Science Friday - Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Is Detected In the Mediterranean | Nerdy Valentines

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Is Detected In the MediterraneanNeutrinos are sometimes called “ghost particles,” because they are nearly weightless, rarely interact with any other matter, and have very little electric charge.Now, scientists have discovered a neutrino with a recording-breaking level of energy, which could bring us closer to understanding physics underpinning the creation of the universe.Host Ira Flatow is joined by Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, to talk more about the latest in neutrino research and other top science news of the week, including supersonic spaceflight without a sonic boom; an asteroid headed for Earth; and why loggerhead turtles are dancing.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.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flore Lichten. And I'm Ira Flato. Some new insights into neutrinos. You know, they're sometimes called ghost particles because they are nearly weightless, rarely interact with any other matter, and have very little electric charge. Spooky stuff. Well, now adding to the intrigue, the discovery of a neutrino with a record-breaking level of energy. Yes, joining me to tell us more about that story and other science stories of the week is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist based in New York. Welcome back, Sophie.

Always good to have you. Thank you. All right, start us off with the ABCs of a neutrino. What exactly is it? So a neutrino is a fundamental particle, but instead of, you know, linking up with other particles to form an atom, for instance, a neutrino really very, very rarely interacts with regular matter. And to catch a glimpse of it, researchers build these huge detectors.

filled with a dense substance like water or sometimes they use ice. And the idea is on the off chance a stray neutrino might pass through this detector. It could bump into an atom in the water or the ice and that could make a reaction of other particles that the detector is able to pick up. So you have these really big detectors in places like Antarctica and now one in the Mediterranean sea, this relatively new detector that found a very powerful neutrino. It's about 10 times more energy than the other, the previous record holder, which was found by the Antarctic detector. Wow. It's 120 peta electron volts.

That's a lot, I'm guessing. Right. I mean, on a larger scale, it's not a ton. But when we're talking about the particle scale, that's big. That is thousands of times more energetic than the particles you would get at a particle collider like the one at CERN. All right. So what does this tell us about Nutriacian?

that we don't already know or teach us about the universe or something. Yes. So the thing about a neutrino this powerful is it probably originated in a cataclysmic event somewhere out in the universe. Think two supermassive black holes merging together, some event like that. But because neutrinos interact so rarely with other matter, it probably traveled to us fairly directly from the event that spawned it, which means we can trace it back much more easily than we can trace other kinds of cosmic rays that have a stronger electric charge and so interact with other matter more. So that makes this a really cool option for us to observe the rest of the universe.

Yeah, the metrinos are really cool. Let's move on to your next story about the changing shape of the Earth's inner core. Really? That's right. So Earth is sort of like we've got the crest on the outside, then we've got a layer called the mantle, then we've got the liquid outer core, and then the mostly solid inner core. And we know that the liquid outer core because of convection is always interacting with the inner core. And this can change the way the inner core rotates.

But in a new study, they used seismic waves that were passing through the earth. And they found that they changed in such a way that indicates that the inner core might not just be rotating. It could also be changing its shape. Well, we know, right, that the inner core may have slowed down over time and now it's changing its shape. That's right. These changes in rotation, it kind of means the inner core moves at a pace that isn't always exactly aligned with the pace that the rest of the planet is rotating. And that actually makes it pretty hard to observe because you've got to account for that rotation when you're trying to measure what else the inner core is up to. And that's what makes this finding so interesting that they've also managed to find these signs that it could be changing shape. Well, maybe it has something to do with my day feeling a little bit different in time. You know. The intercourse is messing with everyone's sense of time.

Let's move on to the next story. As we've seen throughout COVID, I remember wastewater surveillance has proven to be a really effective way to detect the spread of disease. And now a new study has found an even more efficient way to use this technology. Tell us about that. That's right. So if you have a wastewater detection system at one site, you know, you can monitor the waste from humans and see what are the levels of different bacteria and viruses in these samples.

So that will tell you if, say, you know, COVID is going up in one place. But what if you wanted to create sort of a worldwide monitoring network to give you a heads up when an outbreak isn't just happening in one place, but it's creating a larger issue, like possibly even a future pandemic? You would think you might have to have monitoring sites at thousands of places around the world. But it turns out if you have just 20 airports all around the world, that's enough to create a global monitoring system that can give you a heads up about disease outbreaks. Wow. And that would be a good place to put the monitoring devices, right? Yes, exactly. So when you fly on a plane,

humans produce waste, the plane stores that waste. And then when you get to the airport, a truck comes and empties it off the plane. So that means that airports are getting these samples of humans from all over the place, and that makes it a really good place to take samples like this. You know, with the U.S. withdrawing from the World Health Organization, I wonder if we would even be part of something like that. That is the problem with withdrawing from global organizations like this. I mean, as we all learn from COVID, disease outbreaks don't respect borders. And so in order to prepare for them, you really can't just be focusing surveillance on one

country or one location. It's got to be a much bigger look. Yeah. Let's stay with air travel for a bit longer because there's an experimental aircraft, the XB1, created by the company Boom Supersonic. It hits Supersonic speed, but without creating a sonic boom when it broke the sound barrier. Tell us about that. Yeah, Boom Supersonic might need to change its name.

So this aircraft took advantage of a phenomenon known as the mock cutoff. Basically, when you're at different altitudes, the speed of sound is actually different. It moves more slowly when you're at. a higher altitude. And if you're at just the right altitude and the aircraft breaks the sound barrier by just the right amount, the sonic boom is going to travel away from the aircraft in all directions. But as it goes downward, the speed of sound changes. And those changes actually deflect the sonic boom. So it still creates a boom, but that boom cannot reach the ground, which means you don't get any of those effects like very loud, disruptive sound or, you know, breaking glass or

shaking buildings on the ground. How soon might we see something like this in production? Well, Boom Supersonic wants to use what it learned from its experimental aircraft and put that on a commercial airliner that it is planning to start testing in a few years. And they say that this could travel overland so it could do, for instance, a flight from New York to Los Angeles without bothering the people in the ground below. And that would shorten that trip, for instance, by about 90 minutes. Let's step in the sky a minute because there's this story that's been saying,

circulating about a big asteroid heading toward us with a pretty high collision risk. Is that true? Fill us in on that. That is true. This asteroid has the not great name of 2024 YR4, and it has a one in 43 chance of hitting the Earth in 2032. So that's not like a super high chance, but it's much higher than I'm really comfortable with. And so the reason that it's still. uncertain though is because we're basing those odds on data that's incomplete. Their errors can work

their way in. So we really don't know what the final odds will be until this thing gets a little bit closer. But already, that number is high enough and the asteroid is large enough that international bodies are starting to prepare for what can we do if it does turn out that this is headed towards Earth. So for example, NASA a couple years ago did a test where where they deflected an asteroid. They got it to change its trajectory slightly. And so that's the kind of mission that maybe will be necessary. This is not an Earth-destroying asteroid like the dinosaurs.

That's right. Or you could also compare it to the Chelyabinsk meteor, which hit Russia in 2013. That was about 20 meters across. This one is going to be about twice that size or more. Again, there's a lot of uncertainty. If it were to hit Earth, it would absolutely cause damage. but it wouldn't be an extinction-level asteroid, like the one that knocked the dinosaurs out. Right. Let's stay in space just a little bit longer to talk about scientists discovering the largest object in the universe.

Yes. Wow. What is it? It is called the Kipu superstructure, and it is $1.4 billion with a bee light years long and hundreds of thousands of times more massive than just a single galaxy. So sometimes galaxies clump together in space into these clusters, and then sometimes galaxy clusters clumped together into what are called super clusters. And so some of these super clusters have previously been considered the largest objects in the universe. But the Kippoo superstructure is the biggest found so far. Just as they used to ask Johnny Carson, just how big is it? So it's got about 70 super clusters all contained within this larger, super cluster. And if you wanted to start at one end and travel to the other, even if you were

moving at light speed, it would take you 1.4 billion years to traverse the whole thing. Wow. Wow. That is pretty big. All right. Let's close on a delightful story about, of all things, dancing turtles, Sophie. Why are the turtles dancing? The turtles are dancing. And I would encourage everyone to look up a video of this because they are super cute when they dance. The turtles are dancing because they're about to get fed. And so they're waggling their fins, their front fins and they're sometimes spinning in circles and they're opening their mouths. But the way that they know they're going to get fed is what's interesting here. So we know that turtles are really good at navigating through the ocean and we think that they do so by detecting

magnetic fields. And to learn more about that, researchers trained captive turtles that when they were in a certain kind of magnetic field, they would be fed. And just the turtles learned this so well that they started doing their anticipatory food dance as soon as they got to that magnetic field. So we learn a little bit more about how turtles navigate using magnetic fields there. That's right. So for instance, they created a magnetic field that reproduces the field found in one of the migration areas for loggerhead turtles. And so they wanted to see if the turtles would turn in this magnetic field the same way that they turn when they're out in the ocean. And they did. And they also figured out by testing different kinds of magnetic fields and how the turtles responded

to them, they think now that there are two different ways that turtle sense magnetic fields. They use one sense to sort of locate themselves on a map of the ocean or an internal idea of where they are. And the other one, they used to tell them which direction to go once they get to that place. Well, there you have it. Always great stuff, Sophie. Thank you for lightning our day today. Thank you. Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist based in New York. If you want to see those Dancing Turtles, we've got a link for you, a video of the Dancing Turtles up on our website, Science Friday.com. After the break, we're celebrating Valentine's Day, the SciFriway, by listening to some of your nerdiest meatcutes. Stick around.

Last week, we asked you for your nerdy Valentine stories, and boy, did you deliver. Our first conversation was about high altitude cerebral edema, which made him find me irresistible. My nerdy love story goes back to dissecting fetal pigs. I locked eyes, the stars aligned, astronomy was going in my head. I had to know her. We heard about flirting over raw sewage. He was so excited about a wastewater treatment plant, and that is what I knew. That he was my person.

Bonding over medical mysteries. She kindly processed the photomicrographs of the surgical specimen. That was 41 years ago, and we owed all to gout. To steamy moments in the lab. She accidentally lit the beaker on fire, so that's how we met. I love you, Kate. You all had wonderful stories to share, and there's one more we wanted you to hear. Ed, are you there?

Hey, good morning. Okay, Ed, set the scene. Where does this love story begin? Well, in the summer of 1962, I was going into my junior year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. And I needed to pick up some. organic chemistry credits since I had decided to change my major from engineering to pre-med. During the same period of time, my father moved the family from Brooklyn to Knoxville. And so they put some pressure on me to come home and attend summer school at University of Tennessee

in Knoxville. On the first day of class, we were assigned seats and this gorgeous, This tall, blonde with an unintelligible, West Tennessee twang sat down next to me. So I fabbled out a greeting in her direction as this gal was totally out of my league. Much to my pleasant surprise, we were assigned lab partners on the following day. As I was constructing the tower of Erlenmeyer Flask for our first experiment, my partner made a sudden move with her textbook and smashed the entire setup into a hundred small pieces.

That sounds dangerous, Ed. Well, it was. Neelous to say, I was dumbfounded and staggered. Well, did you think this might have been on purpose, Ed, to meet you? I'd like to think that. But at the moment, she apologized. And the good news for that was we were talking. and we're still talking 65 years later.

And since our 50th anniversary, we've had an Erlenmeyer flask sitting over the fireplace at the house. A special one that you had made? She did, yes. Yes, a gold-plated Erlenmeyer flask. Wow. A boy from Brooklyn getting into big time over his head and it all turned out okay. Yes, I spent most of my life getting in over my head and somehow was finding a way. way of making some good out of it, yeah.

Ed, what's your wife's name? Laura Jean. Laura Jean. Do you think this was just a coincidence? All this happened, Ed? Everything happens for a reason they say, huh? What advice would you give other people who are living and working alongside their colleagues in labs today about Valentine's Day?

Well, I would say it ain't over till it's over and go for it. Ed, happy Valentine's Day to you and Laura Jean. Thank you. Thank you for calling us and thanks to everybody who participated. Yes, it was a real bright spot of the week listening to your stories. And you can read more nerdy love stories on our website at sciencefriday.com slash love. That's science Friday.com slash love. That's about all the time we have for now.

A lot of people help make this show happen. George Harper. John Denkoski. Annie Niro. Jason Rosenberg. I'm Ira Flato. Thanks for listening.