Science Friday - Emerging Technologies, Pokémon In The Brain, Colds And Flu. Dec 20, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Back when Science Friday began in 1991, the Internet, as we know it, didn’t even exist. While ARPA-NET existed and the first web pages began to come online, social media, online shopping, streaming video and music were all a long ways away. In fact, one of our early callers in 1993 had a genius idea: What if you could upload your credit card number, and download an album you were interested in listening to? A truly great idea—just slightly before its time. In this segment, we’ll be looking ahead at the next 5 to 10 years of emerging technologies that are about to bubble up and change the world. Think, “metalenses,” tiny, flat chips that behave just like a curved piece of glass, or battery farms, which could transform our energy future.  Scientific American technology editor Sophie Bushwick helped put together the magazine’s special report, the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2019. She will be our guide through this techie future. How does a child’s brain dedicate entire regions for processing faces or words? In order to answer this question, Stanford University neuroscientist Jesse Gomez leveraged a novel visual data set: Pokémon! Gomez, a lifelong fan of the popular anime creatures, wondered if his childhood ability to instantaneously identify all 150 Pokémon—combined with the repetitive way they were presented on screen—might have resulted in the formation of dedicated Pokémon region in his brain. Science Friday video producer Luke Groskin joins Ira to relay Gomez’s story and how Pokémon provide the perfect opportunity to teach us about how our vision systems develop. It’s the time of the year for sniffles, but what exactly is the virus that’s making you sick? Researchers in Scotland took a survey of the viruses in the respiratory tracts of over 36,000 patients in the U.K. National Health System, and mapped out the viral ecosystem in their lungs. Around 8% of the patients with some form of viral infection had more than one virus active in their systems. And it turns out that if you have a flu infection, you’re less likely to also be infected with the cold virus. Sema Nickbakhsh, one of the authors of the paper and a researcher at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow, joins Ira to talk about the work and what it can tell us about viral ecosystems.  And, this week a Congressional budget deal approved $25 million in funding for gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health. Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight, joins Ira to talk about that news and other stories from the week in science. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Coming up, did you know you may have a Pokemon region in your brain? We'll talk about how the video game makes a lasting imprint on kids and how neuroscientists are now using those characters as a window into the brain. But first, for years, Congress has added a policy known as the Dickie Amendment to their annual appropriations bills to largely block federal funding of gun violence research. The amendment was first written in 1996, and it said that, quote, none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control. This week, a congressional budget deal started to push back against that as they approved $25 million in funding for gun violence research at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. joining me to talk about that and other stories from the week. And science is Maggie Kerth, senior science reporter at 538.

She joins me from Minneapolis. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. So tell us what's going on with this budget line for gun violence research. Is this something absolutely new? Well, it's not exactly new. So a lot of places have been calling it the first federal funding for gun violence studies in 20 years, which is not exactly correct. because federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, have been funding this all along.

But it is a symbolic victory for the doctors and the scientists who think that gun violence should be studied more like the way that we study public health crises, including other kinds of fatal injuries. And it's also a branch of funding that's likely to be put towards different kinds of research than what you see from the Department of Justice. So the CDC and the NIH, they are looking at gun violence in a very different way through that lens of public health rather than through the lens of criminal justice. That's interesting. Let's talk a bit about the history, how we got there. What is the story behind this sort of ban on gun violence research? Yeah. So back in 1996, well, back in the early 90s, there were a couple of papers that were published that were sort of looking at the question of whether guns make us safer or less safe, whether having a gun in the home, is something that is likely to make you less likely to be a victim of violence or whether people with guns in the home are more likely to be victims of violence.

And this was a very public health way of looking at gun violence, and it was something that gun rights advocates like the National Rifle Association, though felt was a backdoor to gun control. So that ended up leading to an amendment in a 1996 spending bill that basically was kind of putting a limit on public health research. of gun violence specifically. But scientists say that that's actually a really important branch of gun violence research to do because it helps us answer a lot of questions about gun deaths that aren't related to crimes.

So suicide, for instance, is the biggest cause of gun death by far in the United States. And the people who use guns to kill themselves, they're often legal gun owners. So if you're looking at gun violence only as a criminal justice problem, it's a lot harder to study things like suicide. So this money ends up being really important to the kinds of studies that scientists say aren't getting done enough. So where does the research go from here? What are the next steps? Well, this is a really small amount of money.

It's kind of more of a symbolic victory than a real one yet. And it's about half of what Democrats originally asked for. But it is there, and it is going to be useful. But don't expect the situation to be settled. There are a lot more fights on this left to come. Okay, let's move on to another topic of an interesting topic. There's news this week about a fun word to say, Marsquakes. Not earthquakes, Marsquakes.

Not a candy bar. We're living in the future. We're talking about Marsquakes. So just seven months ago, NASA landed this Insight rover that had found the first known Marsquake, the first known earthquake happening on Mars. and now they're finding that there's actually a whole lot of shaking going on. Insight has documented about two quakes a day in the year that it's been on the Martian surface, and that number actually seems to be on the rise.

And that's kind of a big deal, because until we landed Insight and started finding these Marsquakes, we weren't entirely sure whether earthquakes were a thing that even happened on Mars. So I was looking at one paper, I was looking at an article from back in 2012 that scientists were estimating then that a Mars quake happened once every million years. And now we know it's about twice a day. Twice a day. So this is a really big discovery then?

Yeah, it's a really big change in what we thought was happening and how we thought that Mars worked. One of the things that makes us really interesting is, you know, you know plate tectonics where you have these giant chunk. of the Earth's crust that move around over millions of years, we're not sure still how that happens on Mars or whether it even happens on Mars. So knowing that there are earthquakes happening means that we are learning a little bit more about how the geology of that planet works. Well, how strong, how would you, how strong would these quakes be classified? Are they strong, weak? Oh, they're real weak. They have to measure these things at night. because if they do it during the day, there's too much wind,

and the wind can end up affecting the measurements almost as much as the earthquakes themselves. It's very, very, very tiny. The two biggest ones that they found were magnitude four. But knowing that they're there is still kind of a big difference. Yeah, I'll bet. Lastly, you have some really cool news about chewing gum that's thousands of years old. Yeah, a 57-year-old. 5,700-year-old chewing gum, scientists found a hardened wad of birch tree pitch, which is this kind of blackish-brown

goo that you make by heating up birch bark. And it's been used for thousands of years for a glue, for, you know, putting on the inside of the boats to keep them waterproof. And there's also been these theories that people chew it, either to make it more pliable or even just as like a gum thing. So they found this wad of it in Denmark preserved in the mud, and it had teeth marks in it, and it was preserved well enough that researchers were able to pull a whole complete human genome out of this wad of chewed pitch. And it's actually the first time that anybody has extracted an entire human genome from something other than bone. Wow. So even back then, if you want to keep your privacy, don't spit out your gum.

This is what it is. Yeah, yeah, because now we know a whole bunch about this lady. You know, we know she was a lady. We know she probably had dark hair and dark skin and blue eyes. We know that she was lactose intolerant. We know she'd been eating a lot of duck and hazelnuts. There's all sorts of things we know about her. Oh, Maggie, that's terrific.

It's a great year-ender for you. Thank you very much, Maggie. Thank you. And have a happy holiday. Maggie Kerth, Senior Science Reporter at 538. We'll see you next year. And now it's time to play. good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side, and you know it is time of the year

for sniffles. But what exactly is the virus that's making you sick? Researchers in Scotland took a survey of the viruses in the respiratory tract of thousands of patients to map out the viral ecology, the viral ecosystem in those patient lungs. And it turns out that if you have the flu, you are less likely to also be infected with the cold virus. Joining me now to talk about this is Seema, Nick Bash, a researcher in the MRC University of Glasgow Center for Virus Research in Glasgow, UK. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Nick Bash. Hi, Ira. Thank you so much for the invitation to speak to you all day.

You're very welcome. Fill us in on this. I think we all agree that getting the flu is bad news, especially if it's bad enough to make you go see the doctor. But you found that there might be a hidden plus side to this. Yep. Well, our study is the first to try and provide robust quantitative evidence that there are interactions among flu viruses and non-flu viruses, including those that are responsible for the common cold, like you rightly said. And this hypothesis is something that's sort of not new news. It's been around for decades, but we've not really had the robust quantitative evidence in our study allowed us to really test that question. Do you have any idea why if you have the flu, you have the flu virus, you don't come down with the cold flu, the cold illness?

Yeah. Well, it's a good question. So I'll just start by explaining that we, based on our data, we don't actually know what the direction of the relationship is likely to be. But we do believe, based on the data that we have, that it is more likely that it's the flu that blocks. the common cold virus rhino virus because we see it happen each year so each winter season rhinovirus dips right at the time that the flu virus peaks and we even saw this during the summer wave of the 2009 flu pandemic which is an unusual year for flu there are others that have thought about the relationship the other way around based on that same pandemic period of flu but our data is really suggesting that the relationship is likely to be the other way around and so these cold viruses, although they tend to be more mild in certain individuals and in like the very

young population, for example, or if you're immunocompromised, then you can actually suffer from a more severe type of illness compared to, say, the average person. Could it be that if you have two viruses, they're competing in your body for resources? And if you get the flu first, it sort of muscles out the cold virus? Yeah. So those are the exact sorts of questions that we're interested in because you see, We, and by we I mean biologists and epidemiologists, we tend to study pathogens as individual infectious organisms. But of course, the reality is that they co-circulate in the community together.

And so it's this ecological system that we're wanting to understand better so that we can try to understand whether they are competing for host resources. We also found in our analysis which hasn't been picked up on as much as the fact that we see also cooperative forms of interactions between among the cold viruses. But we don't see this with flu viruses. And so there's something different about flu. Whereas with the cold viruses, they can also have these kind of more cooperative rather than competitive types of interactions is what our data is suggesting. Quite interesting. Thank you, Dr. Nick Best for taking time to be with us today. And I have a happy holiday season to you.

No problem. Thank you. Happy Christmas. You too. Seymannick Bash is a researcher in the MRC University of Glasgow Center for Virus Research in Glasgow, UK. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the futuristic technologies that might shape the next decade. From advanced time-release fertilizers to bioplastics and battery farms to store renewable power, we'll be talking about all of this after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. Myra Flato. Back when Science Friday began in 1991, the internet, as we know, it surely did not exist. There was the arbor net, and people were talking about the first worldwide webpages. What was that?

But social media, online shopping, streaming, video and music, all that was a long way off. In fact, one of our early callers in 1993 had this prescient idea. wherever these record companies are and if I like it, you know. I see you're saying instead of having to go buy a CD you could just download the CD on the internet. Yeah, that'd be great. That's a great idea.

Thanks Dave for calling. Yeah, that was Dave back in Pasadena back in 1993 with a truly great idea and slightly before it's time because that's how we download music now. Well, on today's program, we're going to be making our own predictions

looking ahead at the next five to ten years at emerging technologies that are just about to bubble up. and transform the world. And we want to hear what you have to say. What emerging technology are you most excited to see go mainstream in the next few years and why? Labgrown meat, robotic assistance. Tell us 844-724-8255-844-Sy-Talk or tweet us at SciFRI, S-E-I-FRI.

And to guide us through this techie future is Sophie Bushwick, Technology Editor at SIEC-E-F-Tochee. Scientific American, who helped put together the magazine's special report on the top 10 emerging technologies of 2019. And we have a link up on our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash emerging tech. Welcome back, Sophie. Thank you. Nice to have you back here. How difficult was it putting this list together?

Well, it was a long process. So basically, we had a steering committee that was made up of people from Scientific American and also from the world, economic, And so we had these experts who also called for submissions from even more experts, and then they had all of these nominations and they had to winnow them down to make sure they fit these criteria. So we were looking for things that had the ability to make a big impact on society and on economies. But we also wanted them to be kind of early in their development, things that hadn't really arrived on the scene yet, but that were getting early interest from investors or startups and other sources. One of the topics in the package that you gave me of all the articles you put together, it was sort of like deja vu because the big thing in the 20th century was plastics. Another big thing is bioplastic. Well, it's actually a problem that we liked plastics so much because we're producing so much of it.

In 2014, we had 311 million metric tons of plastic going out into the world, and less than 15% of that gets recycled. So the idea is we're looking for plastics that can biodegrade more easily that we'll be able to recycle and break down and that won't just end up in the environment where they carry toxins, they get eaten by animals, they even get eaten by us humans. They've found plastic in a lot of human digestive tracks. You know, I think when we talked about this last week a little bit, even going so back as far back to see that plastics are mentioned and it's a wonderful life, the film of 1947. but we never saw, right? It sort of caught us blindsided how big a problem plastics would create, right? Right. We're very optimistic at the beginning.

And we're still incredibly reliant on plastics. Plastics are just, they go into everything. They expect that by 2050, the amount of plastics produced are going to triple. So the hope is that we can find a way to make that, to avoid putting some of the plastics into the environment in that way, because it could make the problem even worse. Now, the series also covers advanced food packaging that would let Stores track spoiled or contaminated food with much greater precision. When I was reading that, that sounded fascinating. And something we really need.

Absolutely. I mean, I think the World Health Organization says there are hundreds of millions of people got food poisoning every year and hundreds of thousands of people die from it. So being able to tell when food is spoiled is really important. And there's a couple different approaches that researchers are taking. One is the development of these sensors that can tell you if a package has been opened or if a certain amount of time has elapsed or even if the air in the package contains molecules that indicate that the food has started to rot. So that's one way. And another way is just tracking these sources of poisoning more carefully. So if there's an E. coli breakout in romaine lettuce, it's really important to be able to quickly trace that so we know just what lettuce is dangerous and just which ones are safe to eat.

And the way they're doing that is actually blockchain, which is a technology. We usually think about being used for cryptocurrency, but it basically allows you to keep track of transactions in multiple places at once. So you could track a case of food poisoning back to the source in seconds. Now, we've talked on this show a lot about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is caused by all that nutrient runoff from farms. Your articles say, you say smart fertilizers are on the horizon. Let's say smart fertilizer. So a smart fertilizer is one that you don't just dump onto the field all at once, where it can't all be absorbed by the plants, so a lot of it gets washed away.

So they're developing these fertilizers that are contained in little capsules that break down slowly over time, so it has a slow release of the nutrient. And some of these capsules are actually getting really smart, so some of them can respond to temperature changes. So if it gets warmer, plants are able to grow more, and so this capsule breaks down faster so that the plants can get access. to the nutrients they need. Yeah, that would be very useful.

We asked our listeners on the Science Friday Vox Pop app what emerging technologies they were most excited about. And we got this comment from Al in Las Gatos, California. Autonomous driving vehicles, because my wife is severely, visually impaired, and it would be a good thing for autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles, he was saying. Yeah, it was smart cars. I think that's definitely a technology that's going to be impacting all of our lives.

in the coming years. I mean, it's got the potential not just to help people who can't drive themselves and don't have access to transportation, but, I mean, it could really radically change the way we move around. So I'm really excited about the advent of self-driving cars, self-driving buses. Yeah. While we're talking about energy, what about the safer nuclear reactors? Is there such a thing?

Yes. So we're hoping that our nuclear reactors that are, this is another emerging technology that we're seeing. So I think that a lot of people have some justifiable fears of nuclear reactors. But the fact is that if we want to move away from fossil fuels, nuclear power could be a way to help us do that. And now researchers are testing out fuels that are that are sort of more resilient and reactors that wouldn't melt down the same. same way that we, that reactors experience meltdowns and famous incidents like the Three Mile Island disaster. And much smaller, on a much smaller scale, which would make them a little bit safer also.

Right. The idea is instead of a giant power plant with a big core, you would have smaller scale reactors and that they would be more distributed. So you wouldn't have as much of a danger there. One of the technologies in Scientific American Special Report is the something called the meta lens. It's a tiny lens that could revolutionize optical technology. Here to tell us more as Andre Faroan,

Professor of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Welcome, Dr. Faroan. Hi, Ara. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak on your show. Here, you're welcome. What exactly is a metal lens? How does that compare it to the kind of lens we're used to seeing? Yeah, so we're all used to lenses that are made out of curved glasses or plastics.

A metal lens is a very thin lens, made with a flat substrate. And on that flat substrate, you have tiny little little. blocks of material that have dimensions of a micron and a micron is about a hundred times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. And basically, you have this tiny blocks and when light hits it to these tiny blocks, it interacts with them and you get an effect where light can get focused to a very tight spot similar to what you can get from a regular lens. And you can use this effect to create images as you can have in a cell phone camera, for example. And so what are you doing to the metal to make it all act exactly the way you want to?

Yeah, so what we do, we take this blocks and these are made of actually of silicon. And depending on how big they are, so you can imagine that these blocks are like buildings in Manhattan, for example. And depending on how wide the building is, light interacts with it differently. It basically propagates through it at a different speed. And this creates the effect that we desire, in this case, is focusing the light. And can you describe what a metal lens looks like? So if I was to look at it really close, what would I see? Yeah, you'll see a lot of pillars.

So they can be pillars with a circular cross-section or rectangular cross-section. And so it looks like a forest of pillars. that are placed on a flat piece of glass. Sounds kind of like if I was looking down at Manhattan from above. Exactly, exactly. But in this case, all the buildings in Manhattan will have to be the same height because the way we fabricate these things is that we take a piece of material with a certain thickness and then we etch or we dig down the material.

And so everything ends up being at the same height. Wow. You're sort of cheating, Andre? Like, you're cheating the light, passing through it into thinking it's passed through a lens, even though it wasn't a curved lens it passed through, but our little Manhattan there? Well, we're not, in physics, unfortunately, you can't get away with cheating.

So, yeah, we are using basically the effects at the wavelength scale. So this structure is as small as the wavelength of light, and the wavelength of visible light is hundreds of nanometers, which is about 100 times smaller than a number. human hair. And when light interacts with objects that are that small scale, the wavelength scale, it interacts in rather more non-intuitive ways, rather than compared to interaction with lenses, for example, that we are all used to.

And why would we want to make the light do that instead of just using a curved lens that like the ones we're used to? Yes. So having this lens is thin and flat is a big advantage. And the reason is, I think, stack them on each top of each other with very high ease so you can make complex optical systems by simply stacking of that lenses also these lenses are made with the same processing techniques as used for semiconductor processors and so you can think of having lenses that are fabricating the same process as image sensor for example or some other electronics and you can think of

optics and electronics being fabricating in the same production line, for example, which is highly advantageous in the long run you found to make a product. Well, I want to thank you very much for taking time to talk with us today, Andre. Andre Farrow and Professor of Applied Physics at Caltech, and good luck with your lenses. Thank you very much, Aura. Our number 844724-8255. Let's go to the phones to Bob and Lawrence, Kansas. Hi, Bob.

Hi, hi there. Go ahead. Hey, the thing I'm really excited is in the realm of hydroponic gardening, the vertical gardens that organizations like freight farms in Boston are doing with being able to grow intensive gardens in small space with vertical gardening, hydroponics, and I heard that Kroger is looking at doing some of this in terms of growing hydroponic vegetables on site at some of their stores, I think the first one might be rolled out in Seattle. Yeah, that's an interesting idea, and you'd make food a lot more local. Yeah, I can imagine going.

Exactly. It would be kind of cool to imagine going to a grocery store and literally picking your food off the vine there. Yeah, it's like going to a strawberry farm, but indoors, and doing it that way. Yeah. Thanks for calling. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios here with Sophie Bushwork talking about technologies of the future. Let's see if we get a phone call or two in before the break.

Let's go to Abraham in Jacksonville, Florida. Hi, Abe. Hey, thanks for taking my call. Yeah, I think cryptocurrency, in particular, Bitcoin is going to be pretty huge 10 years from now. What do you think, Sophie? You follow this? Do you think? I've heard some people say it's going to be like the stock market instead of sort of an exchange where you actually buy and sell things.

Right. I think that cryptocurrency is one of those areas where it's extremely hard to predict because it has changed. because it has changed a lot quickly. So there was the early days of Bitcoin, and then there was the Bitcoin crash. And so I'd imagine that we will definitely see cryptocurrency and discussions of cryptocurrency going on into the future,

but it's hard to tell which way the path will zig, you know, towards, I can imagine it being adopted in a more widespread way, but I think that there's definitely going to be a lot of legal and political issues that swarm around this topic as well. And as you mentioned in one of your articles, the food technology,

uses Bitcoin. He uses blockchain, which is the technology behind Bitcoin, right? So I think that something kind of cool about blockchain is it gets all of the attention because of cryptocurrency, but it's actually got other applications as well that are really interesting. Lots of tweets coming in. Andrew writes via Twitter, 3D printed organs, right? Although it's an excitement that's tinged with many concerns over getting the tech right. Absolutely. I mean, at this stage, they're still working on this in the lab. It's not close to. testing in humans yet, but there's some really cool advances with printing using cell, with printing organs that can actually exchange oxygen between cells, for example.

Joshua writes on Twitter, I think a great idea for the future of entertainment would be the growth of VR, I guess virtual reality. Image not just watching, oh, imagine just not just watching a horror movie, but rather being surrounded. See, to me that sounds terrible. I know. Yeah, I'm thinking of alien. You don't know what, that spaceship when it jumps out, right?

I'm sure that there are horror fans who would love that. I am not one of them, but I'm excited on their behalf. Well, let me go to another listener to Jake and Reno, who has something sort of similar, right, Jake? Yeah, well, it's actually not VR, but augmented reality. So VR is the placement of the person within the environment, we create the environment around them. Augmented reality is the environment remains the same,

but you're able to get kind of a heads up display. And the idea is that we'd use this in a surgical setting where there would be an overlay of the person before they cut in, where you could see where the incision points were and where the actual surgery was taking place. So the surgeon could be sitting there wearing a pair of glasses and before they even place the first cut, know what's happening internally. And I think this is kind of a really cool emerging technology that could really have a lot of applications for medical science moving forward. Wow, that sounds cool. I agree. I think that, I mean, a surgeon can't do a practice run on the patient, right? But if they could do a practice run on a digital version of the patient,

it could maybe help. Or if you're in VR and you see exactly on the patient where you have to make the cut. Yeah. You know, and it moves with you as you're making the cut and you're going in. That could be really cool. A lot of other cool things we're going to talk about. We're going to take a break. Our number, 844-724-8255 is a number. If you'd like to chime in and tell us what you see coming down the Mike. We've got all kinds of people tweeting us. Zeke says he wants drone delivery. It's going to be huge. It's on its way. On the next five to ten years.

Absolutely. There's drone delivery and robots that roll are delivery robots that roll are also in development. I've seen a few of those already. Yeah. We'll be right back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking this hour about technologies that might transform the world in the not so distant future with my guest, Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American. And we have a link to Siams, a terrific collection of predictions up on our website at Science Friday.com slash emerging tech. I'd like to bring on another guest now to talk about an innovation that could transform the energy market.

One of my favorite topics are batteries, battery farms, the energy storage technologies of the future. Daniel Schwartz is Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of War. Washington, Director of the Clean Energy Institute. Welcome Dr. Schwartz. Hi, guys. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Now, this is really important. Is it not getting new technology with batteries that can help us create this grid of the future? Absolutely. It really, we don't have a decarbonized world, I think, without better energy storage. So what is, paint this picture for us of the power plant of the future. Where are we now and what do we need to get to where you'd like to be? Well, the power plant of the future is clean.

It's not emitting carbon or other products, and it's adaptable. Both the loads that people use and the generation are adaptable, and that's where batteries and energy storage in general fit between what people want for their load, their energy demands, and what a power plant can deliver. So solar is variable and wind is variable, and we have to buffer between the demand and the supply. And that's, again, where storage comes into play. And how cost competitive are renewables plus storage versus natural gas or coal? Sure. The levelized cost of electricity, which takes into account all the costs of buying the stuff, operating it, and whatnot, are really cost competitive.

Los Angeles Power and Water just put out a power purchase agreement with solar and storage, and they were in the two some cents per kilowatt hour for that power purchase agreement. So there's, for both the storage and for the electricity generation. And so that is cheap. So do we need a next generation of batteries or is the kind of batteries we have running our cars? Can we just stack them all together, put them together and make a power plant out of it? Or do we need something new, Dr. Schwartz? Yeah.

I think we're on the trend of leveraging the massive, massive investment going to electric vehicle batteries. And so the grid side will leverage that, I think, for the five to ten years that we're looking at, because there's something like $250 billion that are being invested in the batteries and infrastructure for electric vehicles over the next few years. And so energy storage is really about getting to scale. And that level of investment is how we're going to get to scale. And the grid will leverage that. And there's also sort of a life cycle to the batteries because you can take that car battery and then when it's done, plug into a house and then take that.

And when it's done, it's useful life in a house plug into a battery farm. So they've got a pretty long lifespan, right? That is such a special and important point, Sophie. I think that combining information about what is the health of that battery and what's its best value at any given time is critical. It happens to be one of the reasons why I like companies that have car, that manufacture batteries, have cars, have home energy storage, and have grid energy storage integrated together. That lets them do so much more because they know the health of the battery at every stage. They can use it three times. That's terrific.

Let's talk about a little bit. We have lithium ion batteries. Now, that's our main battery supply. What is past lithium ion? Is there something else that we are working on? Sure. There's a bunch of technologies, and I would be afraid to say what I think is going to win, but what I will say is that there are technologies coming out with things like sulfur. What happens beyond? Sulfur is kind of one of those chemicals that are going from naughty to nice in 2019.

Sulfur, we used to work so hard to get sulfur out of fossil fuels, low sulfur coal, ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel. Well, sulfur is a super-light element, super abundant and cheap, and there's so many ways you can add electrons to it or take them out, and that's the basis of future energy storage technologies, is cheap, lightweight, energetic, and so I'm pretty bullish about sulfur batteries. You know, the price of solar power has come down so much.

It's getting, it's cheaper now than the, fossil fuels. Are the batteries then what's holding us back from this electric future? So I would say it's integrative thinking that is holding us back. We're used to our energy being supplied for transportation by Chevron, our power being supplied by our local utility, the lights turn on when we need them, and sort of this integrated view that how we demand power and how we deliver it, it's going to be an unbelievably sophisticated machine of storage generation and use that's all connected by information. And I know that batteries are probably the practical solution we're going to see moving forward,

but if we could think out of the box a second, can you tell us a little bit about some other energy storage technologies that researchers are looking at? Sure. There's things like gravity storage where you have big cranes that lift big, heavy, heavy, 35-ton blocks up and stack them up into the height of a skyscraper. And then when you need power, you drop the blocks down to the ground, running it through a motor that generates electricity or a generator. And so these are things that can really cheaply store energy.

And the question will be, does society accept having skyscrapers of concrete bricks storing their energy? That would be an example. We call them buildings here in New York. Not to make light of that. You know, something that was coming of age, I remember back in the 60s, I remember Sophie Scientific American doing a big take on this, and they were flywheels. People were talking about, do you remember that, Dr. Schwartz at all?

I am old enough, and it hasn't gone away. Flywheels are one of those technologies that you can store quickly, bring it up to speed, quickly discharge it. It can potentially have a role. I'm not a person that ever says no to anything that can be inexpensive and adaptable. You know, one of the problems with it, they were, I remember going to see some out in California, some people were experimenting with flywheels and cars, and it was spinning them up and running the cars on them. But the problem with the flywheel is that it creates a great torque as it's spinning,

and it creates a force in one direction, as we know from the laws of physics. And so it's very hard to steer the car once you have this flywheel spinning. There's a lot of these energy storage solutions that I imagine would cause big problems for cars. I can't really picture a tower of bricks on the hood of your car storing some energy in that. Well, we'll look forward to this, Dr. Schwartz. How far into the future do you think we have to look for this? Well, I think, I mean, I think that it's happening now. It's a quiet revolution that's taking place.

And we're going to see more and more coming every year more electrification of vehicles, more ways that you can work with your utility on. on how your energy is used and priced. I want to thank both of you for taking them to be with us today. Certainly you, Sophie Bushback, Goose. My pleasure. Been with us many, many times. She's the technology editor at Scientific American,

and we have a link to the special report, great report, ScienceFriety.com slash emerging technology. Also, Dr. Daniel Schwartz, Professor of Chemical Engineering and University of Washington and Director of the Clean Energy Institute there. Thank you again, Daniel, for coming on. Thanks. You're welcome.

Do you know that there's a Pokemon spot in the brain? Yes, those critters from the popular Japanese anime and games can activate a certain region of the visual cortex. And now neuroscientists are using them as a window into how the brain works. Here to tell us more is Science Friday's video producer Luke Groskin. His macroscope video this week is all about the Pokemon spot in the brain. Welcome, Luke. Hi, Eric.

Do I have a spot, a Pokemon spot in my brain? I'm sorry to inform you that you personally do not have a Pokemon spot in your brain. And I know that probably because... I'm wounded. I know that because I think it's pretty unlikely that you played Game Boy back in the 1990s. No, no. And your knowledge of Pokemon is not up to snuff, to be completely honest. So you have to have played it early on in life?

Is that what you're saying? Yes. So you have to have played it as a child. And you have to have played it on the Game Boy, on a small screen. And if you did that, your brain was exposed to a very steady and standardized little experiment, I guess, as it were. So you saw the little Pokemon on the screen, and you pretty much always held it at the same distance, and the Pokemon always appeared at the same spot on the screen, and your brain started to record each of those Pokemon. And in order to win the game, you had to memorize all those Pokemon.

So as a result, you were motivated to store all the little nuances of these Pokemon. and your brain became specialized, a part of your brain became specialized, at identifying Pokemon. So we created a little memory spot in the brain? Well, the spot existed in the first place, but the brain is super plastic when you're growing up. And it, just like our ability to distinguish between faces

or words or numbers, which all have been shown to have a dedicated spot inside your brain, your brain looked at all these little Pokemon, and dedicated a spot, a little section of neurons that activates and becomes energized when you see these Pokemon so that you can easily identify them and get your little dopamine fix by winning the game. Now, you visited with a researcher in your video on his Pokemon knowledge, and first I wanted to know, how did he know where to look or find this spot? Well, the researcher is a fellow named Jesse Gomez, and he was at Stanford.

He's going to be at Princeton pretty soon, and he played Pokemon obsessively. as a kid on the Game Boy. And he heard about this experiment where they gave Rees' little baby Reese's macaques. They showed them Tetris images. And they learned they got a dedicated zone in their brain. Now, you can't do that with kids. And he's pretty smart. He's pretty clever.

He decided, you know, there was a naturally existing experiment that was conducted the 1990s with Pokemon. And what he basically did is he ran a test. He put himself first into an fMRI. scanner and he showed himself images of Pokemon. And lo and behold, a very specific spot in his brain lit up. Then he did the same with a bunch of other Pokemon players and then a bunch of non-Pokemon players.

And lo and behold, the non-Pokemon players, their brains were relatively inactive in that same spot, whereas the Pokemon players were super active in that spot. And that showed that the Pokemon, that conclusively showed that that Pokemon had been given a dedicated spot in these players' brains. Well, why a Pokemon and not a Bugs Bunny or a Looney Tunes character or something like that? That's a great question, Ira. So I wondered the same thing. The thing is about Pokemon, specifically on the Game Boy and their representation here,

is that, is that Looney Tunes, there's not that many of them that you need to distinguish. What, there's maybe 10. And, you know, some other cartoons, there might be like five or 10 different characters. And all the different styles between these characters are pretty different. Whereas with Pokemon, especially on the Game Boy, they're all pretty universally. They're same style, same presentation, same distance from your eye. And that has a lot of big, big effect on why you got the dedicated spot. Because that sort of standardization, that sort of routine method of exposure,

that just like seeing faces, we're all exposed to faces in a very particular way. And they have a very kind of minor variations on it. That sort of minor variations makes your brain need that sort of level of specialization. Also, where that image fell on your retina has a huge, huge impact on where that image ends up into your brain. Hi, Myra Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking with our video producer Luke Groskin about his new video up on our website about Pokemon and the spot in your brain. Your child is in this video, if I noticed. Yeah, he's all over it. And he's probably the motivation for me probably wondering about this.

Because I, you know, I see him. He can name like up to 500 Pokemon off the top of his head. 500. Yeah, well, there's 800 now. And I see him playing this game, Pokemon Go. And it's a new version. It's not like the Game Boy. But, you know, I ask the scientist, is that, would that have the same effect on a child?

And he said, yeah, probably because the visualization is all pretty standard. you're holding your cell phone at roughly the same length. So it would make sense that it might create a spot. Well, one last question. If you're filling up your brain with all these Pokemon images, are you pushing out something else your child might be learning? It should be worried about that. So Dr. Gomez believes that you don't have anything to worry about here.

All the tests that he ran on the people that had played Pokemon, they were all going on to get their PhDs or they already had their PhDs. And there's no actual scientific evidence. that he knows of, that shows that there's any sort of detriment to filling your brain up with Pokemon. The way that he looks at it is this is just an additional function that your brain can actually take on. And so in that and of itself, isn't necessarily harmful. It just shows the power of what our brains are capable of doing. Terrific. It's a great video. You can see Luke Roskins video on your Pokemon brain up on our website,

ScienceFriety.com slash Pokemon. One last thing before we go. Since we launched the Science Friday Vox Pop app this summer, a lot of you have been using it to share your ideas, your questions, your personal stories. Your comments and stories have been, well, honestly, heartwarming and helpful, and they reinforce why the public part of public radio programming is so critical. You've also been sharing your enthusiasm and encouragement for what we do every week and the importance of Science Friday in your life, and it means so much to hear from you.

So as 2019 comes to a close, I wanted to take a moment to highlight a few of the comments we've received. Let me tell you why Science Friday is so cool. I think it's just really wonderful and engaging. I love it. I look forward to it the same way as I used to look forward to science class in school. I learned so much. Science Friday and Ira Flato has kept me up to date for decades on what's going on. with science and technology.

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Mahalo no, al-huea. I want to thank all of you for listening, participating, and supporting both Science Friday and your local public radio station. Your end donations of yours are an important part of public radio funding, so please make yours and thank you. And of course, on the Science Friday Voxpop app, we want to hear from all of you bird nerds. Yes, record the birds you're seeing and hearing during this year's Christmas bird cat.

We're going to do our annual bird count show that we do every year. We want to hear what you're hearing. That's the Science Friday Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps. Go get the app. Tell us, go on the app. Tell us what you're hearing during this year's Christmas bird count. Charles Breakfast is our director, senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather.

Technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Kevin Wolfe, Lisa Gosselin, and BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. And, of course, you can always go to our website at ScienceFriday.com, and we're active all week on social media. If we don't hear from here before then, have a happy holiday season and Merry Christmas and Happy Chanica to everybody out there. I'm Ira Flato in New York.