Science Friday - Limits On ‘Forever Chemicals’ In Drinking Water | An Important Winter Home For Bugs | Eclipse Drumroll

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

A long-awaited rule from the EPA limits the amounts of six PFAS chemicals allowed in public drinking water supplies. Also, some spiders, beetles, and centipedes spend winter under snow in a layer called the subnivium. Plus, a drumroll for the total solar eclipse.EPA Sets Limits On ‘Forever Chemicals’ In Drinking WaterThis week, the EPA finalized the first-ever national limits for the level of PFAS chemicals that are acceptable in drinking water supplies. Those so-called “forever chemicals,” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have long been used in products like fire retardants and oil-and water-repellent coatings, and are now ubiquitous in the global environment. Water treatment plants will now have to test and treat for several varieties of the chemicals, which have been linked to a variety of health problems in people.Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, joins SciFri producer Kathleen Davis to talk about the rule and its potential impact on water agencies. They’ll also talk about other stories from the week in science, including research into a new vaccine against urinary tract infections, theories that extend the multiverse into a many-more-worlds interpretation, the passing of particle physicist Peter Higgs, and a new front in the war on pest rats: rodent contraceptives.Where Snowpack Meets Soil: An Important Winter Home For BugsWhen winter rolls around and snow piles up, many insects head down to a small layer called the subnivium for the season.. This space, between snowpack and soil, shelters small insects, amphibians,and mammals from freezing temperatures.Arthropods as a whole are understudied, says Chris Ziadeh, graduate of the University of New Hampshire and lead author of a recent study about the distinct communities that live in the subnivium. Better understanding which creatures call the subnivium home in the winter, as well as their behavior, could help us conserve them as the climate warms.Guest host Kathleen Davis talks to Ziadeh about winter arthropod activity, species diversity, and why we should all care about protecting insects in our communities.Drumroll Please! A Performance For The Solar EclipsePeople found all manner of ways to celebrate the solar eclipse that happened earlier this week, but one Science Friday listener found a particularly musical way to take in the experience.Matt Kurtz, a sound artist and musician based in Akron, Ohio, realized his town would be in the path of totality for the April 8 eclipse. So with some funding from Akron Soul Train, a local artist residency, he put together a percussion section (complete with a gong) to perform a drumroll and build suspense up until the moment of totality. They performed in Chestnut Ridge Park to a crowd of onlookers.“When you hear a [drumroll], it forces you to be like, something’s about to happen,” he said in an interview. “It’s a way to pay attention.”As the gong rang out and the crowd cheered, Kurtz put down his sticks and experienced his first solar eclipse totality. “It was a release,” he said. “I had a couple minutes of peace where I got to look at the stars and feel where all this work went to.”Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

There's a hidden winter ecosystem between snowpack and soil. Wherever you step, you can actually reach down where your foot was just at, and you should feel a space right between the ground and the snow, and that's the submivium. It's Friday, April 12th, and it's the best day of the week. It's Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Shishana Bucksbaum. Contrary to what many people might think, insects don't just die out when the weather gets cold. Many of them head underground and wait out the season in this submivium. New research sheds more light onto this mysterious zone.

We'll get into that in just a bit. But first, guest host and sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis discusses the biggest science stories of the week. This week, the EPA unveiled national limits for the level of PFS chemicals that are acceptable in drinking water supplies. Those are the so-called forever chemicals that have commonly been used for things like fire retardants and also oil and water repellent coatings. And now are found just about everywhere. Water treatment plants will now have to test and treat for several varieties of the

chemicals. Here to explain that and other science stories of the week is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist. Welcome back, Sophie. Thanks for having me. So tell me about these PFAS chemicals. What are they and why is this such a big deal? You've probably heard of PFS chemicals or at least the nickname forever chemicals. These are substances that are really, really hard to destroy. And they've been associated with health issues, a higher risk of certain cancers, reproductive issues. There are things that the EPA really wants to get out of the drinking water.

And that's exactly what they've done with this restriction. They've restricted levels of six different PIFAs. The problem is that there's 12,000 different kinds of PIFAs. And when we realize there's an issue with one, a lot of the companies who are using it will replace it with a substance that's actually pretty similar chemically. So there's the risk that, you know, these companies will say, look, we're responding to this restriction.

We're going to phase out this chemical, but they'll just replace it with something that's quite similar. So the EPA is limiting the amount of these chemicals that's being found? The EPA has set these limits for how much is allowable in drinking water. So the point where the restriction is is with the water companies. Previously, there's been cases where one company sued a manufacturer of PFAS because, you the manufacturer had made it, that's how it had gotten into the drinking water supply in the first place. And so they thought that they should be the ones helping to pay for filtering it out of the water.

And they actually won that suit. So it's possible that there will be sort of a ripple effect from the EPA's restriction on drinking water, which will affect directly the people who manufacture these plastics. And do water companies know how to go about removing these chemicals? They do. You can use a certain kind of charcoal filter. You can use known techniques like reverse osmosis. They kind of know what to do. The issue is that just any of these technologies requires financial support.

And so the EPA has given them a few years to make sure that they're hitting those limits. Yeah, I mean, this sounds like a huge effort, and I assume it's going to be expensive. So is the government providing any support for doing this? Is there money to help? There actually is. So as part of the infrastructure bill that passed a few years ago, there's about $1 billion in funding available for states and territories that want to start testing and treating water for Pivas. And they also have some of that funding for people who own private wells, as well as for those bigger public water systems. So let's move on to another health story, which is quite different. This is a story about a possible new vaccine for urinary tract infections.

That's right. So urinary tract infections are the most common bladder infections. They disproportionately affect women. And about half of women will experience a UTI at least once over her lifetime. So we know how to treat them. We treat them with antibiotics, but, you know, antibiotics are kind of a harsh chemical. They kill all bacteria, not just the ones that you're aiming to kill. And they also can lead to issues such as antibiotic resistance. So there's been a couple different studies looking at, could we try to vaccinate people against UTIs instead of just waiting for people to get sick and then treating them?

And in this particular case, they wanted a vaccine that would be easy to take, that wouldn't have a risk of someone choking, and that would be pleasant. So they've developed an oral spray that is pineapple flavored that's sprayed under the tongue. The idea is you actually would get this spray treatment for three months every day getting the spray under the tongue. And then after that three month period, you would be considered vaccinated. And then they tested, they did a clinical trial, you know, how many of the people who received this treatment remained UTI-free. The test period was about nine years. A little more than half of people who received the treatment avoided UTIs for that whole period.

and most people in the study avoided them for an average of about four and a half years. So would this be a vaccine in theory that everyone would get or just if you've been really susceptible to UTIs? Yeah, this might be something that people who have suffered from recurrent UTIs would be interested in. You know, one and four people who get UTIs are prone to these repeat infections, which can be really rough, especially if you've got to, you know, take a bunch of antibiotics each time you get it. Okay, I'm still kind of stuck on the pineapple thing. I assume that's just so that it, like, tastes good enough that people are like, ooh, I'm going to take my vaccine. Exactly.

Yeah. The idea is that, you know, what's something that people would actually want to take every day? Because that treatment period's so long, you know, it's not as much fun to take a pill every day as it is to get a little pineapple spritz. Okay. Speaking of delicious medicine, we have another story. New York City is launching a new tactic in its war against rats. And that is birth control. Delicious birth control, to be exact.

There are these pellets that are packed with fat and salt and also with contraceptives. And the idea is they've just started a pilot to try to distribute these pellets and see if this can contribute to getting rid of rats. The idea isn't that this is like a standalone solution, but this is just one mitigation measure along with New York's attempt to, instead of putting garbage in loose, smelly bags on the sidewalk, to start putting them in containers. like most other cities do. That is another big step towards reducing the buffet for rats. Why is this better than the methods that have traditionally been used in the city against rats? What's happened before is they've tried to put out rodenticide, you know, poisons to poison rats and to keep the population down. But the problem is other animals eat rats.

So this was sort of most famously the eagle owl flaco, this sort of celebrity bird died in part because it had been consuming. rats, it had this poison in its system, not from taking it itself, but from eating animals that had eaten poison. So the idea is that by feeding the rats contraceptives instead of poison, you're avoiding that problem of the damage going up the food chain. But I mean, there have been other attempts to give rats contraceptives in the past that have not been successful. It seems like this is a different type of contraceptive, these fatty, salty, peltes, but there's not a strong history of this working. So we'll see how the pilot pans out. All right. Well, we'll see if it's as delicious as pineapples. But moving on, there is yet another

new use for AI in the news. And this time, we're looking at stool samples. Tell me about this. That's right. So, you know, about one in four people in the whole world end up suffering from intestinal parasites. It's a big problem. It can cause malnutrition. It can cause for children. It can cause problems with our cognitive development. And, you know, there's only a limited number of people who were trained to detect these parasites in stool samples. So why not outsource this particular issue to AI? And that's what a new study just did. They trained in AI on these images of stool samples. And it was able to detect infections almost as often as a human technologist. And in some cases, it caught infections that the human didn't. Well, great. Hopefully it is successful. Let's move on to

some physics news. I know that you are a big physics person, Sophie. I am. Let's talk about the multiverse. Yes. First of all, what is the multiverse? So you've probably heard about the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat. There is this cat in a box with a vile of poison, and whether or not the poison breaks depends on the decay of a particle. And so the idea is you don't know until you look in the box whether that cat is alive or dead. It sort of exists in both states. But once you open the box, the states collapse into the single either alive or dead state. So, The multiverse, the idea is that instead of them collapsing and one possibility vanishing, what really happens when you open the box and observe the cat is that there's all of a sudden

two different worlds. In one world, you're looking at an alive cat. In another, you're looking at a dead cat. So that's the idea of the many worlds theory, that every time you've got an observer looking at this quantum phenomenon, instead of just one possibility not being in existence anymore, the idea is you have multiple worlds in which all these possibilities exist. Okay, so there's new multiverse research out there. How do you go beyond different multiverses? Sure. So the way you go beyond many worlds theory is by having many more worlds theory, which is a great name. But the idea is basically the reason we've got all these thought experiments is researchers are trying to figure out how do we go from this quantum phenomena, this world that's governed by the mathematical equations of quantum mechanics, which is the way the universe was right after the Big Bang, which is the way that we still observe very, very small objects. How does that then become the classical world in which larger objects like you and I function that were,

instead governed by the rules of classical mechanics. So one of the ways that they're trying to figure that out is by having these different thought experiments. And one of them is the many more worlds interpretation. And the idea behind this is that there's just a lot more worlds within each multiverse possibility. One example you could think of is, you know, let's say you decide what to drink for breakfast. And let's say that this is in the multiverse, maybe in one world, you choose coffee. In another world, you choose tea. In another world, you choose orange juice, right? Many more world says that within each of those worlds, there's a ton of other realms. Within the orange juice world, there's a multiverse in itself. And the idea behind this is they're trying to get

rid of the concept that you need an observer. So with the Schrodinger's cat example, you have to open that box and look inside it before you figure out whether the cat is alive or dead. But that requires you, the observer, to be there. And so what they're trying to do with many more world's interpretation is avoid that need is to say, well, what about these quantum effects if we want to take the observer out of the equation. Okay, you're hurting my head a little bit, Sophie. It hurts my head too. But presumably in a different multiverse, we're still here doing this interview, but we're

still talking about the pineapple UTI vaccine because I cannot stop thinking about it. In fact, I think there's an infinite number of worlds in which we're still talking about the pineapple spray. Great. All right. Finally, we're almost out of time, but we wanted to remember the passing this week of one famous physicist Peter Higgs. So tell me a little bit about Peter Higgs and why he was so impactful in physics. Peter Higgs came up with this theory that explains essentially what are the forces that hold

the universe together. In particle theory, the idea is you have these particles that give rise to fields. But in order for these particles to sort of stick together and form larger objects like, you know, atoms and then the atoms to form cells that form humans, you need to have mass. So how do they get their mass? How do these particles have mass? And Higgs came up with this concept of a Higgs field, which is supported by a particle called a Higgs boson, which essentially when particles interact with it, they gain mass. And at first, when he published this, it was not very well respected, but as the years went on, it became a foundational part of particle physics. And in fact, it was one of the reasons that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that experiment was developed in part

to try to find the Higgs boson. And they eventually did in 2012, which was decades. after Higgs' original paper in the 60s. So he had this theory. He lived long enough to see it become foundational and to be proved. He wanted a Nobel for it. And then he died at home at age 94. So he really had an extraordinary life. Yeah, what a full and amazing life. Thank you so much, Sophie, for joining us as always. Thanks. It's always a pleasure to be here. Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist. By now, a large amount of the U.S. is in spring, meaning the snow has largely melted away and temperatures are rising. And you may have noticed that insects are coming back out. Insects don't all just die away

in the winter. Many species weighed out this season in a secret place that lies underneath the snowpack but above soil. This is called the subnivium. New research has come out that sheds more light onto this mysterious ecosystem. And joining me now is the lead author of that study. Chris Z80, who did this study as a graduate student of the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Welcome to Science Friday, Chris. Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for having me on today. So help me picture this submivium.

What does it look like? Yeah, so the submivium is a space that forms under the snowpack. It occurs right between the bottom layers of the snow itself and the ground. It's not a very large space, probably just measuring like an inch or two in height, depending on environmental conditions, but it runs along all areas where there's a sufficient snowpack present. The synivium forms because heat's generated from the ground and it melts those bottom layers of snow directly adjacent to the ground. I know Nivium's kind of a difficult thing to imagine, but if you go out into the snow and winter and you're walking around, wherever you step,

you can actually reach down where your foot was just at and feel around, and you should feel a space right between the ground and the snow. And that's the submivium. Oh, so is the snow on top of the subnivium kind of working like a warm blanket per se? Yeah. So synivium is dependent on that snowpack, as you said, to act as a warm blanket. The conditions are kind of strange down there in the submivium. It stays right around zero degrees Celsius, right around freezing, and about 100% humidity. The conditions may not seem ideal to me or you, especially the near-freezing aspect of it, but it's far better than the conditions typical of the ambient winter conditions, very much more warmer than ambient conditions, and temperatures don't fluctuate as much down there because of

that snowpack. And it sounds like some creatures actually kind of thrive in the submivium. I mean, what do we know about what life is like down there? Yeah, so like I said, it's right around zero degrees Celsius, so right around freezing. It's quite humid down there, and there's actually not a lot of sunlight penetrating through the snowpack there, so it's probably pretty dark, and conditions remain constant down there, which is why these arthropods seem to do so well compared to the ambient conditions. If they're out and about in the ambient conditions of winter, they wouldn't do so well. but in the semivium, it remains constant, and they seem to be pretty happy.

And what exactly is an arthropod? So an arthropod is insects or insect adjacent animals. So anything, essentially what I usually say is anything that crawls along the ground and doesn't have a spine is likely an arthropod. So think spiders, centipedes, beetles, all fall underneath the realm of arthropod. Okay, so originally I was sort of imagining a big, bug party with maybe some like, you know, tasty treats for, for our arthropod friends in the submivium. Do we know if, you know, it's a particularly active place? Yeah, it's probably not

an arthropod party, but yeah, arthropods are dependent. They don't, they don't regulate their temperature very well, their body temperature. And so they're kind of dependent on environmental temperature. And so when it's cold, like it is in the synivium, they become quite lethargic. And so they're rather slow. So whatever they're doing down there, they're doing it very slowly. Okay. So let's talk about the study that you did where you looked at the types of species that were likely to find in the subnivium. What did you find? Yeah. So we collected quite a variety of different arthropods in the synivium. Some of the taxonomic groups that were pretty common include things like spiders,

beetles, centipedes, mites, and springtails, just to name a few. We also found quite a few immature arthropods down there, so arthropods that are in earlier life stages. So are new arthropods being born in the submivium? Yeah, so arthropods are kind of doing whatever they typically do. Whatever you imagine arthropods do in the summer, they're also doing in the submivium. So they're continuing to move around, feed, search for mates, breed, avoid predators, everything associated with an arthropod's life cycle is also occurring down

in the submivium. And I think that this is really interesting because I think there's a myth out there that people who aren't super familiar with insects might think, okay, the winter rolls around and all the insects die. But that's not true, right? Yeah, I also used to think that. Growing up, I thought that all the arthropods just kind of die out when winter rolls around. And we think that just because they disappear from our site, you know, they're no longer part of our everyday lives. So they're just, they must be dead. But in reality, they seek out refuge in places like under the bark or in the mud of lake bottoms

and in the soil and in the semivium and in leaf litter on the ground. So they not only do some summer arthropods over winter in the soil. the submivium, one of our main findings was that there's actually arthropods that only come out in the synivium, which was quite interesting. Oh, interesting. So you were doing this study specifically in your neck of the woods, which is New Hampshire. I mean, can we presume that the species that we would find in the submivium would be the same maybe in other states? Yeah, I mean, you would probably find similar groups. The species, the specific species would probably vary, but you'd probably find the same type of characters. So spiders were quite common in the

Submivium in northern New Hampshire here. But let's say in Vermont or further west, there might be some different spiders active, but I would guess that they are probably pretty close taxonomically and probably serve a lot of the same functions as the spiders here in New Hampshire and the subnivium. So there's always a little bit of an elephant in the room when we're talking about cold weather, and that is climate change. So do we have any idea how climate change might affect these insects that rely on the subnivium to wait out the winter? Yeah, that's a great point. That's kind of why I wanted to do this study is because climate change is an ever-present threat, and snowpack is obviously going to be affected by climate change. And, and, you know,

And these arthropods, like I mentioned before, are dependent on that deep snowpack during the winter. And so with climate change decreasing that snowpack, these arthropods might experience more harsh conditions than the otherwise would. It might seem counterintuitive that as temperatures increase, that these arthropods will experience harsher, colder conditions. but without that deep snowpack there to insulate them, they'll be exposed to the ambient conditions. And so, yeah, so as temperatures rise, these arthropods will actually likely experience colder conditions. So in that case, you know, how many of us assumed where all the insects died in the winter, that might actually be closer to reality. Yeah, unfortunately, it's likely that a lot of those arthropods in the submivium won't deal.

with this change well. Some of them might, you know, it's kind of speculation at this point, but yeah, removing that snowpack probably doesn't bode well for most of them. There's this bigger crises of insect biodiversity loss, right? I mean, I feel like we are hearing all the time about different species that are going extinct. Yeah, and that's another main driver behind this study was this kind of idea that's going around in the entomology world right now is kind of a hot topic. And one of the main drivers of the study, along with climate change, was this idea that's kind of floating around the entomology world right now is insect decline. As you know, a lot of organisms are declining due to human activities. And it's feared that we're

losing a lot of our insect abundance and our insect diversity. And a lot of this is going unnoticed because they are such small organisms that we just don't see them disappearing. And there was a couple studies done here in New Hampshire that correlated insect decline with snowpack decline, just loosely correlated those. And that's why I wanted to kind of look at the organisms that would be most affected by snowpack decline, the insects that would be most affected, those that depend on the snowpack itself. Do you think generally that arthropods are not appreciated as much as they should be? I do think that people don't really appreciate arthropods. as much as they should.

You know, even if you don't spend a lot of time thinking about arthropods, like most entomologists do, they do play an important role in our everyday lives and to the health of our forest. Most people know the importance of pollinators, but beyond that, maybe they don't think about the roles of other arthropods very much. Many arthropods serve important roles in like decomposition and nutrient cycling. They are important components of food webs,

and some arthropods help keep pest populations low. So even if you don't think about arthropods often, they are important components to just about every aspect of our forest. And if arthropods continue to disappear, whether due to climate change or snowpack decline or some other reason, then there will be noticeable changes to things more visible to us, like our trees and our birds and many other things. A good case for protecting our arthropods. That is all the time that we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Chris Iady, who did this study as a graduate student of the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. I don't know about you, but I'm still thinking about the eclipse from this past Monday. Well, a listener named Matt Kurtz from Akron, Ohio, which was in the path of totality, found a special musical way to celebrate it. Here's Matt. The basic concept is that I perform these drum rolls that start quiet and then they build up and get real loud and then kind of stop at the moment of an activity that you wouldn't

expect it to. I think when you hear a drum doing that, it forces you to be like, something's about to happen. Akron was in the center of the path of totality for the total eclipse, and it felt like a perfect continuation to do a drum roll before the total eclipse reaches totality. And so with the magnitude of the eclipse, it felt appropriate to get a small percussion section. We found out the time that the total eclipse would reach total. at the Outdoor Stone Amphitheater. We went up about five minutes before that and began a slow drum roll that built up and stopped right at the moment of totality.

And then I had kind of, you know, a couple minutes of peace where I just got to like, you know, look at the stars and kind of feel where all this work went to. Thanks to listener Matt Kurtz for that special message. And that's about all the time we have for today. Lots of folks helped make this show happen. including Beth Rami. Santiago Flores. Diana Plasker.

John Dancosky. Robin Casmer. On Monday, all about glial cells. They don't get as much attention as neurons, but they make up about half the cells in our brains, why scientists are starting to wake up to their importance. Catch you next week. I'm sci-fi producer.

Shoshana Bucksbaum.