Science Friday - Growing Glaciers, Expanding Universe, Flu Near You. March 29, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

Once upon a time, everything in the universe was crammed into a very small space. Then came the Big Bang, and the universe has been expanding ever since. But just how fast is it expanding? Calculating that number is a challenge that dates back almost a hundred years, when Edwin Hubble used data from Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt to try to answer that question. His value came to be called the Hubble constant, H0. But the exact value of that constant has been hard to pin down. And now two different approaches to measuring the Hubble constant have come up with close, but different answers—and each team says they're pretty confident in the accuracy of their measurements. Ira speaks to science writer and author Anil Ananthaswamy and Nobel laureate Adam Riess to discuss the discrepancy. This flu season, Science Friday teamed up with Flu Near You to ask listeners to track their symptoms to create a map of influenza-like illness across the country. Nearly three thousand SciFri users participated. Science Friday education director Ariel Zych and biostatician Kristin Baltrusaitis, who was a research assistant for Flu Near You, tells us how the SciFri community results stacked up to the rest of participants. Plus, epidemiologist Karen Martin gives an update on how this season compares to years past and how the Minnesota Department of Health uses Flu Near You data for surveillance on a local level. See the results here. It’s become the familiar refrain in this era of climate change: Warmer temperatures, retreating glaciers, and rising sea levels. But when it comes to Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier, it seems the drumbeat of disaster may have halted—for now. Scientists report in the journal Nature Geoscience this week that the once fast-retreating ice sheet has been thickening over the last few years instead. It’s a reversal of a twenty-year trend of thinning and retreating, but perhaps not for long. Ala Khazendar, researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joins Ira to explain why this glacial about-face may not be the cause for celebration that we think it is in this week’s Good Thing, Bad Thing. And Gizmodo writer Ryan Mandelbaum talks about the canceled all-female space walk, NASA's lunar ambitions, and more in this week's News Roundup.   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 Iraflato. Later in the hour, a conundrum facing astronomers trying to measure the expansion of the universe. But first, for those of us looking forward to one day returning to the moon, experts have said it could be possible by the year 2028, less than 10 years from now. But this week, the Trump administration condensed that timeline even further. Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to put American astronauts on the moon within the next five years using, quote, any means necessary. But how realistic is that?

Here to tell us what we can glean from this announcement as well as other short subjects in science is Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer with Gizmodo. Always good to see you, Ryan. Always great to be here, Ira. How's everything going? Fine. Let's talk about this. The Trump administration says it wants to get to the moon in five years.

Is this possible? Is it wishful thinking? Well, I guess anything is possible with enough money, Ira. think that was the question that a lot of the people I spoke to had when they heard this was, okay, well, the Apollo mission was really expensive. Are you going to give us the money to send people to the moon in time? I don't know. That's a question. What would happen? What would have to happen? Would Congress have to suddenly say, hey, here's a pile of money to do this? Yeah. I mean, well, so as you said, the current estimates are 2028. They want it by 24. And I think it's just this weird sort of dissonance for me because NASA is working on the SEL. this big rocket, they've been pushing these timelines, and they've just delayed in this

new Trump budget, is actually delayed part of the SLS. And actually, Bridenstein then said at this meeting that they would need that part in order to get astronauts to the moon. Well, Pence's sort of the retort is that he will, you know, he wants private industry to do it. Whatever it takes, you know, get us to the moon. That's what they, whatever it takes. It means it could be Elon Musk who gets us. Sure, yeah.

And then I think part of that, it's in the context of saying, you sort of declassive, declaring that we're in a new space race against China and Russia, which, okay. Well, we need, you know, that's what got us to the moon in the first place was the space race. Maybe we need a new space race. Maybe. You can't see me rolling the eye on the radio. Speaking of all talk on no follow through NASA, and we had Bridenstown on the show talking about this, had to cancel the old female spacewalk that was set to happen today, right, because of sort of a wardrobe malfunction.

Yeah, what happened was that NASA had announced earlier this month that Ann McLean and Christina Koch would be spacewalk together on the ISS, and that would be the first all-female spacewalk. And then, you know, what happened was that Koch had to be rescheduled for the sizing issues on the spacesuit because the upper portion of the suit was a little too big on McLean when she wore it on last Friday, so now Koch is going to do it. But now the issue is that, well, why haven't we had an all-female spacewalk already? Like, that's the thing that I think has been bugging me and a lot of people online is they're

saying, oh, it's going to happen eventually. It's not our fault. It's a wardrobe thing, but I... Okay. Well, if you have women on the space station, why are there not enough space suits for the women to wear if they have to go outside? Well, and I thought, well, why not already have had somebody... Why not have had another woman who could have just gone out there, right?

I mean, there's all sorts of ways you can think about it. But it didn't happen. Did not happen. Maybe next time. Real soon now. Next scientists who've been trying to hunt down where all the antimatter in the universe went, think they're finally on the right track? So you know that there's a lot more matter than antimatter in the universe.

That's we're all here. That's why we're here. And scientists aren't completely sure why. So what they're doing is looking for places where the laws of physics are different between matter and antimatter. Now, they're right because matter and antimatter look actually pretty much the same except for a small couple of differences. And they've actually, the large Hadron Collider Collider scientists at the experiment, LHCB found a new, never-before-seen example of matter and antimatter seemingly behaving different in their collider. This is something that was first discovered in 1964.

It was the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics, but now they found yet another example of this laws of physics being different, and it's textbook-making stuff. What do you mean? How different? Where might the antimatter be? Does it predict where it might be found or how to make it? It predicts, they observe differences essentially in decay rates between particles and their anti-particle pairs.

and it's not enough to account for all the missing antimatter in the universe. That's going to take more research, more physics, more theories. But for now, they've got another important source, and these are still important signposts for getting us there. Maybe the antimatter is hiding out with the dark energy somewhere. Next, there's another measles outbreak that erupted in New York State, and this time county officials have taken an extraordinary step to contain it. That's right.

County officials have announced a ban. on unvaccinated minors in public places for 30 days or until they get the MMR vaccine. So if once it expires, it's not happening anymore. It won't be actively tracked by police, but it could be retroactively enforced. So they have to go out. If they see somebody, they have to think that this is an, how do you enforce that? I guess is what I'm getting at. I think you just say, you know, if in two years or something or next week, after it's over,

you see that somebody's child went out during this time, then I guess they're arrested. But, I mean, the infectious disease experts, this is not punishment. It's to stop transmission and protect the vulnerable from this disease. I mean, we really are suffering this measles outbreak right now. Finally, it seems like we've got our next candidate for the Jurassic World Series. This is the largest T-Rex ever discovered. That's right. Scotty is the T-Rex's name.

And it was actually first discovered in Saskatchewan in 1991, but it's taken over a decade to both get it out of ground and process the bones and get everything ready to actually study it and Scotty's big. How is Johnny Carson would say, how big is it? An estimated 19,555 pounds. So I think it's important to note that he's not physically, he's more massive by estimates than the other dinosaurs, the T-Rex that we have. Not necessarily longer though.

So what this basically does is it just increases our, the upper limit of how big a T-Rex could be. So in the next Jurassic Park, you can make the T-Rex even bigger. Any special features of this T-Rex? In fact, it looked like he lived a... Well, we don't know the gender, but it looks like we lived a pretty tough life. It had broken ribs and

infected jaw and bite marks on its tail, according to the paper. Well, if you're the king of the jungle, everybody wants a part of you. That's right. All right, Ryan. Thanks, that's great. All right, thanks so much, Ira. Ryan Mandabom's science writer with Gizmodo. Now it's time to play.

good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side. It's becoming a recurring refrain in this era of climate change, warmer temperatures, melting glaciers, rising sea levels. Repeat. But when it comes to Greenland's Jacobs-Haven glacier, it seems that cycle of disaster may have halted. Stunned scientists report in the journal Nature Geoscience this week that the ice stream, which had been retreating for two decades, has instead been,

thickening over the last few years. So why isn't it a cause for celebration? Joining me to tell us all the good and the bad of the glacial about face is Allah Kazandar, a calatialologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Kazandar, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, thank you very much for the opportunity to share our findings. Well, Dr. Kazandar, how surprised were you to discover that after 20 years of melting, one of the Greenland's fastest melting glaciers has actually been growing. It was quite a surprise because over the past few years, when this glacier was being studied intensively,

along with many other glaciers around Greenland, the expectation was that it would continue doing what it has been for the last 20 years, which is retreating, accelerating, and thinning. And there are factors about this glacier that supported the assumption that it would continue this behavior into the future. Okay, so what has caused the glacier to grow instead of shrink over the last couple of years? So this has been really a natural experiment, 20 years in the making. It started in the late 1990s when scientists at the time detected the arrival of warmer waters

in the vicinity of Jakobshaven. And soon after that, the glacier started this retreat, acceleration and thinning. It had a floating ice time or an ice shelf that was something like 15 kilometers long that completely disintegrated by 2003. Our own measurements show that the thickness of the glacier was reduced by 160 meters or almost more than 500 feet near the front. So what we detected now is basically the reversal of the of what happened all that time ago, which is the arrival of cooler waters

in the vicinity of the glacier. And we hypothesize that this reverse, the process is involved, and resulted in the re-advance, the slowing down and the thickening of the glacial. So why this arrival of the cold water? Is this permanent thing, temporary thing? Unfortunately, we strongly,

suspect that it is a temporary reprieve than a resurrection of the glacier. It is most likely connected to a cyclical phenomenon, a good candidate, something called the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the water warmers will be coming back. Isn't that sort of like an El Nino sort of thing, like we have in the Pacific and isolation then? They are cousins. They're cousins, kissing cousins. You mean it's the same kind, it's the same kind of change in the water temperature? Yes, I mean, it's an atmospheric phenomenon that affects also the circulation of the ocean, the temperatures of the ocean, the heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere and so on. And so how long do we expect this to last then? I don't think anybody

knows. It could be back to doing what it did in the coming two years or so, or it could take a bit longer. But we know, and this is the bad news part of it, that most of the heat added to the atmosphere, mostly due to human activity, is actually absorbed into the ocean, more than 90% of it. So there is a high probability that when the warm waters come back again, they'll be even warmer. That will remelt the glacier. Yes, and there is something very, very, um, uh, about this glacier that makes it even more vulnerable, the bedrock on which it lies is beneath sea level, and it deepens the further you go inland,

which means that this warm embrace between the ocean and the glacier will continue for decades to come. And we have demonstrated how sensitive it is to the warming of ocean waters. So this implies that, this retreat might continue, most likely will continue for decades to come. Thank you, Dr. Kassendar, for taking down to be with us today. You're most welcome.

Thank you very much. You're welcome, a la Kuzendar, glaciologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We're going to take a break and come back and look at the stars and see answers like, oh, well, how fast is the universe expanding and why that's in doubt. The, wow, we'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. Hey there, Ira here. You know, I've been looking back at the first quarter of 2019, and I've got to say that some of my favorite conversations on Science Friday have happened in the last three months.

As you know, space is always one of my favorite topics, so we were eager to bring NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein on the show to answer your questions. We also discussed how exercise could reshape our hearts, which is bizarre and incredible to think about. And my favorite segment, because each one of these kids inspires me, was the one with several guests that were under 21 years of age, and winning some of the world's toughest science competitions, as well as driving national conversations to protect the climate. You know, these are fascinating times we're living in, and science and technology are the forefront of the news. we are working extra hard to stay on top of everything, bringing you the most important, relevant, and interesting conversations we can. But we need your donations to support our work. So if you go to ScienceFriiday.com slash give and give whatever you can, you'll help keep us being the trusted new service you deserve. Again, that's ScienceFriday.com slash give.

Or just follow the links from the upper right-hand corner of our web. website. It's that easy. ScienceFriiday.com slash give. And now back to the show. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know the story. Once upon a time, everything in the universe was crammed into a very small space and then the big bang. And the universe has been expanding ever since. Well, so the theory goes. But just how fast is it expanding? Calculating that expansion rate is a problem dating back almost 100 years when Edwin Hubble used data from Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Levitt to define the expansion rate as a number that came, well, came to be called the Hubble constant. But the value of that constant has been hard to pin down.

Two different approaches to measuring the Hubble constant have come up with close but different, significantly different answers. Joining me now to talk about why that matters are my guests. Anil Anandhar Swami is a science journalist and author based in the Bay Area. He recently wrote about this for Scientific American. Welcome to Science Friday, Anil. Hi, Ira. It's good to be on the show. Thank you. Nice to have you. And Professor Adam Rees.

He is a 2011 Nobel laureate in physics, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins University, senior member of the science staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Welcome back, Dr. Reese. Hi, Ira, nice to be here. Nice to have you. All right, India, let me start with you. What is the Hubble constant in late terms? The Hubble constant tells us about how fast the universe is expanding,

and it's related to the, if you're looking at some galaxy, then if you know the distance to that galaxy and you know how fast that galaxy is receding from us, you can use those two numbers to calculate the Hubble constant, which tells you how fast the universe is expanding. And Dr. Reese, why is it so hard to measure that? Yeah. Well, it's just the universe, after all.

That should be pretty simple. But no, really. You know, it's not that it's so hard. It's that it's so hard to measure it so precisely. And particularly when you see a disagreement that may tell us something really interesting about the universe, you want to be really right about your measurement. So we've been measuring and remeasuring for about a decade using the Hubble Space Space. telescope to calibrate the universe. And we have, we think, the most precise answer to date, which is the answer we presented last week. But that answer is in disagreement with other

measurements. Is it not a neal? Yeah. So that measurement is quite significantly in disagreement with another way of measuring it, which is the value that comes from the European Space Agency's plank satellites. So they measure the cosmic microwave background, which is radiation left over from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. And that radiation has features in it that you can use in order to

correlate what happened in the early universe with what's happening now and use that to calculate, you know, sort of estimate the expansion rate now. And those two ways of doing it, Adam's groups and the applying data are in disagreement.

So Adam, how do you measure it? How do I measure it? Well, I use different kinds of exploding and pulsating stars in the nearby universe, and by calibrating their luminosity using geometrical methods like building triangles in space, we can determine how far away they are from how bright they appear, and then we measure what's known as the red shift, and as the Neil described, that tells us how fast the universe is expanding today. Our number, if you'd like to talk about it, is 844724-8.

8255, 844-Sai Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFRI. So why do you think there is this discrepancy, and if it seems to be a significant one, why is there, Dr. Reese? Well, let me give you an analogy. You know, imagine you were trying to measure your height, and one person started at your feet and measured to your head, and the other person started at your head and measured to your feet. And if they got different answers, you'd say, well, you know, somebody's made a mistake.

that's not so interesting. But let me imagine in a different way. Instead, somebody measured their height when you were two years old. Now, when you're two years old, if you're like an average person, you reach about half your height of your eventual height. And so, you know, you double that number and you say, okay, I'm three feet tall when I'm two years old. I guess I'll be six feet tall when I'm all grown up. Then we go out and we actually measure, and oh my gosh, you turn out to be, you know, seven foot two. You're going to play center for the Knicks. But what's exciting is something has gone awry in our understanding. So what we failed to mention was that the other measurement, the one made from the Kossack microbe background, is not really a measurement as much as a prediction.

It is a measurement when the universe was very young. And then we use our understanding of the physics of the universe to figure out how fast the universe will be expanding today. And just like that child who has grown up, we then go out and measure how fast or how tall. the child is, and we find a very different, very surprising answer. And that's why this is really so exciting. It's not just like two people measuring the same thing and getting a different number. It's two scientists or two teams of scientists measuring at opposite ends of the history of the universe and finding that those two do not connect, that there is something missing or another wrinkle

in how we understand the universe. And both teams of scientists are dug in on. They really pretty sure that they've got the right number, right? Right, Anil? Yeah, I mean, both teams have, you know, reduced their errors substantially. So, you know, the playing team is very confident of its measurements. And, you know, as Adam said, they're measuring the cosmic microwave background with very high precision. But then they have to use this thing called the standard model of cosmology to extrapolate to the universe as it is now and make estimates of the Hubble constant.

So, but the actual measurement date, you know, the precision of the measurement. is very high, and as is, you know, the data coming from Adam's team. So, Adam, what does it matter? What does it matter if it's 67 or 74, you know? Right. It's true. I don't actually care what the number is. What I care about is that these two ways disagree and that it might tell us something

interesting about the universe. So for your listeners who may or may not know, about 95% of the universe, we believe, is made up of dark matter and dark energy. These are these mysterious components that we see only by their gravity, but we don't really have a detailed understanding of their physics. They're very mysterious to us. So when we, as Anil said, when we extrapolate from the youthful universe to the present universe, we take some very naive guesses about the nature of that dark matter and dark energy. And so if those naive guesses are failing, if we're seeing this important difference, it may be teaching us something, something really crucial, an important clue about the nature. of dark matter or dark energy.

And that's why we make these kinds of measurements, really to learn more about these mysterious components. Well, you know, if you don't know what 95% of the universes may have, I mean, you don't know anything. Hey, we know it's there. Isn't that right? I mean, why should this little, you know, what could these numbers teach you about learning what 95% of the universe is made in?

Yeah, well, you know, this becomes a quantitative game at some point. And as I said, we use gravity. This is sort of the new science of cosmology in the last few decades is to recognize, hey, most of the universe is not made out of what we're made out of. And in fact, most of the universe doesn't emit light like things we're familiar with. We have to use gravity like a telescope to see parts of the universe. Dark matter, dark energy. You may have heard of gravitational waves, which we are just getting the ability to see.

And so these are our new observing tools that we're using to learn about gravity. I mean, if you were a blind person walking through a room, you know, you'd have to use a different set of senses to figure out what's in the room. And so that's where we are. Let's go to the phone, 844-724-8255. Let's go to Terry. Hi, welcome to Science Friday in Sioux City. Hi, how are you? Hi there.

Hi, how are you? Fine. Go ahead. I was wondering if it isn't the word constant that might be the issue here. That assumes that it's the same throughout the entire universe, and maybe the universe is expanding at different rates in different places. Right. That's a great question. We actually have used these same tools to determine if the universe is expanding at the same rate in different directions.

And, in fact, that has been confirmed to very high precision. But you're also right that constant is kind of a funny misnomer anyway, because it is a number that will change as the universe ages. It's just, we think, constant at any one point in time, but the same in all direction. Could the dark energy that is pushing the universe further apart? Could that have something to do? You know, we don't know anything about it with the number being wrong? Yeah, that is, in fact, one of the possibilities. You know, we take a very, I would say, vanilla guess at what the nature of dark energy is.

And we tried to measure that, and, you know, it roughly looks like that vanilla guess. But, you know, that could be part of the story of what's going to be. going on is that we have kind of a turbocharged dark energy that makes the universe accelerate and expand even faster today. Neil, I'm going to bring another one of our favorite topics into this, and this is like black holes and gravity waves. Is there a LIGO measuring, you know, could be the referee of these two other measurements? Yes, absolutely.

I think that's going to be the exciting thing over the next five years. So your listeners will know that LIGO, which is the laser interferometer, gravitational wave observatory detected gravitational waves from the merging of black holes in the past few years. But in August of 2017, it had another event that it observed that was actually very interesting, which was the merger of two neutron stars. And so these two neutron stars, when they merged, they generated gravitational waves, but they also generated a burst of electromagnetic radiation. And in order to calculate the Hubble constant, you need two things, right? You need the distance to some astrophysical object, and you also need to measure its recession velocity.

So the gravitational wave signature from the neutron star merger gave the LIGO team away to tell the distance to this merger event, and the electromagnetic radiation, which was captured by other telescopes, gave them redshift information, which then allowed them to figure out how fast this is receding from us. Putting those two together, they came up with a Hubble constant value of 70, which sits bang in the middle of the plank and... the data from Adams Group, except that their error bars, because it's just one event, and they just don't have enough data to have good statistical significance. The error bars are so big that they can accommodate both Planck and the result from Adams Group.

So what's exciting is that just this week, LIGO announced that they have upgraded their instrument and have restarted observations, and they're going to, I think, in about a year's time, close it down and upgrade again. So over the next five years, they are hoping to observe about 50 such neutron star mergers, and that will give them enough data to pin down this number to within 2%. And it will be really exciting to see which way they move, whether they move towards Plank or whether they move towards the data from Adams Group. Very interesting. I have a tweet from Sarah who asks a question that's been asked of everybody. The last hundred years, and I want to repeat it.

If the universe is everywhere, you know what I'm going to say, how is it expanding? Is it becoming more infinite, Adam? Oh, I was hoping you were going to ask Gineel this question. And I was going to punt it to Adam. Yeah. What we really mean when we say the universe is expanding is we mean locally around us, and as far as we can tell everywhere else, that whenever two things are separated, like galaxies, that separation grows.

We can't really verify what happens much further than we could see. There's a limit. We can only see as far as the age of the universe times the speed of light. But we believe that the universe continues to expand. And so if it's infinite, it's infinite and getting bigger. You know, as my father used to like to say, what's bigger than infinity? Well, infinity plus one. Hi, I'm Ira Flater.

This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Now you're getting into Aleph and Aleph 1 and decanter, all those sort of things. We have a lot of calls who are interested in whenever we talk about the universe, people want to talk about the universe and its expansion. And that tweet reminded me of a letter I saw many years ago that was sent to Einstein himself about what happens if you poke your thumb through the finite universe?

Where does it go? That sort of stuff has been around all the time. you already, here's another tweet. Let's go to the phones. Let me go to line four. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Charles and Dave. Hi, Charles.

Go ahead. Yes, Ira, thank you. I would like to know if the CMB boundary is expanding, or is it too far to tell if it's expanding? The cosmic background radiation. It's left over from the Big Bang. Right. Well, the cosmic microwave background radiation is actually a tiny slice in time.

It's a snapshot of the universe at a certain moment. The moment when the universe went from being a fog where light couldn't really propagate very far until it suddenly became thin enough, diluted enough, by the expansion of space that it suddenly gets out. And so it's not really expanding, but it is getting more distant from us in time as time goes on. But because we can always look back to it and it's in all directions, it's always available to us. We can always see it. Well, let me just wrap up because we're running out of time. Is it possible that we need new physics here?

Could there be particles, unknown particles, unpredicted particles? Yes. Yes, I would say, you know, on our menu of possibilities are new particles like what we would call a sterile neutrino, exotic dark energy, dark matter that interacts. or decays, another episode of dark energy, all kinds of interesting possibilities, and that's why we're so excited about this discrepancy. But do you have the tools to discover those new particles? I think so.

I mean, new tools are coming online. The various predictions of what would happen if you had exotic particles make specific predictions of, you know, what other signatures you should see. So sometimes this is just the way. science works is, you know, you might get your first clue and your first clue leads to a hypothesis, and that hypothesis recommends another experiment. And so we may be going through a generation of that now. Let me see if I can get a quick caller in from Johnny and Beacon, New York. Hi, John. Welcome. Hi, thanks. How's it going, guys? So, great discussion. My question was,

could these potential differences in measurements from these two groups be based off of, we always assume that the initial Big Bang caused an ever-expanding universe as a constant in one direction. What if the universe hit a point where then it were to retract and almost come back to, let's say, that initial point based up a gravitational pull? Is there any evidence why that is not possible? And I think we always just assume that it was ever-expairing. Okay, I got about 30 seconds for an answer. Well, I could jump in here on this one. You know, we don't really get a good glimpse of the universe between the time shortly after the Big Bang to, oh, the last, you know, seven or eight billion years.

And so there's kind of a dark ages in there. If the universe took a break, you know, it took a snooze during that, you know, we wouldn't know. And that really could also mess up these calculations. Of course, we would look for what is the exotic new physics that explains why that would happen. but, you know, just generic. As a statement, we don't think the universe took a break. Thank you, Adam. Adam Reese, 2011 Nobel laureate in physics, talking with us.

Also, Anil Anandthoswamy, a science journalist author based in the Bay Area, working for Science, Scientific America every once in a while. Well, we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the flu. Did you avoid the flu this season? We're going to talk about flu near you. It was our citizen science project that you all. help to create to give real-time updates and how the virus spread this season.

We have the results. They're in. If I had a bell, I'd ring it. But we'll be back after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We can finally say it.

Spring is officially here. The days are getting longer and warmer. We're at the tail end of the flu season, though not quite done yet. This flu season, we teamed up with flu near you, a citizen science project to track the flu spread across the country in real time. We asked you, faithful listeners, to help out by tracking your symptoms, and boy, did you answer the call? He briefly broke the internet. Did you know that? And Flew Near You's website in the process. So what did the flu look like this season and within our SciFri community? Here to tell us all about it, are my guests. Kristen Baltusitis was a

research assistant for flu near you. She's also a biostatistics graduate student at the Boston University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. You've got, you've been plated with your PhD. Is that right? Yes, I'm a three-day-old doctor. Congratulations. I hope your mom's had. Thank you so much. And Ariel Zick, she's Science Friday's education director. Ariel, welcome to Science Friday. Hello, Ira. Okay, Kristen, at first, congrats, as I say on your minted PhD, but remind us how the flu near you works. What are you asking people? to keep track up.

So essentially, we refer to Fleunier You as a participatory syndromic surveillance system. What we mean by that is we recruit a cohort of citizen scientists across the country to report every week whether or not they have any symptoms. And from those symptom reports, we can kind of track influenza-like illness within the general population. And, Ariel, how many SciFRI listeners participated? Well, we did so well. So by the time all was said and done, everyone registered, we had.

We had just over 2,900 active users for the length of the project, which means we had 2,900 people reporting their weekly flu symptoms. And they were even doing it for other people in their household. So the whole Science Friday cohort represented about 3,500 people. Wow, breaking. We broke the Internet, you say? We did a, yes, yes. When we first announced that people could sign up members of Science Friday's audience from all 50 states flooded to the site, immediately tried to register, immediately broke the website. We fixed it.

And those who hung on with us, they've turned out to be really good reporters. So part of the fun of syndromic surveillance is that data, even when you're feeling well, that's good data. So we ask people to report every week. And Science Friday listeners, you guys did so well. Came through. Yes, they really did. And you found out some surprising facts too, like whales get the flu. Yes, that's right.

So every week we sent a little text reminder to our participants who wanted them to kind of remind. to kind of remind them to log their symptoms, but we also sent some fun flu facts, and we learned things like influenza viruses, especially influenza A viruses, are very promiscuous. They jump around all sorts of species, so whales can get sick with it, and so do seals and ferrets and minks.

And while those are dead-end hosts, we also, you know, they get infected by some of the same routes that other peoples do. So just through contamination of, you know, water. But we also learned some things like that there's a Black Friday for flu symptoms and outpatient clinics. So everybody stays home for Thanksgiving. They get lazy or they don't feel like going to the doctor over a holiday.

And so if you're looking at influence-like illness, for instance, in the flu-nary-you population, you'll usually see a spike in outpatient clinics for people showing up with these flu-like symptoms because they kind of held off until the day after Thanksgiving to check in. So we learned a whole bunch of fun flu natural history as a part of this process. That's great. Dr. Boutresitis, the CDC keeps charge. track of influenza. How can this type, stuff that we do, give us a different picture? So the CDC has a really well-established influenza surveillance system. However, their surveillance

depends upon individuals going to the doctor. Our system differs because we look at the entire population. So most people that do have influenza-like illness don't actually go to the doctor. So the goal of our system is to kind of capture those individuals as well. And then we can provide the CDC with additional information, like what percent of those individuals that are experiencing those symptoms actually do go to the doctor. So we can, we think about this as a very complementary surveillance system to the CDC. Can you tell how this flu season went from the point of view of flu near you? Was this flu season like, well, what trends did we see?

How well did the vaccinations work? Stuff like that? Kristen? So we can look at influenza-like illness. So we can look at those that are vaccinated. versus unvaccinated. However, the vaccination is, we use influenza-like illness, which is a proxy for actual influenza. So we look at the symptoms that are very consistent with influenza. So we can't actually look at vaccination effectiveness, but we can look at what proportion of

individuals within the population are actually vaccinated and whether or not they're experiencing symptoms that are related to the flu. And Ariel Science Friday, as you say, Science Friday listeners certainly heated as a call. And how did our listeners compare to the rest of the flu near you population? So that was something that I was really interested to think about because I think our audience is a unique bunch of people, but also because, you know, we had assembled this around right at the beginning of the flu season. And I was thinking, I wonder how they're going to be different. And we did find some interesting things.

So I mentioned that they were good reporters. They reported just a little more consistently than flew near you. Users did on average. But there were also some other interesting differences. They seemed to get sick less often. Or at any given point in time, a smaller proportion of Science Friday users were experiencing influenza-like illness or those influenza symptoms we talked about than average. And so that kind of piqued my interest a little bit.

I was thinking, well, what is, you know, maybe it's that they're all super vaccinated. So we just have a really high vaccination rate. But when we started taking that apart a little bit, it looked like their vaccination rates, at least their self-reported vaccination rates, were similar to a general audience. And so, you know, that kind of led down this rabbit hole of what are some of the, you know, what could be going on? And why are Science Friday listeners so healthy? You know, and that's one of the fun things about a project like this is, I think there's still a lot to learn about this type of monitoring.

Kristen, do you have any explanations for this? Are listeners extra healthy? Is this due to how they might be reporting their symptoms? Everything that I thought, I was like, well, maybe there's differences in ages and there's fewer younger individuals, but the population distribution looks very similar to flu near you. So I guess we just have a really healthy Science Friday population. We're very happy.

We did find that there were a lot of young people in that cohort. That was a really pleasant surprise. So Science Friday users, you know, we expected them to be fairly evenly distributed across age groups. But it turned out, Kristen, we had a fair number of teenagers participating, didn't we? Approximately 15% of the users were in the 13-17 age range, which is really exciting that we're getting these younger individuals interested in citizen scientists. We're happy to hear that. I want to bring on another guest who uses this information on the ground. Karen Martin, senior epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health in St. Paul.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hello, thank you for having me. So how has the Minnesota Department of Health use this data that flu near U tracks? Well, we've been working with flu near U data for a couple of years now, and Minnesota was one of two states this past year that received a small amount of funding to work on a project that we call confirmed flu near U. you where we're actually looking at the users within our state and then thinking what would happen if we sent the users, asked them if they wanted to sign up for an enhanced surveillance

and sent them some swabs along with some mailing kits and asked them when they got sick if they would do a self swab in the nose, package it up and send it to our public health laboratory for us to test. And so we are looking at not only reports of information influenza-like illness from flu near you users in our state, but we're also getting a subset of samples so that we can see of those who are reporting illness, what actually do they have? And so that's been really interesting to see. And as I think it was mentioned before, you know, this is really giving us a window into a population that we don't have a lot of information about.

So while we normally have a lot of data on medically attended influenza, people who are going to the doctor's office, people are going to the hospital, we really have little information on people who are sick but are not going to the doctor's office. So this is really a great opportunity to see what's going on in that population. And what we found is we are finding flu. We did find some influenza. And in addition to influenza, we tested it also for some other. respiratory pathogens. And just like you would expect, it's a little bit of a viral soup, some other things going on there.

But one interesting thing that we did find was, as every flu season is interesting, I should say, is that we did see sort of a change from the dominant strain in the flu near you data. So at the beginning of the season, we were seeing more influenza AH1, but towards the middle, towards the end of the season, we were seeing it switch over to influenza A8. and that was reflected in our other data as well. So like I said, it's given a nice supplement to the rest of our influenza surveillance data. How would you compare this to last season? If I recall, last year was a pretty severe flu season, wasn't that?

Last season was record-breaking in a number of ways. I mean, we had record number of hospitalizations, record number of deaths due to influenza, you know, a lot of the indicators that we used to describe how severe a season it was. And certainly I want to say any influenza season is severe, and that we do have people that get very sick and very died. But certainly it was nowhere as severe as it was last season. So for that, we're grateful. We are.

So how much longer do we have to endure the season? Well, that is a million-dollar question. But I think it's safe to say that we certainly have, you know, several weeks left of activity. And it could depend on what part of the country you're in. But at least in Minnesota, really just hit peak activity within the past couple of weeks. So we're really still expecting high activity in the weeks to come. So we're definitely not out of the woods yet.

You know, speaking of last year, adding to the severe flu outbreak, we also did not have a vaccine that worked very well. How is the cocktail this year working? It's the cocktail. I like, yeah, I like that expression. Well, you know, unfortunately, the vaccines that we're able to produce right now are not 100% effective. So you're always going to have, you know, the possibility of getting a vaccine and still, you know, potentially getting the flu. So, you know, for this season, I believe it's in the upper 40s as far as percent effective. But that's for getting influenza. Now, if you look at other outcomes such as being hospitalized for influenza or dying of influenza, you know, the efficacy is going to be, you know, much higher.

So definitely still worth it. But I think, you know, I think the search is on for a vaccine that does have better efficacy. But definitely still worth it to get vaccinated. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about the flu near you with Kristen Baltusitis, Karen Martin, and Ariel Zich, and about this flu season. When we say flu map, Karen, some people think that you're trying to make a weather forecast. for the flu, but you're interested in surveillance, right? There is a difference.

Yes, I'm sorry. Did you say Karen? Yes. Yes. For surveillance, yes. So right now with flu, the difficulty with flu is that it is, and I think it was mentioned before, the virus is constantly changing. And so what we are trying to do is we are trying to gather enough data and surveillance

data is finding out who is getting sick and, you know, are there certain groups or certain people who are getting disproportionately affected so that we can better target our interventions, be that vaccination, or do we need to get some better public health messaging about how to better prevent, you know, the spread of disease? So that's, you know, when we put out maps and talk about surveillance. We're really talking about, you know, who is sick and where are basic. Kristen, how many people do you need to report to be able to make a surveillance map? So, based upon some of our studies, we notice that if you have like about 300 to about 500

individuals within a given geographical area, you can track the ILI symptoms within that population fairly well. Obviously, the more individuals that you have, the better your estimates will be. So we encourage everybody to participate. And so you'll be collecting data all year round, right? How can people participate? Go to our website? Yep.

If you go to Flu near you, you can register to be a reporter. And we do encourage individuals to report all year around. So we don't just track symptoms associated with influenza. We track other symptoms. So a few years ago, back in 2014, there was an outbreak of the intra-neurovirus. So we were able, even though that was in September and prior to the start of, of that flu season. We were able to kind of track that virus within our population. So it's important that we get these baselines all throughout the year.

Always important. And Ariel, can people go over to the SIFRIS that site and look it up, stuff they want to say? Yes. Yes, please come and navel gaze with us. Look at how you guys all fared. I think, you know, we mentioned the percentage of individuals in Science Friday's cohort who got sick. That percentage over time is available on our site in ScienceFriday.com. see the link right on the home page, but also browse a little bit, too, and explore some of the differences between cohorts. Certainly, I think you'll be surprised at some of the things we found and didn't find when we started making some of those comparisons. And Dr. Martin, one last question a little bit out of left field for you as a senior epidemiologist

because I have you here on the phone. Do you think we will start to track measles outbreaks? Well, we definitely are tracking measles outbreaks. And, you know, we definitely are tracking measles outbreaks. And, you know, unlike flu where we cannot track every case, we are definitely doing our best to track every case of measles. But as far as on the something like flu near you, you know, I would hope that every case of measles would be immediately reported to a health care facility and a health department rather than just on the Internet. But I think it does have the potential to track other types of diseases. such as a rash illness, but I would hope that measles in particular would have a little more urgency. But that's my opinion. Karen Martin, the senior epidemiologist at Minnesota Department of Health in St. Paul,

Kristen Balticitis, research assistant for flu near you, and Ariel Zich, Science Friday's Education Director. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much, I, Russ. And as Ariel says, you can go to our website to see those flu-new-U stats, and we also have an article up there where you can see the flu virus. You can see it up close under an electron microscope. It's pretty interesting to look at. Go to Science Friday.com.

One last thing before we go, Science Friday is putting on a night of science and spirits at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. Ever wonder about the scientific origin behind the word alcohol? I'm sure you have, and you want to learn how to make a spirit with your own saliva? Hmm. Discover with us on Friday. That's April 5th. Go to ScienceFriety.com slash cocktail. to grab your ticket before a last call,

ScienceFriday.com slash cocktail. Discover Friday, April 5th. That's going to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. That's about all the time we have today. We had technical help from Sarah Fishman, Kevin Wolfrich Kim. Our director is Charles Berkowitz, senior producer, is Christopher and Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather.

Of course, every day now is Science Friday because we are all over social community. You can have your smart speaker play in addition of Science Friday whenever you want. I'm Ira Flato in New York.