Science Friday - DART Asteroid Mission, Rescue Robots, Raccoon Vaccination, Medical Marijuana and Workplace Rules, Lanternfly Signals. Sept 30, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

After Hurricane Ian, Robots To The Rescue Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida Wednesday, with winds over 150 miles per hour, high storm surge and heavy rains. As the storm, now weaker, is projected to move northward, search and rescue operations are setting out to assess the damage – with help from robots, both flying and swimming. Producer Christie Taylor talks with David Merrick, who is leading the emergency management team responsible for flying drones over areas hit by disasters like Ian, about what it takes to use robots in these contexts and how they help speed up response and recovery efforts.   Vague Medical Marijuana Rules Leave Workers and Employers in the Dark Vague legal safeguards for medical marijuana users in Pennsylvania are forcing patients to choose between their job and a drug they say has changed their life, and leaving skittish employers vulnerable to lawsuits, according to a three-month Spotlight PA investigation. While state law protects workers from being fired or denied a job just for having a doctor’s permission to use marijuana, those protections become opaque when people actually take the drug — regardless of whether they do it in their personal time. “It essentially makes no sense,” Pittsburgh attorney John McCreary Jr., who represents employers, told Spotlight PA. Some jobs are specifically regulated by state and federal drug testing rules, but most fall into a gray area that leaves the interpretation of the rules up to employers and the courts. That leads to inconsistency and what employers see as a lose-lose scenario: Either risk a wrongful termination suit, or potentially allow an unsafe work environment. Read the rest of the article at sciencefriday.com.   The DART Asteroid Impact Mission: It’s A Cosmic Smash This week, a small spacecraft slammed into an asteroid—on purpose. The mission, known as DART (for ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’) was an effort to try out a potential means of planetary defense. NASA wanted to discover: Is it possible to change the path of an approaching asteroid by slamming something into it? On Monday evening, the DART spacecraft slammed into the small asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits a slightly larger asteroid called Didymos. Pictures taken from onboard the spacecraft showed the rocky, rubbly terrain of Dimorphos approaching closer and closer, then disappearing, while telescopes observing the impact and cameras on a neighboring Italian Space Agency CubeSat showed a plume of debris ejected from the asteroid. Dr. Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft and is managing the mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, joins host John Dankosky. They talk about the impact, and what scientists hope to learn about asteroids and planetary defense from the crash.   High-Flying Trick-Or-Treat Delivers Rabies Vaccines For Raccoons Rabies is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. It’s fatal in 99% of cases. Because of that, rabies prevention has been one of the most important—and successful—public health initiatives in the US. To contain rabies outbreaks, the USDA leads a mass vaccination effort from August to October to keep the disease from being carried by critters. It’s an action-packed adventure involving raccoons, helicopters, and fish-flavored candy. SciFri’s director of news and audio, John Dankosky, speaks with Jordona Kirby, the rabies field coordinator for the USDA’s National Rabies Management Program. She’s based in Milton, Florida.   Can Lanternflies’ Excretions Be Used To Quell Their Spread? As the invasive spotted lanternfly continues to spread west in the United States, researchers are trying to better understand—and perhaps find a way to control —the behavior of the pretty, but ravenous, insects. Important agricultural crops, including grapes, peaches, and apples are especially at risk from the spreading infestation. As the lanternflies feed on tree sap, they excrete a sweet-smelling liquid known as honeydew. That liquid can attract other insects, and can also allow fungus to grow on affected trees. Writing in the journal Frontiers In Insect Science this week, researchers from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service report that chemicals in the honeydew may act as a signaling agent among the lanternflies—in some cases attracting others of the species. The finding may help explain the way in which the insects can infest a given tree in huge numbers, while leaving neighboring trees largely alone. John Dankosky talks with the paper’s lead author, Dr. Miriam Cooperband of USDA APHIS, about her research, and whether the finding may lead to a way to bait or repel the invasive insects.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida on Wednesday, with winds over 150 miles per hour, high storm surge, and flooding rains. Search and rescue operations are out assessing the damage that's already been done. And helping that assessment are search and rescue robots. Producer Christy Taylor is here with more about that. Hi, Christy. Hey there, John. So what kind of robots are we talking about here? Yeah, we're talking about robots that can crawl through rubble, fly over flooded neighborhoods, or even swim to look for, for example, broken bridges.

They can go where people can't, and they can collect really high-resolution images a lot faster than a person could too. So that way, the more limited human responders can figure out where to go for rescues and later infrastructure repairs. So the idea here is that the robots do the search part, they map where flooding is worse, all that stuff that they do best. and then the humans get to do what we do best. Right, exactly. And there's even some research out there saying that faster response times, even by one day, can not only save lives, but also shorten the ensuing recovery period by months or even years. David Merrick is Director of the Center for Disaster Risk Policy at Florida State University. He's an emergency management expert who focuses on those flying robots, so drones and other unmanned aircraft.

And he is, as we speak, sending those aircraft out across Florida. I got to talk to him first thing yesterday morning. His team was just about to roll out from the slightly noisy convention center in Orlando that's being used as emergency management headquarters. We've been here in the Orange County Convention Center now for a day and a half we spent yesterday here. The wind is going pretty good outside right now, but it looks like the storm has moved south of us pretty well. So this morning, we're going to pack our vehicles. and the hope is as soon as as soon as the winds get below a safety threshold, which is typically tropical storm forest winds, so 39 miles an hour,

we will start pushing forward into the impacted areas. The mission is to support the urban search and rescue with remote sensing. So we're going to use drones, a variety of fixed wing and multi-rotor, to kind of provide a snapshot of what's happening in front of where those USAR teams are going to go. And we've got a lot of new technology. We have multiple Starlink units with us that should actually allow us to push live information back to decision makers. You know, sitting right here, it's dark outside. We know it's bad, but we don't know specifically where.

So we're going to try to get these remote sensing tools into place. to help make those decisions, which is an overly simplistic way to look at it. But that's kind of how it's going to break down to that. Yeah. And, you know, when we talk about robotics in general for hurricane response, I mean, what are the different roles they can play in the different phases? There are a lot of different roles that we can use robots for. I mean, the remote sensing is kind of the easy lift. It's kind of a low-hanging fruit.

It's the one that everyone fully understands to use robots. structural collapses for inspections of areas that we can't put people in a safe way. And we're prepared to do some of that. We have some smaller drones. We don't have any ground robots with us on this event because we're kind of tasked with moving quickly. But there are technologies to anything that's dirty, dull, and dangerous, right? We can put a robot instead of a person. And that includes boats with sonar and submersibles and all kinds of things that can,

that will probably come into play later on in this event as we look at clearing waterways and inspecting bridges and that kind of thing that, you know, all these critical tasks that have to be done before we can kind of get back to normal. Right now, we have flying robots gathering information. Later on, we might have swimming robots gathering information. That's correct. There's a lot of bridges, a lot of bridges that are not, that have to be certified. And that includes looking at their pylings, what's underwater, what's up of an, underneath the bridge, what's the situation there? You know, there's been some record storm surge, a lot of water where it shouldn't necessarily be. And all that means to be looked at before we can put that bridge back into service.

And of course, there's always the concern of structural collapse. We're going to cross our fingers and hope that we don't have a major issue on that, that it's mostly flooding that we're dealing with. But our team was at Surfside in 2021 doing a lot of, repetitive, you know, monitoring and data collection to support that collapse scenario. So a lot of things we can do to the robots. Yeah. Well, and for folks who are in Florida right now, they're facing the stress and fear of this hurricane right now, how do you connect these robots to them potentially having a

better experience of Ian and returning to their home sooner? Everything in emergency management is, you know, we focus on timelines. How fast can we get things done, right? There's never extra time. And so the robots, whether that be flying robots or ground robots or swimming are all going to help us compress that timeline and help us make better decisions, get the better resources in the right place at the right time. You know, that's the, that's the huge trick. We've got a large area to cover and a relatively small number of responders staged up. So we've got to be smart about where they go. So, you know, the robot flying through the air is going to help us speed everything up, at least on paper.

So are these robots as robust to those challenges as human-powered technology might be? Probably not, which is why we carry a lot of them. You know, we do view them as pretty much disposable in these situations, right? It's not like we're going out with one aircraft or two aircraft. You know, we have over 30 aircraft ready to go. You know, we're not going to fly in a risky, well, we will fly in a risky situation. We're not going to fly in a reckless manner. Let's go with that.

But, you know, life safety and getting that information trumps whatever happens to the $2,000 aircraft, right? That is pretty disposable. However, you know, the conditions that I'm looking at outside right now, as the sun comes up here in Orlando, is, you know, there's not manned aircraft flying either. And the wind thresholds, that 39 miles an hour, that's just for safety on the roads. You know, we'll push forward. We may not be able to fly. We won't be able to fly everything.

We have some aircraft that we have in the past flown in pretty significant winds. Do you have a technological wish list for what robots could do, but they can't yet? I do. You know, and some of it is realistic. Some of it, maybe a little more far-fetched. You know, we're working on an NSF project right now in cooperation with Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon University, looking at what robots may have been able to do at Surfside. The condominium collapse in the summer of 2021, which was a very unique looking event, right,

as far as what the makeup of that rubble pile looked like and what kind of robots could have actually gotten in there and gotten underneath and how small that they have had to have them, right? And so that's, that's, you know, one example. I really look forward to the day, and I don't have a doubt that it's coming where the robots are smaller. They're entirely autonomous. It doesn't necessarily require us to drive into the impact area and launch these aircraft or boats or whatever else. We can do that from a long way away and control that, you know, a swarm of aircraft or robots is going to go out and capture all this information rapidly and autonomously and then feed that information back. So, you know, from the something that's this, you know, a couple inches long that can get into a collapse structure to, you know,

swarms of aircraft that are collecting data. All of these things are the wish list, right? And on the more practical side, I just want more power, more time to operate in the same smallish packages, right, without having to get something that's the size of the car. Yeah. Well, and, you know, you mentioned the collapse at Surfside last year. Are there other disasters where we've begun to learn more about the potential usefulness of robots or the actual usefulness of robots? Certainly, right? You know, it comes back to that concept of dirty, dull, and dangerous. Anything that we can't put a person into, whether that be a hazardous material type, even not in a disaster concept, but we get hazardous materials incidents all the time, whether that be a chemical spill or

whatever else. And the way that's mitigated and dealt with now is we put humans into protective gear and we send them into what's called the hot zone to make sure that you can really evaluate what that is. And, you know, this could be happening somewhere right now. not in Florida, not in the middle of Ian. And a robot would be a perfect tool for that. And then many places is becoming the tool for that, right? But the things that we're learning through robots and looking at what NOAA is doing with and sail drone, right, and capturing data from inside a hurricane that is not a place that any sane sailor wants to be.

But there you go. You know, I believe there's, you know, we're making progress on being able to drop robots out of aircraft to fly under hurricanes and see what's going on. And fires out west, you know, the wildland fire, there's not a season anymore. It's an ongoing thing. Those, you know, robots are being used there to gather information about, you know, how is the fire behaving and how is the weather impacting it and where is it going? And, you know, where do we best put resources?

So I think it's fairly safe to say that any type of disaster, that we deal with on a regular basis should have a robot in it, right? We should be we should be automating some of that. Well, with that in mind, does this feel like it is dangerous work for the human people who are deploying these robots? Yes, and that's why I do look forward to the day where we can just, you know, push the metaphorical button from a long way away and fly the drone in and get good information. We're not there yet.

Unfortunately, we're still, you know, when we leave here today, and actually I'm looking at a through the glass right now in the wind somewhere in Orlando, of Power Line has just gone down and is sparking pretty crazily. You know, we're going to have to drive into this, into a situation that is not necessarily safe for people. And I'd like to avoid that. We can't avoid it completely because we have to go. into these places where people need help. But if we can do that smarter and minimize that risk

by using autonomous systems, then I want to see that happen. Well, I wish you very good luck and a safe couple of days ahead of you, David. Thank you so much for the time this morning, and I hope everything goes as smoothly as possible for you and your team. It is my pleasure, and it was great to be here. Thanks very much. David Merrick is the director of the Center for Disaster Risk Policy at Florida State University. He joined us from Orlando. I'm Christy Taylor. Thanks, Christy. And our thoughts are with everyone in the path of Ian this week, as well as the first responders on scene. We've got to take a short break now when we come back learning how to protect the planet from an approaching asteroid.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Earlier this week, we saw some amazing images coming from a vending machine-sized spacecraft as it hurtled intentionally into an asteroid. It was called the Dart Mission for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, trying to see if a small impact caused by humans could be enough to change the path of some future asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Joining me now to talk about the mission and how it went is Nancy Chabot. She's the Dart coordination lead and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins applied for physics laboratory. Welcome to Science Friday, Nancy. Oh, thanks for having me. It's been an exciting week and glad to be here. Yeah, it has been an exciting week. So how do you think everything went?

Everything was a smashing success. I mean, I think that's the words to use for the day. Yeah, I mean, people have worked on this for years. NASA started funding this back in 2015 here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. But really, it was an idea that the international community wanted to do even before this. And it's just such an exciting day that now we've taken this first step. And we're getting all this great data rolling in and trying to take this next phase of, okay, what did this mean for how effective might this be in the future for deflecting asteroids if we needed it? How hard was this to do? I mean, how much precision did it take to hit this little tiny moon asteroid so far out in space? Yeah. And you left out the part where we had never seen what it

looked like before. So, you know, if you just want to add to the complexity there, right? Yeah. So you are targeting a small asteroid in space that had never been seen before. So you weren't sure of its shape. You had some general idea of the size, but, you know, the specifics of how it would be lit by the sun, all of that was unknown. And you need to target it at very high speed, right, in order to have a measurable deflection. So you're going at 14,000 miles per hour towards an object that you've never seen before. It's right next to another asteroid, Dinnomos, that's brighter and larger. And so you can't actually tell the difference between Dormophos and Dinnos until within the last hour of the mission. And so they had to make the spacecraft smart. And that's where they developed

SmartNab, this set of algorithms that uses the camera images on board and interpreted those images, interpreted which one was Dinnos and Dormos, fired each of the little thrusters just the right way. And all of this happened while it was seven million miles away from the Earth. The spacecraft was fundamentally operating on smart nav, flying itself, steering itself in order to do that collision. And those images were fabulous to see here on the Earth and are really giving us a lot of good science that we're doing to understand these asteroids. But they were crucial in order for using that system on board in order to find that asteroid and target it. When it gets closer, the asteroid kind of looks like just a big pile of rubble, like a gravel pit hurtling through space. Is that what you expected to look like?

I think we all had different expectations, but yeah, from other asteroids that we've seen, sort of a big pile of rocks is sort of what they are. We shouldn't think of them as like these one solid chunks of material necessarily. They seem to be loosely bound together, folders and smaller rocks and pebbles, all of different sizes, you know, kind of just thrown on there all together. And so when we did see that, that's sort of like, wow, okay, I guess this is, this is, you know, maybe what makes up asteroids. One thing that's interesting scientifically also is that demorphos is actually the smallest

asteroid that's ever been visited by a spacecraft. So we had seen these other asteroids and we had seen they kind of looked like piles of rock and we're like, but maybe once you get smaller, they won't just be piles of rock. Well, this one still looks like a big pile of rocks. So that's kind of moving the bar for what we understand about asteroids already, just those images that were shared and everybody experienced at the same time for understanding what these smaller size objects look. like, which is important for planetary defense because these are the sorts of objects. There's more of

them out there. This is the population that's a priority for NASA to find these few hundred meter size objects. But it's also interesting scientifically to understand what this smaller size of asteroid looks like and what is that being for how things involve in the solar system. So as you've said, the big idea of this mission is to see if you can move the path of an asteroid like this so that you can provide some planetary defense. Do we know yet for the big idea of this from the data, how well that part of the mission worked? So how much did we move the asteroid? We're still working on that.

But it's also this data of how much material was ejected off the surface is an important component because that's essentially a lot of the unknown. We knew what the mass of the spacecraft is. We knew the velocity are coming in with, you know, we could sort of understand what momentum we would transfer based on that. But we're getting this extra push we expect because of all of this material ejected off the surface, like a little rocket engine that's really enhanced. the deflection. Now, how much? That's where we are, actively going on, still getting that data and still

trying to figure it out. Yeah. So this mission, of course, took quite a bit of time and planning to pull off. How much advance warning would you need to pull off something like this if there was a threat? I mean, in the movies, you know, we'd hear President Morgan Freeman say, you have 24 hours, and somehow or other, everything would rally. I mean, what would you really need to go? get up there and use this in a way that could if we needed to save the earth. Yeah, that's a, I think this, I actually really kind of love fun movies. So I don't, you know, I'm not trying to throw any shade at, you know, it there. But, you know, we're trying to create like this different reality where we're not finding these things at the last minute. So

if you find the asteroids and once we've had them and we're tracking them, people can understand where they are really for like 50, 100 years. This is completely reasonable. So if, if you find, we find the asteroids, we can very realistically be in a position where we're assessing if they're a threat to the earth and having decades potentially in order to do something about it. And that's what you would want, right? You know, it's not going to make for a very fancy movie, but it's a reality that we could realize. And something like Dart then would be realistic, where you would do this many years in advance. And it would be this small collision that would add up to a bigger change in its position with time and a disaster averted without a bunch of fanfare or anything.

A last thing for you, people who work on space missions like this, many of them have long-term goals, like a deep space probe that you can imagine hurtling out into space for millions of years and maybe being found by some civilization a long time from now, or a Mars rover that is giving us wonderful data for for decades to come. This project was essentially we're going to build this really cool thing and we're going to crash it and we'll never see it again. And I guess I'm just wondering as someone who helped to make that happen, how you feel about that? Oh, well, you know, I think all of us here at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, you know, especially people here like designed that, right? They built it, you know, and a lot of people like to think of it as, oh,

they must be really attached to it. And in some ways, it's no, it's like you built this so it could have its moment, right? I mean, this was why you did it, so it could have this moment of glory and do what it was designed to do. You're really looking at thousands of people over years, and I think everybody is proud of the Dart spacecraft. Well, congratulations on this amazing effort.

Nancy Chabot is the Dart Coordination Lead and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. 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. More than 400,000 people in Pennsylvania have medical marijuana cards. But Pennsylvania law doesn't protect workers who use medical marijuana to treat a doctor-approved condition. So this is leading to firings, lawsuits, and court cases. More than a dozen of these cases were in. investigated by my next guest. Ed Mahin is an investigative reporter for the independent investigative newsroom, Spotlight PA. He's based in York, Pennsylvania. Ed, welcome to Science

Friday. Thanks so much for having me. So let's first get a bit of a timeline here. When did Pennsylvania legalize medical marijuana? So after a lot of negotiation and advocacy, our Democratic governor and Republican legislature legalized medical marijuana in April 2016. It took until about early 2018 for marijuana dispensaries to actually begin opening for patients. So yeah, it takes a while to ramp up medical marijuana in any state. What kind of conditions are eligible for medical marijuana treatment? There are 23 qualifying conditions in Pennsylvania. The list includes cancer, epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder. Two common ones are anxiety disorders and chronic pain. Those are ones that I think lead in terms of the number of patients qualifying for those reasons.

Well, and I know that this has come up in other states that have medical marijuana laws on the books. Have there been questions from people about what conditions should actually qualify? Oh, yeah, there's been a whole process. The actual law itself had a shorter list. And then over the years, there's this medical marijuana advisory board that recommends adding certain conditions to the list. And then the Secretary of Health in Pennsylvania will then approve them. Anxiety disorders, whereas one of the conditions, that was added through that process.

And, you know, I've spoken to a number of patients who have talked about how it's helped them. Todd Douglas is one example. I have a clip of him that we can listen to. It helps with pain, but it also helps me feel better about the fact that I have pain. Like some, this pain's not going away. And so Todd's story is somewhat common. He says cannabis relieves pain, which in turn helps with depression, improves his mood, helps him focus.

He says it gives him energy after work, whether he does dishes or build. bike trails in the woods near his house, these are always, he says it helps. And there's more than 400,000 active patients in this state who are approved to use cannabis. So let's talk about what you investigated in your story. What are some of the legal protections that people have who use medical marijuana? So Pennsylvania's law states that employers can't discriminate against an employee solely on the basis of such employee's status as an individual who is certified to use medical marijuana, but we found that protection has significant limits. Pennsylvania's law doesn't specifically address the rights of patients to use the drug when they aren't at work. And unlike some other states,

it doesn't include protections for them if they fail a drug test but are not impaired. And so we found people were denied or fired from a variety of jobs, forklift operator, welder, medical assistant, emergency medical technician, customer service representative. So it's a wide range. It's kind of remarkable, though. It's legal in the state to use medical marijuana if you are approved to have a card. How exactly do employers get away with firing people for doing something that's legal? Yeah. In the cases I reviewed, employers have made three main arguments. One, they argue that using the drug isn't actually protected at all under Pennsylvania law as a worker. You know, it's legal for you to use it, but then they argue that you're not actually protected to have it in your system at all when you're working.

Two, they argue that the job requires safety sensitive work. And so they argue it's too big of a risk for a medical marijuana patient to do that type of work. And three, they'll say federal rules ban patients from doing certain jobs. And they argue that those federal rules trump state law. And we found there's often dispute about how far those federal restrictions. go, and there's often dispute about all of these three issues that I mentioned. But I think that this is a really important distinction. It would be important, I suppose, for employers to know that someone wasn't actively high while on the job. But there's not really

a way to test for that. Marijuana is maybe in your system, but there's no way to tell, am I impaired while on the job? Yeah, exactly. I mean, they commonly used urine drug screens. These are used by the vast majority of employers to test. And they detect that someone might have used marijuana days or weeks ago or several weeks ago. And so they do not measure impairment. And so there's not a good standard or agreed upon way of measuring impairment based on, you know, body fluid, which is how we measure most types of impairment. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm John Dankowski. We're talking with Ed Mahon. He's an investment. reporter for the independent investigative newsroom Spotlight PA. So let's talk through some of the

lawsuits, more than a dozen of them that you investigated. What are some of the things you found? Some workers alleged they were punished even without a drug test just because someone found out they were a medical marijuana patient. Attorneys for one worker claimed he was demoted after his medical marijuana card fell out of his wallet at work. I spoke with another worker in central Pennsylvania who said he asked his boss about what the medical marijuana rules are at the job, and then he disclosed that he was a patient, ended up getting fired. And then I spoke to another worker near Allentown who felt betrayed after he was fired. He thought he had a card, and that meant he had protections.

And then after he was fired, his former employer even sued a state board in an attempt to ban him from collecting unemployment benefits. So a lot of workers losing their jobs, feeling betrayed, and then sometimes running into even other problems because of that. This seems so unbelievably confusing and maybe even puts the entire idea of a legitimate medical marijuana marketplace at issue here in the state. Why isn't the law more clear, Ed? You know, I've spoken to a number of lawmakers and advocates who are working to try to change these laws. But I think you run into issues of just the difficulty of striking a balance. And, you know, one of the Republican lawmakers who's pushing for a change is state Senator Michelle Brooks. She's a Republican and chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

I think what we're trying to do is be proactive. Most certainly, none of us want to see an accident where someone is injured or killed in the workplace. And then suddenly the lens changes to why wasn't something done. And so she made those comments out of hearing earlier this year. And at the time, she was speaking in support of some legislation that would really define safety sensitive jobs. And it would put, you know, new restrictions on firefighters, pharmacists, daycare workers, people who operate a motor vehicle at work. And, you know, that bill passed out of committee. But during the negotiations, as they were trying to strike a balance between, you know, cannabis advocates and the business community, the bill has been. been amended to the point where, like, neither side is pretty happy with what the bill is now, and it's unclear whether that legislation would pass. Well, since there are all these lawsuits that you've been looking into, what's happening in the courts? Is this being settled in any definitive way? You know, a lot of these cases settle privately, which makes a lot of sense.

It's time-consuming and expensive to fight these battles in court. If someone gets fired but gets another job weeks or months later, there are real questions about what kind of damages they are entitled to under Pennsylvania law. I spoke to one attorney. who talked about settling some cases for under $10,000, which is a relatively small amount. There have been a few court decisions that lean in favor of the employer and the right to terminate someone. But Pennsylvania Supreme Court has not issued an opinion that clarifies the rights across the board, and a lot of people are waiting for that type of decision to really give them guidance. Anybody who watches election results during a presidential election knows that Pennsylvania

is kind of a purple state, right? There's a lot of political diversity. Are any of the results that we're seeing in the courts reflecting a traditional liberal or conservative lean in one part of the state or another? That's a really good question. It's something that I'll be interested in watching. So far, I'd say no. There was a court opinion in a north central Pennsylvania county, which is, you know, pretty conservative that was actually good for employees. But right now, we're working with a small sample. And most of the cases, as I mentioned, are settling before a judge fully weighs in on these merits. So it's something to watch for. My guest, Ed Mahan is an investigative reporter for the independent investigative newsroom,

Spotlight PA. He's been working on this story. He's based in York, Pennsylvania. Ed, thanks so much for joining us here on Science Friday. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Coming up after the break, Wyatt, quite literally, rains rabies vaccines from the sky right after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm John Denk, Rabies is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. It's fatal in a whopping 99% of cases, and because of that, rabies prevention has been one of the most important public health initiatives in the U.S. From August to October each year, the USDA leads a mass vaccination effort to try to keep the disease from being carried by critters, an action-packed adventure involving raccoons,

helicopters, and fish-flavored candy. Yes, here to tell us more is my next guest. Jordana Kirby is the rabies field coordinator for the USDA's National Rabies Management Program. Jordana, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, John. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about our program today. So before we get into the details of the program, give us a sense of just how big a deal rabies in the U.S. is right now. So one thing I think that probably most people are not aware of in the United States is that rabies is still very much an issue when it comes to public health and wildlife management. More than 90% of 5 to 7,000 rabies cases that are reported annually in our country occur in wild animals.

And specifically, raccoons are one of the most common species confirmed with the disease. This presents a challenge because raccoons are highly adaptable. They are found just about everywhere in the U.S. They're very ubiquitous, and they're extremely charismatic. So they thrive in most environments throughout our country. In areas where both raccoon and bat rabies circulates, human rabies exposures are actually 600% higher as compared to areas where there's only bat rabies.

So pretty much anywhere you can find raccoons in the United States, you are likely to find rabies. Not necessarily. So raccoon rabies specifically, where raccoons serve as the primary reservoir for the disease, is only found in the eastern United States. And so throughout the rest of the country, there are other reservoirs or other species that are more likely to carry rabies.

And those include bats throughout the entire country, as well as pocket areas where skunks are the primary reservoir and most likely to spread the disease, or in some cases, foxes or coyotes. So you're in your field season right now. Maybe you can walk us through how exactly the USDA vaccinates for rabies. Our program was started in the 1990s, and the scope of the program targets wildlife rabies prevention specifically. The immediate objective of our program is to prevent raccoon rabies from spreading any

further north into Canada or west beyond its current extent in coastal Alabama. And the primary way that we do that is to orally vaccinate raccoons and other target species using an oral vaccine or an or V bait and distributing those at a landscape scale. And we typically distribute a majority of those baits using low-flying airplanes along with helicopters and vehicles. You're dropping some sort of baited vaccination for raccoons to just pick up from the ground? I mean, how does this work? It sounds like a massive undertaking, first of all. Yes, it is. It's quite an undertaking. It really does involve a year-long planning process. But we use the latest in science, data and technology to plan out where we're actually going to distribute these ORV bates.

And so by doing that, it gives us the ability to truly target very specific areas. And using airplanes at a landscape scale really is the most efficient and effective way to get a majority of these bates out on the ground. We start in Maine, beginning in August, and we finish up in the north to north central part of Alabama by the end of October. And during that time, we put out about seven. 75% or more of the total bates that are distributed on an annual basis. Are these bates then being dropped sort of across a large landscape?

Are they being targeted in places where we know there are going to be more raccoons? Give us a sense of exactly where these might be falling from an airplane. Sure. So we very strategically decide where to place the ORV zones. And we do that by looking at the surveillance data for the disease itself. We're establishing about a 25-mile wide barrier. And within that barrier, we'll drop the ORV bait packets, thereby creating kind of this vaccination zone. And then there's the barrier, excuse me, between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

In these areas, we typically don't see a lot of cases of rabies because we've been able to locally eliminate it and prevent the spread. So we do see a decline in cases through time as we continue to vaccinate in these specific areas. So we are currently preventing the spread and preventing it from traveling any further than where we currently find it. But eventually we'd like to shift our ORV zone back to the east and eliminate it. It's something that, you know, over a 50 to 80 year horizon, if you can imagine, is our long-term vision. So getting back to these packets, these vaccination packets that are dropped from airplanes or helicopters, describe what they look like? What do they taste like? Why are they so attractive to raccoons?

We have two different attractants, if you will, and two different bait types that we're currently using. So the first bait type, it's called Raberol VRG, and it is the only licensed product that we currently can use specifically targeting wildlife today in the U.S. That bait looks almost like a small ketchup packet, if you will. It's a small rectangular sachet containing the liquid vaccine, and it's coated in wax along with a very pungent fish-based oil. And then that oil is coated with fish crumbles. And then the other bait type that we're using is called on-rab. That bait is still considered an experimental vaccine in the

United States, although it has been licensed for use in Canada. And that bait's a little different in that it is actually a sweet vanilla-based coating. It works equally as well in terms of attractiveness to raccoons and other animals. It just is a little bit different in terms of the appearance of the bay and the attractant on the bay itself. I can only imagine that a lot of our listeners probably either have a dog or a cat or know a dog or a cat who, if they came across something that was vanilla flavored or probably even better yet fish flavored, they probably gobble it up right away. I mean, is this stuff safe for a household pets or other animals? It is safe. Yes, Absolutely. Although it is not licensed for use in domestic animals, that is actually a question we get all the time. Hey, can I get one of these bates to vaccinate my dog instead of taking them in for their annual shots? And unfortunately, the answer to that is no. The bates are safe. And although it's not common, it is possible that dogs in particular are potentially likely to encounter any of our bates on the landscape. We do our best to try to prevent that from happening when our employees are flying in the planes as well as

in the helicopters, they have the ability to turn the baiting equipment on and off. And they do that very specifically in areas where we're trying to avoid pets and people from finding the baits themselves. Have you gone up in an airplane or a helicopter to drop baits before yourself? Yes, I have. Absolutely. So to tell us what that's like, is it fun? Yes. It's a really great experience. For me personally, you know, we're in rural areas. We're flying along the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States, whether it's in August or in October, it's the best seat in the house. I mean, you see the mountains and the beautiful terrain and you're flying at a pretty low altitude. So for nature lovers in particular, it really doesn't get much

better because you're just, you have this beautiful landscape out in front of you. You're dropping the bait so you know you're doing something that is for the greater good in protecting wildlife and ultimately protecting people, pets, and livestock. And it's a really great time. I do. I thoroughly. enjoy it. And I think it's also really an interesting program because so many of the things that are targeted at stopping the spread of disease means the eradication of an animal. But what you're essentially doing is saying, here, raccoon, have this tasty tree. It's a little bit like, you know, getting some Halloween candy and then all of a sudden you're vaccinated against rabies. You're not going to pass it on to a dog or a human. It sounds like a very humane and lovely way.

to address this really serious problem? Yes. I mean, it is absolutely the most effective way to address a wildlife disease such as rabies, which of course has such significant potential public health impacts. And a lot of disease management involves culling populations, whether it's highly pathogenic avian influenza or other similar diseases. But in our case, that's absolutely not the goal. The intent is to vaccinate the animals and keep them healthy, which ultimately help

to keep pets and humans healthy as well. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but it sounds as though this is part of a larger project to just get rid of rabies in the United States, not just amongst the raccoon population of the eastern half of the U.S., but just getting rid of the disease altogether. Where do we stand in terms of doing that?

I think, honestly, and realistically, that the ability to eliminate rabies altogether as a whole from the United States is very challenging. I still think we have a ways to go on that. One of our biggest challenges, though, with the ability to completely eliminate rabies, I would say, still exist with bats. You know, bats are found throughout the country, similarly to some of these other species, but they have very different ecology. Obviously, they fly. They're not a land-dwelling animal. There are no effective vaccines that we can use orally for bats at this time. And that's why we

specifically have chosen to focus on very specific variants. and in our case, raccoon rabies in the east. Also, there's a huge economic impact. In areas where raccoon rabies exists, more people are likely to be exposed, more pets are likely to be exposed. And then if you look at the potential economic impacts in the absence of management,

that gets pretty astronomical pretty quickly. So there are some huge economic advantages of continuing to conduct our program versus trying to look at overall rabies elimination across the country because we just quite aren't there yet when it comes to all species that potentially transmit the disease. Jordana Kirby is the rabies field coordinator for the USDA's National Rabies Management Program. Jordana, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Now some research that might mean some hope in the fight against the invasive spotted lanternfly. We've talked about them before, the very pretty but very hungry insects that are spreading rapidly in the eastern U.S., and that has ecologists and farmers worried. This week in the journal Frontiers and Insect Science, researchers from the USDA report that they may have found a clue to attracting the spotted lanternfly, chemicals secreted by the insect as part of a sugary goo called honeydew. Joining me now is one of the authors of that report, Dr. Miriam Cooperband, of the United States,

Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Plant Protection and Quarantine Division. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So for those who maybe haven't been up close and personal with a lot of lantern flies, there's this gooey stuff left behind. What exactly is honey-do?

Basically, spotted lantern flies feed on the plant flow-em. They have piercing mouth parts. They penetrate the plant with them. and they drink the juices out of the plant. But those juices, in addition to having some nutrients, they're mostly sugar and water. And so spotted lanternflies filter out the nutrients and keep those. And then they excrete this sugary water substance that's very sticky and gooy. And that excretion is called honeydew.

So you look at these chemicals that are in the honeydew. And what exactly did you find? Well, we collected honey-dew from male spotted lanternflies and from female spotted lanternflies. And we brought that honey-dew back to the laboratory and we looked at it to see what the chemical makeup of it is. And we also tested the honey-dew in bio-assays to see how the male and female spotted lanternflies respond to it. We gave them a choice and they could respond to either the odor from the honey-dews. or to control. And what we found was the male spotted lanternflies had a significant preference for male honeydew and females did not. And then the male and female spotted lanternflies did not have

a strong response to female honeydew, but a very weak response. So that seems a bit counterintuitive. Wouldn't it make more sense if the male honeydew attracted females and vice versa? Yes, it is a little counterintuitive. We were not expecting these results. But when we think about the ecology and the behavior of the spotted lantern fly in the field, it started to make a little more sense. What we see in the field, most of the time you see a 50-50 ratio of males and females. But then for about two weeks before they mate, you can find trees that are mostly females and then other trees that have mostly males on them. So for some reason, and we don't understand this yet, the males and females separate before they mate, and then they come back together again when mating starts.

This honeydew discovery that males are attracted to male odors from honeydew may help explain how they're doing that, but it doesn't explain why they're doing that. So explain how strong an attraction is this? I mean, is it like attracting a bug to say, well, maybe I'll go this direction or that direction, or is it a very, very, very strong. strong attraction that basically says, I need to be wherever that, that smell is. Well, that's a really good question. And that's, of course, what we would hope because we want to find an attractant that we can turn into a tool to use as a lure. So we hope that we're finding something like that. But this is in a laboratory setting. And so they have two choices. Once we figure out what those compounds are that are attracting them, we can go and try to develop a lure out of those compounds and bring it to the field and test it in the field. And that's the

tricky part because often you find attractants in the laboratory, but making them attractive in the field when there are so many other variables and so many other attractive things out there, that's the tricky part. So what makes that so tricky? I mean, give us a sense of those other variables that make it difficult to replicate something in the laboratory that might not work in the field. So there might be multiple modes of communication. They may not only use honeydew. They may use other chemicals that are produced by their bodies. They may use substrate vibrations, which they detect through their legs when they're standing on the same surface, and they can send signals that way. So there are multiple ways that they could communicate

with each other, and this might just be a part of that whole big picture. So as you suggested before, this might explain one of the really unusual phenomenons that we see with these spotted lantern flies, which is you'll see one tree that's just covered with thousands of them and another tree very close by that has none. Yes. And again, we don't know how they do that yet or why, how they aggregate in that way, what signals they're using. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We're just now discovering some of those signals. And I'm sure we're going to be discovering many more as we keep working on this problem. I have to ask you, is this one of the most confounding projects you've ever worked on. Everything I've learned about the spotted lanternfly, everyone I've

talked to as they try to track it across the United States and keep it out of wine fields, for instance. Everyone seems to be perplexed by this thing. Are you? Absolutely. The spotted lanternfly is very enigmatic. We scratch our heads a lot when we find new things. The first few years, we started studying it, lots of head scratchers. But as we started putting these pieces of the puzzle together and started seeing, well, they behave this way under these circumstances and so forth, it is starting to make more sense and come together. So we're learning a lot, and we've come a long way from where we were when they first were discovered here.

Well, good luck to you as you continue to travel down this honey-dew path. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Dr. Miriam Cooper Band is a scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Plant Protection, and Quarantine Division. She's based in Massachusetts. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcast, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

I'm John Dankowski. IRIS back next week.