Science Friday - Microsoft Makes Deal To Restart Three Mile Island | Fish That Use Their Legs To Taste

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

The company is betting big on nuclear energy to meet increasing power needs of data centers and new technologies like AI. Also, new research into a strange fish known as the sea robin finds that leg-like appendages can “taste” prey buried in the sand.Microsoft Makes Deal To Restart Three Mile IslandThree Mile Island in Pennsylvania has quite a reputation in the world of nuclear energy: One of its reactors suffered a catastrophic partial meltdown in 1979, earning the title of the largest nuclear accident in US history. The failed reactor has been inoperable since the accident, while the other reactor shuttered in 2019.But now, tech giant Microsoft has made a deal with the nuclear site to reopen Three Mile Island, and purchase all of its generating capacity over the next 20 years. As Big Tech bets big on artificial intelligence, the need for electricity to power data centers is increasing tremendously. Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is a large investor in nuclear energy.To help Science Friday celebrate Climate Week NYC, Casey Crownhart, climate reporter for MIT Technology Review joins guest host Anna Rothschild to discuss this and other top climate stories of the week.These Fish Use Their Legs (Yes, Legs) To TasteYour legs may help you get around, but what if they could also help you sniff out a snack? That’s a trick achieved by a fish called the sea robin. The fish, which lives on the seafloor, has an unusual appearance, with wing-like fins and leg-like appendages that it uses to walk along the ocean bottom. But in work published this week in the journal Current Biology, researchers report that those legs are also chemical sensing organs that can taste for prey buried under the sand.Dr. Nicholas Bellono, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, first learned of the unusual fish on a visit to the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he was planning to obtain squid and octopus for another research project. MBL workers showed Bellono and colleagues the sea robin, and explained that they have a reputation for being able to locate hidden prey—to the point that other organisms will follow the sea robin, hoping to get in on the meal. The intrigued researchers brought some sea robins back to the lab, and began a series of experiments to better understand their prey-sniffing abilities.Bellono joins guest host Anna Rothschild to talk about the fish, the genetic adaptations that allow it to sense the world through its legs, and the value of serendipity and curiosity-driven research in the scientific world. Transcripts for each segment will be available 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 an unusual fish that tastes with its legs. You heard that right. It's a very clear behavior. Anyone can appreciate it. It's this weird animal, weird trait. So let's try and figure it out. It's Friday, September 27th. And yep, it tastes just like Science Friday.

I'm SciFri producer Charles Bergquist. Coming up, the story of the sea robin, a fish that hunts for prey hidden under ocean sand by tasting through chemical sensors on its six legs. We'll talk about the fish, the genetic adaptations that allow it to sense its surroundings, and the value of serendipity and curiosity-driven research in the scientific world. But first, in a celebration of Climate Week, here's guest host Anna Rothschild, with some of the top climate stories from the Week in Science. Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida's big band region as a category four storm,

one of the most powerful to ever hit this region. It knocked out power to millions, and created what the National Weather Service called an unsurvivable storm surge along the coast. The storm caused flooding across the southeast and multiple deaths. Storms like these have become more common and more powerful in recent years, in part due to the effects of climate change. Here to talk about some of the other biggest climate stories of the week is my guest, Casey Crownheart, a climate reporter at MIT Technology Review,

based in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday, Casey. Hey, Anna, great to be back. All right, Casey. So you've reported this first story for us about Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history. Why is this in the news again? Yeah. So some people might be surprised to hear that there's interest in opening back up a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. Some important context here. So like you said, in 1979, one of the reactors at Three Mile Island, offered a partial meltdown, the worst U.S. nuclear accident in history. But there's actually a second reactor there that started back up in the 1980s and ran, you know, consistently through 2019 when it was shut down due to economic reasons. Now there's interest in opening that plant backup.

So who is interested in opening it up? Yeah. So the news that came out this week was that Microsoft is making a deal to purchase all of the electricity that will be generated at Three Mile Island. It's a long-term power purchase agreement. So the owner of that plant is going to try to open it back up within the next couple of years. And then Microsoft is going to be buying all the power. What might Microsoft need that power for? A lot of big tech companies are seeing a big increase in power demand, partly because of the need to run data centers, including those that power AI. And so that's what a lot of this electricity will probably be going to is these data centers that are in the region.

So if the plant works as it's meant to, how much power could it generate? It's a lot. This is a pretty big reactor. So it's about 800 megawatts of power. And that's about enough to power 800,000 homes if it were powering residential homes. Wow. That's a lot. Absolutely. I mean, and this just goes to show that like power demand from data centers is really becoming a big topic of conversation for sure. Yeah, definitely. You know, some people still have a lot of safety concerns when it comes to nuclear power. How justified do you think that is. It's so understandable, I think, especially in the context of this facility, you know, the home to that accident. I would say that, you know, the U.S. has very tight and careful regulation

of nuclear. Also, one thing I like to bring up is that coal has the highest rate of deaths from accidents and air pollution of energy source. So I think it's very fair to be cautious about nuclear energy 100%. But I also think that, you know, sometimes there are concerns that can be overblown and we need to also consider safety issues from other power sources as well. So let's move on to another story that you reported this week. This one is about electric vehicles. So some countries are ending their support for EVs. Tell us about this.

Yeah. So, you know, electric vehicles are still kind of an early entry to the car market in a lot of countries. But for some places, you know, they're inching towards the mainstream and countries are starting to end incentives for them. So, you know, a lot of countries have programs like direct discounts or tax credits or rebates that are designed to lower the price of electric vehicles, which still tend to be more expensive than gas powered ones in much of the world. And so by making EVs cheaper, the thinking goes that more people will buy them. Recently, we've seen countries including Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, and their EV subsidy programs, though. Right. Do you think that this support is ending too soon?

It totally depends on the place. And this is kind of a really tricky question. And that's kind of what my story was about is how do you decide when it's time to end these programs? You know, EVs are getting closer to cost parity with gas powered cars. These programs can be really expensive, especially as sales become a bigger chunk of total vehicle sales. In Sweden, EVs make up something like 35% of the EV market. So I think, you know, in some countries, it can be time to end these incentive programs. But in other places like Germany, which ended their program at the end of 2023,

we've seen the market really take a hit and sales have dropped after incentives ended. So I think in some places it's maybe a little too soon, according to the experts I've spoken with. How's government support doing for EVs here in the U.S.? So currently there's a tax credit available for new EVs up to about $7,500, and that's currently scheduled to run through 2032. And so we've got kind of a long runway for that. But that might depend on how this election goes. Former President Donald Trump has made public comments. about wanting to roll back that incentives. The U.S. is currently at around 10% EVs if you include full electric and plug-in hybrids. So it'll be interesting to see kind of how this credit works out in the next year or so. Let's move on to our next story, which is honestly pretty bananas. Scientists want to re-free Arctic sea ice, and the first test seemed pretty promising. This sounds like it's out of that Kurt Vonnegut book with Ice Nine. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Not to scare everyone. But so how does this process work? Yeah, great question. So basically how this works is there's a startup that's trying to refreeze sea ice. And what they're doing is they're drilling down. They're drilling holes into the ice. They take water from the ocean, pump it up and then spread it out across the snow on top of the ice. That snow layer freezes into an ice sheet. And it also kind of lowers the temperature so that more ice can

freeze underneath the ice sheet as well. So the idea here is that they want to really, you know, kind of boost this ice, which we're starting to see, especially in the summer, sea ice is shrinking because of climate change because of rising temperatures. Scientists say there could be no sea ice in the summer by the 2030s, even if we cut emissions now. Wow. Yeah, that's huge. How scalable is this? Could it actually save Arctic sea ice? Oh, that's a really great question. I mean, with these kind of efforts to prop up, you know, some of these ecosystems, it can be really difficult, really large, and really expensive to really do this at the scale you would need. So these trials were going on

around the size of like a soccer field. This would need to be done over thousands of square kilometers to actually, you know, have a big impact. The startup that did these tests wants to use underwater drones in the next kind of iteration of this. They say they would need 500,000 drones and it would cost something like $6 billion a year to do this at the scale that they would want to. You know, geoengineering projects like this can often be a bit controversial. Are there naysayers to this plan? Absolutely. I mean, there are some scientists that say this isn't feasible, you know, just from an engineering or an economic standpoint. And I think you also see a lot of people just concerned about, you know, who gets to decide what we're doing in these

places, especially places where, you know, maybe a lot of people don't live. And so, yeah, the governance of these sorts of programs is really interesting and I think really thorny. All right. So for our next story, we're talking about cement. The biggest producers of cement are betting on a green alternative. Just how big of an impact does cement have on our climate? It is one of those problems that I think a lot of people aren't aware of, but it's a big deal. So cement, depending on who you ask, makes up about 7 to 8% of global emissions. Wow, that's huge. I know. You wouldn't think it just from like, walking on your sidewalk. But it's all about the process used to make cement. So today, when you make

cement, usually you're putting things in kilns that get hotter than lava does. And you're also seeing there's a lot of chemical reactions that also kick off carbon dioxide. And so there has been a lot of effort around how we can clean up this process, whether by capturing some of those emissions or totally reinventing it, like we're seeing from some startups, including sublime systems. So this is a Boston-based company. And basically what they're doing is a totally new process, totally new way of making cement. It involves basically zapping, crushed up rocks with electricity in order to make something that can be used in cement to make concrete. How scalable is that? That's, again, one of the biggest questions is always about scale with these sorts of solutions.

You know, concrete is, I think, the second most used substance by humans after water. Like, it's just this huge problem. So I think it's, It's really encouraging to see the giants in this industry showing interest in this technology and putting money towards it. But what will be really crucial is whether this can be cost competitive because, you know, cement is really important and we need it to be really cheap so that we can build things. Right. All right. For our last story, it can be overwhelming to talk about the climate crisis and individual actions can feel like they're just not making an impact, you know? But it turns out that changes that all of us can do can actually make a really big difference. right? Absolutely. So I'm the first to say that, you know, we shouldn't put the burden of climate change on individuals. We've talked about things like cement. Like, I'm not going to be able to do

anything to change cement, for example. But researchers say that, you know, things that individuals and households can do to cut down on climate impacts can get us about 25% of the way towards avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. So it's not, you know, the whole problem. We still need these big systemic changes, new products that, you know, need to get to the market. And so it's not, you know, But there are definitely things that we can do to sort of, you know, start inching our way towards the progress that we need to make. What are some of the most impactful individual actions? This is a great question. I would love to shout out HeatMap News, just put out a great package this week.

It's called Decarbonize Your Life, which really goes through some of these kind of evidence-based, the best actions that you can take. A few of them, if you are in the market for a new car, you should buy an EV. in general, you know, try to drive less, making changes to your home to make it more energy efficient, moving towards electric appliances. So love to talk about heat pumps, things like induction stoves. And then something that anybody can do is look at what you're eating. So wasting less food and eating less beef are two great ways to kind of start to work on your individual contributions. Great. Well, thank you, Casey. That's all the time we have for now, but I'd like to thank my guest, Casey Crownheart, Climate Reporter at MIT Technology Review, based in New York.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Speaking of Climate Solutions, we have a brand new short-run newsletter that highlights some of these stories called Tiny Nature Triumphs. Every two weeks, you can get a story in your inbox about creative efforts to preserve and protect nature at the local level and some inspiration for how you can join in. Sign up at ScienceFriday.com slash triumphs. What if you could taste with your toes? That may not be one of your major life goals, but it is a trick achieved by a fish called the sea robin.

It turns out that its legs, and yes, this is a fish with legs. Its legs are also chemical sensing organs that can taste for prey buried under the sand of the seafloor. Joining me now to talk about this unusual adaptation and how it might have come to be is Nicholas Belono. He's a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. And one of the authors of two papers on the C-Robin published this week in the journal Current Biology. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks. So for people who haven't seen a C-Robin, can you describe what these guys look like?

Yeah, sure. As you said, it's super weird. It's as if you asked a child to draw an animal that's made up of a bunch of other animals. This is a fish that has these wing-like fins, hence the name C-Robin. It has sometimes armor in certain species. And then most obvious to us in what we ended up studying, it has these crab-like legs, six of them, that separate from its big wing-like pectoral fin, to now make the fish able to walk along the seafloor.

Yes, these guys are so weird looking. I highly recommend everyone looking up a photo of them. So how did you become interested in them? We were on a trip to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. We work there pretty regularly. It's a place where people go and study curious marine organisms. So we were there actually to study octopus and squid. We've also studied how the octopus can taste with its arms.

And we were going to get squid for a comparison. And while we were there, one of the guys who manages the Marine Resource Center, where they keep all the animals, knows me pretty well from having worked across years now on various organisms, starting with sharks and how they detect electric fields. He used to package up and send me sharks to study. And so he said, Nick, I got to show you, got the weirdest fish that, that you'll see. And he took me into the sea robin, and right away, of course, you notice it's a fish with legs. It's super weird. But then he told me these stories about how when they catch the

sea robins, the fishermen actually catch a bunch of other fish with it because other fish follow the sea robin because it's so good at finding and uncovering buried prey so that they can hope to steal a meal. And so we thought, okay, that's like right up our alley. We like how animal sense the world around them, and this is a pretty weird example. So maybe it's a place where we could learn some new biology. And I had no plans to study it, but then here we are. So then what kind of tests did you put them through when you brought them back to the lab? Well, the first thing that we wanted to do was we wanted to see if these stories that we heard through the NBL were true, that they really were good at finding buried prey. So we have an animal facility here at Harvard,

including a couple of fairly large pools. So we filled up those pools with sand on the bottom. We went to the grocery store. We got some muscles. We buried them. And the C-Robbins found them right away. Then we ground up the muscles. We tested that in little capsules.

They found those. Then we even did single molecules, single tastents, and they're going to finding those. So they can sense amino acids, which are the things that also we taste in our food. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah, so we thought the same.

This was a really obvious behavior. That's kind of where we like to start. It's a very clear behavior. Anyone can appreciate it. It's this weird animal, weird trait. So let's try and figure it out. So we started using our sort of usual toolbox of tricks where we try to sequence the tissues to ask if there are genes that might be important for disability.

And then make physiological measurements from the, organ and C, is it true that these legs are now sensory? And so we were trying to find the molecules and cells that give rise to this behavior. And we were failing miserably. We could not figure it out. And the reason we couldn't figure it out is because no one really knows and no one really studied the legs in great detail. Where are the actual sensory organs on the legs? And what kind of cells are there is unknown. So it's difficult to do much. point, you didn't even know what exactly they were sensing, whether they were feeling something, smelling something. You didn't know what sort of senses they were using to find these prey animals.

That's right. So we're trying to figure out what are the sensory modalities this leg-like structure is capable of and to what degree and how. And so where the big breakthrough came and it took a while and it's like sort of embarrassing looking back. But we went back to the MBL to get more fish to keep doing studies. And we accidentally brought back the wrong species because we were, you know, pretty ignorant about sea robin biology at this point. I actually never even thought of there being another sea robin species. So we brought this other fish back by accident. And what was great was was it had legs. It walks. It looks kind of like the other one. But it can't find the buried prey. And so we thought at first, maybe we did something wrong and this fish was unhappy.

or something like that. But when we actually looked at the legs, they were very different, and they were different macroscopically, meaning you could look with your eye and appreciate that the C-Robin that senses and digs, it has this really specialized leg structure, which looks like kind of a shovel at the end,

so it can dig through the sand. And then on that shovel ending are these little bumps called papilla where all of the sensory apparatus exists. So they're packed full of touch receptor neurons, and then they're lined with these cells that actually express taste receptors. And looking at the two fish, it's super obvious how different and how specialized the sensing sea robin is. And so we used that then to go and look across sea robins from all over the place to ask, when do they evolve this new ability and in what context. So now that you've seen these structures, could you track down the gene or genes responsible for this

sensation? Yeah, so observing the structures was a huge advantage to looking for such genes. And the reason is we now can be targeted in our analysis. We can look to see our specific genes, which might encode proteins that give the fish the function. Are they expressed in just those tissues? And then we can make physiological measurements from different parts of the leg, some that have the sensory organ and some that don't. In doing so, it was really obvious, especially with this comparative fish, that only the C-Robbin that senses and digs has the large enrichment of touch receptor neurons, which express a known touch receptor called Piazo. And then they have in the cells that line the papilla bumps, a taste receptor that's greatly enriched. In fact, the same taste receptors that

we use to taste just expressed in a new place and in new combinations. Wow. So these things are basically like our taste buds, but they're on the C-Robbins' legs. They're similar, but they're actually different. And that's what we imagine was this is a thing that can be common in fish, is to put taste buds around the body. And they're actually not taste buds. There's something different. And I don't know yet what is the cellular identity, but it looks more like an epithelial cell, which is a cell that lines the skin rather than a specialized taste structure. You know, I kind of get the idea of a fish growing legs. That's unusual, but it doesn't strike me as completely out of the realm of possibility. But how do you get the taste part into the legs? Evolutionarily,

how does that happen? Yeah. I think it's a really great example. In the the C-Rabin of using, this is something my colleague and collaborator, David Kingsley on these two papers, likes to say that the C-Rabin has repurposed ancient genes and known programs, and it's tinkered with them just a little bit and put them in a new place to accomplish new biology. And this is really, I think, a major takeaway of these studies and of evolution, as evolution works using an existing toolbox that it can slightly alter and make new functions. And so the C-Robin accomplishes this using taste receptors, which are very much like our own. But it does so with its specific program, right, as a vertebrate that uses taste receptors.

And this is different than other animals that might occupy the same environment. So like you said, it has this specialized anatomy being legs to walk around. the seafloor and then can also taste with them. This is not unlike another organism in our lab that I mentioned, which is octopus. And octopus does the same thing, essentially. It lives in the seafloor. It has this very specialized body plan to explore the seafloor with the long eight arms. And it uses those arms to look through cracks and crevices and distinguish prey from non-pray. And it has its own set of genes, which are for tasting, that are actually different than the C-Robin and made sense for what the octopus needs to do, which is to sense sticky substances. So it has these receptors

for sticky things. And so it's an example where the final organismal outcome is actually very similar. Both of these animals are able to occupy this new ecology, but they're doing so by tinkering with their existing genes that can produce new functions. You know, this is fascinating. This repurposing of gene patterns and programs is obviously a big take home here. But it also feels like, you know, serendipity and curiosity are also a take home of this study. Yeah, for sure. That's one of the important points for me of this work is, yes, there's, I think, some fundamental concepts to take away about biology, about evolution. But I think what's maybe even more important is the philosophical, style of science here, which is both David and I went through the MBL independently, looked at these fish and we're like, okay, that's really strange. We should probably study that and see how does this weird fish become so weird. And that's where we started, is making an

observation and wanting to figure out how it works. And that to me is, you know, curiosity-based science of its finest is being interested in the world around us and just trying to understand how it works down to a molecular level. Yeah, sometimes you just have to rely on happy accidents. Right. Thank you so much, Dr. Bolono. This is fascinating. Of course.

Nicholas Bolono is a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. That's it for today. Lots of folks help make the show, including Emma Gomez, Annie Niro, George Harper, Jason Rosenberg, and many more. Next time, getting older adults involved in climate activism. I'm sci-fri producer Charles Burgquist. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend.