Science Friday - March Mammal Madness, Underwater Volcano, Listening to Space. March 24th, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

The Latest IPCC Report Is Full Of Warnings—And Hope It’s that time of year: another IPCC report has hit the presses. These reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are like a check up—to let us know how we’re doing on the climate front and what Earth’s future is projected to look like. And to no one’s surprise, this year’s report is full of warnings. But also, it has a lot of room for hope. Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight, joins guest host Charles Bergquist to talk more about the report and other science news of the week. They chat about a 3D printed rocket that didn’t quite make it to space, the mysterious Oumuamua space object, the rise of dangerous fungal infections in the U.S., why researchers are so excited about figuring out Beethoven’s cause of death, and—of course—new research about octopuses’ brain waves.   An Underwater Volcano Off The Oregon Coast Sheds Light On Eruptions A thick blue-white haze envelops the Research Vessel Thompson as it floats 250 miles off the Oregon coast. Akel Kevis-Stirling’s orange life vest and blue hardhat are vivid pops of color in the fog. “You guys ready to go?” he calls into his radio. The person on the other end crackles an affirmative. “Copy that,” he says and looks up across the rear deck of the research ship. “Alright, straps!” The crew of the ROV Jason jumps into action, removing the straps that secure the cube-shaped submarine to the deck. The remotely-operated sub, with a base the size of a queen mattress, is loaded with scientific instruments it will carry down to the seafloor. Kevis-Stirling gets final permission from the Thompson’s bridge for the launch. “Ok, here we go. Jason coming up and over the side,” he calls. “Take it away Tito!” The crane operator, Tito Callasius, lifts the submarine and swings it over the side of the ship into the water. A plume of fine bubbles rises through the waves as Jason starts its mile-long descent to the Axial Seamount, a deep-sea volcano that’s erupted three times in the past 25 years. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   March Mammal Madness Wants To Hear You Roar When mid-March rolls around, your news online—and maybe your conversations with friends and colleagues—can sometimes get taken over by discussions about the tournament. From debating your bracket selections to conversations about last night’s matchup, or celebrating big upsets and debating whether this is finally the year the bat-eared fox goes all the way, it can feel all-consuming. March Mammal Madness is an exercise in science communication involving a 64-animal bracket and nightly simulated combat matchups between animals—where the outcomes are determined by chance and specific species traits found in the scientific literature. This is the 10th year of the tournament, which this month has some 650,000 students around the world predicting battle outcomes on the road to the Elite Trait, the Final Roar, and the championship match. Dr. Katie Hinde, a biological anthropologist in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, and ringleader of March Mammal Madness, joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to talk about the keys to success in the tournament. Want to participate yourself? It’s not too late—you can find the tournament bracket and more information about March Mammal Madness on the ASU Libraries site.   Listen To The Ethereal Sounds Of Space You’ve probably heard that if you scream in space, no one will hear a thing. Space is a vacuum, so sound waves don’t have anything to bounce off of. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that space is silent. A team of researchers are taking data from a variety of telescopes and assigning them sounds, creating song-length sonifications of beloved space structures like black holes, nebulas, galaxies, and beyond. The album, called “Universal Harmonies” aims to bring galaxies to life and allow more people, such as those who are blind and low-vision, to engage with outer space. Guest host Flora Lichtman talks with two of the scientists behind “Universal Harmonies,” Dr. Kimberly Arcand, visualization scientist at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Dr. Matt Russo, astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto.     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 Flora Lickman, host and managing editor at Gimlet Media. And I used to work at Science Friday, and it's very good to be back. So glad to have you back. I'm Charles Bergquist. We're filling in for Ira this week. Later this hour, I'll be chatting with the co-organizer of the Ultimate Natural History Sporting Event, March Mammal Madness. And we'll hear how scientists turn data from the cosmos into an album. But first, another IPCC report has hit the presses. These reports from the integrations, governmental panel on climate change are kind of like a checkup to let us know how we're doing on the climate front and what Earth's future is projected to look like. And to no one's

surprise, this year's report is full of warnings, but also has some room for hope. Here to tell us more about that report and other science news of the week is Maggie Kerth. She's senior science writer at 538, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. So glad to have you here. So walk me through the report. What are some of the big takeaway? So this is a UN committee of scientists, and they have been analyzing and summarizing research on climate change since 1992. Now, after years of treaties and plans that are aimed at keeping warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial temperatures, this newest IPCC report is saying that that's going to be all but impossible. The earth has already warmed by about

one degree. And even if everybody follows their pledges to the letter, it's a very important. probably not going to be enough to stop that from getting hotter of the next few decades. So I feel like each one of these reports is similar in content to what you just said, you know, that Earth is warming, humans are responsible, it's going to be bad. Is this just more of the same? Or how does this report differ from the previous ones? Well, so I think one thing that is important to point out here is that there is some good news. So this report was specifically focused on how we can cut emissions and reduce warming. And it found that the costs of clean energy have fallen dramatically since 2010. And it's also become much more widely used. So it now

accounts for about 10% of the world's electricity. And what's more, there is all the suite of relatively inexpensive interventions that have multiple benefits beyond just reducing climate change. So we're talking about stuff like public transit, energy efficient buildings. And if you take all of those together, this report says that you could cut climate emissions in half compared to 2019. So I'm glad that there's some hope. But let's take a break from the gloom and talk about space or almost space for a moment because a mostly 3D printed rocket launched on Wednesday. Yeah. So this is really cool. Like this rocket was almost entirely made out of 3D printed parts and it was successfully launched and it flew for a whole three minutes. Now, unfortunately,

that was not quite long enough to actually make it to space, which was the goal. This uncrewed rocket crashed into the Atlantic shortly after launching from Cape Canaveral. But what's really cool here is that you shouldn't consider this an abject failure. We're talking about 85% of a rocket, including the engines being made from printed metal parts. The only stuff that wasn't was the computer, some electrical systems, and fasteners, like, screws. And doing that required building these truly massive 3D printers, which is an achievement in itself.

The rockets developers are really hoping that this is going to be the first step in a whole industry of cheaper rockets to meet this growing demand for launching orbital satellites. So what do you get out of being able to 3D print a rocket? What does it get you that traditional methods don't? It makes it cheaper, and it is probably also something that's going to be able to make you be able to make more of these things. There's a big demand right now for launching satellites. We're launching more of them. We're launching them faster and being able to have kind of rockets that are semi-disposable like this that would just burn up on reentry and you make a new one is something that could really kind of cut the cost of pulling these things together.

Do they know yet what went wrong with it, why it crashed? They're investigating that. It's probably something to do with one of those engines. Multiple companies right now are vying to be part of the 3D rocket supremacy, and some of them are even looking further into the future. So there might be a time coming when you just print the satellite in space and no launch is even necessary. Okay.

In other space news, you might remember back when astronomers caught a thing whizzing through the solar system in 2017. They named it Amua Mua. There's new news about that this week. Tell us about it. This was the first interstellar object detected by humans. It passed through our solar system. Everybody got really excited. And it quickly became the stuff of legends, or at least the stuff of really, really wanting it to be a spaceship. It was 300 feet long, oblong. It tumbled by and it sped up as it left our solar system and utterly failed to conform to the expectations. of either an asteroid or a comet. And now there is a paper out where some scientists say that they think Omuamua was probably a

comet all along, just a weird one. So the idea is that this was small for a comet and it was small enough that it could maybe be propelled along by very tiny amounts of hydrogen gas that were being released from these bubbly pockets in the ice that made up its core. Hmm. So, I mean, if this is some kind of funky new comet that they haven't seen before, are there likely to be more of them out there? Or is this a one-off thing? Well, not all scientists by the theory that this was a comet. This is something that there's already pushback on. But it's got to be aliens, right? It's definitely aliens this time.

Right. I'm making the, making the meme hand gesture right now of like aliens. But it does at least give us some hypotheses to test out the next time we spot an interstellar, object, and another one of those came through in 2019. And researchers now think that interstellar objects are more common than we used to believe. Maybe common enough that we could see one every year. Back to Earth, back to not so great news, because a fungal infection is spreading around, and we're not talking about some Last of Us tie in here. Tell us about it. Yeah, you know, the timing does feel a little bit like maybe Candida Aris is getting paid by HBO, but it's not. And this fungus is a drug-resistant fungal infection that's spreading in health care

facilities. This is a new CDC report that was released on Monday. This fungus was detected for the first time in the U.S. in 2013, and there still haven't been very many cases, but it's growing exponentially every year. So there were 53 people diagnosed with this who were ill in 2016, and more than 1400 in 2021. They also found an additional 4,000 people who were carrying it, but they weren't sick. Tell me about what the symptoms are here. How do you know if you may have this fungus? That's a difficult thing to really identify because right now this is something that has largely been detected in people who are already sick and vulnerable with other things. So it's hard to know what is being caused by the fungus and what's being caused by other

issues. It seems to be complicating infections that already exist. Do we know why it's suddenly spreading more? Well, to make that HBO tie-in, it evolved to grow at the human body temperature. It's probably a result of climate change. And it's, it has been spreading in these hospital systems, probably because of understaffed hospitals and the strain on the health care system caused by COVID-19. Now, this next one is one of my favorite stories this month, and it's that researchers figured out how the famous composer Ludwig von Beethoven may have died. Now, I suspect he's still dead. Whatever did him in is probably no longer a threat to anybody. So why do we care? This is one of the things that I kind of love about this story. Beethoven, by all accounts,

probably just died of natural causes. But people have spent a remarkable amount of energy over centuries debating and investigating and theorizing about what exactly killed him. You know, there's alcoholism, there's syphilis, there's lead poisoning, multiple rare diseases that have been bandied about over the years. The man's even been dug up twice so that people could do autopsies. And this DNA analysis is just kind of the latest thing in this long obsession. So it used hair samples. Scientists were able to reconstruct a genetic code that they believe is Beethoven's using five locks of hair that were probably cut from his head. Wow. And now that that mystery is solved, drum roll please, the cause of death is?

It's probably the liver that got him for a couple of reasons. First, Beethoven's DNA, or what we think is Beethoven's DNA, carries several genetic markers that put him at higher risk of liver disease. Second, one of these samples, which was taken closer to his death, has evidence of hepatitis B infection. And like I said, there's everything that was written down while he was still alive. We know he had heavy drinking habits. And there's all these reports of like his skin turning yellow towards the end of his life. So like effectively everything that could go wrong with his liver did. Wow. Very cool. Let's end with the story about a sci-fri favorite, the octopus. A new study is the first to record octopus's brainwaves from freely moving, living their life out there, octopuses. Tell me about that.

Oh my gosh. Octopuses are so cool. What I think is interesting about this is this is this is the closest thing you get to alien intelligence on earth. They have as many neurons as a dog. They look like something the cat dragged in. But they have about two-thirds of these neurons aren't even in their heads. It's like mixed up in their arms. And this brain is spread through this wild, wily body that's really hard to like actually attach anything to. It's squishy. It changes shape. It's a goo ball. And it's an incredibly smart goo ball. that then wants to remove anything that you stick on it that it finds uncomfortable and completely capable of doing that, right? So getting over those hurdles has been really hard. And this is the

first time that they've been able to measure brainwaves in an octopus. What they ended up doing was using portable data loggers and then surgically placing the electrodes that were feeding the information back to them. And what did they find after all of this work? Anything cool? Yeah, so the octopuses were allowed to kind of go about their daily lives, and the results were neat. Some of the brainwaves that they picked up corresponded to things that we've seen in other animals, including humans. So we're talking about like sleep wake cycles, memory consolidation cycles, but there is also some weird patterns that have never been seen before in any other creature. These brainwaves were really slow, and they were really strong. And they sometimes happened in just one electrode, and sometimes we're happening simultaneously

in really far removed parts of this octopus neural structure. Nobody knows what they mean yet. Well, I for one welcome our octopus overlords. Thank you, Maggie. Thank you. Maggie Kerrith is a senior science writer at 538 based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And a program note, next week we'll be talking about spring. We want to hear from you.

Is spring coming earlier where you live? Tell us what changes you're seeing in your neighborhood. And because we're audio people, we really want to hear your voice. Record a voice memo. Send it along to us at SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. After the break, Flora Lickman takes us to the coast of Oregon, where an underwater volcano is teaching scientists about seismic activity. This is Science Friday.

I'm Charles Berkwist. And I'm Flora Lickman. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. There are some famous volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, Mount St. Helens, Mount Shasta, Mount Hood,

but there's one active volcano you probably haven't heard of. The axial seamount. It's about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon and deep under the sea. And this volcano has been busy. It's erupted three times in the past, 25 years. Scientists are studying the axial seamount to learn about how volcanoes work, which will hopefully help us understand the volcanoes that pose a greater risk to people.

Our next guest join these volcanologists on a scientific research cruise to study axial seamount. Jess Burns, science reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting and producer of their show All Science No Fiction. She joins me from Portland, Oregon. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, thanks. All right, let's start with some volcano. facts. The axial seamount is underwater. Does it erupt in the same way as a volcano on land? Like, should I be picturing Mount St. Helens, but under the sea? No, you shouldn't be picturing Mount St. Helens. Because axial is actually a different kind of volcano. It's a shield volcano. It's more like Kilauea in Hawaii. And it behaves really similarly. When axial erupts, it doesn't blow its top, right? You don't get these like. fantastic pyroclas or anything like that. One, it's under the ocean. But the other, it just doesn't behave that way. Instead, the magma below kind of forces open a crack on its slope and the lava just kind of oozes out. And another way, it's actually kind of interesting. It's like the Hawaiian

volcanoes is that it sits over a hotspot and this is like a magma pipeline from really deep in the earth. And this hot spot, just like Hawaii, is why Axial is so active. And in constant, why it's so interesting to researchers. So what happens when it erupts? What are the effects? Well, there's going to be a tube-worm barbecue, so it's not really that great if you're a hyper-local resident. But, you know, for us for an Oregon, just for perspective, 250 miles offshore, under

a mile of ocean, one of the scientists on the ship, Jeff Beeson from Oregon State University, explained it pretty well. It doesn't have that flashy. Axial is going to erupt and cause a tsunami. It's not happening. Axial's not going to do that. Axial's not going to erupt and have a lava flow that goes into someone's backyard. But the stuff we learn from Axio will tell us how potentially a lava flow will work somewhere else. Basically, we only know about the eruptions because researchers have instruments on the seafloor.

And there's actually a permanent cable running from Axial back to the Oregon coast. And that makes Axial the best monitored deep sea volcano in the world. Oh, wow. So you reported your source. story on the scientists studying the axial seam out from a boat. That doesn't seem like a bad assignment. No, it was absolutely the best. My videographer and I were out there for two weeks. Oh, wow. I know. It was a long time. It was amazing they let me go that long. And just to give it like a little taste of like life, they work around the clock. You know, they break off into three teams. They do two, four hour shifts a day. So the sleep schedules are really weird.

There's this endless supply of coffee and breakfast cereal and ping pong. They used this remotely operated submarine called Jason, which was, you know, controlled by this small crew and this converted, tricked out shipping container on deck. And that control room was just this magical place. It was dark and serene. And just any time of day or night, you know, 3 a.m., 3 p.m., that any time that Jason was in the water, you could just go in. in there and just watch what Jason was seeing on the seafloor. So you just see these hydrothermal vents and lava flows and these weird creatures. And it was just like, it was so amazing. It was, it was incredible. So what kind of projects are happening on the ship? What are scientists trying to

learn from Axial? The researchers were trying to see if they can predict when Axial will erupt next. You know, with volcanoes, scientists can often tell a few days in advance that an eruption is imminent. But predicting with any accuracy longer out than that is notoriously difficult. You know, volcanoes are just really complex systems and we don't fully know what's happening underground. Well, these researchers gave an accurate prediction seven months in advance of the last axial eruption that was in 2015. And they did this based on measurements of changes in the seafloor, which is an analog for magma buildup underneath. And they're working to see if they can make another accurate prediction for the next eruption. Could they translate this data to help us understand

volcanoes above ground, volcanoes closer to people? You know, that is the goal. And I don't know if it will translate one to one. But it really, even if they could get some clues, it would be really invaluable. In the Pacific Northwest, half the people live within high impact zones of these high-risk volcanoes. You know, I see Mount Hood. I see Mount St. Helens on my compute to work. Wouldn't it be amazing? Just a few months out, we got a heads up that something can happen. You could start gathering supplies, making emergency plans, and just getting prepared in a way that I know I'm not motivated to do right now. That's about all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Jess Burns, Science Reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting. and producer of their show, all science, no fiction.

She joins me from Portland, Oregon. Thanks for having me. And you can watch a video just produced about the scientists studying the Axial Seamount. That's at ScienceFriday.com slash ocean volcano. You know how it is when March rolls around. Your news online and maybe your conversations with friends and colleagues suddenly get all wrapped up in discussions about the tournament. Your bracket, who won last night, the big upsets,

whether this is the year the bad-eared fox goes all the way. Yep, I'm talking about March Mammal Madness, an exercise in science communication involving a 64 animal bracket and nightly simulated combat matchups between animals. This is the 10th year of the tournament, and joining me now to talk about it is Dr. Katie Hind. She's a biological anthropologist in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University,

but she's also the ringleader of March Mammal Milder. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Hind. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk about our tournament. Walk me through the process here. How does the tournament work in a nutshell? We release a bracket of 64 species, and players are asked to predict who they think is going to go all the way to become champion of that year's tournament. The animals are presented in different divisions, which may reflect aspects of their adaptations or how they're named. And so scientists, narrators who are experts in animal behavior and biology and ecosystems, basically craft a play-by-play story of what would happen if individuals of these two species were to encounter each other in a particular habitat.

And they tell that play-by-play using the scholarly scientific literature, but in a way that is a dynamic, suspenseful story. So you mentioned the home court advantage here. What about when you have two competitors who just, they would never encounter in nature? They have very different lifestyles. I'm thinking like orca versus some monkey that lives in the treetops. So in the first three rounds, the better seated combatant gets home habitat advantage. And what we do generally is we create, you know, through March mammal madness magic,

we transport the visiting combatant into that environment. And we tend to do this in ways that are not exceedingly cruel. We don't typically transport a combatant to the deep sea under extreme pressure, typically. But we come up with some kind of scenario where there's either a forfeit, which of course makes people fairly grumpy. So one time we had some deep sea vent crabs that basically grow their food source by waving their pinters over hydrothermal vents. the deep sea. And that crab was so busy doing that, it didn't actually enter the magic portal

to go to where it was supposed to have its encounter with another animal. So we use a lot of literary narrative devices to tell an exciting story. We have 64 battles that we have to present, and we use a variety of different kinds of scenarios. But sometimes we, you know, we'll do things where an arboreal creature all of a sudden is on the ground. That's going to be very challenging for that animals cognition and adaptations, and their immediate motivation is going to be to try and get up somewhere. So that's going to shape their behavioral response. A lot of the animals actually run away in our encounters because animals have adaptations to not fight, right? Fighting is generally a device of last resort in nature because even for the winners, there's a risk of injury,

or it's a waste of time and energy that is better allocated to more productive activities. Right. So just to be clear, this is not a popularity contest, right? People are not voting on which they prefer. This is based on the traits that each of these species would have if they were to encounter each other. Absolutely, yes. And there is no voting because that tends to always favor that combatants that are most familiar or is not really predicated on the underlying science of those animals' adaptations. Now, I do want to be clear that there are upsets. We do have at times improbable outcomes. And this happens because the team that puts the tournament together, we calculate in an encounter who's probably going to win. Now, it might be that there's a predation event, predator prey dynamic.

There could be displacement at a waterhole among herbivores. There's lots of ways that animals interact in nature. And so we estimate that probability. And then we use a random number generator to actually determine the outcome. And sometimes the really improbable outcome is what that random number generator gives us back. And that's always kind of hilarious because you're like, oh my gosh, how am I going to craft that play-by-play story?

And this is actually, I think, part of the real celebratory community-based cheering and jeering and suspense of the tournament because we then go into the scholarly literature and natural history and look for some kind of, scenario that's evidence-based, even if improbable, to explain something that might happen. So I think a big example of this last year was the championship battle was between a grandma

orca and a pride of lionesses. And in the advanced rounds, we no longer have what is necessarily home habitat advantage. The environment is randomized among four possible battle locations. And this particular scenario, Orca came out to the championship, Pride of Lionesses came out to the championship, and they had to fight in a kelp forest, you know, seawater, but the random number generator is like, and the Pride of Lionesses wins. And I remember, like, looking around at the team and being like, so who wants to help me write this one? And folks are like, no, I think you got this.

Okay. I just want to remind folks that they're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Dr. Katie Hind about the March Mammal Madness Tournament. You can find links on how to participate on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash mammal madness. So looking at the brackets for March Mammal Madness, I don't know how to say this, but they're not all mammals. You're absolutely correct.

In 2018, we introduced a division of all non-mammals. And the joke was that the other organizers, Chris Anderson, who's an entomologist, and Josh Drew, who's a marine scientist that works on fish, that they snuck behind my back and made a division of non-mammals. And it was wonderful because there's a lot of really neat animal adaptations outside mammals. And since the second year, we've always featured occasional non-mammal species, but we've, in recent years, become much more systematic about featuring organisms from across the tree of life. We've even started having plants or other kinds of complex mutualist like lichen. And we want to use the tournament as an opportunity to celebrate

life on Earth and all these amazing adaptations, how they've been shaped by natural selection and evolutionary processes over long periods of time. And by expanding beyond mammals, we're able to just talk about so much more of the kaleidoscope of life on planet Earth. You're 10 years in, how many people are participating in the tournament this year? That's a great question. We don't necessarily track participation. We don't track how many people download the racket, things like that. But we do know that one of our big user groups are educators in classrooms. And from them, we've learned that over 6,500 educators are using March Mammal Madness with their 675,000 learners.

Wow. So the organizers, you must have favorites. Do you ever get tempted just to rig things so that this year the red panda is definitely going to come out on top? Oh, I stopped filling out a bracket year two to try and prevent that kind of fingers on the scales. We generally want it to have suspense and excitement. And like one example, I think, was a couple years ago, the championship battle was going to come down to the red kangaroo versus the harpy eagle.

And that was really exciting. That was the furthest that a non-mammal had ever gotten. We're all big fans of the harpy eagle. We're also fans of the red kangaroo. But it was really exciting. And we used the random number generator and it came back and it said kangaroo. And we're like, ah. And one of the other organizers was like, let's do two out of three.

Best two out of three. We ran the random number generator again. And it basically came back with, did I stutter? Kangaroo. So it's a really exciting process. And oftentimes when there's an outcome that's not necessarily your heart's dream or your favorite species, it's really fun to go into the literature and find a way to make the other combatant, the other species, the hero. You know, every year during these weeks of the tournament, as a scholar, as a scientist,

as a biologist, as an anthropologist, it's magical to just steep myself deeply in the natural history literature and find out about animals that I otherwise never would have read 10 articles about, that now I get to do that because I have to have a story about how this critter beats this other critter. And it's a really wonderful celebration of science and nature in a way that I think we don't get to do as often as academics. So we're nearing the end of the second round. People can still get involved. But any predictions? Where's the smart money this year? Ooh, yeah. We've got some really great divisions this year. We've got a division of species where dads do primary care of young. So we've got a division of Dadbods.

And there's Emperor Penguin Greater Rea, which is related to ostriches and emus, and Wolverine are the top three seeds in that division. People are very excited about them. We also have a division of mighty stripes. And these are mammal species that have stripes. And in that division, there are some really cool hoofed mammals. Ocopi is in that division as the number one seed. and she's going to be tough. She's a big lady, and she's quite good at defending herself in a variety of habitats. So keep your eye on the Ocopy. Got it. Yeah. Dr. Katie Hind is the ringleader of March Mammal Madness.

You'll find links on how to participate on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash mammal madness. She's also a biological anthropologist in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Thanks so much for talking with me today. Thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful. After the break, how researchers turned data from black holes, exploding stars, galaxies, and beyond into the songs of our universe. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Charles Bergquist. And I'm Flora Lichtman. Charles, I know you're into space stuff. True.

Do you have an extraterrestrial bucket list? Like, if you had James Webb Space Telescope eyes and were not constrained by the space. the laws of space and time. Is there an outer space place you'd go see? Yeah, you know, I've always been a sucker for the classic spiral galaxies, like M51A, the whirlpool. I am picturing a giant hot tub in the sky. Is that what it looks like? I mean, it's kind of your classic textbook definition picture of what a galaxy looks like. But it's also this stunningly beautiful spiral of swirling stars up against pitch black space.

Ooh, that sounds like a good destination, and I wish we could go see it, your giant space jacuzzi, but we can't. But guess what? We might be able to hear it. Do you want to guess what it sounds like? So on the one hand, I know that in space no one can hear you scream, but on the other hand, I also somehow imagine all the gas and dust and stuff making kind of a wispy, woozy kind of like a shoo. Well, what have I told you it could sound something like? This. That choral music sung by Trapped Ghosts is Whirlpool Galaxy M51A. Not literally. Like if you blast it off into space, you obviously wouldn't hear this. This sound is made by scientists taking real data and sonifying it, turning that data into sound. My next guests have transformed data from galaxies, black holes, nebulas, supernovas, you name it, into sound. And they put it all together in a new album called Universal Harbohman. Dr. Kimberly Arcand is a visualization scientist at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dr. Matt Russo is an astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto. Both of you, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. Kim, why did you start turning space data into dulcet tunes? Where did this all begin? Well, for me, I've been working for NASA's Chandra Excerbservative. for about 25 years. And I spent the first few years of my career just figuring out how to process,

you know, this invisible kind of light, x-ray light, into something we can see. And then sort of quickly realized after a few years that that's leaving out a segment of the population. Sonification is just this idea of translating information into sound. And this is part of NASA's sonification program? Like, why does NASA want to do this? Yeah. So for the most part, it was because we're really trying to make sure our data is accessible, right? There is this idea that when you've got all of this type of invisible light that you're working with, whether it's x-ray light or infrared light, we don't have to only prioritize the visual. We can use other senses to be able to explore it, to be able to learn from it, to be able to enjoy it.

And so sonification in particular was a technique that I had learned about from a colleague, Dr. Wanda Diaz. She's an astronomer and computer scientist who is blind and uses sonification to be able to understand stars. And so I reached out to Matt and his colleague Andrew, and we started working on a project to take Chandra data and other data sets that we had to translate them into something we could hear and experience in a new way. Matt, you're a musician and an astrophysicist. Is there a connection between the two? There is. And we're not the first to realize this is an extremely old idea. It goes back over 2,000 years to people like Pythagoras.

For centuries, it seemed almost obvious that there'd be some connection between the cyclical patterns in the universe and the cyclical patterns in music, and in particular the harmony of both. And it turns out there is a lot of overlap because music and astronomy both have a lot to do with repeating cycles and listening or observing how those cycles interact with each other. I want to understand this better how these sonifications work. I mean, we know space is a vacuum and sound can't travel through it. So what are we hearing? So there's many different ways to do sonification.

In some cases, you can simply take light data that's received. So, for example, how bright a star is over time and convert that into a sound wave. But you can also take more artistic approaches and maybe convert the pixels in an image to different musical pitches to communicate that information through sound. So we're hearing maybe a translation of brightness or maybe a translation of actually pixels. Are any of your sonifications actual sound data that has been pitched into our hearing range? Yes, there's one amazing example. and it's our sonification of the Perseus Galaxy cluster. And that was an image taken with x-rays,

but the image itself shows ripples, their actual sound waves traveling through gas and space that are launched by a supermassive black hole. And because the sound waves are visible in the image, we can extract their shape and re-synthesize them as a sound. That also involves changing the frequency of those sound waves by about seven or eight musical octaves. That's actually fewer octaves than I would have guessed.

Actually, I misspoke. It's actually seven or eight actual full piano lengths. So 56 or 57 full octaves. Is that closer to your expectation? Yeah. I don't even know. That's probably still fewer than I would have thought. That's quite a lot.

Yeah, 57 octaves means you're doubling the frequency 57 times. So that's really an exponentially large change in frequency. So let's take a listen to the sonified Perseus cluster. So this is a huge collection of galaxies with a black hole right in its center. Kim, this sounds exactly like what I'd imagine a black hole to sound like. Absolutely terrifying. What are we hearing? We've heard that a lot.

Yeah, a lot of people have said that. We've heard people saying it sounds like a horror movie soundtrack or is like something Han Zimmer would write if he was working on like a tense piece of music. I think it really helps strike our imaginations. But this one's really exciting because this is one of my favorite data sets of all time. The science result for this came back, came out in 2003. Some colleagues of mine, Dr. Andy Fabian and some of his colleagues were working on a study of the Perseus cluster of galaxies where this supermassive black hole is just burping out

into the hot gas, creating these pressure waves. And they did the math to be able to find out that, that that was the deepest note in the universe being created, right? This diva out there singing this incredibly deep song. And so when we started this sonification project, I was very excited to work on this one because it already had a sound, if you will, those sound waves in the image that we can hear. And so for this one,

being able to actually translate that or re-synthesize it, you know, back up, was very, very exciting for me because this is a dataset. stared at for a long time. And so to be able to hear it, to actually like hear that, that true sound was just super cool. One of my favorite space structures are the pillars of creation. It's a classic, obviously. And we got some brand new pictures from James Webb last year of the pillars. They look like these giant yellow monster's fingers that are reaching out through the heavens. Please correct me. I feel like I'm, you know, on the line with people who probably could describe it better. You're definitely on the track. The way I like to think of the pillars of creation, they are

tall, skinny columns of gas and dust, and inside those dusty columns are just beautiful little baby stars forming. What I like so much about this dataset, it's, you know, it's very iconic. So a lot of people have seen it are familiar with it. And it's just beautiful. But, you know, not everybody can access what that image looks like. So being able to take that data and combine it with Chander data where you're seeing slightly older stars around it, that combination of data taking that and bringing it into something you can hear is really exciting. Well, let's hear some of it. Okay, this is actually, it's kind of creepy for a nursery.

Yeah. What's interesting about this data set, you know, these tall columns of gas and dust, I think the tallest one's about four light years tall and a light year's. The distance that light travels in a year, so about 10 trillion kilometers to say about 40 trillion kilometers tall. And, you know, when you're looking at that in optical light or infrared light, you're catching those beautiful structures. And all around it are those slightly older stars that are kind of like having these little temper tantrums, if you will, an x-ray light. And so as you're scanning across from left to right, you're capturing those beeps and boops of those little

temper tantrum stars. And then you're also very clearly hearing those tall, thin structures. So that was sort of the idea with that one. So what are the beeps and boops exactly? When you look at the image created with x-ray light, showing all of those intense x-ray bright stars, it's like a spattering of paint. There's bright stars all over. And in this sonification, their brightness and their position controls the note you're hearing. So every little beep and boop you hear is a star emitting intense x-rays.

And the pitch of the note tells you where it is in the image. So if it's toward the top of the image, it's a higher pitch. And the volume tells you how bright or extended that object is. Okay. And so the windy kind of windy synthesizer sound is actually representing the pillar that I see in the picture. Correct. Yep. It's trying to capture that texture, if you will.

That's so cool. I mean, can we learn anything scientifically by listening to the universe? Oh, absolutely. In astronomy, there's, I think, a couple of really good reasons for some. sonification for research. One of those reasons would be studying time series data or things like variable stars. Variable stars, I think, are a great example because when you have a variable star, it's, there's something changing, right? So you're getting the shape of the light curve, if you will, that's going to indicate different kinds of information, whether it's the relative sizes of the stars,

relative surface brightnesses or whatnot. And being able to track that, all those changes by sound can be really helpful. That's so cool. Matt, are there some parts of the universe that are more rock and roll and other parts that are like more elevator music? That's great. There are. The clearest example is solar systems. And this is also one of the earliest connections between music and astronomy. It's actually pretty straightforward to convert the motion of planets into musical rhythms and notes. And so when you do that, every solar system has its own beat and its own kind of harmony. So some are very pleasant and peaceful and others are a little more tense and disjointed. So there's everything up there.

What about our solar system? Where do we fall on the cheesy to cool spectrum? Well, that's, that kind of depends on your, your aesthetics. Our solar system is, it's not very harmonious in a, in a classical sense, a fixed repeating beat like some other solar systems, but it has its own charm. I'm Flora Lickman. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with scientists who turned space data into sound. You said the movements of planets can be converted to notes or rhythms. I'm trying to imagine just what that means exactly.

Like our orbit is given a note, our orbit around the sun? Yeah. So when you hear a note with your ears, what you're hearing is sound waves oscillating, very, very fast. So it's air molecules bouncing back and forth at a certain frequency. And so if you take the motion of the planets, say in our solar system, and you imagine speeding everything up by many millions or billions of times, then each planet has its own frequency. It's doing its cycle at its own rate. And so you can associate that with a certain frequency of sound. And you could see if the planets work together or against each other. Matt, what does it mean to you as an astrophysicist? to hear outer space?

Yeah, yeah, sometimes I do. It's always very exciting when you have a data set and you have some idea for how it's going to turn out, but you never really know until you design the algorithm, you write the code, and then you press run, and you just sit back and listen to what's in that data. So that's always a very exciting moment. And as an astrophysicist but also as a musician,

I just also find it very exciting that there are, are several connections between music and astronomy. There are real sound waves happening in space. They can't travel to us because there's too much of a vacuum, but there is gas in space. There are stars. There are dust clouds with gas and sound can travel through those objects. So I find it interesting from that perspective that it's kind of breaking that common idea that there's literally no sound in space when that's not quite true. It just, sound just has a hard time traveling through space. There is sound in space. Yeah, wherever there's something to travel through. You heard it here first. I love that. I love that. Kim, what about what about you? I mean,

just on the sort of emotional level, does listening to space produce a different feeling than looking over an Excel worksheet? Oh, absolutely. I mean, so I think the first time I've heard some of these pieces, again, I know the data really well. I've worked on this stuff for years, and so I know these pixels. And the very first time I heard the Galactic Center, it was one of the very first pieces that Matt and I worked on. And it was so moving to me because it's a very dense and busy data set. There's a lot going on. There's all of these different kinds of light, three different kinds of light. It's sort of a downtown area of our Milky Way. It's like the hustle and bustle, the New York Times Square kind of area, right? So there's a lot happening,

a lot of energy, a lot of activity. And I can stare at those pixels and I can understand it. But when I hear it, it just makes me think about different segments of the data in a different way. Sound itself just has a sort of stickiness to it, right? Music kind of sticks in our head, and we process sound and music differently. And so I've looked at that image that I created back in 2009, I think, quite differently since hearing it. I've found things in the data that I never realized before. I've seen different, you know, sections of that image and process it in new ways. And I love that.

I love that sound can make me think of a data set that I've, you know, known and loved for so long in a new way. I think it's really exciting. Yeah, it probably makes you have a different feeling about it too or adds to your feeling about it. Oh, absolutely. It adds to it. Absolutely. It does. Kim, part of the goal of this project was to create something that's,

more accessible for blind and low vision people. Have you heard any feedback from people who have used the sonifications? How have they impacted people? Yeah, so we've been working with people who are either blind or low vision on this project pretty much since day one. We've had people saying things like, I didn't know the universe was so beautiful, or I didn't know the universe could be so engaging. And I love that this project is able to bring the data. that I get to swim in every day to more people. Well, thank you both for joining me today. Thanks for having us.

Thanks so much. Dr. Kimberly Arcand is a visualization scientist at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Matt Russo is an astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto. To listen to Universal Harmonies, go to ScienceFriiday.com slash space sounds. Lots of folks helped us put the show together this week, including our director of news and audio, Don Dan Koski. Annie Niro, our individual giving manager. Jordan Smudjik and Jason Rosenberg are grant

managers and office manager, Valissa Mayors. B.J. Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. I'm Flora Lichten. And I'm Charles Bergquist. Have a great weekend.