Science Friday - Farewell, Murder Hornet | What FAA Regulations Tell Us About Mysterious Drone Sightings

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Officials say the invasive Asian giant hornet, with its menacing nickname, has been eradicated from the United States. Also, with drone sightings in the news, we take a look at the current laws and regulations around hobby and commercial drone operation.Farewell, Murder Hornet, We Hardly Knew YouOver the past few years many words have been written about an invasive insect known casually as the “murder hornet”—more formally, the Asian giant hornet, or northern giant hornet. But this week, the USDA and the Washington State Department of Agriculture announced that the insect has been eradicated in the United States. Our long national nightmare is over.Science journalist Maggie Koerth joins Ira to talk about the entomology news, plus other stories from the week in science, including debate over how viruses should be named, the complicated relationship between science and law in the courtroom, and work tracing health signs—through earwax.What FAA Regulations Tell Us About Mysterious Drone SightingsIt’s been all over the news the last few weeks: a slew of drone sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere on the East Coast, starting in mid-November. Federal authorities and President Biden have said that these drones don’t appear to be a threat to public safety, and that the sightings have been a mix of legal drones, airplanes, and helicopters. But questions and concerns remain, particularly among people who live in these areas. And just this week, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) banned most drones from flying over nearly two dozen New Jersey towns.Dr. Missy Cummings, professor and director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center in Fairfax, Virginia, has worked on drone technology extensively over the years. She agrees with what federal authorities have said: that these drones sightings are likely legal drones and aircraft, with some prankster drone owners mixed in.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We've all heard about mysterious drones in the news recently, but what might they actually be? It may be that there were some operations either for security purposes or for research purposes. And military, they're a we can either confirm nor deny group. They may just not want to talk about it. It's Friday, December 20th, the best day of the week. It is Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. There's been a lot of questions and concerns about.

sightings of suspected drones over New Jersey and along the eastern seaboard, so much so that the Federal Aviation Administration has banned most drones from flying in parts of New Jersey out of an abundance of caution. We'll talk to one drone expert about the current rules and regulations around drones, who currently has access to them, and what really might be happening here. But first, here's Irafledo with the biggest science stories of the week. Over the past five years, a lot of words have been written about an invasive insect known casually as the murder hornet. But this week, the USDA and the Washington State Department of Agriculture announced that the insect had been eradicated in the U.S. Our long national nightmare is over.

Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Maggie Kerth, science writer, editorial lead at Carbon Plant in Minneapolis. Welcome back. Hi, thanks so much for having me. You want to give us a thumbnail on this murder hornet? Refresh my memory, please. Oh, Ira, it seems like just yesterday we were freaking out about that murder hornet together. But apparently it's been five years ago and now the murder hornets are all gone. Like the bloom of the roses, they have faded so soon.

And there would be reign of terror upon these United States is no more. Was it ever really very much of a threat as the name made? it out to be? Well, I mean, no. The murder part of its colloquial name mostly applied to bees. You know, these things will just absolutely decimate a beehive. And that was actually the way they were first discovered in Washington State's Watcomb County back in 2019. They'd invaded this beehive. They'd killed everything inside and left these headless bodies in piles. They can be dangerous to humans. There's the stinger on these hornets. They're the northern giant hornet.

And it's big enough to poke through a beekeeping suit. It hurts a lot if you get stung. And if you did get attacked by a swarm, it could kill you. But mostly the murder was other insects. And how did they go about eradicating it? Well, what's really cool about this is that the scientists chalk it up to a community effort. You know, you had average people who were calling into a, tip line every time they spotted murder hornet evidence. They were building bottle traps in their

yards and then like sending these traps full of dead bugs to the scientists to like find where murder hornets were. And they were signing up for what is just this really adorable paper wasp neighborhood watch kind of system where you would adopt a nest of native wasps and keep an eye on it and report in if it showed signs of being attacked. Hmm, that's really cool. Okay, let's turn to a smaller kind of bug, so to speak. There's a debate going on on how to name viruses. I mean, of all the things that be debating, right?

Well, you know how, like, animals and plants all have the name we commonly call them, and then they have that big, long, fancy, scientific Latin name. Yeah. And it turns out that everyone's been kind of inconsistent. with doing that for viruses. And so now there is this group, the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, that is going back and trying to assign formal Latin names to all of these viruses that scientists already call something else. The trouble really happens at the level of species, where instead of having formal names, we've just kind of named them after the organisms it infects,

or the places it was originally discovered. And that gets messy, and it can stigmatize whole regions or countries. Sometimes it's flat out incorrect, like the Spanish flu probably actually started in Kansas. So in 2016, the ICTV started discussing how to fix this stuff. And this year, the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information announced that it's going to adopt 3,000 of these new names. Wow. I mean, tomato, tomato, does it really make a difference what things are called? Well, the scientists are kind of divided on this. You know, some of them think it's a really good idea. Others are saying that they find these new names silly and pretentious and add to confusion.

So, like, would you call COVID-19 beta coronavirus pandemicum? Or would you rather call it HIV or Lenta virus? to MIMDIF 1. Yeah. I'm getting your drift here. Yeah. It's also going to be confusing for a little while because you have the U.S. databases that only use the old names. The ICTV databases are only searchable by the new names. And right now, the only way to match them up is to download this special spreadsheet. And the scientists are also a little bit annoyed about that process. Yeah. Okay. This next one gets a bit complicated. You have a story about how science and the law intersect in an Ohio court case. Tell me about that. Yeah. So there's this really interesting case in Ohio where their Supreme Court

has ruled that evolving science can count as new evidence and make something worthy of a new trial. Back in 2014, Kenneth Grad was sentenced to 24 years in prison for child endangerment and assault charges. after he brought his new baby daughter into the hospital and doctors found she had 26 different bone fractures. A medical expert at the trial kind of went through a process of elimination of like different disorders and came up with the idea that this could only be caused by abuse. But the baby's mother had a history of serious bone and tissue diseases that included vitamin D deficiency, hypermobility, and rickets. And in 2014, the medical expert didn't see any way

that would affect the baby. But in the years since, there have been a lot of new studies that have shifted the balance of research toward the idea that those disorders in a mother could lead an infant to having a higher susceptibility of bone fractures. So the science changed over time. And the state had argued that grad's legal representation was adequate from the time, and he wasn't entitled to a new trial just because science shifted. But the Ohio Supreme Court disagreed and pointed out that there's this tension in the law. You know, the law wants disputes solved quickly and finally. And science doesn't necessarily work that way.

So science wins one here. Yeah. Does this potentially mean that other cases can be. reopened with new science? It could potentially open the door for that. Yeah, it establishes some level of precedent that things could work differently in other places. Cool. All right, let's go back in time for a moment. New research into our early ancestors and how they intersected with the Neanderthals. I find this interesting. Yeah. So there's this genomic study of ancient humans, and it's narrowed down the time frame for when Homo sapiens and the Homo Neanderthalus

could have interbred. But the results are producing a lot of questions, a lot of new questions, as well as a couple of answers. Such as? Well, so we know that humans and Neanderthal's interbred. And in fact, basically everyone that lives outside of Africa from Europe to the Pacific Islands has some small amount of Neanderthal DNA that's floating around in their genome, usually like 1 to 2%. Right. But there is this big spread of time when interbreeding could have happened. So scientists published two studies recently that were aimed at kind of narrowing that down a little bit. And they did this by essentially tracing Neanderthal genetics through time.

They were using samples from modern living people who have very little Neanderthal ancestry. They used some samples from ancient humans who lived thousands of years ago in, kind of the area the Czech Republic is now. And they used samples from some well-preserved Neanderthals. And the results were basically able to give them an understanding of how Neanderthal genetic contribution sort of fizzles away over time. And you can use that to sort of back-calculate an origin date. And the two groups used different ways of running those calculations,

and they came up with slightly different results. But basically, they narrowed down that fateful Roman. to somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. And that's a lot more recent than people thought. Yeah, yeah, that certainly is. Right, let's skip forward just a bit to about 4,000 years ago to the Bronze Age and a story that's a little less friendly. It's sort of ghoulish here.

Tell us about that. Yeah. There are 3,000 human bones and bone fragments in a pit and a cave system. in Somerset, England, and they were all part of this single massacre of at least 37 people that happened about 4,000 years ago. And what is more, those bones that were originally found 40 years ago back in the 70s, they turn out to show signs of cannibalism. There is cut marks on the leg bones that you'd normally see from like where meat is being butchered, fractured ends on long bones, like the kind that scientists find when people have been sucking the marrow out

of animal bones, and even little nibbly human teeth marks on hands and feet and ribs. Wow. And the scientists think these people were captured and held prisoner before being killed because the bodies don't show evidence of dying in a fight. Okay. Let's move on to something just a little bit more pleasant than something completely different. And I'm talking about a story about the importance of earwax as almost a medical test. Tell me about that.

Yeah. So scientists are using sheep earwax as an easy way to know when those sheep had been eating toxic plants. You know, sheep are out grazing in these big pastures and you don't know exactly what's out there. And there are some common plants like this toxic relative of the lily called a death camo that if the sheep eat enough of them, they can get really sick and die. So instead of having the ranchers spend a bunch of time tromping all over their land looking for these plants or spending a lot of time and money doing blood tests to look for signs of poisoning, these researchers show that a better alternative is just to clean out those little sheepies ears

because sublethal doses of the death cam of poisoning show up in the earwax before the sheep get sick. Wow. So they could detect the sheep poison in the earwax of the sheep, which you know where I'm heading with this, Maggie. If this works in sheep, or doctors going to be asking people for earwax samples, perhaps in the future? Possibly. So some researchers think that human earwax could also contain signals of illness, including for diabetes, cortisol levels, metabolic changes, maybe even cancer. Wow, that is interesting. I can see the home test now, right? Put the sample. Maggie, it's always great to have you. Thank you for all the stuff you bring us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And happy holidays to you. To you as well.

Maggie Kerth, science writer and editorial lead at Carbon Plan in Minneapolis. After the break, we'll talk about the mysterious drones spotted above New Jersey and elsewhere along the East Coast. Don't go away. Hi, Ira here. Reminders. you that Science Friday has a dollar-for-dollar donation match, which means that any donation made through December 31st will be doubled. So now is the time to head over to ScienceFriday.com slash support and make a gift. Our 2025 programming depends on the generosity of our fans and listeners.

Again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash support and thanks. It's been all over the news the last few weeks, a slew of drone sightings, New Jersey and elsewhere on the East Coast. Federal authorities and President Biden have said that these drones don't appear to be a threat to public safety and that the sightings have been a mix of legal drones, airplanes, and helicopters. But people still have a lot of questions and concerns about this. And the Federal Aviation Administration just this week issued a ban on flying most drones above almost two dozen towns in New Jersey. Now, we're not going to be. going to solve the mystery of these sightings here on Science Friday. But we will talk about the

state of drone technology, how it's advanced, and what's available to hobbyists to use. Joining me now is my guest, Dr. Missy Cummings, Professor and Director of George Mason University's Autonomy and Robotics Center in Fairfax, Virginia. Welcome back to Science Friday. It's great to be back. Nice to have you. Okay, has drone technology evolved a whole lot over the past few years? I think the drone technology that we're seeing has been further optimized, say, than what we saw about 10 years ago. But I don't think we've seen any substantial changes in the drone technology. But where we have seen substantial changes are in the regulation of the drone technology. Tell me about that.

Well, when I was first on this show more than 10 years ago, at that time, we're talking about it was a lot of, it was a lot of, it was a lot of, it was a lot of, the Wild Wild West. There really wasn't a lot of regulation. The FAA wasn't very happy and wasn't embracing the drones. And then fast forward to 2024, now people realize that there's a lot of commercial applications, that the technologies can actually be very helpful in a number of domains. And the FAA has really worked hard to start regulating these technologies in a way that doesn't suppress innovation, but also still promote safety. So on the whole, I think we are much further along in 2024 that I would have forecasted over a decade ago. Is there any way to know whether these drones are for hobbyists or commercial use or what? Well, if we're talking about the drones flying around

the eastern seaboard, whether it's New Jersey or anywhere else, for the most part, if they're flying around with their lights on, you know, there's a really good chance that they're supposed to be there, that the FAA knows about them, that they've been registered. There is a chance, and I have done significant work on drone contraband being dropped into prison. It is a national problem that we have what I would call unsophisticated attackers trying to drop contraband into prisons. They're unsophisticated because they also leave their lights on. And so it is possible that people who are either just trying to do prankster-like behavior or people trying to do more malevolent tasks like dropping contraband into prisons,

it's possible that they are also flying out there. But hobbyists typically, I know I bought a drone a few years ago, and the first thing you do is you want to take pictures, right? Movies, videos from your drone. And that's what a lot of them do, right? Yeah, and I think that's a good thing. I think one of the greatest thing about drones is that it has lowered the bar for people to get into aviation. And it's encouraging to me as a professor to see everyone so curious about the world around them. People, for the most part, who have the hobbyist drones, just want to look around and see what's going on. And this is a good thing. We should embrace this kind of exploratory behavior. And indeed, the FAA has been very good about allowing people to do these kinds of behaviors in a safe manner. And when does that become a problem for the hobbyists or for we about what the

hobbyists are doing? I don't think the hobbyists are creating any problems because in the case of New Jersey, if they were allowed to be there, the FAA knows about them. Or, you know, you can't rule out that there have been exercises at Picatinny, the military base that's nearby. I've actually worked with that base on drone operations. So it is very possible that within the confines of their own airspace that they were operating, it's also very possible that over at Bedminster, the Trump Golf Course,

that the security people are looking at using drones to do perimeter evaluation. We know that they've been using the little spot robot dogs, so it's not a far stretch. And indeed, many, many organizations are looking at drones for security. So if the government is tight-lipped about it, it may be that there were some operations either for security purposes or for research purposes. And the military, they're a we can either confirm nor deny group. They may just not want to talk about it. And they've been talking, some of the states have been talking about bringing in drone tracking devices.

What is a drone tracking device? Well, there's all sorts of technologies. Indeed, I actually did research for the National Science Foundation. on developing passive tracking technologies. I suspect what they are talking about are RF radio frequency detectors that basically find where there's a radio frequency transmission. You can get an angular offset so you know where it's coming from, depending on the other technologies.

But if you have an RF detector, which is actually pretty cheap, you can probably go buy one yourself on Amazon.com, you can find not only the drone, but also the ground control station. And so it's not hard to find these systems. And if the government put their mind to it, they can. But they also may know where they're coming from. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, some of the sightings that people have talked about, they suspect the drones are like large, a really big, like the hood of a car. Are there commercially available drones that are that big? These hood of a car-sized drones are actually not rare. Companies that film movies, for example, will have drones approximately on that size. Are we seeing those in that area? Doubtful because if that were the

case, they would have been registered with the FAA, and then the FAA would have made an announcement that there was some filming going on. While I believe that some people are seeing drones, I believe that there have been a few drone sightings. When people start to see them at those large sizes, it is probably more likely than not that they are seeing an airplane. Yeah. And that's what we've been hearing is that people have not really seen drones. They've seen airplanes.

The FAA has said that some of these drones that have been reported are virtually in the landing patterns of airplanes. Right. And I think that's another thing to remember about that area with Newark, JFK, LaGuardia, and Philly and Baltimore are not that far away. It is the busiest airspace in the entire country, maybe arguably even in the world. And so your odds of spotting an aircraft in some kind of setup for a landing configuration at one of those airports is extremely high. If a drone is brought down, if it falls down, can it be tracked back to its owner?

This is a great question, and I've worked with a lot of prisons who, it turns out these unsophisticated attackers usually crash into trees, power lines, whatnot. So we've been able to get a lot of drones from near-do-wells. It depends on how unsophisticated that attacker was, right? Depending on, you know, if you can find the make and the model, and you maybe can backtrack that to a purchaser, sometimes people steal them or whatnot, and it's much more difficult. But sometimes you can. And, you know, I couldn't give you a percentage, but it is possible.

Yeah. You know, when I bought my hobby drone, I had to register it to even fly it in my backyard. And I imagine that is still true. Tell us what the process of registration is like. Well, when you register, you really have to ask yourself one of two questions. Am I going to be a hobbyist that's just flying for fun? Am I going to try to do commercial operations like? do real estate photos or websites. So depending on whether you're a hobbyist or commercial,

you'll go down a couple of different paths. You have to get some training. You have to register your drone. Recently, the FAA instituted a remote ID policy, which is, it's actually a very important tool that allows manned aircraft to know that there's a drone nearby because it would be catastrophic if a drone went down the engine of a commercial jet. So we want to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you'll get remote ID both for commercial and hobbyist operations. But the FAA has actually created these spaces where you can fly without all of these issues, but you just stay within a confined area, which I strongly recommend to everybody.

It seems easy to fly these, but I've been doing this for years. And everyone crashes at some point in time because winds are unpredictable. weather can be unpredictable. Winds at the surface are different than wins along. And I find that most hobbyists are really responsible and trying to do the right thing. I would like to point out, though, that if there are people trying to do pranks,

and I do believe their pranksters have come out of the woodwork since this story started airing, these people are not registered. Yeah, and many states in municipal law makers are even calling for stricter rules on drones. Can the rules get any more strict? It is possible, and the FAA is exploring this, right? They're doing this to do temporary flight restrictions over certain areas to calm people's nerves.

You know, I don't think that they need to do anything more. I think it would be counterproductive for commercial applications if they tried to clamp down on this. And certainly people need to understand that you should not be shooting these things down, willy-nilly because there's ramifications of shooting guns in the air and also drones flying in particular ways. And if you're trying to shoot at what you think is a drone and it's a low-flying aircraft, you know, this could be a very serious problem. So I think what will happen is this will calm down. This is not the first time we've had a lot of concern. You know, in the early days of my drone career, people really hated me and hated the work I was doing.

Because I was trying to advance drones in commercial applications. And now, fast forward more than a decade later, it's a thing. And, you know, people are accepting. And I just think we live in a world right now of extremes. And social media has not helped in this case, but also being a college professor of a bunch of teenagers. I promise you that there are a lot of people coming out now, just trying to make the situation worse by flying their drones. around. That's why you're hearing reports all the way from Boston to North Carolina. But like in Boston, they arrested a couple of people. So I'm a big fan of that because if they'll make examples of a

few of these pranksters, then they'll stop doing it. All right. Final good words to leave us with. Thank you, Dr. Cummings, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for letting me come back. You're welcome. Dr. Missy Cummings, Professor and Director of George Mason University's autonomy and robotic center that is in Fairfax, Virginia. That's it for this episode. Next time, we'll talk about one of the greatest science movies of the last decade, Interstellar. It came out 10 years ago.

We'll talk to the movie's Science Advisor, Theoretical Physicist, Kip Thorne. Lots of folks help the show happen, including... Diana Plasker. Beth Rami. Danielle Johnson. Santiago Flores. I'm Kathleen Davis. Have a safe and cozy weekend.

We'll catch you on Monday.