Science Friday - Cybersecurity, Baseball Physics, Opioid Trial. May 21, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Americans’ Online Security Needs An Update Last week, all eyes were on the shutdown of a gas pipeline that delivered fuel to large portions of the Southeastern US. The shutdown was not due to a leak or planned pipeline maintenance, but to a ransomware attack that took billing computers at the pipeline operator offline. The attack had encrypted data on those computers, rendering the data unusable to the pipeline operator until they paid a ransom.In recent years, similar ransomware attacks have affected other significant industries, from computers in a hospital cancer clinic to the Irish health system. Cybersecurity specialist Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, joins Ira to talk about what’s behind the rise of ransomware attacks, and what businesses need to do to lessen their risks. Among the causes, she says, are increasing availability of anonymous money transfers via cryptocurrency, nation-states that sometimes turn a blind eye to hacking activities, and businesses who grow quickly without expanding their security to match. In West Virginia, Opioid Distributors Are Finally On Trial A trial is underway in West Virginia against the nation’s three largest opioid distributors: Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and McKesson. The companies are accused of funneling massive amounts of painkillers to West Virginia communities, fueling the opioid crisis that has devastated parts of the region. By some measures, Cabell County has the worst drug overdose rate in the country, and its rate of overdose deaths is six times the national average. While the companies say the doctors who prescribed the pills are to blame, this trial is a community’s attempt to hold the massive companies accountable. The city of Huntington, West Virginia and the Cabell County Commission brought the case against the companies.  Joining Ira to talk about this trial and what led up to it is Eric Eyre, investigative reporter at Mountain State Spotlight in Charleston, West Virginia. Eric won a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, and is the author of the book Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic. Video Game Skills May Make Better Surgeons The classic board game Operation—in which players try to use conductive tweezers to remove a patient’s funny bone and other ailing imaginary organs—may not be the best tool for training real life surgeons for the operating room. But according to a recent paper published in the journal Surgery, playing video games may have a benefit for training surgeons in specific medical fields.  Arnav Gupta, a third-year medical student at the University of Ottawa and co-author of the study, told Ira that the largest benefits of gaming seemed to come in two specific areas. Gains seen in robotic surgery skills might be due to the similarity of the robotic controls to a game controller joystick. Improvements in laparoscopic surgery, where surgeons operate using instruments inserted through tubes in a thin slit in a patient, may increase doctors’ ability to translate images on a screen to three-dimensional movements. (The researchers didn’t see major improvements in other types of surgery.) Gupta discusses the research with Ira, as well as possible next steps for ways gaming could improve medical training. What A Rare Baseball Collision Tells Us About The Physics Of The Game Recently during a pre-game warmup, Phillies right fielder Bryce Harper was doing some batting practice when he hit a line drive to right field, and it collided with another ball in midair. It was an extremely rare event we’ll probably never see again. But if someone were to try and duplicate the collision, would physics work in their favor?  Ira is joined by Rhatt Allain, assistant professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and writer for Wired’s Dot Physics blog, for a quick back of the envelope discussion. Plus, baseball players and fans are learning more about the physics of the game—exit velocity and launch angle are now statistics that people can calculate and tally. Dr. Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at University of Illinois and professional baseball consultant, talks about how physics is changing how America’s pastime is played.  The Resonating Room Tones Of Composer Alvin Lucier Alvin Lucier is one of the giant figures in experimental, electronic and electro-acoustic music, known for “making the inaudible…audible.”  Last week, he turned 90, and the celebration included a 27 hour marathon of his most famous piece, “I Am Sitting In A Room.” The piece, first recorded in 1969, is very simple in concept but deceptively complex. It consists of a short passage of text, read aloud in a room. That sound is recorded and then played back into that same room, picked up by the same microphone, over and over, until the room resonance renders the speech otherworldly and unintelligible. "I Am Sitting In A Room" has been performed around the world, and has even prompted a series of adaptations by YouTubers, including one who uploaded his video 1,000 times, resulting in bizarre video degradation over time. Lucier’s work has been academically studied for years, and presented and championed at MIT’s Media Lab in seminars devoted to the “quality of sound as experience.”  Listen to his work and a SciFri Soundscape of the music.   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 Iroflato. Coming up later in the hour, a trial of some of the nation's largest opioid distributors, and a look into the physics of baseball. But first, if you were in the southeastern U.S. last week, you may have seen or been in a long line at the gas pump, all resulting from a temporary shutdown of a major gas pipeline. And as you know by now, that shutdown was caused by a ransomware attack that took billing computers of the pipeline. operator offline. And it got us thinking about the vulnerability of the nation's infrastructure and whether more attacks like this are on the horizon. What is causing the surge in ransomware attacks? Joining me now to talk about computer security issues is Katie Musaurus, founder and CEO of Luda Security and visiting fellow at George Mason University's National Security Institute. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me, Ira. You're welcome. We were all watching the effects of the colonial pipeline ransomware attack last week. My question is, is this vulnerability emblematic of the state of infrastructure security in general? Well, you know, it's a complex problem, one that we in the cybersecurity profession have been wrestling with for over 20 years. And honestly, the state of cybersecurity is about the same as it was 20 years ago with some pockets of hope.

but other pockets of despair, as we saw with this attack on the pipeline. And you got it exactly right. It actually wasn't an attack on the computing infrastructure of the pipeline itself. It ended up being an attack that crippled their ability to make money on that pipeline, which is why they shut it down. When they stop making money, things get serious. Yeah, apparently, you know, cash flow is almost as important or more important than gasoline and oil flow. Let's talk about this because you said something alarming about,

we're still at the state of vulnerability we were 20 years ago. Why has nothing advanced? You know, it is a combination of factors, right? If we look at the technological advances that we've seen over the last half century in computing, it's quite a lot, you know, from computers that used to take up entire rooms and had to have reinforced floors to my handheld device that's more powerful than the computers that got us to the moon. So we're seeing super fast evolution of technology without our ability to keep pace with securing it. And that's where we are today, which is shortages in people process and technology needed to secure the infrastructure we've grown dependent on. Well, before we get into those shortages, let's talk about the people or processes that are

behind the ransomware. It seems like there have been more of these ransomware attacks in recent years. We've heard about them at hospitals and other places. Are criminals getting better at breaking into places, or is it just a growth industry? You know, criminals are just as good as their targets. You know, they are only as good as they have to be. And unfortunately, with this particular ransomware attack, those criminals took advantage of human nature and got someone to click on something in a production environment that they shouldn't have. So there's that element. But then there's the other element, which has made it a lot easier to directly monetize cybercrime. And that particular thing,

that's grown in value and popularity over the last few years is cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency itself, though, can't be the root cause of all these ransomware attacks. Could it be? It kind of is. I hate to say it, but it kind of is because before there was a really hard way to directly monetize compromising computers, right? You would have to do some other convoluted way to get the money if you were going to extort someone or blackmail someone with threats of publicly release.

their data. But with cryptocurrency, there is a, you know, there's an option, especially in areas of the world where banking regulations might not be as strict as they are here in the United States. And that combination is unfortunately a deadly combination for the increase in ransomware. So you're saying there are now nation states that are harboring the cybercrime and are just looking the other way. That's exactly right. We've definitely seen, you know, this particular ransomware group is reported to live in Russia. And, you know, I know that several other crime gangs going back from before the ransomware craze, you know, back when stealing credit card information was the major financial fraud that could be carried out online, those crime networks and those crime

businesses often were housed in countries like Russia that would turn it to their advantage when it suited them and certainly would turn the other direction and ignore those crimes when it suited them, especially if they were against their adversaries like the United States. Do you think the government sees this as a national security issue? The government absolutely sees ransomware as a national security issue. And there was recently a report that came out from a group known as the ransomware task force that took 60 different industry experts, pulled them together, and they were from. governments and also from private industry to come up with a list of recommendations

that governments and private industry folks can all do to combat ransomware. But it is a global approach that is necessary. Well, you're in the security business. Can you tell us how to overcome this? What are some of the solutions? You know, it's a broad swath of solutions that need to be put in place. One thing that we have trouble with is that, you know, as I mentioned, we're creating technology faster than we can secure it. And part of that problem is we're not teaching cybersecurity principles even to computer scientists. Most computer science programs in the United States, you can graduate with a degree in computer science having never taken a single cybersecurity course. So rather than, you know, creating technologists to build our powerful

future enabled by the technology that we create and work on together, we're actually creating a whole bunch of new writers of vulnerabilities. They are not code writers. They are vulnerability writers. And on the flip side of that equation, we don't have enough cybersecurity professionals to fill all of the open job roles. And especially so many of them are looking for senior level cybersecurity folks. Where are the entry level jobs? And we need those to formulate a healthy labor pipeline. That's very interesting. Are these infrastructure attacks using new vulnerabilities or Or are they just making use of what's out there already? You know, actually, a lot of the ransomware attacks and other criminal cyber behavior

is not using vulnerabilities for which you'd need a superhacker to find, such that, you know, there are no patches for it, otherwise known as a zero-day vulnerability. You usually don't need zero-day vulnerabilities to carry on these attacks. These criminals will use vulnerabilities for which a patch is already available, but yet hasn't been applied to that particular infrastructure yet. So again, it goes back to the people process and technology. And if you don't have the people to apply those patches in a reasonable time frame,

you then find yourselves victims to crimes that could have been prevented. Sometimes it takes, you know, being hit over the head with a two by four to get your attention. Maybe the pipeline is not a big enough piece of wood. I'm thinking about maybe the stock market or some of the banks or some of the banks or something. like that where people's livelihoods are at play, could that kind of thing still be possible? Somebody hacking in and holding the stock market for ransom? In an interconnected world, technically anything is possible. But, you know, most cybercriminals still do need the internet to function somewhat, right,

to carry out their crimes. So the bolder the crime, the more attention it draws. I think that this particular ransomware group would have been perfectly happy to just continue hitting organizations that were less visible and continue to make money. I think a recent report showed that that particular ransomware group, they had gotten somewhere on the order of $90 million from various victims and Columbia Pipeline being one of them. So could the stock market be held up by ransomware? Absolutely, it could. But the criminals do have to weigh that effect on what potential countermeasures governments and organizations will take to, to, to, to

combat that crime. In other words, you don't want to go over the top. You can put yourself out of business if you shoot, so to speak, too high. Exactly. So what's your advice to companies looking to protect themselves? Well, you know, as companies grow in their personnel and also in their mission and what data they have to protect, it's my hope that companies will grow their cybersecurity capabilities in proportion to that responsibility. We see companies that are unfortunately incentivized to put growth first and security and privacy way later, if at all. And we see that in social media companies. In fact, we just saw that with the popular new app Clubhouse, which is the audio-only app. And I found a bunch of vulnerabilities that were serious security and privacy

violations in that app. And when I went to report it to them, not only did I have to struggle, but I also found out that they had fewer employees at their company than I have at mine. And to me, that speaks to a company that has grown way outside of its capability to secure its users. And unfortunately, the markets keep rewarding that behavior. So advice I would have is try to grow in proportion to the responsibility that you have to your users and the type of data that you have. And try not to get too far over your skis in terms of growth and operations before you have the internal personnel with the expertise and the tools to secure it. You know, it sounds to me like you're talking insurance companies.

You know, maybe insurance companies would not insure you against attack if you don't have the right security installed. You know, cybersecurity insurers have struggled with the right actuarial tables for assessing their risk of taking on customers. Unfortunately, because this industry is so new, relatively speaking, it's one that people are spending money and effort in cybersecurity somewhere between the basement of compliance and the ceiling of, you know, who's got the best marketing strategy. So when cyber insurers go and look to try and evaluate, they can kind of check off that you're doing certain things,

but it's how you do them and when you do them that actually matter more in terms of cybersecurity. And cyber insurers just don't have that depth of understanding yet. They just haven't built it. This is astounding that this, you know, is almost the wild west now of cybersecurity. Well, I am a middle-aged hacker, and I can tell you it's been wild for over 20 years. So I don't see it getting tamed anytime soon, but, you know, one, that's job security for those of us who fight the good fight for cybersecurity. But it's also job opportunities as other industries fade. And as we, you know, come to reckoning with the deep social. inequalities and income inequalities across the world. Cybersecurity is an important option for people

and new workers coming into the workforce. And I can tell you from my experience, you do not need a college degree to get into cybersecurity and really make a difference. Well, those are encouraging words to end our interview and a disappointing state of where we are. Thank you very much, Katie. Thanks so much, Ira. This was fun. Kenny Masaurus, founder and CEO of Luda Security, visiting fellow at George Mason University's National Security Institute. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, a look at a landmark trial involving some of the biggest opioid distributors in the country. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. There's a landmark trial going on in West Virginia against the three largest opioid distributors in the country. The state has been one of the worst hit by the opioid crisis, and communities say these companies are to blame for moving massive amounts of painkillers to West Virginia. It's been estimated that for just the hardest hit county in the state, it's going to take more than $2 billion to recover from this public health crisis. Joining me to shed more light on what's going on with this trial is my guest, Eric Eyre, reporter at Mountain State Spotlight, based in Charleston, Westford. Virginia, air won the Pulitzer Prize for investigating West Virginia's opioid crisis in 2017. Welcome to Science Friday. Well, thanks for having me on. Nice to have you. Can you start us off with the basics? Who's on what side? What's going on? Sure. On one side, you have the city of Huntington, which is one of the larger cities in

West Virginia, and you have Cabell County, and Huntington is the county seat of Cabell County. And there are two areas that have been hit particularly hard by the opioid crisis. On the other side, as you mentioned, we have the nation's three largest prescription drug distributors. They're known in the industry as the big three. It's Cardinal Health, McKesson, and Amerisorzburgan. They're not household names, but two of the two of the companies, McKesson and Amerisor's Bergen are in the top 10 in the Fortune 500. And Cardinal Health, the other defendant, is think in the top 20 of the Fortune 500. And they're basically being accused of fueling the opioid crisis by flooding communities with prescription opioids like Oxycontin, and also by doing so, creating a public nuisance,

not unlike a company that would get in trouble for polluting or a community with toxic chemicals. And their defense has been what? Their defense has been that their shipments really derive or triggered by massive over-prescribing by doctors throughout the state. They also point fingers at the DEA for setting quotas for painkillers, too high annual quotas. They're even starting pointing fingers at some of the manufacturers like Purdue Pharma. For years, they were in lockstep with drug manufacturers, but now they're saying that, you know, the actions of Purdue Pharma were the main cause

of just escalating number of pills that were distributed. As I've been saying, you've been covering this trial from Mountain State Spotlight. What has come to light since it started? Well, we're in it three weeks already. We thought there would be a settlement. I'm surprised that they continued. Backing up a second, there was one in Ohio that Duke County settled about a year ago. This is the first one to go on trial.

And so far, we've heard from a lot of people in Huntington, like, the fire chief, Jan Raider, who talked about how her paramedics had, were suffering from PTSD because of all the incessant calls that they get and the overdoses that they respond to, you know, especially the ones that are difficult or the ones that are, you know, people in their teens or their early 20s. And we've heard, we've heard a lot of testimony from one of the company's executives. It's called Amerisores Burgeoning. That's the, 10th largest company on the Fortune 500. And basically, we've seen evidence that these executives circulated emails

that make fun at West Virginia's calling them pillbillies and also emails that make fun of people from Kentucky joking that it was, there's one in particular that jokes. The executive says it's surprising that this person in Kentucky can even write. Wow, that's not going to sit well with the judge probably. Is there a jury here? It's a bench trial. It's a non-jury trial. They tried to do that for expediency.

But the judge did, you know, he did flinch. He showed concern when this came out, when these emails came out. I mean, basically, you know, these emails were written by executives at the time that there was a huge surge in overdose deaths. Essentially, as I've written my column, that they were mocking us while, you know, our coworkers, our friends, our neighbors, were dying and wrecking numbers after taking too many of the painkillers from the massive shipments that they sent to West Virginia. That's amazing. How big of a grip did these companies have on the state government? Well, they had a big grip, in particular, Cardinal Health. Their main lobbyists for many years

is married to our Attorney General who was pursuing these cases. They've got lobbyists everywhere. and I've got lobbyists on Capitol Hill that during previous hearings on the opioid crisis, we came up with evidence that they were providing questions to the House members that were asking questions about how to solve the opioid crisis. So between the politicians and the lobbyists, there's an extreme amount of control going on. You know, when we talk about wide-scale crises like the opioid epidemic, it can be hard to understand the toll these things have on individual communities. You mentioned about the toll taken just on the health care workers. Can you paint a picture of just how big of a crisis this was and

still is? Sure. Well, the latest numbers from last year show that 1,275 Westrogen has died of a drug overdose last year, and that's a record number for our state. You know, basically the opioid crisis here affects everyone and everybody. And, you know, you have babies being born dependent on drugs. You've got, you know, these soaring treatment costs. We've got overcrowded jails. We have a foster family crisis. And we have, you know, a lot of grandparents raising their grandkids because the kids' father and mothers have passed away due to an overdose. The pandemic hasn't helped things. It's made the opioid crisis that much worse. And the results, the a loss of connection during the pandemic in our rise in addiction. And after two years of

declining overdose, we're now seeing a 50% spike over the past year. So it's been devastating. Your recent book, Death in Mud Lick, is about the opioid crisis in West Virginia. You've been covering this for so long and watched the toll it's taken on the community. So what's it like seeing this all come to trial now? Yeah, it's been a long time. A lot of delays, and I've been writing about this issue for eight years now, and of course, like you said, I've read a book. But now, you know, for the opioid distributors, it's finally their day of reckoning. And for the thousands of families who've lost loved ones, this is their chance to essentially stare down the giants of the opioid industry and try to hold them accountable

for the deaths and destruction that they're accused of causing by flooding the communities with so many hand killers. Yeah. As you mentioned, the trial in West Virginia is not the only trial against opiate distributors and manufacturer as recently. Do you think we might have turned a corner in this crisis? Well, indeed, it's not the only trial. There's more than 2,000 similar cases already in the pipeline. Most of them have been consolidated in federal court and pleases. But what happens here with this trial in West Virginia, in particular in Cabell County, it's not going to stay in Cabell County. Whether it be a judge giving an award for damages or there's still a possibility of a settlement or we could get nothing from this, that will provide a framework for future settlements across the state.

And the other big factor going on is there's a $26 billion settlement in the works with mostly distributors but also one manufacturer. It's a nationwide settlement that West Virginia has chosen to stay out of because they were only going to get approximately $160 million from it. So next week we're supposed to hear word that that settlement probably is going to be finalized. As far as turning the corner, I mean, we kind of had turned a corner. We had two years of declining overdoses. but then it's been sort of, you know, two steps forward, one step back with the new numbers that we got through the overdoses during the pandemic. So, you know, I'm hopeful that we do what we were doing for the last two years. We can reverse this trend and save more lives.

So I think there is some hope. Well, Eric, thank you for your work and thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Eric Air, investigative reporter at Mountain State Spotlight in Charleston, West Virginia. Did you ever play that board game operation where you carefully take the tweezers, try to remove the patient's funny bone, without bumping the sides, almost got it. Rats! There goes the clown nose. Okay, maybe it's not such a great method of surgical training.

after all. But video games might be useful in training surgeons, according to a recent article published in the journal Surgery. Arnav Gupta is a third-year medical student at the University of Ottawa and was co-author on that survey of video games. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I'm super glad to be here. Nice to have you. Now, as I understand it, you surveyed the literature for studies on video games and medical studies and what did you find? So pretty much we did a systematic review where we went through about 2,000 to 3,000 articles related to a surgery, B, video games, and C specifically surgery types such as laparoscopy or robotic surgery. So essentially what came out of it was that we managed to get 16 studies related to both surgery, surgical training in medical students, and video games. And we had

about a total of 575 participants across those 16 studies. And what we essentially found was that if you were a video gamer in the past, you most likely were going to be better at robotic surgery training as a medical student. And if you did something like a video game based training, so specifically a training module or a training regimen that uses video games to enhance certain skills, you'd see the most benefit in terms of laparoscopic surgery or laparoscopic surgery training. We also looked at other interventional procedures such as arthroscopy, so putting a camera underneath or bronchoscopy, so putting a camera in your airway. And we found that there wasn't much evidence supporting the use of video games in terms of training for those skills.

What do you think the difference was? Is there a certain kind of skill that's better trained by video than other? The interesting thing is that with robotic surgery, the whole console itself, while it's never going to be exactly like using a joystick and a controller, the skills that you need are very similar to using a joystick. So the theory is that because of that familiarity, it translates better into the idea of robotic surgery. Now, with laparoscopic surgery, it's a lot more complex, you don't have a lot of the, I guess you could say, quality of life adjustments that robotic surgery may afford you. So for example, in the robotic surgery console, if you look through the screen, it essentially gives you 3D vision. It has a certain sensitivity to your movements,

so it's very precise in that sense. So you don't have the luxury of those in laparoscopic surgery. So perhaps with the video games, we think that that might not be sufficient to essentially make a difference. However, if you were to make training, which specifically focuses on skills that you may see on laparoscopic surgery, that might be more beneficial. So one example I can give you is that when you play video games, you're essentially translating three-dimensional movements onto a two-dimensional screen. Leproscopic surgery is very much the same way.

You have 3D movements, but you're looking at it on a 2-D screen. So in theory, if you make a system that takes advantage of those movements, you'll be essentially directly training those. And as short a term, it will be more beneficial to do video game-based training in laparoscopic surgery. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Arnav Gupta about whether video games can help in surgical training. Do you think that the benefit comes more from, well, the fine muscle movements that you do in surgery and working the joystick in video games? Or could it come from your mental focus. When you play a video game, you're really playing it intensely, and maybe you'll have to do that in surgery also. We mainly saw that the benefits of video games

came from the movements themselves. So we used various outcome measures, including something called economy of motion, which is essentially how efficient are you with your movements. Or we use other metrics to really see how accurate your movements were. How many errors did you make? How many times did your instruments collide? And it really seems that the video games really, do have some benefit in the right context with respect to those metrics. The mental aspect may be related as well, but I think it might just be a transfer effect. Can you give us a name of a game or two that you think improves surgical skills? Ooh, I wish I could say many, but a couple of the games that we kind of came across in our study was a super monkey ball, call of duty, Resident Evil 4,

half-life. They even did some tests such as like chess master or new blood and a racing game like need for speed. So it seems like a lot of the research is trying to tend towards something like a first-person shooter just because once again, that kind of works on that scale of translating three-dimensional movements onto a two-d screen. But, you know, there still needs to be more research done on various types of genres because I think different games have different mechanics that can really be capitalized on if appropriately addressed and maybe. have value as adjunctive training for surgical skills. What kind of games would those be if you're going to do additional research?

I think honestly, everything and anything. You know, I think right now there really is not a bias, but there really is a focus towards those FPS games because once again, that 3D to 2D translation. But I really like to see studies in the future looking at stuff like once again, you know, those racing games, looking at puzzle games, looking at games that force you to make decisions, RPGs, because RPGs, role-playing games, are very popular these days. And I'd like to really see them in newer consoles as well. One limitation of our study you'll notice is that it's been done on very outdated consoles. Like the ones console that they

really, really focused on for laparoscopic surgery was the Wii U. But the Wii U is pretty much a console of the past in this day and age. We have stuff like the Nintendo Switch, the PS5, the Xbox series, X and infinitely expanding PC power. So I totally imagine that there's new games for it with more powerful capabilities due to their hardware and software. So the sky's the limit in terms of what kind of games we can really use. Do you see yourself conducting any more research in this field? Oh, I would absolutely love to.

Pretty much this research study started off when I was mainly interested in urology, which really has a great combination of laparoscopic surgery and robotic surgery. However, now my own medical interests have shifted towards ophthalmology, where you'll see a lot of, you'll see a lot of microscopic surgery. So surgeries on even smaller planes and requiring even more precise movements. Hopefully, if all things going well with residency and whatnot, I would love to take the skill set and apply to ophthalmology. So maybe some sort of video game study to see how we can improve cataract surgery training,

or other difficult ophthalmology surgeries. I have a friend who's in Ophthalmology PGY1. We constantly joke about the fact that, you know, if and when ever I get the chance to do ophthalmology, we'll be playing call of duty on like resident half days just to train for cataract surgery or something like that. Well, I wish you great luck. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Inav Gupta is a third-year medical student at the University of Ottawa. Thanks for being with today. And as I say, good look on your exams, too. Thank you so much. Hopefully those go well. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll step up to the plate for the science of baseball. Just what the heck is launch angle? This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, as a longtime baseball fan and overall baseball geek, I think that if you watch enough baseball,

you think that you've seen just about everything there is to see, and then something really new. and surprising happens. Here's what I mean. Recently during a pregame warm-up, Philly's right fielder Bryce Harper was doing some batting practice. He hit a line drive to right field, and it collided with another ball in mid-air. Bryce Harper lines one to right center field, but it hits a ball that was coming in from the outfield, and the ball spins. That is amazing. It was amazing, an extremely rare event you'll probably never see again. You'd have to get the physics just right for it to happen, but if you were to try and do it again, how would that work? Joining me now is someone who enjoys thinking about these questions, almost as much as I do, but he is a lot smarter and has the

physics to answer them. Red Alane, professor of physics at South Eastern Louisiana University, and writer for wires.comphysics blog. Ret, welcome back to Science Friday. Well, thank you for having me. Okay, Richard, how did those balls collide? What are the odds? How do you figure that out? I mean, it's pretty much impossible to figure out the odds because there's so many, they're unconnected events, right, that just happened to happen. I mean, you can look at the Bryce Harper hitting the ball and you can look at the throw from the outfield and those aren't related at all. So one could start at some time, another could start at some other independent time. And so, you know, if you say, I'm going to start these at the same time, then you can kind of start

playing around with the numbers and doing some calculation to see what the likelihood of those two hitting are. And let's just say that just looking at the hit alone and the angles that you hit at the ball, it's pretty, pretty unlikely that that would happen. But you did go ahead and model the motion. Yeah, I'll have all that happen. Tell us what you came up with. I mean, so what I like to do is to find events in real life. It's a physics problem, right? And the great thing about a baseball is said, if you throw it at not too great of a speed, then it's your classic projectile motion problem in physics where you only have one force acting on it. That's a downward gravitational force. It's a solvable problem, but you can take it a lot further. You could add in air resistance

to the ball and make it more realistic. And that's what we like to do in physics is to make something as simple as possibly start off that way and then add more complicated things as they go on. So what I did was just model a whole bunch of different baseballs on a computer and see how many of them would hit an incoming ball that was tossed from from the outfield. And how many balls did you actually have to get in this so-called Monte Carlo calculation? Yeah, so I did a Monte Carlo calculation, which is named after the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco. And the idea is, we'll just start with a bunch of random different numbers to generate a bunch of different cases. So what I did was start with 5,000 hit baseballs. And then the toss baseball from

outfield is always the same. And I would vary the two angles that that ball would leave the bad at. I didn't change the speed. I didn't change the time. I didn't change the location. And I did 5,000. I didn't do it. I made a computer do it. I did 5,000 hits. And I mean, this is actually a really nice thing to do because if you, you know, programming languages are so easy compared to the way they were in the past that this is something a student could do. If you can get it to work once, you can get it to work 5,000 times. There's no difference. And so of those 5,000 times, just a few of them hit. And I looked at which angles, starting angles from that hit resulted in a collision in the air.

And it was within plus or minus 0.1 degree that it had to leave from that bat in order to hit the ball in the air. So you actually came up with an answer for the question. The answer was that 0.1 degree variation. If it was more than 0.1 degree off from the baseball bat, it would miss the ball in the air. but that doesn't include the timing and changing in the timing of the hit or the initial speed of the hit. I kept those always the same. So it shows you how difficult it is just by changing those two variables, the elevation angle and the side to side angle of that ball leaving the bat. If you're off by more than 0.1 degree, it's going to miss. So given a probability,

I'll probably never see that happen again. Well, and then on top of that, do you think of all the things that have to happen? You have to have a camera there. How many cameras are even recording the swings before the game. I mean, they probably don't even do that. Or it could be looking in the wrong direction. Wow. So, yeah, you're not going to see it again. Right.

I love talking baseball and physics. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Red Alain, associate professor of physics at southeastern Louisiana University and a popular dot physics blogger at Wired Science blogs. There's so much else having to do with the physics of baseball that I just got to keep talking about it. So I'm going to bring on another guest, Dr.

Alan Nathan, Professor of Physics Emeritus at University of Illinois, and someone who has worked with the MLB to answer questions about the game from a physics perspective. Dr. Nathan, welcome to Science Friday. For me here. Baseball fans, and I'm sure you must be one of them, they'll tell you that baseball is nothing if it's not about statistics. And one of the latest statistics about the spin of the baseball, which we've never used to keep track of it before. Why are we keeping track of the spin of the baseball now? Because we can. It's a simple answer. So basically, one of the goals of the pitcher is to confuse the batter.

So if the pitch were going perfectly straight or if it were just under the influence of gravity, it would be for a major league, that would be very, very easy. But the fact that the ball is spinning makes it move in different directions depending on the axis of rotation of that spin, that determines the direction that the ball will move. And the rate at which it's spinning, RPM revolutions per minute, determines how much movement there actually is. And these are very important features of a pitch baseball that pitchers, and baseball fans all consider rather important. And we have this other new statistic that's kind of nutty also, which is.

is exit velocity and launch angle of the ball leaving the bat. Right. So, yeah, the exit velocity, the speed with which the ball leaves the bat, launch angle is the vertical elevation angle, the angle above the horizontal. And I would say five years ago, that wasn't part of the, it was part of the physicist's lexicon, but not part of the baseball band's lexicon. But now it is. People know that, for example, if you want to hit a home run, that exit velocity better be in the neighborhood of about 100 miles an hour or greater.

And the launch angle better be, you know, sort of in the range maybe 20 to 35 degrees. Below 20, there aren't too many home runs above 35, not so many. As I said, physicists have known this for a long time. Fans now are much more appreciating what those terms mean when you say exit velocity. they know what a good exit velocity is, what a good launch angle is. And so are the ball players. You hear them talking about all this stuff all the time. Absolutely.

I mean, people even talk about the launching angle revolution. So, you know, if you hit the ball hard, you know, over 100 miles an hour, but at a low launch angle, you may get a hit, but you're not going to get a home run. To get a home run, you have to really elevate that batted ball. And batters have in the past several years have been doing exactly that. They've been altering their swings in such a way as to increase that launch angle, in effect, going for the long ball as opposed to just the base hit. How big a factor is the wind? Because you watch these games and you see the wind, the wind is blowing out in Wrigley Field.

There are going to be a lot of homers. It's blowing in, you know, in Fenway. there's no one's going to hit it out today. It seems like the wind really is a big factor. The wind is a big factor. It determines, has a tremendous effect on how much that ball carries through the air. And, you know, even something like a five mile per hour wind could have a huge effect. Is that right? Just five miles per hour. Just five miles an hour. You know, it could affect on a ball that's otherwise optimally hit, you know, a ball that might travel close to, to 400 feet. If the wind is blowing out, it would about five miles an hour and travel about 15 feet

more. And if it's blowing into about 15 feet less. And that's only five miles an hour. So the wind plays a huge, huge role. Do you have any opinion on moving the mound? They're testing this out in the minor leagues, right? Moving the mound back about a footer or so. Will that have a lot of effect on the physics? Will the physics change? Yes. So adjustments have to be made. So the principal adjustment is since the ball travels over a longer time, then gravity will exert its effect over a longer period of time. So the ball will drop more than it otherwise would.

And the pitcher is going to have to compensate for that. Batters have the advantage that since the ball is in the air longer, that gives them more time to observe the pitch. and make a decision about whether to swing or not, how to swing, et cetera, et cetera. Has MLB talked to you at all about this possibility? Yeah. So I was part of this committee a couple of years ago

looking into the reasons for the big increase in home runs. And we've kicked around in a sort of informal way, ways that the game could be changed to create more fan interest in the game. There are a lot of people these days, and I count myself among them, who worry that the game seems to be dominated by two things, home runs and strikeouts. And when the ball is not actually put in play, so a fielder actually has a chance to do something, it becomes sort of less interesting to a lot of people. So looking for ways to increase the number of balls in play, decrease strikeouts, actually try to decrease. home runs. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking baseball. I almost started singing the song. We're talking baseball this hour with my guest, Dr. Alan Nathan, Professor Emeritus of Physics,

University of Illinois, a freelance consultant for professional baseball. There were fewer home runs this year than, well, certainly not last year. No one's counting last year, but the year before, do we know why that was? This is something near and dear to my heart. In the half hour or so prior to coming on with you, I was actually analyzing the latest data about that. One thing is for sure true. Home runs per ball and play has dropped this year relative to what it was two years ago. Two years ago, it reached an all-time high. The most home runs in any season of baseball. This year is going to be down significantly. One of the reasons, and probably the primary reason why it's down, is that.

the air drag on the ball is greater than it was two years ago. And this is sort of a property of the baseball. It has the technical name drag coefficient. It's something you can actually measure. And suffice to say, the greater this drag coefficient, the more the ball slows down in the air, the less the drag coefficient, the less it slows down. So what affects the air resistance on the ball and has a tremendous effect on how far that ball will carry. So when that property of the baseball, whatever reason changes, it actually can affect the number of home runs in a very dramatic way. So no one thinks that maybe they changed something on the inside. They deadened the ball from the core, the winding or something like that.

They did, in fact. And they told everyone that they did. But the change that was made to the ball doesn't affect the carry of the ball, the air resistance. it does affect the dynamics of the ball back collision. In effect, as you say, they deaden the ball a little bit so it's less bouncy and it's likely to come off the bat a little bit slower than it otherwise would have. I have not seen in the data that I've looked at so far this year any strong evidence that that's the case.

So if you look at exit velocities, if the ball were significantly dead, you might expect to see a reduction in... X-velocities. And at the moment, I would say it's hard to say that you see it. It's also hard to say that you don't see it. It's just, it's a complicated statistical problem to be able to examine that. I could go on talking baseball all day long about different things. I just have run out of time. I just leave you with one request. If you talk to MLB, please tell them not to get rid of the pick-off throw to first. I mean, that is crucial for keeping the game the way it is. I completely agree.

I'll make sure they know about that. Okay. All right. Okay, give them a little talk for me. Thank you very much for taking time to be with this today. Dr. Allen Nathan, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Illinois, freelance consultant for professional baseball. One last thing for you. And you're really going to have to open up your ears for this one. Last week, 90 artists took part in a marathon 27-hour performance of one of one of the simplest but most

important works of experimental sound art, the 1969 piece, I am sitting in a room. It was part of a celebration of the 90th birthday of the composer Alvin Lucier. Lucieie says his music, quote, makes the inaudible audible. And to do that, he's straddled the line between science experiment and music. He's attached electrodes to his head, using brainwaves to trigger percussion instruments. But Lucier's most famous piece is an exploration of the sound of the human speaking voice, in a setting we can all relate to, the room we're sitting in. The composer's own voice, once defined by a stutter, has weakened due to Parkinson's disease. So we turn to one of his closest collaborators to find out more. I'm Trevor Saint. I'm a percussionist, and I'm the assistant to Alvin Lucier. So in I'm sitting

in a room, Alvin reads a text. I am sitting in a room. different from the one you are in now. And this text describes what's going to be happening throughout the piece. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again. And then that recording is then played back into the same space. I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now.

All the different pitches and tones of human spaces. speech are going out into the room, the piece ends once that is no longer recognizable. Every room is individually tuned based on its architecture, so there are things called resonant frequencies, which are kind of the tunings of the room. And as the text keeps recycling into the room, keeps repeating itself, the resonant frequencies get amplified and become stronger over time, and then the weaker tones, pitches, sounds in the voice that are not in resonance with the room diminish over time. Even though he is the source material, it became the room. And that's what's most important to him is exploring the room. I think of Alvin as an archaeologist

rather than a creator where he's just basically making the listeners aware of the world around them that is there already, but we just can't hear it or our focus is not on it. But you need time. like you's got to be in this space and let nature do its thing. And then if you're patient enough, you get to enjoy it. Just that approach to life in general is beautiful. That's Trevor St. talking about composer Alvin Lucier. You can see performances of I Am Sitting in a Room at ScienceFriday.com

slash room. Our story was produced by SciFrize John Dan Koski. And I'll be sitting in this room. next time we meet. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Plato.