning. So we're spending a lot of money, but it's not happening in any sort of organized fashion. It's reactive rather than proactive. And projects like this New York City project sort of, happen in a national vacuum. We're spending federal dollars, but we're not really taking a systematic

regional or national approach to understanding where the most cost-effective places would be to spend that money, and what places we will, by necessity, need to walk away from in which places where we can protect for a few decades. Well, but we have an administration that doesn't believe that global warming is, you know, worthwhile even talking about, our climate change or ocean. rise or any of that stuff. Right, Klaus? Well, let's leave that aside even so. I mean, that's one of the key questions because you don't have to adapt as severely in the future to sea level rise if we keep greenhouse gases to a minimum. But let's first go back. We talk a lot about protection of the shorelines and coastlines. That is only one of the three possible modes of

adapting to rising sea level. So protection and defense against it is one. Typically, that's done with engineered art structures and they cost money and so they have to be typically focused on areas like, let's say, New York City, San Francisco Bay, maybe the Yusen-Galveston area and so on, where there's a high concentration of assets that we have built over the centuries. Forget about Florida. You cannot protect these sea vaults, Florida, because there is limestone underneath and That's what's called car stick means it has a lot of holes like a Swiss cheese, and the water would run right underneath, so it doesn't matter if you build a wall on top. The second option is not protection, but accommodation.

That means you stay in place. And for instance, for the New York City skyscrapers in lower Manhattan, you would give up first the basements. And then the first floor and then the second floor and you move the infrastructure to higher elevations in the building. You have to have, of course, the infrastructure being submersible. But the most sustainable long-term solution is the political hot potato that nobody wants to touch. It's called managed retreat or I sometimes call it assisted retreat. because communities that have experienced already flooding in the past and will more so in the future, often are quite interested in willing to give up their places if they find a benevolent government

that helps them to do so. So, Rob, you agree that eventually we're going to have to retreat, and that really is the long, long, long term solution, and we should be preparing for that? Certainly, as I said earlier, you know, we can't hold all of these shorelines in place forever. And so that means that there will be sections of our shoreline that we will need to take a step back from. And in some places, that will happen earlier than in others, you know, probably in stretches of shoreline that are small resort communities with the low density of development, the federal government is not going to be willing to guarantee for the next, you know, five decades and longer that we'll be holding those shorelines. in place. And so I think that the sooner that we are able to have a national conversation about

how we're spending our federal dollars and, you know, where we can have this kind of accommodation and where we might try to hold shorelines in place for a bit longer, like our urbanized areas, you know, the more wisely we will be investing that money that we have. Let me go to the phones. Lots of people want to talk about it. Let's go to New Barrel, North Carolina, to Sean. Hi, Sean. Welcome. Hi, how's it going? Hey, there. Hey, good.

Listen, I've got a... They're talking about Hurricane Sandy. I know for a fact that there are three 30-foot waves that breached the Barrier Island there in Orley Beach, which was the epicenter, pretty much the epicenter of Hurricane Sandy. And I'm curious to know with this sea gate that they plan on... suggesting building in New York, how high do they expect to build that gate with possible storm surges as high as 30 feet? And one other question is, what makes us think that man can control or stop Mother Nature? I mean, you look back to the flooding in the Mississippi back, and I think it was the late 90s, when all the levees were, a bunch of levees were breached by flooding out there.

Okay, good questions. Robert Klaus? I mean, there was no 30-foot wave during Sandy. The storm surge on top of the regular tides was short of 10 feet. So I'm not sure where that rumor from that the caller referred to of 30 feet comes in. But you see, it's not as important to ask how high would be the barriers. Yes, that's important whether you defend against 100-year storm, or 500-year-store, a thousand-year storm or whatever, which actually is a misnomer.

It means it has an annual probably of 1 in 100, 1 in 500, 1 in 1 in 1,000. But what's important in the context of sea level-wise, it doesn't matter how high you make the barriers to keep the ocean out because the rivers need to get out to the ocean. So you can make it as high as you want, if you want to spend a lot of money. That does not prevent you from being flooded from behind. Yeah, that's a good point.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Am Iroflato talking about sea level rise with Klaus Jacob and Rob Young. We're talking about what you could do. You know, after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, New Orleans invested heavily in its levy system and in rerouting waterways to prevent another Katrina, and yet they're still considered at risk, right? Of another disaster, did they do something wrong? or with it, what, what do you say to that? Well, it's a pretty complicated and in some degrees impossible task to try and provide storm protection for southern Louisiana.

I mean, this is an area that has the highest rate of relative sea level rise in the continental United States. So, you know, we're looking at sea level rise of around nine millimeters a year, which is double the next highest rate of rise in the country. You have an area that's subsiding and suffering significant land loss. And so, you know, the protection of that area is very, very difficult. And the state of Louisiana has some very detailed plans to continue to build a wide variety of different coastal fortifications. They're rebuilding barrier islands. They're restoring wetlands. They are doing river diversions to add sediment to the tops of the wetlands. But none of those things can guarantee that nature won't find a way to cause another Katrina and flood New Orleans again. You just simply can't give that

kind of a guarantee. And, you know, I think folks in Louisiana are finally recognizing that the map of southern Louisiana will look different a few decades from now than it does today. And they are strategically stepping back from some portions of the coast, you know, by the, decisions they're making on where they're putting the levees. And, you know, they're leaving some communities on the outside of those levies. And I think everybody acknowledges that, you know, that's signaling the end to those places. A tweet from Brian who says about the Hudson River, can it be dammed upriver and diverted into the Long Island sound than New York Harbor is below the new sea level and pumped to maintain a semi-consistent level? So it sounds like this way you've got going into the sound.

Well, nice idea, but hard to do. Because again, the Hudson River wants to equalize in elevation with wherever the ocean will be in the future. So you would have to build a canal that is as high as the barriers would be or any other structure that keeps the ocean out. I mean, the Dutch, who are sort of often referred to as the inventors of all this coastal management built their system after a storm, a Christmas storm of 1950, I think it was. And so they came up with this incredible system that is supported by the whole country

where there is a long tradition of water management. and yet they struggle today exactly with the same problem because that system was designed and built before sealable rise was on the horizon. Okay, interesting. Claus, I have to take a break. We'll come back and continue this discussion. This is very interesting. Klaus Jacob from Columbia University of Lamont Doherty and Dr. Rob Young of the study, a program for the three of developed shorelines at Western. Carolina University in Culloughee, North Carolina.

Our number 844 is 724, 8255, also tweeting at Cy Fry. We'll be right back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking this hour about sea level rise, storm surges, how to prevent, prepare for these devastating occurrences as ocean levels are rising along the coastlines all over America, all over the world, looking for possible examples, possibly from the next.

Netherlands, you know, things are not working out as well as they might be expected there. Also, we were talking about what happens in New York City when it floods, and we were all shaking our heads here in the studio about Kim Stanley Robinson's book, NY2140, which exactly talks about how New York City in 2140 would have coped with sea level rise. It's a really good book as a reference book. It's a piece of fiction, but it's really interesting the way he has scoped all of this out. Also of note, today is the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey's formation. That turned out to be one of the most costly tropical hurricanes in the U.S. history.

Rob, is Houston going to look at building a sea gate there, too, after getting hit so hard? Well, there's certainly some discussion about building the Ike-Dike, as they've called it since Hurricane Ike, going back a few years now as a way to try and reduce storm surge impacts in the area between Galveston and Houston. And, you know, I think it's important to point out that such a structure would not have significantly reduced any of the flooding that occurred from Hurricane Harvey since so much of it was precipitation driven. And, you know, but that plan is certainly on the drawing board right now. And, you know, there's a lot of, I think, interest in the idea within the sort of political class and decision makers in Texas. And there's a lot of concern about the idea from coastal managers and environmental groups.

Let's go to the phones to Marissa in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Hi, Marissa. Hi, how are you? Hi, go ahead. So I was wondering about the role of insurance companies and this question, of assisted retreat. Because I've heard that in some of the cases, like in Long Island, for example, and in New Jersey, when people have now had their houses rebuilt multiple times, you know, the insurance companies

are really paying a lot to keep rebuilding, whereas, you know, these people are unable to move. So I was just wondering, aside from the politics, like, is there something that the insurance companies should, you know, be responsible for in helping these people relocate? I'm happy to comment on that. Well, insurance companies have actually very little stake in flood insurance. We have a national flood insurance program because the private insurance companies have walked away in the 60s and 1970s from flood insurance because they know it's fundamentally not insurable at affordable prices. So Congress then called for a national flood insurance program, and it's nowadays in the order of $20,30 billion in the red. Essentially, we have, because we have this national flood insurance program, allowed building to continue in zones that,

are now flood zones and will be more so in the future, both along the coast, but also along rivers because of more erratic, extreme rain conditions in some parts of the country. In the couple of minutes we have left, I don't know if it's possible to come up with a comprehensive idea, Rob, about where to move forward. It seems like you have to change a social commentary about this. Or communication or dialogue is the word I'm looking for to create a dialogue. And it doesn't seem like that's in the wind, so to speak, at this point. So I think that the solution, ultimately, Ira, is to stop paying and subsidizing people and communities to make the wrong choices. And at the moment, one of the problems we face is that the federal government provides

far more incentives for people to make a bad choice than to make a good choice. And that includes the Federal Flood Insurance Program, but also the Stafford Act itself, where we come racing into these communities, even investment communities, resort communities, and we put all the infrastructure back after a hurricane. You know, we create this giant moral hazard, and then we're surprised when people make the wrong choice. So, you know, one secret to me is finding a way, to get federal dollars out of these areas that are identifiably exposed to hazards that we know exist today and to long-term sea level rise. But, you know, what we really need is national leadership. And, you know, here's where I hate to end on a little bit of a pessimistic note.

But, you know, we've been lacking national leadership on a lot of issues these days. And, you know, when we have a somewhat dysfunctional political system and we have a, a national legislature that doesn't really legislate anymore. My expectation that they can come together to provide a national plan for how we're going to manage our shorelines in the future, which is what we really need, well, my expectations that that will happen are pretty low at the moment. I would say it's not just a federal task. It has to be on the state, and more importantly often, on the local jurisdiction level.

You know, we have so-called home rule in the United States that allows local jurisdictions to make most of the land use decisions. That is typically a very short-term kind of horizon that comes about from these kind of considerations. In climate change and sea level rise needs a long-term vision. So the federal government should provide the long-term vision, and some, carrots in terms of financing, but the real work has to be done locally by communities and cities, counties, and without that, it will not happen. All right. It's interesting that we will wind up on that note.

Klaus Jacob is geophysicist and research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Dowardy Earth Observatory in Palisades. He was a member of the 2015 New York City Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Rob Young is director of the program for the study of developed shorelines and coastal geology professor at Western Carolina University in Calais, North Carolina. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Actually, just to let you know, the Army Corps of Engineers is still taking public comments on that study for New York and New Jersey until September 20th, and you can visit ScienceFright.com slash Seagate to know how you can comment on that. You know, they're saying that goes, elephants never forget?

Well, I don't know if that's fact, right? We don't know if that's ever been really proven. But it has been shown that elephants do not get cancer, or at least their risk for cancer is much lower than it should be for such a big animal. This is something called Pito's paradox put forth by the epidemiologist Richard Pito in the late 70s. The thought goes that larger animals have more cells. The more cells, the higher. probability that one of those cells will turn cancerous.

But this doesn't seem to hold up in nature, including elephants. Why is this? Scientists were curious about this question, so they looked to the genome of the elephants, and their results were published this week in the journal Cell Reports. My next guest is one of the authors. Juan Manuel Vasquez is a PhD candidate in human genetics at the University of Chicago. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, welcome.

Thank you very much for having me here. Talk about Pito's paradox. The idea of bigger animals should be more prone to cancer? Yeah, so if you think about it, cancer in like a multicellular organism, it's just any cell in your body kind of going crazy and suddenly like dividing by crazy, forming a tumor. And so when you think about what exactly should lead to this, well, we all have cells, but the bigger ones among us, like people who are taller, have more cells than those who are shorter. And so you'd think that if any cell goes crazy and that causes cancer,

than just having more cells should increase your odds. And what we actually do see in humans is that it's true. Taller people do have a higher risk of cancer, and large dogs also have a taller higher risk of cancer than small dogs do. And the other thing that we see a lot is time is very important. So cells accumulate damage over time, and then you become cancerous when you get that right set of mutations. So the longer you live, that should also play a very large role

into whether or not you get cancer over your lifetime. And what we've seen is that as people have gotten older and older, we actually have seen an increase in the rates of cancer in older populations. And we also see this in other species as well. So the idea goes, if you have an animal, regardless of the species that is large and long-lived, like elephants and whales, you should see that these animals have a higher risk cancer than a smaller animal. And what we actually do see is that there is no correlation across a wide evolutionary tree of life between these things. So you took it on yourself to find out why. Yeah, well, that's the whole, like, our goal is to find out the exact mechanisms by which this happens, yeah.

And you think you found an answer? We found a piece of the puzzle for sure. Now, tell us about that. So there's this protein called a leukemia inhibitory factor, which is called Lyft for short. And all mammals have a copy of Lyft. It's very important in terms of the developmental pathways that makes us, like, you know, go from just a couple of cells to a human or a dog or whatever animal you want. and what we found was that in the process of just looking for duplicates of tumor suppressors, of which this gene is like one of them,

we found that elephants and their most closely related animals, like relatives, which are the manatee and the hyracks, they all have a lot of copies of this. But when we looked further, only elephants had a functional copy and even like an additional functional copy to the normal one. And the weirder part was that this functional copy was actually more closely related to some of the copies present in manatees and hyraxes than the actual mother copy of the gene

in the elephants, which means that actually this gene, this new like copy, used to be off and it used to be dead just part of what we would consider the junk DNA of the genome. But elephants were able to, in the process of when they evolved to become the elephants that you and I know nowadays, they were able to evolve a new binding site for a very important protein in the elephant body called P53, which regulates cancer, like DNA damage cell response and other kinds of like, you know, just generally getting a feel how the cell is doing. And so what this does is, you know, they now have this copy of a gene which, you know, normally induces like cell death.

And if that were active in any kind of cell, that would be bad, right? You don't really want your cells dying all over to place. Neither when that happens. Yeah, no, it's the worst. But, you know, if you have this now regulated by something that's only present at high levels in a cell when you're under high risk of cell damage, which could lead to cancer, what you have is now a perfect way of coping with your increased cancer risk by actually dealing with cells before they become cancerous in the first place. Wow. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So the elephants have a lot more of this stuff in them that would prevent the cancer from 4.4.

than we do. Yes, that's correct. So it's also more correct to say that they have a very specialized variance. So it's kind of like if you had a switch army, like if we all have like a Swiss Army blade, and this Swiss Army blade has a lot of functions, but then the elephants, in addition to that, actually have like, you know, a good wrench to actually go in and to the works. Yeah, so why don't we, you know, we folks, we people and other animals have more copies of this thing, if it's so good.

Yeah, so like I said, one thing is to have like a mechanism that actually, like, you know, kills a cell in demands when you need it. Another thing is just to have like, you know, a wild gun loose in your body. So because this is a developmental gene, generally when we think about this gene, we don't really think about it as killing cells because, you know, that would be really bad if you're only a couple cells like in your animal, like as an embryo. But when you're talking about the elephants, this was originally dead. So it wasn't actually expressed at all.

So then, you know, it's just kind of floating around a genome and it's not harming anyone. In terms of when we think about what it doesn't mean to actually evolve like something new, there's a bit of luck involved in addition to just being at the right place at the right time. So elephants, when they increased in size from like the common ancestor of manatees, they really had an increased, we believe they would have an increased risk of cancer, and that wouldn't be good for the organism. So somewhere along the line, this proto-elephants develops this mutation, which allows it to express this protein right in the time.

I understand it was, well, why haven't we developed that? mutation to do that. Just unlucky? Yeah, so it's just like, you know, just the kind of random thing that the elephants happen to already have a copy, and we don't have any extra copies of this protein. Can we get a copy or six? Yeah, so unfortunately, you know, human genetic engineering, we're still ways off from doing that in a stable fashion. You know, maybe give us a couple more million years, and we will evolve something similar to this.

But in the short term, you know, we can use what we've learned from these, like, findings in elephants. to actually make drug analogs that can treat cancer in these similar ways. You sound very excited about this. How did you get involved in this? So I've always been very passionate about cancer research, actually. So unfortunately, when I was very young, when I was about four or five, my grandma died of full body cancer. And I had many other people in my family actually pass away from cancer.

And so I've always had a vendetta, you know. And so at the same time, I've always been very passionate about research, about various kinds of, like, you know, cutting-edge technologies. And when I was in the University of Rochester doing my undergrad, I happened to, like, be in the right place at the right time because there was the lab that was working on the Naken Mow Rats and their cancer resistance. And that was about the time that we discovered about the mechanism

by which Naken Mow Rats developed cancer resistance. And I just knew that I found my calling, and I went into the research, and I've been very lucky to be involved ever since. So where do you think your next step in this research is? So, so far we have a couple of examples in the elephants of tumor suppressors, which have been duplicated in order to deal with their increased cancer risk. And, you know, elephants are one animal, but there's also the bowhead whale, which lives 211 years and weighs several tons, which is another, like, big animal that you think would have a lot of cancer but doesn't. So we have this general idea of, like, you know, maybe this tumor suppressor duplication mechanism should be a bona fide way to actually, like, you know, reduce your risk of cancer.

And so what I've been doing is I wrote a script to actually try to find all the different instances of tumor suppressors in these animals. And we're just kind of going through them. You know, if we found two, there must be more. So we're just looking for all of them instead of just picking a handful and seeing what they do. Good for you. Good luck. Good idea there. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Juan Manuel Vasquez is a Ph.T. candidate in Human Genetics University of Chicago. Good luck on getting that. Thank you so much. Excuse me. One last thing before we go. We are wrapping up our summer book club next week with a conversation about Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Can you believe it's 30 years old? Wow. And to celebrate, SciFry is throwing a cocktail party for you time travelers. Join us on August 21st in New York for an interactive evening featuring black holes, hands-on physics demonstrations, games and talks on a very special appearance by Jan 11. And more. All kinds of good stuff's going to happen. your info and tickets available at ScienceFriday.com slash events. That's August 21st here in New York, a cocktail party for time travelers,

tickets, science Friday.com slash events. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher and Taliatta. Producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler. Our intern is Lucy Wang, and we had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim and Sarah Fishman.

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