Science Friday - Genome Traces, Beavers and Wildfire, Halloween DIY, Volcanoes. Oct 22, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

The Ancient Neanderthal Traces Hidden In Your Genome Just how much of your genome is uniquely human? It turns out the number of genetic components in the human genome that trace back only to modern humans, and not to other human lineages or ancient ancestors, are surprisingly small. In a paper published recently in the journal Science Advances, researchers estimate the uniquely human portion of the genome as being under two percent.  Many of the genes thought to be strictly connected to modern humans appear to relate to neural processes. However, traces of genes from Denisovans and Neanderthals can be found scattered throughout the genome—including strong Neanderthal genetic signals in parts of the genome dealing with the immune system.Ed Green, a professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz and one of the authors of that paper, joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to talk about the study, and what can be learned by this approach to studying our genetic code.     Beavers Build Ecosystems Of Resilience Deep in the Cameron Peak burn scar, nestled among charred hills, there’s an oasis of green—an idyllic patch of trickling streams that wind through a lush grass field. Apart from a few scorched branches on the periphery, it’s hard to tell that this particular spot was in the middle of Colorado’s largest-ever wildfire just a year ago. This wetland was spared thanks to the work of beavers. The mammals, quite famously, dam up streams to make ponds and a sprawling network of channels. Beavers are clumsy on land, but talented swimmers; so the web of pools and canals lets them find safety anywhere within the meadow. On a recent visit to that patch of preserved land in Poudre Canyon, ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax emphasized the size of the beavers’ canal network. “Oh my gosh, I can’t even count them,” she said. “It’s a lot. There’s at least 10 ponds up here that are large enough to see in satellite images. And then between all those ponds is just an absolute spiderweb of canals, many of which are too small for me to see until I’m here on the ground.” The very infrastructure that gives beavers safety from predators also helps shield them from wildfire. Their work saturates the ground, creating an abnormally wet patch in the middle of an otherwise dry area. Dams allow the water to pool, and the channels spread it out over a wide swath of valley floor. Fairfax researches how beavers re-shape the landscapes where they live. Across the West, she’s seen beaver-created wetlands survive wildfires. Ira chats with Fairfax and KUNC's Water in the West reporter Alex Hager about how beavers are creating wetland oases that are surviving the West's new megafires.       DIY Halloween Hacks Trying to liven up your ghosts and goblins this Halloween? In this archival segment from 2013, Windell Oskay, cofounder of Evil Mad Scientist, shares homemade hack ideas for a festive fright fest, from LED jack-o’-lanterns, to 3D printed candy, to spine-chilling specimen jars.      The Burn Of Volcanic Beauty This week, Mount Aso, a volcano in Japan, erupted—spewing clouds of ash and smoke, but fortunately bringing no reported injuries. Meanwhile, on the island of La Palma, the Cumbre Vieja volcano has been erupting for over a month now, causing destruction and evacuations on the island, and dramatically changing the island’s coastline.  Robin George Andrews, author of the upcoming book Super Volcanoes, joins Ira to talk about the terror—and wonder—of volcanoes, and why their behavior can be so enigmatic to humans.   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. Later in the hour, it's the intersection of beavers and wildfires. I know you're going to want to hear that. But first, the question you might have been thinking in the lead-up to Halloween, what does it mean to be human? Yeah, SciFrize Charles Burquist is here. Hey, Charles. Hey, Ira.

So we're not talking vampires or werewolves here. This is a study that took a close look at the human genome and tried to map out where it intersects with the genomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans. So you mean other lineages of humans that are not around today, but their genetic traces are? Yeah, in fact, chances are that sprinkled through your genome, there are plenty of genes that can be traced back to one or another of these groups. Now, there must be parts of my genome that are unique to modern humans, no? Some, not a lot. I asked Ed Green, a professor of Biombole, a professor of Biomans,

molecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz, if he could put a number on it for us. It is surprisingly small, the amount of our genome that you would never find in any Neanderthal. It is somewhere around a few percent. And we did this two ways. One way, just saying all of the regions of the genome that are uniquely human genetically. And then a smaller set of this is the regions of the genome that are uniquely human and have what we call a fixed derived allele or some genetic novelty. So it didn't just get inherited from humans in all humans today, but it actually has something new and different that's specific to humans. And that fraction of the genome is less than 2%. Very, very small amount of all of our DNA is just coming from.

human ancestors and has something that could possibly be functionally relevant because it's actually different than what was available in other archaic human groups. How do you can get to that number? Walk me through that. The big question that we wanted to answer is where in individual human genomes is their ancestry from these archaic relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans? in genomes? Do we share genes with them and where do we not? We have in the past made maps, made estimates of how many genes, but getting a real high resolution map of exactly where human genomes

come from Neanderthals. This requires a different technique, and that's the main point of this paper developing this technique, that in its essence is just a tree. Who is more closely related to who as you go across each place of the genome. And then if you include Neanderthals and Denisovans in this giant family relationship tree, then it is easy to kind of put your finger and say, here, Neanderthals fall outside of all human variation. And here at this other place, Neanderthals fall within human variation. And it looks like that's because humans got their genes from Neanderthals.

And we can do this across the genome, across each gene. and then do cool things like make catalogs of where some humans share genes with Neanderthals, where no humans share genes with Neanderthals, et cetera. I'm confused on just what you mean when you say share a gene. You're not saying that we have the same genetic code here. Yeah, this is a really cool thing to think about. So when we say that an individual shares a gene with a Neanderthal, what this means is that the specific DNA sequence of that gene comes from a Neanderthal closer back in time than it comes from another human.

This phrasing, share a gene with, it kind of conjures up this image that there are individuals that share this gene and then there are other individuals that just don't have that gene at all. That is not the case. Sharing a gene in this context, It means that you are identical by dissent, which is kind of a crazy, jargony phrase that just means that if you go back in time, if I share a gene with a Neanderthal and I go back in time, there was an individual, a specific individual who had a name, maybe it was Frank. That individual, I can trace my copy of this gene directly to that individual. and so can Neanderthals trace their copy directly to this individual, the same individual. And that individual was a Neanderthal. That would be identity by descent from a Neanderthal. And if that is the case, then this must have happened by admixture from a Neanderthal.

My relative long ago was a Neanderthal named Frank. And I got this DNA. That's what I mean by sharing a gene with Neanderthal. Now, that gene, whatever that gene is, almost certainly every other human and every other Neanderthal on the planet has that gene. They just have a different version that they inherited from a different ancestor who may or may not have been a Neanderthal. And not only does every other human and every Neanderthal have that gene, probably every mammal has that gene. But it's just a different version that they didn't inherit from even a primate for whatever species they are. So genes, this kind of gene set, 20,000 genes or so, is pretty uniform across, you know, all of mammals and even wider with some variation.

But when we talk about sharing a gene with a Neanderthal versus somebody else, we're talking about identical by descent. Would it be fair to say, like, we all share genes for eyes, but some of us have genes that say blue eyes versus green eyes versus brown eyes? Exactly. There's about eight genes actually that influence eye color, but whatever, this gene that has to do with eye color and there are genetic variance in that gene. And you can ask how similar or different is my DNA sequence in that gene. And that may be, you know, more or less depending what version you have. If you're looking back through the genome here, can you trace any specific traits to specific origins? Well, when we were able to know, make this map and see what genes are shared with Neanderthals. What did we get from Neanderthals?

What did we not like from Neanderthals? We could start to ask, you know, broad questions and specific questions. And one of the most interesting results was in this broad question. If we just look across all humans and say, where does nobody have Neanderthal genes, either by long ago the common ancestor of human and Neanderthals, that version of a gene kind of bopping around in Neanderthals and humans not really caring to do anything different with it, or don't have Neanderthal version of a gene by admixture. Like where are the genes where neither one of those things happen,

where humans currently living modern humans, made some genetic change to a gene and when Neanderthal genes came in, we didn't like it. We got rid of all of those genes, where we just don't like what Neanderthals had on offer. We don't like the old version, didn't keep it around, and didn't accept the Neanderthal version when it was reintroduced to us. And what's interesting is these regions of the genome are highly enriched for, first of all, genes in general. And second of all, genes that are expressed or have some indication that they have something to do with neural function. So neural-related genes were extremely overexpressed in this map of not Neanderthal.

We don't want the Neanderthal version of the genes. Our ancestors got rid of it somehow. And that map, that kind of map where we're not Neanderthal is highly enriched for neural. related genes. Are there places in the genome that there really is a lot of Neanderthal influence, that their version of that specific gene was just way better than whatever was standard issue at the time? Perhaps, and there have been some descriptions of Neanderthal admixture variants that have

gone to high frequency in human populations today. some of these are immune system related genes, which on their surface are easy to understand what they're doing. They help us interact with pathogens in the environment. But beyond that, it becomes very difficult to say exactly what they're doing, what pathogen. And when did this advantage take place? There is kind of, you know, the outline of a interesting story there. historically, there must have been something that happened that caused these variants to go to high frequency. Whenever you see Neanderthal genes or any genes go to high frequency very fast,

and it's due to selection, this means that people died. That's the only way that you get something to go to high frequency. Selection, it sounds like such a clean, you know, clinical word selection. selection means people died. And these immune system genes going to high frequency, it means that if you didn't have it, that you died. But what exactly was killing individuals? That's really hard to know. And that's most of the story of the,

or a lot of the story anyway, of Neanderthal admixture genes that went to high frequency. We honestly, because of this map, having this for the first time, being able to see where we don't have Neanderth genes, we were kind of focused on that. What are the things that are unique to all humans? Everyone who is alive today in the world, all humans that Neanderthals just didn't have figured out. What is, what is it that makes humans unique? Even compared to Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest

extinct relatives, what are the things that we brought to the table that made us kind of the awesome things that we are today? So does that change how I should think about? myself as a species. I guess it depends how you thought of yourself before. But you should be proud. We should all be proud of this genetic uniqueness that we have. And it's a bit telling that what genes are involved here, we would love to know more about the functional consequences of this human uniqueness.

And 2% doesn't sound like a lot, but the genome is a big place. three billion base pairs long, and 2% of 3 billion is quite a bit. We'll be busy for some time trying to figure out what were the functional consequences of this 2% human uniqueness. Ed Green is a professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz. Thanks so much for taking time to talk with me today. Well, you're welcome. Pleasure to be here. So Ira, be proud of those 2% of genes. Thanks, Charles. 2%. two degrees of separation. I will keep that in mind. We have to take a break, and when we come back, taking a closer look at nature's wetland engineers, the humble beaver, what their habitats can tell us

about fighting wildfires. There is a connection. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News for WNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. science stories of national significance. Last year's Cameron Peak Fire was the largest wildfire on record in Colorado. More than 200,000 acres of land burned. While so much of the forest and the path of the fire did burn, something interesting happened in a few areas. The land was untouched by the flames, still green, still wet. How did that happen? Well, there's one thing that these areas have in common. They were home to nature's wetland engineers, beavers. Joining me today to talk about

how these charismatic rodents save some Colorado spots from wildfires is my guest, Alex Hager, reporter for KUNC Public Radio. He covers water in the West. He's based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. Nice to have you. Give us an idea, Alex, of how large the area where the fires did burn and was protected by the beavers? Well, the area that was protected was actually pretty big. And the way that these beaver complexes work is that the beavers create a big network of channels. They are not great runners, but they are great swimmers. So to protect themselves, they have this network, this complex of ponds and little canals that they can swim through. And so because of that, it spreads out the water and actually creates a pretty big area of green and that's kind of wet and muddy. So I was out there wandering around with researcher Emily Fairfax. Within this burn scar, this was only one of a few areas. There were 27 distinct patches of area that were not burned by the fire or that were burned very little. In total, that adds up to about 267 acres.

So in the grand scheme of things, not huge. It's like about one-tenth of one percent of the total land of the fire. But if you're standing on the ground, it feels pretty big. Wow. I know it's been a year since the Cameron Peak fire. What does the area look like now? Is everything which you'd expect it to look like all burnt down? A whole lot of it is. I mean, this area of the Puder Canyon near Fort Collins, it's been scarred by wildfires before. There was another big one back in 2012. And so as you drive along the river into this canyon, you see what is referred to usually as a mosaic burn pattern. So, you know, some of it is just sort of regular dry area. It's got your kind of sage and conifers that you imagine out in the west. And some of these areas have burned just a little bit where the trees are still around, but you can see that they've lost some of their needles or their sort of blackened area on the trunks. Some of the

them are a lot more burned where they've lost all of their needles, but there's maybe a little bit of vegetation left. And some of it was the product of severe burning, where all that's left are these toothpicks, these blackened husks of trees. And the dirt is just totally gray. It looks like moon dust because it's so ashy and burned out. And in the canyon, you can see the results of some mudslides where, you know, that loose soil gave way and rain and washed away houses and took lives even. But there are some patches of green along the river where, you know, it was close enough to water that the fire didn't burn those areas. And then there are bigger patches where beavers spread out the water and created a wetland and stopped the fire from burning.

So in these patches where the beaver were successful, are these like case studies that people can use to see what techniques are working to keep the fires from spreading? Yeah. You know, and that's the important thing to note here is that this is not happening on a massively significant scale. These beaver wetlands, like I said, they're these striking oases of green, but they are oases. They're sort of islands in the middle of this burn area.

And so it's not stopping or slowing down the fire in any significant capacity, but it's a really interesting study in how effectively these singular areas can survive in Colorado and across the West. And, you know, this is not the end of big wildfires in Colorado. Climate change is making them more frequent,

more severe, and to see these little dots surviving, I think warrants a little bit more research. Yeah, I know that you're a water reporter. So talk to me about the important role wetlands are playing in Colorado's ecology. Well, they play a really interesting role in drought, which we've been hearing a lot about recently. You know, for a little bit of background here, when we're talking about water in the West, a lot of it comes from winter precipitation. So you've got rain and snow falling high up in the mountains. And the availability of water has a lot to do with the way that that water makes it down from the mountains into the streams and rivers and the places where humans kind of divert and collect it. And so to have more water, the best way to do that a lot of times is to slow it down,

is to keep it up in the mountains. And so sometimes that's happening in human-made reservoirs, sometimes that's happening in naturally occurring kind of lakes and ponds. Sometimes it's occurring just in cold, frozen snow. But as it's getting hotter, that snow, that snow, is kind of melting earlier. It's melting quicker. And so it's more important to have natural ways for water to be stored up there. And one way to do that is put it behind beaver dams. You know, if you're noticing a thread here, climate change is making that more important as the years go on. And like fire, there's not a massively significant difference in terms of how much water is being stored. But I talked to one fellow who told me quite a bit about this. This is

Joe Wheaton from Utah State University. He has the very cool title of fluvial geomorphologist. He studies the flow and formation of rivers, he had this to say? Beaver are not going to be the miracle answer. You're not going to create, you know, more water at that sort of scale. We have to come to grips with our overuse and the fact that the timing of this stuff is diminishing. And Wheaton told me that where that really makes a difference is on a small scale. And he added this. Now, if I'm a rancher and I have a bunch of these little streams and rivers, those actually make up.

up like 90% of the drainage network of the Colorado Basin. All these littler creeks, the sort of thing that you could walk across. So because of that, these little rivers and streams near ranchers and farmers, they are a testing ground for what are called beaver dam analogs, which is kind of exactly what it sounds like. Humans trying to build things that look like beaver dams. They're trying to replicate what they look like, how they act, and the effects of storing some of that water. But the really interesting thing, as I've talked to researchers about this, is that they are not as effective as the real thing. Beavers have millions of years of evolution that make them really good engineers. They know how to fix these things. They know how to maintain them.

And humans just can't do it the same way. And they've got much better tales than we do. Yes. Thank you, Alex. Great story. Alex Hager reporter for a KUNC Public Radio covering water in the West based in Fort Collins, Colorado. You know, the impact of beavers on the environment is not limited to Colorado. I mean, beavers live pretty much everywhere in the U.S., right? And with climate change making wildfire season more intense and longer,

we're watching these creative carpenters to learn their tricks of the trade. Dr. Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of environmental science at California State University Channel Islands in Ventura, California, is a bona fide beaver expert and enthusiast, and she's going to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about beavers. Friday. Thank you. I'm super happy to be here. Nice to have you. Let's start off by walking me through exactly what beavers do to the environment that makes their habitats so resistant to wildfires. Yeah. So when a beaver moves into the landscape, a lot of the times the stream it's moving into is in a sort of a degraded state, especially in the American West. It's really thin. It's not got a lot

of vegetation around it, and that does not suit the beaver. So what it does is it builds a dam, and then it expands that dam over and over. And then it builds more dams. And then it digs these little canals out from its pond into the landscape and this huge sort of spider web of water. And it's doing all of this because it is great in the water. It's an excellent swimmer, very awkward on land. So the more water they have, the better.

And while that's great for the beaver, what it means is that water is being slowed down and spread out throughout the whole landscape, basically irrigating it so that all the plants stay green and lush and happy, and they don't really turn into that super dry fire fuel. So if you really want to spread the water out into a large area, you just leave it to the beavers to do it. Yeah, absolutely. They're the most motivated engineers because their livelihood really depends on it. And how are the beavers doing?

How about their population? Is it healthy? I mean, it's definitely better than it was. So before the European North American fur trade, there were like 100 to 400 million. beavers in North America. They were literally everywhere. And then the fur trade absolutely decimated their population down into the hundreds of thousands. It was really touch and go for a while for beavers. Today, it's rebounded to maybe 10 to 30 million beavers in North America. So huge gains from their low point, but we're still nowhere near like a fully beavered North American continent.

Yeah. We talked about how beavers in Colorado helped some areas survive the Cameron Peak fire damage. But of course, this must not be a unique case, right? I mean, earlier this year in Sacramento, beavers were let loose on a dry floodplain and they restored it. Is that right? Yeah. They are, I love that case. They're the only engineers that come in ahead of schedule and under budget. They work really hard to get these landscapes into this super resilient state. And they do it throughout the country. I mean, I've seen this happen in essentially every single Western state over and over and over again. Cameron Peak was not an anomaly. Beavers are really experts at making climate-resistant landscape patches. I mean, so how difficult is it to bring the beaver in and

to get them to working? Two beaver or not two beaver? That is the question. How many beaver do you need to make this work? That's a great question. And it's one we don't have a perfect answer to. We have seen instances where a single beaver pond that's probably just being maintained by one family persists through a fire. It's fine during droughts and floods and everything else. But the more beavers, the better in general. It's hard to get them to be where you want because in some parts of the West, you can't move beavers. So in California, it's against the law to physically move a beaver from one site to another. So how do you get them to be where you want? Well, you just kind of have to like entice them by building BDAs, which are beaver dam analogs or

fake beaver dams that they come and fix up, or starting stream restoration. on your own and just crossing your fingers and hoping. There's other states where you can relocate beavers from conflict areas where maybe they're not getting along with their human neighbors into more wild areas where they can exist a little more peacefully. But relocation is not a silver bullet. Those beavers don't always make it when you move them. And it's better to let them sort of choose a landscape and then coexist with them.

How easy is it to move the beaver? I mean, can you just literally pick them up a certain number and drop them down by a helicopter or something like that? I love that you asked about a helicopter because back in the like 40s, that's literally what they did. They, well, not helicopters, but airplanes. There are these great videos online of parachuting beavers. They did it in Idaho.

They did it in California. There's great videos of it from Idaho where they pack beavers up into boxes with parachutes attached and like actually push them out of an airplane. We don't move them that way anymore. They're not super easy to move. When you relocate a beaver, you do have to take their whole family with them, and that's mom beaver, dad beaver, all the baby beavers and like teenage beavers that are living at home. And then you have to move them the right time of the year because they are

not going to hibernate in the winter, but they do need to have a bunch of food stored. So if you move them at the wrong time, they might not have enough food at their new site to make it through the winter. You said the 1940s, what were they doing with beaver back in the 40s? They, that's a great question. They were moving them out of conflict areas in Idaho and putting them into the wilderness where they were going to be able to sort of expand and make those streams healthier again. Now, you mentioned artificial beaver dams.

Are these as effective as the real beaver dams? They're not as effective as real beaver dams. They are definitely effective. You can get a lot of gains from building a beaver dam analog. But when a beaver moves into the landscape, it's a lot more than just the dam itself. The beaver is out there in the riparian zone or the creek side ecosystem chewing on trees and sort of thinning the brush. It's digging these canals. It's maintaining that beaver dam. It's making sure it's not leaking too much. And so they're putting in a lot of maintenance time and

effort that if we just build a BDA and leave it, we're not going to get that same sort of quality of work. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking with Dr. Emily Fairfell. who is from Cal State University Channel Islands in Ventura, California, about the beavers. I mean, this is just fascinating stuff. Is this a new idea? I mean, we certainly could not have discovered how well beaver make dams and control the wetlands. I mean, the indigenous people have been around here a lot longer than we have. Yes, and they definitely were well aware of the importance of Beaver.

I mean, indigenous people have co-existed very productively with Beaver for thousands and thousands of years. before the fur trade crashed their population. And what the cool science that's coming out now is really doing is it's just putting new numbers on ideas that are very old and very well known by certain people. Realistically, how much could we scale up beaver habitats? I mean, is this a possible solution to the wildfire problem here in the U.S. as we know it's getting to be worse? Yeah, we could scale it up a lot.

And there are so many streams, especially in that. National forests and on BLM land where there's not going to be conflict with people. And it's a place where beavers used to live and they no longer live because they've been trapped out way back in the day. And those are the perfect places to scale up beavers and beaver restoration. Like bring in the beavers. Those landscapes are fire prone. They need more wetlands. They need more healthy riparian zones. And the beavers can do that with very, very few downsides. But what do you need to change in the law? Like you said, there are some states that forbid you to move the beaver? In some places, you would need change in laws and policies. I think in a lot of

places, you need just a lot more public outreach and education. People don't always remember that beavers are part of these landscapes. They've been gone for so long. And when a beaver moves in, it's really a dramatic change. Like, they change the landscape. And that can be startling and kind of nervous for a lot of people to see it changing so fast and so out of their control. And so I think there's a huge role for academics and scientists and nonprofits and everybody else to just learn about what beavers do and don't do. So when a beaver moves in, it's not quite such a scary thing. Okay, if we have any listeners who live near a degraded stream because we have very motivated listeners or wetland habitat or are listening to this and think, hey, my area could

use a beaver family. Is this a good thing to do on your own? No, this is not something to do on your own. Definitely work with the wildlife professional. If for no other reason, then you shouldn't handle wildlife. I mean, beavers are living organisms. They are trying to survive. They are big. An adult beaver could be anywhere from 40 to 100 pounds, depending on where you are.

Right? Like, you could, I don't know, I'd want to fight a beaver. Like, that's a large creature. They're very passive. They don't fight and fight a lot unless they're really being threatened. But it's not easy to move them. It's not easy to know where to put them. And if you really want them to succeed,

there's a lot of things to take into consideration about how you catch them and then how you decide where to ultimately place them in the landscape. Tell me the states or a state, let's just use one if it's helpful. That is a particularly good example of beaver restoration. Good example of beaver restoration. I would say it's probably a tie between Washington and Oregon right now. Washington is definitely a leader when it comes to beaver relocation. And they've done a huge amount of research on how to successfully,

take beavers out of high conflict situations and move them into places where they're going to thrive. And I know that they've partnered a lot with the tribes up there. And it's just been a really great collaboration. Oregon has sort of taken the lead with some of the Beaver Dam analog projects and utilizing beavers and beaver-based restoration to support other species like salmon. That's terrific. You've told us everything we've wanted to know and more about beavers and how, if we want to get the job done, we should leave it to beavers. Absolutely. They're there for us. Thank you very much, Emily.

Yeah, this was great. It was a lot of fun. You asked really good questions. Dr. Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of environmental science at California State University Channel Islands in Ventura, a bona fide beaver expert and enthusiast. We have to take a break and when they come back some do-it-yourself ideas for a spookier Halloween. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. With Halloween just about a week away, has the dreaded supply chain issue kept you from getting the giant skeleton you crave, or just the right headless horseman for your decor. Well, fear not because we're dipping into the sci-fi archives

from 2013 for some do-it-yourself ideas you may be able to pull together over the next week. For example, how about turning your pumpkin into a sylon jack-a-lantern or getting spooky with some LED ghosties? We spoke with Windel Oské, co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in Sunnyvale, California. Thank you. It's an honor to be here. Why is Halloween such a good time to make a project? Well, we love to make things, and Halloween is that one holiday of the year that is really focused on making cool stuff,

and it starts out when you're a kid and you learn to make your costume, and you make decorations for the house. A lot of other holidays where you might decorate the house, but Halloween is more about making stuff than any of the others, and we really love that. Now, let's get right into some of these things. have a robotic snapping pumpkin. How do you make that? Describe that. This is one of my favorite projects. So what we have is one of those little mini pumpkins about the size of your palm. And

you cut it in half such that it's got a bunch of big fangly teeth and the top is separate from the bottom. Using a couple of toothpicks, you can make a little hinge such that the top can open and it sort of opens and closes if you manipulate it by hand. So that's pretty neat. You have a little pumpkin that has jaws. But now what we do is we introduce a microcontroller, which is a little tiny microchip that you can program. It's like a baby computer. And inside that we put a program and a little tiny motor and a couple of LEDs. We put the LEDs up on top to give it a couple of eyes and put the motor inside such that it can open up the jaw and close it. Now the cool part about this is you set it on a timer. The motor and the little microcontroller works like a timer.

it sits there for 30 seconds not doing anything and then the jaw slowly opens and then it snaps shut all at once and so this is great because you have little kids walk up to this and they look at it and they see it not doing anything and then it starts to open the jaw and they start putting their finger towards the mouth and it goes snap and they jump back by feet

no kids are hurting it's wonderful oh absolutely not and if they put their fingers in they'd be perfectly safe it's just pumpkin teeth it's okay where can they see that where can you get the plants and how to build this thing On our website, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, it's evilmadscientist.com, and that's called the Snappo Lantern. And we have a bunch of other projects on our website as well that are from very technologically challenging like that one down to very simple ones you can build at home. Give me a simple one. How about the LED stuff that you can make?

Okay, so the LED stuff is simple to somebody like me that happens to have lots of LEDs lying around at home. And that's the distinction we need to draw what is simple versus what is simple to make from what you already have at home. But you can get all the stuff on the Internet, just order it. Oh, absolutely. And that's what we encourage everyone to do. And one of our favorite simple LED projects is called LED Ghosties. So you take a little white LED, actually two little white LEDs, and you hook up each one of them to a little lithium coin cell. And you just hook it up directly and it lights up.

Now you take these two and you tape them to the inside of an empty two-liter bottle. Now you take that two-liter bottle and you hang a piece of white sheet over it and hang it from a string in your yard. Now you have a floating, glowing ghost that has a sheet, but also glowing eyes mysteriously floating somewhere inside of it. I love that one. I saw also you had a simple one that will certainly be useful for Halloween for lighting up the driveway or the walkway or just your front door using LEDs also inside a mason jar. Just very simple. Yeah. So you can do the same thing as the ghosts, but if you forget to put the sheet on, just put them in a mason jar.

It's sort of a temporary garden light. Nowadays, it's really easy to get these solar garden lights. It only costs a couple dollars each, so it's not much reason to use the battery instead of just using a solar light now. Yeah, but do you have to give a hacker or a hobbyist any reason not to do something. I mean, they want to do this because they want to do it, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You have hacked, you even hacked into a Lego figurine, which was quite fast.

Tell us about that. Okay, so there's this wild coincidence, which is that the most common size of LEDs that you can get happens to fit like a glove into the head of a Lego mini figure. And that's because the pitch, the little dots on Legos are five millimeters across and so are these LEDs. So if you take the head off of a Lego minifigure, you can just stick an LED inside and light it up. And we did that. But to make it interesting, you don't want just a little bit. glowing yellow head with a smile. So what we did is we took the back side of a head actually so you can't see the face. And we carved into it and we carved a little jack-o-lantern face with two triangular eyes and a

big toothy smile. And now we have a glowing jack-o-lantern. And now we take a mini-figure, a Lego minifigure and put that head back on it. And now we have a classic headless horseman, you know, pumpkin head guy that you can make. And that's pretty easy. easy to make, but it requires a lot of skill with an exacto knife or some very fine motor control in order to actually do that kind of carving. Yeah, you said on your blog that your fingers were not in good shape. You should have used a drill instead of just the knife. Yeah, so I didn't stab my fingers or anything.

That's the likely hazard when you're using an exacto knife, but I was just holding the little Lego head so firmly between my fingers for the hour or two that it took to carve it that they really hurt afterwards. You had some really gross looking, gross in a good way, specimen jars that you made. Yeah. So besides technological projects like LEDs and things, we also do a lot of food making. And we try and do unusual things no one has ever done before. So, you know, of course, our website is evil mad scientist. We are the, you know, want to do things that are evocative of mad scientist laboratories.

And one of those classics is the specimen jars. And sometimes if you go to a museum, you'll see these old sets of preserved things, you know, some frogs or something really disgusting removed from some animal's intestine. And it's preserved in some yellow sickly liquid and it's a formaldehyde or alcohol or something. And whatever's inside has been faded and is really nasty. So we thought, well, let's do that. It looks just like that, except let's make it. dinner. And so, for example, one of the things we did is we took some chicken breakfast sausages and we perforated them very carefully with a fork in just the right place. So when they cooked,

they bent along those perforation lines. And then when they're cooked, they look just like fingers because they have a couple of bends there like Knuckles do. We put those in a mason jar with a little bit of soup and now you have a legitimate appetizer, but it really looks like you have somebody's cut off fingers in a jar. All right, we're going to keep that there. Let's talk about the Cylon Pumpkin you made with a Larson scanner. It sounds like something out of the Big Bang theory. What is that?

Okay, so Larson Scanner is a term that we coined that is named after Glenn A. Larson, who's the producer of the classic TV shows Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider, both of which had either the robots or the car with the scanning. red light that goes back and forth. And when we wanted to make a sylon pumpkin, we used that term to describe this set of red lights going back and forth. And so the idea is you take your pumpkin, you carve it to look like a classic Battlestar Galactica Cylon, and then you put this set of red scanning back and forth lights inside. There's a couple different ways to make that. We've talked about making it using some discrete classic electronics like a 555-5 timer chip or using a microcontroller

and we also make a kit that is easy to solder together and put into your pumpkin. Also, what about the pumpkin? Can you make a costume out of a pumpkin, a real pumpkin? You can, but I'm not sure you should. So we went to a Halloween wedding last year, and for that we made a, my wife and I made a couple's costume where we had a pair of pumpkin heads, which were actually literal pumpkins that we hollowed out and wore. And this is very challenging to make the walls thin enough

that you can bear the weight of it. If the pumpkin's big enough to fit of your head, it weighs a lot. I'll bet. And if you want to see more of your stuff to make, Window, where should we look on your website? Yes, evelmadcientist.com. Evilmadscientist.com. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today.

And happy Halloween. Thank you. For the rest of the hour, the volcano on the island of Lalpama continues to erupt. It's been going for over a month now, causing destruction and evacuations on the island and dramatically changing the coastline. But elsewhere on earth, a volcano can be a major tourist attraction. Here to talk about the terror and wonder of volcanoes is Robin George Andrews. He's a volcanologist turned science journalist and author of the upcoming book Supervolcanoes.

He comes to us from London. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. We'd love to have you. Is there another, there is another eruption elsewhere this week, is there not? Yeah, this week Mount Asso in Japan on its western island of Kyushu suddenly woke up. Well, not suddenly, it was grumbling for a while and hissing and spitting, but a large explosion cloud sort of emanated from its active crater this week. And there's some amazing footage of it online of these sort of billowing clouds of superheated gas and dust.

But fortunately, the area is not densely. mentally populated and it's quite far from any cities or anything. So hopefully it should be fine and so far no casualties. That's good to hear. So let's talk about this volcano on L'Alpama that has been erupting for weeks. What's the latest? Well, the latest is that it's going to keep on going, really. I mean, it's one of these volcanoes that seems to quite enjoy sticking to a routine and this routine right now is to just keep pumping out lava. So there's no sign that it's going to do anything drastically different at the moment. It's just going to keep erupting lava. But yeah, it's whether there are things in its way, structures in its way or not, it's just going to keep exanguinating itself until

at some point it will stop. Yeah, so it's not an exact science about volcanoes, meaning we don't know when to predict they're going to happen or how long they're going to make their run. No, no. Knowing when a volcano is about to erupt is much more unknown science, but not known exactly. So that's why scientists like using the word forecasting. Volcanoes normally give signs that they're going to do something. It's not necessarily erupts, but this volcano started swelling up. It started playing this sort of seismic symphony that kind of indicated that it was, magma was rising to the surface.

So it seemed pretty likely it was going to erupt roughly where it did start erupting. So that was kind of forecast in advance. But in terms of when a volcano is going to stop erupting, it's a big unknown. Sometimes volcanoes can be full of magma still, full of eruptable magma, like Killaway in 2018, and one day it will just stop. But sometimes they can keep going on for months and weeks. They can peter out, have another crescendo. That is the real unknown.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And when they do erupt, they can produce different kinds of lava flows. Yeah, so volcanoes erupts quite differently. Even each individual eruption from a single volcano is quite different. But, you know, there are kind of a few main types of eruptions. So what you're getting on La Palma is called an effusive eruption. It's kind of coughing every now and then. A bit of gas gets stuck in its throat.

And that's where you get those little explosions. It's mainly just larva oozing out, a bit like someone's standing on a tube of toothpaste or something. And at Mount Asso in Japan, it's an explosive sort of eruptions where you have lots of trapped gas in really sticky magma. So the gas can't escape very easily. So when it does break through to the surface, It's as if you've, you know, shaking up a Coke bottle and then just decapitated it.

It will just rush out in one big go. So quite different eruption styles. And, yeah, it varies from volcano to volcano, and there are thousands around the world. And, you know, sometimes they can be quite destructive moving very quickly down the side of the volcano. Yeah, yeah. So lava is your best chance. If you want to try and outrun an eruption, lava is your best chance. I mean, if it's going down slope, it's obviously going to move faster.

but generally speaking, if larva moves on a flat surface, I don't know if you saw footage of the eruption earlier this year in Iceland, and it's on Raking's Peninsula, but that eruption was happening basically in a valley, and this larva was very slowly oozing out, and you could outwalk it. People actually went up to it inside, cooking things on it. There were wedding proposals in front of it.

There were gigs in front of it. It was considered like a tourist eruption, because it was so safe and so kind of predictable in that sense. But every now and then you kind of get weird chemistries, and there's a volcano in Africa called, Narugongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And that lava can sometimes move somewhere between 40 and 60 miles per hour. So good luck outrunning that. And yeah, if you're, if you're looking at these explosive clouds of hot ash and gas, there's no chance you can outrun

those or out drive them. You know, these things move so fast. Like, you know, sometimes 70 miles an hour or hundreds of miles an hour sometimes. And actually are so forceful, they can actually go uphill. They're the real things you have to worry about, I think. People have this mental image from Hollywood of a huge pool of molten rock right beneath the surface. Is that really what's going on? That kind of pool, you know, that kind of lava lake bubbling thing, you know, that kind of Mount Doom over the rings thing. Lava lakes are incredibly rare, actually. I think there's only six or seven volcanoes on Earth that have got like long-lived, like multi-year lava lakes.

And no one's quite sure why that is. It's like a direct pipe into the sort of magma reservoir inside of volcanoes. So they're really rare. Normally what you have with volcanoes is you either have something mountainous or you have something like the volcanoes of Hawaii, which are really big mountains, but they're kind of very spread out. Or you have just like in Iceland that eruption. It just came out of cracks that open up in the ground as the magma force its way through.

Is there ever really such a thing as an extinct volcano? Yeah, yeah. So there's loads. I mean, most the, an extinct volcano, I guess, in general terms means a volcano that has like no chance of erupting ever again. And once you essentially once a magma supply to a volcano stops, it dies kind of thing. It's almost like oxygen to the brain really. I mean, volcanoes will inevitably eventually die out. It's just, it seems hard to imagine really because they don't really operate on human timescales, right? They are way

beyond our kind of existence. There are volcanoes on Earth that are as old as our species and even older, you know. So volcanoes can die out, but some can live seemingly forever on our time scales. But eventually, you know, sadly, everything dies, including volcanoes. What amazes you the most about them? I see you're very excited. You talk about volcanoes. You're right about them. What have you found that amazes you most? I think it's, they kind of come across as these sort of tempestuous giant beasts. I mean, they were, they're much better understood than they were, you know, 2,000 years ago, say, when people were describing, the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii, you know. I mean, that people consider that to be

the end of the world kind of thing. It was so frightening and so, and so strange and surreal and kind of awe-inspiring in a sort of averse way. And even now when you speak to volcanologists or, you know, I see these things, even though you know the science behind them, you know the physics of what they can do, they still have that visceral sense of kind of awe, it kind of shakes you to the bone sort of thing. And I think the best way anyone has described it to me, someone that lives on an island called Santorini, which is an active volcano. They said volcanoes bring fear and joy together. And I can't think of many things that simultaneously make you feel afraid for your life,

but exhilarated to be alive. And I think more than any scientific thing, that's the thing that really hits me. I can't think of anything else quite like that. Robin, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Oh, thanks for having me at any time. Dr. Robin, George Andrews, is a volcanologist turned science journalist and author of the upcoming book, Super Volcanoes. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again,

subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And of course, you can say hello to us all week long, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the classic way. SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. We do love your feedback. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.