Science Friday - Mosquito-Borne Diseases Are Spreading | ‘Slingshot’ And A Space Mission Gone Wrong

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Several states have reported cases of the rare but serious mosquito-borne illness eastern equine encephalitis. And, the new sci-fi movie "Slingshot," about an astronaut’s mental breakdown, prompts questions about how to prepare humans for long-term space travel.Mosquito-Borne Diseases Are Spreading As Temperatures RiseThis week, a New Hampshire man died of eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), a rare but extremely serious disease caused by a mosquito-borne virus. Human cases of EEE have also been reported in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont, causing some municipalities to step up mosquito control efforts or attempt to limit outdoor activities during peak mosquito times at dawn and dusk.Other mosquito-borne diseases are on the rise as well. Oropouche fever, a viral disease typically found in South America, has been spotted in the US—and in Brazil, health officials are reporting an 800% increase in the disease. Dengue fever, also spread by mosquitoes, has been increasing across Europe. Experts attribute all the surges to climate change, which has brought warmer, wetter weather that has allowed mosquito populations to thrive and expand their ranges.Sophie Bushwick of New Scientist joins guest host Rachel Feltman to talk about climate, mosquitoes, and disease, and how communities are trying to curb the spread. They also tackle other stories from the week in science, including a puzzling result in a dark matter search, how fruit flies change their threat perception during courtship, and investigations into how marmoset monkeys call each other by name.‘Slingshot’ Imagines A Yearslong Space Mission Gone WrongThe new movie “Slingshot,” a sci-fi thriller about a yearslong mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, is out in theaters today. It follows the crew members, played by Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, and Tomer Capone, as they start to unravel, highlighting how long, lonely missions can put astronauts’ well-being in peril.While the movie is certainly a work of science fiction, it does remind us that a lot can go wrong in space, both physically and mentally. So as humans get closer to embarking on long missions to places like Mars and beyond, how are real space agencies thinking about keeping them happy and safe?Science Friday’s digital producer of engagement Emma Gometz sat down with “Slingshot” director Mikael Håfström, and former NASA organizational psychologist Dr. Kelley Slack, to answer those questions and more.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.

A human-led mission to Saturn might sound cool on paper, but space psychologists have some concerns. Space is an isolated, confined, extreme environment. And humans are very social. And when you put that combination together, that creates a lot of stressors on them. It's Friday, August 30th. Around here, we call that Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Dee Peter Schmidt. There's a new sci-fi thriller out in theaters today called Slingshot.

It follows crew members on a year's long space mission as they start to unravel, highlighting how long, lonely missions can put astronauts' well-being in peril. And even though it's fiction, the film does remind us that a lot can go wrong in space. So as humans get closer to embarking on long missions to Mars and beyond, how are real space agencies thinking about keeping them healthy and safe? We'll get into that later, but first, here's guest host and science journalist Rachel Feltman, rounding up the top news in science this week. This week, a New Hampshire man died of eastern equine encephalitis, a rare but serious mosquito-borne virus.

Human cases have also been reported in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont, prompting some municipalities to step up their mosquito control efforts and even advise residents to limit outdoor activities during dusk and dawn. Joining me now to talk about this and other recent science stories is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist in New York. Welcome back, Sophie. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. So tell me more about this virus. What is it and how concerned should we be? So the good news is Eastern equine encephalitis is still very rare. It has killed five people in the U.S. this year, but that is five people out of the whole U.S. population.

So it is definitely a concern. The problem with this disease is it has a 30% mortality rate and it can cause permanent damage to people who fall ill with it. You know, they can have have problems for the rest of their lives. So it's absolutely a threat that we should be taking seriously, but I don't think that folks need to be living in fear necessarily. Right. That makes sense. And this isn't the only mosquito-borne disease out there, of course. In fact, last week we saw a disease specialist Dr. Fauci recovering from West Nile virus. That's right. A lot of these mosquito-borne diseases are actually spiking a bit alarmingly. We've also seen much higher cases of a disease called Oropush virus in South America. Brazil alone has had an 800% increase in the number of

cases. And the mosquito-borne disease Dengue as well. We've got almost double the cases this year compared to last year. And last year was at a record high. Dengue can cause symptoms similar to flu, but it can also in severe cases cause bad bleeding that can cause shock and then death. Wow. And what do we know about why all of these are spreading? Well, for this one, we can pretty much blame climate change. Mosquitoes love warm weather. They love wet weather. So basically, if you are sweating and uncomfortable, a mosquito is going to be very happy. And climate change is not just making their season longer. It's also making their geographic range broader. So they're able to spread into areas where maybe they wouldn't have been able to survive previously. I'm unhappy. The mosquitoes are happy. Nobody's winning. Yeah, mosquitoes love biting me and I hate being bitten, but it's unfortunately the way it is. So is there anything that people can do to protect themselves? Yes, the same measures that you take to avoid getting bitten by mosquitoes will help protect you from mosquito-borne disease. So things like staying indoors during the time of day when mosquitoes are most active, which tends to be around dusk, that can help wearing bug spray, wearing maybe long sleeves and pants if you know you're going to be out for a long time.

Putting screens on your windows and doors is helpful and just making sure there's no standing water around. So if you have an outdoor container that tends to get filled up with rainwater, make sure you're emptying that out. The other option is pesticide spraying. So we tend to be very cautious about this because DDT caused a lot of problems historically. But one option that Massachusetts is using right now is a different pesticide. It's called Anvil 10 plus 10. And they send people a warning to stay indoors during the time when they're spraying, which is very helpful for avoiding having problems with humans. Then they can spray the pesticide.

it keeps down the mosquitoes and it protects folks from mosquito-borne illness. Staying loosely on the climate topic, you have a story about something people can do to help the planet while they're behind the wheel? That's right. This is a relatively minor intervention, but it can actually make a big dent in emissions from passenger vehicles. So if you've ever been in a car with someone who goes up to an intersection, you know that different drivers have different styles.

Some people like to slowly glide up to the intersection and some people kind of accelerate all the way there and then slam on the brakes. And it turns out that the gliding technique is better. If all cars glided up to intersections, then passenger vehicles could cut their total carbon emissions by like 5 to 10%. It's funny. My brother-in-law has a hybrid and is one of those people who really pays attention to his efficiency and he's been gliding all this time.

He already knew it. How much of a difference can this make? Is it just like a thing people can do personally? or is there a way that cities or road planners could actually take advantage of this? So one thing that's kind of cool about this is a lot of cars these days have some sort of semi-autonomous features. You know, you might have, your car might help you stay within your lane or some people their cars can kind of take over when they're driving on the highway. But it could be programmed into smart cars like this to slow down automatically when they're approaching an intersection.

It could set the pace for them. Another thing that could happen is the traffic signal. You could put a device in the traffic signal. So it's communicating with the cars coming up and being like, you've got five seconds or, you know, you're at a distance where you'd have to really accelerate to make it through. So instead, why don't you slow down and glide? And that way you'll have a less emissions heavy experience with this intersection. Very cool. Okay, taking a hard turn now into the world of strange physics and dark matter. I know you have a story for us about those spooky physics things. Yes. I have a very wimpy story for you, wimpy as in weakly interacting massive particles or wimps. So researchers know from looking at

gravitational effects that about 80% of all matter is actually dark matter, but this is a mysterious substance that doesn't seem to even interact with light, which makes it really hard for us to detect it. And so we have a bunch of different theories about what it might be, and one of the leading ones is that it's a wimp. It's all these particles that interact very weakly with regular matter and that's why we're not able to detect it. Despite that, researchers are trying to detect it. They buried this detector about a mile underground called Lux Zeppelin. It's been running for about 280 days now and it has found nothing. Huh. Yes. Is it that the particles aren't doing what they expected or they're just not looking at the right particles? What do they think is going on?

So what they think is happening is just that they're, the good news is there, the good news is there able to restrict the limits of what these particles are able to do. It's sort of like one of the researchers compare this to searching through the ocean for a magical fish. So they've been searching and they've searched about 75% of the ocean. So they know that either this magical fish is in the final 25% and they've got a better idea of where to look for it or the other possibility is that the fish doesn't exist. Wow. That's that's wimpy physics for you. Another mysterious thing. the brain during mating in fruit flies, naturally. Tell me more. Yeah, so researchers have known that when male fruit flies are going through courtship and they're getting close to mating,

they seem to be unable to visually detect threats nearby. And this isn't great for fruit fly longevity. You know, they need to be able to fly away from those predators. So they looked at their brains while the flies were going through courtship. And what they found was that towards the beginning of courtship, the male flies would, they had a, they simulated a predator using light and shadow nearby, and the male fly would say, oh no, okay, I'm getting out of here. But then as the fly got closer to sealing the deal, as it got closer to the mating moment, it seemed to lose the ability to detect that threat. And they found that dopamine in the brain was increasing as the fly got closer to achieving its goal. And they think that the dopamine is just blocking some of its

sensory pathways, basically forcing it to tune out all distractions as it focuses. As it focuses. on what it wants. Wow. I mean, I guess that is kind of an evolutionary trade-off. Yes, totally. So moving up a bit in size, researchers are now looking at how marmoset monkeys address each other. Yes, marmoset monkeys seem to use names to call each other. And this is the first non-human primates that we've seen this behavior in. So it's very exciting and also very cute. I would encourage folks to look up pictures of these marmosets. They're adorable. Always good advice. And I know we actually have sound of this. We're going to play some of these calls. But just to note, if you're listening in the car as opposed to with headphones, you probably won't hear it. It's very high-pitched. We promise there

is actually sound playing. You should go back and check it out later. Oh, yeah. Wow. So what are they saying? I love that. It's almost bird-like. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, these calls are called fee calls, which I think is an appropriate name for it. And, um, Basically, the researchers recorded, took a lot of recordings like this. They took recordings of marmosets in the lab. And marmosets tend to live in these close-knit monogamous family groups. So they took marmosets from three different families and then they paired them up in different ways and listened to their calls. And then they used AI to analyze those calls and to pick out these very subtle acoustic differences in the way the marmosets called each other.

And then they played recordings of these calls for marmosets to see how they responded. And what they found was that marmosets make tweaks to their calls depending on which monkey they're addressing. So they're basically encoding specific information, which we would think of as like a label or a name in it. And different monkeys from the same family group will call a monkey with the same modulation. So like using the same name to refer to the same individual. Oh, wow. So different marmosets have the same name for a specific marmoset. Exactly.

Yes. That's very cool. So what does this teach us? You know, why do we care beyond the obvious? I care deeply. Why does scientists care? Right. Well, we think that, you know, human language didn't just appear out of nowhere. We gained this ability. We probably developed it over time. And so by looking at animals like these marmosets or other species that seem to use name calls. So we've also seen this behavior in parrots, in Egyptian fruit bats, in elephants. So by looking at the way that this name use works in animals that don't use what we would think of this human language, we can learn more about how we,

develop the ability to speak. And finally, another kind of communication, music, and how human brains react to it. Tell me more about this. That's right. So one of the things that makes it really fun to listen to a song is that it has distinct segments. And there's something between the segment called a musical boundary. It's sort of like when you know the beats about to drop in a song, right?

You're approaching the musical boundary. So fun. So researchers were like, well, what's going on in the brain when this musical boundary is is coming up. And to find out, they took brain scans of these subjects while they were listening to three different, very different songs. So one of them was in the genre of Nuevo Tango from Argentina. One of them was progressive metal from the U.S. And then one of them was Stravinsky, so Russian ballet. Waiting for the beat to drop in Stravinsky is underrated. And I'm not being sarcastic. That was one of the original beat drops in my opinion. It's a classic. And what they found

was that when they were approaching that point, when they were approaching that musical boundary, people's a network in the subject's brains lit up. And then after they passed the boundary, a different network was lighting up. So it's sort of like your attention is shifting between these two areas. And they actually compared it to the way that our brains change attention to understand the differences between sentences in language. Very cool. That's all the time we have for now. Sophie Bushwick is Senior News Editor at New Scientist. Sophie, thanks so much for being with me today. Thank you.

The movie Slinghot, a sci-fi thriller about a years-long mission to Saturn's Moon Titan, is out in theaters today. Starring Lawrence Fishburn, it follows the crew members as they start to unravel, highlighting how long, lonely missions can put astronauts well-being in peril. We have been in space for nearly two years. You have two more hibernations. cycles before the slingshot. Houston, we have a situation.

The impact represents no real danger. What if the whole system is compromised? We attempt a slingshot. We get blasted into deep space. While the movie is definitely a work of science fiction, it does remind us that a lot can go wrong in space, both physically and mentally. So as humans get closer to embarking on long missions to places like Mars and beyond, how are real space agencies thinking about keeping them happy and safe?

Science Friday's digital producer of engagement, Emma Gomez, sat down with the film's director, along with a space psychologist, to answer those questions and more. Here's Emma. Joining me to talk about the science of astronaut psychology that slingshot puts on full display are Dr. Kelly Slack, an organizational psychologist who worked on space psychology for NASA, and Mikhail Hofstrom, the film's director. And just a heads up to our audience, we'll discuss things that you might learn from the movie's trailer, but we won't spoil the film's many twists and turns. So welcome to both of you to Science Friday.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Glad to be here. So, Mikhail, what did you learn about this, like, long-term space travel concept while making the movie? Are you, like, a big sci-fi fan? Well, yes, I like sci-fi, but I'm also interesting in the human psyche. And I think space and spaceship is a great arena. for stories about, you know, about loneliness and solitude and longing and self-reflection in space.

That's pushed to its limit. A few years ago, I made a film called Fortin' Eight. It's a Stephen King adaptation with one character in a hotel route, the most part of the film. They are relatives that film, Fortune 28, and a slingshot in the sense. We don't nearly know exactly what's going to happen with a human being so far away in space. So we have to guess and we have to talk to experts. and it's a work of fiction. And it's our take on what our characters go through during this special mission.

And I hope the audience can feel with John, the main character in this film, and his struggles as human struggles, not only an astronaut's struggles. Yeah, that's what interested me about it too. And, I mean, Dr. Slack, as an expert in space psychology, what did you think of it before we get into the nitty-gritty of everything? I thought the film was very interesting. I enjoyed watching it. And of course, having the space background, having worked at NASA for a while, I came at it from a different perspective than I think the average audience member would. Right. I mean, in the real world, how do space psychologists help keep astronauts mentally healthy in space on a long-term mission where you can't be in real-time communication with astronauts? us. Space is an isolated, confined, extreme environment. It's not supposed to have humans in it. And humans

are very social. And when you put that combination together, you get constrained humans who are in a limited social situation, and that creates a lot of stressors on them. So they are doing a lot of research on what kind of prevention should we have? What kind of countermeasures can we put in place, meaning what can we do to help them have the coping mechanisms and all the strategies that they need in order to have a successful mission? And then there's the third thing of, if something does occur, then what treatment options do we have? And another thing I want to touch on was the group dynamic. How big a role would you say teamwork and that dynamic between the crew plays into astronaut well-being? Extremely large. You have to have a team and you have to have a team that

works well together and then you need a strong commander who will ensure that the team is staying as healthy as possible. There are a lot of different ways that NASA does this and other space agencies do this. One thing that's common for commanders is to have the entire crew spend at least one meal together a day so that they get that face-to-face time on the space station. It's so large that you can go an entire day without running to other members of the crew. On a long-duration exploration mission, like is depicted in slingshot, there would not be the luxury of that amount of space or capacity. The vehicle would not be that large. So you would be in closer proximity. So the work we're doing shifts more towards what degree of privacy do the different people need

versus how much togetherness do we have. I mean, and you mentioned a strong commander. I feel like in this movie there definitely is one, but it still contributes to the conflict. Without spoiling much, I would say that's true. So Mikhail, like a NASA psychologist, I'm sure you thought a lot about group dynamics too and how that would impact the film. How did you think about the dynamics between the actors and how that would translate to the astronaut team in the movie?

I mean, it's interesting because it's a small environment and the group dynamic is obviously key to make it all work in such a special situation, like being so far out in space. So we built this spaceship on the soundstage and we didn't take out walls to shoot. We tried to keep it very sort of closed in. But that created a sense of claustrophobia, I think,

that was really good for all of us that worked in the film. And we went in there in the morning, and we tried to avoid going up until we were finished shooting later in the day, just to help ourselves remind us where we were supposed to be on the ship. So, you know, the more we could push that sense of loneliness, the better for the actors to feel right in the situation.

tradition. So back to kind of the space psychology of it all. In the movie, the ship gets damaged and the crew just disagrees about what to do next. And it kind of reminded me of how the Boeing Starliner crew is sort of stuck on the space station right now. I mean, luckily, they have guidance from Earth to decide their next move. But Dr. Slack, how are astronauts trained to manage disagreements about safety on a mission where real-time communication isn't possible or even when communication might be lost? We have done a lot of prep work then if we don't have real-time communication. We put countermeasures on board to increase the likelihood that we can help them, even though it's not real-time. There would be kind of a dock-in-the-box kind of thing or AI-generated

remote psychological help available for them. There was always a medical officer on board, whether they're a medical doctor or not. And they've been trained extensively in coping mechanisms and how to deal with stressors and how to be aware of that, both in themselves and in others. We also would probably put something called proximity badges on them. The proximity badge is a way of us tracking to see if the patterns of interaction have changed over time. And if they do, then that gives us heads up that there might be an issue later. And so then we can, even with a communication delay, start addressing the potential issue that might occur in the future.

One other thing is putting control in the hands of the crew actually is pretty effective as far as giving them a dashboard where they can track their own vital signs, they can watch their own health status. And that puts a lot of control in their hands and gives them a lot of strength as well. I wish that they had a space psychologist like you on the team at Slinghot. What's one of the most surprising things you've learned through your work as a space psychologist working with NASA? I think for me is when we were looking at the space station as an analog to a long-duration exploration mission, one of the things I wanted to do, and I kind of flew this idea past a few people, but it never got more than one degree away from me. I wanted to cover all the windows on the station to see how the astronauts could cope without seeing Earth. one of the favorite things actually the number one activity that astronauts enjoy doing when they're in space is taking photographs of the earth or just sitting in the cupola that mini window kind of bay window type thing that sticks out the side and looking at the earth and when they go somewhere like titan or mars they're not going to be able to see earth and you just really have to wonder

what happens when we as humans who are so tied to our earth, what happens when we are out there untethered, unable to see that which grounds us? Right. I love that word untethered. Okay, well, thank you both for taking the time to talk about this. Thank you so much. It's been very interesting. Thank you so much. Thanks. Dr. Kelly Slack, organizational psychologist, and Mikhail Hofstrom,

director of the new movie Slingshot. It's out now. Thanks for that, Emma. For more stories about science on the big screen, subscribe to Emma's newsletter, Science Goes to the Movies, at ScienceFriday.com slash movies. That's all the time we have for today. Lots of people help make the show happen, including

Sandy Roberts, Robin Kasmur, Jordan Smudjik, Charles Bergquist, George Harper. On Monday, we'll explore how the shifting timing of the seasons could impact human psychology. I'm Cy Frye producer Dee Petersmith. See you then. Thank you.