Science Friday - COVID-19 Supplies Shortage, Citizen Science Month, Mercury Discovery. April 3, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

April is Citizen Science Month! It’s a chance for everyone to contribute to the scientific process—including collecting data, taking observations, or helping to analyze a set of big data. And best of all, a lot of these projects can be done wherever you happen to be personally isolating. Caren Cooper, an associate professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and co-author of the new book A Field Guide To Citizen Science: How You Can Contribute to Scientific Research and Make a Difference, joins Ira to talk about what makes a good citizen science project, how to get involved, and suggestions for projects in all fields of science. Cooper is also the project leader for the citizen science project Crowd The Tap, looking at mapping water infrastructure and the prevalence of lead pipes throughout the country. For more projects to keep you company through this Citizen Science Month and beyond, head over to sciencefriday.com/citizenscience.   Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system and the closest to the sun. The temperature there can reach up to 800 degrees, but the planet is not an inert, dry rock. Scientists recently found water ice at the poles of the planet, and another team found possible evidence for the chemicals building blocks of life underneath Mercury’s rocky terrain—a landscape pitted with impact craters and haphazardly strewn hills. Those results were published in the journal Scientific Reports. Planetary astronomer Deborah Domingue takes us on a planetary tour and talks about what Mercury can tell us about the rest of the solar system.   All sorts of COVID-19 treatments have been proposed, but some are more promising than others. One of these experimental treatments is using the blood plasma from recovered patients to infuse antibodies into those who are currently sick. This week, New York put out a call for plasma donations, becoming the first state to attempt this approach. Sarah Zhang of The Atlantic talks about what we know about the effectiveness and hurdles of this type of treatment. She also discusses the second wave of COVID-19 infections hitting Asia, and the CDC’s changing stance on personal face mask usage.   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 Ira Flato. Just to note, we won't be taking calls this hour. This is a pre-recorded hour due to the need for physical distancing. But first, during the COVID-19 pandemic we're all going through, all sorts of treatments have been proposed. Some of them more promising than others. One of those experimental treatments is using the blood plasma from people who have recovered from the disease, hoping that the antibodies from these recovered patients, could help those currently who are sick. Here to fill us in on that story is Sarah Zang. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic based out of Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Nice to have you back. Hi, thanks for having me. Now, the idea of using blood plasma from survivors to treat patients, this is not a new

idea, is it? And how does this work? It's actually a really old idea. It comes from the late 19th century from before we had antibiotics or you'll be vaccines or antivirals. And that's basically the situation we are in right now with coronavirus, right? So the idea is that it's pretty hard to make a drug or a vaccine from scratch. But we have all these people walking around whose immune systems that figured out how to make antibodies, which are these proteins that can really specifically target and neutralize the coronavirus. So if we could just harness

this ability of all these survivors and collect their blood plasma. And plasma is the kind of yellow liquid that our red blood cells are bathed in. If we could just collect that, maybe that could help people who are still sick. I understand that the synagogue in Westchester, the congregants who were sick and have recovered, are now donating their blood for just such a reason. Exactly. So after Mount Sinai Hospital in New York put out a call for donors, they were actually really overwhelmed with, I think, over a thousand people who wanted to donate. And that's been really wonderful to see. One of the kind of hard parts kind of early on, and sort of the irony is that the bigger, the pandemic, the longer it goes on, the easier will be to find donors. It's just that it's

Not that many people are suitable donors at this point because you need to have gotten the virus but also have recovered. It was really hard to get tested about three or four weeks ago when these donors would have first gotten sick. So right now it's sort of kind of like sifting through like people who want to donate to actually finding people who are the right donors. What's actually in the plasma that they're looking for? Your body makes antibodies that can kind of neutralize and stop a virus or bacteria from

being able to attack your cells. The idea is that we don't really know, but there's a lot of evidence that suggests that antibodies are maybe helpful early on in an infection. So maybe, for example, when you just got the virus that causes COVID-19, and maybe these antibodies can kind of jumpstart your immune system. So it prevents the virus from going from your nose and your throat to your lungs where it is really dangerous. So it is that it's a way to help your immune system to respond quickly when you aren't able to do so yourself. Now, your next story is sort of along the same lines, and this is about the next big test is antibody testing. What is that? Why is that important? Yeah, so as we're saying,

antibodies are these proteins in the blood that are kind of your immune system's reaction to the virus. So most of the tests we're talking about right now, what they look for is the presence of genetic material from the virus and kind of like a nasal swab. These blood tests, they're kind of important for three reasons. The first is, as we're talking about, they could help identify people who would be good plasma donors to help patients who are still sick. The second is that we've been hearing a lot about the fact that some people might get COVID-19, but they don't feel sick at all. They don't have any symptoms at all. These asymptomatic cases, we really want to have an understanding of how many people are actually getting this.

Because right now, if you're not getting sick, you're not getting a test. These antibody tests can give us a better handle on how many people are actually getting sick and how it's really affecting people. And there's a third reason that antibody testing might be useful, which is that we are obviously living through this kind of incredible. period of, you know, social distancing and lockdown. And the idea is that if we could identify people who are immune to the disease, maybe they could go back to the normal lives. Maybe they can go back to their jobs. If they're health care workers, they don't have to get worried about getting

infected again. So antibody testing can help us, you know, get back to a new normal. So apart from all the testing, once someone comes down with the virus and they survive and they're healthy and they're out in the community again, do we know how long their immunity lasts? Oh, that is the question that everyone wants to answer. So based on viruses that are, you know, closely related to this coronavirus, these are viruses that cause common colds. We think the immunity should last several months, but we really don't know. And obviously the reason we don't know is that this particular virus has only been infecting humans for a few months. So we just really have to wait and see. Yeah. Asia got control of their outbreaks, but now there's

a second wave of infections. Are coming from people who are coming back into the country? Yeah, exactly. And this is really concerning and maybe even a preview of what we're likely to see over the next months and weeks. So, you know, these places in Asia, such as Singapore and Hong Kong and in South Korea, they're really seen as kind of rays of hope. These are places that really got Cornish virus under control early on. And now we're having travelers, in many cases, people returning home to these countries.

And they're unfortunately sometimes bringing coronavirus with them. And I think, you know, this is probably what's going to happen across the world over the next several months, which is that it's really, really difficult for every single country all over the world to get coronavirus under control at the exact same time. So even, for example, of the U.S., we are able to flatten the curve, what might happen is that, you know, there's going to be these kind of constant sparks of people coming back because it's really hard to ban all travel. period. And what's going to be really necessary is kind of keep up that really hard work of testing everybody, of tracing the contacts about the travelers, making sure all the travelers actually isolate. And that's going to be just really hard sustained work over a pretty long period of time until we

have a treatment or a vaccine. So are you seeing that countries are trying to stave this off using novel methods of identifying these people? Well, what they're really doing is trying to restrict travel, which unfortunately might also be a preview what's to come. So in Hong Kong, for example, they're also giving electronic bracelets to everyone who comes home, and these bracelets will actually track exactly where you've been. And if you are seen outside with a bracelet, people are actually also just kind of snitching on you. So there's also a lot of social pressure on top of the, you know, literal physical surveillance that's happening for travelers right now. Thank you, Sarah. as always for being so informative for us.

All right. Thank you and stay safe. Yeah, you too. Sarah Zang is a staff writer at the Atlantic based out of Washington, D.C. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

Michigan is home to 12 federally recognized tribal governments. They're sovereign states so they are not required to follow executive orders coming from Michigan's governor, including a statewide stay-at-home order. Still, every tribe is taking precautions to fight the spread of COVID-19. All have closed their casinos, which means less money coming in to fund tribal costs. But how are they doing? Joining me now is Kay LaFond, Science and Conservation Reporter at Interlock and Public Radio in Northern Michigan. Welcome to Science Friday. So happy to be here.

Nice to have you. Tell us what kind of measures the tribes in Michigan are putting in place to limit the spread of coronavirus. Like you mentioned, the tribes are sovereign states, so they're not required to follow executive orders issued by the governor of Michigan. But a lot of them have been issuing really similar measures. So closing their government offices, canceling community events. They've closed all of their casinos. They're still providing essential services to their citizens. So the health clinics are open, their pharmacies are open.

There's lots of work to deliver meals to elders and that kind of thing. But they're all running on skeleton governments right now, just like the state of Michigan. They're all working remotely. And it's a different setup. Yeah, it's a different world. I understand that one of the people with COVID-19 in Michigan was incarcerated in the Upper Peninsula. and some corrections officers that monitored this person in prison are tribal citizens that work at the jail. How are the tribal leaders handling this case?

Yeah, so those were tribal citizens of the Bay Mills Indian community. They had monitored this person while they were sick. Once the tribe found out, they did their own trace and isolate investigation, and that was on top of action taken by the Chippewa County Health Department that they're working with. But basically they've kind of had to work to come up with this new sort of with these new lines of communication, I guess. So now the tribe and the Michigan Department of Corrections have kind of talked about and formalized, okay, you know, these are what we're going to do to inform each other if there are, you know, tribal citizens that have potential exposures and that kind of thing. But Chairman Brian Newland said, you know, it wasn't easy to build that relationship on the fly. it was not a good piece of information for the tribe to find out.

Yeah. We all know that test kits for COVID-19 are very hard to come by in a lot of places, no matter who you are. What's the testing situation like for the tribes? It really varies. Last I heard, though, there were still some tribes that didn't have access to test kits. And that was as of, like, last week, some of the smaller tribes. you know, some of the larger ones, like, for example, the Sioux-St. Marie tribe of Chippewa Indians,

they're the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, and they're based in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. And, you know, the first time I asked, they had had some test kits, but they only had two at that time for their 44,000 citizens. But they've been getting more. So has Bay Mills. I've been talking to them. And both of those tribes right now are actually looking into, like, private labs for their testing needs. so that in the state of Michigan is actually encouraging this. They're saying, you know, if you have access to private labs that, you know,

you have a relationship with and that can kind of help you get these tests processed faster, like they're on board with that. You know, it sounds like the rest of the country. We have states competing with the federal government to buy their own testing kits. It sounds more or less like the tribes are in this kind of situation themselves. The tribes are kind of used to working with the federal government. for this kind of thing. But he basically said they were told, you know, if you want PPE or test kits from the feds,

then you have to go through the states. And then, you know, they were told by the state that they have to work through local health departments in Michigan. So, you know, they've been doing what they can. But they don't all have the ability to test their own citizens. And it's concerning because, you know, they have, they all have health clinics. They have, you know, citizens they have to take care of. Yeah, we've heard the story of many different places.

Thank you for keeping us up to date, Kay. Yeah, absolutely. Kayla Fond Science and Conservation Reporter at Interlock and Public Radio. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're doing a flyby of Mercury to look underneath its chaotic, moon-like terrain, to see what it can tell us about life in the solar system? Can there be water on this really hot cinder of a planet? Answers coming up after the break.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, a brief program note. Have you or someone you know been affected by Valley Fever? We're working on a project about the fungal disease, and we want to hear your story. So chime in on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. The question again, have you or someone you know been affected by Valley Fever? Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system. and closest to the sun so close that the temperature there can reach up to 800 degrees.

You would think that the extreme heat would bake the planet into an inert dry rock. But different groups of scientists have found signs of the basic chemical building blocks of life. One team found possible evidence for these chemicals underneath Mercury's, quote, chaotic rocky terrain. a landscape pitted with impact craters and haphazardly strewn hills. Another study found even evidence for water on that hot rocky planet. Some of the findings were published recently in the journal Scientific Reports. Deborah Domang is an author on that study, and she's also Deputy Director and Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

Welcome to Science Friday. Well, thank you for having me. Give us an idea of what Mercury is really like. Can you describe what it would be like to stand on the planet? How long you would last standing there? You wouldn't last. You wouldn't last standing there. This is an object without an atmosphere.

So there's nothing to conduct heat. There's nothing to change the heat flow. So when you're on the day side, you bake. Like you said, you can melt lead there. It's very hot. When you're on the night side, it's extremely cold. You're exposed to the vacuum of space. and you have nothing heating you. So it's a place of extremes.

How does being so close to the sun affect Mercury? Are there certain features? You say it's so hot on one side and cold on the other side? Does that create specific features to the planet because of its proximity? Not so much in terms of altering the geology, but it does affect the chemistry that you see on the surface. There are interactions with the solar wind that are made more efficient. by the heating on the dayside. The night side can be a repository for what we call volatiles. These are materials that can transfer from solid to liquid to gas within a small temperature range. So the night side can provide them a harbor, whereas on the dayside, they vaporize and they travel. They leave the surface. They travel.

What do you mean by that? Well, they leave the surface. They are in search of a place that is more stable for them, a little cooler where they can reside. Some of them get swept up by the solar wind and carried off. Others stay in proximity. There's what's called an exosphere. That means maybe have one molecule for every cubic centimeter, and they'll reside in this exosphere or atmosphere for a while. But they migrate to places where it's cooler, where they can be stable on the. the surface. That's one of the reasons why we have ice at the poles of mercury. Wait, you got to stop there for a second. There's really, I mean, that blew my mind when I was reading these papers that it's 800 degrees on the surface, but you can have ice at the poles. Okay, so at the poles, you have craters, you have impact craters. And the bottoms of these craters never see the light of day. They never see any sunshine. So they're cold. They are never, they are never heated. So these are nice little niches for volatiles, especially water, to find a home.

It's stable there. They can reside as a solid. They're not heated sufficiently to turn into liquid or gas. So they migrate there. That's their stable happy place, so to speak. So these stable happy places must be far away from the hot side so that the conduction of the rock doesn't even melt them? That's correct. So these craters are deep enough that, like I said, they're permanently shadowed. They're towards the bottom of the craters, and the heat conducted through the surface isn't sufficient to melt. Wow, I love that.

I love that idea, that picture. Give me a better picture of Mercury of how it formed. I know that the inner planets are rocky, right? The outer planets are gaseous, giants. How did Mercury form? Did it form something like our moon? Because it's sort of like the same size, right? So our moon formed after a giant impact with the Earth. And so the formation of Mercury is a little different than that. It formed basically like all the terrestrial planets. You had your little speck of dust that attracted another speck of dust and they attracted more and it accumulated. The composition is based on where or the distance from the sun. accumulated. And one of the things from our study that we're finding unique is that there were volatiles that accumulated with mercury. And these volatiles over its history remained in some

respect. And the chaotic terrain that you mentioned in your introduction is an example of what the surface looks like when you remove volatiles from underneath. And one of the biggest surprising discoveries from the messenger mission, and this is NASA's orbital mission to Mercury, they placed a spacecraft in orbit, was the high volatile content that the elemental chemistry instruments discovered, the amounts of sulfur, the amounts of sodium, magnesium in the surface. That was a big surprise for us, is that how, you know, once again,

this is a hot place, how can you retain such a high volatile content? So this is one of the questions we are still continuing or still trying to answer. Is the planet locked in its orbit, like always facing the sun like the moon is always facing the earth? It is not. It's in two to three resonance. So it's slowly orbiting, rotating as it goes around, the sun, but it does not always show the same face to the sun. And yet when it rotates and those little pockets in the caves where the volatile ice is located, they're still shielded enough that they don't melt away when it's their turn to face the sun? They never face the sun. Remember, you're at the poles. These are deep enough that the sides of the

craters cast shadows over the bottom. So they are never illuminated. They never see sunlight. And that's how come the ice can accumulate there. In your study, you looked at this chaotic terrain of mercury that you talk about. And it is a bit jumbled up, as you say. What was the original idea of how that planet got this way? Okay. So the original idea was there was a big impact that came, and it formed an impact basin known as Chloris Basin. And these chaotic terrains are found on the opposite side of the planet from that impact basin. And the hypothesis was that the energy from the impact traveled around. So it's coming from one side, coming from the other side, they meet, and all that energy disrupted the surface. Right. When our team took a look at this,

and they did an age dating of the chaotic terrain. They found that it did not form at the same time. For this hypothesis to work, the chaotic terrain would have had to form pretty much the same time the Chloric Basin formed. And we found that, well, wait a minute, it did not. The lead author on this paper, Alexis Rodriguez, he has spent a great deal of time studying the Martian surface. And when I showed him this terrain, he's like, I recognize that. On Mars, the chaotic terrain there was identified in the 70s when it was first imaged as indicators of a hydrological system on Mars. This is evidence of water being removed from

the surface, volatile is being removed from underneath to form the jumbled chaotic terrain. You see craters that have been misplaced. You see half of it moved one way, half of it dropped down. you see tectonic features displaced in such a manner that says, hey, these blocks just dropped. And he looked at the chaotic terrain on Mercury and said, this is the same cause and effect. We had volatiles from below removed. That's how the chaotic terrain formed. It formed the same way as it did on Mars. Probably with the same time scale, do you think?

relative time scale, I do not know. Yeah. Yeah. One more mystery to try and solve. A lot of mysteries. And, you know, we keep talking about the volatiles, meaning, besides water, what other volatiles are there on mercury? So the big one for us is sulfur and sulfur containing compounds like sulfur magnesium, calcium, sulfide, magnesium sulfide. So those are the ones that we are hypothesizing that are present on mercury at the moment.

That's based on measurements from the elemental chemistry. That's based on color observations, spectral observations. That's our going in hypothesis at the moment with the data set we have. What has messenger, the spacecraft messenger that observed Mercury, what has it taught you about the planet? So much. so much. So Mercury is just this really complex, intricate system between the exosphere, the surface, the core, the mantle, how it all interacts, how it all interfaces. What's it made of? How did it form? We've gone a long way to answer a lot of these questions. And in trying to answer those,

we've unveiled a plethora of more questions, the interplay between the atmosphere and the surface. How are we forming that exosphere? How are we replenishing it? How come we haven't exhausted the amount of sodium from the surface? How's that coming in to play? So these are a lot of things that we're answering. Vulcanism, the surface was active at one time. And we see from our little study that there's more than just volcanism going on. There's more than just tectonism going on. We have other things going on. There's a volatile system. How active was that? When was it active? Is it still active? We discovered very unique features on Mercury called hollows. And they're some of the youngest features. And they're associated with volatile loss from the surface. How is that connected

with the volatile loss we're seeing in the chaotic terrain? Are they linked? Do we have a global inventory of volatiles or are volatiles very localized? These are the kinds of questions we can only start asking because of what Messenger discovered. Okay, so you've made this study, you've found out these things that you want to know more about.

Where do you go from here on this? Well, the Messenger mission provided a huge research. of data, a huge resource of information. And while we've been mining it, there's so much more work to do on the messenger data set. There's so much left to discover. In addition to that, the Europeans have launched their mission to Mercury that will, I forget the date that it will arrive, but it has a different suite of instruments on board, which will be able to answer some questions that Messenger wasn't able to address. It's so fascinating this planet.

I understand that you have virtually visited all the planets in our solar system. Would that be a fair statement? That would be a fair statement. And how does Mercury, and also some of the asteroids, places like that, how does Mercury rate in mystery, Mercury mystery in our solar? system? Well, that's the one thing about exploration is there's always a surprise around the corner. No matter where you go, you go in with a set of expectations and those are turned over. It doesn't matter where in the solar system you go. There's a mystery waiting to be revealed.

There's a mystery waiting to be discovered. Mercury had its fair share of surprises. It had its fair share of Intrigue. Being one of the missions I've been involved with, it sort of holds a soft spot for me. But I don't think there's anywhere in the solar system you can't go and be excited about. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking with Dr. Deborah DeMang talking about Mercury. Okay, then if you're that excited about Mercury on the planets, I'm going to give you the famous Science Friday blank check question. Now, if I had a blank check and you could spend any amount of money and, oh, I don't have one here in my pocket right now, but if I did, what would you do with it to learn more about Mercury? Lander. A lander. We've never landed there

before. We've never landed there before. So usually the steps in exploration is use. and you look at it through a telescope from the Earth. That's the first step in learning about anything. And then you send a spacecraft to fly by and get a feel for what the place is like. And after you've done that, you send one to orbit, to hang around a while and to really do a reconnaissance. And after that reconnaissance is done,

that's when you want to go and you want to land. And you want to have a more, more in-depth study, where you can only do that by being as in contact with that planet as you can be. So if I had my dredders, I would land something. Or I'd land more than, if it's a blank check when I can spend as much as I want, I'd spend more than one. Let's go crazy. I'd spend more than one. and I would send it with some very unique instrumentation. I would do seismology so I could understand what's underneath. I would do chemistry to understand the mineralogy.

I would want to understand how that magnetic field works and how that solar wind, how does it really interact with that surface and how does it really alter that surface? I'd like to understand the geology of the terrains. And I'd go to that chaotic terrain. I'd go to those hollows. You know, hey, why not? I've got a blank check.

Very jealous of your job, Deborah. Thank you. Thank you. And it's, you know, it's the thrill of discovery. It's an adventure. And that's what I like so much about it. And the people I get to work with and the people I get to meet, that's been, you know, sort of the icing on the cake as well.

Dr. Deborah DeMang is deputy director and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. And good luck on your next voyage to Mercury. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. When we come back, some scientific research projects that you can contribute to while you're staying home during this citizen science month. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Wishing you and yours the very happiest and healthiest of Citizen Science Months. Did you know that? Are you not on board with citizen science? It's a great chance for you to contribute to the scientific process by collecting data, taking observations,

helping to analyze a set of big data. And best of all, a lot of these projects can be done wherever you happen to be personally isolating these days. It helped walk us through what citizen science is and point us to some noteworthy projects you might want to participate in during the Citizen Science Month and beyond, is Karen Cooper. She's an associate professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at NC State University in Raleigh and co-author of the new book, A Field Guide to Citizen Science, How You Can Contribute to Scientific Research and Make a Difference, published by Timber Press. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks. Thanks for having me on today. You're welcome. I just want to let our listeners know that we

are also personally isolating this week, so we really can't take your calls. Let's start right at the beginning. Tell us the definition of citizen science. Citizen science refers to a whole bunch of different activities that people can do in their everyday life that really contribute to scientific research. It's a very broad definition. And I guess there's different ways you could visualize it. You could imagine bird watchers sharing their checklists of birds to a central database where scientists can use those data. You could imagine people using air quality sensors or taking measurements of the rainfall, measuring stream water quality, all those kinds of things. Science at its core is fairly based on observation. And scientists can't be everywhere.

So volunteers, these citizen scientists are the eyes, the ears, the noses, the photographers, gathering observations just at a magnitude and a speed that makes more discoveries possible. And, you know, unfortunately, this seems like a prime time for people looking for projects to do from home. Yes, indeed. It is super relevant right now. It's very timely as everyone is being socially distant. It's really a way to move the world forward, right? People are home looking for meaningful things to do for themselves. And in many cases, looking for meaningful things to do with their kids who are home from school. And it's a way to connect, like sort of in a collective action. sense, being unified toward a common goal but physically separate in our data collection. That's how

citizen science has often referred to as crowdsourcing. And it's not a physical crowd. It's a crowd that's like really highly dispersed. You know, it's a way to do something good that matters. You know, when you ask people to be citizen scientists, and you write about this in your book, field guide to citizen science, America has a long history of citizen scientists, going back to Benjamin Franklin and scientists along the way, who did important science that changed the course of the country? So, yeah, we do write about that in the field guide. And the field guide to citizen science, it covers some of those basics.

It's meant to be read, but it's even more meant to be used. It's like a totally useful step-by-step guide. Earlier, I wrote another book called Citizen Science, How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery, which goes into more details, especially about the history of citizen science, about Thomas Jefferson and his weather data collecting and his efforts to create a statewide system of people that would collect weather data, which really wasn't realized until well past his time right after the Civil War. It was when it finally came about. But anyway, so yes, there's a very actually super rich history of even large scale citizen science projects.

I mean, of thousands of people collecting data like in the 1830s on like the tide levels, right? 650 different stations on both sides of the Atlantic. People collecting the tide marks every 15 minutes, day and night for two weeks straight at exactly the same points in time. Right? That was when people were starting to, like all of our studies of the field of oceanography came from citizen science, right, from sailors, merchant mariners, whatnot. collecting data, these things that are so big. And obviously all these things I'm mentioning were before the time of computers and smartphones. And it's actually is amazing how connected people could be and how people handled these really big data sets that resulted.

I think I'll anticipate what a lot of people are thinking. You know, I don't have any particular skill or training as a scientist to participate. I'm not a biologist. What do I need? Can I can I still contribute to a, let's say, biology project? You know, and that was one of the things that we want to convey in this new book is to really get people comfortable and sort of demystify some of the doubts they might have about citizen science and science in general, in that there are ways to contribute that really don't require a lot of innate skill, like a lot of skills that have required years of training that it would for a professional scientist.

There's very simple ways that people can contribute just based on their local knowledge and experience things that you might be able to observe in your own backyard. You know, you might find some special bug or frog or whatever it might be that you might can take a picture of, right? And you might not even be able to identify it. You might not have those natural history skills. But because you have a smartphone and you can take a picture that has a timestamp and a geolocation and someone else can identify it from that picture, it could be a useful observation, maybe not even by itself. It might not be like a discovery. It might not be like a discovery of some magnitude by itself, but with thousands of others, similar observations,

we can start to see patterns that we couldn't see before. I know you're part of a group called SciStarter. What is that? SciStarter is a website that has a searchable database of over 3,000 citizen science projects and events. many of these projects have lesson plans, you know, that are useful for teachers or other kinds of educators. And people can join SciStarter, keep track of the projects that they do and the contributions that they make, get recognition for all of those efforts. And really, it's a place, just like the name implies, to get started. I mean, what is amazing about these citizen science projects is that they really, no matter what your interests are, I guarantee you there's a project for you, whether it's butterflies, birds, spiders, you know, fish, air, water,

whether you're like the beach, the forest. Let's talk about that. And you have a whole bunch of them in your book, a field guide to citizen science. Give me a top something that everybody can do. Yeah, something that everyone can do. I-Naturalist is a app, a project that involves taking a photograph of something that you observe, and you could observe it. It could be in your house.

It could be a spider that you find in your house. it could be something you find in your backyard, like a particular flower blooming, an interesting plant, a bug. And it's as simple as photographing it and uploading it to the site where other people can see it, comment on it, help identify it, all those kinds of things. Globe at night is a fun project that's done, like it says, at night. It's about light pollution. and it combines interest in astronomy with sort of concerns about light pollution and how that affects, not just our view of the stars, but also just how it affects sort of our quality of life in general. And in Globe at night, what you do is you go outside, you let your eyes sort of dark adapt,

meaning getting used to those hopefully lower light levels. And then each month there's a different constellation. That's sort of the focal point. and you find that constellation and then you rate how much of that constellation you can see. And so that's an index of basically if you can see all of it, then there's very little light pollution. And if you can only see part of it, then you have a lot of light pollution where you are. So that's sort of an example of like the kinds of projects. Yeah, and we've been sending our listeners to all of these kinds of projects.

But I'm wondering how many of them wonder, should they be concerned? about how good they are at doing it. I mean, the data that they collect the quality that's being collected, is it, you know, high quality enough stuff for scientists to be able to make use of? So citizen science projects are designed in ways that really address issues of data quality. So it can really vary. It's all about the data that's being gathered, being fit for the scientific purposes. So there's a lot of different things in place. Like if it's a project that does require a particular expertise on a subject, then that project is likely to provide some kind of training, maybe even some kind of quizzes, some kind of tests that people need to

demonstrate their skills at before they're able to participate. Other projects have consensus sort of tools built around it. So like if it's an online project, like looking at photographs of different wildlife, and there's photos and you say, oh, well, that's clearly a wildebeest or something. thing. It's not just you looking at that one photo. There's probably 20 other people who are also shown that photo. And if they all say it's a wildebeest, then the scientists can have a higher, you know, can feel assured that it was identified correctly. So there's sort of a consensus process in many of the projects. There's a lot of different ways that scientists handle the data quality. And a lot of it is through the volume, just through the massive amount of participants

that can contribute observations on a given topic or a given subject. Yeah. We've had scientists come on who have giant databases of things. They've got star catalogs. They've got genomics, and they're looking for citizen scientists to just basically help them look through the data to find stuff. You have stuff like that also? So I would say citizen science projects typically fall into two sort of categories.

There's ones that you can do online at home sitting on your couch. And these are ones like that where there's just a data deluge that, like you said, scientists have heaps of information, whether it's like photos from an automated telescope or from automated, you know, wildlife cams or whatever it might be. Yeah, genetic data, all kinds of things that they really, our computers actually aren't smarter than people, right? So there's not computer algorithms that can process the information. It takes a human mind, right, to identify.

what's in a picture, to transcribe certain texts that's handwritten, all these kinds of things. And so that's the kind of citizen science people can do online on their computer. And there's many projects like that. And they're from all kinds of topics, from astronomy to disease. There's ones where you help with Alzheimer's research and other kinds of health projects. Some of them are gamified even where you're solving different puzzles and earning points. And then there's a whole class of projects. really are done outside in nature. Sometimes that's backyard nature that involve collecting new

observations of things that people observe because scientists can't be everywhere. And there's people who can collect data from all kinds of places and reveal patterns that were not visible before. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I know that you're the project leader of an effort called Crowd the Tap. It sounds like a very, very important project. Please tell us about that. Crowd the tap is a project focused on safe drinking water in the United States. And so it's focused on our system of pipes that bring water to homes. So the material of our infrastructure affects the safety of our water.

So a lot of this of our focus is on lead pipes, right? Because consuming lead is hazardous to human health. And even though lead pipes were banned in 1986, we have a whole lot of water infrastructure. that was built before then. And it was built underground and it's out of view, but we still use it. And there's still a lot of water systems in the United States that contain lead, but there really aren't sufficient records as to where. And so the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funded researchers at Virginia Tech, at NC State, Northeastern, and Louisiana State University to address this problem of lead and drinking water. And crowd the tap is the citizen science.

project that's part of that initiative. So Crowd the Tap kind of has two main parts. The main thing with Crowd the Tap is that it's an inventory to find out where are the lead pipes in the privately owned parts of the water system, which means people's homes. There's a fair amount of attention about schools because kids are highly vulnerable and also to the public part of the water system. But there's not that much attention on homes. Like what kind of pipes are in people's homes? What types of pipes are buried underground, bringing the water into the homes. And that's what crowd the tap is focused on uncovering. And there's a second part to crowd the tap, which is until we have reliable at-home tests to test for lead and water, for now, testing whether water has lead

involves sending water samples to a lab. And that involves time, it involves money, it involves access, right? Things that are not equal. So not everyone can or will do that. So we want to build a model that can reliably estimate a home's risk of lead in water based on just a few variables. And those variables will include things like the types of pipes and the age of the home. And then some very simple water chemistry parameters that people can do at home like with sort of a litmus paper kind of test strip. And so for that part of the project, we're looking for a thousand homes to help us build this model. So that means that volunteers would do this core part of Crowd the Tap.

They'll report on their pipes and their home and that kind of stuff. They'll do the at-home water chemistry test strip, and they'll send their water to a lab for testing. So then we can look at all those data. And then when other people just report on their pipes and their home chemistry, we can estimate for them their risk of lead and water through this sort of validated statistical model. So for anyone wanting to contribute to crowd the tap,

simply visit crowd the tap.org. Sounds like a great project and something that's well needed. You've got a tutorial live stream and some activities to do around crowd the tap scheduled for next week. That's right. On Tuesday, April 7th with Science Friday's live stream event, we'll be talking about Crowd the Tap. We'll have Mark Edwards from Virginia Tech, who's part of the project. We'll have Brian Mallow, my neighbor science comedian, who is a citizen

scientist in this project, and he's learned to correctly identify his service line, his home plumbing materials. So he'll show us how to do that. Well, if everybody wants to know the details, we can help them out because we have up on our website a link for the event. It's science Friday.com slash citizen science, and it has all the details in there of when this is going to happen. I think it's a Tuesday. This is a great book for people really wanting to get involved and learn. the history of citizen science and find projects for them to do. And I thank you for writing it, Karen. Well, you're welcome.

Thank you for letting me speak about it and for featuring it on Science Friday. Karen Cooper, Associate Professor in the Leadership in Public Science Program at NC State University in Raleigh, co-author of the new book, A Field Guide to Citizen Science, How You Can Contribute to Science Research and Make a Difference and Project Leader for the Citizen Science Project crowd to tap looking at water infrastructure. And if you missed the links we mentioned today or want some other projects to keep you company through this Citizen Science Month, head over to our Science Friday.com slash citizen science page for more information. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather,

and Kathleen Davis. B.J. Leederman composed our theme music, and we're active all week on social media, Twitter, Facebook, the Science Friday Vox Pop app. And speaking of which, we have a new question we want you to answer. Have you or someone you know been affected by Valley Fever? We're working on a project about the fungal disease and we want to hear your story. So chime in on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Wishing you a peaceful weekend. I'm Ira Flato.