Science Friday - EPA Seeks To Revoke Scientific Basis For Greenhouse Gas Rules

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

This week the Trump administration indicated that it would seek to roll back a key EPA finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from things like cars and power plants. The 16-year-old rule, known as the “endangerment finding,” states that six greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health. Sophie Bushwick, news editor at New Scientist, joins Host Ira Flatow to discuss the proposed change, along with news about exoplanet life, Russian drones, rust-based batteries, hexagonal diamonds, quantum entanglement, and extra-old honey.Plus, a robot performed surgery by itself for the first time, on a pig cadaver. Medical roboticist Axel Krieger joins Ira to discuss how he was able to train the surgical robot.Guests:Sophie Bushwick is senior news editor at New Scientist in New York.Dr. Axel Krieger is an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at 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 Ira Flato. This week, the Trump administration indicated that they'll seek to roll back a key EPA finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from things like cars and power plants. Here with the details and other stories from the Week in Science is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at News Scientist in New York. Welcome back, Sophie. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, what is this rule? How does it interact? act with how the EPA regulates things? Well, finding itself, it's called the endangerment finding, is basically the basis of the EPA regulating power plants and vehicles. Like you said, without it, there would be a major deregulatory effort. Our reporter James Deneen spoke with a lot of climate scientists who described this report in less than glowing terms. They described it as flimsy, someone called it nutty. One researcher whose work was cited in the report.

report has called it a farce. And so there is, there's overwhelming scientific evidence that supports the endangerment finding. And already the EPA is going to face a lot of pushback legally. And they're, they're open to public comment as well if they want to try to move forward with this. What exactly is the aim here to take away all the basis for regulation? Yes. The claim is that it's bad for the economy to limit the emissions that power plants and vehicles are allowed. to do, and that by repealing the endangerment finding and removing those regulations, it would be stimulating to the economy. Wow, we seem like returning the clock back. It does seem like an attempt to do that, yes. So is this a done deal, or is this just a possible outcome?

This is just a possible outcome. And already there's organizations lining up lawsuits to try to prevent this. The EPA is opening a public comment period, so people will be able to comment on this and to voice their disagreement if that's what they choose to do. Right. So this isn't, this is just the beginning of a process. All right. Let's switch gears to another kind of a mission. Tell us about the news this week, Re, the search for life outside our solar system and

an exoplanet. That's right. So earlier this year, the exoplanet K2-18B became one of the leading candidates for life because researchers were able to detect what they said was a signature of, you know, these molecules, dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide, and these two molecules on Earth are only produced by life. So that would really suggest some exciting news. The problem is when you're talking about something as far away as this planet, it's 124 light years away. And the way that we figure out what's in the atmosphere is basically researchers look at the light from the star that

this planet relies on. And as that light passes through the planet's atmosphere, it can tell us what molecules are there, but you have to do some statistical analysis. There's different ways of interpreting the data, and so that's made this a controversial finding. So first, there was pushback from other researchers who reassessed the data and found no evidence. Then the original researchers looked to get the data again and did their own reanalysis and said it supported their finding. And now researchers have looked at new data. And one of the researchers on the original studies says this supports the finding, but other researchers said it shows this isn't a sign of life at all.

Wow. Controversy in science, I just disagree with one another? Wow. Wild, right? Wild. Let's get back here on Earth for a bit. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine stretches on, and there's unfortunately an innovation in warfare technology. Tell us about that. Well, from the beginning of this conflict, cheap small drones have played a role. And recently, people have spotted these drones that are equipped with solar panels. So they don't come with solar panels. They've been fitted with them. And the idea is that this could keep a drone charged and allow it to lay in wait to ambush someone. So almost like the drone has become a new kind of landmine. It can just lurk indefinitely until a target comes near. Is this a Ukrainian or a Russian drone?

This seems to be coming from Russian forces, but the fact is that if Russian forces are able to modify drones in this way, Ukrainian forces could do the same thing. And so this might become a much more widespread thing. Yeah, because the Ukrainians are pretty good at drones, aren't they? That's right. One of the really interesting things about this conflict is the use of tools like hobbyist drones that maybe weren't intended for warfare originally. But people are innovating and turn. turning them into military tools. I mean, whether we think that's a good thing or a bad thing, it depends on your perspective, but this adding solar panels to it is now the latest twist in the saga. So it can lurk around for as long as the solar panels. That's right.

It seems to be the panels right now that they're using are a little heavy. And again, these drones weren't designed with that type of modification in mind. So that might limit the amount of power it's allowed to get out of it. It might be something like the power wouldn't be used to keep the drone. flying, but it could allow the drone's sensors to recharge. So if the drone parks itself in some location and then it uses these chargers to keep its sensors alive, it could just not move and keep a digital eye out for anyone coming near. And then once it senses a target, that's when it kicks into gear and just flies there to attack. There's another tech that's a bit

more hopeful. And we're talking here about batteries based on rust. Wow, they should see my old car. They could make sure. I think this is such a cool idea. And I mean, this is based on the idea that when you've got renewable power, it ebbs and flows. You know, solar panels are great when the sun's shining, but you need some sort of battery to store that power for the times when the energy is not so abundant. And so a lot of times that means plugging a battery into the grid that is manufactured in China. made out of lithium iron phosphate. And the problem is those batteries, they don't hold charge for as long as you would like,

just about four to six hours, and they can be quite expensive. So now researchers have developed a battery made from some of the cheapest materials you can find, air and iron, and the claim is that these can hold their charge for 100 hours or longer. Sophie, I find this rust battery thing,

something I have to know more about. Give me some more details on this. Right. So the way this works is, it charges by, it takes electricity, you feed it into the system, and it uses that to convert iron oxides into iron oxides are a form of rust, and it transforms this rust back into iron. And then when it's time for the battery to discharge, it can release this energy by reacting with oxygen in the air to turn back into rust. Wow. And so this is, like, because rust is everywhere,

this is really cheap, right? Right. You don't need space. special minerals, hard to dig up out of the ground to do this. Exactly. That's one of the really cool things about this. It's just taking iron, turning it into rust, and then turning it back into iron, and that's how the battery works, which means what you need is air, which we have a lot of, and iron, which is pretty easy for most places to source. Wow. Let's move on from rusted diamonds. I already think of diamonds as super strong. Right, the strongest materials on Earth, but there's now a new champion, a new stronger diamond in town? Yes, diamonds can be made even stronger by growing them in a hexagonal shape.

So the way that diamonds are is they are molecules ordered in a cubic crystalline structure. And researchers have seen hints that you could have hexagonal diamond, but it's only been found in small amounts. And that's when it's mixed in with cubic diamonds. And researchers have tried to grow it before, but until now they haven't succeeded. And now they've grown a relatively large sample of hexagonal diamond, and it's mostly 100% hexagonal without any cubic diamond mixed in. Wow. Wow. I'm not getting that anytime soon in my jewelry store, I don't think.

Maybe not. It's still going to take some work to grow it in larger amounts. So far, they've grown a piece that's about one millimeter wide, so very, very small. But if they could scale this up, the hexagonal diamond is about 60% harder than your regular. diamond, which means it could be used for things like drilling and making much more resilient tools. Love it. You know, I love weird quantum stuff.

And you have a story about how quantum entanglement might not just be a one-time thing? Tell me about that. This is super cool. So when two particles are quantum entangled, it means they're linked together in such a way that they can do things like spooky action at a distance. They have all these weird shared behaviors. and you're used to thinking about quantum entanglement like a link, but what if you could think about it as a bank,

something you could tap into? Researchers found out that if you have a pair of hypothetical experimenters and they've got these entangled particles, they can share that entanglement with another pair of experimenters, and then it can be shared again. And again, in fact, they can keep on doing this indefinitely, as if our little bank of entanglement is an almost infinite one. Wow, why would they want to do that? Why do we care?

Well, if you want to have something entangled, which is entanglement is required for things like quantum computing or quantum communication, you can create entanglement from scratch, but the idea is sharing it might be an easier way to get more entanglement out there. Sure, I get that. Finally, something sweet to end on, a super old sample of honey, really? That's right. So near Pompeii, there are these, there's this ancient shrine. And in it, researchers, in, you know, 1954, they found these pots with a sticky residue. And they thought at the time that it was animal or vegetable fat, but they noticed it was contaminated with pollen and insect parts. And then now, researchers have used more advanced techniques to analyze the residue of this substance. You know,

they've used things like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. And they found a lot of sugars and some complex acids and some proteins that are found in royal jelly. They even found some protein fragments from a mite that we know feeds on honeybees. So we're pretty sure that this pot used to hold ancient honey. Anybody stick their finger and taste it to see? Unfortunately, these were corked. and the seals have since degraded.

And so I don't think you would really enjoy tasting whatever is left of this honey. You know, bacteria has gotten into it. It's not going to be a yummy taste, but we know it once was. Maybe Winnie the Pooh can try it. All right, Sophie. Always great to have you come and talk with us.

Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me. Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist here in New York. We have to take a break. And when we come back, scientists have successfully trained a robot to perform surgery without the help of a surgeon. We didn't expect that we would get to a point where we didn't need any human intervention. So this was really, you know, even better than we anticipated. Hey, Flora here.

We're wrapping up Science Friday's fiscal year and we could use your support. I know I don't need to tell you. It is a tenuous time for science and for public media. and we are relying on donations from our listeners more than ever. We're aiming to raise $40,000 to close out our budget. And with your help, I know we can do it. So if Science Friday is valuable to you, if you rely on our reporting to make sense of the world

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for the first time researchers at Johns Hopkins University have trained a robot to do surgery on its own, a portion of a gallbladder surgery, on a test pig cadaver. The encouraging results were published last month in the journal Science Robotics. Joining me now to dissect how he trained the robot to accomplish this feat, and what it means for the future of robotic surgery, is my guest, Dr. Axel Krieger, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, based in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me.

You're quite welcome. Can you walk me through what part of the surgery the robot was able to perform all by itself? Yes, there are about three large portions of gallbladder surgery. The first one is dissecting the gallbladder from the liver bed. The second part, that's what we really focused on, is the precision, a clipping and cutting of the artery and the bile duct. So this is going in with small little clippers and identifying where the artery is, placing three plastic clips in it, and then identifying where the bioluct is, then placing three plastic clips in that, and then dissecting between the clips so that the gallbladder then in the third procedural step can be effectively removed. And so that's a very complex, lengthy step and really requires a lot of precision. And there's a lot of deformation of the tissue and anatomical variations even between healthy pigs.

Right. So how do you train a robot to do this? We used a technique called imitation learning. We can effectively now watch expert surgeons perform these steps and then repeat these steps over and over and then train a network to learn to then reproduce those steps. So we can tie what the robot sees to what the robot should do. So it's a hierarchical framework that first predicts the right face of the surgery and then predicts what the robot should do given the certain video image that the robot sees currently. What happens if the robot makes a mistake? I mean, is it able to correct itself before it does something really bad? Yeah, the really nice thing that we demonstrated in our study is that our robot is capable to adapt So small little misplacements.

So imagine if the clipper doesn't, you know, catch the artery perfectly on the first try, the system automatically recognizes that and then self-corrects. That's, you know, one way. So self-correction by the robotic systems. And then also the surgeon would then be the supervisor and could always, you know, stop and take over and complete the procedure manual if necessary.

In our study, in eight consecutive pick surgeries, We didn't need any interventions, but if something unforeseen happens, the surgeon can always intervene and take over. Right. Were you surprised yourself just how well the robot performed here? Yeah, super exciting result. When we set out on this project, we didn't expect that we would get to a point where we didn't need any human interventions. So this was really even better than we anticipated.

Let's talk about getting to that point. How do you get to that point? How big a jump in technology is this new robot from other older ones? It's a major step forward. In older systems, we were able to automate maybe one small task, one little step, and now tying these steps effectively together and recognizing, you know, small mistakes and then consecutively performing these sub-steps to do like a big chunk of a surgical procedure. That's a huge step forward.

Yeah, because you've been designing. robots to do this itself for a few years now, right? Absolutely. You know, we published a study in 2022 where we did a step called the anastomosis, so that's suturing of tubular structures. And so we were able to form that suturing step. But what's really exciting now is that we can boost up the success rate and we have this framework that is more general. So we can train it for all different type of procedures, not just, you know, one step, but by adding more data, we can just learn more procedures and really get closer to clinical viability of this technology. You know, I watched the video you put online of the robot actually doing this work,

and I was surprised how well it did it. I mean, how does the robots work compare to a human surgeon? In our study, we really wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of this technology, so we didn't a very thorough evaluation comparing to expert surgeons. We did a small little, you know, comparison to one surgeon and showed that our robot is a bit slower. We ran it quite slow so we can intervene if something happens. But the movement was more smooth compared to the expert surgeon. So, you know, really some early indication that we are getting on par with even an expert surgeon there. And what about other kinds of surgeries? Now that you've had success with this, Do you see you're able to expand to others besides just gallbladder surgery?

Yeah, for us, this is a fantastic starting point. Gallbladder surgery was the first surgery that was performed minimally invasively. So has this lighthouse character of a new technique for surgery. So that's why it's such a good target. But we are excited to use this technology now for other applications, for other surgeries. You know, a big one that we're working on right now is precision tumors resection, where it's so difficult to delineate where the tumor is from the healthy tissue and cutting that out precisely. That is so difficult for surgeons.

And we really want to use this technology to improve surgical techniques. Yeah, I was going to ask you about the benefit of a robot that can do surgery without human intervention. But you're saying here that in some cases it can do it better than the surgeon. Yeah, that's what we are working on. So integrating preoperative scans effectively. So seeing where the tumor is on other imaging and then combining it effectively with surgical videos, that's kind of the next big goal that we're working on. That is very hard for human surgeons to map these things together in the head.

And so doing this with a robot, we might be able to even boost expert surgical performance. Are you saying a robot independent of a surgeon guiding it or with surgeon supervision? Always surgeon's supervision. Our goal is not to replace surgeons. We want to just make the surgery easier and help surgeons work with this rising caseload, right? We have an aging society, more surgeries need it. And so the individual caseload is doubling in the next 10 years. So how can we help surgeons with that?

How can we do an effective surgery later in the day when the surgeon might get tired by helping the surgeon not having to do every part and every little step of every surgery? But then for portions of it, just watch the robot do. it and then intervene if necessary, that can really improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of surgeries. A lot of surgeries are done today through laparoscopy, right? Can the robot do that also? Yeah, absolutely. So the big improvement of using surgical robots is making it easier to do laparoscopic surgery, minimally invasive surgery. So traditionally, surgeons had to perform large incisions and work with the organs directly with the hands, guidance

directly with the eyes. Now we use cameras and small ports, and we use surgical tools in ports. And the surgical robot that we are working with is a minimally invasive keyhole surgery robot, and so we can do this procedure minimally invasively, yes. All right. Now, you know we have listeners who are listening to this, and they're going to ask, how do I get in on this? How soon might patients see autonomous robots, perhaps this gall bladder surgery in the operating room?

We are super excited to take the next steps and go to do a pre-clinical study. So demonstrating this in live-pick surgeries, that's our next steps that we are very, very hardworking on right now. I also see that, you know, similarly to modern cars where we have some autonomous functions like brake assist, park assist, those autonomous functions. We see those coming in, you know, surgical robotic systems for the next few years. So, for example, the FDA approved recently a camera system that can follow the surgery autonomously. So the camera is moving autonomously, not the surgical tools. And now we can see maybe suction, maybe holding tissue, those things to be coming over the next few years. It's going to take a while before procedures like gallbladers are implemented clinically and commercially.

But we can definitely see the password for those. So what's your next work here? I mean, you were studying this on a pig cadaver, right? Do you ever get to the living breathing pig section? That's exactly the next step. So we demonstrated this on pig cadavers. And now we are working very hard to see if we can do this in a living pig. That will be the next step.

And then if we demonstrate that this is safe and effective, then we can really design a first in human study and work on their regulatory approval for that. What's the most challenging part about creating and training these robots? The most challenging part is getting the right training data. So we acquired about 30 different cadaver from Butchers and then tested on all different anatomy and variations in the lab to acquire our testing data. And we also needed to kind of predict how our robot might make small little mistakes and then add them manually to the training data.

So kind of start some procedures with maybe the clipper or the cutter being a little bit misaligned from the target so that we can self-correct then during the procedure. So you become a bit of a robot whisperer. You kind of anticipate mistakes. How could I fail? And then, you know, add that to the training data. So that's probably the most complex part of our work. You know, we have run out of time. I didn't get to ask you about how our robot scrubs up for surgery,

but that's for the next time. We can talk about that. Thank you so much. There was fantastic questions. You're quite welcome. And come on back when you're, you know, you're working a little more in vivo and live picks. Absolutely.

I would love to come back. Thank you so much for your interest. And this fantastic interview, I really enjoyed it. You're welcome. Dr. Alex Krieger. Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to rate and review the podcast, but only if you like the show. This episode was produced by Charles Berkwist and Soshada Bugs Bow.

See you next time. I'm Ira Flato.