Science Friday - James Webb Focused Image, Decarbonize Your Home, Wildlife Crime. March 18, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

The James Webb Telescope Releases Its First Focused Image This week eager astronomers got an update on the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched last December. After a long period of tweaking and alignment, all 18 mirrors of the massive orbiting scope are now in focus.  In a briefing this week, Marshall Perrin, the Webb deputy telescope scientist, said that the team had achieved diffraction limited alignment of the telescope. “The images are focused as finely as the laws of physics allow,” he said. “This is as sharp an image as you can get from a telescope of this size.”  Although actual scientific images from the scope are still months away, the initial test images had astronomers buzzing. Rachel Feltman, executive editor at Popular Science, joins Ira to talk about the progress on JWST, and other stories from the week in science, including plans to launch a quantum entanglement experiment to the International Space Station, an update on the COVID-19 epidemic, and a new report looking at the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. They’ll also tackle the habits of spiders that hunt in packs, and the finding that a galloping gait may have started beneath the ocean’s waves.    The Climate Crisis Is Driving New Home Improvements A lot of the changes that need to happen to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius need to happen at a huge, international level. But nearly a fifth of carbon emissions in the U.S. come from our homes. Are there things we can do at home to help the climate crisis? And how effective are individual actions? Threshold is a podcast telling stories about our changing environment. And as their fourth season explores what it will take for the world to keep global warming under the crucial 1.5 benchmark, reporter Nick Mott explores what individuals can do to decarbonize their homes. Mott talks to Ira Flatow about his own home improvement project, in a preview of Threshold’s next episode.   From Succulents To Bugs: Exploring Wildlife Crime The world of science is surprisingly ripe with true crime stories. Consider case number one: Deep in South Africa’s Northern Cape, a rare and tiny succulent grows: the Conophytum. Demand for succulents skyrocketed during the pandemic, as more and more people got into the plant keeping hobby. But these succulents only grow in very specific conditions, and poachers will go to great lengths to nab them. The story is the subject of a recent investigation published in National Geographic. Or case two: It’s 2018, and a theft has occurred at the Philadelphia Insectarium, a bug museum and education center. In a daring daylight raid, thousands of creatures were taken from the insectarium—right under the nose of the CEO. No one has ever been charged with a crime. This bizarre big story quickly made the rounds of local and national news, which left out the most interesting details, including a surprise ending. The new documentary series “Bug Out” takes us through the twists and turns of this story, from retracing the events of the day of the heist, to a deep look at the illegal international insect trade. The four episodes of “Bug Out” are available to watch now on IMDB TV and Prime Video.   Joining Ira to chat about these wildlife true crime stories are Dina Fine Maron, senior wildlife crime reporter for National Geographic and Ben Feldman, director and executive producer of “Bug Out.”   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 Irafledo. Later in the hour, a look at upping your home energy efficiency and some true wildlife crime. But first, this week, eager astronomers got an update on the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope, and boy, were they happy. After a long period of tweaking and alignment, all 18 mirrors of the massive orbiting scope are now brilliantly in focus. In a briefing this week, Marshall Perrin, the Webb Deputy Telescope scientist, describe the level of precision. This is a process that we've prepared and practiced for years, and now we've had a chance to run that plan, and it's just an absolute thrill to be able to say that everything worked.

And we now have achieved what's called diffraction limited alignment of the telescope. The images are focused together as finely as the laws of physics allow. This is as sharp an image as you can get from a telescope of this size. Here to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Rachel Felt, Chapman, Executive Editor at Popular Science. Welcome back, Rachel. Thanks so much for having me, Ira. You're welcome. Okay, so the Web Telescope mirrors are all aligned and working well so far. A big step, right? Yeah, this is huge. To have all of these mirrors aligned is quite a feat. It's a multi-step process that they started back in January. Combined, they make a collection area that's about six times as big as Hubble's mean mirror. But of course,

making a space mirror that large, that wasn't too heavy and unwieldy to get into space, was the reason that they engineered these super high-tech multifaceted mirrors, but then the challenge is to make them one perfectly smooth surface, and that required precision down to the nanoscale. So this is very cool. Okay, so walk us through. How do you line up all those segments? What do you use in space there?

Previously, you know, in some previous steps of this, those 18 mirrors were all individually pointed on this one star in the Milky Way called HD 8446, very poetic name. And previously, we were basically getting 18 mediocre images of this one star. And once the alignment was perfect, they combined to create one really, really, really awesome image of that star. Yeah. Yeah. It is a very pretty picture, and you can see it up on our website, and you can see other stuff

in that photo as well. Yeah, exactly. So obviously, the image of the star itself is beautiful, beautiful resolution. But what's really cool is that you can see other galaxies behind it. And that is exactly, well, one of the many things that we're excited about the JWST being able to do. You know, it's going to have that depth of fields that's going to, allow it to look at, you know, some of the oldest galaxies in the universe. Wow. And so when, when is all this tinkering done and when does it really go to work?

Yeah, exactly. So obviously, it's very exciting to see any images at all from this telescope that we've been anticipating for so long. But these are, of course, still just part of the testing and calibration phase. And it's going to be sometime during the summer that we actually see it starting its scientific mission and hopefully shortly after we'll start to see some beautiful images. Cool. Okay. Let's go on to other space news. Some of my favorite kind of stuff and I'm talking about some spooky quantum world stuff. NASA is going to launch a quantum entanglement experiment into space. Wow. Tell us about that. Yeah. So it's funny because this is just like a little thing, the size of a milk carton that's going to launch.

to the ISS later this year and get kind of stuck outside one of the airlocks. It doesn't look too exciting, but yes, it is a quantum experiment. And the idea is for this to be getting us one small step closer to being able to use quantum computing in such a way that like we can have quantum sensors in space and quantum computers on Earth talking to each other instantaneously. It used to be called our Einstein called it spooky action at a distance, right? This entanglement. Right, yeah. So photons have this really interesting and spooky quality of if they become entangled.

They act as if they're connected no matter how far they're physically drawn apart or what barriers lie between them. So in theory, if you create and maintain entangled particles like this, you could create a quantum network of computers or sensors. these nodes of entangled photons that can share information over great distances, even across the vastness of space, theoretically, of course. Theoretically, of course. Okay, let's go back to Earth for a minute, shall we? And some more sobering news because COVID isn't going away anytime soon, is it? No, unfortunately not.

The good news first is that U.S. COVID metrics are very much improved from that high point of the Omicron spike a couple months ago. Deaths are going down, hospitalizations are going down, cases are going down. But unfortunately, we may be jumping the gun a little bit on our lowering of funding and protection and protective action. Yeah, because we need to keep up research into this, because it's probably going to keep mutating. Right, exactly. So a lot of European countries are seeing surges. And generally, throughout the pandemic, that's been an indication that the U.S. can expect another surge. And yes, COVID is still mutating. Recently, researchers confirmed that it does seem very likely that there is a so-called

delta-crone mutation, meaning that they're seeing strains of the virus that have some of the mutations we saw in Delta and some from Omicron. Now, that doesn't mean it will have the worst of both of those strains. It doesn't mean that at all, and mutation is normal. But the reason for concern is that there's a lack of funding, there's a general sense that the U.S. is just kind of done with the pandemic. And then we also have waning immunity. The most vulnerable folks got boosted mostly in the fall, which means their protection has dropped significantly since then. And we see mask and vaccine mandates dropping in places like New York City. I was on the subway the other day and suddenly like no one was wearing a mask, which I don't get because like it's stinky

on the subway. It's a great place to wear a mask. And then, of course, kids under five are still not able to be vaccinated. So, you know, while we are doing much better than we were a couple months ago, we really have to stay vigilant so that we can not slide back. Yeah. We're waiting for more funding to come through Congress. You have a story for us about diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. Yeah. So this new report from the Alzheimer's Association suggests that more than half of Americans may be mistaking what could be early signs of dementia for normal aging. They surveyed about 2,400 people on symptoms of what's called mild cognitive impairment or MCI. And that doesn't necessarily progress to severe dementia. It only does in 10 to 15% of people,

but it is a warning sign. And it's generally a sign that something is wrong. It's not actually a harmless side effect of aging the way many Americans seem to think that it is. So what's a take-home message here? What should people do? Yeah. So, I mean, MCI is like things like, forgetting important info, losing the ability to like make sound decisions, not being able to sense the passage of time, impaired visual perception. It's the kind of stuff that people would be like, oh, I'm having a senior moment. And the thing is that like lack of sleep, poor nutrition, and vitamin deficiencies can all cause MCI and are all treatable. So nobody should panic and think that, you know, having a little lapse of memory means they are certainly going to develop

severe dementia. But you should be proactive and talk to your doctor about it. it because the truth is you probably can do something to regain that little lapse of cognitive power, which is great. And if not, then you can catch that increasing dementia early, which means you can work with a doctor to find both behavioral and lifestyle and perhaps even pharmaceutical interventions that, you know, help you maintain your good quality of life and health for longer. Great. I'm glad we're talking about that. Let's move on to something a little bit lighter. You have a story. I'm not sure that people want to hear about because it involves spiders. It does. Not only spiders, but they're hunting in packs. Tell us about that, please. Yeah, I personally was not

aware before this study that there are social spiders. And I have to say that's one animal I don't really want to think about being social. But about 20 of the roughly 50,000 known spider species, do live in colonies. And an elosimis exomius actually can live in packs as big as a thousand, which is, I don't love that. Wow. Wow. Yeah, and the South American spider, in those packs, they build connected webs so they can span several

feet collectively. And it was already suspected that they used the vibrations on those webs to coordinate hunting because they do this kind of coordinated swarm that allows them to take. take down prey 15 times larger than each individual spider, which again, I don't really love. But scientists were really curious about how they do this. And it turns out they monitor not just the way the prey is moving, but also they monitor the vibrations in the web of each other's movements. And they use that information to like start and stop so that they can all time their arrival at the prey to be in sync because otherwise a little spider is going to get eaten by like this big bug they're

trying to kill. So frightening, but fascinating. And they're in South America. Yeah. Okay, finally, as we gallop toward the weekend, you have a story about how the gallop came to be. Yeah. So most humans are familiar with the gallop by way of horses, but it's a really fascinating movement. You know, when animals walk or trot, that's a very evenly timed pattern known as a symmetrical gaites. And to travel more quickly, a lot of animals switch to asymmetrical gates. They could gallop where all four feet are hitting the ground at like unevenly spaced intervals. There are even aquatic animals that use their fins to kind of do this, which is called crutching or punting. So it was already pretty widely accepted that galloping must have evolved mold.

multiple times throughout the animal kingdom. But in this new study, researchers observed movements of hundreds of species, and they concluded that these asymmetrical gates emerged probably first in ancient fish-like animals before vertebrates, before anything, you know, crawled up onto land or galloped up onto land, as the case may be. So, yeah, they now think that different groups of animals may have actually gained and then lost the ability to gallop. So that's fascinating. know we're talking about a pre-vertebrate, like, fish-like creature from 450 million years ago. And so the question is, why did some animals give up the ability to gallop? So scientists will be trying to answer that question next.

Well, I'm still getting over fish galloping. Thank you, Rachel. Thanks, Ira. Have a good weekend. You too. Rachel Feltman, executive editor at Popular Science. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, what you can do to make your home use,

less energy and combat climate change, and the strange case of a, well, an alleged bug heist. We'll be right back. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. To those of us of a certain age, the spike in oil and gasoline prices is deja vu. I'm talking about the oil embargo of the 1970s, when not only was gasoline expensive, it was rationed. The Carter administration asked everyone to fight back by saving.

energy, with President Carter calling energy conservation the moral equivalent of war. Well, here we are again. With energy conservation, the single biggest action you can take to save money. With climate change long preceding the current moment's high prices, I've been trying to make changes in my own energy life. I've taken advantage of credits my state and utility offer to insulate my home and buy high-efficiency appliances. Reporter Nick Mott at the podcast Threshold is of the same mind, setting out to find ways he could save energy the moment he became a homeowner. On the balmy first day of summer 2021, my partner Leah and I sat in a fancy office room in a town

called Livingston, population about 8,000 in southern Montana. A stranger was guiding us through signing a slew of documents that would change our lives forever. We're going to start off with a settlement. We were buying our first home. Leah and I were excited. We both loved our house and the town. But I was also feeling the weight of this new stage in life. And then if we can just get you to sign and date that one, please? By the end of the signing, some of the documents started to sound straight up absurd. This is our agreement to be agreeable.

This one's agreeing to agree. Agreeing to agree. If only we could use those more in life. Yeah. There are your coffees. Oh wow. Thanks. Congratulations. We own, we did this, we over to homeowners now?

We were. And we had a fat packet of papers to prove it. Nearly a fifth of carbon emissions in the US come directly from things we do in our homes, as in how we collectively heat up our houses, cool them down, and keep the lights on. But my house is one of more than 80 million single family homes across the country.

It is a grain of sand in a vast desert. But I am now directly responsible for that grain of sand. And I think home is this really interesting place to discuss climate change, because eventually we'll all confront the climate crisis, and the place where we'll most personally feel its effects and grapple with how to respond is at home, with our loved ones, where we let our messy, imperfect self-show. So after that frenzy of signatures, I was thinking, if we need to cut back on carbon in the global economy in a major way, what's that mean for one single house right here?

Where could I, an overwhelmed and underprepared new homeowner, even start on this journey? Let me introduce you to our home. Behind our creaky gate lies a creamy, yellow, one-story house with red trim built about a century ago. Somebody who's seeing it for the first time might call it quaint, which I think might be code for old, but in kind of a cute way. We love the house and it's very livable, but look anywhere and you can find something that needs taken care of. But Leah and I were interested in making changes with climate and emissions in mind, which is why I invited Chris Dorsey over to look at the place. Hey, there. Chris?

Chris. I'm Chris Dorsey. Hey, nice to meet you. Chris is the head of Montana State University's Weatherization Training Center. And he says that training center is kind of like... High school shop class for grown-ups. You know, central to our mission is to give them skills they need in order to move us a little bit closer to sustainable housing for all. Weatherization means preparing a house for anything nature throws at it. rain, wind, heat, cold.

And weatherizing also keeps your appliances from working overdrive, cutting down on both utility bills and emissions. Chris and I sit down at the dining room table, and immediately he says, my place is off to a good start, because it's small, which is a compliment, I guess. So there's no amount of money you can spend on photovoltaic panels and smart home controls and expensive construction and build a $5,000-square-foot, $2 million home and call it efficient.

it does not exist. They're mutually exclusive terms. So in terms of impact per person, the best thing can do is build yourself or find and buy or remodel a modest, a small, a simple home. The science backs this up. Studies show the more floor space you have, as in the bigger your house, the more energy it tends to use. So we've got one thing going for us. Our house is small. But Chris had a lot of ideas for things we could do to lower emissions from our home. When we bought the place, I was excited about giving the kitchen a big makeover, new countertops, cabinets, the works. But Chris said it's what's behind the ugly cabinets I wanted to get rid of that could make

all the difference. The spots we don't normally go or pay any attention to, as in the insulation, the stuff that keeps hot air in in the winter and traps cool air in in the summer. Some of these fixes can be relatively small investments that go a long way towards making your house more efficient and set the stage for bigger up grades down the road, things like crawling around in the attic to spray foam into gaps that could leak air from the main house below, or blasting more insulation into the attic, or more insulation on the walls. Nobody sits around at a cocktail party and brags about their insulation. It's kind of

a non-issue. It's a piece of hidden infrastructure, right? But it's that hidden stuff, which really is most critical in how homes tend to operate. He said there's sort of two categories of changes we could be talking about, tweaking what we already have so it uses less energy or investing in new stuff like fancy, efficient appliances, even things like solar panels. So in simple terms, make what we have use less carbon or buy new stuff that uses less carbon, or both. He said those changes can make a real difference in quality of life, too. Studies over the last three decades or so suggest Americans spend on average 90% of their lives indoors. And since we spend that much time inside, The impact of your home on human health is huge.

In fact, one recent study said the air in many homes is so toxic it would be illegal under federal law if it were outside. But there's no legislation like the Clean Air Act that applies inside your home. And for indoor air quality, natural gas, which often powers furnaces and stoves, is a particular source of trouble. Gas stoves especially can create air quality comparable to secondhand smoke. Kids are most at risk. And studies show a correlation between cooking with gas stoves and asthma.

The same pollutants can make people more vulnerable to viruses like the coronavirus and have higher rates of respiratory illness and cardiovascular disease. Luckily, at our home, we've got an old electric stove. It's not necessarily all that efficient, but it is one step above natural gas. That doesn't necessarily mean we're off the hook in terms of indoor air quality, though. Among the hidden hazards would be the discussion about, you know, basements and crawl spaces. What the heck is down there? And do you really want to breathe that air? Do you really want to be a part of that biological community,

which is in your basement or crawl space? So I think you and I are going to go to your basement and take a look and address some of these issues. There's a lot of options out there. Yeah. Do you want to do that now? Let's do it. Let's do it.

Yeah. Here we go. Chris opens our cellar door and we walk down the steps. We enter a small dark room with ceilings just low enough to need to hunch over. Chris turns his attention to what looks like an ancient, oversized filing cabinet in the corner of our crawl space, our furnace. About half of homes are heated with natural gas in the U.S., my included. Keeping House is warm is far and away the largest source of emissions from homes.

And in our case... I don't know how many generations of spiders have lived and died in this thing. How often do you change your furnace filters? We can't find our furnace filter. That's a trick question then. Yeah. Let's look for your furnace filters. We couldn't find it because the whole device had been seriously

a jerry rig to fit our house. There wasn't even a slot like in a normal furnace where a filter belongs. Our whole house had been kind of built that way. A little bit over time, making deal with what already existed, but Chris wasn't deterred by that. I'm going to pop this cover off and take a look at first. That there's a sound for radio. That's just what I was thinking. There's your furnace filter right there. Oh yeah? Not too hard to find it. Not a hard to find at all. No, it's laid down and it is completely perfectly utterly useless. So what this means is that every bit of of dirt and grudeau that gets sucked into the return grills in your house, comes down here and gets heated and harmlessly just pump back upstairs for you to breathe and rebreath.

Oh, wonderful. The furnace was installed in the 1960s, so a new machine would be orders of magnitude more efficient. Unfortunately, Chris said, in Montana, there are woefully few incentives that could help us replace the thing. Chris left us with a much better sense of what we could do to start decarbonizing, but figuring out how and when to make those changes and in what order was up to. to us. I wanted to put our little place in the bigger picture nationally and see if that could help isolate one or two things we might begin with. So I called Leah Stokes, a professor of political

science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Yes, there are two lias in this story, one's my partner and the other is a professor. This Leah was quick to answer how homes can fit in with the kind of massive national transition we need to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. She says the systems change we need can be boiled down to two things. Clean electricity plus electrification. In Leah's eyes, electrification, meaning converting all the stuff that runs purely on natural gas and other fossil fuels into electric, is a major part of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. In terms of houses, she means converting almost everything in our homes to run on electricity,

especially the big draws like furnaces and hot water heaters. Right now, the grid we plug all that stuff into is pretty, dirty. It varies based on where you're at in the country, but nationally our grid is about 60% fossil fuels. So she says at the same time that we're electrifying everything we can, we need to be quickly increasing the amount of renewable energy on our electric grid. And if we make all the changes we need, she says, it turns out that between clean electricity and electrification, we can cut carbon pollution by probably 75% economy-wide. Leah's actually working on electrifying her own home right now,

and she told me that spurred her to ask all kinds of questions about if it still makes sense to convert to electric, even when you're pulling from a dirty grid. Turns out, based on research from the Rocky Mountain Institute, that it makes sense to switch to electric appliances pretty much everywhere at this point in time. That research shows that converting everything in homes to run on electricity substantially reduces carbon emissions,

even if those homes are connected to grids powered by fossil fuels. And in most cases, electrification leads to lower utility bills, too. Leah mentioned a couple all-electric technologies that can be key here to replace their gas counterparts, induction stoves which use electricity and magnetism to get your food cooking, and heat pumps, which are kind of like air conditioners that also run in reverse, extracting heat from outside, condensing it, and bringing it inside. It's interesting to me to hear that you're trying to electrify your own home. When you're like thinking about it, do you wait till the end of life to replace stuff?

Like, what do you replace first? I'm also personally grappling with this. Like we just bought a house and it's very old. Where do you start? Well, rewiring America, which is this great organization that does a lot of thinking on this, they say you definitely want to do it at end of life. One study suggests that we need to replace 80 million appliances in 50 million households over the next 10 years. I immediately thought of my own aging home in appliances.

Our spider-filled furnace was more than 50 years old. So I thought my house, with its ancient, ratty, ready-to-fail appliances, is also sort of an opportunity. I'm going to have to change things out anyway, and as I do, I can try to decarbonize and electrify every step of the way. But making those changes, it turned out, was much easier in theory than in practice. That was reporter Nick Mott at his podcast Threshold, talking about his adventures in home energy efficiency on Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Nick Mod is here with me now, joining me from Livingston, Montana. Hi there, Nick. Hey, Ira.

I can sympathize with your efforts to save energy in your home, and I take issue with your home experts saying, no one ever talks about how much insulation they have in their house. I talk about it all the time. I've definitely become the kind of person that talks about insulation at cocktail parties, and also on radio shows, apparently. How else did things turn out so much harder in practice. Of course, everything looks great on paper. And when you start to do it in practice, right, it's got to be harder than you imagine. I really, really want to heat pump. And that's one of the biggest struggles we're having right now. So we did find one really promising person with a bid that's possibly doable, but it's still super duper expensive. And even though we want

electrify, because it's Montana and it gets super cold here sometimes, it's looking like we might still need to have some gas backup. Another thing is just the order of how we should do things. So an example is we want to put insulation in our attic. That seems easy. We got a bid for it. But, you know, there are a bunch of stuff I had to do up there before we could even take that step. So one of those things was I crawled around up there and sealed a bunch of holes into the house just to keep the house more contained. Also, I needed to replace the bathroom fan and the range hood and I need to vent those through the roof. One contractor who was looking at our place said like anything we do is kind of like polishing a turd. Like nothing's going to be perfect here. That's what

I've really learned. But we're going to keep trying to make it better and better. You know, you're a homeowner. I'm a homeowner. Have you looked into how renters can make these kinds of changes or what they can do to save energy? I have. And first off, I'm a white, relatively middle class, homeowner. So looking at just my house leaves out all kinds of people in different scenarios, not just renters. But renters are a particularly tricky area. So if you're renting, like you're often the one paying the cost for your leaky house or your inefficient furnace. But the owners are the people who can actually make those changes, and they don't feel that same pressure in their pocketbooks. But whether you're a renter or a homeowner, low-income communities

and especially low-income communities of color also pay a disproportionately high ratio of their income on utility bills. That's tied up with the history of redlining and segregation. And there There are these federal programs that work to help weatherize low-income households, but research shows that those programs often miss some of the people that need it the most, and that it leaves out other people who make too much money to qualify, but don't have the financial history to qualify for loans. They might need to make bigger changes. When you start digging into making houses more efficient and sustainable everywhere

all across the country, what you quickly start talking about is also justice and equity. Absolutely. Absolutely. And when we talk about what we should do as homeowners, it gets me thinking about the role of the individual in confronting climate change and the role of the government or collective in getting us to where we need to be. What did you learn about what we're obligated to do as individuals? Absolutely everybody I talked with for this story also ended up talking with me about climate guilt. You know, getting throwaway coffee cups or plastic bags of the grocery store, driving too much, even when you know, you shouldn't basically just being an imperfect human. And one thing I learned and that I think about a lot is that climate action isn't just this either or thing between the individual or the collective.

It can be both of those things at once. One of the more tangible takeaways, somebody told me, and this is from Leah Stokes, who you heard a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara, is that one of the most powerful things you can do is look for structural change on the individual level. That could be something like putting in a heat pump, for example. You know, you compare that to something like giving up meat. That's something you have to make a conscious decision about every time you eat food. But if you put in a new appliance like that, that's a one-time decision that stays around for decades. And if you move, that's also something that affects the next homeowner there too.

You know, one part of the equation is just states helping out or the federal government helping out, things like subsidies or rebates. It could also mean utility providers helping out. Another thing we need to do is prioritize cleaning up our grid. You know, getting more renewables online that could power all those heat pumps or or induction stoves and electric cars as they're adopted everywhere. Well, Nick, I wish you good luck with your house and especially that furnace. Well, thank you so much, Ira. Nick Mott reporter for the podcast Threshold,

which is focusing this season on climate change and the effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And for the full-length version of the story he just told us, that's coming next Tuesday. Check out our website for more information, and you can subscribe to Threshold wherever you get your podcasts. And we want to know what you are doing about climate change in your home, in your community. Send us a voice memo on the SciFRI Vox Pop app.

Tell us what improvements you've been making to reduce your fossil fuel emissions and saving energy. That's on the SciFri Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The stories you're about to hear are true. No names have been changed. On this day, 32 years ago, one of the most notorious art heists in history took place. In the early hours of March 18, 1990, 18 works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston. The case remains unsolved. Art museums are not the only place where high-stakes heists take place.

Deep in South Africa's northern Cape grows a tiny and rare succulent, the cannophytum. Demand for succulents skyrocketed during the pandemic as more and more people got into the plant-keeping hobby. But those succulents only grow in very specific conditions and poachers will go to great lengths to nab them. Here to explain this robbery is D.N. F. Marin, senior wildlife crime reporter for National Geographic, based in Washington, D.C. She is definitely not Joe Friday. Welcome back to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. So you travel to South Africa to report this story. Where exactly do these succulents grow? Yeah, these succulents are extremely rare.

They only grow in two provinces in South Africa, the Northern Cape and the Western Cape, and they also grow in Namibia. But as you mentioned, they're just extremely, extremely rare plants. They're about 100 species of conophytum, but some of them are so rare, they grow in just the equivalent of a couple football fields or they grow on the edge of one cliff. So if you are a collector and you are taking these from the wild, you could potentially take and wipe out the entire wild. population. Oh, no kidding. What do they look like? It's interesting. They are such tiny, tiny plants. They look a little bit like a button or a dumpling. Some of them aren't bigger than a thumbnail. These are so, so small that poachers literally use brooms to sweep for them. I saw the bristle marks in South Africa in the dirt. They camouflage perfectly with lichen and rocks around them,

which is in theory great for their survival. But some of these plants are really striking. Again, they're very tiny. So you really have to be. searching for them. But they might have polka dots or stripes. They can flower in white, in pink, and red. But for most of the year, they're just these tiny greenish-brown blobs. They have a little sun

sheath around them to keep the sun from really hurting them. So to someone who's not a big hobbyist, they might not look like much. Well, you know, I am a plant guy and I have had succulence over the years. But I can't imagine what there is about the

cano that make them such in high demand. Well, definitely one of the things is that they're so rare. My understanding is, you know, that in itself is very alluring. And the idea that they can be really striking. And they're so miniature, right? So if you wanted them for your windowsill, for your household, they would be, you know, unique and beautiful in their miniature status.

What brought me to the story initially was tips from plant hobbyists who told me that during the pandemic, international demand for ornamental plants exploded. And this craze, of course, really hurt South Africa, where rare succulents like these kind of vitamins grow. And the poachers that are coming in and stealing these plants, you know, are getting these demands primarily from China, from Japan, and from South Korea. In fact, you quote a detective in your story who says that these rare plants are worth more than heroin?

They're worth more than heroin by weight? That's astounding. Yeah, it is a really striking thing. These sales are occurring online. And to someone that wants them, they're willing to pay top dollar. We don't typically, in National Geographic, talk about the actual price because we don't want to, you know, help fuel demand. But the range for some of these plants can be quite significant into the thousands. Now, I know that succulents grow very slowly. Does that make conserving these plants then really difficult? Great question, and the answer is yes. These plants can take years to flower. And if you want a significant sized plant, and by significant, I mean maybe walnut sized or even the size of my fist, that will take dozens of years, maybe 100. So the plants that are being dug up might be 100 years old and still quite small, quite quite small. And those are the ones that collectors want because they're bigger. Now, conophytum, some of them do grow in greenhouses in captivity. You can find them here in. the United States in greenhouses. Those ones are teeny tiny. Those are like the size of a thumbnail or a couple fingers put together.

So much, much, much smaller. You know, I'm trying to think of every time you have a theft, you have to have somebody who gets the plants and resell them, but you have someone on the ground who actually does the stealing, I guess. Who are they? Yeah, what's interesting, one of the things I really found fascinating about this story, is kind of fight on poaching at a small scale was not new. foreigners would come into South Africa and collect these plants for years. And, you know, there were

arrests that took place, but the crime is relatively low scale. But during the pandemic, when there were lockdowns that made it very difficult to travel, they started recruiting local poachers in South Africa to do the work. And so there'd be middlemen that were in the cities in South Africa, and there'd be the buyers in South Korea or in China contacting these locals. And the locals are the ones, course that are being caught for the crime, but they're not the ones that are, you know, getting top dollar for the plants. So people have been arrested and fined for poaching or no? Well, the reality is that arrests are happening, but the judicial system for this kind of crime moves incredibly slowly. So there's actually only been a handful of prosecutions so far, even though,

as I discussed in the story, some of these poachers are showing up at individual farms where these plants happen to grow. We're talking big sheep farms that are 25,000, 50,000 acres showing up multiple times a week to try to find these plants. But the few cases that have made it to prosecution, there were just fines of a couple hundred dollars, even though by law, the crime could hold a punishment as large as 10 years in prison. What's interesting is there is a double standard for foreigners that come in and commit these crimes. In 2019, four Chinese poachers were fined almost $10,000 each for the crime. And in another case, two South Korean nationals were each fined about $160,000 for stealing Cano's. Connows is the nickname for Connofitum in Western Cape. And one was

deported, and the other was actually extradited to California because he and associates were charged with stealing succulents from state parks along the northern coast of that state. So again, not Cono Phidem, a different kind of succulent, but showing just this huge international demand, right? That they were stealing these plants, again, to be sold back in South Korea. So succulents are really popular. Any sense of what the future for conosucculins could look like? I mean, they must be, as you say, popular enough that people really want them. And greenhouse-grown canals are gaining in popularity? Might it help the wild ones if you can grow them in the greenhouse? Yeah, there's a lot of discussion about that exact question. But

one of the concerns is, well, there are already connofitam's grown in captivity in South Korea, in China, in the United States, but still this poaching demand exists because people want the big plants, the ones that take a really long time to grow. And when you're growing in a greenhouse, you know, people typically sell off plants maybe a year or a couple years in if you grow them in a greenhouse. So there's still the small plants. So it's a tough nut to crack. But South Africa is exploring the idea of would that be part of the solution, could part of the solution, part of the solution be growing them in captivity and also making sure that there are more opportunities for alternative livelihoods in this area of South Africa around nature-based tourism and other things

so that people wouldn't be as desperate for cash to turn to these kinds of crimes. But it's a really difficult question. You're a wildlife crime reporter. Where does the poaching of plants rank in wildlife poaching of other things or animals? It's interesting. I've been in the wildlife crime reporting space for a few years now, and I've just been aghast at the number and variety of things that people really want. I've written about leech smuggling, like medical leeches. I've written about songbird issues. I've written about, you know, elephant tusks, of course, and just there's such variety.

Of course, the big ticket items are the ones that you might hear about, like, you know, rhino horn, of course. But where the plants fall is a little difficult to say because when you are really categorizing a legal activity, there isn't good tracking, as you would suspect. But this is a high value item. So it's growing and it's getting a lot of attention. Thank you for giving us your attention, Dina. Thank you. Dina Fine Marin, a senior wildlife crime reporter for National Geographic based in Washington, D.C. And now our second crime story, which leads us to the underground world of the insect trade.

It's 2018, the site, a theft at the Philadelphia Insectarium. That's a bug museum and education center. In a daring daylight raid, thousands of creatures were taken from the insectarium right under the nose of the CEO. Oh, no one has ever been charged with a crime. This bizarre, big story quickly made the rounds of local and national news, which left out the most interesting details, including a surprise ending. Not anymore. A new documentary series, Bugout, takes us through the twists and turns of this story,

from retracing the events of the day of the heist to a deep look at the illegal international insect trade. The four-episode docis series is available to watch now on IMDB TV and Prime Video. Joining me to talk about it is Ben Feldman, director and executive producer of Bugout based in New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks so much, Ira. Well, this is a great story. Let's start with the basics. When this news broke in 2018, tell us how many insects were said to have been stolen. Yeah, so the headline said that it was 7,000 live insects stolen, which figured to be about $50,000 worth of bugs,

which was obviously a pretty captivating headline. And there was also initially a good amount of commotion about it because a lot of these insects that were stolen were highly venomous. So the public was definitely a little freaked out here in Philly. I can imagine which bugs were actually taken? It was a wide spectrum, everything from, you know, Roach-Cob. colonies to venomous spiders, including tarantulas and this six-eyed sand spider, which really ended up getting a lot of the spotlight. Because if it bites you, it has the ability to, like, decay, to rot, like, you know, 30% of your body around where it bites.

But there were beetles and spiders and mantids and roaches and a whole, yeah, pretty wide gamut of bugs taken. That's cool. I mean, the scene of the crime originally in a documentary, as I say, is the Philadelphia Insectarium Robbery. But you also get into a lot of detail about the bugkeeping hobby. And how big is this hobby? Yeah. So for me, I mean, that was one of the most enjoyable things to discover, you know, by making this film is, you know, there's this very prevalent and widespread world out there of bug collectors. And this is an enormous hobby around the world, but also in the U.S. And, you know, I would, I would, you know, venture that within, you know, 75 miles or wherever you are listening, in the next couple of weeks, there's going to be an insect fair. You know, at some high school gym or some community center, you know, where people that are passionate in this hobby are going to be meeting up and buying and selling bugs and talking about

breeding strategies of different insects, and, you know, people, people are really into this. In case you've just joined us, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Ben Feldman, director and executive producer of Bugout. Well, if people are buying and selling bugs, this must be a big trade. There must be a big trade in bugs, right? It's definitely a big trade. You know, different parts of the world, different species are more popular. So I found out, you know, in Western Europe, the walking sticks are very popular to keep his pets.

You know, in a lot of Asia, beetles are very prominent. Here in the U.S., there was definitely a tarantula craze. I think that that, you know, is still popular, but it's probably died down a bit from the 90s when we saw him, like, home alone. You know, the brother has a tarantula. Like, that was, you know, really kind of a popular thing in the U.S. for a while. You know, whenever there is a legal trade, there's always an issue. illegal black market trade. And it turns out there is one in the bug industry too, right? There is definitely an illicit trade in the insect hobby, as it's called. And, you know, that was a

really fascinating thing to get some insight into. And, you know, so we got to interview, you know, different U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents and USDA agents who have, you know, worked undercover cases to bust these illegal bug traders. And yeah, there's definitely a pretty vibrant and pretty lucrative illegal bug trade. And is this where people actually go out into the wild and net the bugs and sell them illegally back home or wherever they can sell them? That's definitely partly how it's done. So, you know, in the show, we get to spend some time in Australia with this father-son duo who are big, you know, sellers and collectors and they travel the globe and find, you know, pretty rare species and pay

locals, pay kids to go out and get these species and then pack them into suitcases and fly them, you know, to Tokyo or other parts of the world and sell these things for enormous markups. I mean, just insane prices. And then we also go to Mexico and spend some time with Rodrigo, who's down there trying to fight the illegal trade of tarantulas in particular. And so here these wild life cartels are paying farmers pennies to collect these pretty rare tarantulas on their property, a lot of them that are protected. And then they act as a middleman and sell these, you know, throughout the world. And the U.S. is definitely a big market for those Mexican tarantulas.

There is a really good twist and turn in this. I don't want to give anything away. And in fact, no arrests have been made for this Philadelphia. in sectarian heist. Do you think you made a good case in this documentary for some kind of charges to be made? You know, it'll be interesting for sure to see what happens. I mean, no arrests have been made. But as, you know, the detective on the Philadelphia Police Department says, you know, he knows what happens. But he says, you know, it's a different thing, what you know and what you can prove and what you can take to a judge. So I certainly feel like, you know, we uncovered a lot here. And we were really able to get interviews from everyone, you know, that's part of this story and then get documents

through FOIA requests and other things and really tell the whole story and put everything out there for the audience to decide, you know, what happened here. It's a great story. It's a great story, Ben. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today and talk about it. Yeah, thank you so much. It's great to be here. And, yeah, I appreciate your interest in the story. Ben Feldman, director and executive producer, producer of Bugout, based in New York, and you can watch Bugout for free on IMDB TV and Amazon Prime. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Here's Kathleen Davis with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. Thanks, Ira. Wendy Coonrod is our stewardship manager.

Beth Rami is our controller. Valissa Mayors is our office manager. And I'm Kathleen Davis, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Kathleen. B.J. Leatherman composed our music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.