Science Friday - COP28 Host Had Plans to Promote Oil and Gas | Researchers Detected Cicada Emergence With Fiber-Optics

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

COP28 Host Had Plans to Promote Oil and Gas, Documents ShowThe United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, began this week in Dubai. This is an annual event, where leaders and delegates from around the world come together to discuss how to collaboratively reach important milestones for the future of the planet. Goals like slowing the rise of temperatures on Earth will require buy-in from all major players to be successful.But this week, a document leaked that showed the United Arab Emirates planned something at odds with the event: promotion of the oil and gas industries. This has led to increased skepticism of COP and its goals among both critics and attendees.Ira is joined by Tim Revell, deputy US editor of New Scientist, to talk about this story. Plus, how a single bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool, the way nutrients in soil drive biodiversity, and how amino acids could be formed alongside stars.Researchers Detected Cicada Emergence With Fiber-OpticsIf you were in the eastern United States during the summer of 2021, you likely heard the incessant, whirring buzz caused by the mass emergence of Brood X periodical cicadas. That event, which occurs once every 17 years, brought forth countless cicadas to shed their skins, mate, lay eggs, and die. But it turns out their arrival wasn’t just something that you could witness out the lawn or against your car windshield. The sound of their emergence was something that could be detected by fiber-optic cables.Dr. Sarper Ozharar, a researcher who studies optical networking and sensing at NEC Labs in Princeton, New Jersey, has worked on techniques using fiber-optics to sense the vibrations of things like traffic, sirens, and gunshots. Loud noises produce vibrations that subtly distort optical “backscatter” within a glass fiber-optic cable. Using AI, researchers can decode those vibrations and determine what, and where, a noise may have occurred near the fiber.In the summer of 2021, Ozharar and colleagues detected an unusual frequency signal in their test data. With the help of entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware of the American Museum of Natural History, they eventually determined that it was the whirring of the cicada swarm. Their find is the topic of a report published this week in the Journal of Insect Science.Ozharar joins Ira Flatow to talk about how fiber-optic sensing works, and how an electronics and communications lab ended up publishing in an entomology journal. 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.

Two years ago, researchers detected mysterious signals in a fiber optic cable. We were trying to do some traffic-related experiments in the testbed, and then you have these other frequencies that should not be there. Aliens? Nah. Insects. It's Friday the 1st of December. And today is Science Friday. I'm CyFri producer Charles Bergquist. Back in the summer of 2021, lots of folks in the eastern U.S. were hearing the sounds of the brood-X cicadas. But it turns out it wasn't just something that you could hear or see flitting across the lawn or crunching against your car windshield. That cicada emergence was something that could be detected using fiber optic cables.

Iris spoke with one of the researchers involved to get the buzz on fiber optic sensing. But first, he talks with Tim Revel of new scientist for a look at some of the week's science stories. The United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, started this week in Dubai. This is an annual event where the world comes together to discuss how to reach important milestones for the future of the planet. Big things like climate change resiliency, slowing the Earth's rise and temperature. But this week, a document leaked that showed that the President of the United Nations Climate Conference planned to lobby for oil and gas interests during this event, a position counter to the interests of the conference. Joining me to talk about this and other science stories of the week is my guest, Tim Revell,

the U.S. editor of New Scientist and host of the New Scientist Weekly Podcast based in New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Good to have you back. Thanks for having me. Let's get right into this. Let's talk about top 28. What is this conference normally like and do things actually ever get accomplished there? Yeah, it's that time of year again where the world's biggest climate summit gets underway. And this year, it's expected to be a record 70,000 people attending with representatives from nearly every country. So it is the big climate summit of each year. And not all of them have been that successful, but some too do have a really lasting impact. So one particularly notable one was that in 2015 in Paris, that's when the world settled on this 1.5 degrees Celsius goal of limiting warming to that temperature.

And since then, that's been something that's been repeated and repeated and repeated. And so this year, as you say, there was questions, around whether the United Arab Emirates in Dubai was the right place to host it, given their links with fossil fuels. And then also this story about how they might use the event to lobby for fossil fuel contracts, though the UAE does deny that, has also put a bit of a dampener on the early stages of the conference. Yeah. So what's the reaction about all this job? Are people worried? Or they're trying to power through this or just business as usual? I think it's a bit of both. Like people are worried. You know, the

The conference venue was set around a year ago, and obviously there was a bit of questioning of that at the time. And then this BBC story about the leaked documents and the lobbying has also put a bit of a dampener on it. But this is where countries come together to discuss these big, big issues. And so I think it is still possible that we're going to have a hopeful outcome out of this event. And we're already starting to see some movement on that front. Let's talk about it. It's getting started, right?

What should we keep an eye out for? Yeah, so it kicked off on Thursday, and something we've already seen is the announcement of a new loss and damage fund of about 300 million. And that's a fund that's meant to help poorer countries deal with the impacts of climate change. But things that we also should really keep an eye on is that this is the first conference where countries are going to have a proper global stock take of how well the world is doing to meet that 1.5 degrees Celsius limit on global warming. And then as part of that, they'll have to work out, well, what more do we need to do. do. And so given that is what is at stake, it seems like this year is particularly important. Let's talk about another environmental impact story. And this one is about Bitcoin. We've known that cryptocurrencies use a lot of electricity, but it turns out they also use a lot of

water. Is that right? Yeah, that is right. It's a shocking amount of water. So a single Bitcoin transaction uses, on average, 4,000 gallons of water. And across the whole network, across the world, a team estimate that it's about half a trillion gallons of water that the Bitcoin network is responsible for. To put that into perspective, that's about enough to fill 10 billion baths. Are we talking about water power stations, things like that? Yeah, it's power stations. Effectively, Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity throughout its network to process transactions.

And a team looked at where that electricity comes from, the different regions where the computations happen. And then we're able to estimate the power mix and from that the associated water usage. And that's how they reach these figures. Now, there is another cryptocurrency Ethereum, which made changes that slashed its energy use. How did they do that? Yeah. So Ethereum is when they made this change that you referenced, that reduced their energy

used by 99.99%. So had a huge impact. And what they did was they changed the way that transactions are authenticated. They moved from a system where computation was the main thing to one where instead it was about how much cryptocurrency you have. The problem is Ethereum has a sort of steering group that can make those changes, but Bitcoin is fully decentralized. And the amount of power you have in the Bitcoin network is directly tied to how much computation you can do. And therefore, there's an incentive for you to keep things the way they are. So it seems very unlikely Bitcoin is going to change anytime soon. Yeah, yeah, Ethereum is probably the biggest competitor. Yeah, yeah, it is. And so, yeah, Bitcoin's going to stay doing what it does. Let's move on to our next story about an

AI that hunts crystals. Whoa, tell me about that. Yeah, this is an amazing story. So deep mind, there are a sort of research company owned by Google. And they've created an AI that they are hoping will lead to the discovery of some new amazing materials. Now, this AI is called Nome, and that stands for graph networks for materials exploration. And it was made to look at what sort of inorganic crystals could be possible. And those are crystals that don't arise in biology. We only know of about 48,000 crystals like that at the moment, but Nome has come up with a list of two million. Wow. And what are the implications of this? I mean, what kinds of new materials are we talking? about here?

Yeah, the hope is that these materials will be useful for things like batteries and solar panels. But with AI, when it makes these sort of predictions of what things might be possible, the question is always, well, is it true or not? You know, how accurate is it? Oh, details, details, details. Yeah, details, details. But something the team found is in the time that they were making these predictions, other labs had been, you know, just working on inorganic crystals.

And 700 of those ones that the AI didn't know about, but predicted, are actually possible and have now been created, suggesting that in that two million, certainly some that are real and could be really useful. Wow, another use for AI that you would not think about when you were having coffee in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. Let's move on to something really interesting because it involves one of my favorite topics,

which is soil and dirt. Tell us how dirt drove evolution back in the day. How long ago are we talking about? Yeah, we're talking a long time ago. So this study looks at the last 540 million years. And it turns out there is a surprisingly close link between how soil moved around the ancient world and the blossoming of biodiversity on land. So this team, a team from the University of Sydney, they built a computer simulation that looked at this period, about 540 million years. And up to about 400 to 300 million years ago, soil just ended up getting washed into the ocean from land because much of the world's land masses were just coastal mountain ranges.

But then what changed was that supercontinants began to form. And then the land became better at keeping hold of soil. And this meant that soil and nutrients stopped washing away, and the land became a much nicer environment for life to thrive in. So there's a lot of soil disruption happening in the world today with development, climate-related degradation. Can you see what kinds of implications are here? Yeah, this link that they found worked in both directions. It was really strong that as soil went up, on land, life and biodiversity went. up too, but it also worked the other way around. In these situations where human activity is affecting

soil, we need to be extremely careful that it doesn't also affect biodiversity. Yeah, because soil erosion is a very big problem around the world today, isn't it? The loss of top soil. Yeah, it is a really big problem. There's quite a lot of human activities and also things like deforestation that factor into that and affect the ability of land to keep hold of its soil. And as far as climate changes concerned, soil can be a great sink for carbon dioxide. So you want to keep it around, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We can't have a news roundup without a space story, and you've got one about how a key molecule for life may have formed far out in space. Tell us about that, please. Yeah, this is really cool. So this is a story about amino acids, and amino acids are what proteins

are made of. So they're absolutely crucial for life on Earth. But how they... a rose on Earth is a bit of a mystery. And one idea is that they came from outer space, transported by meteorites and asteroids. But then how they would have formed there, there's also been a bit of a mystery. And so a team at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, they have found that one simple amino acid called carbamic acid can actually be created on clumps of ice in space. Wow, because as we know from the theory of chemical evolution on life here on Earth for a life to have evolved chemically, we need these building blocks, right? We need these amino acids. That's exactly right. We need those amino acids. And what this team found is that there

are conditions around young stars and planets, these sort of clouds that form there that are extremely cold. But even in those circumstances, carbamic acid, which is a mixture of carbon dioxide and ammonia, could actually react to form that amino acid. And then it could have ended up on a meteorite or an that made its way to Earth. And that would solve two things. One, basically how life may have evolved here on Earth and the possibility of life and other places. Yeah, exactly.

And it also gives researchers a new place to look with their telescopes for amino acids in space. For example, the James Webb Space Telescope, we could point in these clouds where young stars and planets form and specifically look for some of these constituent parts. Love that story. We are running out of time. I want to get to our last story, which is coincidentally about clocks. You get it? Just how accurate can a clock be? I mean, can a clock be? Is there a limit, I guess, is what I'm asking. Yeah, so that's what this story is about it. It says that there's a fundamental trade-off in how accurate a clock can be. But this is a real, like, it's quite a heavy physics story. It's all about the second law of thermodynamics. And in case you need a reminder, that's the one that says in any system, disorder increases over time. Now, to really... Entropy, exactly. Entropy in a system increases over time. And what this team found is that with any clock, there is a bit of a trade-off between two forms of what you might call accuracy.

And the analogy is that with a sand timer, for example, if you had a 10-minute sand timer, it's very good at measuring 10 minutes. But if you try to measure smaller increments by sort of following individual grains of sand, there's lots of randomness that comes into play, meaning that if you counted those it wouldn't be very accurate at counting much smaller amounts of time. And what they found is, for a lot of math, that the second law of thermodynamics eventually gets you to this idea that there is a trade-off between that sort of long form of accuracy, the 10 minutes, and the much shorter form of accuracy for individual sand grains. There you have it. You cannot cheat Mother Nature after all.

Thank you, Tim. Thanks very much. Always great to have you. Tim Revel, Deputy U.S. editor of New Scientist and host of the New Scientist Weekly based in New York. If you think back to the summer of 2021, perhaps you'll recall that lots of folks in the eastern U.S. We're hearing the sounds of cicadas. It was the emergence of the brood-X cicatis, an event that occurs once every 17 years.

That emergence was something that could be detected using fiber optic cables. How does that work? Joining me to talk about it is Dr. Sarper Ozhar. He's a researcher who studies opt-exam. optical networking and sensing at NEC Labs in Princeton, New Jersey, and is one of the authors of a report published this week in the Journal of Insect Science, all about sensing the cicada emergence with fiber optic cables. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. The Journal of Insect Science doesn't seem like the normal place for electronics researchers to be publishing in. Yes, exactly. What were you trying to do there? So at NEC Labs, we are working for the smart city, safe city applications of fiber optic sensors.

And we have a test bed here in Princeton, New Jersey, that consists of some utility poles employing a real communication fibers, like the ones you will see outside. Just the regular communication systems. And there we do some smart city application tests like traffic monitoring or emergency vehicle like siren detection and siren monitoring, things like. that and we realized one day we are receiving some interesting signals from the test bed and there's like a distinct frequency quite strong everywhere on the cables so we were wondering what it was and when we just it's a short walk from our lab so when we checked it out we realized it was the skaters no kidding how can an optical fiber detect the sound i mean we think of there's light running through it right Yes. So a good analogy is you can think of it as like a radar.

Many people are familiar with the concept of radar. You send the pulse, an electromagnetic pulse, and it hits a target and it returns back to you. And you just time it. How many seconds does it take to get back to you? And you know the speed of the electromagnetic wave. So you can calculate where your target is. So we do something similar. but instead of sending an electromagnetic wave in the air, we send an optical pulse, short optical pulse, along the fiber.

And we just time it for the return. But one main difference is, in the radar example, you have one target. But in the fiber optic cable, we have a target everywhere along the fiber. So we get a return signal from every one meter or something. So because of those non-uniformities in the fiber, we always get a return signal from almost all locations. So what happens is when there's any kind of sound source, we hear it, right, through the vibrations hitting our ears through the air,

but also the ground also vibrates. Even when we are talking right now, the desk also vibrates. And if there's a fiber nearby, the fiber also vibrates. But in that fiber, because of that vibrations, they couple into a change in the refractive index of the fiber. Very, very, very small effect. So it doesn't affect regular communication, but it modulates the optical pulse ever so slightly.

And then we also discussed the return signal. It's a very, very weak signal. And on top of that very weak signal, there is a very weak modulation. So you're using the fiber specifically to detect these sounds. You're saying gunshots, traffic, et cetera, and by, oh, serendipity, you picked up these cicadas. Exactly. So it was a bit surprising at first. But then when you see those skaters in Princeton area, they're quite loud.

And then they're kind of everywhere. So it was a nice surprise, actually. So we were trying to do some localization and traffic-related experiments in the test bed. And then, voila. So you have these other frequencies that should not be there. And did the other frequencies that should not? be there. Were those the right frequencies that told you, hey, these are cicadas? Yes. So we had to confirm them, of course, right? So for the scientific process.

So we checked out the test pad. We did some other comparisons. And we realized, yeah, it was indeed they skate us. Wow. You know, cicadas, they talk about how they make sounds that's relevant to what the ambient temperature is, right? Were you able to tell something about the temperature based on the buzz? Yes. So again, we are also monitoring the weather conditions of the test bed. Like we can also detect the rain or wind or other kinds of effects with our fibers as well. So we were checking the frequency of these SCADA calls.

And then we realized there's a relation with the temperature. They kind of follow the temperature, but it wasn't like one-on-one mapping. But there's a tendency that they're affected by. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This all sounds really fascinating, but my question is, why would you want to do this rather than just stick a microphone out the window or something? So the thing is, or the main advantage of fiber sensing is you just use a piece of fiber, right? It's a piece of glass that is kilometers long,

and you don't need to have any kind of power on the field. You don't need to have any kind of electronics. Just use a piece of glass and everything. All your power source, electronics, computation is just on the end of the fiber. So that's the main advantage. Because if you want to put vibration sensors for a kilometers long distance, you need to put separate cables for those sensors. You need to get data from them.

So each of them should have their own power source or batteries. Each of them should have their own communication cables, etc. So it's a mess. But in our case, just one fiber, one device, thousands of sensors. And the cable is already there. What other kinds of things do you think you can detect using these fiber optic cables? Some major things we do is like, again, as I mentioned, real-time traffic monitoring and accident reporting, like if there's a car crash or anything like that,

a big, big vibration, right? Another one is like gunshot detection and localization. One other thing is like infrastructure health monitoring. Really? If a tree falls on one of the cables, you know, we can just see it, localize it, or if there's a damage on the pole, on the utility poles, or we can even use these fibers actually for measuring the, for example, the health of a bridge because it's like a vibration sensor.

And we can look at how the bridge is responding as cars are passing by. And if there are some unwanted frequencies starting to emerge, we can say, oh, there's some kind of a problem with the bridge, so it needs to be repaired. Do you think once you're done testing it, we might see fiber optic cables strung about all around the countryside, maybe even on a bridge, let's say, as something that's being used to test or to predict? Yes, definitely. And the thing is actually, currently right now, it is expected that there is 4 billion kilometers of fiber. worldwide. It's already everywhere and it's going to increase more and more with the 5G and 6G because the demand is too high. A copper cable is not enough. We all know. So we need more fiber, more than ever. And the good thing is you can use the same fiber that you use for communication.

You can use it also for sensing. So you don't need a specific or a separate fiber cable for sensing applications. You can already use the readily available ones. It sounds like there's a business here. Yes. That is correct. And I would think the military would be eating this stuff up right now, about remote sensing. Yes. So it has some military applications as well, especially the border security, because you can take this fiber, just put it underground in an area that you want to protect. And if someone is getting closer to the fiber, these steps of the people walking, or some animals, you can also detect those. You know, now that we've been talking about picking up vibrations,

I can see listener mail coming in, can someone use this to eavesdrop on me? Well, that is a very good question, actually. And the answer is no. No need to worry about that. Even for the skate as like, it's not an easy thing to do to decode that thing. And also currently, the only thing we can detect is really loud events that will be shaking a lot of the fiber.

So I would have to be really screaming in my conversation for the fiber to detect. Yes, scream right next to it. Get your fiber on your hand. Just scream on it. And then maybe we can't. I'm going to try that tonight, Dr. Hazara. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. very fascinating. Sure. You're very welcome.

Dr. Harper O'SHara is a researcher who studies optical networking and sensing at NEC Labs in famous Princeton, New Jersey. That's it for today's episode. A reminder, there's still time to vote for your favorite Science Friday story of the year. Let us know at ScienceFriiday.com slash 2023. Next time, Ira talks with artificial intelligence pioneer Faye Faye Lee about her vision for making AI more human-centered. Thanks for listening. I'm Charles Burgquist. We'll see you soon on Science Friday.