Science Friday - Curiosity Rover Discovers Pure Sulfur On Mars | A Science Hero, Lost and Found

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

In a first, NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered pure sulfur on Mars. And, we revisit a conversation from 2015 about Alexander von Humboldt and Andrea Wulf's “The Invention of Nature,” which is our August book club pick.Curiosity Rover Discovers Pure Sulfur On MarsNASA’s Mars Curiosity rover ran over a rock, which cracked open to reveal pure sulfur crystals. This was the first time pure sulfur has been discovered on the planet. The rover found many other similar rocks nearby, raising questions about the geologic history of the location.Ira talks with Alex Hager, who covers water in the West for KUNC, about Martian sulfur rocks and other top science stories of the week, including melting glaciers increasing the length of the day, life rebounding at Lake Powell, a rare whale and new research on how psilocybin rewires the brain.A Science Hero, Lost and FoundAlexander von Humboldt was a globetrotting explorer, scientist, environmentalist, and the second-most famous man in Europe—after Napoleon. So why haven’t you heard of him? This week we revisit an interview with writer and historian Andrea Wulf, whose 2015 book The Invention of Nature aims to restore Humboldt to his rightful place in science history. Not only did this singular polymath pioneer the idea that nature is an interconnected system, but, Wulf argues, he was also the lost father of environmentalism.Ira speaks with Wulf about the man who inspired the likes of Darwin, Thoreau, and Muir, whom contemporaries called “the Shakespeare of the Sciences.” If this book sounds like a great read for your upcoming vacation, you’re in luck! The SciFri Book Club is reading The Invention Of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf in August. Find out all you need to know, including how to win a free book on our website.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Okay, here's a science history quiz for you. Have you ever heard of Alexander von Humboldt? Every school child in the mid-19th century had heard his name. Every scientist who went to Europe where he lived to see him. It was like a rite of passage, basically. It's Friday, July 25th, and today is my favorite day of the week. It's Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Coming up later, we'll revisit the long legacy of polymath and nationalist Alexander von Humbold. But first, this week, there was an unexpected hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park. Just a few miles northwest of Old Faithful Geyser. It's in the Biscuit Basin thermal area.

Here's Ira Flato with Alex Hager, the Water and the West reporter for KUNC, with the latest on that explosion, plus some other top science stories of the week. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me again, Ira. So what's going on here with that explosion? Oh, man, it was really dramatic. If you watch a video of it, it's this giant, plume of steam and rock shooting into the sky and people running away on the boardwalk there.

And unfortunately, nobody was injured, but it is this really spectacular reminder of just how much heat and force sits under the surface at Yellowstone. And do we have any idea of what caused it? Well, scientists say the explosion was probably caused by water heating up from some of that underground geothermal activity and then hitting a clog in that kind of natural plumbing system beneath the surface. And when all that water turns to steam, it's building a ton of pressure. It needs somewhere to go. But when it hits that clog, boom. And so in the grand scheme of things, this could have been worse. Thousands of years ago, Yellowstone was seeing similar explosions

that made craters more than a mile wide. Yeah. Wow. Because it sits on a top of a dormant volcano. That's right. It sits on this big dormant volcano, which that kind of underground activity played a role in heating up the water. but scientists say that fortunately it does not seem there have been any big shifts that will, you know, be bringing lava spewing from the surface anytime soon. Good to you. Now there's another big surprise, but we're going to get that one in space from the NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, which discovered pure sulfur literally by accident on the red planet, right? Yeah, that's right. Since late last year, the Curiosity rover has been rolling around this part of the planet that's full of salty minerals called sulfates.

Scientists think they were left behind by streams and ponds that evaporated billions of years ago. So this week, the rover was rolling around, looking for something interesting, and it rolled right over a rock that broke open. And inside, there were these bright yellow crystals of pure sulfur, which have never been seen before on Mars. Must have surprised scientists, just a bit, huh? It definitely did. It raises a ton of big questions for scientists. Even though they don't know exactly what it means, there's one researcher working on the Curiosity who said that finding a whole field of pure sulfur is like, quote,

finding an oasis in the desert. He said it shouldn't be there. So now we have to explain it. Wow, that is really interesting. Back on Earth here, most of us are very familiar with how climate change is melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. But new research shows that this is also making days, making our days slightly longer. How does this work? Well, the planet is getting hotter.

and as a result, a lot of that ice stored at our planet's poles is melting. So instead of solid water, we have liquid water that can move away from the poles and toward the equator. So we're kind of shifting the Earth's center of gravity a little bit. That means the Earth is

going to move differently, so much so that it is making the day longer. How much? So far it's a pretty tiny change. The day is only getting a little more than a millisecond longer each year. But that is faster than it was before we started to see this 21st century era of climate change. Does it mean anything important? I mean,

it's nice little factoid, but does it have any ramifications or implications? To me, this just shows that, you know, there are huge, irreparable, wide-reaching problems that are going to keep happening if we don't hit the brakes on climate change, not just with living things, but with the planet itself. And if climate change gets worse, we keep putting a lot of emissions into the atmosphere, the rate at which the day is getting longer could double. And could that change how we keep track of time, for example? Yeah, that's right. So far, we have been using the rotation of the earth to calibrate our instruments and

timing measurements, and that could be thrown a little out of whack. For us, it's really nothing but a couple of milliseconds for timing is... Seriously. For stuff to travel near the speed of light, that's a long time. Our next story that you brought us is also about climate change. And we've talked on the show about how Lake Powell is. shrinking. But you actually went out, right, on a reporting trip in Glen Canyon to see some of the scientists who were studying the effects of the lake drying up and tell us what you found,

what they're studying. Yeah, that's right. I was just down there last week, actually, baking under the triple-digit desert summer heat. This is what I'm really excited to talk about, because in a weird way, it's kind of a positive outcome of climate change. Really? Yeah, Lake Pallets, the nation's second largest reservoir and the levels of water stored in there. are dropping. Basically, climate change means less water is flowing in, and people have not been able to rain in their demand. So we've got the supply demand imbalance. The level of water is going down. That is not great for our ability to have enough water for taps and irrigated farm fields. But what it is good for is the plants and animals that live in Glen Canyon, that lived there

before the area was put underwater. Oh, so they're coming back to life again because there's not that much water to kill them. Ira, nature is healing. And I went to go see it happen in action. I went out with these scientists Seth Arns and Katie Woodward. They're doing this research with a nonprofit group called the Glen Canyon Institute. And they're surveying which plants are coming back. And they're finding out that it's a lot of native plants.

They're going canyon by canyon, taking measurements, and seeing that a lot of plants that were there, decades ago in areas that have been underwater, four decades, are able to take root again. And it's bringing back these thriving ecosystems. Even though you're in the middle of the desert, they've got these little creeks running through canyons. They're full of life. They smell like growth. You can see little frogs jumping around and birds chirping. It's really special.

You saw all this stuff. I saw it all with my own two lines. And it was surprising to you to be there and see this stuff. Did you get any impression that maybe with the rainfalls that we're having and the increase in water, that maybe there will be a reversal in the dropping down levels of the lake and bring it back to normal levels the way they used to be? There has been a little bit of a reversal, but in the grand scheme of things, it's relatively small. So Lake Powell gets most of its water from melting snow in the Rocky Mountains. In fact, 60% of the water in Lake Powell started as snow right here in the state of Colorado. And we had a relatively strong year last year.

But at the end of the day, we are in deep. We're over more than two decades of megadrought. And it is going to take more than one snow a year to turn that around. It's going to take serious reductions to demand from the cities and farms that use its water. This next one is a whale of a story. I always going to have to get that in there, specifically about the spade-tooth whale, which locals found washed up on a beach in New Zealand. I saw pictures of this.

Tell us why this is such an extraordinary discovery. Well, this spade-tooth whale is an incredibly rare species. Just to visualize it, looks a little bit more like probably what you would imagine when you visualize a dolphin than when you think of a whale. It's about 15 feet long. It's a type of beaked whale, and they live super deep in the ocean. We know almost nothing about them. This particular species, the spade-tooth whale, has never been seen alive. Since the 1800s, we've only seen hints of this animal six times, like little bone fragments or degraded pieces of a whale's corpse that were kind of past the point of being able to be studied by scientists.

But this was not a live whale, right? This was not a live whale, but it was very intact. And so they got the whole whale that they've never seen before. Wow. Yeah. Wow. All right. So what's next for the whale?

obviously scientists are going to take it apart or look at it. Yeah, they're keeping it in a fridge right now and taking DNA samples, and they sound really excited. One researcher said, spade-toothed whales are one of the most poorly known large mammal species of modern times. What a find, right? A lot of stories about exciting scientists this week and stuff we're finding. And here's a new study. A new study in the journal Nature about psilocybin, and it looks at how the drug rewires, rewires our brain? Tell us, what did they find?

Yeah, this is a new study in the journal Nature that shows just how magic mushrooms work on your brain. So we're talking about psilocybin. That's the substance of mushrooms that makes you hallucinate. So scientists did brain scans before, during, and after people took a dose. And they found that psilocybin entirely resets some of the neurons in your brain for a short period of time, sometimes a long period of time. And these are the pathways that allow you to have a sense of. time and self. And one of the researchers at the Harvard School of Medicine said the changes were so massive that the brains of some of the test subjects resembled the brain of a different

person entirely. No kidding. That is amazing. And I imagine this could help researchers better understand how to harness the drug for therapeutic means, right? That's right. This opens the door even further for psilocybin use in medicine. It's been getting a lot of traction as something that could be potentially helpful in therapy for mental health conditions like depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. So this gives health experts a little more context on how exactly psilocybin impacts the brain and, you know, paves the way for more use of magic mushrooms and medicinal use. We always have to warn our listeners that this is just basic research and you can't go out and, you know, just ask your doctor for a psilocybin treatment yet. Yeah, don't,

don't try everything you hear on the radio at home. All right. Speaking of mind bending, this is a. Last story is about battery bending, and scientists have created soft, super stretchy jelly. Jelly batteries? That's right. It's from a team at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and they created these squishy, bendable batteries that were actually inspired by electric eels. So they can conduct electricity while still being squishable and bendable, and they can be stretched to 10 times their original length without breaking and then return. to their original size. That is thanks to a material called hydrogill, which is more than 60% water.

Wow. Well, I guess if they're bendable, you could put them on places where batteries need to be bent, right? Like clothing, something like that? That's right. Wearables or? That's right. Yeah, wearable technologies are one of the potential uses for these jelly batteries. But scientists think this could go even further. These batteries that are soft and tough at the same time, they could someday be implanted in the body. kind of has some properties of human tissue, so it could be implanted in the brain to help deliver drugs or treat conditions like epilepsy. How far off are the jelly batteries from us using them? This is obviously basic, basic, basic research, and we're not going to see the jelly battery for quite a while, I imagine. This seems like it's in the early stages.

I don't exactly know how far off it is, but it does seem like a promising opening of the door to new batteries that could be used inside your body. Alex, always good to have you on. Thanks for taking town to be with us today. Thanks for having me. Alex Hager, who covers water in the West for KUNC. He's based in Fort Collins, Colorado. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. Here's a trivia question for you. Who has more places named after him than anyone else? Of course, you're thinking George Washington, right? No. Not even our first president can claim a Brazilian river, Mexican mountains. a glacier in Greenland and an area of the moon, not to mention here in the States,

four counties and 13 towns. That distinction goes to a globe-tracking explorer, scientist, and environmentalist named Alexander von Humboldt. A guy whose notoriety in the 19th century made him the second most famous man in Europe after Napoleon. Well, that was then. Now is now. today he's largely forgotten.

But my next guest has been working to change that. Back in 2015, I talked to author and historian Andrea Wolfe about her book The Invention of Nature. In it, she argues that Humbold did nothing less than change our understanding of nature. It was the

overwhelming community choice by members of our SciFright book club who will be reading it in August. Andrea, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. If we know the name Humboldt today, probably because of Humboldt Park in Chicago, right? We have Humboldt County in California.

What was Humboldt's reputation in his day? Well, he was the most famous scientist of his age, which seems mad to us now because very few people, at least in the English-speaking world, have heard about him. Every school child in the mid-19th century had heard his name. Every scientist who went to Europe, went to Paris where he lived, or later to Berlin where he lived to see him. It was like a ride of passage, basically.

Not even our most famous scientists today, or as you say, as famous as Humboldt. What did he specialize in? Well, that's the thing. He didn't specialize in anything. He was a genius polymath who really roamed across the disciplines. He was interested in nature as a whole. In fact, he comes up with this concept of nature

as an interconnected whole, as nature as a web of life, or we would call it today as an ecosystem, although he didn't use the term. So he was looking at plants, for example, not through the narrow lens of classification as other scientists, but looking at them in terms of their vegetation zones, their habitats, the climate.

So he looks at Earth as this living organism. He sort of like invented ecology. Yes. He is very much interested in this. I mean, he sees nature almost like as this tapest. where he looks at animals within their habitat, at plants within their habitat. And then because he sees nature as a web of life, he also realizes that nature is threatened. So if you see nature as a tapestry, you basically, when you pull one threat, the whole thing might unravel.

So he also becomes, you know, the father of environmentalism, really, because he predicts harmful human-induced climate change in 1800. How did he get interested in all of this? Where does he come from? So he's this, what I love about him is that he's not this kind of cerebral scholar. He is brazenly adventurous. He comes from a very wealthy Prussian family in Berlin, and when his parents die,

he basically spends his entire inheritance on a five-year exploration of Latin America. And he ventures deep into the rainforest in Venezuela and across the Andes. and so he's kind of physically incredibly fit, and he sees all these different parts of the world, and he realizes that there are similarities across continents. So he really defines these kind of global vegetation and climate zones, all these things we take for absolutely for granted today,

but which were completely new at his time. You describe in that vein, you describe a pivotal moment when he climbs up Ecuador's mountain, considered to be the highest in the world at that point? What was so pivotal about that climb? So he climbs Chimborazo, which is then believed to be the highest mountain in the world, which is about 100 miles south of Quito in today's Ecuador.

And he climbs up and he reaches more than 19,000 feet. So no one has ever been that high as he had. And he holds the world record for sure. several decades. And for him, he sees, as he's standing on top of the world, he looks down and his vision of nature clarifies, because what he realizes is that the journey from Keto up to the peak of Chimbarazzo was like a botanical journey from the equator to the pole. So he sees the tropical species like banana trees and palm trees in the valley. And then the further up he comes, the kind of the plants changes according to altitude. And he looks. And he looks. And he's, he looks. And he, he's, he looks. And he

he realizes that the plants he's seeing on Chimborazo are very similar to some of the plants he's seen before in Europe, say, for example, in the Alps in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees in Spain. So he realizes that there are these corresponding vegetation zones across the globe. So what clarifies at that moment really for him is that nature is a global force. And that's an extraordinary concept to have at that time. You know, I've got to ask at this point where we've talked so much about him, what happened? I mean, why did his name drop off the map, or literally, so to speak? I think there are several reasons for that.

One is, I think, that some of his ideas have become so self-evident almost. We have absorbed them almost by osmosis that we've forgotten the man behind them. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that he's really the last of all polymath. So he dies in 1859, which is really the last moment where one person can hold all the knowledge of the world in, you know, in one head, basically. Because after that, the sciences specialize so much. So scientists become experts. And they actually look down on people like Humboldt and regard them like amateurs.

And then the third reason, which I think is the most important reason, really, is that he is famous until, well, World War I. And then, you know, neither America nor England is really the right place to celebrate a German scientist. This is a time when the English royal family, for example, changes their surname to Windsor because their other sermon sounded to German, where you have public libraries in America burning German books. So he gets really pushed away. And the interesting thing is that in Latin America, where, you know, he traveled for five years, he is famous. as famous as Jefferson and Washington is famous here, because he was quite instrumental through his friendship with Simon Bolivar in the revolutions in South America. But he went all over the place, didn't he? He had a relationship with Charles Darwin.

Yes. Well, Charles Darwin was admired Humbold. And actually Charles Darwin said that he would have not boarded the Beagle and therefore not conceived the origin of species without Humboldt. So Darwin, as a young man, read Humboldt's books. And that actually made him go to South America. Once he was in South America, Charles Darwin then said that he could really only see the new world through the lens of Humboldt's writings. Then later he modeled his own writings on Humboldt's books, like The Voyage of the Beagles, very similar in style.

And he also used Humboldt's books as source material really while he was working on his evolutionary theory. So he was greatly influenced by Humbold. But there's this wonderful scene where Darwin meets Humbold finally in 1842. So this is after the Beagle. And this hero of his, which has really grown to like mythical dimensions in his head, is this old man who's so used to being the center of attention and who just talks all the time. And Darwin can't get a single word in.

And he was really disappointed. And he wasn't just analytical. I mean, he believed, right, in bringing emotion to science, or as scientists today try to be emotionless. He thought you ought to be committed and emotional. Yes, so he, I mean, on the one hand, he's obsessed with measurements. That's why he schleps around his instruments through Latin America, but he also says that we have to use our imagination and our emotions to understand nature.

So he really bridges enlightenment and romanticism, but he also provides people like Henry David Thoreau, for example, with an answer to how to bring together poetry and science. And I think, I mean, people like John Muir, for example, really follow Humboldt in that, you know, you can only protect nature if you really love nature. So these guys are all driven by this sense of wonder and this love of nature.

Right, you know, it sounds like you're sort of trying to spread the word about Humboldt. Yes, it's absolutely mission. It's weird. So this, you know, I've written a few books, and this is for the first time that I don't feel like I'm on a publicity tour for my book. It's like I'm on a publicity tour for Humbold. I want everyone to know him because he really needs to be restored to his rightful place in the pantheum of nature and science. He's incredibly important and he's shaped the way we think about nature and everyone should know about him.

How do you do that? Well, you know, I try to tell a good story about him. I tried to do him justice with this book. because I'm German, I was able to kind of read a lot of the German original sources because he's really suffered from some very bad English translations of his books because his books are beautiful and he writes really in the, you know, his writing is a blueprint of all nature writing today because he combines these evocative landscape descriptions with scientific observation. So, you know, I try my best.

Is now a good time? Is the time right in society and culture? environmentalism, global warming, all that stuff? I think he is incredibly relevant at the moment because, well, one thing is that his story really explains why we understand nature the way we do it. But he's also, you know, he, he's one of his greatest achievements was to make knowledge accessible and popular. He wanted to unite scientists. He wanted to foster communication across disciplines, which is all incredible, you know, these are incredibly important pillars of science today. probably most importantly, today as scientists are trying to predict and understand the global consequences of climate change, his Humbold's interdisciplinary methods and his idea that nature is one of global patterns, you know, remains resoundingly topical. And the other thing is that he, you know, he looked at colonialism and the destruction of the environment as one system.

So his insight there, economic, social and political issues are connected to environmental problems. You know, sadly, still incredibly important today. Well, we're very lucky, Andrea, to have you to write this book for us. It's a terrific book. I highly recommend. And thank you for taking time to be with us, and good luck. Well, thank you for letting me talk about Humboldt. Andrea Wolfe is the author of The Invention of Nature.

I talked to her back in 2015 when her book came out. If this book sounds like a great read for your upcoming vacation, you're in luck because the SciFri Book Club is reading the invention of nature in August. Find out all you need to know, including how to win a free book. Oh yeah, on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash book club. That's sciencefriday.com slash book club. That's all the time we have this week. Lots of folks help to make the show happen, including Emma Gomez, Annie Niro. George Harper.

Coming up on Monday, looking for love in some strange places. Yes, we'll talk with a researcher who's studying the humble vol to unlock the neurobiology of love. Thank you so much for listening. I'm John Dankowski, and happy Friday.